Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds

Tibor the Hun writes "NPR reports that Susan Solomon, one of the world's top climate scientists, finds in her new study that global warming is now irreversible. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that even if we could immediately cease our impact on pollution and greenhouse gasses emissions, global climate change would continue for more than a thousand years. The reason is the saturation of oceans with carbon dioxide. Her study looked at the consequences of long-term effect in terms of sea-level rise and drought."

Comments

First post

[Anonymous Coward]

We all gona die, but at least I got my first post...

Re:First post

[abuelos84]

That was really amusing. You, Sir, are a fine slashdotter.

Re:First post

[psychicninja]

Weather is not even close to the same thing as climate. Remember when we learned that in High School freshman science class? I can say the average temperature will go up over the next number of years, but that doesn't mean I know if it will be cloudy on March 5th, 2010.

Re:First post

[SanityInAnarchy]

Global warming brought to you by the same people who can't tell you what the temperature will be next week, yet they can tell you what it will be a thousand years from now.

I can't tell you what temperature it will be tomorrow. We've had days as cold as -15 or so (with wind chill) and as warm as 50 degrees Fahrenheit, all in the same winter.

But I can tell you that it is winter, and without looking at the forecast, I can tell you that it will probably be cold. And I can also tell you, without much difficulty, that summer will be mostly warm, and winter will be mostly cold.

Like the REST of the planet has NOTHING to do with the climate.

Before humans, were forests ever clear-cut? There were forest fires, as a healthy part of the lifecycle of a forest, but were they ever completely cut down to roots?

Before humans, was there ever an atomic explosion on the surface of this planet?

Before humans, was there a way for animals on the opposite end of the planet to communicate with each other?

So why is it so hard to believe that humans could be raising the average temperature of the planet by a few degrees every year?

There may actually be good arguments against global warming, but you're just embarrassing yourself, here. Ice shelves are melting. They are melting farther than before, and faster than before. There is more carbon dioxide, and the average temperature is rising.

Yes, we've had ice ages in the past. Yes, it's possible the planet will survive us -- in fact, it's more than likely that "the planet", the dirty ball of rock hurtling through space, will still be here. But I don't particularly want to live through an ice age, if I can help it -- or the opposite.

Let me ask you something. Since most scientists who actually have more than a passing familiarity with the subject overwhelmingly agree that climate change is happening -- since Ford himself has outright admitted that global warming is real, and that the internal combustion engine is contributing to the problem -- where's the motive for such a vast conspiracy? Or if it's vast stupidity, don't you think an intelligent scientist would have shown it to be so, and provided evidence to that effect -- rather than yet more evidence to support that the climate is changing, and that we are doing it?

Re:First post

[Jason Earl]

Yes, weather is not the same thing as climate, but that doesn't mean that these people have a better grasp on climate than they do with weather. If anything understanding climate is more difficult than the weather. We have a pretty good grasp of weather patterns. Good enough, anyway, that I can make a pretty good daily forecast with nothing more than a barometer and a thermometer (and maybe a quick peek out the window).

We know far less about the climate other than it has always been in constant flux.

Re:First post

[TubeSteak]

Yes, it's possible the planet will survive us -- in fact, it's more than likely that "the planet", the dirty ball of rock hurtling through space, will still be here.

I move that if the human race is going to die off, the last survivors use nukes to crack the planet in half.
If we can't have the planet, no one can.

Does the motion have a second?

Re:First post

[FireStormZ]

"Before humans, was there ever an atomic explosion on the surface of this planet?"

Volcano's and Asteroids have put *way* more heat out than the atomic explosions we humans have set off.

"Before humans, was there a way for animals on the opposite end of the planet to communicate with each other?"

thats like saying Before flying animals could creatures go higher in the atmosphere to breath out their CO2?

"So why is it so hard to believe that humans could be raising the average temperature of the planet by a few degrees every year?"

A few degrees every year? we would all be dead. The fact is the 'rapid' temperature curve we were on is petering off and reversing

" During 2006, the doomsters were predicting that 2007 would be the hottest year on record, so why have we seen no reports about this?

        The answer is simple - 2007 turned out to be the coolest year for 30 years. It is also the case that there has been no global warming since 1998. In fact, since 1998, there has been steady cooling.

        Even more dramatic is the fact that the most recent computer model predictions indicate that there will be no more global warming for the next ten years. But the doomsters say that, after this ten-year period, global warming will come back with a vengeance. Why?

        Certainly, mankind's production of carbon dioxide (CO2) has continued to increase since 1998 and will continue to increase, particularly since countries such as China and India say that their economic growth comes first, so they do not intend worrying too much about CO2 production."

http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/there-is-no-evidence-man-made-co2-causes-climate-change-2008-07-04

Re:First post

[FireStormZ]

Right like all those folks in the 70's who were predicting a massive iceage... oh wait they moved onto golbal warming, than to global 'climate change' (something that always happens), and next to?

Re:First post

[frogzilla]

There's probably no point but this simply must be replied to.

Firstly, weather and climate are different and distinct problems. Weather is the current state of the atmosphere. It is a process sensitively dependent on initial conditions, i.e. chaotic (at least to some degree). It is now and will always remain imposible to predict with accuracy more than, say, two weeks in advance. It won't matter how much more precisely you can collect your initial conditions or how perfectly you can design your model the state of the weather in your forecast will diverge from the observed state. This is not new. This is not a surprise. You just don't have a clue.

Secondly, climate is the statistical summary of the weather over different spatial and temporal scales. It is not chaotic. In fact it seems that, though complex and though driven by many interconnected positive and negative feedbacks, it is not something that we can't work out. Changes in the climate, the averages, the extremes and the standard deviations of different observables are obtainable with a (relatively) greater degree of confidence for long times into the future. This is an endeavour where improvements to understanding of the physics of the interconnected systems does lead to incremental improvements in the "forecast" of the climate.

Realise also that studying the climate will lead to understand of how the statistical distributions of weather events are most likely to change. The most advanced climate models will never predict exactly how great (or small) the additional rainfall will be. It will never predict the precise hottest (or coldest) new temperature extreme. What it will tell you is how likely such events will become in a changed climate compared to today.

Individual floods, heat waves, droughts, snow storms, cold snaps or what have you are all weather events that occur following statistical distributions in time and space. They are weather events and unattributable to anything but the state of the atmosphere in the (relatively brief) time before they are observed.

Does that make it more clear?

Also, and I've basically said it above, global warming or climate change does not mean we won't have cold winters any more! Even though people perceived 2008 as being cold in many northern latitude countries it is still one of the top ten warmest years ever observed.

Re:First post

[caluml]

if it will be cloudy on March 5th, 2010

It will be, I guarantee it. You didn't specify where.

Re:First post

[ckaminski]

Global Climate Oscillation! I like that one. Heard it here first folks!

Re:First post

[theodicey]

If anything understanding climate is more difficult than the weather

You're making an invalid assumption. Many systems are easier to predict and understand on a large scale.

For example, if I boil a pot of water, I can easily predict how its overall temperature will increase. It's much harder -- impossible in fact -- to predict exactly where bubbles will nucleate.

Overall temperature = climate. Location of the bubbles = weather.

Re:First post

[Foobar of Borg]

Right like all those folks in the 70's who were predicting a massive iceage... oh wait they moved onto golbal warming, than to global 'climate change' (something that always happens), and next to?

For about the billionth time on this site: It was only one or two articles in news magazines and a collection of scientifically ignorant journalists who were saying there was going to be another ice age. Global warming was well accepted even then. Which brings me to a more important question. Why do you constantly repeat such easily debunked falsehoods? You are like a creationist who still rants about the Piltdown Man or irreducible complexity.

Re:First post

[Jason Earl]

A huge part of the problem is that the folks going on about "global warming" have ridiculously simple models that they are using to try and predict a very complex system. We are just scratching the surface when it comes to understanding the systems that regulate global temperatures.

Dr. Solomon has a computer model that she believes tells the future. Well, I have a neighbor that is convinced that the position of the stars in the skies predicts the future as well.

I am not saying that Dr. Solomon isn't right, but I will say that I am skeptical until there is some evidence that her computer model is actually useful. The earth is definitely not a pot of water.

Re:First post

[shilly]

Interesting to hear about your neighbour. I have a neighbour who also is convinced about the stars and the future, too, with one subtle difference: she believes that she can tell where the stars will be in the future. And guess what? Thanks to the wonders of modern astronomical models, she's mostly right. The whole value of models of the physical world is that they can provide some level of predictive accuracy. Pompous announcements that Dr Solomons hasn't convinced you of the validity of her model until you've seen "some evidence that [it] is actually useful" just make you come across as an ass. Have you reviewed the various articles she's published on the details of her model and do you have the necessary learning (note, not qualification, but hours of intensive study) that enable you to make an informed judgement? I heartily doubt it but stand willing to be corrected. If you have, perhaps you'd care to list the detail of where her papers are wrong, plus links to the letters you've written to the various learned journals she's been published in, where you explained how she was wrong. That, after all, is how science is done.

Re:First post

[FireStormZ]

So disagreeing is now trolling? I see the only reasonable folks are the ones who agree with you..

"since 1998, there has been steady cooling." is a troll? The fact is we are getting cooler over the past half decade (or more)..

Re:First post

[FireStormZ]

"That sure as hell proves that man can not be responsible for Global Warming"

I never said that proved any such thing but posts that follow the logic that because we set off a few bombs maybe that has something to do with it. *if* global warming is caused by man its not because of the nuclear weapons that have been set off.

"but you also claim there is no Global Warming, even that"

I don't claim anything over the past ten years temperature have been *dropping* to the point now where we are now at 1980 temps. Also the readjustment of 'top world temps' that took place last year moved the hottest years on record back to the 30's. This could be a blip, we could be warming, and I can be convinced of that.

I'm just not a climatological chicken little and I am skeptical of folks who are especially when 'climate change' is used by everyone and their mother to push pet causes like birth control, vegan diets,

Re:First post

[Zorlon]

I've seen this argument before and I also have been asked if I believe the earth is flat since I question the validity of climatology findings. Climate is more like economics and we know how easy it is to predict economic fluctuations :) If you read some books on complexity and chaos theory you will find that chaotic systems have a high degree of unpredictability. One of the best books on the subject is The Essence of Chaos by Edward Lorenz (a meteorologist) Comparing climatology science to Newton's discovery of orbital mechanics is a bit of a stretch. The planets orbits can be observed and checked in a few days. Climate predictions would need how long to prove? 10 years, 100? Climate is probably more like weather. We have lots of weather models and a big incentive to predict the weather but we can not reliably predict the weather more than 10 days into the future. How can we then say that we can predict the future climate? I also think that politics has muddied the water my insisting that man made CO2 is the main factor driving climate change. Of course I would like us to get off of foreign oil so I would be content with "Global Warming" being a "Convenient Myth" instead of an "Inconvenient Truth"

Re:First post

[Khyber]

I'm so sick of this.

WE HAVE ICE CORE DATA. WE ARE NOT IN A COOLING PERIOD. We are nearing the peak of our warming period. Then for another 5K years it'll slowly decline, we hit an ice age, and slowly it works back up.

Ice core samples from all over the globe confirm this. Humans have practically NIL impact upon the cycle itself. One of my friends just did a trip to Antarctica for this very study.

Re:First post

[Lars T.]

I don't claim anything over the past ten years temperature have been *dropping* to the point now where we are now at 1980 temps. Also the readjustment of 'top world temps' that took place last year moved the hottest years

No they haven't. Either you are lying or you are an ignorant fool. And repeating doesn't make it so.

Re:First post

[toddestan]

"since 1998, there has been steady cooling." is a troll? The fact is we are getting cooler over the past half decade (or more).

Why 1998? Is it because 1998 was an unusually warm year, making it an outlier? It's may be true to say that 1998 is the warmest year on record, but to use that to imply that the climate is now cooling off is simply wrong.

You may find this random chart off of Google handy:
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/t1975.jpg

Re:First post

[FlyingBishop]

Actually, the Earth really is at least in part a pot of water, with a constant heat source. There's a gaseous lens which permits some heat to enter and some to escape, and various chemicals can enter the pot of water, both from the bowl, and the gaseous lens. If you can measure the overall content of the lens, what chemicals will seep into the lens and the water, and the heat source, it seems pretty reasonable to make the sort of claims she's making. Obviously there are bubbles in both the water and the lens, but I'm prepared to accept that they're transient and not particularly significant. Even if 50% had consistently different behavior, I would expect that it would be sufficiently random that over the course of a decade only the predictable elements would be particularly significant.

But then I'm not a climatologist.

