Slashdot Mirror
Helicopter Rescue For All Passengers Aboard Antarctic Research Ship
The BBC reports (with video) that all aboard the ice-trapped MV Akademik Shokalskiy have been rescued by helicopter, after more than one icebreaker attempt to reach the vessel directly proved too challenging. Also at the New York Times, which reports "The twin-rotored helicopter, based on a Chinese icebreaker, the Xue Long, or Snow Dragon, flew several sorties across miles of packed ice to pluck scientists, tourists and journalists from a makeshift landing zone next to the marooned MV Akademik Shokalskiy research vessel."
A. These people aren't dead thanks to a 20th century technology available to bail them out. The only reason they went on a ship and not on a helicopter in the first place was because it would have been wastefully expensive to do so.
B. People sometimes die for much more mundane dreams.
Yes, and the ice dispenser in my freezer is also supporting evidence for your position, as long as we're not going to look at useful aggregate data.
Care to cite this data? The OP is bringing a hell of a lot more evidence to the conversation than you are.
The fact that you think they had any evidence at all is far more a reflection on you than me.
Its called climate change because of the unpredictable events. Perhaps you would like to consult a scientist? I wont ridicule you like those that claimed it was a myth when Las Vegas got snow in the summer time, but trust me - they got it good.
will work for dragon quest localization
I love good news, it's a shame there is not more of it.
I don't think we were planning on sailing a seagoing ship to Mars, no matter how often that has shown up in anime and Doctor Who (sort of), nor were we planning on doing much sailing on Martian seas, they've been at ultra low tide for quite a few millennia now.
So I was watching this whole thing on the news and they never mentioned once that this expedition was meant to show the melting ice and such in hopes of showing the effects of global warming on the icepack. Now, I do believe Global warming is a thing... and we need to deal with it. But the clear bias by the media outlets isn't doing anyone any favors.
Saying that an isolated incident completely disproves global warming is like saying that my diet doesn't work because I gained a gained two pounds last week (ignoring the fact that I've lost an average of .5 lbs/wk over the last two years).
The only reason they went on a ship and not on a helicopter in the first place was because it would have been wastefully expensive to do so.
No currently existing helicopter has the range needed for a mission like that. Their position is not within reach by helicopters stationed on land, the helicopter that rescued them is stationed on an ice breaker.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Look at me, I don't understand science, and I call people doing their jobs in dangerous environments a vacation.
From a person who has never seriously done any difficult labor in their life, so much you can smell it.
The sub-tag "who-pays-for-all-that-rescuing?" has me wondering if they boat people are planning to pay with carbon credits. I have to say, though, that all climate science debating aside, it's pretty clever to turn one of the most abundant elements in the galaxy into a currency. It reminds me of a plot point in one of Neal Stephenson's books where a character stockpiles shells to use as currency only to find out that nobody else considers them valuable.
Glad everybody is safe. Cue the impending doom guys to work more ice into it's getting warmer paper WTB more grant and endowment funding for fun vacation trips.
Yeah, climate change is a load of crap! Why, I heard that just a couple months ago the whole state of Minnesota turned from lush greenery into an icy snow-covered wasteland! Entire lakes froze over, that didn't have any ice at all in the previous months. Surely the world climate can't be gradually warming over many decades if certain areas ever get any colder in the short term!
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
That's certainly believable. Call B in my reply overzealous then. But A stands just fine with that caveat.
If the ice was covering the globe, you'd have a point. But saying that my basement is cold doesn't prove that my whole house is.
Seeing as how the BBC article clearly mentions that the "Passengers" (aka Researchers) on the ship have been rescued, but that the crew members of the ship are staying on board and could be stuck for several weeks, I hope the attention span of the people keeping an eye on the ship is a bit better than that of the /. editors, who had apparently forgotten that the crew exists before they reached the bottom of the article...
This isolated incident is already morphing to fit your beliefs, isn't it? Scientists, tourists, and journalists? I thought it was some big mission led by a climate researcher to retrace the steps of some decades old mission. You know, to prove how much ice has disappeared over that time period and we can learn how CO2 is going to kill us all.
Soon it will no longer be serious climate scientists that marooned themselves in Antarctic ice such that icebreakers could not reach them in the middle of summer. No, it will just be a bunch of tourists. Nothing to see here, move along.
Yeah, right.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No, actually, it's called climate change, at least originally, because that was a euphemism developed by a conservative think tank to make the results sound more palatable. It's called climate change now, because not all parts of the globe would warm. Unpredictability is just weather being weather, and has very little to do with climate at all.
