I must disagree. Most MBA's from college that I know of are sitting at dead end jobs in HR or working for the feds making peanuts. Your assertion that the water boy is doing better today is probably a local example you know of, but for the most part the jocks had to find real jobs which is something they typically are not all that interested in to begin with, and so they lost their primary drive to life and "settled for HR". I feel sorry for them more than anything, because my life calling as a scientist is still going strong while their life calling to be "a professional athlete" is a dream that is dead. Same for people who want to be actors or actresses. Some of them might still be living the dream, but none of them made it from any school I attended which just goes to show that the advantage nerds have is that our professions don't typically toss us out after eating the best years of our life. Rather, they tend to get better the older we get and so a nerd has never had it this good. Perhaps that is perspective? But in any event your experience differs and I see MBA degrees as something I could always get if management appealed to me (its not like the degree is hard for a scientist) but why should I bother when I am happy doing what I am doing?
Don't let money, or fame or even delusions of grandeur of athletes hold you back from just having a good and fun life if you are a nerd or if not.
There are countries that are better educated than in the US, but if you look at the facts, America is not all that far behind other countries. Some countries, like Japan stop secondary school at about the high school level for all but the brightest and the richest. This means that only the brightest fraction of children are taught past this level for the most part which means when you do standardized testing in those countries, the test scores far outpace the US. This is not to say that the American educational system is superior, but mainly that we do educate farther than those countries. You are basically comparing all American Children to the brightest Japanese children as a rule, and of course they come out looking better. As for the past, the trend has been other countries getting better at education and as such they start outperforming us when you start comparing like that. In that case, its the same as the example of your "friends who were taught in the old eastern schools". When you compare the brightest to everyone else, you tend to get much worse results. I don't think I have ever seen an apples to apples test that measures this at the secondary level. Most primary testing shows a rather complete picture, but past that its not really accurate. Especially as you get out of the developed world where some people don't get any education.
Personally, our education system for the most part is about the same as it was when we were "great". While other countries are doing better, we are stuck in the same old mold. And we can learn from their lessons and how they got better to better our own system, and that is just common sense.
It has nothing to do with a small American elite. Finland for instance has the same system where children go to school until the high school level where some children go into vocational training. What is the secret to their success and other countries? The most notable thing is that only the brightest teachers are allowed to teach by making an educational degree program as difficult as engineering and highly technical degrees are in the states. This means that teachers are respected (unlike in the US), they make good money, and they are the cream of the crop as far as intellectuals. As it is in the US, anyone can get an educational degree and as a rule everyone looks down on teachers as being the "dumb career choice." And so our education goes downhill in comparison simply because we do not set our priorities. The priorities for Americans has always been high tech, engineering, and high tech toys. Politically, the real solution to the problem is a non-starter because our different political groups are entrenched on other issues and like to kick the can down the road to the next politician.
I agree, no where does it mention that increased condensation is something that will be achieved or water efficiency itself will be increased, its only discussing the efficiency of the heat transport process. I read the article to figure out what he was talking about....and they did talk about a second application that does mention condensation as a power source.
But the finding also suggests another possible new application, Miljkovic says: By placing two parallel metal plates out in the open, with “one surface that has droplets jumping, and another that collects them you could generate some power” just from condensation from the ambient air. All that would be needed is a way of keeping the condenser surface cool, such as water from a nearby lake or river. “You just need a cold surface in a moist environment,” he says. “We’re working on demonstrating this concept.
And I am pretty sure this is what the first poster was mis-reading. The idea behind that second process is that in a MOIST environment with a cold surface, you can achieve power generation in this matter as long as you have the following:
large amounts of cold water AND moist air. The reason the first poster is wrong is that he states that this can be an application in arid regions, which as a rule have neither of the requirements.
Considering that the scientific method was developed by Roger Bacon ( a catholic) who codified the method about 700 years ago for the Catholic Church and is widely hailed as the father of science....... (this was based on the work of others including the Greek philosophers too) I would almost say that saying science without Christian might be wrong in itself. Of course, I am assuming you are joking, but you never do know nowadays. In other words, even back in the Middle Ages Christians in general who controlled most of the universities and in general were in charge of research were constantly looking for methods to better explain the world through logic and deduction. You see, the entire meme that the bible is literal or that we "have it your way" like Burger King with religion on select bible quotes and ignore other quotes that don't agree with "your belief on what Chistianity is" is an entirely newer thing that yes a small fraction of Americans to this day still believe in. I personally don't get it, but don't confuse a small group of nut-cases who can't think things through logically with Christians in general.
