It's about as long as we've had mass produced accurate thermometers along with a wide enough spread of people that had them. Any other measure (tree rings etc) are secondary and aren't as accurate as there is an extra layer of error, eg they may be affected by rainfall and not just temperature.
Which is valid, but doesn't address my concern -- namely, that grand predictions about the long term climate of our planet are being claimed with high levels of certainty, based on a very small subset of data that just happens to be in a time window that favors their argument. Whether malicious or merely coincidental, I find it hard to trust science that attempts to simplify the entire climate history of a planet into a ~70 year observation window and extrapolate based only on those observations.
Just for example: he wants to do away with fiat currency.
No he doesn't. He wants a competing currency (http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2012/08/06/are-ron-pauls-competing-currencies-the-answer-to-monetary-mischief/). There's a huge difference between that and "eliminating fiat currency". It's also not that nuts. That's the problem with most people who have a beef with Ron Paul...they always assume he's going to do the most extreme thing possible (like closing every base in every foreign country, rather than just shrinking our presence -- or eliminating every single federal program overnight, instead of merely taking steps towards reducing government overreach). And people also seem to forget that we have a Congress with checks and balances that would keep anything nutty from getting through even if he did try something along those lines.
How about by the standards of the right wing just a generation ago right here in the good ole USA.
How is that fair? Times have changed, and significantly I might add...what we could afford them we can't afford now. It seems to be pretty common sense that the entire country would shift more towards the "fiscally responsible" side of the scale. It just so happens that it shifted Republicans from "we're willing to spend responsibly" to "we don't want to spend at all, cut cut cut!" and it shifted Democrats from "we want to spend like hogs on speed" to "we're willing to spend responsibly".
The other big exception is that Obama after his continuation of big bailouts and stimulus started by bush to save the economy from the freefall we were in, has been that Obama has actually tried to reign in the deficit unlike his borrow and spend republican opponents.
And he seems only willing to pay for it primarily through tax hikes, instead of budget cuts. That's hardly what I'd call "tried to reign in the deficit". Regardless, how can someone take you seriously when spend several trillion dollars in three years and then offer a plan to cut the deficit maybe 100-200 billion per year for the next 10 years?
Undone by the Gramm(R)â"Leach(R)â"Bliley(R) Act. Passed with a veto proof majority.
And where do you think that veto-proof majority came from? Oh yeah, from the 84% of Senate Democrats and 75% of House Democrats that voted for it. But go ahead and keep your blinders on there. Bush is Satan. Republicans are evil. Yaddayaddayadda. At the least the majority of Republicans in office voted against TARP, despite it passing on Bush's watch under a Democratic congressional majority. But I guess that one is Bush's baby too, right?
Heinleins views on sex are hopelessly naive and adolescent, he basically never grew up. His idea of "nests" for example in Stranger in a strange land, essentially group-marriages. He assumes everyone would just get along, there'd be no internal power-plays, no jealousy, no preference, no cliques, no abuse of power - basically nothing human. Yes he handwaves a new religion to explain it, but a new religion doesn't instantly undo a million years of evolutionary adaption.
Is not the point of sci-fi to explore what would be possible if we weren't constrained by the bounds of reality? Like what could life be like if human beings could overcome their own greed, selfishness, and pointless jealousy? It's one thing to call him offbase. On the other hand, you could call humanity in general flawed rather than to claim he's an immature loon. Or do you really find jealousy logical?
They're not changing the coefficients to make the model give them global warming. They're changing them to fit the last 100 years of data, and then seeing what the model says about the future.
How is that not "changing the coefficients to make the model give them global warming"? The earth has been warming for the past 100 years, so any model designed to fit that trend will be much more likely to show a continuation of that trend than anything else, wouldn't it? And why the focus on the 100 year span? That certainly seems arbitrary. Climate of a planet is a long term event, with 100 years being a drop in the historical bucket. Yet the vast majority of focus is on the last 100 years...you know, the time span that once again is more likely to feed their global warming hypothesis...how can you say these choices are anything but self-serving arbitration?
