Good thing I didn't say that. 'Public face' is not the same as 'all are'.
Good thing that's not relevant to the point. The same argument can be made of both sides.
The only thing 'the right' has to do to push Stormfront off the front page is call them out and stop making excuses for them. By not doing that they are encouraging them. For a group with the kind of horrible violent history 'the right' has, controlling authoritarian impulses is the minimum we should expect from them.
It's a stupid argument no matter who makes it. The reason you're seeing headlines about it is that there's an entire industry set up to make sure that Americans are afraid of what they need to be afraid of on any given week. Generally, it's more useful with conservatives, who respond well to the idea that {{jews/gays/blacks/queers/illegals/druggies}} are a threat. On the liberal side the bogeymen seem to be Trump and Neo-Nazis, but it doesn't seem to be a good enough bogeyman to win them elections, so far.
Either way, it's best not to make arguments that assume that your opponents are all bad because some of them are bad. It's technically a fallacy, but also, if you really feel the need to play the game where we oversimplify these groups, I'm pretty sure that the tide of popular opinion is not going to come down how you want.
It's great how you can reduce the problem to a black-and-white issue that you can understand, and pretend that's all there is to the argument. You still have not offered a reason why this is unconstitutional, and you're very carefully avoiding the concept of prosecutorial discretion, which has been a part of common law since before the Constitution was written.
And yes, there is also such thing as the statute of limitations. The point of a justice system is not punishment but rehabilitation. If someone lives quietly for decades after a crime as a happy and productive member of society, isn't that the end goal anyway? And there is of course no moral requirement to obey an immoral law. And god forbid someone might stop to examine what this all might cost to enforce, both in dollars and in expanded police powers.
Your other link was probably intended to be this site. They also have a GitHub page. The code itself is written in PHP in a procedural style, which in 2017 is offensively poor practice. No one should ever use that code under any circumstances, and in a just world the author would be legally enjoined from pursuing this profession.
Yep, writing a sentence from both ends is a pretty bad move. So you could pick "You seem to be confused about the relevance of anti-net-neutrality arguments to conversations about public infrastructure." or "the relevance of anti-net-neutrality arguments to conversations about public infrastructure is strange."
And then you can fuck off because you're only trolling here anyway.
You seem to be confused about the relevance of anti-net-neutrality arguments to conversations about public infrastructure is strange. You're also using a tired and fallacious argument for doing so; NN isn't "all bytes are equal," it's "don't prioritize based on endpoint". Now perhaps we can return to discussing putting pipes in the ground without your dragging in the topic of what to do with them afterwards.
Yes, someone was bound to show up with a "slippery slope" argument. Your point is completely sound, but I don't often find myself advocating genocide, so this is an acceptable risk. Also, whether or not you dislike this idea, you have no legal argument for an alternative: one cannot be forced to provide a platform for arbitrary speech. If we nationalized the Internet infrastructure, or if Nazism were a protected class, this would become a more interesting question. As is, I gotta say I sleep pretty easy knowing that somewhere out in the world, people who celebrate genocide are facing discrimination.
I think your central confusion may be conflating "refusing service" with "providing inferior service". The business may accept or refuse customers for any non-discriminatory reason, but (in this case) they have to give all their customers the same service. And we would not necessarily make these rules if there were not direct financial incentives for abuse, and (perhaps arguably) a history of that actually happening. ISPs are not all monopolies, but the ISP markets generally are not characterized by robust competition, due to high costs of entry.
I don't think you disagree with the concept of "protected classes" so much as you disagree with which classes are protected. The intent was to prevent people from discriminating against things that can't be changed about a person. I am sympathetic to the idea that religion should not belong in that category, but I am not sure that's something that I personally want to advocate. Saying that people shouldn't be allowed to discriminate based on age, sex, or some other physical characteristic is hopefully uncontroversial?
You don't have to wonder, if you realize those are orthogonal issues. You see, hosting content on the Internet costs money, and it's not one of those universal government services. Therefore you are paying some private individual for this. Private individuals can generally conduct business as they choose within the bounds of the law. Businesses typically are able to refuse service for any reason, with the exception being if this decision is based on the customer's race, religion, sex, nationality, etc. So far, I don't believe anyone is claiming Nazism as a religion, and Nazis are not otherwise members of a protected class. The legal situation is pretty clear, barring motivated reasoning.
