CO2 is a greenhouse gas and decreased arctic ice mean less light will be reflected back into space. It's not that complicated.
It gets complicated once you try to predict how much warmer it will get. That's why the IPCC report itself has different ranges of predictions with different consequences and different probabilities.
Furhermore, we know what a world without any ice caps looks like, because Earth has existed that way for most of the time since the end of the dinosaurs, and such a world is just fine for mammals like us.
It's already had catastrophic consequences. Pacific island nations are literally disappearing under the sea. Hotter, more humid weather means more and stronger storms.
Pacific island nations have been disappearing for 20000 years, since sea levels have already risen enormously since the end of the last ice age. It's just a fact of life that you can't settle wherever you want and expect to live there in perpetuity. Much of Europe was settled by people who were forced to move from Asia. Pacific islands were also settled in many cases by people who fled ecological devastation. Environments change and people migrate; it's part of the human experience.
This also isn't that hard: replace fossil fuel power sources with green energy while reducing energy use overall.
Your analysis is naive and unscientific. If "green energy" were comparable to, or cheaper than, fossil fuel energy, then people would already be using it. In fact, "green energy" is considerably more expensive. And since energy input is a large part of the cost of many products (including food), if you switch to green energy, the cost of many products goes up, and the standard of living goes down. It's elementary economics.
Mass transit over highway sprawl. Better home insulation A trillion dollars from the annual war budget would put up a lot of solar panels and wind farms. Geothermal. Small-scale hydro power.
You just keep waving your hands and ignoring basic economics and physics. Switching to mass transit does not actually result in large energy savings. Better home insulation is nice, but again won't make much of a difference. I'm all for reducing the annual war budget, but buying solar panels and wind farms from it will not reduce overall fossil fuel usage much either. Geothermal and hydro power have serious environmental impact.
If you are engaging in knee-jerk denialism for the sake of knee-jerk denialism or because Fox said so, then you are an unscientific luddite. The objections to AGW aren't based on science, they're based on appeals to self-centered egos stoked by the fossil fuel industry.
If you were serious about reducing carbon emissions, there is exactly and only one way of doing that: you tax fossil fuels to account for the externalities you believe they impose on the world. The fact that you and people like you aren't willing to tax fossil fuels that way shows that you aren't serious in your belief about the consequences of AGW, you're just using AGW as a way to push through a political and social agenda, and to funnel large amounts of subsidies to special interests you happen to like.
Personally, I think we should tax fossil fuels more to account for their obvious environmental costs other than AGW (mining, particulates, military, etc.) and end subsidies for agriculture, roads, air travel, oil exploration, and other such industries. But that's all that's needed. Fossil fuel use will naturally ramp down over the next decades as new technologies become available. We shouldn't add yet another bad set of subsidies to an already bad set of subsidies only so that people like you get their pound of flesh too.
None of the BIble-based religions and denominations even agree to what that passage refers to. Nor do I see anything positive in that passage. In the Old Testament, whenever God sent a message to the gentiles, the gentiles got killed in large numbers.
On the contrary, you blindly accept the scientific consensus all the time. Every time you drive a car
The scientific prediction that is relevant to me as a driver is that when I get into the car and turn the key, I can drive somewhere. I don't have to trust anybody on that, I can verify it. In fact, I and hundreds of millions of others verify this every day. It doesn't matter what's going on under the hood, and it doesn't even matter whether the people who built it got the theory right, as long as the thing works.
In fact, the scientists and engineers building cars are clearly using incorrect scientific theories for building cars, but it doesn't matter because the end product still works well enough. How do we know that they are using incorrect scientific theories? Because they always have in the past, that's why cars 50 years ago were much worse and much less efficient than cars today.
So why is global warming different from all the other areas of science that you blindly accept? Is it because you don't like the facts, and therefore deny them?
The relevant prediction of global warming is that if we don't do something drastic now, something horrible will happen half a century from now. Can I verify that myself? No. The only way to figure out experimentally whether that prediction is true is to do nothing and wait fifty years. And even then, we only have one experimental data point, not billions as in the case of cars.
The only thing I can do myself when it comes to global warming is to look at the papers and arguments scientists are making, their reasoning by analogy, and their use of experimental analogs. And when it comes to all that, I'm saying: they haven't made their case.
The problem is that the news is wrong and its negative outlook is totally unjustified. Americans and most of the rest of the world are better off than ever before: healthier, richer, and safer. People are less violent, more educated, and have more liberty and economic freedom. But instead of transforming all these positive developments into something good, people fret about the future and increasingly get sucked into irrational and destructive ideologies.
I don't understand why people have so much trust in the news. Would you trust some random 30 year old college grad who has never held a real job in a political argument? Would you vote for them? So why do you take their opinion of the world as gospel truth when they write a newspaper column?
Remember that the purpose of journalism isn't to inform, it's to sell newspapers. You don't sell newspapers by saying "everything's fine, be happy", you sell newspapers through scaring people and creating controversy.
