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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
No.
Next question?
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...
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?
...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.
The tactics of the eu far left benefited the other side, in case you didn't notice. Ditto for the neonazis. People get pissed when you blow them up, no matter what your political reasons are.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Whoisthreatingwhom?
It appears you are building a straw man so you can have a burning. The sheer idiocy of pretending that all of the people in any one occupation are exactly the same will become clear if you actually think about it.
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.
No and even if they were that wouldn't justify sending them death threats. Also it doesn't seem to have come up on Slashdot yet, but the CSIRO has opened a site at http://www.csiro.au/greenhouse-gases/ where you can view the raw information about green house gas concentrations that has been collected in Australia.
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.
Step 1. Build a global conspiracy supported by every major research organisation world wide suggesting that emitting large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is going to affect the climate and don't forget to suppress the voices of the brave and heroic rouge scientists and oil company researchers who attempt to reveal your conspiracy.
Step 2. Have governments world-wide introduces nation-bankrupting schemes to charge (some) people who bump lots of carbon into the atmosphere for that privilege.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!
Or something like that right? Looking at other countries, like for example NZ, which has a very very similar scheme to what is being discussed in Australia, the results so far have been positive, or is that just more misinformation?
Hell you don't even need to believe in climate change to see the need to encourage the uptake of more renewable energies. Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years. In the meantime as demand continues to rise, prices will go up and countries which don't have alternatives will hurt (a lot in the nation bankrupting sense).
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.
No, that was rhetorical bullshit from an anti-intellectual luddite designed to build up a strawman fit to be lynched.
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.
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.
And you're so sure because? Of what. A two letter word? Sorry doesn't wash. "Climate scientists" in australia have been doing the same thing as their colleagues have been in the UK, US, and in Canada. Refusing to disclose data including methodology for years.
Actually they have been disclosing their methodologies for years. As one would expect from papers submitted to various peer reviewed journals. That isn't quite the same as feeling inclined to satisfy arbitrary, time consuming FOIA requests from armchair bloggers who want the data merely to nitpick it. It's funny how the so-called "climategate" email leak didn't unveil some vast librul conspiracy. What it did reveal was a bunch of scientists bitching in private about armchair bloggers wasting their time with specious FOIA requests.
Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years.
Rest of it is half plausible, but running out of uranium in the next few hundred years? using fast breeder reactors? not likely.
It is still finite of course, but it will last a shite sight longer than all the other things you mentioned by almost an order of magnitude.
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.
...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!
You could at least answer his next question, unless the answer is "yes".
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.
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.
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.
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
We aren't talking about "armchair bloggers", but about real scientists. Vincent Courtillot, a geologist (so not a climatologist) asked the university of East Anglia, and they really were hiding behind copyright, just as how they wrote on the leaked emails. VC isn't exactly just bloging merely to nitpick, he built his own data sets from many weather stations, and found very different results, simply because he couldn't get the original data sets from the AR4. Yes, they disclosed for a part their methods, and then we saw the leaked Pascal source code having some fudge factor written by hand, with no way to know where it came from.
All the above isn't joke, and you can't just dismiss all these facts because you trust blindly only one side. Recognize that it's a highly politicized field, and that we should be extremely careful reading each results, and we SHOULD ASK and CHECK FOR THE DATA. There's no other field on science where this doesn't happen. Why should we do an exception for climatology?
Please don't reply with insults, I'm sick of it, and FYI, I'm not on any side of this, I just think a CO2 tax isn't a good answer, and that currently, there's NO consensus and we should ask for more research, AND THE DATA that goes with it.
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!
Please, name ONE policy with isn't tax, heading toward less CO2 emissions. Give me one example of a country that wants to ban petrol-based cars, or at least push for electric. The profit here, is simply going through a tax, and the enslavement of poor people having no choice but to use fossil fuel for their car, because there's simply no other alternative available, and that nobody cares to make policies to push for such a change. Open your eyes!
How the fuck do you know? Have you read all these scientists' emails?
