I'm not so sure about that. When I listen to the people who know about presidential history, they invariable say that Obama has been an exceptionally active president. Some of the accomplishments aren't amazing, for example, while he order the closure of Guantanamo, the actual closure hasn't been completed. But the list credits him for ordering the closure, not accomplishing it.
I think many Americans are upset over the economy, ideology, or skin color and refuse to give Obama credit for what he's actually done with possibly the most obstructionist congress the U.S. has ever seen. Obama has literally taken plans that the Republican party approved of and offered it as legislation, only to have them turn on it and declare it's now socialist because it has Obama-cooties.
There may some truth to the charge that Obama is a bad negotiator, that he isn't a ruthless, cold-hearted, and dangerous as his opponents. I think he's caved a few times because he feared the consequences to the American people if he stood his ground, mind you, I'm not talking about his political career but literally what would happen to the people of the United States. He may have sacrificed political victory for what he believes is the greater good on the Bush tax cuts and Debt limit. So I agree he should definitely be punished for that.
"...So this is what we need. We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth [laughter] and make the antidote freely available to anybody whoâ(TM)s willing to work for it.
That's some out of context quoting there, which leads me to believe you are anything but impartial. That's a partial quote of an answer to a hypothetical question which wasn't transcribed. Judging from the answer the question was about how you something like: How could we make China's one child per couple policy work on a global level? Context does matter.
If I heard Bush had said something controversial from the Democratic National Council and no one else? I'd take the information with a giant grain of salt. The controversy over this speech was stirred up by the Heartland Institute. Frankly, I don't trust then at all, they have a history of pushing lies and deception to further their political agenda. Frankly, I think this is a classic attempt at manufacturing controversy. Having read the transcript, it's already clear to me that they lied on several points already. So no, I think Wikipedia is a much more trustworthy source than the Heartland Institute.
A gross simplification but seems accurate to me. Warmer air traveling across an ocean will carry more moisture with it, when it hits land and cools it will release more moisture.
It's not just you, there's a whole cottage industry of people dedicate to convincing you it isn't happening. In reality, they regularly go through that phase, "missing heat" was one of those recalibrations. That problem, in particular, was that using satellites they could measure energy coming into the Earth and energy leaving it. Those values didn't match up against surface, air and ocean measurements. Too much energy was coming in and not enough leaving for the temperatures we were actually experiencing. So where was the energy (heat)? Scientists looked into whether the satellite data was faulty (it was by a little bit) and a number of other potential issues as part of that process.
By the way, they found the missing heat, it's in the deep ocean. The 700m to 2km depth water has been absorbing the "missing heat". There's a whole area of research now into why the deep ocean appears to be warming faster than the levels closer to the surface, whether it's actually happening, and what the consequences of this heating are likely to be.
Less overall, though some places will see more ice.
How about, snow in New Orleans?
That depends on the prevailing winds. Air blowing over bodies of water will pick up more moisture and deposit it when it cools, so when the wind blows off the ocean there should be more snow, and when it blows out of a desert it should pick up more moisture. Since there probably aren't any deserts near New Orleans, it will probably get more rain and more snow.
I am all for global warming if it would bring down my heating bill in the winter.
You probably wouldn't notice the amount it's going down. It's on the order of 0.01-0.03 degrees per year. That does mean less gas burned each year. Also, of note, the continental United States has actually been warming more slowly than Europe and Asia (so far).
Actually, according to BEST there's no evidence to indicate that the trend has changed. Or more accurately, 10 years is too short a time to separate climate signal from weather noise. Here's a graph that shows why the trend is not cooling.
That's hard to do, a better solution would be to implement a carbon tax and apply it to imports from countries that haven't implemented a similar level of carbon tax.
Interesting, you are getting your news from a religious organization which claims a scientist made wild and crazy claims (the claims come round-about from the Heartland Institute). Of course, the episode is also written up on Wikipedia and the account there is slightly different.
