This is still a problem! But the people who run around screaming about heat waves causing mass casualty today are simply not credible commentators. Far more people die of cold than heat in any given year, so a reduction in cold days will tend to net out to a gain in human life, not a loss.

It does bug me a little that their knee-jerk response is always insults and censorship (of course my comment was flagged...no wrongthink allowed here, even if it does come from the IPCC!) but every time they do that, it shows normal thinkers that there's a reasonable center ground, and the doom-and-gloom crowd isn't even remotely being rational.

...but then again, that's probably why their first impulse is censorship.

Did I say those words?

This is the latest assessment report, AR6, published 2021-2023. It's the latest IPCC data available. The next one won't come out until after 2029.

The fact that you don't understand this indicates that you don't really know the details of what you're talking about.

The far more likely conclusion is that you're wrong.

Figure 11-9:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Figure 11-2:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Chapter 11:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/

What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Figure 11-2 shows it another way:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:

> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).

That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.

Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/

I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?

https://www.weather.gov/hfo/faq

https://energy.ecoflow.com/us/blog/when-is-it-hurricane-seas...

https://manoa.hawaii.edu/dps/hurricane/

OK, whatever. But what was I dishonest about? Cite the figures. Should be pretty easy.

...oh, and by the way:

> You acknowledge that the downstream consequences of El Niño effects is amplified heatwaves, presumably.

In some places, sure. In others (i.e. the western pacific), it leads to regional cooling.

Let's at least get our facts straight.

Your first link says that more people died this year, relative to predictions for this year, because of a single heat wave. This has ~nothing to do with the discussion at hand, and is a classic example of the sort of hyperbole I am talking about.

The second link says that heat events kill people in the UK. Fine. It links to a single paper claiming that:

> half of the heat-related deaths in Europe in the summer of 2022 have been attributed to anthropogenic climate change (Beck et al., 2024).

Regardless of the quality of the cited paper, this is a far cry from evidence of a trend.

> It's extremely hypocritical of you to accuse me of exaggerating when your own presentation of facts is selective and not-representative of what we are seeing globally.

You're literally exaggerating, right now. I quoted the latest IPCC report and told you factually what it says. You linked to a press release and a UK climate portal page that don't support what you're insuinating.

So? what does that have to do with the question at hand? An 8 year change is irrelevant in the world of climate science. It's statistical noise in a system where cycles run for decades. Weather, not climate.

> The chapter 11 temperature over view is concerning for the consequences:

...and then you quote the part that says exactly what I explained to you, as some kind of counter-argument?

You will note that the part you quoted is, again, combining the types of extremes. They're not talking about just hot days.

I honestly do not understand this need to fatalize data. You don't have a counterargument (because what I said was factually true) so your only rebuttal is to wave your hands and say that it's all scary.

We can be honest -- the world is getting warmer -- and admit when the people predicting imminent death and destruction are exaggerating. This is good!

No.

No, the barriers I'm talking about aren't coming down. Not quickly anyway.

No, nobody assumed this was the "highest and last barrier". That's the point you keep missing.

LLMs are not "solving" the rate-limiting step here. It only looks that way if you don't know what's involved.

I'm just saying that people are focused on the wrong problem because they've got LLM-brain.

Synthetic biology is one of those things.

Thermo Fisher sells a kit to do this [1]. It's something you might do a few thousand times on the way to actually generating a novel virus.

> I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high

I'd argue that it probably already happened, and had nothing to do with AI.

[1] AAV transfection.

That's not a service that makes you a virus, and making one from an mRNA transcript is not trivial.

The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.

So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.

Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.

Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial.

[1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.

Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.