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The EU is Banning Almost All Coal Mining on Jan 1 (futurism.com)
Every unprofitable coal mine in the European Union must cease production by the first day of 2019, the date on which all public funds for the mines will come to an end. From a report: In Spain, that means that 26 coal mines are about to close up shop, according to Reuters. This move away from coal is a refreshing bit of bluntness -- letting the failed remnants of a fossil fuel industry fade away -- compared to how the federal government in the U.S. is grasping at anything to keep coal alive. But it remains to be seen how much of an impact the coal closures will have in the ongoing effort to curb climate change. The deadline was set back in 2010 as the EU sought to move away from fossil fuel dependence, according to Telesur. The EU wanted to end public aid to coal mines sooner, but groups from Germany -- which shuttered its last coal mine earlier this month -- and Spain are responsible for extending the deadline all the way to the end of 2018.
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This will hopefully drive the cost of business for US coal miners way up, since there is now a smaller market of buyers. The real question is why are we providing welfare for the mediocre?
Subsidies in general I'm against...
However the real question is - will this have any impact or energy prices or availability in the EU, or in Spain?
If not, great. But if it does cause prices to rise, or it means electricity becomes more reliably... well then perhaps there was more to the subsidy than just supporting coal.
Ending the use of coal is a noble goal, if for no other reason than the reduction of real pollution. But we also have to be careful not to leave too many people out in the cold, to have alternatives.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well, those instances of the human race that do not prioritize species survival, will not survive. But apparently that is too hard to grasp because it is quite a while in the future. Bust thanks for illustrating the fundamental nearsightedness of most people. Also, Science is not Religion. One is for people with working minds, the other is for the rest.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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You're telling me mining in EU countries like Poland or Bulgaria will stop? LOL. That will put a major proletariat force out in the street, a force that the yellow jackets will look feeble next to.
I mean, it was the Polish miners who brought about the collapse of Communism, remember?
No, most of coal mining will remain operational in the EU under various forms of grandfather agreements for the foreseeable future, regardless of what bullshit sellers like "futurism.com" peddle as "news".
I believe that human caused climate change may be reduced to a sustainable level. All climate change due to natural forces would be unaffected, since nature does not usually burn coal. I am hopeful because this means that exports from the EU to the US would not be subsidized except if the US decides to directly subsidize within the US. A big concern has been that US subsidies get transferred to other countries. Origination of energy (or other product) in the EU would strip the subsidies on export and naturally the US is not going to want to directly subsidize a third world coal company.
Citations please.
We don't even need to get that far. It's about *unprofitable* coal mines. That absolutely doesn't mean this is a move away from coal. This just means this is a move away from unprofitable coal mines. Expected consequences are a loss of many jobs and the accelerated profitability of the remaining coal mines, which is probably going to be pretty easy once we have gotten rid of all the unprofitable ones. Another possible consequence for Germany (for instance) is the future need to import coal from less picky countries. :D
I totally agree that thousands and thousands of scientists across many disciplines,, most who have never talked, seen, or even heard of each other, have somehow conspired to take as much money as possible by lying to the public. It's amazing how they do it!
I mean I even heard someone say the temperature has increased by 1C over the last hundred years. We've only had satellites since 1979.
Iron Maiden are an English heavy metal band formed in Leyton, East London, in 1975 by bassist and primary songwriter Steve Harris. Can you spell non-sequitur?
EU countries will just import more coal from overseas.
Press F to send an FU to all of the obsolete coalies who'll no longer have a part in fouling the air with CO2. Glad the EU is doing the right thing and not subsidizing environmental depredation.
Every unprofitable coal mine in the European Union must cease production
Yes, because in capitalism, unprofitable coal mines would be kept afloat instead. :-p
Ezekiel 23:20
They're NOT picking winners and losers any more. They're just letting the unprofitable coal mines go away.
While I agree that science isn't religion, it is treated as such by most. The scientists are the prophets and the masses have faith that they did their math right.
How many people have the math chops to prove or disprove higher level physics? So in all actuality, it's just a matter of faith that the people who say the math is right are in fact right.
You are fatally wrong. I do know how scientific funding works. Strongly advising hard real-world changes is one of the ways to not get funding for your research. Why do you think climate scientists have been so tame when the models did reliably predict the catastrophe to come about 30 years ago? Simple: They did not want their funding to dry up and did hope the human race would realize how bad things are without them pushing. They have now realized that the human race is far too stupid for that and have started pushing _despite_ the negative effects on their funding, because of pure desperation.
As to the past measurements, why on earth do you think measuring temperatures requires satellites of all things? What these older records use is thermometers and records on paper. What then needs to be adjusted (and the adjustments are entirely legitimate) is the extrapolations of the localized measurements.
How anybody at this time can still think this whole thing is not real and not very dire is beyond me. People like you will probably deny there is a problem while in the process of dying from its effects.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The problem with climate change is some people like to believe it isn't true, because it means they are in some way special and "in the know".
But they are idiots. The science is a provable done deal at this point. Twenty years ago, having some skepticism was sensible (and it always makes sense to be skeptical of motivations -- Al Gore, I'm looking at you), but man-made climate change is just impossible to refute without resorting to a conspiracy that includes basically every climate scientist and body in the world working in coordination, including fake temperature measurements from a huge array of sources. It just isn't plausible. Plus, we are experiencing the exact instability that the models predict, so we would need to be faking pretty much all the global news on storms, etc.
But you know what, even if there was doubt (there isn't), would it not be a good idea to err on the side of caution and not pump huge amounts of shit into the atmosphere?
So you think what will get human civilization ended is the inability of most people to distinguish Science from Religion? Would not surprise me in the least.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You are incapable of distinguishing Science from non-science. Explains a lot.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They're NOT picking winners and losers any more. They're just letting the unprofitable coal mines go away.
Which will then restrict both supply & competition, increase profits for the "winners", and with more political clout, influence peddling via re-election, & under the table "donations". Parent is right: Renewables will have a more difficult time becoming ubiquitous, while fighting against the entrenched interests. Also - jerbs!
The ending of government subsidies to coal mines will have an equalising effect on the cost of coal (up to the new cost of production) making it easier for renewables to compete on an even playing field.
US has increased mercury emission limits so it can burn dirtier coal, but that doesn't mean the EU has.
So US dirty coal cannot be sold to the EU.
Importing coal won't be the solution.
But the more you are into science as a religion the more you read about science, the less you treat it as a religion.
The more you are into religion the more you are into religion the more you are into religion...
Wait... they have coal?
We know climates change. The effects are less well known however. We know a little bit from geology but even there the results of mass extinctions were at least partially if not wholly caused by the event itself and not directly a result of the climate on its own.
The other problem we don't know is the economics. How will it affect progress? How will you pay for the solution? Where do we spend the energy to sustain the energy? Nuclear and beyond (fusion) seems to be the most promising but there is lots of misinformation about the effects of even the worst disasters that could happen while windmills happily chop up whatever golden eagles we have remaining.
Will having unfettered access, innovation and progress to alternative resources get us a solution or will mass murder, government intervention while regressing to the Stone Age prior to extinction be necessary. That's where left and right politics differ.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
All that is being banned is government support of coal mines. If a billionaire wanted to run a money losing coal mine they are more than welcome to. They just won't get any help from the government to keep it open like they would have up to today (2018/12/31).
Closing mines doesn't mean anything, except for impacting the people working there and in the town nearby. The power plants will just get the coal from the mines that are profitable. When the EU is closing the coal fired power plants and replacing them with something that generates fewer emissions then they'll see the reductions that they are seeking.
