Show HN: Zyro – AI Powered Website Builder - <AUTHOR> https://zyro.com/ <comment><USER3> The AI part are:

\- Business name generator

\- Slogan generator

\- Logo maker

\- AI heat map generator (given a mockup of website, analyzes where users potentially would look at)

\- Content generator [https://zyro.com/ai/content- generator](https://zyro.com/ai/content-generator)

I can see logo maker and content generator proving to be very useful for 'mom and pop' websites; quite practical use of 'AI'.

</comment><comment><USER4> Something I've noticed in both website builders and theme buying is that it is very hard to separate the incredible stock photography from the overall style of the site.

The common experience seems to be picking what you think is the "perfect" theme only to find that it's really dependent upon having thousands of dollars of high-end photos taken.

It seems like an unsolved problem.

<comment><USER5> I used to work on Squarespace's templates team, and this is a very real problem we talked about with some frequency.

There's a few solutions, one of which is designing more around text, but in many instances people still want the media-heavy look. For those cases, the image tool tied in with Unsplash, which made getting high quality stock images pretty easy.

<comment><USER6> I like Unsplash, but I don't understand their business model. What makes it sustainable?

<comment><USER7> Unsplash is just an image hosting place. The photos are contributed by users. Unfortunately, they no longer have a CC0 license.

<comment><USER8> What about pixabay?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Squarespace was leaning heavily on 'AI generated websites' only a few years ago. Just add content (text, images and such) and Squarespace's AI magic would turn it into a wonderful website. I just now had a look at their website and it does not have any reference to AI _at all_.

Very surprising. Or maybe understandable: I am not sure if 'AI generated' is a thing to a non-IT person. It sounds complicated. Maybe that is what Squarespace learned.

I am very sure the two people that asked me for an advice in the past days would not care. 'Easy', 'cheap' and maybe 'drag-and-drop' might do it. 'E-commerce', 'onine shop' even more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your insights!

We are working in order to make our website builder the fastest and easiest way to go online.

In addition to easy to use drag and drop, e-commerce and other essential features we introduce AI tools in order to help our users to launch their websites even faster.

<comment><USER10> It seems like Squarespace has an AI powered chatbot on HN, too.

<comment><USER11> You're replying to the OP, not squarespace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any time I hear "AI powered", I can't help it but the image of a curtain pulling back to reveal a bunch of hamsters turning a wheel comes to mind.

<comment><USER13> I think the community is always going to be a little skeptical of website building tools "powered by AI" after thegrid.io[0]

Hopefully Zyro proves the wary wrong :)

[0] - [https://reclaimthenet.org/thegrid-io-not- responding/](https://reclaimthenet.org/thegrid-io-not-responding/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> More people taking up website building and creation, it is nice to see that it can be done easily with a service like this. I think it adds to the accessibility, not everyone understands the tricky part of building a website and most want to do it fast, so o I think this feature is pretty cool

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN, Together with the team, we want to help our users bring their ideas to life, whether that's by creating a website or an online store.

We have made Zyro website builder super easy to use and added some AI-features to help our users to generate text and understand their visitors better.

Make sure to let us know what you think below in the comments.

<comment><USER15> What's the ML part of Zyro? Website text generation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Text Generator and AI Heatmap is integrated to the Website Builder.

You can read more about AI tools: here [https://zyro.com/ai](https://zyro.com/ai)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can't help but think the AI-generated content is a little ambitious, with results like these, for reference I chose Music & Entertainment > Indie Music as the categories for generating content:

> Indie music is a great genre of music. Indie music is the best of indie > music. Indie music is my music, my life, my music. Indie music is the world. > Indie music is life. Indie music is indie music. Indie music is Indie music.

> The band formed in 2009 in the New York City music scene. The group has been > featured on: MTV, NBC, BBC, CNN, PBS, The O'Reilly Factor, BBC Radio, MTV, > NBC, BBC, MTV, and MTV2. The band has been the subject of performances at > several shows such as: E3, E3 2013, E3 2014, E3 2015, and E3 2016. The band > has been featured in: YouTube, YouTube Red, YouTube Music, MTV Music, and > YouTube Vlogger.

Who would this actually be useful for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for pointing this out.

At the moment, if you're choosing by the category, you'll always receive 5-7 results so that you can select the most fitting one. Also, AI is generating "on the spot" and doesn't have pre-made templates that would be presented every time (what makes the generated text unique) - so if the generated text doesn't meet your requirements, you can generate again and again to get new, different results.

Obviously, AI-generated text cannot replace a human writer. Its purpose is more of providing a guide than generating a ready to use the content. It helps to understand how to put everything together, what topics to use. The user only needs to edit the result, so it fits their needs.

As well, our team is working on training the AI writer tool to get better and more accurate results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Where you would make a difference, at least in Europe, is an integrated multi- lingual (and multi-currency) feature. One where you can translate objects (h1, text, message) instead of creating a copy of some page. None of your competitors (which are many) get this right.

</comment><comment><USER18> From the technical side impressive! But if a website plans on using AI to generate content does it really need to be there? Personally, I couldn't think of a situations where turbocharging my fluff generation would lead to a better website. Is this strictly for SEO?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, serjester!

AI Writer helps when you are writing a lot or longer texts.

As well - generated content is SEO friendly because words are collected when crawling the internet. Although, of course, a generated content won't always be perfect, so you may have to make some edits here and there, but it's more convenient than starting from scratch.

<comment><USER19> Sounds a lot like scraped/spun content if you ask me, and that's already a problem with many sites right now. That doesn't make for unique content, nor anything most people would want to read/find useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How is this different than all the others that fail to deliver?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our main focus is customer success and happiness.

Understanding our users' daily struggles and developing powerful solutions that fit everyone's needs is really important to us. All the feedback from users is being collected and forwarded directly to the product team so we could understand and improve our services depending on our customers' needs.

We believe that awesome team can make a powerful and extremely easy to use tools with the support from customers.

<comment><USER21> Man, your PR seems to suffer from corp speak and is something you would expect from a fortune 100 middle executive and not a recently launched startup. Dare to be human.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congratulations on the launch. I am not really sure the world needs another website builder but your pricing looks attractive for small businesses outside the west.

</comment><comment><USER23> No coding skills needed is good, but i really need a "Export code" button :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Could you share the optimisations done for performance, CDN locations, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Zyro is using high-availability AWS (Amazon Web Services) to store and serve website assets. We're using a combination of multiple layers on top of that to achieve the best possible speed:

CDN to serve a website from location closest to website users' - <USER2> download speed

Caching at the edge, to make sure that static assets are not downloaded when not necessary

Serverless tasks for optimization of built website (such as image compression)

Cloudflare - to provide a set of optimizations and protect from attacks

Optimization techniques such as brotli/gzip compression, minimization of the code, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> this looks interesting!

could you share what are the AI tools based on? thinking to get into AI, would be nice to read on how the actual working product is made

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure!

For example "AI Writer" is built on GPT-2 transformer-based language model with 1.5 billion parameters, trained on a dataset of 8 million web pages. It is trained to predict the next word, given all of the previous words within some text. You can read more on it here: [https://openai.com/blog/better- language-models/](https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/)

Another interesting feature is "AI Heatmap". Basically, we took two different datasets to train our model: a dataset from an eye-tracking device and dataset gathered by using BubbleView methodology. More on BubbleView here: [https://bubbleview.namwkim.org/](https://bubbleview.namwkim.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> AI for heat map?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. For training our model we took a couple of different datasets - a dataset from an eye-tracking device and dataset gathered by using BubbleView.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This comment has been powered by AI.

<comment><USER28> Can you tell me more about your technology so I can invest?

/s</comment></comment>


Should RescueTime Help Get You a Job at your Favorite Company? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rescuetime.com/2011/02/24/should-rescuetime-help-get-you-a-job/ <comment><USER2> I hire engineers all the time, and one of the most common failure cases in hiring is someone who's smart but doesn't get things done - i.e. they whiteboard/interview/code sample well, but when push comes to shove, don't actually end up delivering.

There are lots of reasons people don't deliver, but one is that they aren't actually writing code during the day. I'd love to have someone prescreened with a "he actually spent 40 hours this week working in Textmate & Terminal." That's like hearing you're somebody's first choice - a huge point in your favor.

So while I can't imagine this not feeling slightly creepy, I love the idea. Go RescueTime go!

<comment><USER3> I once worked with a guy who spent an inordinate amount of time working in his text editor... modifying editor settings. He didn't actually produce much code on our project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for posting this straw-man, Brian [disclosure - I'm an investor in RescueTime, and talked to Brian about this idea earlier]. If I might kick off this discussion ...

I think it's a cool idea if done right. If I can summarize your post:

      - My RescueTime data *proves* I'm a hot-shot developer.
      - I opt-in to receive job offers from top technology companies.
      - They get to send offers to a pre-screened group of targeted devs.
      - I remain anonymous unless I want to pursue an offer.
      - I score an awesome job with a company I already love.

Seems like a nice process to get around the pre-screening aspect of the recruiting process. And I bet it would work well for occupations like "developer", "web designer", etc.