Re:First post

[I)_MaLaClYpSe_(I]

So, if I get you right, you say that you will not act or even stop trying to convince other people that everything is just fine until the poles are molten, the gulf stream redirected, the climate drastically changed and with it the world economy ruined, mass extinctions going on, the oxygen in the air becoming scarce etc.?

I mean, WTF?

I do notw know which scientist got the best model for the climate but here are some facts:

• Due to an improved understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report states with very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] Watts per square metre (W/m^2).
  • Note 1: Radiative forcing is the change in the balance between radiation coming into the atmosphere and radiation going out. A positive radiative forcing tends on average to warm the surface of the Earth, and negative forcing tends on average to cool the surface.
  • Note 2: At the Equator, the Sun provides approximately 1,000 W/m^2 on the Earth's surface.

• Annual average Arctic sea ice extent shrunk by 2.7 per cent per decade. Sea-ice decreases overall in summer by 7.4 per cent.

• Temperatures at the top of permafrost layer have generally increased since the 1980s by up to 3C.

• The maximum area covered by seasonally frozen ground has decreased by about 7% in the Northern Hemisphere since 1900 - in spring by up to 15 per cent.

• Paleoclimate information supports the interpretation that the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1300 years. The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period (about 125,000 years ago), reductions in polar ice volume led to 4 to 6 metres of sea level rise.

• Annual fossil CO2 emissions increased from an average of 6.4 gigatons of carbon (GtC) per year in the 1990s, to 7.2 GtC per year in 2000-2005.

• CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20 per cent from 1995 to 2005, the largest in any decade in at least the last 200 years.

• For the next two decades a warming of about 0.2C per decade is projected for a range of emission scenarios.

• Even if the concentrations of all greenhouse gases and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1C per decade would be expected.

• Temperatures in excess of 1.9 to 4.6C warmer than pre-industrial sustained for millennia will lead to eventual melt of the Greenland ice sheet. This would raise sea level by 7 metres - comparable to 125,000 years ago.

Source.

WTF?

I mean, does this not sound plausible? I mean, to me it seems to be highly likely that our process of changing the composition of our atmosphere by releasing gigatons of previously absorbed CO2 would yield some big disturbing change.

So, here you are, not wanting to "believe" this "myth". Okey, so what? What if it turns out to be a real myth? And what if it turns out not to be a myth?

By the time that you will find yourself convinced of this immanent threat to humanity, it will be to late. To late for you, your children, your grandchildren, humanity. As the article tells, in a way it is already to late. Which by no means should be read as: "It is to late to act.". No, like, if you are a smoker, you might already have done some irreversible damage to your body. Which does not mean there would be no purpose in giving up smoking, right?

And what the hell do you think is convenient about your lacy ignorant "I-am-such-a-great-doubter" attitude? You get to drive your SUV without a bad conscience while ruining the planet you have borrowed from your children with it. Oh, how inconvenient that is.

You know

OOOK

[afidel]

So they are saying we will have the opposite of the Younger Dryas no matter what we do. That may be true, and it might not be true, but I think it's a bit premature to say that our computer models are so good that they can definitively say what global conditions will be like in 1,000 years. Considering how few variables we model let alone the level of detail we have on those data points I think it's a bit foolish to say we can say much of anything definitive from our models at those type of timescales.

Re:OOOK

[QuantumG]

It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again. The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change. The whole concept that new technology means you can't just extrapolate seems to be lost on them.

Re:OOOK

[thermian]

It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again. The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change. The whole concept that new technology means you can't just extrapolate seems to be lost on them.

You don't know the power of the lecture circuit :)

Seriously, these guys make money by saying these things. Ever heard of anyone making money by saying everything will be fine and lovely?

What all these people seem to miss is that our planet, and life in general will make out just fine, its *us* who are in trouble, us and the rest of the specialised mammals. Ok, some fish may get their shit fucked up as well, but its unlikely to the point of impossible that everything will die.

No, much more likely we'd be gone, and in a few tens of millions of years, its humans who'se bones are being displayed in museum, and made the subject of animated documentaries.

Re:OOOK

[afidel]

I don't disagree wrt reducing emissions, I just think that climate models are starting to become the Microsoft Excel of the scientific community. In business we give Excel to quants and get horribly flawed models that have no relation to reality because they do not understand that there is data they are missing which their model relies upon. I think we are getting to much the same thing with climate models, they put in their handful of datapoints and tweak the model till it conforms then they run it for x years in the future and claim that is somehow a prediction for future conditions.

Re:OOOK

[dbIII]

There was mass starvation in the 1970s, just not where you were living.

Re:OOOK

[polar red]

Read up on how the climate is modelled please.

Re:OOOK

[wrook]

Absolutely! I hear you brother. I've totally lost confidence in *them*. Let's face it. Every time *they* have predicted the end of the world, *they* have been wrong. EVERY SINGLE TIME!

I mean, if once -- only one time -- *they* got it right, I'd be willing to listen. But let's face it. *They* must be absolutely insane, because in my long life (and my father's and his father's before him) I have *never* EVEN ONCE died a horrible death from a world wide disaster of our own making.

And like you say, technology *always* saves us (a fact that *they* are always too eager to sweep under the rug). Every time technology has saved us from imminent disaster, every single time mind you, it has been *technology* that has saved us. *They* would have us think that there are limits to what technology can do for us. But who are *they* anyway to say such nonsense. Let's just look at history.

I'm just so tired of all this crap. I say, let's forget these stupid scare mongers and get back to something *important* like getting terrorists out of our beautiful country!
]

Re:OOOK

[linhares]

It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again.

Did you actually read it? I guess not. There are no predictions in the book whatsoever, the book has a 100 year timeline and a bunch of possible scenarios. Scenario #2 is unfolding, with exponential rise in food consumption, energy consumption, pollution _AS DECADES PASS_. China, if growing at 7% per annum in, say, coal mining, will grow 2^5 its current consumption in 5 decades. THAT IS OF FUCKING GIGANTIC BIBLICAL SHIT PROPORTIONS.

The planet is not infinite. Exponential growth will hit a ceiling, whether you want to believe it or not. Any nerd should know that.

Re:OOOK

[Evil Pete]

Limits to Growth wasn't bullshit. Its predictions are pretty much coming to pass, and pretty much on time. There is a myth that they predicted all apocalyptic shit in the 20th century. I remember when Limits came out .... its predictions were aimed squarely at the early to mid 21st century.

Re:OOOK

[Toonol]

"Premature" is a kind way to put it. Moronic is more accurate. And I'm not a global warming denier; I think it's likely happening. But I'm MORE of a believer in mathematics, statistics, and logic, and those fields tell me that making any statement with that much confidence based on a low resolution, incompletely understood highly iterative model with many missing variables is not far removed from casting bones.

Re:OOOK

[KDR_11k]

So what does technology have to do with this? You mean we'll develop something that removes the CO2 in the future? It's not going to be very energy efficient though, getting the stuff back down will cost a lot more than we gained by releasing it in first place.

Starvation could be avoided with more efficient food growing but merely increasing efficiency won't undo the CO2 we emitted, merely prevent us from releasing more. What is being predicted here is the behaviour of the atmosphere and this researcher claims that we've reached the point where human interaction no longer matters and the planet has gone into a self-reinforcing cycle. You can't extrapolate human action but the planet itself behaves a lot more predictably than humans.

Re:OOOK

[Ice Tiger]

The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change.

"According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 25,000 people died of starvation every day in 2003" - Wikipedia article on starvation.

Mass starvation doesn't mean that everyone in the world is starving at once.

Re:OOOK

[theheadlessrabbit]

Its only 35 years ago every "Expert" and "Scientist" (sorry to kill your God here Atheists) was telling us we were heading for a new Ice Age.
Don't take my word for it, look it up.

ok, i did look it up. here are the results: /quote>...They find very few papers (7 in total) predict global cooling. This isn't surprising. What surprises is that even in the 1970s, on the back of 3 decades of cooling, more papers (42 in total) predict global warming due to CO2 than cooling.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-1970s-science-said-about-global-cooling.html

i don't know how you define the word "every, but "7 out of 42" is not certainly not how I would define it.

Re:OOOK

[rastoboy29]

A thousand years is not a long timescale in geological terms, and those are the terms they are dealing with.

Not saying I know they're research is perfect or anything, but I think it's entirely possible they are right.

Re:OOOK

[Hognoxious]

Ever heard of anyone making money by saying everything will be fine and lovely?

That guy from Rome, the one who wears those funny hats.

Re:OOOK

[Arker]

Yes, but the fact is, they arent starving due to a global food shortage as predicted.

They're starving due to politics. There is more than enough food being produced on earth to feed everyone on it. And the predictions we're referencing were clearly based on the idea that enough food could simply not be produced on this planet for the number of people now living on it. Advances in agricultural efficiency have dramatically increased the effective carrying capacity of the planet. The problem we're actually facing is not a lack of food - food is going to waste in some areas while people starve in other areas.

Re:OOOK

[FTWinston]

I dunno, the models are generally pretty damn good at long term trends. Predicting the weather next week remains an exercise in futility, but for trends on the scale of decades & centuries, they're pretty damn good generally. For 1000 years, it may not predict weather trends particularly accurately, but for a question as simple as "will this CO2 dissolve/disappear within 1000 years" I don't see much to criticise...

Re:OOOK

[secondhand_Buddah]

Ever heard of anyone making money by saying everything will be fine and lovely?

Pop down to your local church of choice next Sunday...

Re:OOOK

[Lars T.]

http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/club_rome_a.html

The Meadows & al. report is probably, just like the IPCC report on climate change today, among these documents that 99% of the people that quote them never read, given the quantity of conclusions supposedly included in this paper that are not found once it is read. ... In short, this "famous" report, that some accuse today of having all possible flaws because no disaster happened yet (!), is nothing else than a scientific paper a little long, presenting the research work that was done to build a model, use it, and the results obtained.

Re:OOOK

[Lars T.]

The same people who claim scientists predicted mass starvation in the 70s are the same people who claim scientists predicted a new ice age in the 70s. We know they are just misinformed about what scientists (as opposed to the media) actually said. Well, not the media, but those who didn't like what was actually said.

Re:OOOK

[HuguesT]

Anyway, all sort of apocalyptic things did happen in the 20th century. I remember two world wars in addition to many more localized ones, and I think we got pretty damn near a nuclear holocaust at least once in 1961. Mass starvation? check. Tyranny, oppression, mass murders and genocides ? check. On a scale never seen before.

I would be foolish to think things are fine and dandy right now and will keep on improving forever.

Re:OOOK

[Zironic]

Predicting climate is somewhat similar to trying to estimate what time a train will arrive at the station, predicting the weather is somewhat similar to trying to estimate at what millimeter of the train track the train will be in the future.

Re:OOOK

[Wonko the Sane]

Its only 35 years ago every "Expert" and "Scientist" (sorry to kill your God here Atheists) was telling us we were heading for a new Ice Age.

And since that time, scientists have rejected that theory since it doesn't match the available evidence. The process works.

Let me know when cleargy start modifying their religious doctrines when confronted with objective evidence.

Re:OOOK

[SL Baur]

I'm not a global warming denier

"Global warming denier"? Are people actually using that term?

If one disagrees with the dogma of the day, that makes one a "denier"? Sigh. Political correctness has gotten way out of hand.

Re:OOOK

[Stephen Samuel]

You don't know the power of the lecture circuit :)

Seriously, these guys make money by saying these things. Ever heard of anyone making money by saying everything will be fine and lovely?

You mean the shills paid for by big oil and other industrial entities? Some of them seem to be the same people who got paid to tell people that the jury was still out on tobacco causing cancer and lung disease -- until a lawsuit resulted in the release of thousands of pages that indicated that the tobacco companies were fully aware that tobacco and cancer were pretty clearly linked..

Re:OOOK

[khallow]

Saying that it wasn't bullshit doesn't make it so. The fundamental claim of "Limits to Growth" was that society needed to both halt expansion of population via population control and halt expansion of capital. The thing they never got was that expansion of capital is necessary to halt population growth. All of the economically well-off societies, the "Developed World" have low or even negative population growth rates once you take away immigration. Further, the entire world has improved substantially over the past 35 years economically and in the average human's standard of living. This isn't an effect predicted by the Limits to Growth.

What does this mean? It means that the idea that one needs to limit both population growth and capital/economic growth is in error. If we had attempted to control society as per the recommendations of the Club of Rome, we would have been deliberately and foolishly restraining activities that increase capital. That in turn would have reduced the overall prosperity of the entire world and increased the global population growth rate. In other words, the very actions meant to prevent human die-offs would have hastened their appearance.