BC won't support Canadian pipelines to the coast so that the country can benefit economically selling oil (and until other countries stop buying oil why not make money from it... it can finance green research). But meanwhile, the British Columbia socialist NDP government is just fine shipping millions of tonnes of American coal through the ports in Delta BC and Surrey. Better support for America than for Canada.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Most things are taken on faith. Never been to Australia, yet I have faith it exists based on what evidence I have. Never been to the Moon but I have faith that it is mostly as described rather then a balloon launched by the evil Liberals to spy on god fearing Americans. Never seen an atom or even an atom bomb, but have faith they exist based on various things that collaborate there existence. I even have faith that things fall towards the center of the Earth in Australia even though it's below me.
This is life, we have to have faith as we can't check everything out, whether it is geography or science. When there is consensus that Australia exists or the Sun burns by nuclear reactions or electricity works by electrons or that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing and CO2 is a greenhouse gas, most everyone has to take things on faith.
Both geography and science generally get more accurate with time and it would be stupid to deny everything we can't personally check out. Shit, even flying to Australia wouldn't prove it exists as perhaps the plane made a subtle turn and landed somewhere else where everyone pretends it is Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I like this quote: "In science there is no authority. There is only experiment."
Religion is for dumbasses.
Renewables will have a more difficult time becoming ubiquitous, while fighting against the entrenched interests. Also - jerbs!
I think the massive increase in electricity prices they bring due to insufficient battery technology has more to do with it. Renewables are about as big a part of the energy mix as they can practically be right now, without some breakthrough in battery tech. Past some point, more renewables means more natural gas with means more CO2. We are probably already past that point now.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
And do we say yes to these ideas without second thoughts about people?
What dumb-ass wrote this summary, 40 percent of the world's electricity comes from coal. And in India and China, it's 70 percent.
Coal baby, powering your planet.
Actually, it turns out that isn't quite the deal. Mostly for the benefit of their workers, the mines were offered money some years back to attempt a "chapter 11"-like reorganization. As of 1 January, they must either:
The crazy billionaire (or Spanish government) would have to not only pay their ongoing operating losses, but pay back the EU the reorganization support money. Since this third option is extremely impractical, it amounts to an order to shut down.
You're right that it does nothing directly for consumption (Spain imports 90% of its coal already; this will only affect 10%), but by eliminating subsidies on its production, this will drive up the price of coal at least a little bit and further accelerate the switch away from coal.
Like the effort to curb the demise of Napster?
Ur $$ for everything I've ever known and loved... the risk is not worth it u greedy fucks.
[($)]
All I ever hear of is the EU banning one thing or another. Do they ever accomplish anything useful or productive, or is that beyond the Old World at this point?
Putin says thank you. Enjoy that energy dependence on your biggest geopolitical rival...
Also, good job kicking your working class in the teeth one more time!
Climate is changing. One can attempt to delay it but nature will take the course most appropriate. Other than that, what do you have to say?
sry :)
[($)]
"EU must not burn the world's forests for 'renewable' energy"
See also: Unintended consequences
The others become MORE profitable.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Yeah, no.. not many prophets write out their formulae and methodology in trade journals for all the other prophets to fact check and duplicate. Faith you believe because someone tells you to, science you believe because it can be duplicated and proven.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of time lags in the system, and we have probably already made changes that will result in 2 degrees Centigrade warming...or more. The oceans have been warming and so has the permafrost. (Most of the current rise in sea levels is due to the warming of the oceans, as warmer water takes up more space than colder water down to around 4 degrees Centigrade.)
So while reducing the impact of current actions is extremely highly desirable, it's probably not going to stave off unpredictably unpleasant results. (We can't say just how bad it will be, because we're pushing the models outside the range within which they have been validated. ... And they weren't really good at detailed predictions anyway, which is why an ensemble prediction approach was used, with large error bars.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I see a market for superior American coal to power all those EU coal-fired power-plants. We can put our coal miners back to work, provided that safety regulations are enhanced to maximize cashflow. That coal will need to be transported to the customer. I foresee fleets of supertankers outfitted with giant wheels that allow them to cross both mountain ranges and oceans. Make the wheels from frozen humus and the chickpea surplus is solved. Kill two birds, or a farmer and an miner, with one stone I say.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I live in BC. And probably unlike you, I was born here. Your hyperbole is utter BS, Chicken Little. There are more tankers moving between Alaska and Seattle refineries on a daily basis than a new pipeline will add. Why aren't you crying about those? Probably because the US based environmentalists who make money coming to protest in Canada haven't told you to. smh
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Meanwhile, why aren't you crying about all that coal going out of Delta Port?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
You deny how much money is to bee made from climate change regulation. Cap and trade is as multi billion dollar scam that enriched bankers in Europe.
There's plenty of experiments. Science works by building models and testing models.
Science discovers how gravity works from doing experiments and generalizations. I do not have to do an experiment to tell you how long it would take for an elephant, dropped from 1km in the sky above *Mercury*, to reach the ground. I can predict it, and that prediction is science. It's a conclusion based on a model we generated that has substantial agreement with evidence that is not elephants and is not above Mercury. But the Mercury-Elephant experiment has never been performed -- I am very confident of this. Nevertheless, I can tell you how long it will take, using science.
Neither. Scenario 3 is a whole bunch of people (overwhelmingly most of those who have studied the phenomenon) predict that extreme events will permanently increase in rate over time, including high powered storms, and this agrees strongly with observations. They predict a sustained global average temperature rise (note: local average temperature decreases are *not* contraindications), which has been observed although to be fair, this needs a long measurement time (we're looking at permanent >2 degree Celsius change from man-made contributions over 100 years). They also predict eventual sea level rising substantially once a certain threshold is reached, which has not yet been reached. Frost-free season lengthening -- that's held for almost 40 years now. Droughts and heat waves have increased in frequency 10-fold. Arctic is projected to get ice-free summers in about 30-40 years.
Most predictions have come to pass, and a distressingly large number of them are passing in the "worst-case-scenario" version. Not literally every one that has ever been made.
Note, no religion ever snagged 97% of people who looked into it to be followers.
I was born in BC, probably older than you and I am pretty sure I've considered what I say very carefully. My hyperbole to you is real concern. And increasing tanker traffic without ensuring there is a way to deal with mistakes (which of course never happen until they do) is very real. Read my above comments and read this as it explains why the lies currently being perpetuated https://www.nationalobserver.c... Some of us in BC actually care about the planet and about the industries that keep our province an amazing place now and forever and aren't willing to sell them out so Joe Bob in Alberta can have 2 four wheelers, a boat, a $100,000 pickup and a 5 bedroom house. Of course if Joe Bon knew about economics he would have realized his inflated oil economy salary wasn't something he should have banked on.
I assume you are an atheist by your rant about religious people. Your belief is of no concern to me other than the fact that (I assume again) you don't believe in an after life. Can you please explain to me how it is nearsighted of anyone to give the slightest care about some future generational cataclysm? I mean no offense man but I got mine so fuck you and the next generation. What will I care in my grave. Seeing as eventually we are all fucked by the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy our species won't survive any way. Why does it matter to you so much when science literally shows that you and everyone you know have no more meaning to the universe than a pile of rocks? Now you want to convince me of some greater good and that I should sacrifice the here and now for some future I won't even experience? I believe your mind is the one that might not be completely working.
We're already there. Most people screaming about science aren't referring to science, they're referring to Scientism.
