Yeah, the discussion is not differentiating between data that's collected, meaning it's not their data (and so they'd have to ask you for it), and data that is generated by the business itself, which is their data. Businesses knowing what frequent customers buy most often and how much they spend goes back hundreds of years, I'd expect.
>Transoceanic shipping has recently implemented its sulfur-free requirement
While probably a good thing for ecosystems, this has removed an unintended "geoengineering" effect. Sulphur dioxide forms a relatively effective reflector for incoming solar radiation.
1. The further back we go, the less reliable the methods of estimating such properties. We only have values for a "global temperature" from the past few years or so.
2. Weather and climate are names for the same underlying nonlinear system. This system is the archetype of a chaotic system - predictions of values and corresponding locations becomes increasingly unreliable and then impossible on larger timescales. Climate modelling was the very thing that lead to our current understanding of sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
1. Sure we have values for earlier periods, estimated through abundant and reliable (in its own way) geologic evidence. But you don't even need to bo back further than 100 years to see how wildly our climate is whiplashing right now.
2. Yes, which is why climate scientists put lots of error bars on their predictions and document carefully the assumptions they're making. To wit, the assumption that we will continue to be as bone-headed about our impact on these systems as we have been. But it is still the case that I have little idea what the weather will be in my back yard in 3 mos but a pretty good idea of what global mean temperature we're looking at in 5 years.
It might make more sense if you consider that the three objects are not usually aligned, due to the tilt of the moon's orbit around the earth. In the case of the full moon, this allows us to see the fully illuminated moon even when we are between it and the sun.
It's more than 6%. Cows eat a lot, so people cut forests to grow more feed (like in the Amazon). Deforestation contribute to global warming, not to mention the biodiversity damage.
Cows also eat lots of alfalfa and grasses which takes no artificial fertilizer or pesticides to grow. And produce a not insiginificant amount of premium quality fertilizer from it that is reducing artificial fertilizer production.
If we care about deforestation then we definitive should also not use ethanol as a replacement fuel, since ethanol uses the exact same farming and plants as the one used for feeds. Animal feed and bio fuel farming are usually combined. The other main source of bio fuel is from the lumber industry.
Limiting temperature change by every additional 0.1°C is not really about comfort. Either way rich people will be comfortable and poor people will be uncomfortable or dead. It's about buying everyone more time to adapt.
With respect to human lives it could mean the difference between tens of millions of deaths and billions of deaths. With respect to wildlife it could be the difference between losing 10–20% of the planet's species in the Holocene extinction versus 40% or more as per the IPCC. With respect to migration it could mean the difference between levels that are painful versus globally destabilizing. With respect to geoengineering it could mean that we have significantly more time to refine the technologies before they're inevitably deployed.
Millions fewer people will die. That’s the difference.
It’s just a sliding death scale, not a binary one. Sure, there might be steps, it might not all be linear, but still: doesn’t mean at some point doing something is pointless.
This reality is wild. It would be like arms manufacturers holding weekly demonstrations of how much collateral damage their latest designs cause in an attempt to increase sales.
