Unlike the average Hollywood celebrity this celebrity is a celebrity for his brains, not his boobs, his looks or his ability to be a circus clown jumping through hoops for the entertainment of the masses.
Fair enough. Hawking's opinion on AI is much like a Rocket scientists opinions on brain surgery or brain surgeons opinion on rocket design.
AKA, really not much good for anything but headlines.
Lots of folks like it. Especially The dropping bombs part. After Saddam and Gaddafi disarmed we invaded and bombed. You think North Korea learned nothing from that? We as a nation are not to be trusted.
Implying Saddam and Gaddafi were 'playing nice' is one of the most sinister and stupid things apologists for their regimes have come up with. Saddam and Gaddafi both supported international terrorists, pursued WMD programs and had committed genocides. Gaddafi's removal was only conducted because he was, by his own public proclamation, in the process of conducting a genocide. One can presume you object to the international communities efforts to abort this genocide? That you are in fact 'pro' genocide?
Saddam didn't 'disarm'. He invaded a UN member state and declared it part of Iraq. When the US led forces liberated Kuwait from Saddam, they also forcibly disarmed him. They also imposed conditions on his being allowed to continue to remain in power in Iraq. The important ones being a no-fly zone over northern Iraq to prevent him from committing another genocide against the Kurdish Iraqi's and a requirement for International inspections to ensure he didn't restart his WMD programs that had been forcibly taken from him.
Saddam violated the no fly zone routinely and he repeatedly stalled, barred and ejected the international inspection teams. When America was of a mind to say better safe than sorry regarding WMD's in his hands, he refused to allow inspections to prove he had none. That doesn't sound like disarming.
Your quaint little 'we are not to be trusted' throw away suggests that somehow Saddam and Gaddafi were hard done by. It implies the idiotic notion that the NK regime would never have pursued nuclear weapons if Saddam and Gaddafi had been left alone.
Your entire comment is as stupid as it is sinister apologetics for the worst dictators and monsters of our era.
Of all the doomsday scenarios you can project this into, here's the darkest one I see as having merit.
The world(China) is likely to continue to do nothing to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles short of strong language. So, the North WILL develop a nuclear arsenal capable of hitting the continental USA. Of course, the North has no reason to start a war with the USA so why bother? The hopeful argument is that it's defensive. That of course flies directly in the face of everything that the North says. Most importantly, reunification of Korea is still one of the North's most 'important' stated propaganda goals.
Here's the scary part to me. A North Korea that can demonstrably deploy multiple nuclear warheads onto American cities is NOT a North Korea that America is eager to wage war with. Would America even be willing to defend South Korea from an invasion from the North anymore in this future that is now inevitable? More importantly, what does Kim think the American's are willing to do if faced with nuclear retaliation? If Kim calculates that America is NOT willing to lose multiple cities to nuclear attack just to defend the South, then Kim can invade the South without worrying about American backup.
Those were predictions of absolute worst case scenarios. Few scientists took them seriously but of course the media would rather report on unlikely sensational worst case scenarios rather then the slow burning disaster that most mainstream models predict
Not all of the predictions listed are as you describe. One was from the original IPCC report. You know, that crowd of guys who rode Al Gore's coat tails to share a Nobel Prize with him. More than a few scientists took them seriously. In fact, it seems to me it has been described as enough to make up a 'consensus'. They also weren't predicting the worst case, but the expected business as usual scenario. Here's a link to the report and a quote of the claim made: Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be about 0 3C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0 2C to 0 5C) This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1C above the present value (about 2C above that in the pre-industrial period) by 2025...
So, the IPCC's first report predicted we'd hit 2C above pre-industrial temps less than 10 years from now. We aren't on track for that, and we certainly haven't derailed our emissions away from the business as usual scenario.
uh-huh. You get to assume that the lone wolf is correct, but if I argue that knowledgeable people, who have studied the problem are correct i'm engaging in some sort of "if all your friends jumped in a lake" argument.
"my friends" believe CAGW because knowledgeable people who have studied the problem believe it.
GP parroted a claim by Roy Spencer that the climate models 'aren't all that good'.
Forget Roy Spencer because I've seen plenty of stuff from him that was cherry picking BS.
The claim though actually rings true. Even a dead clock is right twice a year and all.
Don't take somebody else's word for it though as some kind of my church leaders are better than yours contest. The IPCC looked at climate models, many, many different peer review climate models. Here is an excerpt from many eyes looking at many different models (and a link to the full article): For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
So that's citing at least 8 different journal articles on the subject, somewhat reliable. The state of the art in climate modelling still doesn't get clouds correct, so they have to hand tune them to make the TOA energy balance right. If they don't, the models drift to an unrealistic state.
Now, the Top Of Atmosphere energy balance is the ONLY important thing to predict regarding CAGW. Increased CO2 ONLY affects the planet by swinging the TOA energy balance. The factor that the models aren't good enough to get right without hand tuning for unknowns...
We know the planet is warming. We know our CO2 emissions are contributing. We even know that the last time CO2 stayed at current levels temperatures were much higher. What we lack, is a good century level simulation or prediction of what our annual emission trends will do to swing things. The climate models are the only good tool we have for that, and they aren't up to that task yet, period.
We know qualitatively that reducing our emissions of CO2 is good, we are NOT able to quantify it though. Is halving CO2 emissions better than adapting to the changes in climate? We don't even know the change that halving has on the climate, so we don't know.
Designed to grow quickly and fix carbon quickly... but need something not found in nature to grow -- thus preventing them from becoming an invasive species.
Another question about your solution, which is not at all a bad solution, is the availability of useable Nitrates.
Trees can pull Carbon out of the atmosphere, but get Nitrogen from the soil. The Nitrogen has to be in bio-available form, and there are limited places to get it on Earth (ie - fertilizer). So much so that about 5% of all the world's energy production goes into making Ammonia, mostly for nitrate fertilizers.
I'm not sure we even *could* plant that many trees and expect them to grow - the amount of Nitrogen needed is enormous, and we can't simply add fertlilzer because it costs us energy to make it. (See: Haber Process.)
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad solution, only that it is incomplete. It should be used in conjunction with as many other scaled-up solutions as we can come up with.
I've got an even better solution. If we developed an economically valuable plant, that grows and fixes carbon quickly and 90% of that plant material could be driven back into the earth each year. Maybe a plant that has edible seeds like wheat, or Soy beans, or canola. We could grow the plants up rapidly every year, pull out only the seeds and till the entirety of the remaining biomass into the ground, capturing the carbon...
We could call it the modern agricultural industry.
I figured someone might come back to me with the so called "pause". The problem with that is while the rise in atmospheric temperatures may have slowed down to a statistically insignificant degree the oceans where over 90 percent of the warming occurs continued to warm during that time. There was no real pause, just a small change in the distribution of heat in the system.
