That would be my question. What you have on youtube is a whole world of material that the intellectually and culturally curious kid cannot find anywhere else, or not easily and not at an affordable price. Instructional videos on everything from correct form in deadlifts to how to make mayonnaise or wire an electrical plug or take your laptop to bits and replace the hard drive. Audiobooks. Old movies, performances of (for example) Racine by the Comedie Francaise. Music of all periods performed in all styles. Some obscure work by Machaut? It will be there.

All this, a sort of modern equivalent to a huge multimedia lending library, they want to bar children from, and because? I have never come across anything remotely harmful on youtube. Not that I have looked, but just to say if its there its not at all obvious, and youtube has never suggested anything I would not want a 16 year old to see.

Where we end up on this path is, to give a recent example from the UK, making a speech in Parliament by an MP impossible to view without signing in having proved you are over 18. And then of course, getting your interest in that speech recorded. Think about the implications. Making it impossible to listen to a speech by an elected representative without first proving you are over 18 and then logging in and getting it recorded that you wanted to hear it. Because child protection? Really?

Its technically and culturally illiterate. But its not just that, the way its being done is actually sinister.

The idea that producing some tens of GW in Wyoming can affect the weather in Florida? Whether you produce it from coal, gas or some mixture?

This is really climate hysteria. There is no mechanism by which any such effect could be brought about.

If you want to find something which could affect the weather in Florida, because it does affect the global climate and thus arguably the global weather?

China, with its 14 billion tons a year of emissions, and mining and burning more coal than the rest of the world put together.

If the theory is correct, that could have an effect, its big enough. Nothing that happens at this data center can.

The two are different, and doing one is not doing the other.

The endangerment finding did not enable the regulation of climate. It could not do that. Regulating climate is way beyond the ability of the US or any US regulatory agency to do. The US is too small an economy and does too small a fraction of global emissions (12% and falling) for it to be able to regulate climate or affect it by local action.

Its example has no effects on the largest fastest growing emitters. They don't believe in the alleged climate crisis and all they do about emissions is grow their economies as fast as possible, and let emissions go wherever they go. The endangerment finding and policies based on it have no traction outside the US. And maybe the UK, with its tiny emissions.

The endangerment finding does enable US energy regulation. That is a different thing altogether, but US energy policy has no effects on the global climate.

People need to stop confusing these two things. Argue for energy regulation on its merits. But don't try and argue for it on climate grounds, there are none.

Why does it matter whether people believe in the alleged climate crisis?

This may seem an odd question, but bear with it for a few lines. Whether or not people in the US believe in it, and endorse doing something about it, its surely obvious now that nations accounting for at least 75% of global emissions do not. And its even more obvious that they have no intention of reducing their emissions. You want evidence? How many have updated their targets with real plans and commitments? Hardly any. As for the US, well, Trump got elected, and nothing he has done on energy policy should surprise anyone who listened to his campaign rhetoric. People in the US don't believe in it either, outside a small circle of the political establishment and media. And do they really believe? Or do they just find it politic to claim they do?.

We have to consider the curious fact that everything the climate advocates argue for doing in the US is either impossible or ineffective. An example of the impossible is NY State's intention of moving to net zero in power generation by installing lots of currently non-existent Dispatchable Emission-Free Resources (DEFRs). An example of the ineffective is California's drive to electrify transport by mandating EVs. The first will not happen because its impossible. The second may be possible but will have no effect on national, let alone global, emissions.

An interesting conclusion on this matter has been reached by a visiting group of anthropologists from Alpha Centauri who have been documenting and analyzing human culture. I have been fortunate enough to obtain a copy of the sections of their draft report covering the climate movement. It points out that the US has a strong Calvinist streak from its original founders. One of the main tenets of Calvinism is justification by faith.

