If I were a billionaire I'd hide all my money from those greedy bastards too.
If I were a billionaire I'd pay my taxes, give a shitload of money to charity, and still live a lifestyle that would be the envy of almost everyone who ever lived.
Hello? Last I checked the companies EARNED the money and it was the GOVERNMENTS trying to steal it from them. Yes steal with the threat of violence if you don't hand the money over to them. Power to these companies for fucking the man.
Whence this notion that taxing is stealing? The US Constitution certainly authorizes taxation.
Are we all entitled to getting something for nothing? Enjoy all the benefits of living in a country, and nobody has to pay for it?
In the end all the talk of taxing "the rich" or "greedy multi-national corporations" or some other bugaboo is absurd on the face of it, because you are seeking to attack the very people that have the legal and financial resources to simply shift money elsewhere where governments are less greedy themselves.
Not many of those corporations relish the prospect of losing the right to do business in the USA.
And if the rich leave the country, who gives a shit.
Hasn't this sort of thing been going on for quite a while with large companies? Heck, even smaller companies. It's always in the best interest of the business to keep as much of their profits as possible, and since it's only slightly trivial to buy a politician, loopholes will exist for the foreseeable future.
Yes, if someone's going to be outraged they should be outraged at the laws that allow it rather than the companies that do it.
Is that your way of saying that your own standards don't apply to you? Only to those that disagree with you?
Actually, I try to hold myself + everyone else to an arbitrary standard called "reality". As a liberal, I like it because of its well-known liberal bias.
If I were a conservative I would of course have to use a different standard, probably the polar opposite.
Don't build them in areas subject to storms, earthquakes, etc., and don't cut corners on the design, construction, maintenance, and inspections in order to save costs.
I happen to think that nuclear power is a good idea, but if our species isn't mature enough to do the above, we've got no business using it.
Seriously, all you highly intelligent motivated reasoning alarmists out there, the biggest damage that was ever done to your position was the wild exaggeration and apocalyptic doom mongering. Yes, it has been fairly pointed out that there is a contingent of skeptics who scare monger about the "New World Order", and the UN controlling everyone, but that trope hasn't benefitted the CAGW crowd nearly as much as they've been harmed by their own end of the world rhetoric.
Funny, I hear a lot less end-of-the-world rhetoric than I hear accusations of end-of-the-world rhetoric.
Also, the biggest damage to widespread knowledge of the truth wasn't done by alarmism, but by shills for Big Oil writing opinion pieces in influential newspapers and magazines.
We just cannot. We cannot even predict the weather more than a few days ahead. Yet somehow we pretend that wee can predict climate 100's of years ahead. Small flaws in the model could result in large errors. We cannot even be sure that we have considered all the relevant parameters.
This is just a case of GIGO.
Ah, yes. Oceanology is also a crock, because it didn't predict the wave that ruined my sand castle. And astronomy too - no one predicted the meteor I saw last month. They can't even predict how many planets there are around Betelgeuse! If they can't predict the little stuff, how can they claim to know what's going on in the big picture!
I find it comforting to know that creationists have independently discovered this fraud in the nature of scientists, and frequently invoke it to debunk evolution. We're not in this alone, like some kind of fringe group or something.
The makers of the IPCC models have always said if the models get it wrong for 15 years in a row, then the models are not working. Well, according to the IPCC's own datasets, global warming stopped 16 years ago while their models predicted a continuous rise at the rate of 3C/century:
And of course, The Daily Mail knows more about it than scientists do.
Meanwhile back in the real world, the ten hottest years on record only include two that weren't in the last 10 years, namely 1998 and 2001, both also within your mythical 16 year period. For those 16 years, which I take to start in 1996 since the 2011 results aren't in yet, 14 are included in the 14 hottest years on record.
Here is an easy link if you don't want to visit the scientific literature.
...One of the reasons people are skeptical or even deniers is all this bullshit that they can't get the models and prediction straight. If you keep changing your story, people won't believe you. It's that simple.
Sorry, but this is the way science happens: the overall physics is understood, and then the details are slowly filled and the error bars are refined and the calculations get better.
It's a terrible, terrible thing when scientists try to improve their predictions. They should just make something up and stick to it in the face of all countering evidence, like cranks do.
I'm sure the GP poster will be reassured to learn that creationists also recognize the validity of this argument. Great minds think alike, and all that.
We have pretty good confidence that we know the physics of the greenhouse effect.
We can even measure the earth's reduced thermal radiation at the frequencies absorbed by greenhouse gasses, compared to when measurements were first made around 1970. See this article, second plot from the top.
Right, so you are able to equally explain any and all sets of circumstances with your theory. What does that say about your theory?
Global warming doesn't make any predictions about specific glaciers. (Quantum mechanics is also compatible with any combination of melting and non-melting in the Himalayas, but that doesn't make it pseudoscience.)
Sorry to inform you, but science doesn't depend on satisfying any arbitrary notion you can come up with. Stop acting like a creationist and learn something about the topic.
Sigh... Forbes and the Heartland Institute... what passes for scientific evidence on Slashdot these days.
Is this supposed to be a response to the GP's request for evidence supporting the GGP's claim that we've experienced Global Cooling for the past 20 years?
I hope not. Here's what the link contains to support the anti-GW movement:
“Earth’s ‘Fever’ Breaks: Global COOLING Currently Under Way,” read a blog post and news release on Wednesday from Marc Morano, the communications director for the Republican minority on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. [emphasis mine]
Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist and commentator with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, has long chided environmentalists and the media for overstating connections between extreme weather and human-caused warming. [Wow - they have a real climatolotist on board! That's "a" as in "one". One who isn't exactly a stellar player in the field and who exhibits some rather transparent conflicts of interest.]
The word "twenty" does not occur at the link, and "20" only occurs in some dates.
The article, which BTW is a (respectable) science writer's contribution to a magazine rather than a scientist's peer-reviewed publication, does have this to say about cooling:
The world has seen some extraordinary winter conditions in both hemispheres over the past year: snow in Johannesburg last June and in Baghdad in January, Arctic sea ice returning with a vengeance after a record retreat last summer, paralyzing blizzards in China, and a sharp drop in the globe’s average temperature.
The weather in two places is not diagnostic. The "sea ice returning with a vengeance" is further described, later in the article, as (a) "far thinner than the yards-thick, years-old ice that dominated the region until the 1990s" and (b) "still lower [in extent] than the long-term mean".
So that leaves the "sharp drop in the globe's average temperature" as the only possibly interesting claim in the article. He doesn't give any further detail. A strict reading of the grammar requires the claim to be about last winter, not last year, but maybe he wasn't stating himself carefully. If he meant the whole year rather than the winter, presumably "over the last year" means... oops, the article is dated March 2, 2008.
Yeah, in 2008 we enjoyed a dip.Never mind that it was still higher than any year recorded before 1990, making it of necessity one of the 22 hottest years ever recorded. Any plot of annual temperatures shows up and down from year to year; pointing out that one year is a local dip is vacuous. It's the trend that matters.
And what has happened since then? 2001-2011 account for 11 of the 12 warmest years on record. (1998 is the other member of the twelve.) A comparison of the first 10 months of 2012 to the first 10 months of preceding years suggests that 2012 is on track to be the ninth hottest year on record. And we set a new record minimum for arctic sea ice in each of the past two summers.
I seriously hope I misunderstood the intent of your post, because it doesn't provide the slightest evidence that we've enjoyed a 20-year cooling spell. 16 of the 20 warmest years on record have occurred in the past 20 years. I wasn't even going to bother replying, until I checked in and noticed that it was up-modded to an astonishing "4, Informative". I'm having a little trouble figuring out what it's informative about, except the extent to which
Robots are replacing workers everywhere and we need a new economy to deal with the situation.
I suggest zombies. They're more cost-effective than robots, cheaper to replace, and on their off hours can do even more to reduce the number of unemployed.
Fortunately the validity of the scientific theory of Global Climate Change doesn't rest on whether, or not, Black Parrot provides a citation for every comment he/she makes on Slashdot.
Surely my use of a flying car analogy makes up for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course! Time for a quick trip to the whorehouse, then a quicker trip to church to get saved.
The daughter of the world's leading romanticist becomes the world's first nerd.
If I were a billionaire I'd hide all my money from those greedy bastards too.
If I were a billionaire I'd pay my taxes, give a shitload of money to charity, and still live a lifestyle that would be the envy of almost everyone who ever lived.
