If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

I suspect that for anything that still needs it you can use an FPGA implementation of the Z80.

The conservation laws are statistical, at least to a degree. Local apparent violations can be OK, provided the system as a whole absolutely complies.

There's no question that if the claim was as appears that the conservation laws would be violated system-wide, which is a big no-no.

So we need to look for alternative explanations.

The most obvious one is that the results aren't being honestly presented, that there's so much wishful thinking that the researchers are forcing the facts to fit their theory. (A tendency so well known, that it's even been used as the basis for fictional detectives.)

Never trust results that are issued in a PR statement before a paper. But these days, it's increasingly concerning that you can't trust the journals.

The next possibility is an unconsidered source of propulsion. At the top of the atmosphere, there are a few candidates, but whether they'd impart enough energy is unclear to me.

The third possibility is that the rocket imparted more energy than considered, so the initial velocity was incorrectly given.

The fourth possibility is that Earth's gravity (which is non-uniform) is lower than given in the calculations, so the acceleration calculations are off.

When dealing with tiny quantities that can be swamped by experimental error, then you need to determine if it has been. At least, after you've determined there's a quantity to examine.

Perhaps not but I've a lot of experience using "AI" (although I prefer the term machine learning) for analysis it can and does do stupid things from time to time. In my case that results in some obviously wrong physics results but my code is not in control of a state-of-the-art, fully armed fighter jet.

Exactly how would this apply given that they were protesting _at_ the employer's premises and disrupting other employees who were trying to work there? It seems very reasonable to me that if you turn up at your place of employment and use your access to that place to disrupt the normal business of your employer by staging a sit-in that you should get fired for doing so.

After all, if these people really believed in what they were protesting then the honourable thing to do would be to resign from Google first, like government ministers do when they have a strong moral or ethical objections to the actions of the government of which they are part. Yes, it's a tough decision to make with financial repercussions but if you are not willing to do that then what you have is a preference not a strong moral objection.

I suspect the people who will be most shocked will be those who hold the copyright on the original works that the AI was trained on and is very likely to be partially regurgitating given an output as long as a book.

Yes but Google is not congress and they were not passing a law. That's the problem with the US constitution, unlike moden constitutions that define rights and hence stop anyone who tries to take them away, the US constitution only limits the US government and in today's world large companies often have as much influence on our lives as governments. That being said if you start publicly denouncing your employer it is absolutely reasonable for them to fire you.

The important question is what does the AI in charge of the armed aircraft think it means? One misinterpretation or hallucination and there are going to be a lot of very angry former pet owners.

I'd rather have an objective scientist trained to make decisions based on data and objective reasoning rather than either of those options but I guess that's sadly old fashioned these days.

Sadly this theory is extremely wrong because most of our surface water is in the oceans and despite water being locked up in the poles some of the driest places on the planet are Antarctica's Dry Valleys, right next to the Antarctic ice sheet just as on the Arabian peninsular and elsewhere there are deserts adjacent to oceans. Whether a place is arid is determined by the local climate which is dependent on a host of factors such as prevailing wind direction, local topology etc. not the amount of polar ice - even when that location is right next to that polar ice!

I won't return in coin by calling you an idiot, because I don't think you are one. What I think you are is too *ignorant* to realize you're talking about evolution. "Survival of the fittest" is a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864 to refer to natural selection, a concept that's in the actual *title* of Darwin's book.

Not everywhere. The paper claims that Canada looks like it will have a net 5-20% boost to GDP thanks to climate change.

No, at least not without chemical assistance or mental issues which, in either case, means that the brain in question is not functioning properly.

No, it may sound logical but it is not actually using any logic. All it is doing is predicting what text is most appropriate to add next. It is not doing what a human would which is have some concepts in mind and then struggle to find the correct words to express or explain those concepts. Current AI is exactly like a parrot: it can mimic human writing - and yes do so insanely well - but that is all it is doing mimicing, or in some case just flat out copying. That can, and indeed does, give an extremely powerful illusion that AI somehow comprehends what it is writing but at no point is the AI recognizing a concept and then trying to express that concept in words as a human would.

Well, no *one* of us in a position to save the coral reefs. Not even world leaders can do it. But we *all* are in a position to do a little bit, and collectively all those little bits add up to matter.

Sure if you're the only person trying to reduce is carbon footprint you will make no difference. But if enough people do it, then that captures the attention of industry and politicians and shifts the Overton window. Clearly we can't save everything, but there's still a lot on the table and marginal improvements matter. All-or-nothing thinking is a big part of denialist thinking; if you can't fix everything then there's no point in fixing anything and therefore people say there's a problem are alarmists predicting a catastrophe we couldn't do anything about even if it weren't happening.

As to the loss of coral reefs not being the worst outcome of climate change, that's probably true, but we really can't anticiapte the impact. About a quarter of all marine life depends on coral reefs for some part of their life cycle. Losing all of it would likely be catastrophic in ways we can't imagine yet, but the flip side is that saving *some* of it is likely to be quite a worthwhile goal.

Well, you bringing *evolution* into the argument shows that your views are so far off base theyr'e not even wrong.