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An Inconvenient Truth
There's a movie teaser line that you may have seen recently, that goes like this: "What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you?" The answer is "I'd try." The teaser's actually for another movie, but that's the story that's told in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth": it starts with a man who, after talking with scientists and senators, can't get anyone to listen to what he thinks is the most important thing in the world. It comes out on DVD today.
The scariest horror film of 2006 was a documentary.
The first thing everyone wants to know, or at least to argue about, is whether Al Gore has his facts straight. The short answer is yes, he does. There are minor errors. They don't detract from Gore's main point, on which the scientific debate has ended.
And the main point is scary, and almost too big to think about or talk about. The earth is warming, because of us. Sometime in the next hundred years, our environment is going to change in big ways. We can't predict it with much accuracy yet, but the best estimates we have are that it's going to be -- measured in lives and dollars -- really bad.
In a way this film isn't really about that story. It's about a man telling that story -- someone who, after suffering a bit of a setback, asked himself, well, what can I do now? What's important to me? How do I want to spend my time?
What's important is a question a lot of nerds may be familiar with. We like to talk about important things. But how do you respond when you try to say something serious and the cool kids laugh at you? What do you do, when you put yourself out there, try to engage people's minds, and instead they make fun of your clothes?
The good news for anyone who's had a prom invitation rejected is that people can come back from worse disasters. His presidential bid didn't go so well in 2000. Gore had given talks on global warming before; after he was forcibly retired from public service, he took a Powerbook and Keynote on the road, sharpening and expanding his slideshow talk in airports and hotels.
Half of the film is that talk, and it's an engrossing talk. There are charts and diagrams and footnoted stats (and a Futurama clip) and it's about as fun as numbers and chemicals get. Turns out Al Gore has a sly sense of humor (but not a nasty one -- the film's only two political nudges are pretty gentle). Unless you're a climate scientist you'll probably learn something too.
But the other half, interwoven with the lectures, is a man picking up the pieces and rediscovering something important in his life, a message that he has to tell. That succeeds as a film.
And Gore's lecture succeeded too. Somehow, I'm not sure how, this documentary changed the way Americans look at global warming. In early 2006, global warming was still seen as one of those things that may be true or may not. Pundits were fairly evenly divided and both positions were routinely heard. It's now late 2006 and the debate has moved from "is global warming happening?" to "it's happening, we've caused it, and what if anything should we do about it?"
Most of the warming-deniers left are the real extremists out in Rush Limbaugh territory. We're not yet all the way to a serious, scientifically-informed debate, but somehow, overnight, this film pulled most of the fence-sitters over to where the scientists were years ago.
As for actually fixing global warming, it will take a miracle. Maybe two miracles. I think in the next few decades we're going to need to start an Apollo moonshot-type miracle of technology and engineering to beat back the greenhouse effect. Nanorobots. Reflective dust in the stratosphere. Giant mirrors at the Lagrange point. Bioengineered plankton to sink carbon or change the oceans' albedo. Something. That's just a guess.
But meanwhile, though we hope someone can build us an airbag before we crash the car into the tree, that doesn't absolve us from stepping on the brakes. Right now, we need a change in attitude, in our community and our politics, to start slowing the damage we're doing every day to our grandchildren's Earth -- to buy them time, and give them more options. The only way that happens is when the governments of industrialized and developing nations decide this is a priority.
And the only way that happens is for people everywhere to stop listening to the cool kids and, once again, pay attention to the nerds.
Manbearpig is real!
I don't think the reason that nobody initially wanted to listen had to do with the story, but rather the storyteller. Gore was about as charming and captivating as an endangered sea turtle. Had some other high profile public figure attacked the problem with the same gusto, there may have been a little more initial acceptance of the core message, which I actually feel would have harmed the result.
... An Inconvenient Truth is one big step in the right direction.
Why? Because if anyone else had tried to get congress to act on Global Warming, there would have never been An Inconvenient Truth. Had Gore been more successful in convincing congress to join the Kyoto treaty or strengthen EPA guidelines, I don't believe there never would have been the movie. Which just means that the public would remain uncommitted/unconvinced, and future administrations would have just reversed what the more convincing version of an Al Gore could have achieved in Congress.
What's amazing is that Al Gore's movie really IS engrossing. He comes across as a man with a mission. While he may sensationalize the risk a little at times, he delivers a message that is irrefutable: we must act now. I believe he has helped increase awareness of the problem, and the greater the awareness the greater the chance for long term change. Governments will act on ridiculously expensive endeavours only in the face of overwhelming public support
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
Seriously? So slashdot really is just all advertisements now? :(
Humanity will have to get offplanet.
Fast
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
Of course, I'll probably rent it (along with "Who Killed the Electric Car") tonight for a uber-geek double feature.
Because this seems like an ad for the dvd, not a story. At any rate, this needs to be filed under politics, not science. Or, as a compromise, both.
Happens way too often nowadays, politicians vote and propose things that won't help, or even make the situation worse, since they don't know what they are legislating about.
Oh, and a quick link to buy the DVD.
They laughed at Galileo Galilei, they laughed at Gandhi and they now laugh at everything inconvenient.
Since when does public opinion influence truth?
If a tree falls in a forest and everyone around pretends it never happened, does it make a sound?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The short answer is yes, he does. There are minor errors. They don't detract from Gore's main point, on which the scientific debate has ended.
Consensus is NOT proof. I don't know how else to say this. When someone tells you that there is a consensus among scientists on a certain issue, they have proved nothing about the issue itself.. I'm not arguing that global warming is not real, or is not the fault of humans. But I'm tired of people trying to strong-arm me into acquiescing to the point using blatantly un-scientific methods.
The troubling side-issue no one wants to talk about here is that in our modern world of super-specialization it has become increasingly impossible to fact-check our experts. There are at least 3 distinct parties in this conversation: scientists, the media, and the public at large. If either scientists or the media have a bias at all on this issue anyone who believes the tired-old "scientific consensus" argument can be led around just like those religious fools they love to mock: a subject to an irrational trust in authority. Scientific consensus is the argument used to sell us toothpaste and mouth rinse - not to argue substantively for the biggest scientific crisis the world has faced.
This troubling side-issue of authority vs. science won't go away. We are in danger of becoming a society where science is the new priesthood, universities are the new temples, and PhDs are the new bishops of a timid and trusting flock. I'd say this corruption of science is almost as alarming as global warming, and far easier to demonstrate. Any true follower of science must reject "consensus" for what it is: argument by authority. It is, fundamentally, the same monstrosity that corrupted organized religion 1,000s of years ago. It must be rejected if science is to escape the fate of those organized religions.
I don't mean for this to distract from the central point of global warming. That's an important issue as well. The trouble is: how do we make up our minds about the issue if we reject scientific consensus as proof? The only thing I can think of is to understand as much of the issue as we can for ourselves rather than from the media. That's something I definitely need to work harder on.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Man Bear Pig!!! we must save him too!!!!
The popular belief here is that all climiate scientists agree with Gore's conclusions about Global Warming. It would seem that is not the case. From this article.
"I can assure Mr. Gore that no one from the South Pacific islands has fled to New Zealand because of rising seas. In fact, if Gore consults the data, he will see it shows sea level falling in some parts of the Pacific." -- Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist, associate professor, University of Auckland, N.Z.
- - -
"We find no alarming sea level rise going on, in the Maldives, Tovalu, Venice, the Persian Gulf and even satellite altimetry, if applied properly." -- Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, emeritus professor of paleogeophysics and geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden.
- - -
"Gore is completely wrong here -- malaria has been documented at an altitude of 2,500 metres -- Nairobi and Harare are at altitudes of about 1,500 metres. The new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago. None of the "30 so-called new diseases" Gore references are attributable to global warming, none." -- Dr. Paul Reiter, professor, Institut Pasteur, unit of insects and infectious diseases, Paris, comments on Gore's belief that Nairobi and Harare were founded just above the mosquito line to avoid malaria and how the mosquitoes are now moving to higher altitudes.
- - -
"Our information is that seven of 13 populations of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (more than half the world's estimated total) are either stable or increasing..... Of the three that appear to be declining, only one has been shown to be affected by climate change. No one can say with certainty that climate change has not affected these other populations, but it is also true that we have no information to suggest that it has." -- Dr. Mitchell Taylor, manager, wildlife research section, Department of Environment, Igloolik, Nunavut.
- - -
"Mr. Gore suggests that the Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But 1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland and the melt area of ice sheet was exceptionally low due to the cooling caused by volcanic dust emitted from Mt. Pinatubo. If, instead of 1992, Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner." -- Dr. Petr Chylek, adjunct professor, Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax.
- - -
"The oceans are now heading into one of their periodic phases of cooling.... Modest changes in temperature are not about to wipe them [coral] out. Neither will increased carbon dioxide, which is a fundamental chemical building block that allows coral reefs to exist at all." -- Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, Calif.
- - -
"Both the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than one degree C since 1950. And the area of sea ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years." -- Dr. R.M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia.
- - -
"From data published by the Canadian Ice Service, there has been no precipitous drop-off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable overall coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic." -- Dr./Cdr. M.R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K.
- - -
"The MPB (mountain pine beetle) is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand." -- Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, B.C., comments on Gore's belief that the mountain pine beetle is an "invasive exotic species" that has become a plague due to fewer days of frost.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Is this a plant or what? This isn't news its an Advertisement pulled from netflix about the DVD release. Want to know my favorite part of the movie? When at the premier, the entire "cast" got into big Lincoln SUV's. Drove Four blocks. And then went to movie. It's movies like these that try to drum up sensationalist support for half hearted causes that eventually push into politics. Like everything else. Besides...Harry Potter and the balance of Earth was a much better story line that he wrote.
It's to bad Gore lost the election.
Those who share the opinion that those tags as correct, please tag it as such - this is an alternative form of influencing /. crowd opinion.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Last I heard, they were still arguing over the existence of the medieval warming period and a hundred other possible oddities in recent climatological history. There is quite a bit of debate over what our role in the warming is, and what the climate will do in the next hundred and the next thousand years.
The earth is warming. We may or may not have a role in the warming. We do know for certain that our presence has affected climates at the local level; there *is* some debate still over how much influence we exercise over the global climate. Science has been wrong several times about climate change in the past few decades (The big chill never happened, and warming hasn't progressed nearly as quickly as was once predicted). We've got a lot left to learn before we can accurately predict where this is going.
Don't do science a disservice and proclaim an end to debate. One of the key tenets of science is that very few things are absolute, and our knowledge of climate certainly isn't one of them. As often as science has proved itself wrong in the past, to proclaim an end to debate over a subject like global climate change and declare once side to be fact is to spit in the face of science.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
As we've always known if you're smart enough to understand the impact of these issues, you're probably too smart to want to run for office.
This review says more about the reviewer's issues as a nerd in high school, which he either graduated from last year or harbors such deep seated issues that he'll go "falling down" at his reunion. Seriously, who thinks Republicans are "the cool kids"?
And yet, despite all this, what has really been accomplished? Sure, there's more "awareness" but have people started scrapping their SUVs for Priuses? Have there been any major governmental (in the U.S., at least) commitments to renewable/carbon neutral technologies? Have we come any closer to an idea of how to deal with the fact that two of the most populous nations on Earth, China and India, are increasing in their use of fossil fuels as we speak?
Kudos to Gore for doing his part; Lord knows it's been a thankless task so far. But so far it seems like his is a voice in the wilderness, and as long as big oil has more lobbying power than the environmental movement any sweeping changes will be a long time coming.
See, idiots, does it really matter what causes global warming?
So many of you are caught up in your little meaningless life's that you can't comprehend the mere fact that man kind is dumping it's waste all over the place like a big disgrace.
Who gives a fuck that we are causing global warming or not. It's painfully obvious that the human race needs to stop dumping it's shit all over the earth.
So, to all you idiots out there, I really hope you die, you are not needed here.
Woah. SAW III was a documentary? That's messed up.
I'm sorry, but the Ozone layer isn't registered to vote. You getting skin cancer has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. Good science is about facts. Politics is about bullshit.
Wow, then it isn't scientific. Debate about theories, for true scientists, can never truly end - that's a basic property of science. Everyone may agree - all the evidence may point towards the hypothesis being correct - but true science means that if new evidence comes along that casts the hypothesis in doubt, then the debate begins again. Either the evidence is incorporated into the theory, or the theory is changed or discarded. It's statements like these that have some people wondering just how scientific the theories being touted are. The good news is that people who say these things are generally not the scientists studying the problem. And to those saying these things? I'll just remind you that you are hurting your "cause". Learn to speak with care - it truly helps!
The two are mutually exclusive Malthusian catastrophes. If conventional oil peaks within the next decade or two then the economic fallout will kill much of the pollution causing global warming. The nontraditional sources of petroleum that have been deemed as replacements such as tar sands and coal liquification would be too expensive for all but the upper classes, so those would not be a threat.
Global warming is really an assumption that the world has an infinite supply of cheap petroleum that will continue to feed the problem. Most studies show this is not the case.
The Physical Evidence of Earth's Unstoppable 1,500-Year Climate Cycle
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
From what I have seen the only debate that is settled is the debate over whether the earth is getting warmer, how and why are still up in the air. I watched a program a few weeks back where this group of scientists were looking at layers of earth and talked about how they thought global warming was a natural phenomenon and was basically cyclic. Others claim there is no proof. In the end its all a guess. What happens if we guess wrong? If it is cyclic and nature is performing a partial do-over, wont doing everything in their power to change it make gore and company the ulimate anti-environmentalists? Quite the conundrum, I surely wouldnt want to be the one guessing which answer was right.
"We are entering a period of consequences."
There are some conclusions that I think are inevitable... The final ultimate conclusions is essentially:
Nothing, absolutely nothing, says it can't be done with energy-farms on colossal areas. These farms are used for sequesteration and also as an energy source. This does not depend on changing human nature, it will work and it will pay itself of. All it needs is for someone to propagate the idea.
Runup to that conclusion:
Sadly recent news and statistics can let one only draw the following conclusions:
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
http://www.globalorgasm.org/ is the only way to synergistically channel orgasmic energy into the fight for Gaia. I believe that with the number of young, passionate, single men on Slashdot with the resources to take part in this effort, we will truly be able to make a difference.
The facts are simple: a) the planet is warming up and b) we don't
know why. We suspect that human activity may have something
to do with it, but there is not yet reasonable proof. And we need
that proof before we commit the entire planet to a plan of
action that will cost trillions of dollars, because if it turns
out to be wrong, we won't have the money or resources to address
the real problem when and if we finally discover it.
And the debate goes on.
With algore, the debate has ended, because his constituancy
consists of the extreme loony left who never debated anything anyway.
In short, this film is propaganda, nothing more, and it has no
place here.
If you'd like to recreated a lot of the stuff from the movie, using real data as inputs and getting similar results as what Gore gets, the EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2, re-arrange the continents, change the vegetation cover, or turn the sun down by a few percent all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM. Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.
Space and Computers.
In science, the best you can do are experiments whose results seem to support or not support a theory. Even when the results seem to point one way or another, you can pick apart the methodology, the bias of the experimenters, and more. That's the best you can do with science. It's a human endevor, and has the same human flaws.
That's why we have peer reviewed journals, public debate, and more. No, consensus is not proof. Look at the long standing belief that ulcers were caused by "stress". It turns out it's a bacterial infection and it took a crazy guy drinking a batch of the bacteria to prove his point. But in so many other cases, the evidence changes the consensus. It takes awhile and can be hotly debated, but the process generally works.
Global climate change is in that category. Smaller experiments support it. The historical record supports it. Various measurements support it. Sure, it's not proof, but that's as good as it gets with science.
the man is a former politician, but the film was a science documentary
Bull Gores YOU! and in Dyslexic Russia, Bore Gulls YOU!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
It's useful information about the story; just tag it. Enough agreement, and the tag'll show on the front page.
People can make up their own minds if the tag is useful.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Isn't reducing what we use and making things more efficient a worthy goal in and of itself?
I went to college (I know that doesn't make me an expert on anything, but it's slighty better than "I dropped out of middle school"), and took several earth science classes, and while it wasn't really my field, I fairly distinctly remember several discussion which taught me that in reality, volcanic ash is responsible for over 90% of the actual polution levels in the atmosphere. Meaning that, even if we did STOP GLOBAL WARMING! by destroying all technology, and using a reflected sunbeam from a giant mirror orbiting the planet to melt all of our robots down, we wouldn't really have much impact on the whole situation.
