Eh a few points - first I couldn't find any source for that 70% figure in Iran in your linked articles. Second if you're using any of those countries as your model for gender equality you've clearly never lived there and know very little about them. Thirdly nobody's breaking down Kazakhistan's door looking for quality engineers.
As for the communist thing, I recall reading an interview done with women working on a construction site in somewhere like Cambodia - they were well able for the work but complained constantly that they'd much rather be at home doing the cooking and cleaning. Likewise in Russia, women have no time for feminist screeds - they're quite happy staying at home looking after the kids. In my opinion women are quite capable of successful work in IT, engineering, the sciences and what have you, they mostly just don't want to, regardless of the culture.
Which brings us right around to the elephant in the room, the fact that feminism has no reproductive strategy. The only way that feminism could result in a semi functional society would be for all children to be collectively raised in private or public facilities. Such an environment is very unlikely to have a positive outcome for those children but regardless - their parents likewise usually don't like the idea and never will.
So once again, we find feminism coming up against reality and losing badly.
I think our priorities are a bit different. I don't really see stocks and property as an end in and of themselves.
Don't put words in my mouth. Although as it turns out you might want to look into where pension funds put their money.
Also, people with nothing to do tend to have kids, and that is definitely something the system couldn't afford, so there would need to be measures to prevent that (if having kids doesn't cost you a lot, you'll tend to have them).
Great, so phase two of your economic masterplan is to make sure the system bankrupts itself within a generation. Hint: people are producers as well as consumers.
Have you run the numbers on that basic income idea? Just back of the envelope here, but take the US - 300 million population, give them $200 a week each, that's a cool $3 trillion dollars per annum, which is equivalent to the entire federal tax revenue in 2014. So, you're going to double all taxes to pay for this? Okay so let's cut out all those too young or old enough to already be on a state pension, as well as those who really don't need an extra ten grand a year (which in some places is nowhere near liveable), let's cut it down to 100 million people. That's a trillion dollars per year.
And this is before you start to consider the inflationary effects of pumping that much money into the economy, regardless of how recycled it is - most of that will be going to poor people who will mix it straight back into the liquid economy, taken from the mid to high level wealthy who tend to invest in property and stocks instead.
Basic income is not a workable idea, but fortunately we have social welfare nets that do approximately the same thing for people who actually need it.
It's not ambiguous, it's very clear and perfectly acceptable anglophone denotation. If you want to use some other form of denotation or find this confusing, go to a non anglophone site or improve your language education, respectively.
Really. Really? Really now. So when a large landmass warms up by more than enough to melt quite a large proportion of its copious freshwater ice coverage and dumps that into the north Atlantic, it's not going to have any effect on the rest of the world?
I'm done. Find someone else to tie your shoelaces, simpleton.
I can read both the AC's comment and yours just fine, because I browse at -1. Slashdot is one of the very few remaining sites that practices almost zero censorship, unless forced to by legal action, for which I'm grateful.
In response to the point being made, I believe morbid obesity should certainly not be celebrated or pedestalised, but neither should it be mocked for its own sake. Suggesting it's a good or healthy way to go through life however is putting lives at risk in no uncertain terms.
The section you're tellingly not quoting is as follows:
The rate of temperature change during the recovery phase from the last glacial maximum provides a benchmark against which to assess warming rates in the late 20th century. Available data indicate an average warming rate of about 2C/millennium between about 20 and 10 ky BP in Greenland, with lower rates for other regions. Speleothem data from New Zealand, and positions of mountain glacier moraine termini suggest warming rates of 2C/millennium from 15 to 13 ky BP (Salinger and McGlone, 1989). Speleothem data for South Africa suggest a warming rate of 1.5C/millennium (Partridge, 1997) over the same time period. On the other hand, very rapid warming at the start of the Bölling-Alleröd period, or at the end of the Younger Dryas may have occurred at rates as large as 10C/50 years for a significant part of the Northern Hemisphere.
Emphasis mine. When temperatures spike up by twenty two degrees and then down by twenty degrees, on average there's been a two degree change in temperature over the period, which is what you appear to imagine happened in a smooth gradient over the last twenty thousand years. They were even nice enough to break it into different eras for you - note for example that the disastrous Dryas stadials all occurred within the cited ten thousand year average temperature change.
That this needs to be explained gives me the sads.