He was probably educated in a public school. Some of the people he worked with, worked for, or conducted business with were educated in public schools. He communicates over networks managed by the government. He conducts commerce over road and rail that are funded by the government. He can only do business deals because there is a court system for adjudicating contracts, and that court system is funded by the government. The air he breathes and the water he drinks are free of poisons because there is a government agency dedicated to managing air and water quality. He probably uses computers and the internet in some aspect of his business, and those were creations of government research programs and the government continues to fund research in many areas. He is protected from harm by police, fire departments, a prosecution system, and a prison system all managed by the government.
And he has already paid for all those things through taxes, same as you. So why does he deserve to get taxed AGAIN merely because he was successful through the use of those resources? We all had access to public resources. Some used them more effectively or more successfully than others. Why is that a ticket to more taxation? Sounds like a punishment to me.
But Ayn Rand's solution, "Fuck you all, I am never morally obligated to do a damn thing for anyone else at any time for any reason, I only help others when I feel like it." is no solution
I agree, the middle ground is a far better solution. The problem is that reform is required (particularly of social security and medicare), and no one but the Republicans is willing to talk about it. Paul Ryan is practically getting torn to shreds because he actually pitched a real plan that at least attempts to reform Medicare (however misguided). No one else is even willing to propose a counter solution. And those programs (particularly Medicare), by all estimated projections, are unsustainable. And that's my main issue -- we already have a series of gigantic expensive social programs that are supposed to be doing all these wonderful charitable things everyone is clamoring for. Except they don't work. And they're costing us lots of money. So before we dump a bunch of new cash into the sinkhole that is government, how about we fix the current social safety nets first?
That's your opinion, but Ron Paul at least has 30+ years of proof that says otherwise. Unlike "the other guy" (Obama), whose voting record said one thing while his lips said another. At the very minimum, that critical difference speaks more for rationality than brainwashing.
Again, that's how it's used. Except perhaps in your own writings. Good for you, but epic fail on ignoring how everyone else is using it.
lol, what a vivid imagination you have. And I suppose everyone clamoring for federal powers is really just eager for the return of Caesar? If you believe there's even the most remote chance that slavery would _ever_ return to this country, on _any_ level, you're an idiot -- and frankly, not worth talking to. You're like the mirror of the gun nut scared to death of any gun law whatsoever because it's really just a plot by the government to disarm the populace! Wake up and let go of the tinfoil hat.
But more important is the trend.
The US has lowered emissions 13-14% below its year 2000 peak and it continues to trend down. In the same time, China's has increased over 250% and it continues to trend up. China is easily projected to surpass the US in emissions per capita within the decade. Now tell me you're more concerned about the US.
Well there's a reason why people have taken to calling the Republicans "the party of No" - their strategy in the last few decades essentially seems to have been "block every Democrat proposal when they have the power, then campaign on the fact that the Dems didn't accomplish anything".
Oh please, what would do if all your suggestions were summarily ignored and you were told to "just come along for the ride and sit in the back"? (i.e. you were just treated as some "observer" non-entity with no real voice?). Obama and the Democrats made this a partisan game right from the start. They didn't want compromise and reaching across the aisle...they wanted a rubber stamp on bills they wrote themselves behind closed doors. Only now that the composition of Congress has changed are they trying to be "reasonable" and "team players"
Economic cataclysm is only assured if we have no alternatives to the current economic paradigm. Clearly this is not the case. I've seen a number of economic studies that say it would only take about 3% of GDP to effectively respond the the threat of global warming. That doesn't sound cataclysmic to me.
GDP is 15 trillion -- 3% of that is 450 billion dollars. That's a drop in the bucket! Hell, just look at Germany -- they're spending more than half of that IN ONE YEAR (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-20/europe/31213044_1_renewable-energy-wind-farms-power-lines), 8% of their GDP, and they won't have 35% of their power from renewables until 2030 (which is probably a friendly lowball estimate), and they're only a fourth the size of the US.