Standing desks will make us healthy! Eat more superfoods! Poison-infested CFLs will stop global war-err-climate change! Plastic bags not coming from the US or Europe are all over the Pacific so let us ban straws! Muh sex junk black science man!
Pop culture shit.
Devo's cover of Working In A Coal Mine.
Loretta Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter
Incubus's Diamonds and Coal
Tennessee Ernie Ford's Sixteen Tons
I'm somewhat immune
Please don't breed.
Sc 1.: That is a political statement, not a scientific one. A scientific statement cannot make absolute predictions. And there will be a basis of facts and a chain of reasoning. And before that statement is uses as a well-established base of further study or to recommend actions, it will need and get independent verification. If it is an extraordinary claim, it will need extraordinary verification. (Climate Science has that by now and had it for a while.) After all that, it becomes sound Science and something smart people will depend on.
The problem here is that neither your Sc. 1 or your Sc 2. is Science. The root-cause is likely that you do not understand how the scientific process actually works.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Good god. How can you write that with a straight face?
Simple: I actually know how the process works, from both sides. If you propose to "rock the boat", you probably will have to fund things yourself. Research funding is typically only granted for incremental things that assure results.
But I will stop answering you now. Your perception of your own level of insight and your actual level of insight is grossly out of alignment, making you immune to facts. Here is the research result that explains this (although you probably do not have what it takes to understand it): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–Kruger_effect
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A minor nit - only fresh water is densest at 4 deg. Salt water expands from its freezing point upwards.
I am talking about climate research. Climate researchers are not bankers.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
In Poland there are 76 coal mines and they must operate to supply fuel for 90% of Poland energy generation.
Well, it has gotten rather complex in most areas. But scientists can still judge general merit of well-established facts on other fields with reasonable accuracy. So unless most scientists get indoctrinated in some consistent way (if so, they missed me and some friends of mine), you can check what scientists with no bone in a specific field say about its results.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If most coal mines close, it will drive up the price and make it profitable again!
Thanks for the hearty laugh I got at the idea that climate scientists recommending changes is in any way rocking the boat.
brah i fucking love science!
Thanks EU, helps other countries economies, like Australia's.
In order to believe greenhouse gas theory, I must reject the second law of thermodynamics, but have not been able, It's just too ingrained. Fortunately future generations of engineers will do so, since universities have removed a large part of thermodynamics from their curriculums.
Good luck people, your going to need it, enjoy the consequences of dogmatic stupidity.
The electricity prices are soaring... (think yellow vests in France)
What if somebody invented cheap filtering technology that would make coal burning safe for the environment... Would coal be still considered bad? Oh wait.. Could it be that such technologies already exist?
How can you choke Trotsky-slut warmists on plumes of CO if ya don't keep the mines open ? Garbage-in garbage-out as they say ... Shame to lose that nice pink color among a cold-blooded vipers-nest of Shumero-Pelosites! .
Cars contribute immeasurably more to CO2 emission. What to really do something? Force govt agencies to buy electric cars only. Yes, it is more costly, it requires an infrastructure, but it will work, and it is beneficial in the long run because it creates jobs and is basically the same as spending on infrastructure projects which all governments love (employment, kickbacks, hype).
It sucks that nobody in power can think of anything productive to do with single-industry towns when the industry becomes obsolete or unsustainable. Surely the modern economy has some meaningful jobs available?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
The thing that climate deniers on Slashdot should understand more than most is that climate scientists are scientists and love technology and gadgets and shit. If there was any way to believe that we could just keep.going with coal power, scientists would be pushing it harder than anyone.
(And indeed some do, with carbon capture and other assorted "cleaner coal" technology. Full disclaimer: I used to do numeric models for carbon sequestration. I still think it will work as a transition technology.)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Speaking of misinformation, are you really trotting out the old "send us back to the stone age" bullshit?
When adults talk about this they recognize that no-one wants that, they just have different proposals for how to make life better. They also understand that the effects are fairly well understood at this point, as are the solutions and more important the politics of the solutions.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Mate, I have trouble believing Australia exists some of the time, and I live there.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I love the way people talk about 'science' on this matter of climate change, but never cite any actual research. They say 'bla bla bla thousands of scientists...'
But they never actually vote anything
Just keep in mind the difference between faith founded on facts, and faith founded on nonsense. The former is how science works. You learn to trust science because it demonstrates its credibility on an ongoing basis. It's faith, yes, but it's reasonable faith, as opposed to the usual unreasoning kind.
I have faith that atoms exist because the atomic theory permits making useful and testable predictions. Do we really have no better word for that than to use the same one that people use to excuse believing in magic sky friends?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It was no more reasonable for the average person to be skeptical twenty years ago, not even slightly. There was consensus along climate scientists then, and people aren't generally any better educated on science now than they were then. Most of them knew jack then, and they still know jack now. Either way the reasonable thing is to trust the people who know more than you do. For the plumber to expect to be trusted in matters of shit and then refuse to trust scientists in matters of science is a truly pathetic disconnect.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Overpopulation (because no one will mention it.)
"Speaking of misinformation, are you really trotting out the old "send us back to the stone age" bullshit?"
Of course he is. You don't get to be surprised that someone who vomits up garbage about chopping up eagles is full of shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Faith is taking something as true in the absence of evidence (and in some dictionary, cannot be based on evidence). But here is the thing all those stuff you said you took at faith value, in reality are based of a lot of evidence you accepted while learning and you are full well aware that most if not all you could check for evidence of it if you had enough money to spend : ,etc...etc...). Basically FAITH you never really revisit the premise. You work around making up excuse - people abandoning faith and switching to another are actually quite rare. That is not the same with TRUST where it can happen often.
* At school you were taught basic stuff trivial you could check for yourself and later on built upon it with stuff you could check on your own time.
* this built upon stuff you could check with lot of time and money (and here we go geology, geography, and most basic science covered).
* None of this is faith based, as you could any time use your money to VERIFY the existence (e.g. travel to Australia) what you meant is that it is based on TRUST , e.g. trust that all the information given to you during school is true
* Science function on a similar system of TRUST, TRUST is not FAITH, FAITH is believing without evidence but TRUST is accepting something as true based on a repeated pattern of evidence presented to you constructed on a pyramide of previous evidence.
* If that TRUST is broken, you then reject the previous accepted facts or rules. FAITH on the other hand simply tend to "work around" that ("he had not enough faith", "my prayer were not answered because of gods not having time/not praying enough/not being worthy", "gods work in mysterious ways" , "satan placed those bones here"
* Only one thing could be said to be "faith" and those are AXIOMS. Which is basically stretching the meaning of faith until meaninglessness.
All of this show you why FAITH is not what we use from scientist to lay person when TRUSTING a result we do not take time to verify ourselves.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The effects are less well known however.
And I call strawman right there.
We know that life as we know it depends on a very narrow margin of conditions. Miniscule changes can have dramatic impact. The eco-system is a chaotic system, speaking strictly mathematically. It is stable within small margins, and can easily go into various runaway positive feedback loops. We have already seen in multiple cases how the introduction of one foreign species can impact a local ecology.
We do not need to know the exact effects to understand that there is a considerable risk involved that has a very real probability of causing damage in amounts that we haven't yet heard about in connection with currency values. Trillions will be the pocket change when we're talking about large parts of coastlines affected.
The other problem we don't know is the economics. How will it affect progress? How will you pay for the solution?
