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1/3 of Amphibians Dying Out
Death Metal sends in a Scientific American article reporting that 2,000 of 6,000 amphibian species are endangered worldwide. A combination of environmental assaults, including global warming, seems to be responsible. "... national parks and other areas protected from pollution and development are providing no refuge. The frogs and salamanders of Yellowstone National Park have been declining since the 1980s, according to a Stanford University study, as global warming dries out seasonal ponds, leaving dried salamander corpses in their wake. Since the 1970s, nearly 75 percent of the frogs and other amphibians of La Selva Biological Station in Braulio Carrillo National Park in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica have died, perhaps due to global warming. But the really bad news is that amphibians may be just the first sign of other species in trouble. Biologists at the University of California, San Diego, have shown that amphibians are the first to respond to environmental changes, thanks to their sensitivity to both air and water. What goes for amphibians may soon be true of other classes of animal, including mammals."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PufNFWo9mm0
The endangered species act is a national disgrace.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Has someone told phelps? Has to be said. :)
The rule for species survival is simple: adapt or die. There are historical events of much greater scale and effect than this global climate change will be. If a species can't adapt, then it will die out. A species that can't adapt to a minor change in environment was probably doomed to extinction anyways regardless of Man's contribution to global climate change.
Nature rule, Danial-san.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
So, pools of water didn't dry up prior to global warming? Frogs and salamanders didn't die prior to all this? Is there any animal population from humans to flies that have not gone through expansion and contraction?
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
I thought about X-COM Terror From the Deep. First Rosewell, then we sent probes to Mars. Now there is Gwoba Woba and methane starts coming out from the ocean bed. With the increased drilling for fossil fuels we might hit some nasty water creatures. And they might be mad the shrooms are killing the little amphibian overlord ambassadors on the surface.
Ok. Nevermind. Need some sleep.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
True, we all went along fine before that... o_O
...and it is filled with concrete and hairless apes.
so let's find out.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
Biologists at the University of California, San Diego, have shown that amphibians are the first to respond to environmental changes, thanks to their sensitivity to both air and water.
So maybe we're seeing why the dinosaurs died out. They were too sensitive to environment change. They couldn't adapt to the changes in climate and died.
The article starts out blaming man and herbicides, but then has to conclude that even areas free from herbicides, such as national parks "provide no refuge." So that is blamed on global warming (no doubt man-made), causing the ponds to dry out. Neither of these are supplemented with facts, but is all speculative. Frogs and salamanders are dying, so we must be causing it.
Even though we may want to, there is no way we can save every species from extinction. We talk time and again about survival of the fittest in science class, yet we can't seem to acknowledge that species must adapt or die. Animal species that are hardy will thrive. Those who are not will not. We could have the perfect ecosystem for frogs and salamanders, and that would threaten some other species that found the weather too damp or warm to thrive. We blame ourselves for everything, when in fact there's no evidence that, if we all vanished tomorrow, animals wouldn't continue to die out as they always have.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1012-frogs.html Strange, and I thought the big threat was coming from the fungi that are devastating species. Good thing they tied the threat to global warming, now we can all do something about it! ::smirk::
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
Been reading too many oil company lackeys' "studies", eh? Guess everyone in the field is a gullible fool compared to you, random anonymous Internet poster.
Sun Not a Global Warming Culprit, Study Says
Solar Variability Unlikely To Have Caused Recent Warming
Don't Blame Sun for Global Warming, Study Says
Solar Activity Not Causing Warming
EXTINCTION CRISIS FOR AMPHIBIANS
this time its not our fault... but maybe we can help them (or... is it not nice to fool with Mother Nature?)
The Admin and the Engineer
What's the point of evolving amphibious capability if not for greater environmental tolerance?
Who said evolution has to make sense?
Yes, zombie salamanders are running a muck in our national forest, we must act quickly to stop their plans to accelerate Global Warming. No, I didn't read the article.
I think I just cashed out all my cool points.
Amphibians require both land and water. They can't live in the middle of freshwater lakes and they can't live further inland where it's dry. This limits their choice of environments.
Never mind the bizarre comment about amphibian evolution, anyway.
Let's say you had a group of tool wielding apes who had advanced to such a high level of technology that their activities changed the environment, and upset millions of years of evolution and balance. Despite detecting this early on, they failed to adapt the way the transport themselves, the amount of natural resources they needlessly consume, and did nothing to change course.
Let's say those apes did not survive the correction that the environment made to re-establish equilibrium. Wouldn't that be a tragedy.
You can make all the excuses you want for yourself, but your children don't exist on rhetoric, they exist on planet earth. If you're even willing to take a chance on continuing the path that has led to the decline of every single system of life on earth since the industrial revolution, you're mad, or a fool, or both.
The epidemic of cancer is certainly proof that something that we are doing to the planet it making it and us very ill, let alone the undeniable evidence, built up over the last fifty years, that wherever industrial developments are, vibrant ecosystems are not.
We have serious problems with pollution and habitat loss, none with "Global Warming" which is nothing but a scam to take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools.
It's incredible what kind of nonsense gets modded insightful. A scam by whom? By the national academies of science of all developed countries: http://royalsociety.org/displaypagedoc.asp?id=20742 Why would they take part in a scam? What would just about all major scientific organizations and a vast majority of individual scientists involved in climate research have to gain by putting their reputations on the line in order to "take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools"? What would they have to gain from it?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
What was never addressed was the fact that the amphibians were dying off because researchers (who were trying to protect and count them) carried microbial parasites from one frog hole to the next. They would return to a hole a while later and presto many dead frogs.
End of the story:
*If you are a frog counting biologist - just jump to the immediate conclusion man is bad. End story. No need to go on.
*If you are a normal person - "wait a second, isn't there more to the story"? FCB - "no there isn't" NP - "but I thought YOU were actually responsible for ..."
FCB "The story is over, discussion is over, no more questions, man is bad - period"
Everyone who is remotely interested in the topic can find everything elsewhere with Google, so arguing about global warming (never mind anthropogenic global warming) here is not likely to produce anything useful. Duly note, however, that most mainstream publications are now assuming AGW when talking about other issues: at a purely social-awareness level, AGW has won.
In the meanwhile, Wikipedia on frogs croaking. Note that TFA is similar, despite what TFS suggests: mostly discussion about pollutants and diseases, with a nod to the obvious factor of climate change as one possible cause of habitat destruction.
Personally, I wouldn't take advice on the law or public policy from two jokers who make a living from misdirection and yelling profanity at reasoned arguments.
Furthermore, I wouldn't cite as evidence of how horrible the ESA is a video that builds part of its argument around the notion that there is no mass extinction event going on right now in an article about a mass extinction event going on right now.
Good Lord, give me back the past 30 minutes of my life. What an irritating mishmash of profanity, name-calling, and irrational conservative talking points. Lindy's story was kind of sad, but the impact of the story was blunted severely by all the smug, sneering, venomous, and immature posturing that overlay it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The responses here are infuriating.. Why are nerds so insensitive? How can paving 25% of the land and doubling population multiple times not be pushing other species off the edge? Dont we produce tens of thousands of industrial chemical in huge volumes that had not been in the environment previously? The list of 'mistakes' by industrialists, not to mention the by-products of our massive wars, is too long to list. ugh.. listen up
Is there anything global warming can't do?
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
But even the containment of Chytrid might not be enough to save amphibians, which face a barrage of other threats including pollution, the introduction of alien species, habitat destruction, over-collection, and climate change.
Gosh, I guess we shouldn't worry at all then! I mean, if Chytrid is screwing them over, it's not like we should bother with climate change. I mean, why put out a cancer patient on fire? The cancer's going to kill 'em anyway.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
How did amphibians survive the much greater temperature swings in Earth's history? They've been around for a long time. Were there partial extinctions and then they rediversified?
Based on the rising temperatures in the atmosphere of every planet in the solar system, I think it's safe to say that what we have is global, or indeed, solar warming- but this notion that the change we're experiencing is man made, and the insistence on purveying that- reminds me of the mentality that prompted the backlash to heliocentrism in the 1500s.
!#&*
In addition to what the previous person responding to your post mentioned, it's worth noting that some researchers think the most likely origin of the spread of this fungus to a wide range of habitats is due to widespread use of a research frog species from Africa, though there is some evidence that puts some doubt on that.
Another prominent theory is mentioned in the article you linked:
In Costa Rica's Cloud Forest Preserve of the Tropical Science Center, biologist J. Alan Pounds and his colleagues recently reported the total disappearance of the Monteverde harlequin frog, along with one golden toad species -- caused, he said in the journal Nature, by their increased susceptibility to chytrid disease as rising global temperatures have weakened their ability to resist the toxin.
In other words, chytrid is likely to either be an invasive species introduced around the world by human actions or a species that amphibians were previously able to resist before rising temperatures weakened them. Or both. Either way, saying "this time its [sic] not our fault" is disingenuous at best.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Humans are fucking with stuff they don't understand. Raise Earth's average temperature 1 degree, what's the big deal right? 3-4 degrees won't hurt. People have no fucking clue what it will do, and that's why they shouldn't fuck with it.
"Good thing you didn't quote the same source twice to pad your results." I'm assuming that was sarcasm, because of the two National Geographic articles. The two articles refer to two different studies and were published almost a year apart. If you want to argue editor bias or something like that, that's one thing. However the grandparent was making a legitimate attempt to back up his claim with multiple sources. Just because that's a rarity around here is no cause to try to spin his/her motives. And again, if you weren't being sarcastic, I apologize, but then that line was kind of random.
Why would they take part in a scam?
Same reason they take part in the evolution scam. It's part of their left-wing athiest agenda. Basically, they hate God, and love nothing more than to hurt Jesus. Those sick fucks.
posted by Ptolemy was right!
I'm a pretty green-leaning person and the last thing I want to do is deprive people who have devoted the best years of their life studying herpetology from getting grant money to make a living, but I think amphibian decline research is bordering dangerously on public relations BS pseudo-science.
Amphibian populations are notoriously hard to measure accurately. Populations rise and fall wildly. When you go out to do your first sample, if you're not careful there's often a heavy bias to picking the area with the highest population, so when you do your followup study and that pond has returned to a normal population, it looks like you've detected population decline. That's not to say amphibians aren't wildly vulnerable to all the usual things humans do to an environment: drain it, pave it, spray it. But rather than get half the environmentally-sensitive population panicking randomly about crisis, I'd rather see 1% or 0.1% of the population deeply educated in field biology as serious hobby, keeping long-term consistent records of observations and measurements.
( by the way, the best way to completely destroy a long term population study of a pond is to dredge it and add fish to make it "look more natural" )
"They are alone. They are a dying species. We should let them pass"
They are in the concrete...
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
They're only a part of the Holocene extinction event.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Great, now we can't eat humans anymore?
"Duh, it's SOLAR OUTPUT that determines temps."
Can someone explain how the GP's ignorance could possibly be considered insightful? Or at least tell me how such mind-boggling ignorance is different to that displayed by creationists and flat-earthers.
"Gaia-worship"
"Gaia" is sometimes seen as a god by the fanatics on both sides of the pro/anti environment 'wedge'. However the word/concept is a synonym for "biosphere" and was coined by "the father of Earth Science" James Lovelock. It posits that the biosphere can be considered as a single organisim (ie: a unique organic system fed by energy from the Sun), it has absolutely nothing to do with projecting human/spiritual qualities onto said organic system.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The cause of worldwide amphibian population declines is the Chytrid Fungus. However many do think that global warming is making the situation happen faster and to a more serious degree. Here is some quick links if you want to read more on the subject ...
From Nat Geo:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080401-frog-fungus.html
The NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/science/04frog.html
The CDC:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol10no12/03-0804.htm
Yeah, NASA keeps all that contrary data locked up in a vault, it's the same one they use to house the alien bodies from the area 51 crash and ET's phone from the 80's.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
We've been killing ourselves since the industrial revolution.
True, we all went along fine before that... o_O
Well, before then, we were just killing each other. That's different.
Even in the most populous state (California), only 800 square miles are developed out of 155,000. Gee, that leaves us with a mere 99% left to work with. What will we do?
We nerds are insensitive - especially to people who believe any crap they want (25%, hah!) because they want to believe it, and who can't do basic fact checking and math. Most of the environmental movement is based on "feeling" and not facts. When you let anecdotes dictate your philosophy, you are doomed to live in unhappiness.
