Given the global fiscal debacle, I wonder what took so long. Countries simply cannot afford to leave that kind of money on the table when they have massive debt and double-digit unemployment.
That's exactly what the scientists had been saying but Watts built up a huge following partly on his criticisms of station siting and encouraging people to submit photos of ones that were apparently poorly sited or ones where the surroundings had changed over time, e.g. urban development, new roads, etc.
Of course, if a station had been moved at some point, there was plenty of criticism for that too.
After Willard Watts' Junior Woodchucks went around identifying good and bad stations, researchers used the "good" stations to derive the temps and got almost exactly the same results - indicating that the correction factors that's been used for decades by the USHCN are reliable.
If it was volcanoes, you would see ice loss year round, not just in Arctic summer. The IPCC are not researchers and are never on the cutting edge. They evaluate a huge swath of research and come to a compromise conclusion. As far as ice loss, they've been behind the curve for the past several reports and we're seeing Arctic ice levels that weren't expected for several decades.
Water vapor doesn't last enough to be a forcing so it's a feedback. When there a long-lived GHGs, that can raise the temperature enough to evaporate sufficient amounts of water, then its effect becomes large enough that it's dominant.
Although water vapour has a significant influence with regard to absorbing infrared radiation (which is the green house effect; see greenhouse gas), its GWP is not calculated. Its concentration in the atmosphere mainly depends on air temperature. There is no possibility to directly influence atmospheric water vapour concentration
You don't have to go to that extent. Leave Earth & Sol where they are but remove all the greenhouse gases. Granted, without CO2 there would be no plant life and there would have to be no source of GHGs but if you had a world exactly like ours in this orbit with an atmosphere of only nitrogen, oxygen & argon, it would be too cold to support the current humans and the current flora & fauna.
You have some catching up to do. Because there are not sufficent permanent temp stations in the Arctic, the amount of warming seen there has been seriously underestimated. Rapid Arctic warming is one of the features of global warming / climate change and it should have struck the doubters as very strange that the most staggering decrease in the volume of Arctic ice was occurring during a period where there was SUPPOSEDLY no warming.
And, it's always been grossly inaccurate to say "no warming for 17 yrs" as temps have been slowly rising in places where there are adequate numbers of stations.
The correct statement is "no statistically significant warming". That is NOT the same as saying "no warming" or "we're in a cooling period".
"Largely rejected since then"?? Romneycare was implemented in Spring 2006 - a long time ago in the life of the iPhone but very recent political history. And Mitt got praise from Gingrich, Heritage Fund, etc. Back in 2007 / 2008, Rush Limbaugh said Romney embodied all 3 legs of the conservative stool. The National Review endorsed him in Dec 2007 - http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/223076/romney-president/editors and said he could speak on healthcare with more authority than any other.
Both Romney & Gingrich opined about eliminating "free riders" - thats' the mandate.
But as I said, it doesn't matter for the Dems going forward - they only have to play the Medicare card; the people on that plan love it and they VOTE.
The disillusioned young people who might be put off by the penalties are less likely to turn out. Maybe they'll show up in droves if they're pissed off enough but that's not enough at this point. By then, Obamacare will be 3 yrs old, the stark contrasts between states that adopted it whole-heartedly and those who tried to scuttle it will be very apparent and it will still be the law of the land. What will a GOP Prez / House / Senate do? Repeal it? Have all the new insured go back to living on a wing & a prayer? Have insurerd drop millions with pre-existing conditions? The law survived a SCOTUS challenge and by 2016, California will be forcing the nation towards single-payer.
I don't approve of dishonesty but as political strategy, in light of the prevailing dynamics since Jan 2009, I see it as benefiting the Democrats come 2016. Obama will never be running again and any Dem nominee who isn't tied too closely to him or Obamacare has a strong hand to play on healthcare.
Here's how I see it play out in 2016, assuming the plan is fully implemented and is bringing down costs, which it should.
"Despite our misgivings and our desire for a single-payer plan, we Democrats, led by our former President, gave America a Republican plan which we thought the GOP & business would support. So after decades of political wrangling, the USA finally has universal coverage. Yet the GOP has turned against their own plan, initially proposed in 1974 as Nixoncare, revived in the '90s by Bob Dole and endorsed by the Heritage Fund, and implemented in Masschussetts by Mitt Romney. If they truly believed in it, as they kept reviving it all these years, why turn against it when a Democrat adopted it? If they didn't believe or wanted it to fail, why would you trust them with now? You are effectively putting your life in their hands.
But, there is a better option, one that predates Nixoncare by over a decade - that program is Medicare, a single-payer program, and I say that it's past time that in America, we had Medicare FOR ALL"
Note: if by some fluke or mischance Obamacare doesn't lower costs or cover more people, it's still good for the Dems ( although bad for Obama ) so long as they keep hitting on the fact that the plan is and has always been an idea favored and promoted by Republicans.
From what I can see, even very barebones plans can be grandfathered so long as they don't change much, which is the basic definition of grandfathering. So while I still think it was not a very bright strategy to for Obama to sell the "keep your plan" so strongly, the decisions to cancel them falls squarely on the insurers.
Apparently not. Here's one thing to take away - don't adopt Republican plans. If they believed in them, they would move heaven & earth to implement them, with or without your support.
Not only is Obamacare solidly based on Romneycare - (remember Tim Pawlenty referring to it at Obamneycare during the debates?) - but it's not much different from Bob Dole's plan from the '90 and it's pretty much the Nixoncare proposal of 1974.
It's a Republican plan but it's his signature bill. Better for him to make sure it's implemented well and the flaws get fixed rather than obsess about the name. If it's better known as Obamacare, so be it. We still talk about Reaganomics.
I don't think that it's a statement he ever should have made but it's not like he promised Americans eternal life and now is casting them in carbonite.
Here's what Obama himself said about that - "And once it's working really well, I guarantee you, they'll not call it Obamacare. Here's a prediction for you - a few years from now, when people are using this to get coverage, everybody's feeling pretty good about all the choices & competition that they've got, there are going to be a whole bunch of folks saying "I always thought this provision was excellent, I voted for that thing". You watch, it will not be called Obamacare," -
Tesla is designing, building & selling the most desired American car in decades, which has garnered awards & praise from numerous automotive experts. What's all the bellyaching about? Even if they only manage to make cars for the next 5 yrs, the $34 million a drop in the bucket for the revenue from the ~75000 extra cars they would manufacture, probably not even 1%.
Tesla has 1000 factory workers producing 20,000 cars. Even if they only added 100 new workers @ $50k each, that's $5 million in additional salaries per year. Ignoring the revenue from additional auto sales, the stimulus of that tax break to the local economy would be net positive in just a few years.
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Given the global fiscal debacle, I wonder what took so long. Countries simply cannot afford to leave that kind of money on the table when they have massive debt and double-digit unemployment.
Damn straight. Just spent $1000 for used 16 4GB sticks of HP DDR3 ECC registered memory; that's considered a bargain. New sticks would be $120 each.
That's exactly what the scientists had been saying but Watts built up a huge following partly on his criticisms of station siting and encouraging people to submit photos of ones that were apparently poorly sited or ones where the surroundings had changed over time, e.g. urban development, new roads, etc.
Of course, if a station had been moved at some point, there was plenty of criticism for that too.
After Willard Watts' Junior Woodchucks went around identifying good and bad stations, researchers used the "good" stations to derive the temps and got almost exactly the same results - indicating that the correction factors that's been used for decades by the USHCN are reliable.
If it was volcanoes, you would see ice loss year round, not just in Arctic summer.
The IPCC are not researchers and are never on the cutting edge. They evaluate a huge swath of research and come to a compromise conclusion.
As far as ice loss, they've been behind the curve for the past several reports and we're seeing Arctic ice levels that weren't expected for several decades.
Water vapor doesn't last enough to be a forcing so it's a feedback. When there a long-lived GHGs, that can raise the temperature enough to evaporate sufficient amounts of water, then its effect becomes large enough that it's dominant.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global-warming_potential
Although water vapour has a significant influence with regard to absorbing infrared radiation (which is the green house effect; see greenhouse gas), its GWP is not calculated. Its concentration in the atmosphere mainly depends on air temperature. There is no possibility to directly influence atmospheric water vapour concentration
You don't have to go to that extent. Leave Earth & Sol where they are but remove all the greenhouse gases.
Granted, without CO2 there would be no plant life and there would have to be no source of GHGs but if you had a world exactly like ours in this orbit with an atmosphere of only nitrogen, oxygen & argon, it would be too cold to support the current humans and the current flora & fauna.
You have some catching up to do. Because there are not sufficent permanent temp stations in the Arctic, the amount of warming seen there has been seriously underestimated.
Rapid Arctic warming is one of the features of global warming / climate change and it should have struck the doubters as very strange that the most staggering decrease in the volume of Arctic ice was occurring during a period where there was SUPPOSEDLY no warming.
And, it's always been grossly inaccurate to say "no warming for 17 yrs" as temps have been slowly rising in places where there are adequate numbers of stations.
The correct statement is "no statistically significant warming". That is NOT the same as saying "no warming" or "we're in a cooling period".
The Republican roots of Obamneycare has been detailed by me and several others in previous posts and goes back to Nixon.
"Largely rejected since then"?? Romneycare was implemented in Spring 2006 - a long time ago in the life of the iPhone but very recent political history.
And Mitt got praise from Gingrich, Heritage Fund, etc. Back in 2007 / 2008, Rush Limbaugh said Romney embodied all 3 legs of the conservative stool.
The National Review endorsed him in Dec 2007 - http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/223076/romney-president/editors and said he could speak on healthcare with more authority than any other.
Both Romney & Gingrich opined about eliminating "free riders" - thats' the mandate.
But as I said, it doesn't matter for the Dems going forward - they only have to play the Medicare card; the people on that plan love it and they VOTE.
The disillusioned young people who might be put off by the penalties are less likely to turn out. Maybe they'll show up in droves if they're pissed off enough but that's not enough at this point.
By then, Obamacare will be 3 yrs old, the stark contrasts between states that adopted it whole-heartedly and those who tried to scuttle it will be very apparent and it will still be the law of the land.
What will a GOP Prez / House / Senate do? Repeal it? Have all the new insured go back to living on a wing & a prayer? Have insurerd drop millions with pre-existing conditions?
The law survived a SCOTUS challenge and by 2016, California will be forcing the nation towards single-payer.
I don't approve of dishonesty but as political strategy, in light of the prevailing dynamics since Jan 2009, I see it as benefiting the Democrats come 2016.
Obama will never be running again and any Dem nominee who isn't tied too closely to him or Obamacare has a strong hand to play on healthcare.
Here's how I see it play out in 2016, assuming the plan is fully implemented and is bringing down costs, which it should.
"Despite our misgivings and our desire for a single-payer plan, we Democrats, led by our former President, gave America a Republican plan which we thought the GOP & business would support. So after decades of political wrangling, the USA finally has universal coverage. Yet the GOP has turned against their own plan, initially proposed in 1974 as Nixoncare, revived in the '90s by Bob Dole and endorsed by the Heritage Fund, and implemented in Masschussetts by Mitt Romney.
If they truly believed in it, as they kept reviving it all these years, why turn against it when a Democrat adopted it?
If they didn't believe or wanted it to fail, why would you trust them with now? You are effectively putting your life in their hands.
But, there is a better option, one that predates Nixoncare by over a decade - that program is Medicare, a single-payer program, and I say that it's past time that in America, we had Medicare FOR ALL"
Note: if by some fluke or mischance Obamacare doesn't lower costs or cover more people, it's still good for the Dems ( although bad for Obama ) so long as they keep hitting on the fact that the plan is and has always been an idea favored and promoted by Republicans.
From what I can see, even very barebones plans can be grandfathered so long as they don't change much, which is the basic definition of grandfathering.
So while I still think it was not a very bright strategy to for Obama to sell the "keep your plan" so strongly, the decisions to cancel them falls squarely on the insurers.
Apparently not. Here's one thing to take away - don't adopt Republican plans.
If they believed in them, they would move heaven & earth to implement them, with or without your support.
Not only is Obamacare solidly based on Romneycare - (remember Tim Pawlenty referring to it at Obamneycare during the debates?) - but it's not much different from Bob Dole's plan from the '90 and it's pretty much the Nixoncare proposal of 1974.
It's a Republican plan but it's his signature bill.
Better for him to make sure it's implemented well and the flaws get fixed rather than obsess about the name. If it's better known as Obamacare, so be it.
We still talk about Reaganomics.
I don't think that it's a statement he ever should have made but it's not like he promised Americans eternal life and now is casting them in carbonite.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/29/this-is-why-obamacare-is-cancelling-some-peoples-insurance-plans/
Here's what Obama himself said about that - "And once it's working really well, I guarantee you, they'll not call it Obamacare. Here's a prediction for you - a few years from now, when people are using this to get coverage, everybody's feeling pretty good about all the choices & competition that they've got, there are going to be a whole bunch of folks saying "I always thought this provision was excellent, I voted for that thing".
You watch, it will not be called Obamacare," -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aN2iuIhcx0
D'oh!
It's all Obama's fault.
It's because Obama's the most radical, socialist president ever.
Yes, and then the space aliens. After Ninjas, its space aliens all the way down.
Wrong.
After Aliens, it's Cowboys, led by Taco Cowboy and CmdrTaco
That's what terrorists are for :-)
Tesla is designing, building & selling the most desired American car in decades, which has garnered awards & praise from numerous automotive experts.
What's all the bellyaching about? Even if they only manage to make cars for the next 5 yrs, the $34 million a drop in the bucket for the revenue from the ~75000 extra cars they would manufacture, probably not even 1%.
Tesla has 1000 factory workers producing 20,000 cars. Even if they only added 100 new workers @ $50k each, that's $5 million in additional salaries per year.
Ignoring the revenue from additional auto sales, the stimulus of that tax break to the local economy would be net positive in just a few years.
What about Penistone?
He's on 1st post.