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

[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]

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

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]

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

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

[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]

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

[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]

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]

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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[swb]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[sjames]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

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!!!

[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!!!

[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!!!

[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!!!

[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]

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!!!

[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!!!

[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!!!

[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!!!

[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!!!

[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]

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!!!

[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!!!

[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!!!

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Surprising --Not!

[BrendaEM]

Human beings like burning things.

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.

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.

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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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: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.

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.

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: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) !!!!

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.

[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: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: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: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.

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: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: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

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.

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: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:Chicken Little motherfuckers

[Opportunist]

Why do I have the feeling you're living closer to Michigan than California..?

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: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.

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: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.

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: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.

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

[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".

Re: The science isn't settled: it's dead.

[Falconhell]

Denialist mods cant handle the truth, awwww.

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: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?

[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).

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

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 :|

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: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.

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

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.

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.

let's go out and build a factory

[Dareth]

Early Minecraft players in real life?

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.

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.

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.

[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?

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: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.

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.

[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!

slashdot contributes to global warming

[CmdrTamale]

There is much more heat than light in here.
--
Breaking news: real scientists seek funding.

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.

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!

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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.