Sounds reasonable, but may just push the problem down a level. It's not like the Mitt Romneys of the world don't use offshore tax havens.
Hello? Last I checked the companies EARNED the money and it was the GOVERNMENTS trying to steal it from them. Yes steal with the threat of violence if you don't hand the money over to them. Power to these companies for fucking the man.
Whence this notion that taxing is stealing? The US Constitution certainly authorizes taxation.
Are we all entitled to getting something for nothing? Enjoy all the benefits of living in a country, and nobody has to pay for it?
In the end all the talk of taxing "the rich" or "greedy multi-national corporations" or some other bugaboo is absurd on the face of it, because you are seeking to attack the very people that have the legal and financial resources to simply shift money elsewhere where governments are less greedy themselves.
Not many of those corporations relish the prospect of losing the right to do business in the USA.
And if the rich leave the country, who gives a shit.
Hasn't this sort of thing been going on for quite a while with large companies? Heck, even smaller companies. It's always in the best interest of the business to keep as much of their profits as possible, and since it's only slightly trivial to buy a politician, loopholes will exist for the foreseeable future.
Yes, if someone's going to be outraged they should be outraged at the laws that allow it rather than the companies that do it.
Is that your way of saying that your own standards don't apply to you? Only to those that disagree with you?
Actually, I try to hold myself + everyone else to an arbitrary standard called "reality". As a liberal, I like it because of its well-known liberal bias.
If I were a conservative I would of course have to use a different standard, probably the polar opposite.
s/2011/2012/
Don't build them in areas subject to storms, earthquakes, etc., and don't cut corners on the design, construction, maintenance, and inspections in order to save costs.
I happen to think that nuclear power is a good idea, but if our species isn't mature enough to do the above, we've got no business using it.
Seriously, all you highly intelligent motivated reasoning alarmists out there, the biggest damage that was ever done to your position was the wild exaggeration and apocalyptic doom mongering. Yes, it has been fairly pointed out that there is a contingent of skeptics who scare monger about the "New World Order", and the UN controlling everyone, but that trope hasn't benefitted the CAGW crowd nearly as much as they've been harmed by their own end of the world rhetoric.
Funny, I hear a lot less end-of-the-world rhetoric than I hear accusations of end-of-the-world rhetoric.
Also, the biggest damage to widespread knowledge of the truth wasn't done by alarmism, but by shills for Big Oil writing opinion pieces in influential newspapers and magazines.
Hopefully the new models are not just continuing a 20-year trend of underestimating the impacts of global warming. Like melting arctic ice.
That trend has been so consistent that I find myself wondering whether the IPCC deliberately shoots low to make their projections more palatable.
We just cannot. We cannot even predict the weather more than a few days ahead. Yet somehow we pretend that wee can predict climate 100's of years ahead. Small flaws in the model could result in large errors. We cannot even be sure that we have considered all the relevant parameters.
This is just a case of GIGO.
Ah, yes. Oceanology is also a crock, because it didn't predict the wave that ruined my sand castle. And astronomy too - no one predicted the meteor I saw last month. They can't even predict how many planets there are around Betelgeuse! If they can't predict the little stuff, how can they claim to know what's going on in the big picture!
I find it comforting to know that creationists have independently discovered this fraud in the nature of scientists, and frequently invoke it to debunk evolution. We're not in this alone, like some kind of fringe group or something.
The makers of the IPCC models have always said if the models get it wrong for 15 years in a row, then the models are not working. Well, according to the IPCC's own datasets, global warming stopped 16 years ago while their models predicted a continuous rise at the rate of 3C/century:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html
And of course, The Daily Mail knows more about it than scientists do.
Meanwhile back in the real world, the ten hottest years on record only include two that weren't in the last 10 years, namely 1998 and 2001, both also within your mythical 16 year period. For those 16 years, which I take to start in 1996 since the 2011 results aren't in yet, 14 are included in the 14 hottest years on record.
Here is an easy link if you don't want to visit the scientific literature.
Plants and animals with such narrow ranges are far more susceptible to deforestation and encroachment than to GW...
I'm guessing that polar bears don't stay awake all through the hibernation period worrying about deforestation and encroachment.
You can claim BS on 2012 on 12/22/2012 if we're still around.
Actually there's nothing to be lost by claiming it now, since there won't be anyone to criticize you if you're wrong.
