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Aussie Climate Scientists Receiving Death Threats
An anonymous reader writes "With the Australian parliament beginning the debate on setting a carbon price, climate scientists are reporting an increase in threatening phone calls and even death threats. The threats are serious enough that several universities have increased security for their ecology and meteorology researchers. The Australian government is seeking to introduce a carbon tax by July 2012."
Strelok is here to help.
...a guy isn't safe checking his wet dry hygrometer in the morning.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Since people can't rationalize their hatred of science (since science is logic and reason), they get all emotional and cry and whine and make death threats.
Always do the opposite of a conservative, especially the "freedom-loving" libertarian types.
Are these the same guys who've been refusing SOI/FOIA requests because they claim that their work which is publically funded is 'proprietary'? Or are these the same ones from aussieland that made up the shit including forging the emails that they were being harassed.
Then again I can't really feel too much sympathy. People will only take a decade or two(maybe three) of doom and gloom based on fudged numbers, and corrupted policies. Especially when they realize that what you're proposing will effectively bankrupt the entire country and turn it into a 3rd world dirt farming nation.
Om, nomnomnom...
To the people making threats:
The scientists' work has already been published. They can't revoke those publications no matter how much you threaten them. You may discourage them from publishing more work, but that doesn't take back what has already been said. On the other hand, you may also make them more zealous in defending their cause. This isn't only bad for you, but it's bad for science. Either way it's a lose-lose situation, so use your conscience and don't make threats.
Comments in TFA link to this http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/carbon-death-threats-go-cold/story-e6freuzr-1226071996499 article, that suggest there were two instances of threats five years ago. Why does it seem any and all articles with 'environmnet' in the title instantly get dragged into the mud? Be they pro or against.
Any murderer worth his salt will get them while they are at home...
Yo. Conservative checking in. There's no hatred of science. There's a dislike of fudged numbers, BS, doom and gloom, including the usual "If we don't..." and "we'll be drowning in 10 years, no wait 30 years, no wait 80 years!!11!" that people get tired of. That's not forgetting the refusal to disclose publicly funded data, and then spending years tying up the courts over that pubically funded data. And so on either while refusing FOIA/SOI requests either. Nah. I know it's difficult to accept, but damn. But I suppose you can't fault groups like greenpeace(among other groups) turning around and trying to get their fingers in the pie either. I mean they sure have gone out of their way to invent BS to get written into the last several IPCC's.
Then again, perhaps I could simply say ah liberals. Actually going out and attacking people, including attempting to assassinate them when they don't like their political ideology. Which is sadly much closer to the truth. The US sure has had no shortage of liberals running amok in the last 6-8mo physically attacking conservatives that's for sure.
Also tip: I'm a canuck.
Om, nomnomnom...
That kind of blatant hypocrisy makes others with positions similar to yours look bad via guilt by association. Please try not to set yourself up as a straw-man.
There's a dislike of fudged numbers, BS, doom and gloom, including the usual "If we don't..." and "we'll be drowning in 10 years, no wait 30 years, no wait 80 years!!11!" that people get tired of
Good thing you don't ride a bike to work like me then because its a never ending stream of "if I don't do something now things could be really bad for me in about five seconds".
For me managing the planet should be like riding a bike. I keep an eye out for developing problems and take action when I think something might kill me. The fact that it hasn't so far doesn't invalidate the assumptions I make.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
In the beginning, there was only climate science.
Then came some skeptics, and all was well. And the discussion was between scientists.
Then came some denialists, and all was not well. The discussion was now between politicians.
Now come the death threats, and all is getting worse. The discussion is now between activists.
What's next? Violence? And a 'discussion' between armies?
I'm so glad to see that a lack of knowledge does not hold the world back from taking violent action.
-- Is there any record of a scientist who threatens a religious leader for not agreeing with the Books of Science?
Two 'death threats' were received, one 5 years ago and the other at a staff wine and cheese evening 12 months ago. None of the emails released contained anything remotely like a death threat, and no police involvement has been requested by the putative 'offended' parties. This is nothing more than a beatup by liars trying to get a better budget to improve their office quarters.
And you fell for it because you too are a liberal bigot who loves having their prejudices and bigotry stroked without any interest in the facts,
...is good.
Do you intend to turn that into carbon dioxide and water?
--
The other threat was made to a scientist at a university function last year by a person not known to university staff (or the cops).
Many activists are more interested in making grand gestures and gaining status within their own organisation, than bringing about actual change. Even terrorist organisations tend to follow this pattern.
And scientists (who want to abide by the law) can't defend themselves using guns...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiYZxOlCN10
Yo.
Whoisthreatingwhom?
Source of death threats is likely sock puppet army software by HBGary or similar, commissioned by USA federal government, discovered by anonymous hack.
Probably the source of lots of climate denial posts all over the web.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All?detail=hide
Link to government solicitation document not working, lucky the document is copied inline for our records.
So science should be ignored, as it never deals with proof. Kinda hypocritical as you're reading this on a computer. So it seems you accept science when you want to, and dismiss it as sensationalist bullshit when it suits you. You also seem to have a very perverse idea about climate science and the scientists involved in that field. Which in itself is strange, as your actions ("fuck it - it's wrong") would only be a valid position if you had a solid understanding of of this field.
Hey, didn't British send their common criminals to Australia, religious nuts and crooks to America? With only two latter conditions being hereditary? Australians were supposed to be the sane ones!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
How many carbon credits can i claim if i kill someone?
Gotta be worth something... They won't be producing carbon ever again. Just maybe some methane as they rot.
I think it's more important to establish some sort of procedure to catch those who places those threats and have them accused and trialed for their crimes rather than increasing security on university campuses.
Isn't there a some sort of police force in Australia that can set traps, look at e-mail and phone records and find those criminals?
Isn't there a some sort of police force in Australia that can set traps, look at e-mail and phone records and find those criminals?
Sure, but there is always the risk that the dangerous offender is the person for whom action speaks louder than words, while the person who makes the threat is all talk.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You're talking about data submitted to the scientists by tree rings, right? Or by drilling cores? Or satellites? I'm sure those lazy satellites are just making stuff up instead of measuring it! Just like those evil weather stations all over the world!
If there was only one line of evidence that climate science was based on, you might have a point. But it's not.
As the facts continue to mount against them, these groups...
Climate change skeptics
Evolution denialists
"Birthers" (USA only)
become increasingly more extreme due to cognitive dissonance. I guess the end is when they can no longer even separate the facts from the messengers and having lost the factual battle seek to strike back in any way they can.
How pathetic.
Yea, the research universities use data from tired overworked coasties.
Not.
Anyways, even if you guys made up all of the data statistically some of the data would trend in the other direction also wouldnt it?
Have you thought this through?
No, OK. That explains alot.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Because the fact that murder is illegal means that nobody ever kills anyone /sarcasm. I'd consider owning an illegal handgun less severe a crime.
However, the people who illegally possess such guns in this country (Australia) generally aren't going to use them against scientists so much as dispatching competitors in their illicit businesses ie. gang/mob violence.
So the plebeians will rant and rave about how great science is when it makes their life easier and more productive (internet, modern medicine, manufacturing efficiency, productivity) but when it shows them changes need to be taken that will cost them a tiny fraction of their annual salary they go nuts. The greed of the average citizen in a capitalistic society knows no bounds.
While I think it's great people want to get involved with the environment, stop and think about this like a computer scientist.
If carbon dioxide produces global warming, we will run into problems as the ratio of humans to trees changes. Soon we will have more humans than trees, which means more carbon dioxide than nature can re-absorb.
The only solution is for us to use less land, and have more trees on it, which requires we have fewer humans.
We're like an obese person on a sofa who can't stop spreading out over the whole thing. Soon there will be no sofa left, only fat. What then?
Futurist Traditionalism
What reports are you referring to here and why should you expect scientific predictions (which are usually couched in error bars and scenarios) to stay constant in the face of new evidence or better modelling? And your appeal for raw data is particularly laughable, given that it's the usual gambit that deniers throw out as if it's all some vast conspiracy and if only scientists would spend every waking moment satisfying specious FOIA requests this conspiracy would be revealed.
Is it your position that any law which doesn't completely eliminate a crime is useless against that crime? If a gun ban stops a few accidental killings and a few crimes of passion, is that not good enough? As for criminals, a man who has a gun is usually not out to kill you anyway; he is working on the assumption that the threat of the gun will get him what he wants. Killing you is a hassle. If he's really out to murder you, then whether you have a gun is most likely immaterial because you are alerted to the situation by the first shot.
You may think, "but if he knew other people had guns he wouldn't work on that assumption," but here's the thing - yes he will, because even without a gun ban, most people do not own guns, and most of the people who do own guns don't walk around with them. So his system still works, even against most gun owners. And if you're one of the few, and you pull your gun, you've just escalated a robbery into life or death stakes. This may work out in your favor, but it may not. Maybe to you the contents of your wallet are worth dying for. I've never met anyone who couldn't replace everything in there, though. Most people agree with me; this is why the robbery at gunpoint is successful in the first place.
Putting guns in the hands of every citizen isn't going to decrease murders. Guns have exactly one purpose, and if humans are good at anything, we excel at using tools for their intended purpose.
And yet the homicide rate is lower in Australia than in the U.S.
what is the purpose of banning guns.
preventing the populace from defending itself from a totalitarian regime. History is replete with kings and warlords making weapons illegal for the populace (hence why many weapons are derived from farming tools). Just be glad you're not in GB where knives are on the chopping block.
I am just using the only data and evidence that I have available to me; mainly my own knowledge and experience. Admittedly I have only my have one sample point, and I hope that all the rest of the data is good ,as everyone is putting blind faith into it (although there is no reason to believe it is unless I want to believe that weather scientist are omniscient god like entities who never submit to societal pressure). However I don't have access to the rest of the data, and apparently it is proprietary information. So given the fact that I do not access to this proprietary data, and the only data that I do have is false, I have two choices. I can believe what ever the media is saying, or I can use my own common sense and the very limited data I do have. I have to look outside the window, and ask myself if the weather is going haywire. No. Is it likely that the climate of the planet is changing. Yes. Has it changed in the past. Yes. Would it be great to have a warmer climate, and have dinosaurs running around and shit like they did in the past. Yes. Does it make sense to throw all humanity's efforts into combating this weather change, that might in the end be inevitable? No.
Rather that snipping at each other and making snide character comments it would be better if humanity could work together to try to get off the planet. Rather than worrying about what impact humans have on the climate, climate scientist could be looking into Terra-forming Mars. The only way to eliminate the affect that humans have on the planet, would be to eliminate all the humans. Ohh wait, I forgot only conservative people affect the climate. OK, so just kill all the conservatives, and I a sure the planet will be happy.
-Regards freedom loving libertarian.
http://washingtonceasefire.org/resource-center/international-and-domestic-statistics-compared : banning guns does prevent murders.
and accidents: http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_sy.html
and even suicides: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2007-releases/press04102007.html
having guns does not really do anything to protect anyone.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
...is good.
Do you intend to turn that into carbon dioxide and water?
Probably solid waste with a dose of methane for good measure...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Given that there quite obviously is a link between overall murder-rate and gun murder rate, *that's* the purpose. Lower ownership of guns leads to lower murder rate (whatever the weapon).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence
Fairly obvious when you think about it (go on, use your logic). It's lots easier to pull a trigger than physically melee someone to death.
weather stations all over the world!
Our cutter was one of those weather stations. 98% of the time the data we gave out was bogus. Obviously some data is good. My point was one should not place blind faith in what people are telling you. You should question assumptions, and the validity of the world view.
-Or you can just go on putting blind faith in the experts, and believing the results of the latest scientific study that contradict the results of the second most recent scientific study.
Of course. Any responsible citizen will call the cops after they've been mugged/raped/stabbed/shot/burnedwithfile/killed. Defending yourself can only put yourself and others into danger.
the purpose of a gun made for killing someone is usually to function so that the target dies before he can reply, so a gun works best against people who don't shoot first.
the real purpose for banning guns, controlling them and forcing you to store them disassambled is rather simple. it's to prevent drunk shooting or doing it quickly in bad temper - it's to prevent accidental murders. that's how most of the regular joe vs. regular joe stuff happens anyways.
now if you need to protect yourself from random hired crazies then you need a bodyguarding team complete with bulletproof cars. if you need to protect yourself from a rebellion then you need a gaddafi hideout and your own army.
Go find a medical researcher who works with animals and ask him for his death threat collection....
People doing moderation on the above should use the "Reply to This" link instead. That's how you express yourself when you do not agree!
Methane is colorless and odorless. That's hydrogen sulfide you're smelling.
http://www.object404.com
Think again. Instead of trying to fix real existing threats that we have in front of us (waste management, water resources, starvation, pollution, etc.), the goal is to have a CO2 tax for something we aren't sure about. And we're not talking about banishing fossil fuel cars here, and replacing them with electricity, which would be the first thing to do. No, just tax them... Tax everyone, make a bank of the world which will be privately held, and go with that, continuing to pollute the world. If you think that will save you from dying, you are mistaking!
So science should be ignored, as it never deals with proof. Kinda hypocritical as you're reading this on a computer. So it seems you accept science when you want to, and dismiss it as sensationalist bullshit when it suits you. You also seem to have a very perverse idea about climate science and the scientists involved in that field. Which in itself is strange, as your actions ("fuck it - it's wrong") would only be a valid position if you had a solid understanding of of this field.
I'm not sure exactly how you got to this from what harryturtle777 wrote. Seriously.
I suppose you are right.
People die from fire related deaths each year. I suppose if we banned matches, we could do a similar job at curtailing arson. People die each year from drowning . Maybe if we banned swimming pools we could curtail some of those deaths.