The last 150 years haven't been a period of unique climatological equilibrium, they've been part of a warming process that's been jumping and stuttering along for the past twenty millennia, following in the footsteps of other warming periods which are followed by cooling periods, all of which had exactly zero to do with humanity.
I hope I don't need to explain the implications of this observation, especially vis the scientific validity of comparisons being made between barely a century of intense observations and ten thousand years of evidence being averaged out.
Yes I appreciate these might be difficult questions to answer,
This is nonsense. The glacial/interglacial oscillation of the current ice age is quite stable.
Ahahaha did you even bother to read the linked text? That zipping noise was your credibility exiting stage left. You're a moron.
It's funny that you make it political. Your colors are showing:)
Spoken like a true with us or against us dyed in the wool partisan leftist.
I'm no leftist.
So you lack self awareness on top of everything else.
Both leftists and conservatives should call you what you are- A person who thinks only in partisanship.
I'm not the one peddling partisan politics here friend.
I don't care who Big Oil votes for today.
Yeah you do. Your previous comments clearly indicate that you do. I'm sure the children of future generations will have choice words for you, not that you'll be around to hear them. Which is of course your severance clause.
Dude just enjoy the buttered popcorn and watch the stupid parade, it beats tracking down law professor Anupam Chander and smacking his head with the nearest engineering book until we're forced to flee by the incoming police sirens by a long shot as far as effort goes.
I think that makes your paragraph entirely circuitous.
Give that a little thought.
If we seek to alter its ecosphere uncontrolled, then we most certainly are an infection.
By that bizarre logic the earth itself is an infection.
If we seek equilibrium and stability, we're not.
Given that the earth has never had a stable climate, your notions are entirely alien to nature itself.
I refer to any of the people who are not included in the group of people who believe that we should pull every fucking ounce of carbon sequestered in the dirt and inject it wholesale into the extant cycle.
No, you refer to watermelons, the leftist interpretation of environmentalism - which has very firm roots among the monied classes of the 19th century, to say nothing of conservationism whose earliest manifestations can be tracked back a full thousand years earlier. Much like social welfare systems and every other ostensible social good Marxists have latched onto since Karl hoisted the first of many, many alcoholic beverages, this stuff has been around for a very long time.
You'd think you people would learn, I mean Russia has wound up somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan and China's busily returning to its imperial roots, complete with caste system. What you do is create reactions which eventually end up consuming any gains you might have made, a process which will inevitably end up being replicated even in the enlightened and much reviled (by the left) west.
Leftists believe me to be a conservative reationary, conservatives call me a progressive swine, I'm quite content to watch all of you idiots get hoisted by your own petards.
Dry fact sadly. The reality is that the information I linked to above comes as a major shock to many anthropogenic global warming proponents when it should already be widely known, one fellow I was discussing it with lately proudly declared that we're going through the quickest global warming in 45 million years while earnestly claiming the imprimatur of science. Ask yourself why that might be the case.
For human civilization, we may look back on it and find it to be not very placid at all.
The problem is people who regard this notion as a good thing and refer to human civilisation as an infection.
Yes, they are. Only by our efforts. You point to our success as evidence that we should stop? Like it won't flip? There's still a *lot* of coal left.
The problem is that the only current traumatic event the planet seems to be going through at the moment to cause this particular geologically rapid climate shift is an acute infection of industrialized ostrich-human hybrid civilization.
Your weak link here is the assumption that science is in any way clear about what caused relatively recent drastic climate adjustments. Which leads us inevitably to the conclusion that we can't really go making any definitive statements about the comparitively placid warming we're currently experiencing.
It's much ado about not a whole lot anyway, fossil fuels are being scaled back to nothing and will be out of mass usage in a couple of generations, and no economies need be wrecked in the process either.
such as volcanic activity under Greenland or large asteroid impact.
Except volcanoes don't warm the climate up and there was no large asteroid impact in that period either.
Basically your argument is like saying: "Yeah, fracking can cause earthquakes, but we have determined that earthquakes have happened naturally in the past, so it's perfectly normal and acceptable"
Speaking of which, when you find yourself in a hole, my advice is stop digging. We have records of climate events far more savage than anything predicted by science, in the very recent geological past. Yes the climate is warming up, the question is how much of that are we responsible for.
Either way I expect fossil fuels to be entirely phased out by 2100 (a process which started long before the recent resolution on the matter) so everyone chill out, basically.
