Slashdot Mirror
A Stark Warning On Climate Change
cliffski writes "In a report based on computer predictions, UK government advisor Professor David King said that an increase of even three degrees Celsius would cause drought and famine and threaten millions of lives
The US refuses to cut emissions and those of India and China are rising. A government report based on computer modeling projects a 3C rise would cause a drop worldwide of between 20 and 400 million tonnes in cereal crops, about 400 million more people at risk of hunger and between 1.2bn and 3bn more people at risk of water stress."
This isn't really happening. Move along.
If you haven't already, take a look at Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and "Collapse".
I leave it up to another karma whore to provide affiliate links to Amazon.
Won't this help solve the overpopulation problem?
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
To be fair to China, they've had much smaller growth in their pollution compared to other countries who underwent similar industrialization. Not saying they're perfect, but that should be mentioned.
Yes, the US refuses to cut levels (translation: "refuses to devolve our economy") precisely because the absurd Kyoto Protocol would put no such restrictions on developing nations such as China and India. They could grow and boom, consume all the energy the like and spew unlimited amounts of who-know-what into the atmosphere, but America would have to shrink it's economy to comply.
No wonder it's been called the "Stop America Protocol."
Also, we are lucky to be in a country where being green is good for business. I can think of some companies that are making a pretty penny off cutting emissions and helping others to do so.
Again.
. . . because a number of countries regularly dump hundreds of tons of grain each year to keep prices high. Just don't dump the grain and there will be no lack of food, unless some dictator withholds it to starve his own people.
I like the part how it will shift pollution from being produced by America to being produced by developing third world countries, those that have the fewest restrictions on pollutants (as well as worker safety) and those that are least equipped to clean it up.
Maybe something needs to be done legally to fix the problem if it is in fact a problem...... maybe not, but either way Kyoto was a really poorly designed contract.
LOOK it was a joke, OK ?
...is still just a guess. "A government report based on computer modeling..." So- a projection from the government based on a computer model says that this is what might happen if the global temperature were to rise 3 degrees. Of course, given that computer models are just themselves guesses about how the various systems that affect climate and weather interact anyway, I remain unimpressed. I'll be taking this with more than a grain of salt. Can someone pick me up a salt lick?
Fight psychopharmacological mccarthyism. http://www.norml.org/
So what's the big deal? We either reach a shortage of resources at 6-7-8 billion people, or we hit a shortage at 8-9-10 billion people. Running against the wall of finite natural resources will be just as painful, either way.
It seems to me that, while things like reducing carbon emissions and having meetings about global warming are nice, Japan and in fact all of Europe are having a hard time meeting their so-called "Targets." The fact remains that in the current world, you cannot maintain economic growth and at the same time reduce your carbon emissions to the levels they are talking about. The populace of the world would quickly put off global warming concerns if their unemployment went to 30% and their economies tanked. I think that global warming is a problem and needs to be addressed, but you have to realize we do not have the technology nor the will to solve it. When fusion becomes cheap and room-temp superconductors common, maybe we'll have the solution.
You know, I was reading this great book from the 1960's that described, with lots of charts and graphs and equations, how the world population would soon reach a BILLION people and there was no way agriculture could keep up and feed them. There would be mass death in every country in the 1980s due to a lack of food...
Except that the 1980s came and went and showed it to be completely wrong. The world has never had more food, or higher quality food thanks in large part to American agriculture.
Move along, nothing to see here. Just more America-hating handwringing.
Climate change was occurring long before our species arrived here, has been occurring ever since, and will continue to occur long after we're gone. Are we contributing to it? Yes. Does it really matter in the end? No. There are forces at work here that are a lot bigger and lot more powerful than we are. Ultimately, our species is time limited on this planet anyway. Weather it is a large asteroid, nukes, the environment or the dieing sun, something is going to make this planet uninhabitable at some point. Let's spend less time fighting with each other and more time figuring out how we can get our species off of this lovely little rock and onto the next one because that's our only hope for survival in the end.
The difference is that humans are well adapted to large variances in temperature and climate. A whole lot of the other life on this planet isn't, including many of our favorite crops. If the temperature reaches a point where corn, wheat, rice, etc aren't able to tolerate it, it can have a dramatic impact on humans.
This guy's the limit!
And some water, crops, lives too, maybe...
The problem with Kyoto is that many in the US saw it as unfair. Imagine if someone did a study that showed that internet usage was linked to obesity. So they want to pass a law that curbs internet use. Under this law, slashdot users, who are on the internet 15 hours a day, they need to cut their usage down to 5 hours. But meanwhile people who spend their time on ebay and click on banner adds, so they only spend 4 hours a day online, they don't have to cut down at all. And even worse, your little brother, who hasn't been using the internet only because he was too young, he isn't under any restriction at all. He's just hitting the age where he's going to start using the internet even more than you, but the law wont make him give up anything.
Does any of that sound fair?
Since we know our supplies of fossil fuels are reaching depletion, has anyone actually tried calculating the total amount of future "damage" possible to do by burning all of what's feasibly left to use?
It seems to me that most of the people spreading fear of global warming trends are acting as if, without new legislation and drastic changes, we'll keep on creating this pollution indefinitely.
In reality, it seems to me that once gas prices rise to only another $2-3 per gallon (due to demand outstripping supply), the motivation will be there for some serious change anyway. The most likely alternatives for power generation are things like nuclear plants, and for cars, maybe hydrogen - which would nullify most of these concerns.
"a 3C rise would cause a drop worldwide of between 20 and 400 million tonnes in cereal crops"
A little more accuracy might help their cause. Those numbers are laughable.
Canada actually consumes more energy per person than the US and also produces more CO2 per person.
Simple question is why wasn't Canada mentioned?
I am all for the US reducing Green house emissions. I think that we should start building a lot more nuclear power plants, use as much bio diesel as is practical, use solar where practical, and wind in the few areas where that makes sense.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Ah yes, a "government report based on computer modelling". Because we all know computers never make mistakes right? Let's just not mention the boatload of assumptions necessary to pull off a weather/food/hunger/thirst/death model. It will work as perfectly as the computer 's weather model in "The Day After Tomorrow". Its just a really fancy spreadsheet.
And I love how America "refuses" to cut its emissions, yet China and India's emissions are simply growing. Why wasn't it written that they, too refuse to cut their emissions? Kyoto was a joke.
This whole thing reminds me of a Robert Heinlein quote: "When in fear, or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
...what does it matter? We'll be controlling the weather in another decade or so, right? Man is the master of all he surveys and his technology is superior to the forces of nature. When we're pressed by desperate situations we always come up with solutions that are much better than anything nature could ever come up with in retaliation. I call for regime change on the global climate. Nature is using weapons of mass destruction to try and keep us from democratizing the weather patterns. Let's use the nuclear option and then we'll see who's boss on this planet! Are you with me people!!!? (fist raised in air chanting: Viva la preemptive global climate strike!!!)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Do you really think China and India need the help of the Kyoto Protocol? Production is *already* shifting to those countries. And yes their emissions are uncapped, but their emissions are a fraction of the U.S.'s emissions. When they become part of the problem then we can talk, but right now Europe and the U.S. are the problem.
My family in the suburbs will finally have that waterfront house they've always wanted, and they won't even have to move.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Yes, the US refuses to cut levels (translation: "refuses to devolve our economy")
There is no evidence that cutting the levels of CO2 emissions would "devolve [the US] economy". In fact, the opposite is far more plausible: the move to energy efficient technologies would spur new R&D, it would result in modernization of our transportation and manufacturing infrastructure, it would improve efficiency, it would lessen dependence on foreign oil (thereby also reducing the need for military expenses), and it would create lots of new economic activity and jobs. Pretty much the only people who lose are the big oil companies, some powerful US politicians, and the military.
the absurd Kyoto Protocol would put no such restrictions on developing nations such as China and India. They could grow and boom, consume all the energy the like and spew unlimited amounts of who-know-what into the atmosphere, but America would have to shrink it's economy to comply.
The US economy is already in deep trouble; it's living on borrowed money, provided by China and other nations, while China, India, and other nations are already booming.
Furthermore, those other nations are rightfully arguing that it is not fair that the US has achieved its current economic strength by emitting carbon without restrictions and now they are supposed to limit their economies by not being allowed to emit equal amounts of carbon. But the solution is simple: everybody should pay for the carbon they have already emitted into the atmosphere; when such payments are set up, then India and China will probably be willing to agree to strong limits on their emissions.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1959+world+p
3 billion in 1959
1959, Earth had five billion people.
World Statistics Population: 2.997 billion population by decade ...
our population had doubled from 3 billion to 6 billion in only 40 years (1959 to 1999
so what 1960's book predicted a population of ONE billion real soon now?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Last I read a good number of the signing countries in Europe won't even come close to meeting the agreed upon numbers.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I am at risk of hunger, in fact I am hungry now. I got up late to go to work and didn't eat breakfast
[paraphrasing the mentality of much of the industrial world]
I'm rich, I'll survive. Who cares about all those poor people abroad.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Hey...as so many of you point out, Evolution is a fact, so we'll just evolve. If golbal warming is happening and all the crops die, the polar ice caps melt putting my city under water and the sun rises is the west, I expect we'll learn to grow gills and webbed feet, eat sand...and be happy.
I'm gonna throw a sand-tasting party later if anyone wants to come...
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Climate of Fear (opinionjournal.com)
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.
BY RICHARD LINDZEN
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?
The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.
But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.
If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less--hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.
Nobody cares about poor people now, why should they care about their future.
I mean how many people on Slashdot know what is going on in Africa right now? Like Chad, where fresh French troops were deployed this week to bolster the ranks of the French troops already there to stem off a rebellion. Anyone know who the rebels are or what they want? Anyone cares? Chad belongs to Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the poorest region in the world. How many could place Chad on a map?
Somalia got some attention back in the 90s. It still is a so called failed state. I dunno if many know what that term even means.
And I consider Slashdot to be an educated crowd. So much for the Western World.
Nobody gives a shit about poor people in other countries. Best example: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
Those goals were drawn up in 2000 and when 9/11 came up they were completely off the agenda. Though I don't know if 9/11 is to blame. Maybe they would have been taken off the agenda anyways.
So if you want to make people in Western countries care about climate change you should maybe mention the billions upon billions that natural disasters will cost. Money always gets attention.
Let's assume such a temperature increase would have the impact predicted. That does not mean such an increase is imminent. Some scientists are speaking out that data shows these temperature fluctuations are normal, periodic, and precede modern industrialization. The data also shows that the current upswing in temperature may be about to reverse, since temperatures have leveled off since 1998. This data is being supressed by hysterical, global-warming cultists, like those found frequenting Slashdot.
During the 1970's, scientists were warning that we were entering the next ice age. I am old enough to remember that, so excuse me if I am skeptical about the latest, faddish claims. No one has proven a link between "greenhouse gas" emissions and any periods of climatic change. It is simply a theory that seems plausible on the surface. I hope this does not cause too much cognitive dissonance for those with Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) or those eager for the end of the world as we know it.
(Copied from Jerry Pournelle's letters page, just spell-checked)
The global warming controversy hingers on four key questions:
1. Is there a sustained, long term increase in global average temperatures? 2. If this increase exists, is it due to natural environmental factors (including the observed warming of the sun over the past few decades), to human influences (e.g. industrial carbon dioxide, agricultural methane, etc.), or to a combination of these factors? 3. Is this environmental change likely to be, on the whole, beneficial or detrimental to human society? 4. If the change is likely to be detrimental, what actions should be taken to mitigate or eliminate the deleterious effects.
Briefly, in turn:
1. Is there a sustained, long term increase in global average temperatures?
a. Experimentally observed temperature effects are, at present, well within the historical data base of measured temperature extremes, which include cyclic patterns on scales of a year, two to three years (the El Nino/La Nina cycle), twenty-two years (the "normal" solar cycle), 80-odd years (natural the hurricane cycle which peaked in the 1930s and which is peaking again now) and several hundred years (the cycle that left Lief Erikson's Greenland as an agricultural paradise, then created the "mini ice age" in Europe in the late Middle Ages. These cycles are their interactions are poorly understood, and the possible forcing (or retarding) effects of man made influences even less so.
b. Most of the evidence for long-term "global warming" is a consequence of computer models which, of necessity, oversimple some (or many) aspects of the global environment. All of these models systematically predict warming of from 2 - 9 degrees C (3.5 - 16 degrees F) over the next century. This is noteworthy, but is is evidence -- even after the fact given the not yet understood cycles noted above? In any event, a lot of people think that if the most sophisticated weather models we can produce are in error by several degrees after five to seven days, why should we worry about climate models over the period of a century, and there is much to be said for that position.
2. If this increase exists, is it due to natural environmental factors (including the observed warming of the sun over the past few decades), to human influences (e.g. industrial carbon dioxide, agricultural methane, etc.), or to a combination of these factors?
The pro-warming factions maintain that their models hold that only 30% of observed warming is due to the solar warming, and that the balance is due to human influences. However, the "observed" warming -- against a baseline of mid-1940's temperatures -- is something like 0.2 degrees C (0.4 degrees F), which as noted above is well within the limits of historical temperatures of the past. Even that observed warming is questioned by many researchers, because our most direct temperature measurements are associated with urban areas, which are known to be heat traps due to the replacement of naturally cooling foliage by high-heat-retaining pavement (plus the waste heat of human activities). To some extent (this is being debated rigorously) this effect is skewing the underlying effects of the observed warming.
The solar variations are discussed at sites in the list of references below, and the average variation over the sun's normal 22 year cycle is approximately 0.2% -- which for a normal surface temperature of 300 degrees Kelvin (27 degrees C) amounts to a cyclic change of 0.6 degrees -- against which we are trying to detect a systematic 0.2 degree effect against a two-cycle background. Ask me again in a century.
3. Is this environmental change likely to be, on the whole, beneficial or detrimental to human society?
It is an open question whether meteorological "forcing" by increased temperatures would normally result just in warmer days and warmer nights by the same amount, by increased violent weather, or by a combination of these effects. There are also scare scenarios about Arc
Ok, first off, I reduced my individual emissions. I did this by buying a more efficient air conditioner and improving the insulating quality of my house. In addition, I replaced all of my light bulbs with low wattage, long life bulbs. Why? To save money. I reduced my electrical and natural gas costs by 30% per year. That is the financial incentive Americans need.
Second, the Kyoto Accords are a socialist mandate to hurt highly industrial countries. Have anyone here seen the amount of pollution in Mexico City? How about mandating a reduction in emissions from third world countries' cars? If the US had decided to follow the Kyoto Protocol, we would be one of the few, because the other countries don't care. What about the pollution causes by burning rainforests for planting crops? And we need to cut back on the emissions from Volcanoes. Those things are worse then coal-fired plants.
Lastly, what about this computer simulation? Is it available to the public? Is it open-sourced? We need to review every line of code to see if the researchers are just trying to grab headlines and research dollars. (Research dollars are smarter then the regular dollars) How about someone researching the researchers and the programmers? What did they base the data on? What is the error-ratio? Does their model predict the past knowns accurately? What has been the error ratio since this model has been created? Where did the input come from?
Question everything you hear and all that you read. -- Besides me. ;-)
In God we trust, all others require data.
The US has increased consumption of energy roughly 8% PER DECADE since 1970 (26% total). That is slower than population growth, we actually use less energy per person than we did 35 years ago!
India and China, in comparison, have increased energy consumption 70% and 50% since 1990. India's population increase has been only roughly 18% in that time, and China's has grown 23%.
Looking forward in time, where are the problems going to be? The US is a large consumer, but our per capita consumption decreases with time, and our population growth is slowing (actually, we are shrinking except for the immigration issue). India and China are both increasing population, and increasing per capita usage.
