I'm one of those "Security isn't worth it if it causes us to lose some of our individual liberties."
That was what was ironic to me. George W Bush said "They hate our freedom." so what do we do? We turned right around and reduced our freedom with things like the PATRIOT Act. Maybe they don't hate us quite as much now.
And you threw your credibility away when you conflated the group that awards the science Nobel Prizes (the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the physics and chemistry prizes) with the group that awards the Peace Prize (the Norwegian Nobel Committee).
Or you can do better than any other method we currently have and still get called a failure by bozos who don't have a clue of how to evaluate the results in the first place.
What have you been smoking? Federal income taxes on the highest tax bracket were over 70% from the FDR administration up until the Reagan administration in the 1980's.
Don't get your hopes up too much. Both Portland and Seattle (and the more moderate sized cities as well) have large populations of homeless people they are struggling to deal with.
Parent AC deserves to be modded up. US schools are largely set up like a factory assembly line where the "defective" parts get discarded. That probably works okay for 70 or 80% of kids but fails the rest. That said the powers that be don't really want a highly educated middle class. They're too disruptive to the orderly progression of their ideals.
I go down to the bank every few months and get a couple hundred dollars of them in rolls. Carrying 4 or 5 of them around in your pocket is no big deal and my wallet is thinner without the $1 bills in it. Caution: If you get rolls you're likely to get the occasional Susan B. Anthony dollar too which is silver with a fluted edge, the ones that are easy to mistake for a quarter.
Well, actually when Reagan and the Democrats doubled the Social Security tax in the 1980's us baby-boomers did start paying for our own retirement as well. That's why the trust fund has built up to such a high value.
In my opinion SS should have never been included in the Federal budget to begin with. It has its own fund and the only interaction with the rest of the budget lies in the T-bills they buy or redeem. I think SS was included in the Federal budget mainly because as long as it runs a surplus it helps hide the rest of the deficit.
By the time the next Republican gets elected President "Obamacare" will be so embedded it will be practically impossible to repeal it, just like it's politically impossible to axe Medicare. That's why they're so desperate to stop it from really getting started now.
Huh? You're basing what you think climate scientists are predicting on "The Day After Tomorrow"? No wonder you're so confused. The movie is fiction with little basis in reality. If you paid more attention to the time scales Hansen and Gore put on their predictions you'd realize it's not possible to disprove them yet and won't be for several more decades for the most part. Sheesh, pay a little more attention, eh?
Don't be silly, Climatology doesn't only deal with only time scales on the order of 30 years. That is simply around the minimum time needed to make climatologically significant observations. Climatology deals with time periods ranging from around 30 years into the millions of years.
But that should give you more confidence that they are actually reporting their scientific findings accurately. If they were lying and trying to drive the science in warming direction because of an agenda do you really think they would have made such an alteration?
What does Lovelock have to do with any of this? I didn't believe him when he said "We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now." and I don't give him much credibility on the subject now. By the definitions of climate 12 years is not a reasonable time to detect climate changes which just makes me respect him even less.
In no way can you call Freeman Dyson a climate scientist. He's a physicist famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. On the subject of global warming he believes anthropogenic climate change is a reality and one of the main causes is the rise in CO2 driven by burning of fossil fuels. However he is skeptical of the quality of climate models and he thinks some of the effects may be exaggerated for political reasons. He admits he doesn't know much about the technical facts of global warming so I take his criticism with a grain of salt compared to scientists who are in the main stream of climate science.
Any supposed upper limit is rather arbitrary. The simple picture is that the effects are a continuum that get worse as the amount of CO2 released goes up. At some time you start reaching tipping points where it becomes impossible to reverse the effects but we're not all that clear on where most of those are yet. For instance the last time CO2 was at 400 ppm sea level was around 60 feet higher than it is now. So it may be that we've already assured such sea level rise will occur but it will take several centuries to find out if that's true.
20 million square miles????! India is only 1,269,346 square miles to begin with. I read and article a few years ago that said something like 1,600 square miles of solar cells would be enough to provide all the energy humans currently use each year.
While I agree with most of what you wrote the heat energy produced by power plants (nuclear or otherwise) and other human activities that generate heat is so miniscule compared to what we get from the Sun that it essentially amounts to a rounding error. Probably only a third order effect.
Slashdot Mirror
That should be the "sarcasm" tags.
I left off the tags on my last sentence.
I'm one of those "Security isn't worth it if it causes us to lose some of our individual liberties."
