makerofspoons

It is part of a different solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoplanet

One area of change in one's lifestyle was never going to move the needle significantly. Reducing consumption is the real message- buy things that last, walk or bike, avoid air travel, turn off the AC, etc. Lomborg is right though that the savings on buying meat would likely be spent on other things, which is exactly why we need a carbon tax proportional to the emissions created to manufacture them.

Perhaps you're thinking of Barringer Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

I forgot xkcd had a forum. It hasn't been linked to the homepage in years.

If I had a plausible deniability partition I would put an easy password on it as well.

Eonsmoke even posted this image on Instagram with the caption "Mom! It's a USB Drive!": https://www.masslive.com/politics/2019/06/mom-its-a-usb-driv...

It's a scientific argument, based on the IPCC's synthesis report on climate change and the land, out last week: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/srccl/

It's interesting that you chose a report more than a decade out of date rather than one of the more recent reports they have published.

That really depends- if we get on war footing to address the problem like we confronted WW2 perhaps. If we procrastinate hunger, water scarcity, and conflict have a tendency to be destructive to knowledge.

Climate change and its impact on our agriculture, infrastructure, and political systems will be an increasing damping force on technological changes this century that I'm surprised didn't get a mention in this article.

At a certain point people need to live in physical reality. The 'progress' of everyone going on vacation, eating meat, and building nuclear families was a momentary and unsustainable aberration fueled by willful ignorance of the damage we were causing.

That is unfortunate.

Perhaps government contracts to sequestration companies in order to hit emissions targets could be carved out of existing budgets. I'm from the U.S. and there is certainly money to be diverted. Maybe we just need sequestration contractors in the right districts for certain politicians?

Carbon sequestration is a necessity at this point for many emissions scenarios. BECCS (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage) seems to be the IPCC's favored technology at the moment. It doesn't have to keep up with emissions, we need to cut emissions to the point that sequestration can bring us carbon negative.

June broke the record, too: https://www.noaa.gov/news/june-2019-was-hottest-on-record-fo...

July was hotter than June.

May was the 4th hottest ever: https://www.noaa.gov/news/may-2019-was-4th-hottest-on-record...

A carbon tax and dividend scheme might be more politically palatable, as it wouldn't be as regressive.

This is to be expected- we will continue to break these records until such a time we deploy carbon sequestration at scale.

This was a special report specifically on land use, so it makes sense they focused on diet and forests.

Before Apollo it is possible that missions like Surveyor 3 were contaminated with bacteria like Streptococcus mitis which may have been found on components of Surveyor 3 returned by Apollo astronauts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveyor_3

I have a good friend who is a physics graduate student at Princeton working on fusion and he has said the same.

I played it back in the day. It performed better and looked better than early Roblox. My first exposure to programming was actually thanks to Blockland as it inspired me to download the Torque game engine and mess around with it.

Their CEO was on NPR recently complaining about how Google Maps was eating their lunch and how it wasn't fair.

Why are Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher collaborating on articles with an infamous war criminal?

I'm not sure not being able to afford a holiday away from home is such a bad thing- a staycation is much easier on the environment, not to mention the wallet. One does not need to travel away from one's home to relax and recharge, and requires no burning of fuel on trains or airplanes.

The ECS isn't particularly helpful for near-term predictions of temperature change. The transient climate response is essentially unchanged in these new models (1-2.5 degrees) immediately after a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. The ECS is the equilibrium change and could take centuries to fully be felt.

Is anyone else somewhat underwhelmed by their examples? To my untrained ear it doesn't sound significantly better than the speech to text I've been hearing for years.

I'm almost as alarmist as they come when it comes to climate change, but I'm skeptical of the higher ECS values coming out of the newer models (as are the scientists developing them). In AR5 there was a noted divergence in the ECS values predicted by general circulation models and energy balance models. As computer-minded folk we should appreciate that when attempting a new approach in software one is bound to break things- like perhaps the way aerosols or clouds are being handled which seems to be supercharging the warming in these new models.

You may be interested in Project HARP which investigated such a concept in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP

Loss of the Amazon would be a major tipping point in ecological collapse: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/how-c...

In one model if the Amazon were deforested the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains declines by half. There are global impacts for all of this.

The cat's out of the bag. All this would lead to is law-abiding citizens having their information at risk while criminals continue to use crypto without backdoors.

Mostly I include it in my protein shakes, but I also use it for baking.