As a perpetual optimist, I prefer to see this news not as a harbinger of devastation to the world's food supply, but rather as a wake-up call. A wake-up call to buy corn, wheat, and rice futures!
And you know what? You don't even have to bother dealing with the pesky Chicago Board of Trade. While bread goes bad pretty quickly, saltines last for a long time, as does flour. But why go the boring route?
Common breakfast cereals last for a year at least; also, if you buy now, they come with adorable Ice Age: The Meltdown(TM) toy which, down the road, will really make the irony sting. For example, once the famine sets in, you'll be amassing great wealth from selling $45 boxes of Corn Pops to the stupid starving masses who lacked your foresight. Then, as they finish eating their precious sugared grain pellets they will find an Ice Age toy at the bottom of the box. This mere bauble will become a caustic and bitter reminder of the witless folly that created the famine (and your fortune) in the first place.
So it's win/win!
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
A completely fair point.
If it is true that the cereal crops will decline then it could also be true that the increased temperature would result in longer growing seasons and could be more favorable to the growing of fruits and vegetables.
Except that the increased temperatures do not come with any guarantee that increased rainfall is part of the deal. Even if it is, it may well be in the form of hurricanes - which feed on heat - which destroy crops.
How about our buddies in Brazil, India, and China who also refused to destroy their economies by signing the Kyoto treaty?
Increasing the efficency of your economy hardly equates to destroying it.
Why attempt to heap all the guilt on us?
Because the US's technological superiority, combined with its gross level of wastage, made it the country most able to actually pull it off. By refusing what was in fact just a request that they stop wasting huge amounts of energy, the US sent out a signal to countries like Brazil, India, and China that short-term business gains would be supported by them over the question of long-term destruction of civilisation. Which is what we will be facing if the sea levels rise 100 feet (which is less than half the potential if we lose the ice caps). That hundred feet would flood most of the world's agricultural land in salt-water.
I'm exaggerating of course. Much less than 100' would be needed to wreck America and most everyone else's economies and bring an end to the type of civilisation you and I are used to.
Are these people living in places such as those African nations where slaughter of their own population is commonplace
No, only some. Australia is one of the most at-risk countries, for example. Israel is another. Pheonix in Arizona is another place in deep shit, as is most of the Florida coast - although probably not from starvation, I'll grant you. Anywhere people live where fresh water is imported or used heavily in agriculture is in danger of crop-loss from global warming.
This newest attempt to fear the U.S. into destroying it's economy will fail.
It's funny how easy it is to scare Americans into killing people who never did anything to them, and how hard it is to get them to actually live up to responsibilities, even when the evidence is overwhelming that they have to do something, and do it soon.
Sell crazy someplace else. We're all stocked up.
How true.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
My best reason against the war in Iraq (since taking out dictators is generally such a good idea that you can hardly argue about it) is that with a fraction of the money spent ( http://costofwar.com/ ) we could have come A LOT closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and could have done so much more for so many more people.
Ohhh! I'll take the counterpoint just for fun.
It is pure mential retardation that the US does not reduce emissions. We can replace all Coal electricity plants with Nuclear and other types of energy in 25 years if we got off our asses and did it. Yes kids, Nuclear is the way to cleaner and cheaper power it always has been.
Vehicle emissions could be reduced significantly. you do NOT need a 6 foot wide 12 foot long SUV with 460Hp to drive yourself to work. American public transportation is a complete and utter joke to the rest of the planet. Both of these things could make a huge difference if changed.
Home Solar electricity can work very well if done in the right way. if all houses had some type of Solar electric that did not do the silly store-to-battery system but used a sync inverter to dump the excess power to the electrical grid then the daily peak use would be dramatically reduced making the need for more power plants less. Same for forcing homes to be energy efficient, etc...
Granted lots of these ideas simply move the pollution from one place to another. Solar panel manufacturing is nasty as hell...
Why dont we do it? retooling = less profits therefore doing it the old way makes more money and will continue to be the status-quo.
It will not happen. Just like how $3.00 a gallon gas has not hurt Hummer H2 sales.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
An increase of just 300 degrees centigrade would cause everything flammable to catch fire!
[Insert pithy quote here]
"a 3C rise would cause a drop worldwide of between 20 and 400 million tonnes in cereal crops"
And a 3C rise would open up vast un(der)farmed plains in the northern Mid-West and Canada. Yeah, some currently farmed areas would have significant problems, others would likely see it as a huge benefit. And from what I've heard on climate change, it's not likely that the entire Earth is going to heat up. It's much more likely that some places will get hotter, and others colder as water currents and wind patterns change.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Can't... breathe... Has anyone else noticed how bad the smug has been on slashdot the past few days?
now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
Made ya think!
Cogito Ergo Sum
I refer to Kyoto as economic Jonestown for the US. These climate fear mongers are nothing if not persistant. Seems to me higher temperature and CO2 levels would spur photosynthesis and expand crop yields. What is the predictive track record of these models?
an ill wind that blows no good
This is exactly why i dont care about any of these issues. In the end its not going to make a lick of difference, no matter which way it ends up.
Oh wait, there's a little principle called GIGO that's been with us for ages:
Table 6.1 of Chapter 6 in Houghton et al 1996 (Kattenberg et al., Projections of Future Climate) gives a range of --0.8 C to -1.6C as the calculated temperature reduction during the last century due to sulphate aerosols. Since this represented 29% of the warming to doubling of carbon dioxide, the range of adjustment to the climate sensitivity for 100% warming (climate sensitivity) if the effects of aerosols increase at the same rate, is -2.8C to -5.5C. The adjusted IPCC climate sensitivity range now becomes -4.0C to +1.7C, with the "Best Estimate" in the range -3.0C to -0.3C. The range covers the established "Best Fit" value of 0.8C ± 0.6C, but, this time, at the upper end of the calculated range. The range places predominance on negative predicted values of climate sensitivity.
From http://www.john-daly.com/bull-123.htm :
So essentially the 'models' 'predicting' global warming actually only predict climate CHANGE (wow, surprising to anybody?), and bias upward when the base assumptions predict inputs far outside the high-extremes observed so far.
RIGHT.
All I can say is that it must be a bloody disaster, if New York city's temperatures were to rise in 100 years....to almost the level they were 180 years ago: http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/425725030010
New York Times 1956: "ICE AGE PREDICTED IN GLACIER STUDY"
1968: "NEW STUDIES POINT TO ICE AGE AGAIN"
1933: "America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776"
Sept. 14, 1975 NYT editorial: global cooling "may mark the return to another ice age," that "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" and that it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."
-Styopa
I think it is generally accepted that global warming is happening (very slowly). However, there is no convincing (undisputable) proof that anthropic global warming is a real or preventable phenomenon. Like every other fear mongering cause, it is being used to justify taking your money or your freedom.
Let's make a short recent list:
The Cold War
The War on Drugs
The War on Terrorism
Global Warming
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
You sir are an idiot. Do you read those newspapers about Bat-boy too?
The article makes a common error: asserting that China's CO2 emissions are rising. This is just White House propaganda to undermine Kyoto. China is actually *cutting* CO2 output. Here is an article from Science to that effect. This particlar article only discusses up to 2000, but the downward trend has continued since then.
We don't have "too many people" in the world. Every problem that is commonly attributed to "overpopulation" is actually a problem of having too little money. Only wackos and flakes think the USA or Japan has an overpopulation problem. The population density in Japan is greater than just about anywhere, and yet they have none of the problems attributed to overpopulation.
Yeah, I know, you were just making a throw-away comment, but the only reason it was funny is because lots of people think there really is a problem with "overpopulation".
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The way things are going in America, what with the offshore prison camps, pervasive domestic surveillence, corporations trampling individual rights by suing their customers, and runaway executive power, maybe it should be stopped.
So instead of sending an army or terrorists to combat the Great Satan you send the unlikeliest warriors imaginable, climate scientists! That'll show us.
Not that the Chinese/Indian alternatives are necessarily better, but America is rapidly deteriorating.
Judging from the way Chinese and Indian nationals are falling all over each other to reside in the US one wonders if that statement is true.
an ill wind that blows no good
Since it is, after all, burned.
Best Slashdot Co
There is no evidence that cutting the levels of CO2 emissions would "devolve [the US] economy". In fact, the opposite is far more plausible: the move to energy efficient technologies would spur new R&D,
You *do* realize that you're pushing the broken window fallacy, right? I wouldn't want someone to attempt propaganda innocently.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
a) we're not sure is our fault
b) we're not sure we can stop it
c) we're not sure if we want to stop it
Here's my computer simulation for our weather over the next decade:
cin :: tempIncrease :: "you will have " :: tempIncrease :: "less crops this decade. Plus or minus 10 orders of magnitude"
cout
Those that don't think it would hurt the economy...are all these countries not doing it just evil? I don't think I can think of a single factor more important to the economy than energy costs. Kyoto would cost us a fortune. We'll be running off nuclear and hydrogen in the coming decades anyway. Shouldn't we spend our money on something practical, say feeding the millions of people who are starving now, instead of something that we'd probably have little effect on and we can't even say if it'd be good.
"Increasing the efficency of your economy hardly equates to destroying it."
And reducing emissions hardly equates to increased efficiency. Just look at deisel engines; efficient but hardly clean.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Australia also was a country that did not sign the Kyoto Protocol. I find it strange we don't hear how they are an evil nation contributing to the demise of our planet's climate..
Keep in mind that the hole in the o-zone layer down in the southern hemisphere has a greater effect on Australia than anywhere on Earth (except for Antarctica). So if the treaty was really worth something, it seems they would be a country more than willing to sign, uphold and promote it.
Crichton's novel postulates that (a)the driving force behind Global Climate Change is: grant money and (b) if you are smart enough to build technology that can cause catastrophies, you'll use it to get more grant money instead of selling it to the Pentagon
Now I'll concede that scientists are just as greedy as anyone else, but if Mr. Crichton is not smart enough to see that Big Oil plus The Pentagon have a little more grant money than Big Academia ... I would not recommend his book for anything but comedy.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Seriously, I just splurted coffee all over him from laughing!
Perhaps you mean starvation or severe malnutrition?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Regardless of how much spin and silliness has been slathered all over it.
I like cereal! ---Cheese
But it does matter. Feel free to argue that the rich are only interested in themselves (that's bullshit, of course, but go ahead and make the argument if it makes you happy). But after you've reduced your carbon emissions, good people like yourself will have less money to help the poor (who are, as you point out, the ones who will truly suffer -- but that's the case whether global warming happens or not).
The real question here is this inequality: $(global warming damage with carbon reduction) - $(cost of carbon reduction) $(global warming damage without carbon reduction). Costs matter. For example, for a small fraction of the cost of carbon reduction ($100M), we could supply EVERYONE WORLDWIDE with clean water. If you poo-poo this, you probably have as much clean water as you could possibly want.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The US economy is already in deep trouble; it's living on borrowed money, provided by China and other nations, while China, India, and other nations are already booming.
This provides an interesting counterpoint to your fanciful assertion. Eat my CO2!
an ill wind that blows no good
If you truly believed this, you would have already killed yourself. Demonstrably, even you don't believe yourself, so why should we?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
well, it equals what we have now.
See "Climate of fear", by Richard Lindzen, an MIT scientist, below.
Do try to be open-minded, and not a sheeple:
Climate of Fear
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.
BY RICHARD LINDZEN
Wednesday, April 12, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?
The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.
But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.
To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.
If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, n
Energy consumption, million tonnes oil equivalent 2004:
USA: 2,331.6
China: 1,386.2
India: 375.8
Population of the World:
USA: 300 million
China: 1300 million
India: 1000 million
Comparative energy consumption per individual:
USA: 7.7
China: 1.1
India: 0.4
Globalization leads to the equalization of energy consumption per individual around the world. Americans had their industrialization, China is well on the way and India is just getting started based on these numbers.
Now, what is so unfair about the Kyoto to Americans?
I know I'm stepping on the toes of members of the Religion of Global Warming, but please, how about some honesty? The US has successfully cut emissions by a greater margin than European countries -- countries which are still struggling to reach the Kyoto goals they set for themselves.
Just because we reject an asinine protocol that would do little more than ruin our economy and prop up China, India, and the rest of the world, does not mean we "refuse to cut emissions."
That is all. You may continue with your "US = evil" brainwashing. Good luck.
You're forgetting that The Cold War was a real thing... do you think tens of thousands of megatons of nuclear weaponry on twenty-four hour alert for 40 years was "fear mongering"?
I have to agree with you that the War on Drugs is a farce and the War on Terrorism is a political strawman to consolidate power, both started by the Neocons. (The War on Drugs was started by the Neocons during the Reagan administration.) However, to lump global warming in with these is counter-intuitive. Neoconservatives will dispute the existence of global warming right up until their coastal beach houses are underwater.
Who stands to benefit from reductions in greenhouse emissions? No one. It's a lose-lose situation all around. The Conservative leadership of the United States is playing a global game of "chicken" with the rest of the world to see who flinches first.
This is about triage. This is about slowing our own growth before our growth outstrips the very medium (the planet) on which it flourishes.
This is the guy, his arm pinned under a log, debating whether or not he should cut off the arm and let the body survive or maintain the status quo by not cutting it off and die much sooner. Yours is the arguement made by the arm.
Look. Oil costs money, as do the older systems. China does not have the infrastructure that America/Canada/EU/Japan/Ruusia has. It would be in their best interest to install only clean tech. such as alternative power as well as lots of nukes. In addition, this would be a good time for them to target electrical autos rather than gas (I suspect that they are kike EU and Japan, they tend to remain very local).
In contrast, tearing down an infrastructure and rebuilding is a great deal more expensive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Somalia got some attention back in the 90s. It still is a so called failed state.
Yes, and in many ways it's the most advanced of the poor African countries. In other ways, it's not, but all told, Somalia is probably better-off without being a traditional state. The structure of Somalian society is not appropriate for a central government. The fact that statists (feel free to count yourself among them) call it a "failed state" says more about them than it does about Somalia.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"would cause a drop worldwide of between 20 and 400 million tonnes in cereal crops"
Luckily, I don't like cereal. Kellogs and Post are the one's who should be worrying! Just me know when global warming starts to affect BBQ!
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
So, in the face of mass starvation and dehydration, we're going to sit around and bicker about how unfair it is that some people will have to cut back more than others, and refuse to do anything at all in the hopes that maybe the problem will take care of itself.
The worst of it is that of course it's going to be the least of us who are the first to die.
so what?
water stress? what the hell is that PC talk for? you either have enough water to live or you don't. you have enough food or you don't. we currently pay farmers to NOT grow crops. maybe this will help them earn an honest living. i'm not trolling here.
the sky is falling crap is getting old. a lot of bad things(tm) can/will happen IF a lot of other things happen. we can play this game all day. bad things happen.
i just heard the other day that the average global temp hasn't gone up since 1998. what's up with that? bottom line people won't do anything until they see for themselves a threat or problem.
Thanks for the advice. I found this without much difficulty. I didn't find any credible sources for your doomsday rice scenario.
an ill wind that blows no good
I thought cleaner air leads to global warming. Why do we want to avoid emissions? :p
It's amazing how you're so full of contradictions. Self-deluded and self-centric to the point of obesity. Wake me up when New York is Submerged York.
I thought slashdot had more sensible people. Nah you're just a bunch of f***ed up nerds intent on destroying our world just like your big boss is.
>the hidden nuggets of scientific goodness in there.
Life is short.
It is more efficient to learn science from scientists than from novelists. One might as well read Harlequin Romances for the nuggets of historical information.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Indisputable evidence that the dinosaurs must have been burning too much gas when THEY died out from famine!!
Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
Beacause I'm part of the group that has value. Pretty simple.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Companies already increase efficiency as much as possible. It's economically smart. They're not running companies because they don't know business you know.
But, you're saying the government knows better than companies how to run them? Yowzers, that has implications!
I'd like to see a complete listing of the wastes produced by a modern fission reactor. As a bonus, I'd like to see exactly what plans there are to dispose of it.
Because: "However, at the rate waste is produced by the existing fleet of nuclear reactors in the US, new repository capacity equal to the statutory capacity of the yet-to-open Yucca Mountain would be needed about every 20 years." (Venneri, F; et al. NUCLEAR ENERGY-JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH NUCLEAR ENERGY SOCIETY 41 (3): 223-224 JUN 2002)
LOAD "SIG",8,1
How do you expect to tell which parts are 'scientific goodness' and not just something that sounds plausible? I know that the earth's climate moves in cycles (a la ice ages etc), but we have created a hole in the ozone layer, blah blah blah, and we are going to screw our climate up if we're not careful.
which is totally what she said
I do not read Crichton to get smarter and "learn." That is absurd.
I read Crichton because he is entertaining and throws in just enough science and factual skeleton in his works to keep me from being insulted.
The attempt to move would, anyway...
it would result in modernization of our transportation and manufacturing infrastructure, it would improve efficiency, it would lessen dependence on foreign oil (thereby also reducing the need for military expenses), and it would create lots of new economic activity and jobs.
You presume at least one detail: that an economically viable substitute for oil is possible. EROEI, NIMBY, and the limits of available cropland leave that doubtful.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
"The Environmentalist who Cried 'Global Warming'"
Easy. The stuff with a footnote/citation with the name of a well-respected publication.
What do you mean by "Who stands to benefit?" There is and entire economic and political dogma related to Global Warming. Billions of dollars are spent scaring people. Billions of dollars === Big benefit. Entire political parties are base on it. Political parties ==== Power.
As far as the Cold War. The fear made the Cold War real not the other way around.
And this is not a choice of cutting of your arm or dying. This is trying to cut off your arm before you check to see if you can dig your arm out instead.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
In 10+ years of slashdot reading, I don't think I have ever read so many pathetic posts for one story!
Here are some of the best quotes:
1) Dozens of posts about how unfair it is to let China and India polute so much. Funny that one, since we are talking about a cumulative effect, anyone care to calculate the total polution per capita since the industrial revolution? Hint: China has only just started and has more inhabitants than Europe and the USA put together. Their (mostly poor) citizens are the most likely to suffer from our (western-made) polution.
But any excuse to blame it on others when you do/don't want to make a difficult decision works for some leaders.
2) "...absurd Kyoto Protocol..."
"..America would have to shrink it's economy.."
"..you cannot maintain economic growth and at the same time reduce your carbon.."
"..Countries in Europe are also failing to meet their targets.."
"..the Kyoto Accords are a socialist mandate.."
We have some Fox-news specialists at hand here, great!
FYI: this story was not about America or capitalism. Oh, and some other economies have done quite well at reducing emissions whilst maintaining growth. Never mind.
We haven't found a perfect solution to an imperfect world, so let's do nothing and keep burning it. That makes sense.
Keep putting your head in the sand until you can't get out - no-one will hear you when the water rushes in!
3) "3C isn't that bad". Right, this is the most clueless one. As if we can just ride this or hope that we develop the technology to correct it in time. 3C average on the scale of the earth is gigantic. This is just a question of scale: how big is the Earth compared to your living room? How much energy does it take to warm (or cool) 1 cubic meter of water (1 ton)? How many tons are we talking about? Google around.
4) "The models are wrong" or "There are forces at work here that are a lot bigger and lot more powerful than we are" (...): implying that either the problem is not real or that the Earth ecosystem has been adapting for billions of years and will continue to do so. Maybe so, but the fact is that the last time on record there was a dramatic climate shift was when the dinosaurs went extinct. Dinosaurs are so 'last extinction event', we are so much more clever.
I won't try to pretend that we know for sure that the situation is just as serious, but all the signs are there.
5) Random:
(warming) "...more favorable to the growing of fruits and vegetables. Good for everyone"
"..would open up vast un(der)farmed plains in the northern Mid-West and Canada"
Silly me! Let's launch a 'freedom to polute' site.
"..African nations where slaughter of their own population is commonplace..." (as an excuse for not doing it here either)
"...it is simply just a natural phenomenon like the Northern Lights."
(someone who needs to do a bit more reading)
"This data is being supressed by hysterical, global-warming cultists, like those found frequenting Slashdot"
The good old conspriacy theories. There aren't any good slashdot stories without one of them.
"So essentially the 'models' 'predicting' global warming actually only predict climate CHANGE"
We are screwing with the climate but it could go either way. Well, here is the news: either way is bad. Any drastic change is bad, and that is what the data suggests.
Summary: lots of posts not making any sense and most of them using some off-topic reason for not doing anything.
TODO: 753) write sig.
I know a lot of skinny, fit, crazy people.
it depends who and why that publication is respected. It's difficult to know who to believe just now, with examples recently of the US government putting Michael Crichton into a press conference to speak against global warming, and ignoring actual scientists. Even the scientists can't agree. The world's climate changes 'naturally', but you'd have to be extremely blinkered to think that pollution is not also skewing the natural rhythm of climate change. 'Smog' is a problem in large cities, and if we just keep burning/wasting everything then the whole world will end up in a similar condition.
which is totally what she said
What are your sources? AFAIK you're just spewing some bull-hockey implying the Kyoto Protocol is arbitrary.
Greenhouse gas emissions by country (this was posted earlier, if you scroll up the comment list)
Canada: 23.45 CO2 tonnes / person
US: 24.09 CO2 tonnes / person
Canada's population: 31.56 million
US' population: 280.00 million
Canada: 740.00 Mtonnes of CO2 emitted
US: 6746.00 Mtonnes of CO2 emitted
(All year of 2003)
Why do you sully the good name of Canada?
A billion will starve? Bzzzt! Sorry, that's not how that works. This is an economics question, not a climate one.
Which, of course, is why Julian Simon, bless his soul, has destroyed climate scientists decade after decade as they made their grotesquely wild predictions.
It's government intervention that causes economic hurt and mass starvation on all but the shortest of time scales. And on the shortest of time scales, a throbbing economy is best fit to respond to emergencies.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The world is getting warmer. The world is very big, so a small change (e.g., 1 degree Celsius) is a big deal. About this fact, there is little to no dissent.
Mankind is contributing to this change. There is disagreement about how much, but don't be fooled - we are having an impact, and why shouldn't we? There are six billion of us, and rapidly growing. We think that our legacy of burning wood, coal, and now petroleum products, is going to have no impact, and that the exotic chemicals we have used (e.g., CFCs) have no role in this? Come on. Don't make me Google it for you, do the work.
This change IS going to make a difference. Did it cause Katrina? I don't know. Could it cause floods, rise of global sea levels, famine, thirst, and the loss of thousands of species? Probably. Is it already killing polar bears, bleaching coral, and melting permafrost? Yep. Already.
I want to move on to "how much _really_ is a result of our actions" and "what can we do now".
Despite the misinformation campaign from a particular political agenda, this is NOT a political issue, and it IS something to be concerned about. Our lives are on the line, and people are still engaging in lobbyist games and misleading science, just to, what? Get some more power and money for a generation, so the next one can perish? Do we have no conscience at all?
So, please, certain fellow folks in the US, bring the arguments. Tell me how it's OK for a country with 4 percent of the world's population to produce the most emissions, because we don't want to "slow" our economy. Tell me why we should ignore the problem because, of course, there's a big "scientific conspiracy". Tell me how it's OK, because India and China are doing it too, right? I mean, if other people are doing it, it's not "fair" if we can't. Tell me that the permafrost would have "melted anyhow". Tell me about the volcanoes, and that they put out more emissions than we do, which, of course, makes ours "OK".
And, please send all these arguments to /dev/null. Because it's time for the rest of us to talk seriously about what is going on.
I am not an alarmist. I am not part of a left-wing conspiracy. There are people who know 1,000,000 times more than I do (and more than you do...) about climate change and our role in it. And many, many of them believe there is a real issue, one that could get deadly serious in the not too distant future. Maybe they have a point? Have you checked it out - I mean, really, with an open mind, and not through the filter of the talking points you heard on AM radio this morning?
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
I think the efficiency as terms of CO2 pollution/ product, the companies need little more incentive.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
You follow up a bad analogy about obesity another bad anology about healthcare.
The analogy you are looking for is what the poster said. If you use slashdot 15 hours a day then everyone on the planet gets a little fatter. Also, the analogy needs to include the fact that the Slashdotters have been using the Internet for about 150 years and have been making everyone fat for all that time while everyone else was not using the Internet at all.
Basically, the parties over. Time to get responsible and settle down.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
Back in the 70's, when we imported just 17% of our oil, we had a similar national discussion about energy cuts. J.C. wanted to avoid American dependancy on forgeign oil because he was concerned that future presidents would have to go to war in the middle east to obtain oil. Of course, he implemented de-regulation of oil as well as pushed nukes (interestingly, he prohibited breeders due to safety issue of the time, but he did push general nuclear power) and alternative energy, and finally pushed for energy conservation. It was the conservation that so many said would weaken America. They felt that it was not needed and would hurt America's competitiveness. Yet, from that, the conservation effort has forced us to make more efficient equipment which is then able to be afforded overseas. Prior to that, they were too expensive to run.
The simple answer is that you do not know if Kyoto would have hurt us. In fact, it is quite probable that Kyoto would have helped us be getting us off of oil dependancies and enabling cheaper energy. Cutting pollution is not the same thing as cutting energy. In fact, I think that if we had any real leadership, they would implement a planned long term tax increase on Oil/Coal. This would not only encourage conservation, but new ways of cheap energy.
In addition, we need to de-monopolize the power companies. I can only get my power from one company. If I could choose where to buy my power, I would persue a ompany that has a mix of alternative, nukes. This would encourage buyers to make smart moves, esp. if they know that long-term their costs will go up. Up till recent time, several leaders were pushing the idea that oil is cheap. So many Americans hoped that oil would remain cheap.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Who paid for the "study"? Not what BS quasi-scientific organization is publically saying they "sponsored" the study, but where did the money really come from? Who has the most to gain from continuing to pound the drum about the evils of industrialization & technology? Isn't it ironic that the same evil tools that will bring about the death of billions are used to build mathematical models, publish to the world via the internet and enable the anti-technology media and press machines to work the masses into a frenzy? In the words of Penn & Teller: BULLSHIT!!
We're coming out of an Ice Age! Just a few thousand years ago the planet was blanketed in ice!
Take Lake Okochobee in Florida. It was formed when the oceans receeded from a level some 30 feet higher than they are today, as the Ice Age set in, dramatically lowering the levels of the ocean to closer to their current state.
There weren't any SUV's around to cause THAT warmer climate, nor were they all parked to then cause massive Global Cooling and an Ice Age.
This is just part of natural, inevitable cycle that's been going on for a lot longer than Man has been around, much less downloading pr0n off the internet.
Steve
LOL!! Sorry, I was trying to squeeze in a posting between meetings and didn't preview. I left out a pretty important word after BILLION -- "MORE". Note to self: Must. Slow. Down.
2 56426-3102215?v=glance&n=283155
The book is "The Population Bomb (1968)" by Paul Ehrlich.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568495870/103-3
Ehrlich's prediction was that the world population would expand by a billion in the coming decade and hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 70's and 80s because humanity would outstrip our ability to support the population. Granted, over the past thirty years there have been famines in Socialist and Muslims ruled countries (Eithiopia, North Korea, China, etc.) but those are self-imposed choices made by governments that choose military expenditures over civilian comfort and quality of life. It's not due to technial inability to produce, as Ehrlich claimed would be the case.
>I do not read Crichton to get smarter and "learn." That is absurd
I think we are in agreement then. Whoever suggesting mining Crichton for facts was being absurd.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Why is it with everything BUT climate change we opt to play it safe? When we think we can make a difference on saving lives of people from our nation (whichever that is), we actually try to save them.
A hospital attempts to save lives of people that are almost certainly going to die (from cancer patients to people with multiple gunshot wounds in the chest), because we know from experience that a small percentage will survive. With terrorism, we play it safe aswell. In general, we play it safe when we _know_ that people will die unless we try to save them. People will get insurance to protect them, even though it's unlikely they will need to claim it. The correlation is that we never play it safe when we haven't experienced terrible loss. We don't see the risk until people start dying.
Look at NASA's Columbia and there were engineers that were concerned about the risk of the tiles being knocked off. They were pretty much ignored because there are many things that COULD go wrong with a shuttle and you cannot rule everything out. The lesson we learned from that is that we cannot decide the probability of something happening before it has happened without some sort of similar event occuring in the past. And therefore with climate change, we cannot see the risk. We cannot quantify it as we haven't experienced it yet (well the really bad stuff).
Every first time disaster follows this process:
1. Quiet warnings from people with authority(e.g. FBI intelligence in 911 hijackings, engineers in Columbia accident, geologists(?) in Katrina hurricane, going back further the Nazis were warned about in the early 30s but again the politicians weren't concerned)
2. No-one REALLY listens, because if everyone listened to all the warnings we would never get anywhere, as we'd be busy fixing all possible signs of danger
3. Lots of people die
4. Mass reaction and political consensus goes to preventing disaster in first place
5. Public complains that nothing was done when there were warnings
6. Systems are setup to investigate why people died, who's responsible, and what we can do in future
7. Insurance companies put figures to the odds of the disaster occuring again, having investigated all variables that affect the chance of said disaster happening
The problem obviously is that climate change is on such a large scale that our current way of dealing with disasters just doesn't work. The only way I can think of solving this is to "Play it safe". And then at least we know we did everything we could, rather than looking for people to blame when X% of the world's land mass disappears under the oceans.
Wrong. An expense is an expense is an expense. Whether that spending is a positive or negative for the economy depends entirely on the value that the goods and services purchased provide. Don't think of spending in terms of creating jobs or any of the other economic hogwash that occupies media coverage of the economy. Think of it like this: The economy has a certain amount of productive capability. With our spending we choose how that productive capability is allocated. If we spend wisely we will get good results. Period. The idea of "creating jobs" was created by politicians to justify pork.
You have to compare military spending to everything else that could have possibly been purchased with that money to assess whether it is a positive thing. I leave you with a quote from president Eisenhower:
Summary: "My organic diet gives me superior logic skills. I am slim and agile, with a svelte, lithe physique. I eat raw plants, therefore I am right."
It's hard to argue with logic like that. Thank you for sharing.
Mod parent up.
Right now the US and most other countries could reduce their carbon out put by build nuclear power plants. Want to know why Japan and France have such low per capita emissions? Look at what percentage of there power they get from nuclear.
Yes the people in the US need to buy more fuel efficient cars. Guess what? That is happening thanks to $3+ a gallon gas. However the people in the US and Canada and Australia can't use as little fuel as the people in the EU simply because of geography. Our distances are vast and our population is not as densely clustered as in Europe.
I would like to see a carbon treaty that the US could sign in good faith. How about a uniform reduction across the board? Everybody has to reduce their emissions by the same percentage?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The America economy runs on innovation not oil. This is one area where the Republicans are still conservatives (not like the budget). They don't want our economy to change (change == grow). They must protect those that have money now, not those who have ideas for tomorrow.