Your grossly overstating the state of climate science. The baseline of climate knowledge that is irrefutably known so far as modelling goes includes: -More energy trapped in the system will overall increase temperature in the system -On a decadal average, more energy is trapped in earth's atmosphere than leaves it as directly measured by satellite for the last 30ish years. -With less certainty, indirect air and ocean temperature records suggest that trend has been the case longer still, around 100 years. -With the enormous caveat of all other things being equal, we know increasing CO2 concentrations will increase energy capture via the greenhouse effect. -We know we've been contributing to a steady rise in CO2 cocentrations -The link between the increased energy capture and CO2 rise seems pretty air tight
Now, that tells us a lot, but it doesn't mean our climate models are necessarily ready for decadal or centennial predictive power. As you suggest, predicting global annual temperatures isn't the best measure of a model. It's a big part of why the failure to predict the pause across virtually 100% of all climate models was problematic, not catastrophic. Models are meant to give us more what the next 30,100,300 years might look like. To do that, they don't so much need to predict the temperature accurately, but instead the energy imabalance over time off how much Earth is gaining/losing year on year.
Now, the part you seem to have not looked at is how well our climate models simulate/predict the energy balance for earth. Here's the IPCC 5th assessment comment on exactly that: For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013)
That's from the IPCC 5th Assessment chapter 9, you should read through it with a skeptical mind. What that is saying is that clouds are sufficiently poorly modelled that unless modellers tune them by hand, the model energy imbalance is so off the models drift to an unrealistic state. This is still a universal limitation.
Long story short we know lots, but there is also still lots we don't know. More pointedly, if models can't predict the energy imbalance, they aren't ready to make predictions at all in any meaningful way as that energy imbalance IS the key to the impact of human CO2 emissions.
Most people do not mean literally 100% exact extremes. 1 Atom literally makes an absolute statement false but practically speaking when we say NONE we normal people have THRESHOLDS and so does science and math when we round off and have acceptable margins of error. We don't have to specify such things except in an academic paper. It doesn't mean that the person has no clue; furthermore, even if they have no clue the statement can still be true. I wonder how somebody like you can function in society without being able to selectively disabling anal mode, you literal minded time waster.
Well, if the EPA 15 ppb is acceptably close to zero for you, do the math on the 1.8 nanograms per gram the article cites as the average found in honey. Am I wrong, or isn't that 1.8 ppb? In the event I missed a zero, it's still about the same as the EPA allowances for human drinking water and lead.
I was not specific - I said under most situations. I was NOT specifically referring to water. Actually, I was thinking paint and then gasoline both which took way too long to catch up with expert opinion (which should be enough when health and safety are involved... except profit $$$ so then it has to be 100% scientific consensus...)
I can only gather from your previous post and this one that you believe that unleaded gasoline and lead-free paint all have 0 parts per billion of lead in them, correct?
I'm not sure how else to read your claim that there is NO safe acceptable level under most situations, and that you have no specifically listed gasoline and paint as examples. Of course you still provide no citations, so let me include another of my own. In addition to the lead standards on water, here is the canadian standards for lead in unleaded gasoline and the EPA standard for lead in paint. These are just the first google results to come up, but they each demonstrate set levels of greater than 0 bpp.
You see, the thing is that at such a detailed level, you can measure the amount of toilet water that gets onto your toothbrush everyday. You can pick a small enough quantity of arsenic or plutonium to consume everyday that you'll be fine, even if that numbers is something like 0.001 pbb. You don't seem to know what your talking about and your failure to provide any references is reinforcing that impression.
Yes and 100% of humans will also be contaminated with pesticides and other chemicals as well. The idea that there is a toggle point that may be reached where not only bees but humans begin to drop dead seems to be unthinkable for many right wing types. Just like global warming they will stay in denial until total disaster forces them into a real view of the world.
You completely ignored the GP's larger point.
Bee's on a gross scale survive neonic exposure. Now, because studies show ill effects to bee's from neonic exposure, public pressure is mounting to ban Neonics. In fact, several governments of the world HAVE banned neonics for this exact reason.
GP pointed out the problem is that the alternative chemicals taking the place of neonics don't show the same ill effects on bees. They don't reduce the bee's range or weaken their immune systems. The problem is that the replacement chemicals don't do that because they outright kill the bees dead right then and there!
I'm gonna leave the rest of your rambling as sufficiently contradictory to discredit itself. You did make a very specific claim though to try and underline your whole train:
Remember when Pb was not a problem? Then we had various levels of acceptable Pb under different situations and finally after a REALLY LONG TIME the conclusion that there really is NO safe acceptable level Pb under most situations.
Here's the EPA's current position on Pb in drinking water. Water treatment systems that maintain under 15 parts per billion of Pb are deemed good enough. They also have standards for safe levels of lead in pipes, because that's the largest source of it now. Your wearing your tinfoil hat too tight.
More processing power, models refined over the decades for more accurate forecasting.
...And they *STILL* can't get the computer climate models to even somewhat-accurately track *PAST* climate changes!
WTF makes anyone think that their predictions about *future* climate changes are any more reliable?
Strat
For anyone wanting something more than the parent's word on this, the IPCC backs him up on it in their 5th assessment report you can read about here: For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
One of the referenced papers comments on the reason tuning is desirable: The choices we make naturally depend on our preconceptions, preferences and objectives. We choose to tune our model because the alternatives - to either drift away from the known climate state, or to introduce flux-corrections - are less attractive. Within the foreseeable future climate model tuning will continue to be necessary as the prospects of constraining the relevant unresolved processes with sufficient precision are not good.
So, our inherent understanding of some processes is still not accurate enough for the job and tuning is a necessary evil. Regrettably, the corrections we tune for are bad enough that they are "essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state".
The challenges still faced from tuning are outlined in another of the referenced papers: CM3w predicts the most realistic 20th century warming. However, this is achieved with a small and less desirable threshold radius of 6.0 m for the onset of precipitation. Conversely, CM3c uses a more desirable value of 10.6 m but produces a very unrealistic 20th century temperature evolution. So the tuning process means using less realistic values for parameters just to make sure the TOA energy balances.
That same paper ends with the following note: Furthermore, in order to predict a realistic evolution of the 20th century, models must balance radiative forcing and climate sensitivity, resulting in a well-documented inverse correlation between forcing and sensitivity [Schwartz etal. 2007; Kiehl, 2007; Andrews etal. 2012]. This inverse correlation is consistent with an intercomparison-driven model selection process in which “climate models’ ability to simulate the 20th century temperature increase with fidelity has become something of a show-stopper as a model unable to reproduce the 20th century would probably not see publication
So, as even the IPCC and many jumping on after me here will be liable to observe, the published climate models out there all more or less are able to recreate the historical temperature record. Of course, as noted this isn't necessarily a comment on inherent merit to the models as the authors note their own model tuning meant the choice between picking a parameter value that better fit the known data, or the parameter that would yield a better hindcast and unless you choose the hindcast you don't get published. If the only models that can get published are tuned for hindcasts, it's less surprising that a sampling of published models manages to do that. The question of HOW they manage to hindcast is key, and the inability to properly control TOA energy without hand balling things is huge.
A beautiful fallacy! Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
No, it is pseudoscience because it lacks proper repeatability and has only the barest elements of falsifiability.
In case there is any question, I am in fact referring to both Medical "sciences" and Climate "science".
That having been said, I would still think that it would be the best course of action to err on the side of caution and assume the "scientists" are correct given the extreme ramifications if they are... The venn diagram is pretty convincing:
option 1: They are wrong and we do nothing: No harm no foul.
option 2: They are wrong and we do everything in our power to stop something that wasnt going to happen anyways: Some short term economic losses, maybe.
option 3: They are right and we do everything in our power to stop it: We saved the planet.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
Only one of those options is really bad. the rest are not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Anybody that isn't a gambling junky knows where to put their bet on that one.