Re:OOOK

[khallow]

It makes a wrong prediction. Namely that growth of capital is bad and needs to be halted. There is no understanding that capital can make more efficient use of natural resources. That is, that capital can continue to growth without a corresponding increase in resource consumption.

Re:OOOK

[Neuticle]

They're starving due to politics.

Case in point: Zimbabwe

10 years ago, it was a breadbasket that fed itself and had food left over for export.
Today it's a basket-case where people are starving to death.

The land is still there, the people are still there, and no plague, blight* or drought destroyed production. It was pure, 100% politics that sent Zimbabwe down the crapper.

(*however, Mugabe may count as a blight, plague or both)

Re:OOOK

[Jherico]

If one disagrees with the dogma of the day, that makes one a "denier"?

No. If one denies global warming is happening (independent of whether global warming is actually happening) then one is a global warming denier. Trying to frame the argument in such a way to promote the idea that people who deny global warming exists are somehow rebellious free thinkers (as opposed to short-sighted morons motivated by profit or politics) doesn't make use of the term 'global warming denier' somehow evidence of political correctness run amok.

Re:OOOK

[theodicey]

If you don't believe the consensus of scientists in the field, but are actually publishing sensible articles in science journals, and then you're a critic.

If you disbelieve scientists who are, individually and collectively, vastly better informed about every climate issue than you are because...you read something on the internet...then you're a denier.

Failure of logic

[QuantumG]

Wow. I hope the paper is not as inane as her quotes. There's a difference between passive conservation and active geo-engineering. What Solomon is trying to say is that even if we all hold hands and try to conserve that it'll make no difference because the damage is already done. Of course, to acknowledge this is difficult if you buy into environmental conservationism, as Solomon obviously does, so you end up with quotes like "I guess if it's irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it".

Re:Failure of logic

[KibibyteBrain]

The interesting thing is, to assuming that geoengineering as a solution is impractical as much of the scientific community seems to suggest strikes me as odd being we have basically accidentally geoengineered ourselves into this mess, assuming the current causation theory is correct. Just hope we don't act carelessly in trying to come up with a fix and end up making the problem worse.(see the park service fighting small forest fires in Yellowstone for about a century...)

I know what to blame...

[RuBLed]

Damn whales exhaling in our oceans.

Re:well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dad?

Positive feedback loops.

[blind biker]

I am not surprised. I have been pondering the various, strong positive feedback loops involved with climatic phenomena, like the release of gigantic amounts of methane from the Siberian permafrost due to warming, the decrease of vitality and eventual death of plankton in the oceans (main source of oxygen for the planet, as well as main source of food for fish) due to increased sea temperatures, decrease of albedo due to melting of icecaps and glaciers, decrease of rainfall and consequent decrease of forests (that the Indonesian and Amazonian forests have been mercilessly burnt, doesn't help), to mention just a few. I am sure the better informed reader can add a few more of these positive feedback loops, but in my humble opinion, these are the stronger ones, and make the process of global warming unstoppable.

Re:Positive feedback loops.

[phooka.de]

I am sure the better informed reader can add a few more of these positive feedback loops, but in my humble opinion, these are the stronger ones, and make the process of global warming unstoppable.

You're so right! We did it! Humanity has achieved what supervolcanoes with all their CO2-emissions failed to achieve - massive positive feedback loops! Unstoppable!

For 4.5 billion years, earth might have maintained its fragile balance between supercold and Venus' twin brother engulved in heat and acid rain. It's completely beyond me how that could have lastet so long - no, it must be our special state of being the first intelligent living things, the first walking non-animals (clearly an abomination that has to be punished by nature) which tipped the scales. Now we're heading the Venus-way.

Of course this is bullshit.

Earth is currently relatively cool. It used to be a lot warmer most of the time. Whatever we do, the best we can hope to achieve is to heat it up to relatively warm and to do so quickly enough to cause mass extincion of plants and animals, opening massive ecological niches for new species to conquer.

We're possibly endangering human civilization in the process with it being undescided if the species will survive this or not. But the odds are, that we're positioned pretty well. We can eat both plants and meat and we've proven to be formidabely adoptable to various climates. Anyhow, even a complete breakdown of civilization will be unlikely to push us further back than rural africa, native americans in the rainforests or natives to australia in the outback.

So no, we're not destroying the planet. That's something completely impossible for us and quite unimaginable even for the future (if you define earth as a roughly ball-shaped lump of mostly rock floating around the sun).

No, we're not destroying life on earth. Life has endured worse than us and most of the biomass of the planet is presumably living underground anyway (as in bacteria with very slow metabolism capable to "feed" on the energies released by natural radioactivity found in very deep deep mines in south-africa, to name just one example.)

No, we're propably not destroying humanity either. Would be quite hard to achieve, given how far spread it is and how well adjusted to how many climates. And how it was so before the modern age.

But yes, we might endanger gouvernments, civilization as we know it and so forth. And Venice, of course, unless the dutch take over Italy. But why would they?

Nothing New

[DesScorp]

It's the old "Limits To Growth" bullshit back again. The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change. The whole concept that new technology means you can't just extrapolate seems to be lost on them.

And this kind of hysterics has been around a long time. Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan. According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7. These professional pessimists have always underestimated mankind's ability to change, adapt, and solve problems. They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.

Re:Nothing New

[QuantumG]

In 1898, delegates from across the globe gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.
[...]
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.

And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the nineteenth-century city -- for personal transportation, freight haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite literally starve.

All efforts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.

So when I say Limits To Growth is "bullshit" I'm clearly being inaccurate, I should have said "horse shit" :)

Re:Nothing New

[BrainInAJar]

Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan

Woah there... as a philosophy geek that's done entire courses on Leviathan alone, I can say definitively that you are way out of left field with that one. Hobbes predicted nothing of the sort no matter how you interpret it. The "nasty, brutish, and short" comment was about man devoid of any form of governance such as the literary scenario he laid out for the condition of man in the past.

A horrible misrepresentation of a text like that'll garner you a C- at best by anyone who has actually read the book

Re:Nothing New

[H0p313ss]

You will note however that horses are pretty thin on the ground these days in most major cities. Hopefully the same will soon be true of gas guzzling SUVs.

Re:Nothing New

[MadKeithV]

Or humans.

Re:Nothing New

[Nutria]

it's just that 1st world countries don't care enough to.

Bullshit.

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T bullshit, because it sure wasn't George W preventing the food trucks from rolling into Darfur.

Re:Nothing New

[im_thatoneguy]

And just how did they get out of this horseshit disaster?

By recognizing the problem and finding a solution. Street cars, subways and eventually motor vehicles.

You can recognize the foresight of the New York administration of the late 19th century for recognizing that their current path was not a sustainable one and began planning and investing in solutions to the problem.

But no. I'm sure you're right. If we just completely avoid the problem then the inevitability of progress will happen without any research. Without any change and without any effort.

Meanwhile billions go hungry. Tens of thousands die every day from malnutrition. But no I'm sure you're right there was no food crisis. That's why the UN didn't just have a FOOD CRISIS SUMMIT this summer.

Don't get me wrong. When it comes to technology I'm the most hopeless idealistic optimist there is but I also recognize there is a cost. That right now we are wrecklessly spending resources at an astronomically disproportionate rate to our rate of innovation and that we're like kids in a candy store unsupervised.

We're really living in a bubble of inexpensive and practically free energy. Energy is dirt cheap right now. Commodity materials are dirt cheap. If we don't critically reevaluate our energy sources and our resource recycling very soon the bubble will pop.

We have a limited window of nearly free energy and inexpensive commodity materials to build the infrastructure to ensure we don't see an end to cheap energy and inexpensive materials. If we can build renewable power sources *now* then we can continue to use our fossil fuels for fertilizer and plastic. If we wait until energy prices double, triple, quadruple and on and on then your plastic electronics are going to see the plastic quadruple in cost. If we wait until the energy prices double, triple and quadruple the cost of processing the aluminum in the windmill is going to quadruple.

Avert the energy bubble crashing by saving the 'free food' for when they're needed.

We are already starting to see population constriction. LA is importing almost all of its water. Where do you get more fresh water? Desalination? That's great when energy is practically free, but if fresh water starts costing energy and energy is from limited poorly scaleable sources such as coal then you're going to see the cost of water rise with energy.

Everything is getting tied into our energy supply. Our food. Our water. This is all fine as long as energy stays cheap. Fossil fuels are a limited supply and are requiring more and more energy to extract. We can only expect their prices to rise and rise and rise.

You can say that "technology found a way to solve the environmental problems of the 19th century." and you would be right. They were to STOP POLLUTING. We could be saving a lot of money if we just dumped and polluted like the 19th century. But instead of just throwing up our hands and saying "Oh! Hey! Technology will save us." They actually bought the technology that would save us and accepted the price tag. It's not free.

We can keep continue tapping our free energy credit line but we need to realize it is a bubble. It will increase in price. Our lives are becoming intimately tied to its cost and the best time to start planning for the future is yesterday. These technological advances don't happen when we aren't researching them. We can't just invest trillions of dollars in oil drilling and expect efficient solar panels to spontaneously emerge. It takes interst and investment.

Will we look back on this time and laugh? I hope so. But we'll laugh because we reacted to a threat and fixed it. Our costly and difficult choice will be seen as trivial and obvious. Just as was digging a giant tunnel into manhattan to feed it with water. Just as was building a subway system.

Let's look at the story of Horse shit and highlight the key point. The solution to the horse shit problem... wasn't more horses. We've got a horse shit problem and buying more horses isn't the technological whiz kid solution you're proclaiming will save us.

Re:Nothing New

[syousef]

A horrible misrepresentation of a text like that'll garner you a C- at best by anyone who has actually read the book

You new here? We don't even have the patience to read an article, let alone a book. As for that C- we're use to getting them after spending too much time on /.

Re:Nothing New

[ShakaUVM]

>>The "nasty, brutish, and short" comment was about man devoid of any form of governance such as the literary scenario he laid out for the condition of man in the past.

Or a man in the future, if government totally breaks down, and man enters a "state of war", in which man turns against brother, and reason itself is overthrown. Or something along those lines.

It's relevant to the discussion, since if we're doomed to Malthusian overpopulation (which we're not, but stipulating the point...) then at a certain point, people will enter a state of war as masses of people start starving to death.

Re:Nothing New

[localman]

According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7.

Though the experts were certainly wrong, let's not imply we're doing anywhere near a decent job of providing food for all mankind. Some 50,000 people die each day from starvation. Countless more live in a chronically malnourished state. True, this is not because of an inability to grow the food (probably what the experts predicted) but because of myriad other reasons from politics to economics to logistics.

Cheers.

Re:Nothing New

[FTWinston]

According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7.

In the short term, yes. At great expense. You really think we'll be able to continue to produce food for 7 billion in 20 years?

Consider that we'll probably have no useful quantities of fish anywhere on the planet, and if things continue as they are, stem rot & similar diseases are going to continue to spread, decimating even more of our staple crops. Add to that horrendously depleted aquifers across the globe, and suddenly ... algae looks pretty good.

Re:Nothing New

[Arker]

"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did not invent or popularise the automobile, or the train. They did nothing to solve the problem. They threw up their hands and gave up because the problem was entirely beyond them - and the world today would be a better place if more governments would follow their lead in that.

The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally. Not by any committee of busybodies trying to save the world.

Re:Nothing New

[SenseiLeNoir]

Oh, I think that MANY do know the true potential of Nuclear. The arguments against it are just hiding the true reason why many dont want Nuclear.

First is "NIMBY" (Not In My Back Yard) problems. People dont like seeing a nuclear reactor near to where their precious Johnny lives and grows up (whilst allowing other things that are more likely to harm Johnny's health)

Second, fear of Terrorism.

Both fears CAN be resolved... But Then comes c) The Media, who are really in charge of policy.

Re:Nothing New

[Yvanhoe]

According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7

Barely

Re:Nothing New

[Nutria]

And who mentioned George W?

He was the leader of the first world for 8 years. So, it "must" be his fault. After all, it couldn't be the fault of Omar al-Bashir or Robert Mugabe...

Re:Nothing New

[SenseiLeNoir]

And tell me which of these countries where PEOPLE are needing aid consist of lazy people?

Darfur
Zimbabwe (were people are eating old leather rugs to survive)
and many others.

The fact is, you say that some people are in a far worse position, and these are the people asking for UN aid.

Re:Nothing New

[X0563511]

Something better will come along, just like something better than horses came along.

Out with the old, in with the new. It's what we humans do.