I don't know where you get your numbers, but they're whack. It would cost trillions to put a dent in emissions, and even then I'm not sure if would be significant enough according to the projections.
How is it then that Social Security and Medicare operate on less than 5% overhead? That's far better than most private entities.
You apparently aren't counting fraud (http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2012/05/31/medicare-and-medicaid-fraud-is-costing-taxpayers-billions/) or effectiveness, which is even more important than overhead. I can shovel hundred dollar bills into a furnace pretty efficiently. It doesn't make it the best course of action.
Here's the problem with cheap cynicism: eventually it becomes self-fulfilling.
No, it simply _is_. The history of many many MANY countries speaks as to the inefficiencies and corruptions of large empires with power focused at the top. I have no intention of being doomed to repeat it. Smaller government is the answer.
People who don't demand good government won't expect to get it, and when they don't get it they won't punish those who failed to deliver it.
We DO demand better government, and we DO vote them out (see the Democrat turnover in 2007-2011 followed by the Republican turnover in 2012). The problem is that all the incomers are JUST AS BAD as the ones we voted out. And everyone is too chicken shit to vote for a third party that they'd rather vote in the guy that's gonna ass-rape them WITH a reacharound rather than the guy who is going to ass-rape them without one.
"Oh, it seems we overestimated the amount of H2O vapour which would be present when the increased CO2 levels are taken into account. Let's try adjusting our understanding of evaporation and see if it better fits the last 6 months worth of data. Oh, it does? Wow, this seems to be a better model of physical interactions. Cool, I'll publish a paper on it."
What's happening here isn't the same as happened with string theory, what is happening is we pretty much know all of the basic interactions, we're just trying to figure out weighting coefficients of how much one process interacts with another
And you don't see a problem with this? It's complete guesswork on coefficients. Let's say we have two variables: mankind emissions and unknown activity X. Let's say they both double. Now temperatures go up. Was it the emissions that did it? Or the unknown? Let's try another scenario. Emissions double, but temperatures decrease. In my mind, the "scientific" course of action would be to adjust the emissions coefficient downward. But instead, they look for a new variable (lets call it "aerosols") to fudge the numbers back such that the emissions coefficient "looks right" again. This does not seem like science to me. You've predetermined approximately how much of an effect certain variables "should" have and then do fudge-factoring, hidden variable discovery, and curve fitting to make it work with the observed results. When it deviates in the long-long ago, you simply chalk it up to "inaccurate records prior to the 30s". This is the the kind of junk science I see occurring. The hand-waving of inaccuracies, weak data, and fudge factors, all the while vehemently assuring with 100% certainty that the sky is falling.
This is a common error, frequently made be people who don't understand mathematics and graphs. As long as there is random noise in data, there will always be "plateaus" where things look stable but the underlining trend continues. In the case of global warming, if you try you can actually find a series of continuous downward slopes so that any year of the temperature record can appear to be part of a declining trend, while actual temperatures rise consistently.
You mean like focusing on the statistical noise in the last 100 years instead of the big picture?
But this idea that everyone with a hard life somehow earned their pain and does not deserve help from the lucky is nonsense.
The word "deserve" is where your argument fails. No one deserves a damn thing except life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If my neighbor hits the lottery, he doesn't suddenly owe me something extra simply because he was luckier than I was. If he's generous and kind enough to do something for the less fortunate, huzzah for him. But I'll be damned if I'm going to give the government permission free reign to his good fortune, to redistribute it as they see fit. The problem with your ilk is that you just see rich people as evil, money-hoarding pricks. You don't know them as people, or track their charitable givings, or anything. You don't know if they were handed their wealth from mommy and daddy or if they busted their ass to climb out of poverty up to the top. Regardless of how they got it, they don't deserve it, or they have "more than enough", or they "owe everybody something". And the exact amount they "owe society" is never enough -- it's always a nebulous concept of "they should give more" that is never actually sated (until, I'm assuming, they're just like you)
Paul and Kucinich are not unelectable because they're pure and incorruptible. They're unelectable because everybody who's not a fanboy thinks they loons.
Simply not true. They're unelectable because they don't play the game. They don't tell people what they want to hear. They don't run a campaign of false promises with no intention of actually going through with said promises. They don't pander to the "interest groups" to get votes. What you see is what you get. And that's why they won't get elected. You need to lie to people to get into office. Pretend you're all rainbows and unicorn farts and your opponent is the great satan. Then once you have the job, do whatever you want.
What's your great plan, then -- Don't vote? Leave the country?
Vote third party. Change has to start somewhere.
Under every Republican in modern times, this country has been driven into the shitter.
Using your sample size of 1? Maybe 2? (assuming you mean Bush and Reagan). Bush Senior didn't drive anything into the ground, and actually inherited Reagan's mess. You're honestly going to let the actions of men you can enumerate on less than one hand categorize an entire party of people? Nearly 50% of the country? Sad.
They put business first and people second, deregulate every industry, and let a following Democrat president clean up the mess.
Oh, I guess it's good that Barack Obama did the opposite and bailed out Main Street while sticking it to the banks. Oh wait...
Libertarians (and any other party other than the main two) have absolutely no chance of winning, ever. It's just not in the numbers, it physically cannot happen. So that is a complete waste of a vote; it can have no effect on the political system in the slightest.
That's the most assinine and frankly saddest thing I've ever heard. What if Martin Luther King said "man, there's no way my single voice will ever change anything -- it'll always be status quo -- I might as well just walk the line"? Even if you can't WIN with a vote, the fact you're standing up to be counted amongst a group standing in opposition of "business as usual" has value. Ron Paul may not have won in the 2 presidencies he has run in, but he has spread more awareness for the cause than was ever originally dreamed of
Slashdot Mirror
Which is valid, but doesn't address my concern -- namely, that grand predictions about the long term climate of our planet are being claimed with high levels of certainty, based on a very small subset of data that just happens to be in a time window that favors their argument. Whether malicious or merely coincidental, I find it hard to trust science that attempts to simplify the entire climate history of a planet into a ~70 year observation window and extrapolate based only on those observations.
No he doesn't. He wants a competing currency (http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2012/08/06/are-ron-pauls-competing-currencies-the-answer-to-monetary-mischief/). There's a huge difference between that and "eliminating fiat currency". It's also not that nuts. That's the problem with most people who have a beef with Ron Paul...they always assume he's going to do the most extreme thing possible (like closing every base in every foreign country, rather than just shrinking our presence -- or eliminating every single federal program overnight, instead of merely taking steps towards reducing government overreach). And people also seem to forget that we have a Congress with checks and balances that would keep anything nutty from getting through even if he did try something along those lines.
How is that fair? Times have changed, and significantly I might add...what we could afford them we can't afford now. It seems to be pretty common sense that the entire country would shift more towards the "fiscally responsible" side of the scale. It just so happens that it shifted Republicans from "we're willing to spend responsibly" to "we don't want to spend at all, cut cut cut!" and it shifted Democrats from "we want to spend like hogs on speed" to "we're willing to spend responsibly".
Umm, since when? He wants another huge stimulus: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/12/obama-pushes-billion-dollar-stimulus-plan/
And he seems only willing to pay for it primarily through tax hikes, instead of budget cuts. That's hardly what I'd call "tried to reign in the deficit". Regardless, how can someone take you seriously when spend several trillion dollars in three years and then offer a plan to cut the deficit maybe 100-200 billion per year for the next 10 years?
And where do you think that veto-proof majority came from? Oh yeah, from the 84% of Senate Democrats and 75% of House Democrats that voted for it. But go ahead and keep your blinders on there. Bush is Satan. Republicans are evil. Yaddayaddayadda. At the least the majority of Republicans in office voted against TARP, despite it passing on Bush's watch under a Democratic congressional majority. But I guess that one is Bush's baby too, right?
Source?
I don't know about you, but I'd give up a whole hell of alot for "bliss on tap".