The doom and gloom scenarios of many science fiction writers just reflect the negative outlook of many intellectuals and of the churches. For intellectuals, it's global ecological catastrophes of some sort, war, hunger, etc. that's going to do us in. And when they don't paint end-of-the-world scenarios, they are trying to convince people that they are getting poorer and "the rich" are stealing their money. And churches love to talk about Armageddon, the second coming, and instill a general sense that the world is going to end and end badly. Churches, too, love to instill a sense of poverty, injustice and entitlement in people. All of this serves the political and financial interests of both the left and the right.
There is a way out of this: stop believing the bullshit these people are preaching and get the facts yourself.
Consensus means that most of them believe there is enough support. And no one in the community has come up with anything credible that refutes the basic premise of climate change
But I don't care. I don't believe scientific results theories on "consensus", I believe them if I understand them and I see lots of evidence supporting them.
Furthermore, lack of credible refutation isn't sufficient. Hundreds of millions of people believe in that God exists, acts in the world, and uses his omnipotence so that his existence can't be proven by science or experiment. I can't refute that view, but that doesn't mean I have to believe it.
Presenting the consequences, good and bad, in a non-melodramatic way on a region by region basis for the entire world is the first step.
Why should I believe that those predictions are actually valid? The models leading to those predictions are even more complex than the arguments for why global warming is happening.
Furthermore, if I look at the predictions for Europe and the US from the IPCC report itself, my conclusion is that we don't need to do anything. The cost of remediation is lower than the cost of switching to a low-carbon economy.
I've never been able to understand how some people manage to reconcile belief in the Christian God with guns and military.
Look at your Bible: the Christian God ordered human sacrifice, slaughter of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. And various churches tell you that the pronouncements of their officials come from God. So, put two and two together and you arrive at "God commanded us to kill ______, just like he did a few thousand years ago."
Surely they can't believe that he'd carry a firearm and cheer on a strong military. That's just not the man described in the New Testament at all.
The New Testament is an inconsistent portrayal of Jesus. The all loving kind of Jesus is the picture that's preached a lot today. But there is also Jesus as the Jewish apocalyptic preacher who didn't give a damn about the gentiles and didn't give a damn about what people did to each other as long as they worshiped God before the apocalypse (which was supposedly only a few years away).
I understand evolution both as a theory and the evidence for it. I can and have run experiments that reproduce it. That's why I believe it.
I understand a significant chunk of classical and quantum physics because I understand the math and actually have run experiments to reproduce the results in high school and college. I've generated interference patterns, detected the photoelectric effect, measured quantum noise, measured the charge-to-mass ratio of electrons, etc. That's why I believe those parts of physics.
I understand the theories people have about God and creationism, as they are spelled out in the Bible and in Christian dogma of various denominations. I haven't seen any evidence for the existence of God, for creationism, or for intelligent design, and any experiments I have tried to run myself (prayer, statistics, etc.) have failed. That's why I don't believe in God and why I am an atheist.
I don't understand global warming. I don't have the data, I can't run the numerical models, I can't reproduce it in experiments, and I don't understand the assumptions that go into the models. I don't understand the basis of economic predictions people make about global warming. And it's not for a lack of trying: I have looked at the original literature as well as the IPCC reports. That's why I don't believe it, in the sense that I haven't seen enough evidence to believe it is true. As far as I'm concerned, global warming may be true or it may not be, and I am not willing to make vast changes to my life based on scientific hypotheses that I don't understand.
That is what science and scientific literacy mean: you believe a scientific theory if you understand it and if you get reproducible evidence for it. Evidence means either lots of independent experiments that test the theory, or something that I can reproduce myself. You don't believe it because someone with a lot of credentials tells you its true, or because massaging the data on a single data set eventually yields agreement with some theory.
So, if you want to convince me that action on global warming is needed, you need to come up with a model and supporting evidence that is simple enough and strong enough that it convinces me. Until you do, the scientifically literate stance is to continue to consider global warming an interesting but unproven hypothesis.
Global warming is being sold as a single package: the assertion it has gotten warmer, that this warming is due to CO2 emissions, the prediction that it will get a lot warmer due to feedback mechanisms in the future, the idea that significant warming will have catastrophic consequences, and that we can and must intervene. If you don't accept all propositions, you are branded as unscientific and a luddite. In fact, there is firm evidence only for the first proposition, namely that global average temperatures have increased. The other propositions are increasingly based on guesses and opinion.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the IPCC report and actually read the conclusions. The language in the report clearly uses high uncertainties for most of the predictions. Furthermore, if you look at the report, you'll find that the effects of "catastrophic global warming" as described in the report can be remediated according to the IPCC report itself, and that such remediation may be cheaper than limiting fossil fuel use right now.
So, "global warming" isn't one issue, it's a lot of different issues and arguments. And the arguments for aggressive policies are simply not that strong yet. Furthermore, if you look at actual political consequences, no country or politician, not even those taking the most aggressive stances for action on global warming, have been willing and able to push through the painful policies that this would entail. Global warming right now is just being used as an excuse to push through policies with nobody actually addressing it. There is enormous hypocrisy on the part of advocates for action on climate change.
