It’s precisely what everyone said would happen.

I don't disagree with your general point, but I remember that there were many people (on reddit, but also on lemmy) who said there would be lots of power-hungry redditors just waiting to take over and that the admins would thus have no trouble at all finding replacements.

As a centrist

suppressed Hunter Biden story

“antivaxxer”

lmao

In physics, however, using Latex is absolutely the norm, and on the arxiv it's also absolutely the norm. That they aren't using it shows at the very least that they're out of touch with academic practice. I mean, if their extraordinary claim is true it would be one of the most significant discoveries of the century and pretty much a guaranteed Nobel prize. Therefore you might think they would put at least some amount of effort into presenting their results, such as producing nice looking plots, and, well, using Latex like a normal working physicist. The fact that they don't doesn't mean that they're wrong, but it doesn't exactly increase their credibility either.

PS: I also just noticed that one of their equations (p. 9 in 2307.12008) literally contains the expression "F(00l)". Again, maybe they're just oblivious and didn't realize that could look like they're calling us fools, but the extraordinary claims together with the rather unorthodox and low-effort presentation make me very skeptical.

Alle tot

It seems you're misunderstanding the map. It's how much space each of those categories is taking up as a fraction of the total area of the contiguous US, not where that land use primarily occurs.

Streets aren't really mentioned either, besides "Rural highways". I assume other streets and parking spaces are mostly included in "Urban/Rural housing" and/or "Urban commercial" (smaller rural streets might not be counted seperately from the surrounding land).

“The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion”

Not sure if this will give you hope or not, but one thing to consider is that we could still make it far worse, or put differently, that it's still in our power to stop that from happening. We can't change the fact that climate change already has noticeable negative consequences today, nor that global temperatures will rise by at least 1.5° towards the end of the century (compared to 1950-1980), probably more. But we do have a somewhat realistic chance of keeping it at around 2° or below (see e.g. here or here for easy simulations in your browser). The point is that every tenth of a degree counts, and our action or lack thereof now might well make the difference between it "just" getting bad with regular droughts, crop failures, some regions becoming temporarily uninhabitable due to wet bulb temperatures and so on on the one hand, or all of that on a much larger scale leading to societal collapse if we don't act at all. We live in the worst extinction event the earth has seen since the asteroid that killed the non-bird dinosaurs, but we can still keep it at that instead of turning it into the worst extinction event the earth has ever seen. Luckily, governments (and industry) largely have at least accepted that climate change is a thing, and in Europe and the Americas green-house gas emission have actually already been sinking for the last 15 years or so. Don't get me wrong, it's not great, and these governments still should do much more, but it could also be worse, and the fact that we're lowering emissions despite our politicians generally being very friendly with industry could give at least a sliver of hope. The emissions of China and India (and the rest of Asia) are still rising, but show signs of decelerated growth at least, and in Africa emissions are still fairly low and rising rather slowly, with a chance that some less developed countries might more or less just skip a big chunk of carbon-based industrialisation in favour of renewables. Altogether this means that we're already on a way to avoid the worst possible scenarios, and still have the power to keep it towards the lower end of the scale as far as terrible outcomes are concerned.

In addition, while individuals have always less power than whole governments or industries, there are nevertheless things anyone reading this could do, e.g.:

• Voting for parties that favour stronger climate action, and perhaps even more importantly, not supporting those who do less or even nothing. You can also protest or try to influence your government in some other ways.
• Reduce your personal impact by not consuming animal products (in particular meat and dairy), not flying if you can avoid it, not buying stuff you don't really need, and not having (more) kids. Edit: Also try to favour public transport over driving your own car, and if you need a car, try to use a small, electrical one to reduce emissions.
• Tell other people you know who might listen to do those things. Many people favour climate action in principle, but are too lazy, scared or just otherwise preoccupied to actually start doing stuff on their own. You kicking them in the butt or leading by example can motivate them and in turn other people they might now.

If you're reading this and whether or not you're already doing some of those things, I'm sure you can find at least some things you could do (I know I can, and I'm trying to put it into practice), which might in turn also make you feel less depressed about the situation. As mentioned before, I'm not saying that we're in a great situation, but whining about it helps nobody, and we're still in a situation where we have the power to stop things from getting even worse.

A similar recent article that I thought was interesting and contains many sources: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23778399/media-ignores-climate-change-beef-meat-dairy. It focuses a bit more on the role of media though. They also have this older article on big meat lobbying.

For those wondering like me where the water is supposed to come from:

Authorities have said that water for the artificial river will come from recycled agricultural drainage and groundwater.

This doesn't really strike me as a long term solution though, unless Egypt has vast reserves of groundwater.

Humans have put multiple species on the verge of extinction.

That is a slight understatement:

The Holocene extinction is mainly caused by human activities. [...] the current rate of extinction is 10 to 100 times higher than in any of the previous mass extinctions in the history of Earth.