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2016 Will Be the Hottest Year On Record, UN Says (theguardian.com)
2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century. From an article on The Guardian:The scorching temperatures around the world, and the extreme weather they drive, mean the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, published on Monday at the global climate summit in Morocco, found the global temperature in 2016 is running 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. This is perilously close to to the 1.5C target included as an aim of the Paris climate agreement last December. The El Nino weather phenomenon helped push temperatures even higher in early 2016 but the global warming caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from human activities remains the strongest factor.
There's a BLIZZARD where I live so there couldn't possibly be global warming!
We're just coming out of an Ice Age, it's perfectly NATURAL and NORMAL, there's NO HUMAN-CAUSED Global Warming!
GLOBAL WARMING is just some {insert 'Liberal', or 'Jew', or 'Homosexual', or 'Vegan', or 'Communist', or 'Illuminatti', or 'New World Order', or 'Globalist', or any combination of the above} plot to {insert 'steal our jobs', 'steal our money', 'tell us how to live', or whatever far-fetched paranoid delusional plot is appropriate}
There is no Global Warming, it's all Obama's fault!
I'll tell you what the real problem is: Flint, Michigan is far from being the only place in the U.S. that has lead water pipes, and like Ancient Rome, people are becoming violently idiotic -- or maybe they were violently idiotic in the first place.
The numbers are a global average. Do you understand how averages work?
Luckily for all we Americans, President Bernie Sanders has committed to taking action on global warming, saving the coastal states from massive floods and storms, and ending the massive subsidies for inefficient fossil fuels like coal and oil, while transitioning our workforce to higher paying jobs in solar and wind installation and maintenance, jobs that are 1000 times more than any propping up of a dying fossil fuel pipeline would be.
We dodged one when that Trump guy lost. That was close.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
UN is a political organization. Or is that in question? It's not a scientific organization. Why should anyone care what a political organization have to say about any particular scientific question? By the very nature of politics, the organization must prioritize its political agenda over unbiased fact-finding.
Of course when it comes from a scientific group you'll just discount it because it doesn't represent all scientists, or whatever group of dissident scientists you found that deny that AGW is happening.
No matter how many scientists or organizations agree that AGW is happening you'll find a principled stance on which to discount their warnings.
I stole this Sig
Paris Agreement requires the US Senate. It is a Treaty. Everything else is nothing but "pen and a phone", which can be undone with the same.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Slashdot used to be a site once where actual nerds/geeks/science majors used to comment on science and technology news. You could learn a lot from their opinions and insights, whether they agreed with your viewpoint or not. Now every time someone posts a Global Warming related story on Slashdot, a 4 story building worth of paid-per-post anti-AGW Trolls, each likely operating 20 - 50 sock puppet accounts, seem to post crap that Global Warming "isn't happening" or "cannot caused by human activity". The mere fact that this happens on a once "free" discussion site like Slashdot leads me to believe that a) Global Warming must be getting VERY bad indeed and b) the Energy Industry is very concerned about financial liability issues arising from this. By this I mean that when AGW starts to cause early deaths, natural disasters, major economic and environmental damage, contagious disease outbreaks and similar trouble in different parts of the world, the industry wants to be able to pretend that "nobody is liable for this because AGW simply does not and cannot exist". For this you obviously need a few hundred million dollars worth of Internet Trolls who flood sites like Slashdot with "IT ISN'T US. IT ISN'T US. IT ISN'T US..." Sad. Very, very sad.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
UN is a political organization.
The UN is the collective will of the world's nations.
Why should anyone care what a political organization have to say about any particular scientific question?
Most political organizations throughout history have felt it necessary to foster scientific discovery and invention, and to create self-regulating bodies to further the same.
I was born and raised in the UK before moving to the US about 15 years ago.
Back then it was considered self-evident by pretty much every person in the EU that global warming was not only real, but very definitely anthropomorphic (man-made), and also inevitably going to kill us all if we didn't do something very tangible about it very quickly, which probably meant significant but necessary lifestyle compromises. Anybody that denied global warming was frankly considered a retard.
After doing significant ongoing research on the Internet I still believe that global warming is very real and anthropomorphic, and even though we don;t have absolute proof, since 99.9% of the scientific community and all indicators point that way, (and for those that don't, all have connections/funding to big oil), it just makes basic common sense to take global warming seriously and do all we can before its too late to do anything.
Fast forward to today. I now live in the US.
