The main problem with high oil prices is that the money is going largely to rich oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia, so that they can build monstrosities like ski resorts in the desert. I would have preferred to pay a carbon tax instead; at least the money would stay in our own economy and be used to build infrastructure. Carbon taxes could be offset by decreases in income taxes, so that we don't pay any more overall. As an environmentalist, I am strongly opposed to these high oil prices, because they are siphoning off our wealth and giving it to rich oil foreign oil companies.
OK, you basically agree with what I wrote... The right wing attempts to increase liberty by ceding power to the individuals and their associations (corporations), and the left wing attempts to regulate and restrict liberty and bend corporations to do the will of the State (fascism).
We need to be clear on what we mean by "freedom". I believe that the low taxation small government ideology will lead us to a world where an extremely small group of people control nearly all of the wealth. Rich families will hold their wealth and increase their wealth not because of their innate abilities, but simply because they have far more money to invest in businesses, and to buy the best education. Children in these rich families will remain wealthy not because they are inherently superior to other children, but because their parents happen to be billionaires. They will remain wealthy because they can afford the best financial advisors.
Meanwhile, if we imagine that in a neo-conservative world, the public education system whithers, and the best and most able teachers move to the private education system, then quality education will become extremely expensive. This education, which will be licence to a good career, will become a luxury for the very wealthy. Systems of scholarships might help, but they will likely be extremely inefficient, and will miss many capable but poor students.
I have direct experience with this. A relative of mine was born to a relatively poor family. He did well in the public system, and ended up going to a major university in the UK. He ended up being a government minister, and then the CEO of an important corporation in Europe. If his public education had been of poor quality, then it is unlikely he would have been recruited by the university, and his potential would have been wasted.
I believe that low tax systems such as those proposed by neo-conservatives will lead to a world where there is a massive division between the wealthy and the poor. Roosevelt's "New Deal", a policy where the rich were taxed more than the poor, effectively created the American middle class. That middle class is now disappearing, thanks largely to neo-conservative policies. How would you define "freedom" for a child born to a poor family, a child whose excellent abilities would otherwise lead him to greatness, but instead are wasted because of poor education and lack of access to capital due to lack of collateral. There are strong odds that such a child could wallow in a low paying job for the rest of his life, when a good quality education would have rescued him.
I agree that fascism is corporatism. However, it seems to me that right wing governments act in the interests of corporations. They remove "red tape", which translates into allowing the corporations to do whatever they want. You say that right wing governments typically want as little State interference with companies as possible...to me, that means acting in the interests of those companies. Centrist or left wing governments usually are trying to act in the Public Interest, a difficult thing to do admittedly, but an essential one if a society is to truly prosper.
I have noticed that extreme right wingers/neo-liberals attempt to deny even the existance of the Public Interest. They believe that there is only self-interest. I believe that when real right wing government are in power, they either cede their power to the private sector, or simply become agents of private power. This is not the same thing as a center/left government that seeks to control the corporations in the name of the Public Interest. Power has to be wielded by someone. Would you rather that power be wielded by an unaccountable billionaire, or a democratically elected government?
It makes me laugh when right wingers such as Glenn Beck attempt to co-opt the definition of fascism, applying it to those to whom they disagree with, when the word would be best applied to the very right wingers throwing the term at others. This seems like a strategy of misdirection and confusion, an attempt to make it more difficult to recognize the real fascists.
At the core of fascism is a worship of power, of strength. Fascists despise the weak. In the case of WW2 fascists, they sought to destroy the weak, the degenerates, the Jews, anyone who didn't fit their idea of strength.
The modern fascists also worship strength and power. They despise the modern welfare state because they see social programs as a way of supporting the weak at the expense of the strong, supporting the poor at the expense of the rich. They profess to support the free market, because in their view the free market punishes the weak, while rewarding the strong. The free market is survival of the fittest, and that idea is at the core of fascist thinking.
For right wingers to call liberals fascists is like Orwell's 1984, where "freedom equals slavery". Can you imagine Hitler supporting mentally challenged people? Of supporting the rights of homosexuals? Of supporting religious tolerance? Wake up folks! Learn to recognize a mind-fuck when you see it!
The best way to defeat these thugs is to adopt encryption tools to make our file transfers invisible. Tools like Tor are a good start. But we need to get enough people using secure protocols that the government won't be able to single out and prosecute individuals for using them.
So if you care about your rights in the future, start using secure protocols. Contribute code to open source projects. Make these systems work. Use it or lose it!
This is just like Microsoft's ill fated Cairo OS. It will never happen. The only way I'll believe that MS will actually succeed in creating a successful OS is if they throw out their old OS completely and start again from scratch. This is exactly what Apple did, and it led to an extremely stable and secure new system. The legacy systems can be supported by some sort of VM, again, just like Apple did when it went from OS9 to OSX. The future increases in computing power will negate any drops in performance in legacy programs.
I believe that technology such as this pushes us towards an anti-rationalist society, where there are no facts, only opinions. In such a world, we obtain our insights not from looking at actual facts, but by listening to the opinions of commentators who align with our own chosen political tendencies. Intellectual discourse is reduced to a banal sports match between left wing commentators and right wing commentators, where we cheer the opinions of our own team while booing the opinions of the enemy team. People lose the ability to differentiate fact from opinion. Instead of using the physical world as the ultimate arbiter of truth, we use the opinions of others in whom we trust.
This transformation has already happened. Witness the degeneration of the American news media. In the days of Edward R. Murrow, the famous CBS news anchor, news organizations actually attempted to give the public enough raw facts to develop informed opinions. In recent decades however, news organizations have been gutted. The number of foreign correspondents has been sharply reduced, and those correspondents seldom venture widely. The foreign correspondent has been to a significant extent been replaced by the talking head "expert". These so-called experts gather facts, and then digest them into their own opinions, which are filtered through personal biases that are largely invisible to the public.