Send some of our remaining frogs to Australia, say, in exchange for some Koalas, maybe. I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong.
The problem with this type of reasoning is that we have evolved to a stage where we can "beat" any other species. Human-level intelligence has transformed evolutionary competition into a straight out massacre. We also have the ability to change the environment in ways which are effectively catacylsmic from the point of view of evolution - if you radically alter the environment over the course of a few decades or even centuries, then there is nowhere near enough time for a typical vertebrate to adapt via natural selection to a hostile environment.
If we are indeed affecting the climate, as seems likely, then I find it plausible to think that we could quite easily end up wiping out most species on earth, save for a few super-hardy ones. Unfortunately we will probably survive ourselves, which hardly seems fair. If you want to compete until the end, I hope you like the sound of a future filled with cockroaches, feral cats, rabbits, rats and flies because those are the types of animals which will thrive in a man made environmental apocalypse.
I would like to think that if we are intelligent enough to realise that we have the power to exterminate the other varieties of life on earth, then we are also intelligent enough to realise why we shouldn't (including both cold rational reasons and aesthetic/moral reasons).
Do you really believe that it is ok on any level if, say, every last tiger dies as a result of human impact on the environment? What if we go out and shoot them all? Because we could, and it sounds like you're saying that would be good and proper, or at least 'evolutionarily correct' in some way.
Read Pynchon.
...let him strike down...
I think that's a lot to ask from a super-being that's generally known for doing shit for eternity.
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
So, a global scam to undermine some small ridiculous minority religion? I think not, Pinky.
Hey now, let's not complicate letting a joke go over your head with hyperbole.
Variations of Christianity make up 33% of global religious belief, making it by far the most populous family of faiths, with Islam in second at 20%. Furthermore, it's a very powerful and influential religion, practiced by the majority of people living in First World countries.
Now, the segment of it that's obsessed with the idea that global warming is a lie perpetuated by people motivated by self-interest to seek grant funding is a relatively small portion of Christianity, but it's a very powerful one, because it has a huge influence on US politics.
By no means, should you marginalize climate change deniers as members of a "small" "minority" faith. You risk underestimating a very powerful adversary if you trick yourself into thinking them inconsequential.
Hey! he worked that one week.... well 6days really... seriously though, Tomfrh's post was such a hilarious flamebait that i couldn't help but join in thats all.
By the way, is it just me, or does the statement "Don't blame sun for global warming." not make you want to laugh on the face of it.
Why should it? Do you blame your stove and computer for the year-round temperature of your house or apartment, or are there more important forces at play?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This is /., forgive them for not RTFA :p
correlationisnotcausation
correlationisnotcausation
correlationisnotcausation
I swear, half of the people who write tags on stories on this site would leave their hand on a red hot hotplate to burn whilst arguing that the pain in their hand correlates to the hotplate being red hot, but that clearly as correlation != causation we should consider the other theories about burning hands which are given less airtime by the ignorant media, who do not understand deductive science as well as we do.
correlationisnotcausation
correlationisnotcausation
correlationisnotcausation
Read Pynchon.
From the gripping hand global warming begin turning huge expanses of northern taiga forests to wetlands. Aren't wetlands an ideal environment for amphibians ?
I don't think its only our fault and the global warming we are blamed for that caused the distinguishing of these 2,000 amphibian species. Everything that happens is correlated to previous and current human deeds, to the forces of nature and to natural laws of evolution. If the global warming did not endanger them, I suppose something else would.
The real question is, do they taste good fried?
Yes, but that's not the reason they are crunchy. They are crunchy because we don't take out the bones.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.
You should qualify that one. Here is a species for you: Homo sapiens. Gotcha. (Wink)
How about this one: wheat. Gotcha again.
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them.
Here is a question for you: What is the bare minimum number of species you might be comfortable with?
Here is another question for you: If you whittle down the biodiversity of this planet to only a few "essential" species--what will be the consequences? Please cite your sources when you answer. The biased speculation of a non-scientist doesn't count.
Just callin' it like I see it.
When trying to maintain a balance amoung animals it is often necessary to cull the herd from time to time. Like in america where hunters are often told to hunt deer when their pupulation gets too high. We do this because there are no longer wolves r primitive man to kill off the deer. If we do not do this then many deer starve and become diseased because of limited resources. While I do not think we have to start culling the human herd yet, I do think it is time we start to make it unpopular to have more than 2 children. We could have a "Save the planet, stop breeding!" campaign. :)
I usually do not agree with Chinese policy, but I thik they have it right on this one.
BTW, I notice that the professor of heliophysics quoted says there is no relation between sunspots and solar output. Goes a long way to make that point.
Okay, but that's not the theory that is argued. It's not whether solar spots are related to output, but whether the sun's total output rises and falls. And in fact, it does. It also coincides nicely with earthside temperature variations. BTW, I'll see your article and raise you one: http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/sunwarm.html
... must just be some crackpots from Duke... http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_030320.html
and Columbia ... and .. well, I could go on with several dozen other links, but who what's the point. Google it yourself if you want. If we're all gonna die, I have better things to do. Come to think if it, I do even if we aren't all gonna die.
"A combination of environmental assaults, INCLUDING GLOBAL WARMING, seems to be responsible." What is with the mindless hype nowadays? Will there ever be a time when actual facts rule the day?
What is the rate at which new amphibian species are emerging, to replace the endangered?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
The epidemic of cancer is certainly proof that something that we are doing to the planet it making it and us very ill, let alone the undeniable evidence, built up over the last fifty years, that wherever industrial developments are, vibrant ecosystems are not.
I don't think the basis of your argument deserves the kind of consideration that your point itself does.
The industrial junk we've been pumping out can't be good; I don't think you'll find many people that are pro-pollution... The problem with your argument is studies show cancer has been decreasing for decades -- not just mortality, but also the diagnosis and development of. Considering detection has certainly improved and pollution has certainly NOT improved, it should be on the rise in a big way. Why the discrepancy? It did increase during the 70s and 80s, but was that because of better detection rates? It is easy to write it off as such, but who knows... I don't -- and neither do you.
Unfortunately, that's the problem. We don't have much reliable data to follow because the data itself has been a work in progress for decades. For example, whether or not you believe they have an agenda, the National Cancer Institute shows this downward trend, and it continues. I'm sure if you went back to 1930 or something, cancer rates per capita were far, far lower though; however, you cannot get accurate numbers because many people would have not been treated or improperly diagnosed. It's pretty easy to fudge the numbers and statistics to indeed lie.
As I'm sure you know though, the problem with 'the evidence' is it is difficult to concretely prove... either way. There are just too many variables to take in account with living organisms to do meaningful, empirical tests that prove something without a shadow of a doubt. Sadly, not many people will listen until such links can be made unequivocally.
In short, I wouldn't use cancer as your 'undeniable evidence', but your point/intentions are good and I personally agree with you, although probably to a lesser degree.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Why would they take part in a scam? What would just about all major scientific organizations and a vast majority of individual scientists involved in climate research have to gain by putting their reputations on the line in order to "take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools"? What would they have to gain from it?
Research grant money? Note that they are forecasting those dramatic effects tens years in the future. How convenient. If it does now warm as predicted, they will a) be retired long time ago anyway b) claim the measures taken based on their advice fixed the problem. And it is now "climate change" anyway and climate changes all the time, means they cannot be wrong. Very litte reputation is in danger here, really. The only possible danger for them is radical global cooling - with emphasis on "radical" - otherwise they can always find many apologies why it is not warming as fast as predicted (which it is not, in fact - since 1998, temperatures hardly changed, if not dropped).
Spoilers: I was quoting National Geographic because it had a concise summary of the article. You can find the fulltext of the two separate studies on Google.
I said nothing about National Geographic being a reliable source, and I specifically said that if the poster had an argument about editor bias, that would be different. At no point did I say anything about being a "greenie weenie". In fact, I said nothing whatsoever about global warming. You immediately assume that because someone disagrees with someone's argument that they disagree with their whole point of view. The poster made an incorrect statement, due to not bothering to RTFAs. I offered a correction. Forgive me, I'd briefly forgotten that constructive discussion here is impossible. I'll try not to make the same mistake again.
I've been keeping newts and salamanders on and off for over a decade as pets. And I've seen a huge decline in diversity of the animals available from breeders. Breeders have to get breedable pairs from the wild and when the wild caught ones disappear, so do the captive bred ones. There are a bunch of newts that I have rarely seen breed in almost 10 years now. China is a major source of the species loss too.
Why would they take part in a scam? What would just about all major scientific organizations and a vast majority of individual scientists involved in climate research have to gain by putting their reputations on the line in order to "take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools"? What would they have to gain from it?
Great book of Gaia worship: Earthpage 10:23: and those scientists who take of the cause of the great Gaia and torment thine gullible fools shall finally be granted the ability to bear children and grow fruit from thine earthly nipples. So it is written.
How are solar fluctgations the most important part? I thought it was Earth's facing angle during the year what caused the most temps change. What makes it "obvious" the effect some sun spots have on climate?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
regardless of how large this is blown out of proportion, what freedoms to environmentalism will we lose this time?
We have serious problems with pollution and habitat loss, none with "Global Warming" which is nothing but a scam to take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools.
It's fairly clear that the main issues involved with recent amphibian declines are pollution, habitat loss, and disease. Global warming is at most a distant fourth, and the reason is not hard to find: temperatures just aren't changing that much in most places, yet amphibian decline is extremely widespread and includes nearly every habitat. The places where temperature changes have been most extreme are in high mountain regions and the high arctic, neither of which are prime amphibian habitat - not that there aren't a few there, but most of them live at lower altitudes and latitudes.
Blaming global warming for every bad thing that happens reminds me of the old saying that when your only tool is a hammer, the entire world looks like a nail. It is a terrible oversimplification to a single issue which can hardly be the cause of everything that goes wrong in the world. Pollution - especially the acidification of the aquifers in many parts of the world - is too often overlooked by many people who want to blame everything on global warming.
That said, "global warming" is hardly a scam, although the data are extremely difficult to analyze and the precise degree of man's involvement in it is still open to some debate; but it appears very likely that both natural cycles and man-made causes have been at work. However it certainly makes sense to do what we can to limit its effects, especially since we only have one planet we can call home.
The real world is rarely simple.
No, the real question is.... ...why the fuck should we care?
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them. The loss of even hundreds of thousands of species is statistically insignificant.
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.
Biodiversity is very important. Aside from the fact that losing an entire species forever is an extremely sad thing to happen there are practical implications. For example many of the medicines we use today were discovered by people going into the Amazon, brining back everything they could find, and seeing which of the weird things they found could fight different illnesses on a petri dish. Lose the diversity and you lose all those undiscovered opportunities. In a more general sense loss of diversity within a species leads to increased susceptibility to stressors, this may impact upon economically important species (known as well as unknown) as well as rare frogs.
Also, you don't know what statistically significant means so don't use that term. While the loss of hundreds of thousands of species is important is itself, but is more significant as a marker of the loss of environment leading to the losses of all those undiscovered species and damage to an ecosystem that we rely on but don't really understand.
Will someone please explain to me how global warming is causing mass extinctions? I believe that the average temperature has gone up something like one degree in the last several decades, which is no more than the amount of variation you would see from year to year anyway.
So say the average temperature in some amphibians environment is 70 degrees F. During the last several hundred years, the temperature could have been anywhere from 60-80 degrees and the amphibians were fine. Now the average has gone up to 71 degrees and they're dying out? I don't buy it.
or else!
"Save The Whales"
"Save The Rainforests"
"Think Of The Children"
"9/11"
"Global Warming"
"Change"
"Polar Icecaps"
Thanks to this kind of news, every eco-department will have yet another "reason" to tell us how to live our lives. So far, the BAAQMD has now made it a *CRIME* to use your fireplace on "Spare The Air" days, regardless of how cold it gets during the winter. And no, they won't be reimbursing you for your electric bill.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Chicken with slight hint of prawn. They probably blend OK, if you feel like soup.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yeah, must be poor people in China and other countries trying to catch up and get up to our living standard. Fuck what we have done earlier and to get here. Stupid chinese!
