>As an honorably discharged Specialist in the US Army
As an honorably discharged Specialist in the US Army you are somebody who has been in the military making you uniquely DISQUALIFIED for an opinion on this particular matter. For the same reason that we don't leave scrutiny of politicians up to other politicians but, instead, to the media and the judiciary.
The simple fact is that very nearly every great evil that has ever been committed was done by somebody who sincerely believed they were doing good, or at the very least that what they did was "justified" by circumstance. Nothing personal but this means anybody who has been *in* the kind of circumstances where bad shit gets done is the LAST person who CAN judge whether it was, in fact, justified. It has to be judged by somebody who does NOT have the bias of having been there.
Go read the media reports of Abu Ghraib, notably the ones who asked questions about the soldiers in the videos - every person who knows them report they were nice people, good people - but in a bad situation, they did a terrible thing and I am sure they all believed that the situation was so dire that the terrible thing was made justifiable by it. By being there, their judgment was compromised.
You may despise what the person said, you may sincerely believe that you never once caused a single civilian death that could be avoided - but you are not and cannot ever be the person who decides that. Somebody who was NOT there has to decide what "could be avoided" means, because merely being there must inevitably compromise your judgement. The simple truth is that the US military has gained an extremely well deserved reputation for killing civilians at a hugely unacceptable rate. Everybody in the military believes it was unavoidable or justified - they would have to, there's no way this could have happened if they didn't, but everybody in the military is automatically disqualified from making that judgement - that's what oversight MEANS - and why it exists. Only people outside the military get to judge that, exactly because they WON'T be biassed by having their buddy killed in the trench next to them yesterday, and those people have pretty much overwhelmingly decided that the vast majority of civilian deaths, particularly in the last two wars, were utterly unjustified. You may not like it, but those people - and their right to decide that, is exactly who and what you swore to defend.
Obama made sure ?! Did he have Scalia murdered ? Or is this a case of shit happens and adults deal with shit happening constructively. Destructively or obstructively is prerogative of 2-year-olds.
Ron Paul spent thirty years earning a congressman's salary while doing nothing more than give elloquent speeches to taxpayers telling them how its a good thing if he never does the job they pay him to do. Libertarians may be sincere (if deluded) but libertarian politicians are running the ultimate lazy get-out-of-work scam. I suppose the libertarian voters got their wish: an entire congress has been slacking off for 8 years and telling the world how not doing their job is their job....
Getting the speed solves the lifetime problem. By 5% of lightspeed time is moving a lot slower (at 100% it stops entirely). 80 years may pass on earth but your astronaught would experience only mabe 30. Trouble is when he gets home 160 years have passed on earth. Everyone he knows is dead. His country is now a province of the empire of the grand Pumba of Jakarta. Pizzabagels have become the worlds prinary food supply. Nobody remembers sending him and on the way he probably got passed by another mission launched 100 years after he left with a new 20% lightspeed drive which is already on the way back. The problems with high sublight travel isnt aging and the technical difficulties are utterly dwarfed by the political and psychological difficulties. And this wont conceivably change until we colonize at least our nearby neighbours.
Though if it was sturdy enough the sail could conceivably double as a parachute/kite. Whether it can be that sturdy (even for mars) and still light enough to be practical as a light sail is left as an excercise for Werner Von Kerman.
Entering orbit requires decelerating. Any speed which gets to a planet is way too high to orbit it. You want your periapse as close to the planet as possible and you burn at periapse so gravity helps you break but you still need to slow down or you will just escape again (ina different direction)
Actually - it would make more sense to define that one the other way around. If you have an atomic-accuracy measurement for mass, then it's much more sensible to define volume from mass than the other way around: so you would instead define liter as "the volume of a kilogram of water when these conditions are all at these specific values".
Because if Planck's constant changes - every law of physics is diffferent and we can't make any predictions about how. Seriously, a universe where Planck's constant is different could be 3x3m square vaccuum containing a single deck chair. There is nothing in modern physics that preclude the big bang forming into this tiny pet universe with it's comfortable single amalgamation of matter that is NOT dependent on Planck's constant being the one we know.
And if flooding was the *only* risk, that would be a solution - and a cheap one.