PS I understand global warming, the amount of doom and gloom is excessive. The amount of bad science that gets funded is insane. At this point we really need to get past the it's going to happen bits and stop frothing at the mouth.
No sir I dont like it.
The ice caps do not expand overnight. How is it an isolated event?
Instead, alarmists use isolated events as evidence for their position, and decry those who want the raw data and point out that the overall trend is a cooling, not warning - which goes against ALL theories (that we are coming out of an ice age, that man is causing global warming, that the sun is getting hotter)
Now, I can't deny the presence of people who went "Katrina was caused by global warming," but their being wrong doesn't excuse you ignoring incredibly reliable data from people who know what they're talking about. No more than idiots blathering about super-volcanoes "being due" excuse people who deny the existence of plate tectonics.
You can always find someone hyperbolic and wrong to disagree with, it doesn't make your position right.
I don't know. When do economic models predict I'll win the lottery?
Because you are picking your data...
When you cant win, ad hominem.
TFS is, as usual, wrong. The passengers have been rescued, the crew remains aboard and decidedly not safe.
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
Creator, Father, who dost show
Thy splendor in the ice and snow,
Bless those who toil in summer light
And through the cold Antarctic night,
As they thy frozen wonders learn;
Bless those who wait for their return.
Yes, it's the Navy Hymn, but it will have to do. If you've never been to sea, you'll never grok.
...took Xue Long to rescue them.
Also, there's more going on that just CO2 levels and gradual heating. We're cutting down forrests, polluting the air and water with hundreds of thousands of chemicals, killing off life in the largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs died, paving over and building on top of ecosystems with reckless abandon, ad nauseum. In short, we're changing the environment in many ways at once, not just increasing levels of greenhouse gases. Climate Change seems more descriptive to me than Global Warming.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Well, at least they were able to show the world conclusively that the antarctic ice is, in fact, disappearing.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Except that the data in question isn't of the whole environment, and all its components. Science doesn't have an everythingology to study that.
There's about as much research in that ship as in the Japanese "whale research" fleet that for some mysterious reason needs to test and re-test the deliciousness of whale meat every year..
It's a damn 'eco tourist' (i.e. green-washed) cruise. Not to mention the fact that, being a Russian ship, they're probably dumping toilet water and bilge oil directly into the sea..
I bet the taxpayers are happy about their tax dollars going to rescue this group of clowns ;-)
Just select your dataset yourself and throw out the statistical tests compared to the measured data, seem to be practice on both sides of climate "science". Until they stop messing around with statistics I'm not going to believe either side, got better things to do like restarting my CFC production plant!
... or they don't respond at all. Those that do have either an inconclusive end result or questionable practices. If you cherry pick your data to lead to your result it's not difficult to come up with the conclusion you want, combined with the staggering lack of statistical background knowledge. It's one thing to remove noise from your data, almost all researchers do that when they publish. If you're measuring over a few months or years you're bound to have a few extreme values that aren't representative. But then you should also mention what you did, why, and what the influence on the overall dataset was.If you go further then you should execute the right statistical tests to verify if the chosen samples are representative for the entire dataset. And until they properly do that I'm not taking either side serious.
But to be serious for a minute here, climate science really annoys me at times. Many times you e-mail authors, and I'm talking about both sides, to request more information about their datasets they either say it's confidential (really???), lost, destroyed,
That sure is something actual climate scientists have said, and not some kind of elaborate strawman you set up for yourself to attack.
Yep.
Now, statistically There has been a small increase in drought severity and frequency in the northern hemisphere as some oceanic changes occur, which has some limited, but measurable fallout. But that doesn't mean any given drought is climate change.
Granted there's no model of the earth that includes everything, other than the earth itself. There have been many studies of the effects of deforrestation, pollution, food supply, et al however. And there are more and more interdisciplinary studies using systems theory and complexity theory. Science is itself the study of everything. It's only its practioners who are divided into specialties by their own choice.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
If you can't recognize single incident evidence as more than just being a smart ass than you don't understand the idea of evidence. You flap your lips a lot but you never say much. Step up or shut up.
Doubling down. Okay. If bank of America's stock is down today against yesterday, what does that say about where the DJI will be next year?
Congratulations, if you said anything at all, you're an idiot who jumps to conclusions.
Makes me want to break out an emulator and play a few rounds of Choplifter. :-)
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Saying that an isolated incident completely disproves global warming
In the case of scientific theories so called "isolated incidents" can be all that is needed for "falsification".
