introducing a topic with a statement pretty much saying "everything I'm going to present might be wrong"-- which I claim this is equivalent to -- is not a way to get students to think they are learning something important.
Nevertheless, that should be the general statement made before teaching any branch of science. What you are suggesting is psychological manipulation to ignore that fact.
This is like putting a sticker on a math book saying "1+1=2 is only true according to some beliefs. Proceed with caution."
No, in that you are wrong. Bertrand Russell spent several years and actually proved, in the real and rigorous sense of the word, that 1+1 = 2. Indeed, it may be that only logical statements (such as those expressed in mathematics) can be proved; almost nothing in the physical world can be.
Thinking critically is the foundation of science. Faith is the realm of mysticism.
I would love to see some examples of biological textbooks advocating critical thinking of evolution. Instead of that, the textbooks present a history of events involving the theory, and explain evolutionary theory, but do nothing for showing weaknesses in evolutionary theory. The closest we get to critical thinking are short, amusing anectdotes involving Lamarckism.
What business does God have in any other class than a religious class?
It is impossible to understand our system of laws and human rights without understanding our Judeo-Christian foundation.
Do you not believe in the seperation of church and state?
I believe the only seperation the Founding Fathers intended was freedom of individuals to express their religious beliefs, not the extermination of religious beliefs from the public domain.
Parents can give their children all the religious education they want, or even send them to an outright religious school. But what is taught in public schools needs to be as bias-free as possible, no matter how widely accepted or (in the eyes of very many) very important those religious teachings may indeed be.
That would be an argument for the elimination of the public school system.
On the other hand, "change and differentiation of species over time" is not a theory, it's a fact that we've observed and even caused countless times.
The theory of common descent has not been observed, at least by humans, as that would have required (at the least) humans to pre-exist themselves. That species change over time is not contested by most Creationists. It is, rather, the theory that our modern biosphere is the result of natural processes differentiating a common ancestor.
It's not like it's taught as the law of evolution or something similar.
Yes, it is. The common formula is to proclaim that evolution is both a theory and a fact. Even without that formula, evolutionists commonly reject alternate theories of biological origins, even though no one has ever been able to explain or demonstrate how natural processes could have produced our modern biosphere without external design.
I'll have to ask you why if evolution is the exact science, why are there still monkies around?
The monkeys are supposed to have evolved, too. The common ancestor of apes and humans was neither ape nor human. An alternative question you might ask would be, "If evolution is an exact science, why are evolutionists still making major changes to the human evolutionary tree?"
This is only problably because this is a highly catholic community and they dont want their chilren believing otherwise.
The Pope endorses biological evolutionary theory. There are many Roman Catholic priests working within the Roman Catholic Church to advance evolutionary theory. I attended a public high school of 3000 students--mostly Roman Catholic--and the Catholics had no trouble at all accepting evolution. On what do you base your claim that opposition to evolution in the Atlanta community comes from Roman Catholics? It could just as likely be that they are the ones advocating evolutionary theory!
I think that these stickers shouldent have even been put there in the first place.
It might open young minds to more than mainstream dogma.
First of all, evolution has been PROVEN to take place in some form or another, from bones and fossles
Actually, bones and fossils cannot prove evolutionary theory, and, in fact, the theory of common descent (which is the actual center of debate) is a deduction made after the fact. It cannot be proven in the true sense of the word, and there are alternative explanations possible.
and whick would you be more inclined to believe - A modern theory with -=*PROOF*=-
You obviously don't know what the word, "proof" means. You are confusing evidence with proof. They are not the same thing. It is tragic that our public school systems allow lazy thinking like yours to pass through the system without challenge.
or a child's story that dates back c. 2000 years ago?
You should explain what you have in mind, because no one is arguing for a 2000 year-old child's story. Saying such things makes you look like an ignorant bigot.
This is a subtle example of church INFLUENCING our government,
There is nothing wrong with churches influencing government. Of course, atheists want us to believe otherwise. That is part of the culture war.
and the stickers should have been made optional or "opt out"able.
