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Global warming is an established fact that many uneducated folks don’t believe, because they lack scaffolding built mostly from exposure to science & mathematics. Too many moving parts make understanding technical details difficult.
An alarming increase in rate of warming is documented in recent paper by Columbia University climate group led by Dr. James E. Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Professor Hansen et. al. provided compelling explanations for why warming is accelerating beyond model predictions since 2020.
The acceleration is alarming to most reasonable people.
Some of this post is adapted from answer I provided on Quora during first week of June. After a few readers challenged my answer, I added link to Hansen’s paper in comment. Within hours privileges with Quora were suspended. I could no longer edit posts or comments, write posts, message moderators or contributors — I found myself banished for spam policy violations. *
Quora Moderation then removed my Link to Columbia University climate paper.
I’m not trying to scare anyone, but certain subjects seem taboo these days for not easily explained reasons, right? Someone from Columbia or Harvard writes about Israel and is labeled antisemitic, right? Banishment follows. De-platformed, they lose freedom to speak on any subject.
It seems like climate science is becoming another taboo, at least for me.
Listen to Peter Thiel, below, one of the most powerful AI players in world today and funder of social media platforms.
Tune to minutes 46 to 61. It gets crazy, right? 52-54 is confession that climate change advocacy scares the shit out of him. He slams climate activist Greta Thunberg. She unleashes anti-Christ, he seems to say. Creepiest part for me is he might someday get power enuf to take Earth with him when he sets it on fire.
Who disagrees?
What follows is latest on how Earth warms for any who are curious. It’s consensus common to climate researchers, which reads easy enough for most high schoolers to understand.
Carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), & gaseous water vapor (H2O) help block heat on Earth from escaping into space, right? On the other hand, sulfur compounds like barium sulfate (BaSO4) in paint and sulfate aerosols in pollution help reflect incoming sun energy back into space away from Earth.
Professor Hansen mentions in his paper that recent reductions in sulfur pollutants combined with rising carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) add to accelerating increases in average global temperatures beyond expectations predicted by climate theory. Paper points out that after 2020 all container shipping fleets discontinued use of high sulfur content fuels. This reduction in atmospheric sulfur aerosols was significant but not adequately accounted for in prediction models, the paper claims.
Planetary warming builds when radiated heat pours onto Earth from the Sun and is trapped by atmosphere.
Energy blocking-water-vapor is molecular, a gas. It’s invisible but makes an effective blanket for heat buildup. Clouds, on the other hand, are made of water droplets, a liquid, which radiates heat differently than gaseous water. Clouds hold some heat on their undersides like blankets but are more effective at reflecting incoming heat of the Sun from their topsides.
Main takeaway is this: climate models have underestimated the impact of recent reductions of sulfur pollutants, which were deflecting sun heat more effectively than was understood. The result is that recent acceleration in the rise of global temperatures was underestimated by models.
One result of this study is it makes clear that global warming can be decelerated by re-introducing sulfate pollutants into the atmosphere. Sulfates seed clouds to increase energy-reflecting cloud cover. This method is clearly undesirable because sulfates are known to harm biosphere, oceans, and human health. Best anecdote for poison of increasing atmospheric heat, it seems, is to reduce methane, carbon dioxide, and humidity.
Listen up, people:
It takes enormous amounts of energy to develop & run artificial general intelligence. Billionaires like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Jensen Huang are trying to be first to develop powerful artificial general intelligence, which if tamed will permit who’s first to control the world. Whoever wins race will become modern-day Alexander the Great on steroids, right?
Or worse.
Here’s something else to think about: Human brains contain nearly 100 billion neurons according to some estimates. ChatGPT claims that one quadrillion brain cells can in principle be stacked inside a human head. It’s 1 followed by 15 zeros, right? It’s 10,000 times more than we have. Can ChatGPT be right?
Artificial neurons are much larger than human ones, presumably, and take up more room when stacked. Full disclosure: I have no idea why AGI requires parking-lot-sized infrastructure to work right. Some say it is power requirements, cooling infrastructure, & other hardware, etc.
Those who know say it takes 30,000 GPUs to run ChatGPT. One GPU can be as large as a desktop computer plus its cooling structure.
Who has heard it said that the energy of a small city is necessary to operate fully functional artificial lifeforms like Grok & ChatGPT?
It’s not hard to calculate that AGI is going to run up demand for energy in big ways worldwide.
Is it any wonder that AGI-robber-baron-dictator-wannabes aren’t going to tolerate public discussions of climate science on media platforms they control or influence? As far as I can tell, people like these own or help finance nearly all social platforms.
Artificial-Intelligence billionaires & their social media influencers want people to think climate change is a hoax. They aren’t afraid to use hoax to make truth a hoax, right? Maybe they assume that Artificial Super Intelligence will fix the problems of every lie once ASI is rendered docile and made slave.
Increasing use of fossil fuels might make Earth unlivable in dozens of years, maybe hundreds, not thousands. There is a kinda urgency to getting energy policy right, and soon.
Who agrees?
Meanwhile, Earth endures more violent storms & rising seas.
Billy Lee
* Quora reinstated Billy Lee with all privileges July 10, 2025