Here is another very enjoyable conversation, with @Pandata19’s scientific advisory board member, Dr Jay Bhattacharya. Key ideas in this thread.

Here's more on the new mitigation scenario for 1.5C. How does it work? What would society look like? Are we willing to do what's required to stop climate breakdown? See thread.

1. Most models assume we need to keep growing the economy indefinitely. The problem is this makes it impossible to transition to zero emissions quickly enough; so they speculate on geoengineering and negative-emissions technologies to save us. Scientists reject this as too risky.

2. By contrast, this scenario proposes that high-income countries don't *need* more growth, and can scale down unnecessary production and consumption. This reduces energy demand (from 140 EJ in 2020 to 40 EJ in 2050), and enables a rapid transition to renewable energy.

3. What does it require? In the global North (Annex 1 countries)
•a shift from private cars to public transportation
•reduction in flights
•smaller average house size

Meanwhile, consumption in the global South (non-Annex 1 countries) rises to converge.

4. Significant reduction of aggregate material use. How? Longer product lifespans; regionalization of production and consumption; ban on advertising; a shift in taxes from labour to resources. All of this allows us to reduce ground freight, which cuts energy use.

Heres the story of how I volunteered to be infected with 50 parasitic worms (hookworm) for a year as part of a research study. Check out this thread & follow me for more #parasite & marine biology content [t]
#ScienceTwitter
imgs: https://t.co/hH5YsfS0ay https://t.co/kVurE6BbTS

1st some background on the parasites I got. Hookworms are blood-feeding nematodes that live in the intestine of mammals including cats, dogs & humans. ~500 million people are infected with hookworm, mostly in tropical and subtropical areas including the southern USA

Infection with many worms (100+) can cause anemia, which is most problematic in kids, pregnant women, and the elderly. This clinical study was launched to try to develop a vaccine against hookworms to prevent infection

People become infected when baby worms living in the soil penetrate their skin. Baby worms hatch from eggs that infected people poop out. Where plumbing is scarce, poor waste disposal is a common source of heavy infections (100s to 1,000s of worms)

I volunteered to be vaccinated with an experimental hookworm vaccine (I was also paid). After vaccination, the vaccine (or placebo idk) was tested by infecting me with 50 hookworms (Necator americanus) that penetrated my skin from a patch of gauze I wore on my wrist for 1 hour

Let's talk about Avi Loeb and his theory about alien

First, I should disclose that I work at the fame research facility as Dr. Loeb, though I work in a different department and to my recollection we've never met.

He's a scientist; I'm in computer support.

With that out of the way...
The interview above is worth a read, and a lot of serious thought, because there's an idea there that's really critical to science, and it isn't whether or not aliens have visited (exactly).

It's about how fashion and culture and taboo have an unfortunately strong effect on science.

In particular he compares his theory on alien visitation with the multiverse theory.

Which of these is more deserving of ridicule?

Science is fundamentally a structure for forming hypotheses and then (critically) testing these hypotheses to see if they should be kept, rejected, or modified.