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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.
When your ideas are too good for criticism that's when you know they're worth having.
Nobody has to be trampled by the jackboots of your authoritarian scientific "facts" anymore, Bill Gates! People are free to choose their own facts in Trump's America!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Just like the apollo hoaxers or the chemtrail crowd, there is nothing you can ever do or say that will ever change the mind of climate change deniers. Theyve swallowed the bait completely & they will happily argue about volcano emissions even as the sea creeps into their living rooms.
Its time to leave them behind.
I presume that 'climate change' in this case refers to 'catastrophic anthropogenic climate change'.
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
I have no problem with Bill Gate's wealth but I am annoyed that a guy that lives in a huge house and travels by private jet needs to lecture anyone about climate change. Don't be a virtue signaling hypocrite.
Two hypocrite billionaires who's carbon footprint is more than dozens of families combined living their lavish lifestyles lecturing people who just want to work their shitty job so they can earn their check and try to live a decent lifestyle. When they tone down the way they live by several orders of magnitude, then maybe I'll listen. Until then, they and the climate religion zealots can go fuck themselves.
No. But repeating a lie over and over again does give it a certain gravitas. Now, I wonder where else I can spread something as being "settled" without any attribution ....
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Actually, as I recall, Mr. Gates' credibility is in software development and marketing. I don't see any particular expertise in atmospheric physics or meteorology. . .
Why we trust the opinions of people with no proven expertise in a subject is beyond. . .
"To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize."
Population explosion is part of the dire fact of global warming. It is an emergency issue and is about to bite us so hard we may not survive.Our military leaders consider it the number one threat to American security. There is wonderful progress on generating energy with less climate disruption yet we are still going to sink ever lower as every single person we add to our national or world population amplifies global warming and all forms of pollution. Every new home and new road and new farm is a blow struck against nature. Yet our politicians are unable to talk about restricting births or rolling back developed areas into natural areas.
Well, he is a billionaire after all. Aren't Americans supposed to listen to what billionaires and movie stars say?
#DeleteFacebook
I don't remember people saying that he said '640KB ought to be enough for anyone' until the '90s, but in the '80s I remember him being quoted as saying '64KB ought to be enough for anyone'. The latter quote made more sense, because this was a hard-coded limitation in Microsoft BASIC and was integral to the design, whereas the 640KB limitation came from from Intel.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
These warnings would be more helpful in places where a high percent of the student body rejects the scientific consensus around climate change, because that is what they were taught. I am sure those colleges would be thrilled to host a Q&A with someone like Bill Gates.
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.
The whole debate about climate change is because of three specific groups:
Those who want to suppress the science because it might interfere with them making a profit, those who don't want to admit climate change because they believe having to change will interfere with their way of life, and those who think being ignorant and ignoring the facts is the way to go.
This was summed up quite nicely by Asimov:
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
es, electric cars are "greener" than the old gas guzzler I drive but ... guess what, the gas guzzler costs 10k, the electric equivalent 40k.
You are comparing a used gasoline powered car with a new electric vehicle. The average NEW car in the US is $33,560. You can purchase a new Chevy Volt for $33,220. A Tesla Model 3 is supposed to be $35,000. A Chevy Bolt costs around $36,000. And these are MSRP prices, not what would actually be paid. Furthermore electric/hybrid vehicles will be available for steep discounts on the used marker as well going forward.
If you want people to "go green", you have to make it affordable.
Ok, done. What are you waiting for?
Steam roll over them.
That is precisely how we ended up with Trump as president with Republican majorities in the House, Senate and most state legislatures and Governorships despite Democrats having a lead in voter registration.
Skipping the consensus building phase will cause backlash.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Enough said.
Except that there is no evidence that he actually said it. Go ahead. Find an irrefutable citation that he actually said it. We'll wait.
Yeh, and while Trump is denying basic science, you're not looking at what he's actually doing. It's the magicians trick of distraction. When you see him do some big shouty thing that you're supposed to look at, look at the *other* stuff.
So the anti EPA stuff co-incided with his CIA visit. The one, he stuffed the meeting with spotters, to watch the faces of the CIA staff to see who would swallow the pee he was spraying. And the one that resulted in two American spies getting arrested by Putin (but Putin says he arrested people who might have hacked the US election...... (!!)). Gee I wonder which traitor gave Putin the names? Nobody asks because Trump is busy signing every anti-environment contract he can find and you're paying attention to that instead.