Guns like matches are a tool. You can use the tool wisely or you can not. It is a question of freedom, and whether you have enough faith in humanity to not go around shooting each other just because they can. I being a freedom loving conservative have a great faith in individuals, but not so much in governments, which over time grow corrupt. That is why I would choose to let people have the means to defend themselves in such eventualities. As a liberal, you probably have a distrust of people, but believe a government will protect you from the lone wacky individual, when you don't trust yourself to (by arming yourself). We should just agree to disagree.
It's time for all you free thinkers to get outraged. Just like when Anderson Cooper on CNN runs a story about a gay person getting treated badly, your job is to get outraged. This is kind of like a test of the emergency elitist indignation service. Everyone repeat after me: "I am smart because I repeat what I've been told. disbelievers are stupid because they question what I have been told is fact". After all, global warming... I mean global climate change... is just like original sin in religion, the only difference being global warming is a sin against the earth while Catholics sinned against god. Since we all know man kind is evil and stupid, except for us of course ;) , we must rise to the cause and save the us from ourselves.
Not realising that making a threat to mount a "public smear campaign" not only negates your ability to do so, it in fact destroys your own position?
This campaign of abuse is so incompetent that it's utterly self defeating; any attempt to engage in nuanced debate can now be curtailed simply by labelling the doubter as "one of those denialist terrorists", and refusing to engage with them.
Indeed, if I were a ecomental activist, I'd mount exactly this sort of comedically clumsy campaign in the name of denialists. It works especially well since hug-a-dolphin liberals do actually believe that denialists (i.e. anyone who disagrees with them) are exactly "that dumb".
Bravo, ecomentals. Well played, sirs, madams and non-gender-specificists.
Of course, you're not really saving the earth, you're just inadvertently shilling for the very corporations who are selling snake oil to solve an intractable problem (too many humans), but don't let that stop you, you plucky mentals.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Since people can't rationalize their hatred of science
Yea! Think about the Church of Global Warming
Church of Global Warming? Oh yeah! That's right next to the Church of Gravity and just up the street from the Church of Evolution and the Church of Quantum Mechanics.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Just a guess, but he might be talking about the data from East Anglia, NASA and MIT, which were used to build the IPCC AR4 in 2007, which is always the report everyone talks about. The issue is that gathering all the data is both very hard and very expensive. And what would be a peer review if we had no data sets to work with? Those who asked about these data, like Vincent Courtillot, later tried to gather data from other data sets, as they were in front of walls when asking. And their conclusion are very different. So yes, asking for the data sets on which all the later CO2 policies are extremely important.
...senior climate scientist found bashed with one...
During the French revolution, they rushed into the "Bastille" prison. Not in order to save or free people from there, but because there was guns in it. We got to remember that one... :)
The problem with Australia, strangely, is very different. It is not at all about criminals; it is because Australia is a society based on working class British culture which used to be highly unionised. Australians see high incomes and profligate use of energy as their "rights" - and, as we know, Trade Unionists would demand the suspension of the Laws of Thermodynamics if it infringed their members' "rights". They have got away with it because China has an insatiable demand for Australian minerals, but they are failing to develop a goods and service economy based on those minerals, which means the boom will eventually collapse. (Before anyone mods this flamebait, I have numerous Australian relatives, and the views described above come from my Australian uncle, who founded a successful business and yet used to ride a bicycle around Perth. He felt that the Australian economy was in the long term unsustainable - and his descendants have squandered his fortune.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Oh dear, you've attacked the sacred almighty science reputation ! Kill the traitor ! Oh wait, it's climate "science" (I'm of the exact sciences persuasion, and well, they don't measure up) ! Exterminate the traitor, slowly, neuter his dog and kill his family !
You know, this repuation.
The sad fact is, attempt to hold up climate science to the standards of other exact sciences, like physics, and nothing remains. Predictions made by climate scientists in the past "with 95% certainty" (and higher) have failed to materialize. Do that in physics, and your theory gets laughed out of every conference.
What is by far the most disgusting bit about climate science is that "skeptic" has become an insult. Imho, the basis of science is doubt, and so everybody should be a climate skeptic, even when it comes to established theories. If anyone needs more proof that this science is overly politicized, there you have it. Everybody also knows that this is done for political reasons (the climate treaties) ...
this is disgusting
These are the tough days for the Australia..One after the other natural calamity comes.. God Bless us all !
Information Technology Healthcare
But everyone on slashdot seems to think that the word of scientist is the word of God almighty himself, rather than actually taking the time to look at the situation critically.
What, they're both made up nonsense?
This snappy oneliner brought to you by Xenu, who knew how to deal with overpopulation.
Why does this get covered in slashdot, but not the death threats revealed in Sarah Palin's e-mail release? And if a few whack-jobs threatening Australian scientists is enough to condemn every global warming skeptic, does the same apply to Palin's opponents?
If you're gonna make a faux-utilitarian argument to prove your point that utilitarianism is a bad way to make these decisions, you need to choose better arguments.
Matches are not banned, but they are regulated. In my youth, you could get non-safety matches. Not any more, and it's to prevent fire deaths.
Swimming pools are also tightly regulated. However, they are also a net benefit in strictly utilitarian terms as the QALYs lost to people drowning is outweighed by the QALYs gained through improved fitness, in population terms.
Your first paragraph can be summed up as "My one data point is so much more trustworthy then thousands of scientists." I refuse to address this point because it cannot even stand up on its own.
Your second paragraph says that scientists should instead focus on making another planet habitable. SO scientists can terraform an entire planet, but we as humans cannot cause any inadvertent change in our own environment? That is the argument du jour. That the changes we are seeing are completely natural. If there is no possibility that we as humans have caused these changes, then what hope to we have to terraform a entire planet.
To use a slashdot favorite heres a car analogy. I can probably fix a lot of little things on my car, but I don't have much of a hope building one from scratch. The Earth is our car, it is so much easier to fix what we got, then it is to build a new one.
That doesn't even touch on the fact that this generation, and I'm willing to guess the next few generations, will never live on another planet/moon in large numbers.
This has nothing to do with being conservative, this has to do with ignoring science in favor of a gut feeling.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Are you implying that guns don't kill people...that people kill people? Careful or you'll be labeled a neo-conservative kook!
"the purpose of a gun made for killing someone is usually to function so that the target dies before he can reply, so a gun works best against people who don't shoot first."
Like Greedo?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
You're absolutely right, but if I may (ab)use your analogy:
What good does keeping an eye out for trouble, if you start yanking your bike around at any sign of potential trouble just to swerve right into the car that popped out of your blind spot?
Being proactive is great, reacting panicky and thoughtless WILL put you in danger.
This doesn't address (or even acknowledge) my argument at all.
If you have one line of evidence, it may be flawed the way you suggest. But if you have several independent lines of evidence, and they all show the same trend, that's not something you can account for with inaccurate data collection methods (i.e. what you described).
Just by having lots of independently run weather stations, your made up data would be averaged out unless the majority of operators just happen to make up the same trend in their measurements.
The anger and hatred isn't over the science. It's about taxes. People get tired of being taxed to death. Here in the US they had terrorists throwing tea in the harbor over the tea tax back a few years ago. I think they were the neo-cons who started the whole tea party thing.
</sarcasm>?
It's not like those greenpeace loons are the most level-headed bunch.
Always do the opposite of a conservative, especially the "freedom-loving" libertarian types.
Actually, I find the the libertarian movement more a product of the religious takeover of the republican party than anything else. Of course the teabaggers have jumped on the libertarian ship and seek to sink that as well.
Where's the "fiscal conservative, social liberal" party? (...if not the libertarians)
In other news, I have been receiving death threats from washing machine manufacturers because of this stay-clean white material I have developed. If anyone would like to license the technology please leave a message on Slashdot....
This isn't about science, its about taxes. Big difference.
How is the parent of this not a troll?
If we were doing the right thing we would stop burning brown coal tomorrow and live without power for a while. The carbon tax is very nearly the least the Government could do. What should happen is that polluters should pay the full cost of the pollution they create so that cleaner energy generators can compete. The carbon tax is a small step in that direction.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Same with the tea-baggers as well...
This is blinging
Climate science and particle physics both depend on large amounts of data, theoretical models, and lots of computer power. They are at the leading edge of their disciplines and their standards are more or less identical. Are you saying that, pari passu, particle physics doesn't meet the standards set by classical mechanics?
I conclude that you are not really a physicist or a chemist, or you would not be so ignorant of the kind of research that goes on nowadays.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
May I point you to the little-known concept of exact sciences. It's a wonderful place, everybody knows all sorts of complex theories, and very little about the practical side of things. In fact, even using the word "measure" to propose doing something outside of your room will get you angry looks, and god forbid you suggest going outside. Shaving more than once a month makes you an outsider, unless you're the new kid and still have hopes of courting girls. Either something can be calculated directly from first principles, or we simply don't pretend we can calculate it.
So climate science didn't become an exact science. Climate science, the exact version : co2 forcing heats up the athmosphere and changes dozens of other things too. How does the earth respond to changes in energy input ? Aha !. dU = dQ - dW. Okay, let's calculate ... hmmm we don't actually know dQ, and there are theoretical problems preventing accurate measurements. Hmmm, we can't calculate dW either, as we simply don't know what this means in the context of the earth as a whole, so we can't even theoretically state what a measurement would consist of. Is there any other way to calculate the effects of changes in incoming energy ? Well, short answer : no.
So we can't find a definitive answer to the question what CO2 does to the average temperatures in the athmosphere. (and I'm being polite : I ignore the elephant in the room, that average temperature cannot actually be defined for any non-trivial case. (We can explain temperature changes after the fact, but we can't predict anything reliably for this very reason. You can see what happened in the past, but there are *zero* guarantees the systems won't alter their behavior, because we don't even know what that behavior is)
But of course, this is the answer science is recently been forbidden from using : "we don't know, and nobody else knows either. Anybody telling you differently is a moron".
Climate science is not an exact science, which means the "settled science" basically boils down to "this line seems to have gone up for a while now, so let's just say it will do that again". Why am I being so mean ? Because we don't actually have any formula to calculate that line !
Disagree ? Prove me wrong. But let me get you started : T(lower troposphere) = ... (fill this in). This is then followed by an explanation of the physical properties that make this a deterministic formula (sorry, no differentials please, also any use of the variable "t" is forbidden, as these remove all determinism from your formula).
Is this too high a standard ? Bullshit ! Math uses a higher standard even than this. Applied sciences is basically muddling about. And frankly, theology seems to me better founded than the social sciences.
Because liberal groups would never send death threats to scientists right?
The point of view that the people who send death threats to scientists are mostly conservative would be news to scientists involved in animal testing.
Didn't stop those "pro life" dipshits from blowing up clinics.
A few years after 9/11 I found myself working for an engineering and architectural firm. Though most were staunch republicans, the unanimous view on the 9/11 building take downs were that it was no accident. "Designed to fall that way" true. But only under the circumstances of a controlled and carefully timed demolition sequence of explosions. Planes have crashed into buildings before. Fires in skyscrapers have happened before. But never in the history of skyscrapers has it happened before or since quite like this... and this "accident" happened twice in rapid sequence. That'd be like hitting two hole-in-ones twice in a row.
I agree that it was obvious. Belief trumps fact regardless of how blatant it seems.
There is an excellent reason why climate scientists are being targeted personally. This is -- and has been -- the deniers' game plan all along.
The evidence for AGW is scientifically fairly certain, but powerful vested interests have attempted to derail regulation and legislation, firstly by lobbying, then by paying shady PR outfits to do "doubt mongering" and whip up the unhinged elements of the political Right.
Now that governments are paralyzed, the vested interests hope of tackling climate change have been foiled, by the climate action lobby appealing to the public directly.
The logical counter? Vilify climate action activists and climatologists, depict it as yet another battle of the Culture Wars, and whip up the lunatic Right into an even greater frenzy -- and make it has hazardous and dangerous as possible to advocate action on climate change.
The WORST thing we can do right now is back down in the face of abuse, vilification and threats, because if we do, then the oil majors and Koch Industries wins.
Yes, Michael Mann's response to the Climategate scandal was a bit extreme, wasn't it.
> Yo. Conservative checking in. There's no hatred of science. There's a dislike of fudged numbers,
The problem with the "dislike of fudged numbers" theory is that no-one has ever been able to show that the numbers have been fudged. Climate change has been a hot topic for more than 25 years, and even after all that time no-one has been able to provide and convincing evidence that there is a conspiracy to present false information as fact. Even the infamous East Anglia e-mails showed no evidence for a plot to defraud the world. The reality is that after nearly a generation of trying the extremists have not been able to provide any evidence to back-up their claims of fraud. At some point rational people accept the fact that they were wrong and move on.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
weather stations all over the world!
Our cutter was one of those weather stations. 98% of the time the data we gave out was bogus. Obviously some data is good. My point was one should not place blind faith in what people are telling you. You should question assumptions, and the validity of the world view.
So, who got court-martialled?
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-07/
It is pretty funny. The original poster makes an incoherent ad hominem against "conservatives" (with a nice added libertarian jab), and gets modded up as insightful. And the reply, while also ad hominem, is directed at "liberals", has added substance, and is modded down.
One could conclude then liberals are not very tolerant of differing viewpoints. How does this relate back to the issue of climate science?
We don't care if polluters are paying a tax. We want them to stop the pollution. Banishing coal electricity really is possible.
There are very few guns in Australia (~100,000) with strict rules on sale, transportation, storage. There are very few gun related deaths in Australia (under 10 per year.) There are 100,000,000+ guns in America, and ~10,000 gun deaths a year. Yeah it's probably a coincidence, luckily you have guns to defend yourselves! Hooray for the constitution!