Of course, when you define all the outcomes somehow your argument is compelling...
I'm afraid I can't agree with your views on what it means for us to "do everything in our power to stop it". Nor can I agree with your view on if we do nothing... extinction. So your handy and irrefutable Venn diagram is just a fancy way of declaring yourself the winner by definition, if we can start from assuming you are correct about everything, we can clearly see that you are correct...
If we do everything in our power to stop CO2 that's very extreme. We have the power after all to switch over to negative CO2 emissions if everyone on the planet simply agreed to. We'd turn off ALL fossil fuel based power generation, and start up CO2 capture schemes. Of course, millions and millions of people would die from starvation in this scenario as our ability to produce food would drop radically, and worse our ability to both store and distribute it would as well. The worse part, is humans aren't going to amiably agree to watch their children starve, so if we want some kind of government power to make sure we prevent extinction by acting, even more people are gonna have to be killed for trying to use fossil fuels. We are talking in practical terms of wealthy nations like the west and Europe that can maybe survive on renewables waging war on the developing world to enforce the zero emissions mandate on them.
As for doing 'nothing', it seems to me no stretch at all to say that by the year 2100, electric cars will have made gasoline engines an antique novelty item, and either fission power or renewable sources, or better still fusion will be well on the way to replacing fossil fuel power generation on a COST basis. So, if we do nothing, we've got our emissions globally dramatically dropping off by 2100 anyways. Our climate models have some wide ranging predictions and unknowns, but extinction level change does not result from our curbing our emissions prior to the year 2100.
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
Not quite.
Everything: 4 sigma error, question the model Everything: shame those who think a 6 sigma error is the truth
I agree with where you're going, but in all fairness, the sigma-level that matters depends on the field.
Not all fields can gather very large amounts of data the way particle physics can. For example, psychological and drug-trial studies must live with small sample sizes for moral and practical reasons. Even astronomy sometimes has to cope with large error-bars in results, yet the conclusions they draw can be significant. I think climate science lies somewhere in the middle in this regard.
Climate science is so broad though that it arguably sits in mulitple places. The heat trapping of CO2 is known with extreme precision. Global climate models though still have known unknowns that significantly exceed the global energy imbalance.
Check the IPCC reports on climate models and the CERES and ERBE satellite data on Top of Atmosphere(TOA) energy balances.
Here's the short version. Climate models still model many things poorly because we still don't understand them fully, like clouds. Because of this, the TOA energy balance in the models is similarly poor. To correct for this the models use these poorly known parameters to 'tune' the model's TOA energy results, and the tuning isn't done to make cloud parameters give better matching cloud performance, but instead to give TOA energy a better match. It's all a necessary evil as we refine and improve our understanding. However, the imbalance corrected for by tuning these variables is GREATER than both the directly measured TOA imbalance AND any value of predicted TOA imbalance contribution from changing CO2 concentrations.
The CERES and ERBE direct satellite measurements make the problem even harder. The measurements we do have still have error bars that also exceed the signal of the year to year TOA imbalance and the expected contribution from changing CO2 concentrations.
I took statistics in college and one thing they teach is that not everything has to line up to show a trend.
Except that this point does fit the trend. Does it really not make sense to you that higher temperatures would make the ice break up into smaller pieces and become mobile? Have you ever seen a lake melt in the spring? It doesn't just melt down into a single little ice cube and vanish; it begins to crack and break up into pieces long before the ice completely melts.
You failed to read the IPCC article. Here's the relevant quotes from it: Increased calving of icebergs from the Antarctic Peninsula may, however, affect navigation and shipping lanes north of the Antarctic Convergence. There is no clear consensus, however, about whether the frequency of icebergs, and their danger to shipping, will change with global warming (IPCC 1996, WG II, Section 7.4). Less river ice and a shorter ice season in northward flowing rivers of Canada and Russia should enhance north-south river transport. Combined with less sea ice in the Arctic, this development would provide new opportunities for reorganization of transport networks and trade links. Ultimately, those changes could affect Northern Hemisphere trading patterns (IPCC 1996, WG II, Section 7.5.1).
You need to read your own references better. On the expected results, GP was correct. There was no consensus about what effect warming would have on the threat of icebergs to shipping. There was a consensus that increased ice berg calving was likely in Antarctica. There was a consensus that a shorter ice season and reduced river ice would not only happen in the Arctic, but would make sea travel there change notably for the better.
Your response is about as terrible as you can get.
Take the example of when someone says it's cold in August in Florida this week, looks like climate change is disproven. Your response is akin to declaring that the IPCC expected Florida to be colder in August, and pointing to an article by the IPCC saying they expect it to be warmer. The better response is exactly as the GP observed. Statistically anomalies are going to happen, and you shouldn't be going around embracing the exceptions as the signal.
Clearly that's true to some degree no doubt, but continuing to act as if that's the rational behind all or even a majority of Trump voters (who were not necessarily Trump supporters, there's a difference) isn't exactly endearing the left to anyone outside the echo chambers, or helping to set up whoever runs in 2020 to do better. If there's on thing the middle/low class white people aren't going to want to hear (again) it is someone from a classist institute like Harvard telling them they are racist.
For fuck's sake, someone always has to bring up how the "left" would win over Trump supporters, if the left could just stop being so insulting towards them. Think about this for a second: These are people who ignored every single repulsive aspect of Trump's policies and the campaign he ran. They willingly voted for a man who said, and I quote "I could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." Here's a hint: That means even Trump realizes his own supporters are drinking the kool aid.
These are people who are either completely unwilling to listen to a viewpoint which contradicts their world view, or they actually agree with the deplorable things that come out of Trump's mouth. You're just not going to win over those people; you just have to hope they don't bother to vote, and your side has a better turnout.
Blah, Blah, Blah.
All I hear is the tragedy of why Trump actually stands a chance at re-election. It's not your doomsday scenario of the how evil and intractable Trump voters are though. It's that you perfectly describe the Democratic party's approach to losing the election.
The Democratic party, and people like yourself, need to be reminded that Hillary Clinton LOST to this guy. A presidential candidate that publicly encouraged Russians to hack American computer systems. A presidential candidate on tape talking about he can just grab a women by the p#$$! and get away with it because he's so rich. A presidential candidate that publicly noted the NRA could 'do' something about Obama trying to take away their guns. Take the time to absorb how awful a candidate he truly was. Now take the time to get your head around the fact that Hillary Clinton still managed to lose the election to the guy.
If the Democrats don't want to lose the next election, they need to get people to vote for them next time around that DIDN'T vote for Hillary. If the Democrats choose to declare everyone that voted against Hillary as evil monsters that loved the worst parts of Trump, they are driving away the very people they need to win over.
I might work less at my current job. That doesn't mean I would sit on my butt and watch Netflix all day.
I've actually had periods where I wasn't employed for a reasonable stretch of time. Sure, I did a bunch of video gaming at first, but pretty soon I got bored and restless, and needed to find something productive to do. So yes, I'd find something useful to occupy my time. I might not be punching a clock at a corporate office, though - I might start doing independent hacking and vulnerability research for instance. I might set out coding new apps, or other such things. I might do something entirely different like learn more about automotive computer networks. But I sure wouldn't be idle.