Harassing someone with speech and behavior until they get agitated, then killing them should be legal?
You just keep demonstrating your dishonesty by changing words; we weren't talking about "harassing" and "becoming agitated", we were talking about "flirting" and "threatening violence".
Yes, gay men go to public places and flirt and behave in ways offensive to homophobes like you, just like blacks used to use the wrong water fountains and sit in the wrong seats and generally behaved in ways offensive to racists. And if you threaten them with violence, they will defend themselves. Offending intolerant people is an inevitable part of realizing one's civil rights.
Sorry, but you'll just have to deal with it and learn to control your homophobia and your violent impulses, because the law is on their side, not yours.
Of course it did. Slavers, seeing the end of their lucrative trade coming in Europe, fled to this continent in order to create a slavers-paradise, which they did. America was created in order to be a slave state.
The idea that the US revolution was caused by a desire to replace slave trade with Europe is completely untenable. Europe never had any significant slave trade with Africa (otherwise, there would be lots of African blood in Europe today, yet most of Europe is totally white). Europe also didn't need African slaves, since it had its own native system of hereditary human bondage. In fact, many immigrants came to the US fleeing a life of bondage or destitution in Europe.
The reasons and causes of the American revolution are documented in numerous contemporaneous writings, and slavery wasn't a big part of it. Slavery was economically important, and people realized that they couldn't get states together for a revolution and abolish slavery at the same time. But even at the time of the American revolution, a lot of people realized that slavery was morally wrong and that it would eventually have to be abolished.
The rest of the civilized world had abandoned slavery, while the US clung to it like a security blanket
Oh, sure, they had "abolished slavery" in Europe, but that was a meaningless gesture. Britain and France were enslaving entire nations as "colonies" well into the 20th century. Germany was killing Jews by the millions. Japan was mass murdering Chinese and viciously xenophobic. Debt bondage still existed in many European nations through much of the 19th century. And European nations maintained systems of hereditary nobility and even indentured servitude well into the 19th century. That is what the nations you call "civilized" were doing.
I love America like I love my family, khipu, but it is very, very ill from racism.
If you look at the statistics, the primary problems of the African American community are broken families (two thirds of black kids grow up in single parent homes), high crime rates (several times as high as among whites and other minorities), poverty, and low levels of education. None of those are caused by contemporary racism (although some are remnants of past discrimination), and the only people able to address these issues at this point are African Americans themselves. Yes, there is still some racism in employment and housing, but not enough to hold anybody back. I guarantee you: if you are an African American and get a college degree in a STEM field, you will do well.
Oh, and I have also lived and worked in Europe "as a minority". There is no racism in any European country as awful and as damaging to the national soul as the racism of the US.
Then you were blind to what was going on around you. European minorities like Turks and Arabs are subject to high levels of job and housing discrimination, high rates of hate crimes, and limits on social mobility. Many racist policies that are illegal in the US are routine in Europe. European nations have explicitly rejected multiculturalism and demand that all minorities fully and completely assimilate into the mainstream culture. And even if you completely assimilate, you will still be subject to racial profiling and prejudice if you look different. And to top it all off, many European nations even refuse to quantify these problems, thinking that it's better to just pretend these problems don't exist.
African Americans tend to have positive experiences in Europe because they aren't a European minority, they are a curiosity and treated as exotic guests. African Americans are particularly welcome by European intellectuals as subjects to demonstrate their moral superiority to the US. That's not a new phenomenon: Nazis and various socialists states basically interacted with African Americans in the same way, while being highly intoleran
I don't see any "problem". My prediction isn't an exoneration, it's just that: a prediction. The final outcome will depend on the facts as presented in court and how the jury weighs them.
Our justice system is so racist, that the biggest variable in the length of jail time a defendant gets is the color of his skin, followed only by the color of his victim's skin.
That is a blatant misuse of statistics. Just because race is "the biggest variable" doesn't mean that there is racism. Race is simply correlated with a large number of other factors (family structure, income, education, higher rates of recidivism, etc.). Once you take all those other factors into account, most of the differences go away.
The US was born as a slave state, and the stain will be with us, if not forever,
The US inherited slavery from European colonial powers. The same powers exterminated the American Indians. The founding of the US was part of the solution. European powers still went on enslaving and committing genocide for centuries, and even today, European nations remain racially and religiously intolerant. The "stain" you speak about is a European stain, not an American stain.
Now, I understand that you joined Slashdot to express your sympathy and approval for George Zimmerman.
Are you joking? I've been a Slashdot user since long before the Zimmerman case.
You will find that Slashdot users are a pretty tolerant bunch. There are opinions expressed here that are sometimes pretty outside the mainstream, and sometimes expressed in less than civil terms. But political astroturf trolling, especially done as in-artfully as you've done it, is about as welcome as a fart in church.
