All of this is held up by faith in the standard candle, which has recently been thrown into question. Type 1a supernovae might not be as consistent absolute brightness as previously believed. Without that? Shrug. We lack a yardstick to measure this.
Growing up in the Midwest, we were very much aware that nuclear war could end humanity's existence with scarcely more than a half hour of warning. Climate change is positively tame by comparison.
What these researchers misunderstand is that most people are not so privileged that climate change even makes the list of their concerns. It's not that they don't care, but that they just don't have the time or money to do anything effective.
The average person cannot afford an electric car.
The average person doesn't own a home, but if they did would still be unable to afford solar panels.
The average person can't work from home, because their employer insists they come into the office.
The average person can't live without a car, because America was designed and zoned for car traffic. If every American decided to use public transportation tomorrow, there wouldn't be enough trains or busses for everyone.
The average person can't grow their own food, because they don't own (enough) land. Even if they did, modern agriculture - from fertilizers to harvesting and transportation - depends on diesel fuel.
Given that most governments are owned by the fossil fuel companies, it is rather naive to expect governments to do anything more than token measures to address climate change.
It strikes me as a bit odd that people who are rather astute at predicting climate 50 to 100 years into the future can't predict that, in spite of their polemics, nothing meaningful will be done about climate change. Individuals lack the power, and governments lack the incentive. It seems to me that the old joke about consulting rings true for climate science: if you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem.
There's an interesting debate about the Bhagavad Gita in that some of the stories in there apparently describe effects that are in line with a nuclear or even thermo-nuclear explosion and that therefore Oppenheimer would have "known" about the bomb.
I guess after Otto Hahn was able to split Uranium atoms, physicists started to realize the orders of magnitude of power that this could deliver.
The 1930s were wild. In a sense, we're approaching the same social, political and technological climate again. God knows where it will end. Or if it will just end us.
If we knew how to deal with nuclear waste we would have done so. As of this moment effectively none of the US commercial nuclear spent fuel has ever been properly disposed of. In 77 years it adds up to a lot.
While China's CO2 output is the highest globally, per capita its output is just over half of the US. That's even without considering that much of China's output is as in this article, manufacturing pollution imported from other countries. The bill for this pollution should fall on the country that consumed the manufacturing output.
>the Nokia feature phone business from Microsoft, which had in turn bought the ailing brand in 2014.
No mention that Microsoft sent executive Stephen Elop to dismantle Nokia as its CEO in 2010. Nor that in 2014 as part of the deal to acquire Nokia's phone business leaving the rest of the company to soldier on, Nokia insisted that Microsoft repossess him.
Of how much invested? Published numbers show plans for $80B ai splash. Anybody got to-date numbers? I see $14B on OpenAI and $20B for Nuance Communications. That's $34B sunk.
Also, is this crowing about as reliable as any other marketing babble? They mean to sell this service.
BNE Intellinews article was taken from this press release:
https://www.icm.csic.es/en/new...
which, itself, doesn't represent the research paper accurately:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.10...
The conclusion of the research paper is: hey, we can track these sorts of changes in the southern hemisphere and there are several possible explanations and (as with all successful research papers) more research is necessary.
Don't Look Up
Watch it again.
The Slashdot discussion from crossing 400 ppm in 2013:
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
This year's monthly average peak so far, and a new record, was 430.51 ppm in May.
When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
