I don’t think you were the first in this thread to confuse yeast with mold (and I’m not even sure you intended to do so, though you didn’t correct the post you were replying to); however it really has nothing to do with spores, though that term is rather ambiguous since there are also other organisms that produce “spores” including some bacteria and some plants such as ferns. All of these usages refer to reproductive cells whose functions are similar but whose morphologies are rather different. It does not imply that the “spores” are homologous across these disparate organisms, which even span multiple kingdoms [!].

The main point is that plastic is not indefinitely recyclable. The problem is that the carbon chains tend to get broken up every time the plastic is recycled, and once they become too short the plastic no longer holds together. The problem is worse with some types of plastics than others, but all of them suffer from this to some extent. So far no practical way to reassemble these broken chains has been found, at least for most types of plastics. Moreover you cannot in general mix different types of plastics in the recycling process. So eventually once the material has become sufficiently degraded, the simplest thing is just to break it down into short chains like methane, ethane, and propane and burn it (with all of the environmental consequences associated with that).

Yeast and mold are not at all the same thing.

Most plastics cannot be simply melted and re-made into bottles very many times before breaking down. Most plastic eventually ends up burned or buried, or worse yet as litter.

Probably mu was intended. I suspect this typo was the result of character set conversion, that kind of error is common with a lot of naive character set converters.

Grrr stupid tablet dropped part of my post.

Most plastic recycling can yield anything useful only a limited number of times before the only thing left is for it to get turned into some kind of fuel and burned.

I should add that existing “plastic recycling” methods are for the most part completely inadequate; the plastic can usually be recycled into something useful only a very limited number of times before it gets turned into something useful only kind of fuel and burned or alternatively buried in a landfill. Neither of these is sustainable in the long term.

This completely misses the point. There are significant problems with the toxicity of plastic waste not only in the human food chain but in the biosphere in general. If the plastic can really be turned into something benign enough to eat and that doesn’t contain any microplastics, that could be used for a lot of things besides cookies, anywhere from livestock feed to restoring some of the soil biomass lost to erosion via crude agricultural and forestry practices in the past. The primary issue besides safety is, of course, cost - though plastic disposal through burning or landfills isn’t free either, especially taking into account the long-term environmental effects.

No, I don’t think he’s suggesting rewriting everything. As with anything else, it’s the old 80/20 or 90/10 rule - rewrite the small amount of bloatware code where the computer spends most of its time into more efficient code (preferably non-interpreted). That doesn’t mean rewriting the entire application, either - just the part that’s slowing things down; such places almost always exist in any large application. This isn’t even anything new; we had plenty of interpretive software in production even back in the 70’s and 80’s, but since they weren’t used heavily they weren’t worth rewriting. It’s not an all-or-nothing choice, we’ve just forgotten that there even is a choice.

Since we’re talking about fleet vehicles and not private vehicles, you really should be aware that very many fleet operators (both public and private) have long had their own fueling stations at their fleet parking lots. So yes, the government does indeed build gas stations for their own use. Heck, even many (most?) middling sized farms have a fueling station so that the farmer doesn’t have to drive in to town every time he needs to fill up his tractor.

Except that most government fleet vehicles aren’t used for commuting to work, but rather in the course of their jobs. Examples are law enforcement, postal delivery, etc - while the vehicles may spend part of the workday in the fleet parking lot, much of the time they will be out in the community.

I don’t know offhand how many EV’s the government actually has in operation; for example, under Biden the Post Office was in the process of replacing their fleet of vehicles, many of which were going to be electric, but I don’t know how many were actually delivered and I assume that Trump directed that all of the new ones delivered under his watch were to be ICE. If the number of electric vehicles actually delivered under that program was negligible, then any chargers for them are superfluous. Similarly with other agencies; if there are not many EV’s in the service fleets then there’s not much point in having the chargers running - but if there are a lot of EV’s already in the service fleets, then turning off their chargers is yet another example of absurd government waste. Given how pigheaded he has been about EV’s (at least if they’re not Teslas), it wouldn’t surprise me if he directed that all government EV’s were to be sold off even if they were brand new and working well enough for their purpose, which would be an absurd waste of an already sunken cost, regardless of your opinion about the wisdom of purchasing them in the first place (It would be different if large numbers were not adequate for purpose, though I would think we would have heard about it if so).

The entire affair strikes me as nothing so much as absurd political theater: Claiming to be “saving money” while at the same time selling off brand new (and expensive) equipment at fire sale prices, just to make some kind of cheap political points with his fan base.

I don’t think it’s ludicrous, though it’s by no means guaranteed to produce the results they’re hoping for. You have no clue how science works.