I gave my real answer, actually.
It was "I don't know." Which is appropriate because climate data has no relevant to day-to-day weather. And I illustrated that point with a similar question.
Rather than address the main point, you compared me to nazis(not wanting to damage the economic output of the world by excessive emissions is ethically identical to genocide), made up claims I've never made, and made yourself sound like a crazy person.
The real questions would be the kind answered with study of climate data, you know, wide-scale, multi-measure temperature assessments. The fake question would be "how much does ice at one point near the Antarctic matter?"
Melodrama would be blowing up angrily when your idiotic point is compared against an obvious parallel.
While the world watches the researchers and tourists being "rescued", these guys stay to save the ship if that is at all possible. These are the guys who are doing all the work and should be getting all of the attention and respect they deserve.
--Coder
Absolutely agreed. You could pretty much replace "helicopter" with "nuclear ice breaker capable of sailing in practically any ice" and there would have been nothing for me to gripe about. Although the existing nuclear ice breakers are all in the Arctic and allegedly cannot cross the tropics under their own steam due to insufficient cooling.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
As global warming continues schools in Minnesota are preparing to close next week for more record low temperatures
Meanwhile, the British Midlands have barely seen a frost this year. Your anecdote about Minnesota is worth no more than mine about England.
Is it stuck in the ice "forever"? Or will the Antarctic "summer" experience enough of a breakup in the ice pack to get an icebreaker in to free it?
If it is stuck for the long term, is it any environmental risk of a hull breech from the ice causing leaks, etc, or is the hull strong enough that it won't get crushed, it'll just sit there until the hull rusts out?
No, that's stupid, like really stupid. There's nothing about these models that should be anywhere near that temporally localized.
you're being trolled.
...does anyone know how this works, as far as who pays for these ships supplies? I mean, I understand a little about how scientific research gets paid for - it's usually private funding mixed with some governmental funding. But when an expedition such as this goes south (no pun intended), who pays for the other ships/helicopter to come save them?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
How do you tell the difference between someone who has taken to denying factually reality to antagonize others and one who does so out of self-delusion?
Since it has a required predicate, to whit: "According to their models, there would be a sea of water there".
According to their models, there was nothing about an absence of sea ice.
I'm not a Bayesian model, but if I were I would score an AC or high user number very high when looking for trolls.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yes, but we can't get Congress to get on the rocket. . . .
A few days ago. I saw some video footage of the snow blowing in the wind. Piloting a helicopter in such windy conditions looks dangerous. hats off to the rescue crew.
Meanwhile, the British Midlands have barely seen a frost this year. Your anecdote about Minnesota is worth no more than mine about England.
Everything important in the world happens in the US, didn't you know? That silly "rest of the world" thing is irrelevant.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
polluting the air and water with hundreds of thousands of chemicals,
Credibility dropped here, as you fell off the deep end; your claims went from "sort of vague" to "downright hysterical". Every time I hear someone use the word "chemicals" in such a fear-mongering way, I wonder whether they are aware that water is a chemical too, or that its the worlds biggest fear-word. Oh no, chemicals, theyre so bad for you -- except for all of the ones necessary to support life.
Which specific extinction are you referring to, by the way? There are a number of species which are being removed from the endangered list as they are making a comeback (eagles for one), so that its pretty hard to swallow claim that we're in the middle of the biggest extinction event in the last epoch, especially given how vague and handwavy your whole post is.
It's actually called Ampholpological Global Warming.
3 words to understand.
Ampholpological - human induced (due to CO2, methane, etc.)
Global - global, as in "The Earth as whole", not your backyard
Warming - as in heating up
So, human induced warming of the earth's average temperature. Simple, eh?
It doesn't say that climate will change, but heating the planet likely will change it. It doesn't say weather extremes will happen. It doesn't say there will not be ice in Antactica in December of 2014 or 2020. It says the planet is warming.
Now, if you want to look how your current weather looks in terms of global averages, just look.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-percentile-mntp/201311.gif
so if you live in eastern US, you are probably colder than normal. But if you live almost everywhere else in the world, it is kind of warm. For example, look at Moscow. In 1942, Hitler was defeated near Moscow and weather played an important part. It was very cold and usually it was very cold in Russia in winter. This year? -4C (or +25F).
https://www.google.ca/#q=moscow+weather
So now you can look up weather in plenty of places with internet and verify that NOAA is not lying to you about AGW.
Sometimes I wonder how it is that so many people on a supposedly tech oriented site have apparently no understanding of how technology works.
