It may look like that from this side of the millennium, but no, the history is simply in the process of being forgotten. This was a big effort.

Pretty much ALL of the present solar technology we see in megawatt production today is an outgrowth of the old Large Silicon Solar Array ("LSSA") program of the late 70s/early 80s (although the University of New South Wales group led by Martin Green needs to get some credit, too).

The program was originally part of RANN ("Research Applied to National Needs") and transitioned to ERDA (the Energy Research and Development agency) which then became part of the Department of Energy. LSSA became LSA, and then got renamed FPSA ("Flat Plate Solar Array"-- distinguishing it from concentrator solar arrays). So it had a lot of names.

Of course not. It was paid for by taxpayers (from the rich nations.)

I was there. You weren't.

If you want more details, dig up any of the old IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists' Conference ("PVSC") proceedings from the 70s and 80s and look at the program summary papers, typically the plenary talks toward the beginning.

China makes solar cheaper because they invested in scaling up technologies developed by the west.

What's neglected here is that the rich nations have already done this, by funding a decades-long research and development effort which reduced the cost of solar panels from about $500 a watt in 1980 to under $0.5 a watt in 2025.

Sounds interesting. You forgot to paste the link, could you post it?

If people are using AI to review papers, they're getting what they asked for.

Incorrect.

Warming is proportional to the logarithm of the carbon dioxide concentration. This is the Arrhenius relationship; it's been know for over a century. (For reference, this is why climate sensitivity is expressed as degrees of warming per doubling.)

You could say that "that means that as CO2 increases the slope levels out", which is true, but we are still in the linear range.

An interesting paper (although not peer reviewed), basically re-doing Manabe and Wetherald's 1967 calculations but with updated spectral lines. Did you actually read past the first paragraph? Their conclusion was that for the one-dimensional adiabatic warming due to carbon dioxide, they calculate 2.3 Kelvin per doubling of CO2. Points to note:

1. they express warming as degrees per doubling: they are agreeing with the Arrhenius relationship that warming increases as the logarithm of the concentration.
2. Their calculated value of 2.3 K/doubling is within the error bars of the IPCC estimate (which is the average of many models), although on the low side of the average estimated climate sensitivity. But, it's a simplified one-dimensional model, so it's not expected to be identical to the full 3D models.

I can only repeat that nothing you said makes this a story that couldn't have been equally well reported in 2024, or 2014, or for that matter in 1974.

This is not news.

We seem to be talking about completely different things. Let me see if I can state what I said more clearly. My comment had been that there is nothing new about this "news" story. Your reply was "Not sure I agree. The increase is not linear."

The fact that the increase is not linear is not relevant to the fact that there is nothing new.

You continued "That makes milestones relevant, as it helps gauge the exponent of the function."

Nope. The "milestone" 430 ppm gives you no information whatsoever about "the exponent of the function".

This story is not news. The fact that the curve is exponential does not make it news.

You're really saying that deviations from linearity that happened fifty years ago are the reason that this story is news today?

There is a little curvature visible in the measured carbon dioxide rise, but it's the steadiness of the rise, not the slight curvature in the rise, that is the reason it hit 425 ppm.

The word "should be" has no meaning in the context.

For the majority of the history of the Earth it had no oxygen in its atmosphere. But nobody is saying "basically, the Earth should have no oxygen."

I know too much about human cognitive processes and learning. I know that humans get desensitized to information they hear over and over, and eventually just filter it out.

The greenhouse effect is real, and our emissions are increasing the temperature of the planet.

But.

This really is a non story. The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has been increasing constantly since the measurements have started (and undoubtably before that). Every year has higher CO2 than the previous year. There is nothing new in reporting this. There is nothing interesting about 430 parts per million, it's not a particular milestone, other than it's higher than 420 but not as high as 440. There's nothing about this particular year being the highest level since well before the beginning of the holocene, that's been true for years.

Except as an excuse to keep carbon dioxide in the news, there's really no new in this news story.

Yeah. Depends a lot on what you categorize as a "smallsat," but a lot of these are cubesats built by students, and they have a huge failure rate.

Didn't "fall out of the sky." It lost power and stopped communicating, but it's still in orbit, and will be until atmospheric drag eventually brings it down.

Article was written by somebody who doesn't understand that you don't need power to stay in orbit.

What in the world do they mean, the satellite was "going off course"?

That's absurd. This is a satellite with no on-board propulsion; it can't change orbit. It can't go "off course." It lost power, and hence stopped communicating, but losing power doesn't mean it drops out of orbit.

Alternate source that is a little more credible: https://www.satellitetoday.com...
Another source, but paywalled: https://spacenews.com/methanes...