Net neutrality on the other hand involves not prioritizing traffic based on endpoint. So one would not be able to de-prioritize traffic to Nazi websites based on these rules. To the degree that there has been any unfair prioritization, this has been based on business concerns and not the content itself. Thus while there is a potential avenue for a First Amendment claim, the actual issue being addressed by these rules is monopoly abuse.
Nazis deserve all of the protections afforded to them by law, and not a damn thing more. In advocating genocide, you give up the protections afforded to you by common human decency. Freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequences: if what you say makes people want to exercise their freedom not to associate with you, that's kinda a personal problem.
Really anything other than FTTP would be good. At this point one can make a pretty serious argument for choosing leaders by random lottery: at least it would "drain the swamp", right? Personally I think I would rather have range voting or approval voting. A five-star rating or a YouTube-style thumbs-up thumbs-down ballot would hopefully be familiar enough from daily use to be palatable to voters.
on the other activists who keep insisting that the problem is Real Serious Now, but at the same time reject any approaches that might actually fix the problem.
I'm sure those are exactly the same people.
Iron fertilization is not a new concept and has been explored by scientists in the past. Here's what the IPCC had to say:
Iron fertilization of the oceans may be a strategy for removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The idea is that it stimulates the growth of phytoplankton and therefore sequesters CO2 in the form of particulate organic carbon (POC). There have been eleven field studies in different ocean regions with the primary aim of examining the impact of iron as a limiting nutrient for phytoplankton by the addition of small quantities (1–10 tonnes) of iron sulphate to the surface ocean. In addition, commercial tests are being pursued with the combined (and conflicting) aims of increasing ocean carbon sequestration and productivity. It should be noted, however, that iron addition will only stimulate phytoplankton growth in ~30% of the oceans (the Southern Ocean, the equatorial Pacific and the Sub-Arctic Pacific), where iron depletion prevails. Only two experiments to date (Buesseler and Boyd, 2003) have reported on the second phase, the sinking and vertical transport of the increased phytoplankton biomass to depths below the main thermocline (>120m). The efficiency of sequestration of the phytoplankton carbon is low (<10%), with the biomass being largely recycled back to CO2 in the upper water column (Boyd et al., 2004). This suggests that the field-study estimates of the actual carbon sequestered per unit iron (and per dollar) are over-estimates. The cost of large-scale and long-term fertilization will also be offset by CO2 release/emission during the acquisition, transportation and release of large volumes of iron in remote oceanic regions. Potential negative effects of iron fertilization include the increased production of methane and nitrous oxide, deoxygenation of intermediate waters and changes in phytoplankton community composition that may cause toxic blooms and/or promote changes further along the food chain. None of these effects have been directly identified in experiments to date, partly due to the time and space constraints.
Emphasis mine. Personally I'd sooner explore market-based solutions before heading to geoengineering. Markets are at least theoretically the most efficient way to allocate resources. Algal carbon sequestration has in Earth's past been a method to extract large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere, and there would be a certain poetic justice to use the same technique which resulted in many of the hydrocarbon source deposits. Unfortunately what is practical for Nature may not hold true for us.
So this Haida Gwai "experiment" seems to have deposited 120 tonnes of iron into a square kilometer of ocean. The persons who did this and claimed that this was brilliantly successful did not perform any study designed to show this. Researchers who did attempt to study the experiment did not come to the same conclusions.further discussion. Generally, the ocean is a fairly large thing, and we should not expect to see large effects from manipulating any given square kilometer of it.
At the moment it seems like there's more people willing to try to sell carbon credits for dumping things in the ocean than hard evidence that dumping is effective, as your link points out. The international community seems willing to permit experimentation so long as it is properly controlled. The fundamental soundness of geoengineering is an open question, but setting that aside, the fundamental soundness of this particular strategy seems quite dubious. If you do have some more recent or higher quality studies on the matter, I'm sure I would be gratified for any correction.
Let's require every global warming activist to take MDMA. Then we could actually sit down and start fixing the carbon problem.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the President of the United States is a global warming activist or if you're implying that the roadblock in fixing the "carbon problem" is not the current majority party's two-decade stance against the existence of said problem.
I suppose the former might be valid if one considers "rolling coal" to be a form of activism.