That's great for you. Your anecdote though doesn't refute the experimental runs that have been made before. Many, many times in history nations have tried growing the economy by freeing people to do the work they want to do. Usually the required first step is robbing/taxing land owners/rich so the more deserving people can be free. The end result is mass starvation because the economy does not grow as anticipated by folks relating anecdotes like yours. See the Russian revolution and Mao's great leap forward.
I suppose you could argue that payroll taxes are needed to fund it, but that's a big assumption, and many of the cases for UBI assume it's coming from something else (since it often comes in scenarios where there just isn't enough work/jobs for everyone due to automation or such).
You are quite right, the cases made for UBI almost always assume the money is coming from "something else". The reason is that nobody today can actually afford to pay for it.
American population rounds down to 300 million. Say we cheap out and set UBI at $10,000 annually. That's not even enough for food, clothing and shelter, but we are going to be conservative in pricing this out. The annual cost of that is $3 trillion. The entirety of the American federal budget is $3 trillion.
That means you can't just cancel medicaid, obamacare, and every single welfare program to cover it. You have to cut the entire federal budget, everything.
The reason the 'cases' presented for UBI gloss over the funding by quickly saying it'll be from "somewhere else" is because funding it IS THE PROBLEM.
What ever else you want to say about the Paris Agreement, it's temperature goals are laughable. Look at NOAA's temperature trends since 1880. Temperatures have increased by 1.0 C since 1880, already. The Paris agreement suggests setting goals to keep temperatures below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. From the climate modelling the IPCC has collected, even a complete and absolute global ban on all CO2 emissions tomorrow would NOT reach the 1.5C goal. The existing emissions already out there will ride us over 1.5C before 2100.
This kind of thing has been SOP for the US Government for a very long time, after all, it's how Pinkerton got going.
Anytime Americans have taken a stance that conflicts with the status quo, there has been violence:
The Haymarket Riot is just one of many occasions the US Government in it's many forms has used violence against workers.
First off, it's not the US government that's really behind the pipeline or the tigerswan operations. That's the work of a privately owned, for personal profit corporation.
As for "American's" taking a stance, which American's do you mean should be getting the benefit of the doubt here? The protesters? The owners of the private property? The workers that are trying to build the pipeline? You and I aren't seeing the same basic facts and that is making understanding you difficult. Here's the facts as I see them from reading up a fair bit on this for a long time. Please enlighten me to any blind spots or errors I've made in my base understanding here.
The land on which the pipeline is being built is privately owned by either the company building it, or by people who have made agreements with the company to have the pipeline built.
The protesters are camping on not only reserve land, but also along the pipeline route which is private property belonging the company or local residents. To be clear, they are unquestionably and undeniably trespassing.
The protesters are taking other illegal actions to stop the workers for the company from doing their jobs. Blockading public roads and bridges, trespassing on work sites and obstructing the workers, and burning company equipment and buildings.
Tigerswan's actions from my much quicker overview as they only come across my radar last night appears to have the following as it's 'worst' actions. Flying drones and helicopters over privately owned land and filming activity at the request of the land owners. Paying people to join the protester camps and report back about movements and gather intelligence. Passing this information on to others, including law enforcement. Helping to plan and make recommendations to the company on how to continue to get their work done in spite of the protesters and how to thwart the protesters efforts to stop the work.
Honestly, the worst picture of Tigerswan so far just seems to be linguisitics and background. The company is predominantly ex-military and the language of their reporting all reflects this by approaching the protesters as an insurrectionist movement and using counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency language throughout. The worst actions that they ever recommend is additional survellience and pressuring police to do more than arrest and immediately release people trespassing and vandalizing private property.
From the basic facts, if you want to take the tact of arguing for respecting the rights of private property owners as a basic freedom, it is protesters who are actively violating this principle. The pipeline employees, and sub contractors are all just working on the land their employer owns, doing what their employer wants on it and somehow the protesters believe they have the right to interfere with that. On the grounds of private property rights, the protesters are indisputably in the wrong. Now if you want to make arguments about the greater good and environmental harm in the future as reasons that should trump private property rights in this case that argument could be made. However, it is grossly overstating things to act like the private company hasn't a leg to stand on here, nor that the protesters are clearly in the right or protecting the 'people'.
There is no threat to honeybees (which in the US aren't even native). Queens can be bred in bulk (there are tricks to make a hive produce lots of queens), and starting a new hive only takes a queen and a handful of workers. Beekeepers can order them by mail.
Not quite true - farming practices and the beekeeping practices that are common in the US, are major threats. Pestices are not all that discerning - if they kill harmful insects, then they probably also kill the beneficial ones, and systemic pesticides like the neo-nicotinoids are absorbed into the crop plants and secreted in the nectar. Non-systemic pesticides are less likely to find their way into bees. But possibly the worst threat comes from the fact that beekeepers rely on a narrow monoculture, created by exactly the practices you described, plus of course the way in which American beekeepers in particular transport their hives from all over the US to California, where they can then exchange diseases.
Nice how you entirely ignored the largest threat the GP stated, as did the article and summary. The varroa mite is the primary cause of death in hives right now, outside the natural die off rate. Ironically, all the calls from the anti-pesticide crowd to protect the bees with tougher regulations on chemical usage is contributing to the problem. The only effective treatments right now for hives from the varroa mites are all... chemicals. Restricting chemicals bee farmers are allowed to use to control the mites, and mites developing resistances to what is used are a big problem and if beekeepers could receive a magic solution from the sky a method to better control mites is hands down what they would ask for. But go ahead and make arm chair proclamations about how entire industries are doing everything wrong and you've got 3 simple steps that would solve it all that somehow has eluded them entirely despite the enormous financial incentives to them in improving their methods.
It's entirely unsurprising that a military committee would recommend that a good response to ANYTHING is increasing military spending. When the military advises that defense interests are better served by redirecting their own funding to offsetting climate change that's the point you know they mean it. Otherwise you've got guys with little to no climate background declaring climate change as a good reason to give them more money, which isn't entirely convincing.
The amount of money in AGW is a fraction of the amount of money oil companies pump out of the ground every week.
You are missing just how much money there is to be controlled through carbon taxes and carbon markets. Furthermore, to have a military adviser declaring that topic X is an important reason to increase military funding hardly seems surprising. Call me when the military volunteers their budgets be cut to help offset climate change because it's more effective.
It's a bit of an extreme example but plenty of companies sell network based licenses. So you can install on an infinite number of machines, but can only be running simultaneously on 38 machines at once.
Right, that's why we're currently crushing the WMD-building oppressive regime in North Korea, and pouring troops into Africa to stop the genocide and slaughter by Boko Haram and assorted other nasty dictators.
We seem to be awfully selective about the regions we choose to get involved in.
So let me get this straight. your kinda willing to acknowledge, at least in principle, that lives were saved and/or the situation might have been improved by Saddam's removal. Your counter argument is simply that because not everyone else in the world that needed saving wasn't also saved it was all for naught?
If you see a ferry sinking and everyone on board is drowning and your boat can only hold 5 people do you pick 5 people to save, or do you say it's unfair to save only some of them and just carry on away?
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike the average Hollywood celebrity this celebrity is a celebrity for his brains, not his boobs, his looks or his ability to be a circus clown jumping through hoops for the entertainment of the masses.
Fair enough. Hawking's opinion on AI is much like a Rocket scientists opinions on brain surgery or brain surgeons opinion on rocket design.
