The major problem with a mammoth would be that there would be nobody (as in other mammoths) to raise it. There is a fair chance they worked like elephants. Unless a herd of elephants accepted it (possible but unlikely), you'd end up with a completely neurotic animal that would have no social clues whatsoever.
I don't really see your problem, that really shouldn't alter the taste very much.
Here in the UK, this explains why there is so much more knife crime at the moment - not because the youngsters are necessarily intrinsically more violent but because they have neither the time nor inclination to exercise some self-control and think about the consequences of their actions before drawing that knife from their boot.
I agree with much of your post, but this really doesn't explain what the kids were doing with a knife in their boot in the first place.
"Why can't we all just get along?!" I'd rather see research and development dollars spent making war and conflict obsolete.
Questions like this are why foreign policy isn't in the hands of geeks and scientists that aren't versed in history.
In the entire recorded history of mankind, the only time violence isn't used is when the benefits of using it are smaller than the reward. The only time you don't see violence through out history is when two sides are evenly matched and fighting isn't worthwhile to either side. Even worse, that isn't a guarantee of peace, it is just the only condition through out history that has seen it. Hence, the pursuit of better weapons never ends as every 'side' faces victimization if they fall too far behind the other.
Our civilization is going to hurtle down the road it's going down, until it runs into something Really Bad -- maybe global warming, maybe Peak Oil, maybe something else -- and either engineers a clever way around it, or collapses in an orgy of suffering and death like nothing history has ever recorded.
Given how much money is at stake in finding a solution, my money is on engineering a clever way around it. Like more fission power plants to be later replaced by fusion or solar and efficient electric cars, problem solved. And as bad as America's pollution may be now, it is vastly better than it was 20,40,60 years ago. We are making steady progress and as long as we continue researching better solutions I'm far more worried about global social problems than environmental ones. A half million dead in Rwanda while the world does nothing offends me far more than any neo-hippie driving a hummer.
100 years ago, the Wright Brothers had already flown. The first military flight and the first airport opening were both in 1908.
You're seriously splitting hairs, they flew in 1903. When talking about sweeping scales of history 100 years ago usually means 1900, not November 14, 1908.
Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think", 1945, is considered the first article to describe something like the Internet.
And sci fi has predicted things like fusion and faster than light travel as well. The thing is, before semiconductors were discovered a computer network like the internet was unthinkable.
You are still refusing to recognize the bigger issue. Advances in technology are often abrupt and come quickly. Any day something like the LHC could uncover the connection between gravity and electricity and set off a whole new set of advances like we saw at the start of this century. Point being, predicting mankind's demise based on the assumption no new discoveries are made in the future is ridiculous.
We're running out of oil. The optimistic position is that peak oil is 20 years away. The pessimistic position is that peak oil was two years ago. Few think there's 50 years of oil left. There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil.
Just because your ignorant of the replacements doesn't mean they don't exist. Even if you lack imagination and want to stick with 1808 train systems, there is far more coal in the world than oil. Then there is uranium, thorium which by us 100's of years before we would even need to rely on renewable sources like wind and solar.
Industrial civilization is only about 200 years old. It's convenient to start at 1808, the first year somebody bought a train ticket. That was when the industrial revolution started affecting large numbers of people. Does industrial civilization have another 200 years left?
Um, projecting 100's of years based on assumptions just doesn't work well. How many people 100 years ago would have predicted heavier than air flight, let alone the moon landing? How many would have predicted the internet 50 years ago?
The result has been a lot of work on numerical solutions to General Relativity (GR). Einstein's equation can be divided into dynamical equations and constraint equations, and I know there are many computational models in which corrections must be added "by hand" at each time step (or, if you like, to the solution on each space-like hypersurface in the coordinates of choice) so that constraint equations equations are approximately obeyed.
This is NOT the same as with GCM's though. When finding numerical solutions to GR you know how to check your modeled answer to the correct answer. Modeling the carbon/hydrological cycle is NOT defined anywhere near as well as General Relativity. Modeling a complex system who's operation is not well understood is entirely different from modeling something as well defined as GR.
I'm not sure what precisely you're including in "computational physics", but I don't think this really applies to modeling the structure of stars and compact objects, modeling strong gravity phenomena (like compact object binary inspirals), lattice QCD calculations, quark gluon plasma modeling, structure formation in the Universe, etc. In most of those examples we cannot construct any sort of real controlled test of what's being modeled and in all of those cases much of the data on which our models are based comes from indirect inference. Do you similarly consider all of these areas of investigation (some of which are very active and well funded) to be invalid?
