Hmmm...did I mention that one of the things I love about digital watches is the ease of use?;)
Yes, that Urwerk watch is definitely intriguing in looks, and I do find it interesting to read about the engineering challenges in generating such a complicated mechanism using purely mechanical engineering, no electronics here...but it a) doesn't even provide half the features available to even a $1.50 digital watch from the Dollar Store, and b) isn't very intuitive to read (I guess until you get used to it). Like binary clocks, it's more of a conversation piece than any sort of improvement in actual function...although I will give it points for innovative design. It definitely does represent elegance in engineering, as you said. The drawing set for this watch would sure be something to see!
It begs the question, though: why aren't people designing / paying top dollar for rotary-dial or steam-powered cellphones? Because the electronic versions do the job ever so much better! (sorry, I'm an EE, so I guess my natural bias is showing a bit...;) I can appreciate the design challenges and complexities in creating a full-featured analog watch, but to my mind the right tool for the wristwatch job is digital*. Digital watches can already provide all the functions that mechanical can, plus features that no amount of mechanical engineering could ever squeeze in. It's just too bad that the design community hasn't worked as hard on making them pretty as they have on making them useful, long-lived and practically indestructible...
*Of course, this posits a world where electricity, and specifically watch batteries, are available. In a post-apocalyptic world, I concede, mechanical wristwatches would win out over digital...eventually. As long as people remembered to wind them.
Just curious, but what if the defendant gave them a poison pill password, one that securely wiped the encrypted data upon entry?
Would the defendant be liable for destroying evidence, even though they never entered the password? Also. if the data is wiped before being examined by law enforcement, how could they make the case for destroying 'evidence'? There may have never been any evidence in the files at all...
Oh, never mind. I just saw the flaw in my own logic. Any competent enforcement officer or prosecution attorney would of course make a backup of any encrypted data before applying the defendant's submitted password to it...wouldn't they?
show me time in 24-hour format, show me the month/day/year, show me time in different time zones, allow me to set multiple alarms or chime on the hour or converts to a stopwatch if I ever need it (okay, I rarely use that, but it's handy when I do need it)...what's the benefit to analog watches again?
Thing is.. I can program a digital watch to do all that for me. I can design the silicon to do all that for me. It's fairly trivial.
Er, that was kinda my point. There's no comparison between digital and analog as far as features and convenience is concerned...digital for the win, every time. So why, in this day and age of people shopping for their tech toys on the basis of looks as much as convenience/features, are they all still so bleeding ugly?
Yes, there are a few designers that are trying to make 'stylish' digital wristwatches (most are still clunky and boxy looking, IMHO), but nobody seems to be trying to make them prettier, especially ladies watches. It frustrates me to see racks and racks of nice, dainty ladies dress watches, with fancy metal bands and lovely bezel surrounds...only to see that not one of them is digital. WTF? It's like some form of analog snobbery, since LCD has a certain look and feel, we're not even going to try dressing it up...
That's one ugly watch, but it's really hard to find a nice looking digital watch even for men IMHO. Nixon makes some attractive watches and so do Diesel. They tend to skew to style over features though, "back to basics" is the thing now in digital watches.
Yeah. I've seriously scanned through the local mens digital watch selections, trying to find something that doesn't actually inhibit the motion of my wrist when I try to wear it...no go. I'm not sure why, but it seems the style for all mens watches these days, even the analog versions, is to go as big / clunky as possible! The ones you linked to don't seem too bad, but on a woman's wrist, unfortunately, they tend to look like a big flashy manacle, and usually don't even close tightly enough to keep them from flopping around.:(
True that, at least for watches. They're starting to get the idea with other technology, though, as evident by the rise of the iDevices and competing products. People want their technology to be more portable, to do more, and to look good while doing it...I just wonder why this has not seriously been applied to wristwatches, other than those uber-geek PDA-on-your-wrist things that take up half your forearm and have so many buttons they put a 747 to shame...
That Rosendahl watch you linked to does look cool, though. Much better than mine!
Yeah, those are definitely nicer than the one I have! I still wouldn't call them very 'ladylike', though...
I'm not sure why it seems to be such a challenge to wrap a nice gold or silver bezel around a digital display, then put a fancy metal strap on it, something like this. I know they make the displays small enough, since I've seen kids and tweenie 'jelly' digital watches smaller than that...and the control buttons could be easily recessed, or capacitive touch, to preserve the overall look...