The scientists didn't applaud him for advocating genocide they applauded him for warning that under our current conditions it's only a matter of time before a lethal plague sweeps the earth. Given the poor track record the Heartland Institute has with honesty, and the fact that a standing ovation for a man advocating genocide is not terribly plausible, I'm inclined to believe that the Heartland Institute is misusing the speech to drive it's anti-science and fund raising agendas.
They under-estimated the worst case scenario. No one predicted that China would double the number of fully-operational coal plants in China in less than 5 years (it took 22 years for the previous doubling). On the upside all those coal plants have darkened the earth's atmosphere so it's not a warm as it would have been, the downside is the cooling effect lasts about 5 years or so and the CO2 warming effect lasts between 100 and 1000 years.
I also have doubts that Apple/IBM would have really popularized PCs to the extent that the Wintel monopoly did.
A fragmented OS market would have been competitive and driven prices down, which is almost guaranteed to increase demand. Without the monopoly rents that Microsoft has been collecting, PCs would almost certainly have been more popular.
Only ignorant (willfully or otherwise) people see a colling trend in the last 10 years. Take a look at the graph here, and you might understand how you are being misled.
Of course, the difference is that we actually can see the climate changes already occurring and there's no sign of the J-man.
The changes start small and grow over time. We're seeing persistent year-over-year declines in glacial mass in the Arctic and Antarctic, we seeing northward migrations in animals, plants and diseases. We're seeing increased ocean acidification. The U.N. estimated that Climate Change has reduced the optimum global food production by around 5% from what it would have been without climate change.
These changes don't happen overnight like they did in "The Day After Tomorrow", but they are already happening. You're apparently a doctor, so you should understand that it's best to deal with a disease while the symptoms are minor rather than when the patient is nearly dead.
One of the expected results of global warming is more extreme flooding in areas that regularly get flooded because the warmer air absorbs and carries more water. Global warming probably didn't cause the flood, however, global warming probably magnified the effect so that Thailand's flood control measures could no longer deal with it.
What happened? No significant cuts yet 20 years later we are still well under his best case models.
Actually, there was a significant reduction in the growth of CO2 in some parts of the world due to a little event in 2008... However, Hansen's predictions in 1988 used a higher CO2 sensitivity (4.2 degrees for a doubling rather then the more commonly accepted figure of 3.0 degrees) and expected more solar output than we've received.
Do they really know what is going on? Shouldn't models somewhat capture trends of the data?
That's the way science works, you know. Scientists make hypothesis and then test them. Scientists are usually wrong, but they strive to make the mistakes smaller and smaller over the course of their study. The eventual goal is to make the mistakes so small that they no longer matter at all.
One thing you might note is that the temperature is still trending upwards, so Hansen's prediction were off by a bit on magnitude but he still had the direction right. So you can be happy in knowing that "doom" will be delayed by a few years.
NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO!!! Plan your own life, leave mine alone. If I want to live 20 miles out of town, that is my business and you have no business making it more difficult or expensive. Crowding causes stress and breeds crime. We have enough of both already. Crowding is "living low", and this SHOULD be the land of plenty, and would be if we did taxes right, but that is a whole 'nother country of discussion.
So rather than make your life more difficult they should make other people's lives more difficult?
NO. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!!!! Haven't you been paying attention? We are BROKE! We have to stop the spending now. We have to do things that are CHEAPER, not find new ways for the gov't to go broke more quickly. We need to balance the budget. If its REALLY a good idea, it will attract enough ridership to be profitable. IF it doesn't, then we don't need it. And, people don't want to ride trains, or they'd be doing it.
Lots of people ride trains. For instance, in New York city alone, there are over 1.6 billion train rides a year.
This might be one of those rare times when I actually agree with Bill Gates. A tax on financial transactions should reduce or stop some of the most exploitive behavior in the financial world. "High frequency" trading would become much less profitable, as would the even less ethical exploit of attempting to generate out of date quotes by overloading a trading system system.
