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Humanity Responsible For Current Climate Change
tehanu writes "Scientists working with Antarctic ice have found that the level of greenhouse gases is at the highest level in over half a million years. Carbon dioxide is 27% higher now than any other time over the last 650 000 years. Methane, an even stronger greenhouse gas is 130% higher. The period of time studied covers eight full glacial cycles including a time when the earth's position relative to the sun is the same as it is today. Other scientists have found that the annual rate at which the sea has risen since the industrial revolution is twice that of over the last 5000 years. It is predicted that by 2100 the sea level will be 40cm higher. These results provide strong evidence that human activity since the industrial revolution, rather than just natural processes, has strongly altered the world's climate. As one of the scientists involved in the research put it: 'The levels of primary greenhouse gases such as methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are up dramatically since the Industrial Revolution, at a speed and magnitude that the Earth has not seen in hundreds of thousands of years.'"
Any rise in temperature must be part of the Grand Design.
Don't sweat it! (e.g. shit happens.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Of course the world is heating up. The rapture is nigh!
sigfault. core dumped.
I take issue with the conclusion of this submission headline, as there is plenty of evidence suggesting the possibility that we're not much of a contribution at all. I have yet to hear explanations for why temperatures actually DROPPED from the 1940s to the 1970s despite an increase in our use of automobiles and other gases. Not to mention that when you add the numbers up and take into account water vapor, mankind is only responsible for--wait for it--0.27% of the so-called greenhouse gases.
So, as Penn & Teller put it in their Bullshit! episode on the matter, we're still gathering data. So stop jumping to conclusions!
"Sufferin' succotash."
This is an interesting turn of events...
When the evidence was less than conclusive about either global warming in general or our role in it in particular, the administration roundly decried it, calling global warming a 'myth' and a 'fantasy'.
When the evidence was conclusive about global warming in general, but inconclusive about our role in it, the administration switched to "well...perhaps it is real, but it's surely just a natural phenomenon...we can't be more than marginally responsible".
And now that the evidence about both global warming in general and our role in it in particular is conclusive, the line will now be "oh well...water under the bridge. There's nothing we can do about it now".
In other words...business in usual. It might be a good idea to sell that beachfront property and start shopping for property further north...particularly since you'll be hunting for your own food when the climate shift causes worldwide food shortages.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The reactionary conservative crowd will stick their fingers in their ears and say that "global warming" is a myth. They'll crack jokes about how "global worming" (sic) is supposed to cause an ice age (hyuk hyuk, how funny). Then they'll segue into a rant about how those evil scientists are still trying to spread the "disproven" theory of evolution.
The mountain of evidence that we are, slowly but surely, screwing up our planet's very ability to support life itself does not matter to many people. They would prefer to believe (against all reason) that such a bad thing simply cannot happen to us. Worse, many (most?) people simply don't care what will happen in three or four or five (or ten) generations, since "ah well, I won't be alive then anyways." Never mind that this is the present generation's great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, or whatnot we're talking about, and that most people-- if asked-- will vehemently insist that they care about their children.
Trying to talk sense into these people is like trying to argue with a Scientologist about psychiatry or with a Southern Baptist about evolution.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Galileo started recording sunspots. Mars has its polar caps showing sines of melting and pluto also shows signs of warming.
It would be nice if all the reports about the environment didn't carry the chicken little byline.
Will it scare humanity into changing their habits? I would hope so, but the US ignores the Kyoto Treaty, and burns CO2/CO-producing fuels at hell-bent rates. Mass transportation? Nah.
It proves that unless you're interested in murdering subsequent generations, we need to start now to get energy that doesn't smut-up the atmosphere, our lungs, and forestry/ag plans that don't cut the lungs out of the earth so that someone can have cute cabinets in Miami.
Unfortunately, a little more natural drama (maybe a few dozen more hurricanes this year?) to get the body of humanity to change their habits.
But we can hope.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
BTW, I usually run Firefox, but happened to open this up in Internet Exploder - all three URL's in the article had popups - you forget about those things when you predominantly use Firefox.
P.S. I'm argueably contributing to global warming with my 20,000+ Christmas lights ... although at least I signed up for wind power.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I think we can all agree that it is clear that the most realistic, cost-effective, quickest, safest plans for change involve ubiquitous personal nuclear power and terraforming Mars.
Awesome. That's 40 cm less I have to drive to get to the beach.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Forgot to post the link where I got the 0.27% number from: Global warming--a closer look at the numbers
I was discussing the global warming issue just last Tuesday with someone who was very adamant that humans are responsible for everything. As I offered more and more opposing evidence suggesting that there is no definitive proof that mankind is responsible, he grew more and more emotional until he told me "attitudes like yours are why the planet is going to hell" and wouldn't discuss it further. Unfortunately, these kinds of responses are common when you're trying to rationally discuss climate change and point out that correlation does not equal causality, and that a proven link has not been made. Most of the time, you see lots of "consensus science" used as a debate point--as in, "Well, so-and-so organization says we're responsible and these guys say we're responsible."
I subscribe to what I call my "1/3 the hype" theory. When you see a lot of hype over something, reduce it to 1/3 of itself and believe that instead. E.g., "Linux on the desktop this year is going to take over!" becomes Linux will make a few gains here and there. And "mankind is responsible for everything according to correlation in some figures!" means there's some possibility we're responsible but no hard links yet.
Besides, when someone mentions that temperatures are higher, they always neglect to mention that temps actually dipped from the 40s to the 70s, giving the impression that it's just been a steady, consistent ramp upward with no variation, when it hasn't. And it is misleading to omit that fact.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Well the Tech is out there to reverse this .
2 7424,00.html
We just need a Apollo program level of devotion to it .
University of Wisconsin has a working 3HE reactor, he fuel is just the issue, the moon is the answer.
Helium-3 on the moon, and the new finding of altering Hydrogen atoms molecular
orbits in a manner unknown before and pointing to fundamental errors in physics/Calculus .
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,3605,16
Keep in mind he has had some peer review on this before chucking it on the bone pile .
The Algae that makes enormous amounts of oil for biodiesel and other uses also
gives as a short term methodolgy vs. drilling for oil . It also burns cleaner .
* Soybean: 40 to 50 US gal/acre (40 to 50 m/km)
* Rapeseed: 110 to 145 US gal/acre (100 to 140 m/km)
* Mustard: 140 US gal/acre (130 m/km)
* Jatropha: 175 US gal/acre (160 m/km)
* Palm oil: 650 US gal/acre (610 m/km) [2]
* Algae: 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre (10,000 to 20,000 m/km)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
There is yet Hope, but stray a little and you will fail to the ruin of us all - LOTR
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I live in Minnesota, and it was about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (about -13.3 C) on Turkey Day morning, so I don't really give a hoot that all you suckers in Florida are gonna drown, winter is COLD up here, and I'm for as much global warming as we can push out of our gas-guzzling tanks-as-SUVs. I mean, I think there's a "Minnesotans for Global Warming" club somewhere, and I want to join! (We have recorded -60F (-51C) temperatures in MN like 10 years, and that ain't no stinking wind chill, either, so we have pretty harsh winters!)
(In other news, sell any property you own near sea level.)
For us people in Scandinavia, this climatic change will actually be pretty good, with better climate all around the year.
Too bad, tho, for the already poor people all over the world, in Africa and Asia, and it is also too bad for the Americans.
But this is what they wanted, right? Bush didn't sign the Kyoto protocol, and he could care less about the climate, since the "climate" is so far away from Texas; man, does he detest these "international" things where he isn't the given monarch or what. Besides, Katrina and such disasters are acts of God, not an act of man; there is much intelligence in a design like a hurricane.
And China has said it won't comply to any environmental agreements, since the West already has a hundred years of polluting the world; China wants to catch up before they do anything about it, so that they also can enjoy what the people in the West enjoys. And they are so used to "natural disasters" such as floodings, droughts, "great leaps forward" and so on, and they have so many people to sacrifice for the cause.
So, if I allow myself to be just as selfish as the Americans and the Chinese for a moment, I will say this bodes well for the Swedish economy; we can thrive on your miseries, make me filfthy rich cleaning up your mess and provide services to combat a rising sea level, ever worse hurricanes, serious droughts and other phenomena.
You had it coming, suckers!
There is too many reports citing scientists on global warming doom and gloom and next to nothing being published about our progress in using hydrogen as the source of energy. It almost makes you want to say "Sceintists, stop with the global warming stuff, start working on the renewable energy already!".
The reason? Doom is sensational - and guess what the news outlets will publish first?
Carbon dioxide is 27% higher now than any other time over the last 650 000 years.
But the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
Maybe the C02 level rises every million years or so, each time life evolves into things that make internal combustion engines. Then it falls for a while after each thermonuclear war.
A graph of the last 3 million years?
Niiiiiice.
Human induced climate change will cause havoc, but it won't destroy the biosphere. The asteroid strikes the obliterated the dinosaurs were far more catastrophic and life continued. So if humanity is too stupid to control it's own destiny, then let it suffer the consequences. Life on Earth will be much happier with a few billion fewer humans running around destroying everything.
1. Buy land a few feet above sea level
2. Steady the course, environomentally
3. Sell ocean front real-estate in 30 years
4. PROFIT!
Too bad warmer Winters isn't what we can expect from climate change. The changes are not bound to mean that every day through the year will be warmer, just that on average they will be. We might still have extreme cold, but instead broken up by periods of thaw, which will hurt trees for one thing, and make roads icy and broken. And we'll have bugs moving north, with more trouble for our crops, since we might get snow in August now and then.
Change in the climate stresses every biological creature, and when creatures get stressed, there's death as a result for some of them. We're adapted to live under certain conditions, and if things either suddenly change, or change over time to something very different, the lives our children live could look nothing like our parent's lives did.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
no shit
i could be a scientist
Whether or not anyone is convinced by scientific evidence on this issue is only relevant if the conclusions are false (ie no anthropogenic climate change). If it's true, then there is little humanity can do to reverse the change, nor could they organize to do it even if it were possible. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
So what were those lousy smegheads doing to the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago? Stupid cavemen and their earth-raping!
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
I still don't understand how global warming is supposed to make sea levels rise. Ice has a lower density than water. If you put ice cubes in a glass of water and allow the ice cubes to melt, the water level will go down. So as the polar icecaps melt, won't the sea level go down? (I'm assuming that the outlying pack ice overlying the Antarctic Ocean will melt before the pack overlying the continent.)
It is predicted that by 2100 the sea level will be 40cm higher.
Thanks goodness... that should give me some time to finally aquire an XBox 360.
However, the world is not all that straight-forward.
The issue on hand is NOT oil, it is the control and money it brings with it.
Today's oil barons are ready to ditch oil in a moment's notice, PROVIDED, they can control the alternate source as easily as oil.
Any attempt to break that cartel will NOT succeed. They have been entrenched too long, too powerful, and too much moneyed to be ignored or broken easily.
To save the world from further ruin, we should collaborate with them.
If we are truly "for earth", Bio-diesel and portable nuclear fuel reactors may be the answer. However to be easily adopted, we need to "PROVE" that the same cartel that controls oil (iam not talking about OPEC), needs to be assured that they will still have absolute control over both supply and pricing of the new fangled energy sources.
There have been numerous attempts to replace oil with cleaner fuels, more cheaper sources, however, all have failed for the reason that the cartel is unwilling to relinquish control and will squash any attempt at dismantling the cartel.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
We just need a Apollo program level of devotion to it .
Not even that.. Just getting some iron into the Pacific ocean west of South America would make a good start.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Seriously... Just because CO2 and CH4 are up does NOT mean global warming is anthropogenic... and these models assume the gases in these bubbles in not in flux. I assure you this ice is not a system that is "frozen" (sorry about the pun, but...) as i'm sure these gases do migrate through the ice, especially for those layers closest to the surface, but also for the ones further down. And even if this was shown to be 100% factual (i know, can never be in science) it STILL doesnt mean that this is whats responsible for global warming. Just because you can correlate something does mean there's actually a relationship. After all you could correlate the amount of environmentalists with global warming, so therefor its environmentalist's fault that we're warming. We're coming out of an ice age, its a known fact. These models almost never correlate the preturbations in the earths orbit and spin, as well as solar output (how can we know the suns activities 1000s of years ago? we cant) when a 1% increase in solar output would cause way more of an impact than this unproven facts.
drunk chemists
This is news?
But we Minnesotans also have a solution to global warming. All gasoline sold in MN is a 10% ethanol mix (by law), and many gas stations have 85% ethanol mixes (which costs less per gallon, but because of fuel economy, it works to be about even with gasoline per mile). In fact, last time I topped off (Thanksgiving morning), I filled up with 85% ethanol in a new Mercury Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV). Many new cars are FFV, and ethanol (or other biofuels) is really the only choice that I can see if we humans want to be able to drive around in cars in 300 years when there won't be a drop of oil anywhere. Nice thing about ethanol (from my perspective) is that if you ever take a trip across the US (from car or plane), you'll see endless fields of corn. And we still have a lot of land that can be farmed (in places like Montana, etc.), which translates into more fuel. I consider myself quite the conservative and one the other of my biggest reasons for burning ethanol instead of gasoline is that then I don't have to give money to shady places like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and Canada (oops! JK, but we actually do get most of our gasoline in Minnesota from Canada, I believe).
If the thesis of this article is true -- and that's a big "if" -- then who is more to blame than anyone else for global warming? Why, it't the anti-nuclear "environmentalists," of course. Nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases -- none! Yet the U.S. gets half its electric power from coal. Folks, we burn three tons of coal per *second* in the U.S. alone, and the gaseous emissions kill an estimated 50,000 people per year.
If indeed human activity is causing global warming, then we can solve this problem inteligently or stupidly. The intelligent solution starts with nuclear power. The stupid solution is to give up our mobility and regress to third world living conditions.
If you oppose nuclear power, please educate yourself.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
the plateau and dip in temperatures in the graph, which refutes the idea that it's been a very steady increase in gases since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
ROFL! That's some good reasoning. Let me see if I understand this: since temperature has not been on a steady rise since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there has not been a steady increase of "greenhouse gases." God, that's funny.
Penn calls "Bullshit" on what most of the rest of the intelligent world recognizes because it gives him a big old stiffy to pretend that his "superior" perspective comes from his being more of a man. What moral deficiency is your excuse for this shoddy thinking?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
It kinda reminded me of this article. wasn't that crater full of ice near the planets north pole? isnt ice slightly magnetic? don't we have two ice covered poles on our own planet?
Ok so if a meteor was flying nearby our planet, and tons of ice chunks came into our atmosphere and landed on our north and south poles how would we know? well.. we might find plants and trees not nearly suitable for arctic climates under the ice there. and we do. we also find animals that shouldnt be in those areas (eg. animals that eat only plants). havn't we even found frozen mammoths standing straight up with food undigested in their stomachs? how would you freeze something the size of an elephant that fast without the inside rotting out before freezing? coldest temperature if i remember right was recorded in antarctica, something like -130 F. thats cold, but not nearly cold enough -- you'd need something like -300/400 snow falling really quick and really long. hmmm... so then while the mammoths are trying to walk off -- they get stuck in snow where they cannot move at all, and freeze standing straight up. ideas?
I was trying to be funny (you can't really take me to be serious when I say that I am fine about millions of people dying in floods as long as Minnesota's winters are milder), but I always forget how poorly sarcasm is transmitted over the internet! (Sorry)
But that's a good point, although from my learning of physics, I find it unlikely that there would be increased temp. differentials, but I would expect DECREASED temp differentials (from more energetic convection), with their own set of dangers. Also, we still wouldn't have many bugs up north in your scenario, since as long as there's one or two good, hard frosts, the bugs will die off (it takes at least a month or two for any significant number of them to come back after the last frost in the spring).
