I went to original sources, such as "Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin.
Unless you're more interested in the history of science than in the science itself, that was a waste of time. While an important milestone, the theory and evidence in the book is very far from the modern understanding of and evidence for evolution. Darwin didn't even rule out the possibility of the inheritance of acquired traits.
May I also assume that you worked out the "modern evolutionary synthesis" (ideas largely developed in the early to mid-20th century) that reconciled evolution and natural selection with Mendelian genetics? Otherwise your thinking is mired in the 19th century.
it managed to convince the entire scientific community within a year
It did no such thing. It took decades for various objections and seeming contradictions with other biological ideas to be worked out to broad satisfaction.
A new game. Few or none of the people here are doing that.
If 400ppm CO2 is causing global warming, then can someone please explain to me how the Earth's climate was cooler during the late Ordovician period [geocraft.com] when CO2 was about 4400ppm?
The answer to the puzzle you ask about was unknown for quite some time. It was one of the legitimate objections to the AGW theory. However, serious scientists looked for an answer rather than dismissing it. I've been following the AGW debate for 10-15 years. I wasn't convinced up until about 10 years ago, because there were many serious questions. One by one though most of the serious objections have been explained. That isn't proof (proof doesn't exist in science anyway) but there is a clear trajectory, which seems like a good way to bet. I'll take it on faith that you asked that question in all seriousness. However there are denialists who keep raising the same objections year after year, and most of them were legitimate objections at one time, but they ignore the explanations that have since been found for them.
Has our burning of fossil fuels helped? no. But we certainly haven't caused this. If anything we just gave nature a jump start.
Yes, the climate will change at some point regardless of what we do. Similarly, at some point you will die regardless of whether you bother to look both ways before crossing the street.
The long term consequences of climate change are unknown. The amount of short term pain required to affect the long term consequences are also unknown.
People spend their whole lives dealing with unknowns. They do it by making estimates. If you refuse to deal with anything that isn't completely known, you'll either refuse to go to work because you might get killed on the way, or you won't bother to look both ways before crossing the street, since that may turn out fine.
Nobody wants to be the guy who actually sacrifies anything.
Certainly I don't, unless other people share the same sacrifice. This is not the kind of thing that's going to be ameliorated by a "don't litter" campaign. The only way it's going to change is through some system of incentives and enforcement.
I do recall a few inconvenient facts about global warming. I recall that the global temperature peaked in 1998 and has not broken that record since.... I recall that the temperature reached in 1998 was lower than that of 1934.
An abstract that does not explicitly state that humans are the primary cause of global warming is definitely not the same thing as an abstract that is explicitly stating that humans are not the primary cause. Most of the abstracts that are counted as an endorsement of AGW simply don't go into detail about whether or not humans are the primary cause of global warming. This paper addresses a specific question. The question is "is there a scientific consensus that AGW is a real phenomenon". The answer is YES. Maybe you don't like that answer, so maybe you want to move the goalposts and ask the question "is there a scientific consensus that AGW is the primary cause of global warming". Well, tough shit, that's not what the paper is about.
I'm quoting this (almost) in full because it's rated 0 (get an account!), I don't have mod points today, and it clearly expresses the objection I was going to post. Another way to put this is that the OP gets the prize for meaningless sound bite statistics.
I'm not a climate scientist, but I do have a phd in math.
Serious overkill for this purpose. A decent high school education should suffice.
I shouldn't have to pay the medical expenses for smokers...
I shouldn't have to pay to educate people who are determined to stay ignorant, but I do. The lifetime medical costs for smokers are lower than for non-smokers. Die at 67 of some smoking related ailment and Medicare won't have to pay for anymore medical care for you. Don't smoke, live to 87 and that's another 20 years of medical expenses. Even if you argue that the pre-retirement medical costs are higher for smokers, it's unreasonable to ask smokers to pay higher premiums unless you also reduce their Medicare taxes.
It's people like me that are going to cost you. Almost everyone in my family (both sides) lives at least into their 80's. I'm probably going to cost you a bundle. No apologies.
Furthermore, if your real concern is saving money rather than having some variety of "those people" to sanctimoniously complain about, what's really screwing you is living in the US. No other country in the world pays more than 2/3 of what we do (as %/GDP - at exchange rate or PPP the disparity is much greater), yet many such countries have medical care at least as good as ours and universal coverage.
any trained sniper already has a ballistics computer and range finder wherever they go. It's called their head.
