This is ridiculous and hysterical. Read the IPCC reports, the latest ones. Read some of the observational studies on the most likely warming scenarios. There is no justification for these doom laden fantasies.

You are correct about one thing: there is no likelihood that global CO2 emissions are going to fall. In fact, they will certainly rise. The world outside the West, which is doing 75% of global emissions, does not believe there is any climate crisis, and their approach to emissions is maximize economic growth and let emissions rise as they may. Their approach to COPs is to attend with the sole purpose of preventing them from reaching any mandatory targets. So we will see global emissions rise well north of 45 billon tons a year by 2040 or so. China probably north of 15 billion.

But this is not plausibly going to result in a 4C rise in average global temps by 2085. Though if it were, the appropriate policy response would not be to try to get to net zero in the US, UK, Canada, Australia by installing wind and solars. That will neither get to net zero nor have any effect at all on the global climate even if it does.

The right policy response is to make a rational assessment of local risk, and use the money currently being wasted in subsidizing wind and solar to protect whichever of our local populations are most at risk.

Try reading the paper. You'll find that there is no rational cause for alarm in it. Its just another of these pieces which tries to promote alarm without supplying any rigorous argument for it.

It may be that the fungi are properly modelled in their procedure. But what they do not show, don't even try, is to show that in particular environments any probable increase in local temperatures will lead to major expansion of them.

Modelling the fungi is probably a useful thing to do, an advance in scientific knowledge, of some value in itself, assuming they have done it right. Someone may use it someday for a useful purpose.

But the armwaving in the direction of global warming is without any sort of rigor, its just the more or less compulsory current nod to a prevailing meme.

There is no reason from this paper to think that any reasonably probable increase in global temperatures this century will lead to any alarming spreads of the fungi in any particular locations.

"Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is. Many people think that the energy demand for our industry will go from 3 percent to 99 percent of total generation. One of the estimates that I think is most likely is that data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027, and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale that I have never seen in my life."

So lets build some more wind turbines and install some more solar panels.

And then, since the data centers run 24 x 7, lets install some batteries for when its calm or night.

And then, we notice that some kind of inertia has to be provided, or the whole thing keeps falling over and its kind of difficult to do a black start. So we install a bunch of gas powered flywheels. Not a bunch, really a lot actually. In fact, enough plant to run the data centers except these are just flywheels with no generation attached.

Now it all works, and we have saved the planet and powered the data centers at the same time. That's good.

Until some bright spark wonders why don't we couple some generators to those flywheels as long as we are spinning them all the time....

The problem with weather events and claims about their being due to climate changes is attribution. It usually happens with hurricanes or intense rainstorms, where the claim is that a given event was made more likely by climate change, otherwise known as global warming, or in this case the climate crisis caused by global heating.

[Someone has taken the Guardian style guide to heart....]

It happened with the very hot UK summer a couple of years back, and with a hot summer in Pakistan. Also happened with the California wildfires. The very dry period in Europe which recently caused the Rhine to come close to impaired navigability.

The trouble with the line of argument is that its fairly easy to show that there has been a rise in temperatures. Leave aside the issues with UHI, there can be no doubt that we are and have been in a modern warming period.

But to show attribution you have to connect the rather small amount of warming that is reasonably attributable to human emissions - that is, the warming of the last 50-60 years, to the specific events in the specific geographies in question. How much hotter and drier than usual was it in California, and how is that connected to the fires? How unusually hot was that summer in the UK? You usually do this by tracing back, at which point you find that the events in question are rare but not unprecedented.

And then there is the proposed remedies. The usual cry in these threads is furious alarm followed by a demand for more wind and solar power generation. Apparently in the US. Folks, this is not going to happen, and if it did it would not affect global temperatures one iotia.

Why? Because not more than 20% of the global emitters believe in 'global heating' or have any intention of lowering their total emissions. And because anyway power generation accounts for only about 25% of total emissions. So you have 20% of the world attacking 25% of their emissions. Can you all do the math? There is growing resistance to net zero in the 20%. Doing better than half of generation from wind and solar is inconceivable, given the cost and the lack of any solution to intermittency.

So here it is in a nutshell. There may be ocean heat waves, presumably this is a correct measurement. But showing they are due to the amount of global warming we have seen is problematic. And then, showing that moving to wind and solar in those countries that believe it desirable will have any effect on the phenomenon? That is impossible, it won't.

