Which do you think is more likely?

China.

Which would you be more concerned by if you were NORAD?

Aliens.

A couple things:

"No-one believes CO2 emissions will cause catastrophe."

People's beliefs do not affect whether or not rising CO2 levels will actually cause a catastrophe. Also, their beliefs are not so clear-cut.

An Assessment of Public Perceptions of Climate Change Risk in Three Western U.S. Cities Past studies have found that on average 40% of the American public believe climate change will affect them personally. We contribute a study of climate change risk perceptions in the metropolitan areas of three western U.S. cities (Denver, Colorado; Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona), assessing overall patterns and drivers. A representative mail survey (N = 786) of the general public in these cities revealed that 60% of respondents identified climate change as personally risky, with the perception that it will impact either their family or their city in the next 30 years. Our results indicate that the gap in risk perceptions between the public and experts may be decreasing, although we discuss several limitations and reasons why this result requires further investigation.

You can find other similar studies online.

To forecast that far out you have to have certainty about scientific and technical discovery and development.

When they say "this is what will happen without action", scientific and technical discoveries that lead to a reduction in CO2 emissions are considered "actions".

Are we going to give similar breaks to single employees without children and how great that is?
Are we going to count those who take 5 coffee breaks a day?!
How about those gym nuts that disappear for an hour a day (not including lunch) to go for a run and promise they'll make the time up later?!

I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Embrace,. Check.
Extend. Check.

Will give you three guesses for what comes next.

1) Fork a desktop and screw around with the start menu and GUI, causing adoption to tank.

2) Change the kernel version to 10 and try to give it away for free.

3) Say "screw it" and load it up with ads and spyware.

... I need more guesses!

Yes, I follow. But why does it need to be able to think like a HUMAN brain? Lots of animals have some intelligence without being self aware.

Yeah, I realized after I lay down and closed my eyes, content with the mis-information I had corrected.

Then I woke up my wife with the sound of "Aww SHIT.".

I can buy a 20 watt solar panel at walmart for a hundred bucks. Standard solar output is way less than the max though, because of clouds, night, sunlight that isn't at the right angle, etc. Usually you figure 20% of max production. So that's 4 watts 24 hours per day. Say it lasts 20 years, which is conservative IMO. 4 watts * 365 * 20 = 29.2 megawatt-hours over the course of its lifetime.

If your ideas are correct, that's a subsidy of $230 per megawatt hour, or $6,716 total subsidy for that solar panel.

Let's think about that for a second. Do you really think the government is shelling out $6,716 every time someone buys $100 worth of solar panel from Walmart? And that there's a giant conspiracy to hide that fact from consumers? Does that seem like a sane explanation to you? Or maybe that website should not be trusted without double checking elsewhere on the web.

Here's my link.

When you find a left-leaning AGW zealot who wants more nukes, then I'll start taking the problem more seriously.

Here I am! I find man-made global warming to be very obviously real, and feel that some fourth generation nuclear plants would an excellent addition to our energy supply. You may now take the problem more seriously!

You're probably thinking of flambe?

Quantum Gravity

Do black holes produce thermal radiation, as expected on theoretical grounds? Does this radiation contain information about their inner structure, as suggested by gauge–gravity duality, or not, as implied by Hawking's original calculation? If not, and black holes can evaporate away, what happens to the information stored in them (since quantum mechanics does not provide for the destruction of information)? Or does the radiation stop at some point leaving black hole remnants?

It sounds like they're not 100% certain about Hawking radiation.

Citing 'human decency' is just another form of the 'for the children' fallacy.

So, we can't do anything to improve human decency because it's a fallacy? Because 'for the children' is also an invalid argument. Yet, most of the laws "for the children" actually benefit them. Just because a reason is invalid for some arguments doesn't mean that all reasons are invalid for all arguments!

Unless... did you vote Trump? It's okay, you can tell me.

Also, Stallman was right all along.

He usually is: Intel's chips contain a security hazard

As I recall, Intel came out with a rebuttal that went something like: "It's perfectly secure and a standard computer management feature, you bunch of dunces." I hope they like that crow they're eating.

Well, the energy density of lithium-ion batteries has gone up by a factor of six or so since 1990, in terms of Wh/kg. And it's gone up by a factor of 10 compared to the crummy Ni/Cd batteries I had when I was a kid... I admit though, I probably only needed to hear the news of battery improvements 5 or 6 times tops over the last 30 years.