I don't deny that it's possible that my information isn't 100% valid... like I said, it's what I remember being taught. And while I found several resources to support my viewpoint, none of them were reputable enough for me to feel like they were substantial evidence. There's so much back-and-forth on this particular topic that it's hard to be sure who's full of BS. But one thing I do remember, a few years back, scientists somewhere did a simulation of what would happen if all human live ceased to exist, and they estimated that in somewhere around 50 to 100 years, the earth would completely recover from all of the damages we had done to it, and would continue on as if we had never been. If you look back on earth's history, it has been through some serious shit. Like the moon being knocked OUT of the earth's crust (resulting in our 23.5 degree tilt). I think we could strategically drop nukes everywhere, kill everyone, and in a century or two, which is a drop in the bucket of earth's lifespan, it would be trucking along just fine. A bit tangential, I know, but my point is, I personally don't believe that we the people are really having nearly as much of an impact on the mighty earth as we'd like to think.
Also, Gore taking the Lincoln Navigator to the premiere was beyond hilarious.
Did anybody else have a hard time figuring out what TFA was actually talking about?
You are correct. I would also like to add that the debate is NOT over. If it was, every time the subject comes up, we wouldn't need to hear someone tell us that the debate is over. That is simple a 'tell the lie often enough and people will believe it' attempt. When was the last time the Sun was mentioned on Slashdot, and someone piped in "The debate is over, the Sun is hot!"; Or how about the comment "The debate is over Microsoft publishes Windows".
So if we know enough about our planet's climate to know beyond all shadow of a doubt that the Earth is going to warm up to melt the polar ice caps and change the world as we know it over the next few decades, why can't we get a decent 5 day forecast (that's actually correct for more than 2 out of the 5 days)?
-Now I may be an idiot, but there is one thing I am not sir, and that, sir, is an idiot.
After seeing this I felt that with such an important message why would this not have been simply 'given away'? Wouldn't that be in the interest of Mr. Gore who feels so passionately about getting this seen as widely as possible?
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works James Inhofe.
For people who like technology, Who Killed the Electric Car is a great documentary, though painful to watch. If we all have our geek moral compass properly, we will all have an instinctive aversion to the ham-handed stifling of cool technology for political reasons... and this movie documents one very clear, infuriating case of that.
Yeah - and people wonder why the global warming crowd are dismissed as alarmists... P.S. - Kyoto is nothing but a poorly-veiled attempt to weaken the United States' power and level the global playing field by punishing our economy. I sooo can't wait for the day when we have a commercially viable energy alternative to fossil fuels so that the U.S. can walk away from all these pissant little countries who have little-man syndrome like Iran and Venezuela with our middle fingers high in the air.
Let's say humans are causing global warming and global warming will wreak worldwide economic disaster and kill off millions of people due to famine, flooding, etc. Here are the questions...
1) What is your proposal to completely resolve the problem and avoid the economic and loss of life consequences?
2) How much will it cost (include high & low estimates) to solve the problem? What is the time scale for the costs?
3) What confidence level does the solution have in actually solving the problem? Is there a general consensus in the solution, costs, and liklihood of success?
4) As a last resort... considering this is a global problem and assuming the solutin must be executed on a global level if one country or group of countries refuses to comply with the solution and jeoporadizes the success of the entire solution are military actions acceptable in order to avoid the economic and loss of life consequences?
Al Gore and Co. may be right (I'm still sceptical) but their asking for trillions of dollars and massive control at a global level through indirect control of economies and comitments to payment. They're saying "give us your freedom and money" and we'll help solve this hideous problem we've shown you, but haven't shown you a solution. Before anyone in their right mind would want to give up their freedom and money they should know what they're getting...
I don't believe the argument as to weather global warming is real or not is truely over.
How much he could save the environment by using a purely electronic form of distribution. Why have all those DVDs and all that DVD packaging around if you don't need it?
You don't lose anything by clicking the referred link, and it is in fact a referrence; this is how reference points are meant to be used, surely?
I don't think that the post is a troll, although it's clearly opportunistic. Redundant, maybe?
Wikileaks, no DNS
The other planets are heating up as well. Mars' ice caps are melting and Pluto is creating more vapor while moving further away from the Sun. The Sun has also been very active in the past few years despite being in a "quiet period."
"Global Warming" is a religion, not a science. All the facts point to an increase in energy output from the Sun. Cow farts on Mars and Pluto don't seem likely to me.
You'd better find another source than nizkor.org for your references, because that article you quoted is entirely incorrect.
Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER is appealing to authority a valid step in logic. Only a valid logical argument provides a valid step.
Whoever wrote that entry at nizkor.org probably got confused by the concept of logic encapsulation: if another party has provided a sound logic argument for a particular proposition, then you can validly quote that other party's argument (without detailing it) as a shortcut in your own logic.
However, that's merely like calling a subroutine in computing. It is most definitely NOT equivalent to appealing to that other party's authority.
Mars is getting hot! http://www.mos.org/cst-archive/article/80/9.html Jupiter is getting hot! http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_j r.html
Pluto is getting hot!
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warmin g_021009.html
I blame George Bush.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
The entire Saw series was a predictable, unscary gorefest. It's a pity so many people confuse "disgusting" with "scary" these past few decades.
The one thing I consistently see lacking from the "lets do something" crowd is specific, realistic recommendations of what to do. Too many of the recommendations I see are things like "pass a law". That never helps because it increases costs for those who choose to comply or gives an incentive to move manufacturing to countries without those laws. For a measure to be practical, it has to also be cost effective. Helping the environment sounds like a nice cause, but it's the kind of thing that can only appeal to those rich enough to make that decision. In order for something to work, it has to appeal to more than one group of people. Often times, it has to appeal to the people who oppose your cause.
For example, my wife and I drive Corolla's. They may not be as efficient as the Prius or Insight, but they are practical. They have good gas mileage (we have the manual transmission ones with better gas mileage) and have low emissions. Unlike the hybrids, the Corollas do not require you to substantially alter your driving habits or risk substantial repair costs when we finally find out what maintenance is needed on these after 10-20 years. Evidence(collected by observing cars on the road) suggests that a Corolla will be ugly in 10-20 years, but still be on the road. I don't know if that's true of the Prius and don't want to take that bet. All in all, it's a reliable car that sacrafices additional space we don't regularly need for getting good gas mileage and having low emissions. Relatively low costs for initial purchase, maintenance and feeding are all factors that appeal to a lot of people. The low emissions are there for those who care, and more importantly, for those who don't. Telling people what I've chosen and why for transportation is my small part of trying to help the environment.
People listen to the cool kids because they can relate to them on some level. Conversely, nerds don't relate well to people and believe that being right is enough. Most people have very short attention spans. If the argument in favor of your cause can't be made in one breath, it's too long to stick in the minds of the majority. No matter how many people will claim otherwise, the vast majority of people will vote for reduced cost. Any solution that claims some intangible help to the environment for an increased cost is a lost cause. Hoping for a miracle is a bad way to plan the future. I'd like to see less complaints about global warming and more stories about how someone did something positive for the environment and it didn't cost any more or maybe even saved them money. Those are kind the things that can resonate with people regardless of their stand on the environment and global warming.
The only thing you can do is try. As effectively as possible. IMHO, GW advocates have been somewhat ineffective since the range of rhetorical strategies has been rather limited.
And then there's the question of force: at what point is coersion acceptable?
Let's see... [Please note this is intended as a starting point for a conversation, not as the start of flame-war].
Seriously, though, I think the biggest mistake mankind could make right now is to embark on wild flights of fancy like the ones above, when we do have the technologies right now to solve most of our global warming problems. This was pointed out by Al Gore in the movie: we have the solutions right now, we just need the courage to apply them. The issue is: we must be willing to sacrifice creature comforts to save our planets (and ourselves as well). Examples that were given in An Inconvenient Truth, and on countless web sites are the following:
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
how can sea level fall in 'some parts of the Pacific'? Doesn't water find it's own level? (Barring tides and Bermuda Triangle type gravitational oddities)
watch the video
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
The editors have given us a ready made +5 funny for when the dupe comes out -
..
"What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you?" will evoke a certain sense of Deja Vu
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
I wonder what flak I'll get for ripping the DVD and posting it on the internet. Al Gore's seemed to say in the film "get the message out, by any means possible."
Earth heat up - things die Earth cools down - things die Earth stays the same - things die Some of those things will be us. Universe expands - things die Universe collapses - things die Univers stays the same - things die Some of those things will be us. Stuff Happens - you can't change that.
If you think its too late think about it that the speed that it is happening is a real problem not that it is happening.
Global warming would be OK if it happened in thousands of years time frame and no human infrastructure would block natural movement of habitats.
However we have made it quite speedy thing, and we are also hurting natures adaption to new situation. Also OUR speed of adaption to problem is what makes it problem. A radical change would be needed to slow it down to a pace where it isn't that harmfull.
However I believe there is natural rebalancing act happening before global warming has gotten really out of hand. The system will naturally balance its self.
You know that the sea level raises and countries with too low altitude get over run by sea. Then there is famine and drought. There are plenty of technologicly advanced countries affected by it. And their natural responce is trying to get more land to live in. It will eventually lead to a Nuclear winter. So global warming is naturally balanced by nuclear winter.
©God
Read this: http://www.cei.org/pdf/5478.pdf
This is a 120 page criticizm of "An Inconvienant Truth". I didn't write it do if you guys have issues then please take it up with Marlo Lewis.
M. Lewis is a Senior Fellow in Envirnomental Policy ast the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
http://www.cei.org/
You can contact CWI through their website. Lewis's research is pretty through and I'll advise anyone who really wants to know the truth to actually read what he has to say and think about it rather than just posting a knee jerk reaction. Lewis makes some pretty good points.
If course I expect my post will get modded down. If so - its just another knee jerk reaction by those who wish to suppress the truth rather than actually look at the data.
Listen to yourselves. It's like a Tent Revival around here.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Funny an article that is only a week old, that refutes only ONE response means the debate is over? Funny there's numerous criticisms and most of them are still pretty valid, again on BOTH sides of the field. The debate isn't over. For the last couple years it was pretty much confirmed that there was a moratorium on the debate.
There's a lot of bullshit on global warming from both sides of the field, Al Gore's movie has a lot of stuff in it that wouldn't be kosher except that global warming is "trendy". If you want to promote your political agenda go right ahead, but don't do it on Slashdot, no one cares or if they do they've seen it. And this movie is sure as hell not as rock solid as people make it out to be.
Please see this.
Do all you Global Warming Kool-Aid Drinkers realize that when Mount Saint Helens erupted in the 80s it released more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than all of the cars in the world combined - in all of history.
Clearly this means one of two things...
Global warming is a cyclical phenomenon... or
The earth is destroying itself and we should get the UN to ban volcanos.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Tom_Har ris
Tom Harris is the Executive Director of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP).
He was, until approximately late October 2006, listed as a Director of Operations of the Ottowa office of the High Park Group (HPG), a Canadian PR and lobbying company. His biographical note states that he "specializes in strategic communication and media relations and has 28 years experience in science and technology in the energy and environment, aerospace and high-tech sectors. He has worked with private companies and trade associations to successfully position these entities and their interests with media and before government committees and regulatory bodies." Harris "holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) from Carleton University and a Master of Engineering (Mechanical - thermo-fluids) from McMaster University."[1]
Harris, who was "once a legislative assistant to former Conservative Environment Critic Bob Mills, has been a prolific writer of anti-Kyoto op-ed pieces, typically quoting scientists associated with Friends of Science." [2]
Friends of Science Society is a Canadian non-profit group "made up of active and retired engineers, earth scientists and other professionals, as well as many concerned Canadians, who believe the science behind the Kyoto Protocol is questionable." [1]
In the August 12th, 2006 Globe and Mail feature, The Friends of Science were exposed as being a front group for the oil industry.[2]
Ale Gore is not a nerd even if he did invent the internet.
I definitely agree with the mods for you, but I think you've also overlooked some important aspects of science.
... well, I wouldn't even be listening ...
The trouble is: how do we make up our minds about the issue if we reject scientific consensus as proof?
I think that, for better and/or worse, consensus typically IS proof in science. The best perspective I can offer on this is from a book I read over 20 years ago, called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. Someone else has paraphrased it much better than I could. If enough scientists accept a particular perspective (a "paradigm" in Kuhn's terminology), then that's how science will view whatever problem that perspective addresses -- at least until a revolution comes along and changes the dominant paradigm. (BTW, I don't think we'd have the "priesthood" danger that you fear if enough people would "get" Kuhn's perspective on this.)
The only thing I can think of is to understand as much of the issue as we can for ourselves
If a panel of 10 experts selected by Stephen Hawking reached a consensus of 8 or higher, I think I'd go along with them, regardless of my understanding of the details. That doesn't mean I wouldn't want to understand more detail, of course, but it would certainly affect my interpretation of them. If a panel of 10 experts selected by Jerry Falwell reached
I share your desire to understand more for ourselves, but doesn't science as an institution depend on some level of trust in the "experts"? That is a troubling concept but an accurate description of what we need to do to "believe" anything. In the case of science, I rely on the advice of Henri Theil: "models are to be used, not believed". To make an analogy from another "controversial" science: do we need to believe in the theory of evolution? Well, it's pretty dang practical (antibiotics, to name just one application that couldn't go far on creationism). To make a more absurd analogy: do we need to "believe" in Newtonian mechanics? After all, didn't Einstein and others demonstrate that Newton was wrong? I think Newton and Darwin are incredibly useful, even though I don't have an in-depth understanding of their models (beyond high school science).
Unfortunately, right-wing ideologues have done a masterful job of impugning the credibility of science in general and have at least temporarily succeeded in convincing a significant number of people that scientists are liberal activists, thereby implying that any scientific consensus is actually just a liberal agenda. (How they have done this by skillfully manipulating the "liberal media" is a problem for their paradigm.) I think science can and will "win" in this war, but I don't see how anyone can describe the current situation as "game over" in favor of science on the subject of global warming or evolution or whatever the next battlefield will be.
In the field of climate science, I don't even have a toe-hold on the "state of the science", quite apart from the issue of global warming. This makes it difficult to know whether the theory of man-made global warming is "normal science" or a "scientific revolution". However, I do know this about the opponents of the theory: in general, they are not scientists, unless you define creationism or "intelligent design" as science (which I do not).
As you might imagine, one of my (minor) problems with Gore's perspective is his title. "Truth" has no place in science, at least not the kind of truth that needs to be believed, rather than used. Galileo's truth was pretty dang inconvenient (more so for him during his difficult life than for Gore), but eventually it became just too useful to be rejected.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/11/21/climate .species.ap/index.html
Global Warming, nothing to worry about.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
OK, let's for a moment assume that there is no question that humans (and only humans) are causing global warming. If nothing is done to stop this human-induced climate change, millions of people will die. If all human activity which contributes to global warming ends tomorrow, these millions of people will not die.
Does that about sum it up?
This sounds like the perfect justification for starting a war. If those pesky Americans aren't stopped, the rest of the world will die! So, how come the war has not started? If this is settled, and we know who the enemy is that will be responsible for millions of deaths, we better do something about it, right?
Oh wait. I guess it isn't THAT settled.
I'm forced to wonder about the people that have seen this. I'd imagine that *most* of the people were already believers in humans causing Global Warming. Another piece are the people who are doing everything they can to refute it. I would have serious doubts if this changed a significant amount of people's minds about what they already believed.
Saving the World: One Drink at a Time
I found this article saying that Gore overstates the case somewhat in may cases and backs up its facts with references: http://www.reason.com/news/show/116471.html All in all, I still have no idea to what extent human activity has contributed to global warming. To my mind it makes sense to look to renewable energy sources that cause less pollution anyway, simply because the oils going to run out and pollution obviously impacts on health. In our current political framework, I don't see how that's going to happen.
He didn't do too bad. He got more votes than the other guy.
In a democracy he would have won.
Hahahahaha!! Is that so? Then please conduct an experiment in which you demonstrate global warming. Not in some computer model (I do computer models, I know how "realistic" they are for weather-related systems) but using the world. Whoops! We've only got one! And no time travel (to repeat experiments with same initial conditions)! And, for that matter, no ability to tell the world what levels of pollutants to release into the atmosphere. In short: no experiments.
Umm, just because computer models for weather related systems aren't accurate, doesn't mean they produce complete bull. So yes, the evidence we have is flawed. That of course makes each theory inaccurate. But if a large number of scientists, using different computer models of the Earth, produce largely the same results, would you not say that it is safe to suggest a general trend in the direction of their results?
Consensus is not proof. It can never be proof. But it's the next best thing we have.