More guns = more dead people. Fact
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/carbon-death-threats-go-cold/story-e6freuzr-1226071996499
CLAIMS prominent climate change scientists had recently received death threats have been revealed as an opportunistic ploy, with the Australian National University admitting that they occurred up to five years ago.
Only two of ANU's climate change scientists allegedly received death threats, the first in a letter posted in 2006-2007 and the other an offhand remark made in person 12 months ago.
Neither was officially reported to ACT Police or Australian Federal Police, despite such crimes carrying a 10-year prison sentence.
The outdated threats raised question marks over the timing of their release to the public, with claims they were aired last week to draw sympathy to scientists and their climate change cause.
The university denied it was creating a ruse, maintaining the initial report, in the Fairfax-owned Canberra Times last week, failed to indicate when the threats were made.Reports also suggested the threats had forced the ANU to lock away its climate change scientists and policy advisers in a high-security complex. The Daily Telegraph has discovered the nine scientists and staff in question were merely given keyless swipe cards - routine security measures taken last year.
ANU climate institute director Professor Will Steffen, a key adviser to the Howard and Gillard governments, is believed to have received the threatening letter.
The other threat was made to a scientist at a university function last year by a person not known to university staff.
ANU communications director Catriona Jackson would not reveal the exact wording of the threats, but added: "Abusive emails are par for the course for most climate change scientists."
Scientist and renowned climate change sceptic Jo Nova said the revelation of the death threats was merely a welcome diversion for climate change believers.
"It's a great way to win sympathy. Not that I'm suggesting these scientists are feigning it themselves, but that there are billions of dollars on the table, not to mention a cult-like devotion to the meme," Ms Nova said.
"It's in quite a few people's interests to help those scientists win the sympathy of the crowd, and to distract the crowd with something non-scientific."
Actually if Russia and the USA and a few other select nations stopped selling guns to everyone, it would considerably lessen global conflict and increase the chances of democracy in 3rd world countries. Guns are a very efficient way of killing people and keeping them under control. It's a lot more difficult with swords and spears. Try stabbing 100,000 protesters to death and see how you go.
Correlation is not causation. They also listen to less rap music.
No sig today...
No, a law whose unintended consequences undermines its intended consequences is useless against what it was intended for. A gun ban may stop a few accidental killings, and a handful of crimes, but at what cost? It never ceases to amaze me how some very bright individuals will cast away their critical thinking skills when it comes to certain hot-button issues like gun control. Laws must be evaluated in terms of cost and benefit. You have plainly put forth the benefit, but have failed to consider any minimal cost whatsoever.
As for humans being good at anything, it is often using tools for their unintended purpose as well. It is called adaptability.
Aan objective scientist, seeks only verifiable truth. Anything less is not science.
Fire has many uses that don't involve killing. Guns are good for killing and have no other useful purpose.
Most murders are committed in the heat of the moment by someone you know. Gun ownership in the general population makes this easier to accomplish - you've far more chance of killing someone with a gun than with, say, a knife (as the next most convenient alternative). You're unlikely to take someone to a swimming pool and drown them in the heat of an argument.
Also fire is banned in some instances. Eg, no lighting fires during high bush fire risk conditions.
What exactly was wrong with the way they fell? The models I saw looked pretty convincing. The planes set fire to several floors. Once these were sufficiently weakened, they fell onto the ones below, with an increasing mass and speed hitting each subsequent floor, effectively hollowing out the buildings. The walls of the building were leaning slightly inwards (straight walls that high aren't possible with current materials) and kept rigid by horizontal beams, which were ripped out by the falling material. The walls then gave in to gravity and fell in and down into the tunnel.
How would you have expected them to collapse? Falling over sideways would have required a lot more force than a single plane hitting, and would have happened at the impact time, not afterwards.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So because guns failed to protect some people, you conclude that guns will fail to protect all people?
Frankly there is no way to guarantee safety. Guns exist and aren't going away. I still remember the famous liberal who pulled a gun on some kids who were in his pool. He had written many columns on the banning of guns and how they were evil yet there he was. He lived in a city where guns were illegal, pulled one on unarmed teenagers and threatened them but thanks to his status as an elite member of the media he didn't serve a day in jail. His elite liberal pals all rallied around him to defend what he did. Some people are more equal than others.
Always do the opposite of a conservative, especially the "freedom-loving" libertarian types.
Opposite? So I can't cheat on my wife with my young male interns? Or have, as I like to call them, "Tickle Fights"?
I8-D
The Churches of Gravity, Evolution, and Quantum Mechanics have paid their rent with predictions that have turned out to be true.
That rent from the Church of Global Warming has yet to be paid.
And how do you intend to make them stop doing it? In case you missed it, that's the entire point of taxes on pollution: they gradually raise the cost of polluting until it's not economically feasible anymore. Simply legislating that coal-fired power plants had to be switched off tomorrow would be a disaster, because there's no transition plan. A tax that increases every year at a predictable rate lets people depending on coal have a predictable point where it will no longer be feasible and plan accordingly.
More importantly, it gives a financial incentive to be the first person to switch. If you say 'no more coal in 10 years' then there's a strong incentive to let everyone else pay the R&D costs of developing and deploying other technologies and then roll out your own version in 9 years, for much less since everyone else has helped push the economies of scale. If you start taxing and keep increasing the tax rate, then someone who switches now saves a lot of tax, while someone who switches in 9 years pays a lot more.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This comment, rated "Insightful" no less, illustrates why I hardly ever bother to read the comments any more. This moron provides exactly zero evidence for his apparent conclusion that conservatives and libertarians are the ones behind these threats. Oh, and that they hate science and that they get all emotional and cry and whine and make death threats. Liberals/progressives NEVER exhibit these behaviors. Well, libertarians are not conservatives, and vice versa. Furthermore, those appellations apply to Yankee, not Aussie, politics. Finally, I think a lot of folks would be happy if global warming -- er, climate change -- were about science and not politics.
Also, planes don't fly. At least not in a deterministic fashion: Navier-Stokes is a differential equation. Non-linear, too.
Really, objects don't move, as this involves differential equations.
Clearly, thermodynamics are wrong, because it is as differential equations (or large numbers and probabilities, if you go the quantum route).
You have no clue what you are talking about: you assume that the solution must be steady state. You have no way of knowing that. In fact, you ought to know Sol cycles, so steady-state solutions are certainly wrong.
You have no clue what you are talking about: If I tell you that we are all going to die, with a certainty of .999 in 30 years, give or take 20, the proper reaction is not, in fact, to claim that as the error bounds are large, this must be bullshit.
The proper reaction is to say: oh, we'll prepare for the worst case, then.
Except that it implies impossible things. For example, it is a global, systemic problem, requiring international cooperation. It is a problem _caused_ by markets and production. It implies that there is no benevolent God watching over us. It implies that we are collectively guilty of the bind we are in.
All those things are anathema to conservative. Who would rather go back to the middle ages than admit a single one of them. Which, luckily, is a solution to global warming. Probably the worse, but hey, you gotta work with what you've got :)
I went to visit the NRA headquarters on my first visit to the USA. They had lots of statistics from countries like Switzerland which showed high rates of gun ownership but low rates of violent crime. The take-home message seemed to be that some people can be trusted with guns, but Americans can't. I don't think this was quite what they were aiming for...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A Carbon Tax to try and combat climate change?
72% of Australia's CO2 emissions are produced by the Energy sector. We are the second largest producer of uranium in the world, with 23% of the worlds uranium deposits. And exactly how many nuclear power stations do we run? A grand total of 0.
The two major objectives in reducing gun proliferation, and applying restrictions to gun ownership, are:
* Minimising accidents
* Making it more difficult for J Random Crazy Guy to go postal
You might want to read up on a concept called "defense in depth". Same principle. Just because the results are not perfect does not mean they don't exist.
Careful. Waving irony like that around could take someone's eye out.
You claim the costs are vast and the benefits minimal, yet have demonstrated no actual cost whatsoever.
This does not, and should not, reflect on the vast majority of partisans on both sides, whether they do or don't accept the proposition of AGW or the theory of CO2's role in climate science. Shutting down debate or shouting down the other side because of the actions of a few looney tunes is intellectually lazy.
The issue of climate change is not "resolved" because climate science has become political, and the theory -- such as it is -- has a lot of holes in it that people of a genuinely scientific mindset can see plainly, when they aren't being shouted down by the group-think to which, alas, even so-called scientists these days are susceptible. There was a time when science was 100% certain that the world was flat, and the universe eternal. So much for consensus.
So any call to action that involves increased government power of the sort described above needs to be scrutinized critically. We cannot as laymen just hand over our common sense or our liberties to people who think they know better, no matter how well intentioned they may be (or believe themselves to be). This is especially true when the certitude with which the opinions are held is disproportionate to the evidence, and that evidence has a proven history of being tampered with in fine Procrustean fashion for obvious political gain.
To deny the reality of what East Anglia-style "hiding the decline" did to the argument for AGW (and, therefore, all schemes to tax the planet into health based on reducing CO2) is to deny reality, period.
Of course. Any responsible citizen will call the cops after they've been mugged/raped/stabbed/shot/burnedwithfile/killed.
Amazing!
Go on. I'm sure there are a few that would like to hear about your weekend.
The sad fact is, attempt to hold up climate science to the standards of other exact sciences, like physics, and nothing remains.
You mean like this? (Climate science is physics, by the way).
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
FTA: "One researcher told of receiving threats of sexual assault and violence against her children after her photograph appeared in a newspaper article promoting a community tree-planting day as a local action to mitigate climate change."
Death threats for planting trees? WTF?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
If you're a climate scientist, watch your ass. The US TEA party does not stand for dissenting opinions.
It's not quite that simple. Look at Switzerland and Canada.
You mean this data?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It's a lot more difficult with swords and spears. Try stabbing 100,000 protesters to death and see how you go.
Try shooting 100,000 protesters to death when they all have guns and see how you go. That's why we have a right to bear arms.
you will have to admit a gun is a pretty bad hammer, and a terrible screwdriver...
The costs are clear: some people will have successfully defended their possessions with their guns. This would not have happened without. Except that every time this occurred, an economic loss became a life and death situation. There simply are not enough rampaging murderers that conveniently give you time to aim for gun availability to be worthwhile. There are no defensible use cases for private usage of guns.
Other than recreational, that is, but why allow ammos outside the shooting range, then?
The very principle of terrorism is making grand gestures. From a utalitarian point of view terrorism is just a waste of time and resources.
Shoot them from the air.
Let me quickly give you an example. In China, there's a lot of electric bikes. I mean A LOT. In Beijing, it's even forbidden to use any kind of motorcycle if they don't use electricity. But in France, if you want to sell a bike on the market, it has to be "electricity assisted", which means that you have to move your legs, and not pressing a button, to have the electricity motor to kick in. Otherwise, it's considered a motorized vehicle, and has to comply to all sorts of regulation. The result? In China, such an electric bike is sold for 200 Euros, but in Paris, the starting price is 2000. There's a justification on having prices higher in France, but not that much: it really is because of the regulation. I suspect that you'd see the same kind of policies in other countries as well (otherwise, how come we don't see electric bikes everywhere, when they are so common in China?).
Pushing for a tax on CO2 emissions by vehicles is only part of the needed regulation, and we're skipping all the part that makes it possible to afford having electric.
It's not about science, it's about sacrifice. People are perfectly fine with science, as long as it either benefits them or is neutral. But the second some government talks about asking them to pay higher taxes, forgo some luxury, sacrifice jobs, etc. based on some scientific finding (legitimate or not)--well, WATCH OUT!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Well, not exactly the AR4 itself, that is public. But the raw data used to build it yes.
-1 mod? Moderators, do you bias much?
Surely, logic and reason are important tools of science, but they are not science.
Science is studying scientific phenomena, that is phenomena that repeatedly present themselves to human kind. For example, global warming is not one of them.
What people are protesting against is unnecessary (in their opinion) spending on a problem that has many other factors that are not under human control.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Yeah probably not quite what they were looking for but no doubt as valid as any of theirs! Probably it has more to do with the strictness of the regulations and the types of guns available...
It is a troll. But it's also true. Sometimes the truth is not "politically correct." The post should get +5, Troll.
Must be scientists who, through actual discovery, have shown evidence that completely exposes the climate change/global warming fraud of the NWO Bilderbergs.
I move that any mention on how guns save lives/guns kill people automatically Godwins a discussion. Even this anonymous gun-toting conservative is getting fed up with it.
He's making a legitimate point. Animal activist groups have been threatening scientists for decades. And some of the very ecologists who are crying foul over this today were once advocating blowing up dams because hydroelectricity interfered with their utopian vision of nature.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The deniers are, by and large (and with notable exceptions) members of one of two groups; those industries with serious skin in the game, and those who can not make that cognitive leap past believing only that which does not challenge their comfortable world view. It seems almost inevitable that one or both would begin to resort to violence in order to maintain the status quo. The first groups' doing so would be a completely rational (if a bit anti-social) course of action. The dimwit group, no so much.
What planet are you talking about? Surely, not ours.
Plebeians are not really known for their meticulous health habits and hanging on internet forums otherwise there wouldn't be so much of liberal bias on slashdot or reddit...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I guess that is what happens when you are setting the standards which will eventually be used to tax people out of the ability to earn a living. I am an eco-freak, but honestly if as much effort had been put into developing space travel, or cold-fusion as has been put into extorting people out of burning fossil-fuels...we'd have already cleaned up the detritus from the ills of the industrial revolution, entered the post-nuclear age, achieved super-luminal speeds, and be well on our way to starting another Earth somewhere by now.....
-Oz
The graph here shows that gun deaths scale quite neatly with ownership rates.