Re:Nothing New

[Tynam]

A short while back I came across an old guy on my way through town who'd tripped and smashed his head open on a phone box.

So I skipped the game I was heading to and spent the next hour helping a drunk concussed guy into an ambulance.

Why should I help him? What made him special? What makes it my responsibility? I was standing right frikkin' there watching, that's why.

The 'people' who 'lived off the land' for thousands of years? Mostly illiterate, innumerate, and died at ages 35-40. If they were lucky.

You don't own a computer just because you're hard-working and smart. It's because you're smart and hard-working and had the insane good luck to be born as one of the small fraction of the world's population who get a starting point good enough that that makes a difference.

I don't need to know you to know that; the fact that you can post here makes it a near-as-dammit certainty.

As you said, some people live in disaster zones or wars and genuinely need help. This 'some people' is not a few stragglers; it's tens of millions. Where the hell do you think that UN aid goes? Look it up sometime. And until you do, you've been too lazy to comment on the issue, so don't.

The ignorance in this post is depressing, even for /.

Re:Nothing New

[X0563511]

The solution is obviously to build the reactors in the media's backyards. Can we figure out a way to get the lawyers in there too?

Re:Nothing New

[wall0159]

I guess it's that old anthropic principle at work again - our society has survived, and we're still around to talk about it, hence we solved the problem. That doesn't mean we'll necessarily solve all problems that might be thrown our way, and it's no guarantee that our society will survive current challenges. But hey, if it doesn't, there'll be no one around to say "I told you so".

A lot of people think "oh man, Y2K - what a hullabaloo over nothing" not realising that massive effort went into making it a non-issue. Do you really subscribe to the theory that we should just kick back and relax, and that everything will work itself out? That sort of thinking seems incredibly insular to me.

Re:Nothing New

[elp]

Speaking as an African... You don't know what you are talking about. Most of the starvation is caused by dumb ass politicians. Zimbabwe on its own could probably feed most of Africa, unfortunately all the farms got stolen by Mugabe and "redistributed" which means given to the party faithful and families of politicians none of whom have a clue how to run a commercial farm.

All the rest of the starving countries have similar dumb political problems.

In central Africa the ground is so fertile you can literally toss an apple core on the ground and come back 3 weeks later to see an apple tree starting to grow.

Run properly Africa could probably feed most of the world.

Re:Nothing New

[Goldberg's Pants]

At the time of this reply, you are only at +4, Insightful.

I wish I had mod points. (But then I couldn't post this.) That boils this all down perfectly to the core of the issue. Legislation saying what we can and can't buy to light our homes (regardless of health and safety issues caused by said "allowed" lighting) and other stupid government interference... New York had the right damn idea. "Over to you, boffins. We're stumped!"

Instead now we get endless meeting and think tanks and committees and bureaucracy burning tax payers money just to say "We can't let you have these bulbs anymore because of the power they use. Instead you can have these which contain toxic levels of lots of fun chemicals which mean you can't just toss them in the garbage, but of course you will, meaning these toxins will seep into the water table, but HEY! We appear to be doing something worthwhile and that might get us voted in next election, so fuck it, eh?!"

Re:Nothing New

[Goldberg's Pants]

Leader of the first world? Only in his fucking delusions. Did you see how this "leader" was treated at the G12 summit once they knew his ass was gone? Plus I don't think a whole bunch of "first world" countries condemning your decisions really gives much credence to him being leader of any damn thing outside of his own mind.

Re:Nothing New

[tkrotchko]

"By recognizing the problem and finding a solution. Street cars, subways and eventually motor vehicles."

First of all, if you think about it, horse crap could not have gotten that bad. There were far more people than horses when this article was written and they weren't worried about people crap. Somehow they could deal with that, but horses? If they had a problem it was a problem with perception. Dealing with horse manure was actually a trivial problem. And they did it. There was never instances of horse manure piling up; they had, at worst, an economic problem of how to pay for removal.

More importantly, the automobile, subways and street cars were not invented as a reaction to a horse problem. They were invented because it's in the nature of mankind to invent things and they become popular if they solve a want or need. Horses aren't a preferred means of transportation; they were used because they were the best we had. People wanted to go faster, in better comfort, without regard to weather, not worry about feeding or caring for animals, and sure, didn't want to deal with crap.

Re:Nothing New

[Cyberax]

In a perfect NIMBY world we'd be hunting with wooden spears.

Re:Nothing New

[cripkd]

I have to agree. At first i agreed to the original idea, that the horse manure conference was silly.
But then i remebered that the London Subway was created just because of THAT. Crowded hundred-of-years-old streets that just couldn;t take any more pedestrian and 'automated' traffic. And guess just what the automated traffic solution was back then. Horse carriages. For people, merchandise, post, everything.

Ok, the people that attended the horse manure conference did't just go back to their homes and invented the automobile and just because it's silly that they envisioned 1950's New York covered in horse shit doesn't mean their calculations were wrong.
People bought cheap T-models not only because of the hype and the novelty of it all, but because they proved very reliable and easy to use. And they didn't shit on the street or in your paddock.

And gasoline was the most cheapest and available propulsion. I've always wondered where would we have been without oil (i don't know, different biological processed, different geologica structure, no huge-animals-evolution-step), people would have taken the steps we are taking now towards electrical cars, but 100 years earlier.

The first london underground trains had steam engines. The second batch were already electric, very revolutionary at the moment.

So yes, as silly as those men were, the fact that other people produced solutions for the same problem they gathered there for means it was a time for solutions, and not for hidding their heads in the sand.
Ironically enough, their solution is our problem now. We're now covered in car-shit.

Re:Nothing New

[amiga3D]

I'd bet my life that government wont be able to solve it. If you think that sad pathetic bunch of kiss ass money grubbers in Washington can solve anything you're strongly deluded. There's a reason that the constitution was written to limit the power of government. The founders recognized something that we've forgotten today. That government is a necessary evil. You have to have it but it must be tightly controlled or it will turn around and eat you. The medling of the government with the banking industry is an excellent case in point. I'm still trying to figure how giving failed banks more money to piss away is constitutionally legal.

Re:Nothing New

[Hal_Porter]

Now that idiot Bush is out of office we're the opposition, and the opposition is always edgier than the government.

Re:Nothing New

[Anonymous Coward]

A C- for being completely wrong? And some still wonder why liberal arts degrees garner little respect...

Re:Nothing New

[daem0n1x]

Not by any committee of busybodies trying to save the world.

What if it is a committee of busybodies trying to make a million?

Do you think the pollutant industries we have just now will let anyone do ANYTHING to solve the energy crisis if public powers don't step in? Hell, they're sitting on a resource that's ESSENTIAL to all human activities, and it's growing thinner everyday, which means they can sell it for any price they want in the near future.

Alternative sources of energy available to everyone is their worse nightmare. They will do anything to avoid them, like buying-out all technological breakthrough patents, buying governments, causing wars (they did all this, and will do more) to keep the status quo.

Your laissez-faire utopias put us all in an economical crisis with consequences not yet predictable. I haven't seen any of the prophecies that you free-market fundamentalists are announcing for decades come true. You had your chance. You screwed up badly. Reevaluate your ideals.

Re:Nothing New

[SD-Arcadia]

As a social scientist I can't live with myself if I let this slip. Actually Hobbes's depiction of life as "nasty, brutish and short" is the exact opposite of a "prediction". It describes life not in the future but in the hypothetical and long past "state of nature", before the development of civilized society and the State (The Leviathan) which puts an end to "the war of each against all" that causes life to be "nasty, brutish and short" in the "state of nature". The transformation is purely social, based on a contract between individuals who agree to submit to a strong authority in exchange for personal security. The development of technology etc. does not come into the discussion in any significant manner in Hobbes, although you could argue for that as a factor independently.

Re: Nothing New

[LaughingCoder]

You remind me of a favorite saying that I formerly used as my signature:
br> Politician's Logic: Something must be done! This is something, therefore it must be done.

Re:Nothing New

[Pentagram]

For every scientist that says "WE'RE ALL DOOMED!" another one says "Erm... No we're not." Just like "video games causes violent behaviour" and "video games don't cause violent behaviour".

Scientists generally don't say "WE'RE ALL DOOMED!", though the media sometimes spin it that way. Also, if you think scientists are equally split on the issue of climate change, you are sadly deluded.

It's also very hard to take to any talk of global warming that seriously when a large chunk of the northern hemisphere is freezing its ass off.

Please look up the difference between "climate" and "weather".

Then there's the United Kingdom. The Roman's used to grow grapes there. Now if people grew grapes there today folk would say "Look, global warming! There's your proof." Only this occurred hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution...

Grapes have been grown in the UK for hundreds of years, and they are grown there now. Except historically they were grown in the south of England, and now they are being grown in Wales. Global warming is making wine making more viable in the UK.

Re:Nothing New

[cshotton]

but we are NOT producing food for 7 billion

No, we are wasting much of our production capacity on stupid, tree-hugging, already-shown-to-be-a-wrong-solution "technology" like ethanol production from corn. And a lot of people starve, not because there isn't enough food for them. But because there are corrupt, nasty people between them and a stable food supply.

Interestingly, there are roughly 2 acres of arable land per person on the planet right now. And guess what? Global warming would actually increase that acreage by almost 25% if average global temperatures rose 3F. It's entirely possible that a warming planet (despite the realities of sunspot cycles and impending cooling cycle) is actually required to support humanity, rather than being a harbinger of its demise.

Truth is, we are too stupid to know and too enamored with our culture of "fear" to admit it.

Re:Nothing New

[Admiral Ag]

They managed to put a dude on the moon in 8 years.

Re:Nothing New

[Lars T.]

"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did not invent or popularise the automobile, or the train.

Well, the train was already quite mature by then, and there were several elevated lines in New York. And of course the opening of the first NY subway line falls clearly out of that time range (1904).

http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/578.html
It's not like horse manure was the only problem BTW: "In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from its streets, and late as 1916 Chicago carted away 9,202 horse carcasses. Special trucks were devised to remove dead horses; since the average weight of dead horses was 1,300 pounds, one text on municipal refuse advised that "trucks for the removal of dead horses should be hung low, to avoid an excessive lift."

The coming of the automobile dealt another large blow to the horse. Experimental motor cars had been around for a long time, but cities had always banned them. The crisis of the 1890s and early twentieth century, involving public health fears about pollution, traffic jams, and rising prices for both hay, oats, and urban land, made municipal governments and urban residents much more ready to switch to autos.

Re:Nothing New

[Dog-Cow]

There is probably enough food within the borders of the USA at this moment in time to feed every single person on the planet for a day or so.

The problem is distribution, not production. Idiot.

Re:Nothing New

[Lars T.]

First of all, if you think about it, horse crap could not have gotten that bad. There were far more people than horses when this article was written and they weren't worried about people crap. Somehow they could deal with that, but horses? If they had a problem it was a problem with perception. Dealing with horse manure was actually a trivial problem. And they did it. There was never instances of horse manure piling up; they had, at worst, an economic problem of how to pay for removal.

http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/578.html:
While the nineteenth century American city faced many forms of environmental pollution, none was as all encompassing as that produced by the horse. The most severe problem was that caused by horses defecating and urinating in the streets, but dead animals and noise pollution also produced serious annoyances and even health problems. The normal city horse produced between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of manure a day and about a quart of urine, usually distributed along the course of its route or deposited in the stable. While cities made sporadic attempts to keep the streets clean, the manure was everywhere, along the roadway, heaped in piles or next to stables, or ground up by the traffic and blown about by the wind.
Inventors and city officials devised improved methods of street cleaning and street sweeping became a major urban expense. Increasingly, however, it became obvious that the most effective way to eliminate the "typhoid fly" (so named by L.O. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Entomology of the Department of Agriculture and a leader in the campaign against flies), was to eliminate the horse.
As late as the 1890s, a Scientific American writer noted that the sounds of traffic on busy New York streets made conversation nearly impossible, while the author William Dean Howells complained that "the sharp clatter of the horses' iron shoes" on the pavement tormented his ear.
In 1880, New York City removed 15,000 dead horses from its streets, and late as 1916 Chicago carted away 9,202 horse carcasses.

Yeah, right, the "Horse made problems" were just made up by the liberals and it simply wasn't that bad.

Re:Nothing New

[El Torico]

Congratulations on your moderation. The neo-cons have won the day.

No, they didn't. Actually, the "Paleocons" did. There are big differences between Paleocons and Neocons.

Re:Nothing New

[kvezach]

Chernobyl didn't have a containment dome. It suffered Xenon poisoning because of the low power levels the test demanded, the technicians turned all the safety measures off to run their test, they pulled the control rods out, and it had a positive void coefficient so that the process fed back on itself. See the Hyperphysics page here. To quote from that page: "It was like airplane pilots experimenting with the engines in flight" (Legasov).