What to do then, you will all ask. Accept that there are things we cannot change as well as things we can. Pray to be able to tell the difference. And if China and India are hell bent on increasing emissions at whatever rate economic growth requires, accept that this is something we cannot change. No efforts through the international bodies have had the slightest effect. Except to bring them to COP with the firm and successful aim of preventing any effective action on their emissions.

What can we and should we do? Work on protecting our own people on extreme weather events, however caused. Spend our spare money on education and health. And in general 'cultivate our gardens' and stop getting hysterical about the global climate and other countries whose policies we cannot change.

"our fight against another primarily human-driven crisis: global warming"

Is it the one that China is fighting by installing coal fired generation as fast as it can...?

"One of the purposes of these events is to remind the world that these people exist and are human and deserve the same rights/privileges/respect as everyone else. If you think we're at a point where those rights/privileges/respect are universally given already....well, i'd like to live where you're living. Except i assume it's just a state of denial, at best."

This is my point. I do not think that, any more, they are doing what you say they are. I think they were, but that they have changed very significantly as the rights for which people were demonstrating have been achieved. Yes, I do think (and observe) that they have been achieved,

I am not arguing that Pride marches should be stopped, refused permits and the like. I am simply questioning what the current point is. Some people say they are just street parties. That is not my impression. I think there is a strong element of 'Ãpater la bourgeoisie' about them nowadays which tends to diminish rather than increase acceptance.

I would point out that a lot of gay people are of the same view on this.

As to finding a place where "those rights/privileges/respect are universally given", its not hard. Most of the West now is such a place. There are exceptions of course, but they are just that.

I no longer understand why people are holding Pride demonstrations. Back in the day before equality there was a reason, but now it seems to consist of a bunch of people in fetish gear celebrating, to who isn't clear, and why isn't clear, their sexual preferences. Do whatever you want, but why hold public celebrations of whatever it is you do.

When it was a matter of agitating for gay rights, then it was different. But back then of course the demos were dignified affairs with a political aim in view.

I don't have enough information to form a view on the situation in Hungary. The reaction seems a bit extreme.

This is nothing. The BBC has been generating an entire news channel totally on AI for some years now. Complete with robotic announcers and reporters who do not really exist outside the digital domain, and frequent hallucinations when the channel reports events which have never happened.

There is striking instance of this in their viewers question program. Here a robotic presenter deals with what purport to be readers questions and criticisms. The questions and criticisms are clearly AI generated, but if you look closely at the robotic presenters you can see unmistakeable artifacts there too.

Lately some of us have been looking at the UK Parliament Channel on youtube, and wondering if that does not show similar signs of having been digitized and AI'd. How many of you have actually seen your MP in the flesh lately? Fewer and fewer. The stereotyped robotic behavior you see on the channel, the endless reciting from what are obviously LLM generated commonplaces.

I guess the comfort is that the simulacra on the BBC are probably doing no worse than the real people used to do before they were replaced. Same idiotic politically correct propaganda masquerading as news. That's why its so hard to persuade people of the change. They keep saying, but its no different from how it has been for years, so it can't be, and if it is, probably it doesn't matter.

No, I guess not....

The question makes the assumption that there is something happening to the climate that is important enough to perhaps require 'acknowledgment', presumably meaning mentioning or featuring in the plot.

This is very commonly believed here and on other similar US forums, but it has to be accepted that it is a minority view. Its a minority view within the USA, and even then, the USA is in a minority in having a significant body of opinion on these lines. China, for instance, you will find that the political class doesn't believe it, and the mass of the population neither. You can see from the failure of almost the whole world not to live up to any of their COP targets that this is true. Still, we are talking US movies here, so maybe US movies should reflect the views of the US leading minority on this issue? Help educate while entertaining?

So, you decide that yes, there is a climate crisis and you want movies to mention it, feature it, have plots turn on it etc. What about trans? Do you think that movies should 'acknowledge' the existence and oppression of the LDBTQ+ community? Do you think that plots should regularly have to turn on the characters confronting LDBTQ+ issues in themselves or their surroundings? Should the plague of heteronormativity be acknowledged and confronted in movies?