But you're also talking about massive droughts - and resulting food shortages, so your new house on the hill had best come with bullet-proof windows because when poor people are starving they tend to riot. And when they are thirsty as well they riot a lot. Riots have historically had a tendency to turn into exceptionally bloody wars. So I would make sure you got a lot of guns in there too - you'll need them (and all this is assuming YOU can actually get food and water - because if you're not busy defending what you have, you will have to be one of the rioters desperately trying to find some). And this has already started happening. It's still localized right now, but more and more countries will be following suit. Don't think you won't be affected.
Meantime you'll have crazy people wanting to build walls around borders to keep desperate people from migrating in order to survive -and voters actually seriously supporting their insanity... oh wait, that one is already happening too.
Of course the shift in the climate means the tropics effectively get bigger -which means pests and diseases suddenly have a much bigger survivable range, lots of diseases none of your ancestors ever encountered to which you have no genetic immunity may just seriously reduce how many friends you have... so there won't be a lot of them around to help you while you're crouching in your fortress on the hill hoping to keep your last gallon of water safe either.
And that is just the beginning of it.
Notice I barely MENTIONED planet changes. The problem with climate change is that the climate part and it's effects aren't all that major - even the worst case versions are easily survivable. A few floods, a few more storms - those are manageable. The trouble is what it does to everything we've built to sustain our society - most importantly agriculture and water distribution. In even the mildest version of the physical effects, those are a far greater problem. Much like a zombie apocalypse the greatest threat to you is very soon not the zombies - it's the other survivors. And in the worst case scenarios ? Those human effects scale up exponentially, the mild version makes world war 2 look like a schoolyard scuffle, the bad extremes of the possible effects - that's nearly all of us dead in a few years, by each others hands.
So go build your house on the hill. You will be safe from floods... but that will not help you at all.
It must be a rightwing thing. They all loved Citizens United - and so they all believe that giving money to somebody for political gain is a form of protected free speech. It follows then that if you don't want to *take* the money, you must be censoring the person trying to bribe you - and if you're an elected official who doesn't want to take a bribe I guess that makes it government censorship...
It already has. America is just fairly lucky not to be feeling the brunt of it.
Meantime my country is in the midst of the worst drought in recorded history, the hottest summer we've ever had after the hottest winter we've ever had. Crops are failing, local food production is plummeting - which means imports, which means higher prices... all of which adds up to us being on the verge of bloody riots in the streets when the poor majority get hungry.
This has been building up over about 15 years as each year got hotter and dryer than the last...
This is climate change effect happening to me, right now.
Now don't get me wrong - there's nothing wrong with that as such - not everybody can be a scientist and we don't all need to be experts at everything, if your way of being a good citizen is to be very political so be it, if your choice of information about politics is deranged and your "reading the left" only to look for strawman in a sort of inverted act of confirmation bias - that's sad but perfectly within your rights.
However, when the issue is scientific in nature - party affiliation, tribal identity and all the other things that cloud our political thinking simply don't matter - it's no longer a matter of politics. You chose ot be informed about the latter (for a lose definition of "informed") but not of the former, so when the topic is the former the only acceptable thing for you to is shut the fuck up and do what the experts tell you to do. If you don't like that, acquire the needed expertise to make counter-argument worthy of the name. Facts and evidence don't go away because your ideologically opposed to their existence.
It is not censorship to refuse to publish speech for somebody else or support their statements. ExonMobil has plenty of ways to spread their "views" - the AGU is not in any way acting unscientific when refusing to be associated with those views.
Scientific debate is always welcome - but only if the counter-arguments are *scientific*. The anti-climate-science arguments are, on a good day, slightly less scientific than that published by Answers in Genesis - and most of them are significantly worse. Climate scientists should not lend creedence to unscientific views about their field anymore than biologists should seriously entertain creationism.
If somebody comes up with actual physical evidence that suggest creationism may be true - then, at that point only, where the argument becomes *scientific* - does biology become obligated to pay attention to the idea and consider it seriously. I promise you if that ever did somehow happen (I doubt it) it would have nothing in common with the version the religious nuts spread. In the same way, if the overwhelming evidence for climate change from literally every field of science that is in any way involved in measuring things about the earth or the organisms on it was every challenged by a single tiny shred of any evidence whatsoever from the anti- theory, and at least a credible theory about why that evidence means what they say - along with a viable explanation for why those billions upon billions of pieces of hard evidence for climate change do not in fact mean what everybody who collected them (of which almost nobody is involved with climate science and only a tiny fraction of those are with the IPCC) thinks they mean... on THAT day, scientists will consider that they may be wrong.
