Of course, you rip that quote so far out of context that it becomes meaningless. I've explained why the Democrats can't hope to fix Iraq without at least some cooperation from either Bush or the Republicans in Congress. I've also explained how they're now in a position to make it very hard for the Republicans to not cooperate. I believe that they'll do everything they can.
While I agree that the Democrats need to show results, if you think that the Democrats can just propose a new plan for Iraq and then make it happen, you really need to go re-read the Constitution. If the Democrats had a veto-proof majority, or the Presidency, they could enact whatever legislation they felt appropriate. They have neither, and so they'll do what they can. What part of that situation is so incomprehensible to you?
I don't know about that. How hard is it to take down a country one tenth your size, whose equipment was Russian hand-me-downs even back in the Eighties?
Many of the criticisms of Rumsfeld stem from the fact that he didn't conduct the initial war in a way that would make peace easy. For example he didn't secure weapons depots or protect the buildings and institutions that would have allowed the new government to start from a position of strength. Dismantling the Iraqi army was eventually recognized as a bad decision as well.
You just screwed up your own argument. If the military's only useful mode is the one in which it can deliver overwhelming force, then the military can only be a tool for destroying a nation, not democratizing it. We are at war in Iraq, but we are not at war with Iraq.
World War II was done well, because its goal was relatively simple and straightforward: end Germany's ability to conduct its war. Things like minimizing casualties was a secondary goal.
Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq had a much more difficult goal: change a country's political alignment. In Vietnam and Korea, the goal was to protect our favored governments from the Communists. In Iraq, it was ostensibly to create a democracy.
So perhaps you'd argue that we should have conducted the more recent wars the way we did WWII. But then things get tricky: it's easy to tell when Germany is no longer attacking Europe. It's harder to tell when Iraq is no longer maybe/maybe-not/planning-to-think-about attacking us, and we cannot justify total war against a merely perceived threat. Do that to one or two countries, and the rest of the world will have to put you down like a rabid dog. Otherwise, they may be next.
Iraq, and Vietnam simply had to be heart-and-mind operations. Unless the goal is to turn the entire country against us so that total war becomes an option.
Finally, don't give me this "three thousand years of history has taught us that war is inevitable" crap. There are plenty of ways that modern society turns history on its ear. If a peaceful world is impossible, it may largely be because people believe it to be so. In my mind, the possibility is there, and worth risking everything for.
I'm not sure I understand your legal reasoning. The president says with his signature, "this is the law of the land." Meanwhile, with the signing statement, he says, "this law is unconstitutional, and so I'm not going to follow it."
``It is a mistake . . . to respond to these abuses by denying to this and future presidents the essential authority, in appropriate and limited circumstances, to decline to execute unconstitutional laws," Dellinger wrote.
I've got a simpler solution: If the law is unconstitutional, don't pass the law. If the law gets passed despite the veto, don't execute the law. Then the Supreme Court is supposed to jump in and decide whether the law is constitutional or not.
Yes, I understand why you consider signing statements useful, and even reasonable when used in exceptional circumstances. But it seems like the Constitution doesn't authorize the practice, and letting it go on despite that effectively takes one of the powers of the Judiciary (to determine the constitutionality of laws) and hand it straight over to the Executive. Maybe the Constitution should be amended, to legalize the signing statements or give SCOTUS a way to quickly weigh in on such perceived constitutional turf wars.
So, let me see if I understand these statements. Congress passes a law including a provision that says, "The president must report activities X, Y, and Z to demonstrate that he's executing this law." President thinks, "I shouldn't have to give out that information! I'm the president! It could be the end of national security and the terrorists will eat our babies!" But instead of telling Congress that they're intruding on his perceived constitutional authority (then vetoing the bill), the president throws in an innocuous, seemingly no-brainer statement saying that he'll execute that provision of the law in accordance with his constitutional authorities.
Then Congress can say they're demanding accountability, the President can say he's following the law, and everybody is happy?
Yes, politics is corrupt and self-serving, and Democrats are as much creatures of that process as Republicans. But you sound like you're arguing that the Democrats intend to just let Iraq fester so that it will help them win again in 2008. I'd argue that Dean is right: without the presidency, what can the Democrats do about Iraq? They can't fire Rumsfeld. They can't impeach the President, which requires a supermajority in the Senate. They can't order the troops home. They do control the pursestrings for the war, but cutting off funding would be tricky (along with being possibly dangerous for the troops). They can register votes of no confidence until their faces turn blue, but that's no help.
Now, you make it sound like the Dems sold us a bill of goods, making so much noise about the Iraq debacle that people never noticed that they weren't promising to change things. But I would argue that this election has sent a strong message, which may yet help bring an end to the war. While the Dems can't do anything with Iraq by themselves, Bush is going to have to explain to the new minority party why their continued support of the Iraq War is in their best interests. I expect that he'll be speaking to a far less receptive audience.