I recognize that there will always be bias, and that there is no such thing as true machine-like objectivity. We are all human after all. But there is a spectrum a news organization can occupy, in which on one side the organization presents pure fact, and which on the other the organization presents pure opinion. We have most definitely moved on the spectrum towards presenting pure opinion.
Systems such as that which Microsoft is implementing to filter blog opinions will reinforce the situation in which people form their opinions based on listening only to commentators who already align to their pre-conceived biases in opinion. I believe that this is profoundly negative for our democratic system, and will encourage us to vote and act based on uninformed opinions.
America is not an empire in the same way that Rome was an empire. Rome extracted resources from outlying countries directly by taxation, supported by military force. America is an empire that relies on what we call the "free market". It relies on market dominance for much of its power, and it seeks to preserve this market system because that market system favors American interests. Let me illustrate with an example. Saudi Arabia sells its oil in what might be called a market system. It sells a large amount of oil to America, while also selling it to other countries. If Saudi Arabia decided to suddenly stop shipping oil to America, and instead sell exclusively to China, then America's imperial powers would come into play. It would first use economic pressures to discourage this policy, and if that didn't work, then it would likely use military force. One of the things I am arguing is that America's ability to dissuade other countries from making economic deals that are unfavorable to America is weakening.
When we start using our military power to keep our allies in line, you'll have a point
I would argue that the very existence of overwhelming American military power does keep "allies" in line. Perhaps not Canada, or Europe, but quite possibly China, and definitely Central and South American nations, as well as nations in the Middle East.
You make some good points, but I don't entirely agree with you.
The economic system you are discussing is referred to generally as "neo-Marxism", with its focus on large states ruining the outlying countries for their wealth in an evil capitalistic world. What neo-Marxists never came to realize is that the world is not a zero sum game - and that rhetoric rarely translates into cold hard cash.
I disagree. I am not discussing a "neo-Marxist" system. The simple fact is that American client states send America resources, and America sends them back other resources in trade. If the client state is sending America goods in return for a pittance, then this situation is in America's favor. This imbalance in the trade of goods is highly comparable to the situations in previous empires. It doesn't matter whether the trade takes place in the context of a free market system between private corporations, or within the confines of a neo-Marxist empire. You still have a dominant power receiving a huge amount of goods without having to give much back in return. That for me is at the heart of what it means to be an empire.
Try again. Venezuela's main export partner - still by massive, massive margins (46% in 2006, according to the CIA world factbook) is the U.S. He still sends vast majorities of his oil to the U.S. Economically speaking, he's lining up just fine. Security wise, he's causing a few issues with neighboring countries that we would like him to stop, but as far as his massive oil industry - which is the only real engine his economy has - massive amounts of it are coming here, and there's little reason for him to change that.
I didn't say that Venezuela had stopped trading with America. What I said was that Venezuela was not acting according to the economic wishes of America. They have expropriated oil producing properties from American oil companies, including Exxon Mobile. They are keeping a larger amount of the proceeds of selling oil in the country, and they are redistributing those resources. They are also selling oil in currencies other than the US dollar, which is a huge blow to America's economic power. The moves in South America against the US are largely moves to demand more from America in compensation for the goods they ship to the US. And although there are still some US friendly governments in South America, opposition is growing.
Oh please. The American economy has stalled a bit, but we're not even at the point of a classic recession (failure to increase GDP).
We'll see. However, let's look at some of the facts. Firstly, if America is such an economic juggernaut, then why is it such a huge net borrower? One would think that such an economic superpower would be a net lender. And it might not be such a problem if that money was loaned out to finance increased production, to finance the building of factories and infrastructure. But instead, much of that money has been spent on unproductive consumption of disposable consumer goods, or indirectly on outrageously expensive weapons systems. The only redeeming factor of the American debt is that it is in American dollars, and will thus shrink as the dollar loses value. The simple fact is that the American manufacturing sector has been hollowed out, as evidenced by their shockingly large trade deficits. Close to 70% of the American economy is based on consumer spending.
A classic sign of a declining empire is a massive surge in military spending. During the rise of an empire, many countries will voluntarily join the empire because it is in their own economic interest to do so. As the empire ages, satisfaction with the empire in outlying states begins to decline. The dominant power makes increasing economic demands on these outlying states, while providing decreasing benefits to them. In order to quell the dissatisfaction, the dominant power needs to use increasing amounts of force to preserve imperial power. The increased military spending becomes a huge economic burden for the dominant power, which in turn further increases the economic demands on the outlying states. This becomes a vicious circle of surging dissatisfaction in the empire, and surging military spending. It ends when the economy of the dominant power can no longer sustain the large military. The outlying states fall away to form other alliances, and the former imperial power becomes "just another country".
History has shown this to be true. The Roman Empire collapsed partly because its outlying states rebelled against a huge economic burden. The Spanish Empire collapsed after building a huge armada of ships, only to see the fleet destroyed by an upstart Britain. The British Empire collapsed, as outlying states fell away, despite its huge military power. The Soviet Empire collapsed under the burden of massive military spending. I believe that something similar is happening to America.
Many of America's client states are rebelling against the economic burdens placed upon them. A clear example of this is seen in South America, where several countries (Venezuela included) are acting in contravention to America's economic wishes. One can arguably say that the Islamic insurgency in the Middle East is also a symptom of dissatisfaction by outlying states in the Empire. As the American dollar has declined recently, other currencies, such as the Euro are displacing the US dollar is the currency of choice for international trade. Furthermore, the American economy is in deep trouble, largely because it has borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars to build expensive weapon systems (and also to build too many unproductive but expensive toys such as big screen TV's).
I don't want this decline to happen because I am a part of this empire, but make no mistake: it is happening. Our only hope in this is that America will fade peacefully, like Britain, to become "just another country".
Your seeming dismisal of the opinions of those who are not experts is intellectual elitism.