Currently it's "ban everyone from these Muslim countries", but you're missing the fact he's written a law here, something Congress does, The Federal Court has already said it wouldn't likely stand at trial, and yet there are some border officials are following Trump and not the law. In effect he's faced down the Republican congress and won. He writes the laws, they have their meetings. He doesn't need them to write laws, he does it, they pretend to follow it in order to pretend to have a role.
What happened to the calls for him to divest his businesses and stop accepting foreign money? Lost in all the other stuff he's done.
What about his tax returns? The fake numbers he gave in the election filing? Forgotten.
You see how he sets the agenda by doing something really extreme, and what you miss is what he's doing at the same time. Really important stuff like blocking the head of Defence from security meetings, banning the US Director of National Intelligence from security meetings.... i.e. removing Congregational approved roles from basic government, so that Congress doesn't appoint anyone who has any role.
. . . from Mr. "640K is all you'll ever need" (grin)
(and yes, I go back to DOS 2.x and Windows 1.x)
Brrrr.... I'd rather go back to Linux release 0.01.
. . . from Mr. "640K is all you'll ever need" (grin)
(and yes, I go back to DOS 2.x and Windows 1.x)
I was thinking perhaps go back to those days when United States was the United States ain't so bad after all. Hey there was usenet and a simple DOS machine is perfectly adequate for us to get on the forums and tell others what we really think.
mfwright@batnet.com
The average new car may be $33k, but that's in a world where a new Tesla is $100k. . You can get a Hyundai Elantra for $17k
Why are you comparing a high end luxury car to an econobox? If you want to compare with a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt, fine but don't insult our intelligence with stupid and irrelevant comparisons.
Call me when I can buy an electric car for less than $15 grand.
Nice job moving the goal posts. If it isn't cheap enough for everyone then nobody should bother? What a stupid argument.
Oh and to address your challenge to get an electric car for under $15K, here you go.
It is unfortunate, not only for America but the world, that climate science became a political issue with a party divide. Combined with the venomous team-sport nature of current politics, where people are groomed to be patriots only of their party rather than their country, whether or not a person is allowed to believe science is often dependant on whose political dogma they are soldiers of.
An electric car with a useful range, say 300km on a single charge requires a battery pack that will cost five thousand bucks US, minimum. Add in the cost of the rest of the car and it's not going to be cheaper new than 20-25 kbucks even for a subcompact.
The really bad news is that a battery pack's cost holds up the second-hand cost of an electric car. I can buy a usable petrol or diesel car or a small van second-hand off Gumtree or Craigslist for a thousand bucks which would last me for a year with minimum maintenance costs. Even if I had to junk it afterwards no problem, I can just go and buy another one. A lot of people buy cheap second-hand cars this way as get-to-work daily drivers.
An electric car with a decent battery able to travel even 200km on a single charge will cost several thousand bucks so they'll never be cheap enough for less-affluent folks to buy second-hand.
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!
The problem is global warming being used as an excuse for wealth transfer from rich nations to poor ones.
Work to make our use of energy more efficient. Work to find cleaner sources of energy. Quit using it as an excuse to advance the "one world government" agenda.
Because when a topic is really, really complicated the most important thing is not to be uncertain about it.
The desired response is to be uncertain about things that the science is uncertain about, and to not be uncertain about things on which the science is pretty clearly not uncertain.
If you actually read some of the review articles summarizing the science-- the IPCC Working Group 1 report, for example-- you will notice that there is extensive discussion of uncertainties: what we know, how well we know it, what we don't know, and what the error bars are.
One interesting thing about the real science: the uncertainty goes in both directions. The denier community says "but look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is on the low side of the range that the best science we currently have is predicting." But the opposite uncertainty is also there: "look at the uncertainty: maybe the warming is going to be much higher-- it could be on the high side of the range that the current science predicts."
Pick any two, right?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Here's the thing: Gates must absolutely spend his own money to develop this without any government subsidies or grants whatsoever. He must create a solution that costs less than current forms of energy in both the short term and the long term. None of this cheap now but costs a crap-ton to replace later bait-and-switch b.s. The production solution needs to compete in the marketplace without any government assistance. The solution must be manufactured in-country. Using cheap third-world labor is out. The solution needs to work everywhere and work 24 hours a day. The solution needs to scale easily because human energy consumption isn't going down.
