The title is a fair summary. The paper isn't simply confirming the "climate changed [warmed]" since 2015. The paper is showing the climate warmed the past decade twice as fast as it had between the decades from 1960-2000.
"This 58 indicates that the warming trend has been accelerating from a rate of 0.15 – 0.2 ◦C 59 per decade during 1980-2000, to more than twice that rate [0.4°C] most recently."
Honduras leading up to the 2021 elections was able to oust an authoritarian president Juan Orlando Hernandez (the same recently pardoned by Trump) through peaceful protests - mostly targeted at blocking major roadways between cities with burning tires. This was a sustained campaign over months, I don't see US citizens as prepared for something like that honestly, but logistically that's a recent example that came to mind.
Often thinking about extreme outliers including billionaires makes me think of park ranger Roy Sullivan who according to Guiness World Records is the person struck by lightening more recorded times than any other human being. 7 times.
After the fourth time, Sullivan apparently started carrying around a can of water in his car at all times because his hair always caught on fire when being struck. He also started believing that a force was trying to harm him through lightening strikes and would potentially pick him out even if he was in a crowd of people.
Pretty much anyone can acknowledge that believing in such a force, or carrying around a can of water in case they get struck by lightening again is not reasonable behavior. Extremely rare events (and sequences of events) happen all the time. Given an infinite number of distinct, equally likely outcomes, all outcomes approach a probability of zero, yet one of them will still happen.
Sullivan was of course struck by lightening again a few more times, one of which he apparently even used his can of water to dose out the lightening-induced fire in his hair.
Statistically Sullivan is anomolous even considering his highly increased likelihood of being struck as a park ranger in an area prone to thunderstorms.
Unsurprisingly Sullivan was deeply psychologically affected, became reclusive out of a fear of being struck again, and eventually died by suicide.
If your personal lived experience is the freakish outlier, there is an entirely rational perspective to view the world in a different way. To see coincidences in your life not as coincidence, but as something intrinsic to you. That is how we identify patterns in ourselves — strengths and weaknesses.
I think often for billionaires, they are Roy Sullivan's of business success.
Almost anyone can fathom that given a huge population of totally ordinary people, billions of them, a handful will become outrageously wealthy. Almost nobody can fathom they may just be an ordinary person after becoming outrageously wealthy.
What I think humans aren't really equipped to psychologically accept, is that they can simultaneously be struck by success so many times and still be a typical human. Their must be forces at work meaning these preposterously unlikely string of success cannot be coincidental.
But, we know effectively zero probability events (or sequences of events) of people being succesful must be happening all the time. Absolutely they may be the Virginian Park Rangers of success in that they work in the right place and the right time with the right behavioural quirks to be struck by success at a much higher rate.
But in hindsight getting struck by zero-ish probability events almost always feels, to the person being stuck, entirely caused by comprehensible, intrinsic forces rather than attributable to external factors and the nature of probability.
Musk thinking his instincts should be entrusted tight control of man-hours equivalent to all the lifetimes of a small country's population seems almost humble in that case. Why should the experienced insider have a say? How many times have they been struck by success? Surely not as many.
It's just the equivalent of Roy Sullivan carrying his can of water.
The only things they really have in common are that they both happen to be billionaires who bought their own social media platform that they now use to signal boost discredited right-wing conspiracy theories through memes and insults.
Beyond that, the comparisons are totally superficial.
It doesn't say waiving or modifying "a" regulatory provision, it says waiving or modifying "any" regulatory provision related to the debt. That certainly includes canceling it. "Any" and "waive" aren't up to reasonable interpretation here, which is probably why Roberts dodged them in favor of drilling down exclusively on the word "modify" and taking his textualist hat off so he could ignore the law as written and approved by Congress can be ignored because it had never been used in identical fashion before by a president.