Fuck all poor people who may want to get a car or whatever to.
Rich people ftw!
Or well, fuck rich people to.
I agree that habitat loss is a much bigger problem atm, at least for bigger animals, and especially for bigger animals competing for our prey / seeing us as prey. And polution is obviously a problem to, how big I don't know, I guess global warming thru co2 is a polution problem to though.
Global Warming is real. The only questions are:
How much of it is really caused by us?
And
How much of it actually harmful?
So far, what I see in the media isn't really convincing. I still believe that what we see today can and did happen in earth's history and is therefore rather natural.
Cutting back on our production of harmful and questionable stuff and especially cutting back on what of it we release into nature is surely a good thing. Common sense dictates that just dumping anything in too big quantities anywhere can't be good. But we must be careful not to confuse useful behavior with what this blatant reactionism demands of us. Reactionism and outcry are ALWAYS easily abused tools to sell stuff. Be it a political agenda or newspapers.
Is there such a thing as "clean nuclear energy"? Nuclear energy can be advantageous, and even cleaner than other power sources, but as long as it produces waste that takes millenniums to decay or millions to be reprocessed, calling it "clean" sounds like an oxymoron.
Anthropogenically produced pollutants have increased amphibians susceptibility to fungal diseases. Unfortunately the instances of niche organisms becoming extinct are likely to increase. The knock-on effects are so poorly understood that species-shift may cause catastrophic changes in the way entire biomes operate. People only care about this stuff when it affects their profit or is knocking at their door. Ah well, I'm sure that humans can survive without any of these insignificant species.
If only it were that simple.
1. Evolution takes time.
If you don't have damn good DNA repair mechanisms, different cells in your body change randomly to do different things than what's needed, and you die. (E.g., of cancer.) So there's an upper cap on how often mutations can happen, which puts an upper cap on how fast you can evolve. Heck, even small-ish evolutions in tens of thousands of years are called accelerated evolution.
We're talking about "since 1970" here, which isn't even a blip at evolution scales. _No_ species ever evolved in 38 years.
2. Evolution really works like in the joke about the guys camping, and one of the guys putting on his sports shoes when they see a pissed off tiger: you don't have to outrun the tiger, you have to outrun the other guy. You don't have to be the fastest gazelle, you just have to outrun the slowest when the lions drop by.
What I'm indirectly getting at is that it worked in situations where there was a slow changing equilibrium between hunter and prey, or between species and environment. On the whole, the species still has to be survivable in the short run. It doesn't work for "bang, you're dead!" situations. And normally they do get that short term survivability. Even a species whose become relatively unfit, gets breaks as its lowering numbers also causes the predator population to drop, and buys the prey some more time. Or viceversa, a relatively unfit predator gets a break as the prey over-multiplies and eventually it gets enough of a meal even from sick prey or corpses.
The natural selection will then keep culling from the lower end, and over millions of years, the species gets better.
No species can evolve into something better if you keep hunting it into extinction within decades, or dump poison into its water, or cut down its habitat and replace it with a parking lot. Or if you keep hunting it past the point where predator-prey equilibrium would have allowed it to rebound, that's it, really. Game over.
3. While I sorta see your point about climate change,
A) it doesn't apply for situations when we pollute a place overnight, or when we cause an eutrophication and the algae bloom suffocates everything else
B) you also have to remember that climate change is a bit over-sold these days. It's the #1 best selling sin, and _everything_ gets blamed on it first. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but that it does get blamed for more than it actually caused.
In this case, we don't _know_ whether these frogs died because of climate change or, say, because of pollution. As more and more third world and developing countries industrialize, they pollute more and more. And again, let's not forget that while the carbon cult is obsessed with CO2 only, early unregulated industry puts out a lot more immediately poisonous stuff. Both in the air _and_ in the water, which, as mentioned, is the amphibians' problem: they depend on both.
Seriously, half the world still doesn't have any filters on their factories, or any other environment protection, or still uses lead in its pipes and gasoline. You start worrying about the quality of air when you already have other more stringent QOL components covered. When you're dirt poor, you care more about getting food, clean water, medicine, and a job. As long as even those are hit and miss, or in a lot of places more miss than hit, you don't give a fuck about that factory dumping toxic stuff into the air or water. Lead in the air (e.g., from leaded gasoline) might affect you later, while lack of food will kill you right now.
As little as a new factory starting production, can poison the water of several species over night. Sure, someone out there will scream about all the CO2 from it, as if that were all that could possibly ever matter, and in the long run maybe it even is, but it will be the other chemicals that kill in the short run. Or if that factory produces fertilizers, again, you _could_ worry about the CO2 it produces, but that's an eutrophication event waiting to happen,
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The better question is, is "the cost nuclear energy with reprocessing" cheaper than "the cost of Solar/Wind/Hydro/Geothermal" for equivalent reliability and capacity? And remember, we need to look at the room for expansion for this in the US. We can't compare the Hoover Dam, for instance, as there aren't enough places in the US to build Hydro as a replacement for all the nuclear/coal out there. Further, the best place for Geothermal would probably be Yellowstone national park. But I don't think we're going to build there.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
>>>what we see today can and did happen in earth's history and is therefore rather natural.
Of course. It happened twice in written history, circa 3000 BC and again between 400 and 1200 A.D. during the late Roman era and the Barbarian period. It certainly had nothing to do with the Egyptians, Romans, or Barbarians riding-around burning oil in their cars. The warming was a natural event, and this time (from 1850 onward) is probably natural too.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I recall as a kid how my grandmother's yard was littered with American toads. She was certainly in the right place for wildlife. Right next to a state park. Two acre pond in the back yard. Woods all around. The lawn seemed to dance as I pushed the mower back and forth. If I saw anything less than a few dozen toads while mowing the front lawn, something was wrong.
My grandmother is gone and my parents have since moved into that house. Now it's a treat for my kids if I can find a toad or two there.
My own home has much the same problem. I'm on a wooded lot, backed up against a city greenway with a stream in the back yard. There is plenty of habitat for the toads, plenty of food. Every now and then we'll see one. The neighbors who have been here 30 years say that during the summer the houses would have treefrogs all over them. I have yet to see a single treefrog. And taking my kids back in the greenway to look for salamanders, we have yet to find a single one while flipping over rocks and rotten logs.
I still have my doubts about man's part in changing the climate. But something is wrong. The amphibians are like the canary in the coal mine. And it doesn't take an expert to see that they are disappearing fast.
What will likely happen (circa 2100) is that we still have energy (hydro, solar, coal, oil), but it will become so scarce and so expensive that people will return to a pre-1900-style existence. They'll have a little bit of electricity to light the bulbs, and just enough coal or wood to provide fire to the TV room, and that's about it.
No more whole-house A/C or heating. Only the rich, like kings and presidents, will be able to afford those luxuries.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
What will likely happen (circa 2100) is that we still have energy (hydro, solar, coal, oil), but it will become so scarce and so expensive that people will return to a pre-1900-style existence. They'll have a little bit of electricity to light the bulbs, and just enough coal or wood to provide fire to the TV room, and that's about it.
No more whole-house A/C or heating. Only the rich, like kings and presidents, will be able to afford those luxuries.
Unless somebody gets a fusion reactor to work
CFC 114 is still used for enrichment and is 20,000 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Up to 1 million pounds of CFC114 leak into the atmosphere per year (from the U.S alone) since the inception of the Montreal protocol, banning CFC's, in 1995.
The news gets better, CFC 114 attacks the ozone layer which protects that algae that makes THE OXYGEN WE BREATHE. Radioactive elements aside - CFC's released into the environment by the enrichment process are the number 1 cause of industrial CFC emissions in the U.S.
Instead of being so patronising, you should investigate the scientific, medical, engineering, legal, political and social reasons for opposition to nuclear power and you will find some substantial arguments why nuclear power is not practical at our current level of technology.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Did anybody else read that as "1/3 of amphibians dining out"? I was wondering how so many of them could afford to do that, when most of us are having to cut back.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
We have such special machines named pyromether and thermometer. The lattrer one we use at surface, to measure local temperature and guess what, most of them are averaging to highter temperatures every year. But the real juice we get from the first one, we put them on satelites and measure the temperature averaged on a big area, and guess what, the global average temperature is going up too.
We can't be completely sure. But we can be some 80% to 99% sure that the bigest part of it is man-made. We know, from looking at other planets, from physics and chemistry, and from observing correlations (note that the two fist imply causation) that dumping CO2 at the atmosphere causes global warming. We are also able to make calculations, see how much CO2 we put at the atmosphere, and comare it with how much CO2 goes there naturaly. It is not hard to go from there to a conclusion, since our output is almost an order of magnitude highter.
See, no circular logic. Now, you won't listen anyway, so continue beliving what you want, should I advice you to put all your economies at realstate too? It can only go up.
Rethinking email
Correlation does not imply causation...
just because we can measure better doesn't mean it happens more.
I look at it this way, nature is cruel. We are just better at observing it. How many species have come and gone that we have little record of? Linking it to "global warming" is just sensationalism, an attempt to make the situation sound more dire and attempt to guilt everyone as having been a willing participant in the demise of something they know little to nothing about.
Yet I can predict that every attempt to show otherwise will be met with venom.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Perhaps you should read ... ok, watch different media?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It would appear that your heroes are spreading bullshit. I don't have the credentials to place myself in this reality/bullshit conflict as a scientific authority, but I don't think we have any spotted owls here in California's 11th congressional district so Pombo's bullshit is categorically unqualified. Have you ever worked in a zero overstory? It doesn't require much intelligence to spot some of the errors. Herbicides will prove to be a gross error, ask the scientists in our soon to be fucked future.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Nuclear with reprocessing would never be that expensive, and with reprocessing we have enough nuclear material to last several hundred years. Sorry, but I don't see that happening unless the government starts taxing power at several hundred percent.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Thinking hard about it, it looks like yes, they have.
Also, it makes sure that no valid message will ever be heard by the masses.
Rethinking email
We have come upon the start of the next era....Bladerunner
You really have no idea that on the subject of AGW you are the gullible fool. For example how does this sound; "How convienient that nobody paid much attention to Maxwell's equations for over 80yrs", moronic right? Also why is it that EVERY national science body on the planet gets this "grant money" for saying the same thing? Who is paying for all this? - Who is steering this vast army of rubber-stamp scientists and why do they only rubber stamp AGW? Surely there's more money in rubber stamping research that proves (say) tabacoo is harmless? Do greenies suddenly have more money than FF corporations - where are the Greenies hiding this vast treasure and why aren't they taxed on it?
And please don't insult the intelligence of your audience by claiming you're a skeptic, you have no idea what the word means. However if I am wrong about the "skeptic" thing then you will have had time for introspection on your own assertions and will be able to tell us...
(A) The counter argument to the 1998 thing.
(B) The flaw in that counter argument.
So do you have an answer - seriously I want to know? I will settle for an answer to (A) only, (B) would earn you quite a bit of kudos (and grant money) in the math world.
In case you are still not sure what I'm driving at I will spell it out. Have you ever questioned your assumptions? - I mean an assumption is something that when changed can change a very strongly held belief and unlock a door into a whole new world. eg: Eienstien questioned the assumption that time was constant.
This is not to say all assumptions are wrong but if you want to learn anything then the ones you own need constant testing. For instance I have assumed in my post you are suffering from cognitive-dissonance or you are just incurious in a Palin kinda way. Let me know if it's something else - eg: perhaps you are deliberately anti-science on philosophical/political grounds.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
But can't the fuel be reused over and over again until it's basically harmless?
It's only unclean if you stupidly only use it the one time as far as I understand the possibilities for usage of nuclear.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
And perhaps due to a major meteorite impact that happened to go unnoticed.
They have about as much to do with science or even logic in their pointless rants as does the spring of 1734. have to do with popularity of colored condoms.
I am not a violent person, but from seeing those couple of episodes of that shitty show they put on - I got the urge to club the big loud shithead on the head until he becomes the little quiet shithead, and hang the little quiet shithead by the ankles and stretch him till he turns into a big loud shithead.
What? It would be done only in self defense.
They were hurting me first. Both physically and emotionally.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Like all those species that could adapt to bullets.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
food for the twenty-first century.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Remember the media hysteria over polar bear populations?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear#Population_and_distribution
Of the 19 recognized polar bear subpopulations, 5 are declining, 5 are stable, 2 are increasing, and 7 have insufficient data.
