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No, it isn't. It is more populous, but it is just slightly smaller than the USA, which itself trails Canada and Russia.

Getting a net CO2 cut would basically require that China stop industrialising. If the Chinese government tried that, they'd be overthrown in a bloody revolution

https://photos.mongabay.com/09...

tl;dr - global CO2 emissions will continue to rise until China has a way to generate energy which is cheaper than coal and doesn't emit CO2.

Until then it doesn't matter what the US, UK and EU do. All of those having falling CO2 emissions, but there's no way they can fall fast enough to compensate for the enormous CO2 increases from China.

The Royal Society in the UK did a report on geoengineering and concluded sulphate aerosols for example could be used to effect "a reduction of solar input by about 2%" to "balance the effect on global mean temperature of a doubling of CO2" for "total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars". Check out the Royal Society's report.

https://royalsociety.org/topic...

Delivering between 1 and 5 MtS/yr to the stratosphere is feasible. The mass involved is less than a tenth of the current annual payload of the global air transportation, and commercial transport aircraft already reach the lower stratosphere. Methods of delivering the required mass to the stratosphere depend on the required delivery altitude, assuming that the highest required altitude would be that needed to access the lower tropical stratosphere, about 20 km, then the most cost-effective delivery method would probably be a custom built fl eet of aircraft, although rockets, aircraft/rocket combinations, artillery and balloons have all been suggested. Very rough cost estimates based on existing aircraft and artillery technology suggest that costs would be of the order of 3 to 30 $/kg putting the total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars (US National Academy of Science 1992; Keith 2000; Blackstock et al. 2009). The environmental impacts of the delivery system itself would of course also need to be carefully considered.

I reckon if global warming turns out to be bad, something like this will be done because it's easier to get the Chinese to chip in for it than it is to get them to cripple their economy with steep CO2 emissions cuts. And if the Chinese won't cut CO2 emissions, global CO2 emissions won't come down

https://photos.mongabay.com/09...

Another nice thing about this sort of scheme is that you don't need to be able to accurately predict long term climate. You simply need to look at the trend over the last few years and increase or decrease your sulphate pumping rate.

It's like having a human controlled thermostat for that planet.

I've gone to a small physical therapy clinic and have ran into another patient that started physical therapy on the exact same day that I started with my exact full name and exact same date of birth. That was at just one (independent) clinic in one city.

The census bureau ranks the 100,000 most common surnames here, the 12,000 most common male first names here... Why not search the list and see just how common your first and last names are?

Same birthday (mm/dd) or birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy)? Define "exact full name", as in "spelled identically"?

Your claim is you met someone with the same first and last name (ignoring middle name, which is part of your legal name on your birth certificate and voter record, which is what we are talking about in the case of the Indiana law), and who not only shared your birthday (mm/dd), but was also born in the year as you? I find that doubtful - possible, yes, but very unlikely when birth year is considered.

The program Indiana is running considers birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy), first, last, and middle name. Ignoring name yields only about 11,000 matches nation-wide (11,000 births each day in America), weeding out by gender cuts that number in about half, THEN we can start to consider how many of those 5,000 or so young men share not only the same first but middle and last name. If we include the city of birth, the likelihood of a false match drops even further.

The first name Michael is shared by 180,000 Americans, the last name Bolton is shared by 32,000 Americans, but how many Michael Boltons have you met - ignoring birthday/birthdate?

I've gone to a small physical therapy clinic and have ran into another patient that started physical therapy on the exact same day that I started with my exact full name and exact same date of birth. That was at just one (independent) clinic in one city.

The census bureau ranks the 100,000 most common surnames here, the 12,000 most common male first names here... Why not search the list and see just how common your first and last names are?

Same birthday (mm/dd) or birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy)? Define "exact full name", as in "spelled identically"?

Your claim is you met someone with the same first and last name (ignoring middle name, which is part of your legal name on your birth certificate and voter record, which is what we are talking about in the case of the Indiana law), and who not only shared your birthday (mm/dd), but was also born in the year as you? I find that doubtful - possible, yes, but very unlikely when birth year is considered.

The program Indiana is running considers birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy), first, last, and middle name. Ignoring name yields only about 11,000 matches nation-wide (11,000 births each day in America), weeding out by gender cuts that number in about half, THEN we can start to consider how many of those 5,000 or so young men share not only the same first but middle and last name. If we include the city of birth, the likelihood of a false match drops even further.

The first name Michael is shared by 180,000 Americans, the last name Bolton is shared by 32,000 Americans, but how many Michael Boltons have you met - ignoring birthday/birthdate?

There are hundreds of people with my exact full name in the state of California. I do not know how many share a date of birth with me, but I'd be surprised if the answer was 0.

I wouldn't be surprised - sharing a birthday (Like October 31st) is trivial, sharing a birth date (October 31st, 1972) is exceptionally rare. The odds of you ever meeting someone with exactly your same birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) - ignoring their name - is extremely unusual; factor in that their name has to match also and it will likely never happen.