Bah. It's just one of my pet peeves. Maybe I should design and sell these, then I'd get the watch I want!;)
If books and magazines were behind a glass counter, you can guarantee you would get fewer sales.
Sorry, weren't you aware that you and every other brain dead consumer out there are supposed to snap up their product based on the pretty colours on the covers, the screaming headlines on the magazines and the flashy trailers for the movies?
Seriously, sometimes it feels like advertisers and the entertainment industry think we're all just trout in the pond.
That's always frustrated me. I would love to wear a classy-looking (ladies) watch, but they don't make them with digital displays! Why on earth not?
Ever since I got my first digital watch as a kid, I've never looked back. Now I'd be hard pressed to find a digital watch that doesn't show me time in 24-hour format, show me the month/day/year, show me time in different time zones, allow me to set multiple alarms or chime on the hour or converts to a stopwatch if I ever need it (okay, I rarely use that, but it's handy when I do need it)...what's the benefit to analog watches again? You can replace the numbers on the dial with chips of diamond to mess people up even more, and call it 'high end'?
So I wear something like this clunky looking thing, which may not be bling, but at least it's got the bells and whistles I want. I just long for something a bit prettier for everyday wear...without sacrificing efficiency and (many) features, that is.
> Actually, Mozilla's default behavior is to disable and > prevent the user from re-enabling extensions
That's the old behavior. The behavior for Firefox 5 is different for extensions hosted on addons.mozilla.org.
There is also talk of shipping the add-on compatibility reporter by default.
Excellent! It only took, what, 7 years of user and developer complaints? How very responsive to their userbase!
Seriously. Why did people choose Firefox, if not for the customization and flexibility provided (mostly) by plug-ins and add-ons? I know that's why I migrated...well, that and to prevent ActiveX headaches. It wasn't so bad when they were updating relatively infrequently, but with their new philosophy, they had better address some of these long-standing issues if they don't want to risk losing home users, much less Enterprise users...it's not like they're the *only* customizable browser on the market anymore...
Right up until the release of 6, when Mozilla once again tells us, the users of their products, that we're doing it wrong, and makes Firefox disable any plugin that claims to support a version newer than itself, because we, the consumers of their product don't know if those plugins are really up to date...
> My initial thought would be to assume all > extensions will work and allow the community of > users to report broken extensions
That is _exactly_ what's being done with extensions hosted on addons.mozilla.org.
Actually, Mozilla's default behavior is to disable and prevent the user from re-enabling extensions that don't have an updated version number in the install.rdf file (which they now admit is a rather quick-moving target). It was a royal pain to manually update the install.rdf file just to be able to keep using an older plugin that worked fine with the latest version.
At least you can now fix this irritating default behavior in a couple of different ways, allowing the user to still see which of their installed add-ons aren't 'officially' supported, yet enable and try them anyways.
This should be the default. Okay, disable add-ons that don't report as compatible with the latest update, but allow the user to re-enable them if they want to try it anyways!
One doesn't have to be intelligent or even have a multi-celullar body to change the atmosphere entirely... One only needs time and large numbers.
Allrighty then. Call me when the first couple million years of humanity's influence on the atmosphere is finished, we'll take another look. Considering it took approximately 900 million years for those photosynthetic organisms to alter the composition of the atmosphere, we've got some time to get this figured out properly.
Seriously, sorry for getting you so riled up. I don't have time to dig out and link to backlogs of supporting articles / data, so I shouldn't have said anything in the first place.
I do appreciate your detailed discussion on the matter, however, and I will be taking a closer look at some of your discussion points. (e.g., I hadn't really looked into the science of recycling batteries, I just know there's a lot more 'dangerous' stuff in them in comparison to an aluminum or iron core motor, so I just assumed the recycling process has to be more difficult, dangerous and require more energy than simply melting down the metal scraps and recasting...) Many of them do seem like alarmist statements that have been thoroughly debunked already, but I will refresh my current reading on the latest AGW topics.
I must call bluff on your claim that AGW policies won't reduce the mitigation abilities in underdeveloped countries, however. In the name of cutting carbon, AGW supporters have actively tried (although thankfully not successfully) to block development of so-called 'dirty' energy sources in countries where having that energy available can literally mean life or death to the local populace.
I say, if they have the capability to build it, let them build coal- and natural gas-fired generating stations. It will raise the standard of life for everyone in the area, provide jobs and potentially provide enough supplemental work-energy so that people then have the time and energy to tackle building dikes or irrigation systems to prepare the region for the next wet/dry season. I'm not saying have no emissions controls on the plants whatsoever, but be sane about it and limit the emissions controls requirements to those chemicals that have been proven to cause direct harm. Don't just block them in a knee-jerk reaction, simply because they'll emit more CO2. CO2 feeds us, remember, by feeding the plants that we need to live...
I totally deserved that. I kinda got carried away on my last post, and since I don't have time to dig up and link references to all the articles/databases I have looked at over the last ten years, I shouldn't have opened my big mouth.
Suffice it to say, from the reading I have done on the subject (in an idle, and I'll admit it probably biased manner, since I don't actively seek out the doom 'n gloom prophets' articles), I see enough legitimate concerns with the interpretation of the raw data to support my own doubts on the 'consensus' of AGW. Since when is scientific analysis subject to voting, anyways? Why does it need 'consensus'? Because the data ain't as clear-cut as some would have you believe, that's why.
Im sorry, i have to call this out. Thats a fucking stupid way to look at things. You call it tangable because its easier to see the damage of a starving child, but because you can see the damage of the climate it someone less tangible?
No, I call climate 'damage' intangible because we don't actually know or have any way of measuring what 'climate' is, much less determining what it should be.
'Climate' is mutable, and means different things to different people, depending on what they want to argue about. To some people, it is average temperature alone, while to others it is average air temperature, average wind speed and direction, average precipitation, average cloud formation, average ocean temperatures, average sea level, etc. etc. There are so many chaotic inputs and inter-relationships in the whole system that I highly doubt we will ever be able to predict with any degree of certainty the absolute effects of any single factor on all the rest of the system.
Perhaps after gathering a thousand years (or ten thousand years) of accurate, consistent and globally encompassing direct measurement data points we will be able to puzzle it out and confidently declare that we know exactly what input affects which system, but until then we're monkeys trying to predict how many bananas there will be in 100 years based on the pattern of leaf molt over the last hundred. Oh yeah, and older rulers often randomly changed lengths for years or even decades before being checked and corrected, and often two different rulers of the old style did not measure the same length even when side by side, and by the way they didn't measure the leaves across a certain part of the forest back in the day...good luck!
All in all, climate is meant to change, and change often (geologically speaking), all we can practically do is mitigate the effects as they happen (or don't happen...) I do think it is incredible hubris on the part of mankind to think that we are capable of forcing the process, in either direction.
versus something that 97-98% of active publishing climate scientists say is happening now.
That's great...so why can't they provide raw, unprocessed data that shows it to be so? Whenever I look at any raw temperature dataset, I just can't see the 'warming trend' they're claiming. And even if the warming is happening (okay, it probably is, whether it's because of humans or not...), I still think we, as a people, can be ever so much more effective by focusing on mitigation of potential side-effects, rather than trying to mess with a process that, frankly, we don't fully understand. Especially since all of the the projected side effects are things that have happened and hurt us often in the past, and will happen in the future, regardless of what we do...so why not focus on giving people the tools to deal with these side-effects, rather than trying to remove any mitigation capability at all in hopes that if we appease the climate gods enough, disasters (flood, drought, typhoons, etc, etc.) won't ever happen again?
If starving kids is a tangible and heartbreaking issue for you, then why do you care not about amplifying the rates of both severe drought events and severe flooding events?
I do...therefore we should not be crippling developing economies' access to energy resources, which will ultimately provide the populace with the capability to defend against or mitigate such disasters whether they are caused by AGW, Gaia or plain old bad luck.
Ever used an electric lawnmower?
Ever calculate the carbon offsets for creating, transporting and using the electricity to power that lawnmower? Unless you have dedicated solar and/or wind power solely for recharging the lawnmower battery (which, by the way, will need more carbon offset credits to recycle come end of life), you probably need to draw power from the grid to be able to mow your lawn twice a week (typical around here, grass grows so fast!)
Of course, the absolute best method for dealing with grass? Get a goat. You can even milk it and sell the milk/cheese! (no, I'm not kidding, although city and town by-laws make this unnecessarily difficult...especially considering the size of dogs they let people keep in a 300 sqft apartment...poor pups)
Er, no, however one that was 100% oxygen (or pretty much any gas) would be just as toxic for you and me...should the Clean Air Act cover oxygen emissions as well?
If we were in danger of oxygen emissions reaching that level, then yes, the Clean Air Act should cover such emissions. Since such a thing has no chance of occurring, it's a moot question. The Clean Air Act after all should only affect those emissions that are actually a threat to our health.
Actually, the chance of winding up with a 100% CO2 atmosphere is just as remote. The chance of even winding up with an atmosphere with enough CO2 in it to make it physically harmful is also nil.
The only point on which alarmists can hang their "CO2 is a pollutant" hat on is the theorized warming effects on the atmosphere, and even those theories are wildly inconsistent regarding the absolute and potential environmental effects of the postulated atmospheric warming.
So no, CO2 is not a pollutant. It is not a threat to our health. It is plant food.
No, the crappy motor in the lawn mower is real and tangible. It's not heartbreaking though, the strawman is quite sad. Starving Ethiopians are not tangible.
Actually, I bet they are very tangible*. They're just not sitting right beside you, so it's harder to get worked up about them and therefore harder to get the kids involved in fundraising for them. Whereas that lawn mower is breaking the planet, so mommy and daddy should absolutely go out and buy an eco-certified one right now. And by the way, kids, here's a handy list of eco-friendly lawn equipment suppliers to show your parents...
*I do not think that word means what you think it means...
Slashdot Mirror
We're one step closer to eXistenZ?
Damn, that was one creepy movie...
Hmmm...did I mention that one of the things I love about digital watches is the ease of use? ;)
Yes, that Urwerk watch is definitely intriguing in looks, and I do find it interesting to read about the engineering challenges in generating such a complicated mechanism using purely mechanical engineering, no electronics here...but it a) doesn't even provide half the features available to even a $1.50 digital watch from the Dollar Store, and b) isn't very intuitive to read (I guess until you get used to it). Like binary clocks, it's more of a conversation piece than any sort of improvement in actual function...although I will give it points for innovative design. It definitely does represent elegance in engineering, as you said. The drawing set for this watch would sure be something to see!
It begs the question, though: why aren't people designing / paying top dollar for rotary-dial or steam-powered cellphones? Because the electronic versions do the job ever so much better! (sorry, I'm an EE, so I guess my natural bias is showing a bit...;) I can appreciate the design challenges and complexities in creating a full-featured analog watch, but to my mind the right tool for the wristwatch job is digital*. Digital watches can already provide all the functions that mechanical can, plus features that no amount of mechanical engineering could ever squeeze in. It's just too bad that the design community hasn't worked as hard on making them pretty as they have on making them useful, long-lived and practically indestructible...
*Of course, this posits a world where electricity, and specifically watch batteries, are available. In a post-apocalyptic world, I concede, mechanical wristwatches would win out over digital...eventually. As long as people remembered to wind them.
Just curious, but what if the defendant gave them a poison pill password, one that securely wiped the encrypted data upon entry?
Would the defendant be liable for destroying evidence, even though they never entered the password? Also. if the data is wiped before being examined by law enforcement, how could they make the case for destroying 'evidence'? There may have never been any evidence in the files at all...
Oh, never mind. I just saw the flaw in my own logic. Any competent enforcement officer or prosecution attorney would of course make a backup of any encrypted data before applying the defendant's submitted password to it...wouldn't they?
show me time in 24-hour format, show me the month/day/year, show me time in different time zones, allow me to set multiple alarms or chime on the hour or converts to a stopwatch if I ever need it (okay, I rarely use that, but it's handy when I do need it)...what's the benefit to analog watches again?
Thing is.. I can program a digital watch to do all that for me. I can design the silicon to do all that for me. It's fairly trivial.
Er, that was kinda my point. There's no comparison between digital and analog as far as features and convenience is concerned...digital for the win, every time. So why, in this day and age of people shopping for their tech toys on the basis of looks as much as convenience/features, are they all still so bleeding ugly?
Yes, there are a few designers that are trying to make 'stylish' digital wristwatches (most are still clunky and boxy looking, IMHO), but nobody seems to be trying to make them prettier, especially ladies watches. It frustrates me to see racks and racks of nice, dainty ladies dress watches, with fancy metal bands and lovely bezel surrounds...only to see that not one of them is digital. WTF? It's like some form of analog snobbery, since LCD has a certain look and feel, we're not even going to try dressing it up...
That's one ugly watch, but it's really hard to find a nice looking digital watch even for men IMHO. Nixon makes some attractive watches and so do Diesel. They tend to skew to style over features though, "back to basics" is the thing now in digital watches.
Yeah. I've seriously scanned through the local mens digital watch selections, trying to find something that doesn't actually inhibit the motion of my wrist when I try to wear it...no go. I'm not sure why, but it seems the style for all mens watches these days, even the analog versions, is to go as big / clunky as possible! The ones you linked to don't seem too bad, but on a woman's wrist, unfortunately, they tend to look like a big flashy manacle, and usually don't even close tightly enough to keep them from flopping around. :(
*sigh* the quest continues...
Utility vs beauty alas remains a compromise.
True that, at least for watches. They're starting to get the idea with other technology, though, as evident by the rise of the iDevices and competing products. People want their technology to be more portable, to do more, and to look good while doing it...I just wonder why this has not seriously been applied to wristwatches, other than those uber-geek PDA-on-your-wrist things that take up half your forearm and have so many buttons they put a 747 to shame...
That Rosendahl watch you linked to does look cool, though. Much better than mine!
Yeah, those are definitely nicer than the one I have! I still wouldn't call them very 'ladylike', though...
I'm not sure why it seems to be such a challenge to wrap a nice gold or silver bezel around a digital display, then put a fancy metal strap on it, something like this. I know they make the displays small enough, since I've seen kids and tweenie 'jelly' digital watches smaller than that...and the control buttons could be easily recessed, or capacitive touch, to preserve the overall look...
Bah. It's just one of my pet peeves. Maybe I should design and sell these, then I'd get the watch I want! ;)
If books and magazines were behind a glass counter, you can guarantee you would get fewer sales.
Sorry, weren't you aware that you and every other brain dead consumer out there are supposed to snap up their product based on the pretty colours on the covers, the screaming headlines on the magazines and the flashy trailers for the movies?
Seriously, sometimes it feels like advertisers and the entertainment industry think we're all just trout in the pond.
Heh, you may laugh, but that's exactly what we got our groomsmen as thank you gifts, engraved pocket watches.
Mind you, the casings had this big glass window in the back, so you could see the gears and clockworks inside ticking along...very cool.
Gah, computer's fighting me for control today.
This is the link I meant to post.
They don't make gold digital watches.
That's always frustrated me. I would love to wear a classy-looking (ladies) watch, but they don't make them with digital displays! Why on earth not?
Ever since I got my first digital watch as a kid, I've never looked back. Now I'd be hard pressed to find a digital watch that doesn't show me time in 24-hour format, show me the month/day/year, show me time in different time zones, allow me to set multiple alarms or chime on the hour or converts to a stopwatch if I ever need it (okay, I rarely use that, but it's handy when I do need it)...what's the benefit to analog watches again? You can replace the numbers on the dial with chips of diamond to mess people up even more, and call it 'high end'?
So I wear something like this clunky looking thing, which may not be bling, but at least it's got the bells and whistles I want. I just long for something a bit prettier for everyday wear...without sacrificing efficiency and (many) features, that is.
It annoys me that Google Contacts adds people I've emailed to my contact list.
Same here. It must have pissed enough people off, however, because they added an option to their mail settings to disable this behavior.
> Actually, Mozilla's default behavior is to disable and
> prevent the user from re-enabling extensions
That's the old behavior. The behavior for Firefox 5 is different for extensions hosted on addons.mozilla.org.
There is also talk of shipping the add-on compatibility reporter by default.
Excellent! It only took, what, 7 years of user and developer complaints? How very responsive to their userbase!
Seriously. Why did people choose Firefox, if not for the customization and flexibility provided (mostly) by plug-ins and add-ons? I know that's why I migrated...well, that and to prevent ActiveX headaches. It wasn't so bad when they were updating relatively infrequently, but with their new philosophy, they had better address some of these long-standing issues if they don't want to risk losing home users, much less Enterprise users...it's not like they're the *only* customizable browser on the market anymore...
Right up until the release of 6, when Mozilla once again tells us, the users of their products, that we're doing it wrong, and makes Firefox disable any plugin that claims to support a version newer than itself, because we, the consumers of their product don't know if those plugins are really up to date ...
At least they do seem to be getting the hint. Finally.
Now they'd better keep that plugin up to date...
Add Delicious Bookmarks to the list.
Works fine with FF 5 as far as I can tell, but I had to 'fix' FF's 'we know better dear' default attitude before I could re-enable it.
> My initial thought would be to assume all
> extensions will work and allow the community of
> users to report broken extensions
That is _exactly_ what's being done with extensions hosted on addons.mozilla.org.
Actually, Mozilla's default behavior is to disable and prevent the user from re-enabling extensions that don't have an updated version number in the install.rdf file (which they now admit is a rather quick-moving target). It was a royal pain to manually update the install.rdf file just to be able to keep using an older plugin that worked fine with the latest version.
At least you can now fix this irritating default behavior in a couple of different ways, allowing the user to still see which of their installed add-ons aren't 'officially' supported, yet enable and try them anyways.
This should be the default. Okay, disable add-ons that don't report as compatible with the latest update, but allow the user to re-enable them if they want to try it anyways!
approximately 900 million years
Frig. I didn't notice it didn't take my link.
Bah. Shouldn't be posting today, obvious case of PEBKAC. This is the link I meant to post.
approximately 900 million years
Frig. I didn't notice it didn't take my link.
One doesn't have to be intelligent or even have a multi-celullar body to change the atmosphere entirely... One only needs time and large numbers.
Allrighty then. Call me when the first couple million years of humanity's influence on the atmosphere is finished, we'll take another look. Considering it took approximately 900 million years for those photosynthetic organisms to alter the composition of the atmosphere, we've got some time to get this figured out properly.
tl;dr ;)
Seriously, sorry for getting you so riled up. I don't have time to dig out and link to backlogs of supporting articles / data, so I shouldn't have said anything in the first place.
I do appreciate your detailed discussion on the matter, however, and I will be taking a closer look at some of your discussion points. (e.g., I hadn't really looked into the science of recycling batteries, I just know there's a lot more 'dangerous' stuff in them in comparison to an aluminum or iron core motor, so I just assumed the recycling process has to be more difficult, dangerous and require more energy than simply melting down the metal scraps and recasting...) Many of them do seem like alarmist statements that have been thoroughly debunked already, but I will refresh my current reading on the latest AGW topics.
I must call bluff on your claim that AGW policies won't reduce the mitigation abilities in underdeveloped countries, however. In the name of cutting carbon, AGW supporters have actively tried (although thankfully not successfully) to block development of so-called 'dirty' energy sources in countries where having that energy available can literally mean life or death to the local populace.
I say, if they have the capability to build it, let them build coal- and natural gas-fired generating stations. It will raise the standard of life for everyone in the area, provide jobs and potentially provide enough supplemental work-energy so that people then have the time and energy to tackle building dikes or irrigation systems to prepare the region for the next wet/dry season. I'm not saying have no emissions controls on the plants whatsoever, but be sane about it and limit the emissions controls requirements to those chemicals that have been proven to cause direct harm. Don't just block them in a knee-jerk reaction, simply because they'll emit more CO2. CO2 feeds us, remember, by feeding the plants that we need to live...
I totally deserved that. I kinda got carried away on my last post, and since I don't have time to dig up and link references to all the articles/databases I have looked at over the last ten years, I shouldn't have opened my big mouth.
Suffice it to say, from the reading I have done on the subject (in an idle, and I'll admit it probably biased manner, since I don't actively seek out the doom 'n gloom prophets' articles), I see enough legitimate concerns with the interpretation of the raw data to support my own doubts on the 'consensus' of AGW. Since when is scientific analysis subject to voting, anyways? Why does it need 'consensus'? Because the data ain't as clear-cut as some would have you believe, that's why.
Im sorry, i have to call this out. Thats a fucking stupid way to look at things. You call it tangable because its easier to see the damage of a starving child, but because you can see the damage of the climate it someone less tangible?
No, I call climate 'damage' intangible because we don't actually know or have any way of measuring what 'climate' is, much less determining what it should be.
'Climate' is mutable, and means different things to different people, depending on what they want to argue about. To some people, it is average temperature alone, while to others it is average air temperature, average wind speed and direction, average precipitation, average cloud formation, average ocean temperatures, average sea level, etc. etc. There are so many chaotic inputs and inter-relationships in the whole system that I highly doubt we will ever be able to predict with any degree of certainty the absolute effects of any single factor on all the rest of the system.
Perhaps after gathering a thousand years (or ten thousand years) of accurate, consistent and globally encompassing direct measurement data points we will be able to puzzle it out and confidently declare that we know exactly what input affects which system, but until then we're monkeys trying to predict how many bananas there will be in 100 years based on the pattern of leaf molt over the last hundred. Oh yeah, and older rulers often randomly changed lengths for years or even decades before being checked and corrected, and often two different rulers of the old style did not measure the same length even when side by side, and by the way they didn't measure the leaves across a certain part of the forest back in the day...good luck!
All in all, climate is meant to change, and change often (geologically speaking), all we can practically do is mitigate the effects as they happen (or don't happen...) I do think it is incredible hubris on the part of mankind to think that we are capable of forcing the process, in either direction.
versus something that 97-98% of active publishing climate scientists say is happening now.
That's great...so why can't they provide raw, unprocessed data that shows it to be so? Whenever I look at any raw temperature dataset, I just can't see the 'warming trend' they're claiming. And even if the warming is happening (okay, it probably is, whether it's because of humans or not...), I still think we, as a people, can be ever so much more effective by focusing on mitigation of potential side-effects, rather than trying to mess with a process that, frankly, we don't fully understand. Especially since all of the the projected side effects are things that have happened and hurt us often in the past, and will happen in the future, regardless of what we do...so why not focus on giving people the tools to deal with these side-effects, rather than trying to remove any mitigation capability at all in hopes that if we appease the climate gods enough, disasters (flood, drought, typhoons, etc, etc.) won't ever happen again?
If starving kids is a tangible and heartbreaking issue for you, then why do you care not about amplifying the rates of both severe drought events and severe flooding events?
I do...therefore we should not be crippling developing economies' access to energy resources, which will ultimately provide the populace with the capability to defend against or mitigate such disasters whether they are caused by AGW, Gaia or plain old bad luck.
Ever used an electric lawnmower?
Ever calculate the carbon offsets for creating, transporting and using the electricity to power that lawnmower? Unless you have dedicated solar and/or wind power solely for recharging the lawnmower battery (which, by the way, will need more carbon offset credits to recycle come end of life), you probably need to draw power from the grid to be able to mow your lawn twice a week (typical around here, grass grows so fast!)
Of course, the absolute best method for dealing with grass? Get a goat. You can even milk it and sell the milk/cheese! (no, I'm not kidding, although city and town by-laws make this unnecessarily difficult...especially considering the size of dogs they let people keep in a 300 sqft apartment...poor pups)
Er, no, however one that was 100% oxygen (or pretty much any gas) would be just as toxic for you and me...should the Clean Air Act cover oxygen emissions as well?
If we were in danger of oxygen emissions reaching that level, then yes, the Clean Air Act should cover such emissions. Since such a thing has no chance of occurring, it's a moot question. The Clean Air Act after all should only affect those emissions that are actually a threat to our health.
Actually, the chance of winding up with a 100% CO2 atmosphere is just as remote. The chance of even winding up with an atmosphere with enough CO2 in it to make it physically harmful is also nil.
The only point on which alarmists can hang their "CO2 is a pollutant" hat on is the theorized warming effects on the atmosphere, and even those theories are wildly inconsistent regarding the absolute and potential environmental effects of the postulated atmospheric warming.
So no, CO2 is not a pollutant. It is not a threat to our health. It is plant food.
No, the crappy motor in the lawn mower is real and tangible. It's not heartbreaking though, the strawman is quite sad. Starving Ethiopians are not tangible.
Actually, I bet they are very tangible*. They're just not sitting right beside you, so it's harder to get worked up about them and therefore harder to get the kids involved in fundraising for them. Whereas that lawn mower is breaking the planet, so mommy and daddy should absolutely go out and buy an eco-certified one right now. And by the way, kids, here's a handy list of eco-friendly lawn equipment suppliers to show your parents...
*I do not think that word means what you think it means...