So the Democrats will have to build some sort of consensus with the opposition regarding Iraq, but they'll be working from a stronger position.
Another thing they can start doing immediately is to start taking testimony over the scandals this war has seen. The things the Republicans worked to cover up are the things the Democrats want to expose: rampant corruption among government contractors, the nature and effectiveness of various spying programs, the guilt or innocence of prisoners in Guantanamo and the secret prisons, the evidence that led us into war in the first place. If the Democrats can get in deep and expose the excesses of this war, the Republicans might start thinking that their interests lie in getting Iraq as far behind us as possible.
That's my hope, anyhow. If there is a mandate for change, and change doesn't come, it's hard to know who the voters will blame for it in 2008. So the Democrats really should try to do something.
Thank you for the response, thank you for forcing me to read more deeply, and thank you for the partial reality check on the rising sea level. Now, according to the paper I read earlier today, the Antarctic ice shelf is increasing in mass, and can be expected to do so for the near future (if, as they predict, climate changes increase precipitation over the continent). The Greenland shelf--it is claimed--is starting to trickle away, but much slower than I'd believed.
The paper goes on to predict that a 3C increase in the temperature around Greenland is reasonable to expect, and would eliminate the continent's ice (representing 7 meters rise in sea level) over the course of two or three millennia. So while I think I wasn't too far off on the end result, I was terribly far of on the time scale.
You still misrepresent me in a couple of places. You say that I've claimed the sun is warming. I haven't. I've heard that it might be, but I only speculated that a change in the sun's output might have kicked off warming events in the past. The other misrepresentation is that you keep saying I said "no doubt" when I actually said "little doubt." It's a small thing, but important to me.
I'm not a scientist, and certainly not a climatologist. Despite your obviously impressive familiarity with the arguments of the contra-global warming folks, you're not a climatologist either. If you were, I'm sure you'd be too busy doing research for Exxon to be slumming on Slashdot. I'm having trouble believing that the overwhelming majority of scientists are in on a grand conspiracy. The idea that they might be saddled with groupthink seems more plausible, but I'm still not buying. When science reaches a consensus that is just plain wrong, there is too much incentive to turn that sacred cow into tasty burger (especially given the white hot public debate).
As I've been led to understand things, some studies have indeed been throwing out the tree ring data, claiming it to be less trustworthy. I understand that it looks suspicious. But I also think it looks suspicious for GW debunkers to demand that everyone focus on the one set of data that seems to support their position best, when it seems that several other data sets tell a slightly different story. I'm hardly qualified to judge between the two, but it appears that (broadly speaking) the most qualified people involved in this debate are supporting anthropogenic global warming.
Finally, I do recognize that I have more than a little emotional investment in global warming. Part of me wants it to be true, not because I want us all to drown and burn to death, but because I think there are so many other things out there that are going to require intense levels of international cooperation, and lots of reasons to start thinking about ways to preserve and sustain the planet. Maybe this just seems like a good place to start. If global warming is being grossly exaggerated, then the reasons I described aren't sufficient reason to believe.
So I'm going to fold, because I'm tired and I'm late for something and whatnot. I'm sure I'll be back, as obnoxious as ever, next time the subject comes up. Because this is Slashdot, the place I come when I want to get pissed off. But I'm pissed out for the day, and trying to be a bit reasonable. It's been enlightening.
You're obsessed with the lower graph and its medieval warm period. The problem is, the graphs are looking at two separate things. The upper graph is estimating the global temperature, while the lower one is looking only at conditions in Europe. It's quite possible for one area to cool because an overall warming trend has changed local conditions. Even today, climatologists are speculating that global warming might leave Europe cooler by diverting warm ocean currents away.
Further, why are we even talking about the graphs from the Telegraph article? The graph I was referring to, the one you claimed had a suspicious norm, was this one. You remember how you claimed that they must be taking the average from some other, warmer set of data that they weren't telling us about? You stopped a half inch short of calling them a bunch of frauds. In fact they said exactly how they chose the zero line: by averaging the global temperature from 1960-1991. Had they been trying to make the same chart with devious intent, I would have used 1860-1960, to make sure there was as much red on the last half of the graph as possible.
But no, you had to go out of your way to divine all sorts of nefarious intentions. Then you got yourself confused and started talking about a completely different graph that stretched all the way back to 1000AD.