That is when us the old geezers tell the people that it was the mining company USSR which forced us through their evil ways to venture to the moon just to mine the coal and cheese that were there. The cheese and coal were mined out, we came back, and now people who happily eat cheese tell the world that we never even ventured there. Don't they know where their cheese comes from? Young whipper-snappers nowadays...and get the heck of my lawn.
its already happening. So yea, they will get paid like always meaning the shut-down was nothing but a free vacation to the federal employees. The only losers will be the taxpayers who are paying the workers to do nothing. Something I have always wondered, if they are going to get back-pay anyway, why aren't they working? and if that is the case, why in the world do we call it a shut-down in the first place? Its such a farce really.
Oh, I honestly laughed out loud when I saw that you were using the failed idea of peaked oil to prove your disaster dream. You are just yet another person who does not understand that we do not explore for fossil fuels and/or oil until we need more. Not one geologist on this planet honestly has an idea of how much oil, or coal or any other substance that exists on this planet. All the predictions we have are based on recoverable resources which is "the oil we have found." And so we always have 10 years of oil left. We have had 10 years of oil left for the last 30 years. And that reason is like I said....because people only search for new sources of oil when we start to get low, and when they find it, they stop searching. Although in industry they generally hire enough people just to keep the future that far in check. That is the way its done in the real world anyway. If you had a way to estimate the total reserves on this planet, you might be onto something, but you are talking about a big planet with quite a few niches and holes that have never to this day even seen man. (Think Antarctica).
As for fresh water, no need to be scared. We have had this technology for a few decades now called desalination where ocean water can become drinking water. The naval crew of the US carriers for instance get their drinking water like this after 90 days at sea when the supplies run out. The only complain I remember hearing was that it tasted lousy. So no, fresh water is not in a danger of ever running out, cheap water is. In the future, humanity will have to pay more to obtain water. And than, I don't understand what you mean by synthetic fertilizer (as I assume you mean the stuff we mine from the ground to put back into the ground as fertilizer (Phosphate?) In that case, we have hundreds of years worth of supplies and that takes no more oil than anything else. (We have enough supplies that I know of to feed us for at least 200 years assuming our population doubles 3 times.)
And farm-land is not an issue. We can always grow crops indoors in multi-story buildings with grow lights if we wanted to. That might be a solution for the future so that we can set aside even more land for nature and rely a lot less on pesticides. I can't think of a thing we couldn't do with current technology today that is depended on your view of a catastrophe. Perhaps you have been reading too much literature by Paul Ehlrich who got everything he said incorrect. You are free to trust someone who was wrong about everything, but I am thinking the rest of us should trust in what we can see with our two eyes and not some esoteric future disaster dreamed up by scare mongers.
Great concept, in a world where anything we can imagine is possible through technology because our brains are amazing. I won't doubt our brains are amazing and that we are capable of quite a bit......but that is not reality my buddy. Reality is 6 billion souls all marching to their own tunes in their own directions most of the time contradicting the movements of other people. That is what humanity is, a pale shade of your imagination in that most of us are reinventing the wheel in parallel and each individual adds just a tiny bit to the pie. The truth is that our capability to learn is very depended on other humans and that we learn best by "monkey see, monkey do." Or perhaps the best way of looking at it is the old country song, one step forward, two steps back.
And so the only arrogance is from you still. You believe that your vision or perhaps the paradigm you view both humanity and yourself in is correct and have no reservations of your own limitations. You too could go much farther, but only when you realize that you are just one voice among many crying out in the wilderness for a deliverance from a planet that naturally inflicts harm on its people. And by crying out in the wilderness about how great the minds of humanity are, you completely missed through your own arrogance the crucial question that should be answered first: Why should we geo-engineer at all ? Why should we do more than that? Isn't our sentient existence great enough without playing Gods with things we probably do not understand well enough to do?