What about race? Do you think there is a need for white privilege and white fragility to be acknowledged? What about the Patriarchy? Should movies be attempting to combat racial and gender microaggressions? Should casting be done on the basis of this?

Folks, news from the Delphic Oracle. You can do all this. Will you end up with watchable movies that people will enjoy, recommend to friends, pay to rent or to see in cinemas? I don't think so. People do not want to be sold some political views in their movies, even ones they agree with. What they want is drama, insight, at a personal level. Any suggestion of fixing propaganda in the dialogue, plot or casting is the kiss of death. What you are arguing is what the Soviet Union practiced under the heading of socialist realism, where endless trashy movies tried to convey a predetermined crude moral and poltical conclusion, having to do with political goals and ideology of the regime in power. Plots, characters and dialogue selected for this.

No, you do not want this, and any movie company doing it will go bust. Indeed, this has already happened to some movies.

Its not generally realized outside informed circles, but the BBC news is now actually an AI construction. The move has been gradual over the last couple of years, but now pretty much everything you see is AI. The presenters are AI creations - wonderfully lifelike, but that is what they are.

It shows all of the characteristics of LLMs including hallucinations of events that never happened - as when it reported that an IDF missile had hit a hospital, when human auditing revealed that a Hamas missile had misfired and hit near it. This happens all the time, and they even have an automated reader complaint feature, where if you call in and complain you can have your complaint dismissed by a robotic announcer trained on a vast database of customer complaint calls from all sectors of the economy.

It seems to have a particular problem with human sexes, frequently referring to men as women and women as men, and if often has long pieces referring to something called 'gender' which it sometimes uses as a synonym for sex, and at other times for some other hypothetical entity whose nature is unclear. Its coverage of climate and weather and energy is more than 50% hallucination, it keeps reporting freezing cold periods are the warmest ever, and attributing odd gusts of wind on mountaintops to something it calls climate change. And don't get me started on its hallucinations about wind and solar power. Then there is its coverage of race, where it seems to have been trained on events in some other country, or maybe planet.

Much of BBC radio, particularly Radio 4, has been AI for much longer. The Archers, for instance, has been entirely AI generated and spoken for at least five years, including the plot lines and all the vocalization. The Archers AI was trained on the entire corpus of the program going back to the 1940s, though it also used recordings of other soaps from the past to try to update it, after earlier attempts kept hallucinating about the ongoing War. This is why it has that curious out-of-time feeling to it, and why the voices and articulations sound so wooden. People really did use to talk like that. I know they don't any more, but we have to wait a few years for there to be enough modern examples for training to get more up to date simulations.

The most extraordinary hallucination is that the AI, now penetrating management upper levels, appears to think that the license fee funding will carry on forever and it has not yet noticed the Defund The BBC movement. Actually it hasn't much noticed Reform or the Tory Party for quite some time. And of course in the face of dropouts among the young, it resorts to inserting all these 'its our BBC' snippets, in the absurd effort to persuade people, particularly the young, who don't watch it that its really all theirs too....

Need to wake up. Its not just that they are late submitting their plans, they really do not buy into the whole story. The world outside of the English speaking countries and Germany doesn't buy the story. In fact even within these countries its only the political class that believes the story, the mass of the population is either indifferent or skeptical. There are in the UK a few maniacs who block traffic and deface monuments every couple of months, but that's about it. And we may well doubt how many of the mainstream media writers and elected representatives who go along with it actually believe it, the suspicion is that its more go along to get along than active belief.

What do most countries of the world not buy into?

They don't believe there is any kind of climate crisis. They don't believe converting their economies to all electric is either possible, necessary or desirable. They don't believe converting their power generation to wind and solar is, either.

What will happen?

The next COP will still have tens of thousands of attendees. Those representing 75% of global emissions, and particularly those representing the countries with largest and fastest growing emissions (can you guess who that might be?) will ensure that no binding agreements to reduce emissions are signed.

The world outside of the English speaking countries will continue with their present policy on energy and climate. That is, to grow their economies as fast as they can, and accept whatever emissions result. And of course to attend the conferences to make sure they do not try and impose any restrictions. The US will abandon any emission reduction goals it has - its dropped out of Paris again already, but this is just the start. It may drop out of the conferences too. Notice that NZ is dropping out of the whole process. More will follow.