Political astroturf trolling? You seriously want to assert that anybody is paying me for taking such a politically unpopular position? Here are some other positions I take: I don't think we should take action on global warming, I don't particularly like Obama's health care plan, and I do believe in a strict separation of church and state. I'm a libertarian. You're obviously some kind of progressive. And like progressives everywhere, since the rational and scientific basis of your ideology falls apart under scrutiny, you exhaust yourself in ad hominems and innuendo.
Trouble is that your irrational and ideologically driven policies end up hurting people. You can accuse the US and its justice system of "racism" as much as you want, it's not going to help African Americans because that's not their problem. Furthermore, if you seriously think that Europe does any better in any of these areas, I suggest you live there for a while as a minority; I have, and I can tell you first hand, whatever may be wrong in the US, it is much worse in Europe.
They may not have a duty to retreat, but this would mean it's legal for a gay to go in a biker bar, flirt with bikers, annoying them until they threatened violence until he feared for his life, then take out a gun and shoot everyone.
I sure hope that's legal: offensive speech and behavior are protected by the Constitution. It may not be prudent to enter a homophobic group and display your homosexuality, but the legal and moral responsibility is entirely with whoever starts the physical violence.
(That's also a bad example because bikers tend not to be particularly homophobic.)
He's a cop wannabe who fits the profile of someone who would go hunting, have some idea of what he should be able to get away with, then try to skirt the line. That makes him innocent of the charge, but guilty of premeditated capital murder.
I don't know what he is, but I sure know that you are: your thinking is driven by stereotypes and prejudices. If you had been born in the South 100 years ago, you'd be the guy wearing the white sheet and going out for a lynching, and if you had been born in Germany 100 years ago, you'd be cheering on the Nazis. People like you are reprehensible.
That's the problem they are complaining about: instead of space exploration, a lot of NASA's resources are now being redirected towards global-warming related issues. It is NASA management, Congress, and the Obama administration that are responsible for NASA not fulfilling its core mission of space exploration and having its resources redirected towards planetary observation.
So, if you want manned space travel and space exploration, you should support these guys and help get NASA out of the global warming business. If there is anything space related to be done with respect to global warming, NOAA should do it and account for it in its budget.
Well, the US court begs to differ, and since it has access to Motorola's assets in the US, it can enforce its rulings against Motorola. Companies that do business in the US are subject to US law worldwide.
That's the point, genius. The law is supposed to protect a guy who is defending himself. It didn't defend the black guy who was clearly defending himself.
That's your opinion; a jury thought differently. And it is your opinion too that the jury verdict would have been different if the defendant had been white.
If this system is based on "equal protection under the law" but it has not worked out that way
That's your opinion, not fact. There is little evidence for actual racism in the justice system. It probably does occur to some degree, but it pales in comparison to the much higher actual crime rates among black males. Until the actual crime rate among black males comes down to average levels, it's nearly impossible statistically to even identify racism in the justice system.
But even if you are right and McNeil was convicted unjustly, what bearing does that have on Zimmerman? If black males suffer false convictions and harsh sentences due to racism, the solution would be to address that problem, not to subject more people to the same injustices.
Well, if each company is ordered not to enforce its rulings, then neither can enforce the rulings without getting penalized by some court. What's the logical problem here?
Nobody "handles" the validity of patents. Each court can rule as it chooses, and companies have to figure out to comply. If US and Chinese courts make conflicting rulings, the company may have to withdraw from one or the other nation, or it may have to split. There is no guarantee that you can always legally operate a single company in two nations.
If Chinese and US courts make conflicting rulings so that a company can't comply with both, it has to decide which of the two nations it wants to continue to operate in and withdraw from the other. Doesn't seem very complicated.
The US isn't dictating anything to the German court. The German court can merrily decide whatever it wants to do. But if Motorola acts on the German court's decision, then Motorola is violating the US court's order, and the US court has the means and the right to enforce its order against Motorola.
And don't believe for a moment that German courts work any differently; they too try to impose German law on foreign entities if they have any control over assets or persons associated with those foreign entities.
Well, so we agree then that the US has jurisdiction over Motorola and can tell Motorola what to do even in foreign nations. The question now just becomes whether Motorola's conduct in Germany is actually against US law. You suggest it doesn't, but that's ultimately for this court and its superior courts to work out.
Motorola and Microsoft are both US companies, making them subject to US laws. That means, for example, that if they try to bribe people abroad, they get punished in the US. And it means that if they try to circumvent a US judge's authority by playing legal games in other jurisdictions, a US judge can impose sanctions on those US companies.
The principle is pretty simple: you are subject to a nation's laws if that nation actually has an ability to enforce those laws against you. Since Motorola has plenty of assets in the US, the US can tell Motorola what to do under US law, because if Motorola doesn't comply, the US can take its assets in punishment.
In the dispatcher's tape, Zimmerman said he was following Martin.
Yes, until the dispatcher told him not to. What happened next? Zimmerman then said that Martin ran, and that Zimmerman was going to meet the police at his truck. There is nothing on the police tape that suggests that Zimmerman continued to follow Martin or confronted him.
