A very thoughtful comment on fusion was made to me recently by a person who observed that it might prove to be the worst thing that ever happened to us if we succeed in using nuclear fusion to generate electrical energy because this success would lead us to conclude that we could continue the unrestrained growth in our annual energy consumption to the point (in a relatively few doubling times) where our energy production from the unlimited fusion resource was an appreciable fraction of the solar power input to the earth. This could have catastrophic consequences.
The poster forgot to note that Bartlett wasn't talking about today's energy consumption, but what would happen eventually if we kept increasinbg it exponentially.
Today, human energy consumption is 411 quads per year, or 4 x 10^20 Joules per year, which works out to a power of 1.3 x 10^13 Watts.
About half the sun's power is absorbed by the earth's surface, so solar energy heats the earth with about 690 Watts per square meter. Multiplying this by the cross-sectional area of the earth gives 9x10^16 watts, or about 6400 times the human energy use.
Following Bartlett's reasoning, we see that in nine doubling-times, human activity will amount to 10% of solar warming---a significant, if not mind-blowing fraction. In 13 doubling times, human activity will match solar heating.
If we increase energy consumption at 10% per year, it would take about 90 years to achieve this. It's worth noting that per-capita GDP scales nicely with energy consumption, so if we were to sustain 10% world per-capita GDP growth for a century, we would need to increase energy consumption in this way, even if population stabilized.
Doubling the sun's heating would increase the temperature of the earth's surface by a factor of the fourth root of 2 (Stefan-Boltzman law), or a bit less than 20%: It would warm up from 288 K to about 350 K, or around 150 F. Decidedly uncomfortable, but many orders of magnitude less warming than would be required to turn the atmosphere incandescant.
Bartlett's point was not that we really need to worry about making the sky glow. It was that even if we had a completely free energy source and stopped population growth, we'd still need to think about using energy wisely. In that, he's right.
In THREE HUNDRED YEARS if we still do not have a better energy plan than fission, then I say we use it, by then we will still have at least 4700 years of fission material left. In the mean time fusion is a greatly useful technology.
According to the Uranium Institute, known resources of economically recoverable U-235 are "enough to last for some 50 years" at today's rate of consumption. If prices go up significantly, we could mine other sources, but even so, "all conventional resources are considered - 14.4 million tonnes,... is over 200 years' supply at today's rate of consumption"
Today, fission supplies 16% of the world's electricity. If we converted the world to using nuclear power for all our electricity, we would use up the uranium six times faster, so all known supplies would last somewhere around 35 years.
To go beyond this, we would need to resort to more exotic technology, such as breeder reactors or extracting uranium from seawater and phosphate deposits.
Constituents of high-level wastes produced by reactors have half-lives on the scale of 10,000 years. Contrast this to the time-scale for geological recycling of CO2: around 200 million years.
At the levels of CO2 that we're putting into the atmosphere today, it's likely that biological sinks could reduce CO2 to preindustrial levels in about 200 years, but if we continue to burn fossil fuels for the next two centuries, the biological and short-term chemical sinks will have been saturated.
Based on what we know about the slow (geological) sinks, it could well take on the order of a few million years to get back to preindustrial levels of CO2 from the levels we expect if we burn up all the known coal reserves (estimated at around 250 years from now at current rates of consumption).
Therefore, I am much more concerned with CO2 emissions than with nuclear waste.
The problem with your analysis is that your contract is with the store, not with Valve. You never actually gave money directly to Valve, nor did you recieve anything directly from Valve. You have no legal relationship with Valve. You can sue the store if they did not uphold their end of the contract.
As you note, if the seller wishes to impose additional restrictions after the contract is entered, you may sue to enforce the original contract, but Valve is not the seller, and the store is not imposing restrictions, so your line of argument does not apply.
This point was the basis of the defense in MacPherson v. Buick, (217 N.Y. 382 (1916)) and Judge Cardozo's ruling introduced an exception in the case where the object sold was "a thing of danger" which was negligently manufactured, but since a CD is not inherently dangerous, you'd have a hard time applying this precedent there.
Your state may have a laws declaring an implied warranty of merchantability, in which case you may have rights beyond what your contract with the retailer provides, but if you're going to assert that you have rights which are not spelled out in the contract, you will have a hard time arguing that the law can't also give Valve such rights.
Actually, Paul Starr made the same basic complaints about the assumptions hidden in the underlying model of SimCity in a 1994 in The American Prospect, "The Seductions of Sim."
Fair enough. You give a good example. Another such would be antilock brakes. About 15 years ago, taxicabs in Munich were equipped with antilock brakes and the accident rate went up. Several studies have showed that similarly, people drive faster and follow more closely when equipped with antilock brakes and have more crashes. (See G. Wilde, "Target Risk")
If you've got a reference for the mountain fog lights, I'd love to learn more about them.
And don't forget to add to the cost of medicine the extra tax used to pay for the "universal health care" that guarantees these low medication costs in Canada and Europe. If you do that, is it ever really cheaper?