In the United States, there are about 10,829 births per day - and out of those 10,829 births the odds of two mothers, both named "Smith", with both deliver male children and both will name their children "John" (neither choosing "Jon" or "Johnathan") seems pretty small to me - not zero, but pretty small.

There are lots of people named "Smith" - tons of them. There are a large number of people named "John Smith" - lots of them. There are likely a fair number of people named "John Smith" with birthdays of October 31st. But do you really think there are that many people named "John Smith" that celebrate their birthdays on October 31st and are EXACTLY the same age (in other words they share a birth DATE, not just a birth DAY)?

The surname smith accounts for about 1% of the population, the first name James accounts for about 3.318% of the population, so that gives us a one out of 100 chance that a child will be have a surname of "Smith", and a 1 out of thirty chance that that child with the smith surname will have a first name of "James". I defer to statisticians to do the math.

Ah but I stated in the sentence before that that I have already encountered someone with my exact same full name and date of birth. It was not in the state of California, however. We both started physical therapy for two different injuries on the exact same day and they had to use our injury to identify which chart went with which patient, since it was our first day.

And I had to deal with DHS redress because there is someone with an Interpol warrant with my exact full name and a date of birth within just a few days of me. I was automatically flagged every time I went through immigration. So I have personal experience with the fact that such coincidences DO happen.

There are hundreds of people with my exact full name in the state of California. I do not know how many share a date of birth with me, but I'd be surprised if the answer was 0.

I wouldn't be surprised - sharing a birthday (Like October 31st) is trivial, sharing a birth date (October 31st, 1972) is exceptionally rare. The odds of you ever meeting someone with exactly your same birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) - ignoring their name - is extremely unusual; factor in that their name has to match also and it will likely never happen.

In the United States, there are about 10,829 births per day - and out of those 10,829 births the odds of two mothers, both named "Smith", with both deliver male children and both will name their children "John" (neither choosing "Jon" or "Johnathan") seems pretty small to me - not zero, but pretty small.

There are lots of people named "Smith" - tons of them. There are a large number of people named "John Smith" - lots of them. There are likely a fair number of people named "John Smith" with birthdays of October 31st. But do you really think there are that many people named "John Smith" that celebrate their birthdays on October 31st and are EXACTLY the same age (in other words they share a birth DATE, not just a birth DAY)?

The surname smith accounts for about 1% of the population, the first name James accounts for about 3.318% of the population, so that gives us a one out of 100 chance that a child will be have a surname of "Smith", and a 1 out of thirty chance that that child with the smith surname will have a first name of "James". I defer to statisticians to do the math.

Ah but I stated in the sentence before that that I have already encountered someone with my exact same full name and date of birth. It was not in the state of California, however. We both started physical therapy for two different injuries on the exact same day and they had to use our injury to identify which chart went with which patient, since it was our first day.

And I had to deal with DHS redress because there is someone with an Interpol warrant with my exact full name and a date of birth within just a few days of me. I was automatically flagged every time I went through immigration. So I have personal experience with the fact that such coincidences DO happen.

Every day in America there are about 11,000 births - so out of 320 Million people, only 11,000 or so share your birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy), if we factor in an expected lifespan of say 70 years, that means there are about 770,000 people that share your birthday (mm/dd).

Out of those 11,000 people that share your birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy), how many share your full, legal name?

The most popular surname "Smith" accounts for about 1% of the population.

The first name "James" accounts for about 3.318% of the population.

I could find no resource on middle names.

So what are the odds that of the 11,000 births that occur each day result in more than one child with a first name of "James", a surname of "Smith" AND share the same middle name? Twenty seven? The database analyst is on shaky mathematical grounds when he says that there might be as many as 27 name/birthdate matches for a common name - I think he confuses the more common birthday (mm/dd) with the birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy) the Indiana law specifies.

Every day in America there are about 11,000 births - so out of 320 Million people, only 11,000 or so share your birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy), if we factor in an expected lifespan of say 70 years, that means there are about 770,000 people that share your birthday (mm/dd).

Out of those 11,000 people that share your birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy), how many share your full, legal name?

The most popular surname "Smith" accounts for about 1% of the population.

The first name "James" accounts for about 3.318% of the population.

I could find no resource on middle names.

So what are the odds that of the 11,000 births that occur each day result in more than one child with a first name of "James", a surname of "Smith" AND share the same middle name? Twenty seven? The database analyst is on shaky mathematical grounds when he says that there might be as many as 27 name/birthdate matches for a common name - I think he confuses the more common birthday (mm/dd) with the birthdate (mm/dd/yyyy) the Indiana law specifies.

There are hundreds of people with my exact full name in the state of California. I do not know how many share a date of birth with me, but I'd be surprised if the answer was 0.