Just don't spam users or give out personal information to companies w/o permission.

<comment><USER5> I guess my only problem would be that this really shuts down users that aren't able to install RescueTime on their work PCs due to company security policies. These may be the hot-shot types that are actively seeking a new role and the relative data would be missing for these users unless they do moonlighting of some sort after hours where RescueTime can monitor that data.

<comment><USER4> Come to think of it - I'm locked out because I use Linux all day and there is not a good data collector on Linux!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would be most interested in getting introductions at these target companies. Even if it's an informational interview with the person who has my dream job, that's a big step from not having that relationship.

If we imagine this as an AngelList sort of system, then the employers and prospective candidates are all high quality. The service could just be a match-making service that does a bit of due diligence on their respective quality. That's a big asset.

</comment><comment><USER7> This fits on those, "on paper sounds like a good idea" but in reality I cant quite see it.

1\. easy to game 2\. suffers from the lines of code problem, is someone a good developer because they spend 99% of their time inside emacs

I used rescuetime for a while and I didnt see a particular correlation between how productive I felt one day/week was and how productive rescuetime said I was.

I feel that github has really nailed this public profile of developers that accurately shows what they would be like to work with. I have hired and been hired in the last year and both of them came down to github / open source.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not easy to game in that a lot of the data relies on proportionate comparisons (i.e. time spent in .py files vs. time spent in .java files or on IM). Not only that, but there'll be a level of human interaction involved. If we were going to vouch for a candidate, I'd want to at least look at why we were vouching for them myself, or have someone else audit that conclusion. At this point we're pretty familiar with (and have a lot of reference points for) what a real human usage profile looks like. To your point about the lines of code problem, really the only thing we can do is provide a filtered list of people who we'd be sure spent a certain amount of their time in the technology areas companies are looking to hire in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does RescueTime data actually prove that you're a good developer, though?

At most, it might be able to show that you spend a certain amount of time within programming-related text-editors and that you're not spending time browsing the web. Assuming this is the case, it still doesn't prove that you're doing things effectively or that you're creating software that matches requirements.

Also, if it is possible to fake out RescueTime by writing a program that sends keystrokes (haven't investigated if RescueTime has put effort into preventing fraud like this) then a developer could just set it up on a VM and then use another VM to surf the web all day and be seen as a "good developer".

With that stated, it would still probably be a good filter today since to my knowledge there hasn't previously been an incentive to fake out RescueTime data.

<comment><AUTHOR> You make good points. This process would always be a two-way street, though. Nobody would ever be able to land a job just by having an interesting RescueTime profile. And I'd argue that, for some jobs, coming up with a way to hack this system would be more than enough justification for hiring that person. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a similar thought a few days ago but not for job hiring purposes but more for job understanding purposes.

If you are interviewing with a company it would be great to see the rescue time profiles of the people working there as well as the rescue time of people in different roles.</comment>


John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/dietandfitness/10634081/John-Yudkin-the-man-who-tried-to-warn-us-about-sugar.html <comment><USER2> There is nothing wrong with sugar, or fat. It is the combination that in many food products leads to issues.

Nice program on the real issues here: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t8r4h](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t8r4h)

Been disected in debate here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/keto/comments/1whwlp/bbc_horizon_doc...](http://www.reddit.com/r/keto/comments/1whwlp/bbc_horizon_documentary_on_high_fat_vs_high_sugar/)

But anything not in moderation will cause issues and one day even bottled water will have a warning label that drinking too much can cause death.

I will agree sugar can be bad and soft drinks can and do more damage to teeth than cigarettes and yet you see pictures of bad teeth as a health warning on cigarette packets. Now if a can of cola also had a picture of bad teeth as a warning, how would that go down I wonder.</comment>


Singapore's Smart Nation Minister - <AUTHOR> http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/6488-exclusive-interview-singapores-smart-nation-minister

<comment><USER2> ''Vivian is both a hacker and a dabbler – He used to be an eye surgeon but since he does not get to operate on eyes nowadays, he dabbles in building simple robots, assembling watches, wireless devices and programming apps. His day job is to be the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, and so when he builds apps, he uses the real time APIs generated by the Ministry. That's called user-testing. I used to enjoy this; it is a long time since I've done anything. The last programme I wrote was a Sudoku solver in C++ several years ago, so I'm out of date. My children are in IT, two of them – both graduated from MIT. One of them browsed a book and said, "Here, read this". It said "Haskell – learn you a Haskell for great good", and one day that will be my retirement reading. ''

[0] [http://www.pmo.gov.sg/mediacentre/transcript-speech-prime- mi...](http://www.pmo.gov.sg/mediacentre/transcript-speech-prime-minister-lee- hsien-loong-founders-forum-smart-nation-singapore)

<comment><USER3> Might be the first time Haskell is mentioned in a speech by a head of state or head of government anywhere in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Singapore's sovereign wealth funds Temasek and to a lesser extent GSIC have been going on a bit of a tech buying spree in recent months. If you're a tech startup in the region looking for funding these guys would be your first port of call.

</comment><comment><USER5> > However, the government also is concerned that this democratisation of > publishing could cause greater tensions in its society. "We get it that > something fundamental has changed. At the same time, we don't accept that > freedom of expression is the ultimate value," the Minister says.

> Balakrishnan notes that "reactionary governments" tend to try to shut these > sites down, "which doesn't work". Others "just ignore it, which also doesn't > work". The Minister explains that "what I believe, and it has been > strengthened by my experience in the week in which Lee Kuan Yew passed away, > is to get the silent majority to step up. Suddenly you realise the tone, > even of hitherto raucous, noisy, critical, cynical, gets altered. So the > answer is not to reject those technologies or posts, but to mobilise real > people to express real views on the basis of data and accuracy."

While it's concerning that Singapore assigns a relatively low value to free speech and minority viewpoints, it's also refreshing to see someone in government recognize that the solution to unfavorable speech isn't censorship, but more speech.

<comment><USER6> Singapore for the uninformed have always been Authoritarian democracy.

A hybrid between Authoritarian and Democracy.

While it may looks negatively in many western worlds, it seems to be working for Singapore. And from what I've read their citizens are very well educated and their officials aren't all lawyers, they are far more educated than US politicians.

> unfavorable speech isn't censorship, but more speech.

They're probably going to some how have their own government sponsor speech to counter online speech from what I've gathered. It's seem like the implicit thing the dude implying, where his government will get these unvoiced people to talk about online articles and judge how true it is.

<comment><USER7> >While it may looks negatively in many western worlds, it seems to be working for Singapore.

The things that work in Singapore are as follows:

* Public housing (90% of the country lives in public housing projects and they are all high quality).

* Unapologetic Keynesian macroeconomic management -- when unemployment is edging higher, they might decide to build a new airport terminal. When inflation bumps a little high, they won't. No bullshit about debt ceilings.

* Mercantilist trade policy (similar to Germany, Taiwan, Japan, SK and Germany) - suppression of the value of their currency in order to give their exports a boost. Not used as much any more, but it built their industrial base.

* Intelligent city planning - development policy that is people centric rather than market centric.

Things that don't work:

* Authoritarianism - a culture of authoritarianism it's not just bad for people, it's bad for business. It's particularly bad for the software development process, because it hampers creativity and fosters slavish behavior (it's not just the government that is authoritarian).

* No minimum wage / pathetic levels of unemployment benefits / pension benefits - that's a feature if you _own_ a company. It's a bug if you earn a wage (even a non-minimum wage). You don't see many beggars in Singapore. You do see 85 year old women collecting bottles for recycling and selling tissues.

* Mandatory 2 year military service - doing useless crap for two years won't help the country if Indonesia decides it wants to invade. Again, fosters slavish behavior (possibly a feature if you own the right kind of company).

* Restricted freedom of speech - that's a feature if you run a government, otherwise it's a bug. No, it doesn't help with racial harmony and it never did, despite the government's protestations. Neither does it have any impact on economic growth.</comment></comment></comment>


Charging a mobile phone in a cafe? Pay up, says Vienna owner - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38991163 <comment><USER2> > Some owners also complain about the poor atmosphere created by busy > professionals absorbed in their phones, rather than friend and family get- > togethers.

This. Some coffees are places to have conversations, drink coffee, eat something. When all your tables are used by people just recharging their phones while they check their feeds and news, some of the atmosphere goes away.</comment>


Ask HW: What is the state (for you) of CoffeeScript? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> > for you

a project i know uses coffeescript and i see it as an additional hoop for possible contributors who otherwise know the web platform to jump through

(i contributed to that project once and accidentally introduced a bug related to variable scoping...)

i think nowadays people should be writing es6+ javascript instead (won't even need to transpile it in the future)

</comment><comment><USER3> Irrelevant. Never needed it, never wanted it. And I develop for web (full stack).

</comment><comment><USER4> For background, my startup has been using CoffeeScript since August 2012. A quick check of our git monorepo says that we have 130k lines of code at HEAD, and have probably thrown out at least as many lines in rewrites over the years.

