I remember the DVD commentary on the 2004 Spongebob movie talking about this. It’s bad, but it’s not new.
Going by the NOAA’s data, it isn’t even getting worse, and the five year rolling average has decreased steadily since 1995. It’s inevitable that some years will be above average with that amount of variance.
A plan to slowly decrease it is in operation, the cause and consequences are known and accounted for. As far as climate disasters go, this one’s pretty tame.
I put together this gif for a side-by-side comparison. The picture was taken from a slightly different location, so it’s not perfect, but the difference is obvious.
ASML is basically a strategic asset. Breaking them up to have a more level playing field inherently threatens the West’s economic-political position. If ASML abused their position, it wouldn’t be the regulators so much as the CIA that showed up to tell them to reconsider.
Maybe they’re going for something similar to RDJ’s Sherlock Holmes. A veneer of propriety over a ruthless and savage intelligence.
it becomes the first nation on earth to avoid civil war by allowing its military to rape prisoners
If this is true, it is only because usually the rapists got their way before enough people heard about it for it to become a civil war. Soldiers threatening mutiny unless they were allowed to rape people is a pretty common phenomenon in war.
Incidents like this almost certainly took place during the US American occupation of Okinawa, there just weren’t smartphones to relay the information to the general public, other soldiers, and the government so they could take positions. Maybe the prisoners will be tried at a later date, like the US did with some rapists in the US armed forces.
That’s the neat thing about workers’ rights. Workers have more interest in making good products than investors, especially in artistic fields. Investors will gladly sabotage a product’s quality for the sake of personal gain and move on to the next company with goodwill to exploit, but for workers a job well done is inherently rewarding.
Unionization directly leads to better games with more artistic merit.
Based on my amateur understanding, it actually seems possible if climate change gets bad enough. When the calcium carbonate of plankton, seashells, and limestone reacts with the carbonic acid that defines the acidic zone, you do get an increase of gaseous carbon dioxide in the water.
The main chemical reaction is
The chemical reaction by which seashells and limestone dissolve, releasing CO2 and increasing the gas pressure. The CO2 can be dissolved back into the water via
While dissolving limestone and seashells neutralize the acid in the short term, this just means that more CO2 will be pulled in from the atmosphere and from the freshly produced CO2 to increase the acidity again. Luckily this isn’t an infinite loop - half the CO2 gets stuck in HCO3- each time - so this would actually be a carbon sink from a purely chemical perspective. Ecologically, the dissolving of plankton would take away a carbon sink and so accelerate climate change.
As for the limnic eruption, while shellfish and plankton live in shallow enough water that them dissolving would probably be able to outgas into the atmosphere quickly enough that there is never a toxic concentration, limestone deposits can be found at great depths and can be over a kilometer thick. Just because the ocean can dissolve a 0.2mm plankton shell quickly enough for it to die doesn’t mean it can eat through 2km of limestone at an appreciable rate. It seems possible that ocean acidification would increase fast enough that the limestone isn’t yet all gone by the time it erodes fast enough to form a convective plume, sucking in fresh acidic ocean from the surrounding water while carbonated but less acidic water quickly rises to the ocean’s surface, outgassing the carbon dioxide like a limnic eruption.
While on average the dissolution of limestone would be a carbon sink, a lot of the ocean floor is not limestone, and so these places would draw in CO2 while places that do have limestone deposits would vent CO2. I don’t know if it would be fast enough to produce a toxic concentration of CO2. I also don’t know if by the time oceanic limestone gets eaten away at this rate the earth would still be habitable by humans.