It really pisses me off that armchair scientist wankers such as yourself want to dismiss the overwhelming amount of evidence that the climate is going through major changes.
Meanwhile, weeks after hurricane season has ended, tropical storm DELTA is brewing.
My entire home town has been reduced to rubble.
Fuck you.
Global warming is a theory, not a science. Intelligent Warming, anyone?
What you say is true, however I think it misses the big picture. By publishing articles like these, more people will take notice (you know that most people haven't thought through the implications of global warming, right?) and pressure their governments to change their ways or support scientific research, like hydrogen, to solve or mitigate the impending problems.
My point: Articles about scientists working on alternative energy or climate restoration will not catch the general population's notice when presented without a recognized context.
The research, published in today's issue of the journal Science, describes the content of the greenhouse gases within the core and shows that carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years.
.15 C. see Lomborg, p. 302. Wigley, 1998: "Global warming reductions are small, .08-.28 C."
So what? There has been a history of natual climate change cycles. Why would a relatively miniscule change in CO2 be the culprit for global change? 27% is not miniscule you say. well lets look at the composition of the atmosphere.
Think of the composition of the atmosphere in relation to the size of a football field. Nitrogen takes you all the way to the seventy-eight-yard line. And most of what's left is oxygen. Oxygen takes you to the ninety-nine-yard line. Only one yard to go. But most of what remains is the inert gas argon. Argon brings you within three and a half inches of the goal line. That's pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. And how much of that remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That's how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred-yard football field. So, you are told that carbon dioxide has increased in the last fifty years. Do you know how much it has increased, on our football field? It has increased by three-eighths of an inch--less than the thickness of a pencil. It's a lot more carbon dioxide, but it's a minuscule change in our total atmosphere. Yet you are asked to believe that this tiny change has driven the entire planet into a dangerous warming pattern?
Well we still should take action, you say?
Like the Kyoto accord? Many articles estimate the effect of Kyoto, even with the US signed on, as reducing temperature change by 4 hunthreds of a degree over the next 100 years. Most recently, Nature 22 (October 2003): 395-741, stated, with Russia signed on, temperature affected by Kyoto would be-.02 degrees C by 2050. IPCC models estimate more, but none exceed
Unfortunately it appears that there is nothing we can do in the near future. Tom Wigley and a panel of seventeen scientists and engineers from around the world made a careful study and concluded that there is no known technology capable of reducing carbon emissions, or even holding them to levels many times higher than today. They conclude that wind, solar, and even nuclear power will not be sufficient to solve the problem. They say totally new and undiscovered technology is required. *
[from the article]...levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher, said Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern and senior member of the European team that wrote two papers based on the core.
Ah, good point. Methane is a much worse green house gas than CO2. Is this humanities fault? Well we raise cows and cows burb methane. Sorry, not a fraction of what termites produce.
The total weight of termites exceeds the total weight of all the humans in the world. A thousand times greater, in fact. Do you know how much methane termites produce? Lots.
Man, I am tired of these self rightgious echoterrorists scarying the shit out of my kids at school. What is even worse is that some industries or even governments may be exagerating the dangers just to scare people. Why else would we see almost daily headlines about how pacific islands are being washed over by rising sea levels. While while the average air temperature at the Earth's surface has increased by 0.06 C per decade during the 20th century, and by 0.19 C per decade from 1979 to 1998, the average temperature in Antartica has decreased and the thickness of the ice there is increasing. See article in Nature. This is important since Antartica has 90% of the world's ice. Greenland has 4% and the rest of the world combined has only 6%. So even if the world's temperature rise
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
I'm blaming the dolphins and mice. They actually know what they are doing.
I am Spartacus
Notice that dip you're talking about in your graph is still above the mean temperature in the 1800's. You know... not that looking at a graph isn't better than an actual statistical analysis.
this is a book by michael crichton..it is an interesting read on the politics behind globabl warming studies and so forth...btw, i think illegal aliens from mexico are responsible for globabl warming...
Congrats, you've finally figured out a way of making Minnesota appealing.
Heh, dude... you really don't want global warming, if you don't like the cold... why? cuz if the freshwater ice in greenland/northern canada and cap conntinue to melt--and (with the possible exception of greenland) they're doing a whole heck of a lot of melting--it would kill the salinity balance in the northern atlantic (and recent articles (sorry, no links, but I did see them here and in discover/scientific american) suggest the levels are already way off standard) ... currently, the ocean currents that bring warm water to northern north america and most of europe operates in that the warm water comes north, cools, and sinks, and moves south again to counterbalance... it's literally the pump that provides us with a climate warmer than is natural for these regions. Changing the salinity level would cause the water 'density' to lessen, thus making it unable to sink even when cold... this would mean a temporary increase in temps, but would also collapse the circuit, and (in an as yet only speculative few years) cut off our access to warm weather. You, I (being a mainer), and europe would suffer harshly from suddenly harsh weather and the onset of either another mini ice age (like the one seen from about 1300 to 1900) or major one (since we're overdue).
so.... uh, yeah... you don't want global warming... at all.
What, no mention that Mars is also experiencing a fair amount of Global Warming too ( google for it... articles go back for years)
Will the enviro wackos just hurry up and get that court order against Sol to stop warming up the solar system.
Its modelled as feedback, not forcing, because it has a relatively short residency in the atmosphere ie about 10 days (vs decades or centuries for perturbations in C02 levels)
More here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=142
If this is the case, then how to you explain this? There was 20 times MORE CO2 during the Ordovician period than now, and there was an ice age? Maybe the study didn't go back far enough? Hm?
Agreed. We'll be charging them too.
If you really want to know how damaging our activities on earth are, you need to carefully examine the relevant data from a larger perspective. As observational data proves, not only are we harming our own environment, but careful analysis shows that over the last couple decades of observation, the polar icecaps on Mars have been shrinking as well. So for the love of God, please, everyone, stop doing everything you're doing now! Not only are you killing life on Earth, you're killing life on Mars as well!
:)
Of course, there's the slight chance that CO2 levels have always been higher during "ice ages". (It's a percentage/total amount argument, typically ignoring the accreation of mass for our planet.) Regardless, it's freakin' snowing and in the 'teens here in Michigan, so bring on the heat!
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
The jump to a causal relationship is stuff and nonsense. When A and B both occur, this does *not* mean that A caused B. The sun's output is variable. This planet has been warmer in the geologic past than it is now. It has been warmer in recorded pre-industrial history as well (see the Medieval Warm Period, which can't be blamed on industrial activity). While it is certainly probable that humans have indeed contributed to global climate change, it is entirely possible that their total contribution is minimal compared to that which is happening naturally. Too many people want to claim causal relationships that can't be proven when we are still gathering data. Don't panic, and don't let anyone else panic, don't make any wild claims, and make certain that the spirit of open scientific inquiry is kept alive on this subject. Remember Chicken Little.
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Why is it so hard to believe that us humans are responsible for global warming? The Industrial Revolution brought about automated machinery which required energy and power. We decided to use fossil fuels like oil and coal. We burn these things and it releases carbon dioxide into the air. The more we produced the more people could be sustained, so there was a population boom. This meant more farm lands needed to be created so we cut down more trees. This also lead to more factories, more power stations, the need for more energy. We burned more fossil fuels hence more carbon dioxide.
Why does it seem to some that humans can not bring about climate change? Our population keeps swelling, we keep burning fossil fuels and chopping down trees. Do you think we are unable to produce enough greenhouse gases? Is nature so vast and giant that humans seem to dwindle in strength? We humans are a part of nature. Locusts can devour forests. Why can't us humans ravage the earth?
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Actually hurricane activity is cyclic in nature and not driven by any current climate trend.
Though I'm sure the old residents of Galviston, TX were railing about global warming too.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Geez, he comments on the happenings of the last 300 years, based on a data point from 650,000 years ago. A graph drawn between two points is always a straight line, but that doesn't mean squat. Nuff sed.
Oh well, what the hell...
The Gulf-stream conveyer is really affecting Europe, isn't it? I was under the impression that Europe would become more like Russia, and Minnesota really couldn't get much worse, short of the glaciers returning.
Your answer is probably what a comedian suggested for the Ethiopians back in the 80s: U-Hauls. You need to move somewhere balmy such as Upstate NY. Even Buffalo should seem sub-tropical after Minnesota.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
It's anecdotal evidence, but every time there was a war in the middle east, the next winter was cold. Why? Because war involves a lot of explosions, so it kicks up a lot of dust. Dust reflects back sunlight and helps cause rain, both effects lower the ground temperature.
If we truly needed to stop global warming, we'd won't be trying to cut down on gasoline and coal use - that's too difficult. Instead, we'd be blowing the !@#$%$@@# out of uninhabited deserts.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
What bullshit hyperbole.
Should we hold a memorial for those who lost property and life in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79?
Just because shit happens doesn't mean it rolls uphill...
I'm not popular enough to be different.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
Well, here's one possible explaination for you. But, keep in mind, it's just as pulled out of the ass as your conclustion. You know that "natural cycle" talking point you guys like to harp about? You know, the one where global warming can be easily explained by the natural heating and cooling cycles of the Earth? What happens when you interfere a exponential growth equation onto some waveform?
(Assuming radians)
y=sin(x)+2^(x/2pi) for example?
Now, I don't have my graphing calculator on me, ATM. But, it looks like for some points the value of y actually drops. If you map the equation out, it still grows exponentially. But, to you, that exponential growth can't possibly exsist because at some point it isn't growing as strongly as would be expected from a simple exponential equation.
[A highway, bumper to bumper traffic on the way out. A lot of drivers beep their horns hoping other drivers in front of them start moving] Randy: [beeping his own horn] Come onnn, come on! Sharon: It's useless. This traffic isn't moving! Stan: Dad, isn't it possible the flood wasn't caused by global warming? I, I mean, the water was held back by a giant beaver dam, after all. Randy: No, Stan, I'm afraid us adults just let you children down. We didn't take care of our earth, and now you've inherited our problems. Another Driver: We didn't listen! Randy: [hears this and rolls down his window] Weh, we didn't listen! [rolls up his window]
So, I would assume if you're against "murdering future generations," you're also against abortion, right?
The situation is further complicated by the fact that we're coming to the end of an interglacial period - the last Ice Age technically didn't finish, and will be back for more. Such periods are unstable, in and of themselves, as they change very rapidly on a geological timescale.
There is also the fact that we've got masses of sunspots over a prolonged period, unusual geological activity, etc. All of these will complicate any attempt to model the environment and will muddle which variables humans are responsible for and by how much.
HOWEVER, we must also look at the nature of natural events. Volcanos are very short-term things and they pump the gasses into a much higher part of the atmosphere than do humans. We can therefore filter out natural contributions to the greenhouse effect, because those will go into an entirely different cycle. Human activity is prolonged (and, these days, often 24 hours a day, all year round), is highly regionalized and is often in areas that have a reduced ability to act as sinks. Water near industrialized ports is likely going to have a thin film of oil, making it harder to absorb gasses. Land near industrialized cities is often badly deforrested, with the same results. Farmland is no better, as farmers don't do crop rotation and use chemicals to add nitrates, etc.
Whether you can deduce from all of this that humans are responsible for all damage is tough. I believe so, but I wouldn't be able to produce a convincing argument for it. What CAN be deduced is that the climate has become unstable and may not be survivable if nothing is done. I believe the focus of the debate should be less on who did what (because nobody is taking responsibility, regardless) and should be much more firmly focussed on preserving as much of the biosphere as possible.
Damage to the Amazon jungle is something like 60% worse than previously believed, because loggers have been using thinning techniques to hide evidence of illegal logging. I believe that is a problem. Fish stocks are 10% of where they were at the turn of the 20th century. I believe that is also a problem. Species are becoming extinct at an accerating rate, which I definitely think is a problem. I believe that if we do something to correct these problems, then a lot of other problems will take care of themselves. We then only have to deal with whatever is left over.
People are generally lazy, politicians doubly so, so any plan that involves relatively little work (and less pain) now would surely be a better bet no matter who is right on the global warming front.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
From the submission:
"The levels of primary greenhouse gases such as methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are up dramatically since the Industrial Revolution, at a speed and magnitude that the Earth has not seen in hundreds of thousands of years.'"
I love when it is completely neglected that mankind contributes less than 1% of greenhouse gases. It is never mentioned! That's a pretty big hole which gives a completely misleading picture. "Greenhouse gases are the highest ever since the Industrial Revolution! Oh, yeah...and...uh...we only contribute 0.27% of gases, but still...we're at fault! Screw the fact that solar activity is the highest since Galileo began to record it! Let's latch on to one correlation and ignore the other."
A lot of today's environmental scientists are young college kids who believe something should be done about global warming, so they go into the field, causing a bias in the consensus opinion. You have to prove mankind is causing it, first.
The title should be Americans responsible for climate change ?
These results provide strong evidence that human activity since the industrial revolution, rather than just natural processes, has strongly altered the world's climate
Well, ignoring the creationists (which is scientifically reasonable), man is a product of nature and the materials we use to live our lives with are natural materials since they all come from nature itself. The concept of "man-made" not being "natural" is an inane concept and inflammatory.
I believe in managing nature and it probably makes sense to not cut down every tree in existance. Nonetheless to say the processes man employs to improve life is not natural is just plain stupid. It may be in our destiny to become extinct after we take a few thousand other species with us. So be it. It was the Dinosaur's destiny to become extinct too (much to our benefit since "man" would probably have never come into existance without the demise of the Dinosaur).
I just wish the hyperbolic inflammatory tree huggers would get a grip on reality. Hell, if a 2 million ton asteroid hit the earth and caused the next ice age what would the whining tree huggers have to bitch about then? Probably not global warming (if they survive the hit, that is).
-- Mean People Suck
This Storys headline wins The Ultimate Captain Obvious Award. With no sweat at all.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What I find ironic is how often people who don't trust the fossil fuel industry, and claim not to believe anything they say, etc. have been taken in by the anti-nuclear FUD spread by the very people they claim to distrust.
It's like some bad comedy routine.
Joe Public: I don't trust you.
Coal and Oil guy: I can understand that.
Joe Public: Nothing you can say will make me trust you.
Coal and Oil guy: I know just how you feel.
Joe Public: You do?
Coal and Oil guy: Sure. See that guy standing over there? The one with the pocket protector?
Joe Public: What, Nuclear Guy? Sure, I see him.
Coal and Oil guy: I don't trust him at all.
Joe Public: Why not?
Coal and Oil guy: He wants to kill all our babies and make giant insects and stuff.
Joe Public: Really?
Coal and Oil guy: Really. And he wants to make stuff that will kill people a bazillion years from now if they so much as think about it. That's why I don't trust him.
Joe Public: Wow. Thanks for the warning. But this isn't going to make me trust you any more than I did before.
Coal and Oil guy: I can understand that. Just so long as you don't trust him either.
Joe Public: Or don't worry about that. That guy is scary!
--MarkusQ
So, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were actually higher 650,000 years ago?
Dang, I never knew Java Man drove around in SUVs.
I'm not too worried in any case because most people will not be able to afford IPCC scare-cast rising CO2 levels "global warming" at $100+ per barrel of oil anyway. The fastest way out of both problems is to grow into new technologies competitively, not usurpation by a new self promoted global priesthood based on myth, power and value, again.
Just bring back the aerosols! Rather than scaring people with doom and gloom treehugging, scientists should be figuring out the perfect balance of pollutants that will cancel each other out, and we can continue to enjoy the temperatures on earth without sacrificing our Way of Life!
Mankind contributes less than .5% of the atmosphere's greenhouse gases.
Of course, you won't see this figure on Slashdot anywhere, because people are too busy bashing the US yet again (it makes you soooo hip and enlightened, dudes) to care about looking at reality, not what makes them feel elite and educated.
No wonder Digg.com is taking away all the readers. Readers get to vote on the articles over there.