Unlike climate, economics is not a natural system, but an artifical one. Despite all the bullshit rhetorics that makes it seem like economics is some kind of higher power, we humans decide how it works and where it goes. Anyone who tells you the opposite stands to profit from that falsehood.
If you have one system that is based on the laws of physics, and one system that is entirely man-made, it should be clear to anyone with three working brain-cells which system needs to adapt, because there is only one that can be adapted.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They have now realized that the human race is far too stupid for that
Which oddly enough was way easier to predict.
---
Considerably more than the number of popes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The article is bullshit, or in todays terms, fake news.
The opposite is true, at least for Germany. We are keeping our old coal power stations running while shutting down nuclear power. There has been a conflict this autumn over the expansion of one of several surface mining sites. This is surface mining - the tiny trails in the foreground are from giant trucks.
Coal is the only energy source that Germany has on its own soil. The amount of oil and gas we have is a rounding error, and there are no uranium mines. That is why all through the Cold War, coal has been kept running with subsidies, for military strategic purposes (energy independence in case of war). Because of that, no transition was even started until fairly recently, and jobs and industries are tied to it that can't be quickly moved elsewhere.
And the government that is using every PR opportunity to point out how conscious of the environment they are is actually doing the exact opposite and has been doing that for years. Brown coal (lignite), the one that you get by surface mining, which has much lower energy density than black (bituminous) coal that you get from mines, is the primary coal used in Germany. Its share of the energy mix has been almost constant for the past 30 years, falling from about 38% to about 29% in that time, or 0.3% per year on average. At that speed, it will be another century until we stop using it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Only the cited website (futurism.com), reddit and slashdot are carrying this "news". I'm putting it between quotation marks, as it isn't news: it's fake. Not a single respectable online news source, not a single respectable newspaper carries this. Also, I'd never heard about futurism.com before I read this "article". Moreover, I live in the EU, am professionally familiar with the EU regulation mechanism and am the CTO of a company whose technology, among other use cases, is used to detect fake news. And fake this news is.
Don't get me wrong: I'd love for this to be true, for many reasons. But it isn't. msmash has fallen prey to a fake.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
So in all actuality, it's just a matter of faith that the people who say the math is right are in fact right.
They're having faith in a system. The system takes in people, turns them into scientists and engineers, etc. The end product is technology that would amaze people of previous generations whether they understood the science or not. This would be analogous to witnessing miracles. As a result they trust this system and since the scientists are part of a system that works, they have faith in the scientists. For example, people like their sat-navs and can see that they work. They don't usually know Einstein's field equations or how they're relevant, but they're happy to accept the product exists because scientists and engineers were trusted to do their thing behind the scenes.
In the case of AGW, there is no fancy new toy to play with. In fact they're being told they'll have to make sacrifices. At this point they fear the system is no longer working for them, so they want to peer under the hood and rummage around a little. Their hope is that they'll find some way to put it back on its previous course, where it kept on churning out new products without the lectures on what they should and shouldn't consume, etc.
Again I note that someone thinks mod points are for compensating for lacking intellectual capacity. Poor bastard, must have had a terrible childhood.
They're ending public subsidies for *unprofitable mines*!
lol i suggest you look up religion rates again... because in some countries it was impossible to be without christian faith, punishable by death...
I see the problem.
You're arguing as if they were skeptics and therefore open to new evidence, whereas you are in fact arguing with cynics who don't give a damn about the evidence.
What's more, you're arguing with puritanical cynics, who in the words of a Victorian author, are insensibly drawn to choosing the facts to fit their theories.
There's no point. In terms of effort, it would be easier to find ways to build a functioning Biosphere II on Mars and move there.
Actual climate skeptics, they're worth talking to, because a skeptic is convinced by data and reason. A cynic isn't and never will be. There aren't many skeptics, they looked at the data and were convinced.
And, yes, some were paid a great deal by rich cynics to find faults. What they found was that there was no fault. The science was sound. The cynics these days try to pretend that never happened. Ruins the narrative.
You can't pretend people are paid to get a given result when you pay them to get the opposite and they still get the same result.
Mind you, I doubt that anyone was paying the scientists back in 1896 to talk about AGW.
But, then, thus is about facts and the cynics don't want those.
I'm not sure what they do want, as they mostly oppose their supposed beliefs of Libertarianism in their opposition to AGW. So I reject utterly the thesis that this is for such political beliefs or, indeed, for anything. It is purely cynical reactionary conduct.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Those are low level jobs for low level people. We should not care about them. Our ideals are beauty, peace, internationalism. In our world there cannot be a place for coal miners.
Most people do.
Most people choose not to.
A choice is not an ability.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Prediction is the only valid science - Fred Hoyle
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Thete is no literal proof in science. You're looking for theology.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well, you won't, because it'll affect you within the next decade and already affects you some now.
But you do explain the turgid mind of the cynic.
You know, I've changed my mind about Mars. Let's deport the cynics there. If climate doesn't matter, they should do fine. Right?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Warning people against jumping out of aircraft without a parachute involves gravity the same way as a religious fanatic throwing an unbeliever into a volcano does.
And this falsifies gravity how?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There are plenty of meaningful jobs and there are plenty of vulture capitalists and banks who can help startups create new ones.
But the cynics out there are bent on preventing new industries and new jobs appearing. They want the status quo as it was in 11,000 BC when Libertarianism was a thing.
(I far prefer the Status Quo of the 80s - Whatever You Want, Red Sky, The Oriental... Good days...)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Most of them aren't idiots: they're old people. It's a perfectly rational decision for them to pretend climate change doesn't exist, because fixing it will cost them money while bringing them none of the benefits. Who cares if it bankrupts their children or grandchildren? It's the same approach they've taken to national budgeting: cut taxes today, let the next generation pay for the debt after we're dead.
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The ending of government subsidies to coal mines will have an equalising
No it does not.
It is not the coal that is subsidized. It is the wages of the workers. The subsidizing stops, there is less coal on the market (as the mines are closed). If there is a price change it might go up, but it is just more likely that the drop in the ocean that is now no longer dropping is replaced by a few ship loads of coal from China or Australia.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Demand for coal will remain the same. It will simply be imported CHEAPER, it will cost jobs with the EU governments paying for unemployment benefits, it will increase dependence of foreign energy and it will negatively impact the balance of payments for the importers. Another win for the globalist bankers.
Religion is for dumbasses.
And being a dumbass towards people who follow a religion is 'racist', and dumb.
You probably forgot: humans have a gene for faith and a whole brain region allocated to it.
That is the problem with people who use science for arguments, but know nothing about basics science as in biology and genetics. About the existence of a brain region dedicated to religion and faith, we know minimum since 30 years. Probably longer ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Is deindustrislize and depopulate China at gun point if needed
And renewables are not heavily subsidized? Even playing field only if both aren't
anybody at this time can still think this whole thing is not real and not very dire is beyond me. People like you will probably deny there is a problem while in the process of dying from its effects.
Because most people are to young.
They came out of high school or college around age of 20 ... with age of thirty they here: there is a problem with the climate. But for them it was always like it is ... perhaps a very very little bit less turbulent when they where young. I grew up in an area where the christmas temperature was usually below zero, one record night was 31th of december, not sure about the year, but I got my appendix removed on 24th of december. So it must have been 1974 or 1975. In the night from 31th to the 1st of January, or the next night, I don't remember when I was outside around mid night (I think it was from 1st to 2nd), we had -30C. (Five days after christmas). At those times the winters were cold, -30C at night was common. Daytime usually not above -10C. That always lasted from beginning of January till mid or late February.