Actually, I knew the U.S. housing crash was coming and I don't even live there. It was pretty obvious as soon as I saw a graph of housing prices in the U.S. You may think that I'm making it up, but I remember posting about it on Slashdot in 2004, in the run up to Bush's re-election. At the time there were only two growth sectors in the U.S. economy: housing and health care. That was unsustainable.
Bubbles pop, it's what they all do sooner or later. The housing bubble wouldn't have been worse than any other bubble, if the Federal Reserve hadn't kept interests so low for so long and banksters hadn't invented derivatives roulette. Frankly, I think most Americans are not learning the lesson they need to learn, which is don't put an idiot in charge of your country, even if things are going so well "not even an idiot could screw it up".
Interestingly, Canada's current Prime Minister campaigned with a single speech which he repeated verbatim (down to the times at which he took a sip of water during the speak) every time he gave it. He gave the exact same speech twice a day every day for over a month (and won).
Another interesting thing that happened in the recent Ontario election, was one of the provincial engineering institutes sent a request to each party for an explanation of their policies on power generation. One party chose not to answer at all, one party sent a feel good message that amounted to "we like power and we'll figure out when we win the election", and the third party sent a detailed break down of things that they had planned for the next four years. Sometimes, a smaller venue will get good and relevant information from a political campaign.
I've always found Ron Paul tells it like he thinks it should be based on his theories. Personally, I've always found his theories don't match up well with reality.
I was spanked as a child and frankly, I agree that the questions are irrelevant. The questions are about whether you can justify the abuse or not. But it doesn't matter, controlled violence is still violence. The primary lesson of "corporal punishment" is that violence is an acceptable way to solve problems, whether or not that is the intended lesson.
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I'm not so sure about that. When I listen to the people who know about presidential history, they invariable say that Obama has been an exceptionally active president. Some of the accomplishments aren't amazing, for example, while he order the closure of Guantanamo, the actual closure hasn't been completed. But the list credits him for ordering the closure, not accomplishing it.
I think many Americans are upset over the economy, ideology, or skin color and refuse to give Obama credit for what he's actually done with possibly the most obstructionist congress the U.S. has ever seen. Obama has literally taken plans that the Republican party approved of and offered it as legislation, only to have them turn on it and declare it's now socialist because it has Obama-cooties.
There may some truth to the charge that Obama is a bad negotiator, that he isn't a ruthless, cold-hearted, and dangerous as his opponents. I think he's caved a few times because he feared the consequences to the American people if he stood his ground, mind you, I'm not talking about his political career but literally what would happen to the people of the United States. He may have sacrificed political victory for what he believes is the greater good on the Bush tax cuts and Debt limit. So I agree he should definitely be punished for that.
"...So this is what we need. We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth [laughter] and make the antidote freely available to anybody whoâ(TM)s willing to work for it.
That's some out of context quoting there, which leads me to believe you are anything but impartial. That's a partial quote of an answer to a hypothetical question which wasn't transcribed. Judging from the answer the question was about how you something like: How could we make China's one child per couple policy work on a global level? Context does matter.
If I heard Bush had said something controversial from the Democratic National Council and no one else? I'd take the information with a giant grain of salt. The controversy over this speech was stirred up by the Heartland Institute. Frankly, I don't trust then at all, they have a history of pushing lies and deception to further their political agenda. Frankly, I think this is a classic attempt at manufacturing controversy. Having read the transcript, it's already clear to me that they lied on several points already. So no, I think Wikipedia is a much more trustworthy source than the Heartland Institute.
A gross simplification but seems accurate to me. Warmer air traveling across an ocean will carry more moisture with it, when it hits land and cools it will release more moisture.
It's not just you, there's a whole cottage industry of people dedicate to convincing you it isn't happening. In reality, they regularly go through that phase, "missing heat" was one of those recalibrations. That problem, in particular, was that using satellites they could measure energy coming into the Earth and energy leaving it. Those values didn't match up against surface, air and ocean measurements. Too much energy was coming in and not enough leaving for the temperatures we were actually experiencing. So where was the energy (heat)? Scientists looked into whether the satellite data was faulty (it was by a little bit) and a number of other potential issues as part of that process.