People assume all politicians are lying all the time anyway, so just say anything because people care about the message, not if it is true or not.
No, people assume politicians that oppose their ideology are lying all the time. They tend to assume their guy is "a straight talker" or some other baloney. Exhibit A is the irrational believe on our political right that Hillary Clinton is some sort of pathological liar and crook. This in spite the the actual objective evidence that she is not at all outside the range of normal for a high profile politician. In actuality she is relatively honest among that crowd. (a low bar I know) The same people seem to believe that Trump is telling the truth despite objective evidence that he lies FAR more often.
Even so, it doesn't actually seem to have damaged Trump very much.
That's just because the people he was running against weren't very well liked either. Not one of the Republican candidates (including Trump) was a serious statesman with real gravitas. Easy targets for a guy who has made his life's work self promotion. Hillary Clinton for whatever reason just isn't very charismatic to a big portion of the population - and even the she actually won the popular vote.
(Do you realize that only once since 1988 has a Republican candidate actually won the popular vote? That's 6 of the last 7 elections. Talk about evidence of a screwed up election system...)
When your ideas are too good for criticism that's when you know they're worth having.
Ignoring criticism from people who don't know what they are talking about is different than ignoring all criticism.
Yes, Gates didn't say "your ideas are too good for criticism." What he said was "to really get a broad understanding is a bit difficult."
OK, it's difficult. That means you need to do some work to gain a basic understanding.
If people would actually study what we actually do know, and how well we know it before making their "criticism" based on reading one blog post, maybe then they would do criticism on a level that people would pay attention to, rather than continuously re-assert things that are already well studied and known to be false.
When you will stop transferring CO2 from rich nations to poor ones, you may have a point.
But rich nations emit far more CO2 per capita than poor ones.
Eliminate the red tape and regulation that hampers our building of zero emission Nuclear power plants for our electricity needs. Then replace all coal plants with Nuclear plants.
Until you do this step, stop hectoring me about climate change because if you don't do this step you are NOT serious about fixing Anything, you are just trying to enact legislation to control people's lives....
Because everyone switching to electric cars is pretty useless (yes yes they're more efficient, but thats marginal) until they are All being charged by clean power....
This particular quote was accepted by the world as fact for at least two, possibly three decades. And then all of a sudden, a few years ago, we were told it wasn't true anymore. I don't believe it.
So just because a falsehood was repeated for a long time you refuse to acknowledge that it was false all along when there is no actual evidence? Hope you aren't in the sciences because you'd be rather terrible at it. If you think it is true then please go and cite the source of the quotation. Otherwise you are just passing along what is nothing more than an old wives tale with no actual evidence to back it up. Just because people couldn't be bothered to question a quotation for a long time (after all it didn't actually matter) doesn't mean that it is true or that it was actually said. Lots of famous "quotes" were never actually uttered by the person they are attributed to.
It's 2017 and we're supposed to be living in an oil-stripped wasteland with flying cars and hoverboards.
The problem with predictions is one side has been absofuckinglutely hysterical for decades.
Can't imagine why people aren't buying into more reasonable predictions now.
I'll listen to him when he ponies up and pays me or when my interests and his coincide, but so far, neither has happened.
When you need a doctor do you instead ask anyone on the street for medical advice? After all, there is no reason to assume that they may not be a doctor.
If I don't know what I'm doing then yes I'm going to ask if anyone around me for help. First question will be "are you a medical professional?" I won't assume they either know something or don't until I bother to find out.
Dismissing someone as uninformed about a subject without any evidence either way is idiotic. Bill Gates may know nothing about climate change or he may know a quite a bit about it. But to dismiss him as "software guy" and presume he couldn't possibly be anything else because of a job he had 15 years ago is both prejudiced and stupid.
Hey, I remember when Red Hat install was on three 3 1/2 inch floppies. . .
Liberals may be incompetent and misguided, but the republicans are greedy and hateful. I'll take liberals as the lesser of two evils.
Liberals generally want to expand human rights and benefit humanity.
Republicans are only concerned about themselves and their damn money. No compassion. No selfless acts of kindness. How in the world can anyone think that's the moral and just way of life. And before you say anything about right wing religious charities. They too are only in it to spread their toxic religion in the guise of actually helping people.
The only ones that matter are intellectuals who weigh issues objectively. If you're not educated, get educated or stfu and stay out of the voting booth.