AKA, really not much good for anything but headlines.
Lots of folks like it. Especially The dropping bombs part. After Saddam and Gaddafi disarmed we invaded and bombed. You think North Korea learned nothing from that? We as a nation are not to be trusted.
Implying Saddam and Gaddafi were 'playing nice' is one of the most sinister and stupid things apologists for their regimes have come up with. Saddam and Gaddafi both supported international terrorists, pursued WMD programs and had committed genocides. Gaddafi's removal was only conducted because he was, by his own public proclamation, in the process of conducting a genocide. One can presume you object to the international communities efforts to abort this genocide? That you are in fact 'pro' genocide?
Saddam didn't 'disarm'. He invaded a UN member state and declared it part of Iraq. When the US led forces liberated Kuwait from Saddam, they also forcibly disarmed him. They also imposed conditions on his being allowed to continue to remain in power in Iraq. The important ones being a no-fly zone over northern Iraq to prevent him from committing another genocide against the Kurdish Iraqi's and a requirement for International inspections to ensure he didn't restart his WMD programs that had been forcibly taken from him.
Saddam violated the no fly zone routinely and he repeatedly stalled, barred and ejected the international inspection teams. When America was of a mind to say better safe than sorry regarding WMD's in his hands, he refused to allow inspections to prove he had none. That doesn't sound like disarming.
Your quaint little 'we are not to be trusted' throw away suggests that somehow Saddam and Gaddafi were hard done by. It implies the idiotic notion that the NK regime would never have pursued nuclear weapons if Saddam and Gaddafi had been left alone.
Your entire comment is as stupid as it is sinister apologetics for the worst dictators and monsters of our era.
Of all the doomsday scenarios you can project this into, here's the darkest one I see as having merit.
The world(China) is likely to continue to do nothing to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles short of strong language. So, the North WILL develop a nuclear arsenal capable of hitting the continental USA. Of course, the North has no reason to start a war with the USA so why bother? The hopeful argument is that it's defensive. That of course flies directly in the face of everything that the North says. Most importantly, reunification of Korea is still one of the North's most 'important' stated propaganda goals.
Here's the scary part to me. A North Korea that can demonstrably deploy multiple nuclear warheads onto American cities is NOT a North Korea that America is eager to wage war with. Would America even be willing to defend South Korea from an invasion from the North anymore in this future that is now inevitable? More importantly, what does Kim think the American's are willing to do if faced with nuclear retaliation? If Kim calculates that America is NOT willing to lose multiple cities to nuclear attack just to defend the South, then Kim can invade the South without worrying about American backup.
Those were predictions of absolute worst case scenarios. Few scientists took them seriously but of course the media would rather report on unlikely sensational worst case scenarios rather then the slow burning disaster that most mainstream models predict
Not all of the predictions listed are as you describe. One was from the original IPCC report. You know, that crowd of guys who rode Al Gore's coat tails to share a Nobel Prize with him. More than a few scientists took them seriously. In fact, it seems to me it has been described as enough to make up a 'consensus'. They also weren't predicting the worst case, but the expected business as usual scenario. Here's a link to the report and a quote of the claim made:
Under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be about 0 3C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0 2C to 0 5C) This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1C above the present value (about 2C above that in the pre-industrial period) by 2025...
So, the IPCC's first report predicted we'd hit 2C above pre-industrial temps less than 10 years from now. We aren't on track for that, and we certainly haven't derailed our emissions away from the business as usual scenario.
uh-huh. You get to assume that the lone wolf is correct, but if I argue that knowledgeable people, who have studied the problem are correct i'm engaging in some sort of "if all your friends jumped in a lake" argument.
"my friends" believe CAGW because knowledgeable people who have studied the problem believe it.
GP parroted a claim by Roy Spencer that the climate models 'aren't all that good'.
Forget Roy Spencer because I've seen plenty of stuff from him that was cherry picking BS.
The claim though actually rings true. Even a dead clock is right twice a year and all.
Don't take somebody else's word for it though as some kind of my church leaders are better than yours contest. The IPCC looked at climate models, many, many different peer review climate models. Here is an excerpt from many eyes looking at many different models (and a link to the full article):
For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
So that's citing at least 8 different journal articles on the subject, somewhat reliable. The state of the art in climate modelling still doesn't get clouds correct, so they have to hand tune them to make the TOA energy balance right. If they don't, the models drift to an unrealistic state.
Now, the Top Of Atmosphere energy balance is the ONLY important thing to predict regarding CAGW. Increased CO2 ONLY affects the planet by swinging the TOA energy balance. The factor that the models aren't good enough to get right without hand tuning for unknowns...
We know the planet is warming. We know our CO2 emissions are contributing. We even know that the last time CO2 stayed at current levels temperatures were much higher. What we lack, is a good century level simulation or prediction of what our annual emission trends will do to swing things. The climate models are the only good tool we have for that, and they aren't up to that task yet, period.
We know qualitatively that reducing our emissions of CO2 is good, we are NOT able to quantify it though. Is halving CO2 emissions better than adapting to the changes in climate? We don't even know the change that halving has on the climate, so we don't know.
Designed to grow quickly and fix carbon quickly ... but need something not found in nature to grow -- thus preventing them from becoming an invasive species.
Another question about your solution, which is not at all a bad solution, is the availability of useable Nitrates.
Trees can pull Carbon out of the atmosphere, but get Nitrogen from the soil. The Nitrogen has to be in bio-available form, and there are limited places to get it on Earth (ie - fertilizer). So much so that about 5% of all the world's energy production goes into making Ammonia, mostly for nitrate fertilizers.
I'm not sure we even *could* plant that many trees and expect them to grow - the amount of Nitrogen needed is enormous, and we can't simply add fertlilzer because it costs us energy to make it. (See: Haber Process.)
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad solution, only that it is incomplete. It should be used in conjunction with as many other scaled-up solutions as we can come up with.
I've got an even better solution. If we developed an economically valuable plant, that grows and fixes carbon quickly and 90% of that plant material could be driven back into the earth each year. Maybe a plant that has edible seeds like wheat, or Soy beans, or canola. We could grow the plants up rapidly every year, pull out only the seeds and till the entirety of the remaining biomass into the ground, capturing the carbon...
We could call it the modern agricultural industry.
I figured someone might come back to me with the so called "pause". The problem with that is while the rise in atmospheric temperatures may have slowed down to a statistically insignificant degree the oceans where over 90 percent of the warming occurs continued to warm during that time. There was no real pause, just a small change in the distribution of heat in the system.
Your grossly overstating the state of climate science. The baseline of climate knowledge that is irrefutably known so far as modelling goes includes:
-More energy trapped in the system will overall increase temperature in the system
-On a decadal average, more energy is trapped in earth's atmosphere than leaves it as directly measured by satellite for the last 30ish years.
-With less certainty, indirect air and ocean temperature records suggest that trend has been the case longer still, around 100 years.
-With the enormous caveat of all other things being equal, we know increasing CO2 concentrations will increase energy capture via the greenhouse effect.