Addressing global warming could become the next big technology boom. No one can come up with new ideas like Americans. How do you think we lead the world in Computer Science while having the lowest math scores in the industrialized world? There are no creativity tests in school. Technology is the application of science. We train and import scientists so we can apply what they discover. But if we ignore what they discover, how can we build technologies from it?
Remember the balance, geeks / suits / hippies. The hippies have been screaming about this for years, the suits deny it. It's time us geeks to pick sides. I side with building cool new stuff. Smells like there's a need, let's fill it. It's kinda a cold way to get to doing the right thing, but I'm an American. I believe the market (market == community) will lead us to the correct course of action.
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know." Mark Twain
This is just more drivel from the same scientists who can't even predict next Tuesday's weather. If we are in a global warming stage, we have passed the point of no return, in which case we better figure out how to adapt. These guys talk like there is a magic switch to turn global warming on and off - there ain't no such thing, boys and girls!
Point of fact - for most of the earth's history, ther were no polar ice caps, and the earth's temperature was far higher than today. There didn't seem to be any shortage of life on the planet (albeit most of it was reptilian in nature) and plant life was plentiful. There is NO evidence that if we enter another warming cycle that water would mysteriously disappear - if anything there would likely be more water available rather than less, since it would not be locked up in ice caps.
If we have a problem, it is POPULATION. Witness the developing countries that are striving to improve their conditions. When you have six live births per family as they do in most of these countries, and a desire to lower infant mortality and at the same time improve quality of life and increase industrialization, you are going to see more pollution, period, much less the bogeyman of "greenhouse gases."
Slashdot needs to stop putting this climate foolishness up on the site - after all, if you look at the other articles, most of it relates to energy sucking technology!
I just read a /. post that said the opposite, higher heat, means more evaporation, which makes a denser atmosphere, which would cool the planet, don't have time to search for the post, am out the door for drinks! after all, it's 18:20hrs where I am...
Sig Hansen?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
ost people that need an SUV, for legitmate reasons simply can't afford to buy another car
The problem is that very very few people NEED an SUV.
Many SUVs don't hold any more passengers than a regular small sedan, it is just that the SUV has a little more leg room (and is heavier, taller, less fuel-efficient, etc, etc).
And what about hauling stuff? Well, how often does one haul a whole lot of stuff on a regular basis? Amazing feats can be done with sedans whose rear seats fold down. And before you try to say that an SUV is needed just for a few occasions, consider this. There is an ancient invention called a trailer. Even better, it can be used on different vehicles (you only need to buy it once).
Maybe someone would "need" an SUV if they wanted to take 4 of their overweight friends, and 500lbs of gear, and a boat up a mountain all in one vehicle. But most people don't do this very often....
But do you really think the majority of SUV owners are getting SUVs now merely out of their own vanity?
Have you looked at SUVs lately? Why is "body armour" even a concept on vehicles? So yes, I would say that a high amount of vanity is involved. Money doesn't regulate low-income spending decisions -- debt does.
What about off-road driving? Well, most SUVs have never even seen dirt, despite being equipped with 4x4 drivetrains, etc. And their axles aren't designed for very touch off-roading either.
When people see a strong, muscular person, they tend to make certain favorable assumptions about what they are saying. Similarly, I believe people unconsciously associate large SUVs and vehicles with favorable qualities. (They make the driver appear more effectual, powerful, etc).
Or do you think that the guy who gets the most dates picks his girl up in a Ford Fiesta, Geo Metro, etc?
I strongly believe at least 3/4 of the large 4x4 trucks and SUVs could be replaced with sedans with no disadvantage. (The public is too foolish to realize this)
Just curious - where is your source for this info?
It's important to remember that global temperatures have been much colder and much warmer than they are now in the past 100 million years--I figure that a the most recent ~2.2% of Earth's history is a good enough starting point for us. Furthermore, if we look at the Sloss [cratonic] sequences, there's been a vast variation in sea level during that time, also. A common rebuttal to pointing this out is that our current climate change is happening at an "above average" rate. However, these models assume a gradualist model of climate change. Furthermore, there is no reason--given human records--to assume climactic gradualism based on the principle of uniformitarianism. Also there is good paleoclimatic evidence for drastic, relatively sudden shifts before [http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics /climatechange_wef.html%5D.
From the "next Ice Age" scare of the 70's, to the billions-dead famines predicted for the 80's, environmental groups have relied on pseudo-science and scare tactics to effect policy change. Current climate change is not monolithic--global temperatures fell slightly in the 1990s, and for another example last year's unusually warm Atlantic Ocean was accompanied by an unusually cool Pacific. Furthermore, CO2 levels are only weakly correlated to climate change in the paleoclimate record.
In any case, I've had my geologist rant out.
The Prius actually goes 0-60 in about ten seconds... Equivalent to a PT Cruiser.
I used to live in Massachusetts right off of Rt 1 in Danvers. I'd be amazed if there was a road like this anywhere else in the U.S. where you have to merge into 80MPH traffic from a *driveway*. The Prius didn't give me any more or less trouble that my Nissan Maxima did a 0-60 in 7 seconds.
-Riskable
http://www.riskable.com/
"I have a license to kill -9"
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
If one thinks about the enormous amounts of food that developed countries waste it's mind-boggling. In the US alone we even have an obesity EPIDEMIC. Our leftovers even feed the homeless. There is plenty of food in this world to feed every man, woman, and child on it, and then some. The problem is getting food to people in areas where corrupt and violent governments exist. If we lose hundreds of millions of tons of grain crops, there will be mass death, but only because the richest people in this world will have priority (as it is now) and there won't be anything left for the poor.
Is that if a small climate shift of something like 3 degrees really is going to cause massive crop failures, then your energy is better spent on figuring out new agriculture mehtods (mass hydroponics maybe?) that CAN survive this. Why? Because one thing we know for certian is that the climate is constantly changing. It has been for millions of years, before there were humans, much less a human presence on the level that could change the climate. Thus it's almost certian that the changes will continue, that we do not live in a "normal" climate that will change only if we fuck it up. While we may accelerate changes, they will happen regardless.
So we need to figure out how to survive those changes. We need to accept that the climate will change in the future and that if we dont' adapt, we die. So we need to work on farming that can survive in hotter, or colder temperatures, and so on. We need to embrace the fact taht our environment WILL change and we have to live with that.
Now that's not to say we shouldn't try to not screw it up. There's no point in making things worse if we don't have to, and conservation is basically a good idea for it's own sake. Use less, you'll have more for later if you need it. However we need to stop pretending like we live with what is a "normal" climate and that it will remain for the rest of time unless we change it. The only thing normal about the climate is that it changes. It changes hour to hour, day to day, month to month, year to year, decade to decade, and so on.
It WILL change in the future, and we need to be ready to deal with that.
Just a little Canadian perspective. While Canada has a higher percentage of urbanization than the USA, its population is actually more spread out and more mobile than the American population. Canadians consume more energy per capita than anyone else.
A great deal of this is due to temperature. My home town in northern Manitoba has a temperature range of nearly a hundred degrees Celsius, from -50 degrees in the winter to +40 degrees in the summer.
But another significant contributor to Canadians' energy consumption is distance. If a Canadian in a small town needs to travel to the nearest large city, chances are he is a lot further away than the average small-town American. There aren't as many small-toan Canadians as there are small-town Americans, and there are only 1/10 as many Canadians as Americans in total, but each one uses more energy.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Venezuela is currently fighting over this. They have extremely large reserves, like Persian Gulf large, but in a harder to get form. It's not feasable to produce at less than $40 per barrel. With prices as they are now though, it's sure as hell a worthwhile idea.
Well thing is, they aren't allowed to count them towards their reserves by OPEC, and thus don't have a high production quota (quota is based off of reserve size). They are fighting to get that changed, so they can massively ramp up production.
It's also why some believe Chavez is pushing to fix Venezuelan oil exports at $50/barrel. Seems like a purely alturistic move, in light of the current prices. However if they are allowed to count these new reserves and massively scale up production, it'll force price down. If it goes down too far and approaches $40/barrel, suddenly they aren't making any money off of the production and they still haven't recouped the costs of starting it up. So what they do is get a contract for $50/barrel which people are happy to sign, the price goes down, but you are still paying them $50/barrel becasue you agreed to do so and agreed to keep buying in quantity.
Either way it seems that we are not yet running in to a wall with oil and thus are not going suddenly stop releasing large amounts of CO2.
Explain to me, in concrete terms, how it is damaging to our economy to improve our energy efficiency. It's OK if you can't use big words, I understand.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
If only I had my mod points.
I keep pointing those facts out to people. But, so few ever listen.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I'm really disappointed by the /.er comments on this article. I would think that this group would be less susceptible than the general public to the straw-man and question-begging games played in the media by those interested in delaying the day of reckoning.
Logical Fallacies:
"Only Economics Matter:" whenever responsible people talk about the consequences of our hydrocarbon burn-off, change the subject to a narrow argument about economic costs; one that ignores the cost of ecological damage and ocean rise and paint a worse-case scenario for emissions caps.
"The Jury is still out:" a small group of corporate scientists exist for only one reason - to generate FUD about clear scientific consensus on emissions, toxins, and biology. Don't buy their bull. Responsible scientists agree that human contributions to carbon-dioxide emissions and destruction of natural resources are contributing to the heating of the Earth.
"It doesn't matter because of x:" ah we'll soon be out of oil anyway. Suuuure. Or the apocalypse is almost here, or we'll magically come up with new technology the "day after tomorrow," if you catch my drift. Note the glowing someday of the hydrogen car. This is an interior line of defense after the other rationalizations have been shot down.
Please, those of you who want to dismiss, ignore, or argue against the real scientific conclusions about global warming, I require you, I INSIST you find some new way to argue the point.
Let me add some relevant commentary from about 2500 years ago:
...
"No country has ever profited from protracted warfare. Those who do not thoroughly comprehend the dangers inherent in employing the army are incapable of truly knowing the potential advantages of military actions."
"Those in proximity to the army will sell their goods expensively. When goods are expensive, the hundred surnames' wealth will be exhausted. When their wealth is exhausted, they will be extremely hard-pressed [to supply] their village's military impositions.
When their strength has been expended and their wealth depleted, then the houses in the central plains will be empty. The expenses of the hundred surnames will be some sevenths of whatever they have. The ruler's irrevocable expenditures -- such as ruined chariots, exhausted horses, arrows and crossbows, halberd-tipped and spear-tipped [large, movable] protective shields, strong oxen, and larger wagons -- will consume six-tenths of his resources."
From the 1994 English translation by Ralph D. Sawyer of "Sun-Tzu: The Art of War"
ISBN 1-56619-297-8 casebound
ISBN 1-56619-298-6 special
I'm reminded of one of my favorite Bible quotations:
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9
Unfortunately, we do seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over, don't we?
Only wackos and flakes think the USA or Japan has an overpopulation problem. The population density in Japan is greater than just about anywhere, and yet they have none of the problems attributed to overpopulation.
Overpopulation is about the capacity of the entire planet, not just localized regions. Japan and the US import a significant portion of what they need to surive. Japan has almost no natural resources of its own and very little farmland. They import most of their food (and fish the seas of the world for much of the rest) and are reliant on the rest of the world for energy.
Saying that Japan does not suffer from overpopulation is not looking at the complete system. It's analogous to saying that fridges disprove thermodymics by decreasing entropy as they cool their food. They don't because all of that entropy and heat go out the back.
The world could not support a population density like Japan's everywhere on the Earth. You need to look at the whole system first.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
One of the disadvantages of being the big kid on the block is the spotlight is always on you, and people always criticize your actions. Many nations signed Kyoto with no intention of really doing what it takes to cut their emissions. The problem is, there's no teeth behind it. You essentially walk on the treaty at any time with no repercussions. There's no sancations, no fines, etc, you just walk on it. They figure, correctly so, that it probably won't be major news. However, the US is major news because, well the US is always major news. It's the only country that people from all over the world are hearing about all the time. So, regardless of how they play the Kyoto cards, it'll be scrutinized the world over.
As someone who agrees that global warming is a problem, and that this R&D should be done, let me take the devil's advocate position.
The state of the economy shouldn't just be based on the GDP. The GDP is just a proxy for all economic activity, which basically means how well we're doing at getting the stuff people want to the people who want it. If carbon emissions weren't a problem, and we still spent trillions of dollars working on making sure that carbon wasn't put into the atmosphere, that would be trillions of dollars spent on something that people didn't really want, and those resources could therefore have been spent more wisely.
There would be some benefits, of course. More fuel efficient cars, more renewable energy capacity, more efficient appliances. Those are going to offset part of the money we put into it, even if we don't reap the benefits of a saner climate (which I think we will).
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Before we get worked up into a frenzy over the impending doom from global warming, let's consider the other side of the issue. . .
1 .html
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2005-03-06-
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220
If you'd like to check results yourself, or look at precipitation, ground wetness, soil moisture (all related to drought and famine and food production), or any other of a few hundred climate variables, you can do it at home yourself.
EdGCM is a NASA global climate model (GCM) ported to run on Windows and Mac. Double-click to install, and you'll find it has been wrapped in a nice GUI. Want to add some CO2 or turn down the sun? Check the box and drag the slider! It includes, among many other things, a visualization program to image the results as line plots, or on a map, or however you want...
Space and Computers.
It is political, when there is lobbying done by Exxon to further only it's cause, with no regard to the environment or energy independence. The opinion journal article even contemplates cutting federal funding for climate research. One party has already taken a side... in fact, both know where they stand. Bush's statement at the G8 was hopeful, as was the state of the union speech, but it's back to politics as usual on this issue and just about everything else.
The problem with this issue is that it is actually two issues:
1) Global warming
2) increase in [man-made] atmospheric C02
While #1 is easy to demonstrate, and clearly true, #2 harder to prove due to the noise in the system (the earth produces a lot of C02 from a lot of sources, and has been doing it for long before the 20th century).
The key problem, though is, even assuming #1 and #2 to be incontravertible, proving a link between the two is virtually impossible with current scientific methods. We have no control group, it's too large and chaotic to accurately model (if it could be modeled accuratly, scientists would have no problem raising research dollars by predicting the outcome of a state lotto drawing, a vastly simpler problem, dynamically).
Whether man-made C02 causes global warming is, in fact true, or untrue, we are going to have to decide on a course of action the dark, because we will never know with enough accuracy to guide that decision, and trying to "prove" one way or the other to others, based on what we know, is simply a waste of time.
Usage: fortune -P [-f] -a [xsz] Q: file [rKe9] -v6[+] file1
PBS | Nova is going to air an episode on a new finding. That of the "dimming sun". Pollution on earth is blocking sun light to an effect in reducing the overall temparature. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/dimming.html Watch out :)) "Global Cooling" media-industry will soon mushroom !!
"The US refuses to cut emissions"
This is a very typical method used to win someone over to your side. Take a nugget of truth and twist it until it barely resembles the original fact.
The fact is that the United States has refused to sign onto the Kyoto protocols.
The other fact is that US auto makers are furious with the Bush administration for recent increases in demands on SUV fuel economy.
The US has not refused to cut emissions. The US has been, and continues to push forward with emissions controls by its own sovereign processes.
I will probably be modded down for being an American now.
Thank you for your Canadian perspective. I have only seen Canada while never visiting (go Niagra Falls), so I do not have the best insights on the region. It seems like Canada has some similar issues to deal with as the US, and in some cases such as heating, quite a bit worse.
I think most sane people in Canada are quite like the sane ones in the US. It's not that they want to be consuming such energy, but that it's required to live without going bankrupt and still have access to what one needs. I mean, who in their right mind would yell at a Canadian for using too much energy so he can keep his house livable in those -50 degree winter days?