Liberals may be incompetent and misguided, but the republicans are greedy and hateful. I'll take liberals as the lesser of two evils. Liberals generally want to expand human rights and benefit humanity.
Both Liberals and Conservatives are misguided for different reasons. Liberal idealism and all these other values you describe are meaningless if you're too incompetent to get anything done based on those principles. The principles themselves have ZERO value. It's what you implement based on those principles that has value. Liberals don't want to talk about that because then they would have to admit that their pseudo-intellectualist elitist position is based absolutely nothing of substance. And again, you guys are going to mod me down because I'm telling you precisely what you don't want to hear. You just like to hear yourselves talk and assert that you're that SMARTER than everyone else. Smart people get shit done. They just talk the talk, they walk the walk.
We'll make great pets
something i think those who are of the opinion that 'climate change' is not man made/ over blown etc. should consider is.
Given that the majority of the experts disagree with you AND that the consequences on being wrong on this one are somewhere between bad and catastrophic, what harm is there in finding better, more sustainable models of energy consumption.
I mean "sometime" fossil fuels will run out, why not break the dependency sooner?
The argument seems to be something about people using this issue as a way of gaining control and asserting power, if that is so , how about finding a better solution and running with it.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Discovering the Higgs? New theory on black holes? Gravity Waves? None of these nor 98% of all other science is ever the excuse for people insisting we raise taxes, cut energy supplies and otherwise try to control, through the political process, how people behave.
You're confusing two totally separate issues. There is no problem with people who discuss the politics of how to reply to man-made climate change. It's perfectly consistent to answer that someone else should pay it, or claim that it won't affect me so I don't pay more, or taxes should not be raised and our children should suffer the consequences, and so forth. There are many ways in which the effects could be countered, you could for example propagate massive investments in possible technical solutions, or you could urge for faster development of nuclear fusion reactors. Moreover, there is nothing wrong *at all* with green energy per se and other solutions like substituting certain emissions with others, and it's kind of bizarre to ignore these options for diffuse political reasons.
But the point is that is all politics and has nothing to do with climate science. What's so appalling are the repeated attempts to deny that there is scientific consensus on some facts, and deny this for obvious political reasons. This kind of thinking is fallacious, no matter how you put it, it's just wishful thinking and make-believe, and is a disgrace to all people who do the actual science such as those at NASA. It's also ridiculous to mix up the scientific matter which is pretty much settled by now with political issues about possible responses, and this is embarrassing the political right of the US internationally, since the phenomenon to ignore science for dubious short-term political gain is pretty much limited to the US. Everywhere else people are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the current state of the art in science and political issues that may or may not result from it.
Most simply deny the denial of the global nature of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, deny significant CO2 forcing and are deeply skeptical about sea level change acceleration.
Acceleration doesn't show up on tide gauges we can check, of course it's a bit too noisy and sparse to say much on the shorter scale. Unlike satellites, which can tell us ... yeah, there was no acceleration before, but there is now ... really ... trust us. Nope, I don't trust you, sorry.
My point is that you say libs make no progress, while repubs have negative progress. Last I checked -1 0
That point is USELESS. Two wrongs don't make a right. That's my point. Focusing on points that have no value is not going to make any positive change. How can I express to you in a way that will get through your thick skull? In reality, I'm giving you the golden answer to the question "Why do things suck and why don't ever change?"
The problem can be summarized like this: Liberals say Conservatives do all the wrong things yet Liberals sit on the sidelines and do nothing but complain, theorize and philosophize about how if [insert group here] would behave differently then I/we would be better off. Why don't you get out there and start DOING instead of TALKING. Talk is cheap. Be the change you want to see in the world.
We'll make great pets
No one has proven that top down economics works either but it is uses as an excuse " to control our behavior, our society, and our politics."
This guy is SOOO full of SHIT.
He has had over a decade of time to invest into other nuclear energy, but has chosen to ONLY invest into his stuff, which he is doing with china and it will not be ready for another 20-30 years.
OTOH, there have been MULTIPLE nuclear fission and fusion start-ups that he just ignores, which if he gave just a small amount of money to flible, or Trans Atomic, or any number of good companies, they would be ready in under 5 years.
And that was 10 years ago.
Gates is no different than ppl like the kock bros or Trump. They speak a lot and deliver little.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Maybe Bill Gates is guilty of whatever you want to accuse him of, but if he speaks fact, then the fact needs to be considered objectively. Hypocrite labeling is besides the point, even if it is a point.
Twinstiq, game news
"The desired response is to be uncertain about things that the science is uncertain about"
This is actually wrong. The things that its most important to question are the things that everybody agrees on. That is how you get progress.
That sounds good, but it turns out not to be the way science works. When the Copernican theory was accepted, progress didn't come from people who said "I haven't studied that but I don't believe it, it's a controversy and we should consider that Ptolemy is right." When oxygen was discovered, progress didn't come from people who said "I haven't studied that but I don't believe in it, it's a controversy and we should consider that the phlogiston theory is right."
Science doesn't progress from "people who question things that everybody agrees on". Science progresses from people who do the work of understanding what's already known and building on it.
The disgrace is that the Climate Science community uses terms like "Consensus" which is not a thing in Science.
You are obviously not a scientist of any sort.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Fix the BSOD problem and leave this pseudo science of "man made" climate change to lDIOTS like Algore.
Discovering the Higgs? New theory on black holes? Gravity Waves? None of these nor 98% of all other science is ever the excuse for people insisting we raise taxes, cut energy supplies and otherwise try to control, through the political process, how people behave.
I have no problem if you disagree with the proposed solutions. That's fine: propose other solutions, or propose that we should just live with it. That's fine, no problem.
I have problems with people who say the science is wrong because they disagree with one or more of the proposed political solutions.
Guess what: whether the science is right has nothing to do with your opinions about the politics.. Quit criticizing science to score political points.
But here we have a Science which presumes to control our behavior, our society, and our politics.
The science does no such thing. The science says adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases the average global temperature by a calculated amount, with calculated error bars, according to a mechanism that's been well known for over a hundred years, using methods that are basic to our understanding of all the planets in the solar system that have atmospheres.
Stop telling me the science is wrong when what you mean is "I disagree with the politics."
Here we have a Science which has been embraced by an ideological group as a tool to implement their agenda.
Whether the science is correct has nothing whatsoever to do with what you think of the ideologies.
Hmm, so I guess the sun putting out more energy over the last 100 years and ice lakes melting on other planets doesn't fit into your thinking very well would it.
The sun is not putting out more power, and "ice lakes" are not "melting on other planets". These are both made-up facts. We measure the solar constant. One thing we know for sure is that the current warming is not due to changes in the solar output, because we measure it, and it's not rising.
And I don't even know which planet you think "ice lakes" are "melting" on. The only two solar system bodies which have liquid on the surface are the Earth and Titan, and "ice lakes" are not melting on Titan.
The disgrace is that the Climate Science community uses terms like "Consensus" which is not a thing in Science.
Consensus is how all competing models of reality are evaluated. It's not a part of Science so much as a part of how humans collectively interpret sensory data. And in point of fact, there was once a consensus against the theory of CO2-induced warming. It remained scientifically controversial up until the mid-1950s, until various better measures of the oceans and atmosphere were made. Not only did no one lose their jobs when the scientific opinion shifted, but there have been contrarian scientists publishing in respected journals for decades since then. In particular, noted contrarian Dr. Roy Spencer was lead author on sections of the IPCC reports, and he continues to publish criticism.
The other disgrace is that during the political debate, any push back, any question is met with the blunt instrument called, "Denier!".
No, denier is a term used in a very specific context. If you were able to substantiate your objections to scientific consensus with theory or observation you would be a contrarian. As it happens, AGW is a trivial result of the heat properties of atmospheric gases, and Tyndall's work of the mid-19th century was sufficient to establish CO2 as being a major component of atmospheric warming. His apparatus was a little large, but you should be able to verify his findings in your basement. You want to poke holes in the evidence? Go ahead. Tell us what's wrong about the atmospheric window observations, or our radiative transfer equations. Propose a new mechanism to transfer heat to space, or some unknown negative feedback. If your science is good, people will listen to you. Consensus shifted before on this issue. If you want it to shift again, you need to argue about the science. Alleging some conspiracy is responsible for the consensus is very literally politicizing the scientific debate. There is no evidence for a conspiracy, and substantial evidence in opposition.
