Yes and no.

Visible light carries energy, and hence, yes, absorbing visible light will heat the fabric. However, at temperatures less than a thousand degrees or so, most of the heat energy is carried in infrared light. Since the fabric is specified as being black in visible light, it may or may not be absorbing in infrared.

Well, yes: we live in a society in which 50-kg small humans coexist in spaces with 1000- and 2000- kilogram metal vehicles travelling at a hundred km/hour, and only the social rules keep them safe.

The entirety of our civilization's "safety" relies on our society and its rules. It's not a "small minority"-- it's all of it. Every time I drive I put myself in a situation in which I'm less than one second away from flaming death if I should make the wrong move.

Right-wing operatives have long been pushing that ALL government work should be done by hiring contractors from private industry. This was an example.

The contractor they had been hired by was a company called Opexus; they were hired as engineers working on projects for various agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Energy, Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

Obviously Opexus didn't do a good job at background check.

A few more sites: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
  https://arstechnica.com/inform...
  https://cyberscoop.com/muneeb-...

That is what I think happened. It took some time (millions of years) for LUCA to emerge, once it did it would have quickly spread across the planet, quickly being more millions of years. LUCA would have evolved, some being fitter than others: faster, more robust metabolism - these would have out competed less fit LUCA descendants and also non LUCA that was getting going.

That is not to say that non LUCA descendants do not exist in some niche somewhere - but we have not seen them - yet. So apply Occam's razor and say: possible but probably not.

No, BSOD.

I'd say the safest place to cross would be in front of a huge, impossible to miss bus, with a flipped-out sign reading "STOP" and with flashing lights.

For years the oil companies were heavily funding people to create doubt about climate science. They eventually got publicly outed for paying for bad science, and stopped because it looked bad.

As for atmospheric science, the main funding for atmospheric science is in improving weather models, including hurricane path predictions and aviation weather. Climate predictions are pretty much just another application of the models made for other purposes.

As for the oil companies, they shifted their strategy to funding "think tanks" pushing libertarian ideas, funding advocacy that the government needs to avoid taking any action on climate change.

I remember when my second grade teacher told us that the earth was hotter in summer because it was closer to the sun!

The lesson is, maybe you should learn more science after 2nd grade.

I'm not worried about people who make errors, discover the errors, and retract the work. I worry about the people who lie, and when the lie is pointed out, double down with bigger lies.

To be more accurate, this was an error in an economic study. Economists might think their field is a science, but scientists don't.

The normal cycles-- known as "Milankovitch variations"-- happen on a time scale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. The current climate change is much faster than that.

Nope.

Volcanoes can dump large amounts of carbon dioxide, but for short periods of time. Cumulative, no, volcanoes produce less CO2 than humans do. (And supervolcanoes are more of a problem with ash deposition, not CO2.)

Asteroid impacts, on the other hand... the Chixulub asteroid impact killed every species of life larger than a squirrel (and a large amount of smaller life). Do you really want to say "no worries, carbon dioxide is no worse than a mass extinction?

The interglacial started about eight thousand years ago. The interglacial sea-level rise finished about four thousand years ago. You're way behing

No, of course not. The idea is to look at the information and learn as accurately as we can.

The whole point of the discussion is deciding what to do. Your statement "surely we will do something!" is more or less useless.

But your implication that we can just wait until 2100 and then do something (the path the oil companies want us to take)-- do keep in mind that a lot of climate change will have already happened. The earlier we implement these innnovations, the less bad the problem will be. And, the earlier we fund the research to make these innovations the earlier we will be able to start implementing them.

I am not a fan of the "don't worry, we don't have to do anything, AI will solve all our problems" approach.