CO2 may have been a lagging indicator in past warmings. So what? Does that mean that CO2 concentration has no effect on global temperatures? Of course not. Nobody this side of Exxon is denying that. All it means is that dinosaurs and British peasants weren't burning coal and oil to power their automobiles. The initial temperature rise was caused by something else--perhaps increased sun output--and that released more CO2 into the atmosphere by melting ice and raising sea temperatures. What follows is a positive feedback loop, as increased CO2 and increased temperature feed back on each other, until a new equillibrium is reached.
Eight meters is the absolute, scientifically accurate figure you get when you calculate how far the sea will rise if you take all the ice currently locked up on the land of Greenland and Antarctica. You take the current rate of sea rise and project it out ad infinitum, and you're right: the situation sounds too gradual to worry about. But lots of carbon and methane live in that ice, both of which would accelerate the melting once it starts. I don't know how fast the ice will melt once it gets going, but there is little doubt in my mind that it will be much faster in the future than it has been in the past. Most important, even if it takes a thousand years to reach that endpoint instead of a hundred, that's still an evolutionary blink of an eye. Humans will adapt easily to such a change, but ecosystems will not.
So you can take your bwahaha-ing and shove it up your own rectum. While you may consider me misinformed and foolish, and I certainly consider you the same, I think I've been much more sympathetic to the notion that there is a reasonable human being on the other side of this conversation. Cut the attitude if you hope to convince me (or any potential readers) of anything.
Thanks for making me take a second look at the graph.
The midline is not supposed to represent any sort of "norm". It represents the 1961-1990 mean global temperature, nothing more. If anything, the norm they chose understates the nature of the change.
Now, as you're intent on pretending that climatologists are overreacting to a 0.5C change, let's put that half degree into perspective. The difference between our current climate and the last big ice age was a whopping 5-8C, and our global climate has stayed within a 0.7C window since it ended. Half a degree every twenty years should start to look like a big deal, unless you're amazingly shortsighted.
Finally, saying "water might rise" severely understates the magnitude of the problem. Do you know how many trillions of dollars of... screw it. Do you know how many cities there are located less than eight meters above sea level? If global warming ends up melting the Antarctic and Greenland caps, take a look at the new state of Florida. While it might not happen suddenly enough to cause direct loss of life, we can't just sit idly by and let this happen. America just can't deal with that many blue-haired refugees.
I wasn't actually assuming that the fish would be gone, though it might happen if the population is pushed beneath a certain threshold. "When the fish are gone" was meant as shorthand for, "when the fish population dwindles to the point that they can no longer be relied on as a resource."
Simple fact: The link between greenhouse gases and atmospheric temperatures has been known since the mid-1800's, and has never been credibly disputed. The mechanism showing how CO2 increases temperature has not been in dispute for a long time, so the whole "correlation != causation" argument is wearing pretty thin.
The solution is a bit nuts. But it could have an undo button. If each of these little craft opened up some sort of large, deployable shade, then when we decided it was a bad idea, we could simply have them fold back up.
Also, replace the shades with solar panels, and you'd have a huge electric grid that could be used for extraterrestrial mining and ore refinement. Of course, then you have to steer asteroids towards Earth to run them through the process, which sounds like another screwed up idea.
We should probably just start taking the bus instead. Mass transit is not just for illegal immigrants and crazy homeless people anymore!
Bush is faced with clearer evidence than any of his predecessors, but his reaction has ranged from "no such thing" to "wait for the science to come in". Meanwhile, he's been actively undercutting the ability of the EPA to fulfill its mission.
Sure, our first instinct here is to blame Bush. But B.F. Skinner proposed some pretty compelling explanations for that fact.
Corporations deliberately base their manufacturing in countries that have the weakest environmental regulations so that they can pollute these countries with impunity. Then they ship the wastes back to those same, weakly regulated countries because they're too cheap to dispose of the wastes responsibly. Then foolish Americans like yourself, when presented with this damning corporate irresponsibility, try to place the blame on the poor for being desperate enough to choose the "not starving" option over the "strong environmental regulations" option.
And why? So you can justify your own wasteful lifestyle, or because you're a free market ideologue, or because the 10% extra you might pay for your electronic goods is overly burdensome to you.
In my mind, it comes down to power. We have it, the third world doesn't, and because of this, we can pretty much demand that they do things for us that we would find intolerable if the situation was reversed. We can demand that they work for wages that barely put a roof over a worker's head, let alone give them the capital necessary to provide their kids with a competitive education. We can demand that the citizens of a country not be allowed to unionize. We can demand that they accept the nastiest, most toxic materials we have to offer. We can demand that they sell us the rights to their resources for far less than they're worth. And the third world accepts these things because they're too poor and desperate to not, and because the moment they stop accepting those terms, what little money they're getting out of the deal will dry up and move to some other country that is even more desperate.