I wouldn't be surprised - sharing a birthday (Like October 31st) is trivial, sharing a birth date (October 31st, 1972) is exceptionally rare. The odds of you ever meeting someone with exactly your same birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) - ignoring their name - is extremely unusual; factor in that their name has to match also and it will likely never happen.

In the United States, there are about 10,829 births per day - and out of those 10,829 births the odds of two mothers, both named "Smith", with both deliver male children and both will name their children "John" (neither choosing "Jon" or "Johnathan") seems pretty small to me - not zero, but pretty small.

There are lots of people named "Smith" - tons of them.
There are a large number of people named "John Smith" - lots of them.
There are likely a fair number of people named "John Smith" with birthdays of October 31st.
But do you really think there are that many people named "John Smith" that celebrate their birthdays on October 31st and are EXACTLY the same age (in other words they share a birth DATE, not just a birth DAY)?

The surname smith accounts for about 1% of the population, the first name James accounts for about 3.318% of the population, so that gives us a one out of 100 chance that a child will be have a surname of "Smith", and a 1 out of thirty chance that that child with the smith surname will have a first name of "James". I defer to statisticians to do the math.

There are hundreds of people with my exact full name in the state of California. I do not know how many share a date of birth with me, but I'd be surprised if the answer was 0.

I wouldn't be surprised - sharing a birthday (Like October 31st) is trivial, sharing a birth date (October 31st, 1972) is exceptionally rare. The odds of you ever meeting someone with exactly your same birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) - ignoring their name - is extremely unusual; factor in that their name has to match also and it will likely never happen.

In the United States, there are about 10,829 births per day - and out of those 10,829 births the odds of two mothers, both named "Smith", with both deliver male children and both will name their children "John" (neither choosing "Jon" or "Johnathan") seems pretty small to me - not zero, but pretty small.

There are lots of people named "Smith" - tons of them.
There are a large number of people named "John Smith" - lots of them.
There are likely a fair number of people named "John Smith" with birthdays of October 31st.
But do you really think there are that many people named "John Smith" that celebrate their birthdays on October 31st and are EXACTLY the same age (in other words they share a birth DATE, not just a birth DAY)?

The surname smith accounts for about 1% of the population, the first name James accounts for about 3.318% of the population, so that gives us a one out of 100 chance that a child will be have a surname of "Smith", and a 1 out of thirty chance that that child with the smith surname will have a first name of "James". I defer to statisticians to do the math.

There are first names and family names that are disproportionately common among African-Americans.

http://names.mongabay.com/data... shows over 50% of those with a surname of Jackson self-identify as "Black" (data is from the 2000 US census). Over 40% of Americans with the surname Williams, Harris, Robinson, and Coleman self-identify as "Black."

Washington is the "big winner" with over 80% of Americans with that last name self-identifying as "Black."

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/top... shows some of the "whitest" and "blackest" names.

At 163 a year, "occupant of special agricultural vehicle" results in more deaths than terrorism.

There it is, proof that all farmers need a cavity search every morning!

The essence of the problem is that when a government and media incite fear and paranoia in an undereducated society, and when the true prevalence of threats is already very low, all this does is magnify (in dramatic fashion) the incidence of false positives. And the government knows this, and exploits this, because they are able to leverage that fear to accumulate ever more draconian powers, until the government becomes a police state.

Exactly this. How many people have been victims of terrorist attacks in the US in the past 10 years? A quick check shows that there were 57 fatalities due to terrorism in the US from 2005 - 2014. (Source) Fifty seven in ten years. Even if we go from 1995 to 2014 (including the 9-11 attacks), there were 3,264. Since that's over 20 years, that means there's an average of about 163 fatalities in the US every year due to terrorism. And that's including 9-11 which was clearly an outlier.

At 163 a year, "occupant of special agricultural vehicle" results in more deaths than terrorism.

What's interesting is that we don't even know all the land mammals yet. I mean, I can understand not cataloging every virus, bacterium, insect, plant, and ocean animal, but the fact that there are so many undocumented land mammals and amphibians kind of blows my mind. There's so much left to discover in this world.

Even the wikipedia article and then the article on the documentary by James Cameron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , especially the second of the two, shows that there is more criticism than agreement on the conclusion given of the Talpiot Tomb.

It states on the bone container that it contains Jesus son of Joseph and then there is a container with a Mary. As shown in the article, Jesus was the 6th most common name at the time, Joseph was the 2nd, and Mary was the most common for females. There was a Judah(4th most common name) son of Jesus and someone else if I remember.

Currently, http://names.mongabay.com/male... , that would be like finding a tomb with a David son of John, Michael son of David and a Mary and then claiming it was a specific person. They only DNA tested and found that the Mary and Jesus weren't related *maternally*. Therefore the assumption is made that it must be the wife. Ever heard of paternal cousins? I have quite a few. They didn't test the DNA of the others and asked why not indicated that they weren't scientists/archealogist but journalists. I.e. if their story doesn't fit they have issues. An academic paper was never submitted to an archealogical journal for review. The media doesn't just do that with religion but with many subjects.