In Martin's girlfriend's account, Martin was worried and quickly walking away, when the phone went dead and she couldn't call him back.
In Martin's girlfriend's account, Martin talked to Zimmerman first and said "Why are you following me?" (at that point, Zimmerman was apparently already returning to his truck). Zimmerman responded with "What are you doing here?". Then the line went dead. That means Martin confronted Zimmerman.
Even cops wouldn't approach a potentially dangerous suspect alone. The rules for neighborhood watches tell you not to do that. 911 told him not to do that. That's why, based on the facts that have been made public, Zimmerman is an asshole.
And, again, there is no evidence that Zimmerman approached Martin. According to Zimmerman, according to the dialog with the dispatcher, and according to Martin's girlfriend, Martin approached Zimmerman as he was heading back towards his truck.
I don't think Zimmerman's life was in danger when he was getting beaten up. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, it was fairly standard practice in a street fight to pound the other kid's head against the pavement. It happened to me, and I lived. In hindsight, it doesn't look to me like a justified killing.
Well, he may not have had the "benefit" of your experience; I would certainly be concerned for my life and health if I got punched, thrown to the ground, and had my head banged against the pavement. Furthermore, it wasn't just that, he said he felt Martin going for his gun.
If Zimmerman thought Martin was a dangerous intruder, he should never have gotten out of his car
Zimmerman thought Martin was a burglar. Burglars, as a rule, tend not to be all that dangerous.
It would have been best if Zimmerman hadn't gotten into that situation in the first place.
Agreed. But lack of good judgment isn't the same as murder. And if Martin approached Zimmerman, as seems likely, the confrontation is Martin's fault, not Zimmerman's.
Again, I'm open to the possibility that Zimmerman started something if there is evidence for it, but I simply haven't seen any evidence in the public record so far.
Slashdot Mirror
It gets complicated once you try to predict how much warmer it will get. That's why the IPCC report itself has different ranges of predictions with different consequences and different probabilities.
Furhermore, we know what a world without any ice caps looks like, because Earth has existed that way for most of the time since the end of the dinosaurs, and such a world is just fine for mammals like us.
Pacific island nations have been disappearing for 20000 years, since sea levels have already risen enormously since the end of the last ice age. It's just a fact of life that you can't settle wherever you want and expect to live there in perpetuity. Much of Europe was settled by people who were forced to move from Asia. Pacific islands were also settled in many cases by people who fled ecological devastation. Environments change and people migrate; it's part of the human experience.
Your analysis is naive and unscientific. If "green energy" were comparable to, or cheaper than, fossil fuel energy, then people would already be using it. In fact, "green energy" is considerably more expensive. And since energy input is a large part of the cost of many products (including food), if you switch to green energy, the cost of many products goes up, and the standard of living goes down. It's elementary economics.
You just keep waving your hands and ignoring basic economics and physics. Switching to mass transit does not actually result in large energy savings. Better home insulation is nice, but again won't make much of a difference. I'm all for reducing the annual war budget, but buying solar panels and wind farms from it will not reduce overall fossil fuel usage much either. Geothermal and hydro power have serious environmental impact.
If you were serious about reducing carbon emissions, there is exactly and only one way of doing that: you tax fossil fuels to account for the externalities you believe they impose on the world. The fact that you and people like you aren't willing to tax fossil fuels that way shows that you aren't serious in your belief about the consequences of AGW, you're just using AGW as a way to push through a political and social agenda, and to funnel large amounts of subsidies to special interests you happen to like.
Personally, I think we should tax fossil fuels more to account for their obvious environmental costs other than AGW (mining, particulates, military, etc.) and end subsidies for agriculture, roads, air travel, oil exploration, and other such industries. But that's all that's needed. Fossil fuel use will naturally ramp down over the next decades as new technologies become available. We shouldn't add yet another bad set of subsidies to an already bad set of subsidies only so that people like you get their pound of flesh too.
None of the BIble-based religions and denominations even agree to what that passage refers to. Nor do I see anything positive in that passage. In the Old Testament, whenever God sent a message to the gentiles, the gentiles got killed in large numbers.
The scientific prediction that is relevant to me as a driver is that when I get into the car and turn the key, I can drive somewhere. I don't have to trust anybody on that, I can verify it. In fact, I and hundreds of millions of others verify this every day. It doesn't matter what's going on under the hood, and it doesn't even matter whether the people who built it got the theory right, as long as the thing works.
In fact, the scientists and engineers building cars are clearly using incorrect scientific theories for building cars, but it doesn't matter because the end product still works well enough. How do we know that they are using incorrect scientific theories? Because they always have in the past, that's why cars 50 years ago were much worse and much less efficient than cars today.
The relevant prediction of global warming is that if we don't do something drastic now, something horrible will happen half a century from now. Can I verify that myself? No. The only way to figure out experimentally whether that prediction is true is to do nothing and wait fifty years. And even then, we only have one experimental data point, not billions as in the case of cars.