What a sad, pitiful, mindless flag waver you are. All you seem to have learned from Iraq is that the third world is an ungrateful shithole. You clearly didn't learn that preemptive war is a bad idea. You didn't learn that a foreign policy driven by narrow ideologies and enforced at the point of a gun was a bad idea. How can you look at a war that we initiated, a war that killed more people in four years than Saddam did in thirty, and blame the Iraqi people for the result? Simply put: because in your mind, everyone in the world is supposed to be educated American Republicans, raised on the teat of free market capitalism, and everyone who deviates from that ideal is a moral degenrate who chose to live a crappy life by not recognizing and implementing your superior lifestyle.
The Iraqi people did not greet us as liberators. But in your mind, they should have, and their failure to do so shouldn't be blamed on Bush for tragically misreading the situation, but on the Iraqis for being unworthy of our treasured gift of democracy.
You seem confused about the state of affairs the scientists behind the research are looking to avoid. They're not predicting an ocean with no fish (don't ever trust the/. article titles). They're predicting an ocean that doesn't have enough fish to provide a significant amount of food for us. Let's agree that this would be a bad thing, and also that it's avoidable.
But it will take more international cooperation than currently exists regarding fishing rights. While fisheries do indeed have fairly well-defined geographic boundaries, most of them exist (at least in part) beyond any one nation's exclusive fishing zones. Since fish don't pay much heed to international boundaries, a fishery that was half under U.S. control and half in international waters could be easily overharvested by any nation on Earth with the fuel to get there and back.
Yeah, that's right. I'm looking at you, Iran. I smell a big heap o' invasion coming for your profligate overfishing asses.
I heard that the population of African Elephants has tripled in the last several months. Way to go, elephants!
Wikipedia is probably more accurate on this count (although, come to think of it, 2006 minus 1986...), but you're basically arguing that, because scientists are sometimes wrong, we should never listen to them. Are you going to explicitly state your argument: that worldwide fisheries will most likely continue producing bumper crops in perpituity, precisely because scientists are now claiming the opposite?
Don't be shy. The Bush Administration frequently resorts to such tortured logic to justify its environmental policies.
The idea that fish will become uneconomical to hunt before we can actually do irreparable harm has been brought up several times in this discussion, and shot down quite convincingly. If you want to appeal to market forces, then I think your best hope is that a sufficiently educated fishing industry will get behind treaties to reduce fishing to more sustainable levels. After all, most of them would like their businesses to still be successful twenty or thirty years from now.
On the other hand, never underestimate mankind's capacity to exchange its future well being for a plate of braised salmon steak with just a dash of lemon.
We're not talking about the problems of pollution here. We're talking specifically about the problems due to overconsumption, which America has pretty much mastered. You name any vital resource, and I can guarantee you that we U.S'ians use far more than the world average, and probably more than most similarly industrialized countries. So long as fifty Zimbabweans have about as big an ecological footprint as a single suburbanite from New Jersey, crowing about your low birth rates is to miss the point.
Also, until we stop exporting our electronic waste and other hazardous materials to the third world, and stop moving our manufacturing to the countries that will let us do it the cheapest and the dirtiest, we have no moral ground to stand on.
You claim that America is a shining beacon, and the rest of the world an undifferentiated shithole. I'd love to hear you try to defend that claim. It would probably go a lot like the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" skit from The Life of Brian.
While I, like you, find the current spate of right wing environmental buffoonery disheartening, your dead-on parody cuts to the heart of their sad indifference and arrogant anti-intellectualism. Profound, stunning work. You have my congratu...
The irony? You're probably one of those people who reads the Old Testament prophets, and wonders how anyone could not hear the self-evident truth in their words. This is just more of the same: predictions of gloom, doom, chaos, along with the implication that we will deserve to suffer for our shortsightedness. Maybe it will happen, maybe we'll deserve it. But the sort of religious fervor that allows people to take some satisfaction in the sufferings of others isn't exactly restricted to the environmentalism movement.
BTW, thanks for the new web site. I'm enjoying it immensely, with my usual mix of self-righteous smugnicity and liberal guilt.
I've been looking all over the provided link, in search of a single hint of this elusive "insight" of which you speak."
Maybe, like the fish under discussion, insight is under assault, and to preserve itself it has learned to hide behind little gems like "we can eat vegetarians until the fish population regenerates."
Hmmm... How about harvesting the red algae then composting it? Or turning it into biofuel. I'm assuming, of course, that it can't actually be made into food. Of course, it sucks that it's there, and we should be doing our best to reduce the pollutants that help them grow. Yet it still seems like an interesting idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops. I wasn't supposed to give away the secret plan.
Of course, you rip that quote so far out of context that it becomes meaningless. I've explained why the Democrats can't hope to fix Iraq without at least some cooperation from either Bush or the Republicans in Congress. I've also explained how they're now in a position to make it very hard for the Republicans to not cooperate. I believe that they'll do everything they can.
