2023 was world's hottest year on record - and 2024 could be worse | Climate News | Sky News.
2023 was indeed the record-breaking year, but 2024 could be worse, scientists predict that the average temperature for 2024 will be 1.5c higher that 2023. 
Here’s a website that you might want to check out that forcasts weather around the world 
Where did you find that? Sounds wrong.
It is a misstatement. The baseline should be 1.5C higher than pre-industrial levels (rather than the previous year). Here are relevant quotes from the SkyNews article linked by @Averyw123
Copernicus found 2023 was on average 1.48C warmer than levels before industrial times, when humans began burning fossil fuels at scale.
Copernicus said it is “likely” the 12-month period ending in January or February this year will exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Notes: “Copernicus” refers to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Also, the statement is not about the average temperature over the calendar year of 2024, but rather predictions about the 12-month periods ending in January or February 2024.
The threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels has been widely discussed as a target for limiting effects of climate change. Here is an article explaining more about the context of that number.
Always fresh drama in the chess world 
Hmmm, how would you do the equivalent in Go? Try to set up a triple ko as quickly as possible on an otherwise empty board?
Possibly yeah, but it’d only be beneficial in maybe Swiss or possibly McMahon scoring where a draw would be better than a loss, but in other knockout formats they might just make you replay the game anyway
Many Dutch people love ice skating, but opportunities to ice-skate in nature are becoming increasingly rare in recent decades.
After a very rainy start of the winter, temperatures have dropped below 0 (as in “freezing point of fresh water”) here for a couple of days. So a coworker of mine is one of many who took the day off to ice-skate on some canals.
In one school the janitor transformed the playground into a skating rink during the night. A reportage from the Youth News about it:
My mother loved ice skating and even had her own skates. Yet, for lack of local venues, I was never introduced to ice skating and never saw her skate. It remains an unrealized ambition. Always looks like so much fun.
I’m sad to say that this is unimaginable in the UK! I can’t imagine the number of forms, disclaimers, consents, caveats, autorisations, etc etc that might be required to do such a thing! Not to mention the insurance, helmets, knee and elbow guards that would be needed. And the financial contributions for all the above…
Yeah, we basically don’t bother/care about such things here, as long as speeds are low so that any injuries are only minor.
Cycling is also without all those things here (except for sports/racing cyclists, but they go much faster than everyday cyclists like commuters and kids cycling to school).
The traffic safety agency is recommending senior cyclists to wear a helmet when riding an electric bicycle, because those also tend to go faster, leading to a higher incidence of more severe injuries for senior cyclists in particular.
For a while there was a trend here (I guess during the early 2000s) to make playgrounds safer for kids so they couldn’t hurt themselves falling off a climbing frame, a swing or a seesaw. But it seems this trend has reversed again in the last decade. Having minor accidents like that during childhood seems to have some educational value, resulting in fewer (more severe) accidents as an adult.
I guess also because cycle is more segregated? It’s madness to cycle in the UK without a helmet as heads are no match for cars. Even if the cycling is not so fast the car will be going too fast…
Yes, during recent decades, different transport modes (walking, cycling, driving, public transport) have become increasingly segregated, especially focusing on reducing the risk of cars hitting cyclists or pedestrians at speeds over 30 km/h (20 mph), and also on reducing car traffic in the old town of most cities to reduce pollution and improve the quality of life for people living there.
It’s a very gradual process. Basically every street and road is refurbished in a ~20 year cycle anyway, and when they refurbish a street or road, they need to conform to the latest safety standards, which evolve all the time.
So over my lifetime (54 years), the nature of our cycling/pedestrian infrastructure has changed a lot. Now there are (segregated) cycling paths everywhere. But when I was a kid, there were very few.
Wow, it sounds like your country is still more or less free. No one wore helmets on bicycles when I was a kid, and many didn’t even wear them on motorcycles. When I was in high school, a cross-country teammate gave me a ride home every night on his motorcycle—without helmets. Today, I do believe in helmets, but the safety nannies and their government henchmen became drunk with power after their early success.
Armed with studies on playground safety in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they began removing, from playgrounds everywhere, all the equipment that kids loved. Monkey bars, the most dangerous piece of equipment, and seesaws were completely eliminated. Roundabouts (merry-go-rounds) were removed from most sites (I have seen a few strays here and there), and only swings and slides survived mostly unscathed.
Replacing the taboo equipment, the authorities installed idiotic play structures that most kids ignored. In time, it decayed and got replaced by cheaper monstrosities, or removed entirely. A local playground here has just swings and slides left.
Full disclosure, in elementary school I once fell from monkey bars while doing a stunt where I lost my grip and landed flat on my back. I lay there several minutes catching my breath. I was sore afterward, but otherwise fine.