It's like you saw those characterizations as a challenge to live out. I admit, it's amusing.
Because I don't parrot the Climate Change talking points I am obviously the enemy and therefore need to be labeled as ignorant, racist, or worse.
The first symptom of emotional reasoning is projection, it seems. I would never think of you as an enemy; that would imply that I took you seriously. Your introduction of the topic of racism is suggestive, but not interesting. If you want to take on some labels voluntarily then that would seem like a personal issue.
The point of the CO graph is to show the incredible progress that's been made since the Environmental Movement started
I'm not sure how you can confuse this for "incredible progress", and I don't think that you quite understand the distinction between environmental activists and climate scientists. It's not some sense of stewardship that is driving the IPCC, it's the straightforward application of the known physics of the carbon dioxide molecule. Carbon monoxide is only a serious environmental concern by the stretch of a desperate imagination.
There seems to be a popular delusion among conservatives that climate science begins and ends with An Inconvenient Truth, probably because no stretch of the imagination will encompass a political conspiracy of scientists lasting for more than ten decades. In this way you can dismiss uncontroversial facts as "talking points". It's not that you're not parroting talking points, however: you haven't even identified what points you might or might not be repeating. I'm not convinced you have any idea what you even believe about the physics. As long as these scientists are wrong you don't have to think about that, right?
The greatest contributor to CO2 is carbon monoxide.
For the sake of charity I'm forced to assume that this is not what you meant to say. Carbon monoxide has a negligible influence on climate. It absorbs little energy directly and only persists in the atmosphere for about a month. See the summary here, or the full paper here.[pdf]
This is why some people are skeptical.
I hope that by "some people" you are excluding yourself from the group of people who would take a page of celebrity quotations as a credible argument of any sort. "Some people" are "skeptical" because they have no use for objective reality. Mostly they have no idea what they're even saying, and they refuse to expose themselves to enough information about the subject to make a remotely sensible objection. Saying, "AGW isn't happening," is a non-statement. Humans are dumping huge amounts of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, which will result in warming. If you're disputing that fact, what part are you disputing? That humans are releasing gigatons of carbon, or that it's a greenhouse gas? Keeping in mind that the heat properties of CO2 can be verified in your basement. What part of thermodynamics is wrong? What term is missing from our radiative transfer equations? What hidden mechanism would transfer excess heat from the Earth? It's like saying that gravity is wrong -- it's not a claim in itself, and it's not to say that you're automatically a crackpot, but you do need to account for a couple contrary observations in your theory, and your explanation should probably be better than "I dunno, but it's still wrong!"
Personally, I maintain some hope that AGW will turn out to be milder than anticipated. The 3.7 W/m^2 is a pretty hard lower bound due to thermodynamics, but the H2O feedbacks allow for a fairly wide range of scenarios. It would be nice if Dr. Lindzen's Iris hypothesis were credible. As things are, however, there's just not a lot of room for alternate theories. Any unknown effects would have to be extremely large to offset the warming signal, and extremely subtle to not have been noticed to date in any of the atmospheres that we have studied. Given that our atmospheric physics equations describe extraterrestrial atmospheres well, including the atmosphere of the Sun, the amount of special pleading that would be required seems effectively infinite.
I'm not sure why you think this contradicts anything I've said. Are you under the impression that the molecule retains that heat energy for longer than a few milliseconds?
But eventually, we would settle into a warmer, but likely slowly declining quasi-equilibrium.
Burning all the world's fossil fuels would make the poles pretty tropical for (IIRC) 10e4-10e5 years before silicate weathering would bring things down to a reasonably semblance of normality.
Ultimately the reason why Earth cannot undergo a true runaway warming scenario is that the stratosphere is cold. Water vapor condenses and precipitates out of the upper atmosphere instead of building up there, and CO2 can't get the job done by itself. In a half-billion years or so the increasing solar output will be enough to slowly cook off the oceans, and we'll enter into a 'moist greenhouse' phase before things get *really* toasty.
AGW was first proposed in 1896, and discredited for the next five decades. During the period 1950-1970 the growing body of evidence was sufficient to reverse the consensus, and since then all of the evidence is pointing towards, "Yes, this phenomenon is real and behaves as we expect." Denying this has become a symbol of ideological purity for a current political party, but there's only so far one can take that tactic.
The science is really pretty simple. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Originally, we did not think that it could build up in the atmosphere, and we thought that it could not contribute any more to warming than [a] what it was already doing, and [b] what water vapor was doing. After we became better able to observe the upper atmosphere, it was realized that, yes, there was a bit of a gap for CO2 in the H2O spectrum, but more importantly, the CO2-dense part of the atmosphere extends quite a bit higher than the tropopause. But what does that matter if it's already completely opaque at lower CO2 concentrations?
The effect of a higher partial pressure of CO2 is to push the CO2-dense region of the atmosphere further out into space, increasing the effective 'top-of-atmosphere'. This means that outgoing radiation must take a longer path out of the atmosphere, which effectively traps heat in the lower atmosphere. The "no-feedback forcing" can be relatively straightforwardly calculated to be ~3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of atmospheric CO2, which is equivalent to about 1 degree C of global temperature change.
Now, that in itself is not a huge deal. The issue is that H2O is a strong greenhouse gas and you may have noticed that there happens to be some rather large reservoirs of that stuff lying around just itching to be part of the atmosphere. We've spent quite a bit of time looking for ways that the H2O feedback won't end up being a huge issue. And I think that I'm maligning anyone to suggest that Dr. Lindzen has had the most credible alternate hypothesis in decades, which sadly he has not been able to find credible evidence for. Some major flaw in the physics of H2O is about all that would save us at this point.
AGW is a theory that we've been trying to disprove for more than a century. We've known for about 150 years that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and that many human activities release large amounts of this substance, but the initial assumption was that climate was cyclical and that warm years would balance out cold ones. The theories of AGW and climate change have at every step had to fight for acceptance among people who (reasonably enough) were not prepared to believe in them.
And then in more recent history there is a crowd of conservative voices who have -- being generous -- rejected empiricism in favor of a more rationalist epistemology. Truth is not what you measure -- measurements can be biased, measurers can lie -- truth is what you can prove with logic and reason. It's not like science can measure God, and those scientists are all leftist eggheads anyway. Those elitists don't have a monopoly on truth. Which is all well and good, and certainly an internally consistent philosophy, but if the tragedy of empiricism is never being sure of anything, the problem with non-empirical philosophies is that they are under no obligation to be consistent with observable reality. Politicians at the moment find it useful to take up an anti-empirical position, and rather sensibly they've picked a topic which to date has yet to make much meaningful impact on the lives of most Americans. (I'm from Alaska; the glaciers and permafrost melting has been fairly readily apparent there, since the bulk of these effects has been at the lower alpine/tidewater icefields and the edges of the permafrost fields -- the most visible and accessible areas.)
At this point the Republicans seem a bit screwed. Their constituency won't allow them to walk this one back -- supporting climate science has been a great way to lose Republican primaries in recent years. Symptoms of warming are (consistent with other conspiracy the
Right, how terrible of leftists to object to systemic oppression. When you stop trying to legislate morality, science, and people's genitalia and the color of their skin I'm sure we'll have fewer social issues.
The hatred on the left is a reaction to your team's bigotry. Your values are un-American and antisocial. Which is fine, really, because they're also not shared by the younger generation. Whenever your crowd dies off the social unrest will too. Trump and Arpaio are looking pretty old. And if it comes down to it, you bigots are in the minority, and you've lost pretty consistently throughout history. There isn't a path to victory for you. I'd say it's sad, but you're so far out of touch with the real world that your frothing is actually somewhat comical. Maybe I can start a pool on which will happen first, your death by apoplexy or Trump's resignation.
I also feel that tackling the hazards on a highway as far easier than those on city and town roads. There are a lot less variables on a highway than on a city street.
No, the incidence of the variable elements is lower. If I may be allowed to characterize, I think it's kind of a software mindset to try to reduce the problem to a simpler one, and to pay more attention to the error rate than the failure mode. At the risk of being flippant, we have a tolerance for crashes (I'm also a dev). Given that the energy of any collision rises with the square of velocity, the inherent risk of these collisions also rises proportionally with velocity. Immature technology in this kind of unforgiving environment is likely to result in serious loss of life. We can't guarantee that there will not be road hazards on the highway, so as long as there's a relatively large chance that the car will make a serious error in identifying or responding to a hazard, it's best if we test things out in the environments where hazards are both higher-incidence and lower-risk.
As for the infrastructure, we have HOV lanes because they improve throughput. There may be a point in the future where there are sufficient autonomous vehicles on the road that this will be true for them as well, but until then most cities are not going to be able to carve off extra lanes for this traffic.
Heaher Heyer's death is squarely on the shoulders of the US Left.
I have rarely seen a more malicious falsehood, and it staggers belief that you of all people would be arguing against personal responsibility. For shame, sir.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thing I didn't say that. 'Public face' is not the same as 'all are'.
Good thing that's not relevant to the point. The same argument can be made of both sides.
The only thing 'the right' has to do to push Stormfront off the front page is call them out and stop making excuses for them. By not doing that they are encouraging them. For a group with the kind of horrible violent history 'the right' has, controlling authoritarian impulses is the minimum we should expect from them.
It's a stupid argument no matter who makes it. The reason you're seeing headlines about it is that there's an entire industry set up to make sure that Americans are afraid of what they need to be afraid of on any given week. Generally, it's more useful with conservatives, who respond well to the idea that {{jews/gays/blacks/queers/illegals/druggies}} are a threat. On the liberal side the bogeymen seem to be Trump and Neo-Nazis, but it doesn't seem to be a good enough bogeyman to win them elections, so far.
Either way, it's best not to make arguments that assume that your opponents are all bad because some of them are bad. It's technically a fallacy, but also, if you really feel the need to play the game where we oversimplify these groups, I'm pretty sure that the tide of popular opinion is not going to come down how you want.
It's great how you can reduce the problem to a black-and-white issue that you can understand, and pretend that's all there is to the argument. You still have not offered a reason why this is unconstitutional, and you're very carefully avoiding the concept of prosecutorial discretion, which has been a part of common law since before the Constitution was written.
And yes, there is also such thing as the statute of limitations. The point of a justice system is not punishment but rehabilitation. If someone lives quietly for decades after a crime as a happy and productive member of society, isn't that the end goal anyway? And there is of course no moral requirement to obey an immoral law. And god forbid someone might stop to examine what this all might cost to enforce, both in dollars and in expanded police powers.
Would you mind finding some better arguments?
As long as Antifa remains the public face of 'the left'
This is equally and oppositely as wrong as saying all conservatives are fascists.
Your other link was probably intended to be this site. They also have a GitHub page. The code itself is written in PHP in a procedural style, which in 2017 is offensively poor practice. No one should ever use that code under any circumstances, and in a just world the author would be legally enjoined from pursuing this profession.
Yep, writing a sentence from both ends is a pretty bad move. So you could pick "You seem to be confused about the relevance of anti-net-neutrality arguments to conversations about public infrastructure." or "the relevance of anti-net-neutrality arguments to conversations about public infrastructure is strange."
And then you can fuck off because you're only trolling here anyway.
You seem to be confused about the relevance of anti-net-neutrality arguments to conversations about public infrastructure is strange. You're also using a tired and fallacious argument for doing so; NN isn't "all bytes are equal," it's "don't prioritize based on endpoint". Now perhaps we can return to discussing putting pipes in the ground without your dragging in the topic of what to do with them afterwards.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Which probably isn't the best thing I could say about a congressional candidate. Good luck, by the way.
Yes, someone was bound to show up with a "slippery slope" argument. Your point is completely sound, but I don't often find myself advocating genocide, so this is an acceptable risk. Also, whether or not you dislike this idea, you have no legal argument for an alternative: one cannot be forced to provide a platform for arbitrary speech. If we nationalized the Internet infrastructure, or if Nazism were a protected class, this would become a more interesting question. As is, I gotta say I sleep pretty easy knowing that somewhere out in the world, people who celebrate genocide are facing discrimination.
I think your central confusion may be conflating "refusing service" with "providing inferior service". The business may accept or refuse customers for any non-discriminatory reason, but (in this case) they have to give all their customers the same service. And we would not necessarily make these rules if there were not direct financial incentives for abuse, and (perhaps arguably) a history of that actually happening. ISPs are not all monopolies, but the ISP markets generally are not characterized by robust competition, due to high costs of entry.
I don't think you disagree with the concept of "protected classes" so much as you disagree with which classes are protected. The intent was to prevent people from discriminating against things that can't be changed about a person. I am sympathetic to the idea that religion should not belong in that category, but I am not sure that's something that I personally want to advocate. Saying that people shouldn't be allowed to discriminate based on age, sex, or some other physical characteristic is hopefully uncontroversial?
You don't have to wonder, if you realize those are orthogonal issues. You see, hosting content on the Internet costs money, and it's not one of those universal government services. Therefore you are paying some private individual for this. Private individuals can generally conduct business as they choose within the bounds of the law. Businesses typically are able to refuse service for any reason, with the exception being if this decision is based on the customer's race, religion, sex, nationality, etc. So far, I don't believe anyone is claiming Nazism as a religion, and Nazis are not otherwise members of a protected class. The legal situation is pretty clear, barring motivated reasoning.
Net neutrality on the other hand involves not prioritizing traffic based on endpoint. So one would not be able to de-prioritize traffic to Nazi websites based on these rules. To the degree that there has been any unfair prioritization, this has been based on business concerns and not the content itself. Thus while there is a potential avenue for a First Amendment claim, the actual issue being addressed by these rules is monopoly abuse.
Nazis deserve all of the protections afforded to them by law, and not a damn thing more. In advocating genocide, you give up the protections afforded to you by common human decency. Freedom of speech does not imply freedom from consequences: if what you say makes people want to exercise their freedom not to associate with you, that's kinda a personal problem.
Really anything other than FTTP would be good. At this point one can make a pretty serious argument for choosing leaders by random lottery: at least it would "drain the swamp", right? Personally I think I would rather have range voting or approval voting. A five-star rating or a YouTube-style thumbs-up thumbs-down ballot would hopefully be familiar enough from daily use to be palatable to voters.
on the other activists who keep insisting that the problem is Real Serious Now, but at the same time reject any approaches that might actually fix the problem.
I'm sure those are exactly the same people.
Iron fertilization is not a new concept and has been explored by scientists in the past. Here's what the IPCC had to say:
Emphasis mine. Personally I'd sooner explore market-based solutions before heading to geoengineering. Markets are at least theoretically the most efficient way to allocate resources. Algal carbon sequestration has in Earth's past been a method to extract large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere, and there would be a certain poetic justice to use the same technique which resulted in many of the hydrocarbon source deposits. Unfortunately what is practical for Nature may not hold true for us.
So this Haida Gwai "experiment" seems to have deposited 120 tonnes of iron into a square kilometer of ocean. The persons who did this and claimed that this was brilliantly successful did not perform any study designed to show this. Researchers who did attempt to study the experiment did not come to the same conclusions. further discussion. Generally, the ocean is a fairly large thing, and we should not expect to see large effects from manipulating any given square kilometer of it.
At the moment it seems like there's more people willing to try to sell carbon credits for dumping things in the ocean than hard evidence that dumping is effective, as your link points out. The international community seems willing to permit experimentation so long as it is properly controlled. The fundamental soundness of geoengineering is an open question, but setting that aside, the fundamental soundness of this particular strategy seems quite dubious. If you do have some more recent or higher quality studies on the matter, I'm sure I would be gratified for any correction.
Let's require every global warming activist to take MDMA. Then we could actually sit down and start fixing the carbon problem.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the President of the United States is a global warming activist or if you're implying that the roadblock in fixing the "carbon problem" is not the current majority party's two-decade stance against the existence of said problem.
I suppose the former might be valid if one considers "rolling coal" to be a form of activism.
It's like you saw those characterizations as a challenge to live out. I admit, it's amusing.
Because I don't parrot the Climate Change talking points I am obviously the enemy and therefore need to be labeled as ignorant, racist, or worse.
The first symptom of emotional reasoning is projection, it seems. I would never think of you as an enemy; that would imply that I took you seriously. Your introduction of the topic of racism is suggestive, but not interesting. If you want to take on some labels voluntarily then that would seem like a personal issue.
The point of the CO graph is to show the incredible progress that's been made since the Environmental Movement started
I'm not sure how you can confuse this for "incredible progress", and I don't think that you quite understand the distinction between environmental activists and climate scientists. It's not some sense of stewardship that is driving the IPCC, it's the straightforward application of the known physics of the carbon dioxide molecule. Carbon monoxide is only a serious environmental concern by the stretch of a desperate imagination.
