> In the past thousand years, we have never seen a single season where 4% of Canada's entire forest area burned down
You cannot possibly know this, you do not have accurate records of forrest fires that occurred 800+ years before Canada was even founded. Wildfires abide by power law distributions [1][2] meaning that enormous outliers like the one in 2023 (and maybe even this year) are not unexpected with a long fat tail distribution. Wildfires in Canada have been trending down in terms of number of fires, but the fires are burning more area [3].
> When you normalize the data and isolate forests
Here's the past two decades of forrest fires globally [4], very hard to spot a significant trend. I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem here and that climate change isn't playing at least some role in it, but to attribute this entirely to climate change is misguided and not supported by literature.
Sad but you unfortunately need to make a profit as a public company at some point. In 8 years since going public, they've had essentially one marginally profitable year surrounded by lots of losses while growing to 4000 employees. Easy to blame AI when the fault is really poor leadership.
While I'm empathetic to the overall theme of the post, the strawberries are a terrible example and takes away from the message. Strawberries are delicate little fruits that until a handful of decades ago, were seasonal expensive treats. It's not necessarily a bad thing that we've made a synthetic analog that allows less fortunate people to experience the taste of a perfect strawberry. Real strawberries aren't disappearing because of this, if anything this would have the opposite effect because strawberry consumption in the US have ~quadrupled in the past few decades [1]. No one replaced "500 individual human experiences", strawberries are not "extinct", there's no data to suggest that people "prefer the synthetic version".
There's a bit of a difference between "enforcing social norms" and telling a user to ingest prescription drugs to combat nausea from the other drugs that it told the user to take.
Yes, you should be able to write a book with this same information. No, you should not be able to release software that instructs its users to harm themselves. LLMs aren't people, and you shouldn't anthropomorphize human rights onto them.
> extraordinary amount of labor in order to modify our environment to save civilization from sea level rise and to be able to repair damages caused by natural disasters
Do you really think that 1-2 feet of sea level rise will wipe out humanity? Can you cite any examples of natural disasters increasing in frequency or severity due to increased green house gas concentrations? Would AI help with any of that?
This is just incorrect. The politics in the US say one thing but the market is going in the other direction. 2026 additions to the US grid will be almost entirely renewables - 6.3 GW of natural gas / 86 GW total means ~93% of new additions to grid capacity are renewable [1]. A quarter of the electricity in the US is now generated by renewables [2] and growing rapidly. The states with the largest amount of renewable electricity generation are wildly different politically, but all agree that renewables make the most financial sense [3].
It really doesn't - my source shows average summer temperatures (Th - Tl / 2). This does not say that those regions are experiencing high temperatures that are that much warmer, but that on average (including overnight lows) they are warmer.
Pretty sure global warming is referencing the global affects, not regional ones. You can't make a global argument based on local temperature increases just like you can't make an argument that global warming is causing cooler summers based on the numerous regions that have experienced cooling in the same reference period. Also these are average temperatures increases, not summer high temperature increases.
Most of the increase in local temperatures are overnight lows in the Winter. I'm not sure there's any peer-reviewed mechanism to suggest that daytime Summer highs will increase 20F+ due to greenhouse gases in any parts of the world.
In the reference period 1999->2020, the instruments used by NHANES to track this data changed at least 3 times, they don't account for other changes to the general population that increase bicarbonate levels in serum (i.e. Number of obese Americans rose by ~40% in the reference period [1]). I'm not entirely convinced that using a proxy for C02 levels that can be confounded by a multitude of other health conditions that are common in the American population is a good way of going about this.
> As climate breakdown accelerates, rainfall patterns are changing fast, and water will increasingly become less available at certain times of year. As Sir David King, a former UK chief scientific adviser who chairs the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, says: “Drought in England is no longer a warning. It is a clear signal that climate collapse is unravelling our water, food and natural systems right now.
Rainfall over all of the UK has been increasing since 1840 accord to the Met Office [1]. How is a drought a clear signal of collapse if they've been happening since before the industrial revolution? [2]
> Climate models consistently project environmental changes that would support an increase in the frequency and intensity of severe thunderstorms that combine tornadoes, hail, and winds (high confidence), but there is low confidence in the details of the projected increase.
The models project it, but there is currently low confidence in the increase.
But that's not what the paper says. It says Clear Air Turbulence (CAT) has gotten worse, not all types of turbulence. In this case, the flight flew through a convective storm.
Even so, the paper says there's been a 0.2-0.3% change in CAT:
> The largest increases in both absolute and relative MOG CAT were found over the North Atlantic and continental United States, with statistically significant absolute increases of 0.3% (26 hr) and 0.22% (19 hr), respectively, over the total reanalysis period.
That paper has nothing to do with the incident in question. You're referencing a BBC article that references a paper stating that Clear Air Turbulence is getting worse [1]
> Turbulence is unpleasant to fly through in an aircraft. Strong turbulence can even injure air passengers and flight attendants. An invisible form called clear-air turbulence
But in the incident in question, the plane flew directly through a convective storm.
[1] https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfr-2024-0216 [2] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2...