Okay, so human error will always happen, right? That's why newer plants fail safe. All western plants have containment domes, and newer plant types (such as pebble bed reactors or Generation III reactors like the AP1000) are passively safe, which means that even if all the coolant is removed, nothing happens. Also, most plants automatically scram (insert control rods to maximum positions) on error.

Now let's look at Three Mile Island. A problem in an unrelated system caused the primary feedwater pump to fail. The reactor automatically went to scram as designed (thus showing what I said in the last paragraph). However, a valve that would vent steam caused by heating the water by decay heat (since radioactive decay still happens even when no fission is going on), failed to close, and the monitoring systems did not show clearly enough that it was indeed open long after it should be.
The result was that the reactor in question (TMI-2) was severely damaged and some radioactive Krypton was released. What danger did this entail? To quote the Merck manual, "the Three Mile Island accident did not result in major radiation exposure; in fact, anyone living within 1 mile of the plant received only about 0.08 mSv additional radiation". As a comparison, a chest x-ray is between 0.05 and 0.1 mSv.

Solar might be more safe, but it also occupies a great deal of space and is much more expensive. Fossil fuel plants pollute and for coal in particular, there are mining accidents; since a given amount of coal provides much less energy than a given amount of uranium, a lot more has to be mined for the same amount of energy. Chernobyl was the Bhopal of nuclear power, but we don't stop making pesticides just because of Bhopal, and so we shouldn't stop nuclear power just because of Chernobyl either, but instead take the proper precautions and engineer the systems to be safe.

Re:Nothing New

[TimSSG]

Where the hell do you think that UN aid goes? Look it up sometime. And until you do, you've been too lazy to comment on the issue, so don't.

When it goes to help the people it is OK in my opinion; but, when it goes to help keep the corrupt leaders in power who created the problem through mismanagement or on purpose, I considered a waste of money. Tim S

Re:Nothing New

[sycodon]

And in every instance, that distribution problem is caused by governments.

Re:Nothing New

[Znork]

put us all in an economical crisis

The economic crisis derives directly from the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking, neither of which is free market. Centrally controlled interest rates are not in any way 'free market', and fractional reserve banking is simply fraud (which should be replaced with 100% reserve deposits and the option to invest at the customers discretion and the customers risk).

Blaming the market for doing what the Fed told them to is pointless; when the Fed policy threatens to inflate away any money people have that they don't invest, people are going to invest it. Regulation to prevent it would be ineffective, as you'll currently note, when the Fed doesn't get what it wants it'll go on lowering rates and then simply printing money until people do what it wants. This is the fundamental nature of the Fed, and until it's abolished it's going to continue to mismanage rates and cause bubbles and collapses like this.

With free market rates and without FRB the housing bubble would never have come to pass; as demand for capital increased, so would the interest that depositors demanded, borrowers would have to compete for money to borrow. Only with infinite credit and artificially low rates is it possible to build unsustainable bubbles of the kinds we've seen.

I haven't seen any of the prophecies

You probably haven't looked too carefully. Austrian school economists predicted exactly what happened. Unless, of course, by 'free-market' you mean the self-serving monetarist clowns running a lot of US finance, most of whose approval of 'free markets' is strictly limited to the features that serve them and their friends.

Re:Nothing New

[XcepticZP]

I grew up in Zimbabwe and I have family living their right now. So I know perfectly well what is going on over there. And the fact remains, those people really can't feed themselves and deserve help. If you bothered reading my post, and understood it then you'd realize I pointed out two separate groups. Lazy people needing aid who actually are able to feed themselves if not for their laziness, and then you have people that need aid that are actually unable to get aid. Such as those people in Zimbabwe, or people living in a disaster or war torn area.

Re:Nothing New

[lena_10326]

Meanwhile billions go hungry. Tens of thousands die every day from malnutrition. But no I'm sure you're right there was no food crisis. That's why the UN didn't just have a FOOD CRISIS SUMMIT this summer.

Billons. Hmm. World population is estimated to be in the high 6 billion range. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

I question your unsubstantiated "billions" figure.

The primary cause for famine and starvation is tribal feudal warfare and government corruption. Not the lack of food and not the lack of trying.

Re:Nothing New

[argStyopa]

"The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed."

Seen Washington DC lately?
By pretty much all measures, it's been roof-deep in horseshit since at LEAST the 1950's.

Re:Nothing New

[Wonko the Sane]

With free market rates and without FRB the housing bubble would never have come to pass; as demand for capital increased, so would the interest that depositors demanded, borrowers would have to compete for money to borrow. Only with infinite credit and artificially low rates is it possible to build unsustainable bubbles of the kinds we've seen.

Why do so many people think that fractional reserve banking is all or nothing? The 12:1 leverage limits were working just fine until the SEC was persuaded to raise those limits to 40:1. Then we had the housing bubble.

So clearly the only solution is to throw out fractional reserve banking altogether?

Why not look at all the historical data and determine at what leverage ratio bank failures increase dramatically then set a limit comfortably below that level?

Re:Nothing New

[N1AK]

People bought cheap T-models not only because of the hype and the novelty of it all, but because they proved very reliable and easy to use. And they didn't shit on the street or in your paddock.

People bought cars because they were better for themselves, any benefit for others was a lucky benefit. The automobile and late 19th century New York do not provide a good example of an environmental issue being solved by planning.

The best thing government can do is give incentives for research and development that it believes is for the good of the nation. One of the biggest issues with global warming, is that if true, any solution needs to be global to work. Currently a country is at an economic disadvantage for going 'green' as any nation that chooses not to will have lower costs. If this fundamental issue is not addressed then any countries efforts to become more environmentally friendly will simply lead to the transfer of production and pollution to areas that are not effected.

This displacement phenomena is the same as is often seen when laws vary between bordering states.

Re:Nothing New

[crmarvin42]

Do you think the pollutant industries

You do realize that this "Pollutant Industry" is a giant straw-man, right? Industries exist to make products people want/need. They don't exist to pollute the environment for the sake of polluting the environment.

All industry produces waste. Some of that waste is more detrimental than other, or in larger quantities. A failure of the government to propperly regulate the handling and management of that waste doesn't make those that work in any given industryt he kind of willful polluters you are making them out to be.

The same industry that puts food on the plates of all Americans and a lot of other 1st and 3rd world countries is linked with N and P overapplication to the soil. At first they didn't even know that they were polluting. Then they realized and started limiting soil aplication of manure based on the N content of the manure and the N requirements of the crops being grown on that soil. Then they realized that P was building up even faster than N, and now they limit based on which ever is more likely to cause pollution.
Did those industries contribute to eutrification of lakes and streams? Yes.
Did they do it on purpose? No.
Are they trying to fix it? Yes.
Are there those within the industry that ignore the well know best practices in favor of profits and ease of management? Unfortunately Yes, but when they get caught it usually costs them their operation.

The same goes for most other industries. Are there bad actors that know the dangers of their products and pollute with them anyway? Yes! However, they are most likely the minority and give the rest of their respective industry a bad name. I say punish those that are actually guilty to the extent of the law and refrain from giving everyone else a permanent black eye because of the actions of another entity over which they had no control.

Re:Nothing New

[d3ac0n]

Which doesn't mean things this time will be the same.

Are you willing to bet the life sustaining characteristics of the earth on that?

Yes, it does.

Almost all of the major advances of civilization have been because of private individuals creatively solving a personal problem or looking to make a buck. The only thing Government can do is get in the way.

Personally, I see TFA as nothing more than CYA. The few scientists left publicly espousing the "anthropogenic global warming" myth are realizing that the scientific community of the world has moved on as the evidence against that theory has piled up. While governments and the media of the world are lagging behind by about 10 years, Science has found that AGW is BS, and that man simply cannot do anything to affect the global climate in any meaningful way. (Perhaps if we deliberately set out to destroy the environment, maybe. But certainly NOT by simply continuing to exist in the manner in which we are accustomed to.)

Thus, the few AGW supporting scientists left are trying to recover what scraps of scientific integrity they have (and to save their funding) by saying: Well, it's too late! You blew it up! You blew it all to Hell, you damn dirty Humans!

(With apologies to the late Charlton Heston)

Re:Nothing New

[amiga3D]

They don't have to be white...but it'd be nice if they were competent.

Re:Nothing New

[Dun Malg]

But no I'm sure you're right there was no food crisis. That's why the UN didn't just have a FOOD CRISIS SUMMIT this summer.

There may be a food crisis, but it's not about not enough food being produced, but rather that the hungry do not have access to the surplus. Further, the UN summit was about the predicted food crisis due to global warming, so I'm not sure how that proves any point beyond "experts 100 years ago thought we'd be starving in the near future, and experts still think that today".

Re:Nothing New

[Synn]

The birth rate all over the world is going down. Over 60 countries have a birth rate that won't sustain current populations.

So the population problem is taking care of itself too.

Re:Nothing New

[Dun Malg]

They managed to put a dude on the moon in 8 years.

It was actually 24 years in the making. Kennedy's "we choose to go to the moon" stuff was more a recognition of the advancement of rocket science than a case of "hey, I've got an idea..."

Re:Nothing New

[conureman]

The inconceivability of this is epic. Anthropogenic influence cannot cause irreversible climate change, nor will we ever be rid of the scourge of Passenger Pigeon. Don't overestimate our ability to make things happen.

Re:Nothing New

[Cowmonaut]

Yes. Essentially, if governments would stay out of it and let the scientists and inventors figure out what is going on there's a good chance it could be fixed. Possibly multiple solutions could be found. It's like open sourcing the problem. The government involvement involves a proprietary approach deadlocked on one belief. A government can't afford an open mind. It has to have one thing for it to get behind, and there may be multiple and contradicting issues that are contributing to global warming.

Even the UN just tries to go for the "one cause" and ignores other contributing factors. I doubt it'd be any better if all of humanity were one nation either. The government would still be thinking too small.

Re:Nothing New

[LateArthurDent]

It's not a food crisis. It's a population crisis. In fact, most of the worlds problems today are population related. I wish people could see beyond all these other things and get down to the real problem.

It's not a food crisis. And the food problem is not a population crisis. It's an economic problem. There's no shortage of food, but people in the starving regions don't have any money. It's a type of poverty most of us can't really understand.

However, you're right. There is a population crisis. The energy crisis is a population problem. The environmentalists tells us that we need to individually do really stupid shit like unplug our TV's when not watching to prevent it from using any power in its sleep state. It's true that if we all did that it would add up to make a difference in the short term, but in the long term increasing population and the industrialization of third world nations are going to increase energy usage to such extremes that it simply won't matter.

The solution to the energy crisis is two-fold: better education and economic conditions for everyone will help with the population problem (first world nations usually have a negative population growth if you exclude immigration), and more energy, not less, of the type that is pretty low in emissions. Like nuclear. We need a bunch of breeder nuclear power plants that can reuse its own fuel. This means the amount of radioactive waste we need to deal would actually be pretty manageable.

Re:Nothing New

[AvitarX]

I will make a wager on this.

I wager we ARE producing enough food for 7 billion people.

In 90 days if there are 70 billion surviving people I win.

I am not tying to trivialise suffering here. Simply pointing out that people starving COULD mean we don't have enough for more people, not that we don't have enough food.

You may as well argue that we don't have enough people being born, since every day people day of old age.

There have always been people starving to death, but if the amount of people getting fed is ever increasing, than we can pretty much by definition feed more people than we currently have. Food is not the limiter on human population, it is fucking.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Poulation-since-1000AD.jpg

Arguable when the population growth was flatter, there were other limits, but it is pretty clear that for a while our growth has been at least exponential, leading me to believe that there is very little checking it currently.

Re:Nothing New

[LWATCDR]

Renewables are good but right now we need to move to more nuclear. People love to ignore the fact that the winds farms in Texas this year didn't produce near the power they expected. There wasn't enough wind. Same with solar. You can throttle it to meet needs. They make good supplements. Nuclear is clean, it works, and with fuel recycling we have enough for centuries.

The US bought the load of FUD in the 70s and we are now paying for it. Instead of building more nuclear plants we built coal. They did a great job cleaning coal in the new plants but CO2 was never considered a pollutant.

The latest reactors are even safer than the ones we are currently using. We need to start building them now instead of living in a fantasy world that some unknown break through will make Solar cheap, batteries 1000% better, and the wind never stop blowing.

Re:Nothing New

[Wonko the Sane]

Take your anti-government political stance and tell the millions of unemployed people around the world that private industry had their interests in mind when the people running the show took their cut of the profits and retired off of them.