Even including the "universal health care tax," Canada and Europe achieve better results (lower infant mortality, longer average lifespans) than the US and at lower cost than the US, regardless whether you measure in dollars per capita or as fraction of GDP.
There is no question that the US system of medicine is quite inefficient compared to other industrial nations. However, drug costs are not a significant contributor to this inefficiency.
The greatest source of inefficiency in the US is that Congress requires insurance companies to pay for state-of-the-art care even when a much cheaper, but inferior treatment would produce almost as good results at a fraction of the price.
Even for the uninsured, physicians and hospitals often choose expensive courses of treatment because saving money with alternatives, which might be marginally inferior but much cheaper, would potentially expose them to lawsuits if things turned out badly.
In Europe, the government will pay for therapy they consider cost-effective and often make you wait for it. If you want something fancier or want faster service, you're free to pay for it yourself. This gives people an incentive to ask whether they really want the state of the art, since it might cost them out of their own pocketbook.
In the US, everyone with insurance is decoupled from market forces and feels entitled to spend unlimited amounts on medical care in exchange for a small annual premium. This is not the way to get a market to operate efficiently.
I agree that the more important thing is to clean up the licensing procedures for pharmaceutical distributors, but since we're not about to do that (it would involve big government---hiring more inspectors, creating a bureaucracy to do background checks, etc.) it's not likely we'll see any improvement soon (as the WaPo article I cited above says, there are more inspectors for amusement parks than for pharmaceutical distributors). Given that our government likes buying gadgets better than hiring people, RFIDs might help, even though they are not the best solution.
As to truck hijacking, why would a company implement a policy that would make it more likely to be robbed? You're assuming that the truck would have an RFID that would list the contents of the truck.
Why not just make the RFID contain a UID for the truck and keep the contents in a separate database. After all, it the theives could get the database, they wouldn't need to scan RFIDs. They could just look at the truck's route, wait along the way, and ID the truck by its license plates (or if they must be geeky, hook up a web cam and OCR software to have their computers read license plates).
The RFIDs for the truck's contents would not be readable from the road because a semi trailer has steel or aluminum walls and thus acts as a Faraday cage.
BTW, the first use of bar codes in the world was to code Railroad cars (back in the early 1960s). I'm not aware of barcoding railroad cars leading to a dramatic increase in train robberies, so I'm not sure why you would think RFIDs would be any different.
Back to drugs. The important thing that RFID coding drug shipments would accomplish would be to provide an easy way to help track whether a particular box in the warehouse had been out of the custody of the manufacturer (e.g., bought back from a third-party distributor) or had come straight from the factory.
Part of the problem we face today is that we can't tell where a given box of pills has come from. If we had an easy way to ID the box, we could track its provenence using a database of purchases and sales.
The forged RFID problem is real, but just because a scheme is imperfect is not necessarily a reason not to consider it. It might be that it's hard enough to forge RFIDs (e.g., encode a cryptographic signature of the UID) that beauticians, auto-body repair shops, and drug addicts would look for an easier scam to run.
There's actually less risk of getting counterfeit drugs in Canada than in a US pharmacy because Canada regulates pharmacies tightly, while the US allows almost anyone to get a pharmaceutical distributor's license---even felons.
Also, the story that drugs are more expensive in the US is largely an urban myth. Patent-protected drugs without significant competitors are more expensive in the US, but because of free-market competition, generics are a lot cheaper here than in Europe or Canada. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent article on this topic in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago:
It is not accurate to say, then, that the United States has higher prescription-drug prices than other countries. It is accurate to say only that the United States has a different pricing system from that of other countries. Americans pay more for drugs when they first come out and less as the drugs get older, while the rest of the world pays less in the beginning and more later.
Whose pricing system is cheaper? It depends. If you are taking Mevacor for your cholesterol, the 20-mg. pill is two-twenty-five in America and less than two dollars if you buy it in Canada. But generic Mevacor (lovastatin) is about a dollar a pill in Canada and as low as sixty-five cents a pill in the United States.
If drug companies or the FDA were making the US market much more inefficient than European or Canadian markets, this would not be the case.
According to Gladwell, pharmaceutical prices in the US have risen only at about the rate of inflation, but pharmaceutical spending has risen much faster because people are taking more drugs than ever before. If pills cost the same as five years ago, but you take twice as many pills, your pharmacy bills will rise and it's not the fault of the drug companies or the FDA.
20 cases of counterfeit drugs yet we have to spend thousands and thousands and pass that on to the consumer.
According to a story in the Washington Post, the scale of the problem is much larger than "20 cases" might sound like. Each of these cases may involve tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of doses of counterfeit drugs, many of which are resold back to the major pharma companies, so your local drug store can't tell that they came from a shady middleman rather than directly from Merck's factories.
Phony medicines have surfaced in pharmacies from Florida to Hawaii, including tens of thousands of doses discovered in warehouses of the Big Three wholesalers.