Breaking through huge layers of ice is a totally different task than firing a rocket at another planet. We could be really good at one and really bad at another.
And your credibility dropped to zero by conflating water with pollution. Here's one of the first results when I googled man-made chemicals. I've previously read that there over 100,000 man-made chemicals released into the environment. If you know of a better word than chemical to use, BTW, please let me know. Here's an overview of the current mass extinction event, started about 10,000 years ago when man really started getting down to wiping out animals, burning forrests for agriculture, etc. It's a selective list. Here's a list of man-made extinctions, or at least the documented ones. Googling is hard, but thankfully I was here to do it for you.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
from the article:
The 233-foot Russian research ship had been lodged in the ice since Dec. 24, when powerful winds encircled it with pack ice near Cape de la Motte, about 1,700 miles south of Hobart, Tasmania.
Navigating pack ice is like wandering through a labyrinth where the walls periodically move.
It's now political not scientific people buy the results they want, cheery pick for talking points, remove data that does not support there pet theory. It's more a a religious war that a scientific one at this point.
PS the scientists were on a vacation, retracing the steps of Douglas Mawson's trip 100ish years ago. It's a PR tour not a scientific endeavor.
No sir I dont like it.
Classification: Russian register KM ice class
Year built: 1984
Accommodation: 50 berths expedition, 30 crew
Shipyard: Finland
Main engines: power 2x1560 bhp (2x 1147 Kw) Register: Russia
Maximum speed: 12 knots (2 engines)
Cruising speed: 10 knots(one engine)
Bunker capacity: 320 tons
Oh there eco tourism trip will be fairly rough so much that the leader took along his wife and young children 4 scientists 26 paid tourists it's PR trip not science to go redo a century old expedition Awareness/PR is not science (unless it's quantifying it or otherwise studying it) these guys were a bunch of prats taking a vacation under the guise of science. The expedition is lead by Chris Turney a UNSW prof who happens to also to be pimping a carbon reclamation start up he help found any science would be tainted by his conflict of interest. Sure there were reporters paying to go along it should have had a lot of great photo's and heart and minds sort of fluff and drivel but little of that ya know hard science stuff.
Real scientists are pissed about this boondoggle, it pulled an icebreaker away from unloading supplies for the station only unloading about 1/3 of the supplies, some of the new research gear and all the people to go rescue these guys. Effectively cutting down the time they have to do there work that not photogenic science stuff.
No sir I dont like it.
That sure is something actual climate scientists have said
Not so fast there. You have to admit that the AGW camp is comprised on many different people. And many of those people are in positions that are influential...media, entertainment, etc. These non-scientists regularly equate weather events with AGW. They do so forcefully and very publicly with widespread exposure. All I've ever heard from the scientists are tepid and hard to find statements that, "no, you really can't say that".
Highly prominent scientists in AGW research have moved from science into advocacy of specific public policy. In doing that they have taken the debate out of the scientific realm and placed it into the public realm, where everyone has the right to express an opinion and where the science is merely one component of the debate.
And even then, some very visible AGW scientists are saying that weather events can be related to climate change
So you cannot dismiss accusations that the AGW camp is equating weather and climate when convenient and beneficial to the cause and then hide behind the scientists that are sticking as closely as possible to the scientific method when someone calls you on it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If you know of a better word than chemical to use,
Yes, you refer to specific things rather than waving your hands and saying "...and all of the bad stuff we're doing". Could you have been any MORE vague than you are?
I've previously read that there over 100,000 man-made chemicals released into the environment.
Great. Are they biodegradeable? Does refined sugar count? does salt count? What exactly counts? What quantity? Who's doing it, and on what scale? Is it environmentally relevant?
If you havent learned by now that figures like that tend to be worthless, nows a good time to start. Always demand specifics, or file the factoid under "suspect".
If the ice was covering the globe, you'd have a point. But saying that my basement is cold doesn't prove that my whole house is.
This is /. so I imagine you meant your parent's basement. And it being cold means you're not going to get a girl naked there. (Pray for a warming trend Grasshopper.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Oh there eco tourism trip will be fairly rough so much that the leader took along his wife and young children 4 scientists 26 paid tourists it's PR trip not science to go redo a century old expedition Awareness/PR is not science (unless it's quantifying it or otherwise studying it) these guys were a bunch of prats taking a vacation under the guise of science. The expedition is lead by Chris Turney a UNSW prof who happens to also to be pimping a carbon reclamation start up he help found any science would be tainted by his conflict of interest. Sure there were reporters paying to go along it should have had a lot of great photo's and heart and minds sort of fluff and drivel but little of that ya know hard science stuff.
