Since 2015, the continent has shed sea ice equivalent to the area of Greenland. Researchers call it the largest environmental shift detected anywhere on Earth in recent decades. –– Earth dot com
Everything about Antarctica has defied the experts. For years Antarctic sea ice expanded when it wasn’t supposed to. Then, suddenly in 2016 the sea ice around Antarctica dramatically started to shrink, and that wasn’t supposed to happen either. Scientists wondered at the time if it was just a temporary blip, but then it got even smaller. Holes in the sea ice “as big as Switzerland” have started to appear for the first time since the mid 1970s.
To explain this mystery (that was rarely mentioned) a new paper suggests the salinity of surface waters has changed. We’re not just talking about a small piece of ocean, this is everything south of 50. For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean was getting less salty — an “expected response to a warming climate” they said that started in about 1980, “however, this trend reversed abruptly after 2015”.
So as news seeps out this week that there is a “dangerous feedback loop” where shrinking ice is warming the ocean, bear in mind that the experts also admit this is “completely unexpected” which is their way of saying “the models were wrong”. Carbon dioxide was not supposed to do this.
I read a great deal, particularly speculative fiction. I've tried repeatedly to use various AI tools to track down a short story or book where I can remember details of the story, and perhaps the rough publishing date, but not the title, author, or publisher.
AI appears to be utterly useless for this. It will either come up empty and make vague suggestions, like "Look at fantasy recommendations for the date range you've provided". Or worse, it will focus on the wrong book (say, one published in the 2020s, when I explicitly stated that the book was published in the 1990s) and keep insisting that's the closest match. Even character names or other proper nouns don't seem to work. Telling it to exclude certain titles or authors fails reliably.
When asking similar questions on stories I do remember the details of, getting it to "find" something, it needs to be provided with enough unique information that the story in question could readily be looked up. While it seems like the sort of thing AI ought to be useful for, the only stories it seems to be able to reliably find are very popular ones, even when searching for 21st century works.
The first time, it's a KLUDGE! The second, a trick. Later, it's a well-established technique! -- Mike Broido, Intermetrics