I'm honestly amazed by the number of Americans (including some of my best friends and apparently also including our next president) that apparently sincerely believe that global warming is not even happening and is all just made up by the scientists, or worse, just some commie plot.
With Trumps recent announcement of cutting the EPA and appointing Myron Ebell (famous climate change denier) to head the EPA transition team, I've got to ask:
Am I the fool for unduly worrying about our only means of survival, or is the majority of the rest of America the fool for being so willfully ignorant of all the scientific research and the associated danger of ultimate extinction of much if not all life on earth, for a few short-term dollars?
Putting all your attention on pollution and none on man-made climate change is like worrying about too much salt in your diet while someone is lighting your hair on fire.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
AGW is beneficial for some people for a little while, but in the long run it's very damned bad. And you think scientists are so fucking stupid they don't track other climate elements in their models?
I can't tell whether you are being arrogant, or moronic, but this looks like a classic example of "Hi, I'm a random nobody on the Internet, and all those scientists never thought of this one..."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A supposedly free market depends on fully informed consumers and producers both making rational choices for their own interests.
Just look at that statement. Look at the assumptions built into it. Tell me that's not a lot of horse shit. Information imbalance always existed. People are hardly rational. Free markets never existed, even when humanity consisted of 300 or so person pre-metal tribes.
And then Led Zeppelin came along.
But seriously, a free market is like a unicorn, with wings and the whole nine yards - a unicorn can be described, even painted, animated, carved into wood/stone/titanium, and stories and games written around it, but it doesn't exist and never will. Just like a free market.
It is a figment of imagination and always will be. The fact that so many believe that it's a real thing says that a lot of people are willing to believe bullshit. It's not a fact. It's a religion. It's like believing that My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is a documentary. Rational adults know better.
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BMO
Do you understand that CO2 in the atmosphere traps energy (heat) in the lower atmosphere? And why do you think plants have some infinite capacity to absorb it?
In fact the biggest overall absorber of CO2 to date is the oceans, and what that is doing is altering the oceans' pH. So not only do you have heating, you have overall changes in ocean chemistry.
But I get it, you're just a mindless meme machine. You know nothing, and don't want to, so you just repeat memes you've read.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Slashdot used to be a site that didn't discuss global warming every day, or any of the other political bullshit that is used to justify the seeping United Nations encroachment on national sovereignty occurring worldwide.
The reality is simple. No one believes the leftist diatribes any longer. We've been hearing for decades how global warming will kill us all, but no one notices any temperature changes really. We also know that pollution is way down (if you are old enough, you will remember when smog was a real, visible problem). Few believe in the fantasy that racists, and sexists, and homophobes are secret wreckers undermining society. Certainly, decades of claiming every Republican president is the next Hitler has turned out rather absurdly.
In fact, Slashdot of today, versus Slashdot of 2000-2004 is actually a fascinating analysis of just how far the left has declined. There was real substance in those days. Principled resistance to the Iraq war and responses to 9/11. Real resistance to globalism.
Now, it's just "wahh! bad racist! bad sexist! bad homophobe! bad climate change denier! once we are rid of you, utopia!"
A 'science' built on false assumptions is what we call a pseudo-science. Much like homeopathy.
>what friedman says
Friedman can go piss up a rope. I read his book "the world is flat" and I have come to the conclusion that he entirely believes his own bullshit. Which is what it is. He argues that capital /should/ be fungible and it's a great thing that it is. The problem is that people aren't. There is no such thing as the free movement of people which is what you'd expect in a true free-market where capital is allocated.
And he sees none of his views as harmful. So he can go fuck himself with his own book.
>what we can do
Deal with the market as it is, instead of trying to do it through gedankenexperiments-as-religion based upon nonsense.
They (economists like Friedman) keep trying to make Economics a hard science, when it's not - it's a soft science at best like Sociology. It's not physics and will never be like physics.
But they will keep trying, and getting people to buy their tomes. Because witchcraft still sells.
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BMO
You think the UN controls every major scientific organisation on the planet (all of which endorse the findings of AGW)? You think they also control every climate research organisation around the globe too? Is the UN paying for NASA's research? Do they have authority over NOAA or CRU or CSIRO, or the peer review structure of the many climate research journals as well?
What leads you to believe any political organisation has such an astonishingly far-reaching influence over the entire global science community?
Come to that, what the heck is a "climate change based tax regime"? The science has shown we're changing our climate, and that remains independently true regardless of any proposed political solutions. If you don't like a given tax regime, vote for a different solution - but don't confuse the solutions with the problem, because no amount of political criticism will make that go away.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?