The only thing I can do myself when it comes to global warming is to look at the papers and arguments scientists are making, their reasoning by analogy, and their use of experimental analogs. And when it comes to all that, I'm saying: they haven't made their case.
The problem is that the news is wrong and its negative outlook is totally unjustified. Americans and most of the rest of the world are better off than ever before: healthier, richer, and safer. People are less violent, more educated, and have more liberty and economic freedom. But instead of transforming all these positive developments into something good, people fret about the future and increasingly get sucked into irrational and destructive ideologies.
I don't understand why people have so much trust in the news. Would you trust some random 30 year old college grad who has never held a real job in a political argument? Would you vote for them? So why do you take their opinion of the world as gospel truth when they write a newspaper column?
Remember that the purpose of journalism isn't to inform, it's to sell newspapers. You don't sell newspapers by saying "everything's fine, be happy", you sell newspapers through scaring people and creating controversy.
The doom and gloom scenarios of many science fiction writers just reflect the negative outlook of many intellectuals and of the churches. For intellectuals, it's global ecological catastrophes of some sort, war, hunger, etc. that's going to do us in. And when they don't paint end-of-the-world scenarios, they are trying to convince people that they are getting poorer and "the rich" are stealing their money. And churches love to talk about Armageddon, the second coming, and instill a general sense that the world is going to end and end badly. Churches, too, love to instill a sense of poverty, injustice and entitlement in people. All of this serves the political and financial interests of both the left and the right.
There is a way out of this: stop believing the bullshit these people are preaching and get the facts yourself.
But I don't care. I don't believe scientific results theories on "consensus", I believe them if I understand them and I see lots of evidence supporting them.
Furthermore, lack of credible refutation isn't sufficient. Hundreds of millions of people believe in that God exists, acts in the world, and uses his omnipotence so that his existence can't be proven by science or experiment. I can't refute that view, but that doesn't mean I have to believe it.
Why should I believe that those predictions are actually valid? The models leading to those predictions are even more complex than the arguments for why global warming is happening.
Furthermore, if I look at the predictions for Europe and the US from the IPCC report itself, my conclusion is that we don't need to do anything. The cost of remediation is lower than the cost of switching to a low-carbon economy.
Look at your Bible: the Christian God ordered human sacrifice, slaughter of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. And various churches tell you that the pronouncements of their officials come from God. So, put two and two together and you arrive at "God commanded us to kill ______, just like he did a few thousand years ago."
The New Testament is an inconsistent portrayal of Jesus. The all loving kind of Jesus is the picture that's preached a lot today. But there is also Jesus as the Jewish apocalyptic preacher who didn't give a damn about the gentiles and didn't give a damn about what people did to each other as long as they worshiped God before the apocalypse (which was supposedly only a few years away).
I understand evolution both as a theory and the evidence for it. I can and have run experiments that reproduce it. That's why I believe it.
I understand a significant chunk of classical and quantum physics because I understand the math and actually have run experiments to reproduce the results in high school and college. I've generated interference patterns, detected the photoelectric effect, measured quantum noise, measured the charge-to-mass ratio of electrons, etc. That's why I believe those parts of physics.
I understand the theories people have about God and creationism, as they are spelled out in the Bible and in Christian dogma of various denominations. I haven't seen any evidence for the existence of God, for creationism, or for intelligent design, and any experiments I have tried to run myself (prayer, statistics, etc.) have failed. That's why I don't believe in God and why I am an atheist.
I don't understand global warming. I don't have the data, I can't run the numerical models, I can't reproduce it in experiments, and I don't understand the assumptions that go into the models. I don't understand the basis of economic predictions people make about global warming. And it's not for a lack of trying: I have looked at the original literature as well as the IPCC reports. That's why I don't believe it, in the sense that I haven't seen enough evidence to believe it is true. As far as I'm concerned, global warming may be true or it may not be, and I am not willing to make vast changes to my life based on scientific hypotheses that I don't understand.
That is what science and scientific literacy mean: you believe a scientific theory if you understand it and if you get reproducible evidence for it. Evidence means either lots of independent experiments that test the theory, or something that I can reproduce myself. You don't believe it because someone with a lot of credentials tells you its true, or because massaging the data on a single data set eventually yields agreement with some theory.
So, if you want to convince me that action on global warming is needed, you need to come up with a model and supporting evidence that is simple enough and strong enough that it convinces me. Until you do, the scientifically literate stance is to continue to consider global warming an interesting but unproven hypothesis.
Global warming is being sold as a single package: the assertion it has gotten warmer, that this warming is due to CO2 emissions, the prediction that it will get a lot warmer due to feedback mechanisms in the future, the idea that significant warming will have catastrophic consequences, and that we can and must intervene. If you don't accept all propositions, you are branded as unscientific and a luddite. In fact, there is firm evidence only for the first proposition, namely that global average temperatures have increased. The other propositions are increasingly based on guesses and opinion.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the IPCC report and actually read the conclusions. The language in the report clearly uses high uncertainties for most of the predictions. Furthermore, if you look at the report, you'll find that the effects of "catastrophic global warming" as described in the report can be remediated according to the IPCC report itself, and that such remediation may be cheaper than limiting fossil fuel use right now.
