“Witnesses”? 😂 I have some questions for them.

There’s actually more evidence the asteroid wasn’t the major dinosaur killer…the KT boundary layer, created by the asteroid dust and charcoal from global fires is NOT full of dinosaur bones. If one event killed 75% of species and 95% of all biomass, that geological layer would be absolutely full of fossils, but it’s not…it’s nearly empty, but the layers preceding it show a steady decline in animal populations long before the final death blow.

Yellowstone, the American super volcano, is overdue for a similarly disastrous eruption.
Our grasp of volcanology is far too tenuous to claim we would have a million years of warning before a similar major eruption. We might get no warning at all. Surprise eruptions aren’t abnormal even with all our monitoring…and the strength of eruptions is almost always a surprise.

The acidification of the ocean that preceded the other climate-caused extinction events is occurring today. Once diatoms and plankton can no longer create their exoskeletons the ocean food web dissolves, then the land food web dissolves, then clouds of hydrogen gas start erupting from the deep ocean when bacteria consume the billions of tons of dead ocean life, further poisoning the oceans and atmosphere. Yes, that will likely take hundreds or even thousands of years to play out, but the food webs are already falling apart from other pressures before the plankton even fails. Interesting unprecedented times are ahead.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by BSR.

From YT:

00:00 Zoë Bell
00:15 Lucy Lawless
00:20 Tara Macken
00:23 Drew Barrymore
00:27 Juliette Lewis
00:32 Tamiko Brownlee
00:38 Rosario Dawson
00:45 Amy Johnston
00:49 Cameron Diaz
00:55 Kim Murphy
00:58 Daniela Ruah
1:03 Michaela McAllister
1:09 Kaitlin Oslon
1:18 Lauren Mary Kim
1:25 Florence Pugh
1:38 Zoë Bell
1:47 Julia Butters
1:54 Angela Meryl
2:00 Sarah Irwin
2:08 Daryl Hannah
2:13 Sophia Di Martino
2:19 Tracie Thoms
2:32 Shauna Duggins
2:41 Zoe Saldana
2:46 Ming Qiu
2:50 Renée Goldsberry
2:53 Rosie Perez
3:01 Lilly Aspell
3:04 Thandie Newton
3:08 Mel Stubs
3:14 Jessie Graff
3:17 Zoë Bell
3:24 Monique Ganderton
3:32 Halle Berry
3:43 Heidi Moneymaker
3:51 Scarlett Johansson
4:00 Dayna Grant
4:04 Margot Robbie
4:12 Renae Moneymaker
4:18 Zoë Bell
4:25 KT Tunstall

@newtboy,
" Sane policy makers DO assume the absolute worst modeled outcome"

Here we disagree. When you have a high degree of unknowns in your modelling, you don't always just go off the worst case. Let me argue from the extreme to demonstrate that in principle.

If we are looking to mitigate the risk of an extinction level asteroid strike, we don't solely look at the worst case. The worst case is at a minimum assuming another KT extinction level asteroid out there on it's way to us. Space is big enough that it's still possible one is out there undetected on it's way here in our lifetimes. The probability of that may be low, but it's still a worst case not impossible outcome.

With that known worst case, should we bankrupt the global economy building either a defensive capability to detect and destroy/redirect it, or the capability to abandon the planet in our lifetimes because of this worst case risk?

The answer to me is of course not, you must ALSO take into account other variables like the probability of it happening, the unknowns in the equation that prevent us picturing the problem with full accuracy, and other factors.

Diatoms, and other phytoplankton, are incredibly sensitive to ocean PH and CO2 levels. This can be another feedback loop already in action.
As fewer diatoms photosynthesize, more CO2 goes unused, raising the concentration, lowering the numbers and health of phytoplankton, allowing more CO2 to go unused, raising the concentration, .....
Every molecule of CO2 added to ocean systems removes one molecule of carbonate, which is necessary for the uptake of iron among other processes. By 2100, surface carbonate is expected to decrease by up to 50%. That may well be below the levels diatoms can tolerate.

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/key-biological-mechanism-disrupted-ocean-acidification

If phytoplankton goes, so does the food web. They are the base. If the ocean food web collapses, eventually the bacteria that eat dead sea life will create huge clouds of hydrogen sulfide that cover the land, poisoning any still living organisms there. This has happened before, but on a much longer timescale, with near life ending results for earth.

Hydrogen Sulfide, Not Carbon Dioxide, May Have Caused Largest Mass Extinction. ... "During the end-Permian extinction 95 percent of all species (and >98% of all biomass) on Earth became extinct, compared to only 75 percent during the KT when the dinosaurs disappeared,"

A better title might be "diatoms, the tiny glass shards that support all life on earth, are struggling".

The pilot does straighten it up a little before touching down. This aircraft type has a 40 kt maximum crosswind limit, so this is about as extreme as it gets.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

Looks like a sun crashing to earth.

This one: 43 KT
Tsar Bomba (largest ever detonated): 57,000 KT

43 kilotons. the largest of the teapot tests. Ahh it was a series at the nevada test site during the 50s. LIttle boy being 13 kt and fat man being only 21 kt.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

From a reddit (fwtw) on the topic :

"I'm very curious as to how you got this video, i was under the impression it never left the airfield.
This happened in April 2014, this past year. The weather is absolute crap here, especially for soaring. Well... we get good weather sometimes. Anyway, it's not uncommon for those TG-16A's to go up with a 25 knot gust... But i digress.
The cadets were pushing in because winds were out of limits and the weather was getting worse... and BAM! Microburst.
This microburst hit right next to the airfield. The tower spotted it early, gave a verbal warning "look out..." and cadets are trained to do the following: grab a wing (glider) and turn broadside into the wind and put the spoilers out. The tows were not so easy... nor lucky. Their takeoff speed is about 50 knots, and none of them were powered up when they lifted off the ground, to give you an idea of how bad the wind was. Their only maneuver is to face into the wind and pray they dont actually take off. The tows that took off left for COS airport... it took another 30 minutes of holding gliders before the tower let the cadets start moving the gliders.
As for taking off... 55 kt gusts are the highest the Academy has had in a long time. Considering there were a half-dozen other aircraft within 100 ft of the tows, along with people (i.e. cadets around/in the gliders) if he was moving too far from his position in the queue, the safest action is to get some altitude and try and leave the microburst. Or at the very least put some altitude and distance in between himself and the cadets and aircraft. You saw how slow the tows in the air were moving relative to the ground... those were HARSH winds.
At about 0:20, you can see a cadet hanging onto the wing of a glider on the bottom of a screen. This wind was scary. I don't know if anyone was up at the time, but full tempo ops can be up to 5 tows and 8 gliders... on a standard afternoon training day 3 tows and 4 or 5 gliders is normal. It looks like they were already pushing the gliders to the hangar..."

My understanding is that even though nobody will admit to their actual capabilities, it's fairly widely believed that stealth doesn't work anymore.

While the radar cross-section might be the size of a large bird, which is always a major bullet point in their marketing material, no large bird is flying in a straight line at 5k+ feet and 400 kts and it's easily within the the capabilities of modern processing to sort out all the large bird sized objects and find the one that's behaving in a very un-birdlike way.

Of course, I suppose it's always better in a war to be seen as little as possible, but newer projects like the F-22 and more specifically the F-35 are probably handicapped by being held to meeting the "stealthy" design requirement.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.