Last summer, nearly 200,000 tablets of Lipitor, the world's best-selling cholesterol-lowering medication, was found to be counterfeit and recalled by a small Missouri wholesaler. Some of the pills had already reached Rite Aid and CVS pharmacies.
Part of the problem is that
It can be harder to become licensed as a beautician than as a pharmaceutical distributor. With a $700 permit fee and a $200 bond, a pair of Florida manicurists got a license to sell intravenous drugs. An auto body shop owner in Miami got a license to sell drugs in Maryland. Nevada awarded a license to a 23-year-old former restaurant hostess to operate an Internet pharmacy that specialized in narcotics.
Even worse,
Florida gave licenses to at least a half-dozen felons, records show. Two states -- Georgia and Tennessee -- gave a wholesaler license to James R. Suozzo of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a convicted cocaine user with a long history of heroin abuse, investigative records show. Suozzo's background surfaced when he was arrested in February on suspicion of attempting to sell adulterated Procrit, Epogen and Neupogen to another small wholesaler.
[Bush is] not afraid of taking the risk to remove dictators from power.... Bush is not smart and made a lot of errors
but he is man of action and I respect it.... if not for
American action we would be speaking German or Russian now
As I recall, Hitler and Stalin were also men of action. So is bin Laden. I must part company with you on respecting people simply for being men of action.
Bush is no Hitler, Stalin, or bin Laden, but his action is making the world safer for terrorists. That's why Al Qaeda endorsed Bush and why Iran's parliament just voted unanimously to go full steam ahead with their bomb project. Because Bush doesn't have what it takes to stop them.
In the 1940s, it took FDR and Truman three years to lead America to victory Germany, Italy, and Japan, bring order and stability to those countries, and make the world safer. In three years, Bush has managed to defeat the much less imposing armies of Saddam and the Taliban, but hasn't stopped bin Laden or al Zawahiri and hasn't brought order or stability to either defeated country.
As to removing dictators from power, Bush supports dictators, such as Musharraf of Pakistan, the Sauds of Saudi Arabia, or President Hu of China, when they suit his purposes, and supports pardons for those like A.Q. Khan, who sell nukes to terrorist states.
If Bush had the balls of a Churchill or even Maggie Thatcher, he'd take on major totalitarian states, such as China, or fight Putin's coup d'état in Russia, instad of farting around with pipsqueak nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
Let me digress with a story about a different sort of decision. Several years ago, my son had a high fever, was vomiting, and had a sharp pain in his abdomen. I took him to the hospital. The doctor quickly told me that there was a good chance that he had appendicitis, but that there wasn't enough information know with any great certainty. He recommended immediate surgery despite his lack of data. I went along with his recommendation because and found that my son had a ruptured gangrenous appendix. If I had waited for enough information to be certain, my son would probably have died.
Similarly, we are facing decisions today about the environment where any reasonable scientist will say that we can't be very certain about the consequences of our choices.
If we put off reducing CO2 emissions and global warming turns out to be on the bad side of the range of estimates, we may be faced with thousands of years of environmental disaster.
On the other hand, if we prematurely cut CO2 emissions and global warming turns out to be on the benign side of the range of estimates, we will have condemned billions in the developing world to unnecessary poverty and disease that could have been helped with the money earned by faster industrialization.
For about ten years, I have taken the position that the focus on the climate record of the last century has received too much attention. If we step back from the details of the short-term temperature record and ask about long term climate futures, I see a different picture: Right now, we can be quite certain that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is more than 20% higher than it's been at any point in the previous 400,000 years and almost all of the increase in the last 15,000 years has occurred in the last 50 years, exactly as we would expect if the increase was solely due to burning fossil fuels. With less certainty, it appears that CO2 concentrations may be about 20% greater than they've been at any time in the past 22 million years.
While reentrant feedback loops in the climate make it difficult to sort chickens from eggs and conclusively demonstrate causality, there is a clear correlation between CO2 levels and temperature over the past half-million years. The physical basis for a causal connection between CO2 concentrations and temperature is well-understood, although it's legitimate when critics point out that feedback effects can be large enough to completely overwhelm the primary forcing.
It's also true that our uncertainties about aerosol forcings are larger than the total effect of anthropogenic CO2 emissions to date (IPCC discusses this and clearly states the uncertainties). This means that we do not understand climate well enough to state with certainty what has caused the climate changes that have been observed in the last century. The balance of the evidence suggests to most scientists that CO2 emissions are responsible, but there is certainly room for reasonable people to disagree, and they do!
Where I come down with this uncertainty is as follows: Over the past 100 years, we have increased the amount of CO2 in the air by about 25%. If we continue the current trends of CO2 emissions for another 100 years, atmospheric CO2 at the end of this century will be several times its preindustrial value.
We don't have any reasonable climatological data from the past to tell us what the earth would be like with four times its current CO2 concentrations. There is good reason to worry that there could be severe climate disruptions. If there were, it would take thousands or years or more to bring CO2 levels down to their preindustrial values, so we would be stuck with a changed climate for a long time, even if we assume that there is no hysteresis in the climate system (events such as the Younger Dryas suggest, but do not prove, that there may well be hysteresis that would make it even harder to reverse the climate change).
If we are wrong and slow down industrial activity for several decades and then find out that
I was talking about the climate records. There, there is a detailed discussion of the uncertainties about the urban heat island effect, other uncertainties, the disagreements between different records (satellites vs. surface; different geological records of ancient temperatures, etc). See, for instance, Box 2.1 in "The Scientific Basis" for good discussion of the heat island effect.
The 2001 report also has detailed discussion of model uncertainties. Chapter 8 is all about model evaluation and concludes with a section on what is and is not reliable about the models on a scale ranging from "well-established" to "speculative."
There are numerous graphs showing model calculations versus observed climatic data (see, for instance, figs. 8.15 and 8.19).
The authors of the scientific sections of the IPCC report are indeed real practicing scientists, many of them the best in the field, and they do seem to have read the literature quite comprehensively.
On self interest and scientists, it's amusing that you accuse them of exaggerating their certainty about global warming to keep the funds coming. A couple of years ago, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Daniel Sarewitz accused climate scientists of exaggerating their uncertainty about global warming on the grounds that if everyone accepted that warming was a real threat, politicians might divert funding away from research and toward action. Thus, Pielke and Sarewitz accuse climate scientists of accepting research funding as bribes for continuing to say that things are uncertain and further research is needed. P & S argue that honest climate scientists would say that we know all we need to know; further research is unlikely to resolve uncertainties in any useful way, so we should hang up the expensive research and start taking political action.
I don't buy either your idea that scientists are exaggerating fears of climate change to keep funding coming or Pielke and Sarewitz's idea that they are playing up the uncertainty to keep funding coming. I think they are being honest and recognize that even if they stopped doing climate change research there would still be a lot of well-funded opportunities at predicting ENSO events, droughts, tropical storm trends, etc. It's not as though natural climatic variability is economically or politically negligible.
Rather than trying to fudge an inherently inaccurate and incomplete surface record, these scientists should focus on resolving any problems they have with the satellite record which is the only truly global temperature record we have.
The problem is that to distinguish anthropogenic warming from natural climate cycles, you need a very long climate record. We don't have satellite records from 100, 1000, or 10,000 years ago, so even if satellites unambiguously said that the world had warmed up significantly in the last 20 years, this information would not tell us whether the warming was part of a trend that correlates with CO2 concentrations or merely a coincidence.
For this reason, we use both instrumental records (which do suffer from the urban heat island effect you discuss) as well as indirect records (dendrochronology, hydrogen isotope ratios from ice cores, etc.).
You're being naive if you think we're going to be able to adequately monitor it by some strategically placed thermometers in heat islands of urban sprawl and generally ignore the 75% of the earth's surface that is covered by water.
The 75% of the earth's surface covered by water is measured, albeit incompletely, by water samples drawn by ships crossing the oceans. We have a few hundred years of data from this, but just as with urban heat islands, there are problems comparing old data with new (e.g., evaporative cooling of water sampled in canvas buckets on old sailing ships vs. measurements at subsurface water intakes on modern vessels).
You are exactly right that China is set to become the number one offender in CO2 emissions. My question is how President Bush plans to convince China to do anything about it when he is not willing to cut CO2 emissions in the US.
As another poster has pointed out, China emits only a small fraction as much CO2 per capita as the US does (US has about 5% of the world's population and produces about 20% of the world's anthropogenic CO2 emissions), so imagine what China's total CO2 emissions will be when its per capita GDP matches the US.
Is the US doing anything to encourage China to join an international treaty to limit its CO2 emissions? No. Why not?
The IPCC actually does discuss the uncertainties in depth and has an extensive bibliography. Even Richard Lindzen, one of the more prominent skeptics about greenhouse warming, says that "The full IPCC report is an admirable description of research activities
in climate science, but it is not specifically directed at policy." Lindzen complains that while the IPCC report is quite accurate, "The
Summary for Policymakers is... a very different document.
It represents a consensus of government representatives (many of
whom are also their nations' Kyoto representatives), rather than of
scientists. The resulting document has a strong tendency to disguise
uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is no
evidence."
I would also point out that even Lindzen agrees, in the document cited above and in his testimony to the US Senate, that "global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago," but he claims that we can't tell whether this temperature rise has anything to do with the rise in CO2 levels.
I also find it strange that you would assert that over the past 20 years the Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 governments would have cut funding for scientists who found that the world was not warming up ("many of them depend on ongoing funding that would be in jeapordy if they were to massage the data a little more conservatively"). I can see this charge against the Clinton/Gore administration, but for most of the last 20 years we've had conservative Republican administrations. Can you substantiate this claim?
My understanding is that the increasing population density along African and Asian coasts has been due mostly to population growth and mismanagement of inland fresh water and soil resources, not to demonstrable climate change.
The same seems to be true of Florida, which you held out as an example of climate-change-induced deaths.
I also have not seen any evidence that the frequency or magnitude of tropical storms, droughts, and other weather extremes have been significantly worse in the past decade than fifty or one hundred years ago.
Can you point me to a chapter of the IPCC reports or another peer-reviewed source that argues otherwise?
How would you determine that changing weather patterns are due to global warming as opposed to random fluctuations? How would you determine whether fatalities are due to more extreme weather versus changing land use patterns and population growth.
To the best of my knowledge, deaths associated with weather have been on the rise mostly because of land use and population issues and not because of changing weather patterns.
The IPCC reports are probably the best resource for this. They point to hundreds of papers in the peer-reviewed literature that deal with this very real and difficult problem.
This is a real problem, but people have been working hard on it for 15 to 20 years. Just last week, a paper was published in Science Express (the advance version of Science) that suggests that the uncertainties in measuring past climates are greater than what are commonly accepted by mainstream scientists. The article is available only by subscription, but the New York Times has a good balanced account of it.
If you read the reports from the National Academy of Science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or any of several papers that appeared in Science in the past several years, including those by lead scientists on the MSU satellites, you will see that this is not nearly so straightforward as you make it out to be.
Actually, the satellites use microwave radiometers to measure the radiated power in a certain bandwidth. That's why they're called "Microwave Sounding Units."
What you miss with your argument about CO2 in the way is that the atmospheric gases are both absorbing radiation from the surface and emitting radiation of their own. What the satellite measures is the integral of all the radiation emitted at all layers minus the radiation absorbed by all layers. You don't get a clean black-body curve out, so you need to really understand what you're doing.
The number of people killed in the US by this year's hurricanes is a small fraction of the number killed by hurricanes in 1900. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we can't connect observed storm patterns to global warming with any certainty. In fact, under their predictions of future warming, the IPCC states that we can't predict with any certainty whether global warming will make hurricanes more frequent or more severe.
What's interesting to ask is why the number of hurricanes hitting Florida in the last 40 years is so much smaller than the number that hit in the previous 40 years. If there were a simple relation between hurricanes and temperature, we'd expect that there would have been a generally increasing trend of hurricanes, rather than almost half a century of relatively low hurricane activity.
Similarly, the problems Bangladesh and Mozambique have with typhoons has more to do with population issues (more people living near the coasts) than with changes in weather patterns. Can you point to any reliable data indicating that typhoon activity has been more severe in the last ten years than 50 years ago?
Take a look at the typhoon records for 1860-1890. In 1881, 300,000 people were killed by a single typhoon in Haifong. Between 1864 and 1876, typhoons killed over 280,000.
Yes, I read what I wrote. I am saying that global warming poses a significant threat for the future, but that it's wrong to say, as the person I replied to did, that "the extremes that are killing people in record numbers" today.
About 14 years ago, a group of scientists investigating ozone depletion over the North Pole prematurely told the press that there might be a hole in the ozone layer over the North Pole that winter. The press exaggerated the statement and represented it as a definite prediction. When the stratosphere warmed up a few weeks later and no hole materialized, this gave people such as Rush Limbaugh an easy opportunity to ridicule the whole concept that halocarbons were destroying stratospheric ozone.
Claims that global warming is killing record numbers today will only give anti-environmentalists similar ammunition.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, human energy consumption is 411 quads per year, or 4 x 10^20 Joules per year, which works out to a power of 1.3 x 10^13 Watts.
About half the sun's power is absorbed by the earth's surface, so solar energy heats the earth with about 690 Watts per square meter. Multiplying this by the cross-sectional area of the earth gives 9x10^16 watts, or about 6400 times the human energy use.
Following Bartlett's reasoning, we see that in nine doubling-times, human activity will amount to 10% of solar warming---a significant, if not mind-blowing fraction. In 13 doubling times, human activity will match solar heating.
If we increase energy consumption at 10% per year, it would take about 90 years to achieve this. It's worth noting that per-capita GDP scales nicely with energy consumption, so if we were to sustain 10% world per-capita GDP growth for a century, we would need to increase energy consumption in this way, even if population stabilized.
Doubling the sun's heating would increase the temperature of the earth's surface by a factor of the fourth root of 2 (Stefan-Boltzman law), or a bit less than 20%: It would warm up from 288 K to about 350 K, or around 150 F. Decidedly uncomfortable, but many orders of magnitude less warming than would be required to turn the atmosphere incandescant.
Bartlett's point was not that we really need to worry about making the sky glow. It was that even if we had a completely free energy source and stopped population growth, we'd still need to think about using energy wisely. In that, he's right.
According to the Uranium Institute, known resources of economically recoverable U-235 are "enough to last for some 50 years" at today's rate of consumption. If prices go up significantly, we could mine other sources, but even so, "all conventional resources are considered - 14.4 million tonnes, ... is over 200 years' supply at today's rate of consumption"
Today, fission supplies 16% of the world's electricity. If we converted the world to using nuclear power for all our electricity, we would use up the uranium six times faster, so all known supplies would last somewhere around 35 years.
To go beyond this, we would need to resort to more exotic technology, such as breeder reactors or extracting uranium from seawater and phosphate deposits.
Besides, all our bubble-gum is reserved for making space shuttles flight-safe.
At the levels of CO2 that we're putting into the atmosphere today, it's likely that biological sinks could reduce CO2 to preindustrial levels in about 200 years, but if we continue to burn fossil fuels for the next two centuries, the biological and short-term chemical sinks will have been saturated.
Based on what we know about the slow (geological) sinks, it could well take on the order of a few million years to get back to preindustrial levels of CO2 from the levels we expect if we burn up all the known coal reserves (estimated at around 250 years from now at current rates of consumption).
Therefore, I am much more concerned with CO2 emissions than with nuclear waste.
As you note, if the seller wishes to impose additional restrictions after the contract is entered, you may sue to enforce the original contract, but Valve is not the seller, and the store is not imposing restrictions, so your line of argument does not apply.
This point was the basis of the defense in MacPherson v. Buick, (217 N.Y. 382 (1916)) and Judge Cardozo's ruling introduced an exception in the case where the object sold was "a thing of danger" which was negligently manufactured, but since a CD is not inherently dangerous, you'd have a hard time applying this precedent there.
Your state may have a laws declaring an implied warranty of merchantability, in which case you may have rights beyond what your contract with the retailer provides, but if you're going to assert that you have rights which are not spelled out in the contract, you will have a hard time arguing that the law can't also give Valve such rights.
Actually, Paul Starr made the same basic complaints about the assumptions hidden in the underlying model of SimCity in a 1994 in The American Prospect, "The Seductions of Sim."
If you've got a reference for the mountain fog lights, I'd love to learn more about them.
Even including the "universal health care tax," Canada and Europe achieve better results (lower infant mortality, longer average lifespans) than the US and at lower cost than the US, regardless whether you measure in dollars per capita or as fraction of GDP.
There is no question that the US system of medicine is quite inefficient compared to other industrial nations. However, drug costs are not a significant contributor to this inefficiency.
The greatest source of inefficiency in the US is that Congress requires insurance companies to pay for state-of-the-art care even when a much cheaper, but inferior treatment would produce almost as good results at a fraction of the price.
Even for the uninsured, physicians and hospitals often choose expensive courses of treatment because saving money with alternatives, which might be marginally inferior but much cheaper, would potentially expose them to lawsuits if things turned out badly.
In Europe, the government will pay for therapy they consider cost-effective and often make you wait for it. If you want something fancier or want faster service, you're free to pay for it yourself. This gives people an incentive to ask whether they really want the state of the art, since it might cost them out of their own pocketbook.
In the US, everyone with insurance is decoupled from market forces and feels entitled to spend unlimited amounts on medical care in exchange for a small annual premium. This is not the way to get a market to operate efficiently.
As to truck hijacking, why would a company implement a policy that would make it more likely to be robbed? You're assuming that the truck would have an RFID that would list the contents of the truck.
Why not just make the RFID contain a UID for the truck and keep the contents in a separate database. After all, it the theives could get the database, they wouldn't need to scan RFIDs. They could just look at the truck's route, wait along the way, and ID the truck by its license plates (or if they must be geeky, hook up a web cam and OCR software to have their computers read license plates).
The RFIDs for the truck's contents would not be readable from the road because a semi trailer has steel or aluminum walls and thus acts as a Faraday cage.
BTW, the first use of bar codes in the world was to code Railroad cars (back in the early 1960s). I'm not aware of barcoding railroad cars leading to a dramatic increase in train robberies, so I'm not sure why you would think RFIDs would be any different.
Back to drugs. The important thing that RFID coding drug shipments would accomplish would be to provide an easy way to help track whether a particular box in the warehouse had been out of the custody of the manufacturer (e.g., bought back from a third-party distributor) or had come straight from the factory.
Part of the problem we face today is that we can't tell where a given box of pills has come from. If we had an easy way to ID the box, we could track its provenence using a database of purchases and sales.
The forged RFID problem is real, but just because a scheme is imperfect is not necessarily a reason not to consider it. It might be that it's hard enough to forge RFIDs (e.g., encode a cryptographic signature of the UID) that beauticians, auto-body repair shops, and drug addicts would look for an easier scam to run.
Also, the story that drugs are more expensive in the US is largely an urban myth. Patent-protected drugs without significant competitors are more expensive in the US, but because of free-market competition, generics are a lot cheaper here than in Europe or Canada. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an excellent article on this topic in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago:
If drug companies or the FDA were making the US market much more inefficient than European or Canadian markets, this would not be the case. According to Gladwell, pharmaceutical prices in the US have risen only at about the rate of inflation, but pharmaceutical spending has risen much faster because people are taking more drugs than ever before. If pills cost the same as five years ago, but you take twice as many pills, your pharmacy bills will rise and it's not the fault of the drug companies or the FDA.According to a story in the Washington Post, the scale of the problem is much larger than "20 cases" might sound like. Each of these cases may involve tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of doses of counterfeit drugs, many of which are resold back to the major pharma companies, so your local drug store can't tell that they came from a shady middleman rather than directly from Merck's factories.
Part of the problem is that Even worse,As I recall, Hitler and Stalin were also men of action. So is bin Laden. I must part company with you on respecting people simply for being men of action.
Bush is no Hitler, Stalin, or bin Laden, but his action is making the world safer for terrorists. That's why Al Qaeda endorsed Bush and why Iran's parliament just voted unanimously to go full steam ahead with their bomb project. Because Bush doesn't have what it takes to stop them.
In the 1940s, it took FDR and Truman three years to lead America to victory Germany, Italy, and Japan, bring order and stability to those countries, and make the world safer. In three years, Bush has managed to defeat the much less imposing armies of Saddam and the Taliban, but hasn't stopped bin Laden or al Zawahiri and hasn't brought order or stability to either defeated country.
As to removing dictators from power, Bush supports dictators, such as Musharraf of Pakistan, the Sauds of Saudi Arabia, or President Hu of China, when they suit his purposes, and supports pardons for those like A.Q. Khan, who sell nukes to terrorist states.
If Bush had the balls of a Churchill or even Maggie Thatcher, he'd take on major totalitarian states, such as China, or fight Putin's coup d'état in Russia, instad of farting around with pipsqueak nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
Similarly, we are facing decisions today about the environment where any reasonable scientist will say that we can't be very certain about the consequences of our choices.
If we put off reducing CO2 emissions and global warming turns out to be on the bad side of the range of estimates, we may be faced with thousands of years of environmental disaster.
On the other hand, if we prematurely cut CO2 emissions and global warming turns out to be on the benign side of the range of estimates, we will have condemned billions in the developing world to unnecessary poverty and disease that could have been helped with the money earned by faster industrialization.
For about ten years, I have taken the position that the focus on the climate record of the last century has received too much attention. If we step back from the details of the short-term temperature record and ask about long term climate futures, I see a different picture: Right now, we can be quite certain that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is more than 20% higher than it's been at any point in the previous 400,000 years and almost all of the increase in the last 15,000 years has occurred in the last 50 years, exactly as we would expect if the increase was solely due to burning fossil fuels. With less certainty, it appears that CO2 concentrations may be about 20% greater than they've been at any time in the past 22 million years.
While reentrant feedback loops in the climate make it difficult to sort chickens from eggs and conclusively demonstrate causality, there is a clear correlation between CO2 levels and temperature over the past half-million years. The physical basis for a causal connection between CO2 concentrations and temperature is well-understood, although it's legitimate when critics point out that feedback effects can be large enough to completely overwhelm the primary forcing.
It's also true that our uncertainties about aerosol forcings are larger than the total effect of anthropogenic CO2 emissions to date (IPCC discusses this and clearly states the uncertainties). This means that we do not understand climate well enough to state with certainty what has caused the climate changes that have been observed in the last century. The balance of the evidence suggests to most scientists that CO2 emissions are responsible, but there is certainly room for reasonable people to disagree, and they do!
Where I come down with this uncertainty is as follows: Over the past 100 years, we have increased the amount of CO2 in the air by about 25%. If we continue the current trends of CO2 emissions for another 100 years, atmospheric CO2 at the end of this century will be several times its preindustrial value.
We don't have any reasonable climatological data from the past to tell us what the earth would be like with four times its current CO2 concentrations. There is good reason to worry that there could be severe climate disruptions. If there were, it would take thousands or years or more to bring CO2 levels down to their preindustrial values, so we would be stuck with a changed climate for a long time, even if we assume that there is no hysteresis in the climate system (events such as the Younger Dryas suggest, but do not prove, that there may well be hysteresis that would make it even harder to reverse the climate change).
If we are wrong and slow down industrial activity for several decades and then find out that
That's not what the experts say.
The 2001 report also has detailed discussion of model uncertainties. Chapter 8 is all about model evaluation and concludes with a section on what is and is not reliable about the models on a scale ranging from "well-established" to "speculative."
There are numerous graphs showing model calculations versus observed climatic data (see, for instance, figs. 8.15 and 8.19).
The authors of the scientific sections of the IPCC report are indeed real practicing scientists, many of them the best in the field, and they do seem to have read the literature quite comprehensively.
On self interest and scientists, it's amusing that you accuse them of exaggerating their certainty about global warming to keep the funds coming. A couple of years ago, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Daniel Sarewitz accused climate scientists of exaggerating their uncertainty about global warming on the grounds that if everyone accepted that warming was a real threat, politicians might divert funding away from research and toward action. Thus, Pielke and Sarewitz accuse climate scientists of accepting research funding as bribes for continuing to say that things are uncertain and further research is needed. P & S argue that honest climate scientists would say that we know all we need to know; further research is unlikely to resolve uncertainties in any useful way, so we should hang up the expensive research and start taking political action.