I have a love/hate relationship with CoffeeScript. I detest the implicit function call and object literal syntax. At various points in the language's history, it seemed like the language was essentially "done" and in maintenance mode. Especially when the eco-system stagnates around it and large parts of the community move on to things like ES6 and TypeScript. For example, the JSX tool was essentially a prototype [1], with tons of bugs [2] that were never fixed. And in the 6 months since its deprecation, there isn't a single tool to replace it.

Personally speaking, I consider the language dead and was considering alternatives so we could move off it. However, I still haven't been able to justify it because the alternatives don't make the same tradeoffs that make me love CoffeeScript:

\- Minimal to zero runtime requirements. CoffeeScript generates a few things like `__extends` but that's it!

\- One to one correspondence with generated JS. Source maps are nice but it's great to step through the JS debugger when looking at JS, and being able to convert the JS you're looking at with the CoffeeScript that generated it is not something I want to give up.

\- Recognizes the warts, fixes what it can, and then gets the hell out of the way. `==` in JS is a mistake and IMO no language should carry that forward. Lexical `this` binding shouldn't require hoops to jump through. That sort of thing.

Ideally, if we are paying the cost of switching away from CoffeeScript, we'd move to a language with static type checking and solid support for sum types. I haven't been able to find any such language though, and the recent development spurt in CoffeeScript seems to have staved off that need for now.

PS: Yes, I'm aware of TypeScript. It's sum type support is rather weak. As part of my initial testing to see if it was a suitable language, I found a 5 line program that crashed at runtime. The bug report was closed as "Working as intended" [3]

[1] [https://github.com/jsdf/coffee-react- transform](https://github.com/jsdf/coffee-react-transform) [2] [https://github.com/jsdf/coffee-react- transform/issues/62](https://github.com/jsdf/coffee-react-transform/issues/62) [3] [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/13884](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/13884)

<comment><USER5> The TS response makes sense in light of the other issues your desired behavior would cause.</comment></comment>


Virtualization, Simply Defined - <AUTHOR> http://ewams.net/?view=Virtualization_Simply_Defined

<comment><USER2> At first read I was getting all upset about what a short-sell of virtualization the definition was. Then I read it again and realized it was an intro, and how do you really introduce a concept that solves so many problems? I'm looking forward to reading what comes next.</comment>


Xfinity Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://corporate.comcast.com/news-information/news-feed/comcast-xfinity-mobile <comment><USER2> As terrified as I would be of giving Comcast any more control over my data the rates actually look pretty good and it's nice to see more competition driving out contracts and limits while allowing decent prices for low usage users.</comment>


Ask HN: How long does it take you to learn a new language? - <AUTHOR> Assuming you write software full-time and know at least two languages fluently, how long do you find it takes you to learn a complete different language to a level where you can start contributing to a project with it? <comment><USER2> I've been programming 25+ years and I wouldn't say I truly "know" a single language yet.

But to answer the question... to get to a place where I can contribute meaningfully to a project? Depends on the language, but I was dropped into a PHP / Python shop once after doing nothing but Java and C++ for the preceding 10 years or so, and I was contributing both PHP and Python code in a few days. But if you were to drop me into a Haskell or CL shop, I have a feeling it would take a bit longer.

<comment><USER3> same. Been coding since I was 11 years old. Still learning.

Not sure I can actually point to a single language that I have mastered (except maybe Visual Basic).

I enjoy several language now, but often can't remember syntax for any of them. I think that's the thing that fades as you learn multiple languages - syntax. I know when I should use a loop, I struggle to remember how to implement a loop.

<comment><USER4> It is nearly frightening to go from being super proud of something you thought was your best work on some project, and then just being away from it, six months later, come back and say "who the hell wrote this crap", before realizing that you, in fact, wrote it.

But that's the comfort that comes with the experience. I can afford to forget individual moments in time, because I know I can spin back up very quickly, if need be. It just has its comically absurd moments at the very beginning of the spinning.

I've learned to stop quantifying my learning as the "gotta get it all" mentality, because "what do I need to learn to solve today's problems" has a pretty good streak going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The majority of the time is not learning the language, it's the learning the framework. So it really depends on what's you're doing.

Things that make it take longer.

UI heavy tasks

Anything that requires heavy customization of large framework.

New projects.

Usually in a month I can come up to speed where I'm contributing to an existing project, without doing any heavy framework customization. 6 months until I feel like I can handle pretty much any task, just need a little more time than an expert. And after a year I can probably do most things quickly.

</comment><comment><USER6> Contributing? Very little time. I recently did this with go and was able to contribute patch level changes in a couple of days.

Fluency? Months. Its usually not just the language but the whole ecosystem you need to learn.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. When I started to do python full time I had already been coding professionally (in different languages) for about 15 years. I'd say it took a good 6 months before my code looked nice and pythonic. Sure, it worked from the start but I was reading lots of other code and mine just didn't feel right in comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A couple of decades, perhaps. And even then if I do not practice them regularly they fade, much like real languages.

It takes me much less effort to get back in after that compared to the first time but there usually is some start-up effort required.

Programming you never forget, but the nitty gritty details of language and library implementations are so hard to remember because each language insists on doing their own thing just subtly different from the rest. Languages that are totally alien to the mainstream are much easier in this respect.

But even after decades in some languages I would probably look like a total newbie the first couple of days having to look up commonly used function parameter orderings or record members.

<comment><USER9> This kind of response is on the more uncharitable side of the responding to OP's intention.

If it takes 'decades', you might as well give up now, if you're considering a job opportunity that uses a different language than the one you're used to.

"A lifetime" is not a helpful response in what an honest question like this, because usually everyone realizes that full mastery on the level of compiler implementer is not what is implied by such a question .

Did you miss the part "to a level where you can start contributing to a project with it?" In OPs question?

Is that really decades?

<comment><USER8> If you grow with an eco-system from the day that it starts to be marketed publicly to where it is today you have seen all the good, bad and ugly that came with it and you deeply understand why things are done the way they are done. If you are dropped into an already existing eco-system (say Java) it will take you a very long time to catch up with what for old hands is 'obvious'. Maybe I'm a slow learner, maybe I lack confidence, but for me before I'm ready to go and 'show my work' it takes a long time.

Even now people are asking me almost on a daily basis to post a bunch of python code that I wrote and I'm probably not going to do it even though I fully intended to because - to me - it looks like crap, and I lack the time to make it better.

A couple of extra notes: I'm 'old school', never found an IDE that I liked and tend to memorize everything. This takes a long time. A typical library is a couple of tens to 100's of functions and getting to know such a library (or API, for that matter) takes time as well. Which makes me totally unsuited for certain kinds of programming, the kind where the eco-system moves faster than I can keep up with it.

<comment><USER10> Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If your code runs well enough to solve a problem and be useful, it's good enough to share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most languages are fairly easy to be productive with in a day and master in a few weeks if you already have lots of experience. Some languages are more complicated than others, and the domains they are used for might require a lot more work to learn and master if you are unfamiliar with them.

A language like Haskell or Rust might take much longer to master depending on where you are coming from.

When I was an undergrad, we had a "language of the week"-style PL class. It seemed like an easy 4.0 given the languages they covered (mid-90s, so it was Smalltalk, Prolog, Lisp, SML, and a few more I can't recall).

</comment><comment><USER9> Entirerely depends how different/unfamiliar the language is from the languages you already know. Paradigm shifts are harder.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. Coming from say Java, Python is pretty easy, JavaScript is a bit harder, Lisp/Clojure is even harder, Haskell is a lot harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If the language does not include drastically new concepts it takes me a couple of days to get the syntax down well enough to be productive.

I'm always suspect of people who measure programming skill by the number of languages you/they know. This tells me that they find it hard to pick up new languages and therefore don't really understand the concepts that underlie all programming languages.

When I started programming as a teenager, 25+ years ago, I learned assembly, Pascal, Logo and C. In college I learned C++, Scheme and Java. Later I designed and wrote a language of my own, xmlpl, and picked up other languages like JavaScript, PHP and Python. I've played around with a lot of other languages but haven't really used them in production code. There are _a lot_ of cool languages that don't have enough supporting tools and libraries to make them really useful.

Here's how to pick up a new language:

1) Locate and learn to use the documentation and toolchain.

2) Learn and understand any new concepts the language depends on.

3) Learn 90% of the syntax well.

4) Use it to write something nontrivial that you are interested in.

Notice I did not mention anything about learning the libraries. There's little value in memorizing something you can lookup quickly.

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree with others here that learning a language has a lot to do with learning an ecosystem, libraries, and culture. To contribute to an existing project, it's not necessary to really know the language that intimately. I "know" a handful of languages, but I have contributed in environments that I don't "know."

To learn languages quickly, I think the best way is by learning the 'building blocks' languages are composed from. How are function arguments passed (value vs reference), how is memory management handled (garbage collected, reference counted, manual?). Learning these lower level language concepts then allows a person to approach a new language by saying "How does this new language X handle concept Y?"

</comment><comment><USER15> It all depends upon the time you have. I was once in a position to fix an issue in an open source project that used Django. I had very little knowledge of Python and 0 experience in Django before. So I told myself this is not rocket science and I am not going to give up until I figure this out and started working on the issue. To my wonder, I was able to figure it out by evening. So I would recommend you to get an issue to work and jump right into the codebase. if you don't know which files to modify use the grep command. Go through documentation, tutorials and all only when required. Remember this is not rocket science. Learn as much as you can from the existing codebase.

