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>You need an offline/IRL verification step

That's what the orb thing is about. You go visit, meet humans, have a photo of your eyes. You can't just hold up an AI photo or scan your dog or whatever.


There was an article four days ago about 12 million hectares to grow corn for fuel and that energy from solar is 30x more efficient. Maybe they could make a few million of that nature reserve and put solar on other parts? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47868063)

It was good weather for London. Clear skies and cool.

> It was good weather for London.

Unusual!


I think Kejelcha will be back.

As a London cyclist I don't really mind the odd taxi / Waymo dropping off in the bike lane. It's an annoyance but I guess they have to drop off somewhere.

Most people die at some stage. I wonder if there's any statistical evidence that this lot is abnormal?

The effects of Alzheimer’s are pretty obvious. I don't think not being able to detect it is much of an issue.

An obvious counter hypothesis is the amyloid is produced to counter an infectious agent. It is a reaction to that, not the cause. I think HSV-1 has been hypothesised. I'm not that up on it, just saying there are alternatives.

Which is only relevant if you actually find an infectious agent doing something in the right place, which so far we have not.

The vaccine prevention connection for example AFAIK is just pure statistics: you get the shingles vaccine, your population level Alzheimer's risk drops but we have no direct evidence of why this should be.

Its entirely possible we later find it has no effect and it's a population level quirk of people who were likely to get a shingles vaccine until that research - conversely the cost of just getting one is incredibly low (hence why I did, in relation to that exact data).


Not by my prefered definition. I like science being the study of nature through reason and experiment. Reality trumps consensus.

Climate science is much more complicated - there are many things you could disagree with beyond will tons of carbon change things, yes or no.

Like are we doomed or will it just get a bit warmer before we switch to solar for example.

There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.


> If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists.

Depends! If you're a large fossil fuel company, the obvious move might be to spend more money on advertising agencies scientists, or entire foundations who question climate science instead.

... which they did. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7

Meanwhile, the basics were known since the 19th century. https://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf


> There are also money issues like with the alzheimer's situation. (that is: If climate change is dooming us then we should send more money to climate scientists)

Absolutely, the issues are similar

And if this can upend the business model of some big companies we'll give some "incentives" to some "doubtful" scientists even if their doubts are unfounded (actually very well founded but you get the gist)

Which sucks because such work should be free of pressures and incentives


> we should send more money to climate scientists.

Couldn't disagree more.

Please spend it on those who might actually fix something. There's plenty of can remove carbon or can undo the effect of X on Y. Let's stop falling back on the bad argument of we must leave nature alone right after arguing we change billion dollar industries because we can.

We shouldn't learn to be custodians watching the planet die because of past mistakes, we should be fixing and improving the planet and improving on nature because we can, must and should, shoulder this reaponsibility.

Please not _yet more modelling_ burning HPC into the ground just for a crappy bar line graph (based on assumptions)...


> we should be fixing and improving the planet and improving on nature

How do you do this without a process of finding out what works and what doesn't? Isn't that science? Or am I misunderstanding you saying no more modeling to mean we already know everything we might need to know in order to shoulder this planet scale responsibility and just collectively aren't doing anything except making bar charts?

What does your proposal actually look like without science or climate modeling?


Actually my "Absolutely" referred to the first phrase, not the second one (my bad!)

I am baffled by the number of people on HN, presumably a website for and by technical people, who fail to consider secondary and tertiary effects when it fits their worldview to do so.

There is a yawning abyss of states in between extinction and 'boy sure is a few degrees warmer out here' and none of them are good.

Many organisms would benefit from a warmer climate, just not humans.

We rely on extremely narrow conditions for the fragile supply chains and power structures that keep us on the ragged edge of civilized to continue working. We had an extremely mild contagious disease outbreak, by historic standards, and our economy is still feeling the effects!

Imagine the impacts of something like wildly different rainfall patterns, increased rate of global infectious disease, shifted agricultural zones, changes to Jetstream patterns, large scale crop failures, loss of water supplies, temporary local ecosystem collapses etc. These changes are incredibly fast on the scale of what it takes to reach ecological equilibrium.

These of course mean nothing to biological life, writ large. Life will recover and adapt. To fragile human civilization they mean refugee crisis, resource wars, failed infrastructure, and ten thousand other existentially terrible things.


I get your point but on the other hand humans live quite well in places like Medicine Hat say where it swings from -40 C in winter to +40 C in summer. Against that the likely warming by say 2100 is I think 1.5C up from what it is today which might be just about noticeable?

> Many organisms would benefit from a warmer climate, just not humans.

and a whole fuckin lot that wouldn't, and that may collapse the ecosystem


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