So, "global warming" isn't one issue, it's a lot of different issues and arguments. And the arguments for aggressive policies are simply not that strong yet. Furthermore, if you look at actual political consequences, no country or politician, not even those taking the most aggressive stances for action on global warming, have been willing and able to push through the painful policies that this would entail. Global warming right now is just being used as an excuse to push through policies with nobody actually addressing it. There is enormous hypocrisy on the part of advocates for action on climate change.
You just keep demonstrating your dishonesty by changing words; we weren't talking about "harassing" and "becoming agitated", we were talking about "flirting" and "threatening violence".
Yes, gay men go to public places and flirt and behave in ways offensive to homophobes like you, just like blacks used to use the wrong water fountains and sit in the wrong seats and generally behaved in ways offensive to racists. And if you threaten them with violence, they will defend themselves. Offending intolerant people is an inevitable part of realizing one's civil rights.
Sorry, but you'll just have to deal with it and learn to control your homophobia and your violent impulses, because the law is on their side, not yours.
The idea that the US revolution was caused by a desire to replace slave trade with Europe is completely untenable. Europe never had any significant slave trade with Africa (otherwise, there would be lots of African blood in Europe today, yet most of Europe is totally white). Europe also didn't need African slaves, since it had its own native system of hereditary human bondage. In fact, many immigrants came to the US fleeing a life of bondage or destitution in Europe.
The reasons and causes of the American revolution are documented in numerous contemporaneous writings, and slavery wasn't a big part of it. Slavery was economically important, and people realized that they couldn't get states together for a revolution and abolish slavery at the same time. But even at the time of the American revolution, a lot of people realized that slavery was morally wrong and that it would eventually have to be abolished.
Oh, sure, they had "abolished slavery" in Europe, but that was a meaningless gesture. Britain and France were enslaving entire nations as "colonies" well into the 20th century. Germany was killing Jews by the millions. Japan was mass murdering Chinese and viciously xenophobic. Debt bondage still existed in many European nations through much of the 19th century. And European nations maintained systems of hereditary nobility and even indentured servitude well into the 19th century. That is what the nations you call "civilized" were doing.
If you look at the statistics, the primary problems of the African American community are broken families (two thirds of black kids grow up in single parent homes), high crime rates (several times as high as among whites and other minorities), poverty, and low levels of education. None of those are caused by contemporary racism (although some are remnants of past discrimination), and the only people able to address these issues at this point are African Americans themselves. Yes, there is still some racism in employment and housing, but not enough to hold anybody back. I guarantee you: if you are an African American and get a college degree in a STEM field, you will do well.
Then you were blind to what was going on around you. European minorities like Turks and Arabs are subject to high levels of job and housing discrimination, high rates of hate crimes, and limits on social mobility. Many racist policies that are illegal in the US are routine in Europe. European nations have explicitly rejected multiculturalism and demand that all minorities fully and completely assimilate into the mainstream culture. And even if you completely assimilate, you will still be subject to racial profiling and prejudice if you look different. And to top it all off, many European nations even refuse to quantify these problems, thinking that it's better to just pretend these problems don't exist.
African Americans tend to have positive experiences in Europe because they aren't a European minority, they are a curiosity and treated as exotic guests. African Americans are particularly welcome by European intellectuals as subjects to demonstrate their moral superiority to the US. That's not a new phenomenon: Nazis and various socialists states basically interacted with African Americans in the same way, while being highly intoleran
I don't see any "problem". My prediction isn't an exoneration, it's just that: a prediction. The final outcome will depend on the facts as presented in court and how the jury weighs them.
That is a blatant misuse of statistics. Just because race is "the biggest variable" doesn't mean that there is racism. Race is simply correlated with a large number of other factors (family structure, income, education, higher rates of recidivism, etc.). Once you take all those other factors into account, most of the differences go away.
The US inherited slavery from European colonial powers. The same powers exterminated the American Indians. The founding of the US was part of the solution. European powers still went on enslaving and committing genocide for centuries, and even today, European nations remain racially and religiously intolerant. The "stain" you speak about is a European stain, not an American stain.
Are you joking? I've been a Slashdot user since long before the Zimmerman case.
Political astroturf trolling? You seriously want to assert that anybody is paying me for taking such a politically unpopular position? Here are some other positions I take: I don't think we should take action on global warming, I don't particularly like Obama's health care plan, and I do believe in a strict separation of church and state. I'm a libertarian. You're obviously some kind of progressive. And like progressives everywhere, since the rational and scientific basis of your ideology falls apart under scrutiny, you exhaust yourself in ad hominems and innuendo.
