Rock weathering is something we might be able to speed up but taking the right kinds of rocks, grinding them into a powder and forcing air through it. I have no idea if that's practical but it may be worth looking in to.
We can sequester a notable amount of CO2 as soil through decaying plant matter in a relatively short period of time (as in months given the right conditions).
Compared to the amount of CO2 we are adding which amounts to at least thousands of years of plant growth of per day your "notable amount" is a drop in the bucket.
When you're burning the results of millions of years of biomass accumulation on century scales it's not possible living biomass to come anywhere close to keeping up with current emissions.
I have a couple of big box fans that I can put in the window at night that cools the house off nicely overnight. I take them down in the morning and the house usually stays nicely cool all day.
The article cites the figure and then proceeds to explain, why it is acceptable — without disputing the number. In other words, they accept it. The article (known as Watts 2009 [wordpress.com]) is thus entered into evidence.
The Skeptical Science article said "some". I wouldn't equate that with 89%. Nevertheless the poorly sited stations compare well with the well sited stations after adjustments. In fact the well sited stations show a slightly greater warming trend than the poorly sited stations when they are compared.
Had a copy still existed somewhere, they would've procured one to avoid the embarrassment [blogspot.com]. And it was a major scandal — two months later NY Times ran a "rebuttal" [nytimes.com] (the dishonest newspaper's first mention of the problem, apparently), which still would not say, other copies exist. You are grasping at straws — and drowning anyway.
So this controversy arises 20 years after the actual data deletion. I see no reason for embarrassment. Why should they go to all the work to reacquire the data just to satisfy someone like you? The fact is that other major temperature records such as NASA/GISS and BEST are not missing any data that they deem necessary. Even if you completely throw out everything the CRU has ever done it doesn't change the conclusions of climate scientists one bit.
You wrote yourself, that the prediction was 50-60 mm, while the actual values — according to, once again, you — was 80mm. That's a fail... You may recall, that one of the rules I put down was that the cited predictions, if quantifiable, be correct within 20% of the predicted figure(s).
Well maybe I should have said the prediction was a range from 30 to 70 mm. Then it would have fit into your 20% range.
It may be significant, but it is unclear, of what. That the seas are rising may be observable and measurable (preferably without "weighting" and "adjusting" the observed figures, of course). That they are rising because SUVs — that is not clear at all.
There are always weightings and adjustments to be made in any scientific measurement. Period.
I'm perfectly aware that sea levels rose some 120 meters at the end of the last glaciation. It was caused primarily by changing Milankovitch Cycles along with some feedbacks such as increasing CO2 and dropping albedo. All natural. But Milankovitch Cycles don't change much on century scales. The shortest one (and one of the weaker ones) has a 26,000 year cycle which means 13,000 years from low to high.
As far as the role of humans in the warming it's easy to show that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and that increasing concentrations will absorb even more. It's easy to show that humans are the cause of the increase in atmospheric CO2. Each year less than half of what humans emit stays in the atmosphere. It's impossible to not come to the conclusion that the primary cause of the warming we've seen is anthropogenic. Even such noted climate skeptics as Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer agree that increasing CO2 by itself would cause warming. They just think there are negative feedbacks that counter the CO2.
Climate scientists today blame humanity with the intensity of ancient shamans. But, to establish their scientific bona-fides to people actually familiar with scientific process, they need to make scientific predictions — verifiable, falsifiable, as well as verified and not falsified. And that's where my challenge and your (so far — failing) attempts to answer it come in...
Anthropogenic global warming is falsifiable, just not on a time scale satisfactory to you. If the warming doesn't continue, the ice quits melting, the sea levels stop rising despite continued human emissions of CO2 that would falsify it. If you could come up with something that explains all those better than the current theory that wo
Too late for this tactics. Your fellow alarmists have already accepted the figure [skepticalscience.com] — and tried to defend their colleague's incompetence with the "weighting" and "adjusting".