The stickers state simple fact; evolution is a theory. It would be closed-minded and unscientific to state that no other theories could be made, or should be heard.
What if, in San Francisco, they started putting stickers on textbooks...
They don't need to do that when the ACLU already sues school districts for mentioning "God" outside of comparative religion classes (and how many high schools have a comparative religion class?). But, I agree that by doing so, they are motivated by more than a sense of fairly stating facts.
Make no mistake about it; there is a cultural war, and the ACLU, the scientific community and the debate over evolution is being used in an attempt to exterminate Christianity in public life.
As best I can tell, you are advocating the system of government the United States initially used, that of the Articles of Confederation. That system was a notable failure. The idea that each state is a semi-autonomous nation unto itself, bound to each other only by the loosest of agreements, resulted in such chaos that the early nation nearly destroyed itself. The problem was, states were too independent. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 was created to correct the deficiencies inherent in the Articles of Confederation.
States' Rights is a good idea, in moderation. But, as Franklin mentioned, we either hang together, or we will all hang seperately. Our combined strengths depend on a lot more unity than just loose agreements between mini-nations.
The possibility that a real human might hear my statement is one reason that, after I call Microsoft to activate my copy of Windows XP, and the automated voice says, "Have a nice day," I always say, "Drop dead." I really hate having to activate my OS. Maybe that's the reason that now activation is via Internet connection, instead of phone line?
Even if they are not listening, it still serves as a cathartic moment.
Although I was interested in science and technology at an early age, I did not have much opportunity to experiment with computers. I read a book about the Hollerith Code when I was 11; that was the most I could do at that point, due to lack of opportunities. I was given a working television set to take apart; that gave me some experience with electronics. It helped that I had an old encyclopedia that happened to contain a diagram of the components of the model of television that I was disecting.
I began programming in BASIC, using the Commodore 64 at school and some workstations at a local university. None of this amounted to much, despite my efforts.
My current computer knowledge traces back to my early word processing on IBM PCs using Word and Wordperfect. I was writing a book, and the computer was a useful tool. I wasn't trying to use a computer at that point; I would have used a typewriter if that were all that was available. But, I got so much experience using a computer writing that book that it provided a solid foundation for my computer knowledge. It helped me a lot that I spent so many hours in the Adult Learning Center at Albuquerque T-VI, where the director provided me with a lot of patient, personal instruction in computer use. He was always available to answer my questions, and he was very knowledgeable.
At the same time, I was taking a correspondence course from NRI in Microcomputer Repair. I assembled my first computer from that course. I went to college for Laser Electro-Optic Technology. Eventually, I had to build hardware and software interfaces to computers as part of my program requirements.
If I had been given the opportunity, I would have done a lot more, a lot sooner. I still feel frustrated about that.
I just want you to know that I read about Bharati Prasad several hours ago. According to the account I read, ham radio operators had not been allowed in the region until recently. Mrs. Prasad said that she had been trying for 18 years to return to the area, following her last broadcast in that region. The Indian government restricts movement by ham radio operators, too.
Improvements are fueled by consumer goods, and they have been for quite some time.
Consumer goods are certainly an important market. So is military and government.
Velcro was developed in the
Oops, you left out a thought, there. Were you going to say that Velcro hooks and loops were patented in 1955? Nevertheless, NASA certainly provided a flashy market for the product.
The Integrated Circuit would have been discoverred regardless of Apollo,
I think you mean that it would have been invented, eventually, which is true but not very useful. Many inventions probably would have been invented, eventually, but that doesn't mean that we don't honor who, when and where they were invented.
and it would have yielded Ipod regardless of the giant leap.
Uh-huh. And who do you think were the largest customers of computational and control electronics in the 1950s to 1970s? Military projectiles drove the early computer industry, of which space travel is a branch.
Fuel cells were invented back in the 19th Century, but they remained as little more than lab curiosities until NASA got ahold of them. Today, California gets several score megawatts of electric power from fuel cells. (Yes, I know that is hardly a drop in the bucket, but it is still a great increase in its usefulness over pre-NASA days. Besides, it probably beats out diesel for that application.)
