Slashdot Mirror

We don't worry about India having the bomb and last time I checked they were 'brown people' too.

We did. There were sanctions and everything. It was a lot like the current situation with Iran:

President Clinton immediately reacted to the explosions with shock and criticized India's nuclear testing. The American President argued that India’s actions violated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty endorsed by 149 nations and the 1970 non-proliferation treaty signed by 185 nations. Despite the fact that neither India nor Pakistan has signed the treaties, the President, citing the 1994 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act, immediately called for economic sanctions against India including cutting off $40 million in economic and military aid, and all American bank loans. The President also asked the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to cancel all new loans which could cost India around $14.5 billion worth of public projects, including a major modernization of India's often failing electrical system. Moreover, Japan and other industrial nations soon followed the U.S. example and froze on-going projects in India worth over a billion dollars in aid. http://asiasociety.org/countries/conflicts/india-pakistan-relations-50-year-history

And...

guessing wrong... could be a civilization extinction event

How on earth would Iran gaining a nuclear weapon be an extinction level event for our species?
"no country in history has ever committed suicide in order to destroy another. And Israel, with 200 nuclear weapons and air, sea and land launchers, could easily destroy Iran if it was attacked." - the Huffington Post
"Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel? It would not have gone 200 metres into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed." - Jacques Chirac

Then there's the one being set up to teach creationism...

I have repeatedly said I want no tax dollars paying for religious education and I would exclude any such funding. Hell above this post I questioned someone else about the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case and whether they thought locals should decide what's taught.

After cherry picking the most able and easy to teach kids, these schools will no doubt do better in standardised exams, and everyone will proclaim how great school choice is.

Like nobody will offer to teach under achievers. If there money to be made businesses will do it. As will non-profits. Hell make schools more accountable, which what school choice is all about, and public school will improve. Businesses are bad and governments are good only to socialists. Well how many people have businesses killed versus those killed by governments? Do the math and governments win hands down.

Interestingly, the best school system in the world is in Finland, which doesn't have choice, just good quality, well-funded state schools,

According to you? Then why are so many students from other nations are trying to get into US schools? And how many are trying to get into Finish schools? And if they are so good why can't US schools, public and private, duplicate what the Finish do? Of course don't let reality intrude into your mind.

Now, I'll answer a couple of my own questions. According to Newsweek Finland does have the best education, but they do not offer any evidence. And the Asia Society disagrees saying Shanghai has the best. Though not the best according to McKinsey & Company Long Beach Unified School District, in the US, is in the top 20 worldwide. The Newsweek article also says that what Finland does is being duplicated in the US, "In the United States, KIPP charter schools enroll students from the poorest families and ensure that almost every one of them graduates high school—80 percent make it to college."

Oops, don't let reality intrude.

Falcon

Note the "all caps speak" as well as generous use of bold all caps and exclamation marks.
Sadly, sometimes you must use such a crude language and sacrifice lower caps in order to explain something to someone on the other side of the intellectual barrier.
Simplifications and over-explanations such as "it is colder on the mountain the higher up you go" are also crucial when trying to translate something to Moron.
You see... Morons don't have the mental capacity to understand such concept when they are bound to single word.
So you must cast you net very wide and stretch the concept such as "Mount Everest==cold" over many words.
And you can't just "think in Moron" as that would get you nowhere, and would kind of defeat the purpose of your argument.

Also, note the difference from the tone of my second post in this particular thread which was written in Idiot.
Very similar BUT with Idiot you MUST think in that particular language.
Otherwise it all just gets lost in translation.

That means the ice DOES naturally melt at certain times of the year, so the time of year that the new photo was taken IS relevant, and conspicuously absent from the article.

Indeed, it IS relevant.
Particularly since Mallory's Reconnaissance Expedition was there from July to September 1921, the part of the year we here on the Northern half of the planet Earth like to refer to as "summer" - which is characteristically related to longer and hotter days.
While on the other hand David Breashears took those shots in April of 2010.
Part of the year known as "spring", characteristically related to still relatively lower temperatures (compared to that "summer" thing) and high chances of rainfall. Which translates into snowfall high up in the mountains, naturally.

Oh and, glaciers don't disappear over the summer.
We are talking permanent ice caps here consisting of HUGE chunks of ice in a very cold environment.
The fact that they are powering all those rivers mentioned in TFA should be telling you something.

The photos in the linked article are small and hard to interpret. Better photos with commentary available at: http://asiasociety.org/OnThinnerIce Also check out the "Then and Now link". It shows several other glaciers in the region and shows measurements of the 300-400 feet (122 meters) loss of thickness of ice in several glaciers.

Video of original lecture.

You start your post by saying that nobody disputes the climate change (to the warmer), yet still it seems to be hard to believe that due to increasing global temperature glaciers would start melting. Why is that? This article describes clearly that glaciers are retreating and fresh water supply for hundreds of millions of people is at risk.

What comes to your questions about traffic conditions, we are not talking about a some ski resort here! These glaciers and mountains are far away from any even moderately populated areas.

From the article: "The result is a then-and-now series of photographs from Tibet, Nepal and near K2 in Pakistan - all of which show glaciers in retreat."

That means very insignificant variations in pollution, traffic, construction, etc. Dynamite is useful to clear the surface snow but not whole mountains of ice. Glaciers by definition are formed over years and diminish over years, seasonal variations on snow cover will be there but glaciers are not changing much between seasons. Focus on glaciers is quite obvious, they are the "canary in a coal mine" because they quite accurately reflect long term trends of the climate change. This image compilation is hardly FUD, it gives normal person a view to very remote glacier images. I don't think the article should reference the IPCC study at all and the focus should be purely on the comparing the images and drawing the conclusions from these images.

Here are comparison images with greater accuracy and explanation: http://sites.asiasociety.org/riversofice/comparative-photography

Dude, get off your high horse for a moment and check out the photographic exhibition website where they say that we are talking about 100m (actually they say "320 vertical feet") of ice that's been lost in Rongbuk glacier. That's a lot of ice, and is far more than anything attributable to seasonality.

http://sites.asiasociety.org/riversofice/comparative-photography

You don't trust Japan? The USA has one meeeellion lawyers. Japan has under 17,000. You work it out.