In the military you generally learn two things.
... Two, you learn to unquestioningly obey orders. That is not really a trait associated with any kind of utopian society either.
To be fair, since military service includes officer training, you should also learn how to give orders in such a way as to mobilize personnel to efficiently accomplish a specified goal.
So the coral reefs, which formed during theCambrian Period, and also vertebrates, which was about 540 million years ago, when the average temperature was about 10c hotter than it is now, and when CO2 was over 1500% higher than its is now, are at risk of things getting a bit warmer?
Just a reminder, those "corals" you reference which formed during the Cambrian Period are all extinct. No survivors, no descendants. They all died, 100%, in the end-Permian extinction. After a while-- tens of millions of years-- new species rose up to occupy the same ecological niches, and we also call those corals, but they are unrelated, and in fact even use a different mineral for reef forming.
You can go visit Chazy Fossil Reef today and see coral fossils 480 million years old, from when Northern Vermont was a tropical marine environment.
Not exactly. You can see fossils of organisms that are called "corals", but they are not related to the organisms we call coral today.
Rugose and tabulate corals became extinct in the Permian–Triassic extinction event 250 million years ago, and a different form of reef-building organism arose ten of millions of years later.
"Virtually all corals" is not all corals.
"In the Atlantic Ocean" is not "on the planet".
Headline is very misleading.
Ah yes. I am well aware of this illogical nonsense. To say "billions of years have passed outside the spaceship" -- according to what measurement?
According to the measurement by clocks outside the spacecraft, that is, clocks that are not moving at speeds approaching the speed of light. That's what the phrase "outside the spacecraft" means.
I probably should have said 200 years.
Although we love to give him credit because he is the very picturesque vision of a mad scientist, you should know that many other people worked on AC power, and Tesla was not even the first other them. Of the AC pioneers, probably the most foundational work was done by Charles Steinmetz (who was also an immigrant, but who was in other ways the very opposite of Tesla).
The correct part of your statement is that it certainly won't happen if we don't do the work.
But you seem to be saying don't bother to do the work, because it's hopeless.
Your argument "better technology can never be made cheaper, because it isn't cheaper today" has been disproved by experience,
That wasn't my argument or anything close to it.
That was precisely your argument. When you said "Emissions keep growing while people keep searching for it", this is completely tantamount to saying "technology can never be made cheaper because it isn't cheaper now."
And you apparently do think "technology" is magic since you believe by calling it "technology" it gains magic power to solve a problem. We need real solutions, not simply imagine they will appear.
Magic was your word, not mine. And technology doesn't "magically" appear. It requires a lot of work. By engineers and scientists. But the work won't get done when techno-pessimists like you sit on your collective ass and say "it will never happen."
We're literally in a world where AI is allowed such carte blanche that medical records that need ethical review to be included in a study can just be flung to the AI as training data to side-step the ethical review? Are you fucking kidding me?
The argument is that revealing a person's health information to another person is a violation of personal medical privacy, but this isn't revealing it to a person.
There are multiple cans of worms opened here (some of them being discussed by the other commenters), but it seems a reasonable argument that it's not a HIPAA violation (...except in that we've sometimes seen that a carefully worded query can cause some LLMs to output their training data )
the technology we have now doesn't solve the problem right now
We have immediate solutions, they are just painful for some people.
We also have a lot of people who keep dreaming of future solutions that will allow us to avoid the pain. And they have been imagining those solutions for a couple decades while emissions have increased. So the problem keeps getting worse instead of better while we kick the can down the road.
They have not merely "dreamed" of future solutions. They have done the hard work of instantiating future solutions. e.g.:
Solar: https://blogs-images.forbes.co...
Wind: https://www.vertogen.eu/wp-con...
Battery storage: https://www.huntkeyenergystora...
But you are confidently saying "well, maybe they have improved the technology in the past, but they can't possibly improve it in the future.
Because technology is not, in fact, magic.
Your argument "better technology can never be made cheaper, because it isn't cheaper today" has been disproved by experience,
the feather to leaf however might be an overreaction, but ultimately harmless.
Is it harmless? That's an opinion. Not one I share either.
Is the change an overreaction? That's also an opinion. My answer is, it is no more an "over reaction" than people clammoring for the change in the first place is .
Why is it NOT an overreaction when a feather needs to be changed because someone somewhere was offended, and removing it offends someone else? Who's Offense Matters MORE? Is it offensive or is it honoring? That is the real question and who gets to decide?
And Who gets to decide who decides? Thats the real problem.
The one thing that is deliberately left out of all these discussions is the inconvenient truth -- it is impossible to make a meaningful reduction in the use of fossil fuels without destroying our economy.
Not at all clear. Reducing fossil fuels without destroying our economy will require implementation of better technologies. Turns out, improving technologies is something engineers are good at.
Maybe talk about it on news site, say, that has the motto "news for nerds"?
...and I've never heard anyone complain about China's dictatorship
You're not paying much attention, then.
They're asked to censor usernames with the name "Molly" in them?
People named Molly ought to be a bit concerned here.
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." -- George Carlin