Here's some insight into how the media works.
Did they report on the the 5 subpopulations that were INCREASING or DECREASING?
If they were fair, they'd've concluded the jury is still out and wait for more data to come in.
But they didn't.
They cherry-picked facts to fit the "man is evil" and "climate change is an URGENT" matter narratives.
>>>Unless somebody gets a fusion reactor to work
They already did. The problem is that the reactor USES more energy than it produces, so it's an energy sink, not a source. (Kind of like hydrogen.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Let me try and put this in the way so a kindergarten kid could understand it.
There is this big cake.
And every species gets a part of the cake and eats it. And while the cake can go bad in places it can never go bad entirely cause it is magical.
Now... along comes one species that is particularly good at eating cake and grabs a HUUUGE part of the cake for itself.
And keeps grabbing more and more for itself or just plain ruining the cake just for fun. Just because they can.
So all the other species end up with less and less cake to share among themselves. And cake can still go bad from time to time.
Only now - even a small part of the cake going bad can mean that entire species can end up with no cake to eat at all.
So, because on species took almost all the cake for itself, all other species are running out of cake.
And when they lose even the tiniest piece of their cake - they could all just die out.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
No. Spent nuclear fuel is like a very-heavy metal, which is worthless as an energy source, but is radioactive so it needs to be sealed below ground.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
1/3 of Amphibians Dying Out, thanks to mankind.
There.
What worries me is that mankind is a self-destructing species (whether that's caused by selfishness, stupidity or sin, belongs to another discussion). Ever heard of the Eastern Island?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island#Destruction_of_the_ecosystem
Well, if you're going to take it that literally, I guess not many things make sense to you.
1. We're talking about frogs, not bacteria. You know, a lot more complex stuff, where evolution happens a lot slower.
2. I never mentioned a start and a stop. That's your own strawman. But in a lot of these situations, yes, you could put such goalposts anyway. How about: from where we started changing their environment (e.g., turning a lake anoxic) to when they can actually survive there. If the second doesn't happen within a given time from the first, they're dead. That's your "start" and "stop" in that race.
3. I'm talking enough evolution to deal with radically different conditions, not about the minor mutations every birth has.
But on the whole, I'm under the impressions that you were just looking for some detail to take out of context, deliberately misunderstand, spout some irrelevat truisms, and get the ego-boost of "omg, I found someomne I could sound smart to." Well, I could put it nastier, but let's just put it like this: if your dose of ego-masturbation is to try to put someone between you and the bottom of the proverbial barrel, you already know where you are in relation to that bottom of the barrel. Nothing I could say probably can make it any worse.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sorry for the anonymous post - I'm on the dead run here.
On the point made in the article about ponds drying up, this has never quite made sense to me. If the climate is warming, would that not imply more moisture in the atmosphere and thus more rain, or at least less evaporation?
Think about the last part of your sentence.
Where do you think the more moisture in the atmosphere comes from? More evaporation. Ponds have very little quantities of water, which are easier to run dry than say.... cold oceans in the arctic.
Now imagine that the ponds run dry and that moisture that goes to the atmosphere ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Also, remember that there are zones in the planet where rain occurs very rarely. Unfortunately, evaporation occurs on a daily basis, especially when the sun shines.
In the olden days, when I was a kid, alto-cirrus clouds were so uncommon that I would call people out of the house to come look when I spotted one. Nowadays, they blanket the sky from horizon to horizon. I have heard that this shades the planet to a significant degree, compensating some for the warming effects which HAVE occurred. I have also heard that Canada has three quarters of all the fresh water available on our planet, which makes my Skeena River property seem a wise investment. If I catch someone spraying herbicide in my watershed there will be violence.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I don't see what the big problem is. You said yourself that dumping millions of tons of anything anywhere is probably a bad idea. My response to you is that whether human caused global warming is real or not shouldn't change our behavior. We should strive very hard not dump millions of tons of stuff into our atmosphere. The 'climate change' debate is just a distraction.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
The worst thing that can happen to slow the solution to a human problem is its politicisation.
Politicised issues never get solved, because it is in no one's best interest to solve them: politicians earn their living by promising solutions to problems, and if they actually solve the problems that made the populace vote for them they will be out of work (unless they find another problem to solve). Therefore, a self-serving politician would never want to actually solve a problem that shifts the demographics in their favour. Of course there may be a few politicians who are enlightened and not only self-serving and may seek to really solve a problem, but the majority of them aren't so enlightened.
Unfortunately nowadays environmental issues such as global warming have been linked with politics, and this means that these issues will never be solved. One political group chooses a specific position over global warming ("it happens") and another group chooses the opposite position ("it doesn't happen"), and they just argue ad nauseum to make stupid people vote for them and keep them in their jobs so that they can continue receiving their income (official and unofficial).
Because the issue became political, it is very difficult to distinguish between science and politics now: a study saying "it happens" will be viewed as written by people supporting the political group that has chosen this position over the issue, while a study saying "it doesn't happen" will be suspected as being written by supporters of another political group. So, it became impossible to even contemplate about talking about this issue without being subjected to suspicions of people thinking in political terms. The end result is that scientists who seek not to be exposed to social stupidity shut up and the only people who talk about the issue are those who have no other interest in the issue than using it for political gain.
Environmental issues are scientific issues that should be solved by the experts in the field, the environmental scientists. It is in the university and the laboratory, not in the parliament or the senate, that we must solve our environmental issues. It is a scientific and technological issue that can be solved by developing new green technologies, and these can be developed by scientists in universities, not by old people arguing all day on television.
An issue becomes political when it involves different groups of people bearing different costs related to the management (or solution, if it's ever solved at all) of the issue. With the current technology it is difficult to solve the environmental issues without a change to a more frugal lifestyle (which is seen as a cost by most people) or slower economic growth (which is totally unacceptable to everyone on this planet, except for very few heterodox economists such as those who believe in technocracy). But I see no reason to solve environmental issues with the current, limited technology when we can develop new green technologies that would enable us to solve the environmental issues while in fact allowing us to keep our current lifestyles and most importantly creating new economic growth and new entrepreneurial opportunities as well (even for the current big players in the energy markets, so nobody would have anything to lose, it would be a win-win-win-win-win-win scenario). With new green technologies it would become possible to solve environmental issues without having to involve politicians who debate on television all day and have neither the knowledge, not the will to actually do anything.
Politicisation of science is harmful because it tends to make people suspicious of scientific studies ("is this report genuine or driven by politics?"), tends to attract non-scientists to talk about scientific issues thus fscking up everything, and in the long term is bad for a country and the world because it drives real scientists out of politicised issues, so the issue is left unsolved because of brain drain.
Awesome. It is truly jaw-dropping to consider that your arguments constitute a plan to simply leave things the way they are. Staying the course may provide some sense of security. I claim that we as a culture demonstrate the assertion that doing what we've always done will produce the same result that we have always gotten. Perhaps your perspective is that we needn't change anything.
Your contribution to the discussion is reminiscent of attempts to derail it with straw man attacks designed to inspire doubt. You also execute the "change the subject" move with great verve and flair.
You may want to consider that winning isn't everything. The inherent problem with winning at all costs is that it carries the risk of having nothing and no one with which to celebrate after victory. See also Pyhrrus of Epirus.
I also recommend reflection on who it is that you're trying to impress, especially in this forum. I assert that you have, indeed, made an impression, and that it most likely is not the one you intended to make.
I find your final paragraph to be most telling. You seem to be acutely aware of the complexity of the problem, but your contribution appears to consist mostly, if not entirely of mockery and derision. Given your claim that you are a seminary graduate--I presume that this is a Christian institution--you may wish to review how bystanders treated Jesus, and compare their behavior to yours.
The problem is important, but doesn't yet seem to be urgent to enough of us to take action. It looks to me like a case of denial, in the same way that many individuals ignore signs of failing health. Most of us don't like to confront our own mortality. Such feelings don't change the facts.
In short, we seem to prefer to avoid issues that we regard as potentially painful to consider. To grant credence to the idea that our planet is in trouble gives rise to a very difficult problem. If, for example, US policy and behavior changes, many existing models require profound revision.
The most unproductive choice in the matter is to assign blame. I agree with the argument that extinction is natural. I assert that it is folly to deny responsibility for our habitat, and that there is no integrity (i.e., power and strength) in avoiding the possibility that we may need to change our behaviors in order to survive.
In short, following the path of least resistance works only at the atomic level. We are a complex species; it follows that even the most simple problems require elegant solutions. It is folly to presume that simple is the same as easy.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
I've been looking at China and southeast Asia in general, and it seems to me from what I've read that the rising cancer epidemic there is very good evidence.
According to even their own government, the rate is up due to pollution of the soil working it's way into their crops. There's also the factors of longer life span; new, awful, and Western eating habits; and more statistics becoming available, but I can't think of a single country that goes through industrialization where cancer rates stay low. It may be that everyone lives longer, but like you, I just have this hunch that covering everything in petrochemicals is a bad idea.
Ironically, it seems that countries like Cuba have the best chance of making the swing into the twenty second century. If global warming doesn't wreck their environment, they have already made it past peak oil, they have a thriving biogenetic industry, and no fundamentalist religious elements are stopping research. They still have no freedoms, and are being strangled by the US, but Castro's death should finally give us an excuse to stop looking like paranoid assholes. I wouldn't move there... yet.
And just to clarify, I do have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to "OMG I found something stupid and it's not worth reading any further!" kinds of messages. Among many other ways to add noise to the signal. And I find that Slasdot already has too many of that already. If it's not that, it's the local grammar nazis, and if it's not those, it's the "OMG, you're not worthy to question the scientists" gang, and if anyone managed to avoid even those, there's seven more layers of silliness to be had before running into any usable content.
Ah well... I guess some things just can't be helped.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How do we know global warming is happening?
Through measurements and scientific analysis.
How do we know it's not just a natural occurrence?
Through simulation taking into account known factors.
There you go.
the fact that losing an entire species forever is an extremely sad thing to happen
Extremely sad! Remember guys, losing an entire species is entirely IRREVERSIBLE! There is no undo if we fail to act on biodiversity! One day, maybe millions of years from now, the earth's climate will be back to normal cycling. If we destroy the biodiversity, we can NEVER EVER get that biodiversity back. New species originate at an extremely slow background rate, a rate which has been decreasing since the Cambrian (the time of the Burgess Shall fauna). True, mass extinctions are generally followed by a burst of recovery, but there is also usually a delay of millions of years (see stuff by Dave Bottjer, Peter Ward, Doug Erwin...).
I donate sperm, so no, you didnt get me... and i did qualify it.. I said i'll help *you* save it.
Didn't expect that, did ya?
My Atkins diet says otherwise.
You really are clever, but not enough.
Half of the existing ones. Feel free to derive that number.. oh wait.. you can't.. because there are so many species already that you cannot even count them.
"His name was James Damore."
Those are interesting questions, but the really important one is this: can we afford to bet everything on the chance of you being right? Because if global warming turns out to be harmful, it won't just be a little baby tragedy like the World Trade Center bombing, or the latest tsunami, or the 40000 killed every year in the USA by cars, or the last genocide.
Wait a minute... you're looking at the mainstream media to educate you about science? Hello? Is anyone home? You know that corporations who profit from emitting greenhouse gases are spending billions of dollars to try to convince the ignorant masses that nothing's amiss, right? They use the media. Go check out recent peer-reviewed journals on the subject, and then come and tell us that you're not convinced.
And if you want to see the risk-management approach, try here for a silly and excellent quick overview.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
The effects of a single species coming extinct can be very devastating for the food chain that that species happened to be in. i.e. perhaps it was the single (or most important) food for some carnivore or perhaps it was the only animal that ate some specific plant. In the former case the carnivore is likely to get into trouble too and in the latter case the plant might no longer have a natural enemy and become a pest.
In both situations you can get a chain reaction that could get out of control. Note that of course not animals are the only species that are required to get a food chain running but the problem is that we might not know what the implications are. Potentially the loss of a single species *could* cause a chain reaction causing many other species to be lost.