I would argue that ceding factual and rational scientific debate to a sphere of intellectual elites IS a form of intellectual elitism, whose remedy is the widespread dissemination of scientific arguments to the general public. I believe that we should be raising the level of our children's scientific knowledge, so that they will be able to have factually informed opinions on important scientific issues. If, as you seem to be suggesting, we give up trying to teach proper scientific ideas to the general public, then we risk evolving into an anti-rational society, in which there is no fact, only opinion, and in which people form their opinions on important scientific issues based their own preconceived political/ideological assumptions, and not on actual observation of the physical world.
The reason why so many people are so credulous, so ready to gobble the propaganda of the various interest groups is BECAUSE they have no idea of the actual science. When the population does not understand the science, then they are malleable to anyone who cares to manipulate them. It is only when science is widely known that people make proper decisions as to the best directions to lead society. Democracy itself depends on widespread knowledge. Your seeming acquiescence to widespread scientific ignorance does not bode well for American democracy. If the public is ignorant of most important issues affecting society, then democracy is a hollow shell, and voting is mostly meaningless.
I think we greatly underestimate high school students in our current curriculum. Taught in the correct way, all of the concepts I described above ARE graspable by many high school students. Of course, you won't be able to teach them the calculus attached to the ideas, but the basic concepts are not that difficult. All you need to do is build the basic ideas, brick by brick. Then you link the basic ideas together to build a more complete picture.
Here is an example. Idea #1: Objects emit infrared energy. The hotter an object is, the more energy is emitted. Idea #2: If the amount of EM energy being absorbed by an object exceeds the amount of energy emitted by the object, then the temperature will rise until the rate of energy emission matches the rate of energy absorption. Idea #3: The infrared radiation leaving the Earth is emitted into space by the outermost layers of the atmosphere. Idea #4: The temperature of the atmosphere decreases as altitude increases (until the thermosphere).
All of these ideas are relatively easy to teach, especially if you don't have to teach the associated mathematics. Now link them together. Carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is effectively a barrier to infrared radiation. This barrier causes the infrared to be emitted to space at a higher altitude (idea #3) than it would have without the CO2. Since the upper layers are colder (idea #4), they emit less infrared (idea #1). Because the upper layers are emitting less radiation, there is now more heat entering the atmosphere than there is exiting. Thus, the temperature of the upper emitting layer must rise to restore the energy balance (idea #2). This results in a general warming of the atmospheric system.
Of course, there are some subtleties to the above arguments that may be difficult to teach to high school students, but the main ideas will be grasped. If we believe our children are stupid and incapable of learning advanced topics, then they will fulfill our prophecy for us. We should give our children more credit. They are smarter than we think.
Firstly, the level of many of the posts here, the reflexive and snide referral to the principles of atmospheric science as religion indicate to me that an increasingly large group in society are hostile to science. Here is a New York Times article that argues just that, that there is a rising tide of anti-intellectualism building in America today.
As for the accusations of indoctrination, I believe that climate science should be taught in schools. However, it should be taught at a far more advanced level than they typical caricatures that appear in popular culture. Students should first be taught about the physics of electromagnetic radiation, about absorption, reflection, and emission. They should be given an understanding of how some wavelengths transparently pass through some materials, while others wavelengths are absorbed by the same materials. In my experience, students today typically have a terrible understanding of these concepts.
They should also be taught some basic atmospheric science. For example, they should know why the air becomes cooler as altitude increases (up to the thermosphere at least) because the reduced pressure causes the air molecules to move more slowly. This means that they should be familiar with gas laws, and with the concept of adiabiabatically raising a parcel of air. They should be taught about the latent heat in water vapor and also about relative humidity and the capacity of air to hold water vapor. They should understand that raising a parcel of air causes it to cool, thus reducing the amount of water vapor it can hold. When the water vapor condenses to form clouds, heat is released, causing the parcel of air to rise even faster...this is the main mechanism of storms.
Finally, they should be taught the mechanisms of the greenhouse effect. They should especially be taught that the typical pop culture caricature of the greenhouse effect is wrong. The greenhouse effect is typically portrayed as a sheet of gas reflecting infrared radiation back to Earth. This is not the way it works. Instead, increased carbon dioxide, especially at high altitudes (where it is dry) makes it more difficult for infrared radiation to escape to space. The high altitude carbon dioxide causes the Earth's infrared radiation to be emitted to space at a higher altitude. However, since the air is cooler at higher altitude, the infrared radiation is emitted to space less effectively, thus causing an increase in temperature of the entire system. Here is a nice summary.
If the material is taught in a logical scientific way, then I believe that it cannot be called indoctrination. If the students are familiar with the detailed science underlying the field of climate science, then they will be more able to judge between authentic and fallacious arguments. Mandating that this material be taught is really not that different than mandating that chemistry be taught.
Human evolution is quite easy to create. Humans could evolve to have an average height of 7 feet. This would be rather simple to do in theory: Identify all people who are taller than 7 feet, and then prevent everyone else from reproducing. I can pretty much guarantee that almost all children thereafter would have a height larger than 7 feet, assuming they had an equivalent diet to those humans who existed before. This could be done on pretty much any genetic trait one could choose, and it would produce long term changes, assuming that the filtering went on for several generations.
This is often how evolution occurs in nature. If some sort of disaster causes the death of 99% of the population of a particular organism, then the individuals left behind will pass their own unique genes onto future generations. Evolution often happens quickly. Of course, the population must have first developed some genetic diversity over time before being culled, or no significant changes will occur.
More of us should read Voltaire's writings. He wrote a great deal about fanaticism and religion (he was not an atheist). Some quotes:
One of my favorites:
Those who can make people believe absurdities can make them commit atrocities.
From Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary:
Fanaticism is to superstition what delirium is to fever, and what fury is to anger. The man who has ecstasies and visions, who takes dream for realities, and his imaginings for prophecies, is an enthusiast. The man who backs his madness with murder is a fanatic.