How many Americans here would actually care if Barack Obama was born overseas? Not saying he has been, but assuming for the sake of argument that he was.
I ask because the less useful and more racist protections on democracy in the US (and other countries). I live here in Australia, and I can't honestly say it would bother me in any significant way if one of our many immigrants took the position of prime minister. Well, I could conceive that I would be bothered if my culture and way-of-life were threatened by their being elected, but as things stand, I would consider them as seriously as any other candidate.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Always do the opposite of a conservative ...
That's just the point. In Australia most scientists aren't employed by independent corporations but by the socialist propaganda schools that pass under the name of Universities, which are all government owned. Also any so-called climate "scientists" who aren't in the universities work for an ultra-leftist organization called the Communist & Socialist International Revolutionary Organization (CSIRO).
So you see in Australia we don't have honest scientists such as Roy Spencer and Michael Behe, but only revolutionary socialists posing as scientists. And while climategate once and for all exposed the global warming hoax in the US and UK, it was not really reported here much at all. So while no one except Europeans and the criminally insane believe in this crap any more, most Australians are still being deluded by these "scientist".
Anyhow must run, got some calls to make ...
Colin
"Banishing coal electricity really is possible" Sure it is if you are willing to ignore the consequences. The majority of electric power on the globe is generated by coal. Remove coal from the equation and at a minimum you are reducing global power production by 50%. Can you see the population of any country, especially the leading industrial countries, putting up with this? No power means no jobs.
Where's the "fiscal conservative, social liberal" party? (...if not the libertarians)
The three of us that are left will be at the bar on Friday, punishing our livers.
Look at the price difference between regular bikes in China and France, I bet that's also pretty big.
Besides, electric bikes are mostly bought to replace old fashioned bicycles, not petrol motor bikes, so the CO2 savings would be fairly small.
You haven't presented any arguments at all, just straw, FUD, and lies. Apparently what you don't like about anthropogenic global warming is that it presents a pessimistic scenario and you believe in optimism, right?
Well, the problem is that the outlook is bad, and no optimism will change that. And if you accept the oil industry theory that acting to substitute fossil fuels now will cause economic catastrophe, just wait till the fossil fuels run out and we don't have an alternative. Even assuming fossil fuels weren't causing global warming that would be reason enough to start developing alternatives.
It's funny how people like you disbelieve the studies done by scientists about global warming, yet are ready to believe anything the oil industry tells you about how much cheap fuel we will have when we start getting oil from tar sands and shale.
Do this sanity check, please: look for old articles on tar sands and shale. See how much they promised. I remember the first time I read about the Athabasca tar sands in Canada, in an article in Popular Mechanics in the 1960s. If those predictions had come to reality we would be swimming in oil by now, gasoline would be too cheap to meter.
That was over forty years ago and Popular Mechanics is still printing articles on how the vast oil resources in those sands will give us cheap gas. Talk about "in 10 years, no wait 30 years, no wait 80 years!!!"...
The problem with electric bikes is they have incredibly poor range and I'm doubtful about claims that they are any better for the environment.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Hilarious! Are you a middle east dictator by any chance? Seriously though:
1) Why do you want to shoot protesters?
2) Have you considered that nobody (with a few exceptions) needs to have guns? In such a scenario, protest is all that is necessary to effect change and prevent tyranny. 3) Guns are a mostly outdated piece of military technology that could easily be removed if a few countries agree to stop making them and start destroying them.
Falling over sideways because of the impact of the plane is unfeasible, but nobody said that.
Personally I find very difficult to achieve the required symmetry for the collapse you talk about. I'd see the first floors collapsing, then one side or one angle collapses earlier than the rest so the building leans to one side, with even more mass distributed there, so the leaning should increase. But this, as the simulation, mine is speculation. One should set a scale model on fire (with slimmer supporting structure to account for the difference in dimensions) and see if, and how, it collapses.
Anyway 911, IF it's an inside job, is a too messy job. Why having people wonder how big a fire is needed to have a building collapse, or why those betting on a collapse of airline stocks have been paid instead of being waterboard... er... investigated or a thousand other questions when you can get some nuclear waste from the mafia and kill a million people with a single agent? someone wants to evaluate how we are likely to question the official story, or fill the media with speculation on 911 instead of war stories?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I suggest you stop reading - or half reading - Popper (who is way out of date and now mainly part of history of philosophy of science) and at least read Kuhn, who my director of studies described as the "least wrong philosopher of science". It may open your eyes a bit.
I think, however, you give your lack of understanding away even more with your comments like "real astronomers don't really look at the sky" and "a theory like optics". Real physics and chemistry are surprisingly "dirty". It is sometimes necessary to do real, experimental research to understand where the numbers come from, or theories are simply being built on blind faith.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
First link: Never ever cite either Ceasefire or the Brady Center. Seriously, as a moderate Democrat gun owner these folks are just as bad as the NRA is on the other side. Secondly, the beating the dead horse of correlation versus causation comes in. Second link: don't want a gun accident? Don't own one and stay away from people who do. Third link: completely valid, and a non-issue. Suicide should be a right.
Always do the opposite of a conservative, especially the "freedom-loving" libertarian types.
Also always bypass the opinions of someone who likes to over-generalize to the point of ridiculousness. Oh, wait... erm, I meant "almost always"...
weather stations all over the world!
Our cutter was one of those weather stations. 98% of the time the data we gave out was bogus. Obviously some data is good. My point was one should not place blind faith in what people are telling you. You should question assumptions, and the validity of the world view. -Or you can just go on putting blind faith in the experts, and believing the results of the latest scientific study that contradict the results of the second most recent scientific study.
cool story bro!
I certainly won't be putting blind faith in the Coast Guard any more!
Maybe we should cut their budget...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
> The proper reaction is to say: oh, we'll prepare for the worst case, then.
Proper reaction is proper.
Pity that it happens for CO emissions only, not for everything else. Radioactivity, sythetic substances, radio waves and stuff, drugs, are simply released on the population. Pretty strange, unless you don the tinfoil hat and declare: all innovations which reduce the freedom of the common man, are implemented. Carbon tax reduces income, pollutants make you dependent on therapies. Other theories welcome.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
How will a tax that funnels money to rich people save the planet. The rich have really shown us how they hate waste and excess right?
Pollution used to be a bad thing now its a commodity that only certain people who have more money than you can cash in on. And why is the US and world bank financing coal plants in Africa? I thought coal was bad?
Oh horse shit. By the time one of the denizens of the hood gets his piece out I can have two in the kill box and retargeting for the headshot. Responsible gun owners train, the right is enshrined in the constitution, and Washington DC vs Heller (hint: DC LOST) is a sign of things to come. Don't like it, don't live here. .45 while somebody has just kicked in my back door? Fuck you very much.
In addition, the crap about having to store it disassembled: so I should be putzing around in the dark trying to assemble my
Thirdly, a well regulated militia.. that phrase was written over 100 years before the National Guard, so don't even go there. In the context of the day it mean THE PEOPLE.
> It implies that there is no benevolent God watching over us. It implies that we are collectively guilty of the bind we are in.
So, technological advancements give a small percentage of power hungry sociopaths (that disobey the rules set by most religions) a chance of ruining everybody else's lives, and the fault is ours and of the hypothetical gods they disobey? Wow if you're not a lawyer, study to become one.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Predictions about global warming that were made in the 70's also turned out to be true.
Conservative != libertarian.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
There are no defensible use cases for private usage of guns.
Other than recreational, that is, but why allow ammos outside the shooting range, then?
An armed population will never fall to a tyrannical government. An unarmed population can.
People who claim that there is no valid reason for owning guns, tend to miss this simple rule.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
hiding behind copyrights
Nice spin. The UAE was in the past legally bound to keep an INSIGNIFICANT amount of raw data to themselves, but they also said anyone truly interested could spend 3-6 moths getting their own copy from say the French who own and until recently enforced THEIR copyright on French weather station data. That sort of research was surprisingly common before the internet.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
> There are no defensible use cases for private usage of guns.
Except all the cases where criminals or crazy persons succeeded in killing/maiming their victims, no matter if the issue involved possessions.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I accept that there may be a good explanation for the following, but I have never encountered one. If you examine the adjusted versus raw USHCN and GHCN temperature data, the Adjustments have a steady upward trend for the last century. Why? Using naive averaging with the USHCN, the adjustments are just enough to bring the spike in the 30s below the spike in the 90s, while the raw data shows the 30s as marginally warmer. This pattern is deeply suspicious.
It's especially suspicious after the debacle about the Darwin station in Australia that Watts pointed out. He was accused of cherry picking, and realclimate.org proceeded to cherry pick their own data to show no warming trend in adjustments for a subset of weather stations. His single station choice demonstrated how hard it was to determine exactly why a given station was adjusted the way it did. Since his accusers were focusing on cherry picking, there was no reason to avoid using all stations to see if their was a pattern, except that they didn't like what using all stations demonstrated.
What the east Anglia emails did show was scientists who believed in a particular explanaion, didn't really know what was going on as well as they claimed, and who were disinclined to work with anyone who questioned their data or methods. They did adjust presentation of data to fit narratives, and used tricks that other climate scientists said they never did, like combining temperature data and proxy data into one curve. Stonewalling is bad even if it isn't some sort of plot.
Why did they do this? Because proxy data was demonstrated to be unreliable by what they call the divergence problem, but they didn't want to give up their tree ring data because they didn't have anything better to fall back on. If you calibrate data against one set of hypthetically linked data (pre 70s), then find that it doesn't match against a different set (1980+) it's not legitimate to pretend your calibration is correct. The inconvenience of giving up all the data you've been working with for a decade doesn't make it OK.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
So, if we can't remove coal electricity, and can't move away from polluting cars, what will be the effect of a CO2 tax? According to you, nothing, right?
It is more a case of education. In Switzerland, there is mandatory service for all eligible males. They are given their guns and trained how to use them properly. The entire population knows how to handle guns safely. In America, just the opposite is true. We don't require the population to be trained on gun safety. Education is the better option in our society... Not banning guns.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Look at the price difference between regular bikes in China and France, I bet that's also pretty big.
If you removed the kind of bike that I once tried, that worked for few hours before needing a repair, it's only about twice the price in France.
Besides, electric bikes are mostly bought to replace old fashioned bicycles, not petrol motor bikes, so the CO2 savings would be fairly small.
Wrong. I'm guessing that you never tried one. You can get an electric scooter that can do 60 km with a single battery. If you add a second one (many people do), then you can go even more far. Remove the clamping and it can go up to 50 km/h. Electric bikes really CAN replace petrol motor bikes, it works extremely well, and besides that, electricity costs a lot less than petrol.
Please defile "poor range". Mine does 60 km on a single charge, and a single battery. You can put a 2nd battery if you want, but I didn't need one. 60 km is enough to go on the other side of Shanghai (though, at 30km/h with the clamping that I still didn't removed, it's a bit slow, I have to admit). In Beijing, there's no petrol motorbike anymore, it's banned, and everyone dealt with it and move to electricity.
And since Germany made a knee-jerk reaction by deciding to abandon nuclear, they're going to be burning a lot more fossil fuels at the worst possible time.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
No. The cost has nothing to do with regulations, and very much to do with "stuff in China is cheap". In addition, in China, between the laws banning motorcycles, and an installed base of a gazillion cyclists who'd like to either move a little faster, or with less sweat, and a bit more money than they used to have, there's an enormous market. Here, and in France, the installed base is people driving cars, and a relatively small number of cyclists, hence a tiny market. Now, the regulations may make it the case that we (French or USAian) cannot piggyback on the Chinese market, and you can blame that, but the regulations do not make the bike itself grossly more expensive.
And we're not talking about banishing fossil fuel cars here, and replacing them with electricity, which would be the first thing to do. No, just tax them
It's not like a tax is inherently wrong. For example, if it went to funding R&D into devices which would then pull said CO2 out of the atmosphere.
I don't know if that is the intent, nor am I saying it would fix things if it were. I'm simply arguing against what appears to me to be an argument consisting of "it's a tax, and taxes are bad."
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Global warming is very much a political issue, in that the changes that undoing it demands require a great amount of sacrifice, and thus the will of the people. So modding down conservatives (or liberals for that matter) accomplishes nothing, because they're still going to have Al Gore's embarassing Kilamanjaro prediction or the amazing invisible medieval warm period issues in the backs of their minds.
Climate scientists need to tell their political wing to behave if they want to get anything done. As a skeptic, I see the validity of other arguments on the less popular side (i.e. sunspot activity) and choose not pick sides at all at this point, but said politicians are not helping your cause. Seriously.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
[Citation needed] because Phil Jones has been very good with double speech, saying officially that they would help anyone willing to do peer reviews, but yet he's not. Also, that's the first time that I'm hearing about French weather station data being copyrighted and not available to French researchers. If you're talking about meteo France, It'd be weird, because it's funded at 300 million euros per year by the state (according to wikipedia).
A benevolent God would not allow wholesale extinction of the Human race. Thus, if Mankind, through its actions can destroy itself, there is no benevolent God. Maybe he is hands-off, maybe he doesn't care, maybe he is a sadistic bastard. In no case is he benevolent, if he exists.
Parts of global warming are the collective result of the collective behaviour of humanity. Thus, yes, humanity, as a collective, is guilty. The point is that as a conservative, admitting to the existence of collective problems arising from collective behaviour is anathema. Is guilt equally distributed? no, but this is not, in fact relevant.
....goble-goble-goble... ...cut&paste more crap.... ...more scatter shots that'll take pages to refute.... ...some small grains of truth to make Goebbels cry...
And here it is, a climate denial post!
