Global Warming Started 180 Years Ago Near Beginning of Industrial Revolution, Says Study (smh.com.au)

New research led by scientists at the Australian National University's Research School of Earth suggests that humans first started to significantly change the climate in the 1830s, near the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The findings have been published in the journal Nature, and "were based on natural records of climate variation in the world's oceans and continents, including those found in corals, ice cores, tree rings and the changing chemistry of stalagmites in caves." Sydney Morning Herald reports: "Nerilie Abram, another of the lead authors and an associate professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Earth Sciences, said greenhouse gas levels rose from about 280 parts per million in the 1830s to about 295 ppm by the end of that century. They now exceed 400 ppm. Understanding how humans were already altering the composition of the atmosphere through the 19th century means the warming is closer to the 1.5 to 2 degrees target agreed at last year's Paris climate summit than most people realize." "It was one of those moments where science really surprised us," says Abram. "But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago."

Comments

Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The deniers do not care, they will be dead before the worst hits. As long as they can live high on the hog on their imaginary money until they die, they are happy. There is not one drop of concern for the future of humanity or life on earth in general.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[HBI]

Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"? Humanity isn't wired that way, we care about those we know, not about the distant future and people we don't know. No one really does, anyway. It's always some self-interest, really, when you dig down into people's true motives. Perhaps to appear better than others by some arbitrary standard.

Anyway, your comment comes off as naive, immature raving. Yes, it's true we don't care, collectively. But expecting us to is idiotic.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The deniers do not care, they will be dead before the worst hits. As long as they can live high on the hog on their imaginary money until they die, they are happy. There is not one drop of concern for the future of humanity or life on earth in general.

If you ever work a job in retail or any sort of service involving contact with the general public, such as the trades like auto mechanic or plumber, part-time second job for extra money, whatever ... then soon, you too, will stop giving a fuck about average people. It's only sad or shocking if you had any faith in them to begin with. They themselves will soon show you how unwarranted such faith is. You'll witness their stupidity, their utter imperviousness to obvious facts. You'll see it again and again. Long after you can predict the form it will take, it will continue to happen. The social pressure will be towards accommodating it or at least humoring it, the one choice that enables it. All of this will be the one common thread amongst a very diverse group of people. This will happen to you whether or not you care about climate change, ocean acidification, etc. Just give it time. There is only one inevitable conclusion.

It's much easier to make the case for protecting the biosphere, relatively intelligent sea mammals, preventing what would happen to coastal civilization if the sea level rose, etc. There are solid facts in support of those. Generally, other than a special minority of exceptions, people suck. They're stupid, thoughtless, inconsiderate, sheep-like, panicky herd animals. Better go for saving the whales.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot like most religiously driven Warmists.

Some basics for you:
1) humans do better in warmer climates
2) crops grow better
3) a warmer earth has more farmable pand
4) less enerygy, not more is required to live in warmer climates

Global warming is a *good* thing.

Here's my problems with global warming:
1) there is no untainted evicence whatsoever that the planet is warming
2) if it did warm, I'll be dead before it gets warm enough for me to benefit
3) I dont have children to enjoy it either

Those of you with children should be grateful if your children get the opportunity to live in a warmer world than the barely survivable ice ball we're on now. If the temps dropped only a few degrees we'd al; be super fucked, on the edge of extinction. Pray it gets warmed not colder.

And, finally, worth repeating, the PP is still and likely always will be an uneducated religiously driven Warmist idiot.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"? I'mm not wired that way, we care about those we know, not about anyone I don't know .

I fixed that for you. There ar ea lot of peopel in this world. Some do not care about anyone outside their immediate or extended family - in fact, some have a great fear outside of their "friend zone". Some don't care about anyone at all. And despite your assertions, there are those among us who actually do care about the future and the people in it.

You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[PopeRatzo]

3) I dont have children to enjoy it either

Show of hands: Who here is surprised by this? Now who here is grateful for this?

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

You only speak for yourself. Sounds like we need to send people like you out of country.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Alex, I'd like "Things a Sociopath Would Say" for $1000.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

You think office politics is better side of the fucking fence? Read some Dilbert moron!

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Boronx]

"there is no untainted evicence whatsoever that the planet is warming"

Yes, and no true Scotsman puts sugar in his oatmeal.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

And there it is the usual denialist bullshit.
For any sane person the evidence is clear, and all your pathetic attempts at a positive spin on a disaster, are at best laughably stupid.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Who? BLM & SJWs exhibit just what you are describing in massive amounts, despite being on the left.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I care about the long term path of our species, and plenty of other people do as well (obviously I would choose a relative over some random person, but I sure as shit would choose that random over nothing)...

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Barsteward]

"Those people represent a small fraction of the global population." - but if you asked every parent if they'd want a safer world for their kids and grandkids etc, they would all say "yes" - its just that some of them haven't seen the light about the dangers of global warming yet. so the fraction of the population is potentially greater than you think

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Barsteward]

jeez, thats the biggest load of delusion i've seen for a while

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Sique]

Some basics for you:

1) humans do better in warmer climates

Apparently, they don't. Global population density is highest between the 30th and 50th latitude. If you get into warmer climates, population density shrinks.

2) crops grow better

Most food crops are harvested between 30th and 50th latitude too. Around the 23th latitude (both north and south) you have either large deserts, where nothing grows, or you have the rain forests, which don't have any meaningful soils to put food crops on.

3) a warmer earth has more farmable pand

No, it hasn't. Most farmable land today (90%) lies at less than 100 ft above sea level. If sea levels rise, a large portion of it will be subdued. Yes, Siberia might lose its permafrost. But most of Siberia is either montainous (the whole east of Siberia), or it is far away from any oceans and thus doesn't get much rain. In fact, a Siberia without permafrost will probably turn into a steppe fast (the southern part of Siberia is a steppe already), and finally into a desert, similar to Australia. Thus, no additional farmable land in Siberia.

4) less enerygy, not more is required to live in warmer climates

Because of 1), much more energy will be spend on air conditioning, while many buildings in today's colder climates don't need much heating even during winter season, because they are built as low energy houses, where just the short sun period during the day is sufficient to heat the house enough for the inhabitants.

Global warming is a *good* thing.

We are perfectly adapted to today's warming levels. Global warming above today's levels is a bad thing.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it's passe to say that it's both sides, but it is. Consider that the United States no longer has an anti-war party. At the Democratic National Convention, they tried to drown out and laugh off chants of "No more war" from the delegates. I could go on and on about how now neither major party opposes fracking, the liberals are now further right of George W. Bush on Israel, and so much more. Americans as a whole show even less empathy nowadays.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[TheRaven64]

but if you asked every parent if they'd want a safer world for their kids and grandkids etc, they would all say "yes"

They'd all say 'yes'. Around 90% of them would actually mean it (you'd have thought that sociopaths would be a lower percentage of the population of parents than the general population, but apparently not). Of those, a very small percentage would honestly be able to say that they also want a safer world for everyone else's children. If your children are going to inherit a survivable part of the world, then why should they care that if a billion or two other people that they've never met will suffer and / or die? Herd mammals did not evolve to have an emotional response to that (and, for the most part, that's a good thing - you couldn't function if you had an empathic response to all of the suffering in a world of over 6 billion people). That's why appeals to emotion in things like this are a waste of time.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[AchilleTalon]

Focussing on a single argument, even if I could argue on others:

2) crops grow better

Most food crops are harvested between 30th and 50th latitude too. Around the 23th latitude (both north and south) you have either large deserts, where nothing grows, or you have the rain forests, which don't have any meaningful soils to put food crops on.

Pretty much naive picture here. First of all, this should be weighted by the amount of land available for the considered latitudes. Second, desertification has many causes which are not related to the temperature itself. For exemple, the Himalayas prevent clouds from the Indian Ocean to reach Tibet on the other side creating large dry areas and deserts. To summarize, your arguments aren't any better than the points you are trying to defeat.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[TheRaven64]

Because of 1), much more energy will be spend on air conditioning, while many buildings in today's colder climates don't need much heating even during winter season, because they are built as low energy houses, where just the short sun period during the day is sufficient to heat the house enough for the inhabitants.

To add to that:

Air conditioning works by pumping heat out of buildings. There was an article in The Guardian earlier this week pointing to a study that had found that use of air conditioning had raised the temperature of some cities by 2 degrees (centigrade), which meant that people ran their air conditioning more, leading to a vicious cycle.

In contrast, keeping a house warmer than the outside is much cheaper. Humans with no technology are 100W heaters. All other machines that we put in a house generate heat as a waste product. With modern insulation, it's very easy to reduce the outflow of heat. Heating a house for a day can easily consume less energy than cooling it for a week.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[AmiMoJo]

It's a strange attitude to have, because it implies that everyone else should be trying to murder them to protect themselves. And in the end, the pollution and climate change will get so bad that it makes their corner of the world uninhabitable or at least extremely uncomfortable anyway, although I suppose they are assuming that is far enough down the line not to be a problem in their lifetimes.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Joce640k]

'oatmeal'?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself: we're not all borderline sociopaths you know. When I look, for example, at the footage from yesterday's earthquake in Italy I feel bad. Not because I know anyone in Italy - I don't - but because it makes me feel bad to see members of my species suffering.

Maybe you can think about widespread suffering and not be affected so long as your immediate family isn't affected, but thankfully most of us normals have properties like compassion for our fellow man, common decency and the like.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Sique]

Desertification along the 23th latitude has the same cause everywhere. It's called Intertropical Convergence Zone. Because the Sun stands highest in the region around the equator, temperatures are the highest there, and warm air rises every day, taking much water vapor with it into heights up to 20 km. Here, the water condenses, and each evening just before sunset, you have heavy rain along the equator, hence the rain forests. The dry air floats to the side, making room for more warm, wet air coming up. Around the equator, you now have regular winds blowing to the equator. They are called trade winds, and they blow from northwest to the south east in the northern hemisphere and from southwest to the northeast in the southern hemisphere.

The dry air in 20 km height cools and sinks down north and south of the equator, causing a girdle of high air pressure north and south of the equator. But because the air is now dry, having lost most of its water vapor above the equator, it heats much faster when it sinks down. Thus, air coming up from the ground due to being heated during the day, stops somewhere inbetween, because warmer air sinks down, and the convection stops where both meet. As the air is not cool enough for clouds to form, there is no rain where both streams meet. This effect is called an temperature inversion, because the normal layering of the atmosphere with air getting cooler if you get higher is inverted.

Luckily, the zenith of the sun wanders along the year between both the northern and the southern Tropic, thus at least once a year, those regions get heavy rains. They thus have two seaons: the dry season and the wet seasons. Regions closer to the equator sometimes have two wet seasons. The wet season gets shorter and less intense if you get closer to the Tropics. Outside the Tropics, there is no wet season, thus you have desertification along both Tropics.

Before you call me naive, please get at least some basic meteorologic knowledge!

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[swb]

It's a strange attitude to have, because it implies that everyone else should be trying to murder them to protect themselves.

Isn't that what we've been doing for most of human history? Family against family, clan against clan, tribe against tribe, village against village and so on for most of human existence?

Most of European history from the Greeks onward can be seen as some kind of action/reaction to this dynamic. Established civilizations expanding their territories for both economic accumulation but also attempting to build buffers against other expanding or migration civilizations that threaten their borders.

Roman history can easily be interpreted as a continuous defensive expansionism designed to check the destabilizing influence of Germanic migrations from the North and Parthians in the East from time of Marius all the way to Marcus Aurelius. Much of European history from the 7th century through the 12th century can be defined as action/reaction to Viking expansion, from then on attempts to fix borders against expanding Mongols and Islamic armies from the conquest of Hungary, the Crusades and through the Siege of Vienna.

You could argue that almost purely economic colonialism on the part of Europeans didn't even really start until the general borders of Europe were largely established and fortified and external threats were minimized in the 17th century and even then such expansion was motivated by political and territorial stalemates of a fairly established European states and borders. The "new worlds" were conquered for their economic value but this can easily be explained as defensive maneuvers to outflank their local European rivals as well.

And the European conflicts from the 100 Years War, 30 Years War, Spanish Armada, the Napoleonic Wars all the way through WW I and II are attempts to establish hegemony and secure borders within Europe itself.

It would seem that the entire course of human history can be interpreted as a series of conflicts designed to secure specific regions against outsiders who threaten territorial independence and economic security.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Charcharodon]

Lol, you kids crack me up. The pollution and climate change will get so bad? First off unless you live in the 3rd world shit hole, pollution has gotten lower than it has ever been in my life time and that of my parents and even grandparents. Then again, 3rd world shit holes are not exactly the same as they were when I was a kid either. Back in the day they were truly horrible places to live. Sure they are worse off with pollution compared to say the US or Europe but everything else disease, poverty, crime, famine, etc is much less so. Eventually they will clean up their act as well, and everyone will wonder what the big fuss is about.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[AmiMoJo]

Isn't that what we've been doing for most of human history? Family against family, clan against clan, tribe against tribe, village against village and so on for most of human existence?

Some time in pre-history human beings realized that it was better to work together than to fight each other. It's proven to be a popular philosophy.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

4) less enerygy, not more is required to live in warmer climates

Because of 1), much more energy will be spend on air conditioning, while many buildings in today's colder climates don't need much heating even during winter season, because they are built as low energy houses, where just the short sun period during the day is sufficient to heat the house enough for the inhabitants.

Generally I think it is more efficient to run AC than it is to run heating, so this may be either a net gain, or at least neutral, from an energy cost point of view.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Hold on. The heat removed by air conditioners is already present in that environment, it is just moved from one place to another. That movement of heat does not add to warming. What does add is the electrical and mechanical heat waste from the AC motor and compressor cycle, because that heat is generated.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

> Eventually they will clean up their act as well, and everyone will wonder what the big fuss is about.

Who's the naive now? There's no worrying about the past or the present. Science indicates this is like the Titanic: progressing towards an iceberg and people are happily saying "well, just turn the ship away from it, it's quite far yet".

Except they couldn't. Nor apparently can we -- and it all gets worse because people who do not understand climate (or navigation in that case) think they can bar actions which could help mitigate the problem... because they think that is a plot to take money from them: "what if some people die? A lot of people die everyday so that I can have the lifestyle I want"...

If the such reasoning prevails, then maybe we shouldn't deserve survival as an species after all.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[AmiMoJo]

If you take that attitude then eventually you will drive someone to attack you. Starving people in sub-Saharan Africa can't do much, but when better armed populations start to suffer they will decide it is worth the effort to take your land and resources off you.

So really the calculation has to be if you can be reasonably guaranteed of repelling them at minimal risk to yourself. I noticed that this attitude is popular in the US, and that conincidentally the US also spends more on its military than the next 20 countries combined.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you have a proper argument now. It's not whether the Earth is warming or cooling, it's about who cares. I for one, change my own oil, and dump the waste into the storm drain. Who really can say it is worse than BP or EXXON?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

> If the such reasoning

If such reasoning...

*sigh* [You must wait (2 minutes) to use this resource]

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The deniers do not care

One should avoid religious terminology in a scientific discussion... It is -very- damaging to your credibility.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[DarkOx]

I like the grand parent's idea of abstract people isn't anyone I don't happen to know. Its people that I could not go an physically touch today.

I do care about people, I care a lot about them enough not to demand the throw their lives away economically speaking for a the sake of some folks two generations away.

I would instead suggest that they enjoy the gift of life they have received to its fullest. At the same time lets use the economic advantage we learn how the climate system actually works rather continued speculation and getting hung up on the one set of feedback mechanisms we do understand. Its entirely possible we have already crossed into a run-away condition. If true conservation alone won't save your future generations. We should begin a global scale climate engineer project TODAY! So that its ready in time to be used.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

It was global cooling about 1600 to 1850 before this. even the deniers do not doubt this. There's been warming and cooling before this, greater even. This does not prove that the warming is AGW.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.

YOU shouldn't, either. And don't start anthropomorphizing things, either -- they don't like that. Especially Gaia.

"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic." -Kevin Federline

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The tragedy here is that the children of those predominantly responsible for creating the mess are most likely to survive it.

In other news, altruism does have a function on evolutionary scale. That is why it exists.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[arth1]

Heating a house for a day can easily consume less energy than cooling it for a week.

I think you might have swapped "day" and "week" there...

But yes, insulation is near free compared to cooling.

What should be obvious to anyone is that you can only "produce cold" by producing even more heat in a different part of the system.

But then again, I talked to someone who kept her fridge door open during the heat wave, thinking it would help cool the house. And I know several people who will run a ceiling fan when there's no one in the room, thinking it will keep it cooler.
I blame Reagan for ruining our educational system so kids don't learn to think anymore. More kids now may know the laws of thermodynamics, but fewer are able to apply it to anything.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, who cares? Not my problem.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that the science means nothing right? The start of the industrial revolution produced an infinitesimal amount of greenhouse gases as compared to today.

The only thing that has ever mattered in DIRECT consequence of climate change is:

- OUTPUT OF THE SUN
- PRECESSION AND NUTATION OF THE EARTH-MOON System
- WATER VAPOR

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[jellomizer]

The problem is the scientists are trying to show a rational answer to a gut response.
If the science hasn't swayed the deniers already then nothing probably will... However the trick is to influence their kids. While I am skeptical about most news coverage of science, because it is often over sensationalized, simplified, taken out of context, and stated as fact while it is mostly an untested hypothesis. We need science and rational thought to fill every little gap that the deniers put in their argument.

If this study shows to be strong, then that can fill in one of the deniers "questions" If global warming is caused by humans how come we didn't have it back during the industrial revolution. As most deniers are going that Global Warming is because earth is just going threw a natural warming period as it finishes it last Ice Age. Now if we can teach there kids the fact while their minds are open to new ideas even if we can convert each generation 10% over to stop being a denier, then we can work for progress.

However Science Reporting is so piss poor it makes it easy for these groups to say how science is wrong. Also sometimes we want to watch a Nature/Science show without the guilt.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[GLMDesigns]

Either that or the reasoning behind the facts are wrong. The first steam engine did not get invented until the the 1710s by Newcomen. Watt's steam engine didn't come out until 1770s or so. The amount of coal burnt in the early 19thC as a result of the steam engines was minuscule (It's a guestimate. I don't have the figures.) compared to the total amount of coal and wood that was being burnt for millennia.

So this round of global warming may have started in the 1830 but it is damning - in my eyes anyway - to say that it is the result of the industrial revolution.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

prehistory? before history there was nothing... maybe time is a cycle so maybe you are referring to the future

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why modern houses have an electric heat pump, not a coal fireplace.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you feel sad for the millions of humans who are modern day slaves? You only feel sad because they tell you to

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[drinkypoo]

Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"?

Because they are "people"

If they don't, I argue that they aren't actually people, and we'd be better off without them. AKA you.

Another argument is that sooner or later the men with guns are going to realize that the environment has to be protected. And then they will find that you muck up the numbers, and will have to be removed from the equation in order to make them come out correctly. Buh-bye!

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[drinkypoo]

Around 90% of them would actually mean it (you'd have thought that sociopaths would be a lower percentage of the population of parents than the general population, but apparently not).

Why would you think that? Having children is a sociopathic act when we're overpopulated. At our current level of behavior, Earth is over its carrying capacity. People having children aren't thinking of society, they're thinking of themselves.

Of those, a very small percentage would honestly be able to say that they also want a safer world for everyone else's children. If your children are going to inherit a survivable part of the world, then why should they care that if a billion or two other people that they've never met will suffer and / or die?

That, in turn, is only because they are stupid and ignorant. It should be obvious that we are all living on the same planet.

Herd mammals did not evolve to have an emotional response to that (and, for the most part, that's a good thing - you couldn't function if you had an empathic response to all of the suffering in a world of over 6 billion people). That's why appeals to emotion in things like this are a waste of time.

Herd animals are easy to panic. That's why appeals to emotion work. If you tried them with predators, you'd just get your face bitten off.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

And often the result of war is that you end up assimilating those you conquer. Before you know it, they're part of your side in the next war.

The overall trend has been towards larger and larger organized groups, be they countries, empires or alliances. We actively sneer at the places like Afghanistan where it's small fry continually fighting small fry and consider them backwards and uncivilized.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[drinkypoo]

In contrast, keeping a house warmer than the outside is much cheaper. Humans with no technology are 100W heaters. All other machines that we put in a house generate heat as a waste product. With modern insulation, it's very easy to reduce the outflow of heat. Heating a house for a day can easily consume less energy than cooling it for a week.

It's very easy to keep a house cooler than the outside cheaply. You sink ducts into the ground where they get cooled to 50 degrees, and you use slow, low-power fans to move that air into your house. Sadly, we don't do this, nor do we install adequate insulation into most homes. They are overwhelmingly still insulated with fiberglass, which is practically ancient technology today.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

More climate lies.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

The term 'prehistory' refers to that part of history that predates human's learning to write. With no written records whatsoever historians have very little capacity to study these times and they belong to archaeologists (for humans) and palaeontologists (for everything else) instead.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The American midwest farming region lies at an average altitude of over 1000 feet. The further west you go the higher. More lies.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[nintendoeats]

It is rational to care about what happens to those billions of other people because we have moved from being a predominantly warlike species to focusing on trade and research. Those are both areas where a larger, healthier and happier population benefits the individual. If the population were cut in half then we would lose some economies of scale and have to be more selective about the kinds of projects we take on.

I think that this is proven logically by considering a small group. If you are alone then you must expend all of your time gathering food and a single injury or run of bad luck can kill you. If you have a partner, one of you can focus on food as long as the other is healthy, allowing them to instead work on shelter. In a group of 10 the amount of food needed goes up but the amount of food wasted goes down as does your resitance to changing fortune. Less critical projects like fire and weather protection can be completed more reliably because you are more likely to be able to spare somebody to do them. Move on to 100 people and you can devide your food providers between hunters and farmers, each of whom yields more reliably than a general food gatherer but would never be able to serve as the sole provider of sustenance. All of this ignore the benefits of genetic and social diversity, things which I would argue are more important in our situation.

The only question is whether or not this scales up and I believe that the explosion of great projects, discoveries and luxury goods in the modern world very clearly shows that it does. The American railway could not exist without a large Chinese population for whom the economy had no other particular use. The advances made in elective plastic surgery could be made because the percentage of surgeons we needed to sacrifice to make them was small. We can afford to manufacture computres for the masses because there is a mass to buy them.

In short, humans benefit from the largest sustainable population possible.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[wardrich86]

I consider my kids' kids and so on to be people I know. They're not born yet, but they're still my family. I consider it my duty to protect my family and give them the best life they can have - If only others had the same forethought.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[slimshady76]

The in house amount of heat is higher than the one in the surrounding environment. Thus, when you pump that heat off the house, you drive more heat into its surroundings. Multiply that amount for the number of air conditioned houses and you have a net difference.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh great one, please shower humanity with your wisened benevolence & good intent. Yes, please continue with your great and noble sacrifices so that future generations may evolve into carbon neutral angels.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

No farming in Siberia. The residents don't seem to think so.

https://www.rt.com/business/341892-far-east-land-infrastructure/

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

First off unless you live in the 3rd world shit hole, pollution has gotten lower than it has ever been in my life time and that of my parents and even grandparents.

That's because you define "pollution" too narrowly.

The pollution that's of concern in AGW is carbon dioxide, which have measurably increased over the last 150 years. Not only in your shit hole, but over the entire planer.

Sure, acid rain isn't much of a problem these days, and I hope that pleases you when you die of heatstroke.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor should wikipedia. Nor should imaginative scientists.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Applehu Akbar]

I used to commute through Siberia. The dry, mountainous part is the eastern third. The rest of it looks like Minnesota, or rather what Minnesota would look like if there were no people: green meadow, stands of pine and birch, lots of small round lakes.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The deniers do not care, they will be dead before the worst hits. As long as they can live high on the hog on their imaginary money until they die, they are happy. There is not one drop of concern for the future of humanity or life on earth in general.

So we shouldn't care about fetuses, because they are "just cells," but you want me to care about some people in the future that isn't even conceived yet?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[pipingguy]

"Yes, it's true we don't care"

No! You must care, all the time, about everything your self-defined moral superiors with social license tell you to care about! Otherwise, you are a bad person and therefore must be disparaged, marginalized and punished. Why do you hate the planet and all the good people on it who care more than you?

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Applehu Akbar]

No, the Intertropical Convergence Zone is the stormy sky directly above the equator, a row of thunderheads running around the world that can rise so high that they once batted an Airbus 330 out of the sky at full cruising altitude (Rio-Paris). The desert zones center on about the 30th parallels. Even at sea, sailing ships would tend to get becalmed in these latitudes and without wind or drinking water would have to throw their horses overboard to survive. Hence the name 'horse latitudes'.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with much of what you said....

>blockquote>while many buildings in today's colder climates don't need much heating even during winter season, because they are built as low energy houses, where just the short sun period during the day is sufficient to heat the house enough for the inhabitants.

I guess you've never been to America. We just build garbage with little insulation and let the heater do all the work.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Applehu Akbar]

Because heat pumps are just as expensive a way to heat as a way to cool, they are used only in places where the annual number of heating days is small compared to the number of cooling days.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[wbr1]

He doesn't care that he speaks for all humanity. We know this already. He thinks his view -is- the world.

The real question is if natural selection will gradually work that kind out of the gene pool, or all of us.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Dread_ed]

Another argument is that sooner or later the men with guns are going to realize that the environment has to be protected. And then they will find that you muck up the numbers, and will have to be removed from the equation in order to make them come out correctly. Buh-bye!

Yikes! That's a wake up call right there. Always envisioned right-wing reactionary militants as the catalyzing agent for population reduction wars. Just goes to show that any authoritarian agents with power-centric ideologies they value above the sanctity of human life are dangerous as fuck.

And yet another reason for an armed populace.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[jbengt]

Air conditioners typically reject 20%± more heat to the environment than they remove from the cooled spaces. The only way to get that down to 0% would be to have no temperature difference between sink and source, but then you wouldn't need A/C. Even a reversible, maximum efficiency refrigeration cycle can't avoid thermodynamics.
Still, compared to other sources of heat in a city, I can't see how that would make an appreciable difference in the outdoors temperature, let alone 2C.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com

Damn those "deniers", LOL. You idiot.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

you couldn't function if you had an empathic response to all of the suffering in a world of over 6 billion people

You can, but it's extremely depressing and internet assholes will make fun of your bleeding heart constantly. You'll encounter know-it-all cynics every day who simply can't believe your sincerity. It's not an advantageous trait, and could arguably be considered a mental disorder. But you CAN function within society enough to get by at least, and you'll be hella motivated to do everything you can beyond survival to improve the world.

It's not common, or smart, or even necessarily more virtuous than rationally effective altruism, but there are functioning people like this.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[PmanAce]

A lot of people will need to move (most won't be able to afford it) because of your warming climate enthusiast and rising sea levels. I'm sure those millions will be as happy as you are for a warmer climate!!!

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[avandesande]

Not to mention that nobody talks about positive effects of global warming... will increased atmospheric moisture turn the southwest or the sahara into arable land? We don't really know.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

But why should we relocate the people of earth to an agrarian society? Especially of the 1800 time period? How many people would you have to kill off to recreate that society? Foodstuffs were available then, only from a two day transport, about fourty miles. Localized droughts, plagues, and floods created havoc. Killing many then. And then don't forget the society bosses then, were not humanity orientated then. An example, the forced shipment of the inhabitants of Ireland to Australia, or Canada, just to get rid of renter's of the lands, to create sheparding space.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.

Nor should you. -PCP

Ohh, an interesting paradox! A person who says that everyone is different being contradicted be a person saying that all people being different is somehow all people being the same.

Being different

But all being different is all being the same

But..... but......

Love having philosophical discussions with PhilosoRaptor's on Slashdot, who were at least smart enough to post AC.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Called porridge in most of the world. Oatmeal is the Us/Canada term.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans don't care about their own direct progeny? Is that what you are trying to claim?

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[MrLogic17]

No, it hasn't. Most farmable land today (90%) lies at less than 100 ft above sea level. If sea levels rise, a large portion of it will be subdued.

Umm, [citation needed] on that. Even within the USA, that's not even close to true. The so-called "flyover states" are all well above that, and are producing mindboggling amounts of food.
I'd be shocked if more than 1% of farm land globally is actually 100ft or lower above sea level.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure the researchers are getting paid handsomely for it.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

If your children are going to inherit a survivable part of the world, then why should they care that if a billion or two other people that they've never met will suffer and / or die?

Of course now, if a person is incapable of understanding that their own personal children don't just automatically inherit the half acre of livable real estate left if something comes along and kills the rest of humanity.

There are certain things that seem to be hard for some folks to comprehend. But that doesn't mean that those who cannot understand that they might be the losers in a future world should be the ones to hold sway and win the discussion.

Certain matters that affect humanity are not selective by family. The climate does not stop at one's property line, If we decide to nuc 3/4's of humanity, the side effects come to visit us as well.

One of the big issues deniers seldom address is that even if they don't give a damn about other people, perhaps the effect on their country might give them pause (although I find the patriotism of so many deniers is mere lip service.

But if say, as the growing season lengthens in the north, and if the present lower 48 becomes more arid - a possibility - there is a very good chance that the US might lose it's position in the world. So the endless warfare crowd might not have as happy a future as they like. Even though they might not believe in AGW, they might want to think about it's side effects.

In the end, I think that the hating all that is not us concept, and thinking that it extends to all of humanity and is the normal and correct outlook is one of those memes like trickle down theory that are not correct.

Unless of course, they don't consider people who do care about the future as humans. Then I suppose they might be correct.

Only thing for certain is they'll blame it all on liberals.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[eth1]

Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"? I'mm not wired that way, we care about those we know, not about anyone I don't know .

I fixed that for you. There ar ea lot of peopel in this world. Some do not care about anyone outside their immediate or extended family - in fact, some have a great fear outside of their "friend zone". Some don't care about anyone at all. And despite your assertions, there are those among us who actually do care about the future and the people in it.

You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.

I think it might be more accurate to say that most people actually do care. BUT, they also realize that absolutely nothing they do on an individual level will have any impact whatsoever - everyone has to do it, or it's wasted effort. So there's very little incentive to make one's own life more expensive and less pleasant when everyone around you *appears* to not care (because they also all see everyone else not doing anything).

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[110010001000]

When did THIS happen? Work together rather than fight? Are you from Earth?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[jedidiah]

So the basic math of the proposition doesn't bother you any? You just take it on faith that the English could manage to start destroying the entire planet all on their own as soon as they started building factories?

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

People being in a room makes no difference on whether or not the ceiling fan is actually making the room cooler. People not being in a room will of course make it cooler just due to the heat waste we produce as people.

If leaving a ceiling fan on didn't make it cooler, we wouldn't use them when we were in the room, let alone when we weren't.

The amount of heat waste produced by the fan is also more then offset by the effects of the fan. Even more interesting is if you reverse the direction of the fan, it can keep the room warmer too.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[jedidiah]

The Democrats further right on Israel. You're on crack. There was a Jordanian flag on display at the convention and they were burning Israeli flags outside.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[jedidiah]

Zealots come in all shapes and sizes. I personally never had ANY delusions about EITHER party being anti-war. I think NO ONE in this country gets seriously anti-war until there is a draft on. Then suddenly people start caring about war.

Just consider who today's biggest war mongers are.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

It was ruined long before Reagan. Put the blame where it belongs, with the parents.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that what we've been doing for most of human history? Family against family, clan against clan, tribe against tribe, village against village and so on for most of human existence?

Some time in pre-history human beings realized that it was better to work together than to fight each other. It's proven to be a popular philosophy.

Somehow I think the history i learned in school was not the same as the history you learned.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[jedidiah]

It doesn't matter what way things are going. These naieve ninnies need to get over their flower children fixation and realize that we may need to fight for our survival. If they are right, then there are ugly choices ahead.

There are only so many lifeboats on the Titanic.

You only exist because someone made selfish choices on your behalf.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Why would you think that? Having children is a sociopathic act when we're overpopulated. At our current level of behavior, Earth is over its carrying capacity. People having children aren't thinking of society, they're thinking of themselves.

Define thinking. It's more of a drive, and in some people, completely out of control. Fortunately I think society as a whole has stopped worshiping criminals like the Duggar family and the Octomom.

Of those, a very small percentage would honestly be able to say that they also want a safer world for everyone else's children. If your children are going to inherit a survivable part of the world, then why should they care that if a billion or two other people that they've never met will suffer and / or die?

That, in turn, is only because they are stupid and ignorant. It should be obvious that we are all living on the same planet.

Tribe mentality. Many humans are incapable of thinking of more than 25-30 people as "us". All else is the other, and in some people the other takes a sinister aspect. Lack of empathy be damned, they want them dead.

Example - the people who want as many people thrown in jail as possible, to get as tough on crime as possible, overwhelmingly do not want to pay for that incarceration. A reasoning rational person has to come to the conclusion they want these people killed.

Herd mammals did not evolve to have an emotional response to that (and, for the most part, that's a good thing - you couldn't function if you had an empathic response to all of the suffering in a world of over 6 billion people). That's why appeals to emotion in things like this are a waste of time.

Herd animals are easy to panic. That's why appeals to emotion work. If you tried them with predators, you'd just get your face bitten off.

I'm lost now - I consider humans to be alpha predators.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[jedidiah]

We don't even do as good as we could do with that technology. Very minor tweaks to our current technology yield significant benefits even without getting into anything radical.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Who? BLM & SJWs exhibit just what you are describing in massive amounts, despite being on the left.

Sure. But they are considered kooks and fringe elements, and are not officially sanctioned as the leader of an entire political party as the Republicans have voted for Trump in record setting numbers, and he has alomst doubled the amunt of votes his closest competitor received.

Hard to say that Trump isn't the heart and soul, and intellectual leader of your political party when he lapped all of his opponents.

The rest of us just laugh at the kooky SJW's. They represent fucked up people, not much else.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

It would seem that the entire course of human history can be interpreted as a series of conflicts designed to secure specific regions against outsiders who threaten territorial independence and economic security.

Differential analysis:

The wealthiest playing games and using the rest of us as cannon fodder.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, you don't have an argument.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Eunuchswear]

A Jordanian flag. Wow, the flag of one of tbe US's most faithful allies in tbe middle east. What a bunch of wild-eyed radicals.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[rickb928]

If, however, you believe in something greater than yourself, you soon come to care for, be concerned for, and offer grace to those who so obviously struggle in their daily lives, every single day, every hour, every moment. Those who are always behind the eight-ball, who never seem to get any break other than enough to survive, who trail disappointment and difficulty like a cloud.

If you only believe in yourself, you can easily dismiss those who seem so mean, stupid, and lost. But they deserve better. At the least, they deserve hope.

Life is not 'intended' to be easy. And it is not, for the overwhelming majority of human beings. If you expect to eat today, have a warm and dry place to sleep tonight, and don't have to worry if you will have clean water to drink, you are doing better than much of the rest of the world. If you are confident that you will have all this in 3 months, you are doing WAY better. If you're not thankful for that, you're probably at risk for not only not caring, but for giving others more pain than just life does already.

Take a moment and give thanks however you know you should, whether it is because you were, by an accident of fate, born in a nation that makes this surprisingly easy, because you believe you are chosen to be so, or because you've had the opportunities and the will to take advantage of them, or someone else did so.

And maybe not ignore the opportunity to make someone else's life at least a little better, even if only for a moment. If you find dealing with people is so tedious, sad, shocking, painful, you should indeed find a way to avoid them.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The desire to preserve the human race is a goal not necessarily dependent on emotion.
There is a lot of talk here about what we are 'wired' for. There are plenty of basic tendencies that we can control with our developed brains: for ourselves, our families, or even for the sake of society. This can be a conscious choice versus an extension of emotion driven by primitive directives.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[arth1]

People being in a room makes no difference on whether or not the ceiling fan is actually making the room cooler. People not being in a room will of course make it cooler just due to the heat waste we produce as people.

You're an excellent example of what I talk about.

The primary reason why we use ceiling fans is because air movement across skin helps increase evaporation which has a cooling effect on the person, not on the room. The room gets slightly warmer as a result, but the inhabitants feel cooler.

Running a ceiling fan when there are no people in a room has no cooling effect - at most, it distributes the air so the overall temperature becomes more uniform and slightly higher.

If leaving a ceiling fan on didn't make it cooler, we wouldn't use them when we were in the room, let alone when we weren't.

It does not make the room cooler. And most people are smart enough to not leave them on when there are no people to cool.

The amount of heat waste produced by the fan is also more then offset by the effects of the fan.

Poppycock, balderdash and codswallop. A closed room is an isolated system. The fan motor will produce heat. That makes the sum of heat (entropy) go up.

If you could cool down a room with an internal fan, you would have an invention that reduces entropy in an isolated system. This is impossible - the second law of thermodynamics applies.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[JoeMerchant]

Oh, but we're "better than that now" - we have a New World Order, which I thought was a platitude promulgated by a relatively recent Republican administration, but a quick Google search shows it to be a conspiracy theory about a totalitarian global government. United under one set of invisible rulers, we no longer kill each other in mass numbers, we're focused on killing the whole planet instead.

Having conquered basic survival, and politically advanced to a point where the majority of people have not been directly involved in a killing war during their lifetimes, the economic success that this has brought will be our ultimate undoing.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"It's a strange attitude to have, because it implies that everyone else should be trying to murder them to protect themselves."

Which is why people with that attitude (all of them) generally dismiss the idea of murdering everyone immediately. You seem to be confusing self-interested with short-sighted moron. Long term and thought out self interest is still self interest, looking out for others because it benefits you is still self interest, cultivating a group relationship because it is stronger than you by yourself is still self interest.

We do these things because they benefit us and generally speaking we root for the home team, family, people we know, those we perceive as closest to us and our strongest allies because on some level we associate those people as part of ourselves because they bring us so much benefit. The further from ourselves the more abstract the concept becomes but even helping a random stranger comes down to hoping someone would do the same for us one day. Pure self interest. The only thing that appears to throw a wrench in is our children until you realize that our children are 50% us and just the next iteration of ourselves. Those who don't have children or see them this way don't care about future generations the rest do. But everyone is pursuring their self interest.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[JoeMerchant]

People generally dislike change. They dislike having to abandon their territorial lands, they dislike having to change their diet.

Even though _some_ lands will ultimately be "improved" by global warming, sea level rise will trump all of this by pushing the majority of human population off of the current coastlines inland, to wherever the new coastlines end up being. The fact that (only recently) coastal property is the most highly valued real-estate should tell you something about what people will think of having their once precious homes submerged for millenia to come.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The deniers care, we just think your ability to actually analyze the actual numbers is fraudulent. IE: manmade climate change isn't science, it's voodoo perpetrated by scientists pushed by political interests.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"I'm lost now - I consider humans to be alpha predators."

You clearly haven't met very many insects and microbes but it's okay you will, they get every one of us in the end.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

No surprise, we have been coming out of a cold spell for at least the last 20K years and it will get warmer (science has the evidence), it is the speed at which the change is happening.

If we didn't have global warming, I would be sitting under a mile of ice right now.

So, to cure the problem, we do what? Pay more taxes so that those that don't want to work can live better than those that work? Go back to our caves (not enough for all)? Turn your TVs with remotes off at the wall? Find the main power breaker for your/my house and turn it to the off position every evening (I'm retired and don't need the alarm to go off to get me moving to work)? How do you get to work? Do we create very high density cities to house everyone near their workplace, oh, wait, we've moved back to caves.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, BLM - Bureau of Land Management?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"Those are both areas where a larger, healthier and happier population benefits the individual."

Research yes, trade not so much. Global trade only benefits the absolute most wealthy people and the most populous nations. More wealthy nations actually trickle away their wealth as a result.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"Of course now, if a person is incapable of understanding that their own personal children don't just automatically inherit the half acre of livable real estate left if something comes along and kills the rest of humanity."

Of course not, what do you think the endless warfare is to get us ready for? Taking the livable real estate.

"But if say, as the growing season lengthens in the north, and if the present lower 48 becomes more arid - a possibility - there is a very good chance that the US might lose it's position in the world."

Or crush Canada and relocate. Having the strongest military in the world means we pretty much have our pick of everywhere in the world for where to relocate when that time comes.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[nintendoeats]

If I may split a hair, trade within large populations should not be confused with international trade. The general principle of a large population allows for increased specialization and efficiency benefiting everybody. The practical application of global trade in our current system is another matter and I agree entirely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That said, if we discount the world's absolute poorest people (which I would not do as a rule) I don't think it is controversial to state that even those who are not well off in our society are still doing much better than they would have at any time in the past. What effect population had on that is harder to say but I don't think that we can seperate the technological and organization growth which made it possible from the change in population if we were to going to play "what if?"

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Because heat pumps are just as expensive a way to heat as a way to cool, they are used only in places where the annual number of heating days is small compared to the number of cooling days.

Or where the subdivision developers just didn't want to pay the $100K hookup fee to the gas line, so heat pumps or heating systems with electric-only were the only two options left.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if we reach the point-of-no-return before they do.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

...as to libertarian neckbeards

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Die fucking neckbeard

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

You are just plain wrong. Look at history there are plenty of people's who took care of the environment and knew right away what we were doing was bad and wrong. Native tribes in North America cared for the land and lived in a symbiotic relationship with the land. The white man didn't and for the most part still doesn't.

While you may be wired to not care. A lot of people are.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[pastafazou]

Carbon Dioxide is the foundation of the world's food chain. It's not pollution. Try studying some geology courses. The earth has had climates in the past with CO2 concentrations 10x higher or more than current levels, and life was thriving. Our planet is still stuck in a glacial climate. People don't realize how close our planet actually came to complete extinction a mere 20,000 years ago when the CO2 concentration was under 200ppm. This is approaching the lower boundary for plant life to survive.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[phorm]

"First off unless you live in the 3rd world shit hole, pollution has gotten lower than it has ever been in my life time and that of my parents and even grandparents"

You realise that there different types of pollution, and not all of it comes in the form of overly visible black smog or choking dust? As for 3rd-world shitholes - as you call them - yeah those will be affected first because they're generally already on the line, but then so will your favourite vacation stops, coastal cities, and your food supply as crops go thirsty and water gets scarce.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[0xdeadbeef]

Anyway, your comment comes off as naive, immature raving.

Actually, a rather significant mark of immaturity is trying to pass off dull cynicism as wisdom.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone is happy that you have chosen not to reproduce.

Now prove your point by not using ANY resources. We will all salute your noble sacrifice.

You 'talk the talk'. Now show us all that you 'walk the walk'.

You may want to check out, so to speak, the checkout facilities in Belguim.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[CylanR77]

If you think that the people not thinking enough are a problem, then you're the poster child of the kinds of issues that arise from someone overthinking things.

The primary reason why we use ceiling fans is because air movement across skin helps increase evaporation

Nope, the primary reason is exactly what you said in the next sentence:

it distributes the air so the overall temperature becomes more uniform

Pretty much any ventilation system, forced air, even open windows, does a poor job of distributing the cooler air throughout a room, especially in houses. So in a very real way it does make parts of a room cooler than they would otherwise be without the fan.

You also seem to be laboring under the assumption that every house in the world is some kind of ideal, perfectly insulating chamber. This is where your overthinking comes in, I assure you that they are not. The miniscule amount of power consumed by ceiling fans (about 50 watts for the average home's ceiling fan at full speed) is dwarfed by the amount of power from solar irradiation and leakage of heat from the outside.

You're correct in the technical sense, which is only the best kind of correct in cartoons.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Global population density is highest between the 30th and 50th latitude."

Isn't that where the fucking land is?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, my. You are one problematic individual.

Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"?

Because it's the right thing to do.

Humanity isn't wired that way, we care about those we know, not about the distant future and people we don't know.

No wonder we have the world we do today. Too many twits like you in it.

No one really does, anyway.

Oh, yes. Many do. Many don't. You certainly don't.

It's always some self-interest, really, when you dig down into people's true motives.

Actually, no, it's not always that way. You are projecting far too much.

Perhaps to appear better than others by some arbitrary standard.

For some, yes. For others, no.

Anyway, your comment comes off as naive, immature raving. Yes, it's true we don't care, collectively. But expecting us to is idiotic.

No, it's the right thing to do and the right thing to expect.

People like you deliberately not giving a fuck is part of the problem, not some inherent property of humanity.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[avandesande]

A cynic could claim that the poor will be subsidizing the preservation of wealthy people's waterfront properties with higher energy and food costs.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Correlation isn't causation. It is silly to claim a tiny increase in CO2 levels could cause a measurable climate change. The anthropomorphic climate change hypothesis relies heavily on the claim that all other causes have been eliminated. One never really knows that. Besides, the role of oceans is poorly understood. What is driving the climate change debate is politics.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Gilgaron]

Kinship predates humanity, not just history. And packs of wolves or troops of monkeys still conflict with one another.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[kheldan]

Why the hell should anyone care about abstract "people"? Most of Humanity isn't wired that way, we care about those we know, not about the distant future and people we don't know.

There, fixed that for BOTH of you.

Human technologies have evolved orders of magnitude faster than the human brain has. Most people are still cavemen inside their skulls, cavemen with ICEs and smartphones and handguns and bombs, and they act like it, too. Most people don't really care about the abstract 'someone' on the abstract 'other side of the planet', and in fact this little ball of mud we're living on is also too large for their caveman brains to really comprehend. So is the concept of '100 years from now'. Most people don't really think much past a few months in the future, except in the most abstract sort of way, and don't really think too hard about people outside their own social circle. You tell them 'you need to sell your car and take public transit, ride a bike, or walk, to help stop air pollution and global warming', and they look at you like you're nuts and are trying to ruin their lives. You tell them to conserve resources, and they might for a while, if you're lucky -- then they're back to their old habits. And so on. And this is just 1st World Countries I'm talking about. You go somewhere like China or India or African nations and they'll laugh at you, if they don't attack you. IF we survive the next, say, 1000 years, our brains and 'civilization' (using the term loosely here) might catch up with each other and with technology, and we MIGHT save ourselves. But as things sit right now? Forget about it. We can't even stop fighting amongst ourselves for the stupidest reasons imaginable, let alone cooperate on not wrecking the entire planet. Worse, there are superstitious types who think some Invisible Sky God created it all, and will come down to whisk the Faithful away to some paradise, so who cares what happens to the Earth? Then there's the ones that seem to think that the Invisible Sky God is angry because some people aren't living according to some old book, and is making all this happen to us (which of course is more bullshit), and as soon as the Unbelievers and Infidels are all dead, it'll go back to being nice again. Or whatever. If we, as a species, manage to survive the next 100 years, it'll be a miracle.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[myrdos2]

Precisely. A talking llama from the the UN once told me that they know how to defeat climate change AND poverty, and that everyone has already agreed to the plan. Not sure why we're still talking about this as if it's some sort of issue.

I mean, I was going to install solar panels, but now it seems like there's no point?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I'm more of a doubter than a denier- but this could explain men's fashion choices over the last three centuries, which has often baffled me (in that I see all of them as dressing far too warmly for normal room temperatures).

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[arth1]

Pretty much any ventilation system, forced air, even open windows, does a poor job of distributing the cooler air throughout a room, especially in houses. So in a very real way it does make parts of a room cooler than they would otherwise be without the fan.

Heat rises.
A ceiling fan blows air from the top of the room downwards.
How, exactly, does this make parts of a room cooler, except the very top?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Technology solves everything. Teach your children to think outside the box- and not only will they build a safer world for their kids and grandkids, they'll also make a ton of money off of fearful people in full panic trying to survive.

Myself, I'm thinking that if we start to see sea rise in feet rather than inches, it's time to invest in houseboats.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that in a stagnant room, cooler air will have settled closer to the floor, while hot air is hanging up near the ceiling. And if the temperature inside is, in general, cooler than it is outside, heat radiation will be increasing temperatures near the walls and the ceiling, not the floor. If you turn on a ceiling fan in a room on the upper level of a house in this situation, you're actually going to make the human-habitable part of the room a little warmer in general, as the GP said. If you're in the room, it will feel cooler because the air will be moving over your skin, aiding you in shedding excess heat from yourself a little faster. But if you're not in the room, you're mostly just stirring warmer air into the system.

Sure, if you set your test up just right you'll get a case where turning on a fan in a room of a standard house does actually objectively cool down the human habitable portion of that room. But I'd still say that the GP is right and that a lot of people use fans inappropriately and just end up warming up an empty room.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[codealot]

They care about abstract debt, though. At least they say they do.

Not to change the subject but many climate deniers I talk to name our federal debt as the #1 issue for the wellbeing of our country, not the environment, not climate change, nor greenhouse gases. Perhaps because it's been drilled into their heads by TV, radio and other news sources for years.

There are no wealthy interests doing the same for climate change, at least not nearly to the same extent.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you are just virtue signalling. Humans are all largely wired the same way, absent mental disease or defect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect

That said, mitigating global warming, assuming it is actually happening in an equilibrium shifting, irreversible manner, would actually do more harm than good. If you double the price of petroleum products with carbon taxes, you greatly increase the cost of food, meaning the sizable proportion of people who spend most of their income feeding their families (IE the desperately poor) can't afford to eat. This leads to things like mass riots and wars (not to mention the direct effects), which increase pollution at a much greater rate than simply allowing the burning of fossil fuels at market rates.

Speaking for all of humanity is exactly what the politicians pushing this madness want to do. Their understanding of economics is so surface level and backwards that they have largely mitigated the enormous production surpluses created by technology over the last 40 years. Giving them more control of the economy will lead to further devastation, such that we no longer have growth at all, and instead begin to shrink. A shrinking world economy means misery and starvation on a massive scale.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

You just don't comprehend, but really that's OK, it is all a moot point now. Party on dude!

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a pretty narrow and simplistic view of "all of human history."

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you think that? Having children is a sociopathic act when we're overpopulated.

Huh, to my understanding birth rates have been decreasing for decades in the developed world. Of course you could argue that the future belongs to just those countries that also lag behind with cleaning up their act in regards to polution.

Herd animals are easy to panic. That's why appeals to emotion work.

Of course humans and some other herd animals also have a us vs. them mentality when it comes to emotional responses and a person on the other side of the world does not always register as an "us" and just another "them", sometimes it takes time to build up the necessary emotional connection to care.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

uh huh. i'm sure you'll be singing the praises of CO2 long after a severe weather event levels your home or renders the basic services in your area useless.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

"But everyone is pursuring their self interest." (sic)

That's absolutely false, thank the gods. The definition of a hero or a saint is someone who sacrifices themselves for the greater good. History is full of these people. More of us should try to be like them.

Good = service to something greater than self, even at a cost to self
Evil = service to self, fuck all others

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[swb]

Widely adopted in the "cradle of civilization" and the birthplace of homo sapiens.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the heat in the house comes in from the external environment, the HVAC just pushes it back outside. Houses do not generate heat.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[bfpierce]

You're implying a perfectly efficient heat pump. Those don't exist anywhere but in an undergraduate text book.

They even mention that fact IN said undergraduate text books.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Fan the flames of Class Warfare!

We knew you could!

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[swb]

Strangely, those narrow and parochial activities have shaped history on 4 continents, including that of the Zulus and Aztecs who were both subjugated as part of European colonial expansion.

The Gupta empire faded partly as a result of invasion by the Huns and competition within the subcontinent. They had little contact outside the continent and mentioning them makes about as much sense as mentioning the global influence of the Aquitinians (which isn't to take away from cultural developments, which were significant).

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[g01d4]

Human technologies have evolved orders of magnitude faster than the human brain has.

I think you're conflating genetic evolution with cultural evolution. I believe some human cultures have evolved at (or close to) pace with technology and some haven't. Cultural evolution involves increasing awareness of the (let's call it) limitations of genetically derived behavior and attempts to accommodate for it. Some human cultures may not be enough to ensure survival. It remains to be seen...

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we don't do things like dig huge holes under our homes, install piping that must be highly corrosion resistant, and fight the continuous buildup of mold and other biological growths. Guess we're pretty stupid.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Its entirely possible we have already crossed into a run-away condition. If true conservation alone won't save your future generations. We should begin a global scale climate engineer project TODAY! So that its ready in time to be used.

The likliehood that we'll hit a runaway condition is extremely low. CO2 levels have been much higher at times in the past, and we didn't get anywhere near that level of instability.

What will happen is serious instability as the shift in climate changes weather patterns. This will probably have arid regions become rainy, and vice versa. As well, temperate areas may become sub tropical and sub-arctic areas become temperate. All at the same time that oceanic boundaries shift.

Here is a plausible, but not at all certain scenario. A water rights based civil war. California, having entered into a new arid climate, attempts to assert it's water rights upon the other states fed by the Colorado River, and demands that Oregon allow them to divert a sizable percentage of the Columbia River's water to allow California to grow food. Arizona and Oregon and Washington State refuse to cooperate. California Negotiations with Great Lakes States break off, dooming the proposed Transcontinental aqueduct. So California becomes desperate and moves to physically force Oregon to supply them with water, first in the courts, then by fighting.

Is this outlandish? Check out the California Water Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

For a worldwide list http://www2.worldwater.org/con...

There will also probably be a number of refugees from oceanfront real estate.

We already have climate refugees - Carteret Island pupulation has abandoned theit home http://earthfirstjournal.org/n...

Isle de Jean Charles is considered America's first climate change refugees. Inthe state of Louisiana the citizens have received a 48 million dollar grant to relocate. http://www.npr.org/2016/05/14/...

note: this is not all ocean levels rising - the rerouting of the Mississippi has cause delta erosion, so they are getting hit very quickly from multiple reasons.

So everyone enjoy - the future might be plenty exciting.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you're playing Chicken Little.

Weather is not climate is not weather.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.

YOU shouldn't, either. Explain exactly how I have spoken for all of humanity? What kind of Trumpian world do we live in when a person can say everyone is not alike, and it some how becaomes All people are alike in not being alike. Consider that you at least did one intelligent thnig today, posting as an Anonymous Coward. Honest - you wrote the stupidest thing all week. Perhaps you should go back to posting Gay projection haiku.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Ceiling fans can either blow warm air down like you say or help the warm air rise.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Oh great one, please shower humanity with your wisened benevolence & good intent. Yes, please continue with your great and noble sacrifices so that future generations may evolve into carbon neutral angels.

Fix me a sammich, Coward.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

'What effect population had on that is harder to say but I don't think that we can seperate the technological and organization growth which made it possible from the change in population if we were to going to play "what if?"'

I do. In the US we are actually poorer than in the 50's and 60's. During those times unskilled workers owned cars and homes, products were manufactured out of more expensive but far more durable materials. The only real constant coins in the world are labor and raw materials. While that same worker might have more cans of soda in your fridge those cans are less durable, contain cheaper and fewer raw materials, and represent less labor expended to serve you. You might say, what do I care, I have more beverages! Well, you should care because that worker hasn't gained the value of those raw materials and labor somewhere else. Even within the United States the labor pool has nearly doubled with the addition of women to the workforce but the household hasn't increased the total value of raw resources and labor it controls where it should have doubled. Technology and process would have improved without globalization. For the most part the rest of the world is really riding on the tails of truely revolution technology invented in the US and Western Europe and that technology was developed before globalization.

People have been duped, they are buying cheap disposable, breakable goods, with planned obsolescence to distract them from how little value they have by showing them the quantity of "stuff" they have. An inexpensive safety razor carries most of it's cost in its raw materials (therefore will not drop in value), can be used for less than $2/yr in consumables, provides fewer cuts/razor burn and provides a closer shave vs disposables. It only takes 2-3 shaves to get used to one. Even a fairly inexpensive one is of such high quality they can passed down generations. Disposables cost hundreds a year, they are so cheap that new ones pass the holes used to save plastic off as stylizing, fake innovations are created to make old models obsolete and custom interfaces for replacement blades are used so they can phase out old blades and force people to buy new bases before even that cheap crap has a chance to break.

Mowers, gas and electric mowers don't do the job any faster than push mowers, again there isn't much material of value in them. Your fancy electric mower will break in 2yrs and doesn't do a better or faster job than an old push mower that will last forever with occasional need for oil and blade sharpening. Modernized these would be carbon fiber, use dry lubricant, possibly have rigid blades that don't need sharpened with a few flexible joints to allow for deflecting on hard objects, they would be so much lighter they'd need a strategic weight which would double as a flywheel to store mechanical energy.

Who is going to make and sell them? Nobody. It isn't worthwhile for the rich to invest in goods that are worth something and last forever unless the price is just as high as it would be for those cheap throw away goods. And if they did that people would realize they can't actually afford the modern day equivalent to grandpas old push mower.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Pseudonymous Powers]

If you ever work a job in retail or any sort of service involving contact with the general public, such as the trades like auto mechanic or plumber, part-time second job for extra money, whatever ... then soon, you too, will stop giving a fuck about average people... They themselves will soon show you how unwarranted such faith is. You'll witness their stupidity, their utter imperviousness to obvious facts. You'll see it again and again...

Sure, customer service is no fun. But is it just possible that you're not experiencing these people at their best?

Consider: People who need an auto mechanic or plumber either have a broken car or broken plumbing, which means that either they can't get to where they need to get to in order to stay employed and keep their family running, or their toilets don't work and their house smells like excrement. There's never a good time for either of those. And in either case, they have to let a strange person into the most intimate corners of their lives to fix it. This person will take a frustratingly long time to fix it, and sometimes may even make a mistake that makes the problem worse before it gets better. Then, when it's all over with, they'll charge you SO MUCH MONEY. They often refuse to tell you how much it will cost beforehand, ostensibly because they don't really know yet, but really because implying that the repair will be cheap and then hitting people with surprise charges after the fact is their whole business model.

Judging human nature by how people interact with the repairman is like judging human cleanliness by the state of the toilet bowl before they flush. If the toilet is even working, that is.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

I think it might be more accurate to say that most people actually do care. BUT, they also realize that absolutely nothing they do on an individual level will have any impact whatsoever - everyone has to do it, or it's wasted effort. So there's very little incentive to make one's own life more expensive and less pleasant when everyone around you *appears* to not care (because they also all see everyone else not doing anything).

I'm not so certain. The most conservative guy I ever knew was having a conversation about petrofuels once stopped me in my tracks by saying "Fuck future generations. I want my oil, and I want it now. If we can pull all of it out of the ground - Good, I don't want to be inconvenienced one fucking bit. I don't care about future generations. Fuck them - let them find their own fucking power! "

Impresed me enough that I never forgot the words, these are verbatim.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not so speciesist. Whereas a lot of humans and various other mammals suffered in Italy, lots of other critters benefited. More food for carrion feeders, worms and bacteria. It all sorts out in the end.

But obviously we pick the side(s) we root for.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The deniers do not care, they will be dead before the worst hits. As long as they can live high on the hog on their imaginary money until they die, they are happy. There is not one drop of concern for the future of humanity or life on earth in general.

How about their kids and grand kids?

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, many (most?) modern ceiling fans have settings which allow you to reverse the direction of airflow. They can either push warm air down, or assist in drawing warm air up.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The stuff we put in houses very much so do generate heat. Large public spaces like auditoriums can need to be cooled in the dead of winter because of the large number of 98.6 degree space heaters that sometimes congregate.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[sjames]

Yeah, the kids can go to hell. Just to be humane, slip some fentanyl in with the formula.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Greetings from the Mojave Desert (think: Las Vegas) and I assure you 116F/47C with a Dewpoint of 64F/18C may be arable, but it sure as hell isn't livable.
And getting there isn't going to be easy, either. In the last week of June Las Vegas had a hailstorm that delivered 2" hail from a cloud cover extending up to 50,000ft/15,000m that dropped the temperature 25F/4C in ten minutes, delivered 1/4 of the annual rainfall, and cracked roof tiles and chipped stucco off buildings.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

In other words, you don't have an argument.

None that you are capable of understanding,

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

"I'm lost now - I consider humans to be alpha predators." You clearly haven't met very many insects and microbes but it's okay you will, they get every one of us in the end.

It's not like other alpha predators don't have parasites. I don't think you understand what an alpha predator is. It's the predator at the top of a food chain, not the bacteria that recycle them eventually.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The Ogre philosopher Gnerdel believed the purpose of life was to live as high on the food chain as possible. She refused to eat vegetarians, preferring to live entirely on creatures that preyed on sentient beings.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

"Of course now, if a person is incapable of understanding that their own personal children don't just automatically inherit the half acre of livable real estate left if something comes along and kills the rest of humanity." Of course not, what do you think the endless warfare is to get us ready for? Taking the livable real estate. "But if say, as the growing season lengthens in the north, and if the present lower 48 becomes more arid - a possibility - there is a very good chance that the US might lose it's position in the world." Or crush Canada and relocate. Having the strongest military in the world means we pretty much have our pick of everywhere in the world for where to relocate when that time comes.

Resources. If the strongest military always won, we'd be living under some descendent of Hammurabi. But we'd have a real problem trying to invade Canada without the resources to wage an extended war. As well, you figure America has enough goodwill built up that other countries might side with Canada? There are always nucs, but we'd be invading in order to get arable land, not a radioactive desert. It's a real crapshoot.

The Soviet Union had capabilities that were equal to America's, maybe a bit worse here, a bit better there, but both of us knew that war between us would probably be a pyrrhic victory for whoever won. But all that came to naught. For all their strength, when the union collapsed, the previous incredible might meant little. And, your suggestion of crushing our peaceful neighbors to the north is a perfect example of the very instability I speak of. It isn't for atrocities, or political differences or religion - it's for land to survive on.

This sort of thing is why the Miltary takes AGW deadly seriously, not so they can go to war, but so they can prevent WW3.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Human technologies have evolved orders of magnitude faster than the human brain has.

I didn't know quite where to trim your quote. I do not disagree one bit. While I truly believe that there are plenty of people who are civilized enough to believe that cooperation is the key to survival, instead of killing each other, I believe that there are more than enough people out there who can't see past their noses.

Which is all to say that I care about the state of the world and it's people, but I think our lizard brain is going to cause us at some point to gleefully push the big red button and render us extinct. It will probably be televised as the 4th of July fireworks to end all fireworks shows. I just don't think there is enough time for enough people who do care to evolve. We ded.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the neandertols.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be a dickhead. One doesn't need to be a denier to not care. I'm not a denier and I could care less. What I do care about are asshole like you that want to put the boot to the throats of people like me because of your self righteousness. Climate change enthusiasts are the epitome of Nazism.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Huh, to my understanding birth rates have been decreasing for decades in the developed world." This is the funny thing if you dive in to this line of reasoning. Developed nations aren't fueling the population growth. If you are in the position where you are capable of caring about this issue, odds are it doesn't really matter if you are having children even a bunch of them. The only way to fix overpopulation is to go in with massive military forces and screw with the sovereignty of other nations or to just sit back and let terrible people kill a bunch of innocent people in the developing world.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[nintendoeats]

You aren't saying much that I disagree with (I hate push mowers). In fact, I am a proponent of the safety razor for precisely the reasons that you cited. There is much to the fact that the push to serve a large population has led to lower quality goods. However, I still think that people are better off. You're right, nobody can afford grandpa's old push mower. However, not everybody could afford it when he bought it and there were fewer goods competing for his dollars. Our disposable society is balanced by a wider range of options. The really high quality versions still exist of course, but because there is cheaper competition those prices will nessecarily go up.

The end result is that a whole bunch of people lower down can afford goods and services that significantly improve there lives, but the versions available to people in the middle are driven down in quality. The benefit for the people in the middle is that they have more options because there is more competition within the range that they can afford. That tradeoff is not always worth it to the middle class but in my estimation it is good more often than it is bad. Certainly the utilitarian would say it is good because so many poorer citizens have their lives improved so dramatically.

Of course, the people who really come out ahead are the already wealthy but that is a problem with the way that we have organized our economy, not with the notion of larger populations benefiting from distribution of fixed cost.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

1840... Wasn't that about the end of the Dalton Solar Minimum?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Rakarra]

The deniers do not care, they will be dead before the worst hits. As long as they can live high on the hog on their imaginary money until they die, they are happy. There is not one drop of concern for the future of humanity or life on earth in general.

If you can live high on "imaginary money" until you die, then I don't think that money ended up being imaginary.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[thinkwaitfast]

Won't there be a new coastline? Won't there always be a coastline? And what of those ancient people who invested heavily in coastland only to be heavily in debt when their beachfront condos moved inland a few hundred meters and people didn't want to live there any more?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Rakarra]

It's a strange attitude to have, because it implies that everyone else should be trying to murder them to protect themselves

Humanity is still fairly "tribal." We appreciate local society, and tend to greatly favor the interests of our own society over that of any others. It's how we evolved, it's how we developed civilization, divided ourselves into countries, waged war, etc. It's one constant that has been mostly true since before the stone age. We pretend we are never governed by "instinct" or anything else developed thousands of years ago, but that development is hard to get away from.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Rakarra]

Oh please....

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

A cynic could claim that the poor will be subsidizing the preservation of wealthy people's waterfront properties with higher energy and food costs.

I always thought that we would just invest in old worthless properties inland, then when the water rises, we have the ocean front property for our 15 minutes of high rent living.. They have their time, we have ours.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you say if the amish, in their low energy, self sustaining lifestyles said fuck future generations, we don't want to change our lifestyle?

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[sysrammer]

Or perhaps anthropologists and mythologists.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Maxo-Texas]

In groups up to about 150 in size. Past there it was murderous genocide over and over.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Because your life alone is nothing. Anyone's individual life is nothing. Compared to survival of the species. Evolution is still the greatest drive.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Fan the flames of Class Warfare!

We knew you could!

1996 called, They said that was getting hackneyed even back then.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

The Ogre philosopher Gnerdel believed the purpose of life was to live as high on the food chain as possible. She refused to eat vegetarians, preferring to live entirely on creatures that preyed on sentient beings.

Grendel? Although Gnerdel has a kind of geeky elegance.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Dread_ed]

Goes well with the old adage, "necessity is the mother of invention." Force our future generations into devising increasingly ingenious ways of staying ahead of the extinction curve. No one handed our distant Paleolithic ancestors a leg up, same goes for every generation since. This attitude served us well up to this point, in that we aren't dead yet..

Also goes along well with the "intelligence implies belligerence" adage, though as a cause of the intelligence. A harsher environment will lead to greater intelligence, which will, in turn, reinforce the behavior of molding our environment to our wishes. (Intentional digression) at a certain point I think that deliberate adaptation of our environment will reach a place of diminishing returns. Somewhere along that asymptotic curve it will become more cost and energy effective to deliberately modify the human element of the survival equation.

Not supporting his position per se. Just exploring the taste of that mind filter out loud here. What would I use as rationalization and ancillary support if I were to adopt that thought as valid. As always, even the most ludicrous shit can be justified through human "reasoning" and "logic."

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anne Thwacks]

Bacon, Lettuce, Mushroom. A popular sandwich.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[khallow]

Science indicates this is like the Titanic: progressing towards an iceberg and people are happily saying "well, just turn the ship away from it, it's quite far yet".

Chicken littles on Slashdot aren't science. And you seem remarkably ignorant and short-sighted about the problems that face humanity. Where's the concern about overpopulation, poverty, corruption, habitat and arable land destruction, natural resource mismanagment? These are bigger problems than global warming.

It becomes particularly galling when destructive and ineffective mitigation efforts are attempted which make these bigger problems worse.

Except they couldn't. Nor apparently can we -- and it all gets worse because people who do not understand climate (or navigation in that case) think they can bar actions which could help mitigate the problem... because they think that is a plot to take money from them: "what if some people die? A lot of people die everyday so that I can have the lifestyle I want"...

Once again, we see this meaningless and hypocritical morality play. You are one of the ones who do not understand climate. You are one of the ones attempting to bar actions that can make us and our world better. You are part of the problem.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Rakarra]

Weather is not climate, but neither are they unrelated. Climate doesn't dictate individual short-term weather patterns, but it does affect long-term trends.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[thinkwaitfast]

In the US we are actually poorer than in the 50's and 60's.

If that were true, why aren't more people going back and living like they were in the 50's and 60's. Yesterday I was home shopping and looked at a house built in the late 40's and greatly expanded in the 50's and thought to myself, wow, people really lived like this. I wonder how many people alive today would accept such primitive conditions?.

This was a nice house for the period, but is the kind that I see on real estates all the time that end up abandoned. I've looked at literally hundreds of these properties that are decaying or will decay because of neglect and nobody wants them. They're not expensive to buy and are easily less expensive than apartments. People could be saving so much money and building wealth at the same time,.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[amicusNYCL]

I'm grateful for anyone who chooses not to have children and add more people to this planet.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Rakarra]

Carbon Dioxide is the foundation of the world's food chain. It's not pollution

Water is absolutely essential to our way of life, but if you drink gallons of it, you're going to die. Water intoxication is a real thing.

Venus has a lot of carbon dioxide as well. Since it's in the Goldilocks Zone, it should be able to support life, yet its heavier, carbon-rich atmosphere led to a runaway greenhouse effect that renders the existence of liquid water, and life based on that, impossible. Having a nice amount of something required for life as we know it is beneficial. Too much.. not so much.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

What would you say if the amish, in their low energy, self sustaining lifestyles said fuck future generations, we don't want to change our lifestyle?

Weeellll, side note:

I live around Amish. They have issues with inbreeding, and many of them are assimilating to modern life. In 1849, there wasn't much difference between the Amish and everyone else. By mid 20th century, they were quaint. Now they are looking silly, what with odd rules like you can't have electricity in the house, but you can have a generator that compresses air in a huge tank that you bring the air into the building in order to run air tools, or you can use a powered machine in the field as long as you use mules to tow it out and back, or you can use a tractor as long as it has steel wheels, not rubber. Or you can ride in a modern vehicle, but not drive one. Or you can't have a phone in your house, but you can have one in a little outhouse in the fields. Just wacky stuff that really doen't have anything to do with anything.

They are not stupid people. I'm certain they know that they aren't living on some remote island where civilization can't each them easily. And the change is coming. A co-worker said that she had Amish friends, and the girls would change into "English" clothing in school, some of the more daring would even wear makeup. Then after school, it was back to the approved dresses. Just imagine - hot Amish chicks in miniskirts! Oops - my bad.

Just this summer, I've seen Amish men driving cars, I saw an Amish woman Checking out a minivan to buy. I've seen multiple Aish with smartphones. That's sort of jarring to se a guy in traditional garb checking his text messages. In a few decades, they will mostly be as bad of heathens as the rest of us.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[khallow]

You realise that there different types of pollution, and not all of it comes in the form of overly visible black smog or choking dust? As for 3rd-world shitholes - as you call them - yeah those will be affected first because they're generally already on the line, but then so will your favourite vacation stops, coastal cities, and your food supply as crops go thirsty and water gets scarce.

Unless, of course, that doesn't happen. There is a remarkable lack of evidence for your predictions.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anne Thwacks]

The real problem here, is that the masses prefer to buy (put higher value on) the disposable junk to stuff with long term value. The system then translates this into economic benefits to the rich, but it would still make the rich richer if the poor went for the stuff with long term value - maybe not so rich, so fast, maybe different rich people, I doubt there is much valid data available, because the rich get rich by selling the poor what they will pay for. Same way the poor dispose of their income to make footballers rich - and blame others for it!

Holding up Homer SImpson as a hero, and attacking education like Boko Haram is extremely popular with [trump supporters], while they blame others for the obvious consequences of their own actions.

Condemning experts is a great way to defend your own stupidity, but it doesn't make it any less stupid.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[thinkwaitfast]

Wars don't reduce population. WWI killed 10 million people. The Spanish flu, granted helped by the war, killed 50 million.

world population 1700 to now.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[thinkwaitfast]

People are considered part of the room, at least they were when I took thermo dynamics. And evaporating is a state change, significant energy may accompany a state change without any temperature change. Water at 100degrees and steam at 100degrees are the same temp, but steam embodied a lot more energy.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Maxo-Texas]

The trend towards war is down.

But as we run out of non-renewable resources over the next 100 years, global warming won't matter.

The loss of pesticides, fertilizers, stainless steel, etc. all will limit our growth, lead to population declines, and possibly pretty terrible war (we have a lot of ugly stuff we agree not to use but as history shows, we will use during total war).

80 years from now, we may be at 12 billion and 80% likely to still be rising.

200 years from now, the earth is more likely to have a population of 3 billion than 20 billion. To avoid that we'll have to invent a lot of new technologies really fast as we hit multiple limits. Consumption of non-renewable resources by a population of 12 billion will be terrific.

I think most of the breakdown happens after I die. But I think we do have a breakdown- things have gotten visibly more brittle over the last 20 years. There's not as much slack in the system as their used to be. Which is fine until you have a problem.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[khallow]

once stopped me in my tracks by saying

It got you to shut up. So it worked. Who knows, he might even believe it too!

I think it also demonstrates the perversity of morality. His "fuck them" attitude, if real, is still probably less harmful than your "let's do it for the children" attitude. After all, those future generations will be able to do that, find their own fucking power. But if we hamstring our societies for frivolous moral reasons (which is where we're heading with climate change mitigation), we'll commit concrete harm to those future generations that merely burning a little more oil can't do.

Here's the problems I always see with this sort of moralizing:

1) No evidence that global warming or other climate change is big enough compared to other problems like overpopulation, poverty, habitat and arable land destruction, etc. There is a remarkable lack of evidence to support the claims of harm.

2) Disregard for the demonstrated dynamic that poor people have more kids and poverty leads to overpopulation which is the biggest problem facing humanity. Among other things, overpopulation is the reason that human-induced climate change is a problem in the first place.

3) Disregard for the cost and ineffectiveness of climate change mitigation. When one looks at Germany's Energiewende, the Kyoto Protocol, carbon emission markets, renewable energy public projects, etc, one sees a history of remarkably costly and useless virtue signalling, often combined with cynical exploitation. There's no regard for how to implement any sort of mitigation measures in a way that doesn't harm billions of people nor regard for the outcome of such projects.

So sure, tell us how your beliefs are going to make the world a better place. But if you really are interested in making the world a better place, then maybe you ought to pay attention to what we're doing now.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[phorm]

Right, because it's not as if California is having enough drought to have a government site for it, or western canada. Or how about the oceans, where marine-life can be *very* temperature sensitive.

Or how about a change in parasites, which affects both humans and food-chain animals? The good news is that some parasites that like it cool may die out, but those that prefer warmer temperatures (the majority) will spread more readily.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran a 8 year experiment back in the 80s when one of the grocery stores was singing the praises of their climate changing CO2s. Tacked a couple to the sunny side of a shed, and staked a couple more on the ground. Ten years later my wife took them down and threw them in the recycle when we moved out of that house.

Statute of limitations on false advertising had already expired.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Rakarra]

A Jordanian flag. Wow, the flag of one of tbe US's most faithful allies in tbe middle east. What a bunch of wild-eyed radicals.

I think the parent really meant a Palestinian flag, there were several of them hoisted by Sanders supporters on the floor of the DNC.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

Both of which rely on archaeologists for what little physical evidence they can get, but point taken.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Post hoc reasoning, labeling, and FUD are not "caring". More like a mental disorder. However, for the sake of argument, let's assume you're correct in your premise of anthropogenic catastrophe requiring people to straitjacket themselves into submission to politically correct "science" and relegate themselves and their children to an uplifting future singing approved kum-bay-ya's around an EPA permitted solar-powered LED campfire, riding around in wagons drawn by horses wearing methane-reclaiming diapers, living in caves, and generally satisfying the Laputan whims of a banker-backed, self-appointed bunch of academic whores posing as a technocratic elite when they not filing grant applications or producing taxpayer-funded propa^H^H^H^H^Hdocumentaries for PBS.

Would not then getting at least some of us off this planet exhibit more concern for the future of humanity than expecting everyone to enjoy post-modern innerspace pangaean mindfuck hells?

--
El sueño de la razón produce monstruos --Goya

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

Class Warfare is not a bad thing - and the war is ongoing because it hasn't been won yet.

If you want peace between classes, you have to reduce the differences between them sufficiently to make it impossible for the upper classes to abuse and exploit the lower ones. Only then will the lower ones have nothing to retaliate against.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

Are you happy with the amount of refugees flooding Europe and the USA right now ?
How happy will you be when there are ten million times as many ?

There may be some positive effects in some areas - but change is disruptive, disruption tends to cause violence and death - lots of it, before we settle into a new normal. History is pretty clear on that point.
Plenty of people will be displaced by hunger, thirst and warfare from others equally desperate to control suddenly scarce resources.

Anywhere that has a positive effect will be overwhelmed with refugees desperately fleeing the places that weren't so well off.

In the meantime - we're in for a new age of plagues. Zika is a serious threat to the USA right now - and that's mild, more warmth means greater teritory for plague-carrying insects like mosquitos, that one at least - the rich world won't get to escape.

You're just plain wrong that 'nobody' talks about the positive effects, hell deniers bring them up whenever they run out of ways to deny and everybody else knows about them, but you have to be seriously insane to think they come anywhere close to outweighing the negatives. They don't, not by many orders of magnitude.

You're like the guy drowning in a flood saying "well, at least my roses got watered".

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

On the plus side, labor unions forced so much industry to go overseas that most of this is in China's hands now so there's that.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

Except that it isn't more expensive. There is, at most, a sunk cost fallacy that makes it appear that way. Replacing tech from the 19th century with the best the 21st century has to offer must consistently be cheaper - and indeed, it is.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

When the CO2 was that high - the sun was also quite a lot colder than it is now. But don't let inconvenient facts get in the way.

Anyway, past climates are meaningless. Life can survive in any climate - but no particular species may be able to. Life will survive global warming - but that, by no means, guarantee that life will include humans.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

Except that history is filled with people who sacrifice their lives to save strangers with literally no possibility of reward.

That alone proves this idiotic claim that libertarians so love to be complete and utter poppycock - or, more accurately, a perfect example of projecting. People with no sense of empathy, sympathy or humanity generally find it impossible to conceive that anybody else may not share that nature. They certainly don't realize that they are a tiny minority and in fact almost nobody thinks like them. The rest of us refer to thinking like you described as anti-social personality disorder (or in the vernacular: being a psychopath).

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

You are comparing styles from the 50's and 60's with modern styles? I'm not sure what that has to do with anything most of it has to do with taste. We also certainly have advanced technology.

We just don't focus that technology on producing things that are made to last and our economy hasn't advanced at the same pace. I gave an example of what it might look like if we applied modern technology to the mechanical push mower, comparitively the push mower of the 50's would certainly be ancient and archaic but it would be far more durable and of higher value than the electric push mowers of today.

The underlying point here was economics. We have more stuff today partly because technology has made stuff so cheap that even though we actually have less economic power it can buy more stuff than in the past and partly because we are making lower quality stuff. The bottom line is that if an assembly line worker had the same economic power (the ability to buy as much in terms of raw resources and labor) as someone did in the 50's toward today's stuff they would have as much stuff as the top 1% do now.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[HBI]

It's interesting to note that you, and the rest of the people posting about how much they care about warming and people that they don't know, or even future generations, still bothered to reply to this message instead of junking their computers, selling their houses and cars and living in a tent in the woods with appropriate technology. Or even killing yourselves - after all, as long as you exist, you're fueling resource extraction, pollution and warming.

So I guess you all don't care as much as you think you do.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

For Al Gore So Love The Earth that he stopped flying in private jets and living in enormous mansions with air conditioners large enough to cool a slum in Venezuela.
No? So Al is a denier in your book. Wow, you drank ALL the Kool-Aide, didn't you?

Note, exponential growth in CO2 in the last decade has not had a corresponding increase in...pause for it... Global Warming. The greenhouse gases produced by humans in 1830 are a rounding error on today's emissions. Now, use a little logic here.... if today's emissions fail to be enough to produce empirical evidence of correlation, let alone causality... figure it out....

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Your.Master]

One obvious way is if it blows the warm air across the A/C's heat sensor, triggering it to do the actual cooling.

Another is if it pushes the heat toward areas of weaker insulation and away from areas of stronger insulation. If the outside is cooler than the inside, then the temperature will leak out more rapidly. If the outside is warmer than the inside, then the warmth will leak in more slowly.

Another is if you're in building and where a vaulted ceiling fan is pushing floor 2 heat down to floor 1. My last house was like that, and I kept the fan on constantly because the floor-by-floor difference was enormous.

Another is if the temperature was not evenly distributed within the room's bottom (eg. because one wall is an exterior wall, or one shares a wall with the kitchen, or there are electrically powered devices in there acting as heat sources). Redistributing will directly cool those parts at the expense of parts further away.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"You aren't saying much that I disagree with (I hate push mowers)."

Fair enough. I don't think we are actually too far apart here.

Bottom line, technology and reduction in quality have made goods so cheap we have more of them than they did in the 50's and 60's but if we had equivalent purchasing power (and therefore could buy equivalent labor hours and raw materials worth of goods) then a single earner lower income factory worker in the US would be able to buy more of those cheaper goods than an upper middle dual income family can buy today in addition to owning their house and car.

I understand that you think we are better off anyway and you make an argument in support of cheaper more disposable goods. The reality is that you are probably right for some things and I am probably right for others. But we could have made that shift in focus domestically and be buying cheaper goods made right here without giving up our purchasing power to buy a higher quality of life in China. Most of the technological innovation has been domestic and/or would become domestic rapidly because we are the largest economy in the world.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"Except that history is filled with people who sacrifice their lives to save strangers with literally no possibility of reward."

Being recorded in history is a reward.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

Actually our paleolithic ancestors *did* get a leg up from their ancestors - they inherrited knowledge and evolutionary traits from them, each generation since has gotten legs up from the ones before.
If that wasn't true we would still be living like our paleolithic ancestors.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, actually I do. That's why for example I make an effort to source clothes from companies that don't use slave labour.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

True but that wasn't really what I was getting at. To be equivalent economically a factory worker would need to be able to buy as many man hours and raw resources worth of "stuff" as the 50's/60's counterpart. They can't. The stuff has simply gotten cheaper, due technological advancement, efficiency, and lowering quality standards. So while that worker likely has more stuff today, it doesn't represent as much labor/raw materials and therefore that worker actually has less purchasing power.

Also, the goods we purchase today are not domestic. Each time you pay $20 for $0.20 worth of disposable razor cartridges you are donating $19.80 to improving the living conditions in China while subtracting $19.80 from the living conditions in the US. The rich in the US are likely taking $15 of it, and the rich in China are probably taking 80% of the rest, that is the screwing the poor part but we'd still be screwing the poor in much the same ways if it were all domestic. Every bit of economic power that China gains comes at the expense of US economic power.

But who knows, maybe I'm the short term thinker. In a few hundred years between our completely unutilized mines and our landfills stuffed with foreign raw resources maybe we'll be the most resource rich nation in the world.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

There are no shortage of insects and microbes that both kill and eat humans. I'm not sure you know what an alpha predator is.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

Most of them never had any guarantees they would be recorded in history - or that anybody would even know.

In 1773 the ship De Jonge Thomas was sunk in a storm outside Table Bay in Cape Town. A elderly farmer by the name of Wolraad Woltemade jumped on his horse and rode it into the sea and rescued two drowning sailors from the wreck, saving their lives. Then he went right back in and pulled out three more. He did this 7 more times - saving 14 stranger's lives.
He went in an 8th time - once more risking his life - but as he did so the wreck collapsed and no less than six sailors grabbed onto the horse. The horse, already exhausted, could not carry them all and they drowned along with Woltemade.

By all accounts - including what he told people before he went in - he acted out of pity. He had no way of knowing his actions would be remembered. He knew he was risking his life but he also believed he could succeed. Indeed he did, 7 times he succeeded.

Woltemade had no way of knowing he would go down in history, that in fact South Africa's highest civilian honour for heroism would be named after him - an honour which is only given post-mortem for people who died to save strangers. My own uncle was a recipient. He was working at a gas refinery in the 1970's - in appartheid South Africa when a leak sprung in a gas-line. A number of black workers were trapped inside the pipe. He went and pulled three of them out, then he went in again and pulled out more...and kept going until he himself was overwhelmed by the toxic gas and died.
This was a white man - an extremely rightwing one - in appartheid South Africa, who died to save poor black people's lives. Absolutely everything about his culture, upbringing, religion and politics told him that he was the superior human being - yet he died saving them.

To claim that these people - who were overcome with pity at the suffering of strangers and risked their lives fatally to try and save those strangers were acting out of a desire for glory is an insult to their memory.

Perhaps YOU are so big of an asshole that you could never comprehend a truly selfless act - but don't project your mental issues onto the world at last. Almost nobody else on earth is like that. The people who are always claim that everybody else is like that too. The same way rapists tend to think every other guy also does the things they do. Both are simply wrong about that. It's a story told to make themselves feel better about being assholes.

And that is what you call somebody who has no pity for the suffering of any person, even a stranger, an asshole. Not a typical human being. Not a representative sample. An asshole - and luckily, an extremely rare variety of asshole.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a difference between protestors and democrat institutions. In practice the Democrat party have been funding the military expansion of Israel into Palestinian territories all through Obama's tenure. Despite the tough talk in practice obama was too cowardly to stand up to the Israel lobby. He continued to hand billions to Israel war machine every year when he could have put the squeeze on them to finally recognize the self-determination of a Palestinian state. The only reason why Hillary will win next election is because Trump is even more of a war hawk not because the Democrat party is some sort of anti-war faction. Lets not forget that most Democrat leaders, including Hillary, cheered on the invasion of Iraq for non-existent WMDs. Even Obama looked the other way as Bush used torture. (Bush never prosecuted for what the geneva conventions consider war crimes)

As for the current generation of Republicans... gone off the deep end. Long gone are days of great Republicans like Lincoln and Eisenhower. Principled men with honor and a heart. Most of the current generation of Republicans are either Randroids or American Taliban in the making. The latter is more concerned with biblical gibberish and oppression of minorities that they see as enemies of their home countries than the US constitution. Pseudo-American patriots.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"The definition of a hero or a saint is someone who sacrifices themselves for the greater good. History is full of these people."

The definition of a hero or a saint is someone who sacrifices themselves because they think it is their best chance for lasting personal glory (self interest), to benefit their children in some way (self interest), due to a foolish belief it will benefit them in the more important after death end game (self interest), or due to plain old mental illness (strange incomprehendable self interest).

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Areyoukiddingme]

But we'd have a real problem trying to invade Canada without the resources to wage an extended war.

I'm pretty sure all you need to do to invade Canada is to walk across the border and ask the first person you see, "Where's the nearest Tim Hortons, eh?"

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[JoeMerchant]

Bigger beaches never seem to bother anyone.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[JoeMerchant]

That was Lex Luthor's plan in Superman III (or was it 2, I forget.)

Only works if the entire global economy doesn't go in the toilet - the big comfy economic boom that we're in is the only reason we're not still killing each other at every turn of the decade.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[JoeMerchant]

We only have the capacity to shore up the waterfront if the rise is gradual, like it has been for the last 100 years. If the hockey stick kicks up and we start rising a centimeter a year, lots and lots of coastline will be simply too expensive to preserve, no matter how many "working men" you convince to go dig holes inland to bring dirt out to build up the coast.

Florida already has barrier islands, but they're going to look even funnier than coral atolls if we sustain a gradual sea level rise of something like 0.1cm per year for then next 500 years.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[DarkVader]

That's completely inaccurate. A heat pump is one of the most efficient and least expensive options for heating.

The reason they're not used in very cold places is that they become less useful with an outdoor temp below 35 F.

In a location with many heating days but temps in the 40s and 50s, a heat pump would be your best choice.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[JoeMerchant]

Missed a decimal point, I was shooting for 5m of sea level rise, which would take 5000 years at a rate of 0.1cm per year. Maybe by then we'll have cold fusion (or something as good), and landscaping won't be as expensive as it is today - of course, with enough free energy, you can just run a heat-pump in the ocean and push the heat back into the magma.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[david_thornley]

I really don't care about how the Earth was way long ago. That's not what I evolved in, and that's not what civilization developed in. Climate change will have some positive effects, and it won't wipe out humanity. However, it will have a lot of negative effects, and it's going to be disruptive in very many ways. It's going to hurt a LOT of people, and that's something I do care about.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[david_thornley]

Are you a parent? As a parent, the idea of living it up and leaving a bigger problem for my son to endure is really not attractive. I want my son's life to be better than mine, not worse.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[david_thornley]

The US has never had an anti-war party. It's had parties that were against particular wars. It's had parties that were more or less likely to get into a war, but never an anti-war major party. Your "no longer" suggests that you have some idealistic version of the past.

Fracking, if done right, is a good thing. It allows us to burn natural gas instead of coal, which means less CO2 per joule of electricity produced. It can do some nasty things if done wrong, of course.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Dread_ed]

Well then that's all we need! We have provided our decedents with more knowledge in this generation than all of our cumulative generations previous to this one. Conserving any resources is irrelevant!

Thanks for proving my point, again lol!

Seriously though, Leary and Wilson call inherited knowledge you are referring to the "time-binding semantic circuit" of human consciousness. It is an inalienable trait of being a human. Making a societal decision for conservation of resources for future generations is totally different than the automatic accumulation of human knowledge as a by product of language using monkeys playing with tools. It is even father afield from the results of reproductive pressures expressed in future generations that you refer to.

There really is no way to compare them. Its like comparing geology and satellites. Their Venn diagrams aren't even on the same plane.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Dread_ed]

Not to be a smart ass, but a "population reduction war" is, by virtue of the words placed in that order, a war fought to reduce population. It is, I posit, a logical conjecture about a hypothetical future war. It's not too difficult to foresee something like this. Combine the prime problem of exponentially growing population pressure with the exacerbating factors of dwindling resources, kin selection, religious friction, ideological conflicts between neighbors, and energy-dense technology proliferation and you have the perfect ingredients for a return to our species roots as genocidal monsters.

A war fought for territory, or for honor, religion, or for ideology would be completely different than a "population reduction war." A "population reduction war" would be a war fought specifically to reduce the population on the Earth. Whether this ultimate goal is know or hidden from the participants is irrelevant. In a population reduction war killing the enemy's armed forces is not done to force compliance, depose the government leaders, or to gain territory. Killing the enemy would not be a means to an end in a war like this. Killing the enemy is the end. And, as such, the means would be different than in other wars. Combatants would not be the main targets, they would be tactical obstacles between you and the strategic goals of large populations of civilians.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

> Chicken littles on Slashdot aren't science.

Yeah, right. Let's just indulge in booze, shall we? Why worry? If you're THAT dumb, well, it sucks, but such is life. If you were hired to post things like that, they should fire the guy who hired you.

> And you seem remarkably ignorant and short-sighted about the problems that face humanity. Where's the concern about overpopulation, poverty, corruption, habitat and arable land destruction, natural resource mismanagment? These are bigger problems than global warming.

Pure logic. You know, if you solve all the "biggest" problems, you'll die of a secondary threat, got it? A lot of people can't read in some places and that is a problem which someone could tackle. Of course, you're trolling -- BTW, there's a list of logical fallacies somewhere. If you want to go that way, at least invent a new one.

> Once again, we see this meaningless and hypocritical morality play.

Hey, dude, that's the same music the deniers sing: basically, "morality sucks and I'm not subject to any morality. " It's not even interesting anymore. Wanna live without morals? Maybe I can't do anything to prevent that. But soon I guess that will bring about bad karma, specially when things get real hot. Just a heads up.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Class Warfare is not a bad thing - and the war is ongoing because it hasn't been won yet.

If you want peace between classes, you have to reduce the differences between them sufficiently to make it impossible for the upper classes to abuse and exploit the lower ones. Only then will the lower ones have nothing to retaliate against.

The context is the issue. The "there you go with the class warfare again has been trotted out time and again by th efolks who interestingly enough, won it. years ago.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[haruchai]

"pollution has gotten lower than it has ever been in my life time"

It hasn't "gotten lower" - laws were passed that FORCED individuals & industry to clean up or not a a horrible mess in the 1st place.
If those laws aren't enforced or if they are repealed as more than a few politicians have been trying to do, you'll be living in your grandparent's mess.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most models result in greater desertification. Not less.

I am not aware of any deserts going away. Hotter temperatures puts more water vapor in the air, it doesn't put more water in the soil of deserts for no reason.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

At some level, yes. But keep in mind that most of that "working together" has been more or less explicitly directed towards taking or holding an advantage over some other group of humans.

There's an in-group and an out-group. You work with the in-group, but against the out-group. That's why we have things called "countries".

What, exactly, is the optimum size of group to work with - has been and remains a subject of intense controversy, and is certainly a moving target anyway.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[slashrio]

As a first impression to this story I would say that this is quite unbelievable.
What in fact they are saying is that the supposed result of CO2 accumulation already appeared when we just started to accumulate?
No offense to the 'climate-believers' (and I think this is going to cause me to get flaimed a bit), but to me this is more an indication that the correlation between industrialization and climate warming tends to be more coincidental than causal.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm certain you don't know what "predator" means, or you wouldn't have said something so mind numbingly stupid.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

It's interesting to note that you, and the rest of the people posting about how much they care about warming and people that they don't know, or even future generations, still bothered to reply to this message instead of junking their computers, selling their houses and cars and living in a tent in the woods with appropriate technology. Or even killing yourselves - after all, as long as you exist, you're fueling resource extraction, pollution and warming.

So I guess you all don't care as much as you think you do.

Wow - there's a digital answer! And interesting that you would actually think to post it.. And jeezuz chryste - inviting me to kill myself. Are you a transpland from Tumblr? That's a big insult from me, please do take it that way.

One does not need to return to being a caveman in order to have some empathy towards others. It's a non sequitur. I am at base, a technologist, and enjoy every minute of being one. I love my computers, love my cars, motorcycles and other technology. Why, I even believe technology can help others. These things are not mutually exclusive, helping and technology.

In fact, all but the poorest today live better and longer lives, and better health than Kings of the medieval age. Because of technology.

At one time, I thought that technology like coal was okay. Then I learned more. At one time, I thought that CO2 was just a gas we exhaled. Then I learned more. And beside myself, at one time, humans thought that Benzene (not Benzine) was the shitz. We used it in cleaners, even after shaves. It smelled kind of nice. After some time, we learned it would cause leukemia. Not even disputed. So we have largely stopped using benzene. a very small percentage in gasoline.

Carbon Tetrachloride. This was a wonder fluid at one time. Non flammable. Used in fire extinguishers, dry cleaning and a refrigerant. Even as a insecticide in stored grain. Then we learned it killed people's livers and was really neurotoxic.. So it isn't in much use at all any more.

We've found other, safer methods of doing all the things those dangerous chemicals did. Interestingly, I found out today, that Carbon Tet was replaced in grain storage with food grade diatomaceous earth, a product so safe that we actually eat it. Its a mechanical insecticide, one that insects cannot gain immunity from.

But here is the problem with your attitude. I dunno if you are married or have children or not, but there was a lot of resistance to removing chemicals like benzene, carbon tet, and tetraethyl lead from the environment. By people who seem to share your attitude of not a fuck being given.

Now one of the things I've found out is that if someone in their immediate family gets ill, even in a family that couldn't care if anyone outside it is dead or alive, they tend to care. So let us say the people for whom finding alternatives to those products won the day, and whoever is closest to you had to work with Carbon Tet, say the people who don't ive a damn about things like exhaust fans won the day as well.

Tell me with a straight face and pretend you are in front of a judge. You think myself and other technologists that care more about your family than you could ever muster up for anyone else should FOAD, and you are perfectly fine with whoever you love most in the world getting liver failure and enduring a slow painful death?

And you better damn well hope a replacement liver comes from someone that cares a little about other people if you want your loved one to get a transplant.

Live long, good health, and prosper, along with your loved ones, even if you want me to kill myself.

I even care about ignorant self centerd fuckwtis like you. Don't like you one bit, but you probably have some use. Now gt back to tumblr and fat shame some people.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[slashrio]

If I hadn't taken part in the discussion already, I would have modded this up as 'Insightful'. Spot on.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[slashrio]

I think you just proved his point: You shouldn't expect everybody to care.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[slashrio]

Someone mod this up please! :)

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Imaginary money?

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

I'm certain you don't know what "predator" means, or you wouldn't have said something so mind numbingly stupid.

Sigh - tonight is instruction time for the slower group.

An Alpha Predator is a predator residing at the top of a fod chain also known as an apex predator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Even if one does not consider humans as an alpha, they are at least super predators. I consider them as alpha predators, just as I wrote, an opinion shared by many. If you domake a distinction between super predators and alpha predators, it is usually based on whether you define it as what a human does without the technology, we have developed, or with it. P The insects and microbes that shaitland describes in an attempt to prove me wrong, are actually at the bottom of the food web, or trophic dynamics pool. They are known as the decomposers, and return the components of the now dead thing to the mineral nutrient pool to be recycled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

But we'd have a real problem trying to invade Canada without the resources to wage an extended war.

I'm pretty sure all you need to do to invade Canada is to walk across the border and ask the first person you see, "Where's the nearest Tim Hortons, eh?"

They'd fight us to the death defenting a Horton's! Probably send out coffee to us during fighting breaks as well.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

I think you just proved his point: You shouldn't expect everybody to care.

Never would But the answer was to someone who asked the question of why the hell would anybody care. I understand that there are people in the world that don't care about others. It is a spectrum, form simple disdain to psychopathy.

Obviously the closer you get to psychopathy, the less likely a person is are to understand that others might think differently.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

It is turning Louisiana and Florida into a deeper swamp. It is wiping out islands with typhoons, oceans are warmer, there is more moisture in the air, and jet streams have shifted. Even if it does get warmer in Canada, the amount of time the Sun is up won't change, and the threat for frost is a big deal up there. Let alone having the soil and rock free areas to plant food to offset the good areas we have now.

The problem is that in Ohio, a few degrees warmer in the winter is preferable, as well as a few degrees warmer in the Spring/Fall won't hurt either.

But the pollution is worse now, it is just different (and the environmentalists need to not just focus on CO2). There are huge dead zones in the rivers and bays due to fertilizer runoff and water pollution, coal ash pits are a mess and can't be good. Heavy metals in the water and air are a problem. And the money the dirty energy industry has isn't good for the world economy or the fight against terrorism.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of sunlight in the sub-arctic will impact how life goes on there. It isn't for everybody.

And for the past 800,000 years CO2 levels have been below 290ppm up until the last century.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Areyoukiddingme]

But we'd have a real problem trying to invade Canada without the resources to wage an extended war.

I'm pretty sure all you need to do to invade Canada is to walk across the border and ask the first person you see, "Where's the nearest Tim Hortons, eh?"

They'd fight us to the death defenting a Horton's! Probably send out coffee to us during fighting breaks as well.

Who said anything about fighting? I was suggesting getting into the queue.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[khallow]

Again, remarkable lack of evidence. Confirmation bias is not evidence.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[riverat1]

1) No evidence that global warming or other climate change is big enough compared to other problems like overpopulation, poverty, habitat and arable land destruction, etc. There is a remarkable lack of evidence to support the claims of harm.

And there is a remarkable lack of evidence that you understand the issue of anthropogenic global warming well enough to make a qualified judgment about it.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[arth1]

People are considered part of the room, at least they were when I took thermo dynamics.

Yes, but you apparently missed that this was about people leaving ceiling fans on for cooling when there are no persons in the room.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[quantaman]

I'm sure it's passe to say that it's both sides, but it is. Consider that the United States no longer has an anti-war party. At the Democratic National Convention, they tried to drown out and laugh off chants of "No more war" from the delegates.

That's because the context didn't have anything to do with war, it had to do with signalling opposition to Hillary.

I could go on and on about how now neither major party opposes fracking, the liberals are now further right of George W. Bush on Israel, and so much more. Americans as a whole show even less empathy nowadays.

Ehhh, not really. On Israel and foreign intervention in general Clinton is to the right of her party, but far to the left of the Bush, even on Israel.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[arth1]

Another is if it pushes the heat toward areas of weaker insulation and away from areas of stronger insulation. If the outside is cooler than the inside, then the temperature will leak out more rapidly. If the outside is warmer than the inside, then the warmth will leak in more slowly.

You're exactly wrong, and I'll try to show you why:

Consider your two premises for the "hot outside" situation:
(a): There are (at least two) areas with different insulation, and
(b): The outside is warmer than the inside.

If the air is still, you will reach an equilibrium, where the weak insulation spot can't easily cause more heat transfer to the air on the inside, because the air on the inside is already pretty hot. You end up with a room with areas that are hotter than others, and heat transfer within the room is mainly radiation and not convection.

Now, if you circulate the air on the inside, you provide cooler air to the (a) areas. Cooler air which can absorb more heat from the outside. You've disturbed the equilibrium, and go towards a new one where all the air in the room is subject to being heated through the (a) spots.
In effect, you create a convection oven, which works precisely on the principle of bringing cooler air to the heating elements.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

Okay, move to the more modern world - pretty much since Greek times onward a key aspect of humanity has been that parents shared resources with their children allowing their children to achieve more than they had. This has been the basis of social mobility for most of recorded history. The only times it didn't happen was when class structures were rigidly enforced by law and upward mobility was effectively prevented by the force. Even that wasn't completely effective - in a very real sense the power of the nobility in Europe was broken when the merchants started making more money than them. They simply could not prevent it forever - and where they kept trying, it led to violent revolutions as people were desperate to uplift themselves and their children.

Our ancestors didn't just pass knowledge along, they passed resources along. As far back as the Mesopotamians they would build cities which their descendants would live in (for thousands of years) without having to rebuild them.

The pattern persists - and when the system makes it hard to ensure your children will have a better life than you - you have a recipe for revolution (the US should watch out - 30 years of Reaganomics is turning the US into a prime condition for such an event - the rise of Trump is in many ways the first stirrings of exactly that).

But in this case - we're not talking about conserving resources, we're just talking about not destroying the long-lived resources (like cities) which we've been inheriting for a very long time so our children won't have to rebuild them. It's a lot easier to expand a city over time than to build a new one.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

The people on top of the pile now have every reason to preserve the status quo. Of course they want to discourage class warfare -even if they got to the pile by winning it in the past. The problem with class warfare is it never ends -you just end up replacing one set of overlords with another set. Hence why I said the only way to end it is to change the layout so the overlords have only barely more wealth and power than the underdogs - in that layout, they can't abuse their power because there isn't enough of it.
Even then, that state is not inherently stable and must be actively preserved.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Cars are much more reliable and durable than the 1950s, so I don't buy the reduction in quality argument as a sweeping generalisation. To me it looks more like some products being made to a quality point that takes into account obsolescence that will come relatively rapidly (e.g. phones). In other cases it can be a case of not over engineering products for a lifetime that exceeds expected usage, e.g. a pair of garden shears that might be handed down generations through an extended family which often required proximity. In further cases (e.g. push mowers) lighter but less durable construction may increase utility by making things easier to move. But, to be fair, some items are just of lower quality.

I don't understand the particular obsession with buying man hours of work when most people value the utility of the item rather than the effort required, and outside art and craft or high status items I don't see this as anything new. In any case, with much manufacturing done in Asian countries the level of labour input may actually be quite high.

In terms of what people can own in terms of total goods, or even good quality goods, people are better off than in the 1950s. An example would be Paul McCartney who bought a relatively cheap Hofner bass, which still wasn't exactly cheap; you can now buy something of equivalent utility for a fraction of what he bought, in real terms.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Having used a heavy old push mower I can assure that whilst on small areas it is no slower than an electric it's much more effort and so on large areas, especially in hot weather, it takes longer. Even if an electric mower only lasts 2 years (personal experience suggests more like 5 to 7 years) even a good one is a fraction of the price so the break even point is 20 years or more on a pure cash basis, and closer to 25 if you include net present value.

For the record I think old push mowers are beautiful pieces of engineering and wonderfully sturdy but as much of value as an artefact as a mower. If you are purely looking for something to mow with and you are over 60 a lighter mower might be a better choice.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Plumpaquatsch]

Around 90% of them would actually mean it (you'd have thought that sociopaths would be a lower percentage of the population of parents than the general population, but apparently not).

Why would you think that? Having children is a sociopathic act when we're overpopulated.

Having no children is also sociopathic - because there would be no next generation of a society.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Plumpaquatsch]

Not to mention that nobody talks about positive effects of global warming...

Bullshit - people like you always talk about what they think could be positive effects of Global Warming. It's that they always also ignore any negative effects.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Plumpaquatsch]

Another argument is that sooner or later the men with guns are going to realize that the environment has to be protected. And then they will find that you muck up the numbers, and will have to be removed from the equation in order to make them come out correctly. Buh-bye!

Yikes! That's a wake up call right there. Always envisioned right-wing reactionary militants as the catalyzing agent for population reduction wars. Just goes to show that any authoritarian agents with power-centric ideologies they value above the sanctity of human life are dangerous as fuck.

And yet another reason for an armed populace.

Ahh, yes. He talks about poor men with guns realizing that the environment has to be protected - and you reply that's a reason why the "populace" aka "the rich" needs to be armed. Yeah, I get your argument all too well.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Than George W. Bush during his presidency? Yes, they are. Sure Republicans these days manage to stay right of Democrats but if you consider their policy on Muslims even Bush would be a pinko commie liberal compared to them.

I presume "they" who were burning Israeli flags were the liberal protestors the actual Democrat officials was giggling at and trying to ignore. Both parties have slid way to the right, to the point where neither party is recognizable.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sure they learned that a bigger tribe is better, so we've expanded from village against village to nation state against nation state. Progress!

Modern "cooperation" is nothing more than finding ways to screw-over the other "tribe" on the economic front because our clubs have grown so big that military conflict guarantees mutual annihilation. To think that a few thousand years can completely turn around millions of years of evolution is laughable.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

That may be, but there is now evidence that CO2 concentrations at 1000ppm or higher negatively impact human cognition by a very noticeable amount... once you get to that point, it decreases human cognition on average by about 21%! I don't know about you, but that scares the shit out of me.

Harvard Study

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[drinkypoo]

Yikes! That's a wake up call right there. Always envisioned right-wing reactionary militants as the catalyzing agent for population reduction wars. Just goes to show that any authoritarian agents with power-centric ideologies they value above the sanctity of human life are dangerous as fuck.

You don't get it even slightly, do you? It's going to be the right-wingers who kill you for threatening the environment. Only complete fucking morons think that AGW is invented. The wealthy know that it's real. That's why, for example, Trump is concerned about climate change threatening his golf course. One of the final acts of the Bush administration was to formally acknowledge AGW. The left will keep trying to keep everyone alive, fed, and the like right up until the planet becomes unlivable. The wealthy, on the other hand, have no compunctions about throwing you into the log chipper as the first step on the way to becoming soylent green.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

Hence why I said the only way to end it is to change the layout so the overlords have only barely more wealth and power than the underdogs - in that layout, they can't abuse their power because there isn't enough of it.

I have to agree with the analysis.

One of the ironies of life, is that I hear people speak of longing to go back to the 1950's. The contradiction is that they would not find their pecuniary condition to their liking, as the top tier wasn't as widely separated from the average Joe.

And in principle, I don't care how much money a person makes, in practice, this isn't the way to do it, because our present system has geared itself to award psychopathy.

A perfect example is the Epi-pen debacle. After Mylan raised it's epipen prices by 400 percent, and awarded its Psychopath in Chief Heather Bresch a 671 percent comp package raise in 2015, there was a bit of a revolt. A simple inexpensive device to manufacture, but a lifesaving device for some people, that raise and reward for it starts to resemble a shakedown more than the free market. So Ms Bresch can join the Martin Shkreli hall of shame.

Apparently they have reached their acceptance limit - and strangely enough, are forcing the steer toward a healthcare system more in line with civilized countries.

Regardless, their stock is taking a beating. I have a call into my people to divest in them - if I have any stock in them. Looks like others are doing the same.

This sort of seems like a roundabout reply, but it shows what some folks will do when the system gives them too much money and power.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, we don't do things like dig huge holes under our homes,

With a backhoe. Ever used a backhoe? It makes digging a five foot trench trivial.

install piping that must be highly corrosion resistant,

You may have heard of this stuff called plastic.

and fight the continuous buildup of mold and other biological growths.

It's a non-issue due to constant air movement. But I guess you're smarter than the various people who are actually doing this already.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[drinkypoo]

Having no children is also sociopathic - because there would be no next generation of a society.

That would be true only if you couldn't count on other people having children. I'm not buying into eugenics arguments either; stupid people have smart kids and vice versa. It looks like intelligence is more environment than genetics. We need some people to breed. We should (as a species) stop being shit to women who don't breed, so that the ones who really want to (and preferably those who are good at it) can make babies. People doing a shit job of making babies and subsequently doing a shit job of raising them is why we can't have nice things.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[khallow]

And there is a remarkable lack of evidence that you understand the issue of anthropogenic global warming well enough to make a qualified judgment about it.

If you want to discuss that. We can. There's a lot I don't know about the issue. But I can read scientific literature and it doesn't say what the various chicken littles in this thread have claimed.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if we don't have runaway conditions, we still need to keep our CO2 levels in check. Human cognition is significantly negatively impacted the higher it gets... Harvard Study

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh lord, not this tired argument again... The Earth is -NOT- over it's carrying capacity. Not even close. Ignoring giant wastes of living space such as golf courses, the designs of our cities and the vast distances between areas is poor usage of our land. Add in the fact that half of our food goes to waste when it instead could go to empty bellies. All of these arguments you hear are simple fear-based propaganda used to promote somebody's agenda so they can make money. It's always about the money and has been for at least a couple thousand years. That seems to be the real problem we have.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Some time in pre-history, humans realized that it was easier to steal food than produce the food yourself. If you know that people will steal your food, you no longer produce it. In this situation nobody produced food. However, humans that had no objection to steal also did have no objections to enslave other people to force them produce food so that they could steal it.

Per game theory, we know that entirely rational subjects will pick the most efficient option in the long run. So, to fix this undesirable behaviour, you have to make the work to produce food preferable over the other options. In this case, by making harder to steal and to slave people.

That's why humanity invented clubs and swords.

However, clubs and swords also make it easier to steal and enslave people. The size of the group also tends to determine which side will win in the fight.

That's why humanity gathered together in settlements and developed civilization. They also constructed castles and walls to gain terrain advantages that would further discourage attacks. That also explains why early civilizations tended to settle in the best lands for cultivation, while barbaric nomads that preferred pillage over hard work historically ended with the worst lands.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

A more apt comparison would be that drinking a glass of water from a 100000 litres tank in which an homeopath diluted two droplets of medicine has the same effect in your body than drinking a glass of water from a 100000 litres tank in which only one droplet was diluted.

Because believing that current CO2 levels has an effect on global temperatures requires you to believe in homeopathy. People that think that doubling CO2 will double the temperatures do not understand Amhdal's law.

This is all a scam, and it is clearly obvious when the "implemented solution" does not release less CO2 to the atmosphere than before, instead it generates more, but in exchange of that, large amounts of money move to mega-corrupt countries under the guise of "carbon credits".

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with droughts in California is not caused by global warming. That is just a very convenient excuse so that nobody points fingers at the real causes.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

You are seriously deluded. Trump is isolationist while Hillary and Obama are warmongers.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

This conversation makes me think of Alien Vs Predator. All we need is some huge Alien invasionnto distract us from climate change and terrorism.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I put it slightly differently. America has outgrown it's value. We are over valued in the trade market because of this. Too many dependents on the system, we can balance all the wealth in the US but that doesn't grow the value. We have too many needs and wants to support and there's literally no one left to sell our bullshit to. No other country can afford to buy our bullshit to support our expansive lifestyles. This is a US problem but may exist in other technologically connected countries as well. Many of us already work more than 50 hours a week to prop up people working 15 hours a week. We don't have enough production for everyone in the country to own their own yachts and vacation homes.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

If I am still below the nutritional intake there is zero or less than zero waste. The US has excess waste and less than "break even" exchange of food for labor. We are starving our own for the purpose of what appears to be population control.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Dread_ed]

Populace means the people living in an area. You added the connotation of "the rich" and erroneously so. Unless you define "wealth enough to own a firearm" as "the rich."

I saw his statement as the government/army, not the electorate. Your interpretation makes more sense as I read it, though it is hard to push that through the stereotype filter of typical parlance on this site. I mean really, did he just say "when all the hillbillies in flyover states start caring about the environment..."? Seems implausible to me.

As for an armed populace, I would prefer that all men are armed. The tyranny of government is the enemy. That criminals fear those they would prey on is also desirable. That an armed society is a polite society is a pleasant side effect.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"I consider them as alpha predators, just as I wrote, an opinion shared by many. If you domake a distinction between super predators and alpha predators, it is usually based on whether you define it as what a human does without the technology, we have developed, or with it."

Without technology we are actually pretty low on the food chain altogether. That would mean no rocks, pointy sticks, or traps. There are numerous predators in every climate on Earth that could kill us in that case. For that matter most large prey creatures could. We aren't particularly strong, we have no claws, and no teeth. We don't even reproduce quickly enough to have the advantage of being disposable individually and numbers. Without tool usage and organization aka technology the only advantage we really have is that in almost every other species being our size would indicate something far stronger than we are so predators would be inclined to go after what they think would be easier prey but I think that advantage would quickly disappear as predators discovered how weak and easy prey we are (without tools). Further we aren't fast enough or strong enough to catch much in the way of prey. Without technology man would be more of a scavenger than a predator but this is all fantasy because where other creatures evolved other strengths man evolved tool usage and some level of organization.

For the rest. Has it ever occurred to you that I am not ignorant and that I simply disagree with the common assessment and find it to be ignorant and dated? That your definition of death may simply be a bit unimaginative in my assessment? This concept is old, it views the world on a very macro scale and further arrogantly assumes that macro is more important than micro simply because we've largely dominated macro. Who are we to assume that being beneath (too small for) somethings notice makes one less significant than being above (too large for) somethings notice? Eating is nothing more than breaking down the components of a thing and if a thing is not broken down that thing is not truely dead as it may well be possible to revive it... at least it likely would be without the organisms you assess as being at the bottom of the food chain eating them first. To say they are not killing those creatures, including humans, is akin to saying you aren't killing if you take the life of someone who is unconcious or could survive with medical attention. These organisms are doing just that and it is they who deal the true death blow and they do it to eat which is predatory.

More so, you are ignoring the fact that many microbes and insects are in fact lethal even by common and unimaginative definitions of death. Often killing the host, consuming it in various ways in order to use its resources to multiply and reproduce. We use concerted efforts to take down some prey in addition to technology, you can't count that and fail to count the collective activity of a collection of smaller organisms which work as a community to kill and eat. Man has definitely failed to dominate on the insect scale let alone the microscopic scale. If you disagree then you won't have a problem with me taking some time to get a brown recluse colony well established in the walls of your home. Perhaps you'll be suprised when the exterminators only have a small chance of getting them out and you are forced to flee or die, especially when the females go looking for a warm host to plant their next crop of offspring in but I won't be surprised.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Dread_ed]

So what you are saying is that I was correct initially when I stated I always thought it was going to be right-wing reactionaries, but somehow when I misinterpreted his statement and expanded my viewpoint to include both right and left wing reactionaries and generally anyone who places ideology above the sanctity of human life, all of a sudden I don't get it...

See you said: "It's going to be the right-wingers who kill you for threatening the environment."

I said: "Always envisioned right-wing reactionary militants as the catalyzing agent for population reduction wars."

See, pretty similar. Also notice that I don't discount that idea, only add to it the possibility of another source of social breakdown. Yet somehow you declare I don't get it. Whatevs, man.

Personally, with all the "denier" talk, its the politically active environmentalists with language constriction as part of their policies that I really worry about. They sound like religious people, and we all know how dangerous and destabilizing they are.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[pastafazou]

Inconvenient facts? The sun was NOT quite a lot colder during the Cretaceous, in which CO2 levels are said to have been in the 2000-4000ppm range. Your cold sun theory is only valid for precambrian eons. By the Phanerozoic, solar output would only have been 3~4% less on average than our modern sun.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"Having used a heavy old push mower I can assure that whilst on small areas it is no slower than an electric it's much more effort and so on large areas, especially in hot weather, it takes longer."

I should have stated mechanical push mowers but I think your comments are based on that. I would agree that it is more effort and I won't comment on over 60 because I'm not there yet but I think despite being "harder" if you check the clock it still takes roughly the same amount of time relative to modern electric and gas push mowers. Larger commercial mowers and rider mowers are a whole different story as they are a different class of solution that isn't suitable on normal size lawns and are the right answer for large lawns. That said there are certainly lawns that fall inbetween.

I tried to give an example of what a mechanical push mower might look like if we applied modern engineering. The blades would be incredibly sharp and strong and we could engineer them to have flexible joints so they tend to deflect rather than break or chip. The whole thing would actually be too light for the job even built with the same durability and just like you need some weight on a safety razor or to keep a ship upright you'd need some mass strategically added. Since you have to do that anyway you can use a carbon fiber flywheel to be that weight. Modern carbon fiber flywheels can retain energy for years. In the same manner that electric cars use breaking to charge the batteries every time you stop or hit a snag or change direction the momentum can be absorbed by the flywheel and then released to make the pushing easier. You could even design them to charge the flywheel on breaking and steep enough downgrades only engage the flywheel when going uphill. Since a flywheel stores mechanical rotary energy it would actually be far more efficient in this application than the applications most people are looking to use them for where electrical energy is converted to mechancial and back again. This mower would require dramatically less effort to use than the old mechanical push mowers while having the same reliability. Using dry lubricants means the thing wouldn't clog up with in the same way the old ones did with all that oil and that grime also added quite a bit of resistance you had to overcome.

My underlying point wasn't really about the merits of the mower though. My point was that we've progressively moved toward cheaper goods, whether you think that is good or bad, and we've been so successful that having more goods today doesn't mean we are economically better off than those with fewer goods yesterday. The raw steel and hours of human life that go into producing those goods are the bottom line of your spending power, if a factory worker (just picking it because it's roughly the same effort and skill level today as in the 50's) can't purchase goods that amount to the same number of raw resources and labor hours as he could then, he actually isn't as well off economically because his purchasing power has been reduced.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

And why do you think there were Israeli flags burning outside, perchance?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The title listed here is inaccurate. Industrial-era warming is a subset of the warming that has taken place since the peak of the ice age roughly 20k years ago. When people misrepresent research with headlines like this it is a disservice to the debate... because there is a substantial record of multiple ice ages and warming periods tied to other factors. People can then obfuscate a serious issue with side debates about which one is more significant when there is at least one aspect of warming we can do something about... and another that may be inevitable without substantial climate control innovation. So can we be crisp with how we describe research versus claiming that climate change started 500 years ago?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[angel'o'sphere]

So I guess you all don't care as much as you think you do.
And I think, you are a mich bigger asshole and idiot than you think you are.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

3-4 percent of the heat of the sun is a massive difference.

The cretacious may be the odd one out - but then nothing alive today was alive then and it's unlikely any of the species on the planet today (which includes us) could have survived in those conditions.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Rakarra]

Because believing that current CO2 levels has an effect on global temperatures requires you to believe in homeopathy

No it doesn't. The effects of CO2 are well-known and well-studied in the lab. It doesn't require woo-woo or faith.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[HBI]

Ad hominem is the last refuge of the defeated.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[angel'o'sphere]

Air conditioners typically reject 20%± more heat to the environment than they remove from the cooled spaces.
  That is utter bollocks. I would be surprised if it is more than 2%. Perhaos you typoed?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Methadras]

You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.

And neither should you with your smug self-righteousness about what you believe is good for yourself and others.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

I'll respond to myself to clarify. A lot of people are arguing the merits the specific examples I choose. I think maybe the timelines, 50's vs now are too long for people to relate to. My point boils down to this, if the real cost of goods has dropped to 1/5th of what it was at a given point, being able to afford 4 of them now might mean a better quality of life but still means you are worse off economically vs those who could afford one before that reduction in costs because you'd need to be able to afford 5 and not 4 to be equally well off economically. For the purpose of determining how we are doing economically it doesn't matter if the things have more bells and whistles, it doesn't matter that people who couldn't afford one before can afford one now, etc. All those things just mean technology has progressed and improved the quality of life for those worse off economically, it doesn't mean they have more raw purchasing power.

Let me take it closer. In the late 80's and early 90's my parents were pizza hut store managers, my father the actual manager and my mother head assistant manager. We had a large 50-60" tv (massive thing) that cost $6k+, we had exotic birds and lizards that cost at least $10k, we had a tanning bed that cost $5k+, we had a telescope that cost about $3k, and a computer that cost $5k+, not to mention thousands of dollars for water beds, funiture, jewelry, the latest games and consoles as they came out, over 2000 movies, etc and two new cars. We could and did get any dental, vision, medical work we needed without substantial issue. My parents were shipped around a lot so we never owned the home but owning is cheaper than renting and they had no issues with credit so they could have afforded to own if it had made sense for them.

Do you think pizza hut managers at the store level could afford that today? No, no they couldn't. I've knew a store manager about 7 years ago who went at least a year with a plastic bag taped over the window of his beater because he couldn't afford to have it fixed. You couldn't afford these goods on that kind of salary today even if the numbers all matched because those goods die and have to replaced every few years, it isn't the cost of the goods, it's the burn rate required to maintain it. You'd need an income of double what my parents made to maintain an equivalent lifestyle today.

Consider the computer for a moment. A modern desktop computer is far more powerful of course and far cheaper. A modern replacement might be as little as $400. So you could buy 12 of them for what our computer cost. Do you think a chain restaurant manager can afford to have and maintain 12 reasonably current computers today? The only way they are even going to come close is if they maintain a high end gaming system and that is all they spend their money on like a mmo addict and even then they aren't going to be able to keep that up forever. We basically just used the thing to keep a list of our movies and track some finances. Someone touched it maybe once a month to update those things.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

"I consider them as alpha predators, just as I wrote, an opinion shared by many. If you domake a distinction between super predators and alpha predators, it is usually based on whether you define it as what a human does without the technology, we have developed, or with it." Without technology we are actually pretty low on the food chain altogether. That would mean no rocks, pointy sticks, or traps.

Indeed. But tell me, exactly how many humans are out there today, competing against other animals with only their bare hands? Making force amplifying tools is such an inherent part of what we do, that your completly unarmed human doesn't exist - at leaast as far as I know.

There are numerous predators in every climate on Earth that could kill us in that case. For that matter most large prey creatures could. We aren't particularly strong, we have no claws, and no teeth.

Which is why to me the argument over alpha predation is silly. Silly to the point that when a human is caught by another predator like a bear or lion, it makes worlwide news. One person out of 7 some billion. Because being completely unarmed is an unnatural state for humans. We have so many tools at our disposal.

We don't even reproduce quickly enough to have the advantage of being disposable individually and numbers.

That's because we traded off the make a million of us per female, and hope some survive, for our big brains and ability to use them. You don't produce intelligent beings by using teh reproduction strategy of locusts or coral.

Without tool usage and organization aka technology the only advantage we really have is that in almost every other species being our size would indicate something far stronger than we are so predators would be inclined to go after what they think would be easier prey but I think that advantage would quickly disappear as predators discovered how weak and easy prey we are (without tools).

But the tools are as integral a part of humanity as every other physical aspect. Few adult humans would, if set in a wilderness situation, not start immediately to build devices in order to survive, to catch food and defend ourselves. I certainly would. I'd start with caveman stuff and work my way upwards.

For the rest. Has it ever occurred to you that I am not ignorant and that I simply disagree with the common assessment and find it to be ignorant and dated?

That's because your assessment is just wrong. You take the ultimate end of living things, and make the process that degernerate them and return their building blocks to nature the alpha predators. This not only turns the concept of predation inside out, but also classifies scavenging as predation. It's pointless, because now that a worm is considered an alpha predator, an actual predator must be reclassified as something else, because predators do not gain their nutrients that way.

That your definition of death may simply be a bit unimaginative in my assessment?

After conversing with you, I can understand that you have a hellava lot more imagination than 99.9 percent of the human race. Imagining things does not make them correct.

This concept is old, it views the world on a very macro scale and further arrogantly assumes that macro is more important than micro simply because we've largely dominated macro.

That's because there are both macro and micro scales. I have no idea why you would consider classification of two different scalse as arrogance. It's a way to classifiy things. It was developed in way of explaining the world and how it operates.

Who are we to assume that being beneath (too small for) somethings notice makes one less significant than being above (too large for) somethings notice?

We're the people who make up the classification systems. One is l

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The ice sheet covering Manhattan Island was 3,000 ft deep when it started melting 20,000 years ago. Does anyone have data on factory and auto emissions at that time? Am working on a dissertation about fear mongering in the 21st Century.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Ol Olsoc]

You shouldn't presume to speak for all of humanity.

And neither should you with your smug self-righteousness about what you believe is good for yourself and others.

Perhaps the most pathetic troll all week.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Going by your previous posting history, you aren't one of them either.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[LinuxLuver]

But why do deniers hate their kids? That's the part I don't get. Particularly the cynical ones who make a living off denying climate change by taking money from the Koch brothers and others.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[NeoTubNinja]

To summarize, your arguments aren't any better than the points you are trying to defeat.

They are a lot better. He gave a reasoning for every answer. Even IF you were to consider his points invalid, he did a much better job of presenting his side. So they are objectively better.

Focussing on a single argument, even if I could argue on others:

Can you? You just said all of his arguments weren't any better. Why did you get lazy all of a sudden? Strut your stuff if it's so great. Tell us all the secrets. But alas, you probably can't. You picked up on one bullet point, wrongly too if I may say so, and then proceeded to disregard all of his points. Did you READ any of the parent he was criticizing? The points were an average of less than 10 words a point it looks like. The counter arguments were at least one full sentence apiece. Still objectively better no matter which side you fall on.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhhhhhh! Talk like that endangers the funding for our never-ending fear-mongering to increase political power......errrr......"research"!

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[shaitand]

"Indeed. But tell me, exactly how many humans are out there today, competing against other animals with only their bare hands? Making force amplifying tools is such an inherent part of what we do, that your completly unarmed human doesn't exist - at leaast as far as I know."

This seems an odd thing to say in response to "Without technology man would be more of a scavenger than a predator but this is all fantasy because where other creatures evolved other strengths man evolved tool usage and some level of organization." Or is it just that you are fond of beating down strawmen? Misconstruing my statements by ignoring context or their entirity might be an effective way to dupe a third party into thinking you've won an argument but nobody else is listening at this point and there is no value to be gained with rheotoric here.

"You don't produce intelligent beings by using teh reproduction strategy of locusts or coral."

You could actually argue that is exactly how you produce intelligent beings. You could just as easily view us as neuron nests rather than as singular intelligent beings. Sure you need all the components to work together but the same is true of a bee hive or ant colony. We used to think our neurons were more static and the brain was a fixed structure but in reality brain cells die, new ones are born, and just as we pass information from generation to generation they behave in a way that does the same on a smaller scale.

"That's because your assessment is just wrong. You take the ultimate end of living things, and make the process that degernerate them and return their building blocks to nature the alpha predators."

Which part of my brown recluse example is consistent with your argument? There is also validity in my contention that true death occurs when the information the composes the being becomes irretrievable even though my argument for insects and microbes does not depend on it, only the argument for a small subclass of them. Since the idea that clinical death is a moving arbitrary line we continue to push blows your mind I'm willing to set that aside altogether. A tiger lies hidden in the jungle, pounces when you walk by, and starts eating chunks of you or feeds those chunks to its young, it breaks those chunks down into component nutrients and uses them to build new cells. The "returning to nature" bit is really just the waste product in all the cases we've mentioned. A brown recluse does much the same thing. Granted, we mostly survive brown recluse bites but in this case death is beside the point, we are brown recluse food and not the other way around. Therefore they are the alpha predator. They are just one example.

"an actual predator must be reclassified as something else, because predators do not gain their nutrients that way"

A predator is really just a being that uses the body of another being as it's food source. HIV does this very effectively and is one of the top 10 causes of death. It would seem that we aren't particularly alpha relative to HIV as a predator either. Remind me again, what is the utility of the current definition of predator other than to draw a useless distinction between some lifeforms that consume the bodies of other lifeforms and others? The problem with isolating micro and macro scales is that the model is not uniform. The macro scale classifications were drawn before we knew much about the micro scale and understood that macro things are actually nothing more than the interactions of much simpler components. As we learn more and more about the pieces that actually make a lifeform tick the macro definitions become more and more abitrary rather than based on relevant pieces of information.

Super predator vs apex predator, it's most a distinction that is only useful for young boys arguing whose favorite beast is cooler. These things only serve to throw up mental obstacles to useful classification that draws equivalence to all lifeforms and looks at the various things they consume for nutrients as simple data points useful for building a balanced system or finding the imbalance in one. It leads us to draw false conclusions like that some lifeforms are more benign than others when all lifeforms consume coldly and greedily so they might live.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

#1: I would argue this is correlation and not causation. I would be willing to believe that disease and the latter-mentioned deserts are the big preventers of people living closer to the equator. These are able to be overcome somewhat with modern technology

#2: Agree that crops burn out or lack of good land. I will say that one can either use hydroponics or that there should be some more land closer to the poles that becomes more hospitable to agriculture as temperatures increase....to a point. Also, the land gained will not equal the land lost, as there is more area on a circle between 2 deg longitude close to the equator than 2 deg longitude close to the poles.

#3: Agree, see #2

#4: Agree, it takes more energy to cool than heat, as heat is a waste from any attempt to convert energy to work. This is why the creation of heat is the only energy usage we have that is 100% efficient. Cooling is no where near this efficient, and that waste heat still has to be expelled into the environment (making it hotter).

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[jwhitener]

Not to mention that nobody talks about positive effects of global warming... will increased atmospheric moisture turn the southwest or the sahara into arable land? We don't really know.

Except "they do" talk about it. Most studies conclude that yes, some areas will have more favorable climates, but that overall things will get worse. Mixed bad and good, but more bad overall.

Maybe when you say "nobody talks about (it)" you are referring to politicians and the media? Then yeah, those people tend to focus on the negatives, because it gets more attention.

But the "they" that matters, the scientists, they are very much studying the pro/cons of changing climate.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[jwhitener]

The earth has had climates in the past with CO2 concentrations 10x higher or more than current levels, and life was thriving.

Say it with me: rate of change, rate of change, rate of change....

Life can adapt to extreme conditions, but not as well when it is happening in a few hundred years instead of 10's of thousands of years.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

20% is about right.

Consider data centres. One with pretty standard cool doors and chiller operates at a PUE of around 1.2, I.e. the electrical load is 1.2 times the equipment load. That's the nearest equivalent in a data centre to a house. To get down to 1.02 you need to use immersion cooling, which isn't practical in a domestic situation as you'd drown.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[jwhitener]

People have been duped, they are buying cheap disposable, breakable goods,

It is sort of chicken vs egg problem.

Stagnant wages for the last 30 years means the average US citizen has a lot less buying power. Did people start making cheaper products because that is all Americans could afford?

Did people start demanding cheaper things, so those people effectively outsourced their own jobs overseas.... or did the outsourcing for higher profits happen first, and people ended up only being able to afford the cheap stuff.

I tend to think that people didn't do this to themselves. All the outsourcing and shipping jobs overseas in a race to the bottom was the natural result of how corporate goals and policies have changed over time to be fast-profit, quarter based decision making.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[angel'o'sphere]

No, it is not. And I'm not defeated anway as I did not take part in the discussion. I don't discuss with idiots and assholes.

And unlike other people I have no quarrel to call an asshole an asshole when I see one.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[hucker75]

You sound like a religious maniac. Oh wait, you are. All hail global warming. Get a life.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[haruchai]

Gah, made a few typos in that post. Need to do less multitasking, more proofreading.

should be "or not make such a horrible mess in the 1st place"

and thanks for the upvotes.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

I still THINK it is Global Cooling, not Global Warming. Earth is cooling just like the Sun is cooling. What we perceive as global warming is just a ricochet phenomenon. Just like the amplitude of a low guitar string goes very high that it looks invisible when the string is about to stop vibrating, while sound intensity drops down to zero. All these authors measure is global warming gases and infer immediately this translates into GLOBAL warming. I am no meteorologist but do know systems modeling. I do think the start of the Industrial Revolution also marks the start of a genocidal trend in Humanity. While Humanity increases in size, it also increases in massacres and other related phenomena. Particularly, since murder and massacres are a social phenomenon and the handling of corpses is also a social phenomena, not a **natural** phenomena, the assimilation of a higher rate of population change is the real cause behind greenhouse effect gases and similar physical phenomena measured as global warming. The effects of the biologicity of Humans in the environment as it is affected by technological change is not being adequately included in these models! Lots more can be said here, but I ll place two personal examples. This week outside temperatures were on the order of 30-33 C degrees during the day; there was a light rain with a heavy episode in the night, and temperatures dropped to around 10-16 C degrees in the morning! It was a swamp in the day, by the wee morning it seemed Winter obviated Autumn. If there was global warming, some rain should have not dropped temperatures so extremely. The other situation was in the subway. As temperatures outside were increasing, the subway inner temperatures were also increased above outside temperatures! This is totally social, one would have expected air conditioning but instead the place was warmed up. I think I suffered heat more intensely outside (global warming) because otherwise cool places were also heated so overall I had to accept more heat in my body than expected! Now temperatures are dropping so quickly that I again expect a colder than last year Winter, and this case my error is my health. Incidentally, an infrared thermometer I just purchased would systematically show temperatures were colder than announced in the news and this coincided with my personal appreciation. So now that Global Warming was so well sold, do not expect objectivity in all measures and very little point in developing ideas like these ones into elaborate models.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[MercTech]

Humans have systematically usurped the apex predator slot in so many ecologies. The really weird thing is that once humanity made it to the top; we get a movement to prevent hunting for game management. So many species have overpopulated to the point where ecological collapse is quite possible.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[MercTech]

Entropy losses increase the heat output of a heat pump higher than the cooling effect. The energy put in to pump the heat out comes out as heat too.
Add the paving over in the cities that increases the radiant heating of the air in a city; you can measure several degrees hotter air in a city than an equivalent forest or field in the same general area. Cities create thermals that have a local effect on cloud cover as well. i.e. Hot times in the city are less likely to get cooling rain.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Plumpaquatsch]

Having no children is also sociopathic - because there would be no next generation of a society.

That would be true only if you couldn't count on other people having children.

You mean the people you just called sociopathic because they have children. Good one.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[slashrio]

Well, it was about 'abstract people'.
Me too, when told about some suffering somewhere on the other side of the world of people who are portrayed by the news as 'adversaries of peace and democracy', tend to not care too much about it. But when I see someone I don't know in my street being on fire, I feel a lot of empathy.
So it's not as linear (and despicable) as you seem to see it.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[slashrio]

Last time I checked, the amount of land that is under water is less than 30 years ago (at time of writing down for maintenance).

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[slashrio]

What went wrong with that link?
Ah, that's better. :)

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[toddestan]

Or just insulate the house better. When the temperatures are in the 40's - 50's around here, my house stays comfortable just by the people in it and the waste heat from appliances and electronics. I really don't even need a furnace until the outside temperatures are cold enough that a heat pump (that vents into the outside air) starts becoming ineffective.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump claims to be an isolationist today, tomorrow he wants to nuke anyone who challenged him.

Remember, it was Bush/Cheney who invaded Iraq on a lie. Obama and Democrats sucked in when they took over.

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

"a row of thunderheads running around the world that can rise so high that they once batted an Airbus 330 out of the sky at full cruising altitude (Rio-Paris)"
Assuming that's a reference to Air France Flight 447
* the aircraft crashed after temporary inconsistencies between the airspeed measurements – likely due to the aircraft's pitot tubes being obstructed by ice crystals – caused the autopilot to disconnect, after which the crew reacted incorrectly and ultimately caused the aircraft to enter an aerodynamic stall from which it did not recover.
Which is rather different from an A330 being "batted" out of the sky. What's your evidence for your version?
(Posted as AC because I moderated earlier in this thread.)

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[Eunuchswear]

Who confuses a Jordanian flag with a Palestinian one and thinks there is something wrong with the Jordanian one?

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[pastafazou]

3-4% is NOT a massive difference when you're using the excuse of a sun that is "quite a lot colder than it is now" to explain away CO2 concentrations 10x or more higher than today. And it's not just in the Cretaceous that CO2 levels were much higher, there are other time periods as well that don't fit the flawed narrative.

Re:Pierson's Puppeteers

[silentcoder]

And in none of them did, or could, humans (or any mammals) have evolved or survived

Re: Pierson's Puppeteers

[Anonymous Coward]

The HVAC pushes the heat back outside at an additional energy cost. A SEER 12 air conditioner moves 12 BTU using 1 W-h energy. Since 1 W-h = 3.41 BTU, to move 12 BTU you are actually impacting the environment by 15.41 BTU, which is an additional 28%. A SEER 16 air conditioner adds 21% more energy to the environment. In a big city it adds up fast.

Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not Reddit, FFS!

How about an article on the dozens of predictions made by climate scientists that never ended up happening? The ones like " No more snow by 2012" etc?

Why always toe the line?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[bestweasel]

(+2, Interesting) after 23 minutes. What is it about global warming that drives Slashdotters so crazy? We don't see the same anti-science attitude here about, say, evolution.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

you stupid idiot

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

slashdot gets a Rothschild kickback everytime they post unscientific articles

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[geekpowa]

Paraphrasing: Why do so many people in a science / engineering / IT tech focused community question / challenge / reject something I personally ernestly believe in?

Why indeed?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[bestweasel]

My belief is that there's an overwhelming consensus amongst scientists who are experts in this field that man-made climate change is real and worth taking action to mitigate.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

AGW ain't about science.
It's politics and extortion.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[quantaman]

This is not Reddit, FFS!

How about an article on the dozens of predictions made by climate scientists that never ended up happening? The ones like " No more snow by 2012" etc?

Why always toe the line?

Yeah! Why isn't there an article blaming scientists for all the bizarre predictions you imagined them making?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cool. There was also a total consensus about The Aether, the Earth-Centric universe, Global Cooling, and all kinds of other obviate true science fact.

I believe in global warming, but I'm not so arrogantly fucking full of myself as to assume 100 percent truth, or to insult other people who aren't convinced.

It isn't their fault they aren't convinced. It's yours. Convince them, or admit that you don't have a convincing argument.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Falconhell]

Paraphrasing further, why do such people as totally unqualified in the field as Slashdotters make up such dumb conspiracy theories so they can ignore the actual experts, in favour of a bunch of thoroughly debunked propaganda spread by denialist oil industry shills?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[geekpowa]

Nice strawman.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[WindBourne]

That is not a belief. That is fact.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Karmashock]

Because too many of them virtue signaled on AGW without understanding the science and now they feel like if Al Gore is wrong they're somehow stupid.

Don't get me wrong, some of them are genuinely stupid people... but there's a lot of misplaced trust, lazy thinking, appeals to authority gone rampant... and various other things.

But at the end of the day, their egos got committed to the "cause"... and now they just don't want to feel stupid.

You can evaluate this pretty easily by actually querying them on the science... most people that swear up and down one way or the other don't actually know anything beyond what children are taught in 1st grade. It boils down to happy cartoon suns with squiggly sun rays. Start querying methodology... and suddenly they don't want to talk about it anymore... which is literally where the actual discussion starts... consistently bailing at the start of something that is professed to be understood and which there are professed strong opinions about... is suggestive.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Opportunist]

Hey! I made popcorn just for this occasion, don't ruin it now!

Seriously, there's very little on /. these days that produces nothing but incoherent rants where you needn't engage your brain to enjoy it, let me have my popcorn flick, will ya? We'll return to your highbrow entertainment in the next thread.

I know finding amusement in the bickering of low lives is a guilty pleasure, but let me indulge at least sometimes.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Opportunist]

Evolution doesn't mean that someone would have to haul his fat ass on foot down to the mail box instead of driving his SUV there.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Opportunist]

Odd. A lot of religious nutters ask the exact same question.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Opportunist]

I believe in data. If I still gave a fuck (which I don't because, well, I can't do jack shit about it anyway, it's like worrying about crashing with a plane when you're just a passenger, why bother investing energy into something you cannot influence?), I'd ask both sides to present their data, then draw my conclusions.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[zapadnik]

"Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsiblity to bring that about?" - Maurice Strong,

Your belief is wrong. Consensus means nothing and is not part of the Scientific Method. You have been hoodwinked by a scam. I don't ask you to admit this to anyone except yourself. And learn why the CAGW alarmists are doing what they are doing, and do NOT care about the actual science:
http://green-agenda.com/

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[zapadnik]

The real shills come from the CAGW camp, who are working towards a planetary government which is not a democracy. Here are their own words:
http://green-agenda.com/

Do the sheep know they are being prepared for culling? do you?

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[zapadnik]

Good post. Furthermore, even honest scientists are bamboozled because the source data is being corrupted. Deliberately !
http://green-agenda.com/

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Opportunist]

Because it's easier on their mind.

Let's be honest here, if we wanted to do something about global warming, we'd have to change our way of life. And we'd have to change it big time. We (Europe and the US) use up more resources than the rest of the globe combined. Yes, including China. But they're trying to catch up. Should they ever reach us, it's game over anyway. That this isn't even sustainable in terms of resource usage, not to mention waste production, is, at least to me, obvious. If you disagree, do so, I don't give a shit.

So if you admit that global warming is a reality, you can do two things: Either feel guilty about continued overusing resources or reduce your consumption. Either is not really something people want to do. The first makes you feel bad (and we all know how troublesome this is to the fragile souls of our millennials) and the latter inconveniences you.

So it's easier to just wish it away and say it ain't happening.

Personally, I found a third way. I simply don't give a shit about it anymore. Yes, I'm convinced that global warming is real, the data I have available points to yes. But so be it. I won't live another 50 years, so I don't give a fuck.

If you want to save your planet, go ahead. Hell, I'll even move along. But don't expect me to waste any more of what's left of my time on trying to convince people that they have a duty to their kids. If you don't give a shit about your kids, how could you expect me to?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[AchilleTalon]

There was a consensus around the Y2K bug either. I mean, a consensus isn't by itself a proof of anything. A consensus hold until another one replaces it. Consensus are not facts.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[serviscope_minor]

And a lot of people did a hell of a lot of work in a hurry. Y2K bugs were found *everywhere*. A heroic effort went into fixing them before Y2K rolled over. I'm not sure what your point is.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[serviscope_minor]

Not to the same extent, but there's been a fairly solid cadre of evolution denialists too on slashdot for a long time now. It's a smaller bunch though.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can evaluate this pretty easily by actually querying them on the science

OK then, big shot. You're preaching to the overwhelmingly loudest voice here on slashdot by claiming that global warming isn't real. You just claiming that the people who disagree with you can't support their side with science, can you live up to the same criteria?

Your post had exactly zero facts in it to support your argument against global warming. Do you have any?

(and how amusing that the captcha here this time is "quagmire" - indeed you have put yourself into quite a quagmire)

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[segedunum]

My belief is that there's an overwhelming consensus amongst scientists who are experts in this field that man-made climate change is real and worth taking action to mitigate.

You certainly can get consensus when you have a large pile of grant money to dole out. On the other side of the coin you've got fossil fuel burners with their own self-interest who would love to have those subsidies for themselves. We, the public are surrounded by charlatans and it's no wonder people are distrustful of 'science'. Is global warming, climate change or global weirding (or whatever they call it this week) happening and is it caused by man? Entirely possible, but sadly we're not going to find out with this load of hocus pocus claptrap.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[bfpierce]

Probably because those things you're talking about aren't predictions, they're possibilities.

When people write articles and papers they'll bring out something like 'there's some models that predict this with a certain % liklihood'.

Idiots like you will take that as gospel, when it is not a hard and fast 'prediction', it's a possibility.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[rickb928]

When did it become anti-science to base your opinion on actual data? The warmists have been editing and deleting temperature data for decades, and this is well documented. If you've rejected that evidence, fine, please don't insult me by claiming the evidence is either invalid or nonexistent. And I am not your Google. It is out there to examine. Pretending there is no evidence of warmist manipulation of their data is just a choice. Wrong, but a choice.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

There used to be a consensus that if you dropped to spheres of the same size but one heavier that that the heavier one would fall faster. Guess what?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your claim is wrong. Consensus means EVERYTHING and is the entire reason why science PROGRESSES and it's the entire point of WHY we use the scientific method.

YOU do not go and prove gravity pulls all things to the earth at the same acceleration rate, YOU ACCEPT THE CONSENSUS. And then you use that CONSENSUS to devise a new device that uses gravity to do some work. Without consensus, you CANNOT accept any science and must instead do EVERY SINGLE EXPERIMENT YOURSELF. And, having done so, the result CANNOT be used by ANYONE ELSE, because THEY have to do EVERY SINGLE EXPERIMENT themselves.

Without consensus, science could not possibly advance.

But you don't care about progress, only your tiny ideological bubble being preserved against reality.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a consensus around the Y2K bug either.

The consensus among informed people who worked on the relevant systems was that it was a serious problem, and it needed quite a lot of work to fix it. So we worked on it systematically, fixing and testing system software and applications (over about 5 years on and off in my case). As a result serious problems were avoided.

So, what evidence do you have that this was not the case?

If it's not too difficult for you to understand, try to work out this one example: What would happen if just about every banking system in the world tried to calculate interest for loans and savings over the millennium change, when this relied on the difference between two dates with years stored as two, not four digits, with the original code having been written with the assumption that as time passes date values only ever increase so the difference between two such dates is always positive? What do you think the consequences of every such system crashing or (worse) producing wildly incorrect results, effectively corrupting the databases/files, all within a very short time? And the same sort of thing happening in just about every critical computer system that does any sort of date comparison?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't make them right. Especially when you consider how politicized the whole thing is, and how quickly the term "denier" gets tossed around (Hell, the very first POST in this "discussion" has it!), suddenly it looks less like science and more like religion.

I agree with one of the sensible posters above: Reduce pollution and emissions as much as we can, drive toward clean energy and sustainable living. But enough with this "We're all going to die" rhetoric, it's been proven wrong over and over again already.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that site really the best you can do? (If you want a good laugh and to see where this guy's coming from, have a look at the links from the above site, in particular this one: http://watchmanspost.com/datesandpeople/oneworldgovt.html ). Appears to have been produced by 12 year old in the myspace era, and as for the content, it's absolutely precious.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your lunacy is really starting to show now. I encourage everyone to go to the link above, and make sure you check out all the other websites it links to!
Good for a laugh if nothing else.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not really a straw man. He is dismissing your "question / challenge / reject" of AGW as based on a conspiracy theory, because he assumes you have no actual expertise in this field. It might be an assumption, but it is likely correct that you not only do not have any expertise, but also are being influenced by right wing politics. They are, after all, much more vocal and strident in their anti-AGW opinions, kinda like you.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[swillden]

My belief is that there's an overwhelming consensus amongst scientists who are experts in this field that man-made climate change is real and worth taking action to mitigate.

My belief is that whether or not the warming is man-made is almost completely irrelevant. It's clear that the planet is warming, and it's clear that this is going to make our lives more difficult, meaning it's going to consume huge amounts of labor and resources to adapt. Therefore, we should absolutely be taking action to mitigate the change, as long that action consumes less labor and resources than would be required to adapt to the change (which argues for pretty aggressive action, since adaptation is going to really costly, e.g. relocating a large portion of the human population).

The source of the warming is only relevant because it may point us towards some possible mitigation strategies. We should not, however, focus only on ameliorating the causes. Other, more direct, climate manipulation strategies should be seriously investigated.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[budgenator]

So amongst people who have a vested interest in in continued research grants to study a a supposedly apocalyptic catastrophe, there is a consensus that there will be an apocalyptic catastrophe that requires research grant money for them to study; of course there is.

Now that Global Warming has turned into "Globally it got warmer, but now it may have stopped getting warmer", the alarmists are crying the old "It's worse than we thought" mantra by dredging up some obscure proxy data to interpret, and published it in some crony reviewed magazine. Of course the part they forgot is it wasn't that long ago they told us the the anthropogenic part of global warming was only theoretically possible since 1950, so warming a century before that is either another failed prediction that weakens confidence in the models, or this study is whacked.

It's pretty clear to anyone with half a brain that the extremists on both sides are religious zealots, and you don't have to read very many of the climatgate emails too realize that the moral compasses of high profile Climatologists are off true north.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[bfpierce]

That's because it actually existed and people did a SHIT TON of work to solve it prior to it being an issue.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Statistics and computer models are not science. None of the theories for global warming or climate change can survive the scientific method process. Why is this hard for people to understand?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[budgenator]

That is one of the problems, there is little data any more, it's all been adjusted, normalized and gridded into "data product".

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[budgenator]

There were problems and they were either fixed or worked around, but the problems didn't seem to match the level of hysteria in the media. I had big problems then, our software vertical went belly up, so I got drafted into installing the software updates into our OpenUnix server that didn't have any graphics or networking installed, so I had to download them from SCO and dd them over to floppies on a linux machine yada yada yada. It was hairy but planes weren't falling from the skies either..
Likewise NY is supposed to be underwater now, the Arctic was supposed to be ice-free last year yada, yada, yada and it's not.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not both?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[serviscope_minor]

If you're going to judge things based on the nuttiest reporting in the press, then there's nothing I can do for you.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anne Thwacks]

Statistics and computer models are not science? And what you say is? on what basis? What do you suppose science is? The collected thoughts of Wuzel Gummage?

They are testable, have been tested, and have past the tests within known limits (which are not exactly close tolerance, I agree), and the results are published, and are available for inspection, are inspected, etc. You clearly lack the skill to do this yourself. However, that does not mean that other people are not sufficiently skilled in the art.

Why is this hard for people to understand?

Because unlike you, loads of people have travelled around the world to a wide variety of places, and report back that the experiences of the people living there confirms the data reported by satellite measurements, etc, and those involved in activities like fishing and farming, which are seriously affected by the climate report that their own experience is one of change over several generations. The models may not be correct to two decimal places - but the sign points in the right direction for sure.

While I accept that GW is being used as a tool for corrupt political funding, that is because the corrupt know which side of the bread has the butter on and if it was global cooling, they would be seeking taxes to fund heating projects instead.

Were you born yesterday, or do you just want us to think that?

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[thinkwaitfast]

. I simply don't give a shit about it anymore.

That's my position. Oddly enough, people hate you more for this view than the others.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[thinkwaitfast]

Sadly it's not just /., but all of the internet, at least as far as I've gone. And I grow my own popcorn :)

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Karmashock]

Nice attempt at a goal post move. The issue is not GW but AGW and the the linked concepts of carbon caps and carbon taxes.

As to facts... its a big complex issue with many sub-subjects.

Do you want to go anywhere in particular?

Because if you want me to sperg on the issue, I can do it... and you're going to make an appeal to authority, I'm going to laugh at it, and then we're going to part with both of us throwing insults.

That's what happens.

So can you promise not to make an appeal to authority? Because if you can't make that promise... then I can promise how this is going to end.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Karmashock]

The price of mixing science with politics is that you're left with only politics... the science is gone.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[david_thornley]

Since there's varied sources of funding all over the world, it will take more than one large pile of grant money to get consensus, and there's going to be enough climate scientists out there to blow the whistle if they find anything unscientific.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[david_thornley]

Among scientists who don't have a vested interest in continued research grants that will only support news of an apocalypse (where do you even apply for such grants), there's the same consensus.

It may have stopped getting warmer? Sorry, the old intellectually fraudulent tactic of picking 1998 as your base doesn't work any more. Every month this year has been measured as the warmest on record. It's getting warmer, buddy, and shows no signs of stopping.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[david_thornley]

Science, as a whole, is capable of correcting itself. There are ways of dealing with scientists who take stands against the evidence, and it isn't happening, because the evidence supports climate science. Just because you're American, and have paid attention to Gore, doesn't mean the majority of climate scientists are.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is not GW but AGW

Well, the headline for this article specifically says Global Warming without specifically mentioning whether or not it is caused by human activity.

But if you want to slice it up that way, we can do that, too. Are you disputing whether or not global warming itself is occurring, or are you only disputing whether or not there is a human cause to it?

Either way, you haven't provided any facts to support such a claim. Do you have any facts that either support an idea of global warming being completely independent of human activity or global warming not actually existing at all? Because there are certainly plenty of facts supporting global warming as a global trend, and plenty of solid models showing how human activity has changed the atmosphere drastically enough to bring about climate change.

You certainly don't have to accept the facts if you don't want to - nobody can force you to stop being ignorant - but if you think you have facts to support your beliefs, it would be really interesting to see them.
 
 

So can you promise not to make an appeal to authority?

That is a strange accusation to level, there. Depending on how you view appeal to authority you could potentially attempt to use that as a way to dodge any information that was not personally gathered by the person presenting it to you. It is worth noting that such a dodge goes both ways though in that you would be expected to show your own data - and well beyond just "hey it snowed in Texas last winter hence global warming is bullshit" - in order to not yourself fall into that trap.

So again, do you have any facts to support your beliefs regarding GW/AGW? So far you haven't shown any.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Opportunist]

Because it pisses off both groups. The ones that try to "do something" about global warming because it shows them that their efforts are essentially moot as long as those that COULD do something about it don't give a shit, the ones that deny the existence of global warming hate you simply for showing them what they themselves are and do not want to see.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[jwhitener]

Let's be honest here, if we wanted to do something about global warming, we'd have to change our way of life. And we'd have to change it big time.

Proof. You people that are basically saying "ahh its too hard to change, we'd have to give up too much" need to provide some proof or just be quiet. It is a constant talking point with zero evidence backing it up. In fact the opposite...

Countries that are more aggressively moving to clean energy are not experiencing painful reductions in lifestyle. We have tons of real world f'ing examples of it being easy to change. Why are you ignoring them?

In fact, we have tons of real world examples of countries moving faster than us to clean energy, and it stimulating their economy with new construction jobs, new infrastructure jobs, etc..

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Opportunist]

Yes, but clean energy is (at least now) more expensive than burning fossil fuel. I live in a country that made such a push and yes, you're right, my way of life changed not by one bit. Then again, I can afford the +20% energy bill due to subsidies for wind and solar power.

So, in a way, you're right: You needn't change your way of life. If you can afford it.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that too, I can't do "jack shit". And then a good friend pointed out that the West's habit of consuming meat every day was forcing habitat destruction, poverty and climate change. So I realised that I can contribute with a half dozen other "new vegetarians" to reduce demand for this product.
It isn't much, but it's not nothing.
But I can't tell anyone, because they think I'm self-righteous for not insisting on bacon, ham, sausage and steak all the time. There's a lot of passive-aggressive omnivores out there who don't want you to change, because it means that they could change too, if they gave a damn, and they don't like being reminded that they don't give a damn, because they paint themselves into an immorality corner. If they just let me live my way without beating me up about it, it would be cool.
But my "sacrifice" remains permanently anonymous, and no one else finds out about it.
Think ...
it's really not that hard.

If you want to change the world, take a look at yourself.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This third path of yours is called sociopathy. You're unwell. Let me demonstrate. There's a bullet somewhere with your name on it, maybe, and you think someone else should care about it. How does it feel now to be ignored, dismissed, overlooked? Your life hangs in the balance. So there's hypothetically a bullet with the opportunist's name on it, and we all don't give a fuck, and he's going to whine that we're breaking the social contract by not protecting him and chasing down this threatening anonymous coward. And still no one gives a fuck.
If you want to live on "our" planet, with "our" kids, then you better not cross us too often.
You've been acculturated to think that looking ONLY after yourself is the right thing to do. Who by, one can only hazard ...

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Opportunist]

Mostly by those that I tried to look after. I was actually trying to get people to understand that we're heading for disaster, only to notice that I'm wasting my resources doing so. Then I realized that I do not have kids and that I will not experience the worst effects of our ignorance in my lifetime and from there it was only a rather small step to not giving a fuck anymore.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[shutdown -p now]

What's truly amazing is that AGW is apparently now somehow related to social justice, in the minds of some people.

Although I guess that's the expected end result of increasingly paranoid conspiracy theories that are needed to explain all the things that do not work as they want.

Re: Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Rakarra]

So amongst people who have a vested interest in in continued research grants to study a a supposedly apocalyptic catastrophe, there is a consensus that there will be an apocalyptic catastrophe that requires research grant money for them to study; of course there is.

Conspiracy theory, and it's just as nutty as the other conspiracy theories that I hear about.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Karmashock]

Being American doesn't really matter when the fee fees of people all over the world got involved, David.

The long and the short of it is that there are attempts by alarmists to exaggerate the issue beyond the evidence of science to push policy objectives for political reasons.

When that happens, the science is corrupted because it becomes politics and not science. The price of mixing politics with science is that you just have politics. Its like mixing shit with ice cream. You just have shit now. No one is eating that unless they want to eat shit. And I don't want to eat shit, David.

Now if you want to talk about this in an unshitted version... we can do that. But the consensus argument has been widely debunked as politics. And so have the extreme consequence predictions. What we have left are far more moderate conclusions which is all the science actually supports. On this you are not going to be able to base a grand climate change holy war.

So... what more need be said? The climate change crusade is canceled. Go home.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Karmashock]

Ad hominem is ad hominem is ad hominem. Who said what is not material to an argument unless that person is personally relevant to the issue... and since no person will be relevant to an issue of global climate I don't really care who said what so much as what was said.

In any case... we can engage on the issue if you want. Lets go through it. What do you think I have to prove? All I'm arguing at this point is political contamination which is self evident... but I'm happy to provide evidence of such if you're really determined to question the existence of the sun in the sky.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The question that you did not answer is the key to this discussion moving forward, so I will repeat it on behalf of the person who posted it earlier:

Are you disputing whether or not global warming itself is occurring, or are you only disputing whether or not there is a human cause to it?

Your more recent statement of

All I'm arguing at this point is political contamination which is self evident... but I'm happy to provide evidence of such

Seems to suggest that you are trying to dispute whether or not there is a human contribution to climate change, but if you have an interest in an honest discussion on the matter you should be able to give an honest answer to the earlier restated question.

That said, if you really think there is "political contamination" and that it is so very "self evident", it should be trivial for you to provide factual support for that idea. So please, provide those facts. At the very least we should be able to agree that claiming to have facts is not the same thing as actually showing those facts.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

My answer was thus a response to why a PERSON would hold a position such as that despite being proven wrong repeatedly.

No, your answer - and indeed you yourself - was an EXAMPLE of a person holding a position in spite of being proven wrong repeatedly.
 
 

if you want to have a discussion about AGW... we can do that too...

Other people can. You, however, have shown yourself to be completely incapable of having a discussion on such a matter. You have been repeatedly asked for facts to back up your statements on the matter - for well over a week now - and not once have you provided a single fact in support of your view.

You are more than welcomed to hold your own beliefs on the matter, but you show yourself to be terribly underqualified to discuss the matter if you can't respond directly to a request for factual information. Not only have you failed terribly to respond to requests for facts, you have shown repeatedly a tendency to sling insults at the questioner instead.
 
 

So do you want to discuss my original point

The person who needs to answer that question is you. Multiple times people have asked you about your original claim and not once have you provided any factual support of it.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Karmashock]

So you have no ability or interest in having a substantive discussion and thus any presumed intellectual superiority or integrity presumed on your part is invalid.

You just want to shit sling. Which is fine. Just know that you're seen for what you are... you were given every opportunity to be better than that... you failed.

Re:Stop it with the SJW crap!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Still waiting for facts ... still not seeing any. Who is slinging shit here? I've heard that lower mammals can't tell when they are looking at themselves in a mirror, but I figured such mammals wouldn't be able to type...

Ahh, science

[SuperKendall]

Making the data fit the narrative since 1970.

I wonder when exactly we just start calling all science scientology? Vastly more accurate, what with the e-Meter like shifting uses of temperature data that has been so stretched and re-formed it's kind of a digital taffy now.

Re:Ahh, science

[fustakrakich]

Well, it was kinda warm today...

Re:Ahh, science

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Except here they have it ass backwards with cause and effect, and need to read "The Critique of Pure Reason" from Immanuel Kant.

The industrial revolution was caused by the start of global warming. Before that, humans were huddling under blankets, complaining about how cold it was. When temperatures rose, the folks said, "Hey, it's warm outside, let's go out and build a factory or something!"

Re:Ahh, science

[quantaman]

Making the data fit the narrative since 1970.

Sneaky buggers.

As if all the math and calculations wasn't bad enough.

Now they've got the damn atmosphere in on the scam!

Re:Ahh, science

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah deniers, still desperately flinging FUD at the data they don't like, ignoring the data they can't smear, and of course never producing any data of their own.

Re:Ahh, science

[Anonymous Coward]

Next they'll have the sea levels and glaciers behind them as well!

Re:Ahh, science

[Barsteward]

jeez, yeah, all those thousands of scientists colluding to fool you. i bet you don't believe man landed on the moon either as that was a big conspiracy too

Re:Ahh, science

[Mashiki]

Let's be realistic, there's lot of places especially here in Canada where there are no more weather monitoring stations. Then there are also lots of weather stations in bad places, seen plenty of those out in Alberta and in Ontario. My personal favorites? The one that was placed next to the 401(one of the busiest highway systems in the world), nothing like a pile of vehicle exhaust and hot asphalt to give accurate temperatures. The other, was out in Alberta which was in a valley, next to a river fed from mountain water run-off(roughly 4m away), which spent 2/3's of the day in the shade of a pine tree forest. Then there's all the weather stations that have only existed since 1980 or 1973ish when we had that series of really harsh winters and glaciers were growing at an incredibly fast rate.

Re:Ahh, science

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

But even in the far away places the tempererature is rising.

So even if you remove all places where cities may have influenced it - nothing change - the world is still getting warmer.

So scientists has looked at this and the status is unchanged. The world is warming.

Re:Ahh, science

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as far off as you're trying to joke.

Civilization is perched awkwardly between different threats. In tropics, wildlife becomes a constant rival. In colder climates, simply finding food and staying warm can be enough of a time investment to get nothing else done. However, those people suffering the cold of winter will spend much of that time thinking, and trying to come up with new ideas to make the bitter cold more tolerable (well, some will, others just have sex a lot). When the contemplative are granted a slightly longer summer or a slightly less painful winter, they have a chance to put their ideas into action.
Every major expansion of civilization and technology that can be cleanly charted against local temperatures did so during a warming period. Rome had one, the Renaissance had one, the industrial revolution had one, and records are less clean further back.

It is important to remember the other side, the aggressiveness of nature in warmer climates. If this warmer period does not end within two centuries, it is entirely reasonable to expect that even the force of human urbanization and sterilization efforts will not hold back the tide of insect and smaller threats. A plague to end an era of prosperity instead of a freeze. What happens beyond either is hard to predict in detail, but it will involve survivors finding a way to hide and endure the dangers until things grow more pleasant for another period of civilization.

Re:Ahh, science

[Opportunist]

Did they place it next to the 401, or did they place the 401 next to the weather station?

There are a few weather stations in my home country (and during my studies I had to deal with them a lot), some of them having been in place for centuries, and many of them in rather unfortunate positions, mostly because when they were established it was a necessity to put them close to where people lived (so you could get there on foot), without considerations for projects that were decades or centuries in the future.

Moving those weather stations isn't a good idea either, though, because by taking readings where they are, you get a very good instrument for examining change over time. Moving the weather station would destroy that ability.

Of course such changes in the environment have to be taken into account. If you had a weather station in the middle of a sunny, grassy hill and a huge skyscraper is built in front of it so it's now permanently in the shadow of said building, it doesn't mean that the average temperature dropped by 5 or even 10 degrees Celsius.

Environmental impact on the weather stations have to be taken into account!

Re:Ahh, science

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're after some raw data, the UK's Met Office makes available historic data from its stations, many of which are ~100y old and in the middle of nowhere just as much now as when they were first installed. e.g. Braemar in the Scottish highlands.

Re:Ahh, science

[c]

My personal favorites? The one that was placed next to the 401(one of the busiest highway systems in the world), nothing like a pile of vehicle exhaust and hot asphalt to give accurate temperatures.

You mean the weather stations which are part of the Ontario road weather network, installed specifically to get weather information along Ontario roads?

<sarcasm>Yep, that was poor planning... </sarcasm>

The other, was out in Alberta which was in a valley, next to a river fed from mountain water run-off(roughly 4m away), which spent 2/3's of the day in the shade of a pine tree forest.

A provincial forestry weather station. Odds are it's in that specific spot because of either accessibility, power, or it's a known problem spot.

There's a lot of unofficial weather stations out there (easily 3-5x more than official stations), but they're usually installed for specific purposes (forestry, mining, health and safety, transport, etc). They don't have the same constraints as more official stations simply because the data they generate doesn't matter in the big picture.

The installations of official weather stations, in particular the ones which feed into climate models or get used for aviation, is a hell of a lot more rigorous.

Re:Ahh, science

[c]

Did they place it next to the 401, or did they place the 401 next to the weather station?

They placed it next to the 401. There's a whole network of them specifically for getting road weather information. You can see some results at http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/engli...

A number of provinces in Canada have something similar. The GP is just unaware that there's actually uses for weather stations beyond climate modelling...

Re:Ahh, science

[moeinvt]

Predicting the future is not "science", even though the people making the predictions might have scientific credentials.

The models that the so-called "climate scientists" create are based on curve fitting techniques which attempt to correlate observed data with a hypothesized cause/effect relationship with other observed data.

            "Global Warming" = aX +bY +cZ ...

The scientists use the historical data to find the values of the coefficients a,b,c and then predict the magnitude that a change in X,Y,Z will have on "Global Warming". These models have led to all sorts of predictions that have been proven false. The scientists are constantly adjusting their models as new observations are accumulated. They also massage the historical data to fit the models in order to suggest that the model would have had predictive value in the past "If we massage the data accumulated before year 2000 and apply our model, it correctly predicts climate observations made between 2001 and 2015" etc.

These are the exact same mathematical techniques that economists use to make predictions about how something like GDP would be affected by tax policy, government spending, infrastructure spending, oil prices, etc. etc. Very few people would suggest that economists are doing "science".

Re:Ahh, science

[bfpierce]

You realize of course that it's possible for both things to be true right?

Industrial Revolution caused by the start of global warming (end of the minimum, little ice age), makes perfect sense.

Global warming period being exacerbated by widespread industrialization, also perfectly reasonable given the data and observations.

These two events aren't mutually exclusive.

Re:Ahh, science

[Opportunist]

Well, then there's a good reason for them being placed next to roads if the main function is to provide road side weather information...

Re:Ahh, science

[Anonymous Coward]

"The one that was placed next to the 401(one of the busiest highway systems in the world)" for which they correct the trend and YOU idiots scream out like a 12 year old virgin being gangbanged for the first time "THEY'RE MANIPULATING TEH DATAAAAAAH!!!!!".

If they fix problems, they're manipulating. If they don't fix the problems, then those errors nullify the claims.

Precisely HOW would a warming world be proved to you, if it were to be happening?

Re:Ahh, science

[Mashiki]

You mean the weather stations which are part of the Ontario road weather network, installed specifically to get weather information along Ontario roads?

You mean it was at one time the official environment canada weather station until it was shutdown and then removed for an entire city. Now that cities "official" meteorological reports come from London.

A provincial forestry weather station. Odds are it's in that specific spot because of either accessibility, power, or it's a known problem spot.

Nope, sorry it's an official EC weather station. Yep I know, it's hard to believe isn't it. Welcome to Canada.

Re:Ahh, science

[Mashiki]

Did they place it next to the 401, or did they place the 401 next to the weather station?

Next to the 401 of course. The 401 was built in the 1950's and 60's. The weather station was installed in the 90's to provide meteorological data for Environment Canada(also known as EC). Despite what the person replying to you said, this was the official monitoring station for a city. It was removed in 2009, and the meteorological data is now reported from a city around 40KM away as the officially reported data, that also includes temperature, wind, rainfall and so on. It's not a MTO station, that one is still 2.2km further then that station.

So yeah, figure that one out. Official and recorded meteorological data for a region is from 40km away, and is considered to be correct. Well I suppose that's okay, it's not as bad that one in Alberta records data that's then used in climate models for all towns and cities within 300km.

Re:Ahh, science

[Barsteward]

They also massage the historical data to fit the models"
i see you're a conspiracy theorist as well. What are your scientific credentials? Are they bigger and better than the climate scientists? I prefer to follow the real scientists until other credible scientists prove otherwise

Re:Ahh, science

[Mashiki]

No I actually have an idea of what they're for....having lived in the area as a kid. They just happen to have used it for several decades before they shut it down, don't make assumptions. They have a tendency of not turning out like you'd think. FYI the MTO station was 2.2km further then that one, and is still in operation. The one used for official measurements is now 40km away.

Re:Ahh, science

[budgenator]

Or maybe they thought it's been so fucking cold for so long we can't grow enough food to eat so we better start make things to trade for food from warmer places that still have a growing season.

Re:Ahh, science

[budgenator]

There are only about 8% of the USHCN Sites, sited so that the expected error is less than 1C, which is pretty damning considering the warming for the century is estimated at 0.7 degrees Celsius.

Re:Ahh, science

[Anonymous Coward]

The Critique of Pure Reason was an argument for emotional intuition to be considered just as good as science at least some of the time. Not even people with worthless degrees working as baristas take heed of that.

Don't spew that freshman liberal arts bullshit here.

Re:Ahh, science

[Anonymous Coward]

When EXXON produces a study everyone laughs, because of the source. Meteorologist make their living from the government... either as an employee, through grants, or through subsidies to Universities. The Attorney General of NY Colluded with outer AG's to prosecute coming to the un-government blessed conclusion. There is no funding for any investigation that doesn't support their theory. The government has turned this theory into the biggest tax increase, crony capitalism exercise, and regulatory power grab in history. It's a lie that only 3% disagree... It's more than that. But even if it were, I wonder how they make a living. Oh, and of the admitted 3%, we are talking about PhD educated scientists in their field of study. You, on the other hand are just a 'bien peasant'... a pawn for the political elite who is arogent enough to think they know better than a professional who works in the field just because you watched MSNBC.

Surprising --Not!

[BrendaEM]

Human beings like burning things.

Re:Surprising --Not!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, so do volcanoes. What's your point?

Re: Surprising --Not!

[Anonymous Coward]

Beer good. Fire bad! Fire baaaaad!

Re:Surprising --Not!

[TheRaven64]

Volcanoes throw ash a lot higher than most fires (the Icelandic volcano a few years ago threw up enough ash that it was dangerous to planes even at their normal cruising altitude of a few km up). The ash reflects the sun, so has a cooling effect. They also produce carbon dioxide, which has a warming effect. Which of these will win out varies quite a bit between eruptions. In contrast, smallish fires only throw ash a few metres up (if that) and it quickly settles, whereas the carbon dioxide disburses into the atmosphere.

97% agree that scare tactics work!

[Anonymous Coward]

Tim Flannery keeps being quoted by the ABC and Fairfax as a global warming guru. So it’s important that we keep confronting the Climate Council head with his spectacularly dud predictions.

In 2005:

I’m afraid that the science around climate change is firming up fairly quickly . . . we’ve seen just drought, drought, drought, and particularly regions like Sydney and the Warragamba catchment—if you look at the Warragamba catchment figures, since 98 the water has been in virtual freefall, and they’ve got about two years of supply left . . .

Maxine McKew: But. . . we won’t see a return to more normal patterns?

Flannery: . . . they do seem to be of a permanent nature. I don’t think it’s just a cycle. I’d love to be wrong, but I think the science is pointing in the other direction.

McKew: So does that mean, really, we’re faced with—if that’s right—back-to-back droughts and continuing thirsty cities?

Flannery: That’s right.

(UPDATE: HELP WANTED! THE VIDEO OF THE ABOVE INTERVIEW McKEW DID WITH FLANNERY NO LONGER APPEARS ON THE ABC SITE. DOES ANYONE HAVE A COPY OF IT FOR ME TO SHOW ON TV?)

In 2005:

Perth is facing the possibility of a catastrophic failure of the city’s water supply I’m personally more worried about Sydney than Perth. Where does Sydney go for more water? At least Perth has a buffer of underground water sources. Sydney doesn’t have any backup. And while Perth is forging ahead with a desalination plant, Sydney doesn’t have any major scheme in place to bolster water. It also has nowhere to put the vast infrastructure of a desalination plant.,,

There’s only two years’ water supply in Warragamba Dam If the computer models are right then drought conditions will become permanent in eastern Australia.

In 2007:

So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems...

Since then, of course, there have been repeated floods with dams in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra filled to overspilling.

UPDATE

Melbourne ABC presenter Jon Faine, a fervent warmist, has advertised he will later today discuss what the NSW rain says about changes to our climate. It is yet to be seen if he links global warming to this rain, but Melbourne readers might wish to ensure any scaremongering is challenged (1300 222 774). Here are some facts and admissions worth noting from the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Some key passages:

On thunderstorms:

In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems.

On heavy rain events:

In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.

On cyclones and storms:

Over periods of a century or more, evidence suggests slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones making landfall in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific Several studies suggest an increase in intensity, but data sampling issues hamper these assessments Callaghan and Power (2011) find a statistically significant decrease in Eastern Australia land-falling tropical cyclones since the late 19th century although including 2010/2011 season data this trend becomes non-significant ...

On extreme weather events:

For instance, evidence is most compelling for increases in heavy precipitation in North

Re:97% agree that scare tactics work!

[david_thornley]

Who is this Tim Flannery, and why should I care? Lots of people make extreme predictions. That doesn't mean everything's just peachy.

Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there global warming? Is it caused by humans? I doesn't matter. Really, it doesn't. Life is only precious because we believe it to be. It's all inside our biological processors. It's false data, not aligned with reality at all. Without life there is no suffering. Period.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[MBGMorden]

It's true that really - it doesn't matter. On a geologic timescale, everything we do is happening quickly.

Regardless of how many electric vehicles we put on the road, or how much fuel efficiency we push, every, single, last, drop of gasoline on this planet will be burned in the next ~1000 years. On a geologic timescale whether we burn it all in 50 years or in 1000 it really isn't going to matter.

So basically, we just cross our fingers and hope that by the time we dump all the available CO2 into the atomosphere that's it's not borked to the point that the planet won't recover.

Truly - the only solution we're going to have to global warming is to hope that eventually we just run out of fossil fuels and clean energy is all that's left.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

On a geologic timescale whether we burn it all in 50 years or in 1000 it really isn't going to matter.

Not sure what you mean by geological timescale, or how that is relevant. What matters in an ecological timescale: whether species can adapt and new habitats form with changing conditions with global shifts in temperature. 50 years will be way to short...

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Boronx]

I'll wager there's still way more fossil fuel to be found than we've found already.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Boronx]

"I know liberals would be happy killing off all the conservatives."

Don't think that. There's been a lot of demonization of liberals in US conservative media, but it's all bullshit. Liberals for the most part are the same as most conservatives. They love their family, their country, humanity. The want America to be good and great. They may disagree with you on the best way to go about it.

Part of a successful democracy is the concession that no single individual is wisest in all things, that no single outlook is right for all times. Given that, those of us who value democracy should value a diversity of opinion.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Gravis Zero]

Truly - the only solution we're going to have to global warming is to hope that eventually we just run out of fossil fuels and clean energy is all that's left.

This is absolute rubbish! We have the technology to replace every polluting engine on the planet. All we need now is to finally advance nuclear technology to make LFTRs a reality. With a near limitless supply of clean power, we can create and power the machinery that will restore our atmosphere to it's former glory.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[zapadnik]

The problem is, the Statist Collectivists of the Left also love The State (and its leaders). Just like the North Koreans. The Leftists may be well meaning, but they don't seem to understand that the State has no power except that which it takes from Individuals. And the State has no money except that which it takes from Individuals, as well as the disgusting practice of borrowing against the future labor of unborn generations for vote bribes. The following mass-murdering ideologies could not function without the well-meaning but State-loving Modern Liberals: National Socialism, Soviet Socialism, Maoist Socialism, North Korean Socialism, Ba'athist Socialism, North Vietnamese Socialism, Cambodian Socialism, Cuban Socialism, Angolan Socialism, East German Socialism, Hungarian Socialism, Libyan Socialism, etc etc etc. Do you see any connection? most Leftists cannot !

All those who are happy with Statist Collectivism where they consent to the Collective oppressing or persecuting Individuals who dissent from the majority view are the enemies of Free People and the Free World. Involuntary Socialism is not required to help people, voluntary charity is - but only one of these grows the State so that it is harmful to Individuals. Anyone who doesn't yet understand this allows Collectivism to crush Individualism ! Don't support Rule by the Elites (Statist Collectviism) !!!!

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

If or when we run out of fossil fuels we will have far greater problems than a 1 or 2 degree global temperature increase.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

"If"? You're thinking maybe they'll discover an infinite supply of oil under the Gulf, then?

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[x0ra]

My life is precious to me. The life of an untouchable kid in India's slum isn't.

Re: Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fair enough - she feels the same about yours.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[GoChickenFat]

Truly - the only solution we're going to have to global warming is to hope that eventually we just run out of fossil fuels and clean energy is all that's left.

There's no such thing as clean energy...it's all just pollution in a different form. The global warming agenda, at least it's zealots, seem to only target smokestacks and tailpipes while ignoring the massive pollution needed to create, distribute and store any form of energy.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[AmiMoJo]

A better solution is to make clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels. We are getting there, need to go faster.

In the longer term, we are going to have to find a way to extract CO2 from the atmosphere artificially.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Opportunist]

Life on this planet will continue. Maybe without homo sapiens, but maybe that's for the better for life on this planet.

Life has mastered many other and far more serious threats. Remember the Oxygen catastrophe? That was horrible! And not in the "oh no, like 3000 of the 8 billion people we have died" way we think of catastrophes today, we're talking about an event that caused Earth's temperature to fall by significant amounts (not the piddly crap we're worrying about today, 1-2 degrees, pffffft!), and all because those damn plants had to produce oxygen!

And that was only the first (and maybe not even the first) of a long, long line of disasters and catastrophes that beset life here, often wiping out 90% or 95% of all species! Yet always enough remained to keep the system going.

So why worry? Sure, it will as usual cost the apex predator, but then again, life doesn't really give a shit. Why should it, if not even said apex predator does?

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Opportunist]

We can't get people to care about an event that will wipe them out in about 50 years and you think we get them to invest far, far more resources into avoiding something that will wipe them in a few million years?

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Opportunist]

There's plenty of fossil fuel left. The main question is how much we want to pay for the barrel.

What we pump today wouldn't have been profitable 50 years ago, so by (early) 1970s standards, that oil we pump today was unavailable.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[TheRaven64]

There are a lot of different kinds of pollution, but most of them have very local effects. Spill toxic chemicals into a river and that's local and observable. As nations get richer, there is a natural tendency to regulate this kind of thing, because you're damaging your own assets if you continue to pollute. In contrast, things like carbon dioxide and CFCs rapidly disburse in the atmosphere. There's little incentive to reduce your production of them if no one else is, because your contribution only increases the net amount of harm by a little bit and you only suffer a small proportion of the total. You need a global agreement to make any impact. In terms of tail-pipe emissions, compare carbon dioxide and lead: the former quickly spreads out and there's almost no local impact, the latter is inhaled, builds up in teeth and bones, and collects on the roads. If you live in the USA, lead in petrol in China has no impact on you, but carbon dioxide from burning petrol in China does.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[houghi]

Well DUH! Even if we find one liter of oil, you will be right. Now the hard part. How much unfound fossil fuel is there and in what time frame will we find it. Because you will always be able to say that we did not find everything.
You are basically asking to proof a negative.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is fascist morons who are so lacking in imagination that they can't help but think that those on the Left are the same as them, just wearing different uniforms.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[bytesex]

Well.. maybe. I mean, the finding that the CO2 levels rose almost immediately after the start of the Industrial Revolution (and, for example, the fact that there was a drop around the 1940's) suggests that the CO2 levels in the atmosphere respond more quickly to our producing it (both in up and downward direction) than was previously imagined. That gives a pinch of hope, doesn't it? I mean, if we somehow have all or most of our energy produced from CO2-less renewables (tides, sun, water, etc), then the situation could turn around pretty quickly. And that would be a deviation from the story we've been told until now.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you make it about America, when the GP didn't mention it.

As a liberal, I don't argue with my conservation father, I'm just waiting for him, and the rest of the conservatives to die.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[GoChickenFat]

but...we're happy put those "local effects" in parts of the world, US included, where there's little incentive or too small of a population to have a voice to do something about it. Not sure if it was intended in your spill example but the very body charged with regulating pollution in our rich nation (EPA) actually created a toxic river spill a year ago - http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/09/...

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Big Hairy Ian]

Truly - the only solution we're going to have to global warming is to hope that eventually we just run out of fossil fuels and clean energy is all that's left.

I was going to suggest destroying the human race as a possibility but looking at the presidential candidates I think somebody beat me to it :|

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez. Are everyone morons?

"I know liberals would be happy killing off all the conservatives." is such a retarded statement it has to be either a deliberate troll, or uttered by an utter retard, it doesn't even warrant a reply. The person who spreads bullshit like that should just be ignored for life.

Because, hey, "killing people who they disagree with" is what liberals and liberalism is all about.. right? It's totally not what authoritarians and reactionaries are all about, right?

God help America, because it's for certain not going to help itself.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[PmanAce]

How stupid can you be to label moderate liberals (that I'm assuming you mean in the US because an American democrat is more right than for example a Canadian liberal) with those "socialist" nations? That's like saying conservatives like you are the same as all evil Fascist governments that have existed over time.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[rickb928]

"those of us who value democracy should value a diversity of opinion."

But there is no diversity of action at the federal level. At least not in the US.

Re: Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[rickb928]

And she's a lot more likely to come to America and work than you are to go to India and work.

Re: Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is very obvious and to be expected. I don't know why you felt the need to say it.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[WillAffleckUW]

Why do we care?

Because humans have been around only a fraction of the time that dinosaurs existed (a very very very small fraction), and we've already survived at least three extinction level events. Our track record is pretty bad.

We don't need more things pushing us to extinction, no matter how convenient they are for you as an individual.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately we do not live in a democracy. We live in a constitutional republic. A diversity of opinion is precisely why the USA is a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy.... We the sheeple are too easy to lead and would destroy ourselves if we allowed the government to do whatever it wants.. Oh wait... nevermind.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[david_thornley]

National Socialism was not a leftist plot. It was a right-wing development, as you'd know if you studied a little of the history. Try any history. You'll find that the NSDAP party did have socialist and nationalist wings, it came to power as part of the right wing, and the socialists were terminated with extreme prejudice shortly thereafter. I know this doesn't fit your convenient little narrative, but it's true.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wager that it will take more energy to extract and refine than it produces.

I also doubt there is that much more. At the rate we humans are using it up, even new fields only will last a few months. If it wasn't for fracking, we would have $5/gal gas right now and the US would be hurting with the reduced production. I figure that fracking only has 10-15 more years anyways though.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[Opportunist]

You work under the assumption that this planet "needs" homo sapiens. It doesn't.

Re:Can you handle the truth? I didn't think so.

[GoChickenFat]

There's no such thing as clean energy...it's all just pollution in a different form. The global warming agenda, at least it's zealots, seem to only target smokestacks and tailpipes while ignoring the massive pollution needed to create, distribute and store any form of energy.

This earned me a Troll rating! Slashdot has become a bunch of puss ass mom boy pansies who can't handle a debate that doesn't meet their personal agenda. No wonder the once informative comments section is no longer useful unless your just looking for confirmation of your personal beliefs. Troll this, fuckers! There...earned it!

Chicken Little motherfuckers

[Anonymous Coward]

They want us to kill off most of the world's population and go back 500 years to struggling to survive in a stone age world. Fuck them. Global warming is real and it is a badge of our victory in the fight for survival, our taming of the world and making it MORE habitable, not less. I welcome it and hope to see much more until winter is a story we tell our kids and they scratch their heads and wonder whether we're just yanking their chains when we talk about that thing we used to have called snow.

Re:Chicken Little motherfuckers

[Opportunist]

Why do I have the feeling you're living closer to Michigan than California..?

Texas, Louisiana and Florida

[Anonymous Coward]

Weren't Texas, Louisiana and Florida once completely submerged in the ocean and then surfaced?

Maybe, these idiot scientists should first figure out how the methane gas from the dinosaurs' asses caused the first round of global warming leading to their extinction followed by an ice age.

So, in my simple 5 year old child understanding of things, it appears that the Earth goes in deep cycles where these same states among-st others will be underwater again even if were all dead one day and stop supposedly contributing to global warming.

So, why don't these scientists explain why these states emerged from the sea to begin with? Maybe the lack of global warming was causing the oceans to recede?

Re:Texas, Louisiana and Florida

[Barsteward]

maybe they were pushed up due to the plates colliding, a bit like the Himalayas and some Caribbean islands

Re:Texas, Louisiana and Florida

[Opportunist]

I don't know if they were, I just heard it here the first time. So either provide any kind of evidence or be asked whether you made it up to have a strawman to argue with.

Re:Texas, Louisiana and Florida

[Anonymous Coward]

There are still lots of seamen in the Texas, Louisiana and Florida, probably left after the States raised from the oceans of the ancient times. Try asking asking them. They can often be found hanging at certain bars, which seem to be their favorite past time.

So global warming started...

[hsthompson69]

...even before humans had any significant CO2 output.

Good to know. I'm sure someone out there will find some magical particle humans were emitting in the 1800s at a certain level that didn't scale with the massive growth in population of humanity.

Re:So global warming started...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

It is because we burned all that that we sit here with 2016 technology not dying of different diseases and injuries and infections and feeding many multiples of people per acre than they did.

I have no desire to slow this progress. We would literally, and I mean literally, be better off in the year 2100 or 2300 with risen seas and 2100 or 2300 tech than lower seas and 2050 or 2200 tech.

People in the mid 1800s slamming on the brakes, leaving us with year 1890 or 1930 tech would be no friend to humanity.

And no, you can't have your cake and it too. Business doesn't care why it is hobbled. Hundreds of century long economic experiments showed that over the same time period.

Re:So global warming started...

[Mr0bvious]

Surely that's a stawman argument.

"Reducing use of fossil fuels" != "halting all progress"

You use the phrase "slow this progress" but the remainder of your comment implies almost halting progress.

Limiting use of fossil fuels has (relatively short in terms of human history) economic consequences which will be overcome. If we drastically reduced the use of fossil fuels today I doubt it will take hundreds of years to find a working cleaner alternative, especially when there is economic motive.

Re:So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

do you not know history? coal, wood livestock. many of the same things that contribute to global warming today, existed back then, too. the steam engine, for example, PREDATES the 'industrial revolution' by over a century... it was a catalyst for the rapid advances during that period, but it was invented in 1606 for fucks sake. open a history book, huh?

and as far as the so called report goes... geographically isolated australia might have been a little slow back then, the 'industrial revolution' started in the mid 1700s, not 'near' 1830... and well, DUH. a fifth grader could have made the same conclusion.. that global warming started around that time period.

Re:So global warming started...

[Barsteward]

It is because we burned all that that we sit here with 2016 technology not dying of different diseases and injuries and infections and feeding many multiples of people per acre than they did.

and once the temps get too high, it gets difficult to grow things, check out the sahara and other deserts

I have no desire to slow this progress. We would literally, and I mean literally, be better off in the year 2100 or 2300 with risen seas and 2100 or 2300 tech than lower seas and 2050 or 2200 tech.

Ask those who live in countries where the temp is over 50%c if its better

Re:So global warming started...

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

Actually no we won't. The cost of flooding and storms will cost more then the normal BNP growth if nothing is done.

So the world will be less good off, if we don't do anything about climate change.

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

Re:So global warming started...

[Plumpaquatsch]

...even before humans had any significant CO2 output.

And that is why "We are only talking about a small effect during the 19th century because the increases in greenhouse gases were small compared to the very rapid changes that we see today," RTFA

Re:So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

> some magical particle humans were emitting in the 1800s

You are joking right?

One word, Coal.

Factories in the 1800 belched CO2 like never seen before... The damned butterflies evolved from white to black because of the soot. (you do understand that evolution is real, yeah?)

Re:So global warming started...

[Magius_AR]

"Reducing use of fossil fuels" != "halting all progress" You use the phrase "slow this progress" but the remainder of your comment implies almost halting progress.

I'm looking at the OP's numbers, and it implies no such thing. In fact, it almost exactly implies a ~50% tech reduction. That's far from "halting all progress".

More importantly, you're completely dodging the point being made by trying to claim exaggeration. In simple form: all things have a cost (Perhaps not zero sum, but a cost nonetheless). And every hour of our time or dollar of our money that we throw at accelerating green adoption is an hour/dollar that could have went towards any number of things, like curing cancer or reducing poverty. Is the relationship one-to-one? No. Is it more relevant/substantial than you're trying to claim? Yes.

Re:So global warming started...

[Xyrus]

You know, it would really help if you read the freakin' paper so you don't look like an idiot when making comments.

Also, the paper has received several critiques including one from Dr. Michael Mann. Yes, that Dr. Mann. He thinks that they don't provide a solid basis to draw the conclusions they did, and he makes some good arguments AGAINST the paper's conclusions.

Re:So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely that's a stawman argument.

"Reducing use of fossil fuels" != "halting all progress"

You use the phrase "slow this progress" but the remainder of your comment implies almost halting progress.

Now less so, back then no. We are organisms based on evolution and similarly our technology evolves with us, if you don't feed it what is needed (surplus of man hours, refined raw materials, rapid transport of those materials to the necessary destinations while accounting for the fact each competent scientist taking part in the chain of events leading to a new technology has a very short lifespan relative to the whole of technological process which must be utilized to both catch up from zero knowledge to surpass what is known, etc) you don't get new technologies. Coal and petroleum were the only mechanisms that would have allowed that ample free time and an excess of resources required to get us into the computing age and even start looking at solar as a viable energy.

Climate change shouldn't even remotely be viewed as an insurmountable hurdle we must stifle progress to avoid, the only people who want that are globalist industry leaders wanting to avoid competition and idiots they have brainwashed.

Climate change is a challenge, like any other, for us to exercise our understanding of the manipulation of the universe to resolve then forget about as a relatively minor problem in the grand scheme of things. We're Human, we are as much our technology as any of the biological individuals which make up the species and it is only a sub-Human animalistic drive which would lead someone to fear or cower from climate change rather than conquer it.

TL;DR: learn to control the weather, stop bitching about how the end is nigh.

Re:So global warming started...

[drinkypoo]

It is because we burned all that that we sit here with 2016 technology not dying of different diseases and injuries and infections and feeding many multiples of people per acre than they did.

No. That's only because we burned some of that. Most of what we burned, we burned for profit and greed, not human advancement as a species. Not even accidentally. Most of the unnecessary energy output goes directly to padding pockets.

Re:So global warming started...

[squiggleslash]

No, it started well after humans started adding significantly to the amount of CO2. But it wouldn't have been a surprise if it had started before the industrial revolution began, because humans were already pumping out huge amounts of CO2 for things like steel making. It's just that process accelerated 200-250 years ago as demand for steel increased and as we started using heat energy for machines.

Re:So global warming started...

[pipingguy]

Repeat after me: There WAS no Medieval Warm Period and anthropogenic CO2 is much, much worse than natural CO2. It's evil, in fact!

Re:So global warming started...

[bill_mcgonigle]

...even before humans had any significant CO2 output.

Right. This has been known for at least a decade. What, it doesn't dominate the discussion withing the "scientific consensus"?

Re:So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

...even before humans had any significant CO2 output.

I wouldn't call the wood and coal burning with rapidly doubling population and heavy metal industry as insignificant. Although there are lot more of us today, the industrial processes we use are much more efficient than they were then, and under constant improvement.

Re:So global warming started...

[hsthompson69]

Regardless of coal, wood, or livestock, humanity's global CO2 emissions in the 1800s was minor compared to the 1900s (and more particularly, 1950 on).

If indeed, you want to assert that 1830s level CO2 emissions triggered global warming, and somehow the earth decided to treat 1950s level CO2 emissions differently and warm *less*, I suppose you could try and point to the logarithmic rate of CO2 effect on temperature...but that, of course means that even if CO2 emissions by 2130 are much greater than today, we'll see the same, mild warming we saw beginning in the 1800s.

Re:So global warming started...

[hsthompson69]

The problem is the trend, starting from the early 1800s, is actually quite steady, even though population growth (and co2 emissions) has grown exponentially.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...

https://ourworldindata.org/wp-...

This smells like the thorny attribution problem.

Re:So global warming started...

[hsthompson69]

Mann is arguing with settled science!!??

But, but, what about 97% *consensus*???

Black is white. Up is down. Cold is warm. I don't know what to think anymore! :)

Re:So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

There wasn't a global MWP. Got proof otherwise? And there's no difference between CO2, which is why CO2 we are exhuming is causing global warming, just like it did when it was NOT human produced in the Jurassic. Fuckwit.

Re:So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

While there is no doubt that human activities have effected the environment (the only thing that is debatable is how much) this is getting ridiculous. At that time in history the population was one sixth the current and humans probably used per capita one tenth the amount of energy (or less). There is ZERO chance you could pick any amount of effect they were having on the environment from the climate/statistical noise. If it were significant enough to show through all the noise the ocenas would be drying up and half the planet would be a desert by now.

Re:So global warming started...

[pD-brane]

That "magical particle" is carbon dioxide. Since about A.D. 1750 (or at least 1780) humans have been influencing the global climate considerably (see e.g. IPCC 2013 paragraph 7.5.1).

Re:So global warming started...

[khallow]

If we drastically reduced the use of fossil fuels today I doubt it will take hundreds of years to find a working cleaner alternative, especially when there is economic motive.

My concern here is that we have the habit of making enormous economic decisions on the basis of hysteria and fads. It's not going to stop with a one-time bad decision today. There will be something else tomorrow. Hundreds of years of that will result in a lot of death and suffering.

Re:So global warming started...

[thinkwaitfast]

Yeah, but he is rated 5, Insightful and you are only rated 2. By consensus, you are an idiot. Get with the program.

Re:So global warming started...

[thinkwaitfast]

Population has always grown exponentially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

1700: Britain pulled 3 million tons of coal out of the ground.
1770: Britain pulled 6.25 million tons of coal out of the ground.
1815: Britain pulled 16 million tons of coal out of the ground.
1830: Britain pulled 30 million tons of coal out of the ground.
1863: Britain pulled more than 100 million tons of coal out of the ground.
1882: Britain pulled more than 150 million tons of coal out of the ground.
1892: Britain pulled more than 200 million tons of coal out of the ground.
1902: Britain pulled more than 250 million tons of coal out of the ground.
1912: Britain pulled more than 300 million tons of coal out of the ground.

I wonder what they did with all of it...

Re:So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

The modern steam engine was invented circa 1700.

By the 1830s, we were burning a lot of coal, and had been for a while. And keeping a lot of farm animals.

Re: So global warming started...

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans have been burning coal and wood for thousands of years. A rapid increase occurred owing to population expansion and a little thing you may have missed called the Industrial Revolution.

Re:So global warming started...

[Plumpaquatsch]

The problem is the trend, starting from the early 1800s, is actually quite steady, even though population growth (and co2 emissions) has grown exponentially.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...

https://ourworldindata.org/wp-...

This smells like the thorny attribution problem.

Ugh. Just because you can calculate a "linear trend" doesn't mean the actual trend is linear. You can also calculate a "linear trend" for population.

Re:So global warming started...

[cyberchondriac]

This is what gets me. If this is accurate, and correlation is causation, then it sounds like we're probably fucked. Why? If Earth's thin atmosphere is truly so delicate and fragile that just a mere few years of industry in it's infancy began to raise temperatures immediately, then there's a limit to modernity - because no method of energy production or industry is 100% clean. Even with prevalent solar,wind and nuclear energy, there's always going to be some degree of pollution or greenhouse gas released in energy production, or some kind of nasty byproduct in energy production or maintenance, like manufacture of the batteries needed for solar... at least, for the foreseeable future. I can't imagine zero greenhouse gas emissions being a reality while fulfilling the ever increasing energy demand the future will bring, yet, apparently, here is the implication that this is what it requires.

Re:So global warming started...

[hsthompson69]

Well, sure, but what trend would you calculate for global average temperature since the 1800s? It certainly isn't exponential...perhaps it's logarithmic, or even better, maybe the trend is strictly stochastic, and any observed warming is simply natural variation.

The bottom line is this, I suppose - the attribution problem is thorny, and claims of attribution today with our large scale measurement networks are tricky enough, much less going back 200 years through dubious and uncertain proxies to make any sort of claim of definitive attribution.

tl;dr - the error bars here are all encompassing

Re:So global warming started...

[jwhitener]

The cutting down of forests in the middle east thousands of years ago is one factor that led to much of it being an arid desert wasteland. Of course humans can shape the climate with or without co2 emissions. What is your point?

Re:So global warming started...

[hsthompson69]

Say we stipulate for a moment you're correct, that it was "one factor".

By what method do you discern how much of a factor? How do you tell the difference between "3% responsible for leading to an arid desert wasteland" and "30% responsible for leading to an arid desert wasteland"?

Obligatory CO2 desert greening link: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-g...

Re:So global warming started...

[Plumpaquatsch]

People don't heat the Earth just by propagating.

Re:So global warming started...

[hsthompson69]

Well, CO2 is driven by temperature. Of course it will correlate.

http://joannenova.com.au/globa...

No blame though.

[EzInKy]

You can't blame a person for an action that he has absolutely no understanding of.

Re:No blame though.

[Opportunist]

I don't give a fuck about blame shifting. What's to be gained that way? Yeah, I know who's the culprit, but I'm still flooded up to my nipples. I'd rather want to know who gets rid of it.

Solution is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

We should ban any the burning of all fossil fuels. We could go nuclear, but that would not be politically correct. so we will only use windmills and solar cells. When this plan is implemented there will be a massive die of of humanity (but it will be OK because humanity produces a lot of CO2 and CO2 is poisonousness)

It will be a true win for the liberal's who will no longer have to deal with a vast segment of humanity who does not toe the politically correct line. If we can just keep the population of the planet down to the levels circa 1500, we can possible delay the inevitable sea level rise.

Re:Solution is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

How is anyone supposed to take shit like this seriously when the people expounding it can't even spell?

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Anonymous Coward]

The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times! Oh no! The Jurassic DGW, Dinosaurogenic Global Warming, shows that those Dinosaurs - with their Airplanes, SUVs, Coal Fire Plants and Cars and stuff, you know, those Dinosaurs and their DGW destroyed THE WHOLE PLANET!! With their DGW! Look, who wants 26% atmospheric oxygen? More air to breathe? Who wants that? And who wants more CO2 @1950 ppm, you know, to make all those plants and trees convert that CO2 into a higher O2! Who wants that! And we DON'T want the massive biodiversity of the Jurassic, no, we don't want more plants and animals and trees, no.
Any time period the warmunists want to "prove" there is AGW the warmunists just cherry pick ranges. And now I give the warmunists what the need on a silver platter - now they have the perfect example - the Dinosaurs and their horrible DGW (Dinosauric Global Warming) that destroyed the Jurassic... Wait, no, it didn't, it was the best time for life on earth with 1950 ppm atmospheric CO2!

Debt is Wealth. Ignorance is Strength. Freedom is Slavery. War is Peace. Cold is Warm. Tsarkon

The anti-science sure is odd.

[SuperKendall]

Yeah, I don't know why Slashdot attracts these anti-science nutters that cannot understand the data has been totally blown on the whole global warming scam. Yes some warming is occurring, but not enough to matter in any way worth even getting excited about - at least that's what the hard facts and careful research tell us. Heck it's probably not even enough to counteract the next global cooling phase which is close at hand even in human turns, then will be the time to panic...

Now the soft facts and panicked revelations made by so called "scientists" who are backed by governments trying to bilk the people into more central control - isn't it astounding that after literally decades of being utterly wrong about long term climate forecasts, people still listen to them? But then I guess it's not since other religions have been around thousands of years as well.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[dcollins]

"The authors of the paper note it’s particularly interesting that global warming keeps winning the bet despite ocean cycles, solar activity, and human aerosol pollution all acting in the cooling direction over the past 15 years. Human-caused global warming has become so strong that it’s consistently overcoming these natural short-term cooling factors... In other words, betting against global warming is an almost sure way to lose money at this point."

https://www.skepticalscience.com/betting-against-gw-sure-way-to-lose-money.html

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[sg_oneill]

Ah yes those pesky scientists and their vast left wing conspiracy. Thankfully we have a random slash dot person to expose those cunning monger era of facts.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Boronx]

What do you think will drive global cooling?

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[bestweasel]

How can we distinguish so called "scientists" from real scientists?

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[ravenshrike]

Oh it's much, much worse than that. If you assume arguendo that any of the catastrophic AGW and more than half of the non-catastrophic AGW models are even remotely correct then it's far too late for any of the carbon controls to do jack fucking shit. Which means 4 options are on the table.
1. Kill off 80%+ of the human race if you want to keep the current 1st world standard of living.
2. Kill off 50%+ of the human race and reduce 95% of the remainder to subsistence living.
3. Large scale chemical atmospheric engineering.
4. Invent massive scale carbon sequestration machines to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
The hilarious part is that until recently, number 4 never even passed the lips of the vast majority of AGW believers.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

15 years? The irony here is that they (should)know there are cycles that are 30 years(or more?), that one has only been in its cooling phase for 8 years or so.. I find it funny that they set the time to such a short time knowing that there are pumping mechanisms that won't show their effects until their cycle is complete. But don't let those facts get in the way of their exaggerations. Seriously, I really want to believe but then I read shit like this and I have to wonder if they're just making it up as they go along, or maybe they don't have the best communication skills on the planet and have no idea how they appear to betray themselves to those of us who have some idea what they're saying.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeh, sure, the scientists are all uneducated fools and some random fucking idiot knows better.
What a deeply stupid asshole SuperKunt is, total denial of the evidence that to any thinking person is conclusive.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Namarrgon]

anti-science nutters that cannot understand

My irony meter just exploded.

Yes some warming is occurring, but not enough to matter in any way worth even getting excited about - at least that's what the hard facts and careful research tell us.

Funny how the anti-science nutters are always so highly selective about their "hard facts and careful research", hand-waving away all the rest of the data that doesn't fit their own narrative as "manipulated". Let me guess, the whole of the IPCC Working Group II's collected data is all compromised and ignorable, every bit; none of those described impacts could possibly happen, amirite?

Heck it's probably

Ah, another hard fact, with more careful research behind it?

not even enough to counteract the next global cooling phase which is close at hand

It started 8000 years ago, temperatures have been dropping since then - up until we changed everything.

Now the soft facts and panicked revelations made by so called "scientists" who are backed by governments trying to bilk the people into more central control

Now the baseless allegations of conspiracy and paranoia, with the inevitable government agenda behind it. Did you notice all the Australian climate scientists recently protesting their government's agenda?

But of course I forgot, they just want to keep their jobs, and they have to keep manipulating their data and falsifying their results even when their government clearly doesn't want to hear it - low-paying research on global warming is all they can do, because the fossil fuel industry certainly doesn't have any money for them.

isn't it astounding that after literally decades of being utterly wrong about long term climate forecasts, people still listen to them?

Dammit, my brand new irony meter just exploded as well.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[cheesybagel]

We're overdue an ice age and we're heading towards a solar minimum. Again.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Barsteward]

" Yes some warming is occurring, but not enough to matter in any way worth even getting excited about " - basically, you feel its not affecting you yet so its not happening.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[zapadnik]

Perhaps you should the statements of intentions from the vast left-wing conspirators themselves, you'll be shocked
http://green-agenda.com/

Does it never occur to you that your hypothesis could be wrong? that your interlocutors may, in fact, know a lot more than you suppose - and they understand not only the argument for skepticism, but also the argument made by CAGW alarmist/propagandists ?

Based on your statements, there is a lot you clearly do not know. Read through the statements made in the link I have posted. Oh yeah, if you didn't know about the 500 million people who will survive the intended cull, you are not one of them. Do not say you were not warned.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[zapadnik]

Easy. Real Scientists follow the Scientific Method. They are empiricists who look at ALL the data, and if the data doesn't match their hypothesis they adapt their hypothesis.

The pseudo-scientists are also easy to spot. They talk about "consensus" (which is not part of the Scientific Method) because they don't want to talk about the satellite observations. They talk about computer models, but refuse to discuss why the computer models don't match observed reality. They discard any and all observations that don't match their hypothesis. They call for the legal punishment of their opponents. They care more about global wealth redistribution than whether the empirical data matches their Statist Collectivist worldview. They seek to control the flow of money, and want to dictate how you can live your life:
http://green-agenda.com/

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[zapadnik]

Actually, did you not know the Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm period were warmer than today? This is why Vikings farmed in Greenland and wine grapes could be grown as far north as York in England. Now the graves of the Vikings are under 'permafrost', but it wasn't frosty in their day, because it has been much hotter in the past ! You talk about 'nutters' yet seem to be defending a position for which you don't even understand even the basic counter evidence. Furthermore, I would hope you would look at the statement of the leaders of the CAGW movement:
http://green-agenda.com/

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Opportunist]

The problem is that the general train of thought of those that COULD make this decision is probably going to be: "Hmm... I mean, we do make a shitload of money on weapons and it's not like they get better by sitting around. And let's not forget it's good for the economy. So..."

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Opportunist]

It's like reading an article by a creation "scientist", isn't it?

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[TheRaven64]

And yet that's precisely what the original poster was complaining about. Climate scientists have progressively refined their models over the last few decades as more data became available and as computational power increased to the level that they can run simulations on a desktop that would have needed a supercomputer in the '80s (and far more complex ones on modern supercomputers). When they refine their models and obsolete some of their old predictions (or those of other researchers - there's nothing an academic enjoys more than proving another one wrong) then you grumble about the wrong predictions. When the new models predict some of the same things as the old, then you complain that they're not adapting their hypothesis.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[serviscope_minor]

Actually, did you not know the Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm period were warmer than today?

No I didn't know that, mostly because they're not. Here's a graph:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

See how the global temperature is not in fact warmer during the medieval warm period?

This is why Vikings farmed in Greenland and.... ... and yada yada yada it was warmer in the North Atlantic. We know. The North Atlantic is not the world. This is why it's called *global* warming. And the globe is warmer now than it was then.

You talk about 'nutters' yet seem to be defending a position for which you don't even understand even the basic counter evidence

The irony burns so bad I think my screen is about to melt.

http://green-agenda.com/

I'll bet that website has no agenda!

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the warming crowd keeps "refining" the adjustments to the measurements so the past keeps getting colder so today is warmer. The fix is in and everyone knows it, though some refuse to admit it.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[ravenshrike]

Ah, but according to our betters those periods of warmth miraculously only affected Europe. And Antarctica. But mainly Europe.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[riverat1]

isn't it astounding that after literally decades of being utterly wrong about long term climate forecasts, people still listen to them?

But they haven't been that wrong. Go back and compare what they've said in the IPCC reports to what has actually happened and you'll find they underpredict more than overpredict. Plenty of people on both sides of the issue get hyperbolic in their statements but if you follow what actual scientists say in actual scientific papers you'll find they get more right than wrong.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, permafrost is not a thing anywhere where vikings lived.
But, you are correct that there have been warm streaks, which fit nicely into the models constructed.

The thing is, those models which predict stuff without human intervention shows that we should be cooling down atm.
We are warming up.
That, essentially, is the issue.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

And there were thermometers and ice cores analyzed in Africa and South America to cover those periods? Missing evidence doesn't prove anything, sorry.

That is why the previous warming cycles miraculously only affected Europe - at the time, they didn't even know how big the world was, nevermind how to measure temperature accurately and repeatably.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[riverat1]

We're not really overdue for the next ice age, just headed that way based on Milankovitch cycles. But we've pumped enough excess greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere lately to overcome that and any solar minimum that may occur. There will be no prolonged cooling period in your lifetime.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[houghi]

Funny how the anti-science nutters are always so highly selective about their "hard facts and careful research", hand-waving away all the rest of the data that doesn't fit their own narrative as "manipulated". Let me guess, the whole of the IPCC Working Group II's collected data is all compromised and ignorable, every bit; none of those described impacts could possibly happen, amirite?

I say, let them think what they want. If they think opinion is the same as fact, let them have their opinion as fact. They do not believe in thermodynamics good for them, but then they are not allowed to use any heating or air conditioning in their houses or cars. Also no boiling of food or any other method of cooking or heating food. No fridge.
Separate offices that are without heating or cooling.
Because if they accept that we can change the temperature in a small space like an oven, it should not be hard to say we are able to change the temperature in a larger space, like a house, or a stadium, or a whole city full of houses or many cities. We even use heaters on a terrace in the winter so people can sit outside and be warm. So we can heat the outside world. And they believe that not to be true so they should not use any of it.

Yeah, I am kidding. Kinda.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as there is a contingent of people and political leaders that think building windmills and solar panels will get us there, we are certainly doomed. We've spent trillions and yet wind and solar together are only about 1% of our energy generation globally. Its not gonna work people.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick comment from someone you would probably dismiss as an "anti-science denier"... There's been a lot of credibility issues over the past 25 years with the arguments for global warming, including changed predictions, over-reactions, and papering over of contradictory information. My impression is that there is a lot less of this than there used to be, but it's still hard to separate scientific fact from political agenda. The level of discourse on this very complicated issue is shameful. It is part of the scientific process to be skeptical. Science is science, not faith.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[segedunum]

And yet that's precisely what the original poster was complaining about. Climate scientists have progressively refined their models....

Some would call it refining, others would call it flip-flopping as reality doesn't match up to models. It's why we had a change in language from global warming to climate change and then to stuff like 'global weirding', which became all about 'extreme weather' events. In the 1600s the Thames used to freeze over so that you could safely walk from one side to the other. If that were to happen now climate 'scientists' would be up in arms.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

There will be no prolonged cooling period in your lifetime.

Someone already disagrees with you back on July 9th. Solar physicist sees global cooling ahead [from 2020 to 2053,]

Maybe yes. Maybe no. Maybe we just don't know because we don't have enough information. Or maybe we DO have but "teh Evil {Organization-Name-Goes-Here}" is out to get us.

Or maybe humans don't like change. Another way: "First you tell me to push, and we've build all of these emotions and businesses and structures to push, and now you're telling me to pull? How about I push you off a cliff instead and we'll call it even."

It's all in DEGREE of implementation. "If we don't stop global warming now, it'll be too late" is what I usually hear. But how much is enough?

Mostly on topic: Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?

MY answer. NO. No you shouldn't -- if you care enough about this glorious, wonderful planet and the damage we are all causing to it every day then you shouldn't have kids. And you should kill any current kids you have. Neighbors kids, too. Oh, and go ahead and kill yourself as well. Hmmm? What about me? I'll let you go first, thank you.

Our kids will survive in their environment they inherited. Or they won't. or they'll die of peanut allergies, or the snowflakes will have nervous breakdowns once they get into the real world that doesn't care about them or what they think. It behooves us to leave them the best environment we can but who's to define "best"?

I don't know how to solve this. No one does. We don't even agree on the terms, and can't agree to disagree. So we all do what we think best and hope for the best. Until someone actually decides that violence, money, and power is the solution and then things'll get even worse instead of better.

Hell, I'm an atheist but maybe prayer IS the answer. Or at least actual careful thought and then you ostracize those without any power. Gee, sounds like The Lives of the Rich and Famous and SJWs, doesn't it?

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[bestweasel]

Consensus is a useful guide to the scientific world's thinking. If 99% of experts prefer one explanation, that's the one I'll put my money on.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[bfpierce]

People who call it 'flip-flopping' have a specific term reserved for them, they're called 'Politicians'.

If that's how you view it, that's fine, but don't pretend you're taking a scientific approach to the problem.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

No the problem is 'Scientist' don't say hey, we have this data, that to the best of our knowledge is correct, and we have these models, that we are continuously refining, and to the best of our abiliy this is what we feel will likely happen 20 years from now. But we could be wrong.

Instead of that 'Scientist' come out with a headline saying Now we know exactly what the climate was like 4 billion years ago and through the power of science we can determine what the climate will be like 50 years from now, and if you dare to disagree with us you are a science denier.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[TheRaven64]

Scientists don't come out with headlines, journalists do. If you're getting you opinion of what scientists are saying from the third-hand reports in the media, then you might consider that your opinions don't actually reflect reality that much.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[rickb928]

So we now limit our examination to 2001-2016?

Manipulate the data much? Warming has been alleged for a lot longer than that. What happened to that data?

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[rickb928]

Questions

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[TheRaven64]

It's why we had a change in language from global warming to climate change

We had the change from global warming to climate change because idiots kept ignoring the 'global' part and saying things like 'this summer is rubbish, so much for global warming!'. The weather is a complex chaotic system. Global warming means that the total amount of energy in this system is increasing. This is very simple to understand - more energy is arriving from the Sun than is being radiated into space, by quite a large amount. This is trivially measurable by pointing an infrared camera at the night side of the Earth from space (which NASA does).

The effects of this are more difficult to communicate, because they're not the same everywhere. Adding more energy to the air and water in the middle of the Atlantic, for example, is likely to cause more hurricanes to form, but it may also disrupt the gulf stream and lead to significantly colder weather for a lot of places.

In the 1600s the Thames used to freeze over so that you could safely walk from one side to the other

You mean right at the height of the Little Ice Age?

If that were to happen now climate 'scientists' would be up in arms.

If it were to happen now, then it would not be part of a prolonged cooling trend that had been going on for around 200 years at that point and was just reaching its peak, before starting to warm again. The global temperature then passed the peak of the previous warm period (the Medieval Warm Period) in the last century and kept climbing. But you knew all of that, right?

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Immerman]

>It is part of the scientific process to be skeptical.

Yes, and as is generally the case in science, anyone with hard data contradicting the accepted understanding is welcomed, at the fringes if not necessarily right away at the core. But unless you have solid data and/or the knowledge and experience to formulate and test an alternative, questioning the overwhelming consensus of those who have actually studied the issue you're not being skeptical, you're just denying information you don't want to be true.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[randallman]

Is that you, Malcom?

https://youtu.be/jguarSWDcrM?t...

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[segedunum]

If that's how you view it, that's fine, but don't pretend you're taking a scientific approach to the problem.

Fine, but don't pretend that what is going on right now with 'consensus' views has anything to do with 'science'. People are looking at where their next grant payment is coming from.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[segedunum]

....and this load of objectivist and dualistic bollocks is exactly the problem. You can come up with any load of tripe, and observations *after the event*, to fit the narrative. It's amazing what you can do with means ;-).

If it were to happen now, then it would not be part of a prolonged cooling trend that had been going on for around 200 years at that point and was just reaching its peak, before starting to warm again. The global temperature then passed the peak of the previous warm period (the Medieval Warm Period) in the last century and kept climbing. But you knew all of that, right?

Alas, it's a shame that it doesn't mean anything. The point here is that the Earth has undergone many shifts in its climate, sometimes in a startlingly short period of time. To suggest that people like you know what is actually going on, and then try and predict and say why it's happening is absolutely laughable, but that's the charlatans and PT Barnams fucking about with statistics that we have.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[segedunum]

People who call it 'flip-flopping' have a specific term reserved for them, they're called 'Politicians'.

.....and that is exactly what scientists getting their papers published is about these days. Politics.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll bet that website has no agenda!

Try it, it's a hoot, especially the links to the 'watchmanspost.com' site. Loads of hard science fact there!

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of real science at the green-agenda website. Especially the links to watchmanspost.com. Crammed full of science (if you like your science on the creationism side that is).

Is that the sort of science that you like zapadnik? Creationism/'Intelligent design'? Do you think the (religiously foretold) end times are coming very soon? That satan is promoting 'warmism'? The world goverment of satan is nigh? Just how nutty are you?

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[BundesSheep]

It's not OK to be skeptical without doing the work to provide an alternative theory? There is plenty to be skeptical about. Climate scientists seem to agree that a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial times of 280ppm to 560ppm should bring a warming of about 1C. Not much to worry about on it's own, the scary part comes when you factor in feedbacks, which we still don't have pinned down very well. The fifth assessment report states a range between 1C and 6C for a doubling of CO2 when factoring in various feedbacks, with the most likely values lying between 1.5C and 4.5C. That's a large range, running from "not much of a problem" at the low end to "oh, shit, we're all going to die" at the high end.

That seems like plenty of reason to be skeptical of the more exaggerated claims just by itself, without even factoring in the extreme politicization of climate science in general and what that might entail.

Perhaps it is as bad as it is claimed to be, but I'll wait until that uncertainty drops significantly before I start running around screaming with my hands in the air.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[bfpierce]

No argument here. The entire 'UN' deal is just politics anyways. Bill Nye is more politician than scientist these days.

That's not necessarily a bad thing though, I mean I can see you've made up your mind on that one since 'it's all about grant money' so I won't argue that point any further.

Some people like to study, most of us that do actually enjoy things like eating and owning a house.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know anything about the periods specifically mentioned, but historically we aren't all too off from past temperature swings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg

And LONG term we're a little on the cold side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record#/media/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[LynnwoodRooster]

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. - Albert Einstein

When you have an experiment (newly recorded data) that shows a model is wrong, it's wrong. Even if the vast majority of scientists still believe it to be right. Just takes one fact to tank a theory... That's the crux of the matter, many have hung their entire careers on building a model that has been shown, time and again, to be wrong. And rather than do the scientifically honest thing and toss the model and correct fundamental flaws in it (such as ignoring the impact of clouds and water vapor), they attack the facts that counter their model, and try to demonize those who present the facts..

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[jbengt]

Scientists don't adapt their hypothesis. They adapt their theory - or come up with a new theory.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's your chance: how much carbon would have to be added to the atmosphere for it to incur a real warming scenario of the type the majority of scientists are saying is already happening? 600ppm? 6000? Six parts per thousand? How much?

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

The models don't ignore clouds and water vapour. If they ignored water vapour they would say that the temperature of the earth was about -150C, so obviously they don't ignore water vapour. Have they always modelled additional feedback due to water vapour accurately? No, which is why they get refined over time.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[amicusNYCL]

According to that article, we are currently in a "very deep solar minimum", the "quietest sun we've seen in almost a century". The last grand maximum ended in 2007. So how come that no one younger than 31 has ever experienced a month which is colder than average? Why are we not currently cooling?

Why do I bother? I already know exactly how you're going to respond. Let's all say it together.

"The data is bad"

The data on solar cycles is apparently good data, but the other data that doesn't suit your ideas is bad. Right?

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[amicusNYCL]

Our betters also try to tell me that the northern hemisphere has over twice as much land area as the southern hemisphere, but my gut tells me that's a government conspiracy and that land and weather are equally distributed around the globe. Our betters also try to suggest that they've found evidence for warming in North America and the US during the medieval warm period, but the reason I know they're full of shit is because we didn't have satellites then, and even if we did they would have just fudged the data anyway. I don't trust thermometers anyway, I go outside today and it feels cooler than yesterday, so I know that today is colder than average. That's how facts work.

I also saw this climate map once, they were trying to show how things are warmer on average. But, check this out - one little part of the map was actually colder than average. That's how I know that they make everything up, because I understand that the entire planet always warms and cools at the same rate, and that local variation doesn't exist. That's how they try to convince you to send them all of your oil money, but the guy they hired to photoshop that map fucked up and left part of it cold and completely blew their cover.

And remember a couple decades ago when you couldn't even turn on the TV without seeing Sally Struthers whining about some starving African kid? You want to know why you don't see those any more? Because there aren't any starving people in the world anymore. I know this is a fact because I can drive down the street and there's a grocery store. That's how facts work.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[thinkwaitfast]

Sounds like a job for the symbionese liberation army.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[thinkwaitfast]

We are still in an ice age. In an inter glatiation period unless something got redefined.

Within a long-term ice age, individual pulses of cold climate are termed "glacial periods" (or alternatively "glacials" or "glaciations" or colloquially as "ice age"), and intermittent warm periods are called "interglacials". Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in both northern and southern hemispheres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two agendas make no agendas.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[LynnwoodRooster]

Dr. Roy Spencer says otherwise, that most don't factor in water vapor, and none include cloud formation.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[david_thornley]

There are global warming scammers, but that doesn't affect the fact that we're heating up the surface of the planet and it's going to have some unpleasant consequences. Check out the IPCC reports.

You seem to assume that almost all scientists are supported by governments that are willing to trash science for political purposes, and all in the same way. We're talking about scientists all over. If the data had been totally blown, there'd be enough climate scientists here and there to show that.

And, yes, the scientific predictions have typically been off on the conservative side. I don't find that comforting.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[david_thornley]

Okay, you don't like consensus. Got that. You don't trust things just because a consensus of scientists agree.

Now, where do you get your science? You can't possibly verify physics up through Newton's time by yourself. There's far too many things to do. You're going to have to take some of this stuff on some sort of faith. The neat thing about science is that you can check things. If you ask about Catholic theology, say, you'll find a very large number of things that you can't possibly verify. If you ask about science, you can pick any individual thing and verify it for yourself (it may take some time to learn how to do that, of course). If two theologians disagree, there's no method of picking who's right. If two scientists disagree, there's a method to resolve it. Science lives on consensus, but it has ways to break up false consensuses and allow effective dissent.

You also have a lot of strange views. You can find papers on the satellite observations. You can find papers on the comparisons of projections to reality. It's all out there. It's not hidden. You also seem to think that almost all climate scientists completely disregard the truth, and have a certain political agenda that doesn't vary worldwide. Have you ever thought about what things would have to be true for that to be true?

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[david_thornley]

Yeah, parts of the planet have been warmer and cooler. If you'd like to show me evidence that the planet as a whole has been warmer than what we've got now, go ahead. I haven't seen it.

I don't know what you mean by CAGW, but I'm willing to bet that green-agenda.com does not represent the political objectives of any large group of scientists. I don't know that it's any more legit than the Protocols of Zion.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not quite clear what you're trying to argue here.

Is it that "it was warmer in medieval times, therefore that proves it's not warming now"? Because that doesn't seem to account for (1) local variations, and (2) a long-term cooling trend that's been reversed in the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution.

Or is it that "it was warmer in medieval times, and that shows warming would be beneficial not harmful to humanity"? Because what that doesn't account for is the relative crowdedness of the world today. Let's imagine that Greenland would be a big winner from global warming and will become an idyllic place to live: how, exactly, are half a billion displaced Asians supposed to get there, without triggering World War 3 en route?

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[riverat1]

Yes, of course. But in the common vernacular "ice age" refers to a glacial period. I used to be pedantic about that too but I gave up a few years ago because it took too much effort to correct everyone all of the time.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

There weren't any thermometers in medieval Europe either.

Re: The anti-science sure is odd.

[TheRaven64]

Alas, it's a shame that it doesn't mean anything. The point here is that the Earth has undergone many shifts in its climate, sometimes in a startlingly short period of time

Except that the difference in temperature between the peak of the Medieval Warm Period and the bottom of the Little Ice Age were significantly smaller than the difference between the current temperature and the bottom of the Little Ice Age. The last time we saw an increase in temperature equivalent to the last 200 years it was over a period of tens of thousands of years.

Go and read a news story about an area of science that you know about and compare it to what the original research actually claimed. Now realise that press reports about climate change are no more accurate than that and go and read some of the papers. The models have been consistently refined for the last century, but the predictions are refinements (typically about specific local conditions and timescales), not complete reversals. Each year, there are more measurements that provide more evidence to support the core parts of the models.

Oh, and I don't think the words objectivist or dualistic mean what you think they mean. You can't discard evidence simply by throwing random words into a discussion.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[angel'o'sphere]

Solar minimums we have every few decades. Actually we are in one, so there is no 'heading to it' right now.
The difference in energy output of the sun, between a maximum and a minimum is a shocking 1%.
So if you live in the states, and all other things are equal, and you have hot day with 100F ... during a solar minimum that would be 99F (simplifying a bit as most americans here won't see the error anyway).
Regarding 'ice age' ... the idea that we are 'due' to an ice age in near future is a myth from the 1970s ... the last one started to end 20,000 years ago and only roughly 12,000 years ago it ended, depending how you count.
The next one is due at the _earliest_ in 50,000 years, if at all. Could easily be over 100,000 yeras till the next one.
And: solar cycles have absolutely nothing to do with ice ages, glacier or inter glacier periods ....
Current CO2 levels indicate there won't be any glacial period in the next millions of years, idiot!

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[angel'o'sphere]

CO2 > solar cycles.
WHY the funk should the earth cool because of a solar minimum?
The difference in air pressure between your feet and your head is probably bigger than the difference between solar output between max and min ....

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[angel'o'sphere]

Wrong on all accords.
Right now it is much warmer than during those times.
The viking graves are not under permafrost, otherwise we would not dig them out or know about them.
We are farming right now in Greenland, more than mankind ever did.
You are just an idiot.

Ah, and regarding wine: we are growing wine again in the UK since the late 1980s, get out from under your rock, idiot!

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[angel'o'sphere]

No those oeriods also affected China, at least we have written reports about it.
And I realy doubt that such a phenomenum was not global.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[amicusNYCL]

So what you're saying is that the person that I responded to suggesting that a solar minimum will drive global cooling is not correct.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[angel'o'sphere]

Neither will a solar minimum have any measurable cooling effect, nor will a solar maximum will have a measureable warming effect.
The difference is just to low and any 'random' weather effect is 10-100 times stronger, e.g the exceptional cols summer in germany. Untill a few days ago it was like'10 - 15 degrees Celsius below 'average' or 'expected' temperature. That is a factor of like 400 bigger than the solar variation.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wonder if you would be calling people "nutters" and trying to convince people of man caused climate change if the supposed fixes were lower taxes, smaller government, and less regulation and control of people's lives... In the US, the "fixes" line up perfectly with a political ideology, and I find that too suspicious to ignore.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Namarrgon]

did you not know the Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm period were warmer than today?

No, because globally, they were much colder (see fig 2).

Vikings farmed in Greenland

And now it's easier than ever before.

wine grapes could be grown as far north as York in England.

There's many commercial vineyards there today, and even further north.

Now the graves of the Vikings are under 'permafrost'

Wrong, there hasn't been permafrost at those sites for a long time.

You talk about 'nutters' yet seem to be defending a position for which you don't even understand even the basic counter evidence

I've yet to see you present any, only oft-repeated claims that you obviously have never bothered to check for yourself.

I would hope you would look at the statement of the leaders of the CAGW movement

You seriously expect us to accept a bunch of out-of-context quotes as evidence of some global conspiracy? The only "agenda" it proves is that of the people who set up the website.

"Anti-science" means people who deliberately ignore the huge amounts of collected scientific evidence, and continue to spout provably incorrect claims with no evidence of their own. "Nutters" usually follow this by attempted FUD about the reliability of all the evidence against them, inevitably resulting in global conspiracy claims. You certainly qualify for both terms.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[zapadnik]

Do you know the hypothesis of CAGW ? do you know that not only has this hypothesis not been conformed by experimental evidence but the EXACT OPPOSITE has been *****OBSERVED*****. Computer simulations are no match for observed reality. I bet you don't even know the litmus test of CAGW, do you? hence you believe the falsified data from NOAA, yes, FALSIFIED. Once the source data has been falsified then EVERYTHING else is tainted. You can see this easily if you compare an earlier NOAA data set from a few years ago from the data sets they publish today - they are injecting trends into their data. This is pure Lysenkosim to support the agenda of the one-percenter globalists. And you, as a zombie minion, go along with the lie. No amount of evidence will ever persuade you from your religious beliefs. You REFUSE to use the Scientific Method, or else you would understand that CAGW is ALREADY falsified based on the satellite data.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[Namarrgon]

the EXACT OPPOSITE has been *****OBSERVED*****

So you keep claiming, but repeating it louder isn't going to help. If you can produce this supposed evidence, try doing that, because spamming links to some political site won't sway anyone. And while you're at it, see if you can explain away the mountains of evidence showing the accelerating rise in temperatures for the last 150 years.

the falsified data from NOAA, yes, FALSIFIED

Let me guess, you've got no evidence for this accusation of malfeasance either, right? Your sole basis for all this seems to be that you don't like the results, and something something conspiracy. Well too bad, science doesn't work that way. You can spout Lysenkoism all you like, but from here it looks much more like you're the one denying the evidence you dislike, and producing none of your own.

NOAA are completely open about their data correction methods, which are peer reviewed, confirmed independently, and are corroborated by data & analysis from NASA, CRU, and other international agencies. And if you still don't like it, take their raw data (yes, it's always been available) and do your own analysis (if you can get your methodology through peer review, ha ha). That's what the Berkeley Earth people did (you can check their data too) - and surprise surprise, their results agreed with NOAA, NASA, and the others. So your unsubstantiated claims of "tainted" data are laughable in the face of the real evidence.

No amount of evidence will ever persuade you from your religious beliefs.

What a coincidence; "no amount of evidence" is exactly what you've produced. And yet it's you that has repeatedly dismissed all the evidence against you, citing only some purely hypothetical political manipulation. "Zombie minion" indeed.

Re:The anti-science sure is odd.

[zapadnik]

So you keep claiming, but repeating it louder isn't going to help. If you can produce this supposed evidence, try doing that, because spamming links to some political site won't sway anyone. And while you're at it, see if you can explain away the mountains of evidence showing the accelerating rise in temperatures for the last 150 years.

I don't have to prove anything because I represent the Null Hypothesis. It is you who has to provide the proof for the CAGW theory. I bet you have never looked at the specific prediction of CAGW and compared the satellite evidence verses the surface station record (for sites not affected ny the Urban Heat Island effect, and stations that are providing *real* data and not *estimated* data). Have you ever done this ????? I bet you have no - yet you have very strong opinions about something for which you actually know nothing and have failed to do even basic fact checking on. Shame on you !

With regard to "political site", these are the words of the people running the Green Scam trying to extort money and power from taxpayers, They are not my words, but THEIR OWN WORDS. It is completely relevant. But again like an ignoramus you dismiss the evidence without actually doing a 1 minute job of checking the facts out for yourself. You are acting exactly like the North Korean peasantry does. Shame on you again !

Let me guess, you've got no evidence for this accusation of malfeasance either, right? Your sole basis for all this seems to be that you don't like the results, and something something conspiracy. Well too bad, science doesn't work that way. You can spout Lysenkoism all you like, but from here it looks much more like you're the one denying the evidence you dislike, and producing none of your own.

Do you not understand the Scientific Method ? *******ANY******* observation which contradicts theory is enough to falsify the theory. The MASSIVE and INCREASING difference between the predictions of the CAGW simulations and observed reality are enough to falsify the hypothesis. Furthermore, you can easy see the fraud by comparing the adjusted NOAA and NASA data as they continue to inject trends into the data year after year. They are artificially cooling the past to inject a linear trend into the data. You don't need anything except their own data - because they are adjusting their own data by revising the past. You would see this if you bothered to actually compare their published data from 2005 to their data for the same period published today. But you have failed to do your basic homework and are now ranting about data you have never looked at. Shame on you thrice !

NOAA are completely open [noaa.gov] about their data correction methods, which are peer reviewed, confirmed independently [york.ac.uk], and are corroborated by data & analysis from NASA, CRU, and other international agencies. And if you still don't like it, take their raw data [noaa.gov] (yes, it's always been available) and do your own analysis (if you can get your methodology through peer review, ha ha). That's what the Berkeley Earth [berkeleyearth.org] people did (you can check their data [berkeleyearth.org] too) - and surprise surprise, their results agreed with NOAA, NASA, and the others. So your unsubstantiated claims of "tainted" data are laughable in the face of the real evidence.

Of course if you take their data you get the same results, you silly fool. That is the whole point. When the data are corrupted every downstream product is corrupted. And no, NOAA are NOT open about why the adjustments to their datasets are changing their adjustments by progressively cooling the past and injecting a linear trend of greater and greater gradient with every revision of the SAME historical data. It is THIS that is fraudulent - and you are unable to see it - because you have failed to examine the two published data sets for yourself.

Now, you admit that the warming started 150 years ag

Only time will tell

[ITRambo]

These have been increases in temperatures. This implies global warming. Since we are still at the infant stage of understanding and accurately predicting what will happen over mid to long spans of time it's best to stop arguing, try to pollute less since that just makes sense, and enjoy our lives. Life is too damn short to fight about issues primarily created and controlled by oil, gas, and energy corporations.

Re:Only time will tell

[dcollins]

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Great Filter.

Re:Only time will tell

[Barsteward]

short term self interest only huh...great attitude for humanity and your offspring and their offspring etc etc. your parents must be proud

Re:Only time will tell

[Anonymous Coward]

That has been the default setting for life in general so far: Do whatever is required for you and your loved ones to live, leave the rest to God, or nature, or whatever is larger than you that you don't understand yet. This "no war, no disease, care about the world" attitude may have been in the Bible for 2000-6000 years, but its realisation is a very new thing. One could argue that we needed two world wars to shift our thought patterns. While I would prefer to avoid it at all costs, it looks like people need a global catastrophe to change their mindset and stop believing stupid shit in the face of evidence and reason.

Re:Only time will tell

[drinkypoo]

These have been increases in temperatures.

What have?

This implies global warming.

What does?

Since we are still at the infant stage of understanding and accurately predicting what will happen over mid to long spans of time it's best to stop arguing,

Actually, we're well past infant. We can make pretty good predictions. The only way in which they aren't very good is that things are actually getting worse faster than predicted.

try to pollute less since that just makes sense,

To a lot of people, it doesn't. Consequently...

and enjoy our lives.

I'm trying, but people who don't believe in polluting less are making it difficult. That's why we need to force them to behave better. And that's why we need to argue about it.

Life is too damn short to fight about issues primarily created and controlled by oil, gas, and energy corporations.

This issue was created by physics. Try to keep up.

Re:Only time will tell

[xtal]

We're all in. Only took one player to make the call (the industrialized west); now we see the cards.

We develop magic technology that can fix all this or we die.

I'm betting on the magic technology. You can go vote yourself into a economic depression, but given the current rates of information gathering, we will have the solutions shortly. In may ways, we have one staring us in the face - widespread adoption of nuclear power - but we're too stupid to implement it.

The great filter is the 10,000 or so odd nuclear warheads in the ground right now. It always has been and always will be. Those warheads will fly long before the planet warms up to extinct us.

Re:Only time will tell

[Anonymous Coward]

^^^ THIS ^^^^

Re:Only time will tell

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. There's no way that every species faces this type of challenge. Some planets could benefit from a great deal of sapient caused warming, others might have fuels that don't result in carbon, or some biological reasons why carbon is scarce. Even if we accept that any advanced species lives on an earth like planet that is subject to global warming, it seems unlikely that every species will value things that require large energy expenditures (especially important given that not all cultures on earth do).

Picturing an alien race dealing with our challenges and failing seems like a thing to have happened, but to assume that NONE OF THEM escaped this fate- EVER- is silly.

Ayep. 'Bout time I brought this up.

[eyenot]

Yep.

Also, it was right around the time I was born that the world started gettin' so very interestin' for so very many people.

So it's pretty clear from all available scientific data that I'm pretty much "it". I'm all there is to anything important in life: your life, your wife's life, hell even the lives of the several Presidents that have been elected since I was born. You kind of all owe it to me and my shit. Otherwise your shit would be boring. Trust me: it would be. I can tell because every day I look at your shit and I go, "boring. Fucking fuck's sake it's so boring I'm about to cry."

So I happen to be an expert on this.

Now, now, don't everybody scramble to try and suck my dick at once. You'll just get in the way of the ladies and if you do that I won't be able to see which ones I want to drop kick down my mountain of pure gold and memory modules.

Memory modules are still as good as diamonds right?

Well shucks I wasn't sure when or even how I was going to let the rest of you in on this, but when I saw how well you took this news about the industrial revolution being solely responsible for heating the planet, I decided now was the best time to break it to you.

Fishbowl

[Anonymous Coward]

You know how you forget to clean your fishbowl and it turns murky? That's basically what we're doing to the planet.

Yes, the problem with the real denialists...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, if you think about it people even trying to slow global warming are causing the pre-extinction of millions of species. They are literally future-murderers.

We can all just pray the temperature rises at all instead of going the other way. I'm not sure when the people who supposedly "believed" in science started thinking less energy in a system was better...

Whoa!

[Anonymous Coward]

So the increase in parts per million in almost 200 years time is an equivalent of 0.0012% of the atmosphere.

Run!

Re:Great Barrier Reef Found Unaffected by GW

[Anonymous Coward]

"Article Source: Chris Eade, owner of the diving boat Spirit Of Freedom". Really? You are basing your citation on an owner of a reef diving company. No science done what so ever. Seriously? How can this be modded up.

Idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if these "scientists" realize how pathetic they are. It is at a point where you can just write whatever you want and claim it is true since it can't be disproven let alone tested.

Just a few decades ago scientists were scared of global cooling and wanting to cover the poles with dirt. No matter if the temp is going up or down, scientists want money

The science isn't settled: it's dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Australian universities these days all toe the political line on climate change. There are plenty of opposing views out there, but they've all been forced out of the "academic" left-wing-global-warming echo-chambers that are the universities now. Anyone with an opposing view is outright sacked. There is no funding, and no questioning of the official party line.

Re: The science isn't settled: it's dead.

[Falconhell]

Opposing views maybe, but the facts are clear to sensible people. Why so many supposedly intelligent people deny the fact of climate change on here is a reflection on their arrogance. The usual nutty claims of a scientific conspiracy are as laughable as believing in chemtrails, same mental illness perhaps? Or some prefer nit picking the data to justify their confirmation bias.

Re: The science isn't settled: it's dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this left-wing-global-warming SJW trope a big thing in the real world or is it a few posters making a lot of noise? And why is global warming left wing?

Re: The science isn't settled: it's dead.

[Falconhell]

Denialist mods cant handle the truth, awwww.

Re: The science isn't settled: it's dead.

[Rakarra]

Is this left-wing-global-warming SJW trope a big thing in the real world or is it a few posters making a lot of noise? And why is global warming left wing?

It's probably seen as being left wing due to its association with the environment movement, which has long been left wing. And also, the fossil fuel industry is allied with right-wing politicians in the US. And finally, it is generally a conservative trend to not want to change the way things are. If climate change is real, it naturally follows that some major economic changes will need to occur, a fundamentally un-conservative stance.

Should have said

[Nostalgia4Infinity]

They should have said 20,000 years ago, because that's when it started warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: Should have said

[Anonymous Coward]

After the ice age.

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Anonymous Coward]

That was hundreds of millions of years ago.

WE did this shit 200~ years ago.

Oh.. fucking what the fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

When will this shit stop? We get it. The left wants us to believe that we are ruining the planet beyond repair. We get it. How much do we have to donate to the campaign to get this to stop?

Need to sue those responsible

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to sue the wealthy companies and owner families who are responsible for creating global warming!

Joseph "Heat" Smith

[Tablizer]

I knew it, them Mormons diddit!

Shows cumulative as well.

[WindBourne]

So many like to point to industrial revolution for causing this. Yet, what this study is really saying is that for centuries, if not millenniums, man had been overwhelming nature and slowly breaking down its ability to absorb the co2.

Re:Shows cumulative as well.

[drinkypoo]

So many like to point to industrial revolution for causing this.

That's because humans now emit more CO2 than volcanism.

Yet, what this study is really saying is that for centuries, if not millenniums, man had been overwhelming nature and slowly breaking down its ability to absorb the co2.

Yes, that is also true. We were deforesting the planet in pursuit of war. Most of the really heavy deforestation came when the big countries went naval warfare. We were cutting them down, making them into boats, then putting them out into the ocean and sinking them and losing that wood forever.

Of course, today we're still doing the equivalent; just try getting a permit to cut down a tree in Japan and use it for something, but they are buying California's redwoods as fast as they can be shipped over there. Then they are coating them in tar and sinking them under the ocean for storage. What are the odds that some cataclysm will remove them from the equation? Pretty goddamn good in Japan. We're cutting down the redwoods for nothing, as a species. Just to move some numbers around.

If there were such a thing as karma, humanity would deserve to die.

Re:Shows cumulative as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Boats? Seriously?

The leading cause of deforestation is livestock farming. It's not the pursuit of war, it's the pursuit of the cheeseburger.

Ultimately what it means is that if the increase has been going on for thousands of years because of mankind's hand that either the species has to die or we have to limit the number down to about the same number of users who visit Slashdot in a week and keep it there. No number of solar panel driven Tesla cars will matter if we insist that this planet can support more than a handful of people.

Re:Shows cumulative as well.

[Anne Thwacks]

I am quietly confident that most of the trees in Europe were cut down before the cheeseburger was invented. Most of the trees elsewhere were cut down for firewood.

Re:Shows cumulative as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the really heavy deforestation came when the big countries went naval warfare. We were cutting them down, making them into boats, then putting them out into the ocean and sinking them and losing that wood forever.

We were doing that without fossil fuels, right? And the wood is gone forever? And new wood can grow when we chopped old wood down?
That actually sounds more like a carbon sequestration plan.

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[quantaman]

The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times!

That was 200 million years ago, even the days were 23 hours long and the years more than 20 days longer.

There's a reason scientists publish papers in peer reviewed journals, not every decision is as simple as jumping on the first convenient looking factoid.

The industrial revolution did not cause it

[WindBourne]

Basically, the ability of the environment to absorb the co2 had been depleted. IOW, mankind had been adding co2 for millenniums above and beyond what nature could handle. Had industrial revolution not happened, then it simply means that this would have been delayed.

Re:The industrial revolution did not cause it

[Anonymous Coward]

mankind had been adding co2 for millenniums
 
And every other living creature too.
 
If what is apparent on the surface is in any way the bottom line it means that we can't keep filling up the planet and expect to survive in our current conditions regardless of trappings like renewable energy. We may be able to soften the curve some but it appears that large land animals don't have much of a place in this environment in any great numbers. People need not only turn from oil and coal but also breeding their own kind as well as "farming" animals for food.

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Namarrgon]

The *planet* is clearly fine with high levels of CO2. The biosphere is fine with it too - given enough time to evolve and respond.

But we humans won't enjoy our cities getting flooded and our crops drying out (adapting will be very expensive). And a lot of the biosphere isn't being given time to respond either, since the temperature rise is happening so quickly. Those coral reefs can't just pick up and walk to a cooler area.

A small prolem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since CO2 didn't rise in any statistically significant amount until the mid 20th Century, I guess the alarmists will now admit that CO2 is not a problem? Or does this little bit of cognitive dissonance not phase the zealots?

Maybe the earth knows that humans are evil and warms itself like the body warms itself during a viral infection? Or maybe, the earth was just warming anyway due to natural variation and you are doing what stupid humans always do and find patterns where there are none. Like seeing Jesus's face in a piece of toast.

Re:A small prolem...

[Opportunist]

Where do you draw that conclusion from? What I see is that they show that global warming started when the industrial revolution started and we started to blow smoke up into the air, not that it has always happened at the same level.

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Barsteward]

"Any time period the warmunists want to "prove" there is AGW the warmunists just cherry pick ranges." hahaha thats what the deniers do to "prove" its not happening

Well, here is the evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

No denying now: technology is bad. We must destroy it all and live with nature. Let's round up all the scientists and engineers, kill them, burn all the books and all the machines and cities, then we can go back eating raw meat and burning our shit for warmth.

New research?

[WalksOnDirt]

Ok, the research may be new but the broad result sure isn't. Bill Ruddiman proposed in 2003 that humans have been modifying the climate for thousands of years, mostly through agriculture and cattle raising. Mind you, if he's right, I'm glad we did. But it's warm enough now and the rate of warming is getting out of control; it's time to stop.

Re:New research?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also don't understand why they're saying "It was one of those moments where science really surprised us," when this aligns with previous research and it in fact is the precise result you'd expect in the first place.

Snide incoming

[wkwilley2]

How convenient that Global warming "started" when NOAA started doing official weather records.

Re:Snide incoming

[Opportunist]

It might surprise you, but there is a world outside the USA and the world wasn't created in 1776.

Re:Snide incoming

[Anonymous Coward]

It was created in 1066.

5 days a snow ths year

[Anonymous Coward]

i live n canada and usually we get snow 4 months of the year
gof yourself idiot

Re:Great Barrier Reef Found Unaffected by GW

[Anonymous Coward]

You stopped reading as soon as you saw it was about the word of fishing boat owners, didn't you.
Whilst I conceed that a) the interviewee could be biased, and b) there is few concrete figures in the article, it does point out that the tests and models that were used to determine how damaged a reed was and how well it could recover from the damage were not anywhere near accurate - as proven first by diving boat owners, who went to the reef and looked at it, and later by other scientists.

CAGW in a nutshell

[zapadnik]

There are many people here who talk about CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) but don't understand the hypothesis at all.

CAGW posits that as humans emit CO2 that there will be a logarithmic increase in temperature. The current estimate of CO2s direct effects is a rise of 1.1K per doubling of CO2 (which means, the effect of CO2 decreases logrithmically as you linearly increase CO2 concentration). No one disputes this, not the CAGW proponents nor the skeptics. So let us get past this. Temperature rises caused by this direct effect are NOT catastrophic, and given plants are starved of CO2 and grow better in higher temperatures the gradual temperature increase caused by the direct effects of increasing CO2 are beneficial. Already we see the planet is 'greening' as plants can grow in areas with less water if they instead get more CO2. This is Freeman Dyson's position, and has been confirmed by recent satellite observations.

The next effect is sometimes called the 'Enhanced Greenhouse Effect'. This is the temperature increase caused by non-CO2 greenhouse gases - primarily water vapor (since water vapor is THE dominant greenhouse gas; a 2% increase in water vapor is equivalent to a 100% increase in CO2). The computer simulations made by the IPCC and others estimate the most probable value of this Enhanced Greenhouse Effect is around 3 C as a result of increased water vapor per doubling of CO2. This is a decrease from earlier models where it was estimated as 4-5 C per doubling of CO2. HOWEVER, this is based on computer simulations, but unfortunately the simulations cannot model the water vapor cycle accurately - very important heat transfer mechanisms like convection simply are not modeled correctly. As a result, the computer simulations have not been able to predict the observed climate changes. The computer simulation keep having parameters adjusted to try fit the observed data, but their forward predictions have NEVER matched observed reality once time has passed and the predictions can be checked. Thus, the computer simulations (which according to the Scientific Method are 'hypothesis' and NOT 'observation') are said to have 'no skill' in prediction.

What is ACTUALLY observed by two independent satellite data sets, as well as thousands of balloon observations for the 'Enhanced Greenhouse Effect' is that the 'feedbacks' mostly due to water vapor are around 1 C and possibly zero or even very slightly negative. However, many people cling to the flawed computer simulations and reject the observed reality which shows a vastly more gradual rise (punctuated by spikes caused by El Nino, which happens approximately ecer 4 years, and is usually followed by La Nina cooling).

So, the difference between CAGW proponents ('alarmists') and CAGW opponents ('skeptics') is NOT a dispute about the mild, and mostly beneficial direct effects of CO2, but a dispute about the severity of the 'Enhanced Greenhouse Effect' (as measured by the Transient Climate Sensitivity and Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity). The computer modelers have public faith in their models (although in the various 'Climategate' releases of emails the modellers understand their simulations don't match reality, check out the Climategate emails sometime) despite the fact the models do not match observed reality. The 'skeptics' point to the observed reality and show that the dire predictions made in the past don't come close to observed behavior, therefore the 'Enhanced Greenhouse Effect' is MUCH (by a factor of three at least) smaller than the IPCC has claimed (despite the IPCC adjusting the claim down from outrageously bad to merely silly with the release of each report). This is what is being debated: do you trust computer simulations, or the satellite and balloon observations. Note: surface observations are so sparse as to be worthless, have a large and increasing proportion of estimated data (which are not observations but guesses), and the bad effect of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect - when UHI and es

Re:CAGW in a nutshell

[drinkypoo]

The 'skeptics' point to the observed reality and show that the dire predictions made in the past don't come close to observed behavior,

The problem with this idea is that they're cherry-picking predictions. There are dire predictions which do come close to observed behavior, and these are the ones we've been using most often. The way in which they don't match observed behavior is that observed behavior is actually worse. For example, polar ice is melting substantially faster than predicted by any credible model. If you don't think this change in albedo is going to have additional effects, you're not thinking.

Re:CAGW in a nutshell

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you waste you time wading through this visit the green-agenda.com website, and explore the links, particularly to watchmanspost.com
Then you'll know where this guy's coming from (usual conspiracy stuff, world government about to cull population, plus christian end-times stuff, all the usual mad ravings). He seems a bit shy in his comments about coming clean on the religious angle but the "forthcoming population cull" popped up in one of the comments. Can appear relatively sane at times but obviously struggling not to veer off into the religious nutter area.

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Opportunist]

No, that CO2 was just there. And it was sequestered in the coal and oil that formed back then. But at least we now know where we'll get to if we reintroduce that carbon to the air.

Little Ice Age

[bradley13]

As always, TFA fails to look at the broader context. 200 years ago was the Little Ice Age", i.e., an unusually cold period in history. Much of the warming of the past 200 years is simply due to coming out of this cold period. Exactly how much, is difficult to say.

Re:Little Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

Phew! Thanks for clearing that up!! I feel much better about my denial now. Thanks again!!!

Re:Little Ice Age

[stinerman]

I always find that our average /. commentator has more knowledge than people with terminal degrees in these fields. If only we has slashdotters doing all the research we could have all of our problems licked in a few years, max.

Re:Little Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

This! I wish I had point to mod you up. All these studies *always* pick the bottom of the trough of the Little Ice Age as their starting point - it's cherry picking. They do this because it coincidentally, and so very conveniently, happens around the same time as the start of the industrial revolution. Adjust your time scale out properly, and you'l find that we are still at the coldest levels our planet has ever seen, way below average. We should be seeing warming no matter what.

Re:Little Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't say how much, how can you say most of the current warming? Since we're WELL above the temperatures PRE-LIA, how the fuck can yuo claim the warming beyond that is "us coming out of the LIA"????

Moreover, how the hell do you know there's an LIA? BECAUSE OF THE CLIMATE SCIENTISTS WHO ALSO SAY THAT YOUR CLAIM IS WRONG.

Re:Little Ice Age

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed!!!

Re:Little Ice Age

[kenwd0elq]

Yeah, but we at SlashDot are not getting big government grants to manufacture\\\\\\\\\ investigate the climate phenomena that everybody is so hysterical about. The Global Warmists _ARE_ getting multi-million dollar grants on how to prevent something that is not occurring, and if everybody turns around and says "Yeah, we can see that there's nothing going on here", then they lose their grants, and their rice bowls, and they'd have to come up with some OTHER scam to get the megabux of tax dollars that is the only thing standing between them and having to get "real jobs".

In short:

[Anonymous Coward]

In a nutshell: "I'm Right and All the Others Are Wrong, and Here Are Some Hand-Picked Examples to Prove That".

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[bytesex]

At 1000ppm, CO2 starts getting (a little bit) toxic to humans.

Doesnt this prove that it isnt manmade?

[jgfenix]

If the GW began at the same time as the industrial revolution: 1) It should take some time for mens actions to take effect and now you are saying that it happened at the same time? 2) There were few industrialized countries, mostly some western european countries and USA and at the end of the XIX century Japon and Russia.

Re:Doesnt this prove that it isnt manmade?

[Anonymous Coward]

How long does it take you to react when you get punched in the face? How about each subsequent time? Answer ... it depends on which subsequent strike has place, how hard, and your tolerance. See how science works?

Re:Doesnt this prove that it isnt manmade?

[ventsyv]

On the contrary, it shows even closer connection between climate change and human activity.

Re:Doesnt this prove that it isnt manmade?

[Anne Thwacks]

In the interests of science, I suggest you attempt to punch him in the face a large number of times, so you can accurately record the effects and statistically analyse them (just don't use Excell).

It started even earlier than that

[Anonymous Coward]

Global warming started at the end of the last ice age...

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Anonymous Coward]

The concentration reduction between then (the Cambrian) and now in CO2, was only possible because it was stored in trees. Those same trees that form the massive coal deposits buried around the planet, which that we are currently burning and thus reintroducing the CO2. The buildups of wood thick enough to form the coal in the first place was only possible because there were no fungi that ate dead wood yet. Reintroducing all that CO2 will not be countered by the same mechanic that happend all those millennia ago. So no, it is not a good thing.

Mount Tambora (1815 volcano eruption)

[Anonymous Coward]

From a scientific stand point, I would have thought it would have started with the Mount Tambora (1815 volcano eruption). It was a VEI 7 (Super-colossal), which caused the 1816 "Year without a summer" around the earth.

About the global warming thing, a lot of republican congressmen are shifting to embrace global warming with the idea of a "oil tax'. The reason, is that energy companies are trying to figure out a way to make money from non-oil energy sources. They've realized that with oil being cheap, the non-oil energy sources margins are too thin, or at a loss. With an USA oil tax at the pipe line, or from imports at oil carrier ship (unless the importing country has already taxed it), would then increase oil prices, and the market would then put more money non-oil energy sources.

Re:Mount Tambora (1815 volcano eruption)

[BlueStrat]

They've realized that with oil being cheap, the non-oil energy sources margins are too thin, or at a loss. With an USA oil tax at the pipe line, or from imports at oil carrier ship (unless the importing country has already taxed it), would then increase oil prices, and the market would then put more money non-oil energy sources.

Higher fossil-fuel prices will also assist in reducing the numbers of old, sick, and poor (especially the poor) through attrition as the prices for heating and A/C go higher and higher and more and more deaths from heat/cold exposure and starvation (many will have to choose between food and heat/AC). Luckily it won't much affect those that matter...the rich and the politically-connected who can easily afford outrageously high energy costs.

Increasing energy costs have a very real and serious affect on the lives of people, and price increases are extremely regressive as they hurt the poorest first and worst.

Can't we come up with a solution that doesn't involve forcing poor, sick, and elderly people to die of exposure?

Strat

WTF does this have to do with technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of coarse I'm a troll for trolling what is obviously a troll post. Conjecture, Guessing, Data manipulation, Hyperventilating Hyperbole, all nonsensical gibberish spouted by a herd of bobble heads. Its not science its political science and its primary goal is to fill the coffers of sub-par "scientists" who have no real ability to do any real science. Its snake oil unsubstantiated assertions by idiots who have no clue what the scientific method is or what empirical thinking involves. I am a computer geek I think in binary you know? On/Off Yes/No. This abstract nonsense derived by starting with a conclusion and looking only for information that substantiates your petty little hypothesis is beneath the mind of any genuinely intelligent person. There is a fable called "chicken little" this story is as old as the pyramids. Some chuckle head with a diploma mill indoctrination certificate does not make this science and it certainly has nothing to do with technology. I don't care about your politics nor you opinion on matters you obviously don't have the capacity to understand. There are an infinite number of variables most of which we have no control over. Lets get this straight, even if I do use the best understood science of today; We are falling at unfathomable speed through a vast void attracted to a huge burning ball of gas which is also falling at some non comprehensible speed attracted by something not understood, all the result of a huge explosion so far back in time it can not be conceptualized by our tiny little minds. So some nitwit comes along and says cow farts are gonna kill us all and you really expect me to take you seriously? Scientists my ass.

Pretty Sure Global Warming Started...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure global warming started ~19,000 years ago. Sea levels had risen 91 meters(300 feet) by ~11,000 years ago.Warming has continued slowly since then and sea levels have likewise slowly increased to this day.

I don't give a flying-rat-fuck that the Earth will be 3 degrees C hotter or that sea levels may have risen 1 meter in the next 1,000 years! That's 30-40 generations.

Umm... and the Ice Ages melted because ...

[bwanagary]

Wow. Tunnel-vision. For millions of years the climate on earth has been changing. Ice ages come and go (all without the assistance of humans) - warming and cooling cycles have been happening for millennia. The geological evidence is irrefutable. The authors are correct - as the industrial revolution has exploded, so has the human contribution to temperature rise. But in the history of temperature rise and fall of the earth it is characteristic, not exceptional and therefore not a finding worthy of any alarm. It's just part of the natural cycle.

Re:Umm... and the Ice Ages melted because ...

[ventsyv]

Sure but the natural cycle takes tens of thousands of years, while the human made one takes mere decades. The change in temperature due to the natural cycle is minute.

Re: NIGGERS ARE FAR MORE DANGEROUS THAN AGW

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we should collect their farts and use it as methane fuel.

something not right

[Anonymous Coward]

So 15ppm added in 70 years in the 1800's. We basically did 1000x worse in the 1900's and 2000's then what we did in the 1800's and yet we are not past 600ppm. In the 1900's you had ww1, ww2, korean war, vietnam, desert storm,etc.... You also had 520 nuclear bombs tested at the atmosphere level, volcanic eruptions and wild forest fires throughout the world, industry is 1000x(including coal and oil burning) more than what it was in the 1800's and yet we only reached 400ppm.

who knows

[Anonymous Coward]

Or it could be caused by all the wars.

Everything is worse now - except when it's not

[zerofoo]

I'm old enough to remember the LA smog in the 80s.

That doesn't really happen anymore. The way climate change people talk, it would seem like there has been no environmental progress since the start of the industrial revolution.

Rivers used to catch fire in this country:

http://clevelandhistorical.org...

That doesn't seem to happen much anymore either.

I'm sure back then, people argued against smog and water pollution controls as well. These changes take time - but they eventually happen.

Re:Everything is worse now - except when it's not

[ventsyv]

They happen because someone is pushing for them. If everyone just sits on their hands waiting for things to happen we'll probably still have acid rain and rivers on fire.

hahahaha

[p51d007]

Global warming started AT THE BEGINNING of the industrial revolution. In other words MAN HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Anonymous Coward]

That was 200 million years ago

And your point? CO2 was at 1950 ppm, and the temperature was only 3 deg Celsius hotter. Full stop. Period. That is a fact. Not a "factoid", perhaps it might be an "inconvenient truth", but nothing changes that it is a motherfucking fact. Stop twisting and turning and bobbling and strawmanning and minimalizing and deflecting your way out of everything.

This is why anyone with an actual, functioning brain doubts you people. You're worse than Christians, at least their faith is in a supposed "higher power", your faith is in man who we all know is wrong a hell of a lot more than he's right. STOP IT.

The Ethics of Greed

[SMACX guy]

"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill." -- CEO Nwabudike Morgan

No Run Away Warming

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the main prediction of the Global Warming now Climate Change crowd. Mann, Gore and the IPCC all said that there would be a hockey stick in our future. Only there isn't a hockey stick. Global Warming has stalled out. You can draw a straight line from the peaks of the last three El Ninos. That aint warming.

BeauHD article = Hippie BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time there's something about lefty liberal climate change or some other hippie bullshit, count on it being a BeauHD article.

Light and Communication

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientists keeping tying it to emission of carbon, what they keep over looking is night time lighting and radio communications which also started near that same period of time.
Lights emit heat, and powering them traditionally generates heat.
All forms of radio communication generate heat. Microwave (the latest greatest world wide roll out) really affects those particles of carbon in the air causing them to vibrate as the waves pass by.
But hey we all know no one is giving up their phones, and leaving outside lights on all night for 'security' and 'safety' will continue to be a foolish use of energy.

Results of "cooked" research are ALWAYS clear

[Anonymous Coward]

"But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago."

As I would expect when the results are pre-determined and real science takes a back-door.... Renormalizing data will always show what you want it to show...

Al Gore

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore believes in global warming and he will fly to you on his private jet to tell you so.

Yeah, well I wouldn't worry too much . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

. . . we liberals win every fucking time.

Re:NIGGERS ARE FAR MORE DANGEROUS THAN AGW

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to be black to be a nigger, you can be as lilly-white and red-necked as this asshole is, and be the biggest nigger in all of history, pretty much like this fuckstain is.

That's right, asshole: YOU ARE THE NIGGER HERE, NOT ANY BLACK PERSON. Your SHIT attitude is shitting up the ENTIRE HUMAN SPECIES with your SHIT. Someone needs to push you into a woodchipper, you'll be much more useful as MULCH.

No surprise...

[spurioustruth]

It's been discussed as far back as the late 50's and early 60's that we're enjoying a global warm-up following the last ice-age.
It is wonderful to see the science reach back into the historical record to try and fix the trends we're seeing though.

Some studies say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some studies say dog shit smells good.

Australian National University ties to AMOS

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nerilie Abram, another of the lead authors and an associate professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Earth Sciences..."

Wow. So Abram is a lead author and an associate professor at the Australian National University's Research School of Earth Sciences. Turns out the Australian National University is closely tied to the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society which has been exposed in falsifying scientific data. So Abram's relationship to AMOS begs the question: does he use non-falsified data as well? Anthropomorphic climate change as the major cause has been debunked as well as the so called 97% consensus has been debunked with solidly puts science deniers who believe climate change is mostly anthropomorphic, akin to holocaust deniers.

let's go out and build a factory

[Dareth]

Early Minecraft players in real life?

Fun Fact: Solar and Wind cheaper than Fossil Fuel

[WillAffleckUW]

Without the 90 percent massive subsidies that fossil fuels get, in depreciation, cheap federal and state lands (mining regs), escaping penalties for pollution by bankruptcy, and literal cash infusions for fossil fuel industries, they would be bankrupt today.

Let's help them along and get rid of all fossil fuel vehicle and business tax exemptions, tax deductions, regulatory escapes, and all the other things that subsidize these inefficient fossil fuel dinosaurs.

Literally.

Adapt, adapt, adapt

[NotARealUser]

Humans adapt. Throughout history, there have been periods that have been frigid and periods that have been hot. People were able to adjust lifestyles and the human race went on.

However, equally true is the common narrative throughout history that nature will soon cause our end. There is just a subset of the population that will always fear what they do not understand. Not that fear is all bad, but some become obsessed with their fears to the point that they cannot see the tools they have at their disposal to adapt to the circumstances.

When the world went through the little ice age, lasting approximately 550 years (1300-1850), the world did not come to an end. Neither did it come to an end in the warm period preceding the little ice age.

The world is bigger than the time period that you have been a part of. The climate (and probably most things on earth) tends to work within the confines of a bell curve. Adjusting variables can have some effect. The further from the center you go, the harder it is to have an effect. As we move from the center, we run into bigger issues of which we have no control (i.e. planetary location, solar cycles, etc). The world has been through all sorts of climate patterns and temperature ranges in which adaptations were needed. The point is that Earth, and the species that exist on the planet, are well suited for such variances.

Re:Adapt, adapt, adapt

[Anne Thwacks]

Throughout history there have been plagues that kill off up to 30% of the world's population. Fortunately, Yellow Fever, Ebola and Zika may not actually turn out to be amongst them (but the data is not in yet).

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Mab_Mass]

And your point? CO2 was at 1950 ppm, and the temperature was only 3 deg Celsius hotter. Full stop. Period. That is a fact. Not a "factoid" ... a motherfucking fact.

So, from this one data point, we can fully conclude that having CO2 at 1950 ppm will *always* result in a planet that is 3C warmer than today? I think that the parent was making the point that a whole fuckton of variables have changed in and around the planet in the intervening 200 million years, so it is making an apples to oranges comparison.

Here, I'll give you an example of this reasoning. Last winter, while standing outside with my coat on, I was cold. Therefore, if I want to cool off on a hot summer day, I should go outside and put my coat on. After all, I had my coat on before and felt cold, which is a *fact*, a motherfucking fact.

We'll just move

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? By the time the results of global warming become catastrophic, we'll have the means to move to the newly found second earth. We're all gonna make it.

Sahara into arable land is a disaster.

[Anonymous Coward]

You see, there are these sandstorms that carry over dust with minerals all the way to the Amazon forest (goes very high in the atmosphere)... the ground there is not rich enough to sustain the current amount of green, and needs this extra fertilizer...
So no desert... no Rainforest...

The 1% told us that in the '60s and '70s, too.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Having children is a sociopathic act when we're overpopulated. At our current level of behavior, Earth is over its carrying capacity.

And we boomers have heard all that before. Back in the '60s and '70s the ruling class told us that we were about to be buried in a population explosion that would have us all starving in a toxic waste dump by the '90s and that technological improvements would only make it worse.

They even formed an organization called "The Club of Rome", which put together a computer model that cranked out these predictions.

So lots of responsible people held off on having kids - many until it was too late, even with major medical intervention. Enormous resources were diverted from production of material wealth to reduction of pollution. Costs went up, quality went down, resources were locked up, movement was restricted. Government power over everything, and the amount of money/value they pulled out of the economy grew and grew and grew. Anyone criticizing the paradigm or expressing a different view (especially a pro-technology view) was demonized - by activists, "leaders", and both the "establishment" and "underground" press.)

In the '50s, coming out of a depression and a World War, a family could live well supporting itself on a single income. Now it struggles with two or more full-time employed parents, or survives on a government dole. "There's a labor shortage!" - so the government imports more voters^H^H^H^H^H^H people from the more southern American countries to fill the blue collar jobs and from India, Aisia, and other places for the white-collar positions - and pretty much all of them from cultures where big families are the norm. So much for responsible self-population-limitation. (Think of it as evolution in action.)

But they made the mistake of publishing their software model. Computers got cheap, and programming became less of an arcane ritual practiced only by a tiny clique. Eventually skilled programmers took a look at the model - and found both flaws and gimmicks apparently designed to make it produce the gloom-and-doom, empower-governments, we're all going to freeze in the dark but that's better than extinction, predictions.

And the time came and went. And the disaster didn't happen. And technological improvements made things better, not worse. (And not just because of pollution controls: It turns out that pollution is INEFFICIENT, and as the cost of process control technology comes down and capabilities go up, reducing it can INCREASE PROFIT!)

So the "population bomb" turned out to be a dud. (But a convenient one for the rich and powerful, making them more rich and powerful.) And looking back at history we saw that this was just the latest in a long string of such operations:
1. Predict disaster.
2. Get everyone panicked.
3. Increase power and control to "take action to head off the disaster".
4. PROFIT!
Over and over and over again.

And then came "global warming" (replacing "here comes the next ice age".) Complete with computer models and lots of "scientific data" - from government scientists funded by billions from agencies that somehow only gave follow-on grants to scientists who predicted doom (or made some tie-in to global warming in research on non-climate-related subjects).

THIS time, though, they kept the raw data and models to themselves, handing out only conclusions and "adjusted" data. And after YEARS of digging, some outside the peer-review cliques found some evidence that the adjustments always seemed to increase the signal of warming, possibly by enough to create it out of nothing (or even out of measurements indicating global COOLING), and that this may have been deliberate.

But instead of opening the data to all, it was (and is) STILL kept largely hidden (or claimed to be lost), while a propaganda effort is raised against anyone questioning the conclusions, or the race to take over resources and wealth, and increase control of the general

Re: The 1% told us that in the '60s and '70s, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Very, very, very well said. Never overlook how all end-of-the-world cults pull people in. Believing the end of the world is right around the corner seems built-in or at least easily triggered. Add to that the tried and true religious zealousness of needing to appease the gods, buy your way to forgiveness, and punish the sinners who have angered the gods and you have the modern global warming cult.

Re:The 1% told us that in the '60s and '70s, too.

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually the "Club of Rome" software modles are quite good.
Perhaps you like to share some of your insights about their short commings?

Basic meteorologic knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

> trade winds, and they blow from northwest to the south east in the northern hemisphere and from southwest to the northeast in the southern hemisphere.

Not even close (source).

> Before you call me naive, please get at least some basic meteorologic knowledge!

Ironic.

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[david_thornley]

The Sun was also significantly dimmer 200 megayears ago. Recreate those atmospheric conditions nowadays and it's going to be a lot warmer than it was then.

Simple solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody who believes in man-made global warming put set up a fund to reimburse those who don't for complying with any regulations needed to curtail climate change. Yes, you might be out some money but you'll be saving the world. You get what you want with no complaints. So what's the problem? Are you too cheap to save the world? Wake me up when you're as quick to open your wallet as you are your mouth.

slashdot contributes to global warming

[CmdrTamale]

There is much more heat than light in here.
--
Breaking news: real scientists seek funding.

I Thought That It Started

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it started at the end of the last ice age.

They Never Heard Of The Dalton Minimum!

[kenwd0elq]

Balderdash. 180 years ago, the Earth was coming out of the abnormally cool period associated with the Dalton and Maunder Minimums. And based on the last couple of solar cycles, we're more likely to into another extended solar minimum, and experience markedly COOLER weather.

Warmer weather is associated with prosperity, while cooler weather is associated with famine and plague.

Global warming started....

[Anonymous Coward]

When the Glaciers started melting.

Prove me wrong. Where are the glaciers covering New York?

Inconvenient Truth

[ULTROS]

AL Gores movie is now a joke on itself. Keep being reeled in by Soro's sheep.

Critical thinking anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone think logically through a problem anymore? All these educated people that think they are smart, but instead are so gullible they make the religious look like critical thinkers. Instead of working out what is going on they try to shoehorn a theory into a situation that is in direct contradiction to the theory.

Feynman says when the evidence doesn't support the theory throw the theory out.

At the START of the industrial revolution the world was ALREADY WARMING. And the warming didn't care about the tiniest fraction of CO2 that mankind was producing at that time because the environment doesn't tag certain CO2 molecules as anthropogenic and others as natural.

Instead the climate was warming so CO2 was coming out of the oceans. The 0.01% of CO2 produced by humans was completely irrelevant. A single small volcano eruption produces more CO2 than it would take mankind to produce in 10 years at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Further, natural carbon sinks would easily overwhelm the CO2 production of that time.

Next you will be saying that cavemen lighting fires was responsible for the prehistoric warming because nothing but man can change the climate!

Aaaaargh! Why are people so dumb these days!

Genius!

[AMITAYUS]

There used to be ice 2-3 miles straight up over where I am sitting right now aprox. 20,000 years ago. So they are telling us the ice is melting? Genius!

The year without a summer.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that is NOT the effective base point.

Short sighted

[billd10]

When you already have a foregone conclusion, it is easy to make statements like this. Climate models do not explain why Greenland was once green and crops flourished there. Nor do they explain how wine grapes were once grown in England. Nor do they explain the Maunder Minimum, a period of extreme cold, including "the year with no summer." The reason is that climate models are simplistic and not back-tested. They assume CO2 = temperature and ignore all other effects on temperature, most notably the sun, which is not a constant source of light and heat. Science has a bad name these days because of work like this, which is more akin to religion than science.

Re:So global warming started... TSARKON reports

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bitztream, the autism-hating Slashdot troll!

are you knowledgable on ANYTHING?

[Anonymous Coward]

you're preaching to the choir here, and yet you're getting down-moderated for being an idiot. have you only attempted to discuss matters online or have you ever had a topical discussion face-to-face with a live human being in your life? your track record suggests only the former.

Re:are you knowledgable on ANYTHING?

[Karmashock]

In what way am I being an idiot if I'm saying something you agree with?

Be specific please... I rather suspect you're attempting to "frenemy" here (Friend-Enemy)... claiming you agree when you don't to gain a rhetorical advantage. Just my assumption based on the contradictions inherent in your own statement.

You say I'm preaching to the choir... okay... so you agree with me by your statement... but I'm such an idiot that you think I should be downvoted... Cite the stupid thing I said that lead you to make that statement?

Re:are you knowledgable on ANYTHING?

[Anonymous Coward]

you assume far too much, son.

just to start, when person a says that person b is preaching to the choir, person a is not automatically a part of said choir. rather person a is identifying that the majority voice in the community is on the side of person b. that does not indicate person a endorsing the view of person b nor does it mean that person b is supported by facts.

if you can't tell where else you fell on your face earlier in this thread then there is likely no hope for you. perhaps when you start high school you can join the debate team and learn how to communicate using logic instead of emotion.

Re:are you knowledgable on ANYTHING?

[Karmashock]

Well, sadly making any kind of coherent point, you don't have a coherent point. So... there you are... making baseless insults in a childish attempt to sound superior... and it just... sounds childish.

Not really the way to wound me, brother. Try harder. Or be ineffective on top of being childish. Up to you.

Re:are you knowledgable on ANYTHING?

[Anonymous Coward]

making baseless insults

You were insulted by

just to start, when person a says that person b is preaching to the choir, person a is not automatically a part of said choir. rather person a is identifying that the majority voice in the community is on the side of person b. that does not indicate person a endorsing the view of person b nor does it mean that person b is supported by facts.

???

If your skin is that thin you need a new hobby. Attempting to run with this crew won't work if you take things that personally, especially when you can't back up your arguments with facts when asked to do so. And just as that comment pointed out, you are making big assumptions yet again. You are assuming - perhaps because you feel insulted? - that the post was intended to insult you. Perhaps you should trying reading its content fully before hitting reply.

Re:are you knowledgable on ANYTHING?

[Karmashock]

More baseless insults... you really unseated my position on a complex scientific and sociological issue with your baseless insults here... I mean... wow. /s

In the future, have a thought in your head before you presume to enter a discussion more complex than what mouth breathers like yourself typically discuss. Nothing you are saying here is doing anything to make you sound even remotely rational or educated or mature enough to even participate.

Re:are you knowledgable on ANYTHING?

[Anonymous Coward]

More baseless insults

Where? There was not a single insult in the comment you just replied to. There were questions as to why you were taking offense at the comment prior to it, but no insults were in the comment itself.

Meanwhile rather than answering questions, you went on to

have a thought in your head

 

mouth breathers like yourself

Still people are waiting for you to provide a single fact to back up any argument you have attempted to make in this thread. Good thing nobody was holding their breath or they would certainly be dead by now. It's been over a week now since you last attempted to make a point in this discussion (though even then without any factual evidence whatsoever to support your argument), it seems that you have indeed given up on it and decided to just try to see if you can sling enough mud to get people to forget about how woefully uninformed you are on this topic.

Re:are you knowledgable on ANYTHING?

[Karmashock]

Which argument do you want backed up? And keep in mind, I'll verify that I ever made the argument before I accept that I have to back it up. So do keep in mind when you do goal post... I'm just going to point it out and laugh at you.

Re:are you knowledgable on ANYTHING?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which argument do you want backed up?

Any of them, really. Just pick one. You claimed to be know something of merit on these matters but have not yet provided a single fact to back up that statement.

If you'd like we could start with your original comment in this discussion where you claimed to know something about AGW (even though in so doing you yourself changed the subject from Global Warming to Anthropogenic Global Warming). But go ahead, tell us what you know about this. Tell us why you are so well informed on the matter when others are not. Tell us why your feelings and conspiracies on the matter trump the facts that others have laid out on the topic. Do you have any facts, or do you not?

Time to see your shrink again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even your conservative peers are now moderating you down as an embarrassment. You seem to have issues, kid - it's likely time you go back to your shrink and ask her to adjust your meds. Clearly they aren't helping you to see clearly enough. Thankfully right now it appears you are only a danger to yourself, but you are only a driver's license away from the types who steal cars to run down pedestrians in the sidewalk. Hopefully your parents haven't told you yet where the key goes and which pedal makes the car go forward.