Ugh. I read that as “before your COVID overlords”… 
…wait a minute… coincidence? 
Grey jays (my favourite corvid) rely on food stores to overwinter, and when those thaw too early, before other sources become available, they have to move out. 
It’s a shame. These are bright, delightful, if somewhat rascally birds. We once had a family of them visit our back country Algonquin campsite early every morning for a week.
In less a funny vein:
There are plenty of examples of why trying to base your development on the most extreme circumstances (in this case, a really wet era in a natural desert) are a bad idea, but this might top them all.
Drought discovery in Spain:
It has always been an agricultural subsidy program; I can’t recall a time when everything from the net energy balance of corn ethanol to the environmental credentials weren’t in question. It has never been an “order of magnitude slam dunk” on any of the main measures.
In terms of total cost accounting, it is an energy-net-negative. It takes more energy to make ethanol than the ethanol itself delivers.
In the early days, one argument in the States was that ethanol production was going to make the U.S. more energy-independent.
U.S. governmental supports for specific kinds of [corporate, monoculture, industrial] farming became a Big Ag staple, ossifying quickly into a major profit center itself, straying ever-farther from its initial concept of supporting small independent struggling farmers:
Well shit:
The impact of the sand industry… 
This is what happened to the largest dune in what is now a national park (Indiana Dunes National Park):
Ball, the company that makes glass jars for canning, etc., literally took all the sand away. Didn’t pay for it, and made a lot of money from it.
If only there were better controls to discourage stealing raw materials…like the measures taken to combat brick theft in St. Louis. Multiple issues like this are due to lack of oversight and the political will to put some in place. Globalization makes the problem even more difficult to resolve, because attempts to create standards/labels for ethical organizations (making it easier for purchasing agents and consumers to spend accordingly) don’t always work. In the meantime, the harmful practices get worse:
I don’t know how accurate the data is, but for an “impending doom” take on climate change, this site doesn’t hold back.
I don’t know how accurate the data is
“Polynomial extrapolation” is not good practice without a really good physical justification, not just a data fit. Usually when you extrapolate like that you back it up with some physics to explain why the system should work like that, and you can do that even in just general terms.
For example, a hail stone increases mass with the cube of its diameter, but the surface area with the square of the diameter. They can’t grow enormous because the updraft speed has to grow much faster to lift a larger hailstone because the surface area the wind pushes on grows more slowly than the mass that has to be lifted. We can see how it works even without measurements, just from what we know about how to measure mass, pressure and wind speed.
This site’s data is probably fine, the graphics are pretty, but I’ll draw a question mark on the extrapolation approach unless someone can explain why, even in general physics terms, it should be so.
Thank you for unpacking this for us. Good solid example.
It is true that extrapolation is more art than science.
My confidence rate in good, robust models is tempered with the terrifying knowledge that our home planet is a complex whole system that is still not fully understood.
Data sets, no matter how vast and complete, are only as meaningful as the models (which must answer to physics) they get plugged into.
Oh how I wish more humans would grok immutable scientific laws. It is our species’ denial of those laws that will be our undoing.
At this point, it will be the entire planet’s undoing as well.
They didn’t have passengers- but they very likely had cargo. For what that’s worth.