Believing that the Earth is 10000 years old in the face of hard scientific evidence is like taking dreams for reality.
Once fanaticism has cankered a brain, the disease is almost incurable...There is no other remedy for this epidemic illness than the spirit of free thought, which, spreading little by little, finally softens men's customs, and prevents the renewal of the disease. For as soon as this evil makes any progress we must flee and wait for the air to become pure again. Laws and religion do not suffice against the pest of the soul.
Methinks in these days of growing fanaticism, both religious and ideological, we would do well to learn from what Voltaire wrote.
The satellite data only goes back about thirty years, just about enough for a single datum in climate terms. It seems quite a leap to suggest this is unprecedented (my apologies if I have misunderstood you) from the data available. Can you give me a reference to the historical data on ice thickness?
Well, I'll give a shot at elaborating about that, though this isn't really my exact field. The data on paleo sea ice thickness is likely indirect. Firstly, it is somewhat straight forward to tell whether or not a particular area has been covered in ice during the summer or not in the past. The reason for this is that if an area is covered in thick ice, there will less light making it through to the water, and also less surface gas exchange. This will in turn influence the types of micro-organisms that can live near the surface of the water. When such organisms die, they drop to the sea floor, and a certain percentage of them will become fossilized. If you drill into the sea floor and find a layer with evidence of photo-synthetic organisms, this would probably be construed as evidence that the area was ice free in the summer during the time when the layer was deposited. There are also certain isotope ratios that one can measure in the mud sediments to infer water temperature. It is also possible to tell where thick ice existed at certain times, since ice can become so thick that it scrapes the sea floor. From these markers, and likely many more, one will be able to infer much about what areas were ice free in the summer, and this will be a good proxy for ice thickness. Finally, it is fairly straight forward to gather evidence of temperature and climate from Arctic lakes, by drilling mud sediments and measuring certain isotopic markers. This will give a measure of the climate near the sea ice. Gaining a fuller picture of paleo-sea ice is probably a matter of piecing many diverse clues together.
What is your evidence for blaming global warming on thinning ice? I thought ice accumulation was due to precipitation, which is supposed to go up with the temperature, not down, according to my understanding of AGW theory.
Well, we are talking about sea ice. Glaciers on mountain tops are a result of snowfall that does not melt over the summer. Though some sea ice is likely also a result of precipitation, there is a far larger source of water for it: the ocean. It is a relatively straight forward step to infer that sea ice thickness is largely a function of temperature, since colder temperatures will result in more ocean water freezing. One can see this when observing the freezing of lakes. Since bulk water contains so much heat, it takes very cold temperatures to freeze it, and the colder the temperatures, the thicker the ice. Compare two identical lakes, one that has experienced temperatures of -5C for a week, and one that has experienced temperatures of -25C for a week. Which one would you like to skate on?
the annual variance in ice coverage is enormous - on the order of six to seven million square kilometres of the stuff appears and disappears every year. How does accumulated warming affect ice that isn't there for nearly half the year?
The sea ice accumulates in the winter, when there is no sunshine most of the time, and starts melting in the summer, when the sun shines most of the time. Let's imagine that during the winter, a certain amount of ice forms, due to cold temperatures. Then imagine that the summer is particularly warm, and that more ice melts in the summer then has frozen in the previous winter. This will result in thinner sea ice. Once the ice gets thin enough, it begins to crack and break up, exposing more open water. And since sea ice is 10x more reflective to sunlight than open water, the water will absorb more sunlight, thus increasing the melting.
In the past, there was a centre of sea ice that would not melt in the summer. That centre of int
Henrik Svensmark is one of the main proponents of the theory that cosmic rays have an impact on climate. Following is a quote from an article by Henrik Svensmark written in May 2000:
The influence of solar variability on climate is currently uncertain. Recent observations have indicated a possible mechanism via the influence of solar modulated cosmic rays on global cloud cover.
Surprisingly the influence of solar variability is strongest in low clouds (less than or equal to 3 km), which points to a
microphysical mechanism involving aerosol formation that is enhanced by ionization due to cosmic rays.
If confirmed it suggests that the average state of the heliosphere is important for climate on Earth.
Citation: Marsh, N. G. and H. Svensmark. "Low Cloud Properties Influenced by Cosmic Rays". Physical Review Letters. 85, 4 (2000).
His ideas involve cosmic ray influence on LOW CLOUDS. In that case, under the theory, fewer cosmic rays imply fewer low clouds, which would imply a warmer climate. This idea has significant weaknesses which are covered here for example. One of the main problems with this idea is that cosmic rays have, since 1985 trended in the opposite direction necessary to explain the warming.
Now you seem to be suggesting that someone has reversed the theory, and now say that cosmic rays influence HIGH CLOUDS?!! Who exactly has made this postulate? Where are your citations? What are the reasons for the switch? Without such information, I have to strongly suspect that what you say comes straight from an oil industry funded PR firm that is responding to growing public knowledge about the science.
The graph you supplied SHOWS the minimum sea ice extent I was discussing, which happened in the fall of 2007. It then rises again as winter arrives. What the graph does not directly show is the ice thickness. The reason the arctic sea ice reached an extreme minimum this fall was that it was extremely thin relative to previous trends. This summer, there was a cyclical shift in heat flows to the Arctic Ocean that caused the sea ice to melt. These cyclical heating shifts have happened in the past, but previously they have not had much effect on the area of the ice because in the past the ice was much thicker. The accumulated warming of the past decade has resulted in an extremely thin ice sheet that is very vulnerable to melting under the right conditions.
In other words, the area of the ice is less important than its thickness. The shocking drop in arctic sea ice extent this fall is only important in that it indicates that the ice has become thin due to years of warming. The peak ice area that you allude to is likely a huge area of very thin ice, that will melt quickly in the summer.
As for the "denialist" moniker, I define a denialist as a person who distorts facts in order to deny scientific reality. A skeptic, on the other hand simply doubts. Implicit in the term is a search for truth, and a belief that truth is difficult to discover. Skepticism does NOT imply the distortion of facts to convince uninformed people of one's position.