Two or three years ago we had at 23rd of December +23C. Easy to remember because of the coincident in numbers ...
While the cold was somewhat annoying, and costed us dearly in heating ... it had many benefits, too. It killed insects, like mosquitos. Farmers only needed to plow and not to crush the big shards of soil later, that did the frost. We actually used less salt, because either it was dry, or it was snowing. No freezing rain or half melting snow around. The air was fresh and clean. You had sunshine and not a rainy grey sky for 3 month. I was usually healthy all winter long ... now I have one or two times a cold.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but it is actually likely that I spent a big deal of my spring, summer, autumn in future in Asia, mostly Thailand, but the winters in north scandinavia, or Alaska. Yes, counter intuitive ... but the summer in Thailand is not much warmer (if at all) than the summer in Germany. The spring and autumn in Germany is nice. Winter and summer are just awful. Well, summers are getting better, IMHO ... but not better for the farmers. And I miss the true winter.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Unfortunately, once disproven, many people fall to faith to keep believing what they invested time and belief in.
Exactly like religion.
Most of them aren't idiots: they're old people.
There's plenty of overlap in that particular diagram.
It's a perfectly rational decision for them to pretend climate change doesn't exist, because fixing it will cost them money while bringing them none of the benefits.
It isn't, either. Not fixing it will cost them money, too. It's already costing money, it's not like that's something for the far-off future.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Commenter - inspect thyself. You're a fine one to throw the 'bad effect here' crap. You do it all the time.
Love it. First sentence in your screed contains "life as we know it". Straw. You can't even define that. Do you mean condos on the Florida beaches? You willing to die on that hill?
Another - "one foreign species can impact a local ecology." That has what to do with AGW?
"when we're talking about large parts of coastlines affected."
Ah, you **are** talking about property values.
"based on the laws of physics"
If you're still addressing climate change there, I recommend you look into all the fudge factors introduced to the various models to smooth out their desired, targeted conclusions.
There are other purposes for coal besides burning it. Coke is needed to refine iron into steel.
What Germany stopped mining last summer was the last of its 500 years of domestic anthracite. It is still opening new lignite mines and building new lignite-fired power plants, because to Merkel being antinuclear is more important than cutting carbon. Meanwhile, the older power plants that burn anthracite are not being replaced by anything. They are just importing anthracite instead of mining it locally.
Which will then restrict both supply & competition
Companies failing in capitalism IS competition.
Ezekiel 23:20
An interesting bit research into extreme events is looking at relative vs expected rates of record setting events. There's a lot of research into this, and there are statistical hallmarks of stable systems that we see breaking down in weather records currently.
As an example, lets say we start taking temperature measurements today. Tomorrow is going to be either a record high or a record low, or the same temperature as today. The day after now has something like a one-in-three chance of being a record. As time goes on, the chance of setting a record high or low goes steadily down, as we've sampled enough of the system to have captured the bulk of the variability in our record keeping. There are little blips around tens, hundreds, and thousands of years generally, as we start capturing further data to see things like the dust bowl or medieval warm period.
If you look at the expected rate of record setting weather events vs current records being broken, it's clear that our climate system is not stable. What's interesting is that you can see this without resorting to any sort of meteorology or climate science - just the statistics of measuring a variable system.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Did you miss the word "unprofitable"? These mines would fail and the jobs would be lost sooner or later without massive government subsidies.
"The science is settled!" is a statement of religious zealotry.
You sound like someone terrified of sailing off of the edge of the world.
Climate change is clearly happening, and has been for billions of years. The impact you have on it might range from zero to more than zero. If that impact is = 50%ish then nothing you are doing or proposing matters, and is simply a fascist cloak for controlling the behavior of others.
You are desperate to "settle the science" because it might someday discover the % of impact of humanity on climate change.
*golf clap for Muslims committing economic and political suicide*
You hit the nail on the head. Here's what being a climate skeptic looks like: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic.
Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct.
Richard Muller is the poster child for what a real skeptic looks like and how they behave. He saw what he thought were serious errors in measuring climate change, and decided to do it right. What he found was that he just didn't really understand the field, and he didn't understand why things were being done the way they were. He was excessively and very inefficiently thorough, but doing it his own way he got the same answer, because he was rigorously applying proper scientific and statistical techniques. When you do that, reality doesn't change.
What he didn't do was to prosecute climate change in the media, where reality can take a back seat to flash and entertainment. What he didn't do was make some blogs up and cherry pick evidence to feed to an audience who doesn't want to believe. What he didn't do was go into the comment section of articles on climate change and flatly deny everything we know to be true about climate change. None of that is skepticism. It's trolling at the best, or a bizarrely dogmatic decision to be wrong at the worst.
I think his most powerful point, and one that deniers really need to address, is this:
The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
His argument was sound, and his points sincere.
You responded with baseless and belittling insults, false equivalents, and tropes defending communism.
You are the reason most people see through it.
It isn't about saving the world or preventing disaster for you (else you'd be in Northern Canada in a survival bunker).
It's about controlling others and trying to make them behave how you want, because you are a little, petty fascist.
And of course you're the arbiter of who is a cynic and who is a skeptic, which conveniently allows you to ignore any debate that you lost.
"B-b-but I can't respond to that... He's a cynic! And probably a racist!"
Lots of people can and do have the math skills and the underlying science knowledge. Universities around the world churn out thousands of them every year. You make it seem like this is some black box that 3 people understand, but that's far from reality.
Just because you personally don't understand it, doesn't mean that it's wrong or that nobody really understands it. That's just your appalling ignorance showing.
And saying "the scientists" also makes you look like a dumbass. Which ones? Astrophysicists? Geologists? Oceanographers? Meteorologists? Biologists? Atmospheric scientists specializing in stratospheric aerosols? Because while you don't know this, dozens of fields intersect in climate science. And if one of them was really wrong, people in other fields would notice.
Do you have zero faith in everyone smarter than you? Do you second guess your doctor? Your dentist? At some point in life, most marginally intelligent people recognize that they can't know everything, and they look for ways to determine when they should trust the wisdom of people much more knowledgeable than themselves. If you have a better system to determine the merit of ideas than the university system and peer reviewed publications, we'd all love to hear about it.
All that said, what you're whining about already has been done! If you want a very good example of someone who decided to actually check the climate scientists' work go read up on Richard A. Muller. I even posted a helpful link up above, if google is too hard for you.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
But it's costing them less than fixing it would.
As a homeowner in the UK, not near a coast or river global warming isn't going to affect me in my lifetime to any great extent. Sure, the temperature will go up, but it's a coldish country anyway. There's already adequate drainage in my area to cope with extra storms. I earn enough that even if the price of food goes up ten times it won't be a problem.
From a purely selfish perspective, it doesn't make economic sense for me to do anything to help combat global warming.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Compounding on this, thousands upon thousands of prophets of varying prophetic specialities don't tend to come together to create a bunch of prophetic subsets that are used to test the limitations of and inter-prophetic reliability of other prophecies. While further prophets examine the historic reliability of past prophecies, and use what they find to improve current prophecies, all the while providing a rigorous margin of error for their prophecies.
This is one thing that all climate deniers seem to miss. They have no idea how big the science is, and how very, very deep it goes.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Wind power bird deaths
Solar power bird deaths
Because they HAVE NO COAL left to mine in 90% of the EU. Only the poor eastern block countries have some coal but not much. And I bet if you read the fine print there are loopholes that allow for mining of coal in 'other forms' as well as exceptions for the countries that will "pay a tax" for the right to do so.