By the way, they found the missing heat, it's in the deep ocean. The 700m to 2km depth water has been absorbing the "missing heat". There's a whole area of research now into why the deep ocean appears to be warming faster than the levels closer to the surface, whether it's actually happening, and what the consequences of this heating are likely to be.
if it were getting warmer
It is.
would we see more ice or less?
Less overall, though some places will see more ice.
How about, snow in New Orleans?
That depends on the prevailing winds. Air blowing over bodies of water will pick up more moisture and deposit it when it cools, so when the wind blows off the ocean there should be more snow, and when it blows out of a desert it should pick up more moisture. Since there probably aren't any deserts near New Orleans, it will probably get more rain and more snow.
I am all for global warming if it would bring down my heating bill in the winter.
You probably wouldn't notice the amount it's going down. It's on the order of 0.01-0.03 degrees per year. That does mean less gas burned each year. Also, of note, the continental United States has actually been warming more slowly than Europe and Asia (so far).
Actually, according to BEST there's no evidence to indicate that the trend has changed. Or more accurately, 10 years is too short a time to separate climate signal from weather noise. Here's a graph that shows why the trend is not cooling.
Actually they passed a carbon tax ($23 a tonne), which is different from "cap and trade".
That's hard to do, a better solution would be to implement a carbon tax and apply it to imports from countries that haven't implemented a similar level of carbon tax.
Interesting, you are getting your news from a religious organization which claims a scientist made wild and crazy claims (the claims come round-about from the Heartland Institute). Of course, the episode is also written up on Wikipedia and the account there is slightly different.
The scientists didn't applaud him for advocating genocide they applauded him for warning that under our current conditions it's only a matter of time before a lethal plague sweeps the earth. Given the poor track record the Heartland Institute has with honesty, and the fact that a standing ovation for a man advocating genocide is not terribly plausible, I'm inclined to believe that the Heartland Institute is misusing the speech to drive it's anti-science and fund raising agendas.
They under-estimated the worst case scenario. No one predicted that China would double the number of fully-operational coal plants in China in less than 5 years (it took 22 years for the previous doubling). On the upside all those coal plants have darkened the earth's atmosphere so it's not a warm as it would have been, the downside is the cooling effect lasts about 5 years or so and the CO2 warming effect lasts between 100 and 1000 years.
I also have doubts that Apple/IBM would have really popularized PCs to the extent that the Wintel monopoly did.
A fragmented OS market would have been competitive and driven prices down, which is almost guaranteed to increase demand. Without the monopoly rents that Microsoft has been collecting, PCs would almost certainly have been more popular.
Only ignorant (willfully or otherwise) people see a colling trend in the last 10 years. Take a look at the graph here, and you might understand how you are being misled.
Apparently, over 2000 years.
Of course, the difference is that we actually can see the climate changes already occurring and there's no sign of the J-man.
The changes start small and grow over time. We're seeing persistent year-over-year declines in glacial mass in the Arctic and Antarctic, we seeing northward migrations in animals, plants and diseases. We're seeing increased ocean acidification. The U.N. estimated that Climate Change has reduced the optimum global food production by around 5% from what it would have been without climate change.
These changes don't happen overnight like they did in "The Day After Tomorrow", but they are already happening. You're apparently a doctor, so you should understand that it's best to deal with a disease while the symptoms are minor rather than when the patient is nearly dead.
One of the expected results of global warming is more extreme flooding in areas that regularly get flooded because the warmer air absorbs and carries more water. Global warming probably didn't cause the flood, however, global warming probably magnified the effect so that Thailand's flood control measures could no longer deal with it.
Congratulations, that's science:
Hypothesis, Test, Observe and Recalibrate. Repeat.
What do you think Scientists do?