That was what was ironic to me. George W Bush said "They hate our freedom." so what do we do? We turned right around and reduced our freedom with things like the PATRIOT Act. Maybe they don't hate us quite as much now.
And you threw your credibility away when you conflated the group that awards the science Nobel Prizes (the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the physics and chemistry prizes) with the group that awards the Peace Prize (the Norwegian Nobel Committee).
Or you can do better than any other method we currently have and still get called a failure by bozos who don't have a clue of how to evaluate the results in the first place.
What have you been smoking? Federal income taxes on the highest tax bracket were over 70% from the FDR administration up until the Reagan administration in the 1980's.
Don't get your hopes up too much. Both Portland and Seattle (and the more moderate sized cities as well) have large populations of homeless people they are struggling to deal with.
Parent AC deserves to be modded up. US schools are largely set up like a factory assembly line where the "defective" parts get discarded. That probably works okay for 70 or 80% of kids but fails the rest. That said the powers that be don't really want a highly educated middle class. They're too disruptive to the orderly progression of their ideals.
What does Iraq have to do with any of this?
I go down to the bank every few months and get a couple hundred dollars of them in rolls. Carrying 4 or 5 of them around in your pocket is no big deal and my wallet is thinner without the $1 bills in it. Caution: If you get rolls you're likely to get the occasional Susan B. Anthony dollar too which is silver with a fluted edge, the ones that are easy to mistake for a quarter.
Just stuff it in the coin slot.
And it's not like they don't have any cash on hand with which to pay their employees ;)
Well, actually when Reagan and the Democrats doubled the Social Security tax in the 1980's us baby-boomers did start paying for our own retirement as well. That's why the trust fund has built up to such a high value.
In my opinion SS should have never been included in the Federal budget to begin with. It has its own fund and the only interaction with the rest of the budget lies in the T-bills they buy or redeem. I think SS was included in the Federal budget mainly because as long as it runs a surplus it helps hide the rest of the deficit.
Posting AC because I moderated.
Oops!
I hope you meant "wife".
By the time the next Republican gets elected President "Obamacare" will be so embedded it will be practically impossible to repeal it, just like it's politically impossible to axe Medicare. That's why they're so desperate to stop it from really getting started now.
Huh? You're basing what you think climate scientists are predicting on "The Day After Tomorrow"? No wonder you're so confused. The movie is fiction with little basis in reality. If you paid more attention to the time scales Hansen and Gore put on their predictions you'd realize it's not possible to disprove them yet and won't be for several more decades for the most part. Sheesh, pay a little more attention, eh?
Don't be silly, Climatology doesn't only deal with only time scales on the order of 30 years. That is simply around the minimum time needed to make climatologically significant observations. Climatology deals with time periods ranging from around 30 years into the millions of years.
But that should give you more confidence that they are actually reporting their scientific findings accurately. If they were lying and trying to drive the science in warming direction because of an agenda do you really think they would have made such an alteration?
What does Lovelock have to do with any of this? I didn't believe him when he said "We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now." and I don't give him much credibility on the subject now. By the definitions of climate 12 years is not a reasonable time to detect climate changes which just makes me respect him even less.
In no way can you call Freeman Dyson a climate scientist. He's a physicist famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. On the subject of global warming he believes anthropogenic climate change is a reality and one of the main causes is the rise in CO2 driven by burning of fossil fuels. However he is skeptical of the quality of climate models and he thinks some of the effects may be exaggerated for political reasons. He admits he doesn't know much about the technical facts of global warming so I take his criticism with a grain of salt compared to scientists who are in the main stream of climate science.
Any supposed upper limit is rather arbitrary. The simple picture is that the effects are a continuum that get worse as the amount of CO2 released goes up. At some time you start reaching tipping points where it becomes impossible to reverse the effects but we're not all that clear on where most of those are yet. For instance the last time CO2 was at 400 ppm sea level was around 60 feet higher than it is now. So it may be that we've already assured such sea level rise will occur but it will take several centuries to find out if that's true.
20 million square miles????! India is only 1,269,346 square miles to begin with. I read and article a few years ago that said something like 1,600 square miles of solar cells would be enough to provide all the energy humans currently use each year.
While I agree with most of what you wrote the heat energy produced by power plants (nuclear or otherwise) and other human activities that generate heat is so miniscule compared to what we get from the Sun that it essentially amounts to a rounding error. Probably only a third order effect.
Synthetic fertilizer is mostly made using natural gas which doesn't appear to be running out any time soon.