The article for the movie, which contains the more extraordinary claims being made, contains great critiques.

This all reminds me of how dissapointed I am in general with documentary quality as it has degraded over the last 20-30 years. The journalist were more honest scientifically it seems then and gave good explanations of things. Now, it seems like we are fed pop candy science with flashy pictures.

That's to be expected. The media generally glosses over details and gets them wrong oftentimes just to have a good story. Journalists write about fields they know nothing about oftentimes. They oftentimes have a set desired story and then find the off field people in the field who agree with their desired results.
A good example of this is the previously-mentioned Talpiot Tomb with its given wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and then about the movie made from it by James Cameron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , you will find that under the criticisms that essentially the thing is bogus. It states on the bone container that it contains Jesus son of Joseph and then there is a container with a Mary. As shown in the critiques, Jesus was the 6th most common name at the time, Joseph was the 2nd, and Mary was the most common for females. There was a Judah(4th most common name) son of Jesus and someone else if I remember.
Currently, http://names.mongabay.com/male... , that would be like finding a tomb with a David son of John, Michael son of David and a Mary and then claiming it was a specific person. They only DNA tested and found that the Mary and Jesus weren't related *maternally*. Therefore the assumption is made that it must be the wife. Ever heard of paternal cousins? I have quite a few. They didn't test the DNA of the others and asked why not indicated that they weren't scientists/archealogist but journalists. I.e. if there story doesn't fit they have issues. An academic paper was never submitted to an archealogical journal for review. The media doesn't just do that with religion but with many subjects.

No and no. On the usage front large scale agriculture is as big or bigger a threat than lumber/pulp

There are tons of sources you can find that show that your statement is bullshit, for example: http://rainforests.mongabay.co...

Your own citation proves you wrong. Your citation has a chart stating that logging is responsible for 10-15% of deforestation and large scale agriculture is responsible for 15-20%.

Now those were general figures. I was speaking with emphasis about asia where big-ag is even worse than in the americas.

No and no. On the usage front large scale agriculture is as big or bigger a threat than lumber/pulp

There are tons of sources you can find that show that your statement is bullshit, for example: http://rainforests.mongabay.co...

Perhaps if you faced the reality that large scale commercial agriculture in the developing world is destroying rainforests even with California producing you might understand the point that it is not as simple of replacing domestic California suppliers with offshore suppliers of food.

You have provided no evidence whatsoever that ending subsidies for California farmers will lead to an increase in the destruction of rain forest elsewhere. In fact, the world is not experiencing a shortage of farmland, it's experiencing a surplus and farmland will be taken out of production anyway. It might as well be taken out of production in California when subsidies are eliminated.

You mean other than the evidence of the damage that a single crop, palm oil, can make? [...] Really, your choosing to go down a denier-like path? Well that provides some insight into your desire to keep your eyes closed.

I don't deny that climate change and rain forest destruction are happening. What I "deny" is that the US can or should do anything about it.

You're choosing to go down the path of bubbleheaded environmentalist fear mongers. There is no need to get "insight into your desire to keep your eyes closed", you're simply uninformed and stupid.

"Japan wanted the oil in the Philippines"

uh, wut? Japan wanted the Philippines to protect their southern flank and for agricultural purposes....they wanted Indonesia for oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

But you are correct.....Afgahnistan does not have oil, and the U.S. gets very little of its overall oil from Iraq.

http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_b...
http://news.mongabay.com/2007/...

So when CO2 data is collected, is the season accounted for?

Obviously. Here's the recent CO2 data: http://www.mongabay.com/images... Note the squiggly monthly line. Also note it only takes a few years before the seasonal low is higher than the previous seasonal high.

you can google for them as much I'm not an expert but TWRs are one, the LFTR we had during research in the 40s was regularly shut down passively and started back up-- the "off" is a solidified salt plug that melts if the blow loses power that's keeping it cooled/chilled/melted; and Pebble Bed reactors use neutron cross section broadening to slow the reaction the hotter they get. The later ones have expensive waste reprocessing (hey, good for the economy), the LFTR and TWR can eat our existing 70k tons stored in Yucca mountain, and their waste only need be stored for 300 years, not 10,000.

France has been 95% nuclear for 20 years now or so.
Even the AP1000's are just GenII+ designs, not truly modern age because, we won't approve newer, safer reactor designs because Nuclear Is Unsafe. Green and Liberals of all people should be hardcore for nuclear. It requires excessive government regulation, costs a lot to set up (but is worth it), and would let us easily halve if not quarter our carbon emissions from Coal plants. It doesn't matter how much cap/tax we do, it's going to be a drop in the bucket compared to China. Thankfully, at least they're buiding LFTR to look into.

Bullshit.