Nobber
"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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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/
Hmmmm....I don't know. I doubt they had to make it up. There are a certain percentage of nutcases in any group, although of course the ecomentals feel that they are exempt from this. I'm sure when they start talking about taxing people to stop the earth from warming there are enough real people to get incensed and that some of them will get the bright idea to shoot a scientist or two. The smug superior way the elites have of talking down to their inferiors (everyone who disagrees with them) almost insure they'll enrage somebody into doing this kind of idiocy. The best way to counter the ecomentals is to just stress how much letting them have their way is going to cost. Most people don't like getting ripped off and that's all this is at it's heart, a rip off.
We don't care if polluters are paying a tax. We want them to stop the pollution. Banishing coal electricity really is possible.
Now to ban hockey sticks.
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
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.
Also fire is banned in some instances. Eg, no lighting fires during high bush fire risk conditions.
Poor people do have a choice, bicycles, walking, public transportation, car pooling, electric vehicles, or simply choosing a more economic vehicle the next time around. Of course I'm sure you could concoct some hypothetical poor person for whom none of these choices is practical, and of course the entire country should shape it's policies around that one person right?
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.
Since taxes are created by politicians, not scientist, wouldn't it make more sense to counter the politicians instead ?
I do agree that some protocol should be put in place for scientists to release data and in return to be immune from being pestered by FOIA requests but that's a separate topic altogether, and certainly does not imply that absence of arbitrary-data-request-being-satisfied that somehow it implies conspiracy. It doesn't. The UEA emails don't reveal any "smoking gun" at all, just a bunch of scientists engaged in technical, mundane and occasionally bitchy chitchat with their peers.
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
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
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.
Of course. Any responsible citizen will call the cops after they've been mugged/raped/stabbed/shot/burnedwithfile/killed.
Amazing!
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.
It's not quite that simple. Look at Switzerland and Canada.
You mean this data?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Bullshit. Poor people get a 2nd hand car (which pollute a lot) because they live far away in the cheaper area, where public transportation is almost not existing, and at least isn't enough for them to go to work. This isn't an hypothesis, this is reality.
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?
I was under the impression that the only significant dissension on this topic was among non scientists. Are there are credible scientists making arguments against climate change?
Yes, they disclosed for a part their methods, and then we saw the leaked Pascal source code having some fudge factor written by hand, with no way to know where it came from.
ITYM "Fortran". Or at least that's what ESR claimed. (Actually it was IDL, and commented out)
and we should ask for more research, AND THE DATA that goes with it.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=raw+climate+data
It's very clear from a quick google of Vincent Courtillot that his opinions are not held in high regard by climate scientists. Indeed one of the leaked emails suggests Phil Jones rejected one of his papers as "awful".
Of course Phil Jones doesn't like Courtillot, because he has a complete different opinion as his, and he is giving out numbers, curves, and plausible scientific explanations on what he says, WITH the data together.
Therefore why should a scientist bend over backwards to satisfy his requests?
Maybe because:
- It may give a chance to anyone to prove or disprove what has been researched
- It is what everybody does on all science field
- Because your dislike of someone who doesn't agree with you isn't a scientific argument
- Because it's public financed research
- Because it's the only way to do a satisfying peer review
I do agree that some protocol should be put in place for scientists to release data and in return to be immune from being pestered by FOIA requests but that's a separate topic altogether, and certainly does not imply that absence of arbitrary-data-request-being-satisfied that somehow it implies conspiracy.
Come on! Nobody is pretending we are in a James Bond movie. We are just saying that the head of the IPCC is refusing to have his work peer-reviewed by people he dislike, or who will have enough knowledge to redo all the calculation and maybe disagree. That's important! It's not at all what you just wrote. We aren't just talking about the average scientist here, but THE HEAD OF THE IPCC, Phil Jones. To date, we still don't have his data (unless I'm mistaking), even after the leaks. Shame on these researchers.
The UEA emails don't reveal any "smoking gun" at all, just a bunch of scientists engaged in technical, mundane and occasionally bitchy chitchat with their peers.
