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Bill Gates Warns Against Denying Climate Change (usatoday.com)
Reader JoshTops shares a USA Today report: Bill Gates warned against denying climate change and pushed for more innovation in clean energy, during an event Friday at Columbia University in New York. The billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder joined friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett for a question-and-answer session with students. "Certain topics are so complicated like climate change that to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult and particularly when people take that complexity and create uncertainty about it," Gates said. The planet needs to find reliable, cheap and clean energy, "the innovations there will be profound," Gates said. In December, Gates announced that he and a group of investors would invest more than $1 billion in Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund that aims to finance the development of affordable energy that will reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions.
The fact that it is often repeated does not actually make it true. I am all for making fun of mr. Gates or mr. Balmer aka Developers Developers Developers, but perpetuating this particular quote that is almost 100% false AFAIK is not the way to do it...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
An interesting article on the Gates/Buffet adventure. They are investing in a start-up that is trying to build transportable burner nuclear reactors, IFR lite IIRC
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Literally alternative fact just means facts that support a different narrative than the one a particular group wants.
No, literally alternative facts are exaggerations or opinions proclaimed to be facts by those who continue to circumvent the free press in an attempt to mislead the public. The first use of the term (in nationwide media anyway) was by Kellyanne Conway when she defended the flat out lies told by Sean Spicer about attendance during Trump's inauguration.
Your post is actually a good example of alternative facts. Your commentary on this topic would be insightful if any of your facts were actually true.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
By investing in Nuclear.
He's friggen rich, no commitees, no government oversight, little respect for the common idiot.
DO NUCLEAR RIGHT. Even if it's just pebble bed or another of the safe ones it's still miles ahead of renewables.
And it creates GOOD jobs. Not manufacturing installation maintenance crap jobs but real jobs for 2nd tier geniuses.
It's frikken cheap, it's clean, it doesn't use a whole lot of scarce resources. What's the hold up Bill? Why invest in something that's already popular and being done by private companies and government. INNOVATE with your stupid foundation. INNOVATE.
You OWE US MORE THAN THIS for the companies you crushed and the open source you held back. INNOVATE YOU STUPID DONKEY CODE WRITING BUSINESS MONKEY!
I agree that non-climatologists shouldn't criticize the experts however there are plenty of real climate scientists (with fantastic credentials who have testified before congress etc.) criticizing the main stream alarmism and they are being ousted and treated as heretics because they clash with the common narrative. There was a time where people thought Copernicus was crazy for believing the solar system was heliocentric.
Which started with CNN running a comparison of Obama's crowd during the inauguration compared to a picture of Trumps inauguration 3 HOURS PRIOR to the inauguration start.
False. Your statement is a good example of a fake fact. When you get your news from "alt" fact sources and blogs, that happens a lot.
The photo from the Washington Monument was time stamped 12:01: right at the moment of inauguration. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... Not "3 hours before". There's also a photo time-stamped 11:49:43, and even a time-lapse photo of the whole event here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...
Acutally, I would argue that many "alternative facts" don't even rise the level of lies. A lie has the pretense of representing a particular untrue scenario.
A lie needs to be part of a network of other lies that present a consistent picture. This means you can unravel the whole skein of lies. You can't unravel "alternative facts" that way, because they don't make any pretense to consistency. There is no skein to unravel. So a better word for them is "bullshit":
"Bullshit" is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising.
People justify their belief in bullshit because of the way it makes them feel. This isn't just a fault of education, it appears to be wired into our brains' mechanisms for social identification and reward seeking. That's why bullshit is so effective politically.
Probably the purest piece of political bullshit in living memory is the President's assertion that we should have "taken" Iraq's oil, and his suggestion that he might try to do it. I trust I don't have to explain why a country's oil reserves can't simply be looted, like an art treasure. That particularly bullshit hits both the reward and social identification notes, the exact way that anti-Semitic rants about "Jewish Bankers" did in 1930s Germany: the promise of easy riches from looting a hated alien. Hitler claimed that Jews were greedy bankers who promoted Bolshevism. Chew on that for a moment. The sheer idiocy of believing those things together didn't stop some very smart people from buying it. Even the people manufacturing the bullshit believe it, and that's very different from lies.
So consider the standard response whenever a piece of ominous environmental news comes out: this is the work of the alarmists. Consider the implicit reasoning here: this cannot be true because if it were it would be scary. The word for this kind of thinking is "denial".
Now this doesn't mean there isn't climate alarmism, but what the alarmists are predicting is something very few scientists would agree with: the imminent extinction of the human race. What the evidence points to something in between the denialist and alarmist scenarios: one in which we are forced to confront and deal with unpleasant facts. Alarmism and denialism are pretty much the same thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The news is not the size of the crowd but the fact the President can't accept a fact contrary to his personal narrative and move on. It's more important that the a hit to the man's ego is assuaged than something of substance be done.
It's newsworthy that the President, commander in chief of the world's most powerful military, is so petty and thin skinned. There's absolutely no need for the press to give the President some sort of leeway for their first days and weeks in office. The job of the press is to bring information to the people, not kowtow to the government.
Politicians will lie by very rarely will they straight up deny an easily demonstrated fact. If you allow straight up fiction to become the historical record then you're allowing someone to write their own history.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.