Real scientists are pissed about this boondoggle, it pulled an icebreaker away from unloading supplies for the station only unloading about 1/3 of the supplies, some of the new research gear and all the people to go rescue these guys. Effectively cutting down the time they have to do there work that not photogenic science stuff.
Good grammar is a virtue.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
It's raining where I live. I'll build an ark.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
There is hyperbol and panic on both sides. Doesn't mean either side is 100% right or wrong. With humans it is usally a pretty heavy mix of right and wrong.
"Truth is in the middle" is an idea that assumes there's a fundamentally equal basis to "both sides." When it comes to science v. ignoramuses+shills, that's not really going to work.
Some points are wrong forever, and climate change denialism is one of them.
I'd consult with a climate scientist, but apparently they are trapped in antarctic ice...
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
That's the thing. Overall statistically significant changes in weather patterns, like, say, overall drought occurrence, or net amount of flooding changing decade to decade can be attributed. Things are changing, just not in a localized predictable way. (Hurricanes in particular show no correlation, as far as I've read)
It's not implausible to aggregate some cause there. "The dice are loaded" as claimed in your "damning" link doesn't mean we always roll sixes, just that they come up more often.
That is a reasonable interpretation.
And anti-global warming seems just as religious as AGW to me. IMH(or not so humble)O we need to focus on actually learning how things work and applying knowledge. Both sides seem to be only paying attention to observations to back up their theories rather than taking all observations and building a complete model, with nothing invested in any specific result.
Just my bent $0.02.
"Glad everybody is safe. Cue the impending doom guys ..."
Dude, those are the same people. Check the passenger manifest.
Economic models have nothing to do with who wins the lottery. It's a false parallel
Nope. That's exactly why it's apt. Climate models have nothing to do with whether it's going to be icy today. You're intentionally conflating scales in order to be as wrong as you possibly can. I don't get it.
And I've seen published peer reviewed scientific articles on both sides. I believe that is typically accepted definition of real science.
Meanwhile, the IPCC silently slashes its global warming predictions in the AR5 final draft.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/01/ipcc-silently-slashes-its-global-warming-predictions-in-the-ar5-final-draft/
"Unnoticed, the IPCC has slashed its global-warming predictions, implicitly rejecting the models on which it once so heavily and imprudently relied. In the second draft of the Fifth Assessment Report it had broadly agreed with the models that the world will warm by 0.4 to 1.0 C from 2016-2035 against 1986-2005. But in the final draft it quietly cut the 30-year projection to 0.3-0.7 C, saying the warming is more likely to be at the lower end of the range [equivalent to about 0.4 C over 30 years]. If that rate continued till 2100, global warming this century could be as little as 1.3 C."
No fanfare. No mea culpa.
According to Al Gore's models, within a year. This speech from 2009
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
This seems pretty darn specific
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
You should play doge ball.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Not for any meaningful definition of "both sides" you haven't. The vast majority of what's said in the denial side has 0% representation, and you'll find more published fringe views suggesting cataclysm than that.
Wow. Much ball. Very dodge.
Oh, look, it's a non-scientist.
He meant Anthropological.
God is imaginary
Yeah, you know what would have been really funny considering the sort of PR they were aiming for. If they would have been saved by a Russian nuclear powered ice breaker.
You do not get to pick and choose your data. You will be able to support any conclusion you care to reach if you are allowed that.
Welcome to the new millenium and politicized science.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Although the existing nuclear ice breakers are all in the Arctic and allegedly cannot cross the tropics under their own steam due to insufficient cooling.
Then why don't they go the other way?
Who's paying for the rescue?
I mean, not that China's all capitalist or anything, but they should have their costs covered by someone responsible for this pack of morons.
(I'm one of those crazy people that believe that people who put themselves into extreme situations like mountain climbers (or their inheritors), etc should indeed pay for the extraordinary costs of their rescues or rescue-attempts.)
-Styopa
Err? I feel a whoosh coming on here.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Every single one of your points has at least one fallacy, false assumption or outright lie in it. Additionally, the vast majority of your links point to well-established sources of disinformation. Posting a large amount of such drivel makes it prohibitively time-consuming to write a nice point-by-point rebuttal. However, that doesn't make them any more true.
