Australian here. 1) Most of the "uninhabbited" parts of Australia are not particularly conducive to most kinds of agriculture.. 2) The police here take growing tobbacco as a much more seriously than growing weed.
Yeah that's pretty much a standard feature across most X11 desktops including KDE. The good ones allow you to move those bindings from 'alt' to 'meta' for aplications that use alt.
If you touch the top of the screen get te a full screen window, Left edge you get the left half of the screen, right edge the right half of the screen (on more modern UIs the left and the right edges are broken up into thirds where the lower and upper thirds resize the nidow to exactly one quarter of the desktop).
This method is a lot quicker and more convenient than manually moving or resizing windows.
if you can't see the usefulness in this then that would appear to be out of stubborness and lack of imagination
How much of the ongoing warming is because of mankind's CO2 emissions, vs changes in the Sun?
This is fairly easy to measure: let's concider this from two angles.
Warming via greenhouse gases (trapped radiation) predicts a pattern of warming, warming from external radiation predicts a different pattern. The pattern we are seeing is one where warming is concerntrated towards the poles, the stratosphere is cooling while the troposphere is warming, warming is occuring more at night than in the day etc. This points in the directionion of trapped radiation being the source of the warming with a high degree of probability
Secondly we have been observing the sun dirrectly for some time now and that data doesn't look like it can explain the recent warmng.
I am arguing SPECIFICALLY with OPs claim that "90% of climatologists" believe in AGW. That is based on a flawed study which found that 97% of peer reviewed scientific papers supported AGW (the flaw was that if the paper did not specifically say that AGW was false it was counted as supporting AGW...even when AGW was irrelevant to the topic of the paper).
I think either you or your sources are getting their wires crossed. The study did no such thing. The study in question broke down papers into pro, anti and no discernable position (in the abstract of the paper). The authors of the study tried to contact the authors in this third group. They then put authors who responded pro or anti into those those categories. This still left a large group of papers which were then ignored, the next step would have been to read the papers in full but with over 10,000 papers I understand why they didn't do that. 98% is a reasonable number but should have error bars on it. Since not all research in the field needs to list a position WRT global warming I would be very suprised indeed if the actual number is lower than 90%. Some people have pointed out that if you limit the papers to those published in the last 20 years the number is higher than 98%.
Having reviewed your linked articles, the studies they refer to ALL suffer from selection bias. They rely on surveys of climate scientists who are studying climate change and who published a large number of articles. Yet we know that there have been numerous, at least partially successful, efforts to prevent those who disagreed with AGW from getting published. I am sorry, there is no reliable evidence that 90% of climatologists agree with AGW and it is unlikely to be possible to get such evidence.
If you can produce scientific papers which were rejected by peer review that shouldn't have been then I am all ears. The only thing I am aware that is remotely like this was in the hacked emails where a group of scientists talked about possibly trying to veeto a paper then not actually veetoing that paper. It was published then very quickly critised for using faulty methodology.
More importantly, such efforts are a waste of time because science is not done by consensus. Science is done by developing a theory and making predictions. If those predictions come true, the theory has value and may be considered true until such a time as studies show it to make predictions that are not true. The proponents of AGW have REPEATEDLY made predictions which have failed to come true.
Science kind of is done by consensus, In that the predictions are made the observations made and the experts come to a consensus on what the data means. For us who are not expert in the particular field knowing that the people who live and breath the stuff all agree about particular details is a valuable hueristic. We can get a better picture by cross referencing what the experts are saying but past that point you really have to become an expert yourself.
Now as for failed predictions I am willing to wager a small amount of money that you don't know what the actual predictions made my mainstream climate scientists are. The media doesn't do a really good job of explaining these (either on the pro or anti side), partly because as you know this stuff is more complicated than one can fit into a 5 minute news segment or a soundbite.
You know, instead of signalling your worry, you might try being "hopeful". Like the title to your post.