The central Greenland ice core record (GRIP and GISP2) has a near annual resolution across the entire glacial to Holocene transition, and reveals episodes of very rapid change. The return to the cold conditions of the Younger Dryas from the incipient inter-glacial warming 13,000 years ago took place within a few decades or less (Alley et al., 1993). The warming phase, that took place about 11,500 years ago, at the end of the Younger Dryas was also very abrupt and central Greenland temperatures increased by 7C or more in a few decades (Johnsen et al., 1992; Grootes et al., 1993; Severinghaus et al., 1998). Most of the changes in wind-blown materials and some other climate indicators were accomplished in a few years (Alley et al., 1993; Taylor et al., 1993; Hammer et al., 1997). Broad regions of the Earth experienced almost synchronous changes over periods of 0 to 30 years (Severinghaus et al., 1998), and changes were very abrupt in at least some regions (Bard et al., 1987), e.g. requiring as little as 10 years off Venezuela (Hughen et al., 1996). Fluctuations in ice conductivity indicate that atmospheric circulation was reorganised extremely rapidly (Taylor et al., 1993). A similar, correlated sequence of abrupt deglacial events also occurred in the tropical and temperate North Atlantic (Bard et al., 1987; Hughen et al., 1996) and in Western Europe (von Grafenstein et al., 1999).
The inception of deglacial warming about 14.5 ky BP was also very rapid, leading to the Bölling-Alleröd warm period in less than twenty years (Severinghaus and Brook, 1999). Almost synchronously, major vegetation changes occurred in Europe and North America with a rise in African lake levels (Gasse and van Campo, 1994). There was also a pronounced warming of the North Atlantic and North Pacific (Koç and Janssen, 1994; Sarnthein et al., 1994; Kotilainen and Shackleton, 1995; Thunnell and Mortyn, 1995; Wansaard, 1996; Watts et al., 1996; Webb et al., 1998).
It's like watching someone trying to argue they're still going in the right direction five seconds after they've sailed over the edge of a cliff.
Listen buddy here's a mental exercise for you: try to imagine what would happen if the temperatures in central Greenland today were to spike by more than 7C between now and 2030. You think maybe someone might notice? Maybe it might have an effect of some sort on the rest of the world? Or maybe the rest of the world had already increased in temperature, contributing to this massive spike?
What we've got here is somebody complaining about how ice cores taken in Greenland only measured temperatures in Greenland(!) (ignoring the rest of the research) and further making out that we're in the midst of a man-made apocalyptic climate event when far more savage events have been observed by science in very recent geological terms. No doubt capitalism makes an appearance somewhere in this scientific theology too.
You do realize that even the dessert is a complex ecosystem of micro flora and fona that would be greatly harmed by being permanently covered in solar cells.
The Sahara desert was a jungle a few thousand years ago, for all we know it could be a jungle again in a few thousand years, and what little life exists there won't enjoy that much either. Following your train of thought to its logical conclusion people may as well just curl up into a ball and die for fear of harming anything anywhere. Feel free to do so but don't expect many to follow suit. And again, we're talking about an insignificant percentage of the desert, used to illustrate a point - there's no shortage of renewable energy.
You must also be aware that transmission loss with electricity is well HUGE.
No, it isn't. HVDC lines have been around for a while and have been deployed in many locations. That you weren't aware of this fact says all it needs to say.
in place where there is nobody to maintain them.
That's like asking why would anyone build roads, since there's nobody out there right now to maintain them. Wow.
I don't usually reply to ACs but this level of stupid needs a rap on the knuckles. You do realise that covering a single digit portion of the uninhabited sections of the Sahara desert with inefficient old PV cells could supply enough power to satisfy the needs of the European Union right? We haven't even BEGUN to tap into the potential of renewables.
And before you start paddling your keyboard about how the sun goes down at night, rap yourself on the knuckles and think.
The writing's been on the wall for decades now and the process has been visible to anyone who cared to look - fossil fuel sources are being phased out entirely long term. The only thing objectionable about this story is the idea that Merkel could claim any sort of responsibility for it.
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Good question, e70838.
Eh a few points - first I couldn't find any source for that 70% figure in Iran in your linked articles. Second if you're using any of those countries as your model for gender equality you've clearly never lived there and know very little about them. Thirdly nobody's breaking down Kazakhistan's door looking for quality engineers.
