https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/02/hannah-r...
If it's not climate change it would just be something else (though -- most of the falling civilizations in my link do fall at least partly to climate change. The sea peoples wrecking the bronze age was very likely due to that and mass migration)
I've resisted that on the grounds of not wanting to make things too bureaucratic, but I can feel myself tipping slightly on the question for a somewhat odd reason: there are too many mistaken/accidental flags, especially on mobile, so we probably need a confirmation screen to allow people to say "oops, cancel". If one adds that, it's probably fine to ask for a reason too.
Re the other questions: flags, above a certain threshold, act as downweights on the story. Above another (higher) threshold, the [flagged] marker appears. Above another (still higher) threshold, the story will also be killed, in which case it will show up as [flagged][dead] and closed to new comments. However, if a thread has already gotten a lot of comments, the software won't kill it. In addition, moderators sometimes put [flagged] on a post—but this is rare for stories; we do it more often on comments that are breaking the site guidelines.
So that makes 3 different ways for a story to end up [flagged] but not [dead]. The one you postulated (a story is [flagged][dead] and then we manually unkill it, so it becomes [flagged] but not [dead]) is technically possible and I can't say it never happens, but it's definitely not standard practice and would be a weird edge case if it did happen.
Have I answered your questions?
p.s. various past explanations can be found at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: I forgot about another case. If a post is [flagged][dead] and then enough users vouch for it, it will stop being [dead] but will still be [flagged].
The reality with global warming is somewhere in the middle. It’s a slow boiling problem. We won’t be all dead but billions of people will need to adapt to new climate patterns.
CO2 spiking from ~280 parts per million to 400+ parts per million is a provable fact measured independently by many labs around the world.
https://blog.csiro.au/co2-data-twitter/
The science of global warming - aka CO2 and H2O capturing photons from the sun in infrared spectrum and heating up is well known physics. Experiments can be done at home.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-...
If an asteroid hit earth like when dinosaurs were around, humans would still make it through - it would be very painful. The world would not end.
Gasoline is not the enemy. Most countries don’t like that they have to import from Russia, Saudi Arabia and the likes. The fact is gasoline is a cheap, semi-abundant, portable, energy dense, relatively safe fuel. We got nothing better atm.
Batteries are a start but to be competitive with gasoline, they need to be cheaper and >10X more energy dense.
The fact is we haven’t cracked high efficiency artificial photosynthesis at scale. Capturing CO2 + solar energy into energy dense hydrocarbons.
Our bottleneck is human ingenuity. We ought to be pouring more resources into cracking what nature has been doing for millions of years.
Re who flags what: the basic pattern seems pretty consistent and I've described it a number of times over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... The short version is that there are some people who flag specific topics but usually those flags alone aren't enough to make the difference.