Also here there are more safety regulations nowadays. I remember that in the mid 70s we would play in a ruined/uninhabited house in our village and one day one of us fell through the floor in the attic. He went to the hospital but he survived, though we were not allowed to play there anymore after that incident.
Today there would be a fence around it, or it would even have been torn down long before it became an actual ruin. But in the mid 70s we would just play there and our parents didn’t even know about it. I think playing was more adventurous then (but also more dangerous).
Wait till they think that you can catapult off a swing and land far harder than any stunt on a monkey-bar and then realise that a slide that is not properly constructed or maintained can actually maim or kill a kid going down (I actually almost my fingers going doing a slide when I was a kid - fortunately my hand slipped out from the bear-trap that this thing had become) and then it will be goodbye to those as well 
That sounds like the most healthy and humane approach to me. Don’t let the helicopter parents hear you though…
No phones and no fuss. We used to play football in the streets (those with not too much traffic - not for safety reasons, but because too many cars would interrupt the game too much 
), now the same people that grew up like that have kids on their own and won’t even let them to play out in the garden or, literally, touch grass (and we live in the countryside for God’s sake). 
Sometimes I wish I was a sociologist … some societies are just walking cases of a free PhD study ready to be written just by observing their odd behaviour.
That’s the opposite of my experience as someone that has grown up mostly in New England (northeast USA) and now raising young children that we frequently take to various local playgrounds. I see these things quite often, in most playgrounds that we visit.
Well, not all playgrounds have them, but when they are missing, they don’t really stand out or are missed, as they mainly just seem old fashioned and even more safe and less exciting than the other sorts of equipment that I see everywhere, like various large climbing and play structures that present many more precarious and much higher and more dangerous fall opportunities.
I think that there are plenty of recent studies about child development that support the idea that opportunities to explore, even with some substantial degree of risk, is important for children. I believe this is reflected in the design of playgrounds that I very commonly see.
Maybe this is due to other reasons, or possibly a regional variation? To me, it seems more like a sign local economic depression (lack of funds for modern equipment to replace older stuff that has broken down) than motivated by an overly safe mindset.
In the course of my professional career, I had some involvement with the playground safety movement, so I know about it first-hand. Perhaps New England didn’t succumb to the degree that other places did, or perhaps you all have recovered since those days. I’m glad to hear it.
Yes, we used to catapult out of swings—what a rush! The playground safety people set standards for distances from surrounding walls, fences, and other obstacles, and required wood chips or sawdust for the fall surface.
I can hardly imagine growing up in the protective bubble of modern suburban kids. I don’t recall going into an abandoned house as a kid, but we climbed trees, had rock fights, climbed over freight trains, walked a trestle, and clung to the girders as a train passed over (the big dare of our cohort). But perhaps the most dangerous thing we ever did was to explore a large sewer tunnel; it got pretty scary after rounding a bend and going into complete darkness (flashlights notwithstanding), so we fortunately didn’t go too far. I never heard of a kid, back then, who was seriously hurt, let alone killed, though I have no doubt it happened now and then.
I don’t mean to denigrate the real danger involved in these things—all could produce tragedy—but growing up without some edgy experiences seems a pale existence to me.
Wow, it just still seems so bizarre. I’m flabbergasted that you describe monkey bars as “the most dangerous piece of equipment”. While, of course there are risks on anything that kids could climb on, monkey bars seem to me as one of the relatively safest pieces of equipment, even to the point of being boring. It seems like more of an exercise challenge rather than requiring much daring. Are we even talking about the same thing? Like this, right? (Or similar things made of all metal)
I’ve lived in New England for a few decades and have frequently seen much more exciting and dangerous playground equipment in both my youth and currently for my children. I wouldn’t even think of listing monkey bars as an example, if I had to come up with some of the most dangerous things I’ve seen.
From my youth, maybe the most dangerous thing was just our elementary school playground structure, which was a large three-story building that had two fireman poles that went all the way the top-most level to down into basement of the ground. If someone let go, it would be a very high fall onto a ground that was just covered with loose gravel. Also, when coming down the pole from the top, one has to watch for people getting on the pole from the lower levels, so as to not bump them in the head with your feet and cause them to accidentally fall.
As an example from recent years, here’s a climbing structure that my son is climbing on:
Levels of risk like this have been quite common across New England playgrounds these days. I’d say it’s maybe somewhat safer than what I saw in my youth, especially since the ground is some sort of rubbery thing made from recycled tires, but it doesn’t seem overly safe to me. This is just one example that I quickly pulled up from my photos. There are plenty of similar or riskier playground designs.