Slashdot Mirror

You need to give up on Slashdot.org. Slashdot has long since been over run with the worst moronic right wing global warming deniers and the lowest IQ types imaginable.

I was listening to a bit on the radio yesterday about a woman who contracted a eye worm that normally only infects horses. She ended up pulling a live worm out of her eye, but it didn't really harm her physical health much at all. She was a good sport about it, and emerged with her mental health, too.

So the CBC brings on the guy from the CDC and he's practically jizzing himself with enthusiasm over this rare cross-species infection (due to face flies, which feed on eye secretions, which allows the parasite larvae to jump ship and enter the eyeball).

They also bring on this other guy associated with Monsters Inside Me.

And what he says, basically, is that for almost every mammal (and presumably bird) you will find at least three different parasite species almost exclusive to that animal, so the parasites are always present in greater diversity in any healthy ecosystem.

Just a few parasites, and we're all supposed to quit? What's with that?

Field Guide: Diseases and Parasites of Marine Mammals of the Eastern Arctic — 2003

So the point is, how do whales actually run away from all the parasites? Where is this beautiful, clean oasis that isn't Slashdot the Fallen? Politics used to be like the grizzly bear, one could hibernate for six months and not miss much. But modern politics is way more like the ocean, with bleached coral reefs, red tides, and entire floating islands of petrochemical detritus.

Why Whale Stress Significantly Dropped After 9/11 — February 2015

HowSound #150 - When a Good Idea for a Podcast is a Bad Idea for a Podcast — May 2017

A good pitch has an idea and a plan.

This episode is about the short-lived podcast "How's Your Day?" It's about invisible, unreported stories that got buried on an iconic news day, with a surprising parallel. They found three needles, then caved, even before launch.

Surprisingly, most of this post-mortem episode is about the amazing day of the whales on 9/11.

It's that I don't feel bad asking the audience to work for it, but I think that's something people push against, they don't want anyone to be confused ever, they want everyone to understand things all the time.

The whale portion starts at 9m00; the whales on 9/11 portion begins at 16m00. Great place to bury your head in the sand for twenty minutes and not deal with the Great Parasite Load.

This is a sixty foot whale with visibility less than the length of their body.

They are acoustic animals, and the (normally) unbroken shipping thrum causes them constant stress, because the ocean is now overrun with ships, and maybe it's time for them to all crawl back up onto dry land, lose a few pounds, and live again like God intended for all mammals.

Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.

If they didn't do the peer review, it's probably because the work wouldn't survive it.

That doesn't account for laziness. We don't know if the work itself was bad. I'm suspicious it might be, but it needs reviewed properly.

Climate models are huge and complex, only a few people can truly claim to understand them. They're not lab experiments where you can easily isolate causes and exclude other factors or extrapolate how the ecosystem will respond. There's huge local variations in climate that people use as proof or counter-proof because this year was particularly cold or warm without any validity as a global phenomenon.

Deniers often do claim that the weather outside their window is enough data to refute AGW. I have no doubt that they might have a little problem understanding the modes and the data.

But you and I both know that isn't the real issue. I don't hear anything about radioactivity not being real, and that nucs are some other process is involved. its just accepted. We don't hear much about cosmology, even though it isn't remotely as settled as the greenhouse effect, and there are some pretty active controversies going on, and not many people understand it.

Its money, and who's ox is gored, and who is getting paid for their vote, and inertia, and how somehow the laws of physics has become affiliated with a political party or not. Where once upon a time, not many years ago, the greenhouse effect was believed by most, and how now, scientists are scrambling to save climate data before it is destroyed http://www.businessinsider.com... Who knew that in 21st Century America, that science could become illegal?

That said, just because there's a lot of detail we're working on doesn't mean there's much doubt about the big picture. Take evolution for example, we're still doing tons of research into the exact mechanisms that create and divide species but there's no real scientific competition from creationism or lamarckism that genetics isn't real. "Survival of the fittest" does work as a one-liner summary.

The greenhouse effect is clearly real, if Earth had no atmosphere it would have a surface temperature of -18C instead of +14C.

And yet, people will differ http://www.energycentral.com/c... http://blog.nosuchthingasgreen...

So when they're talking about trying to keep the temperature change because of human activity under 2C we're really talking about a <10% change in the effect. We are just a small part of a pretty big puzzle of how this all works.

It is small in some respects, rather large in others. In addition, there are some wild cards such as methane released by warming: http://www.natureworldnews.com...

catapilist [kat uh pil ist] noun

1. One who aspires to become a caterpillar.

The clathrate gun has already fired

http://www.natureworldnews.com...

It just goes to show, depending on who builds it, something may be an enlightened amateur rocket or a dangerous enemy weapon.

- false. This rocket is long, but it only weighs 1200 pounds. V-2 weighed almost 27,600 pounds and it had a 1000kg warhead on it that could be delivered to a 300km distance from launch.

I don't think it's just the name here that makes the difference.

Stop clear-cutting all the trees for lumber and to put up crappy strip malls and subdivisions!

That is backwards. A mature forest does not remove net CO2. You need to cut it down, sequester the wood in housing or whatever, and then let the forest regrow. If forests are going to be used to remove carbon, we need to cut down more of them.

Well, but old growth forests actually remove more carbon than their younger replacements, so it isn't that simple:

"Rather than slowing down or ceasing growth and carbon uptake, as we previously assumed, most of the oldest trees in forests around the world actually grow faster, taking up more carbon," said Richard Condit, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. "A large tree may put on weight equivalent to an entire small tree in a year."

So by leaving an old growth forest in place, we sequester the carbon (in the forest) and improve the uptake.