These cases are numerous enough to justify guns only in your imagination. Also, knives can also do the trick. Baseball bats. Toasters wrapped in towels.
I didn't say that electric scooters or bikes can't replace petrol bikes, but that electric bikes are mostly bought by people who aren't fit enough for a regular bike, but don't like petrol bikes. I see a lot of older people on electric bikes, using them for leisure purposes. This only adds to CO2 production.
Besides, this is a drop in a bucket. CO2 production by petrol scooters/motor bikes is insignificant compared to cars, and the electric scooter is not a viable replacement (and neither is the current generation of electric cars)
Navier-Stokes is a differential equation. Non-linear, too.
Never mind the inconvenient problem that, for any realistic situation, there exists no known exact solution. You just have to model it using computers and mostly-accurate models. Disturbingly similar to how climatic models work! And yet we're able to do all sorts of interesting fluid dynamics engineering (like the many kinds of jet engines).
There are several countries on the chart in that article that have high homicide rates, but low firearm homicide rates: Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, Estonia. Besides, that chart doesn't correlate levels of gun ownership with crime levels, does it? And there isn't one in that article that does. The whole idea is to have high legal gun ownership-- and all that article addresses is the rate of gun homicide which be stupidly high in places like Colombia where the guns are in the hands of drug lords and not law-abiding private citizens.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Most US gun deaths are in areas where guns are TIGHTLY REGULATED.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Let me ease your doubts. The energy required to propel a bicycle nicely is about 200 watts, 300 if you wish to go extra fast or are climbing hills. Electric motors are pretty efficient, lithium batteries are also pretty efficient in charge/discharge. 5 hours of use (more than you get from one charge, but bear with me) gives you about a kilowatt-hour of energy. Double that, just to be really generous, and call it 2 kilowatts. That's 25 to 30 cents worth of electricity, to travel 60-80 miles. You can also roughly estimate the amount of fuel burned, from the cost of the energy. 30 cents is not much fuel, meaning not much pollution (and it is burned in power plants, which benefit from economies of scale in their pollution control). Another way to look at this is that if you could eat "gasoline", you'd get about 600 mpg on a bicycle, and electric use is comparable to that in scale.
"Range" depends a lot on the design of the bike and how you use it. Electric-only, when the battery is dead, you're stopped. "Assist", you can keep on going under your own power if you need to, which gives you a range (in my experience, on a cargo bike) of about 65 additional miles. The battery weight is not that big a deal, on a bike that is designed for it. Put it this way -- you're not stranded, like you are in a car.
It would make it more cost-effective to generate power in a CO2 neutral way. If you turn part of the CO2 taxes in additional subsidies for clean energy production, it would be even more cost effective.
For example, if it went to funding R&D into devices which would then pull said CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Mother nature beat you to it by almost 4 billion years. Plants and green algae.
Seriously, stop cutting down the rainforests and clearcutting/paving everything.
Most "common folk" tea partiers want to bring back disenfranchised libertarians like myself. Unfortunately, there's a number of fake self-declared libertarians with a microphone (i.e. Glenn Beck) who are probably going to drive libertarians like me to vote for a third party in 2012...again.
I groggily listened to CNN debate while engaging in insomnia denialism, and with three tea partiers and four mainstream Republicans, the only libertarian in the group was Ron Paul. (again)
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Guns have at least as many legitimate purposes as, say, P2P or encryption.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Yes Conservative hate science. There is no fudging of numbers. The fudging of number, data is not available, model source isn't avail is simply a LIE constantly repeated by conservative in hopes that repeating the lie often enough will make people think it is true. The data, the source code for the analysis tools and the source for the models are all freely available for download both in raw and processed form. See www.ncdc.noaa.gov for the both the raw and processed data and http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ for the both initialization data, model output and model source code. The data and software have been freely available for over 20 years. Next lie that documents that Conservatives hate science : Steve McIntyre requested that his followers purposely, with malice of forethought send 10's of thousands of FOIA requests with the expressed purpose of preventing climate scientists,the victims, from doing their work. Steve McIntyre LIED both in his multiple FOIA requests and on his webpage, claiming he needed the YAMAL tree data from Briffa, when in point of fact McIntyre had had the data for over five years before he started on the campaign to flood scientist with FOIA. Then there is Singer and Christy who continue to publish good science documenting that global warming is occurring and that their data proves it. Christy has testified under oath in court that Hansen is correct about the hockey stick temperature curves. On the other hand these "conservative" scientists discard any sense of reality when they talk to "conservatives' and use their error filled results, that they admit to the scientific community is wrong, to "prove" global warming doesn't exist. Maybe you don't understand when McIntyre says on his webpage on June 14 2011 that IPPC scientists should be killed that McIntyre as a conservative is making death threats. Please point to a climate science web site that makes the same death threats. Don't bother there aren't any Please go learn the documented facts before repeating the lies of those who profit from your lack of knowledge and understanding Please poin
I'm simply arguing against what appears to me to be an argument consisting of "it's a tax, and taxes are bad."
Don't you worry, I am NOT a US citizen... :) I truly believe that such tax will have no effect on petrol consumption.
Matches and pools have other uses than hurting things. Guns don't. What's your point ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
"There is no proven link between smoking and lung cancer"
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
Look at the German plan in more detail. They're not turning off existing reactors: they're just not doing "new build" nuclear.
Now, look at the economic cost: from a national perspective (including subsidies all round, e.g. in setting up industries, dismantling nuclear reactors, insurance ...)
then nuclear power is more expensive than renewables. Germany is already pretty commited to a huge renewables scheme (google Desertec), which involves more jobs for Germans, etc. and the case becomes clearer: its gaining political capital from something they were economically going to do anyway.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
whoosh.
There are several countries on the chart in that article that have high homicide rates, but low firearm homicide rates
The trend hold though. Any data set will have statistical outliers.
I'm making the point that the more guns, the more guns deaths of innocent people.
What point are you making ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Here, and in France, the installed base is people driving cars, and a relatively small number of cyclists, hence a tiny market.
/me cannot agree with the above. In Paris many many people went away from using their car (at least, that's what I heard from my friends and the medias, I don't live there anymore...), and went to use scooters. There WOULD be a big market for electrics, if it didn't cost as much as petrol based. Plus there's absolutely no reason an electric scooter would cost as much as a petrol based one, it's a way more complex to control an explosion than it is to just use electrons. Yes, (very stupid) regulations are making the bikes a lot more expensive (you need a registration like a motorcycle, the bike got to be approved for market, etc.), and also the ban on lead batteries (a big part of the additional cost as well).
I wish you had a look in HoChiMin City (Saigon, Vietnam). You would reconsider this last paragraph about the drop in a bucket. There, I'd say (without checking numbers, just by the impression when I was there) that most of the pollution must be caused by motorbikes (maybe, if you remove construction from the equation, which is quite significant).
That is very silly. So, let's tax pollution to create not-pollution energy. How about deciding to not pollute at all in the first place, so we don't need a tax? The "CO2 neutral" thing is really a big bullshit though. Planting a tree on the other side of earth wont remove the pollution you are generating in your own city.
Climate change policy is about redistribution of wealth and globalization, not saving the environment.
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, " -- Ottmar Edenhofer, UN IPCC
It is a tool for those seeking power, nothing more.
Instead of trying to fix real existing threats that we have in front of us (waste management, water resources, starvation, pollution, etc.), the goal is to have a CO2 tax for something we aren't sure about
...and when people try to solve those problems the same people whining about how global warming is a myth suddenly argue that waste management isn't a problem and only commie pinkos care about water conservation, and how poor people should starve because they deserve to and how pollution isn't a problem.
Who says it's science? Carbon tax stuff is just a way for large corporations to get big money. GE is big time in favor of it. That's why so many power stations in Texas close down (too much carbon) but they just rebuild them in nearby Mexico. No carbon tax in Mexico so they sell it to US at Premium prices to and make big profits. Check it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr3l4oPXiAw&feature=related
There's a difference between air pollution like smog and CO2. A motorbike produces a lot of dirty crap in the air, which is very noticeable to a casual observer. A nice clean car on the German Autobahn produces virtually no noticeable pollution, but a ton of CO2.
Worldwide there are about 3x as much cars as motor bikes, and the cars consume a lot more fuel (both by higher consumption/distance and longer distance traveled).
Handle a gun safely. You mean ensure it's clean and loaded, aim it at the person you'd like to kill and pull the trigger? I think the numbers demonstrate Americans can handle guns just fine. The numbers also demonstrate less Swiss would get killed by guns if there were fewer of them. You are mistaken if you think the Swiss are significantly better off than Americans in that regard.
Third link: completely valid, and a non-issue. Suicide should be a right.
Preach it, brother! Even if a person is dirt-poor and has no posessions to his/her name, they still own their life, and I too believe no government should be able to tell them that they cannot have control of ending it.
Sure, that's a nice goal, but you're not saying how to reach it. Do you really trust politicians to judge what kind of technology we should invest in, for example ? I'd rather let the free market come up with solutions. They have more people, and a lot of them are smarter than a few politicians.
We can shut down fossil fuel plants, but when are you going to do that, and what are we replacing them with ?
One could conclude then liberals are not very tolerant of differing viewpoints.
Didn't read TFA, didja? Or are death threats a sign of tolerance of differing viewpoints?
Hilarious! Are you a middle east dictator by any chance? Seriously though: 1) Why do you want to shoot protesters?
Since this question is so ridiculous I assume you're either a troll or a non-English speaker. Please re-read my comment a few more times.
2) Have you considered that nobody (with a few exceptions) needs to have guns? In such a scenario, protest is all that is necessary to effect change and prevent tyranny.
Nobody with a few exceptions need seat belts, airplane seat cushions that can act as floatation devices, or fire extinguishers. Guns, with regards to the right to bear arms, serve the same purpose: to help prevent or correct tyranny.
3) Guns are a mostly outdated piece of military technology that could easily be removed if a few countries agree to stop making them and start destroying them.
What's the new military tech carried by infantry? Lasers? Blasters? Phasers? Disruptors? Anti-Tachyon triple phase pulsed rifles?
Pushing for a tax on CO2 emissions by vehicles is only part of the needed regulation, and we're skipping all the part that makes it possible to afford having electric.
I don't think you'll get very far arguing for Chinese road-safety standards. The fact is you can only average about 15MPH (depending on the rider) on a road bike, and the mass is fairly small. If you hit anything, you might get hurt but it's unlikely that anyone will die as a result of your incompetence. An electric scooter can do at least twice that, sustained. It also weights a great deal more. If it hits someone, they may very well die. You should be just as regulated as you are on a gasoline device with the same capability.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
That was about taxation without representation. The current groups are against taxation even with representation. Even though taxes are currently very low - both in 20th century terms and versus other industrialized nations.
Conservative != libertarian.
The term conservative is so misused as to be meaningless. Conservative literally means being cautious about change. By that definition, neither Republicans nor Libertarians are financially conservative since both are advocating extremist economic policies with tax rates vastly less progressive than historical norms.
If the goal is to stop using petrol, so we can move to alternatives, then let's tax the petrol itself (even more than it is today), not CO2. If we tax it to the point that it becomes cheaper to use electricity, it will happen. A tax on CO2 doesn't set such goals.
Target shooting isn't really useful and there's plenty of other ways of having fun. Archery? I bet burning shit up with a flamethrower is fun too but I'm still glad that's illegal. More lives would be saved by banning all gun sales but I suppose recreational shooting iis fine if they leave the guns at the gun club. At least that would help keep the gun deaths down to mostly the people that use them. Hunting is usually unnecessary. A few guns for legitimate animal culling is fine. The cops and the military also have a legitimate need to kill things occasionally. Having guns everywhere just makes it way to easy for people to kill each other. We're all better off with less of them.
Maybe that word means something different to you, but where I'm from that basically means "right leaning" So essentially your saying everyone that is right leaning and doesn't agree with you is a lunatic?
Ever thought maybe the minority don't speak for the majority? if an engineer started killing people does that make all engineer's murderer's? Or to use your argument - just goes to show the "left" are a bunch of closed minded people who thinks anyone that doesn't agree with them is a lunatic.
Do you also check under your bed for conservative boogy men before going to bed?
And yet...
Vermont and New Hampshire have basically no restrictions on gun ownership, high gun ownership rates, and among the lowest murder rates in the USA.
Ditto Idaho, Iowa, Montana, teh Dakotas.
Illinois has very restrictive gun laws, relatively low gun ownership rates, and a high murder rate.
Louisiana has the highest murder rate in the USA, but restrictions on gun ownership are about the same there as most States (freer than some with lower murder rates, much more restrictive than some with lower murder rates) as most States, and gun ownership rates are not unusual.
Note further than guns are more accessible in the USA than south of the border, but Central and South America, in general, have higher murder rates than the USA.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There's all sorts of electric bi-wheelers for sales in China. Take your pick. From the most simple bike with a battery, to the most heavy scooter with double battery and long range. This really should become a best-seller everywhere, because IT IS very efficient, cheap, and clean. You can search counter-arguments if you want, but I wont change my mind on that, I saw how much it is so popular in China, and how convenient it is, as I own one myself. There's absolutely no reason why policy makers wouldn't push for it in the west, yet it's not happening.
The goal is minimize production of CO2, not to stop using petrol. If we tax petrol to the point that coal-based electricity is cheaper, we're still producing CO2. By taxing CO2, you get everything at the same time, at the correct ratios. It even becomes possible to invest in technology to extract CO2 from coal fired plants, for example.
All science is just bastardized version of physics when you get right down to it.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
All science is just bastardized version of physics when you get right down to it.