Gas Prices brought the Global Warming issue to the forefront, not Gore. When prices at the pump started hitting $3/gal the anti-fossil fuel lobby caught a lot of extra attention. Add to that the unbelievable profits of the oil companies and Iranian-Venezuelan political rhetoric and consumer hate/concern peaked. Now gas prices are lower and you don't hear as much.
If only 50% or the green folks would stand behind the only reasonable alternative, Nuclear Power, then things might get better. But stating something is bad without giving a viable alternative is not going anywhere. Almost every alternative to internal combustion engine requires cheap electricity.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
posted on slashdot, but apparently his user name is "jamie".
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
This isn't offtopic... it's a classic Burma Shave rhyme that deals with the topic at hand!
It's easy to make the correlation/causation fallacy. A scientist observes a phenomena (climate change), then tries to find the cause thereof. "What has changed in our little world that might be driving the trend?", and the 20th century's rapid industrialization and uptake of petroleum-based fuels is easily noticed and studied.
Carbon Dioxide is also a red herring. There are also factors that aren't nearly as commonly considered which have much more of an impact on global climate change. I am specifically refering to underwater volcanism. We tend to not notice much that goes on under the oceans' surface.
From a June 8th email:
Another email from the same source, from August 15th, 2006:
Haven't heard anything about this specific project recently, though Mandeville said recently that his projects are starting to come to conclusion...
I'm not trying to defend oil - while certainly useful, it's also quite nasty - nobody likes oil spills, or getting squeezed dry by multinational oil conglomerates. Luckly we're only a short scientific revolution away from making oil obsolete. Like vacuum tubes, oil will still be useful, but we won't be dependant on it for mechanical mobility.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Isn't reducing what we use and making things more efficient a worthy goal in and of itself?
Yes it is. Unfortunately humans are essentially lazy creatures, and this requires effort. So in frustration, some few have turned to fear-mongering to try to influence people. After all if you don't support the environment, you must be a terrorist.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Average female fertility in Greece, Italy, and Spain is 1.1. So, their populations are going down by half each generation. In a couple of generations, a given Italian won't have brothers, sisters, aunts, or uncles.
China has a one-child policy, so you can expect a similar result there in coming years.
In Germany, it's about 1.35.
In France, female fertility hovers at about 1.89. The rest of Europe has similar numbers.
The US is hovering at about replacement rate, 2.1.
The earth is depopulating. Al Gore's documentary can be safely ignored: The problem we face isn't too many people, but too few.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Maybe this is just a quibbling point but if you really want to appear to have the bulk of the scientific community behind you, there's no need to resort to such Bill O'Reilly-isms.
for paying lobbyists to spread disinfo about climate science. http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/st ory/0,,1876538,00.html
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Stupid even for a troll.
The reason is I'm aware of the complexity of simulation problems. Here at work we deal with rather simple ones, for example simulating the EM radiation on an antenna, and that takes months on a powerful workstation. However things like weather modeling, nuclear simulation, or even plotting how a golf ball flies and things that require the most powerful supercomputer, if they are even doable at all.
So that makes me wonder just how accurate a simulation of the whole of the Earth climate could be run on my piddly shit desktop. It clearly is a very simplistic model. Now that doesn't mean it's wrong, but it certainly opens up that possibility. Any time you simplify something, there's always the possibility that your simplification left out something important. The more complex the system and the more you simplify it, the more true that is.
As a simplistic example suppose I was to design a predictor for human records for the mile run, as in fastest time on record that a human has run a mile. If I were to look at the historical data, I'd find that there's a real simple way to model it to a surprising degree of accuracy: A straight line. There's a very slow trend to faster and faster times that is almost dead linear. Great, my simple simulator is done... Except clearly it's flawed. Even though with the historical data it'll model current data correctly, it's clearly not done right because at some point in the future, it predicts that humans will run the mile in a negative amount of time. The model is too simple, even though it appears accurate for the past and present.
So given the massively more complex problem of modeling the global climate, I'm given to wonder how good a model it is if it can run quickly on a desktop computer. It's clearly a massive simplification. Again, doesn't mean it's wrong, but it sure opens up the possibility that it can be. Saying "Well if we put in the data from X years ago and run it to present it gets the right answer!" means nothing.
While I think climate change is undeniable, and it's obvious that burning fossil fuels pumps compounds into the atmosphere that haven't been there for many years (as well as not being sustainable), there is good news, too.
...).
More and more people are discovering biodiesel, which can be made of sustainable resources, is carbon-neutral, burns cleaner, and works in unmodified diesel engines. When made from oil extracted from algae, biodiesel can even be cheaper than petroleum diesel (without subsidies and taxes).
As far as diesel engines go, you can also run one on pure vegetable oil or waste vegetable oil, although you will have to pre-heat the fuel, or it will be too thick. These oils are cheap, environmentally friendly, sustainable, and probably actually better for your engine than petroleum diesel is.
Another promising energy source is ethanol (AKA alcohol), which is very easy to make from various sugars, starches, plants, fruits, etc., burns clean, is carbon neutral (unless, of course, you make it from mineral oil or another non-sustainable resource), and can be used for a variety of purposes, including powering fuel cells, as an additive to or replacement for gasoline (modified engines recommended, perhaps even necessary - I'm not sure which), and isn't nearly as toxic and carcinogenic as other fuels (gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, methanol,
If you're not concerned about fueling existing diesel or gasoline engines, there are various other sustainable energy sources that could be used.
Sustainable energy sources, particularly fuels that can be used in cars, are seeing increasing use, thanks to high oil prices and increasing public awareness. With economical and political arguments supporting bio fuels, and development and usage being encouraged by various governments, including the EU, I expect sustainable energy sources to replace mineral oil little by little over the next few years. Of course, the last card hasn't been dealt with, but bio fuels are on the rise.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Yes, our planet appears to be warming. The CAUSE is far less certain. Of the Greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, Co2 is one of the LEAST influential. Water vapor is vastly more effective. Global Dimming from particulates appears to have a far more significant influence on global temperatures than Co2. By fixating on Co2 emissions we are missing the probable cause of global warming, as yet to be scientifically determined. We haven't even determined that it isn't an entirely natural process. The earth has been getting warmer for the last 10,000 years. I saw Al Gore's movie. He fails to show any CAUSATIVE influence at all. He implies that higher Co2 levels are linked to higher temperatures, but which way? Does higher Co2 cause higher temperatures, or do higher temperatures cause Co2 levels to increase? Are they even linked, or is it coincidental? He doesn't say, or even ask the question. He's a politician, not a scientist. Yes, more investigation should be done. But by assuming the conclusion and passing laws before we really know what's happening, we may be doing more harm than good. We're definitely hurting the economy in the process.
"Most of the warming-deniers left are the real extremists out in Rush Limbaugh territory."
I still have serious doubts about the science and I am far from Limbaugh territory. I lived through the dire Global Cooling warnings of the 1970s/1980s and I've seen my share of scientific scams. I've studied the research to the best of my ability and read the arguments on both sides. The evidence hasn't convinced me that humans are causing warming beyond natural processes. Global weather is complex.
We need a pseudoscience.slashdot.org for posts like this.
No, consensus is not proof. But when there is a scientific consensus, it means that you shouldn't reject that conclusion unless you have taken the time and trouble to master the scientific literature on the subject at a level comparable to that of a professional scientist working in that field. It also means that anybody who tries to tell you that the conclusion is obviously wrong because of some basic error or overlooked bit of data is almost certainly trying to pull a fast one on you.
Is as follows:
We are fairly confident that the world has undergone drastic temperature shifts in the past, far more than we are looking at in the immediate future. It is also a good bet that we do not live in a magical period where the climate has stopped changing. This will happen again, regardless of human influence. Thus if a small shift in global temperature will lead to massive loss of life, shouldn't we be figuring out how to deal with it, rather than prevent it?
I mean think about it. If we are talking about global famine over a couple of degrees shift, what happens the next time a minor ice age hits and we have something like a 10 degree shift? Are we supposed to just pack our bags and say "Well humanity was fun while it lasted, but I guess it's our time to die." Personally, that's not appealing to me. I think we should try and figure out a way to survive it. I think if small climate shifts really are that perilous to us as a species we shouldn't worry about if we are causing one, since even if we don't one will happen sooner or later, we should worry about doing what's necessary so that it's not a threat to our species.
OK, there is more CO2 in the air than there used to be. Fact of measurement.
CO2 blocks IR radiation. Fact of experiment
CO2 is transparent to visible radiation. Fact by experiment again.
Sun radiates as a 6000K black body (near enough) with most of the power from the visible range. Fact by measurement.
Earth radiates as a 300K black body (near enough) with most of the power in the IR range. Fact by measurement and experiment.
Insolation will increase the tempertature of the earth until the radiation (LW) matches the absorbtion of SW. Experiment by proxy and Fact.
If there is more IR blocking of a SW irradiated black body it will heat up and that level of heating will depend incrementally with the ammount of CO2 around the black body. Experiment by proxt and Fact.
So we have these facts. You can even create experiments that will prove these yourself so there is no need to invoke someone else's authority.
These facts mean that the earth will globally warm up based on there being more CO2 in the atmosphere. There may be other things also heating the world, but even if they all stayed the same, we would see higher temperatures.
This is the basis of Global Warming.
Now, where is the CO2 coming from? What large source of new CO2 is around to explain this? Well the biggest new source of CO2 is burning fossil fuels. Plants, volcanoes and other changes you can think of have all happened in the past. And if the human-created CO2 is not the only source, it is the only source we can control.
This is the basis of Man Made Climate Change. All based on facts and incontrovertible consequences in the first order approximation.
In order to disprove MMCC you will have to find out why the CO2 we humans are pumpin out is NOT the issue.
The scenario with that guy in the summary happens more often than you think.
The reason you should "waste" some times is that we can't vote on climate change. It is not political. Regardless who brings the message, if the message is correct then it behoves us to pay attention to what the messenger is saying.
This "association" claimed between the "left" and the "right" reminds me of my high school math teacher's inclination to have the class "vote" on the correct answer. Math is also not subject to a "vote".
We may have climate change. But if we do it is not caused by CO2. Comparatively speaking: CO2 concentrations compared to the major green house gas is like comparing a sheet of toilet paper to a tree stump. Presence or lack of mountains is far more important for instance. There are a lot of factors. CO2 is very minor.
Have a read here: http://www.friendsofscience.org/
Dr. Tim Patterson for instance states that global temperatures and CO2 are not coupled. Patterson is paid by Carleton University which is turn is supported by two (2) governments both of whom are trying to sell Kyoto to the Canadian public. I would suggest you take his course on Paleoclimatology.
So in this case, those who are paying the salaries are not getting Patterson's support.
I am reminded of the press yapping about "Limits to Growth" in the 70's. A couple years after I graduated I happened to be wandering through the Geology Library at the UofC and found a thesis written by a grad student at the Colorado School of Mines. He discovered the Runge Kutta numerical integrations of the model used in "Limits to Growth" were often not converging. He discoved many other outright mathematical and other errors.... and published them.
Clearly the press is not all that interested in publishing facts. I've never seen a comment or retraction of the speculation surrounding "Limits to Growth" despite the fact that it has been discredited for over 30 years.
That consensus does not equals truth. And I truly astonished to see someone's else criticize the new status quo that accepted, conventional science is achieving; not unlike most religions had a short time ago. Here in /. anyways. But, since the consensus proves that most respected scientific authorities *think* that we should do something about global warming, it would be foolish not to do so. After all, if we assume we are not omniscient (I guess most people would agree on that, even if some people actually think we can get to be) then we can only act to the best of our knowledge. And the best of our knowledge say we are fscking the planet we dwell in.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Scientists: We've confirmed there are numerous asteroids headed towards Earth, one of the largest will hit the middle of Europe!
Crazy Scientists: We're not positive it will hit the Middle of Europe, it could hit slightly to the left, I'll take any sum of money to argue that you are wrong about the asteroid hitting the Earth....
Government: We have vague reports from scientists saying there are asteroids, they all agree almost all of them will miss the Earth, or at least not hit our country directly.
Public: My name is Earl is on tonight.
The scientific debate has ended? When did it begin?
Is Gore a climate scientist? ...or any other kind of scientist?
Eh?
What if while presenting the most important thing in the world, you spoke in a way the offered no credibility to your explanation.
I spent the whole move thinking he's never actually directly answered a question. Reminded me of every meeting I've ever had that involved a marketing person.
My wife argued that he is trying to make the information a pill small enough to swallow yet big enough to be worth swallowing - I just thought he was lying.
Oh yeah - and I'm a tree-hugging freak. I can't imagine how someone who is a disbeliever or non-believer would view this film.
Get your tagline off my lawn.
Thats one law that would really help. Make better standards for diesel.
That toyota corolla, well if its new then it maybe less polluting than new FORD GALAXY, that runs on european diesel, if its not new then it pollutes more than the new FORD GALAXY european diesel model.
One law that matters is taxing SUV(s) out of roads and taxing of fuel compensated by lessened other taxes. Diesel or no Diesel SUV is not a good answer.
Anything that reduces amount of money spend on fuel reduces amount of money leaving United States for getting the oil.
Best solution is TAX fuel but the taxed money wont be out of economy if Goverment puts it back to economy.
©God
Let's wait till California has no drinking water, from it's melted ice caps in the North of the state. Let's wait till drinking water costs $30 dollars a gallon. Then we'll see how well your argument about who benefits works out.
...just to spite Al Gore. Mostly because I hate Tipper and her PMRC witchhunt, but I'm kooky like that.
We all know its realy the MANBEARPIG he wants us to fear!
Good science is about facts. Politics is about bullshit.
Yes, exactly - as noted, file the movie under politics. There is no inconstancy here, unlike with the movie...
News for people who agree with us, masturbation material that matters.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
No offense, but it's the global warming hysteria types that are the "cool kids". Those of us who are skeptical about the selective data used to support the global warming THEORY are labeled as outcasts, losers, or "in denial". The fact that Gore et. al make themselves out to be the victims here is really telling.
Gore is a politician, and many of the scientists that say global warming is happening and it's mankind's fault are generally federally funded (connetion?). Those of us who are interested in the science get put on the shelf.
I guess that's the price of having your clothes made fun of.
I am generally sympathetic to the climate change argument. However I think Gore made some rather unscientific presentations. For example the animated CO2 wiggle violates just about every recommendation the graphics guru Edward Tufte makes on the display of scientific data. The axes are not labeled; the zero reference is not on the screen; flash and ink should not overwhelm the basic numbers.
Another problem are the animations of the ozone hole and the arctic ice melting. Gore does not distinguish the former is display of recorded data, while the latter is a simulation of a possible future.
When you exaggerate the presentation in science, it becomes rhetoric and propaganda. To some degree you cant 100% eliminate such from science, but you should try.
> The US Senate signaled in 1997 that it would reject ratification of the treaty by a vote of 95-0 before it was even
/. catagory, Op-ed.
> signed (essentially symbolically) by Al Gore in 1998.
How dare you attempt to introduce historical fact into today's Hate. I mean, like we all know who is responsible for all the world's ills. He heats the Earth in league with Big Oil and Haliburton. He is waging war on poor innocent brown people with the Milirary Industrial Complex and Haliburton. We know who the problem is.
BUSH!
Seriously though; it is way past time for a new
Personally the Global Warming hoax is far from 'beyond debate'. If there is any science in the arguments it is buried so far in the noise of the politics that no instrument exists capable of seperating the two. And as a political debate all I need to see is the rogue's gallery on the Warming side and their proposed solutions and contrast with the skeptics to know I will fight Al Gore and Jamie with my last living breath.
We defeated Communisism once, we will defeat it again even if we don't have Ronald Reagan leading us this time. And we will do it while defeating Islamic Fascism. Because we must.
Democrat delenda est
Ok. I mean, as long as we're presenting absurdist hyperoles, sure. Sounds like a plan. Particularly, if I can have an opportunity to grab that water as it's running off the mountain. Man, I'm gonna be rich!!!
I'll not do the chemistry. Its not hard. Plant biomass is a sugar polymer: (CH2O)n. When you convert it to ethanol (C2H5OH) you get an energy equivalent of about 2 barrels of oil from a tonne of dry biomass.
(I"m not talking about oils).
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day and about 2/3 is imported.
Since we really don't have cellulose -> ethanol conversion down pat (and we also need to work on pentosan's and lignans) we are going to need one hell of a lot of sugar to fill the gas tanks of North America.