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
(Mostly) incorrect. Nuclear fuel can be reprocessed extensively. Current light water reactors use very little of the energy in uranium, less than 1%. A fast breeder reactor uses 99.5%. This is a huge difference in efficiency (and thus, waste) and it is accomplished by reprocessing. One type of FBR, the Integral Fast Reactor, produces waste at the end of the fuel cycle that is reduced to normal levels of radioactivity after 200 years. The amount produced is tiny compared to LWRs.
In other words, Ihmhi is correct in saying that the fuel can be reprocessed and reused until there is only a small amount of unusable waste. The waste presents a radioactivity hazard so storing it underground might be the best solution, but dealing with the waste of a FBR is trivial as compared with the waste of a LWR.
>>>My response to you is that whether human caused global warming is real or not shouldn't change our behavior. We should strive very hard not dump millions of tons of stuff into our atmosphere.
>>>
But... it's CO2. It helps trees and other plants grow. Other things like CO, HC, NOx, and PMs are bad (damage human lungs), but CO2 can be breathed without harm. If we ignore the global warming aspect, then there's no reason to stop filling the air with CO2. Is there?
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
"What would they have to gain from it?"
Anyway, for the record, I am *mild* sceptic w.r.t. AGW, mainly for two simple reasons:
Why retreating ice on *GREEN*land should be any concern?
Why 0.0001% change in atmospheric gases should affect climate more than 0.1% change in solar output? - OK, this is only my guts feeling, but I think sometimes it is good to put numbers into perspective.
And of course, I welcome any counter arguments. (AFAIK (A) counter argument is that the 1998 was really extreme because of el-nino, so anything that follow seems like drop.)
In fact, I was *mild* AGW believer, until I have checked some facts.
Anyway, I think there are two things to mention about AGW:
First, nothing significant will happend w.r.t. CO2 emmissions anyway, besides taxes. Be realistic, I do not see world abandoning fossil fuels, that simply will not happen. If it causes warming, better get ready for it...
Second, I think that in 20 years horizont we will see what is true and what is not. So the question will be resolved.
In fact, my only concern w.r.t. to AGW is that people will not do something utterly stupid to "stop warming", like those proposals to change albedo by spreading some powder on seas or puttin some mirror to orbit, sequestering CO2 from atmosphere and so on. I can imagine that some such mistake could cause irreversible cooling trend or significant drop in plant growths, which is what we should really be worried about.
I think civilization has much higher prospects surviving in tropical climate than in the ice age.
Why would they take part in a scam? What would just about all major scientific organizations and a vast majority of individual scientists involved in climate research have to gain by putting their reputations on the line in order to "take advantage of Gaia-worship and gullible fools"? What would they have to gain from it?
What would they gain? How about billions in funding? (I'm not saying I don't believe in climate change, I'm just sayin...)
So, for the evolutionist side - shouldn't this be part of natural selection? Survival of the fittest? Shouldn't evolutionary scientists expect extinction ... in fact, isn't that the only way species will continue to evolve?
I've always been confused at the modern day evolutionist's perspective that somehow, death and extinction is very bad, even though it's pretty much the primary part of the theory of evolution.
The same is true for those that complain the loudest about humans ruining the planet. I'm completely FOR treating the planet correctly, but for entirely different reasons. The evolutionist perspective, it seems, should not criticize the highest form of evolution (humans) for their natural behavior; by killing off much of the life in the world, am I not just helping prove what is fittest to survive? Certainly, you can't blame me, the product of evolution, for the way I naturally act.
On the other hand, and this is the part where I get modded troll, flamebait, or "stupid" (not sure what the Slashdot equivalent of "stupid" is :) guess I'll find out), preserving and taking care of different species and the world in general makes more sense in a Judeo-Christian worldview, because Biblically, humans were given that responsibility. "Responsibility" is not really in an ahteistic evolutionary worldview. Or if it is, I see no reason why you should tell me what my responsibility is.
So what? Species have been going extinct for billions of years. Those that can't hack it in the current environment don't get to live in it.
I'm not being deliberately mean or anything, but nature quite simply doesn't give a shit whether you make it or not. Our actions are in no way outside it.
The moment you consider human beings to be somehow outside natural selection in any way whatsoever, you've lost all perspective. We and everything we do are a part of natural selection. This absolutely includes contaminating environments with chemicals that don't normally occur there, and allowing our cat to hunt some birds to extinction.
It's hard to explain the tautology of natural selection here without just saying it: That which survives, survives. That's nature's only rule regarding species. There are no others and there are no exceptions or caveats.
If some monkey species develops a means to completely annihilate some insect species and does so, do we get all up in arms about it? No, we say, "well that was interesting" and write about it and document it and move on. We are no different. Even if we are causing amphibians to die out that's just as natural regardless of cause. If amphibians cannot survive in an environment that contains humans, they don't get to survive.
I don't personally think that killing off amphibians is good or anything, but nature doesn't give a flying fuck what I or anyone else thinks and it makes no distinction between us modifying the environment and some other force doing it.
Question everything
That's what we need here! Drop Bears and Funnel Web Spiders, Yay!
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Let me try and put this in the way so a kindergarten kid could understand it.
The problem with the cake analogy is that it's really not a useful analogy at anything above the kindergarten level.
Like many such false analogies (economics comes to mind as another area where such things abound), it assumes that everything is a zero-sum game: The more I win, the more you lose. That's true in things like sports and games, but it's true in very little else. Sometimes we both win (perhaps by cooperating with each other to do things neither of us could do alone). Sometimes we both lose (perhaps by each of us making it impossible for the other to accomplish anything).
Since I would hope that most of us here are past the kindergarten level, perhaps it would be best to avoid such oversimplified attempts to "explain" things.
You realize, don't you, that without scientifically rigorous documentation, your observation of mere physical reality means nothing to the willful ignorati. I too, have observed the same phenomena. I miss toads.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Six.
And, no, I will not tell you why.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
You are missing the point. Nature doesn't give a shit about Earth being a dead and desert planet either. Nature does not give a shit about mass extinction nor total extinction. The point is that we should give a shit.
Biodiversity is something that has both practical and an ideational values and judging from the problems we have run in in the past, we can expect it to have values we are not even aware of. At the same time we know that if we cause the extinction of species, this is the final word: we will never see them again and we will never get back the ecological systems they helped to form. So in addition to losing specific species that could be of value to us or just nice to look at, study, or just have, their extinction will go hand in had with losing a working biological system that itself is usually part of greater systems of climate, erosion etc. We are not even close to understanding and even less to predicting what will happen if such changes happen and we are utterly incapable of fixing it, once it has been broken.
The comparison to the monkey species or any other species really is also missing one important point: no other species on earth as of yet was capable to make use of massive amounts of energy to influence their environment. While it has happened very often that species have caused the extinction of other species, sometimes of those they needed for their own survival, the scale of how humans are doing it now is unprecedented and can only be compared with the few occasions where mass extinctions occurred because of huge vulcanic or meteor incidents.
So while nature certainly doesnt give a fuck, I do and I think we all should, if we have an interest of our own species to survive over at least some more time in an environment that will remain a constant source of inspiration and wonder to us humans.
So, the earth was truly flat prior to approximately 2300 years ago? You advocate that discovery of a thing causes it to spontaneously exist, such that prior to human discovery it did not exist, or was something else entirely?
This is your support for the statistical insignificance of special extinction? You correlate human discovery of new species with human ovservation of lost species and claim that significance of one grants you accurate knowledge of significance in the other. This calls into question your understanding of the term (which I'm sure you'll look up right now and finally present a well-founded retort), as well as your entire decision-making methodology.
You play fast and loose with your support arguments. If you are unwilling to ground and source your claims, then it is obvious that the conclusions you spout are more important to you than their factuality. The only conclusion to be drawn from your arguments is the existance of your own emotional ass-primate.
So far, what I see in the media isn't really convincing.
Perhaps you should be reading the scientific literature on the subject instead? You know, the type without all that media bias?
I am officially gone from
Yeah, keep ignoring that they were "forecasting those dramatic effects tens years in the future" for about a century now. And guess what happened.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
By next century, I believe any remaining Polar Bear will be hybridizing or competing with the Browns. Of course they are going to be competing for space with the humans migrating to the polar (habitable) regions. You should be okay, the rest of us may also have to adopt an insect diet.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Depends on the change, I suppose. I can see your point if we're only talking about a temperature change of half a degree. Probably there are enough alleles for that.
In other cases, though, the changes are more dramatic. A lake can become outright anoxic within a record time, for example. I don't think it's even possible for fish to evolve to be anaerobic, and it'll take a lot more than 38 years.
Or as another example, let's put it like this, humans have used lead pipes, utensils, paints, cosmetics, etc, for millenia, and we haven't evolved immunity to lead yet. We've drunk alcohol for 5000 years or so (the Egyptians drank 4 litres of beer per day, including the women), but the liver didn't evolve to be immune to it. Duly noted, the frogs do reproduce a lot faster, but I still think that it's not that easy to just evolve immunity to a toxin.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Let's get some facts straight. CFC 114 is not "used for enrichment," it is used as a coolant like any other CFC. There is no technical reason that another, less ozone toxic chemical or method could not be used.
Furthermore, the primary reason coolant usage is so high in the US for the enrichment industry is because of anti-nuclear politics. The numbers you quote for CFC 114 leakage come from the only enrichment plant in the US. The plant is very old (started operation in 1952) and uses technology that has been obsolete since pretty much before it was built. It enriches uranium through gaseous diffusion which has long been made obsolete by the more energy efficient centrifuge. Gas centrifuges themselves may soon be made obsolete by new, laser based enrichment systems that use less energy still. If the nuclear industry was not so hindered by politics, we would probably not still be stuck with USEC producing U-235 through such an outdated method.
By the way, if modern nuclear power plants could get approval to be built, there would be less need for enrichment in the first place. Current light water reactors use U-235 as fuel and to obtain U-235 in sufficient quantities requires enrichment since natural uranium is 99.284% U-238. However, modern designs only require an initial source of enriched material and then can be fed U-238. They accomplish this through extensive reprocessing of nuclear waste and breeding new fissionable material. The end result is an extremely efficient system (uses 99.5% of the energy in uranium as opposed to a LWR which uses 1%) that produces very little waste.
The news gets worse because there is nothing special about CFC 114 that destroys the ozone layer; all CFCs have this effect. You are correct that the CFC released into the atmosphere by the enrichment plant is the primary cause of industrial emissions, but that is industrial emissions. Industrial emissions amount to a small percent of the total amount of CFCs released per year. And as mentioned before, the reason for the CFC emissions being so high for industrial use is that the USEC plant is very old and has coolant pipelines that are corroded and leaking everywhere. In other words, stop trying to make it sounds like nuclear fuel enrichment is single-handedly causing the destruction of the ozone layer which is going to kill us all.
As for the bit about the algae, there is not a lot of evidence to support your assertion. The ozone layer does not "protect algae," it absorbs UV radiation, particularly UV-B. UV-B penetrates deep into tissue and so is cause for concern in humans and other life. However, in investigating the algae populations around Antarctica, where the effects of ozone depletion should be the greatest, no significant changes were observed by researchers. Now don't get me wrong, I do believe we need to take action and reduce our effect on the environment and we need to do that ASAP. However, being scared of nuclear technology and fighting against it is the exact opposite of what we need to be doing. Nuclear energy production has lower emission of all environmentally harmful products, including radioactivity, than other energy production methods such as coal burning.
It is a greenhouse gas. Assuming that the planet is in equilibrium, it will be warmer with higher levels of CO2. It is a physical property of the gas, not dependent on observed temperature or dubious data. The planet is not in equilibrium right now, and one of the big questions is whether that equilibrium, when it is reached, will be an acceptable environment for humans and other species to inhabit. So far, the signs point to the answer being negative. Liek alot.
So if we ignore reality, there's no reason to worry about anything!
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
> There is "no reason" for gods.
Just because you are ignorant of the facts, reasons, and why, of what you would call God, doesn't mean there is no reason. The key is to look for the answer of "Why does the universe even bother to exist in the first place? What is consciousness? What is Life? What is Death? What is Time?" Science is completely ignorant of all these, because it thinks there is no method to arrive at those answers, and is unwilling to embrace something outside its domain to get there.