As for the communist thing, I recall reading an interview done with women working on a construction site in somewhere like Cambodia - they were well able for the work but complained constantly that they'd much rather be at home doing the cooking and cleaning. Likewise in Russia, women have no time for feminist screeds - they're quite happy staying at home looking after the kids. In my opinion women are quite capable of successful work in IT, engineering, the sciences and what have you, they mostly just don't want to, regardless of the culture.
Which brings us right around to the elephant in the room, the fact that feminism has no reproductive strategy. The only way that feminism could result in a semi functional society would be for all children to be collectively raised in private or public facilities. Such an environment is very unlikely to have a positive outcome for those children but regardless - their parents likewise usually don't like the idea and never will.
So once again, we find feminism coming up against reality and losing badly.
I think our priorities are a bit different. I don't really see stocks and property as an end in and of themselves.
Don't put words in my mouth. Although as it turns out you might want to look into where pension funds put their money.
Also, people with nothing to do tend to have kids, and that is definitely something the system couldn't afford, so there would need to be measures to prevent that (if having kids doesn't cost you a lot, you'll tend to have them).
Great, so phase two of your economic masterplan is to make sure the system bankrupts itself within a generation. Hint: people are producers as well as consumers.
Have you run the numbers on that basic income idea? Just back of the envelope here, but take the US - 300 million population, give them $200 a week each, that's a cool $3 trillion dollars per annum, which is equivalent to the entire federal tax revenue in 2014. So, you're going to double all taxes to pay for this? Okay so let's cut out all those too young or old enough to already be on a state pension, as well as those who really don't need an extra ten grand a year (which in some places is nowhere near liveable), let's cut it down to 100 million people. That's a trillion dollars per year.
And this is before you start to consider the inflationary effects of pumping that much money into the economy, regardless of how recycled it is - most of that will be going to poor people who will mix it straight back into the liquid economy, taken from the mid to high level wealthy who tend to invest in property and stocks instead.
Basic income is not a workable idea, but fortunately we have social welfare nets that do approximately the same thing for people who actually need it.
I wasn't aware the summary was written in code, or contained any lengthy co-ordinates either for that matter.
The primary language of South Africa is Zulu. English trails in a poor fourth down the list.
1,425% is ambiguous.
It's not ambiguous, it's very clear and perfectly acceptable anglophone denotation. If you want to use some other form of denotation or find this confusing, go to a non anglophone site or improve your language education, respectively.
Get a globe. Really.
Really. Really? Really now. So when a large landmass warms up by more than enough to melt quite a large proportion of its copious freshwater ice coverage and dumps that into the north Atlantic, it's not going to have any effect on the rest of the world?
I'm done. Find someone else to tie your shoelaces, simpleton.
Have you got a link to that, I hadn't heard shopping centres had started linking security camera footage to facebook accounts?
The link in your sig is dead.
I can read both the AC's comment and yours just fine, because I browse at -1. Slashdot is one of the very few remaining sites that practices almost zero censorship, unless forced to by legal action, for which I'm grateful.
In response to the point being made, I believe morbid obesity should certainly not be celebrated or pedestalised, but neither should it be mocked for its own sake. Suggesting it's a good or healthy way to go through life however is putting lives at risk in no uncertain terms.
The section you're tellingly not quoting is as follows:
The rate of temperature change during the recovery phase from the last glacial maximum provides a benchmark against which to assess warming rates in the late 20th century. Available data indicate an average warming rate of about 2C/millennium between about 20 and 10 ky BP in Greenland, with lower rates for other regions. Speleothem data from New Zealand, and positions of mountain glacier moraine termini suggest warming rates of 2C/millennium from 15 to 13 ky BP (Salinger and McGlone, 1989). Speleothem data for South Africa suggest a warming rate of 1.5C/millennium (Partridge, 1997) over the same time period. On the other hand, very rapid warming at the start of the Bölling-Alleröd period, or at the end of the Younger Dryas may have occurred at rates as large as 10C/50 years for a significant part of the Northern Hemisphere.
Emphasis mine. When temperatures spike up by twenty two degrees and then down by twenty degrees, on average there's been a two degree change in temperature over the period, which is what you appear to imagine happened in a smooth gradient over the last twenty thousand years. They were even nice enough to break it into different eras for you - note for example that the disastrous Dryas stadials all occurred within the cited ten thousand year average temperature change.
That this needs to be explained gives me the sads.
The last 150 years haven't been a period of unique climatological equilibrium, they've been part of a warming process that's been jumping and stuttering along for the past twenty millennia, following in the footsteps of other warming periods which are followed by cooling periods, all of which had exactly zero to do with humanity.
I hope I don't need to explain the implications of this observation, especially vis the scientific validity of comparisons being made between barely a century of intense observations and ten thousand years of evidence being averaged out.
They lost, but you sure as hell didn't win.
If you say so.
I'm unsure how to respond to it.
Yes I appreciate these might be difficult questions to answer,
This is nonsense. The glacial/interglacial oscillation of the current ice age is quite stable.
Ahahaha did you even bother to read the linked text? That zipping noise was your credibility exiting stage left. You're a moron.
It's funny that you make it political. Your colors are showing :)
Spoken like a true with us or against us dyed in the wool partisan leftist.
I'm no leftist.
So you lack self awareness on top of everything else.
Both leftists and conservatives should call you what you are- A person who thinks only in partisanship.
I'm not the one peddling partisan politics here friend.
I don't care who Big Oil votes for today.
Yeah you do. Your previous comments clearly indicate that you do. I'm sure the children of future generations will have choice words for you, not that you'll be around to hear them. Which is of course your severance clause.
Dude just enjoy the buttered popcorn and watch the stupid parade, it beats tracking down law professor Anupam Chander and smacking his head with the nearest engineering book until we're forced to flee by the incoming police sirens by a long shot as far as effort goes.
I think that makes your paragraph entirely circuitous.
Give that a little thought.
If we seek to alter its ecosphere uncontrolled, then we most certainly are an infection.
By that bizarre logic the earth itself is an infection.
If we seek equilibrium and stability, we're not.
Given that the earth has never had a stable climate, your notions are entirely alien to nature itself.
I refer to any of the people who are not included in the group of people who believe that we should pull every fucking ounce of carbon sequestered in the dirt and inject it wholesale into the extant cycle.
No, you refer to watermelons, the leftist interpretation of environmentalism - which has very firm roots among the monied classes of the 19th century, to say nothing of conservationism whose earliest manifestations can be tracked back a full thousand years earlier. Much like social welfare systems and every other ostensible social good Marxists have latched onto since Karl hoisted the first of many, many alcoholic beverages, this stuff has been around for a very long time.
You'd think you people would learn, I mean Russia has wound up somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan and China's busily returning to its imperial roots, complete with caste system. What you do is create reactions which eventually end up consuming any gains you might have made, a process which will inevitably end up being replicated even in the enlightened and much reviled (by the left) west.
Leftists believe me to be a conservative reationary, conservatives call me a progressive swine, I'm quite content to watch all of you idiots get hoisted by your own petards.
Have a good un.
Poppycock.
Dry fact sadly. The reality is that the information I linked to above comes as a major shock to many anthropogenic global warming proponents when it should already be widely known, one fellow I was discussing it with lately proudly declared that we're going through the quickest global warming in 45 million years while earnestly claiming the imprimatur of science. Ask yourself why that might be the case.
For human civilization, we may look back on it and find it to be not very placid at all.
The problem is people who regard this notion as a good thing and refer to human civilisation as an infection.
Yes, they are. Only by our efforts. You point to our success as evidence that we should stop? Like it won't flip? There's still a *lot* of coal left.
Who do you refer to when you say "our"?
The problem is that the only current traumatic event the planet seems to be going through at the moment to cause this particular geologically rapid climate shift is an acute infection of industrialized ostrich-human hybrid civilization.
Your weak link here is the assumption that science is in any way clear about what caused relatively recent drastic climate adjustments. Which leads us inevitably to the conclusion that we can't really go making any definitive statements about the comparitively placid warming we're currently experiencing.
It's much ado about not a whole lot anyway, fossil fuels are being scaled back to nothing and will be out of mass usage in a couple of generations, and no economies need be wrecked in the process either.
such as volcanic activity under Greenland or large asteroid impact.
Except volcanoes don't warm the climate up and there was no large asteroid impact in that period either.
Basically your argument is like saying: "Yeah, fracking can cause earthquakes, but we have determined that earthquakes have happened naturally in the past, so it's perfectly normal and acceptable"
Speaking of which, when you find yourself in a hole, my advice is stop digging. We have records of climate events far more savage than anything predicted by science, in the very recent geological past. Yes the climate is warming up, the question is how much of that are we responsible for.
