Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.
In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun's output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we've applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they're mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we've not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn't happen "too fast" (values of "too fast" may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We're so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun's output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us -- assuming we survive that long.
That doesn't detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.
So, federated network advantages here: you can always modify your instance's hosting code to patch this out, at least for the users on your instance.
What you cannot do is prevent other federated instances from publishing the votes submitted to content on their instance. But if you're accessing that content through your local instance, they can modify the upvote button to pop up a dialog saying something like: "The instance that hosts this content has elected to make usernames visible for upvote/downvote. Would you still like to vote?"
Personally: In many ways I don't mind. I'm on the internet with my real name. I don't mind being accountable for my behaviour online. I might be a little more cautious about upvoting something controversial or NSFW, but largely it wouldn't change my behaviour.
I concur. The problem with Texas is that regulators and legislators are in the pockets of said natural gas companies. So it's very likely to occur in the places that don't need it before it occurs in Texas. Get on it, Vermont! ;)
I admire your optimism and I hope you're correct. At least with the little "city commuters" it probably even makes sense. But lithium battery tech also continues to improve -- so catching up with 2021 is great, but the goalposts keep moving.
There will be an absolute limit coming from physics and chemistry, and lithium is a smaller, lighter ion. In the theoretical limits, it will absolutely be the winner.
But from a practical perspective, if Na-ion becomes light enough and (more importantly) cheap enough, it will probably win the economic game in the longer term.
Plus we can make Na-ion batteries in-situ elsewhere in the solar system without having to first finding concentrations of lithium -- so high tech space industry stuff will likely more towards Na-ion, which will fund some development.
One time, many moons ago, when I was a young a naive student: I dared to counter protest a student union led protest that I disagreed with. I was polite, non-distuptive, and some distance away from the group.
I got reported to campus security for irrational behaviour by someone, which then caused them to go digging. I had been writing editorials for the campus newspaper and they were in the newspaper offices trying to dig up dirt (my editor let me know).
I have no idea whether there is such as thing as due process and such when dealing with campus security (they aren't really police), but at the time I felt violated. I was expressing a political opinion in the most democratic way I could, and someone gunned for me in response. I don't blame security for doing their job, I blame whomever maliciously contrived a report to make them act.
That said, this story is clearly written slanted towards the ACAB angle. I think more digging is required by the journalist here. What was the actual perceived threat.
(And yes, ecoterrorism is a thing, so perhaps there were concerns, real or imagined.)
What surprises me even more is that organized crime hasn't gotten on board much (yet). Like, screw drive by shootings -- drone dropped grenades on rival gangs and such.
Or that drones haven't been used for "school shooting" type mass casualty attacks.
Or that foreign countries haven't snuck in with a sea can full of drones which fan out and attack infrastructure.
Imagine a cruise missile as a drone carrier that just scatters anti-personnel drones along a flight path, each just finding a person indiscriminately.
If there's anything that Ukraine is teaching us, it's that we don't have countermeasures (yet). The autonomous versions are even scarier.
Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.
In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun's output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we've applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they're mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we've not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn't happen "too fast" (values of "too fast" may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We're so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun's output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us -- assuming we survive that long.
That doesn't detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.