For a while I had a T-shirt from The Onion which read Holy Sh*t! Man Walks on F*cking Moon. It made a lot of us laugh (and it was almost certainly stolen by a man called Pete Lucas. Pete, if you’re out there, please tell me this isn’t so).

Related, but different, is what Mitchell Anderson, blogging a paper by Werner Kurz et al in Nature, calls the holy crap factor (Anderson is Canadian, hence the politeness).

Mistah Kurz, he bring bad news: in this case that warming in western Canada, likely to be anthropogenic, has unleashed a chain of events that will release close to one billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere by 2020. The ‘holy crap’ part is that this may be just one several unplanned accelerations of climate change by human agency.

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