It hasn't really occurred to the left, but Trump is more capable and has more integrity than they give him credit for.
I will give you competence maybe and I would have given you intelligence if you had asked. Clearly people have underestimated Trump. If you think that trump might have integrity you need your head examined. Take a look at the details of the Trump University case - there is a reason the thing was settled out of court. If that's not enough have a look into trumps charity or ask yourself what is the deal with the obvious nepotism and failure to disengage with current business activities on the grounds of conflict of interest. Imagine that the same things were being said of Obama and see how ok you are with it.
This is obvious when you consider all their predictions have been wrong, in every case. Trump won't win the nomination, Trump is melting down, Trump has *completely* melted down, Trump will never win the election, and on and on.
To be fair the best information we had put Hillary way ahead this wasn't just the left, for instance the people offering bets on the outcome of the election had the odds at 5:1 against trump a week from the election those odds did schrink to 2:1 against the day before the election - I would say these people had a pretty strong motivation to accurately predict the winner.
Why should we believe anything the left says, when none of their past predictions have come true?
It's also obvious because everyone is running around looking for the "why" of his success. I mean, it's Russia, it's Wikileaks, it's white supremacists, it's "fake news", it's Breitbart, it's Clinton, and on and on. Do you think that maybe Trump is more capable than you gave him credit for?
Part of the reason this is so hard to accept is because the man is so clearly full of shit. It's really hard to accept that anybody would think it a good idea to go with the guy who when asked a question repeats the same phrase again and again without actually saying anything coherent. I know that politicians are generally good at this but trump takes it to a whole new level. In the cases where Trump did propose policy it did not match the rhetoric.
And now everyone is running around with their hair on fire over every subtle thing he does. And I mean *really* "hair on fire" over some of his appointments: he'd going to dissolve the EPA and make our pollution worse than China,
The reason that people think that Trump is going to dissolve the EPA is because he himself said that he wanted to eliminate the EPA. More recently he softened that stance to strongly limiting the powers of the EPA. The question then is - did he say those things because he wanted to appeal to the red team or because he wants to limit the powers of the EPA? Judging from the appointments made I would lean it favour of the later
he's going to stage a military coup and install a fascist regime, [non-political] industry leader appointees are not "draining the swamp", an actual brain surgeon will be incompetent because he has no experience, and on and on.
Many of those appointments (but not all) do look like the opposite of draining the swamp, it's not just the left saying this. Being a surgeon doesn't particularly qualify for being in charge of housing policy, I am genuinely supprised that somebody would think that it would.
A lot of us on the alt-right get a big chuckle over the histrionics and fake emotion. We like seeing your heads explode over these things. You, for example, are signalling deep worry, in a way meant to infect everyone else into a state of deep worry. Go for it! (*snicker*)
We on the alt-right are noticing that a) he's not the president yet, b) he's appointing capable people, and c) he's still inten
Jack *is* the Linux answer to ASIO/Core Audio and it is more than capable of competing with these in terms of scalabality and low latency performance. In fact a lot of high end stand-alone audio hardware now runs embedded Linux and Jack internally.
You do have some difficulty caused by Jack not being historically that easy to set up and get to run smoothly It's design requires the loosening of some security restrictions in order to be able to operate at really low latencies, distro makers tend to care more about security. It also shares problems with Windows (but not Mac) where some PC hardware just isn't designed to deliver low latency performance and that support for audio interfaces is a bit hit and miss. This has lead to a situation where a lot of people in the enthusiast community (the ones using the onboard realtek cards) have just demanded that everything work with alsa because they want to spend time makeing music not fiddling with the system.
The good news is that in 2016 - Distro's generally add the security exceptions when you install jack and as long as your interface is well supported and your other hardware is fit to purpose jack will work without too much effort (at least that is the way it seems to me - but I have experience). It's comparible to getting a Windows/ASIO setup running but not as smooth as MacOS/CoreAudio.
Further good news is that VST support for Linux is a thing and is supported by the available DAWs. This means that should a company want to port their plugins to Linux they just need to replace system calls (if any) and recompile.
Don't like big corporations? Why do you think big government is better? Maybe small both is best. Bernie Sanders? Give me a break. Do you know how other countries provide college for free?.
You can't have small both, I would have thought this was obvious - governments have to be a certain size to be able to effectively keep corporations of a particular size in check. It's pretty clear that in the United States (from an outside perspective) that several of the larger business interests are pretty hell bent on getting rid on the government agencies that keep them in check, especially environmental and safety regulations.
Governments at least in democratic nations have at least some accountability to citizens of that nation and periodic elections allow the removal of really unpopular politicians without bloodshed. I agree that there are dangers associated with big government but I don't see a workable solution short term that doesn't include them.
Free university or at least free tuition is more common than you think it would be, particularly in Europe and at least, Bernie Sanders has a tax plan that sort of adds up, the candidates on the republican side are so far from doing that, you could completely defund the military (which isn't going to happen) and still not make up the difference.
Because the purpose of the IPCC is summarise all the scientific research done on the subject and evaluate the relative importance of each study. Think of it as a meta analysis.
This information is to be given to policy makers so they have as clear a picture of what the risks and likelihoods as we can currently provide.
You could insert a conspiracy in there but it would look exactly as it does if there was no conspiracy.
Scientists don't and are taking that into account. We have a pretty good idea of what caused previous ice-ages - Positions of the continents, variations in the earths orbit and it is predicted that we will have to deal with that in some 10,000 or so years. There is also the consideration that we are trying to feed some 7 billion and rabidly growing people and while the planet might still be inhabitable it might only be able to sustain a small fraction of that population.
The important question is pay some now or risk it and probably pay a lot more in future.
In a similar way to how casino's can accurately predict the takings they will have from a roulette table but not where the ball will end up on any one particular spin of the wheel.
there are two fans of probability that need to be accounted for. The first is the sensitivity of climate to change in CO2 - I think the direct physics calculations come to somewhere around 1 degree to double the level of CO2 from preindustrial rates. Then you have to take positive and negative feedbacks into account. The second fan of probability is predicting what we globally as a species do, whether we increase production or reduce it. How willing we are to modify our behaviour.
Essentially you are seeing those two factors multiplied.
While this is true - given the IPCC past estimates 90% likely. I feel this is the wrong way of looking at it. It will very likely be much more expensive in the long run to do nothing than it would be for us to try to get the situation under control. This is risk management.
A) This is settled, the degree to which it is isn't. I think the current estimates are around 20% slightly positive to slightly negative but easily dealable, 10% likely to be catastrophic, end of civilisation as we know it. The most likely outcome is something between those two extremes. More in importantly there is very high probability that will cost us more to do nothing in the long term.
B) What is settled is that reducing the amount of CO2 we burn will effect the distribution of probabilities of the outcome. Ideally we should phase out coal power as soon as it is practical to do so and we should invest resources into trying to make it practical earlier.
C) What is settled is that the ice is retreating. The preponderance of evidence points towards global warming being the culprit. Nobody knows enough to give you a year. When you hear these statements they typically are prefixed with "If the ice melts at the present rate".
D) This is settled. How much by we don't have a good handle on. What we can say is that all other things being equal warmer oceans will produce more extreme versions of some types of weather event.
E) What is settled is that there are multiple tipping points. What we don't know is how much warming will trigger them. The tipping points that we know about involve the melting of large sheets of ice and the destruction of certain ecosystems and extinction of plants and animals in those ecosystems. Sensitivity is still being debated so we don't know overall how much the effect will be - refer back to A) for a distribution of probabilities.
F) refer back to A)
G) not settled - but refer back to A)
H) This is pretty much settled, it's also the wrong question. Global Warming not only predicts that the planet will warm but predicts it will do so with a very distinct pattern. Different sources of heat will have different patterns of warming. These "fingerprints" include, troposphere warming but stratosphere cooling, significantly more warming towards the poles, more warming at night than in the day, centres of continents warming more than the edges. It is possible but extremely unlikely that a different heat source would produce the same fingerprints.
We have a pretty good handle on the changes that cause the shifts in climate on a geological time scale and we are measuring most of the other possible candidates directly (output from sun, the earths orbit, position of continents).
Most major middle ware engines now support Linux as a target platform. I think the only exception I can think of is maybe the latest iteration of the Unreal engine.
there are some smaller players that support authoring on linux - of particular note are Unigine and in a couple of weeks Leadwerks.
The science on whether a) The planet is warming b) the cause is greenhouse gasses c) of which the primary culprit is CO2 d) which is caused by Human Activity is pretty much settled.
The parts that aren't settled are exactly how sensitive temperatures are to increases in CO2, exactly what increases in temperature will do to weather patterns how much this will play into the worsening of extreme weather events etc.
For instance we know that when the world was between 1 and 2 degrees hotter (125,000 years ago) that the sea level was 4-6 meters higher than it is today. What we aren't sure about is how long it will take for the ice to melt.
Honestly who modded this insightful. Of course the models take into account water vapour into account, and of the effect of water vapour is difficult to model which is a big part of the reason that the error bars given say in the IPCC are quite large.
As for the Antarctic sea ice. The very first article I looked at explains that although the ice extent is a record, the volume of ice is shrinking. It's almost like the somebody read just the headline and made assumptions. I am not sure what finding ice under greenland would prove at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a muslim ban because all muslim's are affected it's a muslim ban because it is clearly targetted at muslims with no real justification.
Australian here.
1) Most of the "uninhabbited" parts of Australia are not particularly conducive to most kinds of agriculture..
2) The police here take growing tobbacco as a much more seriously than growing weed.
Yeah that's pretty much a standard feature across most X11 desktops including KDE. The good ones allow you to move those bindings from 'alt' to 'meta' for aplications that use alt.
If you touch the top of the screen get te a full screen window, Left edge you get the left half of the screen, right edge the right half of the screen (on more modern UIs the left and the right edges are broken up into thirds where the lower and upper thirds resize the nidow to exactly one quarter of the desktop).
This method is a lot quicker and more convenient than manually moving or resizing windows.
if you can't see the usefulness in this then that would appear to be out of stubborness and lack of imagination
How much of the ongoing warming is because of mankind's CO2 emissions, vs changes in the Sun?
This is fairly easy to measure: let's concider this from two angles.
Warming via greenhouse gases (trapped radiation) predicts a pattern of warming, warming from external radiation predicts a different pattern. The pattern we are seeing is one where warming is concerntrated towards the poles, the stratosphere is cooling while the troposphere is warming, warming is occuring more at night than in the day etc. This points in the directionion of trapped radiation being the source of the warming with a high degree of probability
Secondly we have been observing the sun dirrectly for some time now and that data doesn't look like it can explain the recent warmng.
I am arguing SPECIFICALLY with OPs claim that "90% of climatologists" believe in AGW. That is based on a flawed study which found that 97% of peer reviewed scientific papers supported AGW (the flaw was that if the paper did not specifically say that AGW was false it was counted as supporting AGW...even when AGW was irrelevant to the topic of the paper).
I think either you or your sources are getting their wires crossed. The study did no such thing. The study in question broke down papers into pro, anti and no discernable position (in the abstract of the paper). The authors of the study tried to contact the authors in this third group. They then put authors who responded pro or anti into those those categories. This still left a large group of papers which were then ignored, the next step would have been to read the papers in full but with over 10,000 papers I understand why they didn't do that. 98% is a reasonable number but should have error bars on it. Since not all research in the field needs to list a position WRT global warming I would be very suprised indeed if the actual number is lower than 90%. Some people have pointed out that if you limit the papers to those published in the last 20 years the number is higher than 98%.
Having reviewed your linked articles, the studies they refer to ALL suffer from selection bias. They rely on surveys of climate scientists who are studying climate change and who published a large number of articles. Yet we know that there have been numerous, at least partially successful, efforts to prevent those who disagreed with AGW from getting published. I am sorry, there is no reliable evidence that 90% of climatologists agree with AGW and it is unlikely to be possible to get such evidence.
If you can produce scientific papers which were rejected by peer review that shouldn't have been then I am all ears. The only thing I am aware that is remotely like this was in the hacked emails where a group of scientists talked about possibly trying to veeto a paper then not actually veetoing that paper.
It was published then very quickly critised for using faulty methodology.
More importantly, such efforts are a waste of time because science is not done by consensus. Science is done by developing a theory and making predictions. If those predictions come true, the theory has value and may be considered true until such a time as studies show it to make predictions that are not true. The proponents of AGW have REPEATEDLY made predictions which have failed to come true.
Science kind of is done by consensus, In that the predictions are made the observations made and the experts come to a consensus on what the data means. For us who are not expert in the particular field knowing that the people who live and breath the stuff all agree about particular details is a valuable hueristic. We can get a better picture by cross referencing what the experts are saying but past that point you really have to become an expert yourself.
Now as for failed predictions I am willing to wager a small amount of money that you don't know what the actual predictions made my mainstream climate scientists are. The media doesn't do a really good job of explaining these (either on the pro or anti side), partly because as you know this stuff is more complicated than one can fit into a 5 minute news segment or a soundbite.
You know, instead of signalling your worry, you might try being "hopeful". Like the title to your post.
It hasn't really occurred to the left, but Trump is more capable and has more integrity than they give him credit for.
I will give you competence maybe and I would have given you intelligence if you had asked. Clearly people have underestimated Trump. If you think that trump might have integrity you need your head examined. Take a look at the details of the Trump University case - there is a reason the thing was settled out of court. If that's not enough have a look into trumps charity or ask yourself what is the deal with the obvious nepotism and failure to disengage with current business activities on the grounds of conflict of interest. Imagine that the same things were being said of Obama and see how ok you are with it.
This is obvious when you consider all their predictions have been wrong, in every case. Trump won't win the nomination, Trump is melting down, Trump has *completely* melted down, Trump will never win the election, and on and on.
To be fair the best information we had put Hillary way ahead this wasn't just the left, for instance the people offering bets on the outcome of the election had the odds at 5:1 against trump a week from the election those odds did schrink to 2:1 against the day before the election - I would say these people had a pretty strong motivation to accurately predict the winner.
Why should we believe anything the left says, when none of their past predictions have come true?
It's also obvious because everyone is running around looking for the "why" of his success. I mean, it's Russia, it's Wikileaks, it's white supremacists, it's "fake news", it's Breitbart, it's Clinton, and on and on. Do you think that maybe Trump is more capable than you gave him credit for?
Part of the reason this is so hard to accept is because the man is so clearly full of shit. It's really hard to accept that anybody would think it a good idea to go with the guy who when asked a question repeats the same phrase again and again without actually saying anything coherent. I know that politicians are generally good at this but trump takes it to a whole new level. In the cases where Trump did propose policy it did not match the rhetoric.
And now everyone is running around with their hair on fire over every subtle thing he does. And I mean *really* "hair on fire" over some of his appointments: he'd going to dissolve the EPA and make our pollution worse than China,
The reason that people think that Trump is going to dissolve the EPA is because he himself said that he wanted to eliminate the EPA. More recently he softened that stance to strongly limiting the powers of the EPA. The question then is - did he say those things because he wanted to appeal to the red team or because he wants to limit the powers of the EPA? Judging from the appointments made I would lean it favour of the later
he's going to stage a military coup and install a fascist regime, [non-political] industry leader appointees are not "draining the swamp", an actual brain surgeon will be incompetent because he has no experience, and on and on.
Many of those appointments (but not all) do look like the opposite of draining the swamp, it's not just the left saying this. Being a surgeon doesn't particularly qualify for being in charge of housing policy, I am genuinely supprised that somebody would think that it would.
A lot of us on the alt-right get a big chuckle over the histrionics and fake emotion. We like seeing your heads explode over these things. You, for example, are signalling deep worry, in a way meant to infect everyone else into a state of deep worry. Go for it! (*snicker*)
We on the alt-right are noticing that a) he's not the president yet, b) he's appointing capable people, and c) he's still inten
This comment is so misleading it hurts my head.
Jack *is* the Linux answer to ASIO/Core Audio and it is more than capable of competing with these in terms of scalabality and low latency performance.
In fact a lot of high end stand-alone audio hardware now runs embedded Linux and Jack internally.
You do have some difficulty caused by Jack not being historically that easy to set up and get to run smoothly
It's design requires the loosening of some security restrictions in order to be able to operate at really low latencies,
distro makers tend to care more about security. It also shares problems with Windows (but not Mac) where some PC hardware
just isn't designed to deliver low latency performance and that support for audio interfaces is a bit hit and miss.
This has lead to a situation where a lot of people in the enthusiast community (the ones using the onboard realtek cards)
have just demanded that everything work with alsa because they want to spend time makeing music not fiddling with the system.
The good news is that in 2016 - Distro's generally add the security exceptions when you install jack and as long as your interface is well supported
and your other hardware is fit to purpose jack will work without too much effort (at least that is the way it seems to me - but I have experience).
It's comparible to getting a Windows/ASIO setup running but not as smooth as MacOS/CoreAudio.
Further good news is that VST support for Linux is a thing and is supported by the available DAWs.
This means that should a company want to port their plugins to Linux they just need to replace system calls (if any)
and recompile.
Don't like big corporations? Why do you think big government is better? Maybe small both is best. Bernie Sanders? Give me a break. Do you know how other countries provide college for free? .
You can't have small both, I would have thought this was obvious - governments have to be a certain size to be able to effectively keep corporations of a particular size in check. It's pretty clear that in the United States (from an outside perspective) that several of the larger business interests are pretty hell bent on getting rid on the government agencies that keep them in check, especially environmental and safety regulations.
Governments at least in democratic nations have at least some accountability to citizens of that nation and periodic elections allow the removal of really unpopular politicians without bloodshed. I agree that there are dangers associated with big government but I don't see a workable solution short term that doesn't include them.
Free university or at least free tuition is more common than you think it would be, particularly in Europe and at least, Bernie Sanders has a tax plan that sort of adds up, the candidates on the republican side are so far from doing that, you could completely defund the military (which isn't going to happen) and still not make up the difference.
ok had to look it up -- but honestly It looks like a car to me. People are strange.
Because the purpose of the IPCC is summarise all the scientific research done on the subject and evaluate the relative importance of each study. Think of it as a meta analysis.
This information is to be given to policy makers so they have as clear a picture of what the risks and likelihoods as we can currently provide.
You could insert a conspiracy in there but it would look exactly as it does if there was no conspiracy.
Remember also that we took steps to mitigate that risk...
Scientists don't and are taking that into account. We have a pretty good idea of what caused previous ice-ages - Positions of the continents, variations in the earths orbit and it is predicted that we will have to deal with that in some 10,000 or so years. There is also the consideration that we are trying to feed some 7 billion and rabidly growing people and while the planet might still be inhabitable it might only be able to sustain a small fraction of that population.
The important question is pay some now or risk it and probably pay a lot more in future.
In a similar way to how casino's can accurately predict the takings they will have from a roulette table but not where the ball will end up on any one particular spin of the wheel.
there are two fans of probability that need to be accounted for. The first is the sensitivity of climate to change in CO2 - I think the direct physics calculations come to somewhere around 1 degree to double the level of CO2 from preindustrial rates. Then you have to take positive and negative feedbacks into account. The second fan of probability is predicting what we globally as a species do, whether we increase production or reduce it. How willing we are to modify our behaviour.
Essentially you are seeing those two factors multiplied.
While this is true - given the IPCC past estimates 90% likely. I feel this is the wrong way of looking at it. It will very likely be much more expensive in the long run to do nothing than it would be for us to try to get the situation under control. This is risk management.
A) This is settled, the degree to which it is isn't. I think the current estimates are around 20% slightly positive to slightly negative but easily dealable, 10% likely to be catastrophic, end of civilisation as we know it. The most likely outcome is something between those two extremes. More in importantly there is very high probability that will cost us more to do nothing in the long term.
B) What is settled is that reducing the amount of CO2 we burn will effect the distribution of probabilities of the outcome. Ideally we should phase out coal power as soon as it is practical to do so and we should invest resources into trying to make it practical earlier.
C) What is settled is that the ice is retreating. The preponderance of evidence points towards global warming being the culprit. Nobody knows enough to give you a year. When you hear these statements they typically are prefixed with "If the ice melts at the present rate".
D) This is settled. How much by we don't have a good handle on. What we can say is that all other things being equal warmer oceans will produce more extreme versions of some types of weather event.
E) What is settled is that there are multiple tipping points. What we don't know is how much warming will trigger them. The tipping points that we know about involve the melting of large sheets of ice and the destruction of certain ecosystems and extinction of plants and animals in those ecosystems. Sensitivity is still being debated so we don't know overall how much the effect will be - refer back to A) for a distribution of probabilities.
F) refer back to A)
G) not settled - but refer back to A)
H) This is pretty much settled, it's also the wrong question. Global Warming not only predicts that the planet will warm but predicts it will do so with a very distinct pattern. Different sources of heat will have different patterns of warming. These "fingerprints" include, troposphere warming but stratosphere cooling, significantly more warming towards the poles, more warming at night than in the day, centres of continents warming more than the edges. It is possible but extremely unlikely that a different heat source would produce the same fingerprints.
We have a pretty good handle on the changes that cause the shifts in climate on a geological time scale and we are measuring most of the other possible candidates directly (output from sun, the earths orbit, position of continents).
We are reading a commentary on the report - not the report itself. Make allowances for that.
You have a few options including fbx. Which is probably the same route as you would take migrating between different Autodesk products.
How is DirectX not a single Vendor technology? sure you can run more than one companies hardware.
Human Resources
Most major middle ware engines now support Linux as a target platform. I think the only exception I can think of is maybe the latest iteration of the Unreal engine.
there are some smaller players that support authoring on linux - of particular note are
Unigine and in a couple of weeks Leadwerks.
The science on whether a) The planet is warming b) the cause is greenhouse gasses c) of which the primary culprit is CO2 d) which is caused by Human Activity is pretty much settled.
The parts that aren't settled are exactly how sensitive temperatures are to increases in CO2, exactly what increases in temperature will do to weather patterns how much this will play into the worsening of extreme weather events etc.
For instance we know that when the world was between 1 and 2 degrees hotter (125,000 years ago) that the sea level was 4-6 meters higher than it is today. What we aren't sure about is how long it will take for the ice to melt.
Honestly who modded this insightful. Of course the models take into account water vapour into account, and of the effect of water vapour is difficult to model which is a big part of the reason that the error bars given say in the IPCC are quite large.
As for the Antarctic sea ice. The very first article I looked at explains that although the ice extent is a record, the volume of ice is shrinking. It's almost like the somebody read just the headline and made assumptions. I am not sure what finding ice under greenland would prove at all.
honestly Libertarians do a pretty good job of demonizing themselves.