This is just more socialist bull crap from the continent that gave you Hitler, the best Social-Democrat of all times.
Those people are defective.
Wrong.
They've selected one industry to no longer subsidize, while continuing to subsidize hundreds of other industries. Coal mining is now a "loser" industry, while solar panel and wind turbine production are "winners" that still get government funding.
EU countries don't burn much coal to start with.
Granting trading priorities to countries that don't burn coal or similarly restricting trading with countries that does depending on the amount of coal it burns, may work.
Rules like this need to spread like GPL otherwise it has no chance of saving the planet.
about any of it?
[($)]
Opinionated phrases on the article /. readers are smart enough to see this editorial opinion piece as an opinion piece and not a plain news article.
- move away form coal is a REFRESHING bit of BLUNTNESS
- the FAILED REMNANTS of a fossil fuel industry
- U.S. is GRASPING at anything to keep coal ALIVE
- the coal closures will have in the ongoing effort to CURB climate change
- for the transition to CLEANER power
- a CLEAR sign that major world powers are taking THEIR RESPONSIBILITY to help prevent our IMPENDING climate change CATASTROPHE seriously
- in STARK contrast to the U.S.
Cliff notes version:
Spain is ending government subsidies to coal mines Jan 1, 2019. Most or all of the X remaining Spanish coal mines will close. Z Spanish coal mine workers will lose their jobs with most of them taking a retirement buyout package from the Spanish government. The EU mandated ending coal mine subsidies as of .....
Cats killing birds at a rate 10,000 times higher than wind and solar power combined .
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Y'all need to check your age-ism. Just as you'd likely never say "they're just" Jewish / black / female. Casting an old-person net over those over 50 presumes that those over 50 are somehow one homogeneous group.
Those over 50 might have lived through a number of "future" crises (peak oil, climate change from the 80s), to find that, yes, these were real things, just not as catestropic as predicted.
Yea, that's why I used Australia as an example, hard to believe such a place exists so takes faith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Punishing people by death, and even less extreme forms of social coercion, are not people being converted due to their "looking into it" (i.e. making an informed decision after examining the doctrinal claims),
Reading comprehension and logic - you should look into it.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Do you have any actual facts to support your thoughts and "probablys"? Especially since your "probably already past that point now" would mean that there would be actual evidence now of renewables somehow increasing fossil fuel consumption. You "think" its true? Find and post some checkable data.
Currently the EU gets 17% of its electricity from renewables and even real skeptics (using and analyzing data) are not claiming that a renewable "grid apocalypse" until it hits about 30%.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Good. Feline genocide sounds good to me.
You can't even define that.
Of course I can, and I did. Life "as we know it", i.e. as we see around us right now. That may have been imprecise because we also know of life that exists in deep sea conditions and some life that can survive crazy radiation, no oxygen and no sunlight, etc. - I should have said "the current global eco-system".
Another - "one foreign species can impact a local ecology." That has what to do with AGW?
It is an example of fragility. You quote selectively like everyone who is trying to avoid the real argument (by cutting it out) and proving his point on selective parts that can be taken out of context and misinterpreted. I'd prefer you wouldn't try such cheap games.
I wrote in the part that you snipped out that the eco-system is a chaotic system, in the sense of mathematical chaos. That means that it can react with dramatic shifts to small changes. I don't have space nor time for a full lecture on chaos theory, so I'll assume you are familiar with it.
The introduction of species is one area where we can observe this clearly.
Ah, you **are** talking about property values.
It isn't property values that cause the main damage. Imagine that a few big cities actually sink below the ocean level - and many of them, like Mumbai, Miami or NYC are close enough that we're not talking 20m change here - sure you can discuss property damage, but what about the impact on travel and trade connections (ports, airports, trains, highways), the impact on business and industry (in the center and on the outskirts, respectively) and ond art, culture and education? You think you can relocate hundreds of museum, universities, offices and factories?
If you're still addressing climate change there, I recommend you look into all the fudge factors introduced to the various models to smooth out their desired, targeted conclusions.
Ah, the usual climate-denier nonsense. Look, hundreds of people who are paid for denying climate change and who actually studied this stuff have been working full-time for years to debunk everything that the scientific community produces. The fact that despite those efforts the results are solid and accepted within people who actually know a thing about it with a majority that would make a USSR politburo blush, is the strongest possible evidence that details might well be debateable, but the core message is as unassailable as anything in science can be.
Doesn't it feel shitty that you're not even paid for the trolling you're doing here, while other people are?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Unfortunately, you have a point.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. When first made, the climate change claims were extraordinary claims and hence needed extraordinary proof. That proof has been supplied 2...3 decades ago and by now the claim that climate change is not real or nor man-made is the extraordinary claim. Hence the claim that it is not real needs extraordinary proof today. What the deniers have is "I don't believe it".
If this was something not very relevant, I would call the behavior of the deniers instructive and a good example of how not to do it. Unfortunately, what they do is destructive in the extreme and on the level of the whole species. And they provide an "alternative" for those that are undecided, but do not want to face what climate change reduction would actually need to have them do. Hence effective measures get delayed and reduced, which is fatal. My current prediction is 4C (end of the human race) or more. And there is not much time left to prevent that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You're an illiterate idiot. Being able to mouth off on the Internet neither makes you smart, or your "opinions" fact.
I bet dollars to donuts you wouldn't recognize a communist if one came up and kicked you in the ass.
Btw, your line of argument, "it's OK to mod down post you don't like or can't meet with real arguments" is completely in line with both Stalin and Hitler. Well played sir. That's how you become an authoritarian totalitarian.
And, no his arguments were neither sound nor sincere, and his views on left and right can at best be described as "confused" and "ignorant". Most likely though, he's just another one of those "alt-right" retards who can't tell right form their arse and the left from their right elbow.
Ok, lets ban all coal mining. Does it mean the EU will stop manufacturing steel too?
Wtf was that ramble?
Who wouldn't be wary of climate science being (ab)used to sell a "solution" that doesn't even work in models. Every honest climate scientist recognizes that nuclear energy will play a crucial part of any plausible decarbonization pathway, and yet traditional "environmentalists" are the ones working to kill the tool proven most effective in our efforts. Closing nuclear plants decades early, and replacing them with depleting gas plus renewable ornaments is a waste of limited resources, at a time when emissions continue to grow.
Actually the scientists have no more stake in this than the average person on the street. The discovery and verification, as well as measurement and projected results of anthropomorphic climate change is merely a result of their research and not a cause of them. You are confusing the cart for the horse.
The climatologists, as well as the other scientists, neither gain nor lose from the results of their work, and their work will continue without regard for those findings.
If you study fish population and type by taking underwater pictures of a pond, it doesn't matter to you or your study one single bit if you find pictures of trout, catfish, bass, goldfish, or shrimp!
Yeah, shrimp isn't technically a fish, but it can certainly be photographed, and would probably indicate some drastic change in the pond if it used to just be pictures of bluegills for years, and this month it's nothing but shrimp.
As to money... Ever look at a research scientists salary? The only climatologists driving Cadillacs are the ones who inherited them.
Speaking of "follow the money", you really should. All the funding for climatology in the entire world is still chump change from petty cash for even a single oil company. You know, the people that would get the biggest hit to their wallet if something like climate change were accepted by regulators and the public...
So I guess I have to reinforce this statement for you:
FOLLOW THE FOSSIL FUEL MEGABUCKS NOT THE RESEARCHERS SMALL CHANGE!!!