Energy still costs money, for both people in the US and Canada. We do what we can to live, but most people don't just burn oil because it makes a pretty color.
Well, people are doing things about that, too.
The Starks have a saying: "Winter is coming".
I don't think we could possibly fuck up the earth so much that it would be less suitable for life than Mars.
RE: ...I still do not see how slowing emissions could slow the economy,
Well, let's take a look at motorcycling, shall we?
Once upon a time, people rode Harleys across the United States of America. Road films about this subculture were put on the silver screen. Harleys may have had their problems, most notoriously in the late 60s and early 70s when labor unrest meant people got bikes with tools in them, etc.
Fast forward. Sensible, roadside fixable stuff like pushrod technology, motors which could be mostly disassembled without removing them from the frame, carburetors which could be made to work just well enough to limp to the next town, etc. have been replaced by overcomplicated, ungainly crap machines whose systems, well - let's put it this way. Lose an oxygen sensor in the middle of nowhere, and you better hope someone comes by with a pickup truck. And bring your credit card. Take out old part, replace with new. Can't fix em. If your car goes down you can at least sit in it, sleep in it, whatever. Use it as shelter. Not so a bike.
Now, some spotted owl hugger ignores the vastly increased MPG of a motorcycle and screams WAIT A MINUTE! HOLD ON A SECOND! A BIKE PUTS OUT 4 g of carbon hypedupscaretacticane per gallon, versus a fraction of that even in a HUMMER! Apples and oranges comparison, considering how much less gets burned.
The same bunch that thought putting training wheels on motorcycles would keep them upright if something bad happened, or seatbelts on motorcycles was a great idea, decided that heretofore, bikes would pollute 60% less. OR ELSE. Did we elect these people? No. Five appointed folks.
And of course, building your own can only happen once in your lifetime. Not once and if it's stolen, wrecked, repossessed whatever you can own another one, ONCE IN YOUR LIFE.
Well, simpers the espresso sipping folk, Birkenstock hanging off one toe, all you need to do is simply put water cooling, catalytic converters, etc. on the motorcycle and preferably make them run with electric engines which do 40 miles an hour and make no noise.
Catalytic converters run REALLY hot. You can do that on a car because the car design doesn't put the fuel tank on top of the engine and exhaust, or have the rider straddle the working parts. How about sticking it right next to the rider's leg? The new fashion isn't leather chaps but reflective asbestos pants? Water jacketing is just another complicated system that can leak or break on you, it adds weight and cuts down the aerodynamics.
Motorcycles improve traffic flow, get better gas mileage and pollute, by the EPA's OWN ADMISSION, less than 1% of all pollution. They'd get more bang for their buck getting rid of lawnmowers and those SUVs of the sea, motorboats.
However, what happens with the EPA is they pick on those with the least money. Harley, Honda etc. are MORE than happy to comply cause they know that EPA certification of a vehicle runs into the tens of thousands of dollars, and the Orange County Choppers and the West Coast Choppers of this world cannot afford to pay that and compete. (Well, the Teutuls can.)
Has this translated to more Harley sales? Not at all. For the first time in a long time they've got bikes on the floor ready to be sold. Used to be there was competition for bikes before they were even built. Nobody wants the water-jacketed, overly complex V-Rod engine (except for a few enthusiasts) nor the "no user serviceable parts inside" Twin Cam 88 models out there. Engineering has removed all soul from these machines. Harley investors are threatening to sue.
My antique bike can be fixed with a few simple hand tools I can carry on my bike in a small tool pouch. It's simple enough that I can fix it, maintain it, by the side of the road if necessary. If I really want to travel long distances I can carry an extra chain and belt, set of points and some baling wire and deal with about 90% of all contingencies. (Can't repair an exploded case on the street, but then again the chanc
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Ahhhh, I see, so you distinguish between the people who should live and the people who should die. Must be nice to have been born with such insightfulness. You are obviously one of the group who has value, to understand that you are part of the group who has value. You should become a dictator somewhere, and start winnowing out the worthy people from those unworthy of support.
Or not. Personally speaking, anybody who thinks we have too many people will be the first ones up against the wall. We'll continue shooting them until we run out of people with that idea.
Or course, those two paragraphs are sarcasm, however, people who think there are too many people in the world, and purposefully limit their fecundity, are ensuring that the world will be populated by people who don't agree with them. I know somebody who only had two children "to replace their parents". Of course, the problem with that theory is that they had two girls!
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
RE: Well, simpers the espresso sipping folk, Birkenstock hanging off one toe, all you need to do is simply put water cooling, catalytic converters, etc. on the motorcycle and preferably make them run with electric engines which do 40 miles an hour and make no noise.
Many of these folks are those scientifically illiterate enough to think that hydrogen cars will run on putting water in the tank.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
The best data has shown that warming is a poor term and ultimately has caused those who use it to lose credibility with much of the scientific community who is not politically motivated.
Hah! Hahaha! By, "not politically-motivated", you mean the part that doesn't require funding, right?
--- What
Listen to this:
http://kuow.org/m3u/weekday-b20060323.m3u
from here:
http://kuow.org/weekday.asp?Archive=03-23#10
The important parts are from minute 39 to minute 52.
I thought this was a good interview and wanted to pass it along.
The interview answers the basic question of how climate change is predicted to happen (happening). In other words, the science of climate change and not the politics.
-J Tom Moon
What they dont tell you is that since 1998 the average global temperature has gone down .18 degrees Celcius, so the threat of the temperature rising 3 degrees, is almost non-existent.
It's a good thing I re-read your post because I almost wrote a long rant on fission reactors.
I know the holocaust/hitler is Godwin's law territory.
But if hundreds of millions to billions of people are famished or killed over this, then the holocaust isn't even in the same order of magnitude.
Given that possibility, lumping crass industry-sponsored devils-advocate anti-environmentalist pundits with holocaust deniers is pretty appropriate.
Unless of course you're on ostrich with its head in the ground denying Global Warming.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Right. That's why some people are complaining about Mercury and Dioxin pollution blowing over to the US from China. But I admittedly only heard this on NPR this morning, so I got squat for numbers, just like you.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
We could divert that research money into actual solutions, like producing butanol from cellulose leading to significantly less pollution and energy independance.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Fundamentally, most military spending is as good for the economy as paying someone to dig a ditch and then fill it back in. The only payback we get from military spending is research and development that trickles back into the economy via things such as computer systems, aircraft, etc.
But that's not much. Most money is lost in weapons that are never used, or if they ARE used, blow up things that then we have to eventually pay to replace (see Iraq reconstruction). This is a massive inefficiency no matter how you add it up.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Surely, this is a trivial truth--indeed, almost a tautology. The world's climate has always been changing and will continue to change as long as we manage to hold on to an atmosphere. So of course no matter what happens, climate change will continue--and King's assertion will be vindicated. Of course, real science has to include numbers, so we get some:
As the article mentions, the 3 degree figure is itself controversial; if we grant that the world's average temperature is indeed rising (and it does seem to be), there is no way to calculate exactly how much it will rise. Moreover, there are many other factors at work, and there is no way to predict their influence on the world's climate. Indeed, for all we know, our carbon emissions are the only thing that is staving off the next ice age.
There is no clue in the article about how King arrived at his calculation of the loss of cereal crops due to warming. The wide spread between 20 and 400 million suggests a disturbingl lack of precision, but more importantly, why does King think that global warming would cause the loss of any cereal crop production? There's certainly no argument for this cited in the article. Let's grant that a worldwide shift in annual temperatures and precipitation is going to take place; it then seems reasonable to suppose that some areas where wheat is grown today might not yield profitable wheat harvests in the future. But why should we believe that other areas that do not grow wheat today might not become suitable for this crop after the change has taken place? If the world becomes a warmer place, then it seems to me that the latitudes at which wheat can be grown would shift northward (in the Northern Hemisphere, of course). Those latitudes that were previously suitable for wheat might now become suitable for other crops that require warmer weather--anything from pineapples to sugar cane.
As I said, "climate change" is a given of life on this planet. But it seems passing strange to me that those who are talking about it most today insist that all consequences of such change will be negative. Such a purely negative view is surely at least subject to doubt if we consider a relatively recent period at which global temperatures were several degrees higher than today--the so-called "Little Optimum" which lasted from about 900-1200 AD. This was a period when agriculture flourished in Europe, and Iceland was a pleasant place. On the other hand, nobody much enjoyed the ice ages. Lighten up--change can be a good thing!
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I don't think it's going to slow the economy either, GM is READY to rock -n- roll with hydrogen powered vehicle's, people I know at daimler-chrysler will not talk about it so they're at best a year or two away, and I'd be surprised if ford and toyota were being caught napping. The only hold up is getting the stations upgraded; a few tweaks get the profit margins in line and the fluery of economic activity is going to make the dot com boom look like a tea party at the ladies' poetry society! Back that up by have Bush and his "big oil croonies" going to the hospital to be treated for "all day boners" at the thought of finaily being able to get out of the commodity petro-fuel business and into the high margin specialty perto-chem business.
Yeah fools, go ahead think Bush is stupid just like he wants, in a couple years all of those liberal tree-hogging soccer-mom are going to be getting $50.00 salvage for their SUVs because the only fuel in a fifty mile radius is either hydrogen, B50 or E85.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Let's try something interesting. Hopefully. Since this ultimately comes down to an issue of personal finance for many people:
Imagine the likelihood of significant global climate change and its impact on upright mammals (more dangerous than its impact on many other types of critters) could be speculated on as a stock. Would you invest in this stock on the advice of a significant portion of the scientific community or would you pass on this stock and consider it too risky
I would buy shares not because I could flip them soon for a profit but because my research leads me to believe that they will provide significant long term "returns" for myself and my two young boys. For the average human being like me who works for a living the best portfolio strategy is to buy for the long term, not the short term.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
I'll go you one better.
The MRF (Motorcycle Rights Foundation) and other organizations are seeing their way of life go under. To many, one buys a motorcycle to customize it. "Well, you can always bolt some chrome trim onto it, or paint it some wild color." Yeah, but change the wheel size and you're in violation of the law.
Now, keep in mind we're not talking certification (several tens of thousands of dollars!) for an engine, EFI (Electronic Fuel Injection) and exhaust combination, we're talking certification of a model. So if you offer five bikes with the same engine, same exhaust and same EFI, but one has a windshield and fairing, the other a springer fork and the other a girder fork (all of this is front end stuff) that's three times the usurious government inspector fee, even though all three bikes use the same engine, transmission, exhaust etc. and work EXACTLY the same way.
Private folks have proposed certifying components as being EPA worthy, rather than models of motorcycle. The EPA is more interested in a "pay to play" model - if you want to change your exhaust to something cooler looking, pay a licence fee (yearly) to the EPA, make the cheque out to "environmental scam shakedown, inc." and certainly, you can do that, if we decide in our largesse to allow it. I can just see them privately going "come on, take the bait! take the bait!"
Now we start seeing the REAL motivation. If you want to do anything other than What We Say, you can pay us to do it. Cause if there was real harm and devastation from a trumpet muffler rather than a muffled drag, they wouldn't consider it at all. I'll reiterate. These EPA folks are NOT elected, they're appointed, the electable ones are just as miffed. The DMV and State Patrols are not interested in the hassle of having to enforce all these stupid new laws and buy all kinds of tools to do testing and certification, to achieve for all intents and purposes no discernible difference in emissions.
Mind you, that's what all this alarmist GARBAGE, including Kyoto, is about. Sell us on the world coming to an end because of a 0.5F degree change in ambient air temperature, and shake down the first world for money and jobs because of it.
Now we start to understand why the enviro industry works the way it does. Remember kids, SUVs for work or what have you (say a rap lifestyle) are inherently evil, but the same vehicles (albeit made by foreigners) used for Sierra Club outings and making espresso with REI camping gear on your yuppie envirofreak hiking trip are not.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Where is this hydrogen going to come from? OIL.
Look it up.
So, we get far less emissions from a car, but that gigantic hydrogen plant is gonna put out one MOTHER of a load of pollutants. And yeah, they've got enough money, power and influence to simply ignore pleas from the administration to clean up their act.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Regardles of the validity of the science if america isn't going to do anything about its actions and at the same time believes the wether is fuct, then I wouldn't put is past world leaders to see mass killings as a way of dealing with the problem rather than being more imaginative. this is why I think all indapendant media is getting bought up around the nation. Maybe the first goal will just be about going to war with very little media decent but eventialy it will be an attack on americas own people, this is sorta what the new immagration laws are a part of. I feel like the people who want to deny global warming while everyone else believes in it threatens the danger that if global warming of the scale we are talking about will be catastrophic for millions of lives and because we don't try to figure out a way to cut back on emissions, mass extermination by wealthy men will be the way... Geeks wake up. The argument should be wether global warming exists or not. Energy efficient technilogies will raise the standard of peoples lives. For a government that supposedly focuses its planning on worse case senerios did a terrorable job in New Orleans. I believe they have no concern with global warming, the poor people will be the first to die, for the most part rich people move to highlands. And wealthy folks are storing seeds in the poles. It is time for us to try to study terraforming just in case we are warming the planet. The aregument shouldn't be wether global warming exists, it should be what are we going to do if it does about it. And unfortunately I think wealthy fat kats have lazy ass solutions... just a guess, All the arguments are about wether global warming exists or not. Lets just assume for a moment it does, what should we do next? Energy effitiency doesn't hurt anyone except for oil companies, and only if they have nothing invested in sustainable energies. Just because global warming can be proved to not exist doesn't mean that sustainable technologies arn't worth investing in. This is just the oil industry realizing they are going to be fazed out and so they are having this insidious propiganda battle by keeping the argument wether or not global warming exists. Air polution exists, and tech that is friendly to air polution is friendlier to people who live in those areas. I think we can all agree than man has an effect on the environment, so many animals have gone extinct since man's increased succes at survival. There is no reason not to think that eventualy that effect wouldn't just effect animals and plant life but the weather as well. There is no excuse not to go enviuronmentaly friendly. The oil companies are dinasours who know they are about to go extinct and so they are trying to take all the oil and keep us ignorant to other alternatives long enough to use up the oil. The greatest argument for environmentaly friendly tech is has nothing to do with the global warming debate. Would we have to go to war with Iraq if we had focused on weaning ourselves from the need for foriegn oil?
What do I have it for, you may ask?
Well, I live in Denver, Colorado and I ski and camp and fish and go shooting at a couple dozen different times all through the year. Sometimes the roads are snowy and 4WD really comes in handy. Somtimes I'm on back roads or jeep trails to get to the res or campsite. Sometimes I head out into the plains to the range, out there in dirt-road farm country where you just don't want to get stuck. I also have to get to work during the snowy months and high-clearance 4WD makes that easier ... and yes, I do know how to drive in the snow.
For all those activities (except work) I'm hauling at least 1 dog and 1 cooler plus whatever else comes with the activity -- skis, camp gear, guns, tackle, etc. My Jeep gets pretty dirty, inside and out. No sedan could take that kind of (ab)use.
So when I hear people bashing away at "those evil SUVs and their evil owners who are hurting my child's planet", I think that it's just a bit reactionary and generally inconsiderate. The only person entitled to define and satisfy my needs is me. I strongly believe that anyone who thinks they know my needs better than me is two bricks shy of a full load and maybe a little self-righteous, too. Yup, I drive a "gas-guzzling uber-polluting SUV", but I pay the brown sign, too.
Maybe there are people who could be just as happy with a sedan, but there are other features of SUVs that have pretty broad appeal -- the ride height, confidence in-collision (perhaps misplaced if you don't know how to drive one without rolling it over), powerful engines, more confidence that you won't get stuck in crappy conditions, etc. Oddly enough, it's that first one -- ride height -- that really pulls people into driving an SUV, and especially women, I've noticed.