I read through all three versions of that article and no where did I find them agreeing with your 89% figure. They said "Surveys of weather stations in the USA have indicated that some of them are not sited as well as they could be." Scientists understand this and take steps to adjust for it.
I hate to ask this cliche question, but "Are you stupid or a liar?" CRU have already admitted losing the data [uea.ac.uk] — irretrievably.
I read that article too and no where does it say that primary raw temperature data has been lost, just that the CRU does not have it any more. It's still available from the original sources.
Gee, you keep calling me "a lawyer" instead of simply posting in the — perfectly reasonable — format I requested.
Besides, are lawyers really bad? I don't see you objecting, when they are used to prosecute "denialiasts" [dailykos.com] — First Amendment be damned.
I'm not saying all lawyers are bad, they just have different priorities than scientists. As far as prosecuting deniers they are going after organized denial. Exxon's own in house scientists told them back in the late 1970s that anthropogenic global warming was real. The fact that they did not disclose that in their annual reports to shareholders as a possible material effect on their business may be a violation of SEC rules.
Seriously? Do you even realize, what you posted? The "prediction" you cited is waay off — according to you! 80 mm instead of the predicted 50-60... What a way to prove validity of a scientific theory!
80 mm is right at the top of the uncertainty range in the graph I provided so I don't consider it "waay off". Don't you consider it significant that real world observations have been greater than predictions? To me that indicates that scientists have been underestimating the effects.
And then I can not help but notice, that you chose to ignore my question about whether or not you have (less articulate?) collaborators here, who leave the arguing to you while modding me down and you — up. Such question-dodging confirms my suspicions — I'm dealing with a cabal. Whether you are tightly organized or loosely collaborating, I find myself bare-knuckled in a gunfight..
I am collaborating with no one. I'll admit to having down modded you occasionally but I have also up modded you once or twice in discussions not related to anthropogenic global warming.
Ok, I've done some of your work for you. Here is the page on "11.5 Future Sea Level Changes 11.5.1 Global Average Sea Level Change 1990 to 2100" from the IPCC Third Archive Report from 2001. If you click on the graph on that page you get an enlarged versionhere. If you take a straight edge to the graph you can estimate that the projected sea level rise from 1990 to 2016 was around 0.05-0.06 meters or 50-60 mm. Here is a page that shows the methods they used for projections.
Here is a page from NOAA that shows sea level rise as measured by tide gauges from 1880 to the start of 2016. You can hover your mouse over the graph to get the exact numbers for a point in time. You can also use your mouse to squish the graph to zero in on the 1990 - 2016 part for better resolution. By my calculations the sea level rise from 1990 to the start of 2016 is around 80 mm, clearly greater than the projections from the IPCC in 2001.
But you'll probably reject the data from NOAA so here is another graph that shows sea level rise as measured by satellite altimeters from 1993 (when the first one went up) to mid 2015. It clearly also shows around 80 mm of sea level rise since 1993, clearly greater than the projections from the IPCC in 2001.
So there is your prediction from 2001 of sea level rise from 1990 to the start of 2016 and two observational datasets that show the IPCC predictions were on the low side.
Sorry, hon, if 89% of your data-collection stations aren't positioned right, your results are junk no matter, how you "adjust" them.
Well dearie, I await your scientifically based paper that says that 89% of data collection stations aren't positioned right.
"Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data."
Funny, they could not spare one more tape for the originals and chose to use the space for the "value-added" data instead — even though reproducing the "value addition" would've been easy with a straightforward algorithm and the raw data, whereas going back to the originals is now impossible.
Since the original raw data came from sources other than the ones you're complaining about the original raw data is still available to this day from the original sources. There was no need for them to hold that data.
I've been in computers and data storage since the 1980s. It was very expensive back then. The relatively small company I work for spent on the order of $200,000 a year on data storage back then. The amount of data a tape could hold back then was a lot less than now. IIRC our tapes from the late 1980s could hold 50-75 MB of data and cost around $75-$125 apiece. Based on the amount of data that was deleted you're probably talking about 10-20 tapes to store the data and then there's the issue of space to store them along with all the other important stuff they were keeping.
The point is that the original data from the original sources was not destroyed and is still available. All that was not kept was the CRU's copies of that data.
Just how gullible do you think I am?
To me it seems you are so scientifically illiterate that you couldn't tell the difference between a good scientific study and a bad scientific study.
Anyway, still waiting for a list of successful climate predictions from you... You know the format...
I've already given you a couple of examples several time. Someone with a scientific mindset would investigate those to see if my claims are accurate. Someone with a lawyer's mindset like you insists the forms be followed.
Betting on a month, a year or even 2 or 3 years is betting on the weather, not the climate. Even 10 years is kind of short for betting on the climate but it's a bet I would have won every decade since the 1970s and there are plenty of scientific reasons to think that trend will continue. The only think likely to stop it is a really huge volcanic eruption.
Who is doing the weighting (adjusting) and how? What #define-s do they use in their code? Would they not stop "adjusting" before the results show the trend, which they sincerely believe must be there? See, what is "sold" to the public as objective recordings of scientific instruments are, in fact, results of "adjustments" by unknown programs using unspecified parameters...
How would you know? I'll bet you've never even tried looking for those "unknown programs" and "unspecified parameters".
You can start looking here. There are lots of links to NOAA's methods and reasons for adjusting temperatures and even a couple of graphs that compare adjusted to raw temperatures.
Or you can check out the BEST temperature record which is not funded by the government. This page describes how they process the data set and this page contains links to the code they use to process the data.
No one has destroyed any of the raw data. Some have deleted their copies of the data when they no longer need it.
But I seriously doubt you'll take the time to look into it for yourself and you will continue to gullibily believe the people who tell you those things. Unfortunately for you the real world will continue to respond to anthropogenic influences and if you live long enough you will find many of the things scientists are predicting will come to pass.
Will remember that next winter when people are talking about global warming.
There are plenty of idiots on both sides of the issue who want to make a big deal about singular events but since climate is a statistical analysis of average weather and the variability of weather the only real measure of global warming is in the long term statistics. And they say the Earth is warming despite the occasional record cold (or heat for that matter).
In general I wouldn't bet on such a short period as a month. But I'd happily bet a substantial amount ($10,000) that the next 10 years will be on average warmer than the last 10 years.
What I have seen, however, is that people who advocate a libertarian philosophy tend to attack the science because if the science actually were correct, they don't have any solutions to offer. Since they don't have any solutions, they deny the problem.
If I hadn't already commented I'd give you a +1 Insightful. Too many people allow their ideology to override what the science it telling us. In the end they'll find out how big a mistake that was but unfortunately they're taking the rest of us with them.
The improvements in measuring devices are not that significant. There has been an improvement in the number of significant digits you can measure but very accurate thermometers have been available for over 200 years.
That's the pedantic answer. Scientists consider it an ice age whenever there have been significant ice fields at the poles. By that measure we've been in an ice age for the last 2.6 million years at least.
But common usage for most people is that "ice age" refers to a period when the glaciers and ice sheets advance from the poles toward the equator and "not an ice age" refers to an interglacial period when the glaciers and ice sheet retreat back toward the poles.
So by the common usage the "ice age" did end around 10,000 years ago and after the Holocene Climatic Optimum about 8,000 years ago we have been very slowly sliding toward the next "ice age". The advent of AGW has stopped that slide for the foreseeable future.
Despite the obvious evidence that this record high is due to man made global warming, the deniers will be out in force. It's a shame that there are so many people here who reject science.
One individual record is not evidence of much but simply just another piece of data in a record that is collecting thousands of pieces of data every day. The temperature record is made statistically more likely by anthropogenic global warming but can't be attributed directly to it. However most of SE Asia has been suffering heatwaves since April and it may be possible with analysis to attribute some of it to AGW in a few years.
It is a shame that so many people let their ideology get in the way of understanding science.
Anything with the global warming consequences, or other nature disasters will come LONG after I'm cold and dead i the ground, and no one will in that time even know my name to curse it....so, really what do I care and why should I put myself out or deny myself the pleasures of this modern world since I'm here such a short time?
Unless you plan to die in the next few years I wouldn't count on that. The consequences are already happening and will only continue to get worse as time goes on. It may be that your remaining lifetime is short enough that you won't be much affected by the consequences but if you expect to live more than 10 or 20 more years I doubt it.
Of course everything builds on everything else but I have to think the biggest period of innovation has to be the mid 1800s when we started learning how to harness electricity and develop higher speed communications (telegraph, telephone, radio) up to around the 1950's when transistors and digital computers were developed.
What about long haul trucking? Electric vehicles are fine for short commutes but they cannot deliver goods cross country.
I think you can replace the big fuel tanks you see on the side of long haul trucks with big battery packs that can be easily exchanged at a truck stop. As long as the trucks can get ~500 miles of of a battery pack that should be workable.
I doubt Obama had anything to do with the decision to remove those 4 dams on the Klamath River. The owner of the dams, Pacific Power and Light (or whatever it's called nowadays) reached the point of needing to relicense the dams and the cost of adding the necessary fish passage equipment far exceeded any value the dams had to the company so they wanted to tear them down in order to no longer be responsible for them. They are all rather small and don't produce that much power so not much was lost in terms of renewable energy and it's a huge gain for salmon habitat.
You sound like a Libertarian in the vein of author and astrophysicist David Brin. I check out his web page "Contrary Brin" from time to time and find it interesting. You might too.
Have the people who make up a business lost any of their individual rights by virtue of being connected with the business such that the business has to be given rights to compensate? I don't think so.
We grant corporations certain aspects of personhood so they can be treated as a single entity in the legal system but since corporations don't exist outside of the laws that define what they are they have no rights except what are granted in those laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Rock weathering is something we might be able to speed up but taking the right kinds of rocks, grinding them into a powder and forcing air through it. I have no idea if that's practical but it may be worth looking in to.
We can sequester a notable amount of CO2 as soil through decaying plant matter in a relatively short period of time (as in months given the right conditions).
Compared to the amount of CO2 we are adding which amounts to at least thousands of years of plant growth of per day your "notable amount" is a drop in the bucket.
When you're burning the results of millions of years of biomass accumulation on century scales it's not possible living biomass to come anywhere close to keeping up with current emissions.
A GSHP while more expensive to install is probably cheaper to run. Did you try to calculate how long it would take to break even on the cost?
I have a couple of big box fans that I can put in the window at night that cools the house off nicely overnight. I take them down in the morning and the house usually stays nicely cool all day.
The article cites the figure and then proceeds to explain, why it is acceptable — without disputing the number. In other words, they accept it. The article (known as Watts 2009 [wordpress.com]) is thus entered into evidence.
The Skeptical Science article said "some". I wouldn't equate that with 89%. Nevertheless the poorly sited stations compare well with the well sited stations after adjustments. In fact the well sited stations show a slightly greater warming trend than the poorly sited stations when they are compared.
Had a copy still existed somewhere, they would've procured one to avoid the embarrassment [blogspot.com]. And it was a major scandal — two months later NY Times ran a "rebuttal" [nytimes.com] (the dishonest newspaper's first mention of the problem, apparently), which still would not say, other copies exist. You are grasping at straws — and drowning anyway.
So this controversy arises 20 years after the actual data deletion. I see no reason for embarrassment. Why should they go to all the work to reacquire the data just to satisfy someone like you? The fact is that other major temperature records such as NASA/GISS and BEST are not missing any data that they deem necessary. Even if you completely throw out everything the CRU has ever done it doesn't change the conclusions of climate scientists one bit.
You wrote yourself, that the prediction was 50-60 mm, while the actual values — according to, once again, you — was 80mm. That's a fail... You may recall, that one of the rules I put down was that the cited predictions, if quantifiable, be correct within 20% of the predicted figure(s).
Well maybe I should have said the prediction was a range from 30 to 70 mm. Then it would have fit into your 20% range.
It may be significant, but it is unclear, of what. That the seas are rising may be observable and measurable (preferably without "weighting" and "adjusting" the observed figures, of course). That they are rising because SUVs — that is not clear at all.
There are always weightings and adjustments to be made in any scientific measurement. Period.
I'm perfectly aware that sea levels rose some 120 meters at the end of the last glaciation. It was caused primarily by changing Milankovitch Cycles along with some feedbacks such as increasing CO2 and dropping albedo. All natural. But Milankovitch Cycles don't change much on century scales. The shortest one (and one of the weaker ones) has a 26,000 year cycle which means 13,000 years from low to high.
As far as the role of humans in the warming it's easy to show that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation and that increasing concentrations will absorb even more. It's easy to show that humans are the cause of the increase in atmospheric CO2. Each year less than half of what humans emit stays in the atmosphere. It's impossible to not come to the conclusion that the primary cause of the warming we've seen is anthropogenic. Even such noted climate skeptics as Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer agree that increasing CO2 by itself would cause warming. They just think there are negative feedbacks that counter the CO2.
Climate scientists today blame humanity with the intensity of ancient shamans. But, to establish their scientific bona-fides to people actually familiar with scientific process, they need to make scientific predictions — verifiable, falsifiable, as well as verified and not falsified. And that's where my challenge and your (so far — failing) attempts to answer it come in...
Anthropogenic global warming is falsifiable, just not on a time scale satisfactory to you. If the warming doesn't continue, the ice quits melting, the sea levels stop rising despite continued human emissions of CO2 that would falsify it. If you could come up with something that explains all those better than the current theory that wo
Too late for this tactics. Your fellow alarmists have already accepted the figure [skepticalscience.com] — and tried to defend their colleague's incompetence with the "weighting" and "adjusting".
I read through all three versions of that article and no where did I find them agreeing with your 89% figure. They said "Surveys of weather stations in the USA have indicated that some of them are not sited as well as they could be." Scientists understand this and take steps to adjust for it.
I hate to ask this cliche question, but "Are you stupid or a liar?" CRU have already admitted losing the data [uea.ac.uk] — irretrievably.
I read that article too and no where does it say that primary raw temperature data has been lost, just that the CRU does not have it any more. It's still available from the original sources.
Gee, you keep calling me "a lawyer" instead of simply posting in the — perfectly reasonable — format I requested.
Besides, are lawyers really bad? I don't see you objecting, when they are used to prosecute "denialiasts" [dailykos.com] — First Amendment be damned.
I'm not saying all lawyers are bad, they just have different priorities than scientists. As far as prosecuting deniers they are going after organized denial. Exxon's own in house scientists told them back in the late 1970s that anthropogenic global warming was real. The fact that they did not disclose that in their annual reports to shareholders as a possible material effect on their business may be a violation of SEC rules.
Seriously? Do you even realize, what you posted? The "prediction" you cited is waay off — according to you! 80 mm instead of the predicted 50-60... What a way to prove validity of a scientific theory!
80 mm is right at the top of the uncertainty range in the graph I provided so I don't consider it "waay off". Don't you consider it significant that real world observations have been greater than predictions? To me that indicates that scientists have been underestimating the effects.
And then I can not help but notice, that you chose to ignore my question about whether or not you have (less articulate?) collaborators here, who leave the arguing to you while modding me down and you — up. Such question-dodging confirms my suspicions — I'm dealing with a cabal. Whether you are tightly organized or loosely collaborating, I find myself bare-knuckled in a gunfight..
I am collaborating with no one. I'll admit to having down modded you occasionally but I have also up modded you once or twice in discussions not related to anthropogenic global warming.
Ok, I've done some of your work for you. Here is the page on "11.5 Future Sea Level Changes 11.5.1 Global Average Sea Level Change 1990 to 2100" from the IPCC Third Archive Report from 2001. If you click on the graph on that page you get an enlarged versionhere. If you take a straight edge to the graph you can estimate that the projected sea level rise from 1990 to 2016 was around 0.05-0.06 meters or 50-60 mm. Here is a page that shows the methods they used for projections.
Here is a page from NOAA that shows sea level rise as measured by tide gauges from 1880 to the start of 2016. You can hover your mouse over the graph to get the exact numbers for a point in time. You can also use your mouse to squish the graph to zero in on the 1990 - 2016 part for better resolution. By my calculations the sea level rise from 1990 to the start of 2016 is around 80 mm, clearly greater than the projections from the IPCC in 2001.
But you'll probably reject the data from NOAA so here is another graph that shows sea level rise as measured by satellite altimeters from 1993 (when the first one went up) to mid 2015. It clearly also shows around 80 mm of sea level rise since 1993, clearly greater than the projections from the IPCC in 2001.
So there is your prediction from 2001 of sea level rise from 1990 to the start of 2016 and two observational datasets that show the IPCC predictions were on the low side.
Are you happy now?
Sorry, hon, if 89% of your data-collection stations aren't positioned right, your results are junk no matter, how you "adjust" them.
Well dearie, I await your scientifically based paper that says that 89% of data collection stations aren't positioned right.
"Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data."
Funny, they could not spare one more tape for the originals and chose to use the space for the "value-added" data instead — even though reproducing the "value addition" would've been easy with a straightforward algorithm and the raw data, whereas going back to the originals is now impossible.
Since the original raw data came from sources other than the ones you're complaining about the original raw data is still available to this day from the original sources. There was no need for them to hold that data.
I've been in computers and data storage since the 1980s. It was very expensive back then. The relatively small company I work for spent on the order of $200,000 a year on data storage back then. The amount of data a tape could hold back then was a lot less than now. IIRC our tapes from the late 1980s could hold 50-75 MB of data and cost around $75-$125 apiece. Based on the amount of data that was deleted you're probably talking about 10-20 tapes to store the data and then there's the issue of space to store them along with all the other important stuff they were keeping.
The point is that the original data from the original sources was not destroyed and is still available. All that was not kept was the CRU's copies of that data.
Just how gullible do you think I am?
To me it seems you are so scientifically illiterate that you couldn't tell the difference between a good scientific study and a bad scientific study.
Anyway, still waiting for a list of successful climate predictions from you... You know the format...
I've already given you a couple of examples several time. Someone with a scientific mindset would investigate those to see if my claims are accurate. Someone with a lawyer's mindset like you insists the forms be followed.
Betting on a month, a year or even 2 or 3 years is betting on the weather, not the climate. Even 10 years is kind of short for betting on the climate but it's a bet I would have won every decade since the 1970s and there are plenty of scientific reasons to think that trend will continue. The only think likely to stop it is a really huge volcanic eruption.
Who is doing the weighting (adjusting) and how? What #define-s do they use in their code? Would they not stop "adjusting" before the results show the trend, which they sincerely believe must be there? See, what is "sold" to the public as objective recordings of scientific instruments are, in fact, results of "adjustments" by unknown programs using unspecified parameters...
How would you know? I'll bet you've never even tried looking for those "unknown programs" and "unspecified parameters".
You can start looking here. There are lots of links to NOAA's methods and reasons for adjusting temperatures and even a couple of graphs that compare adjusted to raw temperatures.
Or you can check out the BEST temperature record which is not funded by the government. This page describes how they process the data set and this page contains links to the code they use to process the data.
No one has destroyed any of the raw data. Some have deleted their copies of the data when they no longer need it.
But I seriously doubt you'll take the time to look into it for yourself and you will continue to gullibily believe the people who tell you those things. Unfortunately for you the real world will continue to respond to anthropogenic influences and if you live long enough you will find many of the things scientists are predicting will come to pass.
Will remember that next winter when people are talking about global warming.
There are plenty of idiots on both sides of the issue who want to make a big deal about singular events but since climate is a statistical analysis of average weather and the variability of weather the only real measure of global warming is in the long term statistics. And they say the Earth is warming despite the occasional record cold (or heat for that matter).
In general I wouldn't bet on such a short period as a month. But I'd happily bet a substantial amount ($10,000) that the next 10 years will be on average warmer than the last 10 years.
What I have seen, however, is that people who advocate a libertarian philosophy tend to attack the science because if the science actually were correct, they don't have any solutions to offer. Since they don't have any solutions, they deny the problem.
If I hadn't already commented I'd give you a +1 Insightful. Too many people allow their ideology to override what the science it telling us. In the end they'll find out how big a mistake that was but unfortunately they're taking the rest of us with them.
The improvements in measuring devices are not that significant. There has been an improvement in the number of significant digits you can measure but very accurate thermometers have been available for over 200 years.
That's the pedantic answer. Scientists consider it an ice age whenever there have been significant ice fields at the poles. By that measure we've been in an ice age for the last 2.6 million years at least.
But common usage for most people is that "ice age" refers to a period when the glaciers and ice sheets advance from the poles toward the equator and "not an ice age" refers to an interglacial period when the glaciers and ice sheet retreat back toward the poles.
So by the common usage the "ice age" did end around 10,000 years ago and after the Holocene Climatic Optimum about 8,000 years ago we have been very slowly sliding toward the next "ice age". The advent of AGW has stopped that slide for the foreseeable future.
It's interesting how the US economy usually does better under Democratic administrations than it does under Republican administrations.
The #1 thing is reduce our human population.. or the earth will do it for us.
There's a lot of truth in that statement.
Despite the obvious evidence that this record high is due to man made global warming, the deniers will be out in force. It's a shame that there are so many people here who reject science.
One individual record is not evidence of much but simply just another piece of data in a record that is collecting thousands of pieces of data every day. The temperature record is made statistically more likely by anthropogenic global warming but can't be attributed directly to it. However most of SE Asia has been suffering heatwaves since April and it may be possible with analysis to attribute some of it to AGW in a few years.
It is a shame that so many people let their ideology get in the way of understanding science.
Anything with the global warming consequences, or other nature disasters will come LONG after I'm cold and dead i the ground, and no one will in that time even know my name to curse it....so, really what do I care and why should I put myself out or deny myself the pleasures of this modern world since I'm here such a short time?
Unless you plan to die in the next few years I wouldn't count on that. The consequences are already happening and will only continue to get worse as time goes on. It may be that your remaining lifetime is short enough that you won't be much affected by the consequences but if you expect to live more than 10 or 20 more years I doubt it.
Of course everything builds on everything else but I have to think the biggest period of innovation has to be the mid 1800s when we started learning how to harness electricity and develop higher speed communications (telegraph, telephone, radio) up to around the 1950's when transistors and digital computers were developed.
What about long haul trucking? Electric vehicles are fine for short commutes but they cannot deliver goods cross country.
I think you can replace the big fuel tanks you see on the side of long haul trucks with big battery packs that can be easily exchanged at a truck stop. As long as the trucks can get ~500 miles of of a battery pack that should be workable.
I doubt Obama had anything to do with the decision to remove those 4 dams on the Klamath River. The owner of the dams, Pacific Power and Light (or whatever it's called nowadays) reached the point of needing to relicense the dams and the cost of adding the necessary fish passage equipment far exceeded any value the dams had to the company so they wanted to tear them down in order to no longer be responsible for them. They are all rather small and don't produce that much power so not much was lost in terms of renewable energy and it's a huge gain for salmon habitat.
You sound like a Libertarian in the vein of author and astrophysicist David Brin. I check out his web page "Contrary Brin" from time to time and find it interesting. You might too.
A business is a group of people.
Have the people who make up a business lost any of their individual rights by virtue of being connected with the business such that the business has to be given rights to compensate? I don't think so.
We grant corporations certain aspects of personhood so they can be treated as a single entity in the legal system but since corporations don't exist outside of the laws that define what they are they have no rights except what are granted in those laws.