It does reveal however that Jones doesn't like his opponents to peer review his work, and is hiding behind copyright.
The solution is very tractable if you have no morals. There are many ways to get rid of lots of people -- especially people you don't care about.
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.
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.
Please, name ONE policy with isn't tax, heading toward less CO2 emissions. Give me one example of a country that wants to ban petrol-based cars, or at least push for electric. The profit here, is simply going through a tax, and the enslavement of poor people having no choice but to use fossil fuel for their car, because there's simply no other alternative available, and that nobody cares to make policies to push for such a change. Open your eyes!
1. Australia is looking at introducing an emissions trading scheme not a carbon tax.
2. You're opposed to a tax on carbon because of its effect on poor people, yet you're proposing banning petrol cars? You don't think that might have some effect on all those poor people who have to use them "because there's simply no other choices available"?
3. As far as promoting electric cars go, Japan had a scheme promoting hybrids for a while, although I think it has been wound down now. It's not electric but Brazil has been promoting biofuels for decades. That's off the top of my head. There's probably others. Other than that there are plenty of countries investing heavily in public transportation. Japan, France, Germany, Korea, Spain and China have all invested heavily in bullet trains (I'm sure there are others). It's not as shiny as bullet trains but plenty (most?) cities around the world have been working hard to build up intra-city train/tram networks. All of this is irrelevant though firms not individuals are being targeted by the ETS.
4. Even in Australia government direct investment in "green" industries and targeted schemes have been touted as an alternative by the opposition leader. However, most economists have ridiculed the idea preferring an ETS which encourages market led innovation rather than the government attempting to pick winners (and all the incompetence and corruption that implies).
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...
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.
"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.
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.
Yup and you will continue by explaining why the country's course of action regarding CO2 emissions should depend on this hypothetical group of poor people and all policies relating to housing, public transportation, energy etc. should be stationary because of it.
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."
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?
> 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.
Ah but the scientists push for the government to "do something" and of course taxes are mostly what governments do. Especially the federal government.
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.
Did I wrote such a dumb thing? I don't think so. Of course, I'm all for more public transportations and clean energy. But that has NOTHING to do with CO2 taxes.
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.
Most scientists just observe what has happened, and predict what's going to happen. Very few scientific papers have any kind of policy recommendation.
Of course, the governments are free to choose any kind of policy they want. There is no reason it has to involve taxes. Taxes are just an efficient way to impose a policy while letting the free market decide on the most profitable way to implement it. Usually that's better than governments micromanaging directly, but if you disagree you're free to vote differently.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nope. You're just apparently prone to misinterpretation. Oh well.
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?
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.
I don't agree with your 4 steps, so I have produced my own 9 step plan below:
Step 1: Recognise energy security as an issue of vital national interest
Step 2: Incentivise grant feeding egoists in academic ivory towers to produce the evidence required to help you promote your energy policies
Step 3: Vilify and denigrate anyone who does not agree with the paradigm, including equating them with creationists and holocaust deniers
Step 4: Construct idiotic renewable energy targets that cannot possibly be met without shutting down 90% of your entire economy and building 500,000 windmills
Step 5: Refer anyone who questions the paradigm to realclimate, an activist website run by Al Gore's Fenton Communications
Step 6: Completely ignore academic misconduct in support of your paradigm, including but not exclusively inappropriate use of statistical methods
Step 7: Retire before new research shows that atmospheric sensitivity to plant-food trace gas CO2 is barely perceptible, that sea levels aren't rising above trend, that Earth's thermostat is controlled by the complex interplay between ocean/sun/cosmic rays, clouds and water vapour
Step 8: ???
Step 9: National bankruptcy
Governments will O
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
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.
An emissions trading scheme is a carbon tax, except that the money goes first to those who were producing unnecessary emissions (and hence have credits to sell), then to the financial speculators who have bribed the politicians to set up this rigged market designed to ensure continually rising prices for carbon credits. At least with a real tax the polluters would pay and the government would get money, but with the carbon credit scheme the old polluters get grandfathered in, even get paid, while any new manufacturing enterprise has costs the incumbents, non-productive ventures and Chinese firms don't. This raises further barriers to entry to new manufacturing firms in Australia, tilts the field towards the "service sector", and ships the pollution and the productivity to China, where there will be much more pollution emitted compared to the goods produced.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
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.