-We know we've been contributing to a steady rise in CO2 cocentrations
-The link between the increased energy capture and CO2 rise seems pretty air tight
Now, that tells us a lot, but it doesn't mean our climate models are necessarily ready for decadal or centennial predictive power. As you suggest, predicting global annual temperatures isn't the best measure of a model. It's a big part of why the failure to predict the pause across virtually 100% of all climate models was problematic, not catastrophic. Models are meant to give us more what the next 30,100,300 years might look like. To do that, they don't so much need to predict the temperature accurately, but instead the energy imabalance over time off how much Earth is gaining/losing year on year.
Now, the part you seem to have not looked at is how well our climate models simulate/predict the energy balance for earth. Here's the IPCC 5th assessment comment on exactly that:
For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013)
That's from the IPCC 5th Assessment chapter 9, you should read through it with a skeptical mind. What that is saying is that clouds are sufficiently poorly modelled that unless modellers tune them by hand, the model energy imbalance is so off the models drift to an unrealistic state. This is still a universal limitation.
Long story short we know lots, but there is also still lots we don't know. More pointedly, if models can't predict the energy imbalance, they aren't ready to make predictions at all in any meaningful way as that energy imbalance IS the key to the impact of human CO2 emissions.
Most people do not mean literally 100% exact extremes. 1 Atom literally makes an absolute statement false but practically speaking when we say NONE we normal people have THRESHOLDS and so does science and math when we round off and have acceptable margins of error. We don't have to specify such things except in an academic paper. It doesn't mean that the person has no clue; furthermore, even if they have no clue the statement can still be true. I wonder how somebody like you can function in society without being able to selectively disabling anal mode, you literal minded time waster.
Well, if the EPA 15 ppb is acceptably close to zero for you, do the math on the 1.8 nanograms per gram the article cites as the average found in honey. Am I wrong, or isn't that 1.8 ppb? In the event I missed a zero, it's still about the same as the EPA allowances for human drinking water and lead.
I was not specific - I said under most situations. I was NOT specifically referring to water. Actually, I was thinking paint and then gasoline both which took way too long to catch up with expert opinion (which should be enough when health and safety are involved... except profit $$$ so then it has to be 100% scientific consensus...)
I can only gather from your previous post and this one that you believe that unleaded gasoline and lead-free paint all have 0 parts per billion of lead in them, correct?
I'm not sure how else to read your claim that there is NO safe acceptable level under most situations, and that you have no specifically listed gasoline and paint as examples. Of course you still provide no citations, so let me include another of my own. In addition to the lead standards on water, here is the canadian standards for lead in unleaded gasoline and the EPA standard for lead in paint. These are just the first google results to come up, but they each demonstrate set levels of greater than 0 bpp.
http://www.ec.gc.ca/lcpe-cepa/...
https://www.epa.gov/lead/hazar...
You see, the thing is that at such a detailed level, you can measure the amount of toilet water that gets onto your toothbrush everyday. You can pick a small enough quantity of arsenic or plutonium to consume everyday that you'll be fine, even if that numbers is something like 0.001 pbb. You don't seem to know what your talking about and your failure to provide any references is reinforcing that impression.
Yes and 100% of humans will also be contaminated with pesticides and other chemicals as well. The idea that there is a toggle point that may be reached where not only bees but humans begin to drop dead seems to be unthinkable for many right wing types. Just like global warming they will stay in denial until total disaster forces them into a real view of the world.
You completely ignored the GP's larger point.
Bee's on a gross scale survive neonic exposure. Now, because studies show ill effects to bee's from neonic exposure, public pressure is mounting to ban Neonics. In fact, several governments of the world HAVE banned neonics for this exact reason.
GP pointed out the problem is that the alternative chemicals taking the place of neonics don't show the same ill effects on bees. They don't reduce the bee's range or weaken their immune systems. The problem is that the replacement chemicals don't do that because they outright kill the bees dead right then and there!
I'm gonna leave the rest of your rambling as sufficiently contradictory to discredit itself. You did make a very specific claim though to try and underline your whole train:
Remember when Pb was not a problem? Then we had various levels of acceptable Pb under different situations and finally after a REALLY LONG TIME the conclusion that there really is NO safe acceptable level Pb under most situations.
Here's the EPA's current position on Pb in drinking water. Water treatment systems that maintain under 15 parts per billion of Pb are deemed good enough. They also have standards for safe levels of lead in pipes, because that's the largest source of it now. Your wearing your tinfoil hat too tight.
More processing power, models refined over the decades for more accurate forecasting.
...And they *STILL* can't get the computer climate models to even somewhat-accurately track *PAST* climate changes!
WTF makes anyone think that their predictions about *future* climate changes are any more reliable?
Strat
For anyone wanting something more than the parent's word on this, the IPCC backs him up on it in their 5th assessment report you can read about here:
For instance, maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system (Watanabe et al., 2010; Donner et al., 2011; Gent et al., 2011; Golaz et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2011; Hazeleger et al., 2012; Mauritsen et al., 2012; Hourdin et al., 2013).
One of the referenced papers comments on the reason tuning is desirable:
The choices we make naturally depend on our preconceptions, preferences and objectives. We choose to tune our model because the alternatives - to either drift away from the known climate state, or to introduce flux-corrections - are less attractive. Within the foreseeable future climate model tuning will continue to be necessary as the prospects of constraining the relevant unresolved processes with sufficient precision are not good.
So, our inherent understanding of some processes is still not accurate enough for the job and tuning is a necessary evil. Regrettably, the corrections we tune for are bad enough that they are "essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state".
The challenges still faced from tuning are outlined in another of the referenced papers:
CM3w predicts the most realistic 20th century warming. However, this is achieved with a small and less desirable threshold radius of 6.0 m for the onset of precipitation. Conversely, CM3c uses a more desirable value of 10.6 m but produces a very unrealistic 20th century temperature evolution.
So the tuning process means using less realistic values for parameters just to make sure the TOA energy balances.
That same paper ends with the following note:
Furthermore, in order to predict a realistic evolution of the 20th century, models must balance radiative forcing and climate sensitivity, resulting in a well-documented inverse correlation between forcing and sensitivity [Schwartz etal. 2007; Kiehl, 2007; Andrews etal. 2012]. This inverse correlation is consistent with an intercomparison-driven model selection process in which “climate models’ ability to simulate the 20th century temperature increase with fidelity has become something of a show-stopper as a model unable to reproduce the 20th century would probably not see publication
So, as even the IPCC and many jumping on after me here will be liable to observe, the published climate models out there all more or less are able to recreate the historical temperature record. Of course, as noted this isn't necessarily a comment on inherent merit to the models as the authors note their own model tuning meant the choice between picking a parameter value that better fit the known data, or the parameter that would yield a better hindcast and unless you choose the hindcast you don't get published. If the only models that can get published are tuned for hindcasts, it's less surprising that a sampling of published models manages to do that. The question of HOW they manage to hindcast is key, and the inability to properly control TOA energy without hand balling things is huge.
A beautiful fallacy! Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
No, it is pseudoscience because it lacks proper repeatability and has only the barest elements of falsifiability.
In case there is any question, I am in fact referring to both Medical "sciences" and Climate "science".
That having been said, I would still think that it would be the best course of action to err on the side of caution and assume the "scientists" are correct given the extreme ramifications if they are... The venn diagram is pretty convincing:
option 1: They are wrong and we do nothing: No harm no foul.
option 2: They are wrong and we do everything in our power to stop something that wasnt going to happen anyways: Some short term economic losses, maybe.
option 3: They are right and we do everything in our power to stop it: We saved the planet.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
Only one of those options is really bad. the rest are not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Anybody that isn't a gambling junky knows where to put their bet on that one.
