Slashdot Mirror
Sunspots Reach 1000-Year Peak
rlp writes "Researchers at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich are reporting that solar sunspot activity is at a 1000-year peak. Records of sunspots have been kept since 1610. The period between 1645 and 1715 (known as the Maunder Minimum) was a period of very few sunspots. Researchers extended the record by measuring isotopes of beryllium (created by cosmic rays) in Greenland ice cores. Based on both observations and ice core records, we are now at a sunspot peak exceeding solar activity for any time in the past thousand years."
This is a UN body. Can you name for me three UN successes in the past 25 years? Just three. I can name three failures in about two seconds... Rwanda, Darfur, Oil for Food program, 17 Iraqi resolutions, Lebanon, Iran, North Korea... Oh, I was only supposed to stop at three?
That is classic ad-hominem, you are attacking the messanger rather than discussing the issue. This is especially irrelevant since we are discussing a scientific issue, you are talking about war and conflict areas.
Can anyone list a single doomsday environmental prediction that has come true? Just one. That's all I ask.
If by doomsday, you mean end of the earth, then.... *looks around* nope. Seems not. On the other hand, if you mean heavy human impact on the environment, then yes, there are plenty of examples. The Newfoundland cod stock collapse for instance. Plenty of environmentalists were warning for years that a collapse was happening. Warnings were ignored, then it happened.
Or take the deforestation of Easter Island, or this list of disasters. It happened on a local scale, yes, but with the population and technology we have today, we MIGHT affect ecology on a larger, perhaps even global scale.
And now for some environmentalist quotes
More ad-hominmens. Random quotes by fringe nutters does not a coherent argument make.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Attacking the messenger is valid when no one can think of three successes in 25 years.
I could quote areas where UN has suceeded (as I said, the UN works with more than peacekeeping issues), but it would just divert the issue and attract anti-UN trolls. Let me come up with a counter example: the UN is not the only player who has failed in the countries you mentioned. So has NATO, the US, the African Union, the EU... Should we discredit everything these agencies say? No, because they work with many other things too. The people working on the peacekeeping missions are NOT the same people working with The Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change. So again, what you are doing is ad-hominem.
Still, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that if I keep chopping down trees that deforestation would occur.
Or that if we burn things that emit greenhouse gasses, the planet gets warmer...
Still, good examples, but nothing compared to the Global Warming scare tactics of today or the Ozone depletion
Oh, the Ozone "hole" is still there, it is just not mentioned often in the media these days. Ozone depletion didn't turn out quite as bad as some people warmed, BECAUSE WE DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Even some politicans, like Margaret Thatcher (who has a Chemistry degree from Oxford University), realised the dangers and helped drive through the Montrol agreement which caused a gradual reduction of manmade ozone destroying gases. The thinning is still there, but it is finally stabilizing and may slowly heal over decades. If you think the ozone whole was a myth, ask people in Australia about increased rates of skin cancer the last decades.
, global cooling
Myth, it was the popular press talking about it for a while, you did not have anything near the scientific conscencus we have on global warming today.
Fact is that the climate changes all the time. We have global cooling and enter ice ages and then we have global warming to get us out. Sometimes we cool form within an ice age and warm we are not in one. It's 100% natural.
No, it is not.
Besides, RTFA is about the possibility that the main source of heat in our solar system may be responsible for all this heat. Why is that such a far fetched idea?
Why is it such a far fetched idea that gases that trap heat locally (a process known to science since the 19th centruy), if released in sufficient quantities globally might have the same effect globally?
Those are examples from former leading environmentalists to show how wrong they've been in the past
Irrelevant. Totally irrelevant. They are not the people presenting the data, it is scientists.
and to show their true agenda (the end of capitalism)
Also irrelevant. If someone has a political agenda, we might suspect that they slant or distort the data, then we check the data through a peer-review process.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
> we MIGHT affect ecology on a larger, perhaps even global scale.
Actually, we affect ecology simply by existing. Fishing changes fish population patterns, man's spread to every corner of the Earth has caused a decline in certain species and a (relative) increase in others (check out the pigeon population of NYC, for instance). In that sense, environmentalists who say the only way to 'reverse the damage' is to 'remove man' are right, and in fact intellectually honest -- although their PR skills are questionable.
However, most environmentalists grandly over-estimate our ability to cause global-scale disasters. Re your local disasters, disaster size does not scale linearly with technological growth, and ecosystems have a way of correcting themselves -- deforestation in England was a 'hot topic' in 16th and 17th centuries, with people complaining as England's forests were denuded for wood for stoves and ships. In time, the ecosystem bounced back (helped by the shift to steel for ships and gas for stoves) -- there are fewer trees in England now than c.10th century, but more than the 16th and 17th!
One of the best known debunked examples was Sagan's rapid-cooling scenarios ("nuclear winter"). The other problem is environmentalists refusal to see Earth's ecosystem as a evolving system, instead harking back to the past as a ideal that the future should aspire to. Ecosystems don't work that way! Millenia ago, most of Europe was an icy wasteland and the Sahara was an oasis. An observer then might decry the loss of the Sahara, but would they have predicted the advantages a temperate Europe would have brought?
Bottom line: there's nothing more arrogant than the assumption that a given region has the right to enjoy a static, unchanging climate for all of time.
I should probably add that this does not mean that polluters are let off the hook. On health grounds alone, we already regulate most pollutants. As for CO2 emissions (which is what most global warming campaigners campaign for), I would suggest that the "the end is nigh" scenarios many campaigners paint is both scientifically inaccurate as well as damaging to their cause. Rather, they should encourage (through various methods like research grants and tax breaks) use of a basket of energy sources, including solar, wind and nuclear. Nuclear is crucial -- solar and wind are nice but large markets need reliable electricity sources.
Go somewhere random
The news, however, isn't about "viewpoint", or shouldn't be.
If you're a political commentary show, that's one thing. I wouldn't watch "The O'Reily Factor" or "Countdown with Keith Oberman" to get an unbiased reporting of the news, but really, your 9pm news broadcast shouldn't pander to a political agenda, even if the producers have mores based in that agenda.
It seems that nearly every news organization on the planet does so. Even the BBC is only telling you want they want you to hear.
So, is intelligent satire that lampoons BOTH sides, yet somehow manages to cover the news more clearly than most news outlets Kool-Aid? If it is, I'd rather be drinking that than the ditch-water folks like you seem to hold so highly. Face it, the news media has sold out to government and industry across the planet - and subscriptions are starting to feel it. Look at the viewer numbers for most national "news" programs! It's insanity, but with respect to news, the world culture has turned into the Jerry Springer show circa 1994.