I question if North America can grow enough to both feed itself and provide energy... but some are optimistic and perhaps an all out Hemp program should be undertaken. Productivity of Hemp is quite a lot higher than corn for instance.
No, there isn't a consensus among scientists. The above link is a petition signed by 17,000+ scientists who believe: There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
Actually, in terms of fuel used, jumbo jets are the most efficient way to move large quantities of people.
You have it exactly backwards. Commercial aviation is the least fuel-efficient way to move people. Maybe you meant to say jumbo jets in particular are more fuel-efficient than other jet aircraft? You might be correct in that case, assuming that the jumbo jet is always completely filled with passengers, which of course is not true.
A 747 burns 3300 gallons of fuel per hour and cruises at 490 knots. Neglecting to consider takeoff and landing, that means that over a 5 hour flight, the plane will have burned 16,500 gallons of fuel and traveled 2450 nautical miles (2821 statute miles). Assuming the plane is completely booked and is carrying 524 passengers (actual seating capacity varies by model and airline), then each passenger is responsible for 31.5 gallons of fuel.
A Cadillac Escalade gets 20 miles per gallon in highway driving. Filled to capacity (as our 747 was. Fair is fair, after all), it seats 8 people. Traveling the same distance (2821 miles) at 20 miles per gallon, this "gas-guzzling SUV" will suck down 141 gallons of premium. Each passenger is responsible for 17.6 gallons of fuel.
The 747, operating under ideal conditions, is barely half as "efficient" as the much-maligned, gas-guzzling Cadillac Escalade. And you want to hold it up as the pinnacle of efficiency? Better check your numbers. Be glad I didn't bring up busses or trains.
And I didn't even go into the fact that the 747 is spewing its exhaust directly into the thin, upper atmosophere, where it can do the most damage.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
from the OP "Bioengineered plankton to sink carbon or change the oceans' albedo"
Well, all I can say to that is thank fuck morons like you aren't in charge of anything. What sort of a fucking mental fucking lunatic would propose doing something like that??? Even the merest suggestion of trying something like that shows what a cock you are.
We've totally fucked the air-breathers - next stop - kill everything in the sea! Fucker.
It's amazing how many mods tried to vote this down because...well...it's an inconvenient truth.
Science should be a democracy, a republic, and certainly not a dictatorship. Science is about facts, not opinions, but some people just don't want to hear that.
I ain't got no kids, I won't have no grandkids, and very few will have great-grandkids ...; So, tough-gucking-shit we're near to self-created species extinction.
... those that have keep, those nots that have not will not thrive and maybe die.
... eat drink and be happy for tomorrow someone else dies ..., and I know it won't be my great-grandkids; So again, I say tough-gucking-shit we can do nukes, viruses, and/or chems today or to make a better world for the few tomorrow ... just let our decedents thirst and starve to a terrible tortured death.
Well okay maybe there is a small chance to save humanity, but it works like this
Today we live
Politicians, corporatists, and televangelists would persuasively say; to all US, god would want it this way and it is your patriotic duty to die for US.
!HAVEFUN!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Please remember, Michael Crichton is an author of fiction. He is no more an expert on global climatology than he is on dinosaurs. He does a good job of erecting a scaffolding of impressive and plausible-sounding ideas in scientific terms, but ultimately it's just there to support the story he's interested, whether it be about global warming or super-intelligent killer gorillas.
Out of the things I am passionate for, my support of nuclear fast breeder reactors (specifically speaking, the lead-cooled variety) and the development of such is probably at or near the top. Here's why.
Number one: INHERENTLY SAFE
Any commercial nuclear reactor anywhere in the continental US in this day and age is of the thermal type. To put it simply, this means that they operate using highly pressurized water as a coolant and as a moderator. The consequences of using such a reactor are that the water must be pressurized to the extent that it remains liquid while heated to somewhere around 200 degrees C higher then it's normal atmospheric boiling point.
Is this a good thing? Quite frankly, in my opinion, no. Chernobyl was what it was because when the folk operating the plant (a comparatively poor design to be sure) failed to keep the reactor under control, and the heat reached uncontrollable levels, the cooling water literally became a steam explosion, bursting the pipes and blowing a section of the plant apart. This radioactive "steam" then escaped and spread across much of eastern europe. The consequences of using such a design may not ever be fully known.
A fast reactor (as opposed to thermal) is of an entirely different design. A fast reactor does not need a moderator and typically uses a highly heat-conductive liquid (usually a metal with a very low melting point) to cool the reactor core. In most designs, the reactor core sits inside a large "pool" of such material and is cooled by natural convection, rather then traditional "fail-safe" mechanisms like pumps. In addition, the reactor core can be designed in such a way that basic physics prevents it from getting above a certain temperature. As the materials used in such a design expand, the amount of fission reactions actually decrease the hotter it gets. Meaning the hotter it gets, less heat gets generated. It's a natural check against any conceivable type of meltdown, without the need for human interference. In addition, no pressurization of any kind is needed. The entire plant can operate at normal atmospheric pressure. No steam explosions. If every single human being working at such a plant were to die, the fission reactions would die off naturally over time, the reactor would cool down to outside temperatures, and eventually become entombed in a huge chunk of shield material (if Lead or Lead-Bismuth is used as the cooling material). In effect, it's an entirely safe reactor design in every way that practically matters.
Number Two: MORE EFFICIENT
This actually means several different things. First off, and most striking, is that a breeder type of reactor can potentially get nearly a hundred times as much energy out of the already impressive energy potential of uranium ore used in traditional "thermal" reactor designs. This is because thermal reactor designs only "burn" about 1% of the uranium ore that gets put into them, which is Uranium 235. The rest of the Uranium 238 (far more common in nature) becomes highly radioactive and gets thrown away as "waste" that lasts a considerable amount of time before it goes back to the same level of radiation as the ground it came out of. A breeder reactor alleviates this problem by not only burning the usable Uranium 235, but by "breeding" an even greater amount of the Uranium 238 into new fuel, plutonium. The really ideal part is that if integral plant designs become common, the new fuel that gets bred in this process can be refined and put directly back into the reactor core, without the need to ever leave the site. Over time, all of the uranium that gets put into such a reactor gets used as fuel. This gives the human race enough potential energy, given the worlds known reserves of uranium, to last well over a million years. In addition, all that is left is leftover fission-products that have a much smaller frame of time to decay to safe levels then traditional waste, 300-400 years to be exact. And far less of it; small enough amounts to handle safely on site without problems. It can even be
Some have commented that "This is a theory, but we can't blow lots of money on a theory." Hmmmm. So, I guess we shouldn't blow any money on that whole "Theory of relativity" thing? We need to remember that a "theory" to the average user is a hypothesis. A "theory" to a scientist is the final step of the scientific method
1. Observe
2. Generate hypothesis
3. Make preditictions
4. Test preditctions and modify hypothesis
5. Repeat 3 and 4 until predictions match test results
6. Publish THEORY
Politics is different - this is politics: okay, so what's the worst case scenario if the environmentals are wrong? We spend a bunch of money and give our grandchildren a cleaner place to live than they otherwise would've had. If the environmentalists are right and we don't spend the money, that's a much worse case scenario. But that's me. YMMV.
Maybe two miracles. I think in the next few decades we're going to need to start an Apollo moonshot-type miracle of technology and engineering to beat back the greenhouse effect. Nanorobots. Reflective dust in the stratosphere. Giant mirrors at the Lagrange point. Bioengineered plankton to sink carbon or change the oceans' albedo. Something.
What a load of rubbish.
If the climate change story is real - and the fact that the science establishment is pushing it unanimously does not mean it's real - then the solution is to burn less coal and oil. Raising the gasoline tax in the USA to European levels would persuade Americans to buy more fuel-efficient cars, for example.
When the solution is as simple as not buying SUVs, stuff about "giant mirrors at the Lagrange point" is silly twaddle.
So I think most of us agree that global warming is a problem. At some scale or the other. The only question is...SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT NOW? Is there something we can do at our level with the heavy politics going on???
Life is about being a Phoenix!
Seriously..
It DOESNT MATTER if we are contributing or not, we should be taking all efforts to assure we are not contributing by acting as if we are.
We do it in online auctions all the time.. we insist upon escrow and trusted third parties to protect us from fraud. It doesn't mean we think everyone is out to defraud us, we just take precautions just in case. The same thing with space cushions and seatbelts on the road.. so why not with our planet..
I'd also like to point out that exhaust from burning fuels represent unused potential.. by being environmentally cleaner we use our inputs more efficiently, this is cost effective in the end.
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I'm a bit confused about the claims that the author is making:
"And Gore's lecture succeeded too. Somehow, I'm not sure how, this documentary changed the way Americans look at global warming...It's now late 2006 and the debate has moved from 'is global warming happening?' to 'it's happening, we've caused it, and what if anything should we do about it?' Most of the warming-deniers left are the real extremists out in Rush Limbaugh territory. We're not yet all the way to a serious, scientifically-informed debate, but somehow, overnight, this film pulled most of the fence-sitters over to where the scientists were years ago. "
Is there any proof that America's view of global warming has changed? How many people in America actually saw this movie? I didn't see the movie, nor did anyone in my family or circle of friends. Regardless of how small or politically affiliated my circle may be, I do not think you can make a blanket statement about America's opinion changing because of a movie when a large chunk of America has not seen the movie. I'd also like to know how the author is accounting for the large part of the population who really is uninformed or just doesn't really care.
The way I see it is this. The crowd of idiotic morons who say, "One hundred years? Hah! I won't be around so it may as well not be true", aren't going to change their fucked up way of thinking unless they get a bullet through the skull (ie. they stop thinking which they probably did a long time ago anyway). The other group of people who say, "Well it MAY be happening, but we can't know for sure until all the data is in (sometime after I'm long dead and gone) and besides, if we put all these regulations on business, it's just going to hurt you with higher prices (as if companies have the right to make the customer pay for the cost of being in business), well they aren't going to change their minds either unless a post-natal abortion is implemented. The people who say, "OMG OMG teh sky is falling!!!", they aren't a lot of help either because they make the more reasonable folks who believe in climate change look bad (you folks should really calm down so we can approach things rationally). Finally. It's already too late to do a hell of a lot to fix things. The best you can hope for is that *IF* people wake up, we can save a portion of what the planet is like today. Then maybe in a few centuries the damage will reverse as natural systems repair things. But, at the rate we're going I'm happy enough to know that a massive die off is coming soon and I'll be the first in line to take a few idiots down. That is all.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
And I bet the author wears funny looking pants too! LOL!
Anything involving more than 1(ONE) person IS POLITICAL!
There are too many wimps who can barely handle politics on a tiny scale and they only hurt the rest of us.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
.. or just "spy the torrent" if you get what I mean. It's already available, so join the swarm :-)
howstuffworks.com link
:) )
Basically, 747 gets between 69.8 to 100mpg passenger miles per gallon.
Comparing both vehicles as being "full" is a faulty assumption. Airlines work their arses off to ensure that their airplanes take off as close to capacity as possible. Lots of people drive their SUVs to work alone.
(And the 747 is not exactly Boeings most fuel efficient airplane, the 787 is going to kick its arse! Not a huge jumbo jet, but amazingly cool.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
From a post on my weblog addressing this very issue, Why is global warming bad?
Irregardless of whether or not global warming is happening and irregardless of whether or not humanity is the cause, I've never seen this question addressed, let along answered by anyone during this debate. I'm a biologist and I'm fairly certain that life on Earth will survive no matter what. The Earth has seen periods of time where it was warmer and where it was colder than now and life survived - its pretty adaptable that way, sort of the definition of life you might say.
What are the consequences of global warming? Possibly some human structures will cease to be and some human life will be lost, tragic in terms of human life lost, but otherwise not great on a scale of "life in general". I don't think that all of a sudden the atmosphere will get hundreds of times as dense and we turn into Venus overnight destroying all life and the future possibility of life on Earth, thats just not logical. So, the "worst case scenario" is that humanity suffers some problems and possibly a few species go extinct. Big deal.
Do we really expect the world and the environment to remain static? The only constant in nature is that it changes and the only constant for life is that it must continually adapt or die. Humanity is so ego-centric that our solution for messing with the world is to mess with it some more and to freeze a condition that we are used to as the permanent and ultimate "perfect world". Is the current world the one we want to be stuck with forever? Is it the best for the interests of nature as a whole rather than just specifically humans?
We should grow up as a species and realize that the world is not here for us, we are merely one of the more recent, globally-successful species. Our conception of what is "right" for the world is not even close to right, its conflating our interests with the interests of nature in general, as if the world were merely made for us. Species come, species go, trying to hang on to the "way things were" is a very immature response to life in general, we are a baby species and acting like it. Its like the whole global warming fixing crowd drank the Kool Aid on the Biblical statement that we are the sheppards and stewards of the world. We should get over ourselves, we aren't that important.
Even if you still think that we should do something and that global warming is bad, do the global warming "fixers" seriously believe that humanity can agree on what is the "right" global environment? Humans can't even agree on simple things like compassion and how to properly treat each other and you think we can agree on the world's climate? They seem to be of the opinion that "something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done".
Are we going to have a gigantic document like the European Union's constitution that fixes every detail of how the world should work for eternity? Are we going to pander to every special interest in the world? Do we fix the level of the oceans because the Dutch don't want to move? Do we continue to make the Northwest USA a rain-heavy place so that all of the hydro-electric powerplants continue to work? Did you see the effort that went into determing how "lumpy" soup versus stew was so that the proper taxes could be applied and the proper special interests could be protected? Imagine what the global environment document will be like - the mind boggles and the political shenanigans that humans will get up to.
Does anyone seriously believe that the best answer to humanity messing with the environment is for humanity to mess with it some more? Assume we can get it right on the second try? Believe that we can master all of the details of climate and correctly prognosticate all of the consequences of our actions on it to achieve the desired results? Do you have proof that we can do it rather than a hopelessly, optimistic blind-faith that humanity will figure i
The people with the ability to make massive changes are in politics. You tell me, who people will remember, vote for, or value. If politicians made changes that increased taxes, but helped avert this crisis, would the average person even know? Would they care? Now look on the opposite side of the coin. Let's say a crisis or huge situation happens, and the politician is there to propose a radical fix to the problem. People remember the catastrophes, and the politicians eagerness to help solve problems that existed. In short, people remember (and consciously or subconsciously value) reactive politicians much moreso than proactive.
Last I heard, they were still arguing over the existence of the medieval warming period and a hundred other possible oddities in recent climatological history.
e ws/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml
I'm sorry, but that period doesn't support the conclusion we all want to see, so we've had it stricken from the record.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Stormtrooper: Let me see your identification.
Obi-Wan: [with a small wave of his hand] You don't need to see his identification.
Stormtrooper: We don't need to see his identification.
Obi-Wan: These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Stormtrooper: These aren't the droids we're looking for.
Obi-Wan: He can go about his business.
Stormtrooper: You can go about your business.
Obi-Wan: Move along.
Stormtrooper: Move along... move along.
While you have a point about it being an advocacy/advertisement more than news, it IS an important topic. And as for one-sided, yes, it's highly biased towards the facts and science of the issue. And as for over-blown, not really. It's the other, do-nothing, don't-think, don't-worry side that's been over-blown for some time. This movie is just an attempt to get heard.
It is a political issue because the people who do the research are using Federal Grants. It is a political issue because politicians who want to have a strong subject to speak on are relying on ignorance and lack of definitive facts. We do not have enough information about this one way or the other at this point. There is research that suggests that our warming trend over the past century is part of a 10,000 year cycle. Obviously we can't prove or disprove that without tons of data which takes more than a few decades to obtain.
It's easy to pick on big oil being defended overseas because we don't have much choice at the moment. It's easy to say that what we are paying to obtain and protect that foriegn oil could pay for the switch to renewable energy sources. The part you are leaving out is how we'll get from point A to point B. You can't stop cold turkey because our economy does run on oil. It takes time and billions of dollars to set up the power stations and infrastructure to make the switch, but in the meantime we have to keep our economy alive or its a moot point.
Not even close but have a cigar anyway. There are oil shortages because politicians with an agenda stopped the big oil companies from creating any new domestic oil. We have more oil in the ground in the mainland US than all of the Middle East. If we had allowed big oil to tap into that a year ago we'd see a sudden drop in price at the pumps in roughly 8 more years. If they had tapped into that domestic oil 20 years ago we'd probably be paying between 30 and 40 cents per gallon (before tax).
As for coal, it is a domestic resource. The fact that we don't have to pay to ship it from overseas keeps the price low and that helps the market. Believe it or not, anything that helps the market helps the country. Its simple economics. If something costs less then more of it will be sold and the government taxes each sale directly and again on corporate profits.
