God is generally accepted as being "simple", meaning no parts, or physical manifestation, or in time and space.
Generay accepted? By whom? Certainly not by evangelicals, who believe in the literal word of the bible, and number about 100 million in the USA. They believe God created us "in his own image". And that he had a son with a woman in ancient Israel. That's he, so yes, God has a penis. See, that's the problem with thinking your definition of God is "generally accepted". Whatever your definition is, you're wrong. What you're describing sounds more like Deism, which is not even a popular opinion, much less generally accepted.
If you insist on being the loudmouthed variety of atheist, please at least educate yourself on millenia old lines of thought. Discussing the topic of religion without knowing this stuff is like discussing physics without knowing about gravity.
Nice condescension, but whom in particular should we read to educate ourselves, since you know so much about it? If you're talking millennia, then you must mean Catholics, as they're the only Abrahamic religion which has been around that long. Shall we read Aquinas, who considered such questions as how many Angels can occupy the same space?
And what I said is completely relevant to the discussion at hand (global warming), as well as your assertion. Part of the big picture is that the poles are expected to show the effects of warming more quickly. Alaskans are predicted to observe more rapid changes. And they are.
First of all, only a few glaciers are expanding. The vast majority are retreating.
Second of all, rapid glacial retreat near the poles is a prediction of climate science, because the poles are predicted to be more sensitive to global warming. So yes, actually, people living near the poles are seeing global warming first-hand.
I did not say anything about "conspiracy". But biased sources are biased sources, on either "side" of the argument. One is no better than another.
This is complete nonsense. Some arguments don't have two sides. You can be forgiven for getting your idea of objectivity from the mainstream media, which treats every "controversy" as if it has "two-sides" even if the ratio of the sides is 10^8.
Realclimate cites actual scientific papers, for every article. They're "biased" because the science is biased. People who think greenhouse gases don't warm the planet are simply wrong. Just as wrong as people who think creatures don't evolve, or that the earth is flat. Physics dictates a rise in temperature with a rise in greenhouse gases. And guess what, the global experiment in flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases confirms this prediction.
Is the American Astronomical Society biased for endorsing gravity and special relativity?
Which is a common little nugget of handwavium that deniers love to trot out. I'm not saying you're a denier, mind you, but it's a silly excuse.
.There has been a lot of progress in climate modeling, but it isn't like predicting where a cannon ball will land if you know the starting trajectory.
Actually, it is something like that. Though it's more like predicting where a cannonball will land on an alien planet, given a range of values for the mass of the planet.
You know the cannonball is going to come down, somewhere, just not exactly where. Just as we know that raising the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere will warm the Earth. We knew it 100 years ago (and anyone who brings up the widely debunked "70's ice-age" meme, prepare for a severe smackdown. It isn't true).
The physics predicting a rise in temp from CO2 are so basic, you don't need a fancy computer to model them. CO2 (and other GHGs) are opaque to some wavelengths of infrared light. In other words, they're black. Just like you don't need a fancy computer to predict that your black car will get hot in the Texas sun, you don't need one to predict that the atmosphere will heat up when flooded with IR-trapping gas particles. It has to, based on universal laws of physics.
There are some mitigating factors. Plants absorb some CO2 (but not methane). Cloud-cover increases over coastal and ocean regions, due to greater evaporation. However, much of this is offset by the fact that we're still burning down forests to grow crops, and the fact that H20 is also a greenhouse gas. That's where the models come in. We know that CO2 and methane and other gases will warm the Earth. It's only a question of how much.
I'm old enough to remember the 1980s as well, and also well informed enough to know that your characterization of "climatologists were warning that we were heading into another Ice Age" is complete bunk. Some climatologists felt we'd enter another ice-age within 10,000 years or so, if greenhouse gas emissions didn't interfere . There were some non-scientific journals that tried to sensationalize the few papers that you're talking about, but the majority of climate scientists even then predicted that GHG was going to warm the planet.
You didn't answer the question. Do you dispute any of my original facts, and if so, which ones, and based on what evidence? Instead of answering, you brought up yet another tired and debunked denier talking point, which I can also trace to Michael Chrichton, MD.
Your assertion of "the claims" of the rain forests and tropics disappearing is yet another red-herring. I don't know enough to reply to that charge, but I do know it's irrelevant to the discussion, which you continue to studiously avoid.
And you want us to believe that you can predict, WITH GREAT CONFIDENCE, that the Earth will be 10 degrees warming in so many years because of what mankind is doing?
"Oh, well, that's different," screams the AGW crowd.
You don't know the difference between weather and climate.
You also apparently don't know that increased temperatures due to greenhouse gases are a (nearly 100 year old, before the advent of computers) prediction of physics . The models simply try to guess how much.
It's hard not to treat you in a condescending way when you make such elementary errors of assumption, omission, and commission. If you'd actually like to address the science, rather than abusing your Caps-lock key, I'm sure you'd get a less condescending response. If you arrogantly put forth Michael Chrichton-level arguments as if they're sound, and as if you've made some sort of new scientific discovery, expect to be condescended to.
Which of these facts do you dispute?
- Carbon dioxide and methane (and other GHGs) trap infra red energy that otherwise would be lost to space. Without an atmosphere, the entire Earth would be below freezing. - Geological evidence proves that large increases in CO2 lead to corresponding changes in temperature. - Temperatures have spiked higher, faster, than any time in the history of humankind. - Simple physics dictates a rise in temperature when GHGs are increased, yet the output of the sun and its distance from Earth remain the same. For the temperature not to increase would require some sort of mitigating intervention. - No such proposed mitigating factor has been shown to be occurring.
Indeed. I watched it and I don't want my hour back. Coyne gave me some new arguments, which is surprising, since I follow the "new atheists" pretty closely. The charge of ad-hominems is completely without merit. It isn't an ad-hominem to point out flaws in your opponent's logic.
Why not focus on quality instead of major revs?
on
Ubuntu Turns 7
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In 7 years the dev team has put out 11 versions of Ubuntu. I got tired of the rat race. Every kernel broke my video driver, and every major revision broke some other software. I always had problems with compiz, and when I turned it off, I had other problems. I finally gave up when I installed 11 (from scratch) and faced the black screen of death on my first boot, and the solutions I found online didn't work. I tried CentOS but it wasn't compatible with about half the software I wanted to run. It seems like Ubuntu is the go-to distro for most packages, so can't they stick to a version for more than a year?
Hmmm.... maybe I don't. I've spent the last 10 years writing stock market software. For us, "real-time" means in such a fraction of a second that the human operator can't tell the difference. It doesn't do much good to show more quotes than the human eye can see.
I can see how, for engineering applications, the "human" definition of real-time wouldn't be good enough. But I assure you, windows is fast "enough" for anything that involves a human operator, assuming the people writing the software are competent.
I agree that no sane person would make an O/S with it, but it is a great platform for video games, including 3d shooters. In fact, that's what my business partner and I are developing our game with. C# + XNA. Admittedly, our game is 2d, but only because we don't have the resources to create 3d assets, not because XNA is somehow lacking. Our time to production will be cut way, way short because of the simplicity and elegance of XNA. The only thing that makes it difficult is that the XBox version will require us to pre-allocate ALL of our objects, because the garbage collector on the XBox sucks. This does make things a bit trickier, you have to create object pools and crap that you normally would expect the GC to do for you, but it's still the bee's-knees in terms of coding time.
Most of the work of modern games is done on the graphics hardware, not the CPUs. For the tiny amount that is done on the CPUs, C# is plenty fast enough. I can put like 6000 sprites on the screen, rotating and scaling, before I drop below 60fps. And that's only due to my graphics hardware. The game code is hardly doing anything.
Furthermore, the tools to develop against the XBox are just freaking cool. I can debug the console exactly as though it were running on my local box, set a break point, inspect variables, etc, and I can't even tell it's a remote process. It just works.
And finally, the lead developer for XNA is the same guy who made Allegro in the 90s. I don't know if you were programming games back then, or playing around with it, but Allegro was great. The main problem is that it was slow. Well, Sean has had nearly 20 years to refine his techniques, and of hardware advances, and he has it down to an art. You barely need to write any code to have a game up and running. The vast majority of your time is spent in game logic, not looking up arcane DirectX commands. DX is mostly abstracted away.
Well, we know at least one thing that could cause temperatures to plunge almost overnight. In fact, it would probably kill off a lot of plant life, and drop CO2 levels as well.
At this point, given what I know about our chances of surviving this crap, I see a new ice age as the best chance of survival for 90% of life on the planet. If we heat up the Earth too much, we're quite possibly headed for another Permian Extinction level event. The amount of hydrogen sulfide that has built up in the ocean since then is surely enough to kill most aerobic life on earth.
