The article describes a technique for sensing infrared light, turning it into an electric current. It's not possible to do that and display an image on a contact lens that we could actually focus on (you can't focus on something that's right on your eye).

The only way to make a contact lens that would allow somebody to see infrared light would be to have a lens made out of a material such that when it receives an infrared photon, it absorbs that photon and emits a visible-light photon traveling in the same direction. That's very much not going to be possible with a technology built for sensing in this manner. The use of this tech would basically be lighter-weight infrared goggles and other sensors.

They are a benefit to you, however, because they reduce the city's traffic (provided you use the city's roads).

As for Google paying for the stops, Google is in support of that. It's not Google's fault the city is slow to act on the issue.

The Google shuttles are a net benefit to the city as a whole. But they are a symbol of much deeper, broader problems brought on by economic growth, increases in income inequality, and slow housing growth. Economic growth in the bay area has brought a tremendous influx of people, but various regulations have made it difficult to feed demand. This, combined with sharp increases in income inequality, has resulted in soaring housing prices. For a lot of residents, that means they're being forced out of their homes, sometimes their homes of many years.

I would very much like to see the city change the laws so that Google pays for its use of public bus stops, and the city in turn uses that money to expand its public transportation system. It would furthermore be nice to see some action on the side of increasing incentives for building new housing.

Except the survey you linked didn't asked the professionals in the field. It asked people in a different field, many of whom aren't scientists at all.

You can keep burying your head in your ass all you like, but the real world isn't going to wait for you to start paying attention to it. The Earth is warming. Humans are causing it. And the effects are not going to be good. You would be far, far better off if you would pay attention to the actual physical evidence sometime.

Except surveys of climate (and related) scientists have been done as well, and they show very similar numbers.

Once again, your survey wasn't a survey of scientists at all, let alone climate scientists.

Essentially all scientific papers that it is possible to tell whether or not they support the consensus view unambiguously support the consensus view. That's what has been shown. This would not happen if there was any meaningful debate within the scientific community on this subject.

As for the link you offered, that's a survey of meteorologists, not climate scientists. Nearly all climate scientists do, indeed, support global warming unambiguously (and if they are actively working, they are even more likely to support it).

1. Since civilization began, humanity has not faced sea level rise of this magnitude.

2. Ports that have been drowned tend to fare very poorly. And now we're talking about nearly every port city in the entire world having severe problems. The impact will not be pretty.

3. Water vapor is a fast feedback. It is responsible for amplifying the effect of CO2. It isn't a forcing in and of itself, and thus cannot be said to be responsible for the current 0.7C temperature rise.

It was soon shown that Oreskes' "study" was in fact a textbook example of cherry-picking. She had searched the database for papers that included the phrase "global climate change". Only those were included in her analysis. The problem with that being that at the time, only papers that were ABOUT the effects of greenhouse gas warming mentioned the phrase "global climate change" at all. So, in effect, she selected out of the scientific literate just the papers about greenhouse global warming, and then conclude that they all agreed about greenhouse global warming! How surprising!

The fact was, of course, that the majority of climate papers were not about greenhouse warming and never mentioned the subject at all. But those weren't counted.

The phrase "global climate change" does not specify whether the paper is supporting or disagreeing with the consensus view. It's a neutral phrase. It's just a way of limiting the papers to only those that are on-topic. Why do you think limiting to only on-topic papers was a bad thing?

I can guarantee you that there is no possible selection criteria that would result in a significant number of peer-reviewed papers that claim that global warming isn't happening, that humans aren't causing it, or that global warming isn't quite dangerous. I'm sure you can find some, but they won't come anywhere close to the number that support global warming.

Sea levels are set to rise by a meter or more by the end of the century, and the frequency of both droughts and strong storms has already increased dramatically. No, these are not good things.

Also, we only need about 2.2C of warming or so for all of Greenland to melt (though it will take a few centuries to do so). Greenland melting means sea level rise of about seven meters. That's going to drown a lot of cities.

This isn't necessary at all. It's entirely possible for there to only be an appreciable amount of EM radiation at the desired destination. So you can actually lower the noise floor for everybody else versus today's systems. In fact, because the destination signals are spatially-localized, your only limitation on how many devices you can put on the same network is the size of the localized waveform.

The primary concern I have is how they're going to accurately determine the position, and how they're going to accurately factor in obstacles such as buildings and especially vehicles in computing the required EM waveform. I suppose it might work if they make use of some sort of feedback mechanism that continuously updates the waveform based upon information from the phone about the signals it is receiving, but those updates would have to be extremely fast for it to work in a moving vehicle.