Nah, physics is just real science dumbed down for the sake of those who can't cope with emergent properties of complex systems :-)
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Howdy, there --
I'm an e-bike enthusiast. To put it briefly -- pedal-assist adds very, very little to the price of a bike; it's a sensor and slightly more smarts in the controller, all of which are very well-understood and widely implemented. The biggest difference between Chinese e-bikes and those seen in premium markets is the components used -- Chinese e-bikes, because they're built to be powered principally by the motor and to be motorcycle replacements rather than recreational equipment (albeit recreational equipment with a huge amount of utility value), can afford to use heavy, inexpensive, lead-acid batteries (which also are hard to dispose of cleanly, but that's a separate discussion) and cheap, low-end components that weigh a lot and result in poor ride quality. French and American e-bikes cater to a different market -- people who cycle by choice. As such, the demand is for a lightweight bicycle with excellent handling and high-end components that one can actually enjoy pedaling -- although there is no mandate for users to pedal in the American market, an e-bike you couldn't assist with your legs would be an absolute flop. Li-Ion batteries are expensive. High-end bicycle components are expensive -- my last truly high-end e-bike came with a wheelset made in France that retailed about $1kUSD and an internally-geared hub made in Germany that retails around $2kUSD (and is considered the finest available).
It's a completely different market, driven by a different kind of consumer. Of course the prices will be different -- the products are nothing like each other.
No, no cutting and pasting of crap. I went and checked what happened with the adjustments at all stations myself. That put me firmly in the skeptical side. I did so precisely because of the Darwin station discussion.
I can go find the links where Michael Mann said he didn't know of anyone splicing thermometer Data onto tree ring data, and the paper where someone did precisely that. I believe it was Phil Jones. However, there isn't any point. You clearly won't accept that there is any reason to doubt the methods of prominent climate scientists, since you engaged in a content free post to dismiss mine.
The fact remains that divergence is evidence that the original fit was a statistical artifact. They continue using the original fit for tree ring data and claim that it was accurate up until that point, and quite inventively explain other reasons for it instead of accepting that their historical data is flawed
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
In China, such an electric bike is sold for 200 Euros, but in Paris, the starting price is 2000.
There is little need for electric bikes in Paris. Both Paris and Beijing are reasonably flat, but the climate in Beijing is awful. Nobody wants to pedal when it is unbearably hot and humid just walking. Electric bikes are trendy in Beijing, but as daggy as a Segway in Paris.
Drugs are "simply released on the population?" Well fuck that's great news that I can't wait to tell my boss! We'll get to skip the next six+ years of mandated clinical trials (ya know, Phase 0, Phase I, Phase II, Phase III), and save the company several billion dollars! Oooooooooooh! BRAINSTORM!!!one!!!! If our drugs are "simply released on the population" then we can stop bothering with Phase IV and V, the postmarket stuff where drugs continue to be monitored after release on the market! That'll save us a shitload! WAIT WAIT WAIT I've got another one: we can sack the entire legal department! Since drugs are "simply released on the population" there can be no expectation of safety, so suing the pharmaceutical company makes as much sense as suing the hardware store for pounding your nuts into paste with the hammer you bought there! Just think of the savings! Wow...wait. If there's no need for clinical trials and therefor no expectation of safety, then there's probably no expectation of efficacy. So the years and billions spent per drug before Phase I clinical trials can be tossed and all our drugs replaced with tap water in bottles and coupled with an aggressive marketing department. Homeopathy's a booming scam...shit. Guess I'm out of a job and so is everyone else in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.
Maybe you didn't think it through, but if you meant your subject to suggest that death threats to climate scientists is fair play, that's really twisted.
Turnabout is fair play only if you ignore the human beings (scientists) that are the targets and are just rooting for your "team". You might want to give some thought to how your "team" came to be on their side of the issue.
"since science is logic and reason"..
Science isn't logic and reason. Science is funding and fodder for social political leverage.
If you have enough money, you establish a science which will secure your justification for ruling, then pay scientists to prove it to be so.
My hyper-generalization is cooler than yours.. therefore your argument is invalid.
Nope. You're just apparently prone to misinterpretation. Oh well.
It would make it more expensive to generate power in a CO2 neutral way
There, fixed that for you.
You say it is more cost effective. That is correct, but what you really mean to say is that it's more expensive. If you live in the first world, have a good income, and can afford to do away with some of your disposable income, that's all well and good. If you are poor, on the other hand, you've just been priced out of the energy market. It doesn't mean you're going to be buying cheaper energy, or more cost effective energy. It means you are deciding between electricity and food. Since the production of food takes electricity to some extent (not the same as petrol which /.ers continue to conflate ad nauseum), those prices will increase too.
You are literally condemning millions of people to the dark ages by saying that the current technology is bad, so let's just get rid of it. Even if you argue that you are only taxing the bad stuff, you won't see more people going to solar or wind, you'll see more people going broke. IF IT COSTS MORE TO BUY, THEN YOU HAVE LESS MONEY FOR EVERYTHING ELSE!. Why does this not get through the thick-skulled, self-righteous, trolls in this forum?!
Since this question is so ridiculous I assume you're either a troll or a non-English speaker. Please re-read my comment a few more times.
Sorry. Your thinking is so warped I was struggling to see where you were coming from there. I was speaking about third world countries. People struggle to eat in those countries, how are they all going to get guns? If they US, Russia, etc, would stop supplying dictators guns, millions of people around the world might actually be able to overthrow their corrupt governments. In your scenario, you really think it's likely the US government is going to want to shoot protesters? In any case, I'm arguing for less guns - If we don't allow our governments to have lots of guns, how are they going to suppress us?
Nobody with a few exceptions need seat belts, airplane seat cushions that can act as floatation devices, or fire extinguishers. Guns, with regards to the right to bear arms, serve the same purpose: to help prevent or correct tyranny.
Seatbelts, fire extinguishers and flotation devices are all designed to save lives, and do. Anyone who wants to decrease their chances of dying does need them. I'm sorry you think they're wasted if they aren't 100% effective. Guns are made for killing people (the opposite.) When used correctly they are extremely effective. Very few people need them.
What's the new military tech carried by infantry? Lasers? Blasters? Phasers? Disruptors? Anti-Tachyon triple phase pulsed rifles?
Infantry are easy to kill for a modern military force. They are only useful for crowd control (the situation you are so afraid of above) not military conquest. Lightly armed police can perform this duty just fine if the population isn't heavily armed or in large numbers. But they are also unable to control large numbers which means large protests can keep them in check.
I make point A. You reply no, look, it's A. Thus whoosh. See also sarcasm.
Specifically the little bits of money that go to science grants, not the piles of money of the energy companies? Does that really make sense to you?
citation please.....oh wait, you're just wildly speculating. Next!
Economies of scale, economies of scale, economies of scale. Gas scooters in Europe and US are an established market, electric is not. "Many many people in Paris" is a tiny number of people, compared to "many many people in China". Electric assists for bicycles are also expensive in the US, despite (1) the availability of lead batteries here and (2) no need for a motorcycle license or registration. It's almost all down to the market size -- good LED bicycle lights in the US typically cost hundreds of dollars, despite the fact that a 1-3watt power LED and lens costs $10, retail, and the switching current supplies cost less than $20, retail. It has nothing to do with what your or I think the prices "should" be, and everything to do with what the market will bear, and when our opinions shown wrong, you can't just blame "regulations".
In addition, China's paying a price for their casual attitude towards lead -- much more poisoning and contamination that in the US and Europe.
I believe we are trying to move away from polluting cars. Gas powered cars have become cleaner and more efficient . Electric and natural gas powered auto technology is gaining momentum. Even coal burning technologies are becoming cleaner. It just takes time to convert over to another primary source of energy. New manufacturing infrastructure and power distribution systems take time to put into place. The gas station network in the US has taken 100 years to get to where it is now and you can't expect to replace a system that large in just a couple of years.
"A benevolent God would not allow wholesale extinction of the Human race. "
Or maybe the true nature of the universe is that all (i.e. inifinite) realities exist for all things? So in this reality, I may be heathy and live in a peaceful country. In the next (parallel?) reality, I may be sickly and live in a war zone. In one I am good, in another I am evil. And in one, I experience the wholesale extinction of the human race. In another I experience its rescue.
So it is plausible that a benevolent God does exist, and allows the wholsale extinction to happen so that we all can experience it...all.
"Finally, I think a lot of folks would be happy if global warming -- er, climate change -- were about science and not politics."
Particularly the scientists. As a biologist I sympathize with climatologists. We biologists have to deal with creationists alternatively accusing us of such incompetence that their decades-old high-school biology education trumps our PhDs and decades of experience; or so smart and devious that we've successfully pulled off a 150+ year old world wide conspiracy to deny The Truth and thwart the will of God himself. Climate scientists instead have to deal with the fossil fuel industry protecting, damn the consequences, its bottom line. They do so in ways that are similar to the creationists, setting up think tanks full of paid shills to produce bunkum and quote-mine real science while their lobbyists bribe conservative politicians. Yes it sure would be great if we didn't have to deal with anything other than the science.
http://kyon.pl/img/16263,science,.html
One that hath name thou can not otter
Well, yeah - but look at Germany for example - very strict gun laws. However, as long as I have a clean background check, i.e. no prior criminal convictions, I can join a shooting club or get a hunting license. With both comes the ability to buy guns. If you got a legitimate reason why you need a gun, you can get one. If you don't either hunt or do sports shooting, well, then you can't. In my opinion, that is a pretty reasonable solution.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Good thing you don't ride a bike to work like me then because its a never ending stream of "if I don't do something now things could be really bad for me in about five seconds".
For me managing the planet should be like riding a bike. I keep an eye out for developing problems and take action when I think something might kill me. The fact that it hasn't so far doesn't invalidate the assumptions I make.
This is a stupid analogy. Managing a planet is nothing like riding a bike. Whether you cross with or against a light isn't going to determine whether global food prices will rise, whether millions of people will be unable to grow or sell food, or whether pollution will cause thousands of new cases of asthma each year.
The decisions you make while riding a bike are tiny, local, and immediate. The decisions we make about the environment are none of those things.
Nonlinear isn't the same as unsolveable. The Navier-Stokes equation, and the methods for solving it, are a lot more interesting than you let on, and its applications are more interesting than you let on. I mean, aircraft? We built aircraft that worked without knowing anything really useful about fluid dynamics.
There's absolutely no reason why policy makers wouldn't push for it in the west, yet it's not happening.
I agree that electric bikes should be encouraged - but I still have to insist that safety licensing needs to happen. They are just like mopeds, but they are silent. In my state (PA), they are treated as such (under 1.5 HP, under 25MPH). You register them for $9/year, you don't need a helmet, but you do need to be 16 and have a driver's license.
If I ruled the world, you'd have to wear a helmet, but otherwise the PA rules seem reasonable to me.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No. My point was precisely what you are saying. Using sarcasm I implied that if the originator of the thread was right, than aeroplanes would not fly. And certainly we could not build them.
Because his original point was that you cannot solve things which involve differential equations, because then they become non-deterministic.
Which is silly, and wrong. To which you clearly agree.
BTW, yes, I also am a great fan of the relativistic magneto-hydro-dynamic version of the NS equations you use to model supernovae. But this is not relevant. Yes, NS is one of the most intriguing set of equations. Yes solving them numerically is absolutely a great research field. BUT THIS IS BESIDES THE POINT.
Then publish a paper at a respectable journal. What's the problem? Your arguments have been refuted, and it's easy to check it with Google.
And I've actually professionally worked in the field of climate modeling, including working with hydrological data, weather system simulation, etc. You might not realize, but we literally have hundreds of various datasets and nearly ALL of them scream 'AGW!!!'.
It's feasible that, say, meteostations might have flaws causing artificial upward trends, it's feasible that our hydrological records are somehow skewed, it's feasible that our satellite records are flawed (though it's difficult to imagine how) and that the recent upswing of hot weather records is just a fluke.
But it's not feasible at all that ALL our datasets are in error. That would require truly bizarre circumstances, bordering on world wide conspiracy involving hundreds thousands of people.
you really think it's likely the US government is going to want to shoot protesters?
They have. They will again. An armed populace makes it less likely, not more.
In any case, I'm arguing for less guns - If we don't allow our governments to have lots of guns, how are they going to suppress us?
With the guns they weren't "allowed" to have, but got anyway. How do you prevent [a corrupt] government from getting guns? By voting the leaders out of office in 4 years? How does a legitimate government prevent an invading force from conquering them without guns (the prior example stated a universal ban on guns by all world governments, as if that could happen)?
Infantry are easy to kill for a modern military force. They are only useful for crowd control (the situation you are so afraid of above) not military conquest.
Really? Ground troops are only crowd control? And they don't use guns? A corrupt government isn't going to send in "lightly armed police" into a protest rally.
And that's what the right to bear arms is about: allowing a populace to defend itself from a corrupt government. Sure, if the US sends in tanks and helicopters against its own people, the protesters are screwed at that moment, but when the fighting escalates, it can't always be tanks and choppers; at some point, traitorous military would have to be outside of a vehicle, and guns will do more than sharp pointy sticks, even if they're wearing body armor. You're trying to think of a great balancing act where all parties involved are benevolent (well, the state anyway; if the people were benevolent, then you'd not have a problem with them owning guns), but the framers were concerned with a(n all too real) worst case scenario. It was fairly recent for them, and we've seen examples in modernity.
Finally, this point:
Seatbelts, fire extinguishers and flotation devices are all designed to save lives, and do. Anyone who wants to decrease their chances of dying does need them. I'm sorry you think they're wasted if they aren't 100% effective. Guns are made for killing people (the opposite.) When used correctly they are extremely effective. Very few people need them.