1. Buy Air Filtration Unit before Air gets really bad
2. Start putting Air into neat little cans, with 2 nostril holes
3. Call your new product 'Perri-Air'
4. !?!
5. PROFIT!!
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
Not according to this. The rapture index is declining. (Must be a poll amongst married folk. How does one get to be a false prophet, anyway?)
The biggest WTF?
34 The Antichrist:
The French no vote on the EU constitution has downgraded this category.
Fasten your seat belts so the rapture don't suck you into them clouds.
The positive side of the ice core results: the water content of the atmosphere seems to have decreased - the core is almost full of it!
Warning: modding this down could unleash the Rapture!
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
One thing I didn't mention in my submission, as it is not mentioned in any of the articles and is only in the Science publication, the scientists researching the Antarctic ice also found that the level of greenhouse gases correlates well with temperature - when the level of greenhouse gases are high, temperatures are high, when the level of greenhouse gases are low, temperatures are low. Since the level of greenhouse gases is now the highest in over half a million years, it is inevitable that temperatures will rise. From the Science article,
Two basic messages are apparent in this extended history of the atmosphere. First, even with this longer perspective, the modern atmosphere is still highly anomalous. At no time in the past 650,000 years is there evidence for levels of carbon dioxide or methane significantly higher than values just before the Industrial Revolution. Second, the covariation of carbon dioxide and methane with climate, strikingly evident in the Vostok record, follows essentially the same pattern in the earlier time period. The muted climate cycles (as indicated by the deuterium content of the ice) are accompanied by equally muted cycles of carbon dioxide and methane (see the figure). This relationship reinforces the view that the large-scale cycles in Antarctic temperature have global importance, and that climate and greenhouse gas cycles are intimately related.
All that aside, it is the developing world that fans the fires of today's Malthusians; the future of the rich world is rosy by comparison, as declining population and cleaner technology inexorably shrink its ecological footprint.
In other news, "Dogs Like Bones", "Cats Chase Mice", and "The 'Village People' may not be such 'Macho Men' after all"...
Climate change is more likely to cause greater food production than less. And it will be places like Canada and Russia that benefit the most.
Historically, man does better when it's warm.
The Earth is mostly covered in water. A lot of it is very cold, too cold for humans.
Global warming is change. So what?
I've looked into it. I know what could happen. I'm just not worried about it at all.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Scientists have discovered fossils of tropical animals in the Antarctic region. This means that at some point in history, the arctic and antarctic regions were lush, tropical habitats. And life went on. There was life all over the planet at that time. Humans will survive if the ice caps melt. Maybe some of the low-lying cities will have to be relocated, and some areas that are considered "inhabitable" now (the rockies, the permafrost zones) will become tropical habitats, but we'll adapt.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I guessed YOU were joking, but there are all kind of farktards out there that seriously think and speak like that. It's all part of the "me want it now" culture, and they think it translates into warmer winters and normal summers.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Just a nit pick, Although I'd also like to see 3He facilities on the moon shipping back huge amounts of energy and powering a new age of interplanetary manifest destiny, We have to find the 3He first.
Its presence is at the moment, only suspected. It is supposed that based on the moon's lack of atmosphere, that significant and extractable quanties exist trapped in the lunar regolith as a result of constant bombardment from the solar wind.
I hope it's there, but in the meantime, let's ramp up the thorium breeder reactors and learn how to build nuclear rockets with acceptable fallout levels. If 3HE turns out to be on the moon, we're going to need some HEAVY heavy lifters to get the industry up there for extraction.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Mars is warming, too! Thusly human activity isn't the cause and we can go right on exhuming fossil carbon here just like we have for the last hundred years.
That is completely and utterly wrong, despite the fact that Mars is warming.
The earth has gigantic oceans. Mars likely has a little frozen water here and there. The earth has a sizeable atmosphere. Mars has 1% of our air pressure. The Earth's orbit is regular, the orbit of Mars is quite eccentric.
So little water and next to no air means
Earth's eccentricity is 0.016, Mars' is 0.093. We're at 91 - 94 million miles annually, Mars wanders from 128 - 154 million miles which makes its climate much more variable.
If you really and truly want to know what is going on you'll ignore Slashdot and scoot over to http://realclimate.org/
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Did you EVER have a job where you had to haul tools and material around? Where every job you get might be two counties over from where you live? The entire planet is NOT just people who only need to haul a laptop or some schoolbooks from the apartment to some convenient office or school. You are suggesting that some plumber or carpenter needs to take 18 trips on the bus just to get to work and back with all his tools, plus walk hauling a backpack of tools and lumber over his shoulder from wherever the bus stop is and the job site isn't? Or are you prepared for the price of about everything to go up like triple or more? That's the choices you have. That's what tripling the gas price would do, it ripples throughout our economy. All these people who actually build stuff and grow stuff and do stuff-actual wealth PRODUCING jobs-not wealth re arranging jobs or paper or electron shuffling jobs-have to drive, have to haul mass quantities of stuff,there is no other way around it, and if you up their prices, they will guaranteed "up yours". Like ordering stuff online and getting it delivered by UPS or Fedex? Think they will keep the same rates? how about snail mail? Trip on the plane to go see grammaw? All the stuff that has to get from factories or mines or farms to the processing plants and manufacturing plants then to the wholesalers then to the jobbers then to the retail outfits "downtown"? In the US anyway, 6 buck a gallon prices would cause a great depression to make the last one look like a charity give away.
.what you got going at home now, how large is your personal solar array? Or anything similar? How much organic food do you produce with a hoe and shovel and carry to the local food coop or haul with your bicycle trailer and sell cheap?
Perhaps you might need to think this reactionary tax through just a scosh more, follow the economic food chains around. And speaking of actual food chains, I live and work on a farm, you raise the fuel prices to triple what they are now, well get ready for 12$ chickens and 3$ a piece corn on the cob and 6$ loaves of bread at your local urban store. And because the costs of energy are closely related, how about tripling your winter heating bills now? When one fuel goes up in price, they ALL do basically.
I think a better idea is what we are doing now, people switching to hybrids or the coming soon plug in hybrids, adding solar to their roofs, large wind generational projects going in, research into clean coal burning technologies, and etc.
and..just for grins..
See? It's big problem, it's not all just cars and finger pointing. That just gets the finger pointed right back at ya.. That crap with cars is sorting itself out just fine now, people may be dumb but they aren't so dumb as to not notice fluctuations at the pump with mostly UP as the range and the general rise of "other" fuel prices like in their natgas bills and propane and whatnot. People ARE switching to better mileage and cleaner burning cars. check the stats, hybrids are the fastest growing market. And an SUV made it into the top 5 mileage vehicles sold in the US this year, the Escape hybrid. Clunky as it is and slow, the system is starting to work. We are talking overcoming inertial with 300 million people in the US and a lot of entrenched industries. This stuff takes time and a lot of individual effort as well as corporate effort and governmental incentives. . And the track record of governments passing laws and RAISING taxes to try and fix stuff is just mostly pure dismal. People fix stuff when it is practical, logical and do-able to do the fix and not much sooner. That's just how it works.
We are a mobile society, we sunk our infrastructure bucks into roads designed for personal vehicles and trucks as the primary method of travel, and it just isn't practical to have full public transport that goes everywhere, it would cost dozens of trillions of dollars just to get started on it and even then it would never fit all situations..
Want to make
Every time i see this argument come up im amazed at how quickly people jump on board. Im all for not using fossil fuels and stopping deforestation - on principle alone - and for the health of the planet, but the statistics they use to say that global warming is happening wouldnt be accepted in a statistical context on any other occassion. Statements like "the surface temperature of the earth has increased 1 degree in the 20th century". What happened in the 19th, 18th and 17th century? What about the 10th? One point doesnt make a very convincing plot now does it. I understand that we are forced to use the information we have at hand to make decisions and theories but the arguments are full of these limited perspective inferences. Whos to say that the Earth is not naturally prone to taking long term turns that may not be friendly to the existance of humans - since there was already ice ages that we know of, this seems just as plausible as global warming and no scientist out there has data over a long enough period of time to prove that it isnt. Only time will tell.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
You know why you don't see much progress in alternative energies? Because it doesn't bring in money. The companies make billions with the current economy, to research for an alternate economy cost a lot and they are there to make money, nothing else. The car industry has pushed electric car technologies for decades thru lobbying simply to avoid having to do research in it. Oil companies are the second biggest profitable industry after the financial companies. There is money to be made in polluting, none in cleaning up the mess, at least not until the majority of people start caring and talk with their wallet.
Burning wood products is usually okay, because the carbon coming out of the fire came from the atmosphere in the first place. It's just moving around in the cycle. It's not quite the same as long-sequestered carbon from petroleum or natural gas.
As all that is the result of human activity, and humans will never go back to pre-industrial consumption of resources, there is only one logical solution: reduce over time the number of humans, by means of birth control.
We are way too many, and we do not have natural enemies. As every basic science class will teach you, that means humans will otherwise reproduce until all the food (natural resources, in this case) are consumed, and the environment is destroyed. We are creating our own, planetary doom.
the delicate balance that existed before we began adding our share.
_ station.py?id=501947030000&data_set=1&num_neighbor s=1
That delicate balance never existed. Earth has been heating up for thousands of years.
Sulphates? CO2 levels are pretty much uniform over the entire planet. Here is the temperature record for the oldest continually operating weather station in Australia:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp
Now that's global warming!
Hemp Biodiesel
Hemp stalks can be converted to ethanol (with about 20% efficiency by fermentation of hydrolyzed cellulose), into methane (by digestion of the stalks, with 50% efficiency), into producer gas (by thermal gasification at 85% efficiency) and into methanol (by pyrolysis of the stalks, or from producer gas). It is estimated that hemp biomass can yield an equivalent of 1,300 gal/acre of vehicle fuel. Chopped stalks also can be used directly as a boiler fuel.
I think it would be better not to remove the natural Algae fields of the world's oceans because of the rather unfortunate environmental consequences that could occur. But planting new crops in already cleared fields, especially nice dense high-yielding ones, sounds good to me.
This actually severly lowers my value of this study. I do respect you, though, for putting it in. Basically, what we were led to believe is that conclusive proof that humans cause(d) global warming has been found. This completely tears that down. The journal states two important facts: a) the greenhouse gasses and climate correlate and b) the two have always correlated. This tells me that pinning a cause as "the industrial revolution" is strictly circumstantial. The fact is, a major anomolous climate change could have caused these drastic rises in greenhouse gasses (there was a "mini-ice age" in the late 1600s). I'm not suggesting that we should spew black ash into the air. We should all be stewards of the environment. Besides, the earth has been coming out of the last major ice age for a long time. 650 thousand years is very short with respect to Earth's age. People affect the environment; the environment affects us. Humans are here today because of how our ancestors adapted to drastic climate changes.
A common comment I see here is:
- humans only contribute 1% of the CO2.
- hence a 27% increase is a 0.27% increase
This is NOT what the studies show. It is 27% higher than ANY CO2 level in the past 650 000 years. This includes BOTH natural processes and man-made processes. It does not distinguish between the two sources. I've seen their graph. There is a nice cycle with greenhouses gases, and temperature with temperature slightly lagging behind C02 levels. This is the natural cycle that people talk a lot of. Who knows what causes it. Then suddenly, in recent times, the cycle is destroyed and there is a sudden upsurge in C02 levels near present times. It is very clearly anonomalous.
Don't forget the 1% is someone's guess about how much mankind contributes.
It took a Scientist to figure that one out?
There's a reason Clinton is often referred to as America's greatest Republican president. Almost every single one of Bush's policies has been a continuation of Clinton's. Clinton just lied about them better.
It really pisses me off that armchair scientist wankers such as yourself want to dismiss the overwhelming amount of evidence that the climate is going through major changes.
And your qualifications for evaluating the available evidence is better than their's - how?
My entire home town has been reduced to rubble.
Moving to a town that wasn't built under sea-level in the first place might be a good way to avoid that in the future.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
I call bullshit on the whole hydrino thing - until I can buy bottled water at Quik Shop made with hydrinos they don't exist. Only a little tongue in cheek - the discoverer is not inside the physics community, that stuff isn't peer reviewed, and he is raising money on his concept. And I can't help thinking about Vonnegut's ice-9
I also call bullshit on the working HE3 reactor in Wisconsin. Fusion is just barely exothermic as currently implemented by humans. You're saying U of Madison Wisconsin is ahead of everyone else in this matter? I'm willing to believe
Biodiesel is hella good, but it'll be hella better when we make it from agricultural waste rather than edible stuff. Biotech is working on that 24/7 and it is a solveable problem.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
We're all gonna die!!!
.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
At least - I'm in the middle of reading Harrison Schmitt's latest book - Return to the Moon - which goes into this in some detail. And no need for nuclear powered rockets, though he does seem to think something a bit bigger than the old Saturn V would help.
Energy: time to change the picture.
You obviously don't know as much as you think. The scientific method is a form of INDUCTIVE reasoning, not deductive.
Lex? Is that you?
If you have to choose between a future where the earth is HOT...
or one where the earth is cold...
I choose hot.
At least with hot their is the potential that we could harness all that heat energy and do something useful with it.. (like air conditioners!)
td
hard core geek-ware
What if those samples aren't actually a million or whatever years old, and are actually stratified based on, well, let's see.. maybe the ice at the south pole came from a comet. Does the relatively minute wobbling of the earth around its orbit actually make enough of a difference to cause a whole ice age? Is mars cold enough that it would be in a continual ice age, even if it had a good thick atmosphere like earth, and life to support it? If so, then okay, maybe it makes sense, but if not then what, was earh swinging out as far as mars is from the sun, in order to cool off? On the other hand, how much closer to the sun would it have to be to warm up again?
I'm not a geologist, but sometimes you gotta wonder.
Really, if you start with the assumption that the world is young, but that there's been at least one huge major gigantic catastrophy to hit it (like for instance a comet) rather than extremely old with multiple smaller catastrophies (where did all the craters on the moon come from? millions of years worth of one-small-comet-every-50,000-years, or a one time hit from a big long comet tail on its way to the earth?), your view of how things work skews radically.
Incidentally, that's why I think anyone who claims to be able to keep their religion - or maybe I should say more properly, their philosophy of life - seperate from anything they do, is full of balogny (no comments from the peanut gallery about my language, if you please). Your basic philosophy cannot be seperated from anything you think, because it *is* the collection of assumptions that you set out with before thinking anything.
If you believe the world is millions of years old (justifiably or not) you will by default interpret everything you see and try to fit it into your belief. If you see a bunch of sedimentary rock all piled up in layers you'll think "That probably happened slowly, since the world is so old. It must have been millions of years of debris getting piled up a year at a time, and then solidifying over long periods of time, that did that."
If you think the earth is young, you'll think "Hey look, that's sedimentary rock. I.E. it was formed from mud and stuff. It so happens that mud has water in it, and also that if you shake up water with dirt in it, the dirt settles out into layers based on density and whatnot. So, these layers were formed by shaking up water with mud in it, and could have happened in, well, days or months or years, not millions of years." So, clams are on the bottom of the set of layers, and birds are on the top? Hey, you know, clams are heavy. Also they live like.. on the bottom of the ocean (where the bottom layer of dirt comes from). Birds are light (they have o be, to fly). Also, they start off *above* the ocean, and so they'd land on the top layers.... woah! dude, you're right, that does skew things.
Either one seems to make sense, really, if you accept the assumptions behind it. Of course, since I believe the latter, I will now also mention that millions of years worth of sedimentary rock would also be ground down to rejoin the other sedimentary rock within well.. not too long, i.e. any mountains we have now would have to be relatively new even if the earth *is* millions of years old, due to continual rain and erosion, and furthermore there is *no way* that 80 million year old fossil dinosaur (the old name is "dragon") remains would still be around; they'd have been eroded away and replaced with new mountains only a few million years ago, if that was how old they were.