While I agree that the Democrats need to show results, if you think that the Democrats can just propose a new plan for Iraq and then make it happen, you really need to go re-read the Constitution. If the Democrats had a veto-proof majority, or the Presidency, they could enact whatever legislation they felt appropriate. They have neither, and so they'll do what they can. What part of that situation is so incomprehensible to you?
I was surprised too. Does anyone have any theories on why the Diebold machines malfunctioned?
Many of the criticisms of Rumsfeld stem from the fact that he didn't conduct the initial war in a way that would make peace easy. For example he didn't secure weapons depots or protect the buildings and institutions that would have allowed the new government to start from a position of strength. Dismantling the Iraqi army was eventually recognized as a bad decision as well.
You just screwed up your own argument. If the military's only useful mode is the one in which it can deliver overwhelming force, then the military can only be a tool for destroying a nation, not democratizing it. We are at war in Iraq, but we are not at war with Iraq.
World War II was done well, because its goal was relatively simple and straightforward: end Germany's ability to conduct its war. Things like minimizing casualties was a secondary goal.
Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq had a much more difficult goal: change a country's political alignment. In Vietnam and Korea, the goal was to protect our favored governments from the Communists. In Iraq, it was ostensibly to create a democracy.
So perhaps you'd argue that we should have conducted the more recent wars the way we did WWII. But then things get tricky: it's easy to tell when Germany is no longer attacking Europe. It's harder to tell when Iraq is no longer maybe/maybe-not/planning-to-think-about attacking us, and we cannot justify total war against a merely perceived threat. Do that to one or two countries, and the rest of the world will have to put you down like a rabid dog. Otherwise, they may be next.
Iraq, and Vietnam simply had to be heart-and-mind operations. Unless the goal is to turn the entire country against us so that total war becomes an option.
Finally, don't give me this "three thousand years of history has taught us that war is inevitable" crap. There are plenty of ways that modern society turns history on its ear. If a peaceful world is impossible, it may largely be because people believe it to be so. In my mind, the possibility is there, and worth risking everything for.
I've got a simpler solution: If the law is unconstitutional, don't pass the law. If the law gets passed despite the veto, don't execute the law. Then the Supreme Court is supposed to jump in and decide whether the law is constitutional or not.
Yes, I understand why you consider signing statements useful, and even reasonable when used in exceptional circumstances. But it seems like the Constitution doesn't authorize the practice, and letting it go on despite that effectively takes one of the powers of the Judiciary (to determine the constitutionality of laws) and hand it straight over to the Executive. Maybe the Constitution should be amended, to legalize the signing statements or give SCOTUS a way to quickly weigh in on such perceived constitutional turf wars.
So, let me see if I understand these statements. Congress passes a law including a provision that says, "The president must report activities X, Y, and Z to demonstrate that he's executing this law." President thinks, "I shouldn't have to give out that information! I'm the president! It could be the end of national security and the terrorists will eat our babies!" But instead of telling Congress that they're intruding on his perceived constitutional authority (then vetoing the bill), the president throws in an innocuous, seemingly no-brainer statement saying that he'll execute that provision of the law in accordance with his constitutional authorities.
Then Congress can say they're demanding accountability, the President can say he's following the law, and everybody is happy?
That's a bit fucked up.
Yes, politics is corrupt and self-serving, and Democrats are as much creatures of that process as Republicans. But you sound like you're arguing that the Democrats intend to just let Iraq fester so that it will help them win again in 2008. I'd argue that Dean is right: without the presidency, what can the Democrats do about Iraq? They can't fire Rumsfeld. They can't impeach the President, which requires a supermajority in the Senate. They can't order the troops home. They do control the pursestrings for the war, but cutting off funding would be tricky (along with being possibly dangerous for the troops). They can register votes of no confidence until their faces turn blue, but that's no help.
Now, you make it sound like the Dems sold us a bill of goods, making so much noise about the Iraq debacle that people never noticed that they weren't promising to change things. But I would argue that this election has sent a strong message, which may yet help bring an end to the war. While the Dems can't do anything with Iraq by themselves, Bush is going to have to explain to the new minority party why their continued support of the Iraq War is in their best interests. I expect that he'll be speaking to a far less receptive audience.
So the Democrats will have to build some sort of consensus with the opposition regarding Iraq, but they'll be working from a stronger position.
Another thing they can start doing immediately is to start taking testimony over the scandals this war has seen. The things the Republicans worked to cover up are the things the Democrats want to expose: rampant corruption among government contractors, the nature and effectiveness of various spying programs, the guilt or innocence of prisoners in Guantanamo and the secret prisons, the evidence that led us into war in the first place. If the Democrats can get in deep and expose the excesses of this war, the Republicans might start thinking that their interests lie in getting Iraq as far behind us as possible.
That's my hope, anyhow. If there is a mandate for change, and change doesn't come, it's hard to know who the voters will blame for it in 2008. So the Democrats really should try to do something.
Thank you for the response, thank you for forcing me to read more deeply, and thank you for the partial reality check on the rising sea level. Now, according to the paper I read earlier today, the Antarctic ice shelf is increasing in mass, and can be expected to do so for the near future (if, as they predict, climate changes increase precipitation over the continent). The Greenland shelf--it is claimed--is starting to trickle away, but much slower than I'd believed.
The paper goes on to predict that a 3C increase in the temperature around Greenland is reasonable to expect, and would eliminate the continent's ice (representing 7 meters rise in sea level) over the course of two or three millennia. So while I think I wasn't too far off on the end result, I was terribly far of on the time scale.
You still misrepresent me in a couple of places. You say that I've claimed the sun is warming. I haven't. I've heard that it might be, but I only speculated that a change in the sun's output might have kicked off warming events in the past. The other misrepresentation is that you keep saying I said "no doubt" when I actually said "little doubt." It's a small thing, but important to me.
I'm not a scientist, and certainly not a climatologist. Despite your obviously impressive familiarity with the arguments of the contra-global warming folks, you're not a climatologist either. If you were, I'm sure you'd be too busy doing research for Exxon to be slumming on Slashdot. I'm having trouble believing that the overwhelming majority of scientists are in on a grand conspiracy. The idea that they might be saddled with groupthink seems more plausible, but I'm still not buying. When science reaches a consensus that is just plain wrong, there is too much incentive to turn that sacred cow into tasty burger (especially given the white hot public debate).
As I've been led to understand things, some studies have indeed been throwing out the tree ring data, claiming it to be less trustworthy. I understand that it looks suspicious. But I also think it looks suspicious for GW debunkers to demand that everyone focus on the one set of data that seems to support their position best, when it seems that several other data sets tell a slightly different story. I'm hardly qualified to judge between the two, but it appears that (broadly speaking) the most qualified people involved in this debate are supporting anthropogenic global warming.
Finally, I do recognize that I have more than a little emotional investment in global warming. Part of me wants it to be true, not because I want us all to drown and burn to death, but because I think there are so many other things out there that are going to require intense levels of international cooperation, and lots of reasons to start thinking about ways to preserve and sustain the planet. Maybe this just seems like a good place to start. If global warming is being grossly exaggerated, then the reasons I described aren't sufficient reason to believe.
So I'm going to fold, because I'm tired and I'm late for something and whatnot. I'm sure I'll be back, as obnoxious as ever, next time the subject comes up. Because this is Slashdot, the place I come when I want to get pissed off. But I'm pissed out for the day, and trying to be a bit reasonable. It's been enlightening.
You're obsessed with the lower graph and its medieval warm period. The problem is, the graphs are looking at two separate things. The upper graph is estimating the global temperature, while the lower one is looking only at conditions in Europe. It's quite possible for one area to cool because an overall warming trend has changed local conditions. Even today, climatologists are speculating that global warming might leave Europe cooler by diverting warm ocean currents away.
Further, why are we even talking about the graphs from the Telegraph article? The graph I was referring to, the one you claimed had a suspicious norm, was this one. You remember how you claimed that they must be taking the average from some other, warmer set of data that they weren't telling us about? You stopped a half inch short of calling them a bunch of frauds. In fact they said exactly how they chose the zero line: by averaging the global temperature from 1960-1991. Had they been trying to make the same chart with devious intent, I would have used 1860-1960, to make sure there was as much red on the last half of the graph as possible.
But no, you had to go out of your way to divine all sorts of nefarious intentions. Then you got yourself confused and started talking about a completely different graph that stretched all the way back to 1000AD.
CO2 may have been a lagging indicator in past warmings. So what? Does that mean that CO2 concentration has no effect on global temperatures? Of course not. Nobody this side of Exxon is denying that. All it means is that dinosaurs and British peasants weren't burning coal and oil to power their automobiles. The initial temperature rise was caused by something else--perhaps increased sun output--and that released more CO2 into the atmosphere by melting ice and raising sea temperatures. What follows is a positive feedback loop, as increased CO2 and increased temperature feed back on each other, until a new equillibrium is reached.
Eight meters is the absolute, scientifically accurate figure you get when you calculate how far the sea will rise if you take all the ice currently locked up on the land of Greenland and Antarctica. You take the current rate of sea rise and project it out ad infinitum, and you're right: the situation sounds too gradual to worry about. But lots of carbon and methane live in that ice, both of which would accelerate the melting once it starts. I don't know how fast the ice will melt once it gets going, but there is little doubt in my mind that it will be much faster in the future than it has been in the past. Most important, even if it takes a thousand years to reach that endpoint instead of a hundred, that's still an evolutionary blink of an eye. Humans will adapt easily to such a change, but ecosystems will not.
So you can take your bwahaha-ing and shove it up your own rectum. While you may consider me misinformed and foolish, and I certainly consider you the same, I think I've been much more sympathetic to the notion that there is a reasonable human being on the other side of this conversation. Cut the attitude if you hope to convince me (or any potential readers) of anything.
s/useful information/influential message/
Please be a sport and try to spot the difference.
Thanks for making me take a second look at the graph.
The midline is not supposed to represent any sort of "norm". It represents the 1961-1990 mean global temperature, nothing more. If anything, the norm they chose understates the nature of the change.
Now, as you're intent on pretending that climatologists are overreacting to a 0.5C change, let's put that half degree into perspective. The difference between our current climate and the last big ice age was a whopping 5-8C, and our global climate has stayed within a 0.7C window since it ended. Half a degree every twenty years should start to look like a big deal, unless you're amazingly shortsighted.
Finally, saying "water might rise" severely understates the magnitude of the problem. Do you know how many trillions of dollars of... screw it. Do you know how many cities there are located less than eight meters above sea level? If global warming ends up melting the Antarctic and Greenland caps, take a look at the new state of Florida. While it might not happen suddenly enough to cause direct loss of life, we can't just sit idly by and let this happen. America just can't deal with that many blue-haired refugees.
I wasn't actually assuming that the fish would be gone, though it might happen if the population is pushed beneath a certain threshold. "When the fish are gone" was meant as shorthand for, "when the fish population dwindles to the point that they can no longer be relied on as a resource."
Global temperature varied before man showed up. Global temperature is changing again now. Therefore, it cannot be a result of man's actions.
Let me just say that this is not stellar logic, and no one should be swayed by it.
Simple fact: CO2 concentrations have increased dramatically and at an accelerating rate.
Simple fact: Global temperature is rising.
Simple fact: The link between greenhouse gases and atmospheric temperatures has been known since the mid-1800's, and has never been credibly disputed. The mechanism showing how CO2 increases temperature has not been in dispute for a long time, so the whole "correlation != causation" argument is wearing pretty thin.
Simple fact: Humans pump about twenty billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Rush Limbaugh's denials to the contrary, this is vastly more than is produced by volcanos.
More worrying graphs. That sudden spike in graph 2, right when the automotive revolution took off? Very unlikely to be a coincidence.
If you truly believe that man is not changing the climate, and is incapable of doing so, then you are foolish. Oh, and weather isn't climate.
The solution is a bit nuts. But it could have an undo button. If each of these little craft opened up some sort of large, deployable shade, then when we decided it was a bad idea, we could simply have them fold back up.
Also, replace the shades with solar panels, and you'd have a huge electric grid that could be used for extraterrestrial mining and ore refinement. Of course, then you have to steer asteroids towards Earth to run them through the process, which sounds like another screwed up idea.
We should probably just start taking the bus instead. Mass transit is not just for illegal immigrants and crazy homeless people anymore!
Bush is faced with clearer evidence than any of his predecessors, but his reaction has ranged from "no such thing" to "wait for the science to come in". Meanwhile, he's been actively undercutting the ability of the EPA to fulfill its mission.
Sure, our first instinct here is to blame Bush. But B.F. Skinner proposed some pretty compelling explanations for that fact.
Corporations deliberately base their manufacturing in countries that have the weakest environmental regulations so that they can pollute these countries with impunity. Then they ship the wastes back to those same, weakly regulated countries because they're too cheap to dispose of the wastes responsibly. Then foolish Americans like yourself, when presented with this damning corporate irresponsibility, try to place the blame on the poor for being desperate enough to choose the "not starving" option over the "strong environmental regulations" option.
And why? So you can justify your own wasteful lifestyle, or because you're a free market ideologue, or because the 10% extra you might pay for your electronic goods is overly burdensome to you.
In my mind, it comes down to power. We have it, the third world doesn't, and because of this, we can pretty much demand that they do things for us that we would find intolerable if the situation was reversed. We can demand that they work for wages that barely put a roof over a worker's head, let alone give them the capital necessary to provide their kids with a competitive education. We can demand that the citizens of a country not be allowed to unionize. We can demand that they accept the nastiest, most toxic materials we have to offer. We can demand that they sell us the rights to their resources for far less than they're worth. And the third world accepts these things because they're too poor and desperate to not, and because the moment they stop accepting those terms, what little money they're getting out of the deal will dry up and move to some other country that is even more desperate.