The government does have legitimate roles. One of those roles is law enforcement. Here's a great example of a law that should be enforced (18 USC 1341):

"Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, or to sell, dispose of, loan, exchange, alter, give away, distribute, supply,...
...shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both."

If the government had thrown the criminals in jail instead of giving them bailouts then we wouldn't be in this mess.

Lying, cheating and stealing are crimes and should be punished appropriately. Then a free market can function.

Re:Nothing New

[bluie-]

true. no matter what we do, no matter how far our technology goes (unless it allows us to expand into space), if our population keeps growing we are all doomed. eventually we'll need to stabilize our population, and preferably shrink it.

what i'd personally like to see is a culture that cuts out most of the excess crap we waste our time and resources producing, and have a much smaller population with everyone working to produce what we need plus a few luxuries, with a massive focus on advancing technology. Imagine cheap real estate everywhere in the world? plenty of space for everyone?

stop having babies!

Re:Nothing New

[mysticgoat]

"The New York administration of the late 19th century" did popularize the issues and did a lot of direct work on solutions, which helped speed these innovations (implementation starting before the automobile was conceived, and a long time before the automobile became a significant factor):

1. Horse drawn trolleys, with routes that encouraged formation of residential commuting neighborhoods
2. Zoning ordinances in general
3. Taxi industry (remains highly dependent on local ordinances)
4. Short haul delivery and freight industries (remains highly dependent on local ordinances)
5. Bicycles (see below)

These and similar endeavors received support from city governments through ordinances, city brokered bond issues, changes in laws. Between 1897 and 1910, they significantly altered city transportation systems, and through that, all aspects of city life. So the changes were in place before the number of automobile drivers had reached significance.

The annals of the League of American Bicyclists (LAB) documents this with respect to bicycles. Known as the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) until updating its name in 1994, it was founded in 1880 and had become a major lobbying group for paved streets and sensible and consistent traffic laws by 1895. It is one of the very few organizations that had a political impact on urban affairs before 1900 that is still effective and relevant today. The LAW acronym was very deliberate: this group has had more impact on traffic law development than any one else, including the automotive industry, which mostly tweaked traffic laws that had been developed for safer bicycling. Wikipedia article on LAB gives a quick, highly glossed 3rd party description of the organization.

Parent post asserts that

The problem was solved by new technologies invented, developed, an popularised by private individuals looking to either make a buck or solve a problem that they faced personally. Not by any committee of busybodies trying to save the world.

This is false.

The changes were in fact brought about through local political processes like committees using mostly well established technologies like horse drawn trolleys and livery services in controlled ways. Wide area organizations like LAW provided input and attempted to shape the local processes. Arguably the most important innovation during this period was a change in pavement from cobblestones to brick, asphalt, and oiled surfaces-- to improve bicycling conditions.

This is kind of important stuff to know today, because in the city nearest you, there are definitely efforts to reshape the transportation system to something greener, and these efforts involve the same processes that were in extensive use 110 years ago, before the automobile.

Re:Nothing New

[junkgoof]

Population growth is dropping in industrialized countries. It is not dropping in the countries that are not able to feed themselves. Governments, unions, laws, regulations, taxes... Everyone complains about essentials. Is it coincidence that the richest countries all have similar (far from identical) structures (about the only exception is Singapore, and Singapore is tiny with a very particular dictatorship)? Or that the country that spends the most effort destroying all these things is in collapse (look at Canadian banks that whined about how regulation cost them money now that they are among the strongest in the world and can watch less regulated US banks fail). Tearing down the government also involves ignoring successes. Is acid rain still a problem? Lead in the atmosphere? The ozone hole? All of these problems are going away. Why? Regulation. The oil industry said they would go under without lead in gasoline, but it was just laziness and they profited repeatedly by taking it out. Other industries survived the necessary changes as well. No big deal. Dealing with global warming may be more difficult due to crazy politics (demonization of regulation), and the rise of China and India, but, with a will it can be done. The key is to realize that it is nowhere near as hard as the vested interests make it out (there is nothing to be done so we won't innovate, poor capitalists, we have to sit back and watch our profits increase, it would be impossible to do otherwise, we would all die).

Re:Nothing New

[H0p313ss]

Something better will come along, just like something better than horses came along.

Out with the old, in with the new. It's what we humans do.

Contrary to what the arts majors of the world seem to think technology doesn't just "come along". Ssomebody has to recognize that there's a problem and invent a solution. Sitting back and waiting for the future to happen might work for the majority but if everyone did it we'd still be shoveling horse shit.

Re:Nothing New

[FireStormZ]

This is /. you dont need to worry too much about people making babies..

Re:Nothing New

[malevolentjelly]

Interestingly, there are roughly 2 acres of arable land per person on the planet right now. And guess what? Global warming would actually increase that acreage by almost 25% if average global temperatures rose 3F. It's entirely possible that a warming planet (despite the realities of sunspot cycles and impending cooling cycle) is actually required to support humanity, rather than being a harbinger of its demise.

That's an extremely linear way of looking at global warming. I've got some friends who are running major climate simulations for a group of interested companies and governmental bodies over at the NCSA. As far as I can tell, we're looking at the effects of global warming changing the direction of undersea currents, moving climates instead of just "warming" them, drying certain areas and wetting others, and changing weather patterns. So really, it's not just a case of the world getting warmer-- the problems is that we don't wholly understand how this will affect the weather.

Currently, most of our food supply is dependent on an extremely stable growing season. Part of what we have to model is how these minor temperature changes will affect the nitrogen cycle and crop growth- and the current results aren't very promising. What that doesn't take into account is the geopolitical and logistic cost of the fertile region moving to another part of the country.

Beyond this, every time they model ahead x-thousand years, actual results keep beating the "worst case scenario" curve. We didn't know quite how much methane and CO2 were frozen in the sea and ice caps, so we may have started an unstoppable snowball effect.

We just had an unusally bad growing season here in Illinois. That's okay because we usually run at a surplus. We can only have so many of these bad growing seasons, though, before the problem goes from a nagging concern to a worldwide crisis. Chances are people will pass these things off as stupidity or superstition as long as they can. Most just can't cope with the idea of the most stable thing we can imagine, the Earth, is now in a state of very rapid flux that we can't fully grasp-- and it's because we burned every piece of carbon we could find on and under the ground. Let's pretend that this crisis is really happening. How do people act? Do they accept it or is there mass denial from those who can't come to terms with the danger? Can mankind as a huddled mass really handle long term crisis?

Re:Nothing New

[plague3106]

Where will all the electricity come from for all the stuff that is going electric (read "GREEN") now?

Nuclear.

Re:Nothing New

[KagatoLNX]

Free markets != no regulation. Unregulated markets generate monopolies. These are clearly bad.

For a market to function as free, it must be uncontrolled by any coercive forces. Monopolies control markets. Most big corporations try to do so today. It's appropriately called "Marketing", which doesn't just mean "advertising" as most people think.

Governments are pretty much the only response to that, short of riots. Democracy, being a civilized mob, is effectively that. Of course, the government can fail at keeping the market free, but it's hardly worse than the alternative.

At some point, you've got to draw a line that says "This is the limit of a player's coercive effect on a market". The government is the only place to do that. Unless you think the buyers should. Oh wait, we're (in theory) a democracy, same thing.

Do you live in a magical world where markets are free without government intervention? If you "criminalize" market manipulation and then get the government to "enforce the law", you just regulated the market.

Similarly, free market != 100% employment. Especially when the market trades in a currency. Monetary policy is a big deal. You can't avoid this without participating in civics. I'm sorry that you're civically lazy. Time to get back to work.

If you want our democracy to function, I'm fully willing to support you fixing that. If you want our market to function freely, I'll gladly support whatever regulations will achieve that. The problem is, in general, a lack of civic spirit. People don't want to work together to make the government functional. A lot of it is due to people with highly unrealistic ideologies. People that are not unlike you.

Re:Nothing New

[anaesthetica]

Almost all industrialized countries have birth rates that are at or have fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per family. All population growth is coming from the developing world. HIREZ.

Re:Nothing New

[Anonymous Psychopath]

I call FUD.

CFLs do contain more mercury than incandescent bulbs. However, they don't have a high enough level to warrant special disposal procedures.

Below are the EPA recommendations on dealing with a broken CFL. I call shenanigans on your calling FUD.

http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf

How should I clean up a broken fluorescent bulb?
Because CFLs contain a small amount of mercury, EPA recommends the following clean-up and disposal
guidelines:

1. Before Clean-up: Air Out the Room
Have people and pets leave the room, and don't let anyone walk through the breakage area on their way out.

Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.

Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.

2. Clean-Up Steps for Hard Surfaces

Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.

Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass pieces and powder.

Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place towels in the glass jar or plastic bag.

Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.

3. Clean-up Steps for Carpeting or Rug:

Carefully pick up glass fragments and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.

Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder.

If vacuuming is needed after all visible materials are removed, vacuum the area where the bulb was broken.

Remove the vacuum bag (or empty and wipe the canister), and put the bag or vacuum debris in a sealed plastic bag.

4. Clean-up Steps for Clothing, Bedding, etc.:

If clothing or bedding materials come in direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from inside the bulb that may stick to the fabric, the clothing or bedding should be thrown away. Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage.

You can, however, wash clothing or other materials that have been exposed to the mercury vapor from a broken CFL, such as the clothing you are wearing when you cleaned up the broken CFL, as long as that clothing has not come into direct contact with the materials from the broken bulb.

If shoes come into direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from the bulb, wipe them off with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place the towels or wipes in a glass jar or plastic bag for disposal.

5. Disposal of Clean-up Materials

Immediately place all clean-up materials outdoors in a trash container or protected area for the next normal trash pickup.

Wash your hands after disposing of the jars or plastic bags containing clean-up materials.

Check with your local or state government about disposal requirements in your specific area. Some states do not allow such trash disposal. Instead, they require that broken and unbroken mercury-containing bulbs be taken to a local recycling center.

6. Future Cleaning of Carpeting or Rug: Air Out the Room During and After Vacuuming

The next several times you vacuum, shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system and open a window before vacuuming.

Keep the central heating/air conditioning system shut off and the window open for at least 15 minutes after vacuuming is completed.

Re:Nothing New

[HiThere]

I believe (and hope) that these recommendations were written in the first realization that mercury was dangerous and applied to the large fluorescent tube lights, and were then just copied over without thought to "how to deal with a compact fluorescent".

This, however, isn't based on positive knowledge. It's mainly based on hope. But it's also based on a knowledge of how bureaucracies operate.

How long do we have, really?

[ShooterNeo]

The key element about global warming that seems relevant is this : how LONG will it take? If we have 200 years before the ice caps finish melting, then it's not really the crisis that it's made out to be.

Why won't it matter if it takes 200 years? Because realistically at even a fraction of the current rate of technological progress, mankind will have the technology to do something definitive about it in 200 years. The simplest, most elegant solution I can think of to global warming is to build giant orbital sunshades to reduce the total solar irradiance to the earth's surface.

I can even see how this would be done using a juiced version of current technology. Automated factories would produce the thousands of square kilometers of shade material (kind of like the automated factories in Japan right now...). The factories might be on the earth or the moon. We'd blast the shades into orbit using lasers (see Lockheed Martin's new LED pumped laser weapon for technology that could do the job TODAY) and they would automatically position themselves in the right location using tiny ion engines (also already been done).

The solar panels would produce electrical energy, which would be beamed down to earth via microwave. The panels would only be maybe 40-50% efficient, so the waste heat would radiate out to space, reducing the total thermal load on the planet.

Presto! Problem solved, and probably would be a profitable endeavor for some future megacorp.

Re:How long do we have, really?

[shmlco]

"The simplest, most elegant solution I can think of to global warming is to build giant orbital sunshades to reduce the total solar irradiance to the earth's surface."

Why not skip that and just set off a couple of dozen nukes? A mild nuclear winter could offset the global warming trend quite nicely.

Re:How long do we have, really?

[MichaelSmith]

I think you have been overdosing on Kim Stanley Robinson books.

Re:How long do we have, really?