But the physics models you list do have either the basic laws of physics or sizable and reliable data sets to compare against. You cut my post off at an important distinction:
"Our data for most variables in GCM's don't even amount to 100 years worth before relying on projections and estimates. Better still, virtually all the measured data we have is considered to be historically unprecedented(that's bad for calibrating against)."
Look at the datasets presented by the IPCC for sea level, temperature and CO2 levels. Consistently they show a time line with three distinct breaks: indirect, direct and projected. And the data for each break is radically different from the last. What we have is tens of thousands of years of indirect data with a consistent pattern and less than 100 years of direct data with a pattern completely unprecedented in the indirect data. When that is all you have to calibrate your model against, you're going to have problems with a simple model, let alone modeling something as incredibly complex as climate.
You might not want to kill the person, you might just want to charge your phone, but that's the decision you're making, and I believe that's where we're at now with regards to climate change and other environmental damage.
And that is EXACTLY the point. I never questioned that you were convinced that failure to curb carbon emissions was equivalent to wiping out entire cultures. I just stated it is stupid beyond belief to condemn anyone who doesn't curb emissions as wanting to wipe out other cultures.
Oh, and none of the references you gave in any way suggested that man made climate change is destined to wipe out millions unless we act now. Please remember that far more wars have been fought over things like money, which is needed for any attempt at reducing emissions. There is a balance to be struck and just because you believe in a particular approach doesn't make you right. There's a lot of unknowns at the future economic and social impact level.
computational physics work with assumptions that would make a climatologist blush, and models are always non-physical.
Two words, data quality. Computational physics models are calibrated against reliable test data by building REAL examples of what is being modeled. That's the only real way to know if the assumptions used are going to allow reliable results. Our data for most variables in GCM's don't even amount to 100 years worth before relying on projections and estimates. Better still, virtually all the measured data we have is considered to be historically unprecedented(that's bad for calibrating against).
If you want to go further, the complexity of the climate system makes the complexity of a small plasma look childish by comparison.
It seems much more arrogant to me to believe that we have the right to destroy other human cultures and wipe out entire species wholesale because we're not willing to consider the consequences of our actions.
Quite obviously, nobody talking about global warming wants to destroy other human cultures or wipe out entire species. Just because YOU assume that driving an SUV will cause the extinction of penguins doesn't make it true. The argument has NOTHING to do with if we should wipe out other human cultures. The argument is how much impact does human activity have on climate change and how much does that change affect everything else.
It's only zealots that resort to suggesting anyone with different assumptions WANTS to see other people suffer. Thank the heavens the nuts like them are still in the ignorable minority among the likes of the UFO and moon landing conspiracy theorists.
CO2 *DOUBLED* thanks to man over last hundred years.
Actually, the "alarmist's" favorite scientific consensus, the IPCC, states that "A wide range of direct and indirect measurements confirm that the atmospheric mixing ratio of CO2 has increased globally by about 100 ppm (36%) over the last 250 years".
36% total over the last 250 years is not equal to doubling in the last 100 due to man alone.
And if you think that thousands and thousands of people that deal with modeling and understanding *climate* (no, not some "weatherman" on XYZ station) don't look at history to see how climate changed in the past, including sea levels, then you are truly, truly fucked in the head.
Well, from your opening sentence you don't seem to be listening to the people dealing with the models, but let's take a look at the most quoted IPCC 'expert' opinion:
-From 1958 through the early 1990's, the IPCC reference exactly 1 dataset for CO2 concentrations(they neatly dismiss or ignore ALL other existing measured values for CO2 concentrations prior to the 1990). -From 1990 onward 4 datasets from 4 sites have been used:Mauna Loa, Baring Head, Cape Grim (Tasmania) and the South Pole. -From the IPCC's own report I linked above these sites "were chosen because air sampled at such locations shows little short-term variation caused by local sources and sinks of CO2 and provided the first data from which the global increase of atmospheric CO2 was documented." *emphasis mine because it's important*
So the IPCC's opinion of historic CO2 is based on 'measured' values that start in 1990, and a single data source that goes back to '58 chosen BECAUSE it was "the first data from which the global increase of atmospheric CO2 was documented". Still feeling confident in the projections of historically unprecedented change that such a source predicts? That should be rhetorical, but since you also stated with confidence that mankind alone has doubled CO2 in the last 100 years I'm guessing maybe not.
