Researchers in Sweden examined the possible steps that people can take to help tackle the climate crisis. Although a lot of resulting news coverage focused on the most effective action (having one fewer kid), the real takeaway is that individual actions still matter. A lot.

IF YOU’RE a typical westerner, you ate nearly 100 kilograms of meat last year. This was almost certainly the costliest part of your diet, especially in environmental terms. The clamour for people to eat less meat to save the planet is growing ever louder.

Barring some incredible new carbon capture technology, the window for limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius appears to have closed.

For centuries, archivists have noted a curious relationship between “quantity” and “quality” of items in their collections. That is, typically a storage medium’s durability is inversely proportional to the amount of information it can hold. For instance, Sumerian scribes could perhaps only fit a dozen lines of cuneiform onto a typical clay slab, but some of their inscriptions can still be read on surviving tablets six millennia later. Even something as fragile as printed words on paper can endure for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years if properly preserved.

Modern electronic storage media like CDs, DVDs, and computer hard drives can store vastly greater amounts of information, but typically don’t last more than decades at best. Environmental disturbances like fluctuating electromagnetic fields or changing temperature and humidity can corrupt and destroy digitally stored data very quickly. Furthermore, the fast pace of technological progress quickly renders electronic media formats