So.. in conclusion.. if the world is millions of years old, there should be absolutely no way to know it, because we shouldn't have any identifiable remains that *are* that old.
One final question, and this is more a question than a challenge.. if there's more carbon dioxide now than there used to be, and carbon dating works by checking how much carbon there is in something, then wouldn't anything from awhile back seem o be from a really really *long* while back, simply by virtue of the fact that it *
Early bird may get the worm.. but the second mouse gets the cheese.
The Village People are Macho Men, they're just Differently Macho. To wit: You try walking around New York at 3am dressed like that. What don't wanna? Sissy!
Keeping things a bit on topic, what really bothers me about the 'debate' over global warming is that the vast majority of people simply do not have the training nor the information to make any independent judgement. Further it's a bit insulting to the people who actually study this to bring up the same tired talking points as if 'gosh gee we never really though that, the sun might be warming, CO2 might diffuse through ice, blah blah bluh.'
PS: No offense to the previous poster. I just like that idea of Differently Macho Men.
...what's happening here is the scientific community's consensus...
...what's happening here is the consensus of a vocal part of the scientific community ...
There, I fixed it for you.
""Scientific" studies are supposed to be criticised, repeated, disproven...and then when all else fails...accepted."
It's the "when all else fails" part we're trying to stay away from.*
*I'm not planning on having any kids, and be long dead, so when your "oops" hits the proverbial fan? I can shout out a "told you so" from the safety of my grave. You "know it alls".
As a scientist, I acknowledge that global warming is real. I am a member of both the American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Instead of continuing to write about how humans are changing the planet, why don't our out-sourced engineers in India nad China come up with a way to implement 'G L O B A L C O O L I N G'?!!!! I mean how fucking difficult can it be? Stop burning fuel, build more solar panels into every device. Dman people, how long do we have to listen to 'It isn't cost effective, economical, or isn't the right time' for new technologies to take a foot hold? The Bush administration and uncle Cheney are serious impediments to change in our energy infrastructure. Find a way around that, how to beat these huys and the big oil conglomerates, and we all can win the race to longer lives (and humanity's) together.
Even though this number shows up on Wikipedia (and its 1000 spam clones), I looked at some of the references and could not find where they claimed this number. Since it is 20,000%-50,000% (fifty thousand percent) more efficient than soybean oil, why would the latter even be considered for a second? Are we saying I could set aside 1/10 acre of my yard (the size of a garden) and produce 1000-2000 gallons of fuel a year?? That might provide all of my heating needs, gasoline needs, and electricity needs with room to spare! Where do I sign up? I'm sorry, I just find it hard to believe. But if you can find an authentic source (not Wikipedia) - and I hope you're right - please post it.
I read this post in the same accent from the movie Fargo.
Apparently, we're just now coming out of an ice age(oh... about 460 Million years ago) and according to the Illinois State Museum,
I know very few people who can think on geological time scales. I am not one of them. However after hearing all this stuff about being "short sighted", what would one call an over-reaction to bad science (i.e. the hockey-stick graph) that started the global warming "problem"? Also, wasn't there a fear of "Global Cooling" a few decades back?
The Human Race needs to get their collective head out of it's ass and start learning about the world surround it. That learning might lead to enlightenment. And, God knows what Enlightenment MIGHT lead to!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
How much gasoline was used to make your ethanol?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
and yet the Antarctic ice sheets are colder than ever and getting bigger and thicker.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/29
...so the status of Mars is pretty much irrelevant.
But yes, you're right, the sun does make you hot. Give yourself a big pat on the back.
Of course, this is the most convincing case against the current use of ethanol, and one that I often use when arguing against ethanol, but it isn't the end of the argument.
I met a guy not too long ago whose job is the development of catalysts to convert cellulose into glucose (or some sugar, at least), which is then fermented into ethanol. This is a lot more efficient, since you can use pretty much anything that grows as fuel, not just the sugary parts of plants (like corn). Through a more conservative use of renewable fertilizers and other sustainable farming practices, ethanol production is becoming both more financially viable and more environmentally helpful. So, while currently ethanol production provides only a modest positive net energy addition, the future looks bright for ethanol.
(I am sorry for the corniness and rediculousness of that last phrase, but it just seemed to roll off onto the keyboard.)
Errrr... except that another turn things might take could be ice age. Either way radical change is going to difficult.
getting thicker/bigger, not thinner/smaller
http://www.ucsc.edu/currents/01-02/01-28/antarcti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_spaghetti_mons ter
Also temperature slightly lags behind CO2
post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Maybe they are both responding to something else? 'Nuff said.
There is a nice periodic cycle with CO2 and other greenhouse gases...
Well, okay, so we're due? Is that what you're saying? It's gonna happen regardless?
Then suddenly near present times, the level of greenhouse gases shoots up by a massive level.
Well, okay. Maybe (I said maybe, okay?) every time the cycle turns up there is a sharp increase that is of too short a duration to be captured in the ice. I'm not sure that I believe they have that kind of discrimination over 600,000 years of data. For sure I don't trust anyone leaping up and saying It's done! Established fact! Proof positive! No further possible questions!
Carbon dioxide is 27% higher now than any other time over the last 650 000 years. Methane, an even stronger greenhouse gas is 130% higher.
Suppose that this is true. So greenhouse gases were at present-day levels less than a million years ago. That's not such a long geologic time, certainly there were mostly the same species around then as now, we're not talking about some Precambrian period. What caused levels to be so high then? Certainly it wasn't human industrialization.
Climate change is part of the history of the planet, we have ice ages and periods of relative warmth. When we deliberately try to alter climate, we are more likely to cause problems (assuming humans are capable of doing so) than if we let things achieve their natural equilibrium.
Peace and love, y'all
All this said though, I live in Canada and I would welcome an extra 5C from October through May.
Thing is, it's not a pure temperature increase. It's just an average. The influx of energy into the system will (and this is the more troublesome aspect of global warming) make it far more volatile. More swings of weather, more extremes. Compared to the problems of the schizophrenic weather, the extra 5 degrees celsius won't seem like such a good deal. This is also why even a few degrees increase has some major drastically bad effects, while people wouldn't exactly be going around saying "Gee! The average 2 degree increase is pretty nice, isn't it?". This average temperature increase will, for everyday means, be somewhat below the radar, it's only the effects (ice caps melting, increase in likelihood and severity of storms, etc) that are so noticable.
Plus, hey, I'm living in Canada right now too. And let me tell you, during the winter months, even an extra 5 degrees isn't really going to make a difference. On the other hand, the wishy-washy ups and downs of temperature tend to mean there is less and less snow each winter, as the likelihood of a single day which happens to be warm enough to melt it goes up. The average isn't much changed, so the cold still sucks about as much overall, but there isn't much snow to play around with. (Hell, even hot tubs just aren't the same when there isn't snow on the ground). All cold and no fun! You see the problem here?
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
However, it's not as simple as that; the technology hasn't been developed to actually farm the stuff on a commercial scale, but there are people working on that. The first test deployments are by these guys, who are using the exhaust systems from conventionally-fired power to provide nutrients for the algae and prevent the release of CO2 and NOx into the atmosphere.
But yes, in the future you might well be able to grow all the fuel for your car in your backyard.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
oh grow up. itys the aliens. just ask canada.
its a plot. methane was buried deep beneath the sea
methan hydride beds waiting of the signal when
we had ipods and cell phones.
By the same guys who largely deny there's any such thing as global warming: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.", in regards to Iraq's nonexistant weapons of mass destruction.
Well we don't want the smoking gun to be beachfront property in Utah. Even now, those same cretins who claim no proof of global warming, are thinking up ways to spin a fast buck from the disappearing arctic ice caps.
Hell, for all we know, maybe all the excess CO2 is coming from right wingers chanting denial.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
There is a good site that has details and news about current status of Global Warming http://www.climatechangesolutions.com/
What caused all the pollution thousands of years in the past to cause global warming then?
Comparing (most of) Germany to (most of) the US for transportation is silly.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Germany have these things called TRAINS?
Once you get out of the northeast corridor, most of the US has no intercity train service at all. Zip, zero.
The vast majority of cities and towns in the US (number of towns, not population) have NO public transportation at all. Zip, zero.
In most US cities the public transportation is essentially useless if, for example, you're going from one suburb to another. For lots of people a car is simply a necessity. (And don't tell people to "just live where you work." You don't control where you work; you work where you can find a job. If you get laid off, the chances of finding another job hearby (unless you live in the city center) are slim.
Now, we as a society brought a lot of this upon ourselves by societal decisions, so we have some responsibility for creating this situation. But it's a problem that has to be solved at the societal level.
Telling an individual to FIND another way to get around only works if there IS another way to get around.
in recent times, the cycle is destroyed and there is a sudden upsurge in C02 levels near present times. It is very clearly anonomalous.
See a graph of just how anomalous it is at townplan.org/CO2.htm
It doesn't gradually increase. As I said in other posts, the results show a clear cycle in greenhouse gas levels and temperatures. This is the natural cycle. Then close to the present time, there is a massive almost delta-function like spike in the greenhouse gas levels that elevate the gas levels far beyond any other point in the graph. It's so sharp it's practically vertical. And the delta function occurs in all three gases measured (CO2, methane, nitrous oxide). There are no similar events in any of the other results from the last 650 000 years. There are other spikes but they are a magnitude smaller and occur over a longer time scale.
The study notes that the amount of CO2 "is 27% higher now than any other time over the last 650 000 years. Methane, an even stronger greenhouse gas is 130% higher." It fails to mention that CO2 is merely 0.03 percent of all atmospheric gases. So I guess that it has rocketed up from 0.023622047 percent. This is why the enviro-fearmongers like to talk about tons of carbon produced--sounds bigger and scarier. Yet they can't account for the carbon cycle in nature.
Every time they publish a sloppy paper like this as a press release rather than in a peer-review journal, they lose credibility with the very people they should be convincing: Those educated enough to differentiate crap science from real science)
Link: Wikipedia on Atmospheric gases
---
why spend for no 'monetary' gain when you could create vast stretches of aquaculture, produce unfathomable yields of bio oil, and put fossil fuel consumption into a much needed early grave? all while making trillions of dollars, and creating millions of jobs... bio fuel is the way to go, even after the energy consumed refining it the percentage of energy yeild far exceeds photovotaics. not to mention bio oil is easier to stockpile and ship than electricity.
All the energy we consume (except atomic) came at one point from the sun, so if methods exist to increase how much energy we can extract from the sun (and they do, by several orders of magnatude) then we should easily be able to beat this problem, people just need the conviction to commit to the change that needs to happen.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
If you're really interested in what people who know what they're talking about on this issue have to say do the research. One place already mentioned by other posters is http://www.realclimate.org/ and another is http://www.begbroke.ox.ac.uk/begbroke/Display/page /Climate.Basics.html which is the Oxford University site Climate Basics. RealClimate includes information on pretty much every objection that some of the people here have posted. They also explain a lot of the misinformation that's out there and also take suggestions on subjects to post about. It's definitely interesting to see here how many technically knowledgable people aren't really scientifically literate.
From one of the research papers (deltaD is what they use to measure temperature BTW):
The coupling of CO2 and {delta}D is strong. The overall correlation between CO2 data and Antarctic temperature during the time period of 390 to 650 kyr B.P. is r2 = 0.71. Taking into account only the period 430 to 650 kyr B.P., where amplitudes of deuterium and CO2 are smaller, the correlation is r2 = 0.57. Corrections for changes in the temperature and {delta}D of the water vapor source, which also affect {delta}D of the ice, have not been made yet. The strong coupling of CO2 to Antarctic temperature confirms earlier observations for the last glacial termination (9) and the past four glacial cycles (7) and supports the hypothesis that the Southern Ocean played an important role in causing CO2 variations.
Looking at their figures, there include data from the Vostok ice core which overs 0-415kyr BP and the correlation between CO2 levels and temperature is r2=0.7.
And how do you plan to feed the millions of people who will starve when the economy goes to shit because transportation of goods will become prohibitively expensive?
How about focusing on electric transportation and alternative energy rather than tax-starving the populace of energy?
With the amount of money we spent on Iraq we EASILY could have had a power satellite system up and running at this point. BILLIONS, going on TRILLIONS of dollars have gone into that catastrophe for no good reason, and we could have spent the money MUCH better on something that could actually free us from dependency on fossil fuels.
How about re-prioritization rather than telling people to go back to the Stone Age?
+++ATH0
222 billion. My mistake.
Because, you know, we couldn't have invested 222 billion dollars in alternative energy.
+++ATH0
One gallon of diesel has 135000 Btu of energy, or 142 MJ. 10,000 gallons is 1.42 TJ. One acre is roughly 4046 square meters. So (presumably you're talking about annual yields here), each square meter of land will be producing roughly 350 MJ per year.
Peak solar power at sea level is 1 kW/m^2. Let's make the totally unrealistic assumption that the sun shines at peak brightness for an average of eight hours a day, no clouds or anything. That makes 28.8 MJ of solar input energy per day.
Huh. I'm rather stunned. Sure, it bespeaks a significantly impressive efficiency on the part of the algae, but there's likely no perpetual-motion tomfoolery here. Man, I'm going to grow a tank of greasy algae in my backyard!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The hurricane season officially ends November 30th.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Wait, I can get more precise. Average values have been shown to be around 125 to 375 W/m^2. So, guessing an average of 250, we can get 7.2 MJ per day. Since algae doesn't care about seasons or anything like that, we can multiply that by the 365 days in a year to get 2.6 GJ per year.
So, the algae has to be around 13.3% efficient to get an energy yield of 10,000 gallons of diesel per acre. I have no idea if that efficiency is plausible or not.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
What bothers me is the folks who cannot accept that the answer is somewhere in between, it has to be a total disaster scenario or complete denial.
OK, heres the truth. Like most truth, people probably can't handle it, but what the heck.
Humans have an effect on the environment, but it's not that big of a deal, but some interests have seized on this and truned it into an emotional knee-jerk excuse to microregulate every industry on the planent. So now all these industries, are saying get lost, everything's perfect. And the people on the otherside who are trying to controll these industries are saying everything's gonna be dead next year, soaked in a big toxic stew.
If you took away 95% of the freebie funding, and 95% of the BS regulations out of the picture - you'd be amazed at how honest people would suddenly become. Untill then, there isn't a chance in hell - so get used to it.
You know, greenhouse gasses have also increased dramatically since citizens have been represented in government. Maybe we should do away with that, too.
I'm someone who does indeed believe the science behind global warming studies, but still it ought to be pointed out that the "since the Industrial Revolution" part is the scientists taking a bit of freedom with how they spin the results.
There is no increase in greenhouse gases.
There is no gasoline shortage, though gasoline prices need to go up to stimulate a healthy economy.
Smoking does not cause cancer.
Outsourcing is necessary to stimulate a healthy U.S. economy.
There are WMDs in Iraq; we just haven't found where those fanatics hid them.
Our twice-elected-by-the-good-Christian-people-of-Amer ica, George W. Bush, said so, and that's good enough for me!
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Instead of taxing gasoline, they should increase registration fees, tax unnecessary supersized vehicles with supersized engines and offer registration fee reductions for low emission, high efficiency, well-maintained, etc. vehicles down to (or even below) current rates. This way, people with average cars could work their way around the registration hikes/taxes by keeping their vehicles in perfect working order and by opting for more fuel-efficient and low-emission vehicles in the future. Many places already do things along those lines, some even go as far as offering subventions and tax deductions for hybrids. Taxing gasoline would do all the things you suggest, much more simply, much more fairly, and much more effectively. Why have the government have a billion-and-two regulations for which vehicle gets what tax or registration fee, when you can just tax gasoline, which forces people to pay in direct proportion to how much they pollute? Your proposed system is completely arbitrary - someone who drives a decently fuel-effecient vehicle hundreds of miles per week pays nothing, while someone who owns the "wrong" vehicle may drive only fifty miles per week but pays through the @$$, even though he or she is polluting far less.