Every able bodied person of sound mind needs one. Maybe two. And proper training in their use both in home defense, and in defense of nation. I know people who defended themselves with their firearms, and I'm glad they were able to do so, but I'm even more glad that their ownership of firearms is threatening to some in the government. That's what the framers intended. Ballot, Jury, Cartridge.
Shoot them from the air.
Only if they're wolves.
That, and the vast majority of the raw data is available:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
As always, there are some proprietary datasets that are not publicly available, but they form only a small fraction of the total data used in most scientific papers.
We have all these wars going on. I don't mean Afghanistan exactly, I mean the Wars on Drugs, Terror, and Piracy (the digital variety). We've even appointed "czars" for some of these. There was a War on Poverty, but we more than gave up on that. We changed sides. Now it's a silent War on the Poor. They're bashing unions, hard, in places like Wisconsin, but the elites won't set any good example. They ask the unions to sacrifice, and far from sacrificing a little themselves for the cause, take what they persuaded and bullied others into giving up! I cannot sympathize with any bashing of the average citizen for greed when our leaders grab everything in sight, and indulge in the grossest, most wasteful conspicuous consumption, and think it's deserved, and that besides it is only natural.
What kind of elite idiot, who, somehow being clever enough to get the money to afford a million dollar home, spends it on sheer size and utterly useless vanity features such as a two story high entrance foyer with chandelier, and 2 or 3 fireplaces and air conditioners? And that while blissfully ignoring that the house is in a flood plain, is oriented all wrong so that the air conditioning and windows are on the west side of the house where they get the full blast of the afternoon sun, sprawls so much that in the winter it loses heat faster than a thin crust pizza at an ice rink, is highly susceptible to fires, termites, and rot thanks to the all wood construction (but at least they've come to their senses about wood shingles and stopped using them), has single pane windows, a weak slab foundation that will crack in the first 5 years, and not so much as a solar water heater for hot water, no insulation of the hot water pipes, etc. A million is more than enough to build a house that can function without the grid. Instead, these houses are so wasteful that they can easily run up utility bills of over $500 per month. And then this cad of a homeowner has the gall to denigrate the poor as "trailer park trash", "hippies", and "union members".
We should drop the dumbest of these wars, and switch to a War on Greed.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
My point is that the conclusion you draw in your last sentence does not follow from the evidence you presented. In other words, if I conceded that gun control reduces murders, accidents, and suicides, that does not mean they do nothing to protect anyone.
Because he's prepared to ignore real science because the findings are changing. The fact it's changing, to him, seems to imply that he should ignore it. I pointed out that science doesn't deal with facts, just evidence.
Nope, we're phasing nuclear out at a rate where our buildup of renewable energies can fully replace the lost production.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
We are turning off reactors step by step. 8 reactors have been EOL'd already (7 old ones and one that has had frequent problems). Others will be shut down in the order of their age.
Note that this isn't really a hasty plan, it has been drawn up and put in place almost a decade ago by the left government and the conservatives simply altered the plan to increase all run times by 10 years, now that extension has been repealed again after Fukushima made more people hinge their votes on their beliefs on nuclear power instead of other issues (people here have always opposed nuclear power heavily but the conservatives and liberals* have been ignoring that in favor of the industry).
*=Some argue that the party should be called libertarian instead. Whatever they are, they love big business.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"Deciding not to pollute"? Humans aren't hiveminded, every individual has to decide that for himself and evidently most haven't decided to stop polluting entirely. That's why we have a government in first place, to get some semblance of cooperation from this disjointed pile of individuals.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Not to mention the pulp fiction evangelists.
The more guns, the more deaths. Some protection !
Everyone can find a fringe case to suit their needs. It's the totals that counts. Unless you're in that famous category of people who can drink and drive, drink and text, don't need no speed limits...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
This is reheated hash from a month back when it was shown to be a lots of smoke and a couple of mirrors (two threats, years ago)
http://www.news.com.au/national/carbon-death-threats-go-cold/story-e6frfkvr-1226072073038
Copied from there:
CLAIMS prominent climate change scientists had recently received death threats have been revealed as an opportunistic ploy, with the Australian National University admitting that they occurred up to five years ago.
Only two of ANU's climate change scientists allegedly received death threats, the first in a letter posted in 2006-2007 and the other an offhand remark made in person 12 months ago.
Neither was officially reported to ACT Police or Australian Federal Police, despite such crimes carrying a 10-year prison sentence.
The outdated threats raised question marks over the timing of their release to the public, with claims they were aired last week to draw sympathy to scientists and their climate change cause.
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national/carbon-death-threats-go-cold/story-e6frfkvr-1226072073038#ixzz1PqVWfYS6
What about the situations where a victim survived, and an attempted murderer was shot? Are you saying it is unfair that a gun was the deciding factor in that situation, and that the life of the attacker should have been preserved, at the expense of the life of the victim? Crime has economic costs. Self-defense turns out a net positive, as I see it.
And yet, Dr. Lott in "More Guns, Less Crime" showed that when more law-abiding citizens owned (and carried) guns, violent crime goes down.
A quick sample of all the guns I own... wait a minute, they must be defective. Not a single one has killed a person. Next they'll bring up "ammo control," as if the 21 billion rounds of ammunition manufactured annually are each personally responsible for killing a child.
That would require truly bizarre circumstances, bordering on world wide conspiracy involving hundreds thousands of people.
You apparently haven't been watching Alex Jones lately. Apparently, we are on the edge of the abyss. Again.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
There is a reason there is a Justice system. There also is a reason why people are normally only convicted of crimes they have actually committed (or are though to have actually committed).
You may have fantasies of vigilante justice, but back in the real world, these only cause accidents and unnecessary deaths. It is not the case that preventing a single murder is good, it would be the case that the number of murders prevented was larger than the number of accidents. Which is not the case. Note also that the optimal outcome has neither the criminal nor the victim killed.
It never happens that a crime is prevented by some random guy shooting at a would-be murderer (oh, it will happen occasionally, but only in amazingly unlikely sets of circumstances). It happens quite frequently that a burglary becomes a tragedy or that a member of the family gets shot.
I receive death threats all the time from these sh1theads....
Take Al gores Doomsday clock - more than half way, only 4 more years to go....
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/today.guest.html
The politicians, news orgs, and citizens aren't going to read the papers. They're going to see bits of the parliamentary debate. If the scientists can be dissuaded from testifying at the debate then it doesn't really matter if they published papers or not IMHO, the message won't get to the policy makers or the public.
Dear People Threatening Our Scientists,
We will find you. And we will slaughter you in your sleep.
Love and Kisses,
The Australian Army
P.S. Aussie Aussie Aussie oi oi oi, motherfuckers.
There is a difference between vigilante justice and self defense. If you think "vigilante justice" is the only way legal gun ownership can impact the crime rate, you are sorely mistaken.
So far none of my guns have caused accidents or deaths - necessary or otherwise.
What measure are you using to evaluate "crimes prevented?" You use that 'n' word ("never"), but you concede it might happen, not not enough to be statistically significant.
With such an epidemic of murders involving guns, you'd be surprised just how prevalent they actually are. Why don't we make some comparisons: in 2007 (last year I have quick access to data)
Gun homicide deaths in United States: 12,632
Gun deaths, accidental: 613
Gun deaths, suicide: 17,352
drunk-driving deaths: 12,998
The fact that violent crime (including gun crime) has gone down in recent years, even as gun ownership has increased dramatically (and legal concealed carry of firearms has gone up even faster) should tell you something.
Do you also argue that rape victims should not fight back at all, because injuring a rapist has a cost to society? Does locking doors hurt the GDP, by causing thieves to work harder at their occupation?
So 613 useless deaths. Many suicides which occurred only because the occasion was there. You get the same number of deaths by accident by 100 000 inhabitants than Australia has gun murders. This is terrible. You just proved how bad gun ownership is.
For the record, there are in the order of 30 000 total deaths related to guns. all of which are accounted for in your data.
Notice the conspicuous absence of the gun deaths where the rapist/burglar/murderer which got shot by the would-be victim. What about these? Because these are the ones which justify gun ownership, according to you. For the record, in 0.38% of the time is the gun used in self-defence. In a quarter of those cases, the victim actually shoots the aggressor. Let us be generous, they might hit a third of the time, and kill half the time (I am making up these two numbers last, they could be 1 and 1, or more likely .1 and .2, the numbers are from the 90s, but I do not expect them to have changed much). So about 2 (two) of these homicides are those where the gun actually helped the victim. Because I am generous. Against 600 accidents. Hell, even if the victims were all perfect shots, it would still be twelve. Against six hundred.
So I stand by my "it _never_ happens".
If only 20 suicides are prevented by not having guns around (out of 17300), banning guns is worth it!
As for drunk-driving deaths? yeah, I agree, less cars and more public transport would be good.
There's all sorts of electric bi-wheelers for sales in China. Take your pick. From the most simple bike with a battery, to the most heavy scooter with double battery and long range. This really should become a best-seller everywhere, because IT IS very efficient, cheap, and clean. You can search counter-arguments if you want, but I wont change my mind on that, I saw how much it is so popular in China, and how convenient it is, as I own one myself. There's absolutely no reason why policy makers wouldn't push for it in the west, yet it's not happening.
That's how politics works. Politicians gain surprisingly little from actually solving a problem, especially if the problem is unlikely to resurface.
They gain a bit if the problem can be perpetuated in a steady state. Then they always have something to use as an "issue" in a campaign.
They really hit the jackpot if it can suddenly escalate into a crisis, no matter how preventable and foreseeable that crisis was. This is how most power grabs take place. The urgency and fear surrounding a good crisis tends to shut down most lines of scrutiny.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Ironic that blog/commentary regarding a death threat story implies that the solution is fewer people - So in a way both sides agree on the basic solution; the only remaining question is, which people shall we have fewer of? - believers, or non-believers ... ... but don't hold your breath, because they won't, because they can't - and because they don't care. ... If the motivation of climate-ists were truly "humanist", there would be no for-profit "exchange" -and there would be no regressive tax to be inefficiently cycled back to select beneficiaries, (like climate change scientists.) Time will validate the climate-change belief system (or not), long after we're all gone. What I'm sceptical about are the immediate motives of this new religion.
And the answer, is neither. Whichever side is right, it will be fewer poor people.
From an economic point of view, the additional burden of a new "carbon tax" on a society's finite resources must have negative consequences for wherever these resources are transferred from. The predicted consequences of climate change are naught but the product of a series of models and would occur decades into the future, but a tax has consequences the moment it is imposed. According to Wikipedia, a consumption tax on carbon-based fuel (you know, coal, gasoline, etc.) is proposed (e.g. $0.11 (US)/gallon of gasoline). ****Note: This is a regressive tax (i.e. hits the poor the hardest.) I wonder, how would one go about calculating the immediate negative impact (e.g. rates for morbidity, poverty, hunger, misery, etc.) of the proposed climate tax on every kind of affordable power? It should be straight-forward enough. If climate scientists can accurately predict changes in regional mean temperature to fractions of a degree decades into the future, surely, a simple man-made artifact like the economy should be easy (trivial, really) to model
And so, as with most things in life, the bottom line is not life, it is money
There's absolutely no reason why policy makers wouldn't push for it in the west, yet it's not happening.
I agree that electric bikes should be encouraged - but I still have to insist that safety licensing needs to happen. They are just like mopeds, but they are silent. In my state (PA), they are treated as such (under 1.5 HP, under 25MPH). You register them for $9/year, you don't need a helmet, but you do need to be 16 and have a driver's license.
If I ruled the world, you'd have to wear a helmet, but otherwise the PA rules seem reasonable to me.
What is the purpose of trying to protect people (who are old enough to know better) from themselves? If by the age of 16 you cannot grasp the concept that a helmet can prevent serious head injuries, you're probably not going to. We have lots of people on this planet. We can afford to let the imbeciles do themselves in.
Misguided good intentions like yours are why there exists so much stupidity. If you quit protecting people who should know better from their own bad decision-making then stupidity would be naturally and inherently self-defeating.
Back in the Great Depression, North America had the Dustbowl: Arguably the greatest ecological disaster in human history.
It was caused by homesteaders plowing under the native vegetation that was holding the soil in place. They followed their mantra: The rain follows the plow. At the time, homesteaders were making a fortune from the wheat that they could grow during the unusually wet conditions of the day. The fact that the unusually wet period coincided with the homesteaders' plowing strenghtened the belief that plowing the land would turn the desert they were in into a wetter climate.
A few years of unusually wet weather doesn’t change that the land was in an arid climate. The local climate returned to normal a few years later, and the crops died - leaving the land bare. The solution? The rain follows the plow - so even more of the native vegetation was removed, along with its ability to hold the topsoil.
The land was then ready for decades of Black Blizzards - dust storms so powerful 70% of the topsoil was stripped from the land and deposited in the Atlantic. The storms reached Boston, New York, and Washington D.C, blotting out the sun for days.
It turns out rain does not follow the plow, and the mantra only made matters worse.
Climate Change Denial is a new flavor of disaster; the fossil fuel industry is making a lot of money, and has every reason to follow their own false mantra: There's no way humanity can affect the climate; we're just too insignificant.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
A couple of reasons. First, because the dipshit with no helmet gets expensive emergency care that he likely can't pay for. Second, the dipshit without he helmet makes my insurance more expensive. Third, some compassion for the first responders. No one likes to clean up brains. It's also more expensive. Finally, the stupid dipshit probably had a family and orphaned some kids that are now on public assistance. I'm all for individual rights, but one must be pragmatic.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
1st link: I'm sorry you don't like the facts. Are those not bare, cold, hard facts ?
correlation vs causation: indeed, having more guns around probably has nothing to do with shootings, and gun-haters should just ask everyone around them, all the time, if they have guns. makes trips more interesting, if a teeny weeny bit longer
3rd link: Suicides are never a good thing. Trying and failing is a second chance. Having a very easy means to do it on impulse, and not fail, is not a good thing. And you're putting words in my mouth by seemingly implying that i'm against suicide. I'm just against the spur of the moment kind. You on the other hand, seem in love with it ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
My above post could have read instead:
You are wrong, try again.
