Global "Warming" is a misnomer. "Greenhouse" is a more accurate description of the main problem, but not its actual effects. The actual change is that the ocean/atmosphere is becoming more chaotic.
The "fractal dimension" of the dynamic, self-reflexive turbulent system is somewhere between 3, "solid", and 4, "hypercube", like every real object. The more "crinkly" or bifurcated the matter becomes in time, the higher we describe its dimensionality. Temperature, the random kinetic energy of volumes of material particles, is one measure at one scale of that chaotic dimension. Hurricanes, or rather global hurricane frequency, are another measure at another scale. Overall the atmosphere warms up on average across all air mass is increasing. But the complex system has lots of room for more extremes hidden by the average.
So the melting ice we're discussing in this story dilutes the salty ocean, decreasing such features as the "ThermoHaline Current", which keeps North West Europe warm in spite of its lesser sunshine. North West Europe, home to hundreds of millions of people and producer of much of our industrial and agricultural economy, will obtain the Scandinavian climate after the warm current flows only farther south. But since the average is higher, that huge drop in temperature is overbalanced by much warming elsewhere.
All of which changes the ecosystem faster than local species can adapt, or even fitter foreign species migrate. So species die off in vast droves across the globe. Possibly including Homo Sapiens, which will at least lose hundreds of millions or billions in population, with unimagined suffering by the survivors. Unprecedented probably since at latest 12K-25K years ago, when the last ice age reflected a drop in temperature - averaging only about 8 degrees, but severe in some places, balanced by warming in others. Our civilization will collapse, likely for centuries or millennia, possibly without leaving a trace.
None of that sounds like there's much of a silver lining. Except that a thousand years later, any surviving humans will probably have cleaner air and water. And nothing else, except maybe lots of trees which get to say "I told you so".
You've got a fascist party that manufactures dangerously incompetent spokesmodels like Bush to fill their stolen elections. So you support them. Congratulations - you're a fascist, and you actually deserve this criminal government you keep voting for.
You're right. The polls mean nothing, the Democrats are finished. Don't bother going to the polls in November - your boys have it all fixed.
The true power lies with the people. The American people who routinely prioritize the environment above corporate welfare. Who are represented by the government, our way of organizing ourselves to do things as large scale as conserve the environment. Especially when that means protecting us from rapacious industry.
So we need both the grassroots self-help that you and I practice in conservation, and a government that represents us in focusing those efforts. We don't need to stop either effort - we need to do more of both. They amplify each other directly, and each motivates other people who do each beneficial activity.
So the key is activism. Wherever we can get results. If we keep the grassroots while allowing the government to promote pollution, our decentralized efforts will be for naught, and we'll just suffer our way to destruction instead of enjoying the handbasket to hell like the evil and the ignorant who infest our population.
You are living in a denial fantasyland. Democrats are favored to retake Congress this November by double-digit percentages. Counting only people with an opinion, the most likely voters, they've got about a 25% advantage.
But of course your Republicans, so good at "politics" (lying and stealing into election wins), will still get your vote. Because the total catastrophe they've produced is nothing compared to your Republicans' favorite slogans to say on TV.
As I said, this isn't yet another hypothetical debate about blame. It's a practical debate about whether stopping human emissions will slow, stop or reverse the warming that threatens our civilization. Which debate very clearly is resolved in favor of reducing the emissions. We can't control the natural emissions, but we can stop driving ridiculous polluters like your SUV.
So you're not just abusing us with your SUV. You're abusing us by insisting on giving up your chance to avoid the blame, too - while insisting on arguing about blame. You just want to get away with murder.
These people aren't so much ill-informed as insane. They hate everyone who doesn't spin their fantasy. That their little faction that grabbed power by breaking every rule isn't god's chosen to win every battle. So they insist that they're winning every battle. They hate New Orleans more than ever now, because NOLA is so huge a catastrophe that it's nearly impossible to deny. That doesn't stop them from trying.
Note that the wacko is also insisting on the "we're not as bad as Saddam" defense, posted anonymously. They're completely predictable.
HP waits while Japanese mobile companies make 3G work. I remember when Japanese companies used to watch HP take risks and innovate, then copy HP. Looks like the US has conceded the tech innovation leadership to the rest of the world for at least the next generation, which will probably last at least 15-20 years.
Bush is the president - responsible for running the country. The cruel irony is that Bush can be described only as irresponsible.
Bush was warned about Katrina's risk of flooding New Orleans, went on vacation instead, and resurfaced long enough to lie about no one anticipating the levees would fail.
He was warned about Global Warming, and instead has his administration gagging NASA scientists while presiding over the biggest increases in Greenhouse emissions ever. Now the ice is melting even faster than the scientists predicted.
Bush took office with Microsoft ruled a monopoly, and his Justice Department let them continue unabated. The years since have seen continuing abuses, but only foreign courts are doing anything about it, because Bush won't do anything to protect the market. A market that has remained unsafe for new competitors during his stewardship.
Bush was warned that Iraq would collapse into civil war, and now acts like its just a nasty surprise - while he isn't denying it's happening. He got a daily intelligence brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US", after repeated warnings from Clinton's outgoing team and Clarke, the counterterrorism administrator who stayed on. Then he acted surprised when his deprioritization collected the 9/11/2001 planebombings. He was warned before N. Korea got the bomb, before Iran got the bomb, that cutting taxes on the rich would keep the regular economy moribund, that screwing with the Mideast would keep oil prices sky-high.
So maybe you know something about Bush and the Superbowl that we haven't heard yet. Anonymous Cheney, is that you? Shouldn't you be at target practice, or something?
The other biggest monopoly verdict, Microsoft, was issued right before the Bush administration took over. Then, right after they took over, nothing substantial was done to Microsoft to "remedy" their monopolistic abuse. Their market position, and the anticompetitive techniques with they abuse it, hasn't changed.
If Republicans keep the White House even after AT&T returns to a scale similar to its mid-1980s monopoly, there is no chance that either AT&T or Microsoft will see either monopoly status "revisited". In fact, they will redefine American monopoly law together. Legitimizing it, reversing a century of government representing the people defending ourselves from monopoly market predators.
Probably even more important than the White House, the Republican Congress is responsible for oversight of telecom and corporate takeovers. Which means AT&T has to get back on monopoly track before Democrats possibly retake the House, Senate or both this November.
That very well may be how Bush's little token scene played out, after Condi told him it costs $50 per song. After he told that stuff to Abu Gonzales, the Grand Inquisitor acted on those orders, fulfilling his earlier memo to Cheney that "we need a Pearl Harbor type event to kidnap the media moguls who don't just run the videos we make at the DoD Press Simulation Center".
The NASA head quoted making the announcement used to help run Star Wars. A fact to which I linked many citations. The only Trolls in that message's reach are the TrollMods. But I guess using "Star Wars" like a bad word on Slashdot is going to draw a lot of heat from killer nerds.
Grand Inquisitor Gonzales just wants to blackmail the giant media corps into showing more "good news" about BushCo, instead of that residue of "truth" left over from when they used to compete with each other a little.
On the upside, maybe he'll torture some of the musicbiz weasels to make his point.
They couldn't make a business model work by unbundling the network from the hardware. Maybe because their brick HW was rejected by the market, and their non-3G network was rejected by the market. But their brand and marketing dollars are so strong, they could go "virtual", branding other companies' phones and roaming on other networks.
Maybe it's just too competitive in Japan. While Vodaphone is used to making $BILLIONS without hardly any effort at all.
If you'd even bothered to click the link I generously provided, you'd have known that Griffin, the NASA liar^Wdirector making these announcements, used to help run the Star Wars program.
But since you're calling that accursed boondoggle "missile defense", I expect that you don't care. Just so long as Bush can pump more $TRILLIONS of US debt into multinational defense contractors. But not enough money for NASA - except in election year promises, broken ASAP. The secret Star Wars programs, though, just get bigger.
I didn't say we should cut DARPA. I did imply we should get Osama.
We shouldn't have invaded Iraq - we should have gotten Osama instead. If Bush told America "we're going to invade Iraq instead of getting Osama, unless we have a draft", we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. Instead, Bush lied, we invaded Iraq, we don't have Osama. It's not that complicated. Except for the part where we've got a butchered Iraq that will be more dangerous than Osama was, at the cost of thousands of American lives, scores of thousands of Iraqis, tens of thousands of wounded Americans, and hundreds of billions of dollars. Just to name a few.
I think we should do both. Instead, we are working on robodonkeys. But we're not getting Osama. You're just insisting on the fallacy of the excluded middle, which properly executed would sacrifice robodonkey research in favor of getting Osama. But instead they are sacrificing NASA missions.
How come I'm not reading that they're cutting Star Wars "missile defense shield" budgets? Maybe it's because Bush is busy ensuring India, Pakistan, Iran, N. Korea and everyone else has all the nukes they want.
Yeah, my ideology is well established on science. It's opposed only by insane rants. So I sit comfortably eating the insane like candy, after I've made the simple points that the sane can digest when they want to work towards survival.
It's really a great world. I love being right, and having the option to mock people who are wrong so badly. Win-win.
We should put solar arrays in orbit and on the Moon, beaming terawatts down microwave lasers to floating sea platforms on huge cables to a global grid. We should replace all internal combustion with fuelcells. And we should replant forests across the continents. Every bit of progress on those projects buys more time until the tipping point, hopefully enough to put it off for at least centuries, if not achieving millennial equilibrium.
Hopefully we'll be switched over before we run out of oil or clean water. And before we melt enough ice to switch the North Atlantic ThermoHaline Current away from warming Europe to habitability.
The Greenhouse Effect has been amply demonstrated, as well as the contribution of human emissions. Even if the Sun's input is a factor, we need to trap less energy than the increasing Greenhouse will allow. If you have an alternative for radiating that extra energy, or shielding us from it, despite the Greenhouse, and without monkeying with even less understood chaotic climate dynamics, I'd like to hear it.
They won't be drowning when they invade you. And those Dutch people would be among the last to drown. You'll be scrambling for access to their ships when the tide comes for you.
No one who "supported the war" in the Bush administration will lose their jobs for any catastrophe, if they're not insiders. Even Brownie got his job back long enough to rifle the archives for ammunition against the bosses who were making him take all the blame.
BushCo believes in occasional "accountability moments", elections every 2-4 years, between which they can do whatever they want. During those moments, they work overtime on stealing elections.
They're Crime Inc. They're not really a government. That's why everything they do is so broken, compared to the usual government "muddling through".
The political basis to attack Iraq was that Bush had 80% of the country agreeing to whatever he wanted, and he wanted to invade Iraq.
The rest of your argument is in line with Rumsfelds strategy: invade Iraq after the Afghani/Pakistani Qaeda attacked us because "there are no good targets in Afghanistan". Like searching for your lost keys down the block, because the light is good there.
As for the Iraqis breaking the ceasefire agreement, Bush and Blair funneled over $700M from the Afghan war budget to instead provoke Iraq to instigate war, which didn't work.
You don't care about any of that. For whatever reason, you want to bomb Iraq. We've got thousands dead, tens of thousands wounded, 75% of our troops want us to pull out ASAP, Bush lied to send us there destroying American credibility for generations. And Iraq is a bigger threat, and a bigger mess, than it was before we invaded. I'm glad you're satisfied with Bush's sound policies and strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
Global "Warming" is a misnomer. "Greenhouse" is a more accurate description of the main problem, but not its actual effects. The actual change is that the ocean/atmosphere is becoming more chaotic.
The "fractal dimension" of the dynamic, self-reflexive turbulent system is somewhere between 3, "solid", and 4, "hypercube", like every real object. The more "crinkly" or bifurcated the matter becomes in time, the higher we describe its dimensionality. Temperature, the random kinetic energy of volumes of material particles, is one measure at one scale of that chaotic dimension. Hurricanes, or rather global hurricane frequency, are another measure at another scale. Overall the atmosphere warms up on average across all air mass is increasing. But the complex system has lots of room for more extremes hidden by the average.
So the melting ice we're discussing in this story dilutes the salty ocean, decreasing such features as the "ThermoHaline Current", which keeps North West Europe warm in spite of its lesser sunshine. North West Europe, home to hundreds of millions of people and producer of much of our industrial and agricultural economy, will obtain the Scandinavian climate after the warm current flows only farther south. But since the average is higher, that huge drop in temperature is overbalanced by much warming elsewhere.
All of which changes the ecosystem faster than local species can adapt, or even fitter foreign species migrate. So species die off in vast droves across the globe. Possibly including Homo Sapiens, which will at least lose hundreds of millions or billions in population, with unimagined suffering by the survivors. Unprecedented probably since at latest 12K-25K years ago, when the last ice age reflected a drop in temperature - averaging only about 8 degrees, but severe in some places, balanced by warming in others. Our civilization will collapse, likely for centuries or millennia, possibly without leaving a trace.
None of that sounds like there's much of a silver lining. Except that a thousand years later, any surviving humans will probably have cleaner air and water. And nothing else, except maybe lots of trees which get to say "I told you so".
You've got a fascist party that manufactures dangerously incompetent spokesmodels like Bush to fill their stolen elections. So you support them. Congratulations - you're a fascist, and you actually deserve this criminal government you keep voting for.
You're right. The polls mean nothing, the Democrats are finished. Don't bother going to the polls in November - your boys have it all fixed.
The true power lies with the people. The American people who routinely prioritize the environment above corporate welfare. Who are represented by the government, our way of organizing ourselves to do things as large scale as conserve the environment. Especially when that means protecting us from rapacious industry.
So we need both the grassroots self-help that you and I practice in conservation, and a government that represents us in focusing those efforts. We don't need to stop either effort - we need to do more of both. They amplify each other directly, and each motivates other people who do each beneficial activity.
So the key is activism. Wherever we can get results. If we keep the grassroots while allowing the government to promote pollution, our decentralized efforts will be for naught, and we'll just suffer our way to destruction instead of enjoying the handbasket to hell like the evil and the ignorant who infest our population.
Gabriel has said he was thinking about nuclear fallout after a nuclear holocaust. Hopefully aliens raping our seas isn't worse.
You are living in a denial fantasyland. Democrats are favored to retake Congress this November by double-digit percentages. Counting only people with an opinion, the most likely voters, they've got about a 25% advantage.
But of course your Republicans, so good at "politics" (lying and stealing into election wins), will still get your vote. Because the total catastrophe they've produced is nothing compared to your Republicans' favorite slogans to say on TV.
As I said, this isn't yet another hypothetical debate about blame. It's a practical debate about whether stopping human emissions will slow, stop or reverse the warming that threatens our civilization. Which debate very clearly is resolved in favor of reducing the emissions. We can't control the natural emissions, but we can stop driving ridiculous polluters like your SUV.
So you're not just abusing us with your SUV. You're abusing us by insisting on giving up your chance to avoid the blame, too - while insisting on arguing about blame. You just want to get away with murder.
These people aren't so much ill-informed as insane. They hate everyone who doesn't spin their fantasy. That their little faction that grabbed power by breaking every rule isn't god's chosen to win every battle. So they insist that they're winning every battle. They hate New Orleans more than ever now, because NOLA is so huge a catastrophe that it's nearly impossible to deny. That doesn't stop them from trying.
Note that the wacko is also insisting on the "we're not as bad as Saddam" defense, posted anonymously. They're completely predictable.
HP waits while Japanese mobile companies make 3G work. I remember when Japanese companies used to watch HP take risks and innovate, then copy HP. Looks like the US has conceded the tech innovation leadership to the rest of the world for at least the next generation, which will probably last at least 15-20 years.
Bush is the president - responsible for running the country. The cruel irony is that Bush can be described only as irresponsible.
Bush was warned about Katrina's risk of flooding New Orleans, went on vacation instead, and resurfaced long enough to lie about no one anticipating the levees would fail.
He was warned about Global Warming, and instead has his administration gagging NASA scientists while presiding over the biggest increases in Greenhouse emissions ever. Now the ice is melting even faster than the scientists predicted.
Bush took office with Microsoft ruled a monopoly, and his Justice Department let them continue unabated. The years since have seen continuing abuses, but only foreign courts are doing anything about it, because Bush won't do anything to protect the market. A market that has remained unsafe for new competitors during his stewardship.
Bush was warned that Iraq would collapse into civil war, and now acts like its just a nasty surprise - while he isn't denying it's happening. He got a daily intelligence brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US", after repeated warnings from Clinton's outgoing team and Clarke, the counterterrorism administrator who stayed on. Then he acted surprised when his deprioritization collected the 9/11/2001 planebombings. He was warned before N. Korea got the bomb, before Iran got the bomb, that cutting taxes on the rich would keep the regular economy moribund, that screwing with the Mideast would keep oil prices sky-high.
So maybe you know something about Bush and the Superbowl that we haven't heard yet. Anonymous Cheney, is that you? Shouldn't you be at target practice, or something?
The other biggest monopoly verdict, Microsoft, was issued right before the Bush administration took over. Then, right after they took over, nothing substantial was done to Microsoft to "remedy" their monopolistic abuse. Their market position, and the anticompetitive techniques with they abuse it, hasn't changed.
If Republicans keep the White House even after AT&T returns to a scale similar to its mid-1980s monopoly, there is no chance that either AT&T or Microsoft will see either monopoly status "revisited". In fact, they will redefine American monopoly law together. Legitimizing it, reversing a century of government representing the people defending ourselves from monopoly market predators.
Probably even more important than the White House, the Republican Congress is responsible for oversight of telecom and corporate takeovers. Which means AT&T has to get back on monopoly track before Democrats possibly retake the House, Senate or both this November.
That very well may be how Bush's little token scene played out, after Condi told him it costs $50 per song. After he told that stuff to Abu Gonzales, the Grand Inquisitor acted on those orders, fulfilling his earlier memo to Cheney that "we need a Pearl Harbor type event to kidnap the media moguls who don't just run the videos we make at the DoD Press Simulation Center".
Moderation -2
50% Troll
50% Offtopic
The NASA head quoted making the announcement used to help run Star Wars. A fact to which I linked many citations. The only Trolls in that message's reach are the TrollMods. But I guess using "Star Wars" like a bad word on Slashdot is going to draw a lot of heat from killer nerds.
Grand Inquisitor Gonzales just wants to blackmail the giant media corps into showing more "good news" about BushCo, instead of that residue of "truth" left over from when they used to compete with each other a little.
On the upside, maybe he'll torture some of the musicbiz weasels to make his point.
They couldn't make a business model work by unbundling the network from the hardware. Maybe because their brick HW was rejected by the market, and their non-3G network was rejected by the market. But their brand and marketing dollars are so strong, they could go "virtual", branding other companies' phones and roaming on other networks.
Maybe it's just too competitive in Japan. While Vodaphone is used to making $BILLIONS without hardly any effort at all.
If you'd even bothered to click the link I generously provided, you'd have known that Griffin, the NASA liar^Wdirector making these announcements, used to help run the Star Wars program.
But since you're calling that accursed boondoggle "missile defense", I expect that you don't care. Just so long as Bush can pump more $TRILLIONS of US debt into multinational defense contractors. But not enough money for NASA - except in election year promises, broken ASAP. The secret Star Wars programs, though, just get bigger.
We have three separate objectives, all paid by the same budget and managed by the same incompetent government:
- Get Osama
- Make robodonkeys
- Launch NASA missions
We have to prioritize. I'd prioritize: Osama; missions; robodonkeys. Instead we're prioritizing: robodonkeys; missions; Osama. That's exactly backwards.
Get it?
I didn't say we should cut DARPA. I did imply we should get Osama.
We shouldn't have invaded Iraq - we should have gotten Osama instead. If Bush told America "we're going to invade Iraq instead of getting Osama, unless we have a draft", we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. Instead, Bush lied, we invaded Iraq, we don't have Osama. It's not that complicated. Except for the part where we've got a butchered Iraq that will be more dangerous than Osama was, at the cost of thousands of American lives, scores of thousands of Iraqis, tens of thousands of wounded Americans, and hundreds of billions of dollars. Just to name a few.
I think we should do both. Instead, we are working on robodonkeys. But we're not getting Osama. You're just insisting on the fallacy of the excluded middle, which properly executed would sacrifice robodonkey research in favor of getting Osama. But instead they are sacrificing NASA missions.
How come I'm not reading that they're cutting Star Wars "missile defense shield" budgets? Maybe it's because Bush is busy ensuring India, Pakistan, Iran, N. Korea and everyone else has all the nukes they want.
So you want to argue whether Crichton's SF is stronger than TDAT's SF?
Thanks for reducing yourself to clown status. My work here is done.
Yeah, my ideology is well established on science. It's opposed only by insane rants. So I sit comfortably eating the insane like candy, after I've made the simple points that the sane can digest when they want to work towards survival.
It's really a great world. I love being right, and having the option to mock people who are wrong so badly. Win-win.
We should put solar arrays in orbit and on the Moon, beaming terawatts down microwave lasers to floating sea platforms on huge cables to a global grid. We should replace all internal combustion with fuelcells. And we should replant forests across the continents. Every bit of progress on those projects buys more time until the tipping point, hopefully enough to put it off for at least centuries, if not achieving millennial equilibrium.
Hopefully we'll be switched over before we run out of oil or clean water. And before we melt enough ice to switch the North Atlantic ThermoHaline Current away from warming Europe to habitability.
The Greenhouse Effect has been amply demonstrated, as well as the contribution of human emissions. Even if the Sun's input is a factor, we need to trap less energy than the increasing Greenhouse will allow. If you have an alternative for radiating that extra energy, or shielding us from it, despite the Greenhouse, and without monkeying with even less understood chaotic climate dynamics, I'd like to hear it.
They won't be drowning when they invade you. And those Dutch people would be among the last to drown. You'll be scrambling for access to their ships when the tide comes for you.
No one who "supported the war" in the Bush administration will lose their jobs for any catastrophe, if they're not insiders. Even Brownie got his job back long enough to rifle the archives for ammunition against the bosses who were making him take all the blame.
BushCo believes in occasional "accountability moments", elections every 2-4 years, between which they can do whatever they want. During those moments, they work overtime on stealing elections.
They're Crime Inc. They're not really a government. That's why everything they do is so broken, compared to the usual government "muddling through".
The political basis to attack Iraq was that Bush had 80% of the country agreeing to whatever he wanted, and he wanted to invade Iraq.
The rest of your argument is in line with Rumsfelds strategy: invade Iraq after the Afghani/Pakistani Qaeda attacked us because "there are no good targets in Afghanistan". Like searching for your lost keys down the block, because the light is good there.
As for the Iraqis breaking the ceasefire agreement, Bush and Blair funneled over $700M from the Afghan war budget to instead provoke Iraq to instigate war, which didn't work.
You don't care about any of that. For whatever reason, you want to bomb Iraq. We've got thousands dead, tens of thousands wounded, 75% of our troops want us to pull out ASAP, Bush lied to send us there destroying American credibility for generations. And Iraq is a bigger threat, and a bigger mess, than it was before we invaded. I'm glad you're satisfied with Bush's sound policies and strategy.