[Reservoir Penguin]

Dear friend, my name is Obugandu Tzelopi and I represent the Nigerian Ministry of Oil and Gas Development. We very much like your plan and would like to invest USD 100000 (one hundred million american dollars) into your firm. Please let me know how I can contact you to discuss the details of the deal.

not correct

[aepervius]

You cannot extrapolate from the occurence of "new technology" in the past to help us, onto future new technology coming at time to help us. New technology is in general an unknown, and thus you should NEVER plan with them in mind. The new technology could as well NEVER happen and so much screw you up in an irreversible way. Which is why it is insane on planning on new tech coming (ne crude extraction tech, new energy generation tech (including fusion), new food production tech, new recyclage tech , new medicine tech etc...). A sane planning should always be based on current tech. You can always adapt your planning if a new tech comes up. You can't if you are waiting for some new tech to come (when ? In how far the problem would be solved ? What problem would be left ? etc...). waiting for new tech to solve your problem is akin to waiting that the problem solve itself. And that is totally utterly lost on you.

Re:not correct

[Toonol]

So even though it's ALWAYS WORKED BEFORE it would be INSANE TO THINK IT WOULD HAPPEN?

Perhaps you mean we shouldn't just sit on our haunches and hope new technology comes along. I'd agree with that. But if you mean that new technology shouldn't be sought out as the solution to our problem... well, I'd like for you to get off the internet and go find a cave.

Re:not correct

[matt1553]

So even though it's ALWAYS WORKED BEFORE it would be INSANE TO THINK IT WOULD HAPPEN?

I know I'm getting off topic, but there's a fair few philosophers that have something to say on that point.

Re:not correct

[SanityInAnarchy]

So how has it always worked before? (Hint: It actually hasn't, not even close, but let's pretend it has.)

Never -- not once has it worked the way we expect.

Once we got rockets, and we got into space, we expected this to be the "space age", where we would develop spaceships fast enough to travel between stars, and we would colonize the moon, maybe mars, so any problem of overpopulation or pollution might be mitigated by no longer being bound to Earth.

And what happened, instead? We got the information age. We got computers which can calculate insanely fast, and communicate enormous amounts of information over vast distances. We got technology which can tell us, in detail, how utterly screwed we are for waiting for the other technology (faster-than-light travel, better telescopes to find viable planets) that never came.

You can see this kind of thing happening all the time, and much faster, in software. In the 90's, it might have made a lot of sense to speculate that Java would take the world by storm, and that developers would be writing new, cross-platform applications, and that new users wouldn't have to care what OS their computer came with, because they'd just use Java.

Well, there's still too much of a legacy codebase to drop Windows entirely, but Java applets, at least, have been pretty much entirely replaced by Flash, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, by Javascript and HTML. Raise your hand if you actually expected to be using an AJAX (or DHTML, if you like) spreadsheet by now.

Let's just hope...

[jonaskoelker]

No, much more likely we'd be gone, and in a few tens of millions of years

Let's just hope that whoever will be putting our bones in a museum will get a little sophisticated and won't think that digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

Must have forgotten a few negative ones there, no?

[Mathinker]

Considering the evidence that climate has been cyclic with a cycle of approximately 100k years for the last million-odd years, leads me to think that there must also be negative feedback loops involved here. You seem to have missed that. Badly.

Yes, I realize this doesn't mean that there couldn't be a magic global temperature or CO2 concentration at which suddenly this behavior breaks down. But somehow, I don't think we know all that much about all the processes involved.

Re:Don't forget!

[MichaelSmith]

Wasn't that nuclear winter?

Re:Damage is Already Done. Why Worry? Be Happy!

[elFarto the 2nd]

I suggest you read this and see why the Sun is not responsible for our current climate problem.

RTFA

[gpmanrpi]

At the risk of sounding out of place. I listened to this on the drive to Bar Review Class today and the point was that the damage we have done is relatively irreversible, but we can stop the magnitude of the result by limiting green house gas emissions in the present. That is not particularly outlandish, but it is also slightly disheartening to see that we have passed a threshold of no immediate return. That is the reaction is moving in a reaction to restore equilibrium.
I think we need to not discount technological possibilities of the future, however, curbing carbon emissions is a laudable goal for the present.

Re:Don't forget!

[elFarto the 2nd]

I suggest you read this and see why the Sun is not responsible for our current climate problem. Mars receives a tiny percentage of the Sun light the Earth does so we should be seeing a corresponding percentage increase. Jupiter's climate is mostly driven from its internal heat not the Sun (and we really don't know much about that). What about all the other planets, Mercury? Venus?

Re:Damage is Already Done. Why Worry? Be Happy!

[AigariusDebian]

Earth has not been 'far warmer'. See the hockey stick.

Cold in DC and in Europe for that matter is due to slowing of the Golfstream and masses on polar region air coming down, both of those phenomenons are activated by global warming.

It could be that the natural negative feedback loop for the global warming is the formation of an Ice age cowering Europe and most of the USA under miles of ice. That might balance things out. In a couple thousand years.

So ... 10 billion people, frozen Europe, Canada, USA, Russia, scorched deserts in most of Afrika ... where will we all go to live? Will everyone migrate peacefully? How many billion people will be killed in wars to control few strips of land that are still fertile? And how many billions will die of starvation because they did not have the military power to get those lands?

Not so fun.

Not a failure of logic.

[Xest]

I don't really see why that's a failure of logic. Her point seems to be that, look we've pushed it to the point it's going to happen, let's not make it even worse.

The event isn't going to be a simple binary yes it does happen/no it doesn't happen it's going to occur on a sliding scale, it could be major, it could be minor, it could be anything in between, how we react is going to define that.

The logic only fails if you're viewing the result in a simple two state it does/doesn't happen manner. It's your application of discrete logic to a comment about a non-discrete system with a non-discrete range of outcomes that's at fault.

If what she says is true and that it is irreversible, then yes we need to do something about it- it means we've fucked up majorly and we need to do something about it now to ensure the impact it has is as small as possible. Certainly going with the attitude of "Oh well" and continuing as is is likely only going to make it a whole lot worse, or even speed it up so that it happens not in 1000 years, but in 100 years. Even if we can keep it to 1000 years and it is serious then at least there's the hope we'll have a better solution by then, but a solution in 100 years could be a much tougher call.

""If you can invent an easy process..."

[tlambert]

"If you can invent an easy process to turn CO2 in low concentrations back into carbon and oxygen, you have a winner."

Trees?

-- Terry

Re:""If you can invent an easy process..."

[im_thatoneguy]

No good. We need those for paper towels and houses.

Re:Don't forget!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Mars and Jupiter have been experiencing "global warming", too.

Oh yes, you're totally right! I bet you're the sort who argues over accuracy of Earth's temperature records, but you're willing to believe that we have enough data to show global warming on Mars and Jupiter FFS.

Anyway. From Realclimate:

Recently, there have been some suggestions that "global warming" has been observed on Mars (e.g. here). These are based on observations of regional change around the South Polar Cap, but seem to have been extended into a "global" change, and used by some to infer an external common mechanism for global warming on Earth and Mars (e.g. here and here). But this is incorrect reasoning and based on faulty understanding of the data.

A couple of basic issues first : the Martian year is about 2 Earth years (687 days). Currently it is late winter in Mars's northern hemisphere, so late summer in the southern hemisphere. Martian eccentricity is about 0.1 - over 5 times larger than Earth's, so the insolation (INcoming SOLar radiATION) variation over the orbit is substantial, and contributes significantly more to seasonality than on the Earth, although Mars's obliquity (the angle of its spin axis to the orbital plane) still dominates the seasons. The alignment of obliquity and eccentricity due to precession is a much stronger effect than for the Earth, leading to "great" summers and winters on time scales of tens of thousands of years (the precessional period is 170,000 years). Since Mars has no oceans and a thin atmosphere, the thermal inertia is low, and Martian climate is easily perturbed by external influences, including solar variations. However, solar irradiance is now well measured by satellite and has been declining slightly over the last few years as it moves towards a solar minimum.

Read climate reports skeptically!

[liegeofmelkor]

Well, I probably just biased you into thinking I'm a climate change denier with the title, but guess what... I buy into science.

However, there is such a ridiculous, self-reinforcing feedback loop of grandiose speech and groupthink within the climate research community that its no wonder quacks out there are encouraged towards disbelief. If you attend lectures by some of these researchers (personally, its been mostly atmospheric chemists for me), you'll see that nearly every one of them thinks they're some sort of Messiah trying to spread the holy message. This article (the original, not the fluff news summary) is no exception.

In order to secure a newspaper headline title (once again, in order to get THE MESSAGE out), Solomon completely ignores a range of facts and potential solutions.

First fact, she admits in the article that people have previously predicted the consequences to last centuries. Apparently, when you increase the timescale from 200 years to 1000 years, you pass her arbitrary distinction between 'reversible' and 'irreversible'. How about we agree to refer to this as possibly reversible on a really long time scale, huh? And instead of Solomon saying that she was the one to discover global warming was 'irreversible', instead say that it will take longer than expected to return to normal?

Second, Solomon DELIBERATELY turns a blind eye to research already in the literature that contradicts her model. This surpasses vanity and enters into the realm of negligence on the level of an ethical violation. I'm talking about the emerging field of carbon sequestration here. Anyone in the field of climate research WILL know about the branch of research focused on removing and confining CO2 from the atmosphere. While any implementation is still a long way from large scale deployment or commercial viability, if you're going to make predictions on a 1000 year time scale, you might want to take into account technology advances in this field! However, that would destroy Solomon's pretty newspaper headline and reduce it to the following:

Global warming might last five times as long as previously expected assuming we don't find a way to fix the problem first

.

Does that sound front-page newsworthy to you? Ok, I support the theory of man-made global warming. However, if we want to persuade the skeptics and nuts out there, climate researchers should start approaching the issue honestly and responsibly. Half truths will only undermine further discussion!

Don't buckle your seat belt

[Nicolas MONNET]

Don't buy car insurance, either.

After all, you've never had an accident! Who are those doomsayers who say you HAVE to?

Mod parent redundant

[anticlimate]

In the 70s they were also predicting a coming ice age.

That has been refuted even here on Slashdot IIRC. Global Cooling article in Wikipedia says:
"Of those scientific papers considering climate trends over the 21st century, only 10% inclined towards future cooling, while most papers predicted future warming."

Which doesn't mean your statement is necessary false, but you should provide some data supporting it.

Sounds Reasonable

[mosb1000]

The headline is a little alarmist, but the article is more reasobable:

That's really a political decision because there's more at issue than just the science. It's the issue of what the science says, plus what's feasible politically, plus what's reasonable economically to do," Oppenheimer says.

One of the things people don't understand about science sometimes is that it doesn't set policy because it requires objectivity. Goals, which are the basis of judgement and therefore decision making, are subjective.

Re:"Global warming" is political not scientific

[mevets]

I think the point is that the site (antithetically americanthinker) is politically/economically motivated bs.

You ignore...

[thrill12]

... the fact that "ice caps" are the least of our worries. Diseases, spread by insects, could become widespread as insects migrate to previously colder climate zones. Malaria, dengue fever, West Nile etc. That will probably be the quickest "experience" we have with global warming.

As we currently do not have correct antidotes against these diseases, I call your bluff.

And they were probably correct

[SL Baur]

I think they were right (about the coming ice age).

During the "mini ice age" 300 years ago, the notable feature was the lack of sunspots. Guess what the latest photos of the Sun show - NO sunspots.

Temperatures have also been going down, not up recently.

Analogy time. If you're trying to optimize code for speed you want to work on the region of code where you're spending the most time in already. It's the same as with temperature on the earth. The biggest input is the Sun. If the Sun cools down, as it apparently does periodically (periodic ice ages are fairly well documented and proven), then things get colder.

If one was *really* concerned about Global Warming, one would want a thermostat applied to the Sun. No one has suggested that. I find it remarkable the Sun stays as consistent as it does.

Anyway, the Sun is a first order effect, and anything man-made is at best several orders beneath that. We have more to worry about if the Sun suddenly becomes unstable and goes nova than this so-called Global Warming.

I'll leave it to someone else to provide a car analogy.

Re:And they were probably correct

[Hellsbells]

Temperatures haven't been going down by any significant amount. It was a cold winter in parts of the US and Europe, but 2008 was still in the top ten hottest years on record, 2007 in the top three.

Here's NASA's map of average global temperatures for 2008:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36699

Doesn't look particularly good does it?

Barbra Streisand

[SL Baur]

There is a myth that they predicted all apocalyptic shit in the 20th century. I remember when Limits came out .... its predictions were aimed squarely at the early to mid 21st century.

That was not what they were teaching in schools 20 years ago. Oil was supposed to have run out about 1997 or 1998 and tin 1990ish.

Oopsy!

Oh wait! We *did* already run out of oil out of the ground and all of today's oil production comes from extraction from teenager's faces![1] How could I be so dumb?

[1] Who would have thunk that Mel Brooks could save the world?

