We recently had a production security incident because our vendor was using Vercel and decided to change the domain name entry to something else. They left the previously registered domain go back to the pool where an attacker picked it up seconds after let go from the vendor's infra. We started to see our website spreading malware in minutes after this.
I am not sure why anybody would take these matters lightly.
Exactly that. There was not a single global civilization on Earth that had low per capita energy use. High energy use per capita starts with the price.
The 1.5C (and other similar) thresholds are based on pre-industrial averages. An average of between 1850 and 1900 is generally considered to be the modern pre-industrial baseline. This is then the average of 2024 as compared to that pre-industrial baseline.
The significance of this is the rate at which the planet is warming, which is unprecedented as according to historical data. The rate is what concerns environmental scientists as it means that ecosystems etc. do not have the same time to adapt as compared to pre-historical periods of warming.
First time in a very long time. Most certainly the first time since the first beginnings of civilization; I think also the first time since the existence of humans, or maybe even the existence of life at all, but I'm not 100% sure of that.
No one is debating that the earth in the past was much hotter, and far less hospitable than it is today.
The issue here is that modern society was built with certain expectations of certain temperature ranges, and by burning petrochemicals and adding carbon to the atmosphere we have increased the hot house effect of CO2 in the atmosphere beyond the ability of the planet to absorb it, resulting in a net average increase in temperature on a global scale.
A layman's understanding of this:
- burning fossil fuels adds CO2 and CO to the atmosphere
- increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere increases the "greenhouse effect" --- this is easily proven with a science experiment 4th graders can do
- the added solar gain increases the temperature of the planet beyond what can be radiated out into space for that portion of the planet rotated out of the sunlight
- no one has been able to demonstrate that this additional solar energy is doing anything other than warming the planet --- if it isn't doing so, please explain in plain, simple words where this added energy is going and what it is doing
It's possible there were higher spikes in the past, but I would guess that they were all pretty dramatic events, and yes the earth used to be much hotter in the past.
This is obvious if you think about it, all that carbon in the ground had to be in the air before photosynthetic life.
And before any life, the Earth was a molten ball of liquid rock.
The only time scale we care about is the duration human beings have been around. You know the planet being fine it's humans we are worried about and all that jazz.
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