HONESTLY, are you implying that the animation of the ice extent is FALSIFIED?!!!! These things are a matter of public record and are splattered all over the web. It has been reported ad nauseam by numerous media outlets, such that any falsification would become obvious because those who have access to the raw data could easily point out the errors. The animation is based on actual satellite measurements; it is not a theoretical prediction. It has already happened.
Additional signature: The neoconservative dream world: A world with no empirical fact, only opinion.
There are two separate factors here: the actual heat flux from the sun, and the influence of the sun on the Earth's magnetic field, which can result in changes in the cosmic ray flux. The theory goes that fewer cosmic rays means fewer clouds, which means a warmer climate. What you will find if you read this article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, is that all of the solar parameters, be they the heat flux from the sun, or the cosmic ray flux trend in exactly the wrong direction to explain the warming since 1985. To quote the conclusion of this article:
There are many interesting palaeoclimate studies that suggest that solar
variability had an inuence on pre-industrial climate. There are also some
detection-attribution studies using global climate models that suggest there was
a detectable inuence of solar variability in the rst half of the twentieth century
and that the solar radiative forcing variations were amplied by some mechanism
that is, as yet, unknown. However, these ndings are not relevant to any debates
about modern climate change. Our results show that the observed rapid rise in
global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability,
whichever of the mechanisms is invoked and no matter how much the solar
variation is amplied.
Slashdot Mirror
The main problem with high oil prices is that the money is going largely to rich oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia, so that they can build monstrosities like ski resorts in the desert. I would have preferred to pay a carbon tax instead; at least the money would stay in our own economy and be used to build infrastructure. Carbon taxes could be offset by decreases in income taxes, so that we don't pay any more overall. As an environmentalist, I am strongly opposed to these high oil prices, because they are siphoning off our wealth and giving it to rich oil foreign oil companies.
We need to be clear on what we mean by "freedom". I believe that the low taxation small government ideology will lead us to a world where an extremely small group of people control nearly all of the wealth. Rich families will hold their wealth and increase their wealth not because of their innate abilities, but simply because they have far more money to invest in businesses, and to buy the best education. Children in these rich families will remain wealthy not because they are inherently superior to other children, but because their parents happen to be billionaires. They will remain wealthy because they can afford the best financial advisors.
Meanwhile, if we imagine that in a neo-conservative world, the public education system whithers, and the best and most able teachers move to the private education system, then quality education will become extremely expensive. This education, which will be licence to a good career, will become a luxury for the very wealthy. Systems of scholarships might help, but they will likely be extremely inefficient, and will miss many capable but poor students.
I have direct experience with this. A relative of mine was born to a relatively poor family. He did well in the public system, and ended up going to a major university in the UK. He ended up being a government minister, and then the CEO of an important corporation in Europe. If his public education had been of poor quality, then it is unlikely he would have been recruited by the university, and his potential would have been wasted.
I believe that low tax systems such as those proposed by neo-conservatives will lead to a world where there is a massive division between the wealthy and the poor. Roosevelt's "New Deal", a policy where the rich were taxed more than the poor, effectively created the American middle class. That middle class is now disappearing, thanks largely to neo-conservative policies. How would you define "freedom" for a child born to a poor family, a child whose excellent abilities would otherwise lead him to greatness, but instead are wasted because of poor education and lack of access to capital due to lack of collateral. There are strong odds that such a child could wallow in a low paying job for the rest of his life, when a good quality education would have rescued him.
I agree that fascism is corporatism. However, it seems to me that right wing governments act in the interests of corporations. They remove "red tape", which translates into allowing the corporations to do whatever they want. You say that right wing governments typically want as little State interference with companies as possible...to me, that means acting in the interests of those companies. Centrist or left wing governments usually are trying to act in the Public Interest, a difficult thing to do admittedly, but an essential one if a society is to truly prosper.
I have noticed that extreme right wingers/neo-liberals attempt to deny even the existance of the Public Interest. They believe that there is only self-interest. I believe that when real right wing government are in power, they either cede their power to the private sector, or simply become agents of private power. This is not the same thing as a center/left government that seeks to control the corporations in the name of the Public Interest. Power has to be wielded by someone. Would you rather that power be wielded by an unaccountable billionaire, or a democratically elected government?
It makes me laugh when right wingers such as Glenn Beck attempt to co-opt the definition of fascism, applying it to those to whom they disagree with, when the word would be best applied to the very right wingers throwing the term at others. This seems like a strategy of misdirection and confusion, an attempt to make it more difficult to recognize the real fascists.
At the core of fascism is a worship of power, of strength. Fascists despise the weak. In the case of WW2 fascists, they sought to destroy the weak, the degenerates, the Jews, anyone who didn't fit their idea of strength.
The modern fascists also worship strength and power. They despise the modern welfare state because they see social programs as a way of supporting the weak at the expense of the strong, supporting the poor at the expense of the rich. They profess to support the free market, because in their view the free market punishes the weak, while rewarding the strong. The free market is survival of the fittest, and that idea is at the core of fascist thinking.
For right wingers to call liberals fascists is like Orwell's 1984, where "freedom equals slavery". Can you imagine Hitler supporting mentally challenged people? Of supporting the rights of homosexuals? Of supporting religious tolerance? Wake up folks! Learn to recognize a mind-fuck when you see it!
The best way to defeat these thugs is to adopt encryption tools to make our file transfers invisible. Tools like Tor are a good start. But we need to get enough people using secure protocols that the government won't be able to single out and prosecute individuals for using them.
So if you care about your rights in the future, start using secure protocols. Contribute code to open source projects. Make these systems work. Use it or lose it!