Re:Barbra Streisand

[GileadGreene]

That was not what they were teaching in schools 20 years ago. Oil was supposed to have run out about 1997 or 1998 and tin 1990ish.

Regardless of what you were taught in school 20 years ago, that's not what the actual Limits to Growth report said. There was a lot of bogus information propagated about the Limits to Growth report at the time it came out, largely by people who didn't like what it actually had to say. The reality is that the Limits to Growth report explored a number of different possible scenarios (varying assumptions such as the impact of technological change and of social policies), and found that most (but not all) scenarios seem to lead to some kind of "overshoot and collapse" in the mid to late 21st century. These were never meant to be precise predictions, but rather to provide some idea of the global system's behavioral tendencies. Interestingly, a recent study has found that the Limits to Growth "standard run" scenario tracks quite well with the actual observed behavior of the world over the last 30 years. As the abstract of that report says:

Contrary to popular belief, The Limits to Growth scenarios by the team of analysts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did not predict world collapse by the end of the 20th Century. This paper focuses on a comparison of recently collated historical data for 1970-2000 with scenarios presented in the Limits to Growth. The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario called the "standard run" scenario, which results in collapse of the global system midway through the 21st Century. The data does not compare well with other scenarios involving comprehensive use of technology or stabilizing behaviour and policies.

Horse Shit

[TapeCutter]

I get the joke but I'm not sure how we ended up on limits of growth and horse shit, that is not what TFPaper is about.

What it says is that IFF we stopped pumping out GHG tomorrow it would take thousands of years for the ocean to regain it's pre-industrial PH level. The ocean (and the shelled critters in it) is the largest C02 sink, too much CO2 makes the ocean slightly more acidic and this is already having a negative affect on said shelled critters ability to make shells, loss of coral reefs is the most publicised of these effects. Personally I hardly think it's surprising that it would take a long time for makind's CO2 spike to be aborsbed into the system if we all dropped dead tomorrow but science is about measurement and evidence, the question of "how long would it take" is as valid as any other.

limits of growth and horse shit

I like the horse story but the Dodo bird meat industry didn't fare quite as well. Tecnology may one day overcome that "temporary" glitch but until it does the Dodo meat industry went past it's own limit to growth in the 1700's(?). While we are LIMITED by our lack of terra-forming technology I think the most obvious limit to growth comes from from human shit, not horse shit.

As far as I am concerned we have no choice but to turn to technology to fix technology. However it's nice to have a "bug report" that clearly lays out what the problem is. Science is that bug report, without these kind of studies we wouldn't even recoginse the problem, and in fact many people still don't (just look at this thread for examples).

Re:Horse Shit

[toporok]

What I don't understand is why is everyone so obsessed with CO2. Humanity produces but ~2% of it, the rest is produced naturally by volcanoes, forest fires and such. If we all stop producing CO2 tomorrow, nothing will change, it's about time we realized that we are NOT gods and stop playing one. Yes, it's nice to have less pollutants in our cities but let's call it that and not the cure for global warming. Global warming is a natural process that has happened in the past without humans and will happen with or without them again.

Re:Horse Shit

[Admiral Ag]

The stock answer is it is because the system is so delicately balanced that our small contribution puts it out of balance.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm

Re:Horse Shit

[TapeCutter]

Well yes you could go for things of dubious, possibly negative value or you could use technology to stop burning coal. We all seem to agree a technological fix is the best option but where does this idea we have to hang on to the current way of generating energy come from?

Re:Horse Shit

[theodicey]

What I don't understand is why is everyone so obsessed with CO2.

Because the net atmospheric concentration of CO2 has gone up 40% over the last century or so. That's a very significant change, and it's basically all due to human activity. In the laboratory, it is more than enough to cause significant greenhouse warming.

As for the rest of your argument: "Although natural sources represent most CO2 emissions, they do not contribute to the recent observed increase in concentrations because natural sources are balanced by natural sinks that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The increase in carbon dioxide concentration arises because the increase from human activity is not completely balanced by a corresponding sink." -- USG via Wikipedia

Re:Horse Shit

[Nevyn]

Humanity produces but ~2% of it, the rest is produced naturally by volcanoes, forest fires and such.

You probably want to stop reading Fox and Rush, esp. 14 years after their lies have been debunked: July/August 1994
The Way Things Aren't
Rush Limbaugh Debates Reality

They have their value

[plasmacutter]

And this kind of hysterics has been around a long time. Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan. According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7. These professional pessimists have always underestimated mankind's ability to change, adapt, and solve problems. They've always underestimated our capacity to make things happen.

These people have their value though.

Without their strong caveats who knows whether enough of us would feel compelled to actually solve those problems before they blindsided us like a stealth missile.

All optimists, progressives, and risk-takers express this kind of dismissiveness about such dire predictions, but without them, and those who act on them, our decisions would become reckless very quickly.

For instance, if nobody started raising severe alarms about energy use, we probably would have all died in a third world war caused by people fighting over oil for their 10 gallon per mile cars.

Re:"Global warming" is political not scientific

[Lars T.]

Yeah, 32000 "scientists" from just about any field that allows one to get a PhD should easily trump many thousands of scientists from the fields closely related to climate science. Did I mention that that list originally included "Drs. 'Frank Burns' 'Honeycutt' [sic] and 'Pierce' from the hit-show M*A*S*H and Spice Girls, a.k.a. Geraldine Halliwell, who was on the petition as 'Dr. Geri Halliwel' and again as simply 'Dr. Halliwell.'

Yes I do, and yes we will.

[Shivetya]

We can produce food for many times what is on this planet. The only difference is that diets will adjust to which food products can be readily produced. Do you understand how much land that is suitable for farming isn't even used?

Susan Solomon is a CO2 freak. Her contention has been that we produce too much CO2 but every time I have read her interviews she spouts the changes in how much we produce without going into how much is naturally occurring. In other words, it looks bad if you just see how much more we produce but mankind has nothing on the mother nature's numbers.

Hyperbole for the win by the way, we have lots of fish, the key is who is farming it and where. Certain vocal industries are decrying loss of fishing but what good does putting a restriction on where our people can fish if our neighbors don't.

The whole problem with the GW is caused by man is that it really is "GW is profitable to certain men". Cap and Trade is the outcome these people want because it will make them money. In the mean time poor chinese and africans will lose their lands to damns and energy projects that benefit the rich world and a few rich people.

Lovely.

Man isn't the cause of global warming but men will certainly find a way to profit off of it

We must accept our fate.

[((hristopher _-*-_-*]

Are any of us truly surprised.

How many of us just want to believe otherwise, as the idea of it is so difficult to accept. I imagine that one could almost put a name to the mental behavior that so many of us have as we consider this.

It really _has_ always been about adapting, rather than avoiding. The bomb has already gone off, the walk of the meek is at hand.

You are missing why it happens

[tacokill]

There is plenty of food.

Where we struggle, as human beings, is getting it to the people who need it. Politics, not capability, determine who gets fed and who doesn't.
We have PLENTY of resources to feed 7bil, 8bil, or even 10bil people. That has never been the problem. It's our own selves that is the problem.

The final solution

[Bromskloss]

It seems all our problems would be solved if we were fewer...

Some facts from a farm guy

[chris-chittleborough]

In actual fact we currently produce enough food for over 7 billion people. (Some is turned into ethanol, some grain is used to fatten up meat animals, some food goes to overweight people like me ... all because food prices are historically low.) The reason millions of people are starving today has nothing to do with global production shortages -- it's because of political failures.

Re:Some facts from a farm guy

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Uh oh, someone is actually daring to say that ethanol and its subsidizing is a bad idea :)

    You mean to say that when Zimbabwe took over the farms of only the white farmers and the country went from a food exporter to famine, it was the gov'ts fault?! LIAR! It was global warming! It was Bush's fault! It was the UN not having the support of the US! It was those damned fat American's fault!

Re:Excuse me?! "Threw up their hands"?

[Dun Malg]

If by "threw up their hands" you mean "publicly funded and built a massive underground public transit system" and "pushed the adoption of automobiles by adopting increasingly auto-centric laws", then yes, they "threw up their hands".

If you actually knew your history rather than assuming that things then were as things now, you'd know that the public transit system in New York was not built by the government, but by private enterprise looking to make a buck. The move to put it underground was funded by city bonds, but it the elevated train system was already there. Furthermore, "auto-centric" laws came as result of the mass adoption of automobiles by the public at large, not the other way around.

Resource exhaustion is undeniable.

[tjstork]

Well its funny because every manner of fossil fuel is in a state where we are getting "not as good" raw material out of the ground. I'm hardly a big environmentalist but I can't see how anyone can deny any peak fossil fuel or even nearly planetary resource.

The oil we are getting is not as good and harder to extract. In old oil fields you drilled a few hundred feet and you could just pipe it onto a rail car and you were good to go. Now you have to go thousands of feet, blow compressed air into the ground to smash up rocks, heat the oil so you can pump it, and then you have to refine the crap out of it to use it. Even good old coal is certainly not as good - Germany is practically onto burning lignite and that's pretty crappy coal and even in America the good hard stuff is getting used up and we're onto lower grades of coal.

Even for metals you have to wonder where all the good stuff is. In the 19th century, people were getting gold out of the ground and you could SEE chunks of it. Now, when they talk about gold mining, they don't even bother screening the miners because the gold content of the earth is so low that a miner would have to take out an F-150 sized truck of the stuff to get a few bucks.

Meanwhile, up in space, we have an asteroid that is quite literally made out of 20 trillion dollars worth of practically pure iron and precious metals, a planet made out of methane, and we're sitting here with our thumbs up our rears, barring ourselves from using nuclear power to make spaceships with, when unimaginable wealth is in the skies above us.

You don't need to be a scientist or a genius to see where the future is. All you need is to read an assay of a asteroid, and compare that to an assay of what's considered to be a good project today. Right now, if we took a tenth of the capital we spend on developing technologies to get every last scrap of goodness out of our used up planet, we could have enough materials of any kind to essentially end all of poverty on this planet.

There is no long term environmentalism without the conquest of space.

Mice

[leromarinvit]

Don't worry, it's just the mice overclocking the Earth a little bit so they get the ultimate question five minutes eralier. It's all perfectly under control, just ask any mouse about it.

Re:Excuse me?! "Threw up their hands"?

[brkello]

What's your point? You give one example of something that illustrates your point. There are plenty of examples of the government has done positive things. Capitalism wouldn't abolish slavery. Too much government is bad. Not enough government is bad. Why don't people get this?

Re:you mean: solve one problem and get another one

[ArsonSmith]

Umm, well, good luck with that. The only problem with your argument it the complete fantasy that your altruistic busybody is both going to show up and his/her replacement is going to continue in their do goodery. As flawed as free market and capitalism is, it feeds of the basic human instincts of greed and desire to harness them and use them to further the economy. What you suggest is a one track path to fascism.

and they had an abysmal success rate...

[SuperBanana]

They had an entire crew killed on the launchpad on the very first go, and the crew of Apollo 13 were dumb-shit-lucky to make it back to earth. Six of the missions actually landed on the moon, out of SEVENTEEN missions (yes, a number were not designed to land on the moon, or even leave earth orbit.)

Even if you're exceptionally kind, NASA failed to reach the moon 1 in 7 tries.

Not a scientist, just a contrarian

[GeekAlpha]

"I am not a climate scientist, but I believe that if I don't understand no one else possibly could," would have been a sufficient answer.

Re:Global cooling, now global warming...

[KORfan]

There were two papers written about it, one was in Scientific American. Everything else was media hoopla. Carl Sagan was going on about nuclear winter, but mostly the "global cooling" stuff is being resurrected by people who are politically motivated.

Re:There's something wrong with you. Really.

[FishAdmin]

When did I write that doing abortions is the same as taking care of children? You need to get back to your Logic101 classes.

Um, how about right HERE:

That includes not preventing pregnancy, not doing abortions and not taking care of their children properly.

See, this is where you were talking about the poor, ignorant masses that are all too fatalistic to either:

a)not have children

b)abort those unwanted children

or c)take care of those children they DO have.

Right there would be where you were setting up implied equality in the situation, by listing all the alternatives in a grammatical structure of balance.

I'll use an example you should relate to easier: Now that Obama is in office, we'll have less taxes, more money, and a better economy!*

See, that sentence created a progressive equality, just as yours did. With mine it was: Less taxes leads to more money which leads to a better economy! Yours was that if those poor folk had any sense they'd: prevent pregnancy, abort the ones that DO happen, and take care of the select few that they decided were "keepers."

* The above statement is not representative of FishAdmin, his associates, or any sane person. It is merely used as an example, along the lines of "If frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their butts every time they hopped."