Just a random pick of the long-discredited climate myths you regurgitated:
* #9
* #51
* #10
* #119 (it's that far down the list because the smart deniers are busy pretending they never used it). Also on that subject: this and this. Also, your wattsupwiththat.com source makes a huge leap of logic by assuming the 2 scientists were filtered out based on their answer to the first question as opposed to the more mundane explanation that they were filtered because they didn't fill in the second question, which is common practice in this kind of studies and leads to the fluctuating "total sample" numbers that are ubiquitous in the literature. Also, even if their questionable assumption were true, 94.9% still counts as a consensus. Also, it is quite ridiculous of you to compare absolute numbers from polls that were conducted on a different scale (10,257 earth scientists vs. the 10 million science graduates that live in the US). Not to mention that the studies are of a fundamentally different design, with one being reasonably well-designed, and the other one, not really...
* Bald eagles and wind farms, really? How does that even say anything about climate change? Other than that people who are smarter than you are sufficiently concerned about it that they're willing to sacrifice an insignificant percentage of a species that, although iconic, is classified as "Least Concern" by IUCN?
Truly you have a dizzying intellect. Debunking exactly what the GP said didn't happen.
> Going to sea.
> Pissing off Poseidon with your dessert dweller chant.
Release The Kraken!
Is it just me or is China becoming more and more visible on the world stage? Usually you'd have heard that the US Navy had a destroyer in the area and they flew the passengers off. China? Pretty far down the list of nationalities you'd expect to hear about in such a situation.
Airlifting stranded travelers, astronauts in orbit, rovers on the moon...
Welcome back to the world stage, China. Please don't go all Genghis on us like last time.
Hmm. Whether it's "hundreds of thousands" or "thousands" - I too would probably just call them "chemicals" and be done with it. This is slashdot, not a PhD thesis. Seems to me that if one's response is to pick out the portion of his argument that contains some hyperbole, you've not really tackled his argument.
Are you generally agreeing with him but wanting him not to use hyperbole because of the "with friends like these" problem? :)
You're right. I apologize for not listing all 100,000+ "molecules" (since chemicals offends you), with quantity, scale, producer, and environmental effect in a massive 800,000 page slashdot post. Please forgive me.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
AGW stands for "Anthropogenic Global Warming".
Anthropo- : of human beings
-genic : produced or generated by
Dunno where the hell "Ampholpological" came from.
Anthropology is the study of human origins. "Anthropological" means "to do with anthropology".
So I suppose "Anthropological Global Warming" would be global warming cause by anthropologists...
Not being able to cross the tropics to attempt a rescue is pretty moot as it would take the ship too long to get there anyway.
The irony here is that 90% of the worlds nuclear ice breakers are Russian, and this was a Russian ship that was trapped.
Canada should get off its ass and get nuclear ice breakers. Unfortunately this becomes political nonsense rather than common sense very quickly. I doubt Canada has the ability to produce nuclear ice breakers, or it could but at ridiculous expense. It would make much more sense to contract it out to the Russians and have them build us a few. Though this wouldn't help this particular situation all that much as they would be in the north also.
However the government wants to create jobs, and to spend the 6 or 8 Billion locally. Which means we are getting "ice hardened" warships. Which I believe are more less the corvette size. So really expensive warships, that are slow and small, and don't really break ice all that well either.
We could use REAL science here, but it will never get funded. After all, we learned from ICCC that peer review will be 'managed' to predetermined outcomes. Why do real science when you can have so much fun hanging with starlets, drinking good booze, and be entertained by Danish prostitutes at an 'Global Warming' event?
Im objecting to language so vague that there isnt really an argument there. Some of his post has some substance (there are countries releasing industrial chemicals into waterways), but again its so vague that its meaningless; the only point of such a post is to whip up a sort of empty hysteria. See for example with the Snowden/NSA posts that are running rampant right now: whatever substance might have been there is completely invalidated by how mindless and empty the posts are, completely obscuring the actual issue. The result is either that people now believe something thats completely false ("biggest extinction event ever"-- demonstrably false as we're becoming a lot more environmentally responsible in this country, and it was quite bad in the 19th/20th centuries), or are going to tune out a potential issue because of how hysterical the tone of the post is ("releasing chemicals"-- an actual issue in a number of countries like China).
His use of "chemicals" I find particularly bad because its in the same vein as "processed food". "Chemicals" can be good (mosquito control in malaria ridden areas), just as "processing food" is often good (pasteurization), but such comments tend to sway people against such technologies "just because it sounds scary". Starting with "I read that..." just indicates that he was too lazy to actually fact check his one source, and so isnt willing to attach his own name to the statement.
Fair enough. Thankyou.