Yes, there is price fixing on oil but it isn't from anyone in the US. Perhaps you've heard of OPEC before? The price at the pump has nothing to do with stockpiles and vice versa. What does have a more immediate effect on the price of oil is terrorism and natural disasters inside of OPEC nations. If you believe that providing an alternative source of energy in itself will reduce the price of oil then you obviously didn't pay attention to how supply and demand really works. In order for you to use the alternate sources there is a massive amount of hardware and infrastructure that has to be put in place and that will cause the price of the alternative energy to be much higher than oil even at it's current price. If it costs more then it will have a low demand. That low demand would slow the process of providing supply which would cause the high price of the product to stretch over a longer period of time than i
In a nutshell:
The natural cycle timeline here (per Gore's graph) is very long - these are the last few ice ages we're looking at, with data derived from artic ice cores etc.
The inevitable conclusion is that global temperature follows CO2 level and CO2 level is already way above normal due to industrialization. The vertical/horizontal axis here are about in correct ration (showing how far above the normal range the CO2 level is).
http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/8480/globalwarmin gua0.jpg
Well, if you want to go down that road, walking or riding a bike don't expend any fuel, but it would take quite a long time to go 2821 miles.
It's also quite difficult to cross the ocean that way.
What movie is that teaser actually from?
I figured I'd chime in... it bears noting that aviation fuel is still leaded, unlike roadgoing vehicle fuel. There are 2 main aspects to using fossil fuels: emissions and the economics of waste & dependency. In the case of aviation, the emissions per gallon burned, regardless of how economically it's used, can be a lot worse than those burned by a road vehicle. Newer cars and catalytic converters really do an excellent job on the emissions front. Aviation emissions have really only been reduced as a by-product of engineering efforts to improve combustion efficiency of the engines. They still lack anything to clean up their fully leaded exhaust.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
I find that what often appears to be an appeal to authority is really being used as a way to inject scientific knowledge into the debate. While the speaker is saying "So-and-so says X is true," what he really means is that "X has been proven using sound science by so-and-so." Since we rely upon so-and-so and the peer review process to validate the science behind the results, it is reasonable and sound to offer scientific results as fact until further science or analysis reveals flaws. We don't rely on the authority of the scientist to establish the fact, we rely on the soundness of the science. Using the scientist's name is just a vector to allow the correspondent to recall or to refer to the cited science.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
I know what the show is supposed to be, but how dare they mock my personal moral panic?
Commander Buck Murdock: Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
Given that this effect IS correct on a small scale, why isn't it on the large scale? The balance of proof is on you. "But it's more complicated" isn't a proof: it could be more complicated and WORSE. E.g. positive feedbacks. Higher temp -> melting permafrost -> CO2 from rotting frozen vegetation -> higher temp.
Prove that the human element is not the cause of the extra CO2.
THEN prove that extra CO2 *for the specific case of the earth* doesn't work like a lab experiment.
A complicated system may be more predictable than a simple one. Example:
throw one six-sided dice. Comes up 4. Is it biased? Cannot tell.
throw 10 six-sided dice. Average 4.0. Is it biased? Maybe maybe not. However, this is a more complicated system than the single dice: there are 10 of them.
throw 10,000 six-sided dice. Average 4.00. Is it biased? Almost definitely. Far more complicated a system than eevn 10 dice, never mind 100.
So again, prove that the earth acts *oppositely* to a lab experiment. Why is it that every experiment we can make with SW/LW radiation and CO2 is completely opposite to the earth.
Only in America would that comment be labeled "Insightful".
Give it up already... global warming is real.
Dr. Tim Patterson - and he is only one of many - IS ON THE OTHER SIDE and he IS A CLIMATE SCIENTIST.
He is also a very credible climate scientist.
Note: Gore is a lawyer.
Note: In many trials if not most trials... one side is presenting fiction.
I for one believe OJ is innocent. But then maybe I believe his lawyers?
On this basis one can discount at least 1/2 of what lawyers say as being pure fiction whether it sounds believable or not. I tend to think the smell factor with polies is higher than 1/2 but then I'm an optimist.
Question: In a trial, how often do we find the lawyers agreeing?
Why should we expect a concensus in the debate on global warming? The sides will simply forget all about it and find something else to bicker about. Eventually a concensus will form in the scientific community. As this happens the media will ignore it because their purpose is not to convey information - it's to sell papers and advertizing.
I am reminded of a comment by one of my physics profs: Sometimes one generation has to die off. He was refering to the time it took for the physics community to accept Einstein's relativity theory.
I know this is an odd question, but has anyone considered the amount of heat our modern society produces? Lightbulbs, cell phones, cars, trains, airplanes, power plants--everything modern society relies on produces heat.
Might that heat--maybe combined with greenhouse gases--be contributing to recently noticed warming trends?
Global Warming is about as real as Global Cooling was/is and the only "inconvenience" in Al Gore's movie is the "convenient" practice of scientific alarmism.
I think the 747 is a poor choice to pick here for a 5 hour trip, as these are usually geared toward flights of 10 hours or more. Plus, these long routes cross oceans, impassable terrain, etc. that a car cannot simply do, and a plane can do a direct route of flight, whereas typically a car would have to do a bit longer route. So, perhaps a better comparison would be a 747 versus a ship for a transpacific/transatlantic route for fuel consumption. An Escalade would be better compared to, say, a 737. Of course, for the Escalade, you have to take into account the emissions from all 8 passengers eating Funyuns and Beef Jerky on the 2821 mile, 47 hour (based on 60 miles per hour) journey, assuming that this is not their usual diet. At least you can roll down the windows on the Escalade.
It took the killing of 3000 innocent people and the destruction of 2 buildings and part of the pentagon to convince people that the global war on terror was a good idea.
Somehow the near total destruction of New Orleans didn't convince people that perhaps climate change has some tangible consequences.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Basically, 747 gets between 69.8 to 100mpg passenger miles per gallon.
HowStuffWorks fudged their math a bit. Their numbers actually work out to 76 miles per gallon per person, not 100 as they claimed. If you take the speed they use (550 mph), that's actually a mile every 6.55 seconds, not every 5 seconds. Burning 3600 gallons/hour, that's 6.55 gallons per mile, or 0.0131 gallons per person per mile (they claimed 0.01), or 76 miles per gallon per person. However, you concede that it ranged between 69.8 and 100, so that's fine.
My problem is that both you and HowStuffWorks insist on comparing a full airplane with an almost-empty roadgoing vehicle. The Cadillac Escalade, as I said, gets 20 mpg highway, or 0.05 gallons per mile. Split among 8 passengers, that's 0.00625 gallons per person per mile, or 160 miles per person per gallon, which is still well above HowStuffWorks' optimistic calculation of 100 miles per person per gallon for the 747.
I'm not denying that flying isn't faster. I'm saying that there is absolutely no way you can manipulate the math to try and portray it as anything better than what it is. And "what it is" is the absolutely least-fuel-efficient way to travel that is possible.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
There's a movie teaser line that you may have seen recently, that goes like this: "What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you?" The answer is "I'd try." The teaser's actually for another movie, but that's the story that's told in the documentary "An Inconvenient ManBearPig": it starts with a man who, after talking with scientists and senators, can't get anyone to listen to what he thinks is the most important thing in the world -- The ManBearPig. It comes out on DVD today.
The scariest horror film of 2006 was a documentary.
The first thing everyone wants to know, or at least to argue about, is whether Al Gore has his facts straight. The short answer is yes, he does. There are minor errors. They don't detract from Gore's main point, on which the scientific debate has ended.
And the main point is scary, and almost too big to think about or talk about. The ManBearPig is coming, because of us. Sometime in the next hundred years, our environment is going to change in big ways. We can't predict it with much accuracy yet, but the best estimates we have are that it's going to be -- measured in lives and dollars -- really bad.
In a way this film isn't really about that story. It's about a man telling that story -- someone who, after suffering a bit of a setback, asked himself, well, what can I do now? What's important to me? How do I want to spend my time?
What's important is a question a lot of nerds may be familiar with. We like to talk about important things. But how do you respond when you try to say something serious and the cool kids laugh at you? What do you do, when you put yourself out there, try to engage people's minds, and instead they make fun of your clothes?
The good news for anyone who's had a prom invitation rejected is that people can come back from worse disasters. His presidential bid didn't go so well in 2000. Gore had given talks on ManBearPig before; after he was forcibly retired from public service, he took a Powerbook and Keynote on the road, sharpening and expanding his slideshow talk in airports and hotels -- key places where ManBearPig lives.
Half of the film is that talk, and it's an engrossing talk. There are charts and diagrams and footnoted stats (and a Futurama clip) and it's about as fun as zoology gets. Turns out Al Gore has a sly sense of humor (but not a nasty one -- the film's only two political nudges are pretty gentle). Unless you're an exotic zoologist you'll probably learn something too.
But the other half, interwoven with the lectures, is a man picking up the pieces and rediscovering something important in his life, a message that he has to tell. That succeeds as a film. Unfortunately, Al Gore still doesn't have any friends.
And Gore's lecture succeeded too. Somehow, I'm not sure how, this documentary changed the way Americans look at ManBearPig. In early 2006, ManBearPig was still seen as one of those things like Big Foot. Pundits were fairly evenly divided and both positions were routinely heard. It's now late 2006 and the debate has moved from "is ManBearPig real?" to "he's real, he's angry, and what if anything should we do about it?"
Most of the MeanBearPig-deniers left are the real extremists out in Kent Hovind territory. We're not yet all the way to a serious, scientifically-informed debate, but somehow, overnight, this film pulled most of the fence-sitters over to where the scientists were years ago.
As for actually killing ManBearPig, it will take a miracle. Maybe two miracles. I think in the next few decades we're going to need to start an Apollo moonshot-type miracle of technology and engineering to beat back the ManBearPig. Nanorobots. Reflective dust in the stratosphere. Giant mirrors at the Lagrange point. Bioengineered plankton to sink carbon (MBP's key food) or change the oceans' albedo. Something. That's just a guess.
But meanwhile, though we hope someone can build us
As I recall, he got the most votes.
The atmosphere used to be in a stable state with 280 ppm CO2. It is now over 350ppm (fact of measuerment - go do it yourself). But the stable state isn't one where the earth generally gets warmer?
And where did this new source of CO2 come from?
Partly humans, yes?
Well, how much of what is *newly out there* is due to humans and how much from other sources? When you tabulate these other sources, did they exist in much the same proportions when the system was stable at 280ppm? If these systems were the same or similar then, they cannot be the reason why the CO2 concentrations have changed, can they.
Basically.. the ocean currents which keep europe and much of the northern hemisphere warm are sensitive to salinity and temperature..
of specific concern here is salinity. Recent observations have shown huge tracts of ice hundreds of miles across suddenly melting over a period of about a week.
If this happens to the greenland ice sheet, it could stop the north atlantic currents and cause severe glaciation of the northern hemisphere with europe particularly hard hit.
It would be devastating to world economics and food supplies.
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Even if you were to say that your Escalade itself is technically more efficient than the Jet for that 3000 miles, the fact that the Escalade will take a week vs. 5 hours for the jet should account for something. Some questions:
1) Should you have to account for the fuel used to transport the extra week of food that the Escalade riders are consuming for their journey?
2) Should you have to account for the fact that if everybody switched to SUVs for cross-country journeys, congestion would increase and therefore mileage would decrease?
3) Should you have to account for the fact that on a 3000 mile journey, the A/C, stereo and entertainment devices being charged that are freely available on a plane will also be in use in the Escalade, and will likely decrease it's mpg by 10% or more?
I say probably. However, I'd also wager that the ICE trains in Germany which are purely electric and can carry 1000 people at 300kph are most efficient.
I just found the box to change my sig. Um.... [timeless witticism].
News Release:
6 billion people are expected to die over the next 100 years. This is an annual death rate of about 60 million which is equal to the number of people killed in WWII (roughly 62 million).
The death rate is correlated with the expected rise in temperature attributed to Global Warming.
What about the need to balance that harm against the potential harm warming could cause? I think we should be able to reasonably agree, as a society, to take out an "insurance policy" in the form of reduced emissions in order to gain more security in the future from radical climate change.
Crop failures, water shortages, regional refugee crises, loss of biodiversity... all those things would also harm our economy.
You are worng.
We have enough uranium mined to fuel a fleet of 100 reactors for close to 60,000 years.
The fuel efficiency is not an order of magnitude better - its is about 0.2/99.8 = 500x
Stop being so pessimistic.
I say probably. However, I'd also wager that the ICE trains in Germany which are purely electric and can carry 1000 people at 300kph are most efficient.
Unless they're being powered via solar, nuclear or wind technologies, I'd be willing to presume that its not as environmentally friendly as one may think.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Global warming doesn't exist, it is merely a naturally occurring, temporary, raise in the global temperature.
I suggest that everyone should at least read this article written by Senator James Inhofe, http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=17645
This isn't a scientific article, but rather an article on the journalistic habit of creating hysteria with stories on temerature change. You should know the science behind what is going on, instead of just the hype, no matter which view you take.
It's a documentary about Global Warming, not 'Our Earth: Greenhouse or God's Judgment?'.
This is science, it's not been proven or dis proven yet. But there is a scientific explanation for it, much like most of the other theories out there. (Evoloution, black holes...)
:3 rawr.
William Connolley on realclimate parsed the question fairly, here:
I understand that I can either argue from authority (ask you to take my word for it as an expert) or provide some evidence.
You will see in these Slashdot discussions plenty of weaseling on the first three points, despite readers of this list presumably being better informed on science than the general public. The first three points are not open questions in science. Like anything in science they are open for revisiting, but they are not where the action or controversy lies within the research community.
While I agree with the fourth point very strongly, and while a majority of participants in the relevant sciences probably do, it's not universally agreed. It's not really a scientific question, though; it's a question in economics, policies, values, and risk.
The broad scientific questions, the ones typically up for debate, are essentially settled.
What interests me here is why people continue to rant about questions that are part of the consensus, when the case is pretty much closed. They take offense when one has the temerity to suggest they are not only barking up the wrong tree, but that the tree they are barking up was chopped down for pulp years ago, but they don't seriously consider the possibility that while the policy is uncertain, the broad outlines of the facts are known well enough.
For those of you who think people like me are wrong, disingenuous, or even dishonest, consider how the situation looks to you vs how it would look if we were basically right. There would be organizations with substantial investments in resources (especially fossil fuels) whose long term value would be at risk. (There's ample precedent. Consider the history of the tobacco industry.) Their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders would be to minimize that risk. They would therefore inject the greatest possible doubt into the public's understanding of the science.
Consequently, there would be many arguments in the press, mostly appealing to the elements in the society who are generally most suspicious of regulation and taxation, that would cherry-pick evidence and spin tales that were scientifically incoherent and yet superficially convincing.
They would appeal to the fairness of the lay audience. They would claim that there are two sides to every issue. They would object to any presentation that was scientifically balanced on the grounds that their manufactured opinion was not represented. The echoes of this argument ring through every public discussion of the topic, on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Science and commerce do not deserve equal time on scientific questions. Cherry picked evidence does not deserve equal time with the totality of the evidence. The best policy is not a compromise between truth and fiction.
Capitalism is necessary for prosperity, and vigorous defense of private interests is part of the game. Cherry-picking evidence isn't illeg
mt
*pow* Nail in the board in one hit!
You and people like you are exactly why there is definitely a very real debate as to whether man made global warming is happening or not. I point out an often told lie, and show exactly how each person can verify this for themselves, and the response is personal attacks, a restating of one side of the argument in caps, and a restatement of the original lie.
Just look at your very first sentence. "The debate among informed parties IS over." Right there you make anyone that does not agree with you, dismiss you as a fanatic. You make it very clear that you feel anyone who is even considering debating the issue is not "informed". This means that you are unwilling to discuss the issue in a rational and scientific manner. You are simply expecting people to believe, the same way they would believe in a god. You expect them to take it as a matter of faith.
The final paragraph really drives home why you certainly help keep the very real debate going. Everything you say becomes suspect because you obviously jump to conclusions without any evidence and accuse those that don't bow to your authority of being destroyers of the world.
People laugh, scorn, disregard some brilliant ideas. ... is not equal to...
Any idea that is laughed at, scorned, and disregarded is actually a brilliant idea.
-Styopa
Because only in America do we have people who question flawed evidence?