I've got a motorcycle that I take to work about 50% of the time in the summer, but in general the Jeep's the daily driver. Since I bought it, there have been some neat cars to come out that have jeep-like features without the weight. I've comtemplated buying a subcompact for the highway drives, but when it comes down to it, I need a vehicle I can abuse in the mountains and in the snow and on the back roads, so I'd still be keeping the Jeep.
Sorry, Charlie.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
All the alarmism about global warming, and also about "peak oil" has had me worried lately. But suddenly I realized there's nothing to worry about!
When we run out of oil in twenty years, we'll stop producing greenhouse gasses, and global warming will be abated!
Problem solved!
That's sarcasm, you fucking idiot.
Cool! That alleviates me from having to try to take it seriously.
Why the hell is it you can ALWAYS predict a policy position of a self -labelled "progressive" by selecting the most anti-US one?
If you had read any of my other posts over the years you would find that I am a self-labled conservative libertarian.
My views are not anti-US, they are pro-selfsufficiency, a deeply "American Value."
Try being pro-American by standing on your own feet, instead of somebody else's back.
KFG
Saying that the U.S. refuses to cut greenhouse emissions is ignorant. Presumably it's based on the U.S.'s refusal to join the Kyoto Protocols over fears of competitive imbalance (e.g., several fast-growing economies wouldn't be party to the protocol as "developing nations"). That's not the same.
I don't necessarily agree with the U.S. position, but I think any discussion about policy should require a fundamental sense of honesty that is missing from statements like the "U.S. refuses to cut greenhouse emissions."
. . . so it does look like it will be up to humankind to practice some discretion with the burning of fossil fuels. We may be getting closer to the _halfway_ point for _easily_recoverable_ oil, but we're nowhere near that point for natural gas (much of which goes unrecovered just because we don't have a good way to transport it to where it's needed), and we have ungodly large supplies of coal (centuries' worth). The U.S. is especially well endowed with coal reserves . . . too bad that coal is the worst fossil fuel in terms of CO2 release per unit of energy recovered.
Never eat anything bigger than your head.
Second, you can use less energy by being more efficient. This is my preferred option for many areas. Many devices have efficiencies in the 5-10% range, with the other 90-95% of the energy being completely wasted. To me, this leaves considerable scope for improvement. You get the same amount done, but with far less waste. If it turns out the waste is unimportant, you can then ramp up and do far more with the same input as you currently have. This doesn't involve broken windows, this involves preferring insulation to burning money.
Third, you could always adjust the needs. Hauling pig iron around the country at high speed, then letting it rust in some storage area, is wasteful of energy in two ways. You waste energy accelerating a large mass by more than is useful to you, then you waste energy reducing the iron oxide back to iron. If, on the other hand, you moved "non-perishable" raw materials much more slowly, with better containment, it would require much less energy to do so at all points along the way.
(If you've a full pipeline of canal barges, it makes no difference that they travel at a few miles a day, as you can add/remove exactly the same amount to the pipeline over the same time as you could by truck and your stockpile would be no different, the only difference is that you need no storage yards, you use almost no energy and it's vastly easier to protect a barge against the elements.)
Your "broken window" theory also assumes that you can directly compare R&D of efficient techniques (which add value to society and to business) with the activities of any non-contributing industry. Circulating money in a manner that does not add value will actually decrease value. (Money suffers from a form of entropy called inflation.) But the entire game changes when you invest in something that provides direct returns through improved scalability and reduced requirements.
Better scalability, better pipelining, lower energy requirements - sounds like a shopping list of things computer geeks are always asking Intel for, but really these are the things that will make or break ANY industry. It is in failing in these areas that doomed many British industries - the products themselves were generally superior to their American counterparts, but the processes used were too primitive, too neolithic, to survive any serious pressure.
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)
My antique bike can be fixed with a few simple hand tools I can carry on my bike in a small tool pouch. It's simple enough that I can fix it, maintain it, by the side of the road if necessary. If I really want to travel long distances I can carry an extra chain and belt, set of points and some baling wire and deal with about 90% of all contingencies.
Dude, good luck with carrying that mobile parts store with you while you are out riding. I see a lot of guys like you standing along the shoulder of the road, cellphone in hand, calling a buddy to come pick them up.
From the tone of your comment, you are quite happy with your antique bike. I'm happy for you. But you won't catch me on one of those bikes. My 2002 VTX 1800 (the first model year for the VTX 1800) is a fuel-injected, shaft-driven joy to ride. It has always started on the first press of the starter button and my only visits to the dealer are for routine maintenance.
In your other post, you said that "many people buy a bike to modify it." Well, I'd say that many people buy a bike to ride it. When the warm weather hits, I want a reliable bike that I can take on a long ride without worrying about it breaking down.
Funny you should be all unhappy about motorcycle emissions requirements. I think they make a perfect poster child for why sometimes government regulation can be a good thing, and for how it should be done. Scenario:
California places restrictions on emissions for bikes. People get pissed because their CA model sport bike produces 30% less power than the "49 state" version of the same bike. This is a factory restriction, though, with no policing, so people who care just fix theirs. Harley owners probably got pissed about pushrods being outlawed or helmets required or something, I wouldn't know. But fast forward a few years to now:
California still has these "horrendous" restrictions. But now Yamaha ships (basically) one model of their flagship sport bike to the whole world, passing CA emissions without recourse to stupid hacks. Technology evolved to produce more power (and boy does it) AND be cleaner at the same time, all because of a well placed government regulation. Everybody wins, around the world.
Water cooling and proper cam-operated valves and so-on didn't come into the picture because The Man was trying to keep you down, they came in because they improve performance and reliability (you don't have to fix it yourself if it doesn't break) and those are what customers want. Crazy customers, go figure...
I certainly don't see how any of this "slows the economy", though. The economy is driven by tens of thousands of people buying from major manufacturers, not Shaq buying from Jesse James.
How much space does a belt, a chain and a set of points take up?
Lest you think I'm a Japanese bike hating Harley rider, I'm not. I've owned Hondas in the past and agree with you. They are a joy to ride and what have you. But let me put it to you this way - you should be allowed to change the exhaust pipe on it if you want to. I mean, Yamaha is coming out with ads for its Star series basically saying "you know, you CAN get a variety of looks out of this bike".
Oh, and, I don't own a cellphone and unless the engine case has exploded on me, I'm not calling anyone. Your bike may be a reliable bike to ride, but when something goes on it, and give it enough time and it will, you're looking at some serious shop time. I have the luxury of knowing that I can do almost all the work myself if need be (replacing valve guides requires a press, truing a flywheel is left to experts) with simple tools and I can get lots of different types of parts. When I rode a Honda, when something went wrong, it was down the Honda dealership, and I paid dealership prices on dealership parts. Never mind that it was a lot harder to work on them than mine.
My MAIN point is that if I should want an air cooled, pushrod driven carbureted motorcycle I should be able to drive one, in the land of the free, cause I have some pretty valid reasons to want to do so. Just as how you have EQUALLY valid reasons to want your water cooled fuel injected bike. Also, if I should choose to put on a nicer looking set of exhaust pipes it should be my perogative to be allowed to do so.
Many doesn't imply all. Even the metric guys are getting in on customising their rides.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
I think we agree that different riders like different bikes for different reasons. I don't think I'd ever own a BMW bike but every time I see one on the street, I say "Nice bike!". The same goes for crotch rockets. I can't see myself on one but if someone wants to ride a bike that sounds like it has a weedeater for an engine and you have to lay down on the gas tank to ride it, go right ahead. Harley owners ride Harleys because they want to be "cool" and they have too much money in their checking account. Hee hee hee! :^)
:^)
I wanted to let you know that I changed the exhaust pipe on my VTX (the single "sewer pipe") last summer. I'm not sure what the big deal is in your comment about not being able to change the exhaust pipe. There are lots of aftermarket exhausts for the VTX 1300 and 1800.
I agree that you should be able to drive what you want. But the manufacturers may not produce bikes that won't be purchased by a LOT of consumers. You may have noticed that since the debut of the VTX in the summer of 2001 (which is when I picked-up my model year 2002), the other bike manufacturers have started building "big cruisers" like the VTX.
In the name of customizing, I also have a "fuel computer" that I have to install on my VTX (it's on my weekend To Do list). True, it's not as fun as putting new jets in a carb and tuning things but it still gives me some control over how the bike performs. It will also make those Harleys (some of which cost twice what I paid for the VTX) disappear in the rear view mirror that much quicker.
I have no problems with motorbikes. Well, I'm not completely convinced 2-stroke engines are capable of delivering the same power for the same fuel as a 4-stroke engine, if optimally designed, and I'm definitely not convinced either would be superior to a well-designed rotary engine, but that's for a highly optimized design. For right now, I'd be willing to believe that motorbikes have superior performance to a car.
I do not drive an SUV, I do not regard SUVs as suitable for any purpose whatsoever, and I'd regard any environmentalist who owned an SUV as brain-dead.
Yes, cars are too complex these days. This has nothing to do with efficiency, however. There is nothing efficient about a car that cannot be maintained. That should be obvious, since if it cannot be maintained, it cannot be kept at an optimum for the conditions the vehicle is subject to. A hyper-complex car can, at best, only be any good under absolutely average test conditions and nothing else.
The add-ons do nothing for efficiency within themselves, either. They aren't designed to. They're designed to add "value" to a car (read: money in the hands of the manufacturer) but really don't benefit anyone. Cruise control? Well, anything that can control Cruise can't be bad, but I digress. There are numerous reports of cruise controls in cars malfunctioning and activating in a manner that turned the car into an uncontrollable missile - even though there are supposed to be failsafes to prevent just that. The failsafes don't exist. There are also reports of car electronics sparking even when the car is switched off, resulting in houses being burned to the ground and a number of fatalities.
But what have these things added? Most fuel is used in stop-go traffic, not highway cruising. Such additions look "cool", have added nothing and have caused (fortunately only a few, but still far too many) fatalities.
Am I in favour of complexity? No. I am in favour of efficiency. Often, efficiency can be gained through simplicity. Not always - sometimes you need to add enough complexity to be able to do something well. To misquote one famous scientist, things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Am I an environmentalist? I don't like the term, because I don't see things as being necessarily in conflict, and many of my beliefs that are friendly towards the environment are so because they are as simple as possible but no simpler. Those things that are good at achieving results with minimal effort must necessarily also achieve results with the minimum of impact. I like the idea of preserving as many species as possible, but that's just as much because diverse environments are stable AND offer the greatest possiblity of providing me with whatever I might need.
I despise those who believe things because it is their religion. That earns no respect from me. I DO respect those who believe things because they have established something to be true, and I definitely respect those who work hard on pushing their understanding to the limits. That is without regard to the beliefs, including whether I hold them myself. I reserve my greatest disgust and contempt, though, for those who turn meaningless labels (such as "environmentalism") into religious objects of worship or fanatical objects of hate. Such people have no feelings towards that which they profess to worship or hate - how could they, when they don't even know what they are? So not only are they claiming prophetic powers of received wisdom, they are also claiming the divine right of prejudice. Contempt is far better than such people deserve, but in the spirit of not wasting needlessly, I will waste nothing more on them.
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)
RE: I wanted to let you know that I changed the exhaust pipe on my VTX (the single "sewer pipe") last summer. I'm not sure what the big deal is in your comment about not being able to change the exhaust pipe. There are lots of aftermarket exhausts for the VTX 1300 and 1800.
:^)
Your bike is 2002. As of 2006 not only are the requirements on your VTX1800 way stricter, those models and later lose the legal right to have aftermarket parts put on it. As has been stated about the EPA, only chrome and paint can change. Period. $10,000 a day fine if you don't comply.
RE: I agree that you should be able to drive what you want. But the manufacturers may not produce bikes that won't be purchased by a LOT of consumers. You may have noticed that since the debut of the VTX in the summer of 2001 (which is when I picked-up my model year 2002), the other bike manufacturers have started building "big cruisers" like the VTX.
Well, we'll see about that in 2010 when the requirements get even stricter. Point being, and I do have one, there's NO WAY you can get to car-level emissions because these involve catalytic converters and the tech isn't there to do it. And this whole "by the way in two years time you can only get parts from the dealer which we've been paid $50,000 per model to certify" IS going to have an effect on the market, it IS having an effect on the market. I don't see people rebutting this, just "Harley sucks, buy a squid bike."
RE: In the name of customizing, I also have a "fuel computer" that I have to install on my VTX (it's on my weekend To Do list). True, it's not as fun as putting new jets in a carb and tuning things but it still gives me some control over how the bike performs. It will also make those Harleys (some of which cost twice what I paid for the VTX) disappear in the rear view mirror that much quicker.
Be that as it may, it is illegal to install that on a 2006 or later bike. This is my point.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
The Greens Party Energy Policy concurs,
Dr Michael Gunter's submission to the Senate Inquiry into Global Warming noted,
you had me at #!
I was not aware of the stricter regulations for the 2006 model year bikes. I'd mod you "Informative" if I hadn't already posted to this discussion.
First, the Holocaust actually happened. Its antecedents, workings, and results have been documented, studied, and well-understood for some time.
On the other hand, "hundreds of millions to billions of people are famished or killed over [global warming]" is a hypothetical future scenario, that has not happened yet and may--may--not happen at all. Not only that, but its antecedents and workings are not yet well-understood, nor have they yet been well-documented or thoroughly understood. And its results, in some hypothetical future, can only be guessed at, even by experts--they're just making educated guesses.
So at the moment, you're accusing anybody who dissents from the mainstream on climate change worse than a Nazi, even though Nazis actually did perpetrate the holocaust, and we presently have no real evidence that global warming will play out the way you expect nor have the impact on human survival that you expect.
And this is why Nazi comparisons always kill a debate. Because they always seem to be accompanied by exactly this sort of unthinking, heinous disregard for common sense, and blind hatred of dissenters.
(Personally, I suspect you are a big hypocrite: Enthusiastically admiring how Galileo stuck it to the mainstream scientists of his time, while equally enthusiastically denouncing any scientist who questions the mainstream on global warming today.)
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Well, yeah. The EPA rolled out new rules for 2006 models and beyond. Basically, you can't alter anything on your bike except handlebars and paint. Try that fuel computer trick on a 2007 VTX and you incur $10,000 penalties PER DAY.
2010 or so it gets much worse.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
I've often wondered about the actual heat impact of all our combustion engines expelling hot exhaust gases into the atmosphere. Nevermind the progressive warming caused by heat trapped under a layer of greenhouse gases, I'm talking about the mere fact that automobile exhaust, jet exhaust, and other internal-combustion engine exhausts are just plain hot. Does that make a difference? Also, we're changing the albedo of the earth every time we cut down a forest or build a new highway...how does that figure into global warming? Does the heat transfer between hot asphalt and the air amount to any measurable quantity which we could attribute at least partially to global warming? Would we be better off if we had white roads with black lines? Seriously, anyone have any idea about these questions?
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
And, to tie this back in to my original point, this might have an effect on the companies who produce the fuel computers, exhausts etc. for the VTX1800. All in the guise of saving the planet. Not about the fees required to certify models.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
For the purpose of conveying a single person, with near-zero baggage, to and from work, a car is stupid and an SUV is moronic. Mass transit - if correctly designed - would be the "ideal" solution, but I'd certainly regard motorbikes that are efficient as vastly preferable to SUVs and hatchbacks.
(In fact, it would be great if, instead of having one HOV lane and the rest of the road to whatever's out there, they had two HOV, one bike lane, and if there's anything left, cars/trucks get squished into that. If people were adopting sound transport strategies, they wouldn't need a single-occupancy lane except for very rare situations and emergencies.)
Individual rights exist only at the expense of communal rights, so the only sound way of living is to balance these two as best you can. If individual rights trump everything, then no communal rights can exist at all and there will be no community and no individual can exist for long in utter, irrevocable isolation. If communal rights trump everything, then the individual ceases to exist and the community will stagnate, rot and die.
Common sense dictates that the middle way is the only long-term way, that extremes (of any kind) are degenerate and will fail. This fact was not discovered by a "tree hugger" (not totally sure what that means, as REAL environmentalists are way too busy to hug trees, and would consider it damaging to the micro ecosphere of the tree anyway) but was known for sitting around in the shade. It's an interesting worldview that politicos would likely profit from.
Common sense also dictates that venom should be reserved for the true offenders (and I'm more than happy to consider the current EPA as one of the worst offenders of all time). There seems little point and less sense in condemning those who may even agree with you, if there was any kind of meaningful communication. I tend to agree with a lot of different perspectives, because I work hard at finding out what is meant and why. (I also tend to be in a bunch of flamewars, because I also speak my mind whether it is popular or not, and my views tend not to be popular with large segments of society.)
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)
1) Convince me that global warming is happening
2) Convince me that it's due to human activity
3) Convince me that it *can* be 'solved' or at least reduced
4) Convince me that working to 'solve' it won't make things worse like it has in the past.
It's a fine list of prerequisites if all you're trying to do is establish academic proof, and you can act as a disinterested party with detached interest, or even for a small wager made between friends.
As a guide to deciding when to form public policy, it seems less wise. Yes, we *could* wait to bother with any attempt to try to reduce impacts until we fully understand the subject. For some potential outcomes, however, this is obviously going to be an unacceptable policy course.
When you're approaching something with powerful but uncertain consequences, you've several possible courses:
(1) Try to take only actions with small risks/consequences until you understand outcomes well enough to risk more.
(2) Make sure you have the resources to absorb consequences or make large changes quickly as you come to understand things better.
(3) Don't worry about the consequences until you have a full understanding.
Reducing impacts until we better understand the subject has disadvantages, of course, and in a situation where risks are small or correctable, it's often an inferior strategy. The larger the risks get, the more foolish strategy #3 looks.
And the parent poster's personal criterion for judging global warming work, more or less, as advocacy for position #3, which is one reason I find the justification problematic.
Tweet, tweet.
would convince you of number two. Number one is rock solid. Number two, however, requires proving a causation, which of course is impossible. And since we do not have ten thousand earths where we can run ten thousand experiments, it isn't even possible to give you a nice statistical analysis to show a correlation.
We are doing something that by our knowledge of science will cause warming. Warming is happening. That is ALL the evidence we can come up with. That is the nature of geoscience (and astronomy, and history, and much of economics).
The silver lining: Club Med Helsinki
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
Glaciers are melting faster then predicted in the 70's, and the oceans are warming faster then predicted in the 70's. Substantially faster.
I am talking about peer reviewed published papers, not the scare published in the dying years of OMNI.
Yes, both oceans are osilating wilder then predicted, but the average hasn't changed much. Why? well, becasue it is an average. If one goes up 3 degrees and the other down 3 degress that a huge change. Guess what the everage is? exactly the same.
CO2 levels are STRONGLY related to climate oscilations.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is so funny: plugging information that is just wrong, into computer models that are nothing but guesses, and massaging the results until they meet your "OMG PONIES!!!11 We're all going to fry" scenario.
Not only dot we not understand our climate, we can't measure it properly, can't even tell what it was like in the past (with accuracy) and so far can't MAKE EVEN A SINGLE ACCURATE FUTURE PREDICTION. Oh but wait, that's right, 3 Degrees C will kill us all.
*SIGH*
Wake me in a hundred years someone please.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
If the average temperature of the earth changes by 3 degrees, a billion is not an unreasonable number.
Looking at the physical global evidence made me re-evalute my stance on Global warming. Yes, I think it is happening, and it's rate is alarming.
I think the US,and other countries, should start to models about where the new farmalnds will be, what areas will be gone with a 1 foot, 10 foot and 15 foot rise in the oceans. Look at where the people are giong to go and start planning for it.
Shipping lane will change, it is possible to loss global currents. Plan for it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"A collapsing Atlantic ThermoHaline Current ..."
WOuld mean no sea rise, since the water would be in ice form in europe.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And that money can't come from the corporate welfare we're giving away to oil companies because...
Do you have a source for any of your claims?
You're talking awfully breezily about "serious climatologists you know" and about how the science is "in its infancy" and "is too complicated" to give accurate predictions, and you accuse the Kyoto accord of being a blatant anti-US attack, yet you give no reason to believe a thing you're saying; that something is well-written does not make it true. Indeed, your post comes across as more than a little tinfoil-hattish ("it's all an anti-US conspiracy, man!"), as well as heavily relying on the same "without ironclad proof we must ignore it" pseudo-scientific argument that Intelligent Design champions, so it sounds like little more than regurgitated talking points.
Now, you might very well be right about the things you claim, but you give no evidence to back up your claims, which are made in such a way as to be inherently hard to believe. If you're interested in honest discussion, you would do well to address these problems, and try providing much more in the way of substantiating evidence.
> I seem to recall that every other time we (meaning mankind) have tried to "fix" an
> ecological problem, we end up making it about a dozen times worse.
Then I humbly submit you haven't been paying attention.
One obvious example is the Dust Bowl in Depression-era USA. This was a massive ecological disaster---huge areas of farmland had their topsoil blow away in "Black Blizzards"---and it was another situation with both human and natural causes.
Instead of ignoring the problem (it's hard to deny that the sky has turned black) or throwing up their hands and going "oh noes!", though, people eventually figured that something had to be done to stop this, and figured out how. Roosevelt formed the Soil Conservation Service, basically implementing a bunch of government programs to fix the problem (such as planting trees as windbreaks). And fix it it did---Chicago, NYC, and DC are no longer getting Oklahoma topsoil falling out of the sky, and I believe the areas are suitable for farming again.
Quite simply, if you believe that humans can't diagnose and fix an ecological problem without making it worse, you're demonstrably wrong.
So, those European/Japanese cars that get 50+ MPG are, what? Just not possible over here? Give me a break. Extremely powerful players in this heavily lopsided market have worked to create and maintain a highly inefficient energy economy because it makes them money. A bare handful of them would stand to lose if they were forced to clean up their act, and I maintain quite baldly that their needs really don't fucking matter in the long run. Increasing the US's net energy efficiency would immediately and rapidly benefit the sectors of the economy not currently involved in ass-raping consumers with wildly fluctuating energy prices. Kyoto deniers continually cast the equation in terms of how impossible it is to do anything but choke down our economy in order to comply, and then pretend by putting their fingers in their ears that dramatic and immediate improvements in energy efficiency, currently on display all over the rest of the world, are simply impossible here.
I asked for concrete explanations and didn't get 'em, so it's still a dead loss for you.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
> Canada actually consumes more energy per person than the US and also produces more CO2 per person.
The first claim is true, but the second---the one pertinent to this discussion---is false, even using the most recent data available (2004).
Canada uses more energy per capita than the US, but has lower CO2 emissions per capita (link1, link2, link3).
> The difference is that humans are well adapted to large variances in temperature and climate.
No. The difference is that many climatic systems are unstable, which means that a small change in inputs can cause a large change in outputs.
One of the most alarming possible examples, is the Gulf Stream, which is essentially a huge conveyor belt pumping heat from the tropics to the northern Atlantic. Were this to shut down---as has happened in the past and may be starting now)---bad things would happen. For a start, Europe would get much colder (~9deg F), affecting food production, and the southern US would get warmer, increasing droughts and causing more frequent and more powerful storms (especially hurricanes, which are powered by heat in the ocean).
This isn't a matter of "well, it'll be a little warmer, so we'll just sweat a little more". This is a matter of "weather as we know it will change significantly, and not in a manner we'll like."
> The point is, public transport just isn't available in a very large portion of the US.
No - the point is that the US (as a whole) has made a choice to live an energy-inefficient lifestyle.
You're "forced" to live far from work because of the size and luxury of house/apartment you culturally expect. Most other nations live in more modest dwellings, and hence use their land (and heat/AC) more efficiently. By contrast, the US is built on the assumption of cheap land and cheap energy, with the car allowing the latter to be used to exploit the former. Due to this cultural bias towards the car---which quite honestly has had a symbolic appeal (freedom/individuality) far outside its usefulness in the US for decades---more efficient systems such as passenger rail are not seriously considered.
It's worth noting, though, that about 80% of Americans do live in urban areas---which is the same fraction as in the UK---so most of your attempts to draw contrasts between the two countries are little more than red herrings.
So efficient options like public transit aren't predicated on living in a "tiny country" - they're predicated on public policy makers choosing efficient options. The US - perhaps because of its historical wealth - has done so to a lesser extent than many other industrialized countries. Trying to argue that it can't, though, is simply nonsensical - the near-identical urban-rural demographics between the US and European countries skewers that falsehood.
You have some points, but you also have some anti-points. I suspect the result is something worse than a wash. Let's see.
Pushrods are not as efficient as overhead cams, but they're still in use in motorcycles and in cars today. Hell, the Viper's still using pushrods. Pushrods are cheaper than timing chains or even belts, especially when you add in the tensioner, but neither one will help you in the middle of bumfuck unless you have the right tools and the spare parts. Also, I don't know what this looks like on bikes, but the timing chain on my Nissan is not considered a service item. Several people have lost their stupid plastic timing chain guides (there's metal ones on the twin cam, plus a plastic one you don't need) and had their timing chain actually saw partway through their cylinder head, and not had to replace the chain because it was still in spec.
Obviously you don't know shit about fuel injection or computer-controlled carburetion, because if you did you'd know that the systems will run without a working O2 sensor. O2 sensors do one of two things when they are broken - either they provide a bogus signal, or they provide no signal. Either way, you're not screwed over at all. Electronically controlled systems have a "failsafe mode" which they resort to when they get a signal too far out of band, or no signal, from any of the critical sensors in the system which include the O2 sensor and the coolant temp sensor (or in air-cooled systems, the cylinder head temperature sensor.)
If the sensor is simply providing a bad signal, you can just disconnect it and voila, the system moves into failsafe mode. This is also if not identical to then highly similar to the program that the computer runs while the engine is warming up - see, O2 sensors don't actually work until they heat up, yet the engine manages to run before that happens.
Also, a properly designed fuel injection system is not only more efficient but also more reliable than the best carbureted systems, and while tuning four carburetors is a serious bitch, fuel injection systems are self-tuning aside from ignition timing - and in some cases, that too. If my 240SX were the twin cam and not the single cam, and thus had the more advanced diagnostic interface, I would be able to bump the timing up and down in half-degree increments in software, and many vehicles have gone to coil-on-plug now which eliminates the distributor entirely, albeit in favor of more expensive parts. However, COP also provides enhanced reliability - while the price is much higher to have four coils and four transistors, it also allows you to "limp home" on less than your maximum number of cylinders, whereas on a normal vehicle you have one coil which you depend on for all your spark, and that rube goldberg distributor crap.
Actually, a company called eCycle built a prototype diesel-electric hybrid which goes 80mph (still too slow, granted) that can be run on biodiesel of course, or for that matter vegetable oil, and which got something like 120mpg on petrodiesel (biodiesel will produce a result so close as to be indistinguishable, except with less emissions.) The final version was supposed to make 150mpg but they seem to have stop
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> Matthew, you're suffering from the belief in an incorrect meme that seeks uniform distributions.
No, you just missed his point.
Japan's standard of living is predicated on important vast amounts of foodstuffs and raw materials. It is physically impossible for every region in the world to import and consume raw materials at the pace Japan does, since there must be somewhere else for them to import from.
As a concrete example, Japan is about 0.25% of the world's land area, yet consumes about 7% of the world's oil production. The world would only be able to fit about 15 Japans before it ran out of oil production, even though there is physical space for 400 Japans. By contrast, Mongolia would fit into world oil production about 7,500 times, but there is only landmass space for 90 of them.
This isn't a question of whether Japan is good or bad, and the Khmer Rouge has nothing to do with anything here. This is a question of how many physical resources are available in the world, and what that means for overall consumption. And what that means is this:
The world cannot fit very many Japans.
Due to global trade, an increase in Japan's population directly corresponds to a decrease in the maximum sustainable population of the rest of the world. Rich nations can effectively rent space from other nations, allowing their own populations to grow beyond the carrying capacity of the land inside their borders. So overpopulation is a global consideration, not a local one.
That's not efficiency. That's emissions. Kyoto basically wants to have an incentive in place for emissions as well as efficiency.
RE: but neither one will help you in the middle of bumfuck unless you have the right tools and the spare parts.
I replaced all four of mine at a point in time where I had no mechanical knowledge or skill. As for dealing with overhead cams, that's another issue. In fact, I was able to adjust the pushrods within a few minutes.
RE: Obviously you don't know shit about fuel injection or computer-controlled carburetion, because if you did you'd know that the systems will run without a working O2 sensor. O2 sensors do one of two things when they are broken -
I'll defer to you on this one - but the point is if your EFI goes south, you're stranded until someone can come in and replace the entire unit, that's the point I'm making. Sure they're more reliable and almost never break down, but that's cold comfort when you're on a lonely road with a dead vehicle.
RE: whereas on a normal vehicle you have one coil which you depend on for all your spark, and that rube goldberg distributor crap.
I'll defer to you there, too. I know very little about cars.
RE: Actually, a company called eCycle built a prototype diesel-electric hybrid which goes 80mph (still too slow, granted) that can be run on biodiesel of course, or for that matter vegetable oil, and which got something like 120mpg on petrodiesel (biodiesel will produce a result so close as to be indistinguishable, except with less emissions.) The final version was supposed to make 150mpg but they seem to have stopped all work or something.
Shame. I'd have been interested in that. 80mph is fine by me.
RE: What IS an issue with having a catalytic converter is that it complicates the exhaust piping no matter where you put it, which leads to additional restriction, which reduces horsepower. Of course, it does improve torque, so you can gear a little taller (since you have the torque) and make that less of an issue. I suppose you could also just put the cat under the bike where your beloved hardly-movinsome's child sportbike company Buell put a shock absorber, in a move that makes no sense to anyone who is paying attention.
I'm no major fan of the Motor Company. Some of their design decisions astound the hell out of me. Point is with a cat converter, there's heat issues and exhaust hassles, otherwise companies would simply do it.
RE: I wholeheartedly agree that they should be getting rid of two-stroke lawnmowers. I recall reading some statistic that says that a lawnmower produces more pollution in an hour than a modern fuel-injected car (not just a motorcycle) produces in 2,000 hours of runtime. I'm kind of skeptical about that statistic, since it could only be true for 2,000 hours of up-to-temperature runtime where the vehicle is at its most efficient, but even if it's ten or twenty hours (which is entirely feasible) it's still particularly telling.
But my point is, they aren't. And when you start doing things like saying bikes must lose 60% of their pollutants or else, (even though we're not quite sure what the effect of all this carbon stuff is) but for some reason you can run a leafblower and/or lawnmower til it breaks is beyond me. Same with Kyoto. The US produced CO2 is evil and is ruining the planet and killing the little polar bears, but any coming from China is politically correct and therefore perfectly OK to do.
RE: Your last meaningless statement in this paragraph has to deal with the "less than 1% of all pollution" thing. If I fart in the elevator, it's less than 1% of all pollution, but no one's going to appreciate it. Not a great analogy, but I just felt driven to say it.
Your analogy is flawed, cause everyone in the elevator is - and the bike is not the one who came back from the burrito buffet with the double onion bhaji chaser.
RE: and a handful of motorcycles and the motorcycles produce ten times more pollution per mile traveled per person, which is not entirely unfeasible on bikes with no emissions controls, then they ought to be cleaned up.
I believe it was pollution p
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
1) It's not their job
2) They need to use those profits to find more sources of oil, and double quick.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
I agree with your post but there is NO CONTROVERSY, rather there is very strong scientific consensus about the following points.
1. Global warming is occuring.
2. Humans are responsible for the majority of the warming via CO2 emmisions.
The willfully ignorant have not really changed their tack from the old argument the idiot you were responding too is using. There has not been a single peer-reviewed paper for over 10yrs that has questioned either of these scientific FACTS. Sure there has been a plethora of skeptics in the mass media but strangely NONE (yes that's right, none, nada, not one) of these skeptics have had enough confidence in their work to actually bother publishing it in a scientific journal!!!
As for who is "politically motivated", I think the "last word" in TFA is telling...
"President Bush's chief climate adviser, James Connaughton, said he did not believe anyone could forecast a safe level and cutting greenhouse gas emissions could harm the world economy."
What this "last word" says is don't do anything to tackle global warming based on climate modeling because our economic models say we will go broke. Now, guess which of the two groups of models have had the most scientific rigour applied to them?
No prizes either for guessing Connaughton's qualifications for the job of top "environment advisor", he has represented GE against the EPA, and was previously employed as a lobbyist on pollution issues for Alcoa, GE, and other major corporations. Putting a pro-pollution lawyer/lobbyist in that position is like deliberately hiring pedophiles to work as kindergarten teachers. The rationale being that they are now working for "the other side".
As an outsider it is obvious the USA is not run by "the people" or even the republicans, the government (on both sides) has become so corrupt that corporations write government policy no matter who is in power. Americans are not alone however, the same "sell out" has also happened here in Australia, except in our case it is coal rather than oil.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Some are easier to deal with than others. Some require checking a gap with a feeler gauge, not just torquing down, and so on. Pushrods are not necessarily inherently easier to deal with; and in fact, if you count the chain as a single part, you're not necessarily even decreasing your parts count.
You're literally more likely to crack your case (or some other major component) than you are to have your ECU fail, if it's made to any kind of quality standard. Granted, you might be able to JB Weld that case up and limp home :)
Well, last I checked, bikes had distributors too, they were just someplace else. And, since fuel injection has come to motorcycles, I fully expect coil on plug to follow. Distributors suck, whether they use points or they're electronic, because they have moving parts. Coil on plug means there's zero moving parts in the ignition system, and thus it actually eliminates a lot of engine complexity. And again, the single point of failure moves to the ECU, which is a lot more reliable than a distributor.
I don't know that is particularly true. I don't think most people want catalytic converters, and they add cost even in cases where they're not a pain in the ass to implement, which is to say, in cars. I think that without regulation compelling them to implement cats, it's not going to happen. I actually live in a no-smog county in California, in which you only have to smog to transfer title to a non-family member, and yet I have a catalytic converter on my car because I am one of those people - I believe in reducing emissions for a host of reasons, of which the possibility of global warming is only a part.
No argument here. They've got four-stroke engines down to like .25 cubic inches or so for model aircraft. They can definitely make some little 25 or 30 cc units for weedwhackers and leaf blowers. Of course, they'd cost more. I'm pretty sure the reason is lobbying.
No argument here either. I wouldn't have signed Kyoto myself, for just this reason. Allowing developing nations to pollute now just means they get used to it and build their society around a polluting infrastructure. Of course, they probably also wouldn't have all these people living to like 115 years old and such like the
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not saying it's their job, I'm saying we should tax corporations at the normal rate instead of rates between 5-10%, Getting them off corporate welfare, and subsidize renewable energy instead, with national research labs leading the way, like you said.
Oil companies can go from finding one 100m barrel field to another 100m barrel field all they want in the gulf, until they realize it's in their interest to start investing in renewable energy like Brazilian companies have done. What's amazing is, the technology exists, on a large scale... yet it's oblivious to Exxon because the market for crude oil is still large and just too profitable, regardless of how self-destructive it might be.
"Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence."
Lindzen finds logic intimidating because it works against him, his paper was discredited on scientific grounds and he is flat out lying about Mann and his data. Lindzen's op-ed in the WSJ does not look like he is being silenced.
Also I don't think the people who are trying to correct his bullshit would qualify as alarmists.
Looking through slashdot's latest threads on GW, it appears slashdot is populated by people who laugh at ID because it is unscientific and at the same time hold Lindzen's tripe up as a counter argument to one of the most scutinised scientific findings ever offered up to the public.
I habitually put corporate spokesmen like Lindzen into the same basket as flat earther's, ufologists and creationists. If they actually came up with something that had the rigour to find it's way into a peer-reviewed journal, or even a rational argument that hasn't been debunked, it might be worth posting. The op-ed you have reproduced deliberately misinforms, it is offensive to the scientific community in general and climatologists in particular.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
1.Its happening.Glaciers melt.We don't have models far back into past but it melts.Global warmign is working.Whatever is the cause.And it doesn't stop.
,not-renewable,non-recyclable fossil fuel are viewed as Infinite resource.
2.What point if its not entirely to human activity? What if we constitute the critical component that drives the Global Warming forward?
Now Co2 and other cheamicals maybe less
greenhouse producing then water vapor,but they can cause more vapor and other feedback from climate.
3.It can be reduced for enviromental reasons,even without Global Warming looming over the horizon.We could sleep
safely knowing all that is happening isn't our fault and the nature is best preserved.
4.Workign to solve it doesn't mean abandoning economy based on fossils fuel.You don't want drastic changes.
Just move(as close possible) to more nature friendly sources of energy: Solar,Wind,Wave/current/dams,geothermal,Nuclear(ye s,it cause radioactive waste,but 1.It decays 2.It has less enviromental impact then coal 3.Its safe to use 4.waste can be reprocessed),Biomass/Biofuel/Waste,even such inefficient concepts as "Hydrogen economy" reduce pollution.
4.How enviromentally friendly society makes it worse by adopting renewable source of energy?
Its not rabbits in australia(which is disruption of biosystem by introducing new foreign species)
Making it worse requires that These Sources of fuel makes nature somehow more polluted then fossil fuels..
I don't know how makign a wind turbine or a solar tower(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power ) makes more polution then runnign a coal plant or oil extraction rig.
(which of these suppose to make it worse?)
The only answer seems to be "Its cheaper".But its like shark-loaning money hoping it will too far away in the future that you die before you have to pay the loans.Fossil Fuels have one feature you can't depends on.
They are not renewable(despite theorist
suggesting abiogenic petroleum origin)
They are finite.You cannot build on it.
Economy based on fossil fuels collapses as soon fossil fuels end.IF people don't change just because it cheaper now it will be much less cheaper in the future.
Extracting shale oil/tar sands because its cheap(relative to..ethanol from bio fuel?) just postpones the crisis for another day.Finite
OK to get the message people need to evaluate their concepts.
They construct Enviromentally Friendly
Energy source,without it really being such and making things worse just becuase they don't see the big picture.
Imagine that water all water there is on Earth would eb usable as fuel(like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy) by electrolysis.Looks like recyclable infinite resource(though finite,it can be recycled ad infinitum).
But each step you lose energy and that energy must come from other source(not Hydrogen!).
Photovoltaic Cells require a lenghty manifacturing process,involving alot of chemicals and pollution.
Some wind towers can kill birds,and be quite noisy(though very enviromentally friendly solution,even considering manufacturing such towers).Energy production is dependant on air flow.
Biomass/Biofuel is just creating those fossil fuels from waste or feeding substance/fields.Its a (not quite efficient) storage of solar energy(with absorbed part of energy of nutrients/material content).
geothermal isnot strictly renewable(it renewable over large time scales,but cooling starts lowering the efficiency until its not hot enough)short-term,and require a dedicated location to extract(such as volcanic activity zones).Magma and direct access to volcanoes seems far more energy efficient then tapping it from geysers.
Nuclear power plants need storage for waste,and old designs are dangerous to operate due to possibility of meltdown/fatal incidents(such as release of reactor fuel
The Fountain of Youth Temperature Oscillation Health System by Riley is covered by Patent & Copyright. The necessary legalities... preventing corporations from building similar-process devices without paying a royalty. For individuals, anyone can set the system up RIGHT IN THEIR HOME, basement, or garage.
There's both an htm AND a pdf announcement for Space Colonization as well as an International Press Release {Click here for PrLEAP Press Release http://www.prleap.com/pr/32066 . Anyone wishing to do so can make a $1 deposit (2 cents, 20 cents, whatever) into my Wachovia account in Roanoke VA if you wish to contribute toward my next health invention. I do have one and presently lack funding or backers needed to begin work on it. It is, also, an external applied system but it is PORTABLE & WEARABLE.
However, the beauty of Temperature Oscillation applied to the human body is that the very BODY CELLS get a working out as well the circulatory, lymph systems. The Fountain of Youth Health System exercises the human body "temperature-compensation system" (metabolism)... making it possible to excel physically without a "new diet", a "personal trainer", a physical fitness "guru".
This System induces a fluctuation of body temperature that STRENGTHENS THE INNER YOU ALL THE WAY THROUGH. IQ rises from becoming oxygen-bathed, the heart muscle grows progressively STRONGER, even if the person isn't a genius or has just recovered from a heart attack or heart surgery. In reality, the Fountain of Youth Temperature Oscillation System is an "externally-applied thermogenics" system instead of using thermogenic nutrition supplements to burn your flesh from the Inside Out trying to lose weight. UNLIKE THERMOGENICS, Riley's Fountain of Youth Health System goes far beyond simple weight loss. When a person shivers it EXERCISES ALL BODY MUSCLES, so the System is much more than weightloss. It achieves MUSCLE TONING.
It is THE system that will make prolonged Space Travel a Reality
without suffering the muscle degradation of Outer Space weightlessness.
Space Tourism is now OPEN for all, not just military-trained astronauts or cosmonauts. SAFE SPACE TRAVEL FOR ALL. THE OUTER SPACE TRAVEL TICKET BOOTH IS NOW OPEN. We can leave as soon as the ships are ready using an adaptation of my Millenial Dawn engine (adaptation not presently released) plus Space adaptation of my OTHER ENGINE that uses heated & cooled fluids in a "cylinder clash". With a little work, we can be colonizing the Moon in 5 year's time. We'll be healthy enough to leave and healthy enough to survive there or ANYWHERE.
The "trick" is to use extremely lightweight engines that do NOT have to carry a million pounds of fuel &
If the average temperature of the earth changes by 3 degrees, a billion is not an unreasonable number.
In your opinion.
Looking at the physical global evidence made me re-evalute my stance on Global warming. Yes, I think it is happening, and it's rate is alarming.
You also seem to think this justifies calling anybody who disagrees with you worse than a Nazi. Have you considered the possibility that they might either know more than you, or else have an honest misunderstanding of the situation, and that comparing them to the gold standard of mass murderers and bigots is totally inappropriate?
I think the US,and other countries, should start to models about where the new farmalnds will be, what areas will be gone with a 1 foot, 10 foot and 15 foot rise in the oceans. Look at where the people are giong to go and start planning for it.
You also seem to think that anybody who doesn't plan for it is worse than a Nazi. How's your own planning going? Are you fully prepared, or should we be disturbed by your Nazi tendencies?
Shipping lane will change, it is possible to loss global currents. Plan for it.
And if we don't, we're worse than Nazis. I get it. Anybody who disagrees with you is supremely evil and wrong. Does this kind of arrogance and hatred usually work out for you?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
> Where did you get the idea that the government requries all satelites to be launched on the shuttle?
Are you sure you responded to the post you meant to respond to? "Satellites" and "shuttles" are complete non-sequitors here, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
We're doing it that way right now, oil or natural gas convetion, but it's not the only way, any organic chemical with lot's of carbon and hydrogen will work, such as waste paper, agricultural straw, saw dust; just add water and heat. Petrolium isn't magic in the process, it's just that's what they have, where the people who do the "magic" work, so they use what's familiar.
If people complain and bitch enough about the oil, they will not use oil, they want to retain the distribution, just like the RI/MPAA does; Biodiesel and TDP diesel scares the shit out of them because they are "small guy" technologies. Crude oil won't rise above the $70 per barrel for long because they're just too many alternatives that start to become profitable right about there.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Is it possible that a slightly warmer Earth means less starvation? Vast amount of lands can suddenly be cultivated for food... Just a random thought.
Looks like the "blame America" crowd has most of the mod points this week.
FYI:
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More people are living longer in a less polluted envronment world wide. Sounds good to me. The price of food is done virtually everywhere. Mankind is massively more prosperous now than 300 years thanks and only thanks to capitalism: private ownership of the means production and individiual decision on to best use that capital. The big disasters have all been government disasters. Let's think back than a little ways: Stalins Agriculture: 20 million+ dead on htat one Mao's Great Leap Forward (into the cemetery apparently): 50 million+ dead on that fiasco Rachel Carson wrong book (and it has been proven wrong) about DDT caused another 50 million people have needessly died from malaria that DDT eradicates. Werner Ehard and his bullshit, he gets nothing right, if he owned cemeteries no one would die. GW's fuck up in Iraq, less thsn 100K dead, looks like a move in the roght direction to me.
I was attempting to make two points however. First, that India and China used to be technologically advanced and they gave that up. My take is that some of the problems that set them back so long ago are still present. So it doesn't make sense to give them benefits at the expense of societies (like IMHO the EU, Japan, and the US) that have done a better job. YMMV.
Second, what worked for the US doesn't necessarily scale to China and India. In particular, I do see problems with the US's dependence on fossil fuels. Even if global warming from human sources turns out to be milder than expected, it looks like the price of oil will increase for some time. India in particular seems in trouble since it's GDP per CO2 released is even worse than the US (China in comparison is about 20% better than the US, and the EU countries are considerably better than that).
Models back in the early 90's have been proven wrong just 15 years out. There's an argument to be made about the threat of global warming, but it's wrong to claim the models work.
Yeah not most of them, but some do need SUVs. I've been doing a lot of work on a new house, and gosh it would help if I had a big vehicle for moving stuff and buying materials. A pick-up would do it. An SUV would be more useful for times when I'm taking people (or my dogs) on a trip. A station wagon wouldn't work for most jobs. Instead I'm stuck with a tiny car. And it would just be 1-2 people in my SUV most of the time, not a carpool. Would people scoff at me? I guess you would.
I don't know where you live, but focusing on "off-road driving," "picking up girls," and carpooling is not the whole issue. In fact, probably a greater burden on the environment is having children.
yes I can read english, but nobody said anything about it being a random out of control coal fire, and I dont read any news apart from /. for the most part. It looks to be providing you with a little energy.
which is totally what she said
When I was in 6th grade back in the 60s, our teacher, Mrs. Newton, said that because we were between glacial epochs, that we would be more than likely to see, in our lifetime, temperatures rise significantly. She then went on to postulate on how mankind would probably come up with some way to out some solar tent or reflector in space to ward off some of the sun's rays, and that it would have more catestrophic effects than the warming trend would. I saw her a while back, and she pish poshed the whole "mankind is causing global warming" thing, and said that just when things turn around will coincide with a culmination of the efforts made by man to curb pollutants (which is a good thing anyway), and man would claim triumph over the weather Gods.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride