Well the grandparent post is talking about EROEI, while the article you present gives the ROI.
A source for EROEI for you. Sounds a bit on the optimistic side to me but it's something.
Finally the RICS study gives figures at the other end of the extreme. I can't find how they calculated the figures but they seem well off. I do know that they did not take into account raising fuel prices, the money you can get from returning power to the grid and government subsides.
A quote from the independent article for a proponent of the other side is, "He (Jeremy Leggett, executive chairman of Solar Century) estimated the current payback of power-generating PV panels was 13 years."
I hate ironing too, get no iron clothes they are great!
Actually, that isn't speciation as the traditional context of species is concerned. You have either been tricked into believing something from an agenda driven site or are just that ignorant and want to make the leap.
All of the supposed speciation is backwards compatible in that breeding out the differences to produce a separate so called species can be breed back with only existing anomalies within the same new species. This indicates that speciation did not actually occur but the plant species or insect species was just taken to one extreme or another. You simply do not have a new species if you can create the old species with nothing but breeding techniques/decisions of the new species.
So the first example in grandparents post is this:
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
Why was this modded down? The poster asks some questions very valid for discussion. Science forbids we hold anything but a one-sided discussion? Do we just mod anybody down we don't agree with out of existence?
It was probably modded down because his question has been answered on this page and his car argument makes little sense. How in heaven's name can it be said that because science can explain a car it was not created and instead "evolved". The amount of ridiculous thinking in the post hints that the poster will not listen.
The poster makes a valid point. I'm personally annoyed by all the mouth breathers who are SO anxious to prove Intelligent Design people wrong, so much so that they don't use good science and claim ridiculous things as being evolution. I heard a discussion one day about how big corn is now compared to in the past. They said something about people meddling with corn genetics and that was somehow evolution because the corn "changed". Ugh! Bad science is WORSE than no science at all. Can we stop the madness?
Well evolution means change, look it up in the dictionary. The theory of evolution attempts to explain how this change occurs (and more). Therefore to say by human selection of the biggest corn kernels over many years the corn has changed to become bigger is absolutely right. Substitute the word evolution for the word change and it is still right.
Evolution if fact! It is the fact that over time the life on Earth has changed!
The theory of evolution is an attempt to explain how life changed over time and is not proved, nor will it ever be proved, because that is not how the Universe works.
Why are such simple things so easily misunderstood?
Right, so... Whether the terms content creators / publishers impose on your "ownership" of a product are fair or not, you still want to be able to use the product they sell? Yet you want all of this at the terms you? Who gave you the right? If you don't want to abide by a specific term or condition, you don't get to use the product. That's just not how a free market works, and you know it.
If the publisher imposes conditions on a product, and they are the only sellers of that product, where is the free market?
Take a Madonna album, how many different publishers are there and how do their conditions and prices compare? If there is only one how can it be a free market?
If you like a song and want to play it to an audience, who gave them the right to stop you or charge you money? Why?
I'm aware. My point is that I'm tired of "but how much CO2 does it generate?" being tacked on to everything because it's the current fad question.
Fair enough, the answer has such a large range of possible answers that it is meaningless.
The coming ice-age was a science disaster fad.
Well there were
a few papers on the subject. But it was more speculation than accepted scientific consensus. Would you rather all scientist in a field focus on one thing, or explore every conceivable angle?
So was the coming overpopulation and world famine.
Well I can't easily believe the Earth can harbour 6.7 billion people with the level of affluence that the west have. Something has to give, either quality of life or population. Also there are
1 billion who are hungry in the world. Don't you remember the food riots last year?
And the ozone holes that would cause everyone to get skin cancer. And....
What everyone? Don't make up straw man arguments.
What you have done is taken the sensationalism of the press and applied their echo chamber to what the experts think. What the papers say is not what the experts think! Or to put it another way what the news says is mostly bullshit, with an element of truth. If it tires you then ignore it.
As that saying goes: there is no "disagree" button, and troll, off-topic, and overrated are not substitutes.
Or maybe climate is a complex beast and if you want you can probably find a paper to support your position. Therefore to truly understand you need to know the majority of the subject and its recent findings.
Please read chapter 2 pages 188-192 Here is a general paper on the subject.
Of course I don't really expect you will be swayed.
Maybe riseaman is referring this
story which may have become slightly exaggerated?
The last project that I worked on with Richard was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement.
When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. "Hey, we got it right!" he said. "Not bad for amateurs."
Yes the oceans populated with sand bars, coral reefs, outcrops of rocks and islands has been seriously adversely affected.
Luckily we are working on removing these obstacles to ocean currents by raising sea levels and killing coral reefs. Soon our oceans will be the healthiest oceans ever!
You make a good point about the erosion of ocean shelf we need to find some way of removing energy from destructive waves and wind. Maybe even harvesting the energy? Then everything will be solved.
Though you have phrased your post as a joke you are absolutely right! Playing about with harvesting zero point energy is the most dangerous thing ever and has a good change of destroying the universe as we know it.
Eero point energy are usually based on the idea that the vacuum of space it not at it's lowest possible value. Instead it is at a local minima. If that is the case it may be possible to push a region of space from the
false vacuum to a lower energy state and there by releasing energy. Observe that it is not as such energy from nothing, but the energy released by changing the state of space itself. Unfortunately the affect of this is likely to be an ever expanding bubble of space which will move at the speed of light creating the
end of the universe .
ZPE enthusiasts are not only kooks but a danger to everything. Universes which create such beings are luckily naturally selected against.
First of all, we're calling Global Climate Change now, since, you know, the planet has been COOLING for the last decade, despite all the CO2.
Well you can say that, but the
data says different.
Secondly global atmospheric temperature is not the same as the amount of heat energy. The heat capacity of the oceans are far greater than the atmosphere, but it is rather hard to measure the temperature of the entire ocean. If you really think that we will experince cooling in the next 10 years then take a bet with
this guy.
No, the fact is, I haven't heard a scientific THEORY about CO2, at all.
Well that shows your ignorance. In fact the
reasoning is simple for CO2 influence on global temperature, which is why I "believe" it. In fact this is not hypothesis, nor is it theory. It is FACT that increased concentrations of CO2 will block infra-red radiation radiating into space. The only possible way that increased CO2 does not create a warmer climate is if there is a feedback loop that increased CO2 levels produces which more than cancels their known warming effect. Don't even think plant growth because if that were the case than the CO2 levels over the last 200 years would never have risen.
Uh, huh.
Well if you notice that the four inner planets are rocky and most are devoid of water. While the outer planets are made of gas and bigger maybe the material that formed the solar system was not evenly spread.
The top reason for this is the sun is hot!
Read an
encyclopaedia.
I keep going over the proof for Noah's flood. It's not as far-flung as it sounds if you actually RTFM. It calls for a number of animals that would fit in a rowboat- it doesn't have to be millions. And it doesn't have to be a full world, either: Rome 'taxed the world' and I'm certain they didn't get New Jersey.
What?
Considering there are thousands of species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles each. Plus 100,000s of species of plants and millions of species of insects it must be quite a large row boat. No they could not have evolved suddenly in the last few thousand years, into the multitude we see today.
So here's the question.
What *actually* happens when the poles reverse and the Van Allen (etc) belts come down for a short time? The solar wind, largely H3 I'm told, touches an oxygen-covered surface at 33,000mph. So hot hydrogen..on oxygen...rain?
Well the Van Allen belts will dissipate presumably dumping some charged particles in the atmosphere. The reduced magnetic field will allow more solar wind and cosmic rays to hit the atmosphere. But considering there have been many such reversals over time and life has survived fine it's probably not that bad. Regarding rain well I don't know but as the last reversal was 780,000 years ago I doubt it was ever recorded. Homo sapiens are believed to have originated 200,000 years ago.
Even basic test tools like IOmeter require significant CPU usage to drive an HBA to capacity. And that is when it's writing/reading all zeros. It's doesn't actually need to do anything with the data. As would be the case if a database server was requesting 2Gb/s from a disk array, and then had to join/sort/add/whatever the tables retrieved.
What is the CPU doing? Is the memory controller/CPU overwhelmed with data?
With say 1Gb of I/O how does the seek time affect the performance of the work these servers are doing?
True some parts of society promote say promiscuity and some forms of hedonism. For instance the media tend to promote promiscuity presumably because they think it "sells". If you asked the advertisers themselves they would say they are not promoting it. It is simply a picture of a beautiful woman.
They don't intend to promote promiscuity, it is a side effect of them gaining sells. Most other parts of society actively are against promiscuity. The government hands out advice on STDs, "don't have one night stands". People tend to think of others who have many partners not as studs but people who can't form relationships. Parents, religious groups and probably your neighbour see it as unsavoury. If you want to focus on the bad parts of society that is fine, but one part does not mean all parts.
I've come to believe that human's are simply programmed to line themselves up in groups, to fight imagined or real enemies in other groups.
Well you are absolutely right, because working together as a group can benefit everyone in that group.
Imagine you have "free agents" identical in every way except for their color so they are easily differentiated. In this world there are finite resources. Say there are three overall strategies:-
Working individually
Working all together
Working as one of two teams
Strategy 1 does not give you the benefit of working together to accomplish what one alone could never do.
Strategy 2 is pretty good.
Strategy 3 can be the best option because if you work against the other group you can steal their resources, kill them and take them as slaves all to the benefit of yourself.
Of course this is a very simple example and the real world is more complex but I think you can see that grouping together based on little more than nothing and then working against "the others" even if they are the exactly the same as yourself can make sense.
The Bible seeks to promote cohesion by explaining the benefits of good social behavior and uncovering the lies of society (society tries to tell us that bad behaviors like promiscuity, deceitfulness, idolatry and hedonism will make us happy, while in truth those behaviors separate us from the life-giving society we are a part of and will only lead to isolation and tragedy).
Your sentence does not make sense as I have tried to emphasise. Promiscuity, deceitfulness and hedonism (I will leave out idolatry as this is only bad in monotheistic religious) are not lies of society. These are selfish desires of animals (and therefore humans). Almost every society creates rules through law, religion and morality which try to counter our desires which may (often briefly) benefit the individual but harm society.
Of course sometimes a society can lose its way, for example you could say in parts of the west greed was not really considered that bad. I believe that view is now on the wane as western society notices that greed really is bad for society.
While what you say can be true BUT efficiency != sustainability. Efficiency is certainly part of sustainability, but sustainability is defined as the article states, "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Consider oil, to meet sustainability for oil, to literally use it no faster than it is naturally created, would be impossible with efficiency gains. It means not using oil at all as an energy source.
The main argument I see used against sustainability is that it is too expensive. Well if that is true then our children are fuc*ed because we will leave them with far less then we had. People argue that once a resource becomes too expensive then the economy will naturally switch to another. The problem with this concept is we pick the lowest hanging fruit first, what we pick next is almost always going to be worse. As it is worse then we will be unable to support the infrastructure and population we already have. Secondly to switch from one resource model to another requires a lot of work and resources. If we are already running low on resources that the current economy is using how will we be able to change?
The only intelligent answer is that we look ahead and pick a path which is sustainable while we still have the resources to do so. Doing it now is far cheaper than in 30 years when we have to because no one can afford oil, fish, etc.
Fundamentally do we live greedily, taking as much as we can and meeting our every desire? Or do we use as much as we need in a way so that humanity and the Earth will fare well in the future?
Maybe you're confused, but reducing carbon emissions isn't about being FAIR so that everyone gets to do just as much environmental damage as everyone else, it's about reducing carbon emissions.
Sorry, but reducing carbon emissions globally has to be fair. Would you accept being left at the bottom rung of the ladder while others are still living the high life?
Considering China and India are so populous we have to work with them otherwise trying to reduce CO2 emissions would be pointless. The only way through is not to bother or radically alter how we generate energy in our economies. Until we have achieved that, the west has to face up to the truth that we are greedy bastards and are able to reduce our usage far more that the poor of this world.
I think you are thinking of a different Internet. On the one I use if you have nothing to say then you better tell everyone.
But perhaps you have a point there is already Facebook, Twitter and a whole load of special websites for people with nothing to say.
The other side of the coin is that humans are actually intelligent when they put their minds to it. Some of the terrorist plots have been pretty clueless but a well planned and executed plot will take account of the security measures.
If the security at airports and planes is good then why not attack elsewhere and nullify all that work?
DRM suffers from the same problem, your security is only as strong as the weakest link. No security is perfect because you need to trust something, but who watchers the watchers?
I am still stuck at the "something from nothing" question.
This is probably the most vexing question in all philosophy. The way I tend to look at it is why is there anything at all? Why does anything exist? Could all of existence/Multiverse whatever simply not be there
It gives me a headache just thinking about it.
Lets consider what would have happened if you had hit another strong car without crumple zones at 35 mph in a head on collision.
Assuming both cars are really strong (which most likely means heavy which makes it worse) the impulse in a crash would be immense. Maybe the cars are OK but the passengers would not be!
The same situation with light cars with crumple zones would mean that the passengers would experience much less of a G force and less damage. The cars will be worse off, but at least you would have a chance of not being injured. Would you rather be the crumple zone or your car?
According to this
talk
(fast forward to about 8:30) only 5% of the weight of the car is the driver and therefore only about 1% of the energy of the fuel is used to transport you. What a waste!
His solution is to use carbon composites.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally the RICS study gives figures at the other end of the extreme. I can't find how they calculated the figures but they seem well off. I do know that they did not take into account raising fuel prices, the money you can get from returning power to the grid and government subsides.
A quote from the independent article for a proponent of the other side is, "He (Jeremy Leggett, executive chairman of Solar Century) estimated the current payback of power-generating PV panels was 13 years."
I hate ironing too, get no iron clothes they are great!
Actually, that isn't speciation as the traditional context of species is concerned. You have either been tricked into believing something from an agenda driven site or are just that ignorant and want to make the leap.
All of the supposed speciation is backwards compatible in that breeding out the differences to produce a separate so called species can be breed back with only existing anomalies within the same new species. This indicates that speciation did not actually occur but the plant species or insect species was just taken to one extreme or another. You simply do not have a new species if you can create the old species with nothing but breeding techniques/decisions of the new species.
So the first example in grandparents post is this:
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
So how does that fit in with your post?
Why was this modded down? The poster asks some questions very valid for discussion. Science forbids we hold anything but a one-sided discussion? Do we just mod anybody down we don't agree with out of existence?
It was probably modded down because his question has been answered on this page and his car argument makes little sense. How in heaven's name can it be said that because science can explain a car it was not created and instead "evolved". The amount of ridiculous thinking in the post hints that the poster will not listen.
The poster makes a valid point. I'm personally annoyed by all the mouth breathers who are SO anxious to prove Intelligent Design people wrong, so much so that they don't use good science and claim ridiculous things as being evolution. I heard a discussion one day about how big corn is now compared to in the past. They said something about people meddling with corn genetics and that was somehow evolution because the corn "changed". Ugh! Bad science is WORSE than no science at all. Can we stop the madness?
Well evolution means change, look it up in the dictionary. The theory of evolution attempts to explain how this change occurs (and more). Therefore to say by human selection of the biggest corn kernels over many years the corn has changed to become bigger is absolutely right. Substitute the word evolution for the word change and it is still right.
Evolution if fact! It is the fact that over time the life on Earth has changed!
The theory of evolution is an attempt to explain how life changed over time and is not proved, nor will it ever be proved, because that is not how the Universe works.
Why are such simple things so easily misunderstood?
Right, so... Whether the terms content creators / publishers impose on your "ownership" of a product are fair or not, you still want to be able to use the product they sell? Yet you want all of this at the terms you? Who gave you the right? If you don't want to abide by a specific term or condition, you don't get to use the product. That's just not how a free market works, and you know it.
If the publisher imposes conditions on a product, and they are the only sellers of that product, where is the free market? Take a Madonna album, how many different publishers are there and how do their conditions and prices compare? If there is only one how can it be a free market?
If you like a song and want to play it to an audience, who gave them the right to stop you or charge you money? Why?
I'm aware. My point is that I'm tired of "but how much CO2 does it generate?" being tacked on to everything because it's the current fad question.
Fair enough, the answer has such a large range of possible answers that it is meaningless.
The coming ice-age was a science disaster fad.
Well there were a few papers on the subject. But it was more speculation than accepted scientific consensus. Would you rather all scientist in a field focus on one thing, or explore every conceivable angle?
So was the coming overpopulation and world famine.
Well I can't easily believe the Earth can harbour 6.7 billion people with the level of affluence that the west have. Something has to give, either quality of life or population. Also there are 1 billion who are hungry in the world. Don't you remember the food riots last year?
And the ozone holes that would cause everyone to get skin cancer. And....
What everyone? Don't make up straw man arguments. What you have done is taken the sensationalism of the press and applied their echo chamber to what the experts think. What the papers say is not what the experts think! Or to put it another way what the news says is mostly bullshit, with an element of truth. If it tires you then ignore it.
As that saying goes: there is no "disagree" button, and troll, off-topic, and overrated are not substitutes.
Or maybe climate is a complex beast and if you want you can probably find a paper to support your position. Therefore to truly understand you need to know the majority of the subject and its recent findings. Please read chapter 2 pages 188-192
Here is a general paper on the subject.
Of course I don't really expect you will be swayed.
The last project that I worked on with Richard was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement.
When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. "Hey, we got it right!" he said. "Not bad for amateurs."
Yes the oceans populated with sand bars, coral reefs, outcrops of rocks and islands has been seriously adversely affected.
Luckily we are working on removing these obstacles to ocean currents by raising sea levels and killing coral reefs. Soon our oceans will be the healthiest oceans ever!
You make a good point about the erosion of ocean shelf we need to find some way of removing energy from destructive waves and wind. Maybe even harvesting the energy? Then everything will be solved.
Though you have phrased your post as a joke you are absolutely right! Playing about with harvesting zero point energy is the most dangerous thing ever and has a good change of destroying the universe as we know it.
Eero point energy are usually based on the idea that the vacuum of space it not at it's lowest possible value. Instead it is at a local minima. If that is the case it may be possible to push a region of space from the false vacuum to a lower energy state and there by releasing energy. Observe that it is not as such energy from nothing, but the energy released by changing the state of space itself. Unfortunately the affect of this is likely to be an ever expanding bubble of space which will move at the speed of light creating the end of the universe .
ZPE enthusiasts are not only kooks but a danger to everything. Universes which create such beings are luckily naturally selected against.
First of all, we're calling Global Climate Change now, since, you know, the planet has been COOLING for the last decade, despite all the CO2.
Well you can say that, but the data says different. Secondly global atmospheric temperature is not the same as the amount of heat energy. The heat capacity of the oceans are far greater than the atmosphere, but it is rather hard to measure the temperature of the entire ocean. If you really think that we will experince cooling in the next 10 years then take a bet with this guy.
No, the fact is, I haven't heard a scientific THEORY about CO2, at all.
Well that shows your ignorance. In fact the reasoning is simple for CO2 influence on global temperature, which is why I "believe" it. In fact this is not hypothesis, nor is it theory. It is FACT that increased concentrations of CO2 will block infra-red radiation radiating into space. The only possible way that increased CO2 does not create a warmer climate is if there is a feedback loop that increased CO2 levels produces which more than cancels their known warming effect. Don't even think plant growth because if that were the case than the CO2 levels over the last 200 years would never have risen.
I don't understand
Uh, huh. Well if you notice that the four inner planets are rocky and most are devoid of water. While the outer planets are made of gas and bigger maybe the material that formed the solar system was not evenly spread. The top reason for this is the sun is hot! Read an encyclopaedia.
I keep going over the proof for Noah's flood. It's not as far-flung as it sounds if you actually RTFM. It calls for a number of animals that would fit in a rowboat- it doesn't have to be millions. And it doesn't have to be a full world, either: Rome 'taxed the world' and I'm certain they didn't get New Jersey.
What? Considering there are thousands of species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles each. Plus 100,000s of species of plants and millions of species of insects it must be quite a large row boat. No they could not have evolved suddenly in the last few thousand years, into the multitude we see today.
So here's the question.
What *actually* happens when the poles reverse and the Van Allen (etc) belts come down for a short time? The solar wind, largely H3 I'm told, touches an oxygen-covered surface at 33,000mph. So hot hydrogen..on oxygen...rain?
Well the Van Allen belts will dissipate presumably dumping some charged particles in the atmosphere. The reduced magnetic field will allow more solar wind and cosmic rays to hit the atmosphere. But considering there have been many such reversals over time and life has survived fine it's probably not that bad. Regarding rain well I don't know but as the last reversal was 780,000 years ago I doubt it was ever recorded. Homo sapiens are believed to have originated 200,000 years ago.
Even basic test tools like IOmeter require significant CPU usage to drive an HBA to capacity. And that is when it's writing/reading all zeros. It's doesn't actually need to do anything with the data. As would be the case if a database server was requesting 2Gb/s from a disk array, and then had to join/sort/add/whatever the tables retrieved.
What is the CPU doing? Is the memory controller/CPU overwhelmed with data? With say 1Gb of I/O how does the seek time affect the performance of the work these servers are doing?
True some parts of society promote say promiscuity and some forms of hedonism. For instance the media tend to promote promiscuity presumably because they think it "sells". If you asked the advertisers themselves they would say they are not promoting it. It is simply a picture of a beautiful woman.
They don't intend to promote promiscuity, it is a side effect of them gaining sells. Most other parts of society actively are against promiscuity. The government hands out advice on STDs, "don't have one night stands". People tend to think of others who have many partners not as studs but people who can't form relationships. Parents, religious groups and probably your neighbour see it as unsavoury. If you want to focus on the bad parts of society that is fine, but one part does not mean all parts.
I've come to believe that human's are simply programmed to line themselves up in groups, to fight imagined or real enemies in other groups.
Well you are absolutely right, because working together as a group can benefit everyone in that group.
Imagine you have "free agents" identical in every way except for their color so they are easily differentiated. In this world there are finite resources. Say there are three overall strategies:-
Strategy 1 does not give you the benefit of working together to accomplish what one alone could never do. Strategy 2 is pretty good. Strategy 3 can be the best option because if you work against the other group you can steal their resources, kill them and take them as slaves all to the benefit of yourself.
Of course this is a very simple example and the real world is more complex but I think you can see that grouping together based on little more than nothing and then working against "the others" even if they are the exactly the same as yourself can make sense.
The Bible seeks to promote cohesion by explaining the benefits of good social behavior and uncovering the lies of society (society tries to tell us that bad behaviors like promiscuity, deceitfulness, idolatry and hedonism will make us happy, while in truth those behaviors separate us from the life-giving society we are a part of and will only lead to isolation and tragedy).
Your sentence does not make sense as I have tried to emphasise. Promiscuity, deceitfulness and hedonism (I will leave out idolatry as this is only bad in monotheistic religious) are not lies of society. These are selfish desires of animals (and therefore humans). Almost every society creates rules through law, religion and morality which try to counter our desires which may (often briefly) benefit the individual but harm society.
Of course sometimes a society can lose its way, for example you could say in parts of the west greed was not really considered that bad. I believe that view is now on the wane as western society notices that greed really is bad for society.
While what you say can be true BUT efficiency != sustainability. Efficiency is certainly part of sustainability, but sustainability is defined as the article states, "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Consider oil, to meet sustainability for oil, to literally use it no faster than it is naturally created, would be impossible with efficiency gains. It means not using oil at all as an energy source.
The main argument I see used against sustainability is that it is too expensive. Well if that is true then our children are fuc*ed because we will leave them with far less then we had. People argue that once a resource becomes too expensive then the economy will naturally switch to another. The problem with this concept is we pick the lowest hanging fruit first, what we pick next is almost always going to be worse. As it is worse then we will be unable to support the infrastructure and population we already have. Secondly to switch from one resource model to another requires a lot of work and resources. If we are already running low on resources that the current economy is using how will we be able to change?
The only intelligent answer is that we look ahead and pick a path which is sustainable while we still have the resources to do so. Doing it now is far cheaper than in 30 years when we have to because no one can afford oil, fish, etc.
Fundamentally do we live greedily, taking as much as we can and meeting our every desire? Or do we use as much as we need in a way so that humanity and the Earth will fare well in the future?
Maybe you're confused, but reducing carbon emissions isn't about being FAIR so that everyone gets to do just as much environmental damage as everyone else, it's about reducing carbon emissions.
Sorry, but reducing carbon emissions globally has to be fair. Would you accept being left at the bottom rung of the ladder while others are still living the high life?
Considering China and India are so populous we have to work with them otherwise trying to reduce CO2 emissions would be pointless. The only way through is not to bother or radically alter how we generate energy in our economies. Until we have achieved that, the west has to face up to the truth that we are greedy bastards and are able to reduce our usage far more that the poor of this world.
I think you are thinking of a different Internet. On the one I use if you have nothing to say then you better tell everyone.
But perhaps you have a point there is already Facebook, Twitter and a whole load of special websites for people with nothing to say.
MightyDrunken is hungover and needs a beer.
They are interesting to look at, but are probably not alien space craft or even UFOs.
Are you sure that it's detrimental? In general, the warmer periods in Earth's history coincide with a vigorous growth in the biosphere.
Citation needed.
More energy is available.
I could quibble but I won't.
Yeah, we lose Texas. but we gain large swaths of Canada and Siberia.
You forgot we lose India, China, Brazil, Southern Europe ...(depends on the degree of warming)
Just remember: Change isn't always bad. Climate change might be bad, might be good; most likely it will be a mix.
Well it is bad if people are living in areas which are by the sea or where they can farm and then it moves. Lots of people would have to move.
The other side of the coin is that humans are actually intelligent when they put their minds to it. Some of the terrorist plots have been pretty clueless but a well planned and executed plot will take account of the security measures.
If the security at airports and planes is good then why not attack elsewhere and nullify all that work?
DRM suffers from the same problem, your security is only as strong as the weakest link. No security is perfect because you need to trust something, but who watchers the watchers?
I am still stuck at the "something from nothing" question.
This is probably the most vexing question in all philosophy. The way I tend to look at it is why is there anything at all? Why does anything exist? Could all of existence/Multiverse whatever simply not be there
It gives me a headache just thinking about it.
Lets consider what would have happened if you had hit another strong car without crumple zones at 35 mph in a head on collision. Assuming both cars are really strong (which most likely means heavy which makes it worse) the impulse in a crash would be immense. Maybe the cars are OK but the passengers would not be!
The same situation with light cars with crumple zones would mean that the passengers would experience much less of a G force and less damage. The cars will be worse off, but at least you would have a chance of not being injured. Would you rather be the crumple zone or your car?
According to this talk (fast forward to about 8:30) only 5% of the weight of the car is the driver and therefore only about 1% of the energy of the fuel is used to transport you. What a waste!
His solution is to use carbon composites.
No these are far too easy. Want we want are SECRET QUESTIONS, not answers. Mine is, "The answer is 42. What is the question?".