What happened? No significant cuts yet 20 years later we are still well under his best case models.
Actually, there was a significant reduction in the growth of CO2 in some parts of the world due to a little event in 2008... However, Hansen's predictions in 1988 used a higher CO2 sensitivity (4.2 degrees for a doubling rather then the more commonly accepted figure of 3.0 degrees) and expected more solar output than we've received.
Do they really know what is going on? Shouldn't models somewhat capture trends of the data?
That's the way science works, you know. Scientists make hypothesis and then test them. Scientists are usually wrong, but they strive to make the mistakes smaller and smaller over the course of their study. The eventual goal is to make the mistakes so small that they no longer matter at all.
One thing you might note is that the temperature is still trending upwards, so Hansen's prediction were off by a bit on magnitude but he still had the direction right. So you can be happy in knowing that "doom" will be delayed by a few years.
NO! A THOUSAND TIMES NO!!! Plan your own life, leave mine alone. If I want to live 20 miles out of town, that is my business and you have no business making it more difficult or expensive. Crowding causes stress and breeds crime. We have enough of both already. Crowding is "living low", and this SHOULD be the land of plenty, and would be if we did taxes right, but that is a whole 'nother country of discussion.
So rather than make your life more difficult they should make other people's lives more difficult?
NO. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!!!! Haven't you been paying attention? We are BROKE! We have to stop the spending now. We have to do things that are CHEAPER, not find new ways for the gov't to go broke more quickly. We need to balance the budget. If its REALLY a good idea, it will attract enough ridership to be profitable. IF it doesn't, then we don't need it. And, people don't want to ride trains, or they'd be doing it.
Lots of people ride trains. For instance, in New York city alone, there are over 1.6 billion train rides a year.
This might be one of those rare times when I actually agree with Bill Gates. A tax on financial transactions should reduce or stop some of the most exploitive behavior in the financial world. "High frequency" trading would become much less profitable, as would the even less ethical exploit of attempting to generate out of date quotes by overloading a trading system system.
The Prime Minister is a Conservative, of course.
On the provincial scene, the Conservatives didn't answer, the New Democrats gave vague answers and the Liberals gave specifics.
Actually, I knew the U.S. housing crash was coming and I don't even live there. It was pretty obvious as soon as I saw a graph of housing prices in the U.S. You may think that I'm making it up, but I remember posting about it on Slashdot in 2004, in the run up to Bush's re-election. At the time there were only two growth sectors in the U.S. economy: housing and health care. That was unsustainable.
Bubbles pop, it's what they all do sooner or later. The housing bubble wouldn't have been worse than any other bubble, if the Federal Reserve hadn't kept interests so low for so long and banksters hadn't invented derivatives roulette. Frankly, I think most Americans are not learning the lesson they need to learn, which is don't put an idiot in charge of your country, even if things are going so well "not even an idiot could screw it up".
How about the Ministry for the Reduction of Tourism?
Interestingly, Canada's current Prime Minister campaigned with a single speech which he repeated verbatim (down to the times at which he took a sip of water during the speak) every time he gave it. He gave the exact same speech twice a day every day for over a month (and won).
Another interesting thing that happened in the recent Ontario election, was one of the provincial engineering institutes sent a request to each party for an explanation of their policies on power generation. One party chose not to answer at all, one party sent a feel good message that amounted to "we like power and we'll figure out when we win the election", and the third party sent a detailed break down of things that they had planned for the next four years. Sometimes, a smaller venue will get good and relevant information from a political campaign.
I've always found Ron Paul tells it like he thinks it should be based on his theories. Personally, I've always found his theories don't match up well with reality.
I was spanked as a child and frankly, I agree that the questions are irrelevant. The questions are about whether you can justify the abuse or not. But it doesn't matter, controlled violence is still violence. The primary lesson of "corporal punishment" is that violence is an acceptable way to solve problems, whether or not that is the intended lesson.
All of which, he could, in theory, do from the prison library.