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NASA Says 2005 Could Be Warmest Year Recorded
Ant writes "CNN reports that a weak El Nino and human-made greenhouse gases could make 2005 the warmest year since records started being kept in the late 1800s." From the article: "While climate events like El Nino -- when warm water spreads over much of the tropical Pacific Ocean --affect global temperatures, the increasing role of human-made pollutants plays a big part."
You apparently want Earth colder and Mars hotter. Make up your mind!
Sudden global climate change is a serious issue that should be dealt with, but it is interesting how on one side NASA feels it's possible to control and affect positive massive global climate change on Mars but fears comparatively tiny changes on Earth.
I'm a big tall mofo.
...we live on Earth!
the coldest year on record
the wettest year on record
the dryest year on record
the fewest storms on record
the most storms on record
Depending on where you live, your exact location could have any of these conditions. It's funny how the most generic weather predictions can always be proven true.
All in all, 2005 looks to be pretty scary. I wouldn't go outside, based on NASA's findings.
---gralem
In the US, we allow people to call themselves neo-Nazis and salute Hitler while holding a sign proclaiming that "God hates fags." And, as nauseating as I find those points of view, I think people should have the right to express them (but not to act on them.)
The bottom line is that the right to keep and bear arms is directly linked to the right to free speech (which most of us cherish). And one could argue quite strongly that the American tendency to hold opinions that differ from (todays) academic orthodoxy is itself a direct application of that same right of free speech.
If the rest of the world jumps off a cliff, should America join them?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
We have a government that does pretty much what we tell it because we have two guns for every three citizens and a tradition of cleaning house when needed.
You mean the American revolution? As far as democratic change goes, that was a pretty lightweight and recent effort. Nations like France fought long and hard for democracy, other nations in Europe have had a tradition of democracy going back a thousand years, and yet others had democracies and lost them again. America is a newcomer in the area of creating and maintaining democratic government, and there is no support for the view that America's gun policies are responsible for the current existence of democracy in the US, in particular since attitudes towards guns and gun ownership were altogether different around the time of the American revolution.
Please feel free to show the evidence that the U.S. government is significantly more scared of its populations than other national governments. Feel free to work in references to legislation such as the Patriot Act, where appropriate. Or any legislative issues where gun ownership made a difference.
Yeah, funny .. but actually it's interesting to compare our behaviour to that of a deadly virus: the latter will also consume all available resources multiplying as quickly as possible until its host is completely destroyed, and unless it can find a new host, it will die along with the host.
Personally I'd like to believe that we're more intelligent than a virus cell, but all evidence seems against it.
Except that he never said that. That one is from MAD magazine 1991.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/candidate.asp
Think of the dirty '30s dustbowl as being the norm, not an exception.
Think of Europe having much colder winters because of the lack of a thermocline to drive the gulf stream currents.
Think of rising oceans as the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps melt, and as the waters around the earth rise due to thermal expansion.
Think of recurring global catastrophies that make the recent tidal wave look like "just another day".
Think of what we're handing our kids.
Think - everyone said "don't worry, it won't happen in our lifetimes anyway."
I think they were wrong.
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I am not American but European.
What comes to the first issue: it is U.S. internal politics, so I don't worry about it that much. If the Americans want to let any nutjob out there to have guns, it is their problem, as long as it happens within their borders, i.e. they are only killing each other.
Not that I wouldn't find it insane, though. The pro-firearms people always say that "guns don't kill people, people do" as their main defense. But same applies to cars, and still driving a car is not a constitutional right, but a special privilege granted only for those, who have obtained a driver's license. And yet killing living things -- including, but not limited to humans -- is the primary function guns are actually designed for, but this is definitely not the case with cars.
The problem with global warming instead just seems to be that when people are not absolutely sure that global warming happens and that CO2 emissions caused by humans are actually contributing to it, they are willing to do nothing, as they feel that the preventative measures are too expensive to take without certainty of their necessity and effectiveness.
Unfortunately, this viewpoint is just as shortsighted as quarter-year capitalism -- and like that, it seems to be most common in the U.S. The problem is that these people do not realise two facts about the measures that should be taken to stop the expected global warning.
1) That if the humans have, in fact, contributing to global warming, as is assumed, the preventative measures must be taken now to be effective. If we postpone this until we have the bulletproof evidence, then it means that large-scale global warming is already happening, and it will be too late to take any preventative measures; we would have no option left but to deal with the conseqences, and we already know that that would become helluva lot more expensive than any preventative measures as the glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica would melt in large scale, raising the sea level several metres and the extreme weather systems would become even much more common than they are now. Over time, it would probably cost a lot of human lives, too.
2) That if we take the preventative measures, and we'll find out later that we could have never done anything to stop the global warming, or that it wasn't actually even happening in first place, the technology we had developed wouldn't still be in vain; first of all, we wouldn't be dependent of oil anymore, which problem would need to be solved anyway, as oil is not really renewable energy source.
Second, we would likely have developed lots of new high technology stuff along the way, creating many entirely new businesses. These businesses and the value they would have added to the economies of the countries that would have developed them wouldn't be going away.
Car is a good analogy again, as Americans love their SUVs; consider, that in future SUVs would all be using fuel cells. Now, to avoid CO2 emissions, the hydrogen used in those must not be produced using fossil fuels. Nuclear is a good option, of course, but fission is not renewable either, and then we'd yet have to deal with all the waste, which still seems to be somewhat problematic. So how about if U.S. would just invest so much money to fusion research (still pocket money comparing to the war in Iraq), that it would become the leading provider of fusion technology in the world, for example? An entirely possible scenario. Lots of extra research among renewables would not be bad idea either. The way to turn all this into good business will be there, if political will is.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
You honestly think the government is more responsible because you have guns? You actually believe your government is afraid of you? Talk about an inflated sense of self-worth :-)
Seriously though, your "tradition of cleaning house when needed" would come to an abrupt end when that small gathering of armed civilians gets an Apache-helicopter-beatdown. Don't kid yourself about being able to wrest control of the government away by force.
Funny enough, do you know what the US would look like if this scenario were to play out?
Iraq.
Your picking of Italy as an example shows you know little on agriculture. Olives (and wine) do not need much water to grow. But you can't live on wine and olives. You need grass to feed the herds on, you need a lot more water to grow crops, vegetables and fruits. Southern Italy is becoming really dry by now, esp. Sicily.
Hot summers can be dangerous to old people, as over 10,000 dead in France during the 2004 (or 2003) summer show.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Global "warming" isn't going to just raise everyone's thermostat by 5'C. It's cranking up the chaotic fractal dimension of the atmosphere. Some places will get colder. Like when the Greenland ice melts, flushing fresh water into the North Atlantic, it will push the "Thermo Haline Circulation" farther south, making the warm Gulf Stream flow more directly from America to, say, France, instead of warming the Baltic. The UK will plunge into an arctic climate like northern Scandanavia, along with the rest of northern Europe. Other places are likely to also freeze or drop, though the average will be higher, meaning some places will become hellishly hot. And the kinds of storms we'll see in the ongoing transition will make hurricanes look like mist.
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make install -not war