There seems to be a popular delusion among conservatives that climate science begins and ends with An Inconvenient Truth, probably because no stretch of the imagination will encompass a political conspiracy of scientists lasting for more than ten decades. In this way you can dismiss uncontroversial facts as "talking points". It's not that you're not parroting talking points, however: you haven't even identified what points you might or might not be repeating. I'm not convinced you have any idea what you even believe about the physics. As long as these scientists are wrong you don't have to think about that, right?
This. You can have a fully functional Linux laptop for $100. It's cheap enough to be disposable, and still powerful enough for dev work at least.
The greatest contributor to CO2 is carbon monoxide.
For the sake of charity I'm forced to assume that this is not what you meant to say. Carbon monoxide has a negligible influence on climate. It absorbs little energy directly and only persists in the atmosphere for about a month. See the summary here, or the full paper here.[pdf]
This is why some people are skeptical.
I hope that by "some people" you are excluding yourself from the group of people who would take a page of celebrity quotations as a credible argument of any sort. "Some people" are "skeptical" because they have no use for objective reality. Mostly they have no idea what they're even saying, and they refuse to expose themselves to enough information about the subject to make a remotely sensible objection. Saying, "AGW isn't happening," is a non-statement. Humans are dumping huge amounts of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, which will result in warming. If you're disputing that fact, what part are you disputing? That humans are releasing gigatons of carbon, or that it's a greenhouse gas? Keeping in mind that the heat properties of CO2 can be verified in your basement. What part of thermodynamics is wrong? What term is missing from our radiative transfer equations? What hidden mechanism would transfer excess heat from the Earth? It's like saying that gravity is wrong -- it's not a claim in itself, and it's not to say that you're automatically a crackpot, but you do need to account for a couple contrary observations in your theory, and your explanation should probably be better than "I dunno, but it's still wrong!"
Personally, I maintain some hope that AGW will turn out to be milder than anticipated. The 3.7 W/m^2 is a pretty hard lower bound due to thermodynamics, but the H2O feedbacks allow for a fairly wide range of scenarios. It would be nice if Dr. Lindzen's Iris hypothesis were credible. As things are, however, there's just not a lot of room for alternate theories. Any unknown effects would have to be extremely large to offset the warming signal, and extremely subtle to not have been noticed to date in any of the atmospheres that we have studied. Given that our atmospheric physics equations describe extraterrestrial atmospheres well, including the atmosphere of the Sun, the amount of special pleading that would be required seems effectively infinite.
Oh Hai. I am from 1986.
People from 31 years ago could build space launch systems.
You assholes can't.
Yay, millennials!
Burma Shave?
Yeah, but where are you going to find a cage big enough to hold both of their egos?
Your analogies are inapplicable; see my other response.
The sarcasm was quite cute.
I'm not sure why you think this contradicts anything I've said. Are you under the impression that the molecule retains that heat energy for longer than a few milliseconds?
But eventually, we would settle into a warmer, but likely slowly declining quasi-equilibrium.
Burning all the world's fossil fuels would make the poles pretty tropical for (IIRC) 10e4-10e5 years before silicate weathering would bring things down to a reasonably semblance of normality.
Ultimately the reason why Earth cannot undergo a true runaway warming scenario is that the stratosphere is cold. Water vapor condenses and precipitates out of the upper atmosphere instead of building up there, and CO2 can't get the job done by itself. In a half-billion years or so the increasing solar output will be enough to slowly cook off the oceans, and we'll enter into a 'moist greenhouse' phase before things get *really* toasty.
AGW was first proposed in 1896, and discredited for the next five decades. During the period 1950-1970 the growing body of evidence was sufficient to reverse the consensus, and since then all of the evidence is pointing towards, "Yes, this phenomenon is real and behaves as we expect." Denying this has become a symbol of ideological purity for a current political party, but there's only so far one can take that tactic.
The science is really pretty simple. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Originally, we did not think that it could build up in the atmosphere, and we thought that it could not contribute any more to warming than [a] what it was already doing, and [b] what water vapor was doing. After we became better able to observe the upper atmosphere, it was realized that, yes, there was a bit of a gap for CO2 in the H2O spectrum, but more importantly, the CO2-dense part of the atmosphere extends quite a bit higher than the tropopause. But what does that matter if it's already completely opaque at lower CO2 concentrations?
The effect of a higher partial pressure of CO2 is to push the CO2-dense region of the atmosphere further out into space, increasing the effective 'top-of-atmosphere'. This means that outgoing radiation must take a longer path out of the atmosphere, which effectively traps heat in the lower atmosphere. The "no-feedback forcing" can be relatively straightforwardly calculated to be ~3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of atmospheric CO2, which is equivalent to about 1 degree C of global temperature change.
Now, that in itself is not a huge deal. The issue is that H2O is a strong greenhouse gas and you may have noticed that there happens to be some rather large reservoirs of that stuff lying around just itching to be part of the atmosphere. We've spent quite a bit of time looking for ways that the H2O feedback won't end up being a huge issue. And I think that I'm maligning anyone to suggest that Dr. Lindzen has had the most credible alternate hypothesis in decades, which sadly he has not been able to find credible evidence for. Some major flaw in the physics of H2O is about all that would save us at this point.
AGW is a theory that we've been trying to disprove for more than a century. We've known for about 150 years that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and that many human activities release large amounts of this substance, but the initial assumption was that climate was cyclical and that warm years would balance out cold ones. The theories of AGW and climate change have at every step had to fight for acceptance among people who (reasonably enough) were not prepared to believe in them.
And then in more recent history there is a crowd of conservative voices who have -- being generous -- rejected empiricism in favor of a more rationalist epistemology. Truth is not what you measure -- measurements can be biased, measurers can lie -- truth is what you can prove with logic and reason. It's not like science can measure God, and those scientists are all leftist eggheads anyway. Those elitists don't have a monopoly on truth. Which is all well and good, and certainly an internally consistent philosophy, but if the tragedy of empiricism is never being sure of anything, the problem with non-empirical philosophies is that they are under no obligation to be consistent with observable reality. Politicians at the moment find it useful to take up an anti-empirical position, and rather sensibly they've picked a topic which to date has yet to make much meaningful impact on the lives of most Americans. (I'm from Alaska; the glaciers and permafrost melting has been fairly readily apparent there, since the bulk of these effects has been at the lower alpine/tidewater icefields and the edges of the permafrost fields -- the most visible and accessible areas.)
At this point the Republicans seem a bit screwed. Their constituency won't allow them to walk this one back -- supporting climate science has been a great way to lose Republican primaries in recent years. Symptoms of warming are (consistent with other conspiracy the
Right, how terrible of leftists to object to systemic oppression. When you stop trying to legislate morality, science, and people's genitalia and the color of their skin I'm sure we'll have fewer social issues.
The hatred on the left is a reaction to your team's bigotry. Your values are un-American and antisocial. Which is fine, really, because they're also not shared by the younger generation. Whenever your crowd dies off the social unrest will too. Trump and Arpaio are looking pretty old. And if it comes down to it, you bigots are in the minority, and you've lost pretty consistently throughout history. There isn't a path to victory for you. I'd say it's sad, but you're so far out of touch with the real world that your frothing is actually somewhat comical. Maybe I can start a pool on which will happen first, your death by apoplexy or Trump's resignation.
I also feel that tackling the hazards on a highway as far easier than those on city and town roads. There are a lot less variables on a highway than on a city street.
No, the incidence of the variable elements is lower. If I may be allowed to characterize, I think it's kind of a software mindset to try to reduce the problem to a simpler one, and to pay more attention to the error rate than the failure mode. At the risk of being flippant, we have a tolerance for crashes (I'm also a dev). Given that the energy of any collision rises with the square of velocity, the inherent risk of these collisions also rises proportionally with velocity. Immature technology in this kind of unforgiving environment is likely to result in serious loss of life. We can't guarantee that there will not be road hazards on the highway, so as long as there's a relatively large chance that the car will make a serious error in identifying or responding to a hazard, it's best if we test things out in the environments where hazards are both higher-incidence and lower-risk.
As for the infrastructure, we have HOV lanes because they improve throughput. There may be a point in the future where there are sufficient autonomous vehicles on the road that this will be true for them as well, but until then most cities are not going to be able to carve off extra lanes for this traffic.
Heaher Heyer's death is squarely on the shoulders of the US Left.
I have rarely seen a more malicious falsehood, and it staggers belief that you of all people would be arguing against personal responsibility. For shame, sir.