This is just like Microsoft's ill fated Cairo OS. It will never happen. The only way I'll believe that MS will actually succeed in creating a successful OS is if they throw out their old OS completely and start again from scratch. This is exactly what Apple did, and it led to an extremely stable and secure new system. The legacy systems can be supported by some sort of VM, again, just like Apple did when it went from OS9 to OSX. The future increases in computing power will negate any drops in performance in legacy programs.
I find this sort of methodology quite disturbing when I imagine it used in political campaigns. In fact, I suspect it is already being used.
I believe that technology such as this pushes us towards an anti-rationalist society, where there are no facts, only opinions. In such a world, we obtain our insights not from looking at actual facts, but by listening to the opinions of commentators who align with our own chosen political tendencies. Intellectual discourse is reduced to a banal sports match between left wing commentators and right wing commentators, where we cheer the opinions of our own team while booing the opinions of the enemy team. People lose the ability to differentiate fact from opinion. Instead of using the physical world as the ultimate arbiter of truth, we use the opinions of others in whom we trust.
This transformation has already happened. Witness the degeneration of the American news media. In the days of Edward R. Murrow, the famous CBS news anchor, news organizations actually attempted to give the public enough raw facts to develop informed opinions. In recent decades however, news organizations have been gutted. The number of foreign correspondents has been sharply reduced, and those correspondents seldom venture widely. The foreign correspondent has been to a significant extent been replaced by the talking head "expert". These so-called experts gather facts, and then digest them into their own opinions, which are filtered through personal biases that are largely invisible to the public.
I recognize that there will always be bias, and that there is no such thing as true machine-like objectivity. We are all human after all. But there is a spectrum a news organization can occupy, in which on one side the organization presents pure fact, and which on the other the organization presents pure opinion. We have most definitely moved on the spectrum towards presenting pure opinion.
Systems such as that which Microsoft is implementing to filter blog opinions will reinforce the situation in which people form their opinions based on listening only to commentators who already align to their pre-conceived biases in opinion. I believe that this is profoundly negative for our democratic system, and will encourage us to vote and act based on uninformed opinions.
America is not an empire in the same way that Rome was an empire. Rome extracted resources from outlying countries directly by taxation, supported by military force. America is an empire that relies on what we call the "free market". It relies on market dominance for much of its power, and it seeks to preserve this market system because that market system favors American interests. Let me illustrate with an example. Saudi Arabia sells its oil in what might be called a market system. It sells a large amount of oil to America, while also selling it to other countries. If Saudi Arabia decided to suddenly stop shipping oil to America, and instead sell exclusively to China, then America's imperial powers would come into play. It would first use economic pressures to discourage this policy, and if that didn't work, then it would likely use military force. One of the things I am arguing is that America's ability to dissuade other countries from making economic deals that are unfavorable to America is weakening.
I would argue that the very existence of overwhelming American military power does keep "allies" in line. Perhaps not Canada, or Europe, but quite possibly China, and definitely Central and South American nations, as well as nations in the Middle East.
You make some good points, but I don't entirely agree with you.
I disagree. I am not discussing a "neo-Marxist" system. The simple fact is that American client states send America resources, and America sends them back other resources in trade. If the client state is sending America goods in return for a pittance, then this situation is in America's favor. This imbalance in the trade of goods is highly comparable to the situations in previous empires. It doesn't matter whether the trade takes place in the context of a free market system between private corporations, or within the confines of a neo-Marxist empire. You still have a dominant power receiving a huge amount of goods without having to give much back in return. That for me is at the heart of what it means to be an empire.
I didn't say that Venezuela had stopped trading with America. What I said was that Venezuela was not acting according to the economic wishes of America. They have expropriated oil producing properties from American oil companies, including Exxon Mobile. They are keeping a larger amount of the proceeds of selling oil in the country, and they are redistributing those resources. They are also selling oil in currencies other than the US dollar, which is a huge blow to America's economic power. The moves in South America against the US are largely moves to demand more from America in compensation for the goods they ship to the US. And although there are still some US friendly governments in South America, opposition is growing.
We'll see. However, let's look at some of the facts. Firstly, if America is such an economic juggernaut, then why is it such a huge net borrower? One would think that such an economic superpower would be a net lender. And it might not be such a problem if that money was loaned out to finance increased production, to finance the building of factories and infrastructure. But instead, much of that money has been spent on unproductive consumption of disposable consumer goods, or indirectly on outrageously expensive weapons systems. The only redeeming factor of the American debt is that it is in American dollars, and will thus shrink as the dollar loses value. The simple fact is that the American manufacturing sector has been hollowed out, as evidenced by their shockingly large trade deficits. Close to 70% of the American economy is based on consumer spending.
A classic sign of a declining empire is a massive surge in military spending. During the rise of an empire, many countries will voluntarily join the empire because it is in their own economic interest to do so. As the empire ages, satisfaction with the empire in outlying states begins to decline. The dominant power makes increasing economic demands on these outlying states, while providing decreasing benefits to them. In order to quell the dissatisfaction, the dominant power needs to use increasing amounts of force to preserve imperial power. The increased military spending becomes a huge economic burden for the dominant power, which in turn further increases the economic demands on the outlying states. This becomes a vicious circle of surging dissatisfaction in the empire, and surging military spending. It ends when the economy of the dominant power can no longer sustain the large military. The outlying states fall away to form other alliances, and the former imperial power becomes "just another country".
History has shown this to be true. The Roman Empire collapsed partly because its outlying states rebelled against a huge economic burden. The Spanish Empire collapsed after building a huge armada of ships, only to see the fleet destroyed by an upstart Britain. The British Empire collapsed, as outlying states fell away, despite its huge military power. The Soviet Empire collapsed under the burden of massive military spending. I believe that something similar is happening to America.
