We are still screwed: the coming climate disaster

I think our intelligence gives us an edge in adaptability over the dinos.

Pride goeth before a fall? Maybe.

For the record, plenty of dinosaurs survived the K-Pg extinction event, just not the big ones. A bunch of their descendants left little crap-cylinders all over my lawn.

Fucking geese. GO BACK TO CANADA!

My dog thinks they’re walking Pez dispensers.

Ew.


Oh, jesus, I just got that.

Dogs are weird, man.

We need to build a wall to stop them!

It had better be a flying wall. Just saying.

I do love me some Phalanx, but something about those big AA cannons just can’t be beat.

The CIWS is awesome though, since it keeps shooting at all the pieces of whatever it’s destroying, until there’s nothing bigger than a quarter, so even the wreckage doesn’t get to the target. It gets physically pushed back by bullets.

It is. But those thuds from that Gepard.

Wall of steel, man. Wall of steel.

Yeah I feel the same. On a practical level it must have much larger range as well.

I would like to think we can still take data from one time, unrepeatable events, like Deepwater Horizon and use it even if it’s not something we can actually replicate.

Doesn’t fly ;)

https://thebulletin.org/plant-could-save-civilization-if-we-let-it11826

On the one hand, I like the idea of the edible CO2-scrubbing plant. On the other hand, this feels like a “what could possibly go wrong” situation rife with the potential for unintended consequences. Gene editing certainly has potential, but I suspect that doing the proper due diligence to ensure we don’t end up with a disaster might take the 10 years anyway.

Sure, we should all fear vegetables going wild. Hell there was even a documentary about the epidemic.

What disasters do you imagine coming from the use of CRISPR?

We don’t fully understand any but the simplest genomes, much less exactly what’s going to happen when you modify complex ones. What if modifying this plant turns it into the next kudzu, or emits some unexpected toxin in small amounts that only becomes harmful at scale? Plenty of potential issues, not necessarily specific to using CRISPR, but the use of that tool makes more fundamental and sweeping changes than traditional plant-breeding techniques. Bigger chances, bigger potential upside, and bigger potential downside as well.