They are not waiving the building code requirements that make newer structures fire-resistant.

Canceled policy = you’ve got an opportunity to get another one when your current one runs out.

Denied claims are of course a problem.

Failure is indeed possible, though it does look like activism moved the estimates of how hot it’s likely to end up by 2100

I tried it. It produces reasonably accurate results a meaningful fraction of the time. The problem is that when it’s wrong, it still uses authoritative language, and you can’t tell the difference without underlying knowledge.

That’s still not into the realm where I trust it; the underlying model is a language model. What you’re describing is a recipe for ending up with paltering a significant fraction of the time.

The bots are mostly langauge models, not knowledge models. I don’t regard them as sufficiently reliable to do any kind of fact checking.

There’s a fair bit of evidence that it works. That’s why people keep on doing it.

Basically, the total cost of ownership went up, so the set of potential buyers shrank, and the overall value went down, so the right amount to charge people for taxes is lower.

That’s fairly uncommon; what’s been happening instead is large-scale non-renewal of insurance policies.

Written by Gavin Schmidt whose career has been defined by heading one of the long-term temperature management projects

It’s probably some years off; there’s something of a roadmap on how to do it, but crossbreeding it in takes quite a few years, and something like CRISPR usually means a lot of testing of the engineered variety.

It’s better to make that clear before people build houses, and conditions can change so that places which were previously not too high a risk are now high-risk.

That and bitcoin mining

There are two different parts to that:

1. What was the ignition source, which is currently unknown
2. What caused it to go from a tiny fire to a huge fire very quickly, which is the result of having a couple of fairly wet years, followed by a very dry year, combined with hot dry winds. A warming world is in part responsible for those conditions.

I’d go into it with a plan for the following:

• retrofit insulation & windows
• replace gas heating with a heat pump
• electrical system upgrades
• Solar
• storage battery

Musk doesn’t care much about that; he’s more interested in hate for nonwhites and women.

There are designs intended for installation on urban buildings, but so far, they’ve not proved to be a more cost-effective spend than rooftop solar; there are really huge economies of scale which generally mean that it makes more sense to have community ownership of one big turbine somewhere.

It’s within the range where a lot of people understand it. The goal when interacting with a straight-up denier is not usually to convince them — it’s to give space for the people watching the conversation to reject them.

Energy markets have never been free in that sense. It’s always been about government support.

Ice melts slowly enough that it’s not likely to actually be underwater during the next four years.