goodnight mooned posted:

What would you guys do with 100 million dollars?

goodnight mooned posted:

What would you guys do with 100 million dollars?

Hubbert posted:

Stereotype posted:

if I suddenly got $100M I would probably buy some land and build a self-sufficient commune and invite all my friends

actionjackson posted:

the article makes it sound like they take CO2 that was released previously, and then use it for some new burning, which I guess is net zero? because the new burning or w/e isn't adding anything additional

Hubbert posted:

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1675651339098152960

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1675651339098152960

goodnight mooned posted:

What would you guys do with 100 million dollars?

Soggy Muffin posted:

Nice gem from GBS “gently caress the doomers” thread

SniperWoreConverse posted:

wait it only costs ~500bil to reverse climate change????

so hypothetically several, a few, or possibly even one rich fucko can potentially save the earth and become permanently immortalized as the hero who pulled us from the brink. Uh, but none are doing it uh so well huh. Sorta seems like either climate change is nbd or maybe there shouldn't be private entities in control of that level of resources.

Paradoxish posted:

I read posts like this and go back and forth between thinking it's really funny and then kinda raging out because people with this attitude have basically allowed our future to be destroyed. Weird feels tbh

SniperWoreConverse posted:

wait it only costs ~500bil to reverse climate change????

so hypothetically several, a few, or possibly even one rich fucko can potentially save the earth and become permanently immortalized as the hero who pulled us from the brink. Uh, but none are doing it uh so well huh. Sorta seems like either climate change is nbd or maybe there shouldn't be private entities in control of that level of resources.

RandomBlue posted:

we'll just invent the technology bro, relax

Soggy Muffin posted:

I want to know what existing tech vampire panties thinks can reverse this. It’s probably some poorly understood geoengineering poo poo he saw in a cheerful kurzgesagt video

cash crab posted:

me and my boss were talking about climate stuff today when another coworker came up and listened in and after a bit was like "but that's for like. Our grandchildren. Right?" and my boss laughed. a beautiful shared crack ping.

Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:

haven't checked the thread it's from, but that post reads like satire to me. the formatting and emojis don't help, if the author actually was serious

blatman posted:

why the heck did you have a pet pony and how did it die

Hubbert posted:

quote:

A Third of North America’s Birds Have Vanished

At first Adam Smith couldn’t believe his calculations. Then it sank in.

For weeks, Adam Smith had been crunching the raw data from more bird statistics than anyone had ever tried before—thirteen different bird counts and millions of radar sweeps. Suddenly he heard the musical chime that tells him his results are ready. He leaned across his desk, surrounded by enough high-powered computers to heat up his entire office, and stared at what could only be an impossible conclusion: Over the past fifty years, his calculations found, a third of North America’s birds had vanished. “Well, that can’t be right,” he thought. “I must have made a mistake somewhere.”

Smith, one of the hemisphere’s top specialists in bird populations, just sat for a while in his cluttered cubicle at the Canadian Wildlife Service, which was decorated with caribou antlers, a musk-ox skull, and early drawings from his twin boys. Then it dawned on him. “This would be a massive change, an absolutely profound change in the natural system,” he said. “And we weren’t even aware of it.”

Up until that point, counting the abundance of individual birds throughout the entire continent was impossible. At any given time, many species number in the tens of millions in North America—adding up to billions of birds—and they’re constantly on the move. But the science of bird study was advancing, and a close-knit group of scientists was experimenting with using radar imagery, satellite photos, and citizen science to add precision to the dozens of conventional bird counts done for groups of species.

The computation Smith had just finished that day in May 2019 combined individual population estimates for 529 bird species, from the most common sparrows and robins to rarities hardly ever seen. When Smith pulled these estimates together and adjusted each for its degree of certainty, the findings came down to a single ski slope of a chart. It showed a precipitous drop in nearly all these species in every part of the continent. At the bottom sat four lone digits—2.913. That’s the number of breeding birds in billions that had disappeared since the early 1970s. He had documented an accelerating churn of seasonal losses that slowly took their toll on the abundance of birds. And it translated to an astounding third of the adult birds that not long ago filled North America but now are gone.


The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows. That equates to 750 million birds, from bright yellow Eastern and Western Meadowlarks with their incessant morning songs to the stately Horned Lark with black masks across the male’s eyes and tiny hornlike feathers that sometimes stick up from their heads. Forest birds lost a third of their numbers, or 500 million, including the compact, colorful warblers and speckle-breasted Wood Thrushes that sing like flutes. Common backyard birds experienced a seismic decline. That’s where 90 percent of the total loss of abundance occurred, among just twelve families of the best-known birds—including sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, and finches. There’s been relatively little research on these species, and there’s no sense of urgency when resources are already stretched thin for so many other birds in more dire need.

The possibility of such losses was too startling to share with his colleagues until Smith checked every step of his calculations, particularly since he’d never attempted this analysis before. “It always takes a couple of times to get these numbers right,” he said. After a day and a half of painstaking scrutiny, Smith realized there was no mistake. “I was speechless. We’ve lost almost 30 percent of an entire class of organisms in less than the span of a human lifetime, and we didn’t know it.”

The "canary in a coal mine" is going to have another meaning in a few years, when there are no canaries left.

goodnight mooned posted:

What would you guys do with 100 million dollars?

Xaris posted:

holy hell, birbs

https://nautil.us/a-third-of-north-americas-birds-have-vanished-340007

we're at like 80%-90% of insects (lol even regular people notice the windshield splatter is basically gone) and 30% bird decline. that number is going to keep going way up. no more insects to eat, no clean water or wetlands, everything has pollution and microplastics in it, and we're either chopping or burning down all the forests and grasslands.

I'm now recalling seeing giant flocks of birds often flying in massive V-patterns in the sky when i was younger very frequently -- I just now realized I haven't seen that in over a decade

Xaris posted:

holy hell, birbs

FFT posted:

All you can really do is take personal precautions like masks/respirators/filters and lol, lmao

4 more to go