It would be frankly unscientific to do so before then. Forget whether you trust the temperature data - thats one tiny data-point out of billions of pieces of supporting evidence. We are watching animal migrations and everybody from park rangers to marine biologists are confirming that we're seeing exactly the patterns that would happen if climate change was happening the way it was expected. Geologists are watching glaciers melt at rates they themselves would have called "crazy alarmism" if you had mentioned those rates to them a decade ago.
It's not political - it's science, it's the closest thing to a fact humans can ever have. It's also one of the most tested and scrutinized theories in the entire history of science. There may not be a MORE trustworthy scientific theory in existence because none have ever been THIS thoroughly tested.
Eerm.... what planet are you living on ? They've all held up remarkably well - if anything, they consistently UNDERPREDICTED what's happened so far. Whoever told you different was lying and you were too dumb to realize it, and of course you didn't check or find out what the counter-arguments and evidence are (and why they are so overwhelming) because that would not fit your political views.
Which is proven in the next line when you bring up a politician - which is utterly irellevant to a discussion about the SCIENCE of climate change. But since you did, of COURSE they had zero value - they are not implemented yet. That's like saying "The polio vaccine saved nobody at all from polio before Salk invented it so I don't see why we should give it to people now". Hell the first ones aren't even scheduled to go into effect until next year !
Exxon's own scientists informed the board of the risks of climate change decades ago - and the company has known about it internally (and lied about it to the public) ever since. They actually based their exploration planning on waiting for global warming to start melting glaciers so arctic drilling would be cheaper - we have documentary proof of this. It's amazing that so few people know this... do you people never read the news anymore ?It was headline news on every major channel and paper for weeks !
Two separate publications working entirely independently (indeed - without knowledge of each other) both found hard evidence proving these allegations. Documents from the company itself showing them acknowledging the reality of climate change decades ago and planning the cover-up - and even basing business plans on exploiting the fact that warming would melt glaciers and make arctic drilling more profitable if they delay it for 20 years (which they did).
There is no shred of reasonable doubt that these allegations are true and in light of the documents published by the journalists the state of California is already investigating bringing criminal charges against the company for large-scale fraud.
That doesn't quite correlate with the counter-point - which is looking at what animals live particularly long lives. Galapagos tortoises for example. What seems to differ is those creatures are extremely well armored and living in an area with very little natural predators.
This matters because living to *reach* the potential lifespan of the body is extremely rare in nature - there's no point in extending that for most creatures as they simply would not live to benefit from it, so you need the rapid breeding to make up for diseases, predators and accidents. Humans only raised our average lifespan beyond 30 in the last couple of centuries - for millions of years before that hardly anybody lived more than half the time the body can usually sustain itself.
Galapagos tortoises typically do live their whole lifespan since not much kills them - so the natural evolutionary response is to breed less often, thus preventing overpopulation problems. That pattern isn't viable for most animals however, and so it hasn't occurred in them.
One likely outcome then is that - with enough time - human breeding patterns will adjust to reflect our ever longer lifespans and ever lower risk of predation. In a way, this is already happening - except it's happening through cultural rather than biological evolution. Wealthier people have fewer children - not least because their children have far higher odds of actually all living into adulthood. Technology is really just a form of cultural evolution. Indeed one of humanity's most powerful evolutionary advantages is culture - and having a particularly strong form of it (one reason we are the most dedicated parents in the entire animal kingdom), this is valuable because cultures and minds can evolve much, much faster than bodies can - and allows for adaptations which would have taken body plan evolution many millions of years to achieve to instead be done in a manner of years.
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>As an honorably discharged Specialist in the US Army
As an honorably discharged Specialist in the US Army you are somebody who has been in the military making you uniquely DISQUALIFIED for an opinion on this particular matter. For the same reason that we don't leave scrutiny of politicians up to other politicians but, instead, to the media and the judiciary.
The simple fact is that very nearly every great evil that has ever been committed was done by somebody who sincerely believed they were doing good, or at the very least that what they did was "justified" by circumstance. Nothing personal but this means anybody who has been *in* the kind of circumstances where bad shit gets done is the LAST person who CAN judge whether it was, in fact, justified. It has to be judged by somebody who does NOT have the bias of having been there.
Go read the media reports of Abu Ghraib, notably the ones who asked questions about the soldiers in the videos - every person who knows them report they were nice people, good people - but in a bad situation, they did a terrible thing and I am sure they all believed that the situation was so dire that the terrible thing was made justifiable by it. By being there, their judgment was compromised.
You may despise what the person said, you may sincerely believe that you never once caused a single civilian death that could be avoided - but you are not and cannot ever be the person who decides that. Somebody who was NOT there has to decide what "could be avoided" means, because merely being there must inevitably compromise your judgement.
The simple truth is that the US military has gained an extremely well deserved reputation for killing civilians at a hugely unacceptable rate. Everybody in the military believes it was unavoidable or justified - they would have to, there's no way this could have happened if they didn't, but everybody in the military is automatically disqualified from making that judgement - that's what oversight MEANS - and why it exists.
Only people outside the military get to judge that, exactly because they WON'T be biassed by having their buddy killed in the trench next to them yesterday, and those people have pretty much overwhelmingly decided that the vast majority of civilian deaths, particularly in the last two wars, were utterly unjustified. You may not like it, but those people - and their right to decide that, is exactly who and what you swore to defend.
Obama made sure ?!
Did he have Scalia murdered ? Or is this a case of shit happens and adults deal with shit happening constructively. Destructively or obstructively is prerogative of 2-year-olds.
Ron Paul spent thirty years earning a congressman's salary while doing nothing more than give elloquent speeches to taxpayers telling them how its a good thing if he never does the job they pay him to do. Libertarians may be sincere (if deluded) but libertarian politicians are running the ultimate lazy get-out-of-work scam. I suppose the libertarian voters got their wish: an entire congress has been slacking off for 8 years and telling the world how not doing their job is their job....
Orson Scott Card explored this very well in the Ender series, especially in Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide.
Getting the speed solves the lifetime problem. By 5% of lightspeed time is moving a lot slower (at 100% it stops entirely). 80 years may pass on earth but your astronaught would experience only mabe 30. Trouble is when he gets home 160 years have passed on earth. Everyone he knows is dead. His country is now a province of the empire of the grand Pumba of Jakarta. Pizzabagels have become the worlds prinary food supply. Nobody remembers sending him and on the way he probably got passed by another mission launched 100 years after he left with a new 20% lightspeed drive which is already on the way back. The problems with high sublight travel isnt aging and the technical difficulties are utterly dwarfed by the political and psychological difficulties. And this wont conceivably change until we colonize at least our nearby neighbours.
Though if it was sturdy enough the sail could conceivably double as a parachute/kite. Whether it can be that sturdy (even for mars) and still light enough to be practical as a light sail is left as an excercise for Werner Von Kerman.
Entering orbit requires decelerating. Any speed which gets to a planet is way too high to orbit it. You want your periapse as close to the planet as possible and you burn at periapse so gravity helps you break but you still need to slow down or you will just escape again (ina different direction)
Actually - it would make more sense to define that one the other way around. If you have an atomic-accuracy measurement for mass, then it's much more sensible to define volume from mass than the other way around: so you would instead define liter as "the volume of a kilogram of water when these conditions are all at these specific values".
Because if Planck's constant changes - every law of physics is diffferent and we can't make any predictions about how. Seriously, a universe where Planck's constant is different could be 3x3m square vaccuum containing a single deck chair. There is nothing in modern physics that preclude the big bang forming into this tiny pet universe with it's comfortable single amalgamation of matter that is NOT dependent on Planck's constant being the one we know.
Since you didnt actually do the experiment, your dismisal of the predicted results is fraudulent.
Go suck an exhaust pipe. Citation enough ?
Poisoning them.
And if flooding was the *only* risk, that would be a solution - and a cheap one.
But you're also talking about massive droughts - and resulting food shortages, so your new house on the hill had best come with bullet-proof windows because when poor people are starving they tend to riot. And when they are thirsty as well they riot a lot. Riots have historically had a tendency to turn into exceptionally bloody wars. So I would make sure you got a lot of guns in there too - you'll need them (and all this is assuming YOU can actually get food and water - because if you're not busy defending what you have, you will have to be one of the rioters desperately trying to find some). And this has already started happening. It's still localized right now, but more and more countries will be following suit. Don't think you won't be affected.
Meantime you'll have crazy people wanting to build walls around borders to keep desperate people from migrating in order to survive -and voters actually seriously supporting their insanity... oh wait, that one is already happening too.
Of course the shift in the climate means the tropics effectively get bigger -which means pests and diseases suddenly have a much bigger survivable range, lots of diseases none of your ancestors ever encountered to which you have no genetic immunity may just seriously reduce how many friends you have... so there won't be a lot of them around to help you while you're crouching in your fortress on the hill hoping to keep your last gallon of water safe either.
And that is just the beginning of it.
Notice I barely MENTIONED planet changes. The problem with climate change is that the climate part and it's effects aren't all that major - even the worst case versions are easily survivable. A few floods, a few more storms - those are manageable.
The trouble is what it does to everything we've built to sustain our society - most importantly agriculture and water distribution. In even the mildest version of the physical effects, those are a far greater problem. Much like a zombie apocalypse the greatest threat to you is very soon not the zombies - it's the other survivors. And in the worst case scenarios ? Those human effects scale up exponentially, the mild version makes world war 2 look like a schoolyard scuffle, the bad extremes of the possible effects - that's nearly all of us dead in a few years, by each others hands.
So go build your house on the hill. You will be safe from floods... but that will not help you at all.
For the same reason you shouldn't imagine that just because a tobacco company sponsors a football team smoking will make you a better athlete.
Yeah... because when somebody refuses to take a bribe, that's a BAD thing right ?
It must be a rightwing thing. They all loved Citizens United - and so they all believe that giving money to somebody for political gain is a form of protected free speech. It follows then that if you don't want to *take* the money, you must be censoring the person trying to bribe you - and if you're an elected official who doesn't want to take a bribe I guess that makes it government censorship...
It already has. America is just fairly lucky not to be feeling the brunt of it.
Meantime my country is in the midst of the worst drought in recorded history, the hottest summer we've ever had after the hottest winter we've ever had. Crops are failing, local food production is plummeting - which means imports, which means higher prices... all of which adds up to us being on the verge of bloody riots in the streets when the poor majority get hungry.
This has been building up over about 15 years as each year got hotter and dryer than the last...
This is climate change effect happening to me, right now.
Now don't get me wrong - there's nothing wrong with that as such - not everybody can be a scientist and we don't all need to be experts at everything, if your way of being a good citizen is to be very political so be it, if your choice of information about politics is deranged and your "reading the left" only to look for strawman in a sort of inverted act of confirmation bias - that's sad but perfectly within your rights.
However, when the issue is scientific in nature - party affiliation, tribal identity and all the other things that cloud our political thinking simply don't matter - it's no longer a matter of politics. You chose ot be informed about the latter (for a lose definition of "informed") but not of the former, so when the topic is the former the only acceptable thing for you to is shut the fuck up and do what the experts tell you to do.
If you don't like that, acquire the needed expertise to make counter-argument worthy of the name. Facts and evidence don't go away because your ideologically opposed to their existence.
The trouble is - you seem to read a lot of politics but you don't seem to read any science.
It is not censorship to refuse to publish speech for somebody else or support their statements.
ExonMobil has plenty of ways to spread their "views" - the AGU is not in any way acting unscientific when refusing to be associated with those views.
Scientific debate is always welcome - but only if the counter-arguments are *scientific*. The anti-climate-science arguments are, on a good day, slightly less scientific than that published by Answers in Genesis - and most of them are significantly worse. Climate scientists should not lend creedence to unscientific views about their field anymore than biologists should seriously entertain creationism.
If somebody comes up with actual physical evidence that suggest creationism may be true - then, at that point only, where the argument becomes *scientific* - does biology become obligated to pay attention to the idea and consider it seriously. I promise you if that ever did somehow happen (I doubt it) it would have nothing in common with the version the religious nuts spread.