<comment><USER16> I've been actively working with Django and Python for the last six months. Before that I was using Python for utility stuff, scripts, automation etc. It looked like a nice language earlier, now I think I will never get to learn it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It varies widely, depending on the language and the type of contributions. It can be pretty quick for languages which are very similar, like between C# and Java, or for languages which are easy to learn, like Go. Languages that include a number of complex concepts not shared among other common languages, like Haskell, may take much longer.

I think the scale of contribution is a much bigger differentiator though. At one end is a trivial bug fix - tweaking a string, changing an option passed to a method, something like that. I'd say usually under an hour for that, unless the language is very difficult indeed. A little inspection of the code around it plus programmer common sense and a few Google searches will usually tell you what you need to know. Things get harder the bigger the change you're trying to make though. If you're doing major adjustments or new functionality, you'll need to know the best practices for how to do things in that language, how the rest of the application is architected, etc. You may need to learn the languages standard library, if it has one, and if not, what are the best third-party libs for doing various specific things and how to bring them into the project. This could easily take weeks or months.

I suppose the ultimate level of contribution would be making significant changes to the language itself, its standard lib, or to any large, mainstream libraries used in that language. There, you also need to understand the overall purpose and mindset of the language and have a broad view of the ecosystem of how it's used and who is using it. That can take years, maybe decades.

</comment><comment><USER18> There's a couple different stages and you can stop at pretty much any point: being able to read it, understanding all the ideas, writing with correct idioms, writing fluently, being able to design projects/systems effectively in it, and finally coding stability.

I know a lot of languages and learning new ones gets easier as you learn more of them. I can read pretty much anything aside from some APL variants. It usually takes me 2-3 hours to get the ideas for most. I can usually get to writing reasonably good code over a weekend and that's usually enough to fix bugs or contribute code following someone else's design patterns but it's fairly slow going. From there things slow down a lot because you need to work your way through the ecosystem learning the common libraries and their interfaces so it's usually 2-3 weeks full time before I really feel fluent and 6-8 weeks full time before I'd be confident in adopting it professionally. I find that my coding style stabilizes (I look at code I wrote 6 months ago and would still write it that same way) in a language after about a year and a half.

This timing varies a lot depending on the language. Languages that are designed to be familiar to C#/Java/JS devs like Dart or Go and you fall in that camp, you can blast through the tutorial to get the syntax and be into learning idioms. If you're significantly shifting paradigms (e.g. picking up your first functional, logic, or concatenative language) then you can expect to spend a couple weeks being blocked in the ideas phase. Switching domains is similar so if Rust is your first systems level langauge, you're going to spend a LOT of time on OS and memory details that other languages handle for you.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Completely different" is a difficult concept when comparing languages... Not only because similarity is a gradient, not a category; but also because most major languages today are in some way or another descended from C.

So the answer to your question will probably hinge largely on the degree of similarity between your known languages and the one you wish to learn. To give a personal example: I currently know Java, Python, Common Lisp and R, in the sense that I have written non-trivial code in these. Last year, I tried to teach myself Haskell, and failed miserably. It was a very different syntax to everything else I knew and had several concepts that were quite alien to me. (It didn't help either that I didn't strictly _need_ to learn it, and didn't have much spare time on my hands...) This year I am having to learn Julia for a project I joined, and I am finding it much easier. Although it isn't quite like any of the other languages I know, its syntax is close enough and I am already acquainted with its concepts. The result was that two weeks after my first exposure, I was ready to contribute code.

</comment><comment><USER20> Background: I've been writing code for about 25 years, and I consider myself to be pretty good at what I do.

Depending on the language, I'd say a couple of weeks of full-time work. I tend to dabble with new languages, so the calendar time is on the order of months. That said, I've started a few jobs where I had to learn a new language trial- by-fire style, and I was productive and able to contribute to projects actively within days/weeks.

The thing is that _most_ programming is similar, regardless of language. You still have arrays and tries and dicts and functions. The patterns are largely the same. There are, of course, different families of languages where some patterns are more similar than in other languages, but for the most part, when I pick up a new language, I'm really learning more about syntax and structure than anything else.

For example, Go took me about 2 weeks to become really productive in it. Elixir, on the other hand, has taken me a lot longer (partially because I dislike Ruby -- especially Rails -- and therefore the syntax is fairly alien to me).

Hope that helped.

</comment><comment><USER21> Usually if it's just another object oriented language I'll be able to get a simple patch going in a day or so. However learning the language could take a couple of months at best for me to be able to add it on my CV.

The thing I find challenging when learning while in a project, is that it's hard to separate then ecosystem, the framework and the language '.

</comment><comment> nv-vn Different times for every language. Some I've been able to pick up in a matter of days or even hours (being able to read and write Dart code, for example, was very easy because I already knew Java, C#, JavaScript). Others take a few weeks to feel comfortable (learning OCaml for the first time or getting started with Prolog). Finally, there's a category of languages that take forever to be able to use (namely, Haskell). But each language becomes exponentially easier the more similar languages you know. Learning Haskell after knowing Idris felt like nothing, and switching from Java to C# was a piece of cake. The best way to learn languages quickly is to just keep learning new things. Even apart from learning new abstractions for each language and being able to reuse them, you end up training yourself to think in a more abstract way with more possibilities to work with.

</comment><comment><USER22> Two weeks. I refer to it as the cussing period because it's full of situations where I know something is possible and easy, but I have to figure out how to find the right documentation and put together the peculiarities of the new language in my mind. Usually that feeling of frustrated helplessness goes away after two weeks.

</comment><comment><USER23> Learning a C like language - about two weeks. That is my recent experience with Python.

The part that takes awhile is not the language it's the framework. I would say 6 months to a year.

</comment><comment><USER24> Depends on what you mean by "know". I was able program in Python without ever learning it (not by choice), I had to look up a few things, but my code worked in the end.

To actually fully know _any_ language and all its quirks is tough. Look at Ecmascript specification, it's quite long. And that doesn't cover all the undefined behaviors.

[https://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/8.0/index.html](https://www.ecma- international.org/ecma-262/8.0/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER25> Contributing to a project probably on the first week: As in after code-review it will get merged and pushed to production.

The problem is you're going to be slow until you get comfortable with the language, so it does take its toll on development speed. It's also harder to estimate and schedule since you have to take your own learning into account.

I find that it takes me a couple months to feel comfortable if I like the language (Golang) but with ones I don't (PHP) it always feels like a slog. To each their own here though.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's a bit of a matrix for me.

* Dynamic-type languages usually only take 2-3 days to start contributing, sometimes I'll even have a new PR in on day 1. * Static-type languages honestly take me awhile, usually around 1-2 weeks to start contributing. * To feel actually competent, it usually takes a week in dynamic, closer to 2 months in static for me. * Also, there's "weird" languages, like Erlang/Elixir/Rust/etc, which have their own learning curve. It just adjusts upward by different amounts.

</comment><comment><USER27> Not an answer but a general comment on learning languages: instead of setting your goal as "to learn as much of a languageas possible", instead you can go for "I want to be able to do this class of things that will be made very easy once i know thia language".

If you do the former it's very easy to learn something then forget it. Furthermore, echoing other comments, you would lack clear measures of success because it almost makes no sense to ask whether you truly "know" a language.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've done this a few times, and I can start contributing quite soon. Like the first week. It just takes _much_ longer.

I know enough "software engineering" that I know pretty well _what_ I want my code to do. So I just need to figure out how to express that in this new language.

Right now, I've been doing Python for 3-4 months and am starting to feel quite comfortable. Then again I'm far from an expert and would not do well at a Python centric interview.

</comment><comment><USER29> Contributing? Within a week, though slowly at first with a lot of comments on my PRs.

It'll take ~3 months to hit my full stride and mostly understand the correct "way" to write that program (its common patterns, how best to use some of its features).

A deep ("expert") understanding of the language? Like 3 years, but varying wildly depending on the projects I use it for, the feedback I get from others, and the research and dedicated practice I put in.

</comment><comment><USER30> On a massive Perl / Mojolicious project it took me about 2 months to contribute, and 8-10 months to gain a moderate level of fluency. Like others have mentioned, I don't think I will ever fully know the language.

On an extremely large Salesforce APEX project, it took me a few weeks to contribute and a couple of months to gain fluency. APEX is pretty much a subset of Java (with minor differences) so there was a lot less to learn there.

<comment><USER31> Took me a couple of days to grasp Mojolicious as a Perl programmer. Really well thought out framework.

2 months sounds insane. I guess you did not click with Perl?

<comment><USER30> The application uses Mojolicious magic very heavily and we have a lot of Perl 'wizards' who like to write code that relies on little known language features. Now that I am very comfortable with Perl I enjoy reading that kind of code, but coming from mostly Java/APEX it was a difficult experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I've programmed in over 20 languages, it typically takes a couple days to a week to make a meaningful contribution to a project. The more languages you know, the easier it gets because there are very few truly novel things in programming languages - just different syntax for doing the same.