To some extent, it's pretty irrelevant whether humans are changing it or not. The true question is "What is the cost of the changing climate, and what is the cost of fixing it?" This of course begs the question of whether the change is manmade or not, but it's not the starting point.
No, the effect humans are having is ALL that matters when trying to figure out the cost of 'fixing' climate change. The cost of preventing climate change is 100% dependent on how much our activity can impact it. If our influence on climate change is enormous maybe we could change it enough by spending $10 per year, but if we have only a small influence on climate change, even trillions of dollars may not be enough to change climate to a meaningful extent.
We have a cost/benefit equation before us to choose between adapting to climate change, and trying to stop it, or some combination there of. The impact that we can have on climate change is of unquestionable importance to that decision and the alarmists seem to think that by setting the costs for adaptation at infinity they can ignore the question, they can't.
A simple answer: between 1993 and 2000, the mean rate was 3.1mm/year, and it is increasing. These islands are like, 150 centimeters above sea level. Not much margin there.
For scientific questions like sea level rise, get a better source than wikipedia. Even the IPCC estimates the current measured rates of increase at around 1.7mm/year. By their best guess, even by the end of the century rates are only expected to be reaching 4mm per year. There estimates also contradict the article's 59cm increase, citing an expectation of 22-44cm above 1990 levels by 2090.
Another nice part of the IPCC report linked above is a graph they include showing sea level changes. It is pretty well flat before the 1900's and rises from 1900-2000, and from 200 through 2100 it begins rising much sharper. The graph is also nicely broken up by three lines that show the flat line before 1900 is "estimates of the past", and the slightly rising line is the "instrumental record" and the scarily rising line is "Projections of the future". If that doesn't draw a critical look from any rational mind I don't know what will.
It is also typical of climate change science, we have a very short term data set and base most projections on estimates of the past and future. Then scary graphs are shown were the estimate past is mostly static, the present is gradually changing from the past's static pattern, and the future is predicted to change exponentially. Just look at the graphs frequently used for temperature and CO2 concentrations as examples. It's BS and I can't believe how many scientifically minded people seem to tolerate it.
Can someone please exlplain how it is that a bunch of irregulars with poorly maintained AK-47 rifles and surplus Katyusha rockets that date back to the cold war can keep us on our toes in Afghanistan when we have all of this high tech and expensive army gear?
It sounds like you are missing part of the picture. In the first days of Afghanistan, the Taliban forces still attempted to hold territory and maintain a military presence in Afghanistan. They were cut down so badly they have abandoned that notion. That's why you see them using their current tactics. Hide in Pakistan, or frightened/sympathetic villages and place IED's in areas that are travelled but not well defended by our forces. Just look at the casualties our troops suffer in the region, they are almost exclusively due to IED's and suicide bombings. Look at the operations where they even use rifles, virtually all of them are against aid workers and the few that are against actual soldiers are largely unsuccessfull.
Now, with that picture in mind the question of how we are still not in better control of the country looms all the larger. Other posters have pointed out the safe haven in Pakistan, which is a problem. I'm pretty sure that the larger problem though is economic. With far more than half the country's GDP dependent on the opium trade, the fact that the Taliban are one of the only buyers looms large. It's hard to get the support of people who can't feed their children without selling their crops to your enemies. The summary being that the Taliban's persistence has nothing to do with military capability. IMHO we should be buying the opium from civilians at market price and if we can't find a good use for it just throw it in an incinerator. The support it would gain is worth the expense 10 times over. The national GDP is around $10 billion, I'm from Canada and even our relatively small presence there has already doubled that in cost.
I'm not implying that any recorded UFO event is extraterrestrial in origin, but in many cases you have to consider this possibility by an absolute lack of alternative explanations.
And intelligent design isn't implying any particular creator, they just want to consider the possibility by the lack of alternative explanations.
I'm sorry, but most people, I'll say correctly, believe alternative explanations like top secret terrestrial craft over extra terrestrial origin theories. You see, we know there are terrestrial sources for flying objects. As of yet, we don't know of any extra terrestrial ones. The only 'evidence' of extraterrestrial origin is the absence of evidence for terrestrial origins. That's not good enough to leap to conclusions, it's one step from invoking the FSM or Santa's sleigh.
I'm Canadian too, so I've been watching the party's here closely:
I'm sorry to say it, but the Reform merger ruined the tories.
Only if by ruined you mean brought them back into power. I'm pretty confident all political parties(at least Canada/US ones I'm familiar with) care only about getting their party more power/influence and in that sense the merger was great for them.
"Unite the Right" really amounted to a bunch of secular, principled conservatives compromising to quasi-fundamentalist American style conservative values. It got them elected, but at what cost?
And again, only if conservative American values are defined as slightly left of Obama. The Canadian left has swung out too far and the voting public is voicing it's displeasure. Nobody in Canada wants to adopt American style healthcare, but then, only the extreme left actually believes that the Conservative party wants that. The rest of us don't consider having a strong and positive relationship with our largest trading partner and closest ally as akin to treason. There is a line between selling out to America and simply working together with your neighbour, but our lefties are too caught up in hating Bush to see that line.
I know I aught be able to work this out myself, but I'm not sure if general newtonian calculations would be accurate. Is it possible to orbit a black hole from inside the event horizon if it is big enough? It seems intuitively obvious that if you can't achieve escape velocity you shouldn't be able to reach an orbital velocity either but I thought I'd see if someone was willing to give a more solid answer.
What is it that makes it possible for these kind of people to have investors fawn at their feet whilst the rest of us have problems getting investors to believe in the basic laws of physics?
Your answer is in your question. These people sell to those that don't understand or care about the basic laws of physics, that is a much larger target market.:(
Well, you see, there's this thing about military action: it's not all the same. It tends to actually matter who you attack, at what scale, with what goal, and with what strategy.
It is very possible that another leader would fuck up spectacularly too, but I have to believe that _most_ leaders would at least go after someone who actually had something to do with the attack.
First off, I too hate Bush. This still sounds to me like "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos". Don't believe me? How many democrats voted against the Iraq war?
The whole 50/50 coin toss election process the article points out suggests to me a bigger change is needed than a mere switch from Rep to Dem or vis. versa every couple years.
It has seen the end of Jack Thompson, It has seen the end of a RIAA lawsuit, The end of copyright cops, The end of Comcast's forging of RST packets, It will soon see the end of the Empire itself!
Wow. You couldn't be more wrong. Any scientist anywhere will tell you that the ocean is a carbon sink - absorbing CO2. Only after the Ocean gets warmer does it release CO2.
The point is that the Ocean wouldn't being emitting CO2 if it wasn't absorbing so much of it from man made sources in the first place.
And if it wasn't absorbing so much CO2 from all the other 95% of the world's natural carbon emission sources. It is hardly good science to say mankind is dominating all climate change factors when our largest influence is an extra 5% to CO2 emissions.
Al Gore, while he mentioned a number of previous Ice Ages, noted that the CO2 levels directly related to temperature, and that at no time in 650,000 years did CO2 levels ever go higher than 300 ppmv (parts per million by volume). The historical high is 280 ppmv.
In 1960, there was a concentration of 315 ppmv. Today we sit at 385 ppmv. There is no projection that it will slow down or decrease, but rather increase much more.
And all measurements of CO2 concentrations from more than 100 years ago are all based on ice core samples. When the data shows an unprecedented change in measurements in those last 100 years one might be wise to take a harder look at the interpretation of ice cores. Much like the hockey stick graph shows a radical temperature rise that coincides with the start of the measured temperature record.
Pointing out that both times coincide approximately with industrialization is true, but ignores they also coincide with a methodology change in collecting the data!
Do we know that ice cores would register peaking CO2 levels like those today for a 10 year period in a sample from 100,000 years ago? Do we know that we are properly accounting for urban heating in temperature measurements? The fact that we describe the data for both as unprecedented in 100's of thousands of years might suggest to some the answer to both is no!
The only dispute is over the "average ice density" in the Arctic, but no one disputes the reduction of ice of the caps, or Arctic Shrinkage. The before and after pictures are shocking.
And undersea geologists went in within the last year or 2 and found a shocking amount of underwater volcanic activity. Not only were they expecting none, they found nearly record levels of activity. But no, the ice is melting because of CO2 emissions. But once again remember that underwater vents dump out more CO2 than humanity combined, and we just found a new extremely active section right under the arctic ice that's melting at record rates.
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The major problem with a mammoth would be that there would be nobody (as in other mammoths) to raise it. There is a fair chance they worked like elephants. Unless a herd of elephants accepted it (possible but unlikely), you'd end up with a completely neurotic animal that would have no social clues whatsoever.
I don't really see your problem, that really shouldn't alter the taste very much.
Here in the UK, this explains why there is so much more knife crime at the moment - not because the youngsters are necessarily intrinsically more violent but because they have neither the time nor inclination to exercise some self-control and think about the consequences of their actions before drawing that knife from their boot.
I agree with much of your post, but this really doesn't explain what the kids were doing with a knife in their boot in the first place.
What would happen if you aerosolized said cube with a small explosive?
I presume you mean a small explosive like, say, I dunno, anti-matter?
"Why can't we all just get along?!" I'd rather see research and development dollars spent making war and conflict obsolete.
Questions like this are why foreign policy isn't in the hands of geeks and scientists that aren't versed in history.
In the entire recorded history of mankind, the only time violence isn't used is when the benefits of using it are smaller than the reward. The only time you don't see violence through out history is when two sides are evenly matched and fighting isn't worthwhile to either side. Even worse, that isn't a guarantee of peace, it is just the only condition through out history that has seen it. Hence, the pursuit of better weapons never ends as every 'side' faces victimization if they fall too far behind the other.
Our civilization is going to hurtle down the road it's going down, until it runs into something Really Bad -- maybe global warming, maybe Peak Oil, maybe something else -- and either engineers a clever way around it, or collapses in an orgy of suffering and death like nothing history has ever recorded.
Given how much money is at stake in finding a solution, my money is on engineering a clever way around it. Like more fission power plants to be later replaced by fusion or solar and efficient electric cars, problem solved. And as bad as America's pollution may be now, it is vastly better than it was 20,40,60 years ago. We are making steady progress and as long as we continue researching better solutions I'm far more worried about global social problems than environmental ones. A half million dead in Rwanda while the world does nothing offends me far more than any neo-hippie driving a hummer.
100 years ago, the Wright Brothers had already flown. The first military flight and the first airport opening were both in 1908.
You're seriously splitting hairs, they flew in 1903. When talking about sweeping scales of history 100 years ago usually means 1900, not November 14, 1908.
Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think", 1945, is considered the first article to describe something like the Internet.
And sci fi has predicted things like fusion and faster than light travel as well. The thing is, before semiconductors were discovered a computer network like the internet was unthinkable.
You are still refusing to recognize the bigger issue. Advances in technology are often abrupt and come quickly. Any day something like the LHC could uncover the connection between gravity and electricity and set off a whole new set of advances like we saw at the start of this century. Point being, predicting mankind's demise based on the assumption no new discoveries are made in the future is ridiculous.
We're running out of oil. The optimistic position is that peak oil is 20 years away. The pessimistic position is that peak oil was two years ago. Few think there's 50 years of oil left. There's really nothing on the energy horizon big enough to replace oil.
Just because your ignorant of the replacements doesn't mean they don't exist. Even if you lack imagination and want to stick with 1808 train systems, there is far more coal in the world than oil. Then there is uranium, thorium which by us 100's of years before we would even need to rely on renewable sources like wind and solar.
Industrial civilization is only about 200 years old. It's convenient to start at 1808, the first year somebody bought a train ticket. That was when the industrial revolution started affecting large numbers of people. Does industrial civilization have another 200 years left?
Um, projecting 100's of years based on assumptions just doesn't work well. How many people 100 years ago would have predicted heavier than air flight, let alone the moon landing? How many would have predicted the internet 50 years ago?
The result has been a lot of work on numerical solutions to General Relativity (GR). Einstein's equation can be divided into dynamical equations and constraint equations, and I know there are many computational models in which corrections must be added "by hand" at each time step (or, if you like, to the solution on each space-like hypersurface in the coordinates of choice) so that constraint equations equations are approximately obeyed.
This is NOT the same as with GCM's though. When finding numerical solutions to GR you know how to check your modeled answer to the correct answer. Modeling the carbon/hydrological cycle is NOT defined anywhere near as well as General Relativity. Modeling a complex system who's operation is not well understood is entirely different from modeling something as well defined as GR.
I'm not sure what precisely you're including in "computational physics", but I don't think this really applies to modeling the structure of stars and compact objects, modeling strong gravity phenomena (like compact object binary inspirals), lattice QCD calculations, quark gluon plasma modeling, structure formation in the Universe, etc. In most of those examples we cannot construct any sort of real controlled test of what's being modeled and in all of those cases much of the data on which our models are based comes from indirect inference. Do you similarly consider all of these areas of investigation (some of which are very active and well funded) to be invalid?
But the physics models you list do have either the basic laws of physics or sizable and reliable data sets to compare against. You cut my post off at an important distinction:
"Our data for most variables in GCM's don't even amount to 100 years worth before relying on projections and estimates. Better still, virtually all the measured data we have is considered to be historically unprecedented(that's bad for calibrating against)."
Look at the datasets presented by the IPCC for sea level, temperature and CO2 levels. Consistently they show a time line with three distinct breaks: indirect, direct and projected. And the data for each break is radically different from the last. What we have is tens of thousands of years of indirect data with a consistent pattern and less than 100 years of direct data with a pattern completely unprecedented in the indirect data. When that is all you have to calibrate your model against, you're going to have problems with a simple model, let alone modeling something as incredibly complex as climate.
You might not want to kill the person, you might just want to charge your phone, but that's the decision you're making, and I believe that's where we're at now with regards to climate change and other environmental damage.
And that is EXACTLY the point. I never questioned that you were convinced that failure to curb carbon emissions was equivalent to wiping out entire cultures. I just stated it is stupid beyond belief to condemn anyone who doesn't curb emissions as wanting to wipe out other cultures.
Oh, and none of the references you gave in any way suggested that man made climate change is destined to wipe out millions unless we act now. Please remember that far more wars have been fought over things like money, which is needed for any attempt at reducing emissions. There is a balance to be struck and just because you believe in a particular approach doesn't make you right. There's a lot of unknowns at the future economic and social impact level.
computational physics work with assumptions that would make a climatologist blush, and models are always non-physical.
Two words, data quality. Computational physics models are calibrated against reliable test data by building REAL examples of what is being modeled. That's the only real way to know if the assumptions used are going to allow reliable results. Our data for most variables in GCM's don't even amount to 100 years worth before relying on projections and estimates. Better still, virtually all the measured data we have is considered to be historically unprecedented(that's bad for calibrating against).
If you want to go further, the complexity of the climate system makes the complexity of a small plasma look childish by comparison.
It seems much more arrogant to me to believe that we have the right to destroy other human cultures and wipe out entire species wholesale because we're not willing to consider the consequences of our actions.
Quite obviously, nobody talking about global warming wants to destroy other human cultures or wipe out entire species. Just because YOU assume that driving an SUV will cause the extinction of penguins doesn't make it true. The argument has NOTHING to do with if we should wipe out other human cultures. The argument is how much impact does human activity have on climate change and how much does that change affect everything else.
It's only zealots that resort to suggesting anyone with different assumptions WANTS to see other people suffer. Thank the heavens the nuts like them are still in the ignorable minority among the likes of the UFO and moon landing conspiracy theorists.
CO2 *DOUBLED* thanks to man over last hundred years.
Actually, the "alarmist's" favorite scientific consensus, the IPCC, states that "A wide range of direct and indirect measurements confirm that the atmospheric mixing ratio of CO2 has increased globally by about 100 ppm (36%) over the last 250 years".
36% total over the last 250 years is not equal to doubling in the last 100 due to man alone.
And if you think that thousands and thousands of people that deal with modeling and understanding *climate* (no, not some "weatherman" on XYZ station) don't look at history to see how climate changed in the past, including sea levels, then you are truly, truly fucked in the head.
Well, from your opening sentence you don't seem to be listening to the people dealing with the models, but let's take a look at the most quoted IPCC 'expert' opinion:
-From 1958 through the early 1990's, the IPCC reference exactly 1 dataset for CO2 concentrations(they neatly dismiss or ignore ALL other existing measured values for CO2 concentrations prior to the 1990).
-From 1990 onward 4 datasets from 4 sites have been used:Mauna Loa, Baring Head, Cape Grim (Tasmania) and the South Pole.
-From the IPCC's own report I linked above these sites "were chosen because air sampled at such locations shows little short-term variation caused by local sources and sinks of CO2 and provided the first data from which the global increase of atmospheric CO2 was documented." *emphasis mine because it's important*
So the IPCC's opinion of historic CO2 is based on 'measured' values that start in 1990, and a single data source that goes back to '58 chosen BECAUSE it was "the first data from which the global increase of atmospheric CO2 was documented". Still feeling confident in the projections of historically unprecedented change that such a source predicts? That should be rhetorical, but since you also stated with confidence that mankind alone has doubled CO2 in the last 100 years I'm guessing maybe not.
To some extent, it's pretty irrelevant whether humans are changing it or not. The true question is "What is the cost of the changing climate, and what is the cost of fixing it?" This of course begs the question of whether the change is manmade or not, but it's not the starting point.
No, the effect humans are having is ALL that matters when trying to figure out the cost of 'fixing' climate change. The cost of preventing climate change is 100% dependent on how much our activity can impact it. If our influence on climate change is enormous maybe we could change it enough by spending $10 per year, but if we have only a small influence on climate change, even trillions of dollars may not be enough to change climate to a meaningful extent.
We have a cost/benefit equation before us to choose between adapting to climate change, and trying to stop it, or some combination there of. The impact that we can have on climate change is of unquestionable importance to that decision and the alarmists seem to think that by setting the costs for adaptation at infinity they can ignore the question, they can't.
A simple answer: between 1993 and 2000, the mean rate was 3.1mm/year, and it is increasing. These islands are like, 150 centimeters above sea level. Not much margin there.
For scientific questions like sea level rise, get a better source than wikipedia. Even the IPCC estimates the current measured rates of increase at around 1.7mm/year. By their best guess, even by the end of the century rates are only expected to be reaching 4mm per year. There estimates also contradict the article's 59cm increase, citing an expectation of 22-44cm above 1990 levels by 2090.
Another nice part of the IPCC report linked above is a graph they include showing sea level changes. It is pretty well flat before the 1900's and rises from 1900-2000, and from 200 through 2100 it begins rising much sharper. The graph is also nicely broken up by three lines that show the flat line before 1900 is "estimates of the past", and the slightly rising line is the "instrumental record" and the scarily rising line is "Projections of the future". If that doesn't draw a critical look from any rational mind I don't know what will.
It is also typical of climate change science, we have a very short term data set and base most projections on estimates of the past and future. Then scary graphs are shown were the estimate past is mostly static, the present is gradually changing from the past's static pattern, and the future is predicted to change exponentially. Just look at the graphs frequently used for temperature and CO2 concentrations as examples. It's BS and I can't believe how many scientifically minded people seem to tolerate it.
Can someone please exlplain how it is that a bunch of irregulars with poorly maintained AK-47 rifles and surplus Katyusha rockets that date back to the cold war can keep us on our toes in Afghanistan when we have all of this high tech and expensive army gear?
It sounds like you are missing part of the picture. In the first days of Afghanistan, the Taliban forces still attempted to hold territory and maintain a military presence in Afghanistan. They were cut down so badly they have abandoned that notion. That's why you see them using their current tactics. Hide in Pakistan, or frightened/sympathetic villages and place IED's in areas that are travelled but not well defended by our forces. Just look at the casualties our troops suffer in the region, they are almost exclusively due to IED's and suicide bombings. Look at the operations where they even use rifles, virtually all of them are against aid workers and the few that are against actual soldiers are largely unsuccessfull.
Now, with that picture in mind the question of how we are still not in better control of the country looms all the larger. Other posters have pointed out the safe haven in Pakistan, which is a problem. I'm pretty sure that the larger problem though is economic. With far more than half the country's GDP dependent on the opium trade, the fact that the Taliban are one of the only buyers looms large. It's hard to get the support of people who can't feed their children without selling their crops to your enemies. The summary being that the Taliban's persistence has nothing to do with military capability. IMHO we should be buying the opium from civilians at market price and if we can't find a good use for it just throw it in an incinerator. The support it would gain is worth the expense 10 times over. The national GDP is around $10 billion, I'm from Canada and even our relatively small presence there has already doubled that in cost.
I'm not implying that any recorded UFO event is extraterrestrial in origin, but in many cases you have to consider this possibility by an absolute lack of alternative explanations.
And intelligent design isn't implying any particular creator, they just want to consider the possibility by the lack of alternative explanations.
I'm sorry, but most people, I'll say correctly, believe alternative explanations like top secret terrestrial craft over extra terrestrial origin theories. You see, we know there are terrestrial sources for flying objects. As of yet, we don't know of any extra terrestrial ones. The only 'evidence' of extraterrestrial origin is the absence of evidence for terrestrial origins. That's not good enough to leap to conclusions, it's one step from invoking the FSM or Santa's sleigh.
I'm Canadian too, so I've been watching the party's here closely:
I'm sorry to say it, but the Reform merger ruined the tories.
Only if by ruined you mean brought them back into power. I'm pretty confident all political parties(at least Canada/US ones I'm familiar with) care only about getting their party more power/influence and in that sense the merger was great for them.
"Unite the Right" really amounted to a bunch of secular, principled conservatives compromising to quasi-fundamentalist American style conservative values. It got them elected, but at what cost?
And again, only if conservative American values are defined as slightly left of Obama. The Canadian left has swung out too far and the voting public is voicing it's displeasure. Nobody in Canada wants to adopt American style healthcare, but then, only the extreme left actually believes that the Conservative party wants that. The rest of us don't consider having a strong and positive relationship with our largest trading partner and closest ally as akin to treason. There is a line between selling out to America and simply working together with your neighbour, but our lefties are too caught up in hating Bush to see that line.
Maintaining an outward velocity = c would keep you at the event horizon indefinitely.
The concept of standing still while having an enormous velocity makes my head hurt and my heart long for obedience to Newtonian physics.
I know I aught be able to work this out myself, but I'm not sure if general newtonian calculations would be accurate. Is it possible to orbit a black hole from inside the event horizon if it is big enough? It seems intuitively obvious that if you can't achieve escape velocity you shouldn't be able to reach an orbital velocity either but I thought I'd see if someone was willing to give a more solid answer.
What is it that makes it possible for these kind of people to have investors fawn at their feet whilst the rest of us have problems getting investors to believe in the basic laws of physics?
Your answer is in your question. These people sell to those that don't understand or care about the basic laws of physics, that is a much larger target market. :(
Well, you see, there's this thing about military action: it's not all the same. It tends to actually matter who you attack, at what scale, with what goal, and with what strategy.
It is very possible that another leader would fuck up spectacularly too, but I have to believe that _most_ leaders would at least go after someone who actually had something to do with the attack.
First off, I too hate Bush. This still sounds to me like "Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos".
Don't believe me? How many democrats voted against the Iraq war?
The whole 50/50 coin toss election process the article points out suggests to me a bigger change is needed than a mere switch from Rep to Dem or vis. versa every couple years.
It has seen the end of Jack Thompson,
It has seen the end of a RIAA lawsuit,
The end of copyright cops,
The end of Comcast's forging of RST packets,
It will soon see the end of the Empire itself!
$700 billion should about do it, Empire ended. :(
If you tone the attacks down in the future, you will save yourself from having an otherwise informative post leaving a sour tasts in readers mouths.
As correct as you may be, the parent's tone was extremely tame compared to those he was replying to...
Wow. You couldn't be more wrong. Any scientist anywhere will tell you that the ocean is a carbon sink - absorbing CO2. Only after the Ocean gets warmer does it release CO2.
The point is that the Ocean wouldn't being emitting CO2 if it wasn't absorbing so much of it from man made sources in the first place.
And if it wasn't absorbing so much CO2 from all the other 95% of the world's natural carbon emission sources. It is hardly good science to say mankind is dominating all climate change factors when our largest influence is an extra 5% to CO2 emissions.
Al Gore, while he mentioned a number of previous Ice Ages, noted that the CO2 levels directly related to temperature, and that at no time in 650,000 years did CO2 levels ever go higher than 300 ppmv (parts per million by volume). The historical high is 280 ppmv.
In 1960, there was a concentration of 315 ppmv. Today we sit at 385 ppmv. There is no projection that it will slow down or decrease, but rather increase much more.
And all measurements of CO2 concentrations from more than 100 years ago are all based on ice core samples. When the data shows an unprecedented change in measurements in those last 100 years one might be wise to take a harder look at the interpretation of ice cores. Much like the hockey stick graph shows a radical temperature rise that coincides with the start of the measured temperature record.
Pointing out that both times coincide approximately with industrialization is true, but ignores they also coincide with a methodology change in collecting the data!
Do we know that ice cores would register peaking CO2 levels like those today for a 10 year period in a sample from 100,000 years ago? Do we know that we are properly accounting for urban heating in temperature measurements? The fact that we describe the data for both as unprecedented in 100's of thousands of years might suggest to some the answer to both is no!
The only dispute is over the "average ice density" in the Arctic, but no one disputes the reduction of ice of the caps, or Arctic Shrinkage. The before and after pictures are shocking.
And undersea geologists went in within the last year or 2 and found a shocking amount of underwater volcanic activity. Not only were they expecting none, they found nearly record levels of activity. But no, the ice is melting because of CO2 emissions. But once again remember that underwater vents dump out more CO2 than humanity combined, and we just found a new extremely active section right under the arctic ice that's melting at record rates.