That's what some engineers said when they first came out with this wussy CAD stuff. Sliderule and paper is all you need. Probably some truth to it in the early days, but the tech improves.
Call me back when team wildlife kills and butchers the hunters at a rate with, say, three orders of magnitude, of the rate at which team hunters kills and butchers the wildlife.
I'll settle for even odds. Anything less challenging and you might as well use a slaughterhouse.
For that matter I bet most people reading this do calculations with a computer, or at least a calculator. Real men still use slide rules, or pencil and paper (log tables allowed for beginners).
Next you'll be petitioning against adding rifling to barrels.
Agreed. The "real" way to do something is whatever somebody grew up with. People talk about a manual tranny being real driving, but I say it's degenerate ever since they added synchromesh. A caveman, heck, somebody from the early 19th century would think a modern rifle is cheating.
Your novice wouldn't even get a chance to fire, even with this rifle.
Assuming the Secret Service saw the assassin. I suspect camouflage/hiding is at least as important as marksmanship. Heck, Reagan came within a hair's breadth of being killed by a guy with a pistol. Sheer luck he didn't die.
I think it was meant as a joke, though it wouldn't surprise me too much if a real Randroid wrote something like that. With Randroids it can be hard to tell whether it's satire or it's real.
That whole article sums up what is wrong with these venture capitalist funded start-ups; they want to compete on a different playing field than established companies.
That's only in Europe. In the US we have a level playing field: both new and established companies, large and small, demand the right to import the cheapest labor they can.
Slashdot Mirror
I went to original sources, such as "Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin.
Unless you're more interested in the history of science than in the science itself, that was a waste of time. While an important milestone, the theory and evidence in the book is very far from the modern understanding of and evidence for evolution. Darwin didn't even rule out the possibility of the inheritance of acquired traits.
May I also assume that you worked out the "modern evolutionary synthesis" (ideas largely developed in the early to mid-20th century) that reconciled evolution and natural selection with Mendelian genetics? Otherwise your thinking is mired in the 19th century.
it managed to convince the entire scientific community within a year
It did no such thing. It took decades for various objections and seeming contradictions with other biological ideas to be worked out to broad satisfaction.
Call me a denier for asking a question.
A new game. Few or none of the people here are doing that.
If 400ppm CO2 is causing global warming, then can someone please explain to me how the Earth's climate was cooler during the late Ordovician period [geocraft.com] when CO2 was about 4400ppm?
See here.
The answer to the puzzle you ask about was unknown for quite some time. It was one of the legitimate objections to the AGW theory. However, serious scientists looked for an answer rather than dismissing it. I've been following the AGW debate for 10-15 years. I wasn't convinced up until about 10 years ago, because there were many serious questions. One by one though most of the serious objections have been explained. That isn't proof (proof doesn't exist in science anyway) but there is a clear trajectory, which seems like a good way to bet. I'll take it on faith that you asked that question in all seriousness. However there are denialists who keep raising the same objections year after year, and most of them were legitimate objections at one time, but they ignore the explanations that have since been found for them.
Has our burning of fossil fuels helped? no. But we certainly haven't caused this. If anything we just gave nature a jump start.
Yes, the climate will change at some point regardless of what we do. Similarly, at some point you will die regardless of whether you bother to look both ways before crossing the street.
The long term consequences of climate change are unknown. The amount of short term pain required to affect the long term consequences are also unknown.
People spend their whole lives dealing with unknowns. They do it by making estimates. If you refuse to deal with anything that isn't completely known, you'll either refuse to go to work because you might get killed on the way, or you won't bother to look both ways before crossing the street, since that may turn out fine.
Nobody wants to be the guy who actually sacrifies anything.
Certainly I don't, unless other people share the same sacrifice. This is not the kind of thing that's going to be ameliorated by a "don't litter" campaign. The only way it's going to change is through some system of incentives and enforcement.
The tree hugging AGW crowd are missing one very key element. Starving people don't care. They want food.
Which is all the more reason to be concerned about AGW, since the harm to agriculture is one of the biggest likely adverse effects of it.
I do recall a few inconvenient facts about global warming. I recall that the global temperature peaked in 1998 and has not broken that record since. ... I recall that the temperature reached in 1998 was lower than that of 1934.
You need better recall - none of those things are true.
The fact that the correlation has not yet been proven is only a small part.
It hasn't and it never will be, because in science you can never prove anything. I do find it a handy guide on which way to bet though.
An abstract that does not explicitly state that humans are the primary cause of global warming is definitely not the same thing as an abstract that is explicitly stating that humans are not the primary cause. Most of the abstracts that are counted as an endorsement of AGW simply don't go into detail about whether or not humans are the primary cause of global warming. This paper addresses a specific question. The question is "is there a scientific consensus that AGW is a real phenomenon". The answer is YES. Maybe you don't like that answer, so maybe you want to move the goalposts and ask the question "is there a scientific consensus that AGW is the primary cause of global warming". Well, tough shit, that's not what the paper is about.
I'm quoting this (almost) in full because it's rated 0 (get an account!), I don't have mod points today, and it clearly expresses the objection I was going to post. Another way to put this is that the OP gets the prize for meaningless sound bite statistics.
I'm not a climate scientist, but I do have a phd in math.
Serious overkill for this purpose. A decent high school education should suffice.
Add in the asymmetric risk to the wealthiest parts of the world and the politics gets even more dubious.
What's that mean? Do you thing the wealthy or the poor parts of the world would be at greater risk from climate change?
The problem here, is getting the public to adopt heatsinks on their heads as fashionable.
No problem. Tin foil hats can double as heatsinks.
I shouldn't have to pay the medical expenses for smokers ...
I shouldn't have to pay to educate people who are determined to stay ignorant, but I do. The lifetime medical costs for smokers are lower than for non-smokers. Die at 67 of some smoking related ailment and Medicare won't have to pay for anymore medical care for you. Don't smoke, live to 87 and that's another 20 years of medical expenses. Even if you argue that the pre-retirement medical costs are higher for smokers, it's unreasonable to ask smokers to pay higher premiums unless you also reduce their Medicare taxes.
It's people like me that are going to cost you. Almost everyone in my family (both sides) lives at least into their 80's. I'm probably going to cost you a bundle. No apologies.
Furthermore, if your real concern is saving money rather than having some variety of "those people" to sanctimoniously complain about, what's really screwing you is living in the US. No other country in the world pays more than 2/3 of what we do (as %/GDP - at exchange rate or PPP the disparity is much greater), yet many such countries have medical care at least as good as ours and universal coverage.
What matters is companies use it as an excuse to fuck over their employees.
But if they didn't use this excuse, they'd just find another.
Just sound like the world's biggest douche bag and say, "Cloud ... blah blah .... Cloud"
Suppose it's a sunny day?
any trained sniper already has a ballistics computer and range finder wherever they go. It's called their head.
That's what some engineers said when they first came out with this wussy CAD stuff. Sliderule and paper is all you need. Probably some truth to it in the early days, but the tech improves.
Call me back when team wildlife kills and butchers the hunters at a rate with, say, three orders of magnitude, of the rate at which team hunters kills and butchers the wildlife.
I'll settle for even odds. Anything less challenging and you might as well use a slaughterhouse.
For that matter I bet most people reading this do calculations with a computer, or at least a calculator. Real men still use slide rules, or pencil and paper (log tables allowed for beginners).
Next you'll be petitioning against adding rifling to barrels.
Agreed. The "real" way to do something is whatever somebody grew up with. People talk about a manual tranny being real driving, but I say it's degenerate ever since they added synchromesh. A caveman, heck, somebody from the early 19th century would think a modern rifle is cheating.
Your novice wouldn't even get a chance to fire, even with this rifle.
Assuming the Secret Service saw the assassin. I suspect camouflage/hiding is at least as important as marksmanship. Heck, Reagan came within a hair's breadth of being killed by a guy with a pistol. Sheer luck he didn't die.
Bah, that's nothing, I once killed a polar bear with a banana.
Show us the video!
I think it was meant as a joke, though it wouldn't surprise me too much if a real Randroid wrote something like that. With Randroids it can be hard to tell whether it's satire or it's real.
+10
we built our entire railways at the turn of the last century on the backs of chinese immigrants
Such provincial West Coast nonsense. Elsewhere in the country we built the railroads on the backs of Irish immigrants.
Stfu statist. If you want to earn money or respect you should join the Galt class and not the Marx class.
Re: Marx
Is that Groucho, Chico or Harpo?
That whole article sums up what is wrong with these venture capitalist funded start-ups; they want to compete on a different playing field than established companies.
That's only in Europe. In the US we have a level playing field: both new and established companies, large and small, demand the right to import the cheapest labor they can.
So, riddle me this: how do you pay your workers a lot of money, but offer a cheap product?
Henry Ford figured it out. Anyone who can't doesn't deserve to stay in business.