Yes it is real, the question now is how much of an impact (if any) do humans have on it? All the Al Gores in the world back their claims of human impact with the "hockey stick" graph, which ignores the fact that in the middle ages, the Earth was significantly warmer than it is today. And that for the past few centuries we've been in a cool cycle, which we're now coming out of.
The debate is not over. The closed minded Gores of the world have just refused to listen to any evidence that challenges their claims. Now that's "science".
Who walks 2800 miles? Noone. So if the 747 didn't exist, even if the SUV is 25 miles per person per gallon, people wouldn't go 1000 miles on holiday as often as they go 3000 miles on holiday by plane. They may go as far as 300 miles (5 hours @ 60mph average) or a little more, but who wants to drive for three days to go on holiday and then drive three days to get back?
Let's review the greenhouse theory of global warming. Our planet would be one more icy rock hurtling through space at an intolerable temperature were it not for our atmosphere. This thin layer of gases -- about 95 percent of the molecules live within the lowest 15 miles -- readily allows the sun's heat in but resists its reradiation into space. Result: The earth is warmed.
Now for an inconvenient truth about CO2 sources -- nature generates about 30 times as much of it as does man. Yet the warming worriers are unconcerned about nature's outpouring. They-- and Al Gore -- are alarmed only about anthropogenic CO2, that 3.2 percent caused by humans.
They like to point fingers at the U.S., which generated about 23 percent of the world's anthropogenic CO2 in 2003, the latest figures from the Energy Information Administration. But this finger-pointing ignores yet another inconvenient truth about CO2. In fact, it's a minor contributor to the greenhouse effect when water vapor is taken into consideration. All the greenhouse gases together, including CO2 and methane, produce less than two percent of the greenhouse effect, according to Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, by the way, is described by one source as "the most renowned climatologist in all the world."
When water vapor is put in that perspective, then anthropogenic CO2 produces less than 0.1 of one percent of the greenhouse effect.
If everyone knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, why do Al Gore and so many others focus on CO2? Call it the politics of the possible. Water vapor is almost entirely natural. It's beyond the reach of man's screwdriver. But when the delegates of 189 countries met at Kyoto in December 1997 to discuss global climate change, they could hardly vote to do nothing. So instead, they agreed that the developed countries of the world would reduce emissions of six man-made greenhouse gases. At the top of the list is CO2, a trivial influence on global warming compared with water vapor, but unquestionably man's largest contribution.
In deciding that it couldn't reduce water vapor, Kyoto really decided that it couldn't reduce global warning. But that's an inconvenient truth that wouldn't make much of a movie.
Source: Patrick Bedard (9/2006)
Did Al invent the Internet before or after he invented global warming?
From the Competitive Enterprise Institute: http://www.cei.org/pages/ait_response.cfm
Yes, yes, I uderstand they can't be trusted, as they deny the current conventional wisdom and should be burned at the stake like the heretics they are. Nonetheless...
668: Neighbour of the Beast
The only fault that comes to mind immediately with this argument is that the Escalade may be carrying eight passengers, but...where is their luggage? Can an Escalade carry eight passengers PLUS two suitcases per passenger (16 suitcases) PLUS a carry-on (eight more bags) PLUS that well-defined personal item (such as a laptop or briefcase, eight more small bags)?
I ask simply because I don't know the cargo capacity of an Escalade. A 747 will carry all that, plus that occasional extra/overweight baggage, without the need for a trailer or rooftop cargo box (both of which will cut your fuel economy considerably).
I think a more equivalent argument would be the fuel required to move a certain amount of mass from point a to point b; after all, that's what's being moved, whether it's people or cargo.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
The libertarian answer might be to stop subsidizing any form of transportation. Privatize roads. Don't build airports. etc.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Wow. Do you believe the Earth is only 6000 years old too? Jesus Christ...
Even if you were to say that your Escalade itself is technically more efficient than the Jet for that 3000 miles, the fact that the Escalade will take a week vs. 5 hours for the jet should account for something.
Yes, it does account for something. More people travel 3000 miles during holidays just because of these planes. If they had to drive 4 days just to get to their destination, they might choose to not travel so far.
So a fair comparison would be the difference in gas consumption between a 3000 mile 747 trip and a 300 mile Escalade trip. I think the Escalade will win out.
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I couldn't care less about whos trying to sell dvd's, all I know is that there's a hole in the ozone over my country, that wasn't caused by MY country which results in UV rays giving New Zealanders Skin Cancer at an alarming rate, that just over from us in Australia they are having worse droughts than before, back in my country we are generally having the hottest temperatures we've ever had (average temperature) and that a FRICKING ICEBERGS HAVE JUST SAILED PAST. I think thats the problem.
---
Note: I have not yet seen the movie. I agree with the submitter's statement above! I have to say though that no government is going do anything unless it is financially beneficial, or at least beneficial to their reelection efforts. It's all about short-term thinking, unfortunately. Kind of like corporations and their balance sheets.
Let's not forget that the 747 is also carrying cargo that has nothing to do with the passangers.
why is it that the extra CO2 in the earth's atmosphere doesn't result in higher temperatures. What facts do you have that show this is not the case.
Yes... but the question is how you enforce the goal. Do you have the government put a gun to people's heads and threaten to kill them if they don't reduce consumption or make things more efficent, or is it a decentralized popular social movement? No one has a problem with protecting the enviornment... it is just the question of how much police powers to regulate private non-violent behavior that we disagree about.
Al Gore is of the school that thinks totalitarian government is the solution to enviornmental problems, which is why so many people hate him even if they agree with the science of global warming.
The "inconvenient truth" is that Presidents are NOT elected by the popular vote but rather by the votes of the electoral college. We wouldn't expect anyone who supports Gore's "truth" to really be concerned about what the truth actually is though.
I'm happy you are willing to keep your absurd disbelief personal.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
But what is the gas mileage of Cadillac Escalade when travelling across the Atlantic ocean? Across the Arctic ocean? Or even when travelling from New York to Anchorage?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
I've become convinced that (1) there is such a thing as global warming, and while (2) I'm not convinced it's entirely due to carbon dioxide emissions, (3) we probably ought to do something about it.
Thing is, as far as I can tell, the solutions proposed by Gore and other environmentalists are nothing short of looney. Their so-called solutions would largely shut down the economy of the United States for very little benefit, as emissions by third world countries increase drastically. Losing the economic powerhouses the United States and other industrialized countries have become is worse than futile, because it's these powerhouses that are likely to be the only true fix for our predicament.
Instead of trying to shut down emissions we ought to be figuring out ways of actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Promoting plant growth is one good idea, but there are others and there's no reason we can't split our efforts. In the meantime we should also try to climb out of the "mankind is a disaster" intellectual pit and find the other mechanisms by which our climate is changing, and actively oppose them - whether it's "natural" or not.
Bunny huggers tend to believe that the Earth should remain undespoiled and that we are killing nature. The fact is, the climate changes naturally, we see ice ages, and species die out all the time. Humanity is reaching the point where we can not only change the climate accidentally, but also on purpose; and if we fail to regulate the Earth's climate we risk our own existence.
The only way that happens is when the governments of industrialized and developing nations decide this is a priority.
Exactly. The reason that Kyoto failed was because it exempted the major developing nations of India and China from having to do squat while America and to a lesser extent Europe were supposed to bend over and take a large economic kick in the ass. The theory was that America and Europe had had their time to pollute and experience economic growth so they (the developing nations) should now have their chance, but that is like offering America and Europe the stick with no carrot and that will never work. You can argue all you want about how our grandfathers did what when but they are all dead now and you can be sure that people will not accept harsh measures unless they feel that everyone is equally involved in the here and now regardless of past development. If we cannot agree on that then we may very well continue until we have wiped ourselves out because, as John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run we are all dead anyway," and there are not enough people out there who are altruistic enough to limit present consumption unequally so that their grandchildren can inherit the earth. If the pain of reform is not shared equally among the nations of the world then there will be no reform...it is as simple as that.
A meterologist can't tell me what the temperature is going to be 1 week from now in my home town, but the climatologists can tell me what the temperature of the ENTIRE PLANET is going to be 100 YEARS from now?
I started to watch an Inconvenient Truth on a recent flight. I had nothing else to do. I'm interested in the topic. I wanted to hear what Al had to say. It started out fine. Inspiring actually. He showed some photos of the earth taken from various Apollo flights. I am interested in that too. Then he told a story about 2 teachers he had, one good and one bad. The good teacher went on to great things... then he cracked the joke that the bad teacher was now in charge of the environment for the Bush administration.
Click.
Biased. End of discussion. Nothing to see here. Move along...
Take, for example, Newtonian gravitation and mechanics. We KNOW that newtonian gravitation is merely a simple approximation to the more complete and complex truth of Einsteinian gravitation.
That doesn't stop NASA et al using newtonian physics to put an object on a couple of km wide bit of rock that is rolling round at thousands of mph and is millions of miles away.
So simple doesn't mean wrong. It just means simple.
Just to chime in here, airlines that have spare cargo room in their planes actually ship cargo that aren't from the passengers. You could think of them like those dedicated UPS / Fedex / etc.. planes that also shipping meat bags.
To the originator of the 747 efficiency debate, although the 747 at maximum capacity can still spew a lot of nasty wasteage when they're filled filled to capacity, they're almost always sitting near the 100% threshold. Airlines spend millions of dollars to make sure their planes get the highest profit/cost ratios and frankly, that correlates with their waste expenditures.
Now, you're a family man, 2 kids and wifie. You drive your big auto from Seattle to New York. According to your own admission, the car is at maximum capacity. No? Well we'd better ask around to share the car with some of the jones' down the street or maybe in the next city to fill up the car. What? You'd never do that, ever? What does that say about the test then? The best synthetic situation in the world is fine until you actually APPLY it to the real world.
Bye!
The trouble is: how do we make up our minds about the issue if we reject scientific consensus as proof? The only thing I can think of is to understand as much of the issue as we can for ourselves rather than from the media. That's something I definitely need to work harder on.
6 /11/avery-and-singer-unstoppable-hot-air/
You will find a lot of homeworks here:
http://www.realclimate.org/ "Climate science from climate scientists"
Click on the "archive" link at the top.
Try this recent one first, as it debunks several common unscientific claims:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
Then you can also use their search engine with keywords like "myth".
Please also note that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gives references to the studies that its reports are based on.
http://www.ipcc.ch/
Science has been wrong several times about climate change in the past few decades (The big chill never happened, and warming hasn't progressed nearly as quickly as was once predicted)
You need to be more careful whom you believe. There are a lot of lies being spread around, and these two statements are prime examples. There was never any scientific consensus predicting a "Big Chill" (the notion derives from an alarmist article in Newsweek, not the scientific literature). And the warming rate is well within the range of uncertainty of previous predictions.
Don't do science a disservice and proclaim an end to debate. One of the key tenets of science is that very few things are absolute, and our knowledge of climate certainly isn't one of them. As often as science has proved itself wrong in the past, to proclaim an end to debate over a subject like global climate change and declare once side to be fact is to spit in the face of science.
Science is always open to revision. It is quite clear that our knowledge of gravity is not absolute, and perhaps it never will be. But that doesn't mean that it is not irresponsible and dishonest to suggest to somebody that he shouldn't worry about the cliff edge that he is heading towards, because we have not reached "an end to debate" on the subject or gravity.
Now we have stories about stories about the release of a story about Global warming, which is of course another story.
but that's just the point, isn't it? They very well could be powered by wind technology, or nuclear, or, in 50 years (always just another fifty years >.<) fusion... it's easier to pack an environmentally friendly power generation source into something the size of, oh, Wisconsin, than it is to pack one into a family sized vehicle.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Al Gore needs money for a presidential bid in '08, so this is really quite convenient!
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
You are children of a dead planet, earthdiedre, and
this death we do not comprehend. We shall take you in, but
may we ask this question-- will we too catch the planetdeath
disease?
Right...I almost said that, but then I wasn't sure if passenger flights carried extra cargo like mail sacks, etc. There used to be a service on airlines where you could essentially buy your cargo a ticket on a particular flight so that you knew exactly when it would arrive at its destination, but I don't know if such a service still exists.
(and as has been pointed out, passenger flights don't have much extra room for extra cargo)
This uncertainty is why I suggested that a more fair comparison would be to examine how much fuel is burned per ton of cargo per mile of travel; that would be a more consistent comparison. After all, the original poster didn't take into account the luggage that the Escalade had to carry; the SUV was carrying LESS in terms of weight per passenger than the 747.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I don't think it does anyone service to complain about travelling 500mph and :-)
getting nearly 100mpg/per passenger. Many people don't realize just how
fuel efficient these planes are. While I'm sure you are right in the fact
that we aren't going to use them instead of railroads to move tons of coal
I think the average joe should know that it's more fuel efficient to
fly a 747 across the country rather than drive himself or even 2 people.
I remember reading something to the effect that per passenger the TGV
(high speed train) uses more energy than a 747 (mainly because
air resistance at sea level is more than air resistance at 40,000 feet)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon_ Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine
... It's a place where going into the market can take time because people talk in the aisles and at the checkstands. Life is slower, so you have to be patient. You'll be part of that slowness because it is enjoyable to be neighborly." The main visitors are tourists who come to hike, backpack and fish in the area's many rivers and streams. Cave Junction is the sort of out-of-the-way location you might seek out if you were hoping to survive a nuclear war, but it is not known as a center for scientific and medical research. The OISM would be equally obscure itself, except for the role it played in 1998 in circulating a deceptive "scientists' petition" on global warming in collaboration with Frederick Seitz, a retired former president of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) describes itself as "a small research institute" that studies "biochemistry, diagnostic medicine, nutrition, preventive medicine and the molecular biology of aging." It is headed by Arthur B. Robinson, an eccentric scientist who has a long history of controversial entanglements with figures on the fringe of accepted research. OISM also markets a home-schooling kit for "parents concerned about socialism in the public schools" and publishes books on how to survive nuclear war.
The OISM is located on a farm about 7 miles from the town of Cave Junction, Oregon (population 1,126). Located slightly east of Siskiyou National Forest, Cave Junction is one of several small towns nestled in the Illinois Valley, whose total population is 15,000. Best known as a gateway to the Oregon Caves National Monument, it is described by its chamber of commerce as "the commercial, service, and cultural center for a rural community of small farms, woodlots, crafts people, and families just living apart from the crowds.
>I know what the show is supposed to be, but how dare they mock my personal moral panic?
Eh. I've never been a particular fan of South Park. In the beginning, it was just little kids cursing -- shock value but not much more; I didn't watch it. Years later, some friends showed me some newer episodes which I thought were better, but I'm not in the habit of watching it.
I don't dispute South Park's right to say what it wants. I'm just exercising my right to be annoyed by it!
Apart from that, i really loed the video taken from the galileo spacecraft where you can see earth rotating in space, and looked it up on the net, for your convenience:
Once the efficiency of photovoltaic cells increases and wind power gets broader acceptance, I'll agree with you. Unfortunately the undesired side effects of both technologies leads to them being less efficient than traditional means of sourcing power in the coal and oil combustion plants. Unfortunately, even the most green places have problems adopting the technologies due to overhead costs, as well as unintended consequences.
Photovoltaics have come a long way in the last twenty years, but creating them have many side effects such as silica pollution in the manufacturing process. They require a large amount of room to generate significant energy. They only produce significant amounts of energy at peak ten or so hours a day, necessitating the use of battery cells to store the energy for other times. The batteries themselves have huge environmental impact when being disposed of, leaking acid and lead into aquifers.
Wind generators are large and unsightly, to the point where US Senator Kennedy (D-MA) has blocked erecting wind structures near Martha's Vineyard because they would spoil the views. Similar opposition have been placed on wind structures in the valleys of Vermont's picturesque ski villages, because local businesses fear the wind generators would entice their vacationers to go elsewhere. Again, similar to Solar power, they are limited to being able to generate power when the wind is blowing.
I'm not saying either is a bad option, especially when used together. The real answer is that we must wean ourselves slowly off of the current usage so that more efficient technologies can advance the other possibilities. A combination of lowering consumption and increasing efficiency of new power technologies can get us where we need to be.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
So if - as you claim - it is demonstrably impossible to stop the trend - your answer is to do nothing?
Please show all math.
Going on our merry way without a defensible plan for our living quarters is how we got here.
Good luck with that continued approach.
We can - and have - reversed some fairly scary things on this planet.
Maybe this is doable, maybe it's not. There is one certain path to failure, and that is ignorance.
The populus needs to be at the very least informed and in dialogue on this or nothing will change.
If the populus needs to be hit betweeen the eyes with the two-by-four like this movie - then so be it.
It's taken this populus four years to figure out that going to war without a defensible plan for success was a bad idea.
And all under the guidance of a president who had a long list to pick from of lessons learned about Vietnam when he visited there - and picked one that wasn't even on anyone's list.
I'm a biologist by training.
Some of the physical and chemical parameters we're seeing now weren't even thought to be possible, never mind reachable with some way to go.
That means one of two things - either we were wrong about what the occupants of this planet can stand, or we're well on our way past screwed heading for LOS.
There's no reasonable, practical sense in betting on the former, and if the latter is reversible, we need to know that.
As for Al Gore, he's better in this movie than you ever saw him in a debate. He's like Bob Dole in that sense - one person on a podium, another when it's more like normal dialogue.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Kyoto is NOT working: http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/index.php?sty=761 27&source=rss&dest=STY-76127
Curb consumption: stop breeding! How about *that* "lifestyle change".
Al Gore is a failed journalism student and a failed politician. Why should we listen to a man who failed at two professions but not a man who has succeeded in at least one? That is, since we're obviously supposed to discount what a man says because of what he does for a living...
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
While the concept of global warming is important, the movie is serving up a bunch of propaganda designed to promote the author's current views on the solutions to a problems not clearly understood. A person can view the movie and be just as ignorant afterwards as when they started. The movie is designed to stir people up and get them behind a questionable course of action that may not resolve or diminish the problem at all. Unfortunately, the American public (the primary audience for this movie) lacks the intellectual skills to evaluate the problem and its solutions, so whatever action is taken is likely to be "sold" to the public through vehicles such as this.
Speaking of sales pitches: The article is a sales pitch for the DVD and is blatantly biased, yet slashdotters are discussing it as if it had real merit.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
So it DOESN'T MATTER if the aliens are actually about to invade or not, we have to prepare as if they were. Think of the consequences if we're not prepared!
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
"Reflective dust in the stratosphere" - first of all, we should focus on energy, that was accumulated during long, long time, and also that, encapsulated in the form of potential (nuclear, etc.). Isolation from incoming (more-less stable) energy is not the point, perhaps. Breaking incoming quantity may, even, damage those established forms, that depend on exactly that.
Servant of karma
Hey.. we're doing it with the threat of meteor strikes.. there are probes en route right now to investigate some space rocks and, in the end, help us determine the best way to blow them up before we end up like dinosaurs.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I don't dispute South Park's right to say what it wants. I'm just exercising my right to be a whiny bitch
Fixed it for you.
The sun has absolutely no effect on Earth's climate.
The sun never fluctuates. Ever.
AlGore is not a 'tard, he invented the Interweb.
Bush is Hitler.
Republicans are evil.
No WMDs were found in Iraq.
Terrorism stems from poverty.
The USA is the biggest threat to global peace (after those damn Zionists).
The UN is the best way to world peace.
Islam is a religion of peace.
Slashdot is a great forum with brilliant editors and their moderation system works perfectly.
This post is not sarcastic.
there are few things lower than trolling slashdot for reference points.
i ent/dp/B000ICL3KG/sr=1-3/qid=1158270805/tag=ottode struct-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
True, however, his link was not a referrer link. The "ref" in Amazon URL's is actually their way of tracking how people move around their site. Go to a few amazon pages and check out the normal links. You'll see that most of the links on the page have the same "ref" code and it changes depending on where you are in the site. So they can track how people browse the site.
A true Amazon affiliate link looks like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Truth-Incomven
The important thing in a Amazon link is the "tag=whatever". That's how they do referral/affiliate codes.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
How about a deal? You give up your Volvo and NPR, we'll give up our SUVs and PlayStations.
"Once the Sun burns out, this planet is doomed. You're just making sure we spend our last days using inferior products." - B. Simpson
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Ten reasons there's no such thing as global warming:
Good satire uses humor to expose some truth. One of my favorite South Park moments was during the episode about tolerance. The characters had just toured the Museum of Tolerance where they learned to respect people of other races and cultures. Leaving the museum they see a smoker sitting at a fountain smoking and start ripping on him, calling him names and telling him to get lost. It was funny because there is some truth there, that we preach tolerance of other races yet condemn smokers so easily. With "Manbearpig" the satirical truth Matt and Trey went for was the global warming is just as real as the creature manbearpig. Both are figments of Al Gore's imagination. If global warming was false, and the alarm over it was as overblown as South Park Al Gore's fear of manbearpig, then the satire would work. But we know global warming is happening, and that current practices of humanity are the primary causes of it. So, the satire just doesn't work. A much better environmental-focused South Park satire was of the smugness of hybrid car owners in the episode "Smug." I love hybrid cars, but that episode was funny because it took to task the superiority complex of some hybrid owners.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
Well, if you want to go down that road, walking or riding a bike don't expend any fuel
Sure it does, it's called food.
(And it'll be cheaper to just affix an electric motor to your bike than to eat enough food to pedal it yourself. http://odograph.com/?p=339)
The Oregon petition was sent out was basically misleading and full of half truths/untruths. It was assembled by a crackpot (Arthur B. Robinson). This info was in the previously included link. You can also follow the associated cross links through source watch. Also there is no vetting on the listed signatures, when examined they contained duplicates and obviously false entries. There is no credentials listed or affiliated institution.
... in turn, was one of the funders of the George C Marshall Institute in Washington DC.54 In 1994 the institute published a report called "Global warming and ozone hole controversies. A challenge to scientific judgment," written by its board chairman, Dr Frederick Seitz. While introducing the subject Seitz also listed a dozen other environmental substances whose dangers he considered controversial, including nuclear wastes, asbestos, acid emissions from burning coal, toxic waste disposal, genetic engineering, pesticides, and passive smoke. Referring to the latter he wrote, "there is no good scientific evidence that passive inhalation is truly dangerous under normal circumstances."
Frederick Seitz, wrote a cover letter endorsing it. While perhaps is not a crackpot, is well past his prime (he was born in 1911), previous work after retiring from university duties was working for the tobacco industry. In fact he is pretty much a general purpose supporter of any polluting industry, currently belongs to several Oil funded lobby groups.
http://tc.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/10/4/375
I suspect you joined just to add more FUD to the fire, so it is not a surprise th you would bring this largely meaningless poll.
BTW Consensus, is majority, not everyone. Clearly there will always be people of the caliber of the above that will disagree with anything, especially when being funded by industries who would benefit from that disagreement.
If he's that serious about it, and truly sincere about it, Gore should set up a bit-torrent of his film and provide it for free. I'm sure George Soros would be happy to pay off Gore's investors to allow this.
I've had enough of those who want to tell me that the sky is falling yet want me to pay them to tell me so. If the sky is really falling I expect you to tell me for free.
I'm also not gonna pay you to lie to me (talking to you, Michael Moore).
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
So a fair comparison would be the difference in gas consumption between a 3000 mile 747 trip and a 300 mile Escalade trip.
And more people travel 300 miles because of these cars. If they had to bike 4 days to get to their relatives 2 towns over, they might not choose to travel so far.
So a fair comparison would be the difference in gas consumption between a 300 mile Escalade trip and a 30 mile bike ride. I think the bike will win out.
(... forehead slap.)
I just found the box to change my sig. Um.... [timeless witticism].
After a while, the fallacy of South Park becomes apparent: they make fun of anyone that believes in anything or takes a stand for anything
So eventually, you have to conclude that the political tenor or the show is to believe in nothing. Except watching TV. And doing nothing.
In an ideal world sarcasm is humor to paint ones path through the world. In high school mentality, it is an illusion of airs of superiority maintained by denigrating everything that is not you.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
Filming and doing a film is BAD for global warming Posting on slashdot is BAD for global warming Such thing would be interesting if it is not related to politics. The action shouldn't be taken in _NOT_ doing something that we are used to do, but in finding new ways of getting the same results with 'global-warming' in mind. Don't ask not to drive a car, or not to take a plane to go on holiday. Just let people do what they like, in a better way. STOP. Sorry for my bad English.
ciop ciop
What actually happened is that a researcher searched to find 928 studies containing the phrase "Climate Change" and skimmed the abstract of each study in order to classify it. The whole study was not read, only the abstract. As I understand it, each study could have a big section pontificating on why the results cast doubt on every consensus going back to Darwin for all we know; if this doubt wasn't expressed in the abstract, it was counted on the pro- side of the equation.
Another way to summarize the results is that the phrase "climate change" tends to signal support of the consensus view. Searching on other phrases such as "climate variability" can produce different results.
When you survey scientists as to their individual opinions, you also tend to find more skepticism there.
I play Nerd-Folk!
ever since the population of the united states figured out that computer literacy is a survival trait, geeks haven't had nearly as tough a time as they had in molly ringwald movies in the 80's. do healthy adults really still see the world in terms of who the "cool kids" are? from where i am sitting, smart people run shit.
i have known several leaders who don't make decisions without consulting someone that they trust. many often surround themselves with people they consider to be "good people". those people are often smart, at least in the eyes of the people who consult them.
as far as politics go, real intellectuals steer clear of the stuff, which is why washington is saturated with idiots. if you ask me, we just need to figure out how to upgrade the collective IQ of the people washington counts on to do their reading for them.
maybe then, businessmen and politiicans would stop looking at the world like a football game, and thinking just one quarter at a time. with a little serious long term thinking, perhaps there could be some real progress made towards finding a solution.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
hundreds of millions of people will die from flooding, storms, drought, starvation, loss of freshwater, topsoil erosion, disease, and pestilence that will lose jobs from economic controls.
If anything, cleaner power generation will require more people since it must be distributed across geography as well as methods, rather than the huge wealth concentration that results from power coming largely from one source: oil. Monetary distribution in this manner generally coincides with a perception of a more wealthy economy. Also, since many many different strategies from biological, chemical, geological, hydrological, and nuclear must be pursued, the broad base of research investment is more likely to yeild a range of useful associated technologies, rather than the current technologies which have matured and played out.
I wouldn't doubt that economic equations can show that concentrated oil results in a larger overall amount of money, say 1 quintillion dollars, but if it's concentrated 95% with a select few and quibbles for the rest, while 1/2 quintillion dollars is distributed more evenly, I think the vast vast majority of people will do better with that. So I dispute that carbon emission restrictions will harm the proverbial, hackneyed "average joe".
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
...I've got for you right now probably what is the most important news you could ever hear, yet I'm certain I'll get ignored, modded down, poked fun of..., even flamed and lambasted here on /. for telling it to you.
Face it, every last one of us here is going to die someday. Some of us sooner than others. And what's going to happen to you afterward? You think that the essence of our consciousness will just fade away into nothingness and oblivion? This is the news I bring right now: That "essence" of our consciousness is our souls. The energy which both emanates from and fills our biological tissue with life and gives us sentience. That soul and the living biological body that the soul inhabits (for a brief while) is a gift from God himself. You know, God, the dude that created the whole freakin' universe with a single thought? The thought that exploded outwards from a single point with so much energy that it created space-time itself and some of which, condensed down into matter as it settled into lower levels of energy magnitude. Yeah, that God. You know who I'm talking about now. Well, He created our souls too, and the bio-material bodies that house them for a very short while on this planet. Why did he do such a thing? Lots of different people have lots of different answers about that and I'm not sure myself, but one thing I am sure of is that after we die, we don't just fade away into oblivion. We're gonna actually get to meet our creator. Most of us just briefly enough to be told or shown that we fucked up in during the brief period of our biological existence and sent away to what is pretty much the eternal equivalent of solitary confinement. Some of us however, will be welcomed home into His presence. Some of those will be fuck-ups too, but because of one small detail, their souls will be permitted to spend eternity in Heaven too... and that one detail is... yep, you guessed it. God's own Son, Jesus who is the only hope most of us can ever have of escaping eternal isolation after we die. Look Him up, learn about Him, talk to Him, ask Him to save your wretched soul. You'll be surprised... and very glad you did. I certainly am.
And PS: The Universe wasn't created by "Intelligent Design", The universe was created by a Genius!
One sided? It's supposed to be. It's a documentary
I'm calling bullshit. Documentary is meant to present an unimpassioned recording of events as they happen, without being tied to or filtered through pet theories.
This I hold as true, in spite of the fact that the Michael Moore school of "propoganda as documentary" continues to be so lucrative.
Not saying that we shouldn't be looking for ways to be kinder to the environment, or that Gore doesn't make some good points, but Documentary? Meh.
"Hey, the third matrix movie would have been good except for the plot,story, and acting." --AC
Every time these articles get posted we get a cadre of folks who come out of the woodwork heaping out the FUD, quoting industry funded mouthpieces like CEI (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=CEI).
Or pointing out the quite dubious Oregon Petition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition) as some kind of FUD attacking the idea that there is consensus on global warming issues.
The fact is that there is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists, of course there are those who disagree, but the number who actually have qualifications and are not funded by the oil industry is vanishingly small. Consensus doesn't mean unanimous BTW.
The question that I wonder about is: If you are not a primary expert in the field, why would you side with the oil funded lobbyists and the lunatic fringe.
When I turn that question on myself. I believe the consensus view for two reasons. It is the veiw of almost every credible scientist that I have heard an opinion from.
Even when I apply my own simple litmus test:
CO2 is a heat trapping gas (there is no disagreement here)
We are increasing concentrations of C02 (no disagreement)
Conclusion: How would it not be increasing heat?
Admittedly simplistic, but I wonder how those here spouting industry sponsored FUD come to their conclusion that defies both the consensus and common sense.
Switch from income taxes to energy consumption taxes. Instead of avoiding taxes and regulations, corps would put those efforts into cutting their energy consumption taxes (whether they cheat or bribe is another matter.)
Pollution taxes for garbage are also a good idea. (who doesn't hate blister packs?)
Property taxes based on size not resale value, with only breaks for growing food. (farmers could get paid--many use gov money already.) Not exactly related but many problems stem from property taxes being like RENT.
HIGH GAS TAXES. everybody will complains, because they do not really care about the children (who will have high gas prices.)
Cut down US military. single biggest polluter and energy waster on earth, even when at peace! (Never happen voluntarily.)
People who only hate taxes will only start caring when it costs them.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
My argument is for those people who have become True Believers in their dogmatic approach to consensus determining fact. It is generally agreed that those people are idiots.
"(and as has been pointed out, passenger flights don't have much extra room for extra cargo)"
working for United Airlines, 747s go out with more cargo than baggage, ALOT more. ESPECIALLY international flights... long range jumbo jets are alot more efficient than many might argue for fuel/mass/mile scale...
It would be nice if governments would get off their asses and get some of these environmentally friendly power generation techniques out there... I mean, here in Canada there's a big push to go nuclear, but I'm not sure if the push is quite big enough...
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
So a fair comparison would be the difference in gas consumption between a 300 mile Escalade trip and a 30 mile bike ride. I think the bike will win out.
I agree, but no one in their right mind is saying that cars are more environmentally friendly than bikes. Someone is saying that 747s are more environmentally friendly than SUVs however, and the point I was making is that they are wrong.
I guess I do not see what your point is regarding comparing Escalades to bicycles. You might as well compare Coke to Pepsi, because it has just as much relevence to this discussion.
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
whatev.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
I thought Al Gore was hilarious in Saturday Night Live skit May 2006: http://1wit.com/clips/President-Al-Gore-May-2006.m ov
Global Warming is not "Science" at all
This is science
..... Sorry
Bwaahahahhahah Um
Science refers to either:* the scientific method - a process for evaluating empirical knowledge; or* the organized body of knowledge gained by this process.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
Ok now here is the challenge show me ONE of these studies you are talking about
much less read and understood that does not have fudge factors built into it and I will agree that you are approaching it from a scientific stand point not before. Every one that I am aware of has included some kind of fudge factor built into it.
Now on that note
Aceptance of ideals, beliefs, etc., which are not necessarily demonstrable through experimentation or reason.
At the edge of climate change, these things begin to occur with more strength and frequency. Because of the millions of variables at play, it's not an immediate change that you detect in a given year. "Wow. Now we have 10 Katrinas every year starting in 1995." That's not the way it begins. It's in fits and spurts. If this year were any inidcation of what the future holds, people would have answered the "Should we rebuild New Orleans?" question by saying, "Well, let's see how 2006 pans out. If it's clear, then we don't have anything to worry about."
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
So I can block them when I read slashdot.
Huh? What on earth did you expect? We are ALL biased. For instance, you are biased against things which appear to be biased.
If he didn't have a viewpoint which was different from others, which he felt was correct when others were wrong, he wouldn't have bothered making a movie. That's how it works.