To achieve mastery in a language takes years of steady use, a constant attention to learning best practices, and good code reviewers.

</comment><comment><USER33> I learned go and wrote [https://github.com/kahing/goofys](https://github.com/kahing/goofys) in a month, and learned rust and wrote [https://github.com/kahing/catfs](https://github.com/kahing/catfs) in about the same amount of time

</comment><comment><USER34> It is not only language you have to learn. its ecosystem, environment, libraries, frameworks, tools, testing, debugging, paradigms, and etc.

Since mastering a language takes years, I use 20hrs rule. I spend 20hrs on reading, learning and practicing the language and environment itself and after that I dive directly into the project.

(I've been programming 9+ years.)

</comment><comment><USER35> It really depends on the language. Going from C# to Java and vice-versa is pretty seamless, but moving from Java to C++ can be dizzying even if the two have a lot of commonality.

In general, though, the more languages you learn the more likely it is that the next one you try to pick up is easier.

<comment><USER23> I posted earlier that it only takes me about two weeks to learn a "C-like language". But I never thought that was only the case because I learned C and then C++ _first_ and used them for about 80% of my development for 10 years. If I had started out with C#, Java, or Python and then wanted to learn C or C++ it would have taken me a lot longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There's not really a linear relationship between knowing about a language and contributing to a project. I contributed to a C++ program after Googling around a couple of hours without having written C++ ever before. Granted, it was a small patch, but still.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's kinda like you're an American that just moved to another country. The native people will know you're from America for a long time just by hearing your voice. It will be in the subtle details. (Yes I'm talking about the software side too)

</comment><comment><USER38> It's one thing to learn a language, and another thing to "learn" the ecosystem of libraries and be productive.

</comment><comment><USER39> it depends, if you have experience with similar style of language than learning syntax and starting to contribute is easy may be 1-2 days. However "knowing" involves learning how it is implemented and how the tooling works underneath. Which can easily take 2-3 years.

</comment><comment><USER40> Depends on how much the current maintainers are willing to do by themself, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER41> a day

</comment><comment><USER42> HA HA, I thought you are talking about real language. Anyway, I have learnt to read japanese in 20 days, in order to read novel in japanese. Today, I still don't speak fluently since I didn't particularly interest anything other than some reading.

It is pretty similar experience to learning a programming language. You can cram yourself to be productive on a new language in a week. But to master a language, you have to expose yourself into different situation when use the language. You can be good at using python to write some machine learning code, but how about a web application? How about writing qt? And also different size of a similar project need dramatically different architecture.

English is not my first language, so it is pretty similar situation. I can talk professionally as a software engineer. I can write a HN post that anyone can understand (or maybe not). I can read news, article about technology etc. But when I try to read literature such as novel, I found myself I don't have enough set of vocabulary in this setting to comfortably read without constantly checking dictionary. I cannot flirt a girl in English whose first language is English. So, obviously I don't claim myself mastering in English because I cannot use English effectively in all situation and social settings. But who does anyway if it is a second language? Similar to programming language, you just cannot master a language without knowing all or at least most aspect of different application and pitfall on implementation. Even the language inventor can't do that I believe.

So, the point taken is use a language to be productive enough on your setting is enough as a goal. You can aim to adopt more different situation if you want improvement. But perfect is the enemy of good.</comment>


Scientists Identify How Many Trees to Plant and Where to Stop Climate Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/how-many-trees-to-plant-to-stop-climate-crisis/ <comment><USER2> It's not either one solution or another, or what is the best solution, there is not one single solution for solving climate change, it's not that simple.

This is a thought fallacy that leads us nowhere, it's a complex problem with many causes and lots of moving parts.

We can't just plant a bunch of trees and keep living like before, growing to 10 billions and beyond.

We need to plant a bunch of trees AND reduce traveling AND stop eating so much meat, AND stop fishing so much, AND stop creating to much waste, AND keep the world population under control, etc. It's not OR, its AND.

Thinking "Oh well someone is just going to plant a bunch of trees and fix it, I'll just back to eating my cheeseburger" is not a productive message at this point in time, when so much is still to be done to convince the general public that lifestyle changes are urgently needed.

<comment><USER3> If I play devils advocate here for a moment: Why is it that everybody is so interested in "lifestyle" changes, and so uninterested in things like OP or Project Vesta [1]? I sometimes get the feeling that some people just see this whole climate thing as a good opportunity to force their (pre-existing) values/virtues on others...

1\. [https://projectvesta.org/](https://projectvesta.org/)

<comment><USER4> Exactly. People (not necessarily the parent comment) love to focus on the lifestyle choices because they allow them to paint those advocating change as hypocrites, and so dismiss the entire message.

The vast majority (~80%, [1]) of the greenhouse gas emissions do not come from "lifestyle" choices such as eating meat, but from transportation, industrial use and electrical production. These require changes at the policy level that individuals can't create by themselves but only by calling for action by legislators. Planting more trees on a national scale can absolutely be one of the many policy changes that we call for to help balance the scales, because we will never get those three sectors down to zero.

As for the specific question of meat, it would undoubtably help for everyone to eat less meat, but in fact if every single person in the US went vegetarian, it's estimated that it would only reduce the US's CO2 output by about 5%. [2]

1\. [https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas- emis...](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas- emissions#transportation)

2\. [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/climate/what-if-we-all- at...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/climate/what-if-we-all-ate-a-bit- less-meat.html)

<comment><USER5> > The vast majority (~80%, [1]) of the greenhouse gas emissions do not come > from "lifestyle" choices such as eating meat, but from transportation, > industrial use and electrical production.

But the reason we use so much transportation, industry, and electricity is due to lifestyle choices. Meat requires feed which is transported, and then the animals are transported, and then the meat itself is also transported. Industry makes those iPhones you buy a new model of every other year. Etc.

> As for the specific question of meat, it would undoubtably help for everyone > to eat less meat, but in fact if every single person in the US went > vegetarian, it's estimated that it would only reduce the US's CO2 output by > about 5%

5% is nothing to sneeze at. Eating less meat alone won't stop climate change, it's true, but in combination with other sacrifices?

Here's my problem with the people who make arguments like you're making: I feel like you're unwilling to make sacrifices and are using this argument to justify how you can claim to care about the environment while also doing basically nothing to improve the situation. You'll say "well, one person isn't going to make a difference", yes, in the same way a raindrop does not consider itself responsible for the flood. If we are so unwilling to make sacrifices for ourselves, why should we believe that other people will make any? Why will they vote against their interests? Pay lip service to the idea in a public forum and then explain away your own contribution to the problem as being but one drop in the flood, voting is secret. Someone says "we should eat less meat", an objectively helpful thing to do by your own metric, and you say "No, no. It's a small thing, we should focus on something less important to me!".

It's frankly quite frustrating to see. Short of some miracle techology, I'm pretty sure this kind of thing is the reason we won't be able to avoid the worst case scenarios of climate change and future generations will look back on us with well deserved disgust.

<comment><USER6> I don't get this reasoning. Global warming has been self-reinforcing since before my dad was born, so a 100% reduction in human co2 emissions will not stop climate change, just slow it down. It's also an exponential process and we're not in the early stages, so it won't even slow it down that much. Imagine the effect of a 5% change now, which is a completely unrealistic goal to boot. It's nothing.

[https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate- feedba...](https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/why-positive-climate-feedbacks- are-so-bad)

We don't need miracle technology, we have the technology to take control of the climate, and we'll be forced to use it, whatever other measures are used.

So lifestyle choices are great and all, but please stop saying they're for the climate. They're insignificant, even if 100% implemented.

The proverbial raindrop you're talking about matters very little if the reason for the flood is a dam breaking. Great attitude on the part of the raindrop to not make the situation worse. But all the raindrops together only make the situation 0.1% worse than it was before the rain ...

<comment><USER7> > So lifestyle choices are great and all, but please stop saying they're for > the climate. They're insignificant, even if 100% implemented.

This is false.

> That's why the late 2018 IPCC report stood out that reducing meat > consumption by 90% is the single biggest way to reduce global warming. Some > studies also show that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland > use could be reduced by over 75%. In this way, reducing your meat > consumption is also a big step to stop not only deforestation but also > global warming on a larger scale.

[https://e-csr.net/definitions/what-is-definition- deforestati...](https://e-csr.net/definitions/what-is-definition- deforestation-causes-effects/#3-eating-less-meat)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7)

Or better yet: [https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/Fullreport-1...](https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2019/08/Fullreport-1.pdf) (search for "meat" and "diet")

<comment><USER8> > Some studies also show that without meat and dairy consumption, global > farmland use could be reduced by over 75%

But reducing farmland by over 75% is not enough by itself to counter climate change. And, if we can plant enough trees outside of farmland the reduction of farmland is not even neccessary.

It seems, we agree that we need more trees. But you want to get there by eating less meat. Yes, there is a connection between meat and trees, but why not just plant trees?

Edit: reduced the quote to relevant part

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This has been debunked at plenty of places, but I guess it needs repeating.

