Would be nice if we started with the actual marginal land and not the marginal land in real estate terms. Roofs for a start. Parking lots next. Really no reason why any and all industrial land shouldn't look like a pure sea of solar from orbit. Every square inch is low hanging fruit no one would complain about a solar panel going in there.
They still do rooftop solar like I say, it is just at a scale that seems to only pay for the lights in the building and not generate surplus. So a guy still has to be up there no matter what every now and then even right now.
Desert ecologies are often boosted by solar (turns out animals spend lots of time in the shade so they aren’t roasted, and solar panels are shade). Industrial areas, at least where I live, tend to be pretty dynamic with respect to structures, I guess you could do it, but you would have to redo it a lot.
Manatees like when you leave a freshwater hose leaking into the saltwater. Ecologist tell you it is bad though because the animal develops a dependency towards human intervention that might not be a long term phenomenon.
Where I live the industrial areas are pretty much two elevations across the entire lot. You get the warehouse where it is a massive building with a flat roof of a single height. And you get where the trucks pull in and back into the warehouse, also a bunch of flat cement with fixed height requirements one could trivially deck with solar.
And when I looked at industrial areas in denmark, or at least in the vicinity of copenhagen, I saw pretty much exclusively that outside actual oil refineries. Just a ton of warehouses, flat roofs, truck yards. Again already with some solar, just only implemented to the extent to supplement a buildings utility bills, using only a small fraction of that massive flat roof, not to produce an excess of energy. I dare say most industrial property the world over looks more or less like that: rectangular building, flat roof, truck yard.
I would actually phrase is a "fossil fuels are an existential threat" - regardless on how climmate change will impact us, it is IMHO enough to see the destructions people are capable due to fossil fuel money & it makes 100% sense to get ridd of any dependency on fossil fuels ASAP.
It's hysterical claims like this that cause so many problems for climate researchers and policy makers when the doomsday scenario fails to materialize. And then that's when you get newspaper clippings about the melting of the arctic sea ice by the year 2000 and everyone laughs and then discounts the whole thing.
Please don't do this. It is not an "existential threat" outside of various fundraising pamphlets and political organizations, and they exploit science for political gain at the cost of the credibility of the whole enterprise.
I don't think you're qualified to make this assessment. If a large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat, I'm tempted to agree. In fact, I think most widely held scientific stances on this are meant to be balanced and as agreeable as possible, so I personally believe it's likely to be worse than the mainstream opinion.
Climate migration is already an issue. Extreme climate events are already increasingly problematic. Will civilization collapse in the next 50 years. Almost certainly not, but will we be better off then than we are now? Unless we rapidly increase the rate at which we address this issue, I don't see how that happens either.
Of course I'm qualified to make the assessment, as the respectable scientific community has been warning people to not make such bombastic statements, and similar warnings were in the IPCC. You really aren't doing yourself any favors by pushing hysteria into scientific disciplines. This is exactly why the climate movement has lost so much credibility and suffered so many policy setbacks.
No, the world is not ending. The clouds are not burning. There is no risk to life on earth. These are technical discussions about whether sea levels will increase by 2mm per year or 3mm per year.
> large majority of the scientific community is treating it and calling it an existential threat
I haven’t seen evidence of this. What I see is scientists making measured predictions about massive costs in human life, economies, refugee crises, and wars. Extinctions. Like, horrible stuff. But not extinction or even civilisational collapse.
Yes. Extinctions are horrible, but they aren’t an existential threat to us. Climate change simply isn’t an existential threat. That doesn’t mean it isn’t urgent. Like, the Bronze Age collapse and black plague and WWII weren’t existential, doesn’t mean they’re fine. But raising the stakes beyond what the science says like this undermines the credibility of the real warnings.
I think it's really naïve to realize that climate change is an existential threat to many species, but not connect that we are part of the ecosystem which is being put in danger. You are experiencing survivorship bias.
Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life. Which is also a totally valid interpretation of the phrase.
Ex ante survivorship is literally the delineation between existential and not.
> Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life
You see why this comes across as bullshit, though. It’s needlessly redefining a word to seem more punchy. We have plenty of perils we massively mobilize against without imagining they’ll exterminate the human species.
We will go from 8 billion humans to maybe 1 or 2 billion humans, but that is probably going to happen either way. Poor countries will be obliterated, rich countries are likely to see tanking living standards. Long term humans go extinct (or are superseded by some sort of singularity successor) and the earth recovers in a few thousand years as if we never existed.