It proposes to reconcile the apparent mass of contradictions in the movement by the hypothesis that the demands for belief and for ineffective or impossible actions do not in fact have any motive to produce any actions which the movement's beliefs would seem to imply are necessary. It proposes that in fact people publicly express their beliefs in the crisis and the proposed irrational remedies as testimonies of faith, marks of Grace, as Jonathan Edwards would have put it. By witnessing in this way, you can persuade your fellows that you are among the probably elect, worthy of respect, and these sentiments will be most useful in your business and social life.

You are not justified by lowering emissions. You are justified by your faith in the crisis and by your faith that DEFRs and EVs are important and valid solutions. Whether they are or not, who cares? Its faith that justifies.

Will the windmills actually produce any usable electricity? Will the EVs lower emissions? Does China show any signs of reducing its emissions? Only denialists will ask such questions, and we manifest our marks of Grace by denouncing any who ask them.

So to answer the question this post began with, yes it does matter if people believe, but not for the reasons you might assume. It matters to them and their associates because its the basis for inclusion or exclusion. It does not matter to the planet one way or the other, because these beliefs they claim to have don't connect to any transmission mechanism for effective action. In fact, if you claim to be a believer, the more extreme and impossible your demands are, the better. It reduces the chance that people will actually implement them, and that you will have to justify the results. And it shows that you are a fully committed member of the elect and so most worthy of social esteem.

Puritanism is having a long second life. The Cheka becomes the KGB, the SD becomes the Stasi. Well, that's how it looks to the anthropologists from Alpha Centauri. From what I understand, they seem to be submitting their paper to peer review here on Earth. Despite having been cautioned that if they are right, it will be a long time in review, and is unlikely to be approved. If the forces they allege are really present, they will make publication of such theories almost impossible. There will be a lot of social currency to be won from denouncing them.

There are two inconvenient questions which matter to this subject, and which Slashdot will not cover, either editorially in the selection of stories or in the comments from the regulars.

Question One: what will the output from wind and solar be in Germany or the UK in December, at about 5pm on a weekday, during one of the usual stalled high pressure episodes that last a week or ten days every winter? And what percent of faceplate is this number?

Question Two: what sources of generation are you then going to use to meet demand?

Go look up the numbers - for the UK they are readily available on Gridwatch. So its easy to answer the first question. The second...? No-one knows, or if they do, they are keeping it secret. Like Slashdot and most commenters they are just calling everyone who asks 'deniers' and hoping something turns up.

This is intermittency, the insoluble problem for the net zero generation project. And no, you cannot run a country off batteries for a week or ten days in winter. Just do the numbers. You can neither afford them, buy them, nor commission and run them.

It may be that this is the hottest JUNE. But consider what this means. We take an arbitrary 30 days, average the temps, and come up with a number for this 30 day period as compared to other previous 30 day periods.

Is there anything special about this particular 30 day period as opposed to any other? No. Is there anything special about 30 as opposed to 45 or 60 days? No.

I could equally well say (though it would not be true) that this year is the warmest for the period: last two weeks of May + first two weeks of June. That would be just as valid (or invalid) indicator.

As an indicator of whether European summers are getting hot, or whether this summer is hotter than previous ones, this is meaningless. The climate does not care about our arbitrary divisions of the days into calendar months.

If you want to make a real comparison, the thing to do is compare this summer with the summer of 1976, which was a real scorcher. Fortunately someone has done that for us:

https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

There's not a lot going on. Its summer. In any summer you can take some arbitrary number of days, and compare that period with previous periods of the same days, and if you go through enough iterations you can probably often find periods which are, this year, warmer than the corresponding periods in earlier years. So what?

This is just the usual media hysteria about an ordinary summer, which we have now got used to expecting every year. Meanwhile in Europe the crowds are enjoying a warm dry summer, flocking to the beaches and parks in defiance of the hysterical health heat warnings. Realizing that they are having a series of great summers, but that it will not last, so make the most of them, and that next year the UK Met Office will be forecasting a heat wave and a 'barbecue summer', only for nature to deliver a cold wet one, and the next year too. Its chaotic, and sometimes you do get a string of reds or blacks. But that is all that is going on.

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.