China is in complete violation of international law and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which China itself signed and had agreed to and ">ratified in 1996.

China has been building structures, hunting and mass poaching endangered species and destroying coral reefs within the maritime exclusive economic zones of The Philippines and Vietnam (200 nautical miles or 370km from the coastline of those countries) while at the same time, forming naval blockades and harassing fishermen from Vietnam and the Philippines in their own waters. Recently a Chinese fishing vessel was caught with the poaching and mass slaughter of over 500 endangered and protected sea turtles within Philippine waters. Pics of the slaughter.

This article is a must-read on the behavior of the 800lb gorilla China and its bullying tactics: China's Pre-Imperial Overstretch and follow-up article: China and the Mosquitoes.

Another must read is the NY Times article A Game of Shark And Minnow about the ragtag crew of Philippine marines stationed on a grounded derelict ship in the area as an outpost. That NY Times article has a very good diagram on the 200NM exclusive economic zones and China's ridiculous "nine-dash line" tongue-shaped delineation which claims the entirety of the area hundreds of miles away from their nearest legal territory, Hainan Island. The basis of China's 9-dash line claims? Fabricated bullshit. Pre-19th century maps show this. Even China's own historical maps contradict their absurd claims. Bullying, intimidation, violation, invasion and annexation of territories of smaller, weaker states. It's that simple. See also: Tibet.

There is inherent bias in that graph. It goes along the lines of this solution to your per capita carbon problem:

Step 1: Increase your population to 1bn people.
Step 2: Kick the majority of them out into the country and don't provide them with power or other energy.
Step 3: Profit.

No ??? involved in this case.

The fact that China's per capita emissions are low are irrelevant when you realise they have 10% higher emissions than the next dirtiest country. Then you look at graphs like this which show that China's emissions are growing at an extra-ordinary rate. Finally take a look at China's environmental policy, if you can find one.

Saying the worlds biggest polluter, fastest growing polluter, and polluter with no clear plan of slowing down pollution is not too bad because they have a large population is absurd.

Wrong bogeyman - It's all good (as in a "progressive worsening of civil and human rights/Censorship") because they are paying their international debt owed, at the expense of civil and human rights. Venezuela is the only petro-state with a debt over 50% of the GDP.

If the Venezuelans kicked out the corrupt, started nationalizing anything owned by foreign companies and/or stopped paying any odious international debts and started putting the inerests of common Venezuelans before their debt obligations, then suddenly civil and human rights and censorship would become an "issue" for the world to "label Maduro a dictator or demanding the OAS' Democratic Charter be activated.". A sad, hypocritical reality, really...

I don't know your reference for saying that "the models are broken". In my understanding the models used e.g. in IPCC reports, are quite good.

It is completely unreasonable to dismiss them just because they are not perfect. The proper approach is to study the discrepancies, reason about their possible causes and estimate the effect of the errors on the question you are seeking to answer with the model.

Look at this

http://www.drroyspencer.com/20...

What I don't get is why they don't chuck out the models that are bad, keep the ones that are good and invent ones that are better. Right now it almost seems like they do the opposite - the ones that predict OMG! Runaway Global Warming! get loads of press time. And the ones that don't predict anything too drastic get largely ignored and the people that made them called evil deniers.

Actually that's what denier really means. If you think the world is warming slowly but it's no great problem like the satellite temperature measurements say you're an evil denier. In fact unless you support massive CO2 cuts now on the basis of the most alarmist model you're a denier. I.e. it's really an argument about policy, not whether you think the world will be 0.5 degree C or 1.0 degree C warmer in a hundred years time.

You can see that when geoengineering is brought up. The Royal Society did a study that showed that Sulphate aerosols for example could be used to effect "a reduction of solar input by about 2%" to "balance the effect on global mean temperature of a doubling of CO2" for "total annual cost at 10s of billion dollars". So we don't need to rely on the precautionary principle to tell us we need to cut our CO2 emissions to zero now just in case. We can go on as we are, monitor temperature and build ourselves a planetary thermostat quickly and cheaply if it becomes necessary. Of course the 'cut CO2 now' lobby hate this.

They also hate it when you point out that CO2 emissions in Europe and the US are trending down. China's CO2 emissions are increasing massively. If you want a global CO2 cut you'd need to get China to stop industrializing. Which they won't do

http://photos.mongabay.com/09/...

Or of course that the actual satellite measurements of temperature are undershooting all the models - you need to use the adjusted temperature measurements from ground stations. And the adjusted temperature measurements only do that because the past has been getting cooler. Those cavemen better watch out, pretty soon it will be below absolute zero when they are.

What this is really about is that you've got people who'd make a load of money if everyone was forced to by CO2 permits. It's pure rent seeking by them. Or people who know deep down we're all sinners for our materialistic lifestyle and want to force everyone into the modern equivalent of sackcloth and ashes to repent.