What are the consequences we should draw for policy?

Accept that global annual emissions are going to rise above 45 billion tons. If this is going to lead to disaster, disaster is what is going to happen. Since it is impossible for politicians and activists in the US, UK etc to do anything about this, rational policy has to be to do the best possible to protect one's own citizens from the consequences. You may not like this, but its the only rational thing to do. The UK, take an example, if it vanished from the global and took all its emissions with it, it would have zero effect on the global climate. Similarly in fact for the US - do the math. Its 5 billion tons of emissions would be made up in five years by China, India and the developing world.

The US and UK Australia and Canada need to abandon their fantasies of climate control by energy transition. No, reducing my personal emissions will make no difference. No, reducing my state's or city's emissions will make no difference. No, extreme weather or wildfires are not a reason for trying to move power generation to wind and solar. The weather is going to be what it is, plan on living with it. You cannot change it.

The underlying reason for this is probably the most upsetting thing for the latter day imperialists who throng the climate activist movement. It is that the West is too small a player in global economic terms for just about anything they do in their own energy policies to have any material effect on the global climate. The days of the West leading the world, or driving the global economy, are over. Get used to it. And if you feel really strongly about emissions, go demonstrate outside the Chinese embassies. Good luck with that!

Not really. The question is about the grid itself. It has power from a number of sources, increasingly intermittent wind and solar. So when a large user wires directly into one constant base load generator the effect is not just to change the point at which power is drawn while leaving everything else the same. The effect is to raise the proportion of of the grid that is being supplied by intermittent sources.

You notice that they are not approaching the operators of wind or solar facilities with a request to connect directly.

The underlying phenomenon which no-one will talk about is that attempting to migrate the grid to intermittent power generation technology, while at the same time increasing demand of a sort that requires consistent base performance is not going to work. Is not working. And the result is that the largest and most sensitive users are looking for ways to bypass what they can see is a disaster coming down the line at them.

Object to this? Go ask them why they are not building or connecting to wind farms, and you'll get your answer instantly. As long as you ask in private, because no-one will admit to this publicly.

Years ago when very young I listened to speakers in a store and ended up buying a pair of Bose ones. Believe it or not, after having listened also to B&W. They sounded rich and warm. Youth!

Took them home, was very happy with them for a day or two, then felt growing unease, finally listened carefully and got to the problem, it was the one note booming Bose bass. Unlistenable to for any length of time if what you wanted was clear reproduction of acoustic music.

What you test with, by the way, is speaking voices, both male and female. You'll hear it right away then. If they sound natural and balanced, music will be OK too.

So they were just intolerable. I gave them away to a friend, who was delighted with them. For a week. After a week she was not so sure. After a month she too gave them away. Never considered anything else by Bose again.

No, neither one. What is dangerous and not fit for purpose is mixing bicycles with cars and trucks on the same roadway. It cannot be done safely, its defective by design.

Holland was faced with this decades ago. The country was heavily dependent on bicycles for transport, particularly kids, and the arrival of large scale car ownership led to a rise in accidents and deaths of cyclists, again particularly children.

So they did the logical thing and installed what you see in Holland today, bicycle paths everywhere. In Holland you almost never have to cycle on a road with cars and trucks. Bicycles are still not a particularly safe mode of transport, particularly for the elderly. They are naturally unstable and falling off can be quite serious. But cycling on a dedicated path is hugely safer, and pleasanter, than cycling in the middle of cars and trucks whose one error of driver judgment can kill you immediately.

In 1971, 3,300 people died on Dutch roads, including 500 children. This gave rise to the 'stop child murder' campaign, and action to build bike paths and segregate traffic By 2023, despite a 30% population increase, traffic deaths in the Netherlands dropped to 684 overall. Child traffic fatalities (under 15) fell from over 400 in 1972 to just 20 in 2023.

It was not the only measure - there were also other car control and traffic limiting measures, including the creation of so called 'living areas' in which through traffic was prevented and speed control measures put in place. But it was the main one dealing with the car/bicycle accident epidemic, and it totally worked.

The UK has tried to have campaigns to increase cycling without providing a properly segregated infrastructure, and the experience is that it cannot be done. You can produce a temporary rise in bike use. But when people find out how dangerous and unpleasant an experience it is to cycle on mixed use roads, they stop.