If you are concerned about the poor, the situation can be handled with a fuel credit equal to the average value that people put in each year. For example, a typical person driving 12k miles per year at 20 mpg uses 600 gallons. Let's say we implement a $1/gallon tax, but give a $600 tax rebate. This is approximately tax neutral, but slams gas hogs and rewards those are frugal. It encourages everyone, rich and poor alike, to conserve. It also does not harm the poor. as most will find a way to come out ahead, and the gas hogs who don't are SOL.
A gasoline tax is quite close to economically efficient, and fairly taxes everyone in direct proportion to the problem they create. It is both fair and effective. Arbitrary regulations and cut-offs, such as you suggest, are neither.
Maybe if he did something useful with his four years, instead of lit-crit or queer studies, he'd have a real job.
--ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
The fact that the earth hasn't seen levels like this in half a million years is like stating that it will never snow because the last three days has been 20 degrees celcius. Half a million year is nothing on a timescale measured in billions of years. What is interesting in the article however is that we see a shift from blaming carbon dioxide to blaming methane. This is done because a lot of evidence has been accumulated that contradict the doomsday scenarios of climate change caused by CO2. This is basically another article that is aimed at increasing funding for research into a change that is quite natural and has occurred over and over again for a long long time.
It is closer to ten thousand. One after the other, the same general conclusion. Have you ever even read Nature or something similar? There is practically no debate about the following two points in the scientific community:
1: The climate is warming
2: Human activity is a major contributor to the warming
The information is out there.
The contemporary scenario for global warming is a new ice age, you know.
One of the great temperature regulators for Planet Earth is the Thermo-Haline Current, which originates in the North Atlantic. An increased rate of polar icecap melting MAY dilute and weaken the brine that drives this conveyor belt, effectively stopping it. Now, this conveyor belt works its' way through the bottom of the ocean, south to the tip of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, then makes a vertical u-turn in the Pacific off the coast of China, then back to the North Atlantic through the surface of the ocean.
In a nutshell, the Thermo-Haline Current takes cold water south via the bottom of the ocean and warm water north via the surface. If we manage to disrrupt this current, there goes temperature distribution and boom!, the Northern Hemisphere will freeze up, and who knows how long it would take to kick-start the current again.
Current models effectively predict the above scenario. However, I have a question I've never read or heard mentioned: Wouldn't the lack of temperature distribution also make tropical water much, much warmer? Will we have to start getting familiar with categories 6 and 7 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale? Maybe even a year-round hurricane season?
My god, what a morbid yet fascinating mess.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Before OPEC embargo, very few 4 cylinder cars offered for sale in the US, and less adoption. I remember seeing VWs, simcas and some renaults, and a few datsuns, etc and not many of them compared to other cars. After OPEC, 4 cylinders got sold, developed, talked about, used, whatever and it *stuck* to this day, it has become common, just about every manufacturer now sells models with 4 cylinders and good mileage.. they suck more to work on this is true, but still, you can get them. Now to work on the fuel they burn..biofuels, start with blends, work up.
We got the lightweight 4 cylinder pickup out of it as well for that matter. That didn't even exist before then IIRC, closest you could get was a full sized with a 6 cylinder. Before OPEC, solar arrays were fantastically non existent except for very limited research projects and use in space etc. some few perivate folks had them but not too many. Since then a slow but sure climb, year after year, now there's an actual shortage of PV panels on the market, even with a slew of manufacturers. Wind chargers, the same,(after a small but intense period in the early 20th century that fizzled) now they are the fastest growing method of commercially produced grid electricity around the planet. More wind by the megawatt going in then anything else. I'd call that fairly significant. Yes, it's a long time, because we are living it, but historically it's short. We as a society can change radically in a short time, as long as the shock or kick in the butt isn't permanent. A little wake up call now and then is good, but a permanet borking of the economy isn't, because then there isn't enough to MAKE the cool new stuff. Catch 22.
I remember when there really were not that many computers, mostly some large mainframes. Then hobbiest computers and build your own kits hit, then the first commercial "home" computers, then the apple and pc revolution seriously kicked it in gear, now-they are as common as televisions, and we are so many evolutions down the road that now we have antique personal computers. It didn't happen in two years, but 20-30? Bam, done deal, society is completely changed in one generation. Yes, personally I would have liked to see it happen much faster, but so it goes... Sure, stuff is doable on mass scales then,when the time is right, stuff just happens. Give society an incentive because it's practical, you'll get a lot of interest and some early adoption (stage we are just leaving now, IMO). When the interest increases demand enough to where economies of scale kick in, then you'll get mass adoption (the stage we are just entering now).
What with all the manufacturing layoffs announced lately, someone is going to bingo to the fact that building wind chargers in particular is not all that hard, and we might see some really large factories switching over. Going from hybrids as we have them being sold now to plug-in hybrids is a relatively easy step, that could possibly take advantage of the wind chargers going in perhaps, and the interest in solar PV combined with the mature market now and the recently passed tax incentives is accelerating there as well. Instead of taxing fuel more, they eliminated in a way and offered a tax credit on the alternatives. Which is a much better choice if you ask me, given that government will always be bound and determined to "do something", I'd rather have them err on the side of leaving me and you with more cash in our wallets to do what we think is cool..
One thing leads to another. Maybe someone with some juice in some large corporation facing loss of business in one direction might even read this and get inspired. Or perhaps a big union guy facing a lot of his brethren out of work soon. People get to thinkin'... Ya never know, but humans have a habit of rising to the "build stuff and use it" challenge pretty readily when the time is right. We always have anyway...
I dunno man, I think we are a poorer society without our philosophers. I was looking back at the archives at my uni, and they had old records from philosophers., that families used to sit around the phonogram and listen to. I suspect we'd be a lot more thoughtful society if people still revered philosophers like they used to.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
glass bottles are usually sorted by color, crushed and re-made, even when "recycled". It is usually cheaper than sorting, shipping, and cleaning the bottles.
and no, this isn't as much of a troll as you might think....
but who were the evil greenhouse gas polluters who raised the temperature of the earth so high half a million years ago?
I once saw someone call Bush a genius. Apparently this comment comes from the same alternate universe, where the word insightful is a synonym for "fucking idiotic."
As others have said, antarctica used to be in the fucking TROPICS.
Jesus fucking christ.
This space available.
Yup. Don't care. As the enviroment increases to get warmer the areas of the earth that will be effected the most will be the temperate mid bands of the planet, and that means The good U S of A and Europe will be hit the most. Fry em up. Temperature shft will effect us canadians less, and in some cases it help open up new land for usage. Stick another Yank on the Barbie. Just remind them that the US didnt want to help with the problem, and now thye can live with the consequences. Declining abilty to grow their own food, cities not having the power needed to run all those air conditioners.... Mother nature will take out on us. And if we do go to far, well, we will all die out, and the cockroaches can take a shot at running the place.
While it can't really be argued that global warming is not happening, or that human activity is the cause of it, the question is then: what now? Not everyone believes that global warming is a bad thing, overall. But if you think so, the cure to global warming is really simple, in principle: stop consuming so much. It is industry, after all, that contributes much of the greenhouse gasses. However, how many in this crowd can stop buying and using technology items? And, if you did so, what would happen to the economy? It would likely collapse. Now consider that, as it is often said elsewhere, that poverty is actually the greatest destroyer of environment, and consider the entire worlds population living in that condition. Which is worse? Frankly, I think the evidence is strong that global warming is happening, and that human industrial activity and modern lifestyles contribute to it. But what is the alternative? If the US Government spent a billion dollars to "do something", would it really help? Would it even have dent on global production? Six billion people are bound to have an impact, no matter what you do, and no matter how much taxpayer money you want spend on it. Perhaps we will just have to learn to live with and adapt to it. After all, change is a normal part of the universe and we are part of it.
--
The early bird catches the worm. The worm that sleeps late lives to see another day.
Well, you have illustrated the academic equivalent of the difference between Michael Jordan and the kids playing basketball at my local park. There is still room at the top for a few superstar philosophers to make a living from books and tapes and lectures, even if they may not call themselves philosophers. Deepak Chopra and Stephen Hawking and George Lucas are philosophers, after a fashion. But there's no way every holder of a Philosophy B.A. can make a living in his chosen field.
I suspect we'd be a lot more thoughtful society if people still revered philosophers like they used to.
Philosophers have inflicted a good deal of misery on the human race, too. I'm sure Hitler and Lenin and Pol Pot considered themselves philosophers.
I'm with William F. Buckley; I'd prefer to be governed by a hundred names picked at random from the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Some scientists are always saying things like humans have been around for one million years, and that's just a blip in the timeline of the Earth or universe. Those comments are just meant to show how tiny and insignificant man is.
But when it comes to global warming... oh, no! 5,000 years is suddenly significant. 650,000 years is suddenly a huge stretch of time that, without a doubt, shows their conclusion.
Ok, so various levels are at the highest in x thousands of years. Well, we weren't around x thousands of years ago, so why were they high then? Maybe the same reason they are now?
...." That means they were at these levels before, and clearly the earth survived.
Not that I don't think we contribute to the polution of this planet, but I would be more concerned if they said "The highest levels EVER" rather than "The highest levels in
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I suppose you could call it Ad hominem, except that it fallaciously slanders the argument without basis instead of the person making the argument. Perhaps we've stumbled on a whole new branch in the study of logical fallacies.
Only time, and /., can tell.
-Vendal Thornheart
Past climate changes responsible for Humanity.
Global dimming might have been what caused the temperature not to rise in the middle of last century, We didn't really care to remove all particles and other stuff at that time. The sunlight don't get through, but it's still getting warmer....strange.
MOD PARENT FUNNY. Obviously this is a clever variation on the old joke that US math education is in crisis because 50% of the students perform below average.
There is no question that certain groups would bear the brunt of an increased gas tax over other groups, and that being sort of a poll tax, is regressive. However, charging people for the externalities resulting from their actions is one of the few ways to make the "invisible hand" work in the real world. Reducing carbon emissions has some economic impact--unquestionably true. However, when the economic cost of having to switch to less desirable oil sources such as shale oil as reserves are depleted, as well as an ecological catastrophe caused by global warming, will be staggeringly high, and while we may not live to pay it, our descendants most definitely will. If we in the USA will not make the slightest reduction in our fuel consumption, how can we possibly tell China not to burn coal like there's no tomorrow? Oh wait, I forgot, our foreign policy is being run by a bunch of short-sighted, ignorant maniacs who've pissed away all our foreign political capital, after the previous administration sold our sovereignty to help enrich multinational corporations. I guess it doesn't matter then. Carry on. Be happy.
Scientists find that applied science and scientists caused global warming.
The eruption of Mt. St. Helens released more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than humans have since the beginning of the industrial revolution. I think the best thing to do for our earth is to cool down it's core so it stops producing lava and 'sploding mountains.
or else!
Your calculations show that 0.01% of the atmosphere is CO2. Hence you argue, it is impossible for a 27% increase in the CO2 levels to affect anything. 0.004% of the human body is iron. So the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere is 250 times the percentage of iron in the human body. http://www.britannica.com/ebi/article-202929 Using your reasoning, I guess iron has absolutely no effect on the human body and is just there as filler eh? 20grams is 0.03% of the weight of a 60kg man. Yet, the lethal human dose for arsenic is 20g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic 50mg is 0.000083% the weight of a 60kg man. Yet, the lethal human dose for hydrogen cyanide is 50mg. If it is inhaled, concentrations of 300 parts per million is all that is needed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanide
Will the two-thirds of the population that live near the coasts do us in the mountains a favor and please stay where you are and drown?
http://www.iceagenow.com/QandA.htm
Yeah thats really smart. Make gas $6 a gallon so people already hurt by the poor economy the US is experiencing can be hurt even more.
Or maybe they'll get new and better jobs from all the high-mileage cars, energy conserving factories and homes, and public transit that would have to be be built in response.
In any case, the economy won't be hurt as badly as global warming will hurt it.
For the record, I am very environmentally minded, but the fact is that people will drive no matter what the price is. We pay around $2.50 avg around the country (not an exact figure, just estimating for sake of argument) and no one takes the bus to work.
Obviously, at $1000/gallon, people couldn't afford to drive, so there must be some point in between when they stop driving. Furthermore, it's a non-linear response and it has a built-in hysteresis, so the fact that currently, changes in price seem to influence behavior fairly little doesn't mean it's difficult to influence behavior that way. At European price levels, SUVs definitely become unattractive and people don't buy them.
Of course, there are other things one can do to get people to switch: reduce parking in the cities, make roads smaller, and collect more highway tolls. Those steps make driving less attractive, public transit more attractive, and cause people to buy smaller cars if they do drive.
Incidentally, the climate is also non-linear and with a built-in hysteresis: at some point, only adding a little more CO2 to the atmosphere may cause rapid and strong global climate changes, and they may not be reversible by reducing CO2 (quite apart from the fact that it takes centuries to reduce atmospheric CO2 appreciably since it has a long half-life).
So, both on the economy and on the climate, people like you are making the wrong assumptions: you think it has a linear, continuous response, and that you can simply extrapolate from current observations, but the fact is: you can't.
And besides, we're going to run out of oil in the next 100 years anyway, and the earth will balance itself out and go back to equilibrium, and everyone will be happy (except for the oil companaies).
More likely, half the people will be dead, the economy will be in ruins, there will be billions of refugees, and coastal cities will be flooded.
You really don't grasp the seriousness of the situation. If we convert all the fossil fuel into atmospheric CO2, really bad things will happen.
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People who stick their heads in the sand have a tendency to expose vital body parts to abuse...
The Native Peoples that live above the Arctic Circle have been doing so for 7,000 years. They have over 200 words for snow, but none to describe the emerging climate there. They are learning the meaning of the terms "global warming" and "environmental disaster" first hand.
Let me be the first to thrust my virtual boot firmly up your virtual backside...
Since it looks like the Moon will be far too dangerous a place to live until it is completely paved over (current Moon dust == silicosous(sic) article), we need to find a way to live here on Earth without the heavy-footed environmental impact we are making today.
Denial will not change what is happening, any more than that of a 4 year old's temper tantrum.
You can't hope for a government that considers "intelligent" design as a self-proven scientific theory. Global warming to them is just a punishment from God unhappy because not enough oil states are being invaded.
God bless America and the separation of church and state.
give me a break !
you are running out of fuel ?
you american people are running the world out of fuel with those eight-bangers.
that dubbya guy kicked the kyoto protocols out of the window, and you folks expect
any kind of understanding from the rest of the world ?
glad the hybrid cars are catching on, but stop beeing moronic about fuel pricing -
no one will be environmentally inclined at 2.50 bucks per gal.
where i live, we currently pay fraggin 8 dollars per gallon, 6.5 for diesel. people start thinking
about how to avoid driving. and here is a broken public transportation over here,
but people have no way but use it. or move a couple of miles closer. towns missing
to install pubtrans get serious impact on tax-budget over the years.
so why not use the 4 bucks per gal from everyone and install pubtrans ?
you could for one use a bus to get to work, that doesn`t even need railroad tracks.
a bit of car-sharing would also do good - last time i was to ft. lauderdale, FL, we where
the only people using the "more than one person" line on the 1 to miami - cannot believe
how people can be that stupid.
i am not tree-hugging, but a bit of sense would do you all good, before the next dubbya
bombs some country for fuelprices and possibly gets ahoisted by his own export-nuke-petards. have you ever noted that the u.s. of a. use about one third of the worlds gasoline
by themselves, but do have significantly less population than one third ?
you guys are burning gas that should be improving life in the 3rd world.
at some point i`ld rather see cockroaches take over the world, they are much more
resourceful than humans, and have a lot kinder social system.
go www.vhemt.org if you think you know about ecology.
and besides, we`re gonna be at war for fuel in 1992 anyway... 100 years - yo kiddin.
We over here in good old Europe knew that climate change was "manmade" for about some decades. really, in the begining of the 90ties I heard the disscusion about climate change on TV. Funny, this is posted as some "breaking news" here, because in Europe it is a "consensus". Oh, and it is really tragic, that in the US of A, which is with 25% by far the worlds biggest "producer" of CO2, the climate change is seen as a myth. Thanks for killing the planet, enjoy your SUV - as long as it is still possible.
I don't begin to understand how "Climate change" comes about or how the mechanisms work or if in fact it is steerable.
g roundsource_heatpumps.cfm#efficiency
can we alter our environment? yes appears to be the answer every land area which isn't subject to extremes of cold or heat or dryness seems to have been modified by man.
from farming to industrial plants, we seem to have modified the planet whereever we live and that mostly is everywhere.
I am not judging the implications of these changes just stating the obvious.
Can we alter global forces, with our small contributions?
Well if you think of a car a tiny amount of input from us
to the steering wheel will alter its direction. The vast forces within the car are controlled by our small input.
we don't really put much in do we, but its undeniable the small contribution of the driver is magnified.
Look at where we are people, in a near perfect orbit of the sun closer its too hot further away its too cold. we have an abundance of water and near perfect conditions for life. We are lottery winners! It's a fluke.
The Earth is a dynamic system a lot of interactions going on we don't comprehend well enough.
So far we have been lucky the balance of forces has been in our favour making this planet habitable. nobodys at the controls steering.
I would suggest that man has been fairly ineffectual for most of our species existance. mostly we have worked alongside the natural balance and have been lucky (less of us too).
it's only in the last couple of 100 years we have harnessed energy from our environment and put it too work and made it portable.
we are now big energy consumers and the rest of the world wants to be too.
I think we are influencing the direction of the balance of forces on this planet. just like the movement of your little finger on the steering wheel of a car will change the direction of a car.
However I think that at present we are driving the car blindfolded- we don't know what the results will be.
I don't think arguing that we control this tiny % of the environmental forces so we don't have an affect is more than a comforter to a child , just makes us feel better.
The day after tomorrow is going to be outside our lifetimes (hopefully) so its not really our problem?
The balance of the worlds forces has made this planet habitable so if we minimise our influence we should be ok
it hasn't crashed yet (or has it maybe thats why the dinosaurs went extinct).
thats not a certainty either.
I think right now we are just about at a stage where investigation and modeling of the realworld is possible -certainly 50 years ago it wasn't and I think we might find answers within this century.
in the mean time can we upset the dynamic balance, its possible certainly. Should we actively be seeking to minimise our impact now and hope the natural balance keeps going till we know enough?
Seems like a plan to me.
Finally something to think about.
http://www.eere.energy.gov/femp/technologies/eep_
Heat exchangers seem to be very efficient. I have seen sites claiming over 100% efficiency that is the enegy moved to where its wanted is far greater than the energy to move it.
Seems like this could be a great way to have our energy and reduce our enviromental impact.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
1. one does not exclude the other - the wide spread of fungus may be due to climate change - warmer and wetter seasons.
....
2 60% is between 35% and 70%
So I do not see your point
" However, should Wikipedia reproduce a political POV in a scientific article? -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_fo r_comment/William_M._Connolley"
Would Britannica make such a mistake?
"Interestingly enough Mr Hieb gets a lot of attention in the blogosphere. It's interesting because he doesn't have any weight to what he says; he just says what people want to hear. People such as yourself. You want humanity to have had no effect on global warming so you selectively quote people who say what you wish were true. It doesn't matter who they are, or how wrong they are, as long as they say exactly what you want to hear.
It's almost like a religion."
Linux good, Windows bad.
I can't help wonder why you think 650,000 years is relevant to your argument. This is just another part of the same point that a previous poster tried to make before you responded. It's frustrating to see you build up all this steam and then indicate that, well, actually it *has* happened before. You don't explicitly say it, but you say it nonetheless.
Is it possible that we simply don't have data from before then? If so, then that's a little like sticking the dipstick in till it just touches oil, drawing it back out, and stating that the car needs more oil. Pardon the awkward metaphor.
I also think that there are better ways of propelling our selves and our goods around the planet. I believe there are more effective methods of living that acknowledge our responsibility to our environment. But... what if this *is* a pattern and no matter how conscientious we are, it's going to happen and life on earth as we know it is doomed anyway?
...That hydrogen fueled cars are superior to gasoline cars. Perhaps it will be the day after tommorrow.
\
28.8MJ/day is 10,512MJ/year. 10,512 is more than 350. sorry.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Have you noticed the recent ad campaigns of the oil companies? ... oil products that they sell.
I've seen ads by Shell, BP, Chevron, Esso - all on the same topic - "We care about the environment and we are looking into better solutions".
Indeed, oil companies SHOULD and CAN invest in research for new, clean sources of energy, but in the short term, what these ads do is boost the company image and increase sales of
I've worked in an oil company and know that clean fuel is cool, but nothing fills the bank accounts like a cool 100.000 metric tons oil tanker.
There is a phenomenon called global dimming, which is basically about reduced sunlight on the surface of Earth due to particles in the atmosphere absorbing incoming sunlight. Reduced sunlight means lower temperatures. As filtering has become more common, the amount of small particles getting into the atmosphere has reduced. Global dimming has therefore slowed down, leading to faster global warming.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
"The time is right for a true people's hybrid vehicle. The web is peppered with how-to sites for converting your old car into an electric vehicle, but why not develop SourceForge-style documentation for an open source hybrid?"
http://www.makezine.com/01/car/
which nobody will want to hear is that the number of inhabitants on this planet must be reduced. For example, the ecologically sustainable population for the US is only about 110M and we're pushing towards 300M now. I have no idea what the numbers for China and India are but I'm quite certain they are way over their sustainable levels too. Very probably the whole planet is out of whack.
So, zero population growth is not sufficient. The population must be reduced. And dramatically. Maybe the avian flu can help us out since humans on their own seem incapable of doing so.
Who said anything about this being an argument *for* global warming and the connection with CO2 levels? I was replying to a comment whose sole reasons for dismissing that the rises in CO2 have any effect whatsoever with world climate because CO2 only forms a small fraction of the atmosphere and hence there can't be any significant effect whatsoever. I was trying to point out the problems in his/her argument, not prove anything. There *is* a difference between the two things you know.
1. CO2 levels up 27% over a long period of time...the same period of time where the population of humanity increased x000%. Seems to me that a human population increase so drastic would have caused a bigger impact on CO2 levels since our lungs produce it. And that's before taking into account the industrial revolution.
2. Methane levels up 130%. So stop farting. But seriously, what caused this? cows? industry?
3. Study claims that greenhouse gasses increased dramatically in the past 1000 years than any time before (back to 650000 years). Isn't the industrial revolution only about 150 years old?
Committing treason is an impeachable offense.Lying to Congress in the hopes they will permit your war action (due to that little document called the Constitution, the president cannot go to war without the formal approval of Congress) is treason. George Bush is a traitor.
I am NOT a fan of Bush, I did NOT vote for him, we'd be in a hell of a lot better a situation if he were never in the White House...but he has never committed treason. Treason is specifically defined in the Constitution, Article II, Section 3: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort."
Again, BushCo has done some very very nasty things, and is no doubt one of the worst administrations in the history of the country, and again, it would make me very happy to see them gone, but you can't nail them on treason. Morally...yeah, it is treason, "a betrayal of trust or confidence." Legally...no. I have no doubt there's an impeachable offense, at least in this case (I may hate Bush but I'm not naive, he's not the first president to lie to Congress), but there's nothing been done that's treasonous by the extremely narrow definition under US law.
(Yes, I realize somebody will say the necons are the true enemies of America and therefore BushCo is aiding and comforting them, but that ain't gonna fly legally. Shady, very bad for the country, but not enemies.)
((As usual, IANAL, if anybody who is would like to correct me, much appreciated))
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
...just more intricate than most people are willing to consider.
It's practically the core programming of evolution that every species has a drive to breed, expand, and spread itself. Aside from lemmings (who may have been stampeded over the cliff by Disney dudes anyway) there seems to be no limit to this drive aside from external forces like environment and predation.
So we have humans. 5 BILLION of them. That would be a fairly high population for any animal, but then add that every handful of them has a FIRE going, 24 hours a day. (Sure, in "civilized" countries few of us have cooking fires going, but we do have a boiler, a car, and a power generation facility running for our benefit somewhere...).
Heat in the system increases. Ya think?
But my question really is, SO WHAT?
Oh noes! Humans might be heating the atmosphere and making it warmer! Who's going to suffer? HUMANS. Sounds very karmic to me. Florida's going to be flooded? I'm sure the alligators are laughing it up, as are the migratory bird population. Yes, our prices are going to go up, millions more may die in more significant weather events. Cities placed on marginal land (like, oh, I don't know - say ones built in a SWAMP, between a major, shifting river, a huge lake, and the ocean) will eventually be wiped away.
But the climate of earth is dynamic. It's never been static, and it's never going to be static. Humans are what, 3 to 4 million years on this planet? Did it ever occur to anyone that we may have blossomed in a climate that was, briefly, particularly mild and hospitable? And that may have in itself been a transient event, a long one, but still transient?
Humanity is like any other species. They expand like a cancer until they breach the carrying capacity of the environment or become the subject of a new predator. Surprise, it's happeneing to us. So why do the environmentalists think we're somehow "special" and that the course of species development should be different for us?
-Styopa
..is that the studie also shows that the rise of temperature comes BEFORE the rise of CO2 !!
Which of course means that the rise of CO2 CANNOT be the cause of the rise of temperature.
Mundus Vult Decipi
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Last time I read the comments on a global warming story on slashdot, all the replies were from people in .us, basically claiming that global warming was a european plot to destabilise the US economy.
I even heard someone from the Bush administration on the radio claiming that this was pretty much a conspiracy by European goverments, who were able to do this because "European scientists are not independent - they are government funded".
This position was supported by quite a few US scientists who quite categorically denied global warming, or at least claimed it was natural.
So, now the evidence is pretty conclusive, what do all the gainsayers think? If our government funded scientists were in fact right, doesn't that make your corporate funded ones wrong? And why were they wrong? Are they perhaps, *shock* not independent? They are, after all, dependent on corporate dollars.
Essentially none. Gas is not used in the main tractors anymore (diesel is more efficient), is not an ingredient in fertilizer (though some is made from oil), not is it used in distillation (natural gas, coal, or methane - more on this latter).
Ethanol production is energy positive. New factories get about a 1.67:1 energy in/energy out ratio when all factors are properly added in. (One "researcher" from California can't add the right numbers though, so he doesn't get this one) Much better ratios have been achieved in the lab, but they are not ready for production yet.
Did you notice I mentioned methane as a fuel for distillation? Still experimental, but it shows great promise - you locate the ethanol plant next to a beef feedlot, feed the waste from the cattle, then take the waste (manure) from the cattle and turn it into methane, which fuels the distillation. Really cool process and I'd like to see more of it.
Biodiesel (Up to 5% in unmodified old diesel engine, up to 30% in regular modern diesel engine)
(It's much more easy than you think for a gaz company to start selling such stuffs.
If they haven't done yet, it's just because they don't have the incentive.
But in europe, since the gaz prices have risen, every gaz company is mad about trying to introduce such mixture,
because cutting the price by mixing some cheap and none taxed ecological stuff helps them to cut price to an competitivly interesting level.)
(and stopping to beleive such urban legends as "Accidents are more deadly if you drive in a small car when everybody else around is driving SUVs". It's just plain wrong. SUVs are dangerous to pedestrians, not to other cars)
All people need is an incentive. Bigger taxes on gaz, and taxes on cars based on their fuel efficiency, will encourage them to start thinking. Reports about what was the CO2 level half a million years ago won't.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This is exactly the sort of thing I mean.
- It doesn't matter that there were no major health issues caused by Three Mile Island. It is still the primary reason for the souring of opinion toward nuclear power in the US because it was a mistake that nearly ended in disaster.
- It still exhibits the fundamental problem of nuclear power: one mistake and you're done. People do not believe it is wise to try to operate a facility with those kinds of tolerances.
- Something can be very safe, and still be considered too dangerous to use.
- For example, we don't use hydrogen in lighter-than-air vehicles anymore. It can be done safely for significantly less money than helium, and there were very few accidents. But you make a little mistake and "Oh the humanity!".
- It doesn't really matter that you only have a 1 in 6 chance of death in Russian Roulette. Eventually, you get a bad pull.
- And the truth is that no other form of energy can have such a long-lasting or damaging disaster.
- Hydroelectric dams come close, but you don't have to deal with millions of acres of radioactive land, just death and mud.
-- MarkusQSo the facts don't matter, the scare story is what counts. You do realize, of course, that almost anything that happens could be characterized as having "nearly ended in disaster" if you're willing to play fast and loose with the facts. So all you're really saying here is that the scare stories worked, which was my point.
Do these people by any chance drive cars? Because, you know, one mistake while you're driving and you're done. Same thing with using a fork.
Do you mean that people can (incorrectly) decide--or be persuaded--that something is too dangerous even though it is in fact safe? Or are you mired in some sort of Orwellian double speak, where "Safety is danger"?
Excellent analogy to Chernobyl, which was after all a normal fire, not a reactor problem, and not unlike some of the accidents that we commonly see in the fossil fuel industry. The Hindenburg disaster didn't have anything to do with the hydrogen, though it was widely blamed; the fault lay with the coating applied to the fabric and the same thing would have happened if it had been filled with helium. But even though this fact has been known for years, in the public mind it will always be helium's fault.
Not at all true. If you are engaged in other, risker activities your chances of death from the Russian Roulette go down. If, as in the case of nuclear, the risks are far lower than (for example) driving a car, your chance of death isn't effected much at all.
Tell me that when your front yard is hot enough to cook a pizza--or right, we'll all be dead then, won't we. I think the scare stories of both global warming and nuclear disasters are overblown, but to say that nuclear is worse is absolutely nuts. Read about surface conditions on Venus (which is very much like Earth, except it had run-away global warming and we haven't yet).
The other thing to consider: A nuclear disaster is something that would represent the most extreme failure mode of the system, while global warming is a natural consequence of the normal operation of the fossil fuel economy.
We have millions of acres of radioactive land right now. Pretty much anywhere there's granite is radioactive, for example. It may come as a surprise to you, but we get the radioactive material we use for nuclear power by digging it out of the ground. It's been there all along, and if we don't dig it up it will simply stay there, making the ground radioactive, just as its done for billions of years.
nuclear energy is not free. you have to spend energy to mine the uranium, to build and maintain the reactors, and to store the spent nuclear fuel rods in caskets, and to transport them to yucca mountain, and to make sure they dont leak/breakup on the way.
if anyone could calm down for a while and study those energy costs, and compare them to alternatives, then i might support more nuke plants. it would be nice to know what is going on in France and what their numbers say about energy use and safety. but then you need to ask australia and khazakstan how much energy they spend mining the stuff. oh wait khazakstan is a corrupt third world country. they might simply lie to you.
furthermore, nuclear energy plants explode and contaminate wide areas. while it is true that they can be built safely, i am not sure the US government nor US industry is capable of doing this. i say this as someone who has worked for the government, whose dad worked for big Oil, and who has read a lot about the various near-accidents we have had and the various corporate negligence cases that are so common in our society.
in other words; do you really want the people who ran Enron or the various accounting-scam corporations to be in charge of something that could destroy hundreds of square miles of land for generations to come? (dont ask me, ask the wall street journal about all this corporate malfeasance, fraud, neglect, and abuse)
do you really want us to have 'energy task force meetings' with the Executive branch of government that are completely closed to the public, where the attendees from major US energy companies lie about having even been there? would they act the same with nuclear issues? ( i refer to the recent Oil company executives lying to congress about meeting with Dick Cheney )
Has anyone from three mile island, chornobyl, or the other nuclear disasters and near/disasters ever been reprimanded or punished? in our society when people screw up like that we dont like to have rich and powerful people face any consequences of their actions for things like this.
nuclear could be great but it is something we, as a society, might not be ready for it yet.
i also wonder why its OK to spend hundreds of billions of dollars studying nuclear energy over the years, but you have to beg like a dog to study wave power, tide power, geothermal, solar, wind, wind-at-sea, sea currents, etc. until the US military gets its claws out of government, it will be hard to progress on these issues.