Of course, when you define all the outcomes somehow your argument is compelling...
I'm afraid I can't agree with your views on what it means for us to "do everything in our power to stop it". Nor can I agree with your view on if we do nothing... extinction. So your handy and irrefutable Venn diagram is just a fancy way of declaring yourself the winner by definition, if we can start from assuming you are correct about everything, we can clearly see that you are correct...
If we do everything in our power to stop CO2 that's very extreme. We have the power after all to switch over to negative CO2 emissions if everyone on the planet simply agreed to. We'd turn off ALL fossil fuel based power generation, and start up CO2 capture schemes. Of course, millions and millions of people would die from starvation in this scenario as our ability to produce food would drop radically, and worse our ability to both store and distribute it would as well. The worse part, is humans aren't going to amiably agree to watch their children starve, so if we want some kind of government power to make sure we prevent extinction by acting, even more people are gonna have to be killed for trying to use fossil fuels. We are talking in practical terms of wealthy nations like the west and Europe that can maybe survive on renewables waging war on the developing world to enforce the zero emissions mandate on them.
As for doing 'nothing', it seems to me no stretch at all to say that by the year 2100, electric cars will have made gasoline engines an antique novelty item, and either fission power or renewable sources, or better still fusion will be well on the way to replacing fossil fuel power generation on a COST basis. So, if we do nothing, we've got our emissions globally dramatically dropping off by 2100 anyways. Our climate models have some wide ranging predictions and unknowns, but extinction level change does not result from our curbing our emissions prior to the year 2100.
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model
Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
Not quite.
Everything: 4 sigma error, question the model
Everything: shame those who think a 6 sigma error is the truth
I agree with where you're going, but in all fairness, the sigma-level that matters depends on the field.
Not all fields can gather very large amounts of data the way particle physics can. For example, psychological and drug-trial studies must live with small sample sizes for moral and practical reasons. Even astronomy sometimes has to cope with large error-bars in results, yet the conclusions they draw can be significant. I think climate science lies somewhere in the middle in this regard.
Climate science is so broad though that it arguably sits in mulitple places. The heat trapping of CO2 is known with extreme precision. Global climate models though still have known unknowns that significantly exceed the global energy imbalance.
Check the IPCC reports on climate models and the CERES and ERBE satellite data on Top of Atmosphere(TOA) energy balances.
Here's the short version. Climate models still model many things poorly because we still don't understand them fully, like clouds. Because of this, the TOA energy balance in the models is similarly poor. To correct for this the models use these poorly known parameters to 'tune' the model's TOA energy results, and the tuning isn't done to make cloud parameters give better matching cloud performance, but instead to give TOA energy a better match. It's all a necessary evil as we refine and improve our understanding. However, the imbalance corrected for by tuning these variables is GREATER than both the directly measured TOA imbalance AND any value of predicted TOA imbalance contribution from changing CO2 concentrations.
The CERES and ERBE direct satellite measurements make the problem even harder. The measurements we do have still have error bars that also exceed the signal of the year to year TOA imbalance and the expected contribution from changing CO2 concentrations.
The ice becoming more mobile to the point of becoming a hazard to navigation was something I've never seen predicted before.
Well maybe you never saw it, but...
I took statistics in college and one thing they teach is that not everything has to line up to show a trend.
Except that this point does fit the trend. Does it really not make sense to you that higher temperatures would make the ice break up into smaller pieces and become mobile? Have you ever seen a lake melt in the spring? It doesn't just melt down into a single little ice cube and vanish; it begins to crack and break up into pieces long before the ice completely melts.
You failed to read the IPCC article. Here's the relevant quotes from it:
Increased calving of icebergs from the Antarctic Peninsula may, however, affect navigation and shipping lanes north of the Antarctic Convergence.
There is no clear consensus, however, about whether the frequency of icebergs, and their danger to shipping, will change with global warming (IPCC 1996, WG II, Section 7.4).
Less river ice and a shorter ice season in northward flowing rivers of Canada and Russia should enhance north-south river transport. Combined with less sea ice in the Arctic, this development would provide new opportunities for reorganization of transport networks and trade links. Ultimately, those changes could affect Northern Hemisphere trading patterns (IPCC 1996, WG II, Section 7.5.1).
You need to read your own references better. On the expected results, GP was correct. There was no consensus about what effect warming would have on the threat of icebergs to shipping. There was a consensus that increased ice berg calving was likely in Antarctica. There was a consensus that a shorter ice season and reduced river ice would not only happen in the Arctic, but would make sea travel there change notably for the better.
Your response is about as terrible as you can get.
Take the example of when someone says it's cold in August in Florida this week, looks like climate change is disproven. Your response is akin to declaring that the IPCC expected Florida to be colder in August, and pointing to an article by the IPCC saying they expect it to be warmer. The better response is exactly as the GP observed. Statistically anomalies are going to happen, and you shouldn't be going around embracing the exceptions as the signal.
Clearly that's true to some degree no doubt, but continuing to act as if that's the rational behind all or even a majority of Trump voters (who were not necessarily Trump supporters, there's a difference) isn't exactly endearing the left to anyone outside the echo chambers, or helping to set up whoever runs in 2020 to do better. If there's on thing the middle/low class white people aren't going to want to hear (again) it is someone from a classist institute like Harvard telling them they are racist.
For fuck's sake, someone always has to bring up how the "left" would win over Trump supporters, if the left could just stop being so insulting towards them.
Think about this for a second: These are people who ignored every single repulsive aspect of Trump's policies and the campaign he ran. They willingly voted for a man who said, and I quote "I could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." Here's a hint: That means even Trump realizes his own supporters are drinking the kool aid.
These are people who are either completely unwilling to listen to a viewpoint which contradicts their world view, or they actually agree with the deplorable things that come out of Trump's mouth. You're just not going to win over those people; you just have to hope they don't bother to vote, and your side has a better turnout.
Blah, Blah, Blah.
All I hear is the tragedy of why Trump actually stands a chance at re-election. It's not your doomsday scenario of the how evil and intractable Trump voters are though. It's that you perfectly describe the Democratic party's approach to losing the election.
The Democratic party, and people like yourself, need to be reminded that Hillary Clinton LOST to this guy. A presidential candidate that publicly encouraged Russians to hack American computer systems. A presidential candidate on tape talking about he can just grab a women by the p#$$! and get away with it because he's so rich. A presidential candidate that publicly noted the NRA could 'do' something about Obama trying to take away their guns. Take the time to absorb how awful a candidate he truly was. Now take the time to get your head around the fact that Hillary Clinton still managed to lose the election to the guy.
If the Democrats don't want to lose the next election, they need to get people to vote for them next time around that DIDN'T vote for Hillary. If the Democrats choose to declare everyone that voted against Hillary as evil monsters that loved the worst parts of Trump, they are driving away the very people they need to win over.
I might work less at my current job. That doesn't mean I would sit on my butt and watch Netflix all day.
I've actually had periods where I wasn't employed for a reasonable stretch of time. Sure, I did a bunch of video gaming at first, but pretty soon I got bored and restless, and needed to find something productive to do. So yes, I'd find something useful to occupy my time. I might not be punching a clock at a corporate office, though - I might start doing independent hacking and vulnerability research for instance. I might set out coding new apps, or other such things. I might do something entirely different like learn more about automotive computer networks. But I sure wouldn't be idle.