The other thing missing in your calculations is the cost of risk during bulb replacement. Climbing a ladder to replace a high outdoor lamp comes at an elevated risk of injury or death due to falling from the ladder (1:8689 odds of dying from a ladder fall in a lifetime.) (The average cost of a fall from a ladder in 2004) was over $11,000.) For an incandescent bulb, the cost of that risk is 25 times that of an LED. And that's not counting the labor time, or amortizing the cost of the ladder itself.

Your article doesn't say anything at all mostly. Here are some numbers that are actually useful, but that put the transportation number significantly lower than I did. I stuck with higher numbers from another source to make the impact of cars as high as possible. Going by the world-wide numbers from the link above, the move to electrical cars will have even less impact than I stated.

The IPCC report from 2007 (referred in this article) puts the number at 13% for all forms of transportation, that includes, personal vehicles, professional vehicles, trains, planes, boats etc. Large ships are huge emitters of both CO2 and also bad pollutants (CO2 is not a pollutant as such).

How about the historical average value for CO2?

Question is what period to average over

Over hundreds of millions of years we'd end up with a very high average. In fact the further you go back, the higher the average. There's something wonderfully twisted about the idea of pitching a plan to set an industry friendly high target CO2 level to US right wingers by explaining that we should set it at the average over the last say 100 million years given that a sizeable minority of them would be young Earth creationists who don't actually believe the Earth is 100 million years old.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png

How about the average over 400,000. That looks like it would be about 250ppm, i.e. quite a bit lower than today. On the other hand consider

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html

Do rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations cause increasing global temperatures, or could it be the other way around? This is one of the questions being debated today. Interestingly, CO2 lags an average of about 800 years behind the temperature changes-- confirming that CO2 is not the cause of the temperature increases. One thing is certain-- earth's climate has been warming and cooling on it's own for at least the last 400,000 years, as the data below show. At year 18,000 and counting in our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age, we may be due-- some say overdue-- for return to another icehouse climate!

So either way it seems like we need to get those SUV engines running. Also tell the Brazilians to fell more rainforest to stop them sucking the valuable CO2 out of the biosphere and causing an economically disastrous ice age.

Luckily the Chinese are doing a heroic job emitting CO2.

http://photos.mongabay.com/09/forecast_co2_line.jpg

So it doesn't really matter what the US tries to do - even if it could somehow magically cut its CO2 output to zero in the long run we'll have a lot more of it around thanks to China. And over a few decades it is almost certain that Burma, Vietnam and the like will industrialise in much the same CO2 intensive way China has. Taiwanese manufacturers have a "China+1" strategy - i.e. build factories in China plus one other country. In fact China is a big country and it is only the coastal regions that are highly industrialised and thus emit the CO2. Unfortunately that pattern is unlike to be repeated in smaller developing countries that make up the rest of Asia - they are likely to end up as industrialised as Japan over the whole country.

So the odds of humanity as a whole agreeing to cut its total CO2 output is zero. That's not really unreasonable actually - the US and Europe industrialised in a CO2 intensive way. Their CO2 outputs are now flat or falling because the factories have moved to Asia. If I were in China, Burma or Vietnam I'd be very hostile to the idea that my country should stop industrialising because of concerns about CO2 affecting the climate in the future. Especially if those concerns came from countries who have already passed through that stage of development. Even a new Cultural Revolution in China would only cause a pause in the process. Once it was over it would resume.

Yes, there appears to be an increase in the amount of plant growth, measured in a Gabon rain forest, which will help greatly in giving us more time to prepare: http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0218-forest_carbon.html
The way to understand an incredibly complex system, is to first start with first principles, making a crude model, seeing if it fits the data, and then gradually refining the model by adding more complex interactions and factors. The basic idea was already documented in 1906 in a popular scientific work by Svante Arrhenius (yes *1906*) so his hunch about the CO2 variable was pretty much right. You're deluding yourself.

A ton of sugar would cost a lot more than a ton of coal. http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/sugar.html . The amount of coal is so abundant still that the market price of it is lower than the cost of raising sugar-cane or sugar-beets and refining them into sugar.

a ton of coal costs from $30 per 2000 lbs in Y2K upto $150 per 2000 lbs in the year 2008, and about $30-$50 per ton in May of 2012.

a ton of sugar would cost about $600 with the world price of sugar at less than 60 cents per kilogram.

A ton of sugar would cost a lot more than a ton of coal. http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/sugar.html . The amount of coal is so abundant still that the market price of it is lower than the cost of raising sugar-cane or sugar-beets and refining them into sugar.

a ton of coal costs from $30 per 2000 lbs in Y2K upto $150 per 2000 lbs in the year 2008, and about $30-$50 per ton in May of 2012.

a ton of sugar would cost about $600 with the world price of sugar at less than 60 cents per kilogram.

For example, a new cute monkey is interesting, but a Penis Snake is downright frightening. From what did it evolve - did some poor unfortunate man have a very traumatizing mishap whilst walking through the jungle? Is its tongue white and liquidy? Can it be masturbated? Does it perform cunnilingus to impregnate females, or does it have its own sub-penis?

All of these issues and more must be discussed and must, eventually, be resolved.

Oh great, a new breed of monkey. Just what the world needed. I sure am glad that we solved all those other problems so we can care about this.

What are you complaining about? It's one more thing for you to have sex with.

Oh, and you missed this on the page? http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0802-penis-snake-amazon.html

Does anyone else think that this new monkey looks a lot like that badly restored painting of Jesus that was in the news a few weeks ago? Monkey (from TFA), Jesus; you decide.

Yeah you're a fucking idiot. Here is what you do. You say things that make you feel good then claim them as facts. That is 100% of what you've done in this thread .

You're exactly the reason it's going to come to violence because anyone who fits that description is immune to reason.

So continuing the list of things you've said which are false and proved false , we can now add the following , oh and one more thing, the mendacity and superficiality with which you throw out these false statements without a care in the world as to their veracity, even to the level of not bothering to use the resources provided you to see if, in fact, the scientific literature DOES make such a claim, bespeaks nothing but a psychopathic indifference to the welfare of others and reveals the fact that instead of arguing in good faith, you're merely using this argument as a form of ego-defense and propaganda.

Believe me when I say I've argued with at least 100 of your ilk and you're all remarkably the same broken, stunted personality types. Slashdotters, remember this conversation when your government seeks your help in repressing the Great Conservative Rebellion. Do what your government requires of you and above all, have no pity because the diseased mind behind these denialist posts is a photocopy of every other denier on the face of the planet.

• Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, says that if the buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences pushed global temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today, well below the upper temperature range that scientists project could occur from global warming, Earth's population would be devastated.

  "In a very cynical way, it's a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something â"- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people."

• I think it's extremely unlikely that we wouldn't have mass death at 4 degrees.

  "If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving." Australian climate scientist Professor David Karoly, alongside Melbourne University and CSIRO colleagues, will give a paper next week on likely changes to our climate in a 4-degree scenario. He has warned that "we are unleashing hell on Australia",

• http://news.mongabay.com/2009/1216-hance_sealevels2.html#

  Allowing the climate to rise by just two degrees Celsius - the target most industrialized nations are currently discussing in Copenhagenâ"may still lead to a catastrophic sea level rise of six to nine meters, according to a new study in Nature.... In the US a sea level rise of 6-9 meters would permanently submerge New Orleans, most of southern Florida, and part of the East Coast. Low-lying islands-now pushing in Copenhagen for a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius--would sink meters underwater, while the ocean would come to cover most of Bangladesh and the Netherlands.

You don't have a point when you say such predictions are not published, since it's the same scientists who publish the research proving AGW who are also making these predictions. Unless of course you consider them to be liars.

So let's review what lies you've told today, shall we?

You claimed the science behind AGW was poor and not trustworthy. When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.

You claimed that the rise in sea level was nothing to worry about. When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.

You claimed that AGW would not be catastrophic . When that was shown to be false, you went on to another argument.

You claimed that warnings of catastrophic consequences of global warming do not appear in studies. Now that has been shown to be false, and what's more, a red

Sorry Belits but the USSR did collapse under the effort of paying for the military, just not in a dollars and cents kinda way. It collapsed because so much of its limited production capacity was diverted to the military there were huge lines for everything from shoes to toilet paper and one could bribe another with lipstick or fancy foods simply because they were so hard to come by they were quite valuable.

This is outlined and explained with the figures here but I'll quote one of the relevant bits "Soviet leaders since the late 1920s have emphasized military production over investment in the civilian economy. As a result, the Soviet Union has produced some of the world's most advanced armaments, although it has been unable to produce basic consumer goods of satisfactory quality or in sufficient quantities" end quote.

So I'm afraid it WAS military spending that caused the collapse, but it was in using up industrial capacity not in money. Oh and I vote independent so you can put away your "republican propaganda' brush.

Exactly

Do you know what else has poor soil? The Amazon Forest http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0502.htm

It took me a moment to realize you weren't talking about the company. Damn, you internet!

Exactly

Do you know what else has poor soil? The Amazon Forest http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0502.htm

It didn't happen NEARLY as much a few years back and I doubt the number of meth heads has increased that much since then

A glance at this graph will give you a swift education on why copper theft has increased recently.

BTW coward, Here is something for you to look at. This is the coal use by nations. It is already incorrect. China's usage is increasing, while America's is decreasing. Over the next 4-5 years, America's total amount of coal use is expected to drop about 10-30%. Keep in mind that America is already at 46% and dropping. China is over 70% for Coal and racing to 80-85% of their energy by 2016.

energy prices are climbing precisely when Americans are suffering through the toughest economic times since the 1920s?

I don't see too many of them buying more economical cars, smaller houses or switching off their "security lighting" as a result of this crisis. The USA still has some of the cheapest fuel in the world, how can they not manage?

I know it's tough to believe in global warming in the USA because most of the time GW Bush was in power there were governmental campaigns to obfuscate it (in pretty much the same way the creationists use "teach the controversy" to pretend evolution is still 'unproven') but even they're starting to admit there might be something going on now.

Short version here.

OK, time to burn some karma...

I lived in Brazil for 5 years, and the Brazilians I talked to didn't consider deforestation to be a problem. In fact, the story I'd consistently hear from them is that much of the deforestation is to support grazing for cattle, and that the same acres end up burned year after year because the forest takes back the grasslands as fast as it's burned. They perceive the Amazon as being largely uninhabitable and untameable, taking back roads and farms faster than they can be built. It's considered a national tragedy that so much land in their country cannot be used for farms, homes, roads, or ranches.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for conservation and habitat preservation; my been-there/done-that creds include the t-shirt from the Eco '92 conference in Rio. I simply don't see why the environmentalists who so carefully catalog deforestation can't be bothered to simultaneously chart forest re-growth. It should be simple to overlay forest boundaries on a map of Brazil and show the recession of the forest over time; 232,000 square miles (slightly smaller than the state of Texas) is a dramatic loss, and a good graphic showing where it has happened would be media gold - strong, clear evidence supporting the damage to the ecosystem. The fact that I've never seen such a map supports, in my mind, the Brazilians' assertion that it's not really a problem.

Seriously, if someone can disabuse me of this notion I'd appreciate it. I've taken a bunch of heat over the years because, as a self-indentified conservationist, I haven't bought into the "ZOMG BURNING TREEZ IS THE SUXXORZ!!!ONE!!" philosophy that my environmentalist friends take regarding the Amazon. Can there seriously be no balance found between sustaining the needs of the people and the preservation of our ecology? Because telling that to the people who feel like they're already on the losing side of the battle is just kicking them when they're down.

Food costs have not actually doubled in terms of comparable dollars. However, the composition and quantity of "food" purchases is much different, and much of it is wasteful. And, government debt and overall money mismanagement have eroded the purchasing power of our money.

You're looking at food costs in the US, which are cushioned by the fact that distribution and packaging occupy the majority of costs. But go out of the first world? This is what the raw wheat prices are doing: http://www.mongabay.com/images/commodities/charts/wheat.html

See for yourself:
Apple
Oranges

Which would you choose?

"The earthquakes in Alaska and Chile happened about 50 years ago, when those areas were much less built up than today."

Santiago is a large city, and 50 years ago it was still a large city -- it's population was "only" about 2 million according to UN estimates. The current population of Sendai, Japan, is about 1 million and is the largest in the Tohoku Region (essentially the northern end of Honshu), the closest densely populated area to the March 11 earthquake. The epicenter of the March 11th earthquake in Japan was over 100km away from most of the cities in Japan, so it wasn't beneath them there either. The 2004 Sumatra earthquake and subsequent tsunami still managed to kill over 200000 people, even though it's epicenter wasn't beneath an urban "built-up area" -- a great number of people live along the coast in the region in many smaller urban centers. To refer to this quake as the largest in history to hit a "civilized area" is a bit ridiculous unless your definition of "civilized" is pretty damned narrow.

As is too often the case for such a smart guy, Pournelle doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, and manages to offend people at the same time.

Eat less, or no, meat.

Cattle ranching is the #1 cause of deforestation in the Amazon. Unless it is curtailed (ideally by a decline in demand for unsustainable meat, but military action should also be an option), there will be no Amazon in a few years.

FTFA:
"When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "

Article on how Hitler was History's Second Greenest Conqueror for killing 11+ million people in 3... 2... 1...

Oh? Not awards for Hitler today? But 11 to 17 million less people means less fields needed and more forests, right? Surely with entire towns wiped out they returned to nature and helped the environment, right?

No, because Hitler only picked out specific members of towns for execution, generally just slightly reducing the population of lots of places but not really impacting overall land use (also, he introduced us to the Autobahn, and just look at what that has resulted in). Genghis was much more of a progressive, killing everyone equally, resulting in large swathes of uninhabited land where resisting cities used to be. Stalin gets negative points because while he did kill lots of people, he also re-populated a whole bunch of the areas that Ghengis had gone to the trouble of de-populating in the first place.

FTFA: "When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. "

Article on how Hitler was History's Second Greenest Conqueror for killing 11+ million people in 3... 2... 1...

Oh? Not awards for Hitler today? But 11 to 17 million less people means less fields needed and more forests, right? Surely with entire towns wiped out they returned to nature and helped the environment, right?

http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0718-worlds_largest.html

corporations today are bigger than governments. until fools like you wake up to this fact and become aware that a corporation can govern your life much more than a government can, we will have to take all this shit.

no. you dont have choice. economies of scale in capitalism do not allow choice. dont fool yourself.