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"Bill McKibben on the Year in Climate News."

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

 

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In today’s newsletter, an uncertain future, and then: • Dawn of the bionic man • Patients as human profit generators • The past year’s Internet gods Hotter and Hotter Scientists don’t yet understand why temperatures have been steadily spiking above the projections. But what they do understand is bad enough. By Bill McKibben Illustration by Sean Dong Living through the onset of rapid global warming involves learning to roll with the punches. Increasingly, those are quite real and painful—this year saw, again, an accelerating toll of flood and drought. But, even for climate scientists sequestered in the lab, life increasingly seems like a series of bewildering blows. As 2024 began, we’d just finished the most remarkable year in the planet’s modern climate history—2023 had shattered every global record for temperature, with researchers firm in the conviction that our planet had seen its hottest average temperatures in at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. But, even as they watched the mercury soar, they weren’t completely sure why. Keep reading If you know someone who would enjoy Science & Technology, please share it. Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up. Editor’s Picks  Annals of Medicine A Bionic Leg Controlled by the Brain A new kind of prosthetic limb depends on carbon fibre and computer chips—and the reëngineering of muscles, tendons, and bone. By Rivka Galchen 2024 in Review The Gilded Age of Medicine Is Here Health insurers and hospitals increasingly treat patients less as humans in need of care than consumers who generate profit. By Dhruv Khullar Our Columnists  The Financial Page How Long Will the Trump Crypto Boom Last? As a pro-crypto Administration prepares to take power and crypto investors cheer, there are some parallels with the dot-com boom of the late nineties. By John Cassidy  2024 in Review The Year Creators Took Over The attention economy has dominated the Internet for more than a decade now, but never before have its protagonists felt so central to American life—or had such direct access to the levers of power. By Kyle Chayka From the Archive  Annals of a Warming Planet What Is the Opposite of Oil Drilling? A growing industry aims to remove carbon from the atmosphere—but it’s still in its infancy, and greenhouse-gas emissions remain dangerously high. By Michelle Nijhuis Cartoon by Christopher Weyant P.S. The monarch butterfly has been deemed a threatened species by federal wildlife officials. Every fall, driven by an inner compass of some kind, millions of monarchs leave Canada and the northeastern U.S. to descend on a forest of oyamel firs in the mountains of central Mexico. “The journey is the most evolutionarily advanced migration of any known butterfly, perhaps of any known insect,” Carolyn Kormann writes, in an exploration—accompanied by astonishing imagery from Brendan George Ko—of their activities, their protectors, and their endangerment. 🦋

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