Even if you miss the point and take the "next question" bit literally and look at his next question it's about if death threats are faked then later in the post he treats them as real and well deserved. It's worthless noise of an angry child in the body of a man and I gave it a far more polite reply than was deserved.
you really think it's likely the US government is going to want to shoot protesters?
They have. They will again. An armed populace makes it less likely, not more.
You really think government staff can order the killing of protesters and keep their job/stay out of jail? The fact that protesters have been shot is proof that people just can't be trusted with guns because there's always some moron that mistakenly decides that killing someone is necessary, when it isn't. Ideally no-one would have guns, but I think we can agree that's not possible, so it's best to keep them to a minimum.
With the guns they weren't "allowed" to have, but got anyway. How do you prevent [a corrupt] government from getting guns? By voting the leaders out of office in 4 years? How does a legitimate government prevent an invading force from conquering them without guns (the prior example stated a universal ban on guns by all world governments, as if that could happen)?
There are a whole bunch of checks and balances preventing the sorts of levels of corruption necessary for a government to start suppressing their population. You have to somehow fly under the media radar, co-opt all branches and all levels of the military, the police, state governments, etc etc. It's just not practical these days. It's not the 18th Century anymore.
Really? Ground troops are only crowd control? And they don't use guns? A corrupt government isn't going to send in "lightly armed police" into a protest rally. And that's what the right to bear arms is about: allowing a populace to defend itself from a corrupt government. Sure, if the US sends in tanks and helicopters against its own people, the protesters are screwed at that moment, but when the fighting escalates, it can't always be tanks and choppers; at some point, traitorous military would have to be outside of a vehicle, and guns will do more than sharp pointy sticks, even if they're wearing body armor. You're trying to think of a great balancing act where all parties involved are benevolent (well, the state anyway; if the people were benevolent, then you'd not have a problem with them owning guns), but the framers were concerned with a(n all too real) worst case scenario. It was fairly recent for them, and we've seen examples in modernity.
Well for starters humans basically are benevolent en masse. When was the last time you saw hundreds of thousands of people rallying to achieve something really evil? In just doesn't happen! This is why democracy works. Evil requires a small number of selfish people with a high concentration of power. So long as you dilute power enough and spread it around it's reasonable to believe that there will be enough good people to prevent the nasty ones from consolidating the power required for totalitarian rule.
Every able bodied person of sound mind needs one. Maybe two. And proper training in their use both in home defense, and in defense of nation. I know people who defended themselves with their firearms, and I'm glad they were able to do so, but I'm even more glad that their ownership of firearms is threatening to some in the government. That's what the framers intended. Ballot, Jury, Cartridge.
That may have been their intention but they lived in a very different time. Our institutions are now very well developed, we have instant global communications, high levels of scrutiny on government activities. Corruption is still very possible and will endure. But not to the levels required to start executing people.
I suppose there is always a slim chance of that happening, but frankly the chance of being indiscriminately killed by some asshole with a gun is much more likely.
Politicians, police and prosecution is a deadly combination.
Excuse me asshole, what are you implying? Because what I'm reading is an incredibly ignorant screed by someone who obviously knows nothing of terrorism , tea party activists or the real World. BTW, "tea-bagging" is what your boyfriend does with you; it is not the grass roots political group.
"I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called 'Mr.Evil,' thank you very much!"
To MacTO:
I don't think the people making the threats read slashdot.
Love,
Anonymous Coward.
Follow the money!
I mean: when managing our planet we should err on the side of caution. The last century has seen a massive increase in the energy consumption of the human race, both because of population increase and increased personal energy use. The atmosphere responds slowly to stress, so there has not been enough time for us to observe the result of the stress which we are placing on it. Sensible, conservative, behaviour should be to be careful, lest we break something which can not be easily fixed.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I think the planet is warming, but the whole idea behind the carbon tax has nothing to do with the climate. It is a strangely popular government tax that effects everyone's pocketbook, directly or indirectly. It is a bit odd, that people are demanding to pay more taxes and not even realizing they are demanding to be taxed.
In other words, your statement that "having guns does not really protect anyone" was equivocation about the aggregate statistics of gun violence and control measures. Got it.
In the future if you would kindly avoid ambiguous statements in order to further your ideology, I would appreciate it.
(Not sure if troll, or...)
Are you referring to the global cooling predictions, or to some actual warming prediction that existed in the 1970s? If the later, I will extend my juvenile analogy and say the Church of Global Warming is writing checks its science can't cash. :-)
You do not need to read TFA to know that intolerance can exist on both sides of a debate.
The predictions of a coming ice age in the 70's were a myth. It was understood that the cooling phase at the time was due to increased aerosols blocking sunlight, and that warming due to CO2 would eventually overcome that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU_AtHkB4Ms
"not really" should have been your clue. If you would kindly kindly "get" clues next, I would appreciate not wasting my time.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I wouldn't normally quote M. Crichton, but I think he summed it up best: "The 'precautionary principle', properly applied, forbids the precautionary principle."
> A benevolent God would not allow wholesale extinction of the Human race.
Depends, some gods are infinitely just, and that extinction, as a direct consequence of the freedom of some evil men, could be compatible, especially for those religions with an afterlife.
Man is the purpose of creation, but probably not because of him belonging to homo sapiens.
As for the collective guilt, they burnt Jews and they are throwing phosphor at Arabs because of concepts like that, responsibility is always personal.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Seriously? an eternity in Hell as a just punishment for any crime -- say, even the destruction of a planet seems a tad on the excessive side? Is your "benevolent" god a sadistic bastard?
And no, there is such thing as collective responsibility. For example, you may live in a corrupt society. Mere survival requires you to buy in that corruption. You are not guilty of it, though, because you did not have a choice. However, the system perpetuates because everyone participates.
This is collective responsibility: your individual actions are negligible, but the result of the (slightly reprehensible, sometimes negligibly so) actions of everyone can be much more than the sum of individual actions. We might well burn (or at least be uncomfortably hot) because of such a process. Responsibility can be collective.
Justice should however only consider individual guilt -- but this is a completely different topic.
you will have to admit a gun is a pretty bad hammer, and a terrible screwdriver...
A word to the wise, take care to pay attention where the gun is aiming if you use it as a hammer. I believe there was a Darwin Awards winner who tried to use a loaded shotgun to break out a car window by hitting it with the butt of the gun.
Maybe you have cause and effect backwards. Maybe guns are more tightly regulated where the most gun deaths occur.
AC's comment is insightful.
In the same system of belief you have a god sending people to hell, and a god declared loving and just.
You might find the combination unreasonable, and refuse to believe, it's ok. Could be a fake so clever that instead of trying to adhere to human logic to become acceptable, it completely derails from it.
If you go on to say such combination doesn't make sense, I can point out that logic applied to the divine dimension is exactly like function called outside its scope, so you should say "it doesnt make sense under the assumption that the logic system we developed can be applied arbitrarily to the god object and dimension". That is, you switch a system of belief for another one. Still ok.
But, if on the same scriptures that say a god did this and that, it's written that that god is just and loving, you simply can't come to the opposite conclusion by considering only the parts that suit your argument. Either take all or refuse all. If not, then Einstein is wrong because, E!=mc.
If you say justice must consider individual guilt, then it's ok for me, but I don't see much usefulness in the term collective responsibility as an abstraction.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Logic is not arbitrary. Your pick of axiomatic system is -- provided it satisfies a set of criteria. And then you create your maths. But this process is not arbitrary: there are no systems where pi is 3, for example.
For the record, I am not a believer. But I don't mind believers, provided they can stay consistent in a logical sense. Now, this usually means that a take-all approach to religion is something I do mind: believing that your holy book is divinely inspired is OK, believing it is perfect (which translation? what became of context? errors? symbolism?) is crazy. It assumes that your interpretation of it is Divine. And that, I call having a God complex.
Also, believing that a benevolent being would send anyone to Hell is highly inconsistent: you are holding God to lower standards than humans!
Einstein never said E = mc. He said that E = mc^2 in the first order approximation. Also, Einstein's theories can be redeveloped in any sufficiently powerful axiomatic system. There is no need to believe in logic: it is. There is need to believe in science: it is wholly based on the assumption that the observable universe is how it is because of a set of immutable, fundamental laws. Let's face it, this is faith.
Collective guilt is very important as a concept: it covers the reality that although you are responsible for your actions, you are also part of a larger social organism, which you might not be able to measurably influence, but which is capable of actions which might be deemed guilty. Recognising this is important when discussing societies and values.
You are grasping at straws now. If someone made the statement that "seat belts do not really protect anyone", nobody would take that as meaning seat belts actually do protect some people but hurt others.
maybe because that statement would be false ? are you comparing guns to seat belts now ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
No, I made an argument using the same phraseology you used in your anti-gun rant. And by your saying that statement would be false, which is right, we have come full circle and it appears you really did mean what you said.
This is all a beat up by left winging laborites and their greeny socialist mates to divert attention that they are a pathetically bad government trying to introduce yet ANOTHER tax on the Australian public. Don't believe the hype, the Australian government is broke and on track to being the worst government and leaders we have ever seen, they are desperate to get any revenue raising through including a farcical Carbon Tax.
Compared to what? Granted, they would be worse than a straight human powered pedal bike, but they use drastically less resources and energy than a car or even a motorcycle. I guess they can only carry one person, so if you compared them to the per-passenger costs of mass transit then maybe.
i'm afraid the people you're trying to reach have given up on listening and interpreting to any other theories than the mantras and dogmas they live by. To me, there's hardly any difference between blind dumb-asses like this and an al-qaeda terrorist who would lash out at you with deadly force for slandering or even mentioning the name of a (long) dead guy
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
I didn't write logic is arbitrary, I said "arbitrarily applied to" ....
Nobody questions that logic systems are correctly built on some axioms, like I didn't say that a metaphorical function body has bugs. I said that you can't call a function where it is not defined. All human concepts are not necessarily defined in a trascendent plane, or not in the same way. "God is evil", "god is good", "god IS", are all potentially invalid phrases, which we accept making assumptions on the concept of god, for all trascendent gods.
I agree on the problem of translation, but that makes harder to draw any definitive conclusion from scriptures which is the same problem of the application of logic.
About hell, as a believer or a skeptic, nobody can determine what it means, so I agree that a just and loving god has higher standards than humans, yet I cannot logically rule out anything. I do not say that to scare people, and myself do not fear a possibly present infinitely just judge.
About Einstein formula: that was exactly my point, i took out parts that suited me and declared the rest worthless.
About logic, be careful or it becomes "faith". Logic is the product of abstractions our brains compute, instinctually first and consciously later, which are able to predict how things become. Everything works fine because the metaphorical functions are used in their scope.
Just program a cellular automata world with ternary logic, or implementing wishes (a cell can acquire a particular state if some entity "desires it" for whatever implementation of desire), and see how this world's binary logic is utterly worhtless there. If you are able to create abstractions with a different underlying logic, than the logic outside this world is not necessarily compatible with ours. (Note also the cellular automata world exists with a different logic only as an abstraction, physically it is implemented with binary logic on a pc).
To make it simpler, in a world where macroscopic things are, and are not, at the same time, binary logic would be an academic exercise with little worth. The world does not obey logic, it is logic that is modeled after the world. Math being the language of a god is already a problem in the field of religions.
Other problem. The predictive power of logic depends on the definition of time. No time, no prediction power, every arbitrary logic system that we conceive has an equally worthless predictive power. That makes the "who created god" and evolution vs creationism and "destiny vs freedom" arguments very silly.
Now you're thinking with portals :_D
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
So on a bike you can run out of power. That can't happen to a car (Not mine anyway). It's always ready with more than enough fuel to make the trip.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I think the issue is, electric cars, DO have a limited range, that even falls within the daily unassisted range of fat old men on bicycles. If you add an electric assist to a bicycle, for a very low price (dollars, energy, carbon footprint) you get a lot of the benefits of a car, and you don't have to worry about being stranded when the batteries run down, because you yourself can keep on pedaling. "A lot of the benefits of a car" means that for common-case use of a car, the bicycle is just as good -- given the speeds you actually travel in dense areas, and the loads that you actually carry, the assisted bicycle can carry the load, and move roughly as fast (what is lost in the fast stretch, is gained filtering through stopped traffic). The bicycle's also faster if you account for the exercise that you need -- with the bike, you get it "for free" (alternatively, you exercise for a while, then show up instantly at your destination). If you're over 40 and you're not accounting for this, you're a fool.
PS perhaps you are too young to remember the oil embargo in the 1970s. It's possible to run low on gas, and not be able to refill in ten minutes and be on your way. Here, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis .
I said "from say the French", meaning I was using France as an example. The fact remains the UEA was legally restrained from supplying a small amount of raw data to third parties by the governments who owned the data, there was nothing stopping genuinely interested researchers from obtaining the data from the primary source in the same way as the UEA, NOAA and others had done. And there's the rub, the people cough-climateaudit-cough who made over 50 FOI requests for this stuff in just two days were not the slightest bit interested in the data, they were interested in bogging down the research.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And there's as well Courtillot who asks for the data, never had them, and did exactly what you said above: tried to gather the data by himself. Unfortunately, it was a very long and uneasy task, and he couldn't get all the data he wanted, so himself said that his results aren't as good as one could expect, because of the lack of data.
Continue to say/think what you want, this retention of data IS a problem, however you put it.