The law of unintentional consequences strikes the arrogant quite often. And that is because they believe they are correct no matter what evidence is presented and they will always (ALWAYS) double down and assume they are correct even with contradictory evidence. That is why the brightest minds of humanity have been open and not closed to the idea that we do not know everything...quite yet. And that is my great lesson for you today sir. Arrogance can derail the smartest minds we have because through that arrogance, people close their minds and close their minds to the possibility that the views of others might just be correct after all. Don't become another victim of arrogance. There is a reason this term applies to especially the most educated people in society.
Have some nice scientific literature with which to back that claim up?
From the research I have seen, everything is normal as far as weather and "extreme weather" goes and in case you missed it, not one single storm on this planet has been directly attributed to humans as of yet.
You must have missed the crucial point of the recent summary for policy makers (IPCC)
“No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.”
IPCC says that there is no best estimate for climate sensitivity which for the lay readers means that no one knows what the actual effect of CO2 is going to be. Physics tells us 1.0 degree C per doubling. Sensitivity tells us by what we multiply that 1.0 times to get what the actual effect of CO2 forcing is going to be. Before this, the range was 2-5.5 C. Now its ?
Warmer and more CO2 is great ground for plants to take over. More than likely, scientists are missing the key piece of the puzzle that basic biologists have known for years, in that the life on this planet waxes and wanes based on what the planet gives life (possibly vice versa). Plants are known to use less water, and grow faster with more CO2, which is why NASA found what they did in that study.
We shouldn't be afraid of climate change, we should be afraid that plants will take it all over and control us someday in the future. I don't know about you, but I for one bow to our new green overlords.
How do you know that our current administration is not doing just this? If they used the material they collected illegally, we could already be seeing this at the higher ends of the spectrum with politicians buying votes on bills based on blackmail or even buying compliance on certain issues through the same.
I agree, I don't think republicans are the issue, but democrats are not either. This particular issue seems to vary between rep to rep. Obama himself voted for the patriot act extension back when he was a senator. I don't think either party is really for or against this issue quite yet. The reason nonsense like this gets passed is because we have so many false democrats and false republicans who vote to increase their own power at the expense of the people. Until the people start voting because of this issue, neither party will take a definite stance on this issue.
If we want things to change, the best thing we can do is to start voting big Government idiots out of office such as Obama, George W., and of course McCain who in my mind is one of the worst neocons we have in congress currently.
What does creationism have to do with human caused global warming?
I think you are confused on that topic for one. Two, my views and the views of most skeptics are not because "the GOP told us so". I have yet to meet one skeptic out of the hundreds I know that has ever made that kind of connection. We believe that humans are not causing witnessed change because we have looked at the data, at the computer models, and have found them to be lacking. Following the scientific method, we as skeptics are just asking for science, namely that warmists prove the null hypothesis incorrect before sprouting off that global warming is a fact. You do realize that no one has proven that the changes we have witnessed are not natural, correct?
And finally:
Big oil is not on the side of skeptics. Its on your side of the argument. Big oil gives 100 times more money to big green in donations than they do to skeptics and yet you still parrot that wrong line. Big oil also publicly declares that they believe global warming is the fault of evil man. Why would you post such an untrue statement that would have taken 10 seconds to look up?
http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/the-energy-future/climate-change.html
Does that mean you are drinking the kool-aid from big oil than? Its actually a relevant question.
I would hope people would bet heavily on climate change. Because the climate on this planet has been changing drastically for the last 4 billion years and I doubt it will suddenly decide to STOP changing because humans now inhabit this planet. We have seen vast hot times, vast ice ages and even a probable snow-ball Earth where the entire planet was covered in ice. We have even seen atmospheres that would poison humans, and atmospheres without oxygen even.
This planet has been changing since day 1. So yes, you are throwing out a red herring here either through ignorance on what climate skeptics believe, or because you just want to insult half the US through your "talking points." Serious climate skeptics do not believe the warming we have seen is the fault of man, but rather natural warming that the planet is giving us through processes that we do not quite understand yet. Most of us also believe as a rule that CO2 DOES have an effect, but that its been over-emphasized by political organizations that take the normal 1C per doubling of CO2 and simply multiply it by some figure to make it worse with zero proof that water will amplify the effect instead of moderating the effect of CO2 increases which is what water normally behaves. (Hello, we use water as a temperature moderator in nuclear power plants, so we do know it behaves like this)...