Quote from the article: "Around 0.9 billion hectares (2.2 billion acres) of land worldwide would be suitable for reforestation, which could ultimately capture two thirds of human-made carbon emissions."

This is wrong. The reason is a bit technical. The issue here is that about half of the emissions going into the atmosphere get soaked up by natural sinks, e.g. the oceans. However if you take carbon dioxide out of the air the reverse happens: The oceans and other sinks re-release the carbon.

This needs to be taken into account, but hasn't happened here. So the effect is only about half the size of what is claimed.

Sources by some climate scientists explaining this: [https://twitter.com/pepcanadell/status/1147066574299377664](https://twitter.com/pepcanadell/status/1147066574299377664) [https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1147190442145898496](https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1147190442145898496)

To be clear: There's nothing wrong with planting trees as _one_ solution to the climate crisis. However this study was presented in a way that overestimated the effect massively. (Also I have some doubts that planting trees is "easy" given the political situation in the countries that have the largest potential.)

<comment><USER10> On a practical standpoint, I don't think the article tackles the concept of forest management at all. Other than what's been going on the past few months, the Amazon doesn't see wildfires like the Pacific Northwest does. An Amazon forest can be denser per acre compared to a NW forest. Thinning forests is a common practice, across America at least, to manage burnable material that naturally occurs in a forest. Plus to deal with a lot of beetles and other pests that have been killing the forests. At the end, it's not enough anymore to just plant a tree and call it day in most forests. Management needs to be apart of the plan too. It would suck to plant a ton of trees, just to see it go up in smoke.

<comment><USER11> The Amazon is wet enough that it doesn't have natural massive fires. The recent and ongoing fires are set to clear the land for agriculture. They have to cut the trees down first, wait for them to dry out a bit, and then set them on fire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just to let you know, there has been considerable forestation taking place in Europe during the last 100 years:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04/watch- how-europe-is-greener-now-than-100-years-ago/)

Yet, somehow people in Europe think that a huge deforestation is taking place.

<comment><USER13> For anyone who thinks the Scottish highlands are beautiful. Here is what it used to look like and will again one day soon.

[https://rewildingeurope.com/rew-project/restoring-the- caledo...](https://rewildingeurope.com/rew-project/restoring-the-caledonian- forest/)

(The video at the bottom is a bit gushing but it's a decent view of what the reforestation projects want to achieve).

<comment><USER14> This is a great example of exporting your forest needs. About 1/3 of the UK's renewable energy is wood pellets shipped across the ocean from the US [1]. So yes you can have reforestation but for that to happen at the same time as your demand for wood pellets increases you have to burn a lot of bunker fuel to ship that wood across the ocean.

But of course in the end you get to claim that you are using more renewable energy and increasing local forest coverage!

[1] [http://www.biomassmagazine.com/articles/16053/uk- bioenergy-c...](http://www.biomassmagazine.com/articles/16053/uk-bioenergy- capacity-generation-increased-in-2018)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With all these smart people reading Hacker News, why is the the top comment so negative. This is a legitimately doable thing.

The vast majority of us on here are some type of engineer. We can answer the question of "How do we efficiently plant 1bil hectare of trees within 5 years?"

Yes, we need to do other things too. But if we wait for some panacea plan to emerge it will be too late. Just do it.

Just imagine if we accomplished this within 5 years. How glad would we be in 30 years once they really started to mature? Let's be good to future us.

<comment><USER16> > engineer.

nature can plant trees instead. Trees, if left alone for a couple of years will naturally reproduce and plant themselves. The key bit is leaving the space alone. It is not something that really needs engineering on the whole.

There is a small amount of places where trees would not be able to colonise if left alone - and we need to use the science of Ecology to examine why. it's here where geotechnology can come into play, but for the vast vast majority of the billions needed, we just need to leave alone .

Now, saying that, there is a great benefit in getting children interested in nature and planting trees and so we shouldn't stop planting efforts for that sake. But there is a deeply troubling idea that we can engineer nature to save nature when it's nature that can save itself and us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The recommendation is to reforest 103 million hectares of the US. That is about 400,000 square miles in a country of about 4,000,000 square miles, i.e. 10% of the surface area. It's not clear where there is that much land suitable for forest that is not being used for ag and other purposes. Of course, we could decrease the amount of land used for agriculture, since we are continually in surplus and export a lot of foodstuffs.

Some parts, such as New England, were farmed more intensively and have been allowed to go back to forest. In other areas, such as the midwest, poor or swampy land that was used for dairy farming pastures is no longer needed, since dairying is now concentrated in fewer huge herds. However, in these cases land had been allowed to go back to forests naturally, with scrubby transition shrubs and trees that are pretty poor forests. We could get both more carbon capture and more forest products by better forest management in the US. Invasive species such as kudzu, asian bittersweet, and porcelain berry make transitioning back to mature terminal stage forest difficult and expensive.

<comment><USER18> The article does mention that it takes into account land already in use by humans. I can only assume that "use" includes agriculture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> People need to start thinking of natural regeneration / rewilding as an option because "planting trees" per se does not create a self sustaining balanced forest ecosystem. Forestry plantations are often pretty much green deserts, like any other agricultural monoculture.

There's a pernicious influence from government here. It's unhelpfully easier to get funding for "plant 1000 saplings" than for "leave an area to transform into thorny scrub, pioneer tree woodland, and finally full woodland".

[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/26/wildwo...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/26/wildwoods- britain-climate-change-northern-forest)

<comment><USER17> It would be nice if natural regeneration worked, but in this area an idle plot quickly becomes overrun with invasive species. Some of these are foreign trees, such as alianthus, and some are US trees not native to this area, such as black locust. Even these fast growing and short lived species become quickly entangled in non-native vines and dragged down in windstorms. The result is a tangled mess nothing like the theoretical progression from thorny scrub, pioneer tree woodland, and full woodland. Getting to something like a natural woodland may be possible naturally, but it takes many decades, and the resultant species will certainly not be the mixed oak and chestnut forest, since there are no more chestnuts. Nature only goes forward, never back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just as a political lesson, reforestation is fascinating.It seems to have casually gone from seeming unfeasible practically and politically to feasible... without much of a struggle.

Impossible until it isn't.

<comment><USER21> Surely that's because its a suggest that we can "solve" an extistential crisis without changing the way we do business or live our lives in any meaningful way.

Feels a bit too good to be true.

<comment><USER20> I disagree with the zero-sum assumption that often seem to permeate environmentalism, and climate politics in particular. Half the time it seems that effectiveness is judged by inconvenience, negative economic consequences and such. I sometimes think it hurts the cause more than outright anti- environmentalism.

If the only "real" solutions are things like reducing human energy use long term, you might as well stop caring and just hope for the best. It won't happen, and even if it does than the long-term^ consequences might be worse than climate change.

The actually sustainable solutions are those that are cheap, positive sum, and lead to humans thriving.

IDK if this _is_ a solution (or meaningful part thereof) for climate change. It's not really an easy solution though. Land politics are tough, to put it mildly. They always have been.

^Operative term.

<comment><USER14> > If the only "real" solutions are things like reducing human energy use long > term, you might as well stop caring and just hope for the best. It won't > happen, and even if it does than the long-term^ consequences might be worse > than climate change.

But that's absolutely the path we're on and have repeatedly chosen. I don't think comments pointing this out are claiming they are environmentalists, just pointing out something that very few people really want to discuss.

It's funny that we discuss "sustainability" as some sort of future goal, when, by definition, the alternative is a way of life that cannot be sustained. "Less unsustainable" is still unsustainable. Since serious sustainability is clearly seen as some sort of absurd joke, then we should at least stop pretending that things are going to be okay.

The really interesting part will be when we feel the other pain of unsustainable living: resource depletion. Fighting the impact of climate changes is going to be even trickier when we have less energy to do it with.

<comment><USER22> > The really interesting part will be when we feel the other pain of > unsustainable living: resource depletion. Fighting the impact of climate > changes is going to be even trickier when we have less energy to do it with.

Energy is the one thing we shouldn't run low on given that we have the sun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Things like this article describes, the fact the world is getting greener as a result of human activity[1] not to mention the constant advance of technology is why I'm still optimistic for our future despite all the doomsday predictions.

[1] [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china- an...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-and-india- dominates-the-greening-of-earth-nasa-study-shows)

</comment><comment><USER24> Setting aside whether this is a solution (even a partial one), I applaud the effort to come up with solutions like this.

It's hard and sometimes impossible to get other people to change. Especially when they are in other countries where legislative changes aren't even possible. This means it can take a long time, at best.

It's easier to change ourselves. Come up with things we can do that have a positive impact is a great idea.

<comment><USER25> Meat consumption is the number one issue and as someone who likes to consume meat I think that

> It's easier to change ourselves

is a bold statement. Maybe some of us can muster up the will to resist $5 meat packages in the supermarket every single day. I am sure not all and especially not _enough_ people can do that off their own free will.

So what we need is to make meat a luxury item again and ban any and all mass production of meat. It basically amounts to torture anyway and the meat quality is somewhere near garbage.

It would be a lot easier if the meat options in supermarkets were restricted to expensive "organic" meat from animals who lived in acceptable conditions.

Cheap mass produced meat is an incredible ecological killer.

Ok, so there will be people who don't want to lose their meat. I don't want to. But even others will _resist_ that notion. It's not like the production is sustainable so sooner or later it will happen anyways. The question is, how much damage will we produce along the way?

<comment><USER26> >is a bold statement. Maybe some of us can muster up the will to resist $5 meat packages in the supermarket every single day. I am sure not all and especially not enough people can do that off their own free will.

Simply switching from beef to chicken results in a dramatic reduction of greenhouse gasses you are personally responsible for. I ditched about 90% of my beef for chicken last year and barely noticed.

<comment><USER25> Apparently it can be nearly _any_ other meat than beef, except maybe lamb. Beef is multiple times as potent as any other form of meat when it comes to climate impact. Aside from emissions, it has a large effect on water pollution as well.

For starters: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Never mind the fact it takes trees decades to get to their maximum annual CO2 uptake levels and that species vary wildly in the levels of CO2 they take up...

Planting trees isn't the answer, drastically reducing emissions _immediately_ , drastically reducing construction levels (creating concrete is a huge source of CO2), cessation of paving over square mile after square mile of soil to create roads and housing additions, ceasing the practice of removing all of the top soil from ecologically diverse fields to sell and then throwing Kentucky blue grass sod down and putting up cookie-cutter houses, ceasing coastal fishing that has been damaging kelp and seaweed 'forests' and actively repopulating them via sustainable farming of kelp and seaweed which will drastically increase local marine species populations over time.

Hell, abandoning foolish technologies like cryptocurrency will have IMMEDIATE impact. Bitcoin alone uses an insane amount of electricity. One estimate [1] puts a single bitcoin transaction at using as much electricity as it takes to stream 48,011 hours of YouTube which is nearly 21 days of average U.S. household electricity usage! The network has had an annualized carbon footprint equal to Denmark and an electricity consumption equal to Austria. For imaginary flippin' internet money that is largely used for speculation, ransomware and illicit drug trade!!!

Yes, replacing the forests we've cut down in the past several centuries is imperative but it isn't a solution. You can plant all the trees you want but as long as you're producing nearly 40 gigatons of CO2 a year, you're just making yourself feel good and getting some PR for your company/party/country.

[1] [https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy- consumption](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption)

<comment><USER27> > You can plant all the trees you want but as long as you're producing nearly > 40 gigatons of CO2 a year, you're just making yourself feel good and getting > some PR for your company/party/country.

Wouldn't planting enough trees to gobble up 40+1 GT of carbon a year do the trick? I think this is the point of TFA.

<comment><USER28> trees only capture carbon temporarily

<comment><USER29> We can also cut them to make room for new trees. If we don't burn the C in them to CO2, but use them as raw materials (buildings, alternative to plastics, etc.) there is even more potential for carbon capture in this way.

Of course, the long term solution is to grow as many new trees per year as we emit CO2, so there is an upper limit for our CO2 budget, but this should give use time to convert to carbon neutral energy production and consumption without hampering the the GDP growth too much. In fact, it has been estimated that world GDP can actually grow even during the transition, due to, for example, positive effects of improved environment (health improvements lead to productivity improvements and so on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What I don't like about planting trees for carbon absorption is that is leads to really boring forests: in Canada they'll plant mono species stands of white spruce, which typically absorb the most carbon. This is however not the best in terms of biodiversity... Doing something as complex as forestry while optimizing for one objective is not the best approach IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER31> Trees help, but alone won't "stop" the climate crisis, and wont do anything to combat the worst greenhouse gases.

<comment><USER32> The study has data to back up it's findings and suggests tree growth can help; what data are you using to back up your statement?

From the article: "The Crowther Lab of ETH Zurich has published a study in the journal Science that shows this would be the most effective method to combat climate change."

<comment><USER31> So where exactly does the article say this method will _stop_ the climate crisis?

It doesn't, because it's not true as the ETH reseachers are well aware and will readily tell you. As I mentioned in my post, trees ALONE will not stop the climate crisis because the only thing they'll really help with is CO2 absorption, and climate change is driven by more than just C)2 levels.

<comment><USER33> Ah the old absolutist "doing something doesn't get us 100% of the way there, so we should sit on our hands" argument.

<comment><USER31> Preposterous. Where exactly did I suggest this? What I'm saying this in no way will "fully solve" the climate crisis and I'm afraid that presenting this approach as a complete solution will lull people into a false sense of security and complacency.

A lot of the claims made in this piece are very exaggerated re: potential to address climate change

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The prevailing view in my culture is that planting trees does not necessarily equate to 'reforestation'. I've seen forests decimated first-hand and then replanted as monoculture tree plantations.

</comment><comment><USER35> Pretty much the same as [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360513) ...

</comment><comment><USER36> Individually, we can also give our money to offset our (and others') carbon emissions.

By donating to cost-effective charities (ones that are experts at doing the offsetting), we can do more good than through other individual actions.

Read the Founders Pledge Climate Change Executive Summary:

[https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-change- executive-...](https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-change-executive- summary)

</comment><comment><USER37> Wow, people are desperate for good news. Well, this is a July article, and the idea that this "stops" the climate crisis is nonesense.

The treest would remove about 10-15 years worth of emissions over 40-100. Emissions are increasing (in fact, accelerating).

Moreover, that carbon would be removed over 40-100 years, and in that time, none of those trees could be cut, nor could they burn.

Now, it should be done! But it is by no means a way of stopping climate.

Fundamental systemic change is requied.

</comment><comment><USER38> Are there any NGOs working on reforestation based on this report I can donate to?

<comment><USER39> "If we can warm up the earth, we can also cool it down."

[https://justdiggit.org/](https://justdiggit.org/)

<comment><USER40> Well you're going to have to account for the natural oscillations to[0], when it's quite complicated apparently for some people to understand the most basic one[1]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_oscillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_oscillation) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_multidecadal_oscillat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_multidecadal_oscillation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Link to the pdf of the actual study: [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/365/6448/76.full....](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/365/6448/76.full.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER42> Trees don't solve our other environmental problems of plastic, carcinogens, extinctions, etc.

Yes, plant trees as a partial solution. Consider it a starting point, nowhere near an endpoint.

We can dance around it all we like, partial solutions like planting trees don't address that the environment reacts to our population and behavior.

Ultimately we must lower our birth rate and produce less or we will override partial solutions. Projections about or population leveling off would change when assumptions change, like the world being cleaner from planting all these trees. Unless we change our cultural values, goals, and behavior away from growth and externalizing costs.

<comment><USER10> I do agree, and I do agree about over population is a problem.

But question, _who_ must lower their birth rate? And how do you implement such a plan? How do you punish people that makes sense? That's a super tricky problem and can't just be waved around. China attempted this... and there's a term that comes to mind on how that turned out... cluster fuck. I mean, I'm not going to vote for any law that says if you have a child outside your allowed quota, then the child is "disposed" or taken away. Thus, how do you enforce it? Tax the piss out of someone? Just to make them poorer and then those kids have a piss poor life even worse than normal?

The population level off isn't tied to the climate being cleaned. It's based on the concept that if countries go from developing to first world status, they adopt 1st world birthing rates of 2 kids or less. Do I buy that argument? Eh? Maybe, to an extent. But knowing human nature. There's going to be a country or two that will propaganda to have more kids to out beat the rest of the world. Humans have a habit trying to gain an advantage over other people. If there's one to be had, they'll have it.

<comment><USER43> They will adopt 1st world birthing rates and 1st world consumption rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> International standards for shipping pollution are a few decades out of date. It's been about 40 years.

International trade organizations need to address the pollution happening in international waters, including combustion gases, dumping, and all the national subsidies for environmentally hostile activities relating to shipping.

The article does not actually present an actionable plan for tree-planting. It seems to be saying that deserts, mountains, and tundra are viable targets for afforestation--a.k.a. land area not already forested that is not used by cities or agriculture.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've been talking about this for years. This could conclusion is beyond obvious to anyone who has looked at the realities of climate change rather than the politically fed frenzy the thing has become.

Plant trees.

</comment><comment><USER46> Can someone here make some kind of an app/platform that let's me know where I can go to plant a tree and how to do it?

I would be a big fan of a long weekend/vacation planting trees part of industrial scale joint operations where I am making an actual difference.

Maybe include payment and and donations for seeds/land/water/etc. I worry about climate change all the time but I don't know how to affect change at an impact level.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I worry about climate change all the time but I don't know how to affect > change at an impact level.