...and saying, We're off the hook, Martha.
at least that's what an appointed panel in the California Republic (a.k.a. the Peoples Republic of California) thinks. While it's true that CO2 is emitted during the fermentation process it's also true that the vines that produce those fermenting grapes are taking in CO2 all year round. So, is wine a net polluter or not? The panel says yes but the wine growers say no.
Even if the panel gets its way it may only win the battle but ultimately lose the war. Major wineries are looking towards Nevada to produce the (fermented) finshed product and use the Californian ground to simply grow the grape. Some larger producers are even suggesting that they would bulldoze their tasting rooms in Napa, Sonoma, and elsewhere to make the land stictly agricultural leading to huge upheavals in local economies and tax bases as supporting industries lose the tourist trade (Would anyone want to go look at a bunch of vines in a field if you couldn't sample?).
So, add wine, beer, and carbonated beverages to all the things you must sacrifice to save the planet. Isn't this a wonderful time to be alive?
America, and sadly my own country Australia are well documented the worst CO2 emitters per capita.t ent/emissionsindividual.html, I'm sure you could find more up to date articles if you searched hard enough.
http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/con
There are other countries where the governments don't give a crap about the environment as you mentioned, but the size of their industry is smaller compared to the size of the populace, and the populace are also poorer and can't spend as much on big cars.
Every country is a problem, but being labeled as the main leader of the world is a double edged sword for America. Until America starts becoming environmental, the rest of the world will just say, "If America gets to pollute so much, why can't we?"
It's turtles all the way down.
For one thing, Randell Mills is a quack. He's been touting his device for the past 10 years, and has yet never gone public with it. He's also been discussed on Slashdot before. Secondly, calculus cannot possibly be wrong. It has been rigorously derived, and just because you don't know or understand the derivations doesn't make them any less true. Finally, quantum electrodynamics is the most successful theory in the history of physics. It has been verified to about 99.996% accuracy (only because our measuring devices cannot do any better than that), and has made extremely accurate, experimentally verified predictions, including (among other things) the energy levels of the hydrogen atom.
We couldn't hurt the earth if we wanted to. Make it unlivable for us, yes. Destroy it? No. And after we've killed ourselves off (either via pollution/global warming/thermonuclear war/pooping too much), there will be another species that's adapted to all of that and will prosper.
I don't know if I find that site particularly credible. For one thing, he claims that the Irish Potato Famine was caused by climate change, when in fact it was caused by a fungus.
And fungus grows well in all climates?
You can't take the sky from me...
I totally agree with you, just as a general FYI:
You can convert with the Google Calculator, it can do pretty nifty conversions.
Overly Critical Guy, I want to suggest to you that you go back and read each post you have made on this thread. You are starting to sound like a broken record. I really don't know what the sufficient amount of evidence is for you in regards to this water-vapour crap you keep spouting, but from the many replies you have received there exists copious linkage and information that sort of annihilates your Geocraft statistics page. Please, do not take this as an attack. Just go back and read what you wrote, and read the responses again. Taking them in order as I just have, I think you may agree, while it is hard to offer absolutely completely bulletproof evidence of something so complex, the observed differences are weighing very heavily against you.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So ... guilty till proven innocent?
The point of guilty until proven innocent is to default to the least injurious assumption. In crime, that means that we default to the one that doesn't ruin a man's life and that keeps the investigation of a crime going. In global warming, we should default to avoiding disaster.
Remember, if global warming people are right and we don't listen to them, the worst that can happen is a disaster that will take centuries to reverse and will lead to widespread famine from desertification in Africa and Central Asia and the loss of temperate topsoils, the irrecoverable loss of the world's biodiversity and the medicines that could come from it, the freezing of Europe due to the loss of the North Atlantic current, the flooding of most of the world's current shorelines, increased hurricanes due to longer seasonal warming of waters, increased spread of malaria due to greater tropical insect populations, vicious resource wars that will tear apart the Middle East and fray relations between all neighbors who share rivers & other water resources, diminished international trade, and diminished political capital for the USA -- the nation that consistently blocked action against fixing the problem.
If the global warming people are wrong and we listen to them, then the worst that happens is we have poured a bunch of money into more efficient use of resources & alternative energy (technologies needed for space colonization anyway) instead of all the products we could've had with our previous expenditure of energy.
Of course, a snarky soundbite just sounds so much better than actual reason.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Comment removed based on user account deletion
From the blurb: "...at a speed and magnitude that the Earth has not seen in hundreds of thousands of years."
Question, what happened hundreds of thousands of years ago when we were hunting with sticks in the Olduvai Gorge?
If the current situation is not unique, what makes anybody thing WE are the cause this time?
Clue to the "scientists" raging on against the machine, correlation does not prove causation.
Greenies follow a religion, not science. Flame on, Greenies.
...that lots of people ride the bus. I do. And when I do, I see other people who do. Some days it is so crowded that you have to wait for the next bus, where you get standing room only. Other days, its more thin. But I have never seen it empty. This bus-using trend can and will grow as the economic pressures to do so increase.
:)
And for those who simply must drive, higher gas prices will reduce joyriding, and will increase the economic incentive to develop and purchase more fuel-efficient engines, and (perhaps more importantly) alternative fuel engines. Such engines aren't very economically viable now, but the more financial incentive you put behind it, the more innovation will be put into it.
Total rubbish from an economic simpleton. Poverty kills. The more money that is deflected towards unobtainable social-engineering goals or speculative global-warming alleviation schemes, the less is spent on food aid and pharmaceutical research and education.
So, causing extinctions that deprive us of a rich source of pharmaceutical research and bringing drought to Africa mean we spend less on food aid and pharmaceutical research? Also, I do believe that the political factions (world-wide, not just in the US) that oppose global warming alleviation are those parties most interesed in ending food aid, healthcare, and education spending. The rest of your post is just blanket assertions without any concrete reasoning behind why they might be true.
Spending on global warming alleviation will not cause poverty. It will create jobs and lead to more efficient use of resources as it has in Japan, one of the world's most resource stingy economic powerhouses (by necessity). Spending on biofuels will bring money out of the hands of oil rich areas (like the Middle East and Russia) and put it in the hands of agriculturally rich areas (like the USA and South America). Spending on solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal power, will put money into power generation that needs no external fuels which I believe will inevitably become cheaper than fuel-consuming methods. Raising fuel efficiency standards on cars will eventually bring down the TCO for cars, elevating the poor in the long-term as well as reducing the harmful emissions that put a burden on the health of city dwellers (and thus on the taxpayer's wallets). Encouraging and facilitating mass transit (such as via PRT systems) may eventually eliminate the need for cars for much of the nation's poor and lead to more efficient use of resources with accompanying drops in price for energy due to decreased demand. Carbon sequestration technologies also assist in making coal a much cleaner technology that spews less mercury and radioactives than it currently does. If fusion technology finally pans out, we will be capable of feats relying on energy densities much greater than we have previously imagined. Carbon-neutral energy generation gives us a leg up on working in places where the atmosphere is at a premium such as in space or deep under the ocean.
The net benefit of attention on global warming and pollution is that our economic system may in fact become more efficient by no longer ignoring the economic effects of externalities. By no longer looking at each industry as an unconnected system whose waste outputs are not considered to have any effect on anything else, we may be able to optimize the world economy by preventing harm by one industry to another, allowing all industries to operate at a greater efficiency than they could in pretending to be completely independent agents. This is something to be embraced as much as the computerized logistics revolution of the last half of the 20th century which has increased global economic efficiency by slashing waste in supply chains.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Maybe if he did something useful with his four years, instead of lit-crit or queer studies, he'd have a real job.
I really love this post. Only gay people would ever have trouble finding work. Menial and oppresive jobs are not "real" work. If you have trouble finding work suited to your skills, it's your own fault. All in one sentence!
Masterfully done, hero! Now, about the 30,000 GM workers that just got laid off -- can you tell me where they're going to find new jobs suited for their ball-lickingly queer skills of assembling cars and trucks?
The tax money grants to study "global warming" must be drying up. Any time there is a fleury of media reports - ignited by a fleury of media releases from the people in white lab coats who hustle tax money grants - means that coffers for the welfare program for people in white lab coats is near empty.
These people in white lab coats must believe that the planet we are living on (earth) is the only planet in the solar system - and that the changes in the sun (for example) - have no realtionship to what happens here on earth. (Intelligent Design?)
Regarding the CO2 "study" - the white coats are hypothesizing that ancient air trapped in ice has less CO2 than air does now. But is that true? Did, these people actually measured the CO2 correctly in their "study" - has that been confirmed -by who? - yes/no?! A "good" scientist always plays devils advocate on their own hypothesis first - before releasing any info. Did these people do it? For example, are there other causes for the CO2 to be lower way back when (sorry Creative Design Foklks) - like diffusing into the ice over millions of years. This planet has been frozen over 98% of the time - so what's the impact on ancient climates ... and so on. In other words how many variables have been left out by this group of white lab coats (and other white coat groups)?
Or is it all about tax cash grabs by running around and shouting the "sky is falling"?!
Taxing the fuel does allow the limited option of using less fuel, not that the US urban geography is adapted to less driving right now.
Tax the vehicles by weight. It is ironic that the same people who claim status and safety of their SUV, are perfectly happy when driving a relatively small Porsche, Miata or other image, second, third childhood toy.
There is. We have hotdish potluck at the Lutheran church second tuesday of the month. Don't worry about bringing a copy of RedGreen, we have all the episodes. And yeah, turkey day was damn cold.
Sera (Minneapolis)
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
"Maybe if he did something useful with his four years, instead of lit-crit or queer studies, he'd have a real job."
Queer is a legal word now. So don't be offended. Be Happy. The landlord say your rent is due...
Have you guys heard GM is coming up with a new H2 in 2007? Fuckin sweet! I'm gonna get a parttime job so I can get the bigger engine option.
IANAClimatologist, but the main reason for the temperature drop would likely have been because of an increase in particulate matter, little itty bitty particles such as coal dust and the like, that was more common during that time period. Particulate matter had been the focus of initial anti-pollution campaigns because it was the most obvious pollutant. What was happening was that the particulate matter blocked, and still does to some extent, the full energy of the sun, thus decreasing the total energy entering the system and decreasing the temperature.
A blog about stuff.
I am from Minnesota as well, and you forgot to mention the affects on our summers. Sure it's freezing in the winter, but in the summer it's very hot and humid. For a while this past summer we had more 90 degree days than Atlanta with horrible humidity. Sure warmer winters would be nice, but warmer summers would be awful.
The US also leads the world in obesity. Anyone know the concentration per acre, and potential extraction rates we could achieve in rendering our lardasses?
Some of the discussion revolving around global warming deals with future energy sources, and in particular nuclear power. Readers might be interested to know there is a techno-thriller novel about the American nuclear power industry, written by a longtime nuclear engineer (me). It is called "Rad Decision", and is currently at RadDecision.blogspot.com. There is no cost to readers. "Rad Decision" provides an entertaining and accurate portrait of the nuclear industry today and how a nuclear accident would be handled.
"I'd like to see RAD DECISION widely read." - - Stewart Brand (Founder, Whole Earth Catalog, tech icon, futurist).
All sides of the nuclear power debate will find items to like, and dislike, within "Rad Decision". I'm not sure myself what the future of nuclear energy should be (really). What I am sure of is that we will make better decisions about our energy future if we understand what our current energy sources are. And I think that knowledge is lacking.
I hope you'll take the opportunity to look at this independent, no-cost project. You might even enjoy it.
James Aach
Author - "Rad Decision"
http://raddecision.blogspot.com/
Yet another hydrino troll. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all I've heard from Randell Mills is a lot of hype. He applied classical EM theory to the hydrogen atom, and advanced science all the way back to the 1913 Bohr atom. No wonder it 'overthrows' quantum mechanics, since that didn't come along for another 10 years or so. He keeps popping up every few years, promising clean, cheap, limitless energy if you'll just invest $10m in his company, <blink>BL@CKL1GHT P0W3R!!11!!1!!!!1</blink>. See here for more info.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
The amazing things that these scientists discover! And I thought those critters were just dumb beasts. Now I'll have to imagine a T-Rex driving about in some gosh-awful big SUV and smoking a cigar the size of a telephone pole.
For those with an undue faith in the much hyped conclusions of scientists, my point is that, if all this happened before without humans, the present cause could also be primarily natural. Read the article and you'll see that the scientists doing this research have a "cause" they're trying to prove. Never trust a scientist with a cause. We've gotten into too many messes before because scientists went hysterial--eugenics and the 'population explosion' being two more obvious examples.
--Mike Perry, Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull
If energy is absorbed, temperatures will rise -- until an equilibrium is reached in which energy is radiated from the object (the atmosphere, in this case) at the same rate at which it is absorbed. Only if the energy is reflected (i.e., if the Earth's albedo is increased) will lower temperatures result.
The author of the wikipedia article you linked understands this:
It is thought that the water droplets in clouds coalesce around the particles, resulting in the clouds consisting of a greater number of smaller droplets, which in turn makes them more reflective: bouncing more sunlight back into space.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
A lot of this whole US gas mess is exactly because the government DID consider farmers and give them tax credits for trucks and large vehicles. Then what happened? People bought the immediately cheapest vehicles of course, with expenses considered later. So now grandmas get to drive aroung in GIANT 6-wheeled soviet tank rejects because it makes them 'feel safe' (speaking from personal experience here).
A good idea would be to separate the "have to drives" from those who do not and grant tax credits accordingly.
My point was that the claimed output levels, energy-wise--10,000 gallons of diesel per year per acre--correspond to an energy output of 350 MJ per square meter per year.
I was coming at it from two angles--how much energy does the claimed process produce, and how much energy does the region supposedly producing it receive in sunlight. Since, as you point out, the sun shines a lot more than 350 MJ of energy on a given square meter per year, it's certainly plausible on an energy basis.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The problem with the conservation line of reasoning is that most people are incapable through inability or unwillingness to follow it and act upon it. Even if some sort of global movement gained momentum like the kyoto protocol there will still be America like entities ruining it for everyone. I think the only way out of this mess is to let the oil run out and for the current system to collapse and be rebuilt. So maybe we should cheer the Hummer drivers on for speeding the change along which will likely lead to a life style more in equilibrium with nature and will likely be more harmonius and pleasant. Farmers and teachers will regain their place as the corner stones of society. Lacality will mean something once again and the sort of greed flaunted brazenly by SUV drivers will be the subject of scorn instead of with adoration as it is today.
What I don't understand is what you think the motives of these scientists are?
The motives of oil companies and politicians are wll understood because the reward mechanism that drives their behaviour is well understood. But, what about the reward mechanisms inherent in science leads to you believe that scientists have a reason to distort their findings in this way?
Evidence of global warming doesn't help oil companies or politicians. No scientist gets a fat pay raise for finding and reporting evidence of global warning.
The is an alternative - The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement http://www.vhemt.org/
;) right ?
Less humans = less polution
Correlation.