The universe is most Logical and Loving. You only perceive it differently because you don't have all the facts, and are viewing it through a narrow and limited human perspective, instead of a spiritual perspective. If you have children you would realize that children don't always understand the reasons and think things are "unfair" until they mature. Humans, for the most part, are still spiritually immature children.
> We are still left with all of the same problems and mysteries of the universe that we started with.
On this I agree -- Religion has been used as a crutch for far too long. It's always easier to make excuses "Someone else will save me", instead of getting of your ass and taking responsibility for the consequences in your own life -- but that would involve work.
mars has melting ice caps, explain that one away?
*Sigh* Read up here. In short, the trend of "warming" on Mars is too short, Mars has a higher eccentricity to its orbit (meaning more fluctuation in its distance to the Sun) than Earth, and most importantly...
Solar radiance has been on the decline during this time period. If the Sun is such a dominant force in global climate change (on Earth and Mars), then why have temperatures supposedly been going UP on Mars while the radiance of the Sun has been going DOWN?
You people are just working so hard to maintain your happy delusions that you don't bother digging into the facts behind your claims. "(A) The Sun's output fluctuates. (B) Some glaciers on Mars are melting. That must mean that (I) the Sun's output is increasing, (II) all of Mars is warming (but let's not be too hasty about melting glaciers saying the same thing about Earth!), and therefore global warming is all the Sun's fault! Don't worry, be happy!"
The truth is that we have no evidence of *global* warming on Mars due to insufficient data on the planet's climate, and if the Sun was such an important influence, then the climate there should be *cooling* instead.
Pfft. I could take global warming deniers more seriously if they had ANY interest in getting to the objective truth instead of wrapping themselves in the most whatever scraps of information and half-truths they can use as a security blanket.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
As opposed to cherry-picked global-warming-is-a-hoax "facts"?
Yes.
AND as opposed to *not* cherry picking facts, but presenting them in as unbiased a manner as possible.
Which was the point I made, glad to see you did not argue with it.
Kudos for finding the hidden solution :) I've added you as a friend.
>>> >>>
But... it's CO2. It helps trees and other plants grow. Other things like CO, HC, NOx, and PMs are bad (damage human lungs), but CO2 can be breathed without harm. If we ignore the global warming aspect, then there's no reason to stop filling the air with CO2. Is there?
oh go ahead and breathe co2 and test your claim that breathing it causes no harm! lol
Logic, macros, and more
>>>It is a greenhouse gas.
Yes I know, but the person I was responding to said, "The climate change debate is just a distraction," and that's who I was replying to. If said person believes we should ignore climate change, then there's no reason to limit CO2.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
I would like to point out, for those of us denying our responsibility for the reality of the anthropogenic destruction of the one planet that all the scientifically proven existing lifeforms in the universe live on, that the economic implications dwarf anything related to ALL of the economic "crises" of oh, say, all of RECORDED HISTORY. Think. Please.
My friend, Patrick Laffey, used to point out that clearly our Fearless Leaders believed that they would be leaving on the Star Ship Enterprise. Did you get an appointment to Star Fleet Academy? Lucky you.
Those of you who supplement logic with faith, Jesus is coming, and BOY, IS HE PISSED.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
The 5 people on Slashdot who actually bothered to buy SPORE and play it will get this joke
What about the 250,000 people on Slashdot who actually bothered to download SPORE and play it?
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
The reason frogs are dying is because they aren't worth any money to anyone, so nobody really cares. In countries like France I'm sure they have bio-security to stop travelers bringing in diseases for them. Countries are already recognizing the impact other countries can have on their climate and taking action to prevent unexpected changes. Trying to make people care by arguing that them dying off might affect the planets future is simply doom-saying unless you can prove it, and it will be hard convincing the majority without hard proof as it won't get media coverage. Change isn't always necessarily bad, it creates new opportunities. Sure people's hearts bleed when you talk about animals dying, but we probably kill many more to eat.
Here's a further question, however. The article hints at multiple factors, but then incessantly intones global warming, global warming, global warming! Actually, the article seems reasonably noncommittal about it, but the summary was excerpted primarily the global warming references.
Has the estimated 2/3 of a degree change in average temperatures over the last century really resulted in dramatic devastation of seasonal ponds or merely tended to shift their latitude and/or elevation slightly (trust me, dried out tadpole corpses already existed back in the 80's when Stanford started this study and I was catching critters in seasonal ponds)? What about increased human water use lowering the water table, and development altering drainage patterns. And don't forget other factor cited like pesticide use and changing pH in waterways.
I don't have anything against global warming science, but in this case, it doesn't sound like they have actually confirmed a link between global warming and the factors cited.
Why? Feel free to justify your opinion with evidence.
One word: Bananas
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
The problem with crying wolf over forecasted claims of doom is that we, as a species, are often wrong. Are we seriously going to believe that 1/3rd of amphibians have such a tenuous claim to life that a one degree shift in temperature is causing them to die off? Fine, let them die.
But what if it turns out to be mercury. Or Nitrates? Or perhaps it's just an over abundance of silt in the water. Or maybe its some sort of fungus. Maybe, just maybe, the frogs are the canary for global warming. But my fear is that we're going to mobilize the world to spend trillions on cutting carbon emissions and using heinously expensive alternative sources of energy (while china and the third world laugh and burn more coal than we conserve) all for nothing.
In the end, it will be something we stopped looking for and had no money / resources left to address that will kill us off.
All because we're too arrogant to believe we're wrong and stop asking questions.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
Yes, as a matter of fact it is. If I were among the jurors in Salem in 1692, I'd refuse to convict, despite the other jurors' pleas to protect the girls being afflicted by the witches, etc.
Because the proponents of the global warming, and, especially, those of the idea, that humans (the rich ones, of course — the class struggle is almost always cued into a green's argument) are responsible, have put forward nothing deserving anything other than mockery and derision (well, the Che Guevara-adoring among them also deserve a noose or a bullet too, but that's another subject). There may, indeed, be a problem, or there may not be one, but the inconveniences, that "the greens" demand we accept, are too serious to be undertaken "just in case". And, of course, the most famous of the greens are rather hypocritical, which ruins their case even further.
So, until the theory, that blames rich western societies for the global warming, becomes scientific (it is merely a political one now), and can explain the drastic climate changes of 5 and 10 thousand years ago, I shall remain skeptical.
And no, I'm not, in actuality a seminarist — I was just mocking the GGP. But I have enough education to be able to discern science from attempts to "restore social justice", and will not cramp my lifestyle, just because some Leftie thinks, I have not earned, what I own.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
that number sounds inflated. What about the 32,000,000 people who read the reviews and didn't BOTHER downloading / buying spore?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Soylent Green is ... aww.. never mind.
So far, what I see in the media isn't really convincing
See, that's where you're going wrong. Why, if only there was a global electronic network that made journal papers, raw data, and plain English explanations of what it all means freely available to anyone capable of searching for it.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
How did you "get" him?
You have to mention a species he might not actually want to help save. I don't think he'd mind helping you save wheat. I'm pretty sure by buying some wheat product he ever-so-slightly increases the demand for wheat thereby causing more of it to be sown by farmers. I'm sure he's not adverse to buying some dinner rolls. What he's saying is that any species that requires particular effort to save has no established benefit to him.
The 'climate change' debate is just a distraction.
I'm not sure I can agree with this. The Government seems to take it pretty seriously. There have already been 2 humanitarian disasters as a result of climate change (Somalia and now Sudan). You see, when it stops raining people cant grow food, and hungry people tend to get angry after a while. So... a 10 year drought in Somalia is a real problem for the people that live there. And somehow the US seems to just "get involved" in these sorts of things from time to time.
And when the analysis (done by guys a lot smarter than me) says that people are going to starve to death, well I guess I have to take the situation pretty seriously.
Back to the point of the article though - CO2 is probably not the main problem in this particular case - it is pesticides. I see no slowing in the use of pesticides in the near future agriculturally and eventually we really will have to figure out a better way to keep bugs from eating our food. When vast estuaries (see the Mississippi delta for one) become totally dead, well it makes it harder and more expensive to get delicious fresh seafood. And I like sushi.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Just thought I'd mention that I agree with you. The reason why we're seeing so many species extinctions now, as compared to the distant past is because we're alive now and the fossil record is not very accurate. The reason why we're seeing so many species extinctions now, as compared to the recent past is because we're looking more now. It's perfectly natural and I can't believe our society has become so fucking bleeding heart that we put the interests of spotted owls over the interests of humans. And, no, none of these extinctions make a lick of fucking difference to our survival. I don't need an ecosystem to support me, I'm a human, we make our own god damn ecosystem.
How we know is more important than what we know.
My apologies, then. I shall strive to read more carefully in the future.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
OH I don't know... maybe there is better money in it. No one is the least bit suspicious of big oil companies like BP spending millions of dollars in researching why oil is bad? Produce less and make more. No one wants to think this could be a scam? We are stuck making houses out of wood. Which cutting trees destroys the planet. Rocks have to be quarreled. Mining is bad. Metal has to be mined and than smelted as well. Or use petroleum products which is destroying the planet as well. Pretty much we have eliminated all the building block materials as being contributors to the earth dooms-day. Since we aren't all going to live in caves (even than we would need to heat our caves,) this pretty much means we are forced to buy these commodities but at a premium price as they get the prices driven up higher and higher with the help of doomsday cults. I'd say a paycheck is a pretty lucrative reason why scientific persons would want to only study one side of the possibilities. The likelihood of the government being a nonpartisan party in scientific research while corporations are spending millions in lobbying (if the government members are not owners of such companies already) is next to nil as well. SO... there is a very great chance of our results of research being bias. I reserve a lot of doubt in the study conclusions I hear. If you want to accept the results you hear on faith, that is your right to do so. But there is room to doubt.
Tina Fey said it, not Sarah Palin.
> The universe is the only existant thing for all time and forever more.
That is an assumption on many levels.
> Consciousness is a word that describes a process, nothing more.
Your confusing Evolution with Awareness.
> We are very close to cracking this process.
Sandly, we are not. For the most part, people don't have a fucking clue what consciousness is. It certainly won't be found in the physical dimension. Science is looking for the answers in the wrong place.
> You are making the same mistakes as most people in searching for answers to questions that you don't even understand in
the first place.
I already have the answers. I was simply pointing out the fallacy in the GP thinking "Since I don't understand the reason of the Universe, God, etc, therefore it doesn't have one." and letting others know that there indeed an answer.
> What is life?
Unless you have been dead, you _know_ NOTHING about Life.
Your fallacy is thinking these are 'dumb questions.' I say this because you don't have a valid frame of reference to even understand the answer. Here is an analogy: If you have been born blind, you have no concept of color. Without a frame of reference, talking about an experience doesn't mean anything. If you don't know what "hot" means, the phrase "Don't touch the hot stove, you will get burnt" means nothing. The only way to truly know something is to experience it.
> Define GOD.
All-That-Is.
All-Parent.
Feel free to pick a definition that fits within your belief system, although I would tend to recommend one of the two listed since they tend to be the most accurate given the limitations and inaccuracies of language. Maybe you will find another one.
> Define the universe first.
I'm assuming you mean this one, and the physical dimension since you never clarified...
An Universe is a manifestation of God's thought.
> Define time first.
A dimension of mind quantized or fractalized; hence the reason one can go "outside" or "transcend" time. At a higher level there is no such thing as time, past or future, as everything is "NOW." At the physical level (if you excuse the irony), time is a meta-physical buffer so that we may learn how to see the consequences of our actions, instead of all the consequences being immediate available.
> Define life first. Define death first.
A transfer of consciousness from one dimension to another. Life is the "entering" into the physical dimension. Death is the "exiting" of the physical dimension.
It would be constructive to find your _own_ answers, instead of others telling you. The only hint I will give is that the traditional definition of Life and Death is a kindergarten level of understanding. Everything is "Alive." Sadly as humans, the general populace is not aware of even 1% of "Life" because people fall into the trap of thinking it is physical. At the physical level, yes you are correct, Death appears to be a polar opposite of Life, but on a higher level, it is not, for there is no such thing as Death on a higher level. Chi, Ki, Prana, Life Force, whatever you want to call it doesn't change its nature or purpose.
>> "The universe is most Logical and Loving."
> Now this remark is just fluffy puppy dogs, pink bunnies, and kittens talk, and has absolutely no practical use in a rational conversation.