RCP8.5 is pretty much ruled out by people as unlikely for some reason, even as we have the major super power on the planet pulling out of the Paris agreement on climate change.
There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature if we don't change course and reach net zero.
Saying its not an existential threat is just wild to me.
> There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life
Yes, but that temperature isn't going to be reached by fossil fuels.*
The reduced brain function from the extra CO2 (if we burned all of it) may make us unable to adapt to the higher temperature, however.
* Ironically, unbounded growth of PV to tile all Earth's deserts could also raise the planet's temperature by 4 K or so, and 6 K or so if tiling all non-farm land.
Deserts are huge, this by itself would represent an enormous increase in global electricity supply; but also, current growth trends for PV have been approximately exponential (in the actual maths sense not just "fast") for decades now, so this could happen in as little as 35 years give or take a few (both scenarios are within the same margin for error, because exponential is like that).
> There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature
There is such a temperature. We are not getting to it in half a century at current emission rates, even with zero curtailment. If you have a source that shows the opposite, I’d be happy to read it.
You literally said “the existential threat happens in 100 years.”
And to your questions, we don’t know. I’d love to see the data. I’m still sceptical we hit “existential” levels for human survival. That wouldn’t even happen if we went back to dinosaur levels of CO2.
I've never been able to decide whether it is or not. I'm still vaguely scared of the clathrate gun, permafrost releasing extra CO2, and phytoplankton shrinking under ocean acidification so we can't have as much oxygen as we're accustomed to.
Edit: one of those crossfire situations where the downvotes could be coming from either direction. I'm going to assume they mean "don't be scared".
I don't know who downvoted you, people treat this topic with religious zeal. Yes, basically all the arguments trying to claim that the influence of CO2 has positive feedbacks relies on cascades of things amplifying warming.
And that's certainly something to discuss, whether there exists a type of rube goldberg machine where higher levels of CO2 cause the permafrost to melt which cause even higher levels of CO2 which cause something else to release even more CO2, etc.
I certainly wont deny that such a sequence of events is possible, and it's worth studying. But on the other side of that you have basic physics, which shows that the warming effects go with the log of CO2. That really slows things down by quite a bit. It turns a doubling into an additive factor.
Now, could it be that the cascade of events is such that it overcomes the logarithm? E.g. that it is an exponential or super-exponential chain of events that would release exponentially more CO2. Uhh, maybe, but this is not something to try to terrify the population with. And it sounds extremely unlikely. So you need an extremely precarious set of assumptions -- or just deny physics outright -- to overcome Arrhenius' Greenhouse rule. Logarithms cover a multitude of growth sins.
LLMs will need to develop a notion of trustworthiness. Interesting that part of the process of learning isn’t just learning, but also learning what to learn and how much value to put into data that crosses your path.
I got confused because a journal referenced them
> The experiment’s reach has now spread into the published medical literature. The bixonimania research has been cited by a handful of researchers, including a study that appeared in Cureus, a journal published by Springer Nature, the publisher of Nature, by researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Mullana, India (S. Banchhor et al. Cureus 16, e74625 (2024); retraction 18, r223 (2026)). (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher.)
It’s gunna be even wilder when people realise they have an incentive to seed fake information on the internet to game AI product recommendations
I’ve already bought stuff based off of an AI suggestion, I didn’t even consider it would be so easy to influence the suggestion. Just two research papers? Mad.
You are pointing at something that is orthogonal to this paper. The LLM did not randomly recommend or bring this disease up to people - it merely assumed the disease was true when the preprint was pointed at it.
Interesting, will be looking into RAG now. I assume Claude was retrained regularly but Opus for example was last trained August 2025. Way older than I thought it’d be
It’s not mad… it’s the same damn thing as taking Wikipedia articles as Truth without looking at the citations and verifying them.
AI research is for research, not for blindly accepting. If you’re looking for Truth you need to institute a gatekeeper that does that homework for you.
There’s something deeply disturbing about how internet groups allow perverts and criminals to hype each other up into thinking they’re okay to be doing what they do
> Might Yvette Cooper, as our Foreign Secretary, finally cease putting out inane statements that seek to blame Iran for acting in self-defence, which is its right, and instead offer support in the face of a wholly unwarranted bombardment, part of it committed with the active participation of the UK government by permitting the use of UK air bases for that purpose?
Iran is a terrorist state, how can they have the right to commit war crimes?
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