But it still sucks.
Hey, at least it's creating jobs *somewhere*.
If they want to flog this dead horse of a fad back to life.
How about "we're all fucked"?
...One of the reasons people are skeptical or even deniers is all this bullshit that they can't get the models and prediction straight. If you keep changing your story, people won't believe you. It's that simple.
Sorry, but this is the way science happens: the overall physics is understood, and then the details are slowly filled and the error bars are refined and the calculations get better.
It's a terrible, terrible thing when scientists try to improve their predictions. They should just make something up and stick to it in the face of all countering evidence, like cranks do.
I'm sure the GP poster will be reassured to learn that creationists also recognize the validity of this argument. Great minds think alike, and all that.
We have pretty good confidence that we know the physics of the greenhouse effect.
We can even measure the earth's reduced thermal radiation at the frequencies absorbed by greenhouse gasses, compared to when measurements were first made around 1970. See this article, second plot from the top.
Right, so you are able to equally explain any and all sets of circumstances with your theory. What does that say about your theory?
Global warming doesn't make any predictions about specific glaciers. (Quantum mechanics is also compatible with any combination of melting and non-melting in the Himalayas, but that doesn't make it pseudoscience.)
Sorry to inform you, but science doesn't depend on satisfying any arbitrary notion you can come up with. Stop acting like a creationist and learn something about the topic.
Hackers can turn your home computer into a BOMB. Do you want your family to be blown to smithereems?
Couldn't they just put him in a Loki Jar, and keep his head wrapped in tin foil to keep him from blowing up the interweb with his mind?
The GGP request was mine
Ah, that explains the "to be fair" phrase, which I never figured out.
Tip of the hat to you, for asking for evidence.
To be fair I found the link on Forbes and the Heartland Institute, and replicas from scientists in the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/science/02cold.html
Sigh... Forbes and the Heartland Institute... what passes for scientific evidence on Slashdot these days.
Is this supposed to be a response to the GP's request for evidence supporting the GGP's claim that we've experienced Global Cooling for the past 20 years?
I hope not. Here's what the link contains to support the anti-GW movement:
The word "twenty" does not occur at the link, and "20" only occurs in some dates.
The article, which BTW is a (respectable) science writer's contribution to a magazine rather than a scientist's peer-reviewed publication, does have this to say about cooling:
The weather in two places is not diagnostic. The "sea ice returning with a vengeance" is further described, later in the article, as (a) "far thinner than the yards-thick, years-old ice that dominated the region until the 1990s" and (b) "still lower [in extent] than the long-term mean".
So that leaves the "sharp drop in the globe's average temperature" as the only possibly interesting claim in the article. He doesn't give any further detail. A strict reading of the grammar requires the claim to be about last winter, not last year, but maybe he wasn't stating himself carefully. If he meant the whole year rather than the winter, presumably "over the last year" means... oops, the article is dated March 2, 2008.
Yeah, in 2008 we enjoyed a dip.Never mind that it was still higher than any year recorded before 1990, making it of necessity one of the 22 hottest years ever recorded. Any plot of annual temperatures shows up and down from year to year; pointing out that one year is a local dip is vacuous. It's the trend that matters.
And what has happened since then? 2001-2011 account for 11 of the 12 warmest years on record. (1998 is the other member of the twelve.) A comparison of the first 10 months of 2012 to the first 10 months of preceding years suggests that 2012 is on track to be the ninth hottest year on record. And we set a new record minimum for arctic sea ice in each of the past two summers.
I seriously hope I misunderstood the intent of your post, because it doesn't provide the slightest evidence that we've enjoyed a 20-year cooling spell. 16 of the 20 warmest years on record have occurred in the past 20 years. I wasn't even going to bother replying, until I checked in and noticed that it was up-modded to an astonishing "4, Informative". I'm having a little trouble figuring out what it's informative about, except the extent to which
Robots are replacing workers everywhere and we need a new economy to deal with the situation.
I suggest zombies. They're more cost-effective than robots, cheaper to replace, and on their off hours can do even more to reduce the number of unemployed.
Fortunately the validity of the scientific theory of Global Climate Change doesn't rest on whether, or not, Black Parrot provides a citation for every comment he/she makes on Slashdot.
Surely my use of a flying car analogy makes up for that.