Many of America's client states are rebelling against the economic burdens placed upon them. A clear example of this is seen in South America, where several countries (Venezuela included) are acting in contravention to America's economic wishes. One can arguably say that the Islamic insurgency in the Middle East is also a symptom of dissatisfaction by outlying states in the Empire. As the American dollar has declined recently, other currencies, such as the Euro are displacing the US dollar is the currency of choice for international trade. Furthermore, the American economy is in deep trouble, largely because it has borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars to build expensive weapon systems (and also to build too many unproductive but expensive toys such as big screen TV's).
I don't want this decline to happen because I am a part of this empire, but make no mistake: it is happening. Our only hope in this is that America will fade peacefully, like Britain, to become "just another country".
We need more scientific education, not less.
I would argue that ceding factual and rational scientific debate to a sphere of intellectual elites IS a form of intellectual elitism, whose remedy is the widespread dissemination of scientific arguments to the general public. I believe that we should be raising the level of our children's scientific knowledge, so that they will be able to have factually informed opinions on important scientific issues. If, as you seem to be suggesting, we give up trying to teach proper scientific ideas to the general public, then we risk evolving into an anti-rational society, in which there is no fact, only opinion, and in which people form their opinions on important scientific issues based their own preconceived political/ideological assumptions, and not on actual observation of the physical world.
The reason why so many people are so credulous, so ready to gobble the propaganda of the various interest groups is BECAUSE they have no idea of the actual science. When the population does not understand the science, then they are malleable to anyone who cares to manipulate them. It is only when science is widely known that people make proper decisions as to the best directions to lead society. Democracy itself depends on widespread knowledge. Your seeming acquiescence to widespread scientific ignorance does not bode well for American democracy. If the public is ignorant of most important issues affecting society, then democracy is a hollow shell, and voting is mostly meaningless.
I think we greatly underestimate high school students in our current curriculum. Taught in the correct way, all of the concepts I described above ARE graspable by many high school students. Of course, you won't be able to teach them the calculus attached to the ideas, but the basic concepts are not that difficult. All you need to do is build the basic ideas, brick by brick. Then you link the basic ideas together to build a more complete picture.
Here is an example. Idea #1: Objects emit infrared energy. The hotter an object is, the more energy is emitted. Idea #2: If the amount of EM energy being absorbed by an object exceeds the amount of energy emitted by the object, then the temperature will rise until the rate of energy emission matches the rate of energy absorption. Idea #3: The infrared radiation leaving the Earth is emitted into space by the outermost layers of the atmosphere. Idea #4: The temperature of the atmosphere decreases as altitude increases (until the thermosphere).
All of these ideas are relatively easy to teach, especially if you don't have to teach the associated mathematics. Now link them together. Carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere is effectively a barrier to infrared radiation. This barrier causes the infrared to be emitted to space at a higher altitude (idea #3) than it would have without the CO2. Since the upper layers are colder (idea #4), they emit less infrared (idea #1). Because the upper layers are emitting less radiation, there is now more heat entering the atmosphere than there is exiting. Thus, the temperature of the upper emitting layer must rise to restore the energy balance (idea #2). This results in a general warming of the atmospheric system.
Of course, there are some subtleties to the above arguments that may be difficult to teach to high school students, but the main ideas will be grasped. If we believe our children are stupid and incapable of learning advanced topics, then they will fulfill our prophecy for us. We should give our children more credit. They are smarter than we think.
Firstly, the level of many of the posts here, the reflexive and snide referral to the principles of atmospheric science as religion indicate to me that an increasingly large group in society are hostile to science. Here is a New York Times article that argues just that, that there is a rising tide of anti-intellectualism building in America today.
As for the accusations of indoctrination, I believe that climate science should be taught in schools. However, it should be taught at a far more advanced level than they typical caricatures that appear in popular culture. Students should first be taught about the physics of electromagnetic radiation, about absorption, reflection, and emission. They should be given an understanding of how some wavelengths transparently pass through some materials, while others wavelengths are absorbed by the same materials. In my experience, students today typically have a terrible understanding of these concepts.
They should also be taught some basic atmospheric science. For example, they should know why the air becomes cooler as altitude increases (up to the thermosphere at least) because the reduced pressure causes the air molecules to move more slowly. This means that they should be familiar with gas laws, and with the concept of adiabiabatically raising a parcel of air. They should be taught about the latent heat in water vapor and also about relative humidity and the capacity of air to hold water vapor. They should understand that raising a parcel of air causes it to cool, thus reducing the amount of water vapor it can hold. When the water vapor condenses to form clouds, heat is released, causing the parcel of air to rise even faster...this is the main mechanism of storms.
Finally, they should be taught the mechanisms of the greenhouse effect. They should especially be taught that the typical pop culture caricature of the greenhouse effect is wrong. The greenhouse effect is typically portrayed as a sheet of gas reflecting infrared radiation back to Earth. This is not the way it works. Instead, increased carbon dioxide, especially at high altitudes (where it is dry) makes it more difficult for infrared radiation to escape to space. The high altitude carbon dioxide causes the Earth's infrared radiation to be emitted to space at a higher altitude. However, since the air is cooler at higher altitude, the infrared radiation is emitted to space less effectively, thus causing an increase in temperature of the entire system. Here is a nice summary.
If the material is taught in a logical scientific way, then I believe that it cannot be called indoctrination. If the students are familiar with the detailed science underlying the field of climate science, then they will be more able to judge between authentic and fallacious arguments. Mandating that this material be taught is really not that different than mandating that chemistry be taught.
Human evolution is quite easy to create. Humans could evolve to have an average height of 7 feet. This would be rather simple to do in theory: Identify all people who are taller than 7 feet, and then prevent everyone else from reproducing. I can pretty much guarantee that almost all children thereafter would have a height larger than 7 feet, assuming they had an equivalent diet to those humans who existed before. This could be done on pretty much any genetic trait one could choose, and it would produce long term changes, assuming that the filtering went on for several generations.
This is often how evolution occurs in nature. If some sort of disaster causes the death of 99% of the population of a particular organism, then the individuals left behind will pass their own unique genes onto future generations. Evolution often happens quickly. Of course, the population must have first developed some genetic diversity over time before being culled, or no significant changes will occur.