Two small silver linings though. Roberts and his majority pulling all of these crazy stunts makes the SC much more interesting and has generated a ton of public interest. Public awareness and participation is gonna be an important step in reforming the court. Second, now that the majority no longer bothers with creating a legal pretext for its edicts (they aren't decisions without actual standing), they have created space within the legal world for serious conversation and effort towards reforming the SC to return it to its original intent as a judicial rather than legislative body. Reading some of the dissenting opionions it should strike anyone that the veneer of legal plausible deniability behind the conservative court's actions has been pierced to the point where you have dissenting justices quite explicitly calling out the unconstitutionality of the court's actions in writing.
"In adjudicating Missouri’s claim, the majority reaches out to decide a matter it has no business deciding. It blows through a constitutional guardrail intended to keep courts acting like courts," she wrote, adding that by deciding the case, the high court "exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution."
Consider that getting many views and avoiding losing subscribers or viewers are probably very much inline with the motivations of (insert your favorite highly biased political pundit). Particularly when dealing with small subsets of the population, popularity is a very unreliable North Star to guide you towards neutrality. Consider for a moment that, like nearly all audiences, your audience too holds biases. In that case, it’s very possible that more of certain types of bias, not less, would produce a more loyal and engaged audience I.e. more views less unsubscribes.
I am not familiar with your work, your biases, or your success in achieving neutrality. Based on the comment I am responding to, you may be well served by investigating a phenomenon called “audience capture” which a lot of excellent journalists have written about at length. Audience capture is a very hard pitfall to avoid entirely, especially when you are in a position where you financially rely on audience engagement and size.
If your goal is to avoid bias, a very noble goal, what you describe in this comment in all likelihood will sooner or later cause you to lean into more bias rather than less.
I saw this article posted on another thread today. I already read it years ago, but returning to it still felt very fresh once again. DFW writes with such an aware, candid, and at times gentle voice. So glad he wrote as much as he did, so sad there isn't even more.
Thinking of him reminds me we all have to remember to cherish, take care of, and be gentle with ourselves and one another.
If I can jump in a cage with a wild tiger, or a giant pot of boiling water, hands down I'll die by tiger.
Nature has a lot of horrible deaths, don't get me wrong.
But boiling sensory wise (at least for humans) is similar to immolation (being burned alive) and it unfortunately takes longer to actually kill the person than burning them alive.
Tigers naturally kill prey quickly to avoid injury, often going for the neck.
My response is an attempt to summarize lobster-pain-experience info I just gleaned in this thread from a much more thought-provoking and lengthy article already linked to in another comment called "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace.
Lobsters definitely feel pain at least as a stimulus responding to extreme heat.
Lobsters have nociceptors, special pain-receptors that are “sensitive to potentially damaging extremes of temperature, to mechanical forces, and to chemical substanceswhich are released when body tissues are damaged.”
Humans have similar receptors. Consider if you touch an extremely hot stove and remove your hand before you even realized what happened. That (temperature) pain stimulus is sent to your spinal cord (not your cortex) and then responds by moving your hand before you are consciously aware (through the cortex) of what is going on.
Lobsters do not have anything like the cortex which is involved in pain interpreation for humans (and also pain supression like in extremely traumatic events where a person doesn't feel any pain immediately after losing a limb).
The lack of a pain suppression mechanism is a little scary to think about in the context of being boiled alive, but this could potentially be because lobsters' experience of pain is so radically different from our own that they may not even have use of a pain supressor.
There are interesting anecdotes about people who received frontal lobotomies experiencing pain as a neutral experience that is neither bad or good. As in they feel pain from, but it is not perceived or interpreted as "bad" by them.
Also in general, lobsters are unusually sensitive to temperature among invertebrates, responding to temperature changes in lab studies as small as 1°, and their seasonal migratory patterns also seem to highly motivated by finding their preferred temperatures.
If you drop a lobster in a container of room temperature sea-water, the lobster just kind of sits at the bottom looking for the darkest most isolated space if there is one (normal behaviour) vs boiling sea-water you will notice lobsters trying to use their claws to not be fully submerged, push off the lid, etc... in the 35-45 seconds it takes for boiling water to kill them.
p.s. I hope this response is useful, I wrote it partially to let the mentioned article I just read sink in for myself.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/fossil-fuels-are-th...
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