In any event, the last 15 years are showing that the climate models which were never more than a weak hypothesis were in fact wrong. If CO2 did drive temperatures, the temperatures would have kept on increasing as long as CO2 was increasing in our atmosphere. That failure of the models in essence shows us that CO2 has a more minor impact on temperatures which kind of leaves the only alternative left:
That the climate is changing due to reasons we do not understand.
The experts are the ones stuck on the dying horse. The rest of us have moved on and are trying to figure out what is causing the current stagnant temperatures. As for future temperatures, Ill flip the coin and tell you what the future holds. And I hope these companies are also planning for a cooling world, because frankly we are in what is called an inter-glacial and at some point regardless of man we will be thrust back into an ice age that will be much worse than the supposed catastrophe of warming. We can adapt to warming. We can not adapt to cooling as well. Think about that.
Every insurance worker in the world is going to claim disasters are worse today than in the past and getting worse. This is because he makes money on maximizing risk. If the risk is great for disasters, he can bilk you out of even more money because you are scared he might be correct. Its a gamble as always with insurance, and he wants you to fork over more money. I wouldn't trust an assertion like that from someone in the insurance industry anymore than I would trust a tobacco industry rep who tells me cigarettes are safe.
In every case, MAKE him back-up his assertions with facts and figures that show that disasters by number really are increasing.
Fear is the justification that these insurance companies are going to use to jack people's rates up. We have seen fewer hurricanes, fewer tornadoes and sea level rise is still about the same as it has been for the last 100 years, and yet people are more than willing to pay more for insurance simply because these disasters "must be in the pipeline."
Here is the secret:
People will always take advantage of you if you let them for monetary gain. And people will always side politically with the group that benefits them the most. Who benefits from climate change hysteria?
Or perhaps the insurance companies are doing both...being prudent just in case temperatures do start rising from our stagnant levels over the last 15 years, and if it turns out to be wrong, those rate increases can be blamed on the scientists. Its really win-win for them, and I would be careful if I was predicting doom and gloom, because if people get screwed out of money that goes into insurance companies, those people might be a little pissed in the end. So keep your predictions and projections on a realistic level is the moral there. People do tend to get over-excited about being made to be chumps with money.
8000 years ago, during the Holocene climate optimum which was warmer than we are today, it is widely thought that all arctic sea ice melted every summer. The polar bear survived this, so the only conclusion one could make is that since the polar bears are not depended on year-round sea ice for survival. That is unless you are insinuating that the polar bears evolved in just 8000 years?
That is why this claim that polar bears need sea ice has always seemed silly to me.
What, you mean like record high antarctic ice extents that are yearly over-looked? Or how temperature in the arctic have been running below average for 2 years now?
There are plenty of facts that are over-looked by both sides truth be told. and yes, I would hardly call this year a recovery or a two year trend the sign of things to come, but I think everyone should keep an open mind and keep an eye on the data over the next couple of years. A cooling arctic is hardly consistent with the theory of catastrophic global warming, and if indeed it turns out skeptics are right, it might be best to not say things you regret later. IE: don't call someone a fool who might end up being correct. The conclusion might be premature, but if they are correct, well what does that make you?
In other words, this debate could use a lot more decorum on both sides.
I never knew a libertarian who stated that all Government is bad, and that capitalism is always good. Of course, when you make generalizations on subjects you don't know anything about, you are liable to get it completely wrong. Libertarians are not anarchists period. That might be part of your confusion. Libertarians believe in SMALL Government, not NO government which is what differentiates libertarians from anarchists. You can thank me for this lesson on terms, but like always, look the word up if you don't know what it means! Please.
As for Government intervention, if a problem is large enough, I don't as a libertarian see an issue with a massive Government project. If a meteor is coming towards the Earth and the proof is easy to see, I would be the first to support massive Government spending to attempt to save the planet. The problem that most people who are skeptics on global warming is that the evidence for "catastrophic" climate change is not in evidence. You expect us to believe and trust you and others like you when all along every prediction and projection even has ended up being wrong. If CO2 did indeed have an amplification effect on water as proposed by global warming catastrophe believers, we would have seen much higher temperature than what we have so far. Now, if CO2 has a more minor inpact as the physics tells us (1.0 degrees C of warming per doubling) or even less, the models would diverge from reality like they have recently simply because the effect of CO2 is too small to over-come natural variation.