Now of course there's still another point you don't seem to realize. Scientists don't collude. A handful may work together on an occasional project, but the way they make their bones is by proving other scientists wrong! What the F do you think peer review is all about? It's not some mutual masturbation society or anything like that, they TRY to disprove each others work, constantly! That's actually part of their jobs! Why the heck do you think they place such a high priority on releasing data and basically just blow off anything that doesn't release the data? Because it's harder than hell to disprove something without the data, and you can't honestly back something that lacks the data either. Put a dozen scientist in a room together, and they'll come up with 20 different hypothesis and collectively disprove 37 of them! Yeah, the math doens't seem to work out, but those guys really work hard to prove each other wrong...
By the way, when it comes to climate change, they've got the data. They've got mountains of data that supports it. You literally do not even have a hard drive with enough raw storage to hold all the relevant data they've collected over the last century. Hell, over the last 20 years!
And yes, strangely enough, we have scientific data on the climate the precedes the launching of man made satellites. Ever hear of a barameter, or thermometer, or a rain guage, not to mention all the other instruments in the average weather station... Yeah, the satellites let us fill in certain types of data from more of the world that historically had little to no data, but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist. With claims like your's, you'd think the entire series of Xanth novels never exist until after the last one was printed. NOTHING works like that.
By the way, we have data on temperatures and climate due to cooperations from many fields of science, and rather than it just being one point, they have many that corroborate the results, so they can be highly rated as to reliability. I could list them here with their basics, but even the ones I know about would double the size of this huge post, at the very least. Nobody in the sciences is pulling numbers out their ass.
Ah the hockey stick. Yes, the arguments against it are a pretty poor con job. You see, the presenters showing the uptick just showed one nice and obvious segment for the data adverse and scientifically stupid (tv presents and politicians, not to mention high school rejects). That wasn't fake, it was just an easy to understand and recognize examp
Ban volcanoes. They are soooooo bad for the environment. They could, like, cause so much pollution that everything on the planet would die. If you really want to save the planet, you will demand that your government ban every volcano ever.
I'm more optimistic. The efficiency gains we've realized over the last couple of decades are incredible. LEDs, HVAC, even ICEs are all massively more efficient than their predecessors. At the same time, we're steadily deploying more and more renewables, and they are already outperforming most fossil fuels from a cost standpoint. My house is 2x the size of my parent's house, but it costs 20% what theirs costs to heat and cool. 80 years of construction improvements makes a giant difference from an efficiency standpoint.
Efficiency is self-rewarding. All other climate-based arguments aside, the people who live more efficiently are going to have more money to spend, and the businesses which are more efficient, especially in regards to their infrastructure costs, are going to be more successful. We're not likely to go backwards in this regard. Pretty much nobody will ever again build a new home with a coal furnace in the cellar and crumpled newspaper in the walls. Yet that was not uncommon during the early half of the 1900s.
More importantly, the developing world isn't going to go through the whole power and efficiency revolution that we did. They're going to be starting with our better technology, and advancing from there. China is a good example. Thirty years ago, they weren't building massive fields of solar arrays and wind turbines. And yes, while they are still building coal plants, they're also deploying a lot of renewable energy. Like the rest of the world, financially, it makes sense to be moving to renewables.
We've already made some serious steps towards developing carbon negative concrete, which would be a real game-changer. Cement production releases a ton of CO2, but if it could be made to be a net negative, we'd have industrialized carbon capture. CO2 reinjection into gas wells seems to work, and there are some other promising capture and storage projects under development.
I think we're tantalizingly close to being able to address climate change in a meaningful way. One more iteration on battery storage will get us a very, very long way. Double the capacity or half the price, and storing electricity will become a financial no-brainer for most of the world.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
See subject: "Allahu ahkbar" 100's of years ago when EVERYONE ELSE RAN (except lithuania) vs. muslim hordes (who would CUT OFF YOUR HEAD & RAPE YOUR WOMEN if you didn't "convert") & we were OUTNUMBERED like 100:1 & STILL BEAT THEIR ASSES (better strategy, stronger men, great cavalry & GREAT GENERAL who iirc, became a pole king).
* We were known as "the defenders of Christianity" & I had family who were ancestral KNIGHTS then (very proud of that here & WHO I come from (proud AMERICAN/U.S. Citizen GENERATION #1 here too)).
APK
P.S.=> Me? LOL - I stop a DIFFERENT THREAT & like poles BEFORE ME?? I do it for EVERYONE (for the ABSOLUTE good) https://news.slashdot.org/comm... (even for advertisers that INFECT/TRACK/SLOW us as they often use hosts to PROTOTYPE TEST their own heinous machinations in ads))... apk
See subject: Like our "relatives" in Russkies we can sleep in it. We took Russia & HELD IT (Hitler + NAPOLEON failed, we didn't (St. Petersberg occupied by POLES for 2.5 yrs.)). IIRC, nobody ELSE has EVER done that to "The RUSSIAN BEAR".
* So tell us all ANOTHER ONE you undereducated DOUBTLESS MONGREL weezil...
APK
P.S.=> Oh, I'm having a FIELD-DAY on YOUR obviously UNEDUCATED ASS between this & my other post here https://news.slashdot.org/comm... WHICH YOU HAD TO LAMELY TRY TO "downmod hide" & DELETE too (I have the screenshot proof) you weak fool... apk
See subject: BEST LAND in EUROPE (w/ the Ukraine) bar-none & have HELD OUR MUD/GROUND per https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
You can't "MAKE MORE LAND" & let alone some of the most fertile on the planet for millenia like poland has & I've BEEN there + saw WHY storks (giant birds, 6-8 ft. tall) MIGRATE for centuries from Africa to eat landfrogs (frogs MEAN CLEAN LAND is why)).
* Now, isn't /. AFFILIATED w/ DUBAI like that "nice guy" DARTH CHENEY HIDING FROM INTERPOL THERE TOO?
(Lookup BizX & DUBAI - don't be TOO amazed @ the BULLSHIT "SJW" BRAINWASHING /.'s been doing since WHIMPSlash took over (he's their pawn imo)).
Lastly: We're not EDUCATED?
Ask who helped BREAK the ENIGMA MACHINE CODES of Germany in WWII w/ english folks fool... & tell us MORE of your bullshit, you UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous WORM weezil.
APK
P.S.=> Go on now WHIMPSlash & /. "editors" - downmod hide OR DELETE this like you've been my posts by the 100's this week - I'll just BLOW YOU AWAY (& more @ midnite for our NEW YEAR TRADITION too, lol - publicly - @ YOUR EXPENSE)... apk
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I have my own personal coal mime and I will continue to mine. Screw the EU!
No, it's not. You can have all the math chops in the world and it doesn't have the slightest bearing on whether "high level physics" is correct or not.
Science is this odd branch of philosophy that holds that ideas should be tested, and the ones that don't work discarded. Every time you use a computer you test the standard model of physics. The average person tests a good deal of our scientific knowledge more or less constantly. It's so reliable that the average person doesn't even realize they're doing that. Contrast that with religion, which is so unreliable that the occasional false positive or confirmation biased outlier is given a special name: "miracle."
What is a "climate denier"? An attempt to equate people like me with holocaust denial?
I don't know you. I can't comment on you or people like you.
As a general comment, the term arose in general psychological usage during the height of AIDS denialism (i.e. those who deny that AIDS is caused by HIV). It can refer to flat-earthers, evolution deniers, and GMO deniers (i.e. people who believe that GMO foods in general are less safe than the current food supply; it doesn't include people with economic objections).
It can also refer to people who deny historical consensuses, because it's the same psychological processes going on.
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Whenever someone suggests that there's a gene, or even a particular brain region, for some higher level behavioural characteristic, you're pretty safe in assuming (taking on faith, if you will) that they're, at best, *vastly* over simplifying.
Assuming you mean the VMAT2 gene, one, unreplicated study, suggested that it might have as much as a 1% contribution to variance in scores on a self-transcendence scale. A third of that scale is a sub-scale measuring "self-forgetfulness", such as the tendency to forget oneself when concentrating on or absorbed in some task. Notably, tendency to believe in any specific religion was shown to be entirely culturally based.
It's all very, very sketchy, but some guy wrote a best selling book, so there's that.
You are the reason most people see through it.
Who the FUCK takes anonymous comments on Slashdot as some kind of representative of the mainstream scientific consensus?!
Pretending science can answer all questions is an insult to real scientists.
I don't know if science can answer all questions, but if it can answer even one it's still more valuable than religion.
I just modded your sorry ass down. And if I could post under my name and mod you down I would, but I can't.
If I'm a climate denier because I don't believe in the shit being perpetrated on mankind then you my enemy are a koolaid drinker.
Two can play this game!
It's not the scientists who are spending billions to sponsor climate change denial.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I totally agree. Now go to the next step. In this context what is "rocking the boat"? You haven't really thought this through have you.
From the viewpoint of coal and oil producers who've been making billions by externalising the true costs of their products, anything that might curtail that certainly qualifies as "rocking the boat". Thanks for playing!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If moderating "-1, Spite" makes you feel better, okay.
None of this is personal from my perspective. I don't know you either.
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Notably, tendency to believe in any specific religion was shown to be entirely culturally based.
Obviously.
However the readiness to change/convert to another one is mind based. Same as being afflicted by religion from what ever culture you come from.
Interesting would be to have an experiment where people are completely barred from religions and mystics during they grow up and when they are set free, ask them about their thoughts ...
(P.S. a positron encephalogram does not lie about your brain regions ...)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
know of life that exists in deep sea conditions and some life that can survive crazy radiation, no oxygen and no sunlight, etc
Extremophiles do not make do not result in a wide range of life and they'll never be very intelligent, any may not ever have brains just simple nervous systems. "Life" my survive on earth in many different conditions, but life that can get off the planet before it's swallowed by the sun cannot.
Every honest climate scientist recognizes that nuclear energy will play a crucial part of any plausible decarbonization pathway
[citation needed]
and yet traditional "environmentalists" are the ones working to kill the tool proven most effective in our efforts.
Which one do you mean, wind, solar, or battery backup?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is it obvious? Most religions have in common the claim that they are true, and all others are false, and also the idea that every person has a soul, spirit or some essence that is part of or otherwise connected to a deity. Some also claim that a particular ethnic group represents "the chosen people," or, slightly more subtly, that certain types of people are inferior, cursed, or otherwise lesser in the deity's eyes. The non-heritability of specific religions seems obvious from a scientific point of view, but is not obvious from a religious one.
P.S. The analysis of PET images has many of the same problems as any other functional brain imaging technique. Functional PET experiments usually look at differences in the concentration of radio labelled glucose, the idea being that if a particular part of the brain is active more glucose will be delivered to satisfy the increased energy demand. For an active task like finger tapping versus rest the experiment and interpretation is (reasonably) straightforward. But how do you compare religiosity versus rest? Does the active state really represent spirituality, or is it something else (pleasure, fear, the subconscious rolling its eyes)? Also, complex behaviours are complex. Lots of different parts of the brain will have increased activity, and other parts decreased. Many different behaviours will be associated with changes in the same area. The concept of a specific "god spot" has been fairly well discredited. Aside from all that, the "god spot" was the observation that people with damage in the right parietal lobe show increased feelings associated with spirituality, and people describing those feelings show decreased activity in the same general region. Decreased activity. The "god spot" might better be called the "skepticism centre" or perhaps the "reality locus."
Humans killing all other living things faster than anything else is.
Grow trees for charcoal. It's environmentally friendly. Not even kidding.
Unlike climate, economics is not a natural system, but an artifical one. Despite all the bullshit rhetorics that makes it seem like economics is some kind of higher power, we humans decide how it works and where it goes. Anyone who tells you the opposite stands to profit from that falsehood.
If that were 100% true, you would think we could force our man-made economic system to constantly provide optimal outcomes. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
We can't simply change the laws of economics and have it work. They are rooted in sociology, which is unfortunately an incredibly poorly researched field. We simply don't know enough about human nature to bend society and economics to our will. So, although economics is "artificial' in that it's a system made up of humans, it's also a system that developed organically.
One of my favorite examples of the sociological side of economics is the Plano Real.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Despite all the bullshit rhetorics that makes it seem like economics is some kind of higher power, we humans decide how it works and where it goes.
I disagree.
I see economics as an extension of the laws of thermodynamics and entropy.
I see money as a kind of abstract measure of expended effort and thus of energy.
This concept is complicated by compounding effort/energy to produce goods and services with demand: human desire (which is itself modulated by effort/energy expenditure) and human values (again, modulated by effort/energy expenditure).
If anyone can point me to an economist who has figured out how to directly convert money into joules or kilowats or ergs then I would be very grateful; otherwise it seems to me that the lack of the rigorous definition of this concept is partly what holds back economics from being a proper science.
cut taxes today, let the next generation pay for the debt after we're dead.
Fixed it for you.
In either case: you better be voting for a balanced budget and/or cutting all entitlement spending and cutting defense spending to the bone or else you're a hypocrite.
when the models did reliably predict the catastrophe to come about 30 years ago
If the catastrophe is yet to come... that is, if it has not yet come to pass... then how can you say they reliably predicted it?
In order to do science one must first be able to think.
You want to see a climate change denier, go look in the mirror, you useless incel turd.
Well, I really hope you are right, but I just do not see it. Especially geo-engineering is basically a hype. The human race cannot do tech on the scale needed.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hot off the presses - one of the things that gives me hope: https://www.bbc.com/news/scien...
Studies show making products more efficient has - along with other factors - already been slightly more effective than renewable energy in cutting CO2 emissions.
The difference is that glamorous renewables grab the headlines.
It's not an all-or-nothing approach. Too much CO2 in the atmosphere has a lot of causes, and a lot of solutions. The key is to work on all of them, not fixate on one of them.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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Most religions have in common the claim that they are true, and all others are false, and also the idea that every person has a soul, spirit or some essence that is part of or otherwise connected to a deity. ... slightly more subtly, that certain types of people are inferior, cursed, or otherwise lesser
If you think that, you don't know much about religions.
I for my part no none that claims that it is the only one true and the others are false, or that they are true as in the sense of truth.
That is one reason for the success of Islam in Asia and partly Africa. Africans converted to Islam so they could no longer be traded as slaves, ironically they became slavers them self and captured people living more inside of the continent. Many parts of Asia where heavy influenced by Hindu, or where Hindi, e.g. what is now Indonesia. So the arab traders told them: "you are all stupid, living in castes, having no power, become muslims, under Allah we are al equal!"
The soul/spirit thing is ofc the tricky part. If you do e.g. martial arts, or yoga or meditate and feel your inner energy it is hard to be not convinced that there is a "spirit" aka Qi/Chi/Ki/Prana. But from my point of view that is easy to accept without need of a religion ... the universe made us like that, why would I need a god to explain my spirit?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.