It sets the framework from which to understand _why_ things even happen in the first place. As long as people assume the opposite, "The universe doesn't make any sense, god is illogical, the universe is unfair, poor me", they will never understand reality to any depth, and learn the most important lesson: They are in control of their destiny. It's liking asking directions on how I do reach the city (to the East) and being told to go North. It won't take you where you want to go.
Peace
Well, before then, we were just killing each other.
You take that back! My ancestors didn't spend millennia driving megafauna to extinction so you could claim that they were merely homicidal. Give them the credit that any race of bloodthirsty psychotic apes deserves.
But they taste good not because they are crunchy, but because "We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest-quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose." Unfortunately, the Ram's Bladder Cup (which is "fresh Cornish Ram's bladder, emptied, steamed, whipped into a fondue with sesame seeds and then garnished with lark's vomit"), Cockroach Cluster, and Anthrax Ripple are not nearly as popular.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
"...athiest agenda."
It's not actually the athiest agenda, but it is athier than most.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Did you not realize that both the Gros Michel and the Cavendish are the SAME species?
"His name was James Damore."
Half of the existing ones.
Which half?
Let me predict your answer: "the half we don't need."
OK. How does one determine the half we don't need? A good answer does not end with some allusion to violence against "hippies" or "liberals" just because you are feeling frustrated. A good answer has some thought behind it. I'll take a non-response as an admission that you have no idea what you are talking about.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Ok you have surprised me by getting (A) more or less correct, however I'm not sure why you don't accept the explaination. As to some of your other questions...
"Why retreating ice on *GREEN*land should be any concern?"
Nobody expects Greenland's 3 mile deep ice cap to dissapear this century. However at it's current rate it will melt in a couple of centuries and raise the sea level a few meters. I agree that this is not something that will happen in our lifetimes and so does the IPCC, but over the next few decades the rate of melting will affect places like Bangladesh where most of the country is less than a meter above sea level (in some places the ocean has already moved up to 5km further inland causing people to constantly relocate villages). The vast number of refugees this will create will move out of the lowland and head for India causing political instability.
"Why 0.0001% change in atmospheric gases should affect climate more than 0.1% change in solar output?"
First of all the effect of CO2 is not linear, the absorption rate of IR radiation by CO2 has been known for over a century. I also think your figures are wrong - a hell of a lot of research went into creating this graph that shows all the major forcings on the Earth's atmosphere. Note the large error bars and also the fact that areosols (soot, ect) have a large cooling effect that masks about half of the effect of CO2.
"First, nothing significant will happend w.r.t. CO2 emmissions anyway, besides taxes. Be realistic, I do not see world abandoning fossil fuels, that simply will not happen."
The planet will have a global cap and trade system by 2012, the only nation that is seriously standing in the way is the US and both presidential hopefulls say they will implement a cap and trade system. Nobody expects FF to go away, what they are aiming at is reducing emmisions over a 40-50yr period (roughly the life span of a coal plant). Simalar global treaties have been successfull implemented for CFC's, lead in petrol, atmospheric nuclear testing, and a few other exotic air borne chemicals. Even the "pea-soup" fogs in the UK during the 50's were succesfully cleaned up (only to reappear in China half a century later)
"Second, I think that in 20 years horizont we will see what is true and what is not."
I don't think you need to wait that long, the Artic ice cap is half the size it was in the 80's and much, much thinner. Here in Australia it is also recognised as "the straw that broke the camels back" of the Murry Darling river system. The water has been mismanaged (as it has in California) but the worst drought in Australia's history is still continuing to cut our harvest by 50% over what it used to be before the mid-nineties and many scientists are saying our local climate has changed permenently to a dry conditions. Our storm patterns have shifted ever so subtly and a 10% drop in rainfall translates to 30% less water in our dams and rivers (this is because the dry ground soaks up the rain and reduces run-off). Australia was the 4th largest exporter of grain, famine is the real danger with CO2, not wet feet. This hasn't happened overnight, it has been happening for nearly 50yrs. Over the entire contienent the average rainfall has not changed but the north has more rain and the south has less, pity that most of the ground suitable for crops is in the south and SE where the now dry rivers have been depositing silt for millenia.
"In fact, my only concern w.r.t. to AGW is that people will not do something utterly stupid to "stop warming"..."
Yeah, there are some stupid mega-engineering proposals, thankfully I don't see anyone lining up to pay for them. As for a warmer (tropical) world being an overall benifit, this may be true but the problem is not so much the change to 'tropical' as the rate o
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I have to wonder about your attitude and your sig. How do you define "liberal"? How are these "liberals" hurting you to the point where you want to see them "slugged in the teeth"? You need to take a good hard look in the mirror and see if all of the frustration you feel is not self-inflicted. Maybe you have some self-loathing that you should look into. I don't know about your personal issues, but I don't wish to see anyone slugged in the teeth, liberals or conservatives alike. I'm conservative on a lot of issues. Here are some: pro gun rights, tighter immigration policies, extreme fiscal conservatism, more Federalism (i.e. states rights), etc. Do you want to see me get slugged in the teeth just because I call out ignorance when I see it, like I do in this thread in a few places? Sometimes I even call out anger and hatred at the expense of my karma. I'm doing that right now.
Just callin' it like I see it.
That is an assumption on many levels.
This is a classic example of projection - seeing one's own flaws in another person, but not oneself. Here are just a few of your assumptions:
[Consciousness] certainly won't be found in the physical dimension.
An Universe is a manifestation of God's thought.
[Time is] a dimension of mind quantized or fractalized; hence the reason one can go "outside" or "transcend" time.
Time is a meta-physical buffer so that we may learn how to see the consequences of our actions, instead of all the consequences being immediate available.
[Life is] a transfer of consciousness from one dimension to another. Life is the "entering" into the physical dimension. Death is the "exiting" of the physical dimension.
Everything is "Alive."
Chi, Ki, Prana, Life Force, whatever you want to call it doesn't change its nature or purpose.
Unless you have been dead, you _know_ NOTHING about Life.
And last, but not least,
I already have the answers.
Not only is that an assumption, but it also has to be the most egocentric statement ever made.
Your confusing Evolution with Awareness.
No. Biological evolution (as far as we can tell) is a process built out of inexact reproduction and differential survival, while consciousness (as far as we can tell) is a process that is based on the activity of structures in the brain. Different things, but both processes.
As long as people assume the opposite, "The universe doesn't make any sense, god is illogical, the universe is unfair, poor me", they will never understand reality to any depth, and learn the most important lesson: They are in control of their destiny.
I don't know anyone who thinks that way. To mirror your statement, I would say that: The universe does make sense, but not in a preplanned way that makes human concerns the center of the universe - the physics of a fatal car crash make perfect sense, but don't expect that to comfort anyone. God is a concept best explained by psychology - it has nothing to do with anything outside the human mind. The universe isn't really unfair, it just exists - fairness (like beauty) exists only in the eye of the beholder, and is a purely human concern. As for "poor me" - why?
Ah. I see that you prefer to lump your perceived opponents into easily dismissed groups. Apparently they're all of the same mind to you, e.g., no extremists on either tail of the bell curve. I'll grant that there are those who are derisive, and that their rantings haven't helped, and seem only to have stirred you and others like you to resist with insults and invalidation. In particular, your invectives ("some Leftie") are repellent, and do not serve to further your argument. To quote from your own post on another topic
Thanks for clearing up that you've no formal religious education. I'm now curious what you refer to when you claim that you have "enough education". It leaves the impression that you feel that you've had all the education you need.
I wonder at your blanket dismissal of empirical data. The planet is on a distinct warming trend. This isn't merely well-grounded scientific theory. It's a fact. If you insist, I'll provide multiple sources for hard evidence.
You seem to be stuck on the argument that human activity is responsible for global warming. I personally don't care why the Earth's temperature is rising. I'm interested in whether this is a normal cyclical trend. Even if it is, I want to know how these rising temperatures will affect our species, directly and indirectly. It's futile to suggest that we have lived through earlier warming cycles. We must at least consider the present state of the world in comparison to what we know and can discern about the states during earlier warming cycles.
Getting back to the main topic of discussion, I view it as puerile to presume that the extinction--or even a drastic reduction--of any species warrants investigation. Why are they dying off? How will it affect us? Is it something we did, and if so, what is the impact of changing our behavior? If we're not responsible, then what is, and can we influence the outcome, or must we accept the change and compensate for it? More importantly, what is the impact of ignoring the problem?
To wit, if it's a matter of simple economics, I view it as folly to put off remediation simply because of the cost, especially if the main consideration is that some would lose money on the investments that they have already made. Suppose that you discovered mold growing in your home. Would you put off rectification simply because the cost might affect plans you already have for the money? It's not important to determine whose fault it is: The priority is your own health and the value of your home.
If you would take care of your private residence, then by extension you ought to be curious about what's going on with the planet it's parked on. If you'd just ignore the problem in your own home, then you are likely ignorant in other areas of your life as well.
You may wish to consider that responsibility and blame are not interchangeable.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
I really like that so many people want the cold hard facts about whether man is responsible for global warming. And they want the numbers on pieces of paper - to crunch the data before they will decide to go out on a limb and say that they agree this is happening because these numbers say so, and that men do affect the environment around them. Problem is, the numbers can be manipulated to show either - or, and they can take decades to collect and analyze. I don't think we have that much more time. So here are the 'facts' as I've seen them. When I go to my favorite fishing holes, streams, and rivers, I cannot eat the fish I get. They are poison now. Because of man. When I am driving on the interstate, I can 'see' a big city I am approaching well before I get there, over the horizon, by the dome of brown, misty smog and crap in the air above it. The same brown smog that causes 'Know-Zone' days where you should not re-fuel your vehicle until 6PM. The same brown misty crap that causes smog alerts, where the local government has to warn the young and old to stay inside for their own health. Created by man. And I see that my Dad and the other farmers I know are not allowed to use certain pesticides anymore because those pesticides almost made the American Bald Eagle extinct, or they have contaminated water wells for a hundred miles in the recent past. Made by man. Sprayed on a field. Affecting our World. I see stretches of brown, dead trees that have been killed by acid rains because of contaminants originating hundreds of miles away. 30 years ago (?) a huge river caught on fire because of the crap that men were putting into it from many miles upstream. And does anyone remember the Love Canal making so many children so sick ? I see the laws that HAD to be made to stop people from dumping their used motor oil out back, or using and releasing all the CFC's that opened up a hole in the ozone layer ? Which, btw, seems to be closing again since the bans ? I see the Extra Diligence Required now in watershed areas, because what folks dump on the ground - ends up in peoples drinking water for hundreds and thousands of miles. Sept 11th, 12th, 2001. Aircraft are banned from the skies over America. Resulting in some of the most beautiful, blue, and cloudless skies anyone living can remember seeing. No artificial clouds from vapor trails. No unburnt fuel or nasty emissions ( stand on an airport tarmac sometime.. that crap is nasty, and it'll give you a quick headache ), none of that crap pumped into the air on those days, as it is every single day of every single week otherwise. I see signs of mankind affecting the environment in huge swaths, everywhere I look. And I marvel that we have grown so used to seeing it, that we come to accept these things as natural. Like being surprised at the cloudless skies for 3 days in 2001. Or we write it all off as a small price to pay for progress. Like the unfortunate sicknesses and cancers so many suffer when something mankind has been doing ends up being proven to hurt people.. usually many years after the facts, and well after the company responsible has made their money and vanished. So, somebody here wants to tell ME THAT MANKIND CAN'T AFFECT AND DESTROY OUR ENVIRONMENT !!?? That what is happening CAN'T BE OUR FAULT ? BULLSHIT. I got news for ya. Man has become a force of nature in a way. There are so many of us, pumping so many different un-natural things into the air and water and soil, that we are indeed affecting the world we live in. Big Time. That little smokestack you can see out your window, or on your drive to work each day, seems like it can't be cause for much concern. And by itself, maybe it isn't. But you aren't looking at the BIG picture. When you next see that smokestack, imagine many thousands of them right there, all beside each other, and all of them belching out crap. That is a small portion what America is putting into the air. Every Single Day. Now imagine Many Thousands MORE of those smokestacks, each one belching even more crap out of them than the first bu
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
You want a reason why a specific species is worth considering saving ? Ok, I got one. Mankind. If only so your children can see their children be born with just 2 arms and legs, and 10 fingers and toes, in a world they can live in and grow to watch their children grow and live and love. Hope that's enough for you. As for the rest. I assume that since you are reading this that you know about the food chain. How every little ecosystem is somehow tied into every other ecosystem. How the loss of one species or habitat affects other species and habitats. When all the whales and seals and bears and tigers are gone, and your grand-children don't even know what a zoo is, and they can only imagine a beautiful, magnificent world inhabited by such creatures, will you feel vindicated ? When all that is left in this world are safe zones and un-inhabitable zones, and a very few spots that still have decent drinking water, though not enough to bathe in, because the men before them kept on polluting the land and water and let the animals die off because they did not care. Will you feel good about this then ? Each species on the earth has a purpose. Take Bees. Most folks would love to live on without them. But right now scientists and farmers nationwide are very worried about the sudden drop and die off of bees in America. Seems that bees are necessary to pollinate the foods we eat, like corn. And when all the cows and pigs die off, and the fish are all poisoned, I reckon we'll need plenty of corn. So millions of dollars and teams of specialists are now having to be put into a huge effort to determine why the bees are all dying. So now you have mankind, and bees. Do you need more ?
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
Sorry for the anonymous post - I'm on the dead run here.
On the point made in the article about ponds drying up, this has never quite made sense to me. If the climate is warming, would that not imply more moisture in the atmosphere and thus more rain, or at least less evaporation?
Think about the last part of your sentence.
Where do you think the more moisture in the atmosphere comes from? More evaporation. Ponds have very little quantities of water, which are easier to run dry than say.... cold oceans in the arctic.
Now imagine that the ponds run dry and that moisture that goes to the atmosphere ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Also, remember that there are zones in the planet where rain occurs very rarely. Unfortunately, evaporation occurs on a daily basis, especially when the sun shines.
Also, climate change models suggest that areas of precipitation will be changing as warming accelerates. Areas that now get little rain may get much more rain, areas that how get plenty of rain may get much less. Think Atlanta, Georgia in the last few years.
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
too bad it's not the creationists dying out. :) There's no reasoning with them since their views are based on irrationality. How can you reason with somebody who choses irrationality?
Then, once they were gone, we could actually talk about the real topic here (the dying out of an entire class).
Too bad, I thought we might be able to at least eat some green frogs in the future, once the other species die out, but this will not be the case, unfortunately, as I do love fried frog legs... and what about all those beginner science people, who won't know where to find something to dissect? Oh well, looks like soylent green will be human, after all. Well, we can all look on the bright side, at least we'll decrease our worldly population once the animals and plants aren't around to feed us. Kidding aside, what we can do to help is let these animal and plants heal by instead overconsuming the same things again and again, like red meat and black oil, why don't we decide to let our planet rest every once in a while. We need more trees planted, more rivers cleaned, less dumping in oceans, or polluting our sky. Just like the Natives of these lands once did, let the ground lie fallow for a while, let your car take a vacation in the garage, conserve water, electricity, and paper and plastic. We have been conditioned to equate our consumption to our livelyhoods, thinking we have to support the big exploitive companies that bring us our products so conveniently. We need to become determined to rescue ourselves from this 'getting worse' reality by being less commercialistically consumeristic, and more self reliant. I mean, how on Earth did they survive on "Little House On The Prairie"? Plant corn in your backyard, if you have one, along with some tomatoes, beans, squash and lettuce. So many things we can do in so little time means we still have a good chance to Save Our Ship called, Eartha Oceanus. Godspeed to US all, or Evolspeed, which ever you desire.
Irrelavent. CFC114 is used in the process, whether it is used to cool the beers of the technicians or comes in direct contact with the element. The FACT is CFC114 is used.
Again, irrelevant. Whatever the reasons, Paducah is still in operation enriching uranium leaking CFC114.
All modern pre-approved reactor designs are once through cycle, for example the Westinghouse AP-1000. Politically conditions are extremely favourable for Nuclear reactors to be built. Regulatory framework has been discarded (in the guise of the 2005 Energy act).
Uses U-238 !?!?!? Are you sure you don't mean Pu-239? Because I think you are talking about a IFR - which needs significant advances in material technology to be viable. Send a link if you really mean a viable commercial reactor that can use U-238.
Compared to what, domestic emissions? old fridges on rubbish tips? More irrelevance, the plant is in operation - no other enrichment facilities are available. CFC114, a greenhouse gas 20,000 times more potent than C02 is leaking from Paducah at 1 million pounds, thats 453,592.27 kilgrams PER YEAR since the bans began. That is 8 618 255.03 kilograms *since* CFC114 was banned. That's the equivalent of 172,365,100,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the enrichment process alone and does not include the 1 Gigawatt of coal fired power used to run Paducah. What part of 'Paducah is still in operation' do you not understand?
It's always, always the same thing. Nuclear advocates can't take responsibility for the externalities of the nuclear industry, instead 'it's those greenies fault for not letting us build something else'. Build a geologically stable waste dump first and then maybe we can move on from there.
Well a quick google seach produced this straight away
Overall, the production of oxygen in the oceans is at least equal to the production on land if not a bit more
and
Field studies indicate that photosynthesis is impaired first, followed by decreases in protein concentration and changes in pigment composition. As a result, a dramatic decrease in photosynthetic oxygen production can be measured after exposure to solar radiation
Or of course you could just go straight to the official UN monitoring of CFC114 after Montreal Environme
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I thought /.ers believed in evolution?
"Global Warming is real. The only..." No there is one more question: Over what time period? The long term change is towards cooling. That is a fact.
Contrary to your apparent belief, I don't have to prove anything. The burden of proof is on people, who want me to sacrifice various modern-day conveniences to stall/prevent/reverse Global Warming.
That all (or nearly all) such people, under minimum of scratching, reveal themselves to be advocates for "social justice", makes them easily dismissable, yes. Not my fault, though. I don't have to "see their side" of the argument.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The problem with amphibians dying is caused by idiots messing with mother nature. My folks have a camp in upstate NY. The lake used to be stocked with just trout, bullhead and perch for as long as I can remember. Recently sport fishermen from down state started introducing bass and pike into the lake. There are no frogs because the pike eat up all the tadpoles. I'm not a scientist but if you introduce a predator without bothering to think of the impact on the ecosystem its just plain stupid. I saw a bumper sticker the other day, ignore the environment it will go away.
Climate has changed rapidly in the past without humans. Climate research shows that average temperatures have increased many degrees centigrade in a single decade. The old believe that climate changed slowly in the past is long gone. It is amazing that some people still believe it. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/abrupt/story.html
"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt,as far as possible
I would suggest that all who believe in anthropogenic global warming read this. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VF0-3YS9862-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=f5228771e5b2eb13a78e4d93d3f7a004
"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt,as far as possible
Don't we have gene banks for plants and animals both? I just saw a program the other day that said Norway is funding a huge increase in it's arctic gene bank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault). I know that there is a lot of worry over species extinction, but as long as we've got the gene map then we've got the species preserved. I'm fairly confident that we'll be able to clone anything we've got stored. Call me crazy.
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been wide
Apparently monkeys do >_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwegzhXAqaQ NSFW!
Since you seem to lack the critical thinking skills necessary to comprehend what I am saying, allow me to elaborate.
Say we have this food, lets call it Soylent. It's a miracle food, provides people with all the necessary nutrients to live healthy, productive lives. It becomes such a staple part of our lives that we cannot live without it. What do you think would happen if something like the banana problem occurred in Soylent? And don't say we'd just go back to the way it used to be before Soylent, because in this fictional universe, everyone felt exactly like you about biodiversity, so we didn't bother keeping anything else around. We destroyed everything in order to grow more Soylent.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
"Why retreating ice on *GREEN*land should be any concern?" Nobody expects Greenland's 3 mile deep ice cap to dissapear this century.
I think you have completely missed my point. It It is called "greenland" for some reason. I believe that there is still much more ice on Greenland than there was 1000 years ago.
In fact, the very name was my first "sceptical signal" w.r.t. AGW.
"Why 0.0001% change in atmospheric gases should affect climate more than 0.1% change in solar output?" First of all the effect of CO2 is not linear, the absorption rate of IR radiation by CO2 has been known for over a century.
Indeed it was. The absorption rate is nonlinear - it quickly decreases with concentration. You get the most for the first 200ppm.
The rest in models is so called "feedback effect". To get any significant warming, you have to introduce strong positive feedback into the model.
Note the large error bars and also the fact that areosols (soot, ect) have a large cooling effect that masks about half of the effect of CO2.
Well, sceptic would say they are trying to find excuses... :)
The planet will have a global cap and trade system by 2012
So what. New taxes. They will slowly get absorbed into economics and forgotten.
And there is always the China and other emerging countries. I would not hold my breath.
"Second, I think that in 20 years horizont we will see what is true and what is not." I don't think you need to wait that long, the Artic ice cap is half the size it was in the 80's and much, much thinner.
BTW, I wonder what kind of signal would stop AGW hypothesis.
- If there is drop in temperature by 1 C over 10 years?
- If polar caps get stronger than in 80's?
- If CO2 drops without decreasing industrial emmisions?
(I have my gut feelings that AGW proponets would only add another variable to the model to explain "temporary slowdown", but that is just sceptical me :)
OTOH, I think there is one simple signal that will eventually stop the AGW hysteria in media:
- if temperature drops eventually for one winter and heating expenses (carbon tax included) hits U.S. (and/or worldwide) families...
BTW, the funny thing is that I in fact welcome many things positively influenced by AGW hysteria - I like solar panels, I like electric cars, I like nuclear energy. And I think that SUVs are the most stupid cars on the road - I would never buy one (even if my wife desires it strongly...).
You are the one lacking the critical thinking skills. However, your slipery slope skills are fully charged. If you knew how I felt about biodiversity then you would not say what you did, so don't pretend that you do.
There is a difference between watching a thousand species out of tens of millions go extinct and watching 1 out of 2 go extinct.
Your slipery slope arguement only applies to conditions near the later, not the former. We are at the former, where a critical thinker would actualy be.
"His name was James Damore."
If you knew how I felt about biodiversity then you would not say what you did
I can only know about you what you say on here, and it certainly sounded to me like you felt biodiversity was unimportant.
There is a difference between watching a thousand species out of tens of millions go extinct and watching 1 out of 2 go extinct.
When those "thousands of species" all share some common ground (they're all amphibians/pollinators/insectivores/etc) and are a sizable chunk of the total # of different species that share that common ground, no, there is no difference.
Now don't get me wrong, regardless of what we do, the planet can and most likely will bounce back. The planet has had catastrophic extinctions in the past, and it has recovered. The question though, is will we bounce back with it?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
I can only know about you what you say on here, and it certainly sounded to me like you felt biodiversity was unimportant.
Yet I didnt say that it was...
I ask you, what is the practical difference between Extinct and Almost Extinct aside from the emotional horror that a species might be "lost forever?" Is it really reasonable to do anything more than zoo captivity in order to satisfy those emotions?
The slippery slope goes both ways. The calls for biodiversity is the same as the "for the children" justification used in other walks of life. Its meant to invoke an emotional response for lack of a persuasive reasoned arguement.
"His name was James Damore."
stranger_to_himself: Biodiversity is very important.
You: Why? Feel free to justify your opinion with evidence.
Now it could just be that you like a good debate, playing devil's advocate, or what have you, but when you simply leave it at that, it is not unwarranted to believe that you feel biodiversity to not be important.
Now I too may have misrepresented myself. Please don't think that I care if a species is "lost forever," it was never my intent to imply that I was arguing from the emotional viewpoint of "all creatures are cute and must be protected forever and never ever ever change." All that I'm discussing is the underlying ecosystem.
Ecosystems are in a balance, some more precarious than others. The problem is, we do not truly understand how these extinctions will end up effecting things. It could be that all those amphibians did not have enough of an impact on their ecosystem for it to be noticed when they go missing. Or the situation could end up becoming analogous to rabbits in Australia. But again, we do not know.
Now I'm also not saying that we need to completely rid ourselves of industrial expansion, simply that we should not ignore such events if we expect to continue to progress as a species.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-