Does this provide strong evidence as the summary states? I don't know what kind of correlation there is for looking at ice cores (I'm assuming I haven't RTFA) and world events. What kind of correlation can we expect from these observations? I like science and all, but blaming it all on humanity is a little too sensational for my critical thinking processes.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
We have off road diesel in a similar lesser taxed manner but it is only for off road use. None of the road trucks can use it legally from in any manner, from the farm through all the various middlemen to the dinner table. and no other tradesmen who have to carry tools and materials can use it either, full price at the pump. If it goes on the road, full taxes.
And from what I am seeing your farmers are going to be hurting soon, and you've already put a lot of them out of business. Don't worry, your turn to pay much higher food prices is coming, along with the rest of the planet. Not sure when, but it'll happen. Enjoy the good old days while they last. North Sea oil has peaked, and we are one more loony tunes stunt away from losing a lot of mideast oil and possibly venezuelan oil as well. The USA/UK axis of middle east meddling for the past century is coming home to roost.
I had some good trips with only 100 micrograms of Acid back when my weight was about 75kg. That's about... erm... 0.00000013% of my body weight.
I did the only rational thing and moved closer.
Now I can see my office building from my flat.
The second most rational thing would be to change job.
The least rational thing is to believe we can keep commuting that much and expect that our actions will have no consequences.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Well, most of the US does... The Country of Texas also... Yes we have recycling programs but most people don't use them...
Remember when a bag of aluminum cans fetched $10? Subsidized recycling programs didn't seem to last very long. I've noticed my apartment's dumpster frequently overflows with trash, but the recycling cans never get full... Yet most of the stuff people throw away is paper boxes, paper plates, plastic food trays, drink cans, etc...
Also, has anyone been into a coffee shop lately? What do people do? They get their coffee, a napkin, a few packets of sugar, a plastic stirrer, and a plastic lid. Mix the sugar with the stirrer and then immediately throw away both the sugar packets and the plastic stirrer. Then 15-20 minutes later, they have drank their coffee and throw away the heavy paper cup and the plastic lid... And this is often a DAILY RITUAL for them!!! (Why not re-use the stirrer and use a mug?)
That's heck of a lot of trash produced! And from something that already tasted like crap...
One of the other postings complained that people in farming/construction do need large trucks... Well that's fine, but here in Texas, I see a whole lot of people with sooped-up 4x4 pickup trucks... Most don't even having towing hitches and the their cargo beds appear to have seen little use... WTF?!?!?! Even the Ford Truck commercials show an overweight guy driving an over-sized pickup truck. BEST IN TEXAS my ass...
Sadly, even today, being environmentally unfriendly is still a good business plan for many...
That is precisely the problem.
Environmental damage is nowhere considered a long term cost.
Our economic models are completely oblivous to environmental damage, one way to make them less so would be to tax polution heavily.
One such a tax is in place maybe your initial analysis would be different.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The rosyfied situation you are envisioning is completely unrealistic.
If we don't do something now we may not have the time to populate all those wonderful planets of yours (which please? as things currently stand only Mars has a remote possibility of being terraformed in any meaningful time scale).
Even if we would let things run their current course and managed to start populating other planets, still global warming has the potential to cause enormous suffering on real people.
To ignore, yet again, the tragedy of the poor (because be in no doubt, the poor people are the ones that will take the worst of global warming) would be a derelction of duty.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
20%.
Fucking conspiracy theorists.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is that simple buddy.
As for being prosperous, you are, even if you think a McDonalds salary is nothing, you could be earning the equivalent of one month's salary in many other parts of the world with a few hours of flipping burgers.
If you need to study the quality of the jobs then refer to some other statistics, but don't try to shoehorn your conception of the world in a number that is pretty straight forward to calculate.
People being overqualified for a job or needing a better paid one (who doesn't?) does not vanish the job magically.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Since Methan is such a bad gas then all the MAJOR generators of methane should be shut down imediately. Kill all the ants and cows and other bovine beast then the methane gas % would drop 50%!
Should we hold a memorial for those who lost property and life in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79?
Done. Try visiting the Naples area some time. The digs at Pompeii and Herculaneum include museums that amount to national memorials. They attract their share of tourists. Interesting stuff.
Of course, there's no problem finding reading material on the topic. Both google and amazon.com can help you a lot there.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
... tropical storm DELTA is brewing.
I'm sympathetic to your position but making shit up doesn't help anybody.
Try visiting the NOAA National Hurricane Center. The advisory this morning was that Delta would lose strength during the day. It has actually increased (slightly) both wind and ground speeds. It isn't predicted to reach hurricane strength.
Yesterday it was headed roughly for the Azores. It is now predicted to curve around and head for Morocco. The storm has been wobbling around a lot, though, so it could hit anywhere. Or fizzle.
Anyway, if you're involved in North Atlantic shipping, you are following this storm. You don't really want your ships to tangle with it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I agree, but it's the philosophy faculties' fault. If they actually did philosophy rather than write commentaries on the works of dead philosophers, we might get somewhere. It's unfortunate that the best philosophy seems to be coming from popular science writers thee days, because they don't have the training to do it property.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
(Rolls Eyes)
No shit, Delta's for real... That's not what the GGP was making up. He was pulling the idea that the end of the hurricane season had passed out of his ass.
I live in Florida. I carefully watch both NOAA's sites and the blogs of climatologists like Jeff Masters.
And by the way, according to him there are two more potential areas to watch right now, "in the mid-Atlantic just west of Delta's current position," and "The region just north of Panama may get active, as wind shear levels are expected to be low the next five days."
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Taxes are both an arbitrarily imposed political burden and a form of outright punishment, and are also primarily a form of rigid political control by the power elite, and being a proponent of personal soverignty and Freedoms, they are anathemic to my basic core philosophy of living.. In addition, the entire notion of taxes in an artifical fiat currency based economy are economically and logically *absurd*. They are ludicrous. That they are even considered valuable and necessary by most people is, to me, the result of massive and persistent brainwashing of the populace by the same power elite via their overtly propogandized controlled educational system and mass media. Not only in the US but in any other nation that has its economy controlled by central bankers and their criminal peers in so-called government.
I'm sorry, but as a thinking person...really, I am just not that stupid. I simply refuse to be dumbed down to that utterly absurd level.
When we have a true produced tangibles wealth-based currency system, you can get back to me on imposed taxes. they might be necessary then, who knows, but perhaps. Until then, I am against taxes and only recognize reduction of taxes or tax credits as the only legitimate non threat of violence form of gentle persuasion by the societal groupings known as "government".
And perhaps you don't know much about me, but I am a big alternative energy proponent,I am a consumer of same, and an innovator of same. I have been a true conservationist and politically active since the early 60s on this subject. I am fully aware of the future and our responsibility to the planet and our progeny. And in my studied political and economic opinion, taxes are not the way to induce positive change, in fact, they usually result in the opposite occurring.
I would never seek to coerce, punish, admonish or threaten any of my fellow humans. I seek only to gently encourage and educate. Two paths,and I know the one I chose long ago.
--
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Great quote. I always thought, back when I was still being sent to church, that this was what was meant by God creating us "in His image". How boring it must be, if you're a god, to watch people abjectly worshiping you. Much better to raise up a species that spins off individuals who are worth having a conversation with.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
That story you linked to is absolutely insane from the point of view of a physicist. I've read his claims and his model violates relativity as well as all of quantum mechanics. And he claims his theory is easy to prove but won't prove it to anyone just yet. The red flags should be going up super fast here. And even faster when you see that he has millions of dollars he conned from investors.
Average Joe doesn't behave the way I want him to, so why should he be treated as an equal? Being treated differently doesn't mean unfairly, as long as I get to choose who gets what treatment.
If you don't respect Joe, why should he respect you? Why do you get to set the rules about who deserves equal treatment?
Big deal. The climate is getting warmer. Big deal. We will all be dead anyhow. The planet cannot die. We die and the planet goes on. It has happened before. Who know all this aledged global warming could be saving us from an immediate terminal (for human life) ice age. Get a life people.
Did I say that? No, I did not. You can be an English major specializing in literary criticism, or for that matter a Queer Studies major, without being gay. It's the field of study that is worthless in the real-world job market, not the sexual proclivities of the job seeker. There are plenty of gay engineers and doctors making serious coin and loving their interesting, challenging, socially useful jobs.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Behold...
The power of the sun....with no radioactive waste either !
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPics.htm
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
like a runaway subroutine, repeating, self-renewing itself
This can be figured into the calculations. Remember, the booty collected from corporate gasoline use would also be figured into the credit.
Anyhow, I do think the poor should share some of the burden as well. I grew up in a small, rural town, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the correlation between gasoline use and income in my town was negative. In other words, the poor often were the worse hogs of all, often spending far too much of their stretched cash on ridiculous trucks. Rich or poor, such fools should be slammed.
A $1.00/gal tax phased in over a couple of years would be fine by me. Make it tax neutral with a credit and you have a winner.
Unless you have a whole bunch of earths where you can run controlled experiments, establishing "causality" is impossible.
There is as much "debate" about the two points I listed in the mainstream scientific community as there is "debate" about evolution. You are making the same arguments as ID supporters - that gaps in our knowledge mean you can throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Most recycling is exactly what you said - extra energy in trade for less garbage. This is rarely a good deal, though things are improving.
Hey , that's great. You go ahead and pay $6 for gas. Everytime you fill up, whip out your Blackberry and calculate the difference. Send it to Uncle Sam. Voluntarilly. Be a shining example for us tree-haters. Pay 'til it hurts.
It's not about SUVs. That's too easy. If you're jealous that your neighbors can afford extravagent vehicles and you can't, just admit it. It takes a big geek to recognize his shortcomings. Cars don't emit methane. Cows do. It is imperative that we stop driving cows.
Instead of taxing the fuel with some socialist nonsense, let's cut to the chase and privatize the atmosphere. The world is always complaining that the United States is wrecking the air, so obviously, this means that the United States already owns the atmosphere and can proceed to sell it.
The atmosphere would be broken up into digital parcels, each of which would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. To spur the growth of American jobs, only an American company could be allowed to purchase an air lot. However, companies could sell the lots or break them up and sell them as they would real estate.
To emit or take anything from the atmosphere, you as an individual would need to purchase atmospheric rights. Generally, this would be done at birth so you wouldn't have to worry about it. But, we could do it prior to birth and just forcibly abort any fetus whose mother did not secure breathing rights for at say, 6 months. For the genuinely destitute but still useful people, we might have some sort of an aid program so that the able bodied could breath if they are down on their luck. But the riff raff would be bred out of existence.
Nations that refused to pay breathing rights to the American companies would be exterminated. We would need to develop larger atomic bombs and reconsider 10MT+ weapons, genetically engineered virii, as all would be a legitimate means of dealing with all these third world atmospheric freeloaders.
This is my sig.
making either of the following claims:
1: The earth is not getting warmer
2: The cause is not human-induced
I have full access to all the relevant journals. I must have missed your evidence in the flood of mine.
Evolution and global warming are the same in that there is no longer debate about existence, but rather only debates about the details of the past and projections for the future.
Here is another challenge for you. Please describe any experimental result which would convince you that global warming was being caused by humans. I can easily do the reverse. For example, if ice cores and such were to show similar gas and temperature spikes as the one we are currently undergoing, it would be a strong argument that natural cycles can cause what we are seeing. 600,000 years of data have failed to provide such evidence. What we are seeing is unprecedented in the "natural" data.
The atmosphere (or the enviroment in general) is a public good. That is the crux of the problem, and not one that is easily resolved.
Too bad you can only come up with a tongue-in-cheek method of privatization.
You missed the entire point.
Trying to inspire sympathy for global warming because of the entirely unrelated Atlantic Hurricane Season (which has seen very comparable hurricanes in that area before) is just fucking stupid. Climate change is a lot more complex than the resulting damage from hurricane season. Cry me a fucking river.
I'm not popular enough to be different.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
Both elementary economics theory and practical experience shows that isn't true.
What you are perhaps forgetting is that, although a price rise in gasoline overnight will not make people change their mind about driving to work the next day, in the long term it will have many other effects. It will make the public consider a more fuel-efficient cars on their next purchase. It will make home buyers consider houses with a smaller commute. It will increase demand for, and hence availability of, public transport. It will make cars unnaffordable for people like students, who will choose to live on a campus which does not require a car. Ultimately, it will create an incentive to reduce the creation of sprawling cities which are designed on the assumption that every citizen owns a car and wants to drive it everywhere. Which, by happy coincidence, would also make for cities which are far nicer places to live. Where you know your neighbours, your friends live within three blocks of you, and you don't have to travel three miles just to get milk.
For disclosure: I lived in the US for 5 years, but am now back in my home country, England, so that's where my perspective is coming from.
Yeah, but I think there are two very different things going on here. There's the scientific story, in which things like the recent rash of North Atlantic hurricanes is just a detail, buried in a mass of statistics. Then there's the socio-political story, in which most of the people in power have a strong (personal profit) incentve to downplay global warmng, while the great majority of people don't understand and won't notice or care until it bites them.
/. readers) have hardly any statistical understanding at all. So if you're going to get their attention (which you must if you are to effect changes in a democratc society), you have to somehow get their attention and get across this "global warmng" thing.
;-)
Saying that such isolated stories like New Orleans aren't relevant to the global warming issue is of course true in a scientific setting. But to understand the scientific issues, you need a good understanding of statistics, and most people (including most
So far, the only technique that seems to work is to keep looking for news stories that are vaguely climate related, and keep saying "global warming". It's true that no individual event is scientific evidence. But it is political evidence, the only kind that usually works. The other side will, of course, say "it's not proof". You happily agree with that, and mention that there is an overwhelming body of published evidence, of which this event is just one tiny statistic. You mention the century or so of published articles on the topic. You give links for people who want to learn more about the topic. You keep suggesting that it's a complex topic, and that people will have to learn a lot (including - ack - statistics) to follow the science.
Alternatively, people who don't want to learn all that techie stuff can just listen to the climate experts and trust them. Of course, that's tricky, since there are people with economic agendas trying hard to muddy the waters. Better if people try to learn something.
Anyway, we can expect lots more anecdotal "evidence" of global warming. In a society of sound-bite and bumper-sticker voters, that's necessary to get the story across to people who can't or won't understand the technical writings on the topic.
And we can expect lots more flame wars here on the topic, until the changes reach the point that they can't be ignored. So far, only a few tropical islands have been abandoned due to rising waters. In a few decades, this will be a major news story. Until then, about all we can do in the political arena is to just keep beating on the anecdotes and keep chanting "global warming".
(Oh, yeah; we should also keep agreeing that "further research is needed". This is important with an administration that's cutting back on funding for research.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
>Methane, an even stronger greenhouse gas is 130% higher. I'm not sure how that statistic proves anything about humans causing global warming. Check the stats on industrial emissions below: Methane emissions 1E12 g/year: ruminant: 80-100 termites: 25-150 paddy fields: 70-120 natural wetlands: 120-200 landfills: 5-70 oceans and lakes: 1-20 tundra: 1-5 coal mining: 10-35 natural gas flaring and venting: 10-30 industrial and pipeline losses: 15-45 biomass burning: 10-40 methane hydrates: 2-4 volcanoes: 0.5 automobiles: 0.5
"Until then, about all we can do in the political arena is to just keep beating on the anecdotes and keep chanting "global warming"."
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
From April 28, 1975.
Please recognize that the term "global warming" is a misnomer. It is climate change we are concerned about, and it's not warming that will be the problem. It's not cooling either. It's idiots supposedly acting in our best interests to try and prevent something that may be completely out of our control. Volcanism, for instance, is responsible for tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year -- moreso than every vehicle on the road today combined. This debate should be about focusing on more renewable energy sources, not pollution controls. This debate shouldn't be led by environmentalists, because these are the same asshats who fucked up Yellowstone National Park.
We need to stop listening to the Mass Media and start using common sense.
I'm not popular enough to be different.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons