> How many of the 'Independants' get their money from (or are members of) GreenPeace, the Audobon Society, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist organizations?
And how many get their money from industries that produce greenhouse gasses?
>
Next question, How much study has there been over whether or not the warming will actually cause harm? Not from an "All warming is bad standpoint" but from a "this are is getting warmer, lets figure out what will happen" point.
It's already wreaking havoc among plants and animals, sometimes with a direct economic impact, because the earlier spring thaw is throwing the interaction between species out of sync. For some species, things like pollination and food supply depend critically on the relative timings, and the warm-up is happening too fast for them to adapt. (The adaptation isn't necessarily evolution; it can be things like moving the species' range closer to the pole. But forests don't walk very fast, and the mobile species that depend on them can't very well migrate without them.)
Then there's things like rising sea levels resulting from warming; for details check out some maps.
More generally, we've built our habitations and infrastructure on the basis of the world as it is, and as the rug metaphorically shifts beneath our feet the social and economic disruptions are going to hurt like a mother. Reorganizing our entire agricultural system to adjust to changes in rainfall, replacing hydroelectric power generation lost for the same reason, moving our coastal cities and their inhabitants, etc., isn't going to be cheap or convenient. And when the whole world starts having those kinds of problems, all simultaneously and extending over decades, the urges of the 'haves' to stay 'haves' and the 'have-nots' to merely survive, is likely to cause an increase in armed conflicts that will make us think the War on Terror was the Good Old Days.
> The problem isn't what I know or don't know, it's the fact that climate scientists are arrogant and, frankly, foolish enough to try and claim that they understand climate enough to make predictions 100 years in the future.
Talk about arrogant, you're telling the professionals that you know they don't know their own field of study.
> I find it funny how many americans choose to believe the stances pursued by energy interest groups who have money to loose on tighter regulations concerning global warming, rather than the independant scientific community.
What's really funny is that they think the scientists are the ones that have big money at stake.
> As far as climate goes, its period is similar to geologic timescales, or in other words, thousands and thousands of years. We don't have thousands and thousands of years of climate data, let alone multiple periods' worth.
Actually we do. The reason scientists started predicting the onset of an ice age 30 years ago is that they had amassed enough data to show various long-term cycles in the climate. (An overlay of 22Ky, 41Ky, and 100Ky cycles, according to a recent article by Ruddiman.)
And the deviation from that pattern indicates that we've done more to warm things up than we would know about if we only had the thermometer-era data. We're getting warmer when we should be getting cooler; the delta is almost certainly the result of unintentional terraforming by H. sapiens.
> We have climate data from ice cores drilled into miles of ice in the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica.
Also sediment cores from lake, sea, and ocean bottoms, and tree-ring samples. In some cases even the geological record can be useful, since annual deposition rates can tell us about freezes, melts, and droughts.
The amazing thing is that you can find this stuff out by simply reading a magazine or watching a television documentary now and then, and yet many intelligent people remain completely unaware of it.
> If a terrorist group is able to build a dirty bomb that causes mass casualties why would they want a nuke?
If you think a dirty bomb in New York would be disruptive, imagine what would happen if someone popped a nuke positioned to make a big chunk of the Greenland ice sheet collapse into the sea and shut down the Atlantic Conveyer.
I don't know whether a single nuke would suffice, but you get the idea.
> US Media to citizens: "Not worried yet? Why not??? There is plenty to be afraid of, like tururists, nookular bombs, dirty bombs, Ay-rabs, tururists, environmentalists, communists, Eye-rackees, protesters... Oh, did we mention tururists yet?? There's a big, SCAAAARY world out there, filled with scary non-American people!"
> unless the website designers were deligent in using valid charecter checking I can use sql injection on ms sql server (mysql?) and have the server ftp out to my system and download any software I want....
> The sad thing is, that because of vested interests (read: public school teacher unions), the parents are going to continue paying for this system they oppose.
Fortunately it was free of charge, so the payments won't be very high.
> Welcome to the wonders of socialism and government, generally.
Yeah, 'cause the schools are so much better in Somalia.
> [King Zad's voice?] in an age where reliance on technology is reaching a dangerous threshold, it'd be wiser to spend the money and resources on a new administrator or teacher instead of tagging students.
Yeah, but the tags just make it so much easier when they need to sell a few more students to the organ harvesters in order to make their next payment on the new football stadium.
I see that two other people have used this subject line, so I guess it must be the next big "fp" kind of thingy, and I just want to get in on it before everybody starts doing it.
> > Sorry, but geologists rationally took apart creationism 200 years ago.
> I suppose I'm supposed to fill in your argument for you and believe Lamark just "took apart" creationsim. I can certainly stomach much of his work better than I can stomach Origin of the Species, but he was no more a geologist than Darwin.
Lamarck and Darwin are irrelevant to the assertion you are presumably replying to.
> I've said it before and I'll say it again - the computer you're using, the chair in which you sit, the glass from which you drink all had an intelligent designer. What makes the planet and the universe different?
Uh, they don't have an intelligent designer?
That was too easy; ask a harder one.
> To be quite frank, I think the chances of so many different species of life forming on one planet from some primordial soup is pretty far out there.
And I think I'm good in bed, but that doesn't necessarily make it so.
> I think it takes more faith to believe in the (ever changing) beliefs of science than to believe in the Bible.
Surely you know the Bible changed a lot over the course of its history. To say nothing of its interpretations. (Do you have any idea how many "bible based" sects there are in the USA these days?)
At any rate, believe whatever you please, but if you argue bad arguments for your beliefs, don't expect a free pass from the people hearing them.
> Even when we believe they are false, ideas like Creationism threaten to unravel the framework by which we understand the world.
Huh? Does the idea of a flat earth threaten to unravel astronomy and planetology? Does the idea of alchemy threaten to unravel chemisty?
> We feel better if we are able to rationally take apart offending ideas, but, failing that, we will mostly settle for just shouting them down when we are among those who we feel sure will agree one way or the other.
Sorry, but geologists rationally took apart creationism 200 years ago.
> Frankly, 99% of the/. community lacks the scientific background to really understand and refute the claims of Creationists.
Oh, please. Most of their claims are simple logical fallacies and/or attempts to 'refute' science by misrepresenting well known facts or arguing that Darwin was a baby raper.
> On the face of it, it would seem to provide some evidence for the Intelligent Design crowd.
No, it doesn't even provide evidence that biological evolution doesn't work, because it's just a simulator. A "failed" simulation hardle proves that the real thing doesn't work. Especially when the simulator doesn't even try to be a detailed model of the real thing.
And even if it did provide evidence that biological evolution doesn't work, that would not be evidence of an intelligent designer.
> Darwinism doesn't explain everything as tidily as some may think.
ID doesn't explain anything at all.
> Behe goes on to say some systems can't be produced by natural selection because "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional."
His IC argument ignores the possibility of changing the function of a system, which is probably the most common way evolution acts.
> Heavy stuff
I would have said "deep".
ID is nothing but creationist apologetics, bowlderized to try to sneak it past the US court system.
Slashdot Mirror
> Now lets hear the slashdotters comment of how they too are misunderstood savants.
I've got the "misunderstood" part down, but I can't figure out where to go frome here.
> Do Slashdot editors even read Slashdot?
No, they've got better things to do with their time.
> Now *that* is a cool idea.
Coming soon to a Superman movie near you. Or was that a James Bond movie? A season of "24"? A Tom Clancy novel?
> How many of the 'Independants' get their money from (or are members of) GreenPeace, the Audobon Society, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist organizations?
And how many get their money from industries that produce greenhouse gasses?
>
Next question, How much study has there been over whether or not the warming will actually cause harm? Not from an "All warming is bad standpoint" but from a "this are is getting warmer, lets figure out what will happen" point.
It's already wreaking havoc among plants and animals, sometimes with a direct economic impact, because the earlier spring thaw is throwing the interaction between species out of sync. For some species, things like pollination and food supply depend critically on the relative timings, and the warm-up is happening too fast for them to adapt. (The adaptation isn't necessarily evolution; it can be things like moving the species' range closer to the pole. But forests don't walk very fast, and the mobile species that depend on them can't very well migrate without them.)
Then there's things like rising sea levels resulting from warming; for details check out some maps.
More generally, we've built our habitations and infrastructure on the basis of the world as it is, and as the rug metaphorically shifts beneath our feet the social and economic disruptions are going to hurt like a mother. Reorganizing our entire agricultural system to adjust to changes in rainfall, replacing hydroelectric power generation lost for the same reason, moving our coastal cities and their inhabitants, etc., isn't going to be cheap or convenient. And when the whole world starts having those kinds of problems, all simultaneously and extending over decades, the urges of the 'haves' to stay 'haves' and the 'have-nots' to merely survive, is likely to cause an increase in armed conflicts that will make us think the War on Terror was the Good Old Days.
> The problem isn't what I know or don't know, it's the fact that climate scientists are arrogant and, frankly, foolish enough to try and claim that they understand climate enough to make predictions 100 years in the future.
Talk about arrogant, you're telling the professionals that you know they don't know their own field of study.
> I find it funny how many americans choose to believe the stances pursued by energy interest groups who have money to loose on tighter regulations concerning global warming, rather than the independant scientific community.
What's really funny is that they think the scientists are the ones that have big money at stake.
> As far as climate goes, its period is similar to geologic timescales, or in other words, thousands and thousands of years. We don't have thousands and thousands of years of climate data, let alone multiple periods' worth.
Actually we do. The reason scientists started predicting the onset of an ice age 30 years ago is that they had amassed enough data to show various long-term cycles in the climate. (An overlay of 22Ky, 41Ky, and 100Ky cycles, according to a recent article by Ruddiman.)
And the deviation from that pattern indicates that we've done more to warm things up than we would know about if we only had the thermometer-era data. We're getting warmer when we should be getting cooler; the delta is almost certainly the result of unintentional terraforming by H. sapiens.
> We have climate data from ice cores drilled into miles of ice in the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica.
Also sediment cores from lake, sea, and ocean bottoms, and tree-ring samples. In some cases even the geological record can be useful, since annual deposition rates can tell us about freezes, melts, and droughts.
The amazing thing is that you can find this stuff out by simply reading a magazine or watching a television documentary now and then, and yet many intelligent people remain completely unaware of it.
> If a terrorist group is able to build a dirty bomb that causes mass casualties why would they want a nuke?
If you think a dirty bomb in New York would be disruptive, imagine what would happen if someone popped a nuke positioned to make a big chunk of the Greenland ice sheet collapse into the sea and shut down the Atlantic Conveyer.
I don't know whether a single nuke would suffice, but you get the idea.
> US Media to citizens: "Not worried yet? Why not??? There is plenty to be afraid of, like tururists, nookular bombs, dirty bombs, Ay-rabs, tururists, environmentalists, communists, Eye-rackees, protesters... Oh, did we mention tururists yet?? There's a big, SCAAAARY world out there, filled with scary non-American people!"
A simple fnord would have sufficed.
"none"
> unless the website designers were deligent in using valid charecter checking I can use sql injection on ms sql server (mysql?) and have the server ftp out to my system and download any software I want....
Even Duke Nukem Forever?
"Dammit, that thing said I could stand up in the boat!"
> Hrm, I wonder if their eventual explanation will involve words like "threats" and "guns".
Either that, or the students learned to spell l-a-w-s-u-i-t.
> The sad thing is, that because of vested interests (read: public school teacher unions), the parents are going to continue paying for this system they oppose.
Fortunately it was free of charge, so the payments won't be very high.
> Welcome to the wonders of socialism and government, generally.
Yeah, 'cause the schools are so much better in Somalia.
> [King Zad's voice?] in an age where reliance on technology is reaching a dangerous threshold, it'd be wiser to spend the money and resources on a new administrator or teacher instead of tagging students.
Yeah, but the tags just make it so much easier when they need to sell a few more students to the organ harvesters in order to make their next payment on the new football stadium.
> But seriously, businesses rarely do things for free,
Undoubtedly they were trying to generate a success story in a gamble to be first-to-market. "The first (school's) fix is free."
> and it's unlikely any one would offer free services in exchange of bad PR.
Yeah, bad PR doesn't fit the (hypothetical) business plan given ablove.
It's part of the operating system now... at least until all the AV companies are bankrupt.
At any rate, can we expect the usual chorus of "you get what you pay for" from the astroserfs?
> his was taken by another post here on slashdot
I'm too lazy to type it up again, so read it here.
Here's some more fun stuff. Click the links at the top for before-and-after photo sets. The 'glacier' link is a good place to start.
I see that two other people have used this subject line, so I guess it must be the next big "fp" kind of thingy, and I just want to get in on it before everybody starts doing it.
> > Sorry, but geologists rationally took apart creationism 200 years ago.
> I suppose I'm supposed to fill in your argument for you and believe Lamark just "took apart" creationsim. I can certainly stomach much of his work better than I can stomach Origin of the Species, but he was no more a geologist than Darwin.
Lamarck and Darwin are irrelevant to the assertion you are presumably replying to.
> I've said it before and I'll say it again - the computer you're using, the chair in which you sit, the glass from which you drink all had an intelligent designer. What makes the planet and the universe different?
Uh, they don't have an intelligent designer?
That was too easy; ask a harder one.
> To be quite frank, I think the chances of so many different species of life forming on one planet from some primordial soup is pretty far out there.
And I think I'm good in bed, but that doesn't necessarily make it so.
> I think it takes more faith to believe in the (ever changing) beliefs of science than to believe in the Bible.
Surely you know the Bible changed a lot over the course of its history. To say nothing of its interpretations. (Do you have any idea how many "bible based" sects there are in the USA these days?)
At any rate, believe whatever you please, but if you argue bad arguments for your beliefs, don't expect a free pass from the people hearing them.
> Even when we believe they are false, ideas like Creationism threaten to unravel the framework by which we understand the world.
Huh? Does the idea of a flat earth threaten to unravel astronomy and planetology? Does the idea of alchemy threaten to unravel chemisty?
> We feel better if we are able to rationally take apart offending ideas, but, failing that, we will mostly settle for just shouting them down when we are among those who we feel sure will agree one way or the other.
Sorry, but geologists rationally took apart creationism 200 years ago.
> Frankly, 99% of the
Oh, please. Most of their claims are simple logical fallacies and/or attempts to 'refute' science by misrepresenting well known facts or arguing that Darwin was a baby raper.
> On the face of it, it would seem to provide some evidence for the Intelligent Design crowd.
No, it doesn't even provide evidence that biological evolution doesn't work, because it's just a simulator. A "failed" simulation hardle proves that the real thing doesn't work. Especially when the simulator doesn't even try to be a detailed model of the real thing.
And even if it did provide evidence that biological evolution doesn't work, that would not be evidence of an intelligent designer.
> Darwinism doesn't explain everything as tidily as some may think.
ID doesn't explain anything at all.
> Behe goes on to say some systems can't be produced by natural selection because "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional."
His IC argument ignores the possibility of changing the function of a system, which is probably the most common way evolution acts.
> Heavy stuff
I would have said "deep".
ID is nothing but creationist apologetics, bowlderized to try to sneak it past the US court system.