That's great for you. Your anecdote though doesn't refute the experimental runs that have been made before. Many, many times in history nations have tried growing the economy by freeing people to do the work they want to do. Usually the required first step is robbing/taxing land owners/rich so the more deserving people can be free. The end result is mass starvation because the economy does not grow as anticipated by folks relating anecdotes like yours. See the Russian revolution and Mao's great leap forward.
I suppose you could argue that payroll taxes are needed to fund it, but that's a big assumption, and many of the cases for UBI assume it's coming from something else (since it often comes in scenarios where there just isn't enough work/jobs for everyone due to automation or such).
You are quite right, the cases made for UBI almost always assume the money is coming from "something else". The reason is that nobody today can actually afford to pay for it.
American population rounds down to 300 million.
Say we cheap out and set UBI at $10,000 annually. That's not even enough for food, clothing and shelter, but we are going to be conservative in pricing this out.
The annual cost of that is $3 trillion. The entirety of the American federal budget is $3 trillion.
That means you can't just cancel medicaid, obamacare, and every single welfare program to cover it. You have to cut the entire federal budget, everything.
The reason the 'cases' presented for UBI gloss over the funding by quickly saying it'll be from "somewhere else" is because funding it IS THE PROBLEM.
What ever else you want to say about the Paris Agreement, it's temperature goals are laughable. Look at NOAA's temperature trends since 1880. Temperatures have increased by 1.0 C since 1880, already. The Paris agreement suggests setting goals to keep temperatures below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. From the climate modelling the IPCC has collected, even a complete and absolute global ban on all CO2 emissions tomorrow would NOT reach the 1.5C goal. The existing emissions already out there will ride us over 1.5C before 2100.
This kind of thing has been SOP for the US Government for a very long time, after all, it's how Pinkerton got going.
Anytime Americans have taken a stance that conflicts with the status quo, there has been violence:
The Haymarket Riot is just one of many occasions the US Government in it's many forms has used violence against workers.
First off, it's not the US government that's really behind the pipeline or the tigerswan operations. That's the work of a privately owned, for personal profit corporation.
As for "American's" taking a stance, which American's do you mean should be getting the benefit of the doubt here? The protesters? The owners of the private property? The workers that are trying to build the pipeline? You and I aren't seeing the same basic facts and that is making understanding you difficult. Here's the facts as I see them from reading up a fair bit on this for a long time. Please enlighten me to any blind spots or errors I've made in my base understanding here.
The land on which the pipeline is being built is privately owned by either the company building it, or by people who have made agreements with the company to have the pipeline built.
The protesters are camping on not only reserve land, but also along the pipeline route which is private property belonging the company or local residents. To be clear, they are unquestionably and undeniably trespassing.
The protesters are taking other illegal actions to stop the workers for the company from doing their jobs. Blockading public roads and bridges, trespassing on work sites and obstructing the workers, and burning company equipment and buildings.
Tigerswan's actions from my much quicker overview as they only come across my radar last night appears to have the following as it's 'worst' actions. Flying drones and helicopters over privately owned land and filming activity at the request of the land owners. Paying people to join the protester camps and report back about movements and gather intelligence. Passing this information on to others, including law enforcement. Helping to plan and make recommendations to the company on how to continue to get their work done in spite of the protesters and how to thwart the protesters efforts to stop the work.
Honestly, the worst picture of Tigerswan so far just seems to be linguisitics and background. The company is predominantly ex-military and the language of their reporting all reflects this by approaching the protesters as an insurrectionist movement and using counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency language throughout. The worst actions that they ever recommend is additional survellience and pressuring police to do more than arrest and immediately release people trespassing and vandalizing private property.
From the basic facts, if you want to take the tact of arguing for respecting the rights of private property owners as a basic freedom, it is protesters who are actively violating this principle. The pipeline employees, and sub contractors are all just working on the land their employer owns, doing what their employer wants on it and somehow the protesters believe they have the right to interfere with that. On the grounds of private property rights, the protesters are indisputably in the wrong. Now if you want to make arguments about the greater good and environmental harm in the future as reasons that should trump private property rights in this case that argument could be made. However, it is grossly overstating things to act like the private company hasn't a leg to stand on here, nor that the protesters are clearly in the right or protecting the 'people'.
There is no threat to honeybees (which in the US aren't even native). Queens can be bred in bulk (there are tricks to make a hive produce lots of queens), and starting a new hive only takes a queen and a handful of workers. Beekeepers can order them by mail.
Not quite true - farming practices and the beekeeping practices that are common in the US, are major threats. Pestices are not all that discerning - if they kill harmful insects, then they probably also kill the beneficial ones, and systemic pesticides like the neo-nicotinoids are absorbed into the crop plants and secreted in the nectar. Non-systemic pesticides are less likely to find their way into bees. But possibly the worst threat comes from the fact that beekeepers rely on a narrow monoculture, created by exactly the practices you described, plus of course the way in which American beekeepers in particular transport their hives from all over the US to California, where they can then exchange diseases.
Nice how you entirely ignored the largest threat the GP stated, as did the article and summary. The varroa mite is the primary cause of death in hives right now, outside the natural die off rate. Ironically, all the calls from the anti-pesticide crowd to protect the bees with tougher regulations on chemical usage is contributing to the problem. The only effective treatments right now for hives from the varroa mites are all... chemicals. Restricting chemicals bee farmers are allowed to use to control the mites, and mites developing resistances to what is used are a big problem and if beekeepers could receive a magic solution from the sky a method to better control mites is hands down what they would ask for. But go ahead and make arm chair proclamations about how entire industries are doing everything wrong and you've got 3 simple steps that would solve it all that somehow has eluded them entirely despite the enormous financial incentives to them in improving their methods.
It's entirely unsurprising that a military committee would recommend that a good response to ANYTHING is increasing military spending. When the military advises that defense interests are better served by redirecting their own funding to offsetting climate change that's the point you know they mean it. Otherwise you've got guys with little to no climate background declaring climate change as a good reason to give them more money, which isn't entirely convincing.
The amount of money in AGW is a fraction of the amount of money oil companies pump out of the ground every week.
You are missing just how much money there is to be controlled through carbon taxes and carbon markets. Furthermore, to have a military adviser declaring that topic X is an important reason to increase military funding hardly seems surprising. Call me when the military volunteers their budgets be cut to help offset climate change because it's more effective.
It's a bit of an extreme example but plenty of companies sell network based licenses. So you can install on an infinite number of machines, but can only be running simultaneously on 38 machines at once.
Right, that's why we're currently crushing the WMD-building oppressive regime in North Korea, and pouring troops into Africa to stop the genocide and slaughter by Boko Haram and assorted other nasty dictators.
We seem to be awfully selective about the regions we choose to get involved in.
So let me get this straight. your kinda willing to acknowledge, at least in principle, that lives were saved and/or the situation might have been improved by Saddam's removal. Your counter argument is simply that because not everyone else in the world that needed saving wasn't also saved it was all for naught?
If you see a ferry sinking and everyone on board is drowning and your boat can only hold 5 people do you pick 5 people to save, or do you say it's unfair to save only some of them and just carry on away?