I don't buy either your idea that scientists are exaggerating fears of climate change to keep funding coming or Pielke and Sarewitz's idea that they are playing up the uncertainty to keep funding coming. I think they are being honest and recognize that even if they stopped doing climate change research there would still be a lot of well-funded opportunities at predicting ENSO events, droughts, tropical storm trends, etc. It's not as though natural climatic variability is economically or politically negligible.
Rather than trying to fudge an inherently inaccurate and incomplete surface record, these scientists should focus on resolving any problems they have with the satellite record which is the only truly global temperature record we have.
The problem is that to distinguish anthropogenic warming from natural climate cycles, you need a very long climate record. We don't have satellite records from 100, 1000, or 10,000 years ago, so even if satellites unambiguously said that the world had warmed up significantly in the last 20 years, this information would not tell us whether the warming was part of a trend that correlates with CO2 concentrations or merely a coincidence.
For this reason, we use both instrumental records (which do suffer from the urban heat island effect you discuss) as well as indirect records (dendrochronology, hydrogen isotope ratios from ice cores, etc.).
You're being naive if you think we're going to be able to adequately monitor it by some strategically placed thermometers in heat islands of urban sprawl and generally ignore the 75% of the earth's surface that is covered by water.
The 75% of the earth's surface covered by water is measured, albeit incompletely, by water samples drawn by ships crossing the oceans. We have a few hundred years of data from this, but just as with urban heat islands, there are problems comparing old data with new (e.g., evaporative cooling of water sampled in canvas buckets on old sailing ships vs. measurements at subsurface water intakes on modern vessels).
As another poster has pointed out, China emits only a small fraction as much CO2 per capita as the US does (US has about 5% of the world's population and produces about 20% of the world's anthropogenic CO2 emissions), so imagine what China's total CO2 emissions will be when its per capita GDP matches the US.
Is the US doing anything to encourage China to join an international treaty to limit its CO2 emissions? No. Why not?
I would also point out that even Lindzen agrees, in the document cited above and in his testimony to the US Senate, that "global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago," but he claims that we can't tell whether this temperature rise has anything to do with the rise in CO2 levels.
I also find it strange that you would assert that over the past 20 years the Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 governments would have cut funding for scientists who found that the world was not warming up ("many of them depend on ongoing funding that would be in jeapordy if they were to massage the data a little more conservatively"). I can see this charge against the Clinton/Gore administration, but for most of the last 20 years we've had conservative Republican administrations. Can you substantiate this claim?
The same seems to be true of Florida, which you held out as an example of climate-change-induced deaths.
I also have not seen any evidence that the frequency or magnitude of tropical storms, droughts, and other weather extremes have been significantly worse in the past decade than fifty or one hundred years ago.
Can you point me to a chapter of the IPCC reports or another peer-reviewed source that argues otherwise?
To the best of my knowledge, deaths associated with weather have been on the rise mostly because of land use and population issues and not because of changing weather patterns.
This is a real problem, but people have been working hard on it for 15 to 20 years. Just last week, a paper was published in Science Express (the advance version of Science) that suggests that the uncertainties in measuring past climates are greater than what are commonly accepted by mainstream scientists. The article is available only by subscription, but the New York Times has a good balanced account of it.
If you read the reports from the National Academy of Science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or any of several papers that appeared in Science in the past several years, including those by lead scientists on the MSU satellites, you will see that this is not nearly so straightforward as you make it out to be.
What you miss with your argument about CO2 in the way is that the atmospheric gases are both absorbing radiation from the surface and emitting radiation of their own. What the satellite measures is the integral of all the radiation emitted at all layers minus the radiation absorbed by all layers. You don't get a clean black-body curve out, so you need to really understand what you're doing.
What's interesting to ask is why the number of hurricanes hitting Florida in the last 40 years is so much smaller than the number that hit in the previous 40 years. If there were a simple relation between hurricanes and temperature, we'd expect that there would have been a generally increasing trend of hurricanes, rather than almost half a century of relatively low hurricane activity.
Similarly, the problems Bangladesh and Mozambique have with typhoons has more to do with population issues (more people living near the coasts) than with changes in weather patterns. Can you point to any reliable data indicating that typhoon activity has been more severe in the last ten years than 50 years ago?
Take a look at the typhoon records for 1860-1890. In 1881, 300,000 people were killed by a single typhoon in Haifong. Between 1864 and 1876, typhoons killed over 280,000.
Yes, I read what I wrote. I am saying that global warming poses a significant threat for the future, but that it's wrong to say, as the person I replied to did, that "the extremes that are killing people in record numbers" today.
About 14 years ago, a group of scientists investigating ozone depletion over the North Pole prematurely told the press that there might be a hole in the ozone layer over the North Pole that winter. The press exaggerated the statement and represented it as a definite prediction. When the stratosphere warmed up a few weeks later and no hole materialized, this gave people such as Rush Limbaugh an easy opportunity to ridicule the whole concept that halocarbons were destroying stratospheric ozone.
Claims that global warming is killing record numbers today will only give anti-environmentalists similar ammunition.