What a sad, pitiful, mindless flag waver you are. All you seem to have learned from Iraq is that the third world is an ungrateful shithole. You clearly didn't learn that preemptive war is a bad idea. You didn't learn that a foreign policy driven by narrow ideologies and enforced at the point of a gun was a bad idea. How can you look at a war that we initiated, a war that killed more people in four years than Saddam did in thirty, and blame the Iraqi people for the result? Simply put: because in your mind, everyone in the world is supposed to be educated American Republicans, raised on the teat of free market capitalism, and everyone who deviates from that ideal is a moral degenrate who chose to live a crappy life by not recognizing and implementing your superior lifestyle.
The Iraqi people did not greet us as liberators. But in your mind, they should have, and their failure to do so shouldn't be blamed on Bush for tragically misreading the situation, but on the Iraqis for being unworthy of our treasured gift of democracy.
You seem confused about the state of affairs the scientists behind the research are looking to avoid. They're not predicting an ocean with no fish (don't ever trust the /. article titles). They're predicting an ocean that doesn't have enough fish to provide a significant amount of food for us. Let's agree that this would be a bad thing, and also that it's avoidable.
But it will take more international cooperation than currently exists regarding fishing rights. While fisheries do indeed have fairly well-defined geographic boundaries, most of them exist (at least in part) beyond any one nation's exclusive fishing zones. Since fish don't pay much heed to international boundaries, a fishery that was half under U.S. control and half in international waters could be easily overharvested by any nation on Earth with the fuel to get there and back.
Yeah, that's right. I'm looking at you, Iran. I smell a big heap o' invasion coming for your profligate overfishing asses.
I heard that the population of African Elephants has tripled in the last several months. Way to go, elephants!
Wikipedia is probably more accurate on this count (although, come to think of it, 2006 minus 1986...), but you're basically arguing that, because scientists are sometimes wrong, we should never listen to them. Are you going to explicitly state your argument: that worldwide fisheries will most likely continue producing bumper crops in perpituity, precisely because scientists are now claiming the opposite?
Don't be shy. The Bush Administration frequently resorts to such tortured logic to justify its environmental policies.
The idea that fish will become uneconomical to hunt before we can actually do irreparable harm has been brought up several times in this discussion, and shot down quite convincingly. If you want to appeal to market forces, then I think your best hope is that a sufficiently educated fishing industry will get behind treaties to reduce fishing to more sustainable levels. After all, most of them would like their businesses to still be successful twenty or thirty years from now.
On the other hand, never underestimate mankind's capacity to exchange its future well being for a plate of braised salmon steak with just a dash of lemon.
We're not talking about the problems of pollution here. We're talking specifically about the problems due to overconsumption, which America has pretty much mastered. You name any vital resource, and I can guarantee you that we U.S'ians use far more than the world average, and probably more than most similarly industrialized countries. So long as fifty Zimbabweans have about as big an ecological footprint as a single suburbanite from New Jersey, crowing about your low birth rates is to miss the point.
Also, until we stop exporting our electronic waste and other hazardous materials to the third world, and stop moving our manufacturing to the countries that will let us do it the cheapest and the dirtiest, we have no moral ground to stand on.
You claim that America is a shining beacon, and the rest of the world an undifferentiated shithole. I'd love to hear you try to defend that claim. It would probably go a lot like the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" skit from The Life of Brian.
While I, like you, find the current spate of right wing environmental buffoonery disheartening, your dead-on parody cuts to the heart of their sad indifference and arrogant anti-intellectualism. Profound, stunning work. You have my congratu...
Wait, you're serious?
Hmm. We do have a bit of a situation then.
The irony? You're probably one of those people who reads the Old Testament prophets, and wonders how anyone could not hear the self-evident truth in their words. This is just more of the same: predictions of gloom, doom, chaos, along with the implication that we will deserve to suffer for our shortsightedness. Maybe it will happen, maybe we'll deserve it. But the sort of religious fervor that allows people to take some satisfaction in the sufferings of others isn't exactly restricted to the environmentalism movement.
BTW, thanks for the new web site. I'm enjoying it immensely, with my usual mix of self-righteous smugnicity and liberal guilt.
I've been looking all over the provided link, in search of a single hint of this elusive "insight" of which you speak."
Maybe, like the fish under discussion, insight is under assault, and to preserve itself it has learned to hide behind little gems like "we can eat vegetarians until the fish population regenerates."
Hmmm... How about harvesting the red algae then composting it? Or turning it into biofuel. I'm assuming, of course, that it can't actually be made into food. Of course, it sucks that it's there, and we should be doing our best to reduce the pollutants that help them grow. Yet it still seems like an interesting idea.