I would encourage you to donate to Trees For the Future, as I have done for the last several years. Here's a blog post I wrote about it: [https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate- chang...](https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate-change-with- trees.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> i'm currently looking into tree-planting as a climate change solution with the aim of making it into either a nonprofit or a for-profit organization, but my research so far has not been promising.

the trouble with planting trees is that it's difficult to turn into a virtuous economic loop without government intervention because the cost of land is so high. nobody wants to buy a tree that is planted somewhere else, and very few individuals or companies are interested in purchasing trees for the creation of a carbon offset certificate or personal carbon offset. in other words, people don't value carbon sequestration, they value things that sequestration can produce downstream, like air that isn't jam packed with CO2.

in a vacuum, you can plant one tree for 20 cents of effort -- assuming you own the land you're standing on. but in the real world, land is expensive, and it has both up-front purchase costs as well as ongoing land tax costs. and trees aren't exactly productive assets unless the government assigns an economic value to carbon sequestration via a carbon tax or something similar.

all of these concerns occur well before you can even start to approach the idea of scaling tree-planting to the point where it makes a dent in the climate crisis. for the idea to work economically, it needs a lot of subsidization, at least under the present conditions.

of course, this is where philanthropy could step in and make a massive difference. if a billionaire or two would set aside a few billions to purchase deforested lands and replant them, we could make major progress. but they won't, so that leaves us hunting for a market capitalist solution to a problem caused by collective ignorance of externalities during economic activity.

<comment><USER48> You don't need to buy land specifically. In fact, that's probably counter productive. A better bet would be to seek a lease or an easement in someone's plot for a fee.

<comment><USER47> if you don't own the land, you can't stop the owner from chopping down all the trees you planted and letting the CO2 exhaust into the air again. i guess you could try putting it into a contract, but it would de facto be unenforceable because you wouldn't know if the land owner was cutting down trees on their property anyway.

<comment><USER48> that's why you purchase an easement, and yes, it would be enforceable. I mean, it would be as enforceable as making sure no one poached your trees on your vast swaths of remote, distributed acreage. In my scheme, because the revenue is recurring, the owners would have every incentive to prevent poaching, thus potentially relieving you of some extra costs.

I suppose a tree hating owner could sign up and then chop down your trees, but luckily, you can probably sue him for breaking a contract, or just not let him have another tree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > stop eating so much meat

Do people actually read the reports and study's around climate change or do they just follow what they see in the news?

</comment><comment><USER50> But if we manage to mess up the oceans badly then we'll need a lot more trees than ever was.

</comment><comment><USER51> I thought forests were carbon neutral, at least if the trees are allowed to rot. Is there a plan to remove the dead trees so this doesn't happen? Even if you turn it into lumber and make buildings with it, eventually it tends to rot or burn.

What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER52> [https://twitter.com/katherinegould/status/117549742050484633...](https://twitter.com/katherinegould/status/1175497420504846338) the lead of the paper in question

</comment><comment><USER53> Planting trees is good, but it won't solve our problems. It would be nice if governments first halt and prohibit the destruction of our existing forests in case that happens for a profit. Same counts for all other resources like gas, oil, minerals, etc.. It should not be possible to farm that for profit, it should only be allowed when there is a real proven need where the loss can be calculated and compensated to assure future life and to prevent the extinction of species.

If this depletion of resources continues at the current rate, we are in fact committing suicide at a planetary scale. The sad thing is that we can only look and talk about it, there is no control by anyone. We wanted democracy, well this is one of the traits of democracy. No control, but above all discussion and corruption(for profit). I'm afraid that if our governing systems remain dictatorial, communist, democratic, etc.. we won't make it into the next century. Mankind will eventually destroy itself(and other species) because of a lack of an intelligent governing system.

</comment><comment><USER54> This article is from July, I belive it has been discussed here previously.

</comment><comment><USER55> So, where can I plant some near me?

Edit: They have a tool, sort of: [https://www.crowtherlab.com/maps-2/](https://www.crowtherlab.com/maps-2/)

</comment><comment><USER56> Where does the water come from to reforest 58 million hectares of Australia? It does not seem at all practical in the remaining time left, unless they are looking at very light forestation.

</comment><comment><USER57> Whe you read the entire article they state they don't know the output. They're not sure that would make significantly change.

</comment><comment><USER58> I think the solution to climate crisis is in Oceans since 95% of the world's oceans and 99% of the ocean floor are unexplored

</comment><comment><USER59> i actually asked a NOAA weather scientists about what would happen if we plant billions of tree where the winds of hurricanes root from?

He told me it's always good to plant trees BUT know that by altering the environment, chances are you will be redirecting hurricanes to other countries and be ready to get sued!

<comment><USER60> Just...what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Would it be more effective than growing the number of phytoplanktons? If so, by how much?

<comment><USER47> based on my research into phytoplanktons and cyanobacteria-based climate change mitigation for the purposes of commercialization, my take on this is that planting trees is probably a significantly easier approach in terms of the amount of effort involved on an ongoing basis.

in terms of efficacy, i'd say it depends on how productive your phyto/cyano farm is versus planting trees over a 10-year course per dollar. phyto/cyano farms will be super dense in terms of sequestration, capacity but you'll be investing hundreds of dollars per unit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Is Western China really so mountainous to have that large area with relatively no trees?

</comment><comment><USER63> "I have not looked at this deeply, so take all of this with a grain of salt, but a quick scan makes me believe that this is very hyped.

Having skimmed the paper it seems the only thing the authors do and what is peer-reviewed is estimate earth's theoretical maximum capacity for reforestation.

There are few problems:

1) Feasibility: "200 GtC is a technical potential assuming every hectare of forestland on earth is increased to 100% forest cover"

[https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1147190442145898496](https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1147190442145898496)

"An assessment of the biophysical capacity for restoring global tree cover provides a necessary but insufficient foundation for evaluating where tree cover can be feasibly increased. The kinds of trees as well as how and where they are grown determine how and which people benefit. In some contexts, increasing tree cover can elevate fire risk, decrease water supplies, and cause crop damage by wildlife. Reforestation programs often favor single- species tree plantations over restoring native forest ecosystems. This approach can generate negative consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage (5), threaten food and land security, and exacerbate social inequities. How restored lands are governed determines how reforestation costs and benefits are distributed."

[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/24](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/24)

There are no dollar signs or economic feasibility analysis in that paper. So the people who wrote it just cited some number that is not peer-reviewed and even if loosely based on previous numbers might not work at the scale.

\--

2) There seems to be no scientific consensus how much (or even if!) new trees are a GHG sink on net. Some legitimate papers even suggests that new trees could be a net GHG source. (the paper does not make any new contributions to this question and I think just assumes that trees absorb GHG).

For instance, see this recent paper in Nature communications:

a) "Limited capacity of tree growth to mitigate the global greenhouse effect under predicted warming" [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10174-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10174-4)

b) this recent paper in PNAS (top journal as well)

"On-going carbon uptake due to forest demography is large, but much smaller than previous influential estimates have suggested. Contrary to previous findings, these latest data sources indicate that the sink is predominantly in mid-high latitude, rather than tropical, forests.

[https://www.pnas.org/content/116/10/4382.short"](https://www.pnas.org/content/116/10/4382.short")

from

[https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xY3iSgDRHidue8J7C/...](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xY3iSgDRHidue8J7C/new- study-in-science-implies-that-tree-planting-is- the?commentId=wSZm2PQh4iWZ5Qra2)

</comment><comment><USER64> Trees aren't bad, but they're a solution like how a bandage is a solution to a systematic bacterial infection...

</comment><comment><USER40> The "Climate Crisis" has been debunked by UN Chief Climate Scientist[0] and by IPCC itself[1]

[0] [http://co2coalition.org/2019/09/27/chief-un-climate- scientis...](http://co2coalition.org/2019/09/27/chief-un-climate-scientist- calls-the-climate-crisis-narrative-religious-extremism/) [1] [https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/the- great-...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/the-great- failure-of-the-climate-models)

<comment><USER65> The first article is referring to an interview that is hardly a "debunk". It's just one persons opinion on how grave the issue is (e.g. should you stop having kids?).

The second piece is classical climate change denial, e.g. the "pause/hiatus" in warming This animation shows well that it's just an artifact of a hand picked timeframe [https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leugnung_der_menschengemacht...](https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leugnung_der_menschengemachten_globalen_Erwärmung#/media/Datei%3ATemperaturanstieg- vergleich-zwischen-ausschnitt-und-gesamtverlauf.gif)

More info here [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial)

<comment><USER66> Here's a quote from the article he cited:

> Atmospheric scientist John Christy developed a global temperature record of > the lower atmosphere using highly accurate satellite soundings. NASA honored > him for this achievement, and he was an author for a previous edition of the > U.N. report. He told a House Science Committee hearing in March 2017 that > the U.N. climate models have failed badly.

> Christy compared the average model projections since 1979 to the most > reliable observations — those made by satellites and weather balloons over > the vast tropics. The result? In the upper levels of the lower atmosphere, > the models predicted seven times as much warming as has been observed. > Overprediction also occurred at all other levels. Christy recently concluded > that, on average, the projected heating by the models is three times what > has been observed.

You characterize that as "classical climate change denial" and "just an artifact of a hand picked timeframe." Then you link to a Wikipedia article about "Climate change denial," as if he just needs to read it to understand what an ignorant denialist he is, and then he'll agree with you.

So, according to you, is John Christy in denial?</comment></comment></comment>


Alarm at Google Yahoo partnering - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/technology/7393486.stm

<comment><USER2> The timing of the coalition in opposition is really suspect to me. Am I conspiracy theorist if I think it sound like a front for MS backed pressure groups to scupper the deal?</comment>