No I don't mind. The loss of those edge cities will be more than compensated by the ability to grow food in the fertile plains of Siberia and Northern Canada
Yeah well not everyone shares your desire to move because of catastrophic climate change.
Furthermore, parts of the icecaps could fall off suddenly. It's not like it's guaranteed to melt in an orderly, slow fashion. Fancy huge tidal waves that cross continents?
Also still waiting on a response as to whether you enjoy breathing hydrogen sulfide.
There aren't any peer-reviewed publications because those who control the publications wont publish dissenting opinion, and you can prove there's no validity to the dissenting opinion by pointing to the lack of peer-reviewed publications....
You claim circular logic on the part of the GP, and then you use it yourself. How... ironic.
Your statement is a classic example of begging the question (AKA, circular reasoning). You assume your premise in your statement. To wit, you assume that:
1.) There are dissenting articles worth publishing (feel free to cite one) 2.) Scientific publications base their acceptance of articles on whether the submitter is arguing against prevailing opinion
Neither of your unproven, circular assertions have any merit whatsoever. In fact, science loves controversy, and the best way to make a name for yourself is to prove a prevailing opinion incorrect. Examples abound:
- The cause of the Cretaceous extinction (once thought to be a slow death as the earth cooled, now known to be an asteroid) - the evolution of birds (now known to be from theropods, though that was once very controversial) - gradualism in evolution (now replaced by punctuated equilibrium) - gradualism in climate (we've now shown that climate changes can occur very, very rapidly, rather than over thousands of years) - the number of species of man (that's right, there were more than one, although the oldbeards still hate this idea, it's fairly widely accepted now)
These are just a few examples of science being turned on its head because scientists dared to go against consensus. You know how they did it? By publishing peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals.
That's it? Try 400 MILLION years. The earth had much higher levels of CO2, and yet animals survived just fine. Humans would be okay as well. In fact it used to be a tropical paradise with plants growing everywhere, since they had tons of CO2 to consume and thrive. I fail to see the drawback of higher CO2.
First off, the OP said that 280 ppm is "suddenly" more than the biosphere can handle. There's nothing sudden about 400k years. In fact, in recent geological history, 380ppm is quite an anomaly.
As to your point, the water level was also several hundred feet higher 400 million years ago. I guess you don't mind if Florida, Hawaii, California, New York, London, New Delhi, Washington, Vancouver, most of Italy, and countless other places just vanish under the ocean when the ice caps melt?
Furthermore, if the temperature gets too hot, hydrogen sulfide that has been building up (and been sequestered there due to temperature) for millions of years will outgas from the ocean, and kill almost every animal on the planet.
Furthermore, if carbon levels continue to increase, the acidity of the ocean will continue to increase, which could kill off most of the protozoa and plankton that form the basis of the entire food chain.
Yes, the Earth was hotter 400 million years ago. The point is that upsetting the current balance is likely to have all sorts of catastrophic effects. Because guess what? During those 400 million years you're talking about, when we see rapid changes in temperature and CO2, you know what else we see? Massive extinction events.
Do you see the downside now, or were you just being facetious in the first place?
Yeah my bad. I meant year, honestly, but whether you believe me or not, it's irrelevant to my point. 700bln a year is quite an incentive to lie about the climate, and is a bigger incentive than lone scientists have to get grants.
In fact, I'd wager that if you want to go be a scientist for the oil industry, you'd make a hell of a lot more money.
So if you're going to argue that a million here or there is an incentive to lie and conspire, you have to admit that the oil companies have an even bigger incentive to lie and obfuscate and conspire.
Historical CO2-levels in the atmosphere range from over 4000ppm (even 7000ppm further back) to... about 280ppm. Why is the lowest number suddenly the only number the biosphere can handle?
Sure, if you want to go back to a time when the earth was inhospitable by humans, there was more CO2 in the atmosphere. What does that prove? Exactly nothing.
I didn't find the data you're talking about in your link, but I'm guessing you're comparing the CO2 concentration from tens or hundreds of millions of years ago to today. Umm... why?
I'm not quite sure as to how to answer your question, because it is completely nonsensical, based on a faulty assumption, and displays a profound ignorance. You've basically asked me to give you an entire education from scratch in paleoclimatology. But I'll give it a shot, briefly.
The amount of CO2 the biosphere can absorb is related mostly to the amount the ocean soaks up, and the amount used by plants in respiration. At different periods in the Earth's history, there have been differing amounts of volcanic activity, flora, and fauna. Each of these contribute to the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The time period you are referring to is a time period in which there was a much different balance of these factors on the Earth.
And the assumption that the Earth has some type of natural temperature from which is it not supposed to deviate, what is that belief based on?
No one says that any particular temperature is natural. You're just making that up. What we say is that willfully raising global temperatures is a bad idea because it can have catastrophic consequences for people. Why is this concept so elusive to deniers? If temps go high enough, life will suck and billions will die . Even if the rise was natural (it isn't), if there was a way we could stop it, we should try it .
You don't have to read humanist and transcendental philosophers to recognize that billions dead and a sucky life for those who remain is a bad outcome. If your house was on fire, would you say, "well, there's fires in nature all the time. It's natural!" Or would you try to put out the fire? This is basic common sense. Somehow it gets thrown out the window when the topic of AGW is broached.
Higher temps also mean more droughts, which means less food and water, which means more wars. It's why Al Gore won the peace prize, and deserved it.
I hope this helped you grasp the concept of catastrophic change (but I realize it probably didn't).
We put about 5% of the carbon into the atmosphere, but that 5% is enough to tip the balance and cause CO2 levels to rise, because the biosphere cannot absorb it.
How the hell did this get troll modded? Asking for a cite is trolling? The OP made a blanket assertion with nothing to back it up! Hopefully whoever did that gets meta-modded into/. hell.
Mann gets millions from NSF and Penn State doesn't want that to stop.
Really? Well, since we're on the subject, the USA buys 700 billion dollars worth of oil every day.
So, assuming intellectual consistency on your part, do the oil companies who spend millions on AGW denial research, and stand to lose trillions of dollars if we reduce our oil consumption have a bigger conflict of interest than a professor, or Al Gore? Just curious.
2.calling it warming is kind of fucked up since it's warming in some places, and cooling in others
Wow, so the Earth isn't actually warming overall? Holy crap, I should go get rich on Intrade.
I don't know if you know anything about trading, but there's a crapload of bids out there, and hardly any asks for that contract. Wonder why?
Based on the current bid, you can get almost 4x your money back if this year is not the hottest year on record. So what are you waiting for?
As far as your "argument", please provide an example of a recent long-term cooling trend, on the order of decades (as man made global warming has been) anywhere on the Earth. A cold winter isn't climate. It's weather. Denialists such as yourself cannot seem to (or don't want to) grasp this concept.
No it's not, it's based on other research that says man's contribution to a natural process is mostly insignificant.
[citation needed]
CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm to 380ppm since the onset of the industrial revolution.
The earth's biosphere can absorb only a certain amount of CO2, i.e. - that which is produced naturally. When you add more than the biosphere can absorb, atmospheric levels of CO2 increase. You are tipping the scales, as it were.
The fact is, climate scientists predict how much CO2 levels will rise over the long and short term, and do a pretty fantastic job of it. Can you do better with your theory of nothing?
I wouldn't call myself a "warmer", but I also don't know how encyclopedias can print as fact that 95% of CO2 in the atmosphere comes directly from volcanos, rain, and plant matter decay.
If the entire remaining 5% is strictly from man, I just can't see that being a significant contributor to the speeding of this natural process.
You can't see it, or you won't see it? Do you have a better idea of where the excess carbon is coming from? Let's hear it!
Finally, I always like to mention to the AGW folks that 10,000 years ago the place where I live was completely covered by a glacier. I'm very glad for global warming, because where I live is now a beautiful region inhabited by a multitude of species both migratory and permanent
Global warming also can cause hydrogen sulfide outgassing from the ocean. You can't breathe hydrogen sulfide. But it's just part of the natural order of things, so who cares, right?
In all seriousness, can you at least post some reputable links refuting my statements
Maybe because you didn't even attempt to make a refutable statement of fact. The closest you came was this:
I'm all for taking better care of the planet, but the global warming nuts haven't really provided much evidence and they're the ones making the allegations.
The way I see things, if you make a bunch of claims, the burden of proof is ON YOU... not the people you're speaking to.
You don't make it clear what claims you are talking about, or what evidence we're supposed to provide. Should we link you to every climate study since the beginning of time? What exactly is it that you believe (erroneously) climate scientists claim without evidence? Do you think they just go around making claims with no science to back it up? What in the hell gave you that idea?
Just making a blanket statement that there's no evidence for anything in climate science isn't an argument. It's a troll.
Here's how actual argument works: you make a claim, and support it with evidence. Other people rebut your claim on the basis of your evidence, or other evidence.
Why is it that the global warming deniers can't ever seem to get this right? You think the scientists are wrong? Then post something factual. It's not my job to defend and litigate all of climate science just because you lack education in the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Generay accepted? By whom? Certainly not by evangelicals, who believe in the literal word of the bible, and number about 100 million in the USA. They believe God created us "in his own image". And that he had a son with a woman in ancient Israel. That's he, so yes, God has a penis. See, that's the problem with thinking your definition of God is "generally accepted". Whatever your definition is, you're wrong. What you're describing sounds more like Deism, which is not even a popular opinion, much less generally accepted.
Nice condescension, but whom in particular should we read to educate ourselves, since you know so much about it? If you're talking millennia, then you must mean Catholics, as they're the only Abrahamic religion which has been around that long. Shall we read Aquinas, who considered such questions as how many Angels can occupy the same space?
I'm afraid that you are the one who is incorrect.
And what I said is completely relevant to the discussion at hand (global warming), as well as your assertion. Part of the big picture is that the poles are expected to show the effects of warming more quickly. Alaskans are predicted to observe more rapid changes. And they are.
First of all, only a few glaciers are expanding. The vast majority are retreating.
Second of all, rapid glacial retreat near the poles is a prediction of climate science, because the poles are predicted to be more sensitive to global warming. So yes, actually, people living near the poles are seeing global warming first-hand.
This is complete nonsense. Some arguments don't have two sides. You can be forgiven for getting your idea of objectivity from the mainstream media, which treats every "controversy" as if it has "two-sides" even if the ratio of the sides is 10^8.
Realclimate cites actual scientific papers, for every article. They're "biased" because the science is biased. People who think greenhouse gases don't warm the planet are simply wrong. Just as wrong as people who think creatures don't evolve, or that the earth is flat. Physics dictates a rise in temperature with a rise in greenhouse gases. And guess what, the global experiment in flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases confirms this prediction.
Is the American Astronomical Society biased for endorsing gravity and special relativity?
Which is a common little nugget of handwavium that deniers love to trot out. I'm not saying you're a denier, mind you, but it's a silly excuse.
Actually, it is something like that. Though it's more like predicting where a cannonball will land on an alien planet, given a range of values for the mass of the planet.
You know the cannonball is going to come down, somewhere, just not exactly where. Just as we know that raising the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere will warm the Earth. We knew it 100 years ago (and anyone who brings up the widely debunked "70's ice-age" meme, prepare for a severe smackdown. It isn't true).
The physics predicting a rise in temp from CO2 are so basic, you don't need a fancy computer to model them. CO2 (and other GHGs) are opaque to some wavelengths of infrared light. In other words, they're black. Just like you don't need a fancy computer to predict that your black car will get hot in the Texas sun, you don't need one to predict that the atmosphere will heat up when flooded with IR-trapping gas particles. It has to, based on universal laws of physics.
There are some mitigating factors. Plants absorb some CO2 (but not methane). Cloud-cover increases over coastal and ocean regions, due to greater evaporation. However, much of this is offset by the fact that we're still burning down forests to grow crops, and the fact that H20 is also a greenhouse gas. That's where the models come in. We know that CO2 and methane and other gases will warm the Earth. It's only a question of how much.
I'm old enough to remember the 1980s as well, and also well informed enough to know that your characterization of "climatologists were warning that we were heading into another Ice Age" is complete bunk. Some climatologists felt we'd enter another ice-age within 10,000 years or so, if greenhouse gas emissions didn't interfere . There were some non-scientific journals that tried to sensationalize the few papers that you're talking about, but the majority of climate scientists even then predicted that GHG was going to warm the planet.
Here's just one paper which destroys your assertion: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1
You didn't answer the question. Do you dispute any of my original facts, and if so, which ones, and based on what evidence? Instead of answering, you brought up yet another tired and debunked denier talking point, which I can also trace to Michael Chrichton, MD.
Your assertion of "the claims" of the rain forests and tropics disappearing is yet another red-herring. I don't know enough to reply to that charge, but I do know it's irrelevant to the discussion, which you continue to studiously avoid.
You don't know the difference between weather and climate.
You also apparently don't know that increased temperatures due to greenhouse gases are a (nearly 100 year old, before the advent of computers) prediction of physics . The models simply try to guess how much.
It's hard not to treat you in a condescending way when you make such elementary errors of assumption, omission, and commission. If you'd actually like to address the science, rather than abusing your Caps-lock key, I'm sure you'd get a less condescending response. If you arrogantly put forth Michael Chrichton-level arguments as if they're sound, and as if you've made some sort of new scientific discovery, expect to be condescended to.
Which of these facts do you dispute?
- Carbon dioxide and methane (and other GHGs) trap infra red energy that otherwise would be lost to space. Without an atmosphere, the entire Earth would be below freezing.
- Geological evidence proves that large increases in CO2 lead to corresponding changes in temperature.
- Temperatures have spiked higher, faster, than any time in the history of humankind.
- Simple physics dictates a rise in temperature when GHGs are increased, yet the output of the sun and its distance from Earth remain the same. For the temperature not to increase would require some sort of mitigating intervention.
- No such proposed mitigating factor has been shown to be occurring.
Indeed. I watched it and I don't want my hour back. Coyne gave me some new arguments, which is surprising, since I follow the "new atheists" pretty closely. The charge of ad-hominems is completely without merit. It isn't an ad-hominem to point out flaws in your opponent's logic.
In 7 years the dev team has put out 11 versions of Ubuntu. I got tired of the rat race. Every kernel broke my video driver, and every major revision broke some other software. I always had problems with compiz, and when I turned it off, I had other problems. I finally gave up when I installed 11 (from scratch) and faced the black screen of death on my first boot, and the solutions I found online didn't work. I tried CentOS but it wasn't compatible with about half the software I wanted to run. It seems like Ubuntu is the go-to distro for most packages, so can't they stick to a version for more than a year?
Hmmm.... maybe I don't. I've spent the last 10 years writing stock market software. For us, "real-time" means in such a fraction of a second that the human operator can't tell the difference. It doesn't do much good to show more quotes than the human eye can see.
I can see how, for engineering applications, the "human" definition of real-time wouldn't be good enough. But I assure you, windows is fast "enough" for anything that involves a human operator, assuming the people writing the software are competent.
I agree that no sane person would make an O/S with it, but it is a great platform for video games, including 3d shooters. In fact, that's what my business partner and I are developing our game with. C# + XNA. Admittedly, our game is 2d, but only because we don't have the resources to create 3d assets, not because XNA is somehow lacking. Our time to production will be cut way, way short because of the simplicity and elegance of XNA. The only thing that makes it difficult is that the XBox version will require us to pre-allocate ALL of our objects, because the garbage collector on the XBox sucks. This does make things a bit trickier, you have to create object pools and crap that you normally would expect the GC to do for you, but it's still the bee's-knees in terms of coding time.
Most of the work of modern games is done on the graphics hardware, not the CPUs. For the tiny amount that is done on the CPUs, C# is plenty fast enough. I can put like 6000 sprites on the screen, rotating and scaling, before I drop below 60fps. And that's only due to my graphics hardware. The game code is hardly doing anything.
Furthermore, the tools to develop against the XBox are just freaking cool. I can debug the console exactly as though it were running on my local box, set a break point, inspect variables, etc, and I can't even tell it's a remote process. It just works.
And finally, the lead developer for XNA is the same guy who made Allegro in the 90s. I don't know if you were programming games back then, or playing around with it, but Allegro was great. The main problem is that it was slow. Well, Sean has had nearly 20 years to refine his techniques, and of hardware advances, and he has it down to an art. You barely need to write any code to have a game up and running. The vast majority of your time is spent in game logic, not looking up arcane DirectX commands. DX is mostly abstracted away.
Well, we know at least one thing that could cause temperatures to plunge almost overnight. In fact, it would probably kill off a lot of plant life, and drop CO2 levels as well.
At this point, given what I know about our chances of surviving this crap, I see a new ice age as the best chance of survival for 90% of life on the planet. If we heat up the Earth too much, we're quite possibly headed for another Permian Extinction level event. The amount of hydrogen sulfide that has built up in the ocean since then is surely enough to kill most aerobic life on earth.
No I don't mind. The loss of those edge cities will be more than compensated by the ability to grow food in the fertile plains of Siberia and Northern Canada
Yeah well not everyone shares your desire to move because of catastrophic climate change.
Furthermore, parts of the icecaps could fall off suddenly. It's not like it's guaranteed to melt in an orderly, slow fashion. Fancy huge tidal waves that cross continents?
Also still waiting on a response as to whether you enjoy breathing hydrogen sulfide.
That's a brilliant circle of logic.
There aren't any peer-reviewed publications because those who control the publications wont publish dissenting opinion, and you can prove there's no validity to the dissenting opinion by pointing to the lack of peer-reviewed publications....
You claim circular logic on the part of the GP, and then you use it yourself. How... ironic.
Your statement is a classic example of begging the question (AKA, circular reasoning). You assume your premise in your statement. To wit, you assume that:
1.) There are dissenting articles worth publishing (feel free to cite one)
2.) Scientific publications base their acceptance of articles on whether the submitter is arguing against prevailing opinion
Neither of your unproven, circular assertions have any merit whatsoever. In fact, science loves controversy, and the best way to make a name for yourself is to prove a prevailing opinion incorrect. Examples abound:
- The cause of the Cretaceous extinction (once thought to be a slow death as the earth cooled, now known to be an asteroid)
- the evolution of birds (now known to be from theropods, though that was once very controversial)
- gradualism in evolution (now replaced by punctuated equilibrium)
- gradualism in climate (we've now shown that climate changes can occur very, very rapidly, rather than over thousands of years)
- the number of species of man (that's right, there were more than one, although the oldbeards still hate this idea, it's fairly widely accepted now)
These are just a few examples of science being turned on its head because scientists dared to go against consensus. You know how they did it? By publishing peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals.
Oops, I didn't mean to list New Delhi. That's probably where everyone is going to have to move to when the ocean starts rising, actually.
That's it? Try 400 MILLION years. The earth had much higher levels of CO2, and yet animals survived just fine. Humans would be okay as well. In fact it used to be a tropical paradise with plants growing everywhere, since they had tons of CO2 to consume and thrive. I fail to see the drawback of higher CO2.
First off, the OP said that 280 ppm is "suddenly" more than the biosphere can handle. There's nothing sudden about 400k years. In fact, in recent geological history, 380ppm is quite an anomaly.
As to your point, the water level was also several hundred feet higher 400 million years ago. I guess you don't mind if Florida, Hawaii, California, New York, London, New Delhi, Washington, Vancouver, most of Italy, and countless other places just vanish under the ocean when the ice caps melt?
Furthermore, if the temperature gets too hot, hydrogen sulfide that has been building up (and been sequestered there due to temperature) for millions of years will outgas from the ocean, and kill almost every animal on the planet.
Furthermore, if carbon levels continue to increase, the acidity of the ocean will continue to increase, which could kill off most of the protozoa and plankton that form the basis of the entire food chain.
Yes, the Earth was hotter 400 million years ago. The point is that upsetting the current balance is likely to have all sorts of catastrophic effects. Because guess what? During those 400 million years you're talking about, when we see rapid changes in temperature and CO2, you know what else we see? Massive extinction events.
Do you see the downside now, or were you just being facetious in the first place?
Yeah my bad. I meant year, honestly, but whether you believe me or not, it's irrelevant to my point. 700bln a year is quite an incentive to lie about the climate, and is a bigger incentive than lone scientists have to get grants.
In fact, I'd wager that if you want to go be a scientist for the oil industry, you'd make a hell of a lot more money.
So if you're going to argue that a million here or there is an incentive to lie and conspire, you have to admit that the oil companies have an even bigger incentive to lie and obfuscate and conspire.
Historical CO2-levels in the atmosphere range from over 4000ppm (even 7000ppm further back) to ... about 280ppm. Why is the lowest number suddenly the only number the biosphere can handle?
The lowest number since when?
If we're talking about the last 400 thousand years, you are completely and entirely wrong
Sure, if you want to go back to a time when the earth was inhospitable by humans, there was more CO2 in the atmosphere. What does that prove? Exactly nothing.
I didn't find the data you're talking about in your link, but I'm guessing you're comparing the CO2 concentration from tens or hundreds of millions of years ago to today. Umm... why?
I'm not quite sure as to how to answer your question, because it is completely nonsensical, based on a faulty assumption, and displays a profound ignorance. You've basically asked me to give you an entire education from scratch in paleoclimatology. But I'll give it a shot, briefly.
The amount of CO2 the biosphere can absorb is related mostly to the amount the ocean soaks up, and the amount used by plants in respiration. At different periods in the Earth's history, there have been differing amounts of volcanic activity, flora, and fauna. Each of these contribute to the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The time period you are referring to is a time period in which there was a much different balance of these factors on the Earth.
Hopefully this answers your question.
And the assumption that the Earth has some type of natural temperature from which is it not supposed to deviate, what is that belief based on?
No one says that any particular temperature is natural. You're just making that up. What we say is that willfully raising global temperatures is a bad idea because it can have catastrophic consequences for people. Why is this concept so elusive to deniers? If temps go high enough, life will suck and billions will die . Even if the rise was natural (it isn't), if there was a way we could stop it, we should try it .
You don't have to read humanist and transcendental philosophers to recognize that billions dead and a sucky life for those who remain is a bad outcome. If your house was on fire, would you say, "well, there's fires in nature all the time. It's natural!" Or would you try to put out the fire? This is basic common sense. Somehow it gets thrown out the window when the topic of AGW is broached.
Higher temps also mean more droughts, which means less food and water, which means more wars. It's why Al Gore won the peace prize, and deserved it.
I hope this helped you grasp the concept of catastrophic change (but I realize it probably didn't).
We put out a lot more CO2 than the earth itself does,
Actually, it's not even close.
We put about 5% of the carbon into the atmosphere, but that 5% is enough to tip the balance and cause CO2 levels to rise, because the biosphere cannot absorb it.
How the hell did this get troll modded? Asking for a cite is trolling? The OP made a blanket assertion with nothing to back it up! Hopefully whoever did that gets meta-modded into /. hell.
Mann gets millions from NSF and Penn State doesn't want that to stop.
Really? Well, since we're on the subject, the USA buys 700 billion dollars worth of oil every day.
So, assuming intellectual consistency on your part, do the oil companies who spend millions on AGW denial research, and stand to lose trillions of dollars if we reduce our oil consumption have a bigger conflict of interest than a professor, or Al Gore? Just curious.
Wow, so the Earth isn't actually warming overall? Holy crap, I should go get rich on Intrade.
I don't know if you know anything about trading, but there's a crapload of bids out there, and hardly any asks for that contract. Wonder why?
Based on the current bid, you can get almost 4x your money back if this year is not the hottest year on record. So what are you waiting for?
As far as your "argument", please provide an example of a recent long-term cooling trend, on the order of decades (as man made global warming has been) anywhere on the Earth . A cold winter isn't climate. It's weather. Denialists such as yourself cannot seem to (or don't want to) grasp this concept.
No it's not, it's based on other research that says man's contribution to a natural process is mostly insignificant.
[citation needed]
CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm to 380ppm since the onset of the industrial revolution.
The earth's biosphere can absorb only a certain amount of CO2, i.e. - that which is produced naturally. When you add more than the biosphere can absorb, atmospheric levels of CO2 increase. You are tipping the scales, as it were.
The fact is, climate scientists predict how much CO2 levels will rise over the long and short term, and do a pretty fantastic job of it. Can you do better with your theory of nothing?
I wouldn't call myself a "warmer", but I also don't know how encyclopedias can print as fact that 95% of CO2 in the atmosphere comes directly from volcanos, rain, and plant matter decay.
If the entire remaining 5% is strictly from man, I just can't see that being a significant contributor to the speeding of this natural process.
You can't see it, or you won't see it? Do you have a better idea of where the excess carbon is coming from? Let's hear it!
Finally, I always like to mention to the AGW folks that 10,000 years ago the place where I live was completely covered by a glacier. I'm very glad for global warming, because where I live is now a beautiful region inhabited by a multitude of species both migratory and permanent
Global warming also can cause hydrogen sulfide outgassing from the ocean. You can't breathe hydrogen sulfide. But it's just part of the natural order of things, so who cares, right?
In all seriousness, can you at least post some reputable links refuting my statements
Maybe because you didn't even attempt to make a refutable statement of fact. The closest you came was this:
I'm all for taking better care of the planet, but the global warming nuts haven't really provided much evidence and they're the ones making the allegations.
The way I see things, if you make a bunch of claims, the burden of proof is ON YOU... not the people you're speaking to.
You don't make it clear what claims you are talking about, or what evidence we're supposed to provide. Should we link you to every climate study since the beginning of time? What exactly is it that you believe (erroneously) climate scientists claim without evidence? Do you think they just go around making claims with no science to back it up? What in the hell gave you that idea?
Just making a blanket statement that there's no evidence for anything in climate science isn't an argument. It's a troll.
Here's how actual argument works: you make a claim, and support it with evidence. Other people rebut your claim on the basis of your evidence, or other evidence.
Why is it that the global warming deniers can't ever seem to get this right? You think the scientists are wrong? Then post something factual. It's not my job to defend and litigate all of climate science just because you lack education in the matter.