Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten)

Claim that predictions of global warming magnitude are gradually going down thanks to successful pledges or action.

Here's a graph from Cypher.

It's the amount of warming Earth is projected to face by 2100 has dropped, but declines have recently plateaued far above 1.5 degrees Celsius, a threshold scientists say we should avoid.

So the year of the temperature estimate is on the x-axis, and the projection of global temperature increase in Celsius by 2100 is on the y-axis, and we see current actions and government pledges and targets as two different lines.

We see that the current actions line starts at 3.7 in 2013 and has been gradually declining down to the point where it's at 2.7.

Government pledges and targets have been starting at 3.1 and have more or less tracked the same way.

They climbed a little bit in around 2018 to 3.2, which was just below the current actions line.

And now they've gone down to about 2.1 at the current actions point where it's 2.7.

Scott writes, source is Cypher News, hat tip Stefan Schubert, apparently citing Climate Action Tracker, but I get the impression that this is just some people eyeballing the size of pledges and not any more sophisticated forecasting.

I don't know how to square this with the claim that such and such a thing, summer temperature, sea ice, etc., is much worse than anyone expected.

17.

I don't know anything about the Lucy Letby case, Lincoln Post, but all of my smart friends who have been right about this kind of thing before say she's innocent.

18.

A reader asks House of Strauss, an edgy sport substack, whether the vibe shift away from political correctness threatens the edgy substack business model.

As the power of orthodoxy declines, can you still get rich and famous as a brave anti-orthodoxy critic?

His answer?

Nothing that can happen from here is as bad as the Twitter slash X link deboost, which made attracting attention harder for everyone.

I mostly agree.

I think discoverability has suffered.

People who are already famous will be able to stay famous without too much extra effort, and everybody else will have to explore new options.