In the same way, if the overwhelming evidence for climate change from literally every field of science that is in any way involved in measuring things about the earth or the organisms on it was every challenged by a single tiny shred of any evidence whatsoever from the anti- theory, and at least a credible theory about why that evidence means what they say - along with a viable explanation for why those billions upon billions of pieces of hard evidence for climate change do not in fact mean what everybody who collected them (of which almost nobody is involved with climate science and only a tiny fraction of those are with the IPCC) thinks they mean... on THAT day, scientists will consider that they may be wrong.
It would be frankly unscientific to do so before then. Forget whether you trust the temperature data - thats one tiny data-point out of billions of pieces of supporting evidence. We are watching animal migrations and everybody from park rangers to marine biologists are confirming that we're seeing exactly the patterns that would happen if climate change was happening the way it was expected. Geologists are watching glaciers melt at rates they themselves would have called "crazy alarmism" if you had mentioned those rates to them a decade ago.
It's not political - it's science, it's the closest thing to a fact humans can ever have. It's also one of the most tested and scrutinized theories in the entire history of science. There may not be a MORE trustworthy scientific theory in existence because none have ever been THIS thoroughly tested.
Letting ExxonMobil fund the AGU while also spreading science denial and anti-science claims is like letting anti-vaxxers fund the FDA.
Eerm.... what planet are you living on ? They've all held up remarkably well - if anything, they consistently UNDERPREDICTED what's happened so far. Whoever told you different was lying and you were too dumb to realize it, and of course you didn't check or find out what the counter-arguments and evidence are (and why they are so overwhelming) because that would not fit your political views.
Which is proven in the next line when you bring up a politician - which is utterly irellevant to a discussion about the SCIENCE of climate change. But since you did, of COURSE they had zero value - they are not implemented yet. That's like saying "The polio vaccine saved nobody at all from polio before Salk invented it so I don't see why we should give it to people now".
Hell the first ones aren't even scheduled to go into effect until next year !
Exxon's own scientists informed the board of the risks of climate change decades ago - and the company has known about it internally (and lied about it to the public) ever since. They actually based their exploration planning on waiting for global warming to start melting glaciers so arctic drilling would be cheaper - we have documentary proof of this.
It's amazing that so few people know this... do you people never read the news anymore ?It was headline news on every major channel and paper for weeks !
>If their allegations are true about exxon,
Two separate publications working entirely independently (indeed - without knowledge of each other) both found hard evidence proving these allegations. Documents from the company itself showing them acknowledging the reality of climate change decades ago and planning the cover-up - and even basing business plans on exploiting the fact that warming would melt glaciers and make arctic drilling more profitable if they delay it for 20 years (which they did).
There is no shred of reasonable doubt that these allegations are true and in light of the documents published by the journalists the state of California is already investigating bringing criminal charges against the company for large-scale fraud.
That doesn't quite correlate with the counter-point - which is looking at what animals live particularly long lives. Galapagos tortoises for example. What seems to differ is those creatures are extremely well armored and living in an area with very little natural predators.
This matters because living to *reach* the potential lifespan of the body is extremely rare in nature - there's no point in extending that for most creatures as they simply would not live to benefit from it, so you need the rapid breeding to make up for diseases, predators and accidents.
Humans only raised our average lifespan beyond 30 in the last couple of centuries - for millions of years before that hardly anybody lived more than half the time the body can usually sustain itself.
Galapagos tortoises typically do live their whole lifespan since not much kills them - so the natural evolutionary response is to breed less often, thus preventing overpopulation problems. That pattern isn't viable for most animals however, and so it hasn't occurred in them.
One likely outcome then is that - with enough time - human breeding patterns will adjust to reflect our ever longer lifespans and ever lower risk of predation. In a way, this is already happening - except it's happening through cultural rather than biological evolution. Wealthier people have fewer children - not least because their children have far higher odds of actually all living into adulthood. Technology is really just a form of cultural evolution.
Indeed one of humanity's most powerful evolutionary advantages is culture - and having a particularly strong form of it (one reason we are the most dedicated parents in the entire animal kingdom), this is valuable because cultures and minds can evolve much, much faster than bodies can - and allows for adaptations which would have taken body plan evolution many millions of years to achieve to instead be done in a manner of years.