Those "space-age" fabrics are the product of a huge huge huge chemical industry, of which the space industry is a teeny tiny consumer. Space age fabric development probably owes far more to lingerie than it does to space suits.
Oh, I don't know... Nylon was popular for so many reasons. It did not hurt that you could buy the same product that was sending astronauts into space.
NASA is mostly a waste of money. Admit it.
The International Space Station and the Space Shuttle programs may be mostly wastes of money, and they account for the majority of NASA's current budget. However, that is recent. Say what you like about inevitable progress, but we wouldn't have our large space satellite industry today without NASA's considerable investment. That means everything from communication satellites (including cell phone, pagers and Internet) to spy satellites to Gravity Probe B (and GP A, for that matter). NASA research has gone into a lot of other devices that we take for granted, too, besides some that are waiting to make their commercial debut (I am watching for that ultra-quiet helicopter blade that NASA developed).
I feel sadness inside everytime it occurs to me people think the reason to buy a two-way radio is to chit-chat about BS over public air-waves. These are powerful tools, baby.
About 2 years ago, I bought a MindStor PSS-1810, which is a battery-powered, independent (embedded OS) hard-drive with PC Card, USB 1.1 and IEEE 1394 ports. It cost me about $350 for the device with a (2.5-inch) 10 Gig hard drive. It fits very neatly into a small camera pouch, which makes it very handy to wear over my shoulder. I can take pictures anywhere, out in the middle of nowhere, and download all the photos from my camera to my MindStor. When I get home, I use the IEEE 1394 connection to download my files to my PC.
MindStor went out of business about a year ago. There isn't much of a market for external hard drives for cameras. Now, the MindStor is just about obsolete, because several companies offer portable DVR for around $700. The pDVR not only stores photos, it will display them, too, and store and display video and audio files. They can hold and play several movies on battery power.
It's nice that Alpha-Data is offering this $60 hard drive case, but it isn't that large a technological step ahead of where we were 2 years ago.
I recently watched some video feeds showing a prototype Cube, which was then advanced to a Hypercube design. I had no idea that IBM had managed to miniaturize the system so much, or that they were even working on this project.
"In 1991, hikers found the preserved body of a man trapped in an Alpine glacier and freed as it retreated."
Ol' Oetzi sure was a spry character!
I Googled on Lonnie Thompson's name, and came across some National Geographic articles. One notes,
"When Thompson's reports of glacial recession on Kilimanjaro first emerged in 2002, the story was quickly picked up and trumpeted as another example of man destroying nature. It's easy to see why: Ice fields in the tropics--Kilimanjaro lies about 220 miles south of the Equator--are particularly susceptible to climate change, and even the slightest temperature fluctuation can have devastating effects. 'There's a tendency for people to take this temperature increase and draw quick conclusions, which is a mistake,' says Douglas R. Hardy, a University of Massachusetts climatologist, who has been monitoring Kilimanjaro's glaciers from mountaintop weather stations since 2000. 'The real explanations are much more complex. Global warming plays a part, but a variety of factors are really involved.'
"According to Hardy, forest reduction in the areas surrounding Kilimanjaro, and not global warming, might be the strongest human influence on glacial recession. 'Clearing for agriculture and forest fires--often caused by honey collectors trying to smoke bees out of their hives--have greatly reduced the surrounding forests,' he says. The loss of foliage causes less moisture to be pumped into the atmosphere, leading to reduced cloud cover and precipitation and increased solar radiation and glacial evaporation."
To the contrary, all available evidence shows that Malthus was mistaken to extend his results to humans. JulianSimon, the Doomslayer, proved the folly of applying Malthus to human population.
advances in technology over the past 150 years or so have simply forestalled what is otherwise inevitable.
More than mere forstalling, advances in technology have radically improved the quality of human life with no end in sight.
stop creating new North Americans / Western Europeans).
Your prayers have been answered, at least in Europe (and Japan). The U.S., though, is projected to see about a 50% population growth over the next 30 years.
A quick skim through the University of Leicester article (written by geologist Jan Zalasiewicz), raises the following flags:
University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz heads a group of eminent geologists which has just published a paper in The Guardian
1) The Guardian is not a peer-reviewed journal.
2) The Guardian is notorious for it Left-leaning political views.
These changes did not lead to catastrophic global extinctions of the earth's biota.
3) The extent of extinctions in those periods of significant climate change can only be estimated roughly, based on the small fraction of plants and animals that were in the special conditions necessary for fossilization to occur.
4) The phrase, "catastrophic global extinctions" leaves unanswered how widespread the extinctions are believed to have been in those eras.
5) Is the geological group prepared to claim that current climate changes would lead to "catastrophic global extinctions," and, if so, how solid is the evidence for such a claim?
The extensive animal and plant communities of the past, undisrupted by human development, could adapt to the changes by migrating, or by shrinking or expanding populations.
6) Animal and plant communities certainly have retained the option of changing their populations.
In shrinking animal populations, of course, there is an excess of deaths over births, by starvation or predation. Our current human population, faced with comparable climate change, will have a similar choice, and there is now little room for migration.
7) Humans occupy a very small fraction of the entire Planet.
8) Human adaptibility gives humanity virtually unlimited migration opportunities.
the longest Antarctic ice-core record yet obtained shows that the warm phase before that, a little less than half a million years ago, lasted some 30,000 years. That long interglacial episode is thought to be the best model for our current warm phase, because of the similarity of the earth's alignment vis-à-vis the sun's rays. On these grounds, therefore, even without human intervention, another 20 000 years of warmth may be expected.
9) Climate change (global or local) is not understood well-enough for reliable, direct extrapolations from a single historical data point.
That the earth has been shown to recover eventually is philosophically comforting, but will be of no practical help to many hundreds of human generations.
10) Of course, Earth is not harmed by climate change, and Dr. Zalasiewicz surely must know that. Such a comment is a sloppy-slip more commonly seen from environmental alarmists.
So how much can sea level rise in a world where, say, the levels of CO2 are at twice pre-industrial levels and where global temperatures are between 2 and 5 degrees higher? We cannot predict this precisely, but sea level rises of a few to several tens of metres would not be geologically unusual.
11) The only way to know how far sea levels would rise per atmospheric change is to make careful measurements of sea level changes against atmospheric changes, controlling for other variables. Appeals to what has happened in other circumstances are mere idle speculation.
Even at today's slightly elevated temperatures, with a rise of around half a degree centigrade, mountain glaciers are receding significantly, as also seem to be, locally, the margins of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The Greenland icecap is vulnerable, and its loss would mean a sea level rise of some 7 metres...
This would accord with geological evidence indicating past ice-sheet collapses, releasing 'iceberg armadas' and causing sea level rises of several metres in a decade.
12) Noteably, the article presents absolutely no measured change in sea levels.
The threat to humanity is clear: such a disappearance of living space (with some 100 million people living within less than 1 metre a
They can be particularly efficient -- up to 60 percent -- when waste heat from the gas turbine is recovered by a conventional steam turbine in a combined cycle.
That's what he said in his post that you are contradicting. His specific words were, "Gas turbines seem to only become highly fuel efficient when the heat of their exhaust gas is captured by a secondary system."
Another name for it is a co-generation plant, which became popular about the late '80s to early '90s (just after I finished my career working on steam turbines).
There are no modern, natural famines. There is ample food supply to feed every person on Earth as much as each person needs. All the famines that exist today are man-made, the products of regional stupidity (Communism, greed, war, genocide). Even with the regional famines, there is ample food from the rest of the world to feed everyone, if not for problems with distribution (again, distribution is disrupted by people with an agenda, not because of natural shortcomings).
Leftists have chosen to blame starvation on population explosion, but the real cause are the policies of the people in regional power, whether warlords or dictators. The wars are not fought over food, but over power, money and race. The Left is lying.
Your examples are defective to your point for various reasons. Your first link, describing, "Carbon Dioxide Toxicity," refers to a pH imbalance in the blood, caused by carbon dioxide (acidosis). The article does not claim that carbon dioxide is toxic per se, but that a buildup of carbon dioxide concentration results in a chemical imbalance. Note that if your blood contains enough bicarbonate, it will neutralize the pH from acidosis, even with the same amount of carbon dioxide still in your blood.