So, the reason you get called a denier is that your ignorance on this subject is deliberate and politically motivated. Scientists are not just people who try to take the world apart and see how it works. There is some inherent degree of nuttiness involved in examining different models of reality, and reality is frequently outlandish beyond common ken, so having a tolerance for crazy ideas about reality is very much part of scientific philosophy. There's that classic line by Bohr,
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Now, maybe you don't adhere to the concept of an objective reality, and that's at least a valid philosophy. However, if such a thing exists, then science does describe that objective reality, and arguments about what the world is like need to be made by means of specific and precise empirical measurements. That is to say, if you're going to use political or rhetorical arguments against a vast body of scientific evidence, we can't really stop you from doing that, but you will probably not be taken very seriously and you may be called a "denier".
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I'm sorry, but you do know where Bill's house is located, right?
Lake Washington in Medina, WA; a place with an elevation of 69 feet above sea level.
Global warming is expected to raise the sea level perhaps as much as 2 feet in the next century.
I think he's safe
In South America is summer now. In Chile, South America, there are, right now, more than 120 active fires which have already consumed more than 1,000,000 (a million) acres of forest and several towns. Fires are spreaded in a fringe of 1,000 km. (625 milles). The average daily temperature has been over 93F, with averages 9F above the average in previous year. About ten days ago, in Santiago, Chile, there was a max peek of 99.32F which is the highest value since they have records, from the last 120 years. Additionally to local people there are more than 500 specialist from more than ten countries working there. You can check it at https://www.google.com/?gfe_rd... It's a real inferno.
... and using so much energy to do nothing related to what we want them to do, we could cut down on global warming?
The dropped brick will still fall even if it is at the center of the Earth -- it will still be falling around the Sun, and falling around the galaxy.
The rate at which the ecosystem can absorb CO2 is obviously insufficient to compensate for our CO2 output, or CO2 levels would not be increasing. In point of fact, your objection was thought to be completely valid in the 1920s, and Arrhenius' theory of CO2-induced warming was considered debunked. Then we measured things like the turnover rate of the oceans and found that happened a lot more slowly than expected, and that was the end of that idea. Keeling's observations beginning in 1959 were the final nail in the coffin, but his were actually just the first unambiguous measurements. There had been plenty of papers published prior to then suggesting that we were producing carbon in excess of the natural world's ability to absorb it, which is the reason that anyone even bothered to attempt to measure a global atmospheric CO2 concentration. Your argument would be more pertinent if this were 1917 rather than 2017. You may want to update it to reflect the status of science in this century.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The question you should be asking yourself is: "Who are the ones involved in implementing energy sources that don't depend on oxidation of hydrocarbons, and who are the ones fighting tooth and nail against these alternatives?" There you go.
(You probably won't care for the answer, but reality has a way of not caring about about what you like or don't like.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Seeking for cleaner, cheaper ways to generate energy should be a pursued either way, because at a the bare minimum you're making the places where you pollute worse to live.
Gates must absolutely spend his own money to develop this without any government subsidies or grants whatsoever.
Why? The issue is whether or not our descendants have a livable planet.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Nuclear fills that bill nicely at this time.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Given that in most of the elections in that period a democrat won, that hardly seems shocking.
So the fact that republicans won the presidency in 3 of 7 elections despite winning the vote in just 1 of 7 doesn't concern you? It sure as hell concerns me. Especially given how bad George W Bush was as president and how terrible Trump is shaping up to be.
And since the electoral/popular split has only happened 5 times in US history, it is not a common occurrence, even if it has happened twice in the last sixteen years.
When a rare thing starts happening with unusual frequency responsible parties should be asking why things have changed. Might be nothing to worry about but then again it might be worth worrying about a lot.
To be pedantic, the 8-bit processor chips common when Microsoft was started generally had 16-bit address spaces, and so 64K was a hard limit (less than that in most cases due to memory-mapped I/O). It didn't matter if you were working in Microsoft BASIC or Fortran or what, that was a hard address-space limit. The Intel 8088/8086 architecture could address a megabyte in a clumsy way, but MS-DOS reserved much of that address space, leaving 640K for the user memory. At first, this was moot, since memory was expensive. Allegedly, one reason IBM went with the 8088 rather than the more powerful 8086 was that the 8088 could conveniently have 64K of memory, since it had an 8-bit memory bandwidth, while the 8086 would require double the number of 4164 chips.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
This is Slashdot, where pseudonymous people not living in the applicable country give legal advice. Heck, I've gotten medical advice from here also. I haven't necessarily taken all this advice, mind you.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes