ClimateBook

Heinavesi is a lovely place. We used to go there for the tanssilava when we spent a summer near Savonranta in a mökki. I hope the tanssilava is stil there.

So, you'd basically have to provide your entire day's diet (in the form of plant biomass) in order to suck up the CO2 that you produce in the house. I don't think anybody can do that with indoor plants.

Here's a back of the envelope answer. Take the calorie content of your daily food (about 4000 for two people, typically). That will turn into CO2, releasing energy through respiration. Plants have to produce an equivalent caloric content of that food to offset the CO2 you produced.

Trump is so easy to manipulate. Netanyahu has had his way with Trump.

There is also a primary choice for the Senate slot to replace the asleep-at-the wheel Dick Durbin. I have a hard time distinguishing between the two front-runners, but either would be better than Durbin has been. (I vote absentee in Cook County).

This is a very important primary, which will pick the successor to Jan Schakowski for IL-9. Dark money groups of Trump supporters including AIPAC are backing Laura Fine as the least likely to push back aggressively against Trump. I favour Dan BIss, but either he or Kat Abu are better progressives.

In my district, it's LibDem's that win, and I'm sticking with Layla Moran, who is a very responsive MP. But in many other places it's tme to switch to the Green party. Their victory in Gorton/Denton shows how much Labour has blown their strategy by courting Reform voters.

UK's Starmer says US can use British bases for defensive strikes against Iran missiles British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Sunday that his country has accepted a U.S. request to use British bases for defensive strikes against Iranian missiles in storage depots or launchers.

It's bad enough that Nigel Farage is Trump's poodle, but now so is Keir Starmer. He has just authorized the use of UK bases for support of Trump's illegal and ill-conceived war on Iran. Does Labour stand for anything anymore? www.reuters.com/business/aer...

Yes, I've stopped calling CH4 from underground "natural gas" That might have been a useful distinction at a time when burnable "gas " (largely CO, in fact) was made from coal, but my preferred term these days is "fossil gas." We don't talk about "natural oil" or "natural coal."

Another good exam question, but a harder one, because it involves an understanding of photosynthesis, plus the complicated business that plants also do respiration of stored carbohydrates. Andy Knoll once told me "Plants make their lunch, but they have to eat it, too."

We'll assume there's no combustion in the room, only respiration, i.e. no clandestine smoking you there at the back.

It's a great exam question, by the way, to use this data, plus some simple information about human metabolism, to figure out how much air was actually exchanged by ventilation. (The starting point is to compute how much CO2 increases per hour in a room with volume V and n students.)

fulfilling Trump's desire to weaken Europe -- though Europe has a defense through accelerating decarbonisation, which will make them (us) less vulnerable to that sort of thing.

If Trump's war drives up oil prices because of disruption in the Mid-East, in greatly increases profits for US domestic producers. Yet another giveaway to the rich fossil fuel industry, at the cost of making life yet more expensive for ordinary people. The high costs will also hit Europe,

Has it occurred to anybody that Trumps Iranian war ploy greatly benefits his friends in the domestic US oil and gas production industry? Fracked oil and gas requires high prices to be economic, and at current prices it's barely profitable, if that.

be actually toxic for Earth mammals, largely because of acidosis I think. Stick insects can survive those levels (if there is also oxygen) but not thrive. What kinds of protection mechanisms could evolve to allow complex multicellular life to survive very high CO2 levels?

(The ventilation in the room turned not to be very good). Levels like that really can make one feel lethargic, even though not strictly speaking toxic. As an astrobiological aside, the CO2 levels needed at the outer edge of the conventional habitable zone (in excess of 2 bars) would

I had no idea how high indoor CO2 was until they started installing CO2 monitors in lecture halls during Covid (after lockdown lifted), as an indicator of ventilation. When I would walk in, levels would rarely be below 600, and would typically go above 1000 at the end of a one hour lecture.

Never fear - you have some good prime numbers coming up. Talk about being in the "prime of life"!

OpenAI to work with Pentagon after Anthropic dropped by Trump over company’s ethics concerns CEO Sam Altman claims military will not use AI product for autonomous killing systems or mass surveillance

surveillance of the US population. The "assurances" given by the Pentagon mean nothing, in a government that is full of pathological liars. Anthropic wasn't buying it, but OpenAI does, as long as the money keeps flowing. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The shame of Oxford's throwing in its lot with OpenAI is now compounded. OpenAI openly declares that ethics have no role in the use of it's products. It's fully OK for the Pentagon to use OpenAI products, however unreliable, for autonomous weapons that chose who they kill, and mass illegal

The people of Maine didn't really need yet another reason to ditch Susan Collins, but yet they have one. The ever-pliant Collins has come out in support of Trump's illegal, unconstitutional and ill-considered war on Iran. Both of the leading Democratic contenders have rightly condemned Trump's war

OK, good but we need to start seeing some atmospheres on rocky planets around M stars. (I'm not counting subNeptunes, even though many of them are 90% or more rock/iron by mass).

And as a corollory, if you think Boston's winter temperatures are trying (I don't personally) use Kelvins.

I have long summarized the risk as that "The danger isn't from artificial intelligence. It's from artificial stupidity." (compounded in the case of Hegseth by real human stupidity). It's a confederacy of stupidity.

The Bulletin keeps getting better and better. It is one of the few publications still taking on the big challenges, and speaking truth to power. They operate on a relative shoestring They deserver your subscriptions, and your donations!

technology). In some sense, you could say that the glitter of A.I. chatbots have co-opted their human "masters" into doing their dirty work (sort of like flowers have co-opted bees into the more benign work of distributing their pollen).

As an aside, this article is a great example of how

(Hegseth) deciding to put deeply flawed A.I. into autonomous chains of command risking deaths of millions or billions. It is not the A.I. itself that hatched this crazy scheme. It is the witless human who is at fault (with fault shared by a lot of the A.I. oligarchs who have over-hyped their

Anthropic’s showdown with the US Department of War may literally mean life or death—for all of us Why the showdown between Anthropic, a major developer of artificial intelligence models, and the US Department of War lead to existential-level catastrophe.

This recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a perfect (and horrifying) example of the real risk scenario: thebulletin.org/2026/02/anth... It is not a matter of an autonomous A.I. hatching a plot to obliterate humanity. Rather, it is a matter of an incompetent HUMAN ...

I have generally downplayed the A.I. guru's and longtermists existential risk scenario where runaway A.I. obliterates the human race for its own purposes, which are not our purposes. One of the reasons for my disdain for that is that it detracts from the real catastrophic risk scenarios for A.I. ...