Your second link gives anectdotes related to suffication, pure and simple. Everything in the Snopes article describes ordinary suffication.
Your third article is similar to your first article.
Carbon monoxide is poisonous, because it chemically bonds to the hemoglobin in our blood. Even the tiniest amount of carbon dioxide has this property, and will proportionately interfere with our body's ability to transport oxygen. In contrast, carbon dioxide is mostly inert, and our bodies have natural regulating defenses to protect against chemical effects (such as acidity caused by carbon dioxide dissolving in water).
Yes, you can die from suffication if there is a high enough concentration of carbon dioxide in your air. No, there is nothing unusual about people falling unconscious very quickly after walking into an unbreathable environment.
In a sealed room you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning before you die of asphyxiation from the lack of oxygen.
No, I don't believe that is correct. If you entered a room with a high concentration of carbon dioxide, you would almost instantly fall unconscious and stop breathing from lack of oxygen. In about 5 minutes, you would normally suffer brain damage from lack of oxygen.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevertheless, that should be the general statement made before teaching any branch of science. What you are suggesting is psychological manipulation to ignore that fact. This is like putting a sticker on a math book saying "1+1=2 is only true according to some beliefs. Proceed with caution."
No, in that you are wrong. Bertrand Russell spent several years and actually proved, in the real and rigorous sense of the word, that 1+1 = 2. Indeed, it may be that only logical statements (such as those expressed in mathematics) can be proved; almost nothing in the physical world can be.
I would love to see some examples of biological textbooks advocating critical thinking of evolution. Instead of that, the textbooks present a history of events involving the theory, and explain evolutionary theory, but do nothing for showing weaknesses in evolutionary theory. The closest we get to critical thinking are short, amusing anectdotes involving Lamarckism.
It is impossible to understand our system of laws and human rights without understanding our Judeo-Christian foundation.
Do you not believe in the seperation of church and state?
I believe the only seperation the Founding Fathers intended was freedom of individuals to express their religious beliefs, not the extermination of religious beliefs from the public domain.
Parents can give their children all the religious education they want, or even send them to an outright religious school. But what is taught in public schools needs to be as bias-free as possible, no matter how widely accepted or (in the eyes of very many) very important those religious teachings may indeed be.
That would be an argument for the elimination of the public school system.
The theory of common descent has not been observed, at least by humans, as that would have required (at the least) humans to pre-exist themselves. That species change over time is not contested by most Creationists. It is, rather, the theory that our modern biosphere is the result of natural processes differentiating a common ancestor.
Yes, it is. The common formula is to proclaim that evolution is both a theory and a fact. Even without that formula, evolutionists commonly reject alternate theories of biological origins, even though no one has ever been able to explain or demonstrate how natural processes could have produced our modern biosphere without external design.
Then let loose the dogs of war! We will fight to the last man.
The monkeys are supposed to have evolved, too. The common ancestor of apes and humans was neither ape nor human. An alternative question you might ask would be, "If evolution is an exact science, why are evolutionists still making major changes to the human evolutionary tree?"
The Pope endorses biological evolutionary theory. There are many Roman Catholic priests working within the Roman Catholic Church to advance evolutionary theory. I attended a public high school of 3000 students--mostly Roman Catholic--and the Catholics had no trouble at all accepting evolution. On what do you base your claim that opposition to evolution in the Atlanta community comes from Roman Catholics? It could just as likely be that they are the ones advocating evolutionary theory!
I think that these stickers shouldent have even been put there in the first place.
It might open young minds to more than mainstream dogma.
First of all, evolution has been PROVEN to take place in some form or another, from bones and fossles
Actually, bones and fossils cannot prove evolutionary theory, and, in fact, the theory of common descent (which is the actual center of debate) is a deduction made after the fact. It cannot be proven in the true sense of the word, and there are alternative explanations possible.
and whick would you be more inclined to believe - A modern theory with -=*PROOF*=-
You obviously don't know what the word, "proof" means. You are confusing evidence with proof. They are not the same thing. It is tragic that our public school systems allow lazy thinking like yours to pass through the system without challenge.
or a child's story that dates back c. 2000 years ago?
You should explain what you have in mind, because no one is arguing for a 2000 year-old child's story. Saying such things makes you look like an ignorant bigot.
This is a subtle example of church INFLUENCING our government,
There is nothing wrong with churches influencing government. Of course, atheists want us to believe otherwise. That is part of the culture war.
and the stickers should have been made optional or "opt out"able.
The stickers state simple fact; evolution is a theory. It would be closed-minded and unscientific to state that no other theories could be made, or should be heard.
They don't need to do that when the ACLU already sues school districts for mentioning "God" outside of comparative religion classes (and how many high schools have a comparative religion class?). But, I agree that by doing so, they are motivated by more than a sense of fairly stating facts.
Make no mistake about it; there is a cultural war, and the ACLU, the scientific community and the debate over evolution is being used in an attempt to exterminate Christianity in public life.
States' Rights is a good idea, in moderation. But, as Franklin mentioned, we either hang together, or we will all hang seperately. Our combined strengths depend on a lot more unity than just loose agreements between mini-nations.
Even if they are not listening, it still serves as a cathartic moment.
I began programming in BASIC, using the Commodore 64 at school and some workstations at a local university. None of this amounted to much, despite my efforts.
My current computer knowledge traces back to my early word processing on IBM PCs using Word and Wordperfect. I was writing a book, and the computer was a useful tool. I wasn't trying to use a computer at that point; I would have used a typewriter if that were all that was available. But, I got so much experience using a computer writing that book that it provided a solid foundation for my computer knowledge. It helped me a lot that I spent so many hours in the Adult Learning Center at Albuquerque T-VI, where the director provided me with a lot of patient, personal instruction in computer use. He was always available to answer my questions, and he was very knowledgeable.
At the same time, I was taking a correspondence course from NRI in Microcomputer Repair. I assembled my first computer from that course. I went to college for Laser Electro-Optic Technology. Eventually, I had to build hardware and software interfaces to computers as part of my program requirements.
If I had been given the opportunity, I would have done a lot more, a lot sooner. I still feel frustrated about that.
I just want you to know that I read about Bharati Prasad several hours ago. According to the account I read, ham radio operators had not been allowed in the region until recently. Mrs. Prasad said that she had been trying for 18 years to return to the area, following her last broadcast in that region. The Indian government restricts movement by ham radio operators, too.
You can't. That name is already taken. Or, more precisely, the new cone is called, "Anak Krakatau" ("Child of Krakatoa").
I am wondering when the next major eruption in the area will take place, particularly now that there has been a major seismic event.
Consumer goods are certainly an important market. So is military and government.
Velcro was developed in the
Oops, you left out a thought, there. Were you going to say that Velcro hooks and loops were patented in 1955? Nevertheless, NASA certainly provided a flashy market for the product.
The Integrated Circuit would have been discoverred regardless of Apollo,
I think you mean that it would have been invented, eventually, which is true but not very useful. Many inventions probably would have been invented, eventually, but that doesn't mean that we don't honor who, when and where they were invented.
and it would have yielded Ipod regardless of the giant leap.
Uh-huh. And who do you think were the largest customers of computational and control electronics in the 1950s to 1970s? Military projectiles drove the early computer industry, of which space travel is a branch.
Fuel cells were invented back in the 19th Century, but they remained as little more than lab curiosities until NASA got ahold of them. Today, California gets several score megawatts of electric power from fuel cells. (Yes, I know that is hardly a drop in the bucket, but it is still a great increase in its usefulness over pre-NASA days. Besides, it probably beats out diesel for that application.)
Those "space-age" fabrics are the product of a huge huge huge chemical industry, of which the space industry is a teeny tiny consumer. Space age fabric development probably owes far more to lingerie than it does to space suits.
Oh, I don't know... Nylon was popular for so many reasons. It did not hurt that you could buy the same product that was sending astronauts into space.
NASA is mostly a waste of money. Admit it.
The International Space Station and the Space Shuttle programs may be mostly wastes of money, and they account for the majority of NASA's current budget. However, that is recent. Say what you like about inevitable progress, but we wouldn't have our large space satellite industry today without NASA's considerable investment. That means everything from communication satellites (including cell phone, pagers and Internet) to spy satellites to Gravity Probe B (and GP A, for that matter). NASA research has gone into a lot of other devices that we take for granted, too, besides some that are waiting to make their commercial debut (I am watching for that ultra-quiet helicopter blade that NASA developed).
Yeah, not like the Internet!
MindStor went out of business about a year ago. There isn't much of a market for external hard drives for cameras. Now, the MindStor is just about obsolete, because several companies offer portable DVR for around $700. The pDVR not only stores photos, it will display them, too, and store and display video and audio files. They can hold and play several movies on battery power.
It's nice that Alpha-Data is offering this $60 hard drive case, but it isn't that large a technological step ahead of where we were 2 years ago.
"In 1991, hikers found the preserved body of a man trapped in an Alpine glacier and freed as it retreated."
Ol' Oetzi sure was a spry character!
I Googled on Lonnie Thompson's name, and came across some National Geographic articles. One notes,
"When Thompson's reports of glacial recession on Kilimanjaro first emerged in 2002, the story was quickly picked up and trumpeted as another example of man destroying nature. It's easy to see why: Ice fields in the tropics--Kilimanjaro lies about 220 miles south of the Equator--are particularly susceptible to climate change, and even the slightest temperature fluctuation can have devastating effects. 'There's a tendency for people to take this temperature increase and draw quick conclusions, which is a mistake,' says Douglas R. Hardy, a University of Massachusetts climatologist, who has been monitoring Kilimanjaro's glaciers from mountaintop weather stations since 2000. 'The real explanations are much more complex. Global warming plays a part, but a variety of factors are really involved.'
"According to Hardy, forest reduction in the areas surrounding Kilimanjaro, and not global warming, might be the strongest human influence on glacial recession. 'Clearing for agriculture and forest fires--often caused by honey collectors trying to smoke bees out of their hives--have greatly reduced the surrounding forests,' he says. The loss of foliage causes less moisture to be pumped into the atmosphere, leading to reduced cloud cover and precipitation and increased solar radiation and glacial evaporation."
National Geographic Adventure: Kili is Crumbling
The quoted text is linked to another article:
National Geographic Adventure: The Ice Man
Intersection
To the contrary, all available evidence shows that Malthus was mistaken to extend his results to humans. Julian Simon, the Doomslayer, proved the folly of applying Malthus to human population.
advances in technology over the past 150 years or so have simply forestalled what is otherwise inevitable.
More than mere forstalling, advances in technology have radically improved the quality of human life with no end in sight.
stop creating new North Americans / Western Europeans).
Your prayers have been answered, at least in Europe (and Japan). The U.S., though, is projected to see about a 50% population growth over the next 30 years.
University of Leicester geologist Jan Zalasiewicz heads a group of eminent geologists which has just published a paper in The Guardian
1) The Guardian is not a peer-reviewed journal.
2) The Guardian is notorious for it Left-leaning political views.
These changes did not lead to catastrophic global extinctions of the earth's biota.
3) The extent of extinctions in those periods of significant climate change can only be estimated roughly, based on the small fraction of plants and animals that were in the special conditions necessary for fossilization to occur.
4) The phrase, "catastrophic global extinctions" leaves unanswered how widespread the extinctions are believed to have been in those eras.
5) Is the geological group prepared to claim that current climate changes would lead to "catastrophic global extinctions," and, if so, how solid is the evidence for such a claim?
The extensive animal and plant communities of the past, undisrupted by human development, could adapt to the changes by migrating, or by shrinking or expanding populations.
6) Animal and plant communities certainly have retained the option of changing their populations.
In shrinking animal populations, of course, there is an excess of deaths over births, by starvation or predation. Our current human population, faced with comparable climate change, will have a similar choice, and there is now little room for migration.
7) Humans occupy a very small fraction of the entire Planet.
8) Human adaptibility gives humanity virtually unlimited migration opportunities.
the longest Antarctic ice-core record yet obtained shows that the warm phase before that, a little less than half a million years ago, lasted some 30,000 years. That long interglacial episode is thought to be the best model for our current warm phase, because of the similarity of the earth's alignment vis-à-vis the sun's rays. On these grounds, therefore, even without human intervention, another 20 000 years of warmth may be expected.
9) Climate change (global or local) is not understood well-enough for reliable, direct extrapolations from a single historical data point.
That the earth has been shown to recover eventually is philosophically comforting, but will be of no practical help to many hundreds of human generations.
10) Of course, Earth is not harmed by climate change, and Dr. Zalasiewicz surely must know that. Such a comment is a sloppy-slip more commonly seen from environmental alarmists.
So how much can sea level rise in a world where, say, the levels of CO2 are at twice pre-industrial levels and where global temperatures are between 2 and 5 degrees higher? We cannot predict this precisely, but sea level rises of a few to several tens of metres would not be geologically unusual.
11) The only way to know how far sea levels would rise per atmospheric change is to make careful measurements of sea level changes against atmospheric changes, controlling for other variables. Appeals to what has happened in other circumstances are mere idle speculation.
Even at today's slightly elevated temperatures, with a rise of around half a degree centigrade, mountain glaciers are receding significantly, as also seem to be, locally, the margins of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica. The Greenland icecap is vulnerable, and its loss would mean a sea level rise of some 7 metres... This would accord with geological evidence indicating past ice-sheet collapses, releasing 'iceberg armadas' and causing sea level rises of several metres in a decade.
12) Noteably, the article presents absolutely no measured change in sea levels.
The threat to humanity is clear: such a disappearance of living space (with some 100 million people living within less than 1 metre a
That's what he said in his post that you are contradicting. His specific words were, "Gas turbines seem to only become highly fuel efficient when the heat of their exhaust gas is captured by a secondary system."
Another name for it is a co-generation plant, which became popular about the late '80s to early '90s (just after I finished my career working on steam turbines).
There are no modern, natural famines. There is ample food supply to feed every person on Earth as much as each person needs. All the famines that exist today are man-made, the products of regional stupidity (Communism, greed, war, genocide). Even with the regional famines, there is ample food from the rest of the world to feed everyone, if not for problems with distribution (again, distribution is disrupted by people with an agenda, not because of natural shortcomings).
Leftists have chosen to blame starvation on population explosion, but the real cause are the policies of the people in regional power, whether warlords or dictators. The wars are not fought over food, but over power, money and race. The Left is lying.
Your examples are defective to your point for various reasons. Your first link, describing, "Carbon Dioxide Toxicity," refers to a pH imbalance in the blood, caused by carbon dioxide (acidosis). The article does not claim that carbon dioxide is toxic per se, but that a buildup of carbon dioxide concentration results in a chemical imbalance. Note that if your blood contains enough bicarbonate, it will neutralize the pH from acidosis, even with the same amount of carbon dioxide still in your blood.
Your second link gives anectdotes related to suffication, pure and simple. Everything in the Snopes article describes ordinary suffication.
Your third article is similar to your first article.
Carbon monoxide is poisonous, because it chemically bonds to the hemoglobin in our blood. Even the tiniest amount of carbon dioxide has this property, and will proportionately interfere with our body's ability to transport oxygen. In contrast, carbon dioxide is mostly inert, and our bodies have natural regulating defenses to protect against chemical effects (such as acidity caused by carbon dioxide dissolving in water).
Yes, you can die from suffication if there is a high enough concentration of carbon dioxide in your air. No, there is nothing unusual about people falling unconscious very quickly after walking into an unbreathable environment.
In a sealed room you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning before you die of asphyxiation from the lack of oxygen.
No, I don't believe that is correct. If you entered a room with a high concentration of carbon dioxide, you would almost instantly fall unconscious and stop breathing from lack of oxygen. In about 5 minutes, you would normally suffer brain damage from lack of oxygen.