Is not the point of sci-fi to explore what would be possible if we weren't constrained by the bounds of reality? Like what could life be like if human beings could overcome their own greed, selfishness, and pointless jealousy? It's one thing to call him offbase. On the other hand, you could call humanity in general flawed rather than to claim he's an immature loon. Or do you really find jealousy logical?
lol, the man misspelling philosophy as "phylosophy" is trying to take the intellectual high ground here? There's something deeply ironic about that.
I'll believe those numbers when I see them.
How is that not "changing the coefficients to make the model give them global warming"? The earth has been warming for the past 100 years, so any model designed to fit that trend will be much more likely to show a continuation of that trend than anything else, wouldn't it? And why the focus on the 100 year span? That certainly seems arbitrary. Climate of a planet is a long term event, with 100 years being a drop in the historical bucket. Yet the vast majority of focus is on the last 100 years...you know, the time span that once again is more likely to feed their global warming hypothesis...how can you say these choices are anything but self-serving arbitration?
And he has already paid for all those things through taxes, same as you . So why does he deserve to get taxed AGAIN merely because he was successful through the use of those resources? We all had access to public resources. Some used them more effectively or more successfully than others. Why is that a ticket to more taxation? Sounds like a punishment to me.
I agree, the middle ground is a far better solution. The problem is that reform is required (particularly of social security and medicare), and no one but the Republicans is willing to talk about it. Paul Ryan is practically getting torn to shreds because he actually pitched a real plan that at least attempts to reform Medicare (however misguided). No one else is even willing to propose a counter solution. And those programs (particularly Medicare), by all estimated projections, are unsustainable. And that's my main issue -- we already have a series of gigantic expensive social programs that are supposed to be doing all these wonderful charitable things everyone is clamoring for. Except they don't work. And they're costing us lots of money. So before we dump a bunch of new cash into the sinkhole that is government, how about we fix the current social safety nets first?
That's your opinion, but Ron Paul at least has 30+ years of proof that says otherwise. Unlike "the other guy" (Obama), whose voting record said one thing while his lips said another. At the very minimum, that critical difference speaks more for rationality than brainwashing.
lol, what a vivid imagination you have. And I suppose everyone clamoring for federal powers is really just eager for the return of Caesar? If you believe there's even the most remote chance that slavery would _ever_ return to this country, on _any_ level, you're an idiot -- and frankly, not worth talking to. You're like the mirror of the gun nut scared to death of any gun law whatsoever because it's really just a plot by the government to disarm the populace! Wake up and let go of the tinfoil hat.
Those are inaccurate 2008 numbers. The correct numbers are here: http://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/2012/trends-in-global-co2-emissions-2012-report
USA 17.3
China 7.2
India 2ish?
But more important is the trend. The US has lowered emissions 13-14% below its year 2000 peak and it continues to trend down. In the same time, China's has increased over 250% and it continues to trend up. China is easily projected to surpass the US in emissions per capita within the decade. Now tell me you're more concerned about the US.
Oh please, what would do if all your suggestions were summarily ignored and you were told to "just come along for the ride and sit in the back"? (i.e. you were just treated as some "observer" non-entity with no real voice?). Obama and the Democrats made this a partisan game right from the start. They didn't want compromise and reaching across the aisle...they wanted a rubber stamp on bills they wrote themselves behind closed doors. Only now that the composition of Congress has changed are they trying to be "reasonable" and "team players"
GDP is 15 trillion -- 3% of that is 450 billion dollars. That's a drop in the bucket! Hell, just look at Germany -- they're spending more than half of that IN ONE YEAR (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-20/europe/31213044_1_renewable-energy-wind-farms-power-lines), 8% of their GDP, and they won't have 35% of their power from renewables until 2030 (which is probably a friendly lowball estimate), and they're only a fourth the size of the US.
I don't know where you get your numbers, but they're whack. It would cost trillions to put a dent in emissions, and even then I'm not sure if would be significant enough according to the projections.
You apparently aren't counting fraud (http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2012/05/31/medicare-and-medicaid-fraud-is-costing-taxpayers-billions/) or effectiveness, which is even more important than overhead. I can shovel hundred dollar bills into a furnace pretty efficiently. It doesn't make it the best course of action.
No, it simply _is_. The history of many many MANY countries speaks as to the inefficiencies and corruptions of large empires with power focused at the top. I have no intention of being doomed to repeat it. Smaller government is the answer.
We DO demand better government, and we DO vote them out (see the Democrat turnover in 2007-2011 followed by the Republican turnover in 2012). The problem is that all the incomers are JUST AS BAD as the ones we voted out. And everyone is too chicken shit to vote for a third party that they'd rather vote in the guy that's gonna ass-rape them WITH a reacharound rather than the guy who is going to ass-rape them without one.
And you don't see a problem with this? It's complete guesswork on coefficients. Let's say we have two variables: mankind emissions and unknown activity X. Let's say they both double. Now temperatures go up. Was it the emissions that did it? Or the unknown? Let's try another scenario. Emissions double, but temperatures decrease. In my mind, the "scientific" course of action would be to adjust the emissions coefficient downward. But instead, they look for a new variable (lets call it "aerosols") to fudge the numbers back such that the emissions coefficient "looks right" again. This does not seem like science to me. You've predetermined approximately how much of an effect certain variables "should" have and then do fudge-factoring, hidden variable discovery, and curve fitting to make it work with the observed results. When it deviates in the long-long ago, you simply chalk it up to "inaccurate records prior to the 30s". This is the the kind of junk science I see occurring. The hand-waving of inaccuracies, weak data, and fudge factors, all the while vehemently assuring with 100% certainty that the sky is falling.
You mean like focusing on the statistical noise in the last 100 years instead of the big picture?
http://www.longrangeweather.com/global_temperatures.htm
I agree that such focus on the short-term trends can be very misleading.
The word "deserve" is where your argument fails. No one deserves a damn thing except life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If my neighbor hits the lottery, he doesn't suddenly owe me something extra simply because he was luckier than I was. If he's generous and kind enough to do something for the less fortunate, huzzah for him. But I'll be damned if I'm going to give the government permission free reign to his good fortune, to redistribute it as they see fit. The problem with your ilk is that you just see rich people as evil, money-hoarding pricks. You don't know them as people, or track their charitable givings, or anything. You don't know if they were handed their wealth from mommy and daddy or if they busted their ass to climb out of poverty up to the top. Regardless of how they got it, they don't deserve it, or they have "more than enough", or they "owe everybody something". And the exact amount they "owe society" is never enough -- it's always a nebulous concept of "they should give more" that is never actually sated (until, I'm assuming, they're just like you)
Simply not true. They're unelectable because they don't play the game. They don't tell people what they want to hear. They don't run a campaign of false promises with no intention of actually going through with said promises. They don't pander to the "interest groups" to get votes. What you see is what you get. And that's why they won't get elected. You need to lie to people to get into office. Pretend you're all rainbows and unicorn farts and your opponent is the great satan. Then once you have the job, do whatever you want.
They exist, they're called libertarians, or constitutionalists.
Vote third party. Change has to start somewhere.
Using your sample size of 1? Maybe 2? (assuming you mean Bush and Reagan). Bush Senior didn't drive anything into the ground, and actually inherited Reagan's mess. You're honestly going to let the actions of men you can enumerate on less than one hand categorize an entire party of people? Nearly 50% of the country? Sad.
Oh, I guess it's good that Barack Obama did the opposite and bailed out Main Street while sticking it to the banks. Oh wait...
That's the most assinine and frankly saddest thing I've ever heard. What if Martin Luther King said "man, there's no way my single voice will ever change anything -- it'll always be status quo -- I might as well just walk the line"? Even if you can't WIN with a vote, the fact you're standing up to be counted amongst a group standing in opposition of "business as usual" has value. Ron Paul may not have won in the 2 presidencies he has run in, but he has spread more awareness for the cause than was ever originally dreamed of
In this bought-and-sold country? Exactly correct.