Where is the proof? That is the question all of us skeptics are asking and we are willing to discuss radical ideas to fix this problem when the proof arrives, but over the last 5 years we have seen nothing but obfuscation, insults and downright dirty behavior including scientists keeping their methods to themselves and simply publishing papers that no one else can duplicate. If you instead of spending time insulting us and obfuscating the truth went out and attempted to prove your case minus insults and full of dialogue, you might not be losing numbers like you have. That kind of behavior simply turns normal people off. So what about it? are you willing to have a discussion on this subject, or are you just going to call me "true believer" and other insulting terms and insult anyone who questions a certain orthodoxy. Because in my experience the person throwing out the insults is the one who tends to have nothing else to say.
I did ask myself that very question. What could possibly cause increased contact between humans and polar bears? And it dawned on me that if their numbers were becoming smaller, contact between them and humans would be rarer and rarer even if they are pushed out of one ecosystem. You can not have contact with a species that basically does not exist. In that sense, the best bet is to indeed look to the experts and see what they say.
I saw a wide variety of reports, but the latest research that I could find says this (the link is rather harsh and opinionated, but the facts stand)
And it seems that their numbers are indeed increasing.
You see, a metric such as "polar bear clashes with humans" tells you nothing about their actual numbers when you really think about it. Scientists indeed study this very problem by taking population numbers. In reality, their numbers are up and it seems that the number one cause of their original demise was probably human hunting of them to begin with. now that we protect them, their numbers are going up...and yes contact between them and humans are also going up as their populations increase. I expect their numbers to continue to increase which is the correct thing to do until they do reach a number that is satisfactory. Of course, this has nothing to do with sea ice or the extent as the polar bear numbers seem to correlate much better with the amount of hunting we do on them. And since global warming is so politicized, no one wants to study the salient facts.
I realize you won't take my word for it or even the peer-reviewed literature that the link I gave talks about, so ask yourself this, if their numbers really are decreasing, why are people thinking of increasing quotas for hunting them?
Police departments of all stripes can make more money for their departments through property seizure, so why would they waste time with actual criminals which actually costs them money?
The second we allowed as a society police departments to confiscate individuals' wealth was the second we lost our way as a society. It does not help that tickets and other roadside violations are also money that goes to the local police department directly. And so we have police in this country whose jobs are directly depended on outside revenue streams and so their employers are no longer every citizen, but rather those who they imprison and fine. They are constantly looking for additional people to finance their jobs like that. And what does all of this money that they confiscate give them? Military level arms, body armor, and all sorts of little toys that make breaking into someone's house a quite large ordeal. So next time someone "swats you" you can thank the illegal confiscations and mountains of traffic violations that made it possible for semi-trained idiots to go around with military level machine guns and body armor.
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I must disagree. Most MBA's from college that I know of are sitting at dead end jobs in HR or working for the feds making peanuts. Your assertion that the water boy is doing better today is probably a local example you know of, but for the most part the jocks had to find real jobs which is something they typically are not all that interested in to begin with, and so they lost their primary drive to life and "settled for HR". I feel sorry for them more than anything, because my life calling as a scientist is still going strong while their life calling to be "a professional athlete" is a dream that is dead. Same for people who want to be actors or actresses. Some of them might still be living the dream, but none of them made it from any school I attended which just goes to show that the advantage nerds have is that our professions don't typically toss us out after eating the best years of our life. Rather, they tend to get better the older we get and so a nerd has never had it this good. Perhaps that is perspective? But in any event your experience differs and I see MBA degrees as something I could always get if management appealed to me (its not like the degree is hard for a scientist) but why should I bother when I am happy doing what I am doing? Don't let money, or fame or even delusions of grandeur of athletes hold you back from just having a good and fun life if you are a nerd or if not.
There are countries that are better educated than in the US, but if you look at the facts, America is not all that far behind other countries. Some countries, like Japan stop secondary school at about the high school level for all but the brightest and the richest. This means that only the brightest fraction of children are taught past this level for the most part which means when you do standardized testing in those countries, the test scores far outpace the US. This is not to say that the American educational system is superior, but mainly that we do educate farther than those countries. You are basically comparing all American Children to the brightest Japanese children as a rule, and of course they come out looking better. As for the past, the trend has been other countries getting better at education and as such they start outperforming us when you start comparing like that. In that case, its the same as the example of your "friends who were taught in the old eastern schools". When you compare the brightest to everyone else, you tend to get much worse results. I don't think I have ever seen an apples to apples test that measures this at the secondary level. Most primary testing shows a rather complete picture, but past that its not really accurate. Especially as you get out of the developed world where some people don't get any education.
Personally, our education system for the most part is about the same as it was when we were "great". While other countries are doing better, we are stuck in the same old mold. And we can learn from their lessons and how they got better to better our own system, and that is just common sense.
It has nothing to do with a small American elite. Finland for instance has the same system where children go to school until the high school level where some children go into vocational training. What is the secret to their success and other countries? The most notable thing is that only the brightest teachers are allowed to teach by making an educational degree program as difficult as engineering and highly technical degrees are in the states. This means that teachers are respected (unlike in the US), they make good money, and they are the cream of the crop as far as intellectuals. As it is in the US, anyone can get an educational degree and as a rule everyone looks down on teachers as being the "dumb career choice." And so our education goes downhill in comparison simply because we do not set our priorities. The priorities for Americans has always been high tech, engineering, and high tech toys. Politically, the real solution to the problem is a non-starter because our different political groups are entrenched on other issues and like to kick the can down the road to the next politician.
I agree, no where does it mention that increased condensation is something that will be achieved or water efficiency itself will be increased, its only discussing the efficiency of the heat transport process. I read the article to figure out what he was talking about....and they did talk about a second application that does mention condensation as a power source.
But the finding also suggests another possible new application, Miljkovic says: By placing two parallel metal plates out in the open, with “one surface that has droplets jumping, and another that collects them you could generate some power” just from condensation from the ambient air. All that would be needed is a way of keeping the condenser surface cool, such as water from a nearby lake or river. “You just need a cold surface in a moist environment,” he says. “We’re working on demonstrating this concept.
And I am pretty sure this is what the first poster was mis-reading. The idea behind that second process is that in a MOIST environment with a cold surface, you can achieve power generation in this matter as long as you have the following:
large amounts of cold water AND moist air. The reason the first poster is wrong is that he states that this can be an application in arid regions, which as a rule have neither of the requirements.
Considering that the scientific method was developed by Roger Bacon ( a catholic) who codified the method about 700 years ago for the Catholic Church and is widely hailed as the father of science....... (this was based on the work of others including the Greek philosophers too) I would almost say that saying science without Christian might be wrong in itself. Of course, I am assuming you are joking, but you never do know nowadays. In other words, even back in the Middle Ages Christians in general who controlled most of the universities and in general were in charge of research were constantly looking for methods to better explain the world through logic and deduction. You see, the entire meme that the bible is literal or that we "have it your way" like Burger King with religion on select bible quotes and ignore other quotes that don't agree with "your belief on what Chistianity is" is an entirely newer thing that yes a small fraction of Americans to this day still believe in. I personally don't get it, but don't confuse a small group of nut-cases who can't think things through logically with Christians in general.
That is when us the old geezers tell the people that it was the mining company USSR which forced us through their evil ways to venture to the moon just to mine the coal and cheese that were there. The cheese and coal were mined out, we came back, and now people who happily eat cheese tell the world that we never even ventured there. Don't they know where their cheese comes from? Young whipper-snappers nowadays...and get the heck of my lawn.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal_government/house-and-senate-bills-would-pay-federal-workers-for-shutdown-furloughs/2013/10/03/d2fc8096-2c58-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html
its already happening. So yea, they will get paid like always meaning the shut-down was nothing but a free vacation to the federal employees. The only losers will be the taxpayers who are paying the workers to do nothing. Something I have always wondered, if they are going to get back-pay anyway, why aren't they working? and if that is the case, why in the world do we call it a shut-down in the first place? Its such a farce really.