Peer Review isn't all that it is cracked up to be. THE only real review is when peers can actually review the work. Just being published behind a paywall doesn't mean it is reviewed, by anyone.

http://www.natureworldnews.com...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Give the world access, and the papers will be peer reviewed.

Dude, As perhaps you have, I have followed this "debate" for years, in the same way I have followed the "debate" over things like creationism and the efficacy of supply-side economics. However, unlike the debate for these other things, faux pas can be reversed. Please tell me you have had the courtesy to consider what is at stake if you are wrong: extermination of the human race. The effects of melting methane hydrates on the Arctic sea floor are a game changer.

Unless we solve this, this is certain death for me, you and our kids. You think I may be frothing at the mouth? Good! I am. We should be in crisis mode. Please stop sewing disinformation until you know the science for sure. You willing to risk your kids dying from global climate extermination? I'm not!

Mysterious Seafloor Methane Begins to Melt Off Washington State Coast

Warming Arctic Ocean Seafloor Threatens To Cause Huge Methane Eruptions
Pacific Seafloor Methane is Escaping at Alarming Rates
Enormous mounds of methane found under the Arctic sea: Underwater pingos may reveal 'worrying' clues about climate change

Except the people actively shutting down scientists that don't conform to the agenda:

http://www.climatedepot.com/20...

http://www.natureworldnews.com...

http://godfatherpolitics.com/2...

It always depends on how you compare. "All other things remaining equal" is one of the ways one can compare. It's valid but one has to be careful about conclusions because the other things are not remaining equal.

And then you go on to make some totally bogus comparisons, e.g. grasses and some food crops to anything relevant. To wit:

When water is not scarce most plants benefit from the extra CO2

Most plants don't benefit from the extra CO2, period, because in order to do more photosynthesis they'd have to have more sunlight, and most plants already have all the sunlight they can handle. In fact, you can literally see zonation changing with climate change; the climatic zones are marching northward. Decreased rainfall in California and increased temperatures in Oregon mean that people are starting to put in vineyards up there. The pines can't handle this weather, they're dying in droves... the ones that didn't just burn in the Butte fire, or the Valley fire, that is.

There are simply less plants in arid regions, so we don't really care if they can use more CO2. We only care if the bulk of the biomass can, and it can't — trees cannot use appreciably more CO2 than they're already using. So like I said, increasing atmospheric CO2 will really do nothing meaningful for us, while it does many things to us. Trees do use less water when CO2 levels are higher, but clearly not enough to save them — again, just stand in one place, look around you, and count the dying trees.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic....
http://www.natureworldnews.com...

Please name the last time these issues happened in the US. You might find LA at their worst to be near China's moderate levels, but nowhere near on average.

China Helps Reverse Global Forest Loss, With a Little Bit of Luck

According to a recent study the total amount of vegetation in the world has gone up over the last decade. This is mainly due to tree planting efforts in China, changing rainfall patterns allowing more growth in new areas and (probably) the increased amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The not so good side of things is that the plants aren't taking up all the extra CO2, it's still going up just at a somewhat slower rate, and if rainfall patterns continue to change a lot of that new growth could end up dying off.

CO2 causes damage to the environment because of its action as a greenhouse gas, and by causing acidification of the oceans.

I personally am not convinced that acidification (at least, from CO2) is a problem. During the cretaceous period, CO2 PPM was well known to be at least 1700, possibly more, which is considerably higher than our present 400. Furthermore during this same period, the earth is believed to have been far more green than it is today (that is, much more abundant plant life) had rather large and abundant macroscale life (dinosaurs to be exact) in addition to a rather thriving oceanic ecosystem.

If the models are correct, then it would likewise follow that today's ocean is very alkaline compared to that era, a condition that should be equally inhospital to marine life. Relatively speaking anyways.

I know the common counter-argument is that life can't adapt fast enough to these changes, but when we look at places like Chernobyl, you can see that that isn't true either. Not just for animals, but for humans as well. People indigenous to the Andes for example made dramatic physiological changes to adapt to the cold low oxygen atmosphere within a single generation (they literally walk barefoot in VERY cold temperatures.)

That, and then things like this:

http://www.natureworldnews.com...

Excuse me if I don't see a doomsday scenario come of this. The best arguments I've heard center around preserving present environment in order to preserve the economy, but the likes of Kyoto propose wrecking the economy anyways.

http://www.natureworldnews.com...

when we find multiple examples of a particular animal with gaps on both sides.

When it comes to creationist arguments, there are always gaps. Some of them wouldn't believe you existed if you couldn't produce your great-grandmother's birth certificate and dental records.

The more T-Rex fossils we find without finding any evolutionary ancestors or descendants, however, begins to point to the fact that they may not have existed.

Or that were simply more T. Rexes in total than any particular one of their ancestors (descendants don't really come into this one, what with the dinosaurs being wiped out around the time of T. Rex. And it stands to simple reason that the latest ones would be the easiest to find).

Or any of a number of reasons (climatological, even psychological*) why we've dug up more T. Rexes and not many - but not zero - of their ancestors.

As I recall it's not like we've unearthed hundreds of T. Rexes from which to draw much of a conclusion, anyway.

*the possibility that finding one enormous and now cemented-in-popular-culture killing machine from the dawn of time will lead to people digging all over the same area looking for - and finding - more.

this is first day stuff people, dont make me sign up to a page just to view an article, and dont use that article for the summary. Find a link that "just works"

here you guys go http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/5036/20131122/siats-meekerorum-new-carnivorous-dinosaur-species-kept-t-rex-check.htm