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A Typo Almost Derailed Paris Climate Deal (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: On Saturday, world leaders completed an ambitious international agreement to address climate change. But when the officials received the first copy of what was supposed to be the final draft, a one-word mistake threatened to derail their progress. Part of the agreement involved language that encouraged wealthy nations to provide monetary aid to poorer nations in order to help transition to more sustainable systems. But the draft used the word "shall," which would have made it a legally-binding requirement. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pushed back on the change, noting that previous versions of the document had used the word "should" instead. Officials tried to quickly figure out whether the swap had been made intentionally. Ultimately, they classified it as a typo, and hurriedly prepared a corrected version of the document, which was adopted without incident.
I see you've fallen into the typical USian trap of thinking America is the center of the world. Hint: it's not. Not everything that happens is because of America.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I see you've fallen into the typical USian trap of thinking America is the center of the world. Hint: it's not. Not everything that happens is because of America.
The U.S. is currently the second largest source of CO2 emissions and the number one source of CO2 emissions of all time. So for this issue America actually is the center of the world and the primary cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
You're a bullshitter and a liar. The medieval warm period was within 0.2 degrees of what we have today.
That's bullshit rhetoric.
"I am not going to go green because it would change nothing" - multiply this by 7 billion and you get a clear picture.
If total disaster looms 200 years away and by going green you delay it by 1000 years, that's pretty awesome. Gives you enough time to convince (or coerce) the rest of the world to follow your path.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls... but on the off chance that you are ignorant and not just an angry little elf.
He didn't go "full on Republican retard" - he knew he could not get a binding treaty past the Republican-controlled Senate. This forced him to sign an agreement that is non-binding. If that single word had been allowed to pass, it would have triggered a Senate vote and inevitable rejection of the entire agreement.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
yet the criminals still had no problem acquiring them from outside sources
No problem? It's a hell of a thing to get a gun in the UK. Yes, criminals can and do get them - but not your low-level drug dealers who do the majority of the shooting in the US. They can't afford them. You had to very carefully word your language to make it true, but even so it is extremely misleading.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I utterly discard the idea of some shallow island nations going under water as any sort of logical reason to curtail the economic development of a gazillion more people.
You *do* realize that much of the coastline around the world is at or about the same elevation above sea level as places like the Maldives and that there are many large cities (including first-world cities), industrial complexes and military bases, etc... on the coastline - right? And you *do* realize that a rising sea level will very negatively affect *those* cities, complexes and bases too - right?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Well the options are not A) Fuck over future generations or B) Don't fuck over future generations.
The options are more like A) make the planet warmer for future generations that may cause them some problems in the future which they may not be able to accommodate with their technology that may be indistinguishable from magic today or B) fuck over the current generation in the hopes that we might be able to slightly mitigate the damage we've already done to the carbon cycle.
I'm not selfish. I believe that mitigating climate change will have minimal impact on my 1st world life, but may cause huge problems for the poor trying to move up. The selfish thing is believing that because you can afford to spend more on energy to benefit future generations, everyone else should too.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
No actually, in the numbers I was looking at, suicide was listed separately from homicide. Even Wikipedia has a page on this topic... here take a peek, they have references to their information sources and they broadly agree with my ballpark figure. 0.06 gun homicides per 100000 population in the UK (2011) compared to 3.55 gun homicides per 100000 population in the US (2013). Considering violent crime has been generally falling in both countries, the two year difference in the measurements should bias in favour of your argument and it still shows nearly a 60:1 ratio.
List of countries by firearm related death
Even allowing for crap in the stats, bad data the gap is still very large for two civilized countries. Do you really honestly believe that the ready availability of guns in the US has no contributing effect here?
The medieval warm period wasn't as warm as you're suggesting (I can't find any citations for more than 2 degrees, and the delta may well be less), and it wasn't world-wide: northern Europe (and some other parts of the northern hemisphere) was warmer, and as it turns out, europe ended up writing a disproportionate part of modern history, so that was remembered.
Globally, temperatures were lower than they are now.
This isn't a secret, nor is the information hard to find; e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There may be some truth to the inevitability of global warming, but make no mistake: our generation sure is screwing over the future thoroughly. Even in optimistic assumptions, it seems likely that greenland will lose most of its ice; which sounds to me like the world is likely to experience sea level rises of at least 10 meters (since greenland isn't the only glacier on the planet, and because warm water expands).
The question is whether that takes thousands of years - so cultures and populations get to adapt relatively calmly - or something scarier than that.
People aren't great at dealing with rapid change.