Either way I expect fossil fuels to be entirely phased out by 2100 (a process which started long before the recent resolution on the matter) so everyone chill out, basically.
Yes, but those transitions usually take place within thousands or tens of thousands of years.
Not so. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...
The central Greenland ice core record (GRIP and GISP2) has a near annual resolution across the entire glacial to Holocene transition, and reveals episodes of very rapid change. The return to the cold conditions of the Younger Dryas from the incipient inter-glacial warming 13,000 years ago took place within a few decades or less (Alley et al., 1993). The warming phase, that took place about 11,500 years ago, at the end of the Younger Dryas was also very abrupt and central Greenland temperatures increased by 7C or more in a few decades (Johnsen et al., 1992; Grootes et al., 1993; Severinghaus et al., 1998). Most of the changes in wind-blown materials and some other climate indicators were accomplished in a few years (Alley et al., 1993; Taylor et al., 1993; Hammer et al., 1997). Broad regions of the Earth experienced almost synchronous changes over periods of 0 to 30 years (Severinghaus et al., 1998), and changes were very abrupt in at least some regions (Bard et al., 1987), e.g. requiring as little as 10 years off Venezuela (Hughen et al., 1996). Fluctuations in ice conductivity indicate that atmospheric circulation was reorganised extremely rapidly (Taylor et al., 1993). A similar, correlated sequence of abrupt deglacial events also occurred in the tropical and temperate North Atlantic (Bard et al., 1987; Hughen et al., 1996) and in Western Europe (von Grafenstein et al., 1999).
The inception of deglacial warming about 14.5 ky BP was also very rapid, leading to the Bölling-Alleröd warm period in less than twenty years (Severinghaus and Brook, 1999). Almost synchronously, major vegetation changes occurred in Europe and North America with a rise in African lake levels (Gasse and van Campo, 1994). There was also a pronounced warming of the North Atlantic and North Pacific (Koç and Janssen, 1994; Sarnthein et al., 1994; Kotilainen and Shackleton, 1995; Thunnell and Mortyn, 1995; Wansaard, 1996; Watts et al., 1996; Webb et al., 1998).
Eh, birch trees come in several colours including white and grey. Betula populifolia is the grey birch.
It's like watching someone trying to argue they're still going in the right direction five seconds after they've sailed over the edge of a cliff.
Listen buddy here's a mental exercise for you: try to imagine what would happen if the temperatures in central Greenland today were to spike by more than 7C between now and 2030. You think maybe someone might notice? Maybe it might have an effect of some sort on the rest of the world? Or maybe the rest of the world had already increased in temperature, contributing to this massive spike?
What we've got here is somebody complaining about how ice cores taken in Greenland only measured temperatures in Greenland(!) (ignoring the rest of the research) and further making out that we're in the midst of a man-made apocalyptic climate event when far more savage events have been observed by science in very recent geological terms. No doubt capitalism makes an appearance somewhere in this scientific theology too.
You do realize that even the dessert is a complex ecosystem of micro flora and fona that would be greatly harmed by being permanently covered in solar cells.
The Sahara desert was a jungle a few thousand years ago, for all we know it could be a jungle again in a few thousand years, and what little life exists there won't enjoy that much either. Following your train of thought to its logical conclusion people may as well just curl up into a ball and die for fear of harming anything anywhere. Feel free to do so but don't expect many to follow suit. And again, we're talking about an insignificant percentage of the desert, used to illustrate a point - there's no shortage of renewable energy.
You must also be aware that transmission loss with electricity is well HUGE.
No, it isn't. HVDC lines have been around for a while and have been deployed in many locations. That you weren't aware of this fact says all it needs to say.
in place where there is nobody to maintain them.
That's like asking why would anyone build roads, since there's nobody out there right now to maintain them. Wow.
I don't usually reply to ACs but this level of stupid needs a rap on the knuckles. You do realise that covering a single digit portion of the uninhabited sections of the Sahara desert with inefficient old PV cells could supply enough power to satisfy the needs of the European Union right? We haven't even BEGUN to tap into the potential of renewables.
And before you start paddling your keyboard about how the sun goes down at night, rap yourself on the knuckles and think.
The writing's been on the wall for decades now and the process has been visible to anyone who cared to look - fossil fuel sources are being phased out entirely long term. The only thing objectionable about this story is the idea that Merkel could claim any sort of responsibility for it.
http://www.maglaunch.com/