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.
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.
Why don't you go ask some geologists including those belonging to GEOLOG how well that's working out. They refuse to disclose data. I'll wait, maybe you can get it from those climate scientists and publicly disclose it.
Om, nomnomnom...
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
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.
So they should all die because some guy somewhere won't provide raw data? You really are a piece of work.
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.
Actually having had family members working in this very field in the CSIRO I can tell you that they bend over backwards to respond to FOI requests, however certain lines are and must be drawn in the sand.
Data who's release would ruin the PhD chances of a student will not be released where possible prior to the PhD process ending, because its fucking ruinous to wreck some guys 10 years of research to appease stupid anti-science denialists.
Data which belongs to private companies (as a lot of this data is) cant be released because it would be illegal, as we have a fairly strict copyright regime.
And FOI requests that are plain onerous are going to be rejected because these guys are seriously overworked already and as we learned from the letters leaked in the climate-gate frame up, much of the FOI requests coming in to these guys are nothing more than harassment.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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.
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
Only if you use a scheme that grandfathers in emission permits. An auction based system avoids this. Oh and I thought Chinese manufacturing generally involved less (greenhouse gas at least) pollution than Australia. They have a much greater mix of nuclear and hydro going into their power grid and from what I understand their coal power plants are cleaner. Also it's not like Australia has much in the way of carbon intensive industries left that could be viably shipped overseas (assuming cattle farming, power generation and the resource sector aren't going anywhere)....
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.
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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 what alternative reality is Phil Jones THE HEAD OF THE IPCC? He was the head of the CRU at East Anglia University but that's a far cry from the IPCC. Why should I believe anything else you say if you can't get such an obvious thing right?
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.
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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.
Sure, the head of the IPCC is made of politics rather than scientists. So I'll rephrase: he was the head of the scientists, together with NASA and MIT, that built the AR4, which is the main document made by the IPCC in 2007. He clearly lead the report building though. Sorry for the shortcut, but I thought it was so obvious... Does that make all what I said as invalid? Are you contesting his role as a scientist in the AR4? And remember, my point was the hate between VC and PJ... You're just trying to play with words and make it looks bad, it's silly.
"An auction based system avoids this." But who sells the credits in the first place? Either the government, in which case it is essentially a tax with market/speculator set rates and lobbyist-rigged supply,. or the existing CO2-producing industries, or some combination of the two.
"...from what I understand their coal power plants are cleaner."
Nukes and hydro are about 16% of Chinese electrical production capacity. Coal is at least 78% and that is not declining much if at all - several hundred more coal plants are set to come on line in the next few years.85% of their plants usually have no sulfur scrubbers, and the pollution is horrendous according to people I have talked to. The Chinese have the dirtiest coal plants in the world. Even if they did have scrubbers, about 15-20% of total world CO2 emissions come from Chinese coal burning.
"Also it's not like Australia has much in the way of carbon intensive industries left that could be viably shipped overseas..."
But it has one big one that could be brought back. Much Chinese coal is burned to smelt Australian iron ore into steel, and the Aussies could move up the value chain by selling steel rather than ore. Having the steel made locally would likely stimulate other industries, too. That won't happen with a carbon tax/ carbon derivative system where China is exempt.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
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.
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.
Phil Jones was a lead author along with Kevin Trenberth of 1 chapter out of 11 chapters in the IPCC AR4 Working Group I report and 44 chapters in the full report. The chapter was admittedly an important one: "Observations: Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change" but it's the only one that lists him as a contributor. That hardly makes PJ the head of the IPCC. Maybe I'm a little touchy about precision but that was just too far from reality for me to let go.
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
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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.
The sheer idiocy of pretending that all of the people in any one occupation are exactly the same will become clear if you actually think about it.
You are presuming he is capable of thinking clearly about it.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.