ToJoh

In this case, the egg is planet-sized. To make an omelette for celebrities and billionaries. Bargain!

Yes, let's not miss the real problem with global heating and ecological destruction: all the annoying grandstanding.

Ignore the doomsters and get on with cheering on another celebrity as they blast off into orbit!

Bummer that it meant releasing a massive cloud of planet-heating greenhouse gas into the atmosphere of this little blue dot.

Good point. I feel articles such as these might have a role on HN if they can lead to some clever people seeing some meaningful problems to work on.

* CFCs are used in relatively few products. Greenhouse gasses are integral to how we get food, build, make gadgets, move around, and keep the lights on. * There is considerable cheating on CFCs in China (source: widely reported)

If a third of the world becomes uninhabitable within the space of 3-4 decades, expect the remaining parts to also feel it.

A couple of thoughts:

* The models are continuously updated. Recent measurements of land surface temperatures and polar ice sheets have been tracking worst case scenarios, not the previous expected mean (see e.g. Arctic ice sheet melt-off in 2020). * There are considerable confidence intervals around predicted temperature increases and related forecasts, e.g. GDP growth. * There are considerable nonlinear dynamics such as thawing permafrost or sea-floor deposits of methane, or death of carbon sinks such as forests. This means that the outcomes of the models can diverge wildly from the mean expected outcome. * I believe IPCC models do not take into account the political upshot of massive loss of farmland and habitable land in the tropics (i.e., refugees and wars).

It is encouraging that this sort of article is upvoted on HN. Probably worth coming to terms with the fact that COVID19, GPT-3 and one's favourite flavour of Lisp maybe don't matter quite as much as the fact that much of the planet will likely be uninhabitable before many on HN reach middle age.