Trouble is that your irrational and ideologically driven policies end up hurting people. You can accuse the US and its justice system of "racism" as much as you want, it's not going to help African Americans because that's not their problem. Furthermore, if you seriously think that Europe does any better in any of these areas, I suggest you live there for a while as a minority; I have, and I can tell you first hand, whatever may be wrong in the US, it is much worse in Europe.
I sure hope that's legal: offensive speech and behavior are protected by the Constitution. It may not be prudent to enter a homophobic group and display your homosexuality, but the legal and moral responsibility is entirely with whoever starts the physical violence.
(That's also a bad example because bikers tend not to be particularly homophobic.)
I don't know what he is, but I sure know that you are: your thinking is driven by stereotypes and prejudices. If you had been born in the South 100 years ago, you'd be the guy wearing the white sheet and going out for a lynching, and if you had been born in Germany 100 years ago, you'd be cheering on the Nazis. People like you are reprehensible.
That's the problem they are complaining about: instead of space exploration, a lot of NASA's resources are now being redirected towards global-warming related issues. It is NASA management, Congress, and the Obama administration that are responsible for NASA not fulfilling its core mission of space exploration and having its resources redirected towards planetary observation.
So, if you want manned space travel and space exploration, you should support these guys and help get NASA out of the global warming business. If there is anything space related to be done with respect to global warming, NOAA should do it and account for it in its budget.
Well, the US court begs to differ, and since it has access to Motorola's assets in the US, it can enforce its rulings against Motorola. Companies that do business in the US are subject to US law worldwide.
That's your opinion; a jury thought differently. And it is your opinion too that the jury verdict would have been different if the defendant had been white.
That's your opinion, not fact. There is little evidence for actual racism in the justice system. It probably does occur to some degree, but it pales in comparison to the much higher actual crime rates among black males. Until the actual crime rate among black males comes down to average levels, it's nearly impossible statistically to even identify racism in the justice system.
But even if you are right and McNeil was convicted unjustly, what bearing does that have on Zimmerman? If black males suffer false convictions and harsh sentences due to racism, the solution would be to address that problem, not to subject more people to the same injustices.
Well, if each company is ordered not to enforce its rulings, then neither can enforce the rulings without getting penalized by some court. What's the logical problem here?
Nobody "handles" the validity of patents. Each court can rule as it chooses, and companies have to figure out to comply. If US and Chinese courts make conflicting rulings, the company may have to withdraw from one or the other nation, or it may have to split. There is no guarantee that you can always legally operate a single company in two nations.
If Chinese and US courts make conflicting rulings so that a company can't comply with both, it has to decide which of the two nations it wants to continue to operate in and withdraw from the other. Doesn't seem very complicated.
The US isn't dictating anything to the German court. The German court can merrily decide whatever it wants to do. But if Motorola acts on the German court's decision, then Motorola is violating the US court's order, and the US court has the means and the right to enforce its order against Motorola.
And don't believe for a moment that German courts work any differently; they too try to impose German law on foreign entities if they have any control over assets or persons associated with those foreign entities.
Well, so we agree then that the US has jurisdiction over Motorola and can tell Motorola what to do even in foreign nations. The question now just becomes whether Motorola's conduct in Germany is actually against US law. You suggest it doesn't, but that's ultimately for this court and its superior courts to work out.
Motorola and Microsoft are both US companies, making them subject to US laws. That means, for example, that if they try to bribe people abroad, they get punished in the US. And it means that if they try to circumvent a US judge's authority by playing legal games in other jurisdictions, a US judge can impose sanctions on those US companies.
The principle is pretty simple: you are subject to a nation's laws if that nation actually has an ability to enforce those laws against you. Since Motorola has plenty of assets in the US, the US can tell Motorola what to do under US law, because if Motorola doesn't comply, the US can take its assets in punishment.
Yes, until the dispatcher told him not to. What happened next? Zimmerman then said that Martin ran, and that Zimmerman was going to meet the police at his truck. There is nothing on the police tape that suggests that Zimmerman continued to follow Martin or confronted him.
In Martin's girlfriend's account, Martin talked to Zimmerman first and said "Why are you following me?" (at that point, Zimmerman was apparently already returning to his truck). Zimmerman responded with "What are you doing here?". Then the line went dead. That means Martin confronted Zimmerman.
And, again, there is no evidence that Zimmerman approached Martin. According to Zimmerman, according to the dialog with the dispatcher, and according to Martin's girlfriend, Martin approached Zimmerman as he was heading back towards his truck.
Well, he may not have had the "benefit" of your experience; I would certainly be concerned for my life and health if I got punched, thrown to the ground, and had my head banged against the pavement. Furthermore, it wasn't just that, he said he felt Martin going for his gun.
Zimmerman thought Martin was a burglar. Burglars, as a rule, tend not to be all that dangerous.
Agreed. But lack of good judgment isn't the same as murder. And if Martin approached Zimmerman, as seems likely, the confrontation is Martin's fault, not Zimmerman's.
Again, I'm open to the possibility that Zimmerman started something if there is evidence for it, but I simply haven't seen any evidence in the public record so far.