You said yourself you wanted to know what his viewpoint was. If he wasn't biased, he wouldn't even have a viewpoint. The two go hand in hand.
-FL
Communism defeated itself, old Ronny "What" Reagan had nothing to do with it. JFK "won" the cold war during the Cuban Missle Crisis - the rest of the time was just Communism collapsing under it's own bloated corpse. When there isn't incentives for people to work, they won't - and Reagan didn't cause that. However I do sleep better at night knowing old Ronny's "Star Wars Defense Initiative" is protecting all of us.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Sorry. I don't know how to start a new thread.
b out/position/globalwarming.jsp
What pompous ass posts that a scientific debate "has ended" concerning something where you can't even have a control in the experiment?! This CO2 scientists isn't that sure:
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/a
We don't have an extra earth to know what would have happened without certain stimuli, so it is a matter of empirical educated guesses. There is no hard science here.
I'm all for taking the most conservative actions concerning something as important as the planet, but it is pure drivel to say you "know for sure" something you have arrived at through correlation of data. Correlation does not prove causation. You need to have a control.
mod parent up: funny
The 928 studies were randomly selected from many thousands. The problem is that warming skeptics have a hard time getting published. This is one of the main complaints of the skeptics - people are unwilling to hear the opposing view. I have no problem believing the 928 number. I have a problem using a publication count to determine the existence of consensus on a highly polarizing idea like global warming.
- Ok, but, you do realise that the Competitve Enterprise Institute is a group, they call themselves a "think tank" that champions the cause of big business and desires open markets, right? They are exactly the ones that stand to lose from accepting global warming as a real threat - or rather, if we start doing something about it. If you cared to check the history of the organization, you will see that their triumphs all involve sueing to remove, or sueing to stop the introduction of regulations which harm the bottom line of big businesses: including.. tobacco, alcohol, motor companies,GM food companies, and what do you know... the oil/gas companies. What would you expect from a "group" that in their history state: "In March 2001, CEI helps convince the Bush Administration not to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant." - Yeah, no bias what so ever.
Furthermore, they also have a long standing beef with Al Gore... from 1992... In CEI's "Competitive Enterprise Index," an annual ranking of congressional votes on economic issues, Al Gore ranks lowest in the Senate for the second time in three years. CEI zings Gore for "increased spending, higher taxes, greater regulation, and more political interference in the marketplace." His score of seven points out of 100 puts him dangerously close to the "0-zone." That quote is from 1992 of their history, found here: http://www.cei.org/pages/history.cfm/
Examples of their quests to stop regualtion of businessa re numerous, are few as follows: From 1992, stopping regulation of car size which was attempting to reduce fuel consumption, by arguing smaller cars lead to more road deaths: "independent researchers found that CAFE, by forcing car manufacturers to make vehicles smaller and lighter to comply with higher fuel economy standards, led to an increase in the number of highway deaths per year."p/>
Another, 1996, for alcohol companies: "CEI enters the alcohol beverage business with Vino Veritas Freedom of Speech Wine, Stout Heart Beer, and Be an Old Grand-Dad Whiskey, setting the stage for its First Amendment suit against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms over telling the truth about moderate alcohol consumption--namely, that it can be good for you." Yes, emphasis on CAN, one glass of red wine can be good for you, bottles of whiskey and kegs of beer - not so.
Again, from 2001, "CEI's Ben Lieberman testifies before Congress on the increase in gasoline prices. He points out that the Clean Air Act's 1990 amendments' gasoline composition mandates--which vary throughout the country--and the Act's New Source Review and New Source Performance Standards programs--which impose stringent requirements on the building of new refineries and the expansion of older facilities--bear much of responsibility for the spike at the pumps." Arguing that clean air policies increases petrol prices so as to promote anti clean air policy among voters and politicians... pretty obvious what stance this group will have on global warming given that what some of the solutions are.
From 2003, "Also in September, CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr. and CEI Senior Fellow Iain Murray brief Andrei Illarionov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's top economic adviser, shortly before the United Nations World Climate Change Conference in Moscow. At the conference, Putin declines to set a date by which Russia would ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Then in December, Illarionov announced that Russia would not ratify Kyoto "in its present form." Congratulations, this group convinced a nation NOT to sign Kyoto, again pretty clear what their agenda is.
Im pretty sure i dont need to go on.... their agenda is clear.
Guzz.
I live in a city that is the headquarters of most of the Canadian Oil patch. Much of what we do is funded by oil money.
Dispite this fact, there are many very impartial people who live here and I happen to be one of them.
The oil industry is very unlikely to be able to supply the oil the population would like to consume. Thus, we will be doing our part to reduce at least North American comsumption of this fossil fuel. Like it or not. The general population is not going to like the idea that within 5 years we are most likely clearly going to be past the peak of world oil production as as such - CO2 emissions from oil (and gas) consumption are going to start to fall.
So like it or not - in the very near future we likely will meet our Kyoto targets.
There may be a lot of people freezing in the dark by then.
I have posted this before. Anyone who is conserned about CO2 emissions can buy a more fuel efficient vehical, take public transportation, and insulate their house. Putting R50 in the walls can virtually eliminate the consumption of winter heating oil and natural gas. During the construction phase, beefing up the walls to R50 adds as little as $1 buk per square foot of building envelope area. It can be cheaper than installing space heating and one wins both summer and winter... with a far more comfortable home.
What would be really nice is if people could forget the politics and focus on the problem. The problem is that like it or not - within a very few years the oil age will be over.
I for one will not worry very much about CO2 rising for the next 100 years driven by man's consumption of fossil fuels (at least oil and gas) because I know damn well oil and gas will not last that long. Most likely we will be seeing a world wide reduction in oil consumption of about 5% compounding per year by 2015. North American natural gas is already past peak. Most of the North American nitrogen fertilizer industry is presently shut down as a result. I suspect the plastics feedstocks industry will be next.
I thought that's what the title was!
Libertas in infinitum
That's why train locomotives measure their mileage in ton-miles per gallon. Railroads now see around 700-800 ton-miles per gallon on average. If your car got that kind of mileage it would get about 350-400 miles per gallon.
Please check the wikipedia artical on the integral fast reactor and check the talk pages. You will find I wrote part of that artical.
I am fully aware of what reactor designs such as the IFR can do. It is about 2 orders of magnitude better than your esitimate and indeed, the spent fuel (which is usuable in an IFR and other advanced designs) will remain dangerous for 1000's of years, just as you said... unless it is burned and thus turned into electricity.
The public has been lied to by the pollies - again. I am trying to help spread the truth.
Sorry I offended your delicate sensibilities.
Nonetheless, the evidence is in: Humanity is on the decline.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
... is the contention that global warming is caused by humans and the implication that by reversing the things we have done to "cause" global warming, we can reverse it.
I have no problem with the obvious existence of global warming, or that we are accelerating it.
But the facts are that this round of global warming started about 30,000 years ago, when the land bridges between Russia and Alaska and Ireland and England disappeared due to rising sea levels, as the melting of the prior Ice Age began due to the warming of the planet. What sparked this is certainly open to debate, but it follows a pattern observed across the larger scale of paleological climate.
There are a LOT of things that influence global warming/cooling. Now that the permafrost is well on its way to thawing and decomposing into methane and carbon dioxide, the millions of square miles of locked up greenhouse gases are beginning to emerge.
And even if we were to immediately cease all man-made greenhouse gas production, worldwide, it would not stop the continued increases in greenhouse gases from natural sources.
There are a lot of ways we need to be working on managing our planetary climate, and reducing our own emission of greenhouse gases is only one of them. The film presents it as the only solution. We need to be investigating the use of solar blockers (dust and "stuff" injected into the upper atmosphere to act as a planetary sunshade), ways to scrub excess greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, and above all else, more and better studies to better understand this unbelievably complex process.
Simple solutions to complex problems don't work.
It's barely getting started.
e ws/2006/11/12/nclim12.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
In the climate change debate, one figure is real. The Sunday Telegraph's website registered more than 127,000 hits in response to last week's article revealing that the UN had minimised the sun's role in changing past and present climate, persisted in proven errors and used unsound data, questionable graphs and meretricious maths to exaggerate future warming threefold.
The views of 200 readers who emailed me are in the link above. About a third are scientists, including well-known climatologists and a physicist who confirmed my calculations. Some advise governments.
Nearly all condemn the "consensus". Most feel that instead of apologising, the UN has misled them, especially by using the defective "hockey-stick" temperature graph.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Here's a graph including the "significantly warmer" middle ages.
e rature_Comparison.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2000_Year_Temp
Insightful my ass. How about incorrect.
Oh boy, what is this?
Please for you own good talk to psychiatrist about it.
Horror film about science theory ??? Was you shitless scared?
If not you lied to us then. You may consider nice career in propaganda field.
Ask Fidel Castro where to apply.
The review above states that Gore's movie is the thing that has changed public perception regarding Global warming issues. I see no evidence of this. In fact, it seemed to me fairly clear that perception was shifting before the movie was even released. I'm not sure what led to the shift. Probably not any one thing. But I'm hoping the shift sticks. True or not. Overstated or not. Global warming is an issue that has to be taken seriously.
That said, I do have an alternative opinion on that question. I personally think that a major impetus in the shift of recent perceptions on this issue was the recent hurricane that hit New Orleans, and the realization at about that time that the hurricane season in and around the gulf of mexico really have been getting more intense the past few years. that may not even be caused by global warming. It could be an unrelated fluctuation in nominal weather patterns. But that doesn't matter. It's the perception that matters.
And in my opinion, the hurricanes that season struck a nerve with a lot of people. People realized that weather can be serious business and shouldn't be taken lightly. I think those events spooked the nay sayers, and gave the advocates for global warming awareness some needed leverage with the media and, indirectly, the public. I think the timing and reach of Gore's movie is building on that, but not driving it.
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot
> 1. The research is biased. A huge majority of the people researching climate change support the theory. If it were 50/50 I might consider it.
Yeah, it' like 1+1=2. Since Russel and Whitehead proved it, almost 99.9 % of the mathematicians support it. They are so biased.
Lol
2) Stick a couple of thermometers inside the containers.
3) Fill one with normal air and fill another with exhaust from your desired source (i.e. coal plant, car, cow, etc.).
4) Label them.
5) Heat the containers to a desired temperature. Please be careful here as there is a "scientific consensus" that gases expand when heated.
6) Record the time. For those that don't believe in the abstract concept of time, you may skip this step.
7) Remove the containers from the heat source.
8) Observe container #1 periodically until its temperature reaches equilibrium with the temperature outside the container and record the time when it does. Concurrently, do the same with container #2. For those of you that skipped step 6 for religious reasons, just record which container reached equilibrium first.
9) Repeat steps 1-8.
Do any of your exhaust sources appear to trap heat for longer than your control source? Vary the size of your containers, does this make a difference? To be fair, there were a infinite number of assumptions and sources of error in every step of this experiment but I assume you can grasp the idea that altering the composition of gases in one container will change its rate of heat dissipation relative to the other. Did increasing the amount of "green house" gases decrease the rate at which heat was dissipated? If so then you have just proved the fundamental concepts of global warming. Extrapolating those results to planet-sized proportions is an exercise left to the reader.
Your Escalade assumptions are fatally flawed:
First of all, 20mpg is the EPA highway estimate for the two-wheel drive model, while the all-wheel drive comes in at 19.
Second, the city estimate for either model is only 13mpg, so assuming a 50/50 mixed driving style, the true mileage figure is approximately 16-17mpg.
Finally, as has been pointed out by other posters, you are assuming the Escalade is full (highly unlikely), and neglecting the added cargo capacity of the 747.
I'm not defending Boeing, but if you're going to make an argument, or disparage someone else's statements, please make sure you have your facts straight.
you really expect me to be able to express my opinion of what's so fucked up in this world in 120 characters or less?
Boeings' site http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/pf/pf_4 00_prod.html suggests fuel capacity is 57,285 US Gallons and it has a maximum range of 13,450 km (8 357.4 miles) , even assuming that does not count taxying/circling/emergency fuel this gives us an efficiency of 0.14588 miles per gallon. Multiplied up by the 524 passengers this gives us 76.44 miles per gallon per passenger.
This is better than any car I've driven.
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
'What's important is a question a lot of nerds may be familiar with. We like to talk about important things. But how do you respond when you try to say something serious and the cool kids laugh at you? What do you do, when you put yourself out there, try to engage people's minds, and instead they make fun of your clothes? ' -been there.
I seldom reply to blogs, however the discussion regarding global warming was interesting. I have worked for the National Science Foundation and spent over five years in the Antarctic. Our predictions relative to the speed of melting glaciers in the Antarctic have been wrong by signifanct factor from when we accomplished the studies in the late 70's. The data from ancient ice cores is irrefutable, the glaciers are melting all over the world and regardless of our arguments over the reasons, the planet's temperature is rising. Many of us are commencing the metrics of construction of dynamico-stochastic models of the ocean and the real contemplation of momentum and salinity fluxes on ocean circulation. I have moved to the high deserts of Arizona above the 6000 foot level and commenced satellite tie ins to ocean based beacon systems. The geopolitical situation and life as we know it can change quickly. Think about your future if the servo mechanisms that serve the distribution of food and fuel become even slighty disrupted.
That link's to a story on Christopher Monckton. RealClimate.org takes some pain to deflate the climate change deniers who get a fair amount of press, and they address Monckton here
Well, of COURSE RealClimate.org takes pains to "deflate" the climate change deniers! But Monckton is not denying that climate is changing. He claims that a) the data have been grossly distorted, exaggerated and even fabricated, and b) the UK's way of addressing climate change and energy conservation is idiotic. He also addresses the RealClimate criticisms of his analysis in his second article, pointing out that his calculations do NOT assume the Earth is a black body, for instance. (BTW, I can't muster much regard for an outfit that stoops to ad hominem snottiness in every other sentence, i. e., "a viscount, no less, with obviously too much time on his hands".)
I'm afraid I don't really know what you're talking about. The "etc." only makes things worse. :) Let me try to explore this idea.
Obviously a "controlled experiment" where we isolate two patches of the Earth and do different things to them will not help at all to show causation. For example, we might find two very similar islands in the middle of the Pacific and build giant glass walls around them, a hundred miles high, to cordon them off from the rest of the atmosphere. Then we could e.g. inject a few kilotons of CO2 into the atmosphere of one of them to observe what changes it wreaks.
Of course that wouldn't be enough -- the islands might be slightly differently shaped or sized, changing the heating patterns above them and affecting the local climates. So let's posit they are exactly the same size and shape. We'll probably have to build them ourselves. Oh, and let's put them at exactly the same latitude as well. Now wait! They can't possibly be at the same longitude also, so they are getting slightly different amounts of sunlight (on one island, its daylight hours occur slightly closer to or further from the Earth's perihelion, and in slightly different stages of the sunspot cycle).
It gets worse. How many fish are encircled in each glass cage? We can't have circulation with the rest of the ocean and we can't have ecosystems that differ between the two. Even one fish's worth of difference could make the difference of a species extinction which results in algae bloom taking over the microenvironment, throwing all our calculations out of whack. We have to have precisely the same number of fish to start with.
But of course there are random effects that can result in nonlinear changes even if the number of each enclosed species is the same. If two fish have different start states in their little fish brains at the beginning of the experiment, maybe the control fish will swim left while the experiment fish swims right, getting itself eaten by a shark... which saves that shark from starvation, resulting in more fish getting eaten, a catastrophic decline in the fish population, and we're back the algae bloom.
Any experiment regarding climate with a "control" environment, right up to the entire Earth itself, will be impossible to duplicate precisely. There will always be factors beyond the scientists' control.
In fact, even if we could build a second Earth that is atom-for-atom identical with ours, and place it into orbit let's say 180 degrees away from our Earth, there would still be differences between the control Earth and the Earth we experiment on. Opposite sides of the sun don't necessarily radiate exactly the same amount of energy, for starters, especially since one Earth is 6 whole months off in the sunspot cycle! So this basically requires we build a second entire solar system... but then... suppose a stray cosmic ray impacts the brain of a fish on experiment-Earth but not control-Earth, causing it to swim left... you see where this is going I assume.
Not only is a controlled experiment whose results are indisputably due to the difference in starting states impossible to build with current technology, it is impossible to build even in theory.
If you disagree, I'd like to hear what kind of controlled experiment you had in mind.
2006 hurricane season is over, and not one made landfall.
So much for that "theory". You are correct of course, the hurricane and Gore's assertion that "global warming caused it" are responsible for this shift in perception.
It's sad that science has never entered into it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.