WTF are you talking about?!
More of us should read Voltaire's writings. He wrote a great deal about fanaticism and religion (he was not an atheist). Some quotes:
One of my favorites:
From Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary:
Believing that the Earth is 10000 years old in the face of hard scientific evidence is like taking dreams for reality.
Methinks in these days of growing fanaticism, both religious and ideological, we would do well to learn from what Voltaire wrote.
Well, I'll give a shot at elaborating about that, though this isn't really my exact field. The data on paleo sea ice thickness is likely indirect. Firstly, it is somewhat straight forward to tell whether or not a particular area has been covered in ice during the summer or not in the past. The reason for this is that if an area is covered in thick ice, there will less light making it through to the water, and also less surface gas exchange. This will in turn influence the types of micro-organisms that can live near the surface of the water. When such organisms die, they drop to the sea floor, and a certain percentage of them will become fossilized. If you drill into the sea floor and find a layer with evidence of photo-synthetic organisms, this would probably be construed as evidence that the area was ice free in the summer during the time when the layer was deposited. There are also certain isotope ratios that one can measure in the mud sediments to infer water temperature. It is also possible to tell where thick ice existed at certain times, since ice can become so thick that it scrapes the sea floor. From these markers, and likely many more, one will be able to infer much about what areas were ice free in the summer, and this will be a good proxy for ice thickness. Finally, it is fairly straight forward to gather evidence of temperature and climate from Arctic lakes, by drilling mud sediments and measuring certain isotopic markers. This will give a measure of the climate near the sea ice. Gaining a fuller picture of paleo-sea ice is probably a matter of piecing many diverse clues together.
Well, we are talking about sea ice. Glaciers on mountain tops are a result of snowfall that does not melt over the summer. Though some sea ice is likely also a result of precipitation, there is a far larger source of water for it: the ocean. It is a relatively straight forward step to infer that sea ice thickness is largely a function of temperature, since colder temperatures will result in more ocean water freezing. One can see this when observing the freezing of lakes. Since bulk water contains so much heat, it takes very cold temperatures to freeze it, and the colder the temperatures, the thicker the ice. Compare two identical lakes, one that has experienced temperatures of -5C for a week, and one that has experienced temperatures of -25C for a week. Which one would you like to skate on?
The sea ice accumulates in the winter, when there is no sunshine most of the time, and starts melting in the summer, when the sun shines most of the time. Let's imagine that during the winter, a certain amount of ice forms, due to cold temperatures. Then imagine that the summer is particularly warm, and that more ice melts in the summer then has frozen in the previous winter. This will result in thinner sea ice. Once the ice gets thin enough, it begins to crack and break up, exposing more open water. And since sea ice is 10x more reflective to sunlight than open water, the water will absorb more sunlight, thus increasing the melting.
In the past, there was a centre of sea ice that would not melt in the summer. That centre of int
Henrik Svensmark is one of the main proponents of the theory that cosmic rays have an impact on climate. Following is a quote from an article by Henrik Svensmark written in May 2000:
Citation: Marsh, N. G. and H. Svensmark. "Low Cloud Properties Influenced by Cosmic Rays". Physical Review Letters. 85, 4 (2000).
His ideas involve cosmic ray influence on LOW CLOUDS. In that case, under the theory, fewer cosmic rays imply fewer low clouds, which would imply a warmer climate. This idea has significant weaknesses which are covered here for example. One of the main problems with this idea is that cosmic rays have, since 1985 trended in the opposite direction necessary to explain the warming.
Now you seem to be suggesting that someone has reversed the theory, and now say that cosmic rays influence HIGH CLOUDS?!! Who exactly has made this postulate? Where are your citations? What are the reasons for the switch? Without such information, I have to strongly suspect that what you say comes straight from an oil industry funded PR firm that is responding to growing public knowledge about the science.
The graph you supplied SHOWS the minimum sea ice extent I was discussing, which happened in the fall of 2007. It then rises again as winter arrives. What the graph does not directly show is the ice thickness. The reason the arctic sea ice reached an extreme minimum this fall was that it was extremely thin relative to previous trends. This summer, there was a cyclical shift in heat flows to the Arctic Ocean that caused the sea ice to melt. These cyclical heating shifts have happened in the past, but previously they have not had much effect on the area of the ice because in the past the ice was much thicker. The accumulated warming of the past decade has resulted in an extremely thin ice sheet that is very vulnerable to melting under the right conditions.
In other words, the area of the ice is less important than its thickness. The shocking drop in arctic sea ice extent this fall is only important in that it indicates that the ice has become thin due to years of warming. The peak ice area that you allude to is likely a huge area of very thin ice, that will melt quickly in the summer.
As for the "denialist" moniker, I define a denialist as a person who distorts facts in order to deny scientific reality. A skeptic, on the other hand simply doubts. Implicit in the term is a search for truth, and a belief that truth is difficult to discover. Skepticism does NOT imply the distortion of facts to convince uninformed people of one's position.
READ THE EFFING ARTICLE!!!
HONESTLY, are you implying that the animation of the ice extent is FALSIFIED?!!!! These things are a matter of public record and are splattered all over the web. It has been reported ad nauseam by numerous media outlets, such that any falsification would become obvious because those who have access to the raw data could easily point out the errors. The animation is based on actual satellite measurements; it is not a theoretical prediction. It has already happened.
Additional signature: The neoconservative dream world: A world with no empirical fact, only opinion.
There are two separate factors here: the actual heat flux from the sun, and the influence of the sun on the Earth's magnetic field, which can result in changes in the cosmic ray flux. The theory goes that fewer cosmic rays means fewer clouds, which means a warmer climate. What you will find if you read this article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, is that all of the solar parameters, be they the heat flux from the sun, or the cosmic ray flux trend in exactly the wrong direction to explain the warming since 1985. To quote the conclusion of this article: