Wrong. There is absolutely no evidence that a change in CO2 has ever caused a change in temperature in the history of the planet. In fact, the only causal relationship ever found is the inverse: it's been shown that changes in temperature have caused equivalent changes in CO2 concentration, with the change in CO2 lagging the change in temperature by about 200,000 years.
Actually, that's wrong: it has been shown very clearly that, while there have been periods of warming in which the CO2 has NOT increased, there was NO period in which the CO2 has increased without an increase of global temperature. In other words, every time there was an increase of CO2, there was also an increase of global temperatures, but the inverse is not true.
The solution would be to get the "new" technologies to produce energy at or below the cost of current energy generation, not taxing everyone in oblivion to artificially do this.
That will never happen - the new technologies are all more expensive than traditional ones, especially carbon fired powerplants. If the CO2 produced by traditional technologies would cause direct loss of capital to the producers of such energy, then of course, the "market would take care of it all", but that's not possible.
It's the same thing as with pollution: a factory that pollutes its environment with carcinogen metallic salts doesn't have any incentive to clean up that pollution or to not pollute, if just dumping the waste is cheaper. So the government must step in and make sure pollution COSTS real money to the factory.
Now, if you want to argue that CO2 is not causing any damage to humankind, then do that. But the discussion is based upon the assumption that CO2 is a harmful side-product which has to be curbed.
I cycle too 12 miles a day. I like the challenge of not getting crushed by a car. Reminds me of Paperboy on NES.
We'll have to disagree there: for me it is important to be relaxed. The time I spend cycling to work is MY time, I want to enjoy it and not to worry whether I'll have my brains squished out under a car or truck tire.
9 miles is about 14.5 Km. I do 11 Km in slightly less than 30 min, so we're about equal in speed, though I have a few uphills (3 major ones) on my commute - and I have a singlespeed! Which makes the ride all the more workout-ish:o)
I commute to work on a bicycle almost every day. That's 2x11 Km each day. Some of my colleagues have longer commutes.
I enjoy it a lot, and consider that in Finland there is a ton of bicycle paths, so one doesn't need to risk his/her life while cycling.
Of course, if you're in most of the US or Canada, you're shit out of luck, but there are some cities that are cyclist-friendly even in North America.
BTW, as a general comment about your life: I think your lifestyle is deeply fucked. You basically don't have a life. If you are married, you are sacrificing not only yours, but your wife's and your children's life as well. You'll die just like the rest of us, buy you'll wonder where did your life go.
You get divorced, your ex's brother/new-beau/... is a mountie. No warrant is now needed for them to indulge in a little ''fishing trip'' to see if they can find anything to hit you with...
Your business rival has a brother/... who is a mountie. Repeat as above...
You piss someone off at the golf club who has a brother/...
Don't be sexist! It could also be a sister mountie...
Not to mention the fact that narrowly technical claims ('not actually hosting copyrighted files', etc.) are disingenuous and, in effect, simply shift all of the blame, and criminality, to the file-shareres themselves.
Yeah, that would be like shifting responsibility from road building companies to the criminals who use them to get away from a crime scene. That would be stupid.
Can we do away with the "XP still alive" stories? At this point "everyone" knows that people are going to continue using XP for as long as possible. The other people with Software Assurance or other Microsoft volume licensing programs are going to stay on XP just until they can plan a migration to Windows 7. A small minority will finally make the shift to Linux, and a couple people will slurp up the Jobs flavored Kool-Aid and justify spending significant amounts of money to be locked into a completely proprietary hardware/software "solution".
Can we do away with these retarded posts that complain about a story but comment on it? And yours was actually a juicy little useless rant - you really put your heart into it!
I agree, but not completely. Public sanitation is what makes life expectancy increase from 35 to 65 years. Healthcare is what adds the extra 10 to 15 years. But even if we disagree, we can agree on "every little helps":o)
By the way, was that paper peer-reviewed? Seems to me like it wasn't.
OK, thank you for that - now I am satisfied that the report you cite is total bullshit.
Then, the kicker comes on page 66; I quote:
Perhaps, most significant of all, the average lifespan of Americans has increased (Figure 2-5) [ Graph of Mean lifespan in US, 1890-2010, omitted ]. In fact, there is no better way to obtain a good picture of how human health and welfare may trend in the future under increases in greenhouse gas emissions than to assess how we have fared in the past during a period of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
That lifespan increase had everything to do with development in medicine and a better healthcare network. Deriving a conclusion that there was no global warming from data on lifespan is utterly silly.
Without our movies, music, paintings and books we would completely loose our sense of who we are, and where we've been. (books in particular, do you really think the world would not be negatively effected if all of the classics simply ceased to exist over night?)
(emphasis mine) You know, if you are going to rant about the importance of culture, "books in particular", you should make sure you know the meaning of the words you are using.
I am going to write a whiny, holier-than-thou post on the Internet to let everyone know that I know there are more important things in the world: starving children, Iran, etc.
Fuckin' A! I don't get what's so many news reports to write about? The man died, presumably of a heart attack. End of story. And yet, on BBC News there are 4 (I shit you not!) stories about Jackson in the top 10 read news.
People should chill the hell out and look at the big picture.
The only solution is climbing high enough during sun-hours, and sailing during night-time. Until we invent new power storage technology, such as super-flywheels or such.
the market has chosen not to go for ground-based installations of the type you describe yet
You are not serious when you say that, are you? Do you have any idea of how many solar powerplants have been already built, and how many are being built? Here are the Solar thermal powerplants producing a total of 562MW right now. There is 1.5GW of such powerplants under construction, and several GW announced. All of them the kind that the Sahara project is targeting. I think the market has spoken, loudly, already.
And how much installed power does the satellite gimmick provide? 0! But don't let simple logic interfere with your lack thereof. Your debating skills will surely make up for total lack of facts.
The Helios is an amazing technological feat: it reached an altitude of about 30 Km, which is the highest a non-rocket aircraft has ever achieved. And due to its propellent being unexhaustable, it could, conceivably, stay in the air forever, provided that it climbs high enough during sun-time.
The Helios is stuff I'd like to see more development in.
You are arguing (and I swallowed the bait) about geo-political instability for building such a plant for European energy needs, while this space gimmick is being planned by a US company for US energy needs. And the USA has plenty of deserts where no such geo-political uncertainties exist.
Also, if you think orbital solar is expensive, imagine trying to string HVDC lines across hundreds of miles of shifting sand dunes, then under the Mediterranean sea or across Gibraltar. Then think how expensive it'll be to send people into the middle of one Earth's largest deserts to service all this equipment. It makes space look cheap.
You are wrong about this. The 200MW this space gimmick will produce is a drop in the ocean compared to what terrestrial mega-plants can produce. Besides, we already have oil drilling sites in much less hospitable (both politically as well as environmentally) places, and we have to build thick pipe lines to carry that oil, and the servicing of such infrastructure is way more complex than a solar powerplant of the same energy output. AND in addition to all this, the oil drilling site is temporary - it is exhausted after a while so either we have to build new drilling sites nearby, or if the whole area is exhausted, the whole pipeline is worth shit! And in spite of all this, it's still very profitable to do this. I submit to you that it is even more profitable to do the same in case of a gigantic solar plant. The energy harvested is many times more, and it is practically inexhaustible.
But there wouldn't be such implications if the USA built such a powerplant somewhere in Nevada, Utah or Arizona (or New Mexico, Idaho or... there's plenty of deserts in your country).
Compared to the USA, Europe is pretty fucked, when it comes to free areas with plenty of sunlight. But, EU politicians are sucking enough Arab dick, that the political climate may be somewhat favorable for us to build some plants in Morocco and Egypt, perhaps even Algiers, and with enough sucking, Mauritania and Libya are also possible options.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I would really like some more text around that graph in the second link. It looks awfully suspicious - that average temperature just looks wrong.
Wrong. There is absolutely no evidence that a change in CO2 has ever caused a change in temperature in the history of the planet. In fact, the only causal relationship ever found is the inverse: it's been shown that changes in temperature have caused equivalent changes in CO2 concentration, with the change in CO2 lagging the change in temperature by about 200,000 years.
Actually, that's wrong: it has been shown very clearly that, while there have been periods of warming in which the CO2 has NOT increased, there was NO period in which the CO2 has increased without an increase of global temperature. In other words, every time there was an increase of CO2, there was also an increase of global temperatures, but the inverse is not true.
Is that like the goatse guy? Hey wait, that involves exercise too!
Well, mainly stretching....
The solution would be to get the "new" technologies to produce energy at or below the cost of current energy generation, not taxing everyone in oblivion to artificially do this.
That will never happen - the new technologies are all more expensive than traditional ones, especially carbon fired powerplants. If the CO2 produced by traditional technologies would cause direct loss of capital to the producers of such energy, then of course, the "market would take care of it all", but that's not possible.
It's the same thing as with pollution: a factory that pollutes its environment with carcinogen metallic salts doesn't have any incentive to clean up that pollution or to not pollute, if just dumping the waste is cheaper. So the government must step in and make sure pollution COSTS real money to the factory.
Now, if you want to argue that CO2 is not causing any damage to humankind, then do that. But the discussion is based upon the assumption that CO2 is a harmful side-product which has to be curbed.
I cycle too 12 miles a day. I like the challenge of not getting crushed by a car. Reminds me of Paperboy on NES.
We'll have to disagree there: for me it is important to be relaxed. The time I spend cycling to work is MY time, I want to enjoy it and not to worry whether I'll have my brains squished out under a car or truck tire.
BTW, I have that game :o)
Live fast, die young, and leave a thin, pale corpse covered in bruises and sores.
You're forgetting toothless.
9 miles is about 14.5 Km. I do 11 Km in slightly less than 30 min, so we're about equal in speed, though I have a few uphills (3 major ones) on my commute - and I have a singlespeed! Which makes the ride all the more workout-ish :o)
How is LA hills-wise?
I commute to work on a bicycle almost every day. That's 2x11 Km each day. Some of my colleagues have longer commutes.
I enjoy it a lot, and consider that in Finland there is a ton of bicycle paths, so one doesn't need to risk his/her life while cycling.
Of course, if you're in most of the US or Canada, you're shit out of luck, but there are some cities that are cyclist-friendly even in North America.
BTW, as a general comment about your life: I think your lifestyle is deeply fucked. You basically don't have a life. If you are married, you are sacrificing not only yours, but your wife's and your children's life as well. You'll die just like the rest of us, buy you'll wonder where did your life go.
What if:
Don't be sexist! It could also be a sister mountie...
Not to mention the fact that narrowly technical claims ('not actually hosting copyrighted files', etc.) are disingenuous and, in effect, simply shift all of the blame, and criminality, to the file-shareres themselves.
Yeah, that would be like shifting responsibility from road building companies to the criminals who use them to get away from a crime scene. That would be stupid.
(+1, Car Analogy)
Can we do away with the "XP still alive" stories? At this point "everyone" knows that people are going to continue using XP for as long as possible. The other people with Software Assurance or other Microsoft volume licensing programs are going to stay on XP just until they can plan a migration to Windows 7. A small minority will finally make the shift to Linux, and a couple people will slurp up the Jobs flavored Kool-Aid and justify spending significant amounts of money to be locked into a completely proprietary hardware/software "solution".
Can we do away with these retarded posts that complain about a story but comment on it? And yours was actually a juicy little useless rant - you really put your heart into it!
I agree, but not completely. Public sanitation is what makes life expectancy increase from 35 to 65 years. Healthcare is what adds the extra 10 to 15 years. But even if we disagree, we can agree on "every little helps" :o)
By the way, was that paper peer-reviewed? Seems to me like it wasn't.
OK, thank you for that - now I am satisfied that the report you cite is total bullshit.
Then, the kicker comes on page 66; I quote:
Perhaps, most significant of all, the average lifespan of Americans has increased (Figure 2-5) [ Graph of Mean lifespan in US, 1890-2010, omitted ].
In fact, there is no better way to obtain a good picture of how human health and welfare may trend in the future under increases in greenhouse gas emissions than to assess how we have fared in the past during a period of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
That lifespan increase had everything to do with development in medicine and a better healthcare network. Deriving a conclusion that there was no global warming from data on lifespan is utterly silly.
Without our movies, music, paintings and books we would completely loose our sense of who we are, and where we've been. (books in particular, do you really think the world would not be negatively effected if all of the classics simply ceased to exist over night?)
(emphasis mine)
You know, if you are going to rant about the importance of culture, "books in particular", you should make sure you know the meaning of the words you are using.
I am going to write a whiny, holier-than-thou post on the Internet to let everyone know that I know there are more important things in the world: starving children, Iran, etc.
Fuckin' A! I don't get what's so many news reports to write about? The man died, presumably of a heart attack. End of story. And yet, on BBC News there are 4 (I shit you not!) stories about Jackson in the top 10 read news.
People should chill the hell out and look at the big picture.
The only solution is climbing high enough during sun-hours, and sailing during night-time. Until we invent new power storage technology, such as super-flywheels or such.
the market has chosen not to go for ground-based installations of the type you describe yet
You are not serious when you say that, are you? Do you have any idea of how many solar powerplants have been already built, and how many are being built? Here are the Solar thermal powerplants producing a total of 562MW right now. There is 1.5GW of such powerplants under construction, and several GW announced. All of them the kind that the Sahara project is targeting. I think the market has spoken, loudly, already.
And how much installed power does the satellite gimmick provide? 0! But don't let simple logic interfere with your lack thereof. Your debating skills will surely make up for total lack of facts.
Great reference, thank you!
The Helios is an amazing technological feat: it reached an altitude of about 30 Km, which is the highest a non-rocket aircraft has ever achieved. And due to its propellent being unexhaustable, it could, conceivably, stay in the air forever, provided that it climbs high enough during sun-time.
The Helios is stuff I'd like to see more development in.
You are arguing (and I swallowed the bait) about geo-political instability for building such a plant for European energy needs, while this space gimmick is being planned by a US company for US energy needs. And the USA has plenty of deserts where no such geo-political uncertainties exist.
What an undignified way to end.
Also, if you think orbital solar is expensive, imagine trying to string HVDC lines across hundreds of miles of shifting sand dunes, then under the Mediterranean sea or across Gibraltar. Then think how expensive it'll be to send people into the middle of one Earth's largest deserts to service all this equipment. It makes space look cheap.
You are wrong about this. The 200MW this space gimmick will produce is a drop in the ocean compared to what terrestrial mega-plants can produce. Besides, we already have oil drilling sites in much less hospitable (both politically as well as environmentally) places, and we have to build thick pipe lines to carry that oil, and the servicing of such infrastructure is way more complex than a solar powerplant of the same energy output. AND in addition to all this, the oil drilling site is temporary - it is exhausted after a while so either we have to build new drilling sites nearby, or if the whole area is exhausted, the whole pipeline is worth shit! And in spite of all this, it's still very profitable to do this. I submit to you that it is even more profitable to do the same in case of a gigantic solar plant. The energy harvested is many times more, and it is practically inexhaustible.
True enough, I agree!
But there wouldn't be such implications if the USA built such a powerplant somewhere in Nevada, Utah or Arizona (or New Mexico, Idaho or... there's plenty of deserts in your country).
Compared to the USA, Europe is pretty fucked, when it comes to free areas with plenty of sunlight. But, EU politicians are sucking enough Arab dick, that the political climate may be somewhat favorable for us to build some plants in Morocco and Egypt, perhaps even Algiers, and with enough sucking, Mauritania and Libya are also possible options.
Seems to me that that Sugar was laced with copious amounts of LSD.
To be scientifically honest, this satellite is projected to be in geosynchronous orbit, 35.786 Km above the Earth, largely avoiding the Earth's shade.
That said, the huge-solar-plant-in-a-desert idea is still dearer to me than this gimmick.
You are right, the Solaren CEO does say it would be in geosynchronous orbit.
My bad. I was wrong, you were right.