Your information is significantly out of date. The current percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 0.0427%, not 0.03% as you claim - it's been rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, when it was about 0.028%; It hasn't been as low as +/- 0.03% since the 1950's. While there is a certain (small) amount of debate about how much CO2 was in the atmosphere during the Pleistocene era (2.58 million years ago up to about 11,000 years ago) because the proxy data that we have are not as reliable as modern instrumentation, we have pretty high confidence about the data gathered during the 20th and 21st centuries, and they show a consistent rise in CO2 levels that really started to take off around 1950 or so. Moreover the source of the bulk of this excess CO2 is clearly from fossil fuels, which can be demonstrated by the atmospheric carbon and oxygen isotope levels which precisely match what would be expected if the source of the excess CO2 was all ancient plant matter, and no other explanation (volcanism, etc) seems to fit the evidence. The quantities required also roughly match the amount of fossil fuels burned (there will of course also be some released from melting permafrost, which will have a similar isotope profile, but so far that's a secondary effect, and is in any event a knock-on effect).

This of course doesn't *prove* that the additional carbon is *causing* climate change, and the computer models are, like all computer programs, subject to bugs and incorrect assumptions and the like. There is no possible way to run multiple experiments on additional (real, non-simulated) Earths to see what effect different levels of CO2 have.

HOWEVER, we do have pretty unequivocal evidence that the global climate is warming up significantly. Probably the most obvious is the loss of ice from the poles, especially the Arctic. For a while it was thought that the same phenomenon was not happening in the Antarctic, and that there was a net increase of ice in some parts of the Antarctic, but that no longer appears to be the case. It is hardly a requirement that temperatures and effects increase by equal amounts all over the globe (!). Likewise the glaciers in high altitudes are almost universally retreating.

Another piece of evidence that is hard to explain any other way is that the global sea level is moving inexorably higher over the last 200 years. Not just at a few locations (which might be caused by other effects such as subsidence), but all over the globe. This is mostly because of the thermal expansion of the water in the ocean, not the melting of polar ice since so far most of that has been sea ice rather than land ice, and melting sea ice won't raise the water level. It's not very fast (less than 2.5 mm/year on average), but it is extremely consistent, and over a span of decades can put many low-lying coastal communities at risk.

And of course we have direct temperature measurements taken at thousands of locations around the Earth, though I'm sure you will want to discount them. While there is every effort made to ensure that the measurements are a good representation of average global temperatures, it is never possible to have one thermometer every square kilometer so that we can get a complete global picture, and there's always a small chance that the dataset is not fully representative. They too show a consistent rise in global temperatures.

Which brings us back to those pesky computer models. While there are always possibilities for errors in the models, the awkward fact is that we have several independent models, and they all show more or less the same thing: That the higher levels of CO2 are largely responsible for the observed warming effects. And when you run them on PAST levels of CO2, their predictions all agree fairly well with the historical data. It is difficult to explain why they would all be wrong on future predictions (and in the same direction) when they all work so well for the historical climate data. It may not be quite impossible, but it certainly strains credulity.

It was possible to have some reservations about the accuracy of the climate models 20 years ago or so, but it is getting harder every year to deny that their predictions should be taken seriously.

Yes, it would melt faster if the temperature warmed up. Most of the natural ice in the Arctic is from snowfalls, which are essentially pure water. The idea is to create enough of it such that it stays around longer than the ice that's there "naturally", and thereby increasing the albedo of the Arctic ocean, causing more sunlight to be reflected back out into space. Obviously there are a lot of interactions involved here, and the point of the study is to see whether it might be possible to force the system into a colder climate regime or at least to hold the line where it is rather than seeing significant warming in the Arctic and losing massive quantities of ice every year like we're seeing now.

Yes, in the worst case. But if they can manage to keep enough of the sea ice around, there would be some hope of cooling the Arctic and expanding the ice over time. (Over geologic time the sea ice has both increased and decreased, so it *is* possible to increase it, although it's difficult). Admittedly this would be a little like the mythological Sisyphus who was doomed to roll a huge boulder uphill for eternity, but if it can buy us some time to get our act together, so much the better.

I think they're trying to find out whether this has even a prayer of working, not to come up with an ideal long-term solution right away. As one researcher I used to work with liked to put it, "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." If you're trying to expand our knowledge of something, it often seems a bit like scrabbling around in the dark until you can find that interesting nugget you were looking for.

Yes, obviously the point is to increase the thickness of the ice and hopefully seeing lower losses of sea ice as a result, since it would take longer into the Arctic summer to melt the thicker sea ice. Since the albedo of the ice is fairly high and therefore reflects most of the incident light back out into space, the longer you can keep it around the longer you retain that high albedo. Water has a relatively low albedo, so it absorbs a lot more heat than does the ice, causing both it and the air to warm up. Your mistake is in thinking that the idea is primarily to protect the ice over land, which also has a low albedo, but the article does say that they're pumping the water *from the seawater below* which wouldn't work as well for ice sheets over land since you'd have to pump the water from a distance.

It might work, but it would probably take years to restore a significant amount of sea ice. You need to create enough ice to make headway against all the ice lost through heating of the ocean water and the land area in the Arctic, which are losing their ice cover rapidly (lowering their albedo and absorbing even more energy as a result). Still, anything that can buy us a little time could be critical to solving the climate problem without causing too much damage.