Oh, I honestly laughed out loud when I saw that you were using the failed idea of peaked oil to prove your disaster dream. You are just yet another person who does not understand that we do not explore for fossil fuels and/or oil until we need more. Not one geologist on this planet honestly has an idea of how much oil, or coal or any other substance that exists on this planet. All the predictions we have are based on recoverable resources which is "the oil we have found." And so we always have 10 years of oil left. We have had 10 years of oil left for the last 30 years. And that reason is like I said....because people only search for new sources of oil when we start to get low, and when they find it, they stop searching. Although in industry they generally hire enough people just to keep the future that far in check. That is the way its done in the real world anyway. If you had a way to estimate the total reserves on this planet, you might be onto something, but you are talking about a big planet with quite a few niches and holes that have never to this day even seen man. (Think Antarctica).
As for fresh water, no need to be scared. We have had this technology for a few decades now called desalination where ocean water can become drinking water. The naval crew of the US carriers for instance get their drinking water like this after 90 days at sea when the supplies run out. The only complain I remember hearing was that it tasted lousy. So no, fresh water is not in a danger of ever running out, cheap water is. In the future, humanity will have to pay more to obtain water. And than, I don't understand what you mean by synthetic fertilizer (as I assume you mean the stuff we mine from the ground to put back into the ground as fertilizer (Phosphate?) In that case, we have hundreds of years worth of supplies and that takes no more oil than anything else. (We have enough supplies that I know of to feed us for at least 200 years assuming our population doubles 3 times.)
And farm-land is not an issue. We can always grow crops indoors in multi-story buildings with grow lights if we wanted to. That might be a solution for the future so that we can set aside even more land for nature and rely a lot less on pesticides. I can't think of a thing we couldn't do with current technology today that is depended on your view of a catastrophe. Perhaps you have been reading too much literature by Paul Ehlrich who got everything he said incorrect. You are free to trust someone who was wrong about everything, but I am thinking the rest of us should trust in what we can see with our two eyes and not some esoteric future disaster dreamed up by scare mongers.
Great concept, in a world where anything we can imagine is possible through technology because our brains are amazing. I won't doubt our brains are amazing and that we are capable of quite a bit......but that is not reality my buddy. Reality is 6 billion souls all marching to their own tunes in their own directions most of the time contradicting the movements of other people. That is what humanity is, a pale shade of your imagination in that most of us are reinventing the wheel in parallel and each individual adds just a tiny bit to the pie. The truth is that our capability to learn is very depended on other humans and that we learn best by "monkey see, monkey do." Or perhaps the best way of looking at it is the old country song, one step forward, two steps back.
And so the only arrogance is from you still. You believe that your vision or perhaps the paradigm you view both humanity and yourself in is correct and have no reservations of your own limitations. You too could go much farther, but only when you realize that you are just one voice among many crying out in the wilderness for a deliverance from a planet that naturally inflicts harm on its people. And by crying out in the wilderness about how great the minds of humanity are, you completely missed through your own arrogance the crucial question that should be answered first: Why should we geo-engineer at all ? Why should we do more than that? Isn't our sentient existence great enough without playing Gods with things we probably do not understand well enough to do?
The law of unintentional consequences strikes the arrogant quite often. And that is because they believe they are correct no matter what evidence is presented and they will always (ALWAYS) double down and assume they are correct even with contradictory evidence. That is why the brightest minds of humanity have been open and not closed to the idea that we do not know everything...quite yet. And that is my great lesson for you today sir. Arrogance can derail the smartest minds we have because through that arrogance, people close their minds and close their minds to the possibility that the views of others might just be correct after all. Don't become another victim of arrogance. There is a reason this term applies to especially the most educated people in society.
Have some nice scientific literature with which to back that claim up? From the research I have seen, everything is normal as far as weather and "extreme weather" goes and in case you missed it, not one single storm on this planet has been directly attributed to humans as of yet.
“No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.”
IPCC says that there is no best estimate for climate sensitivity which for the lay readers means that no one knows what the actual effect of CO2 is going to be. Physics tells us 1.0 degree C per doubling. Sensitivity tells us by what we multiply that 1.0 times to get what the actual effect of CO2 forcing is going to be. Before this, the range was 2-5.5 C. Now its ?
So tell me, is that science?
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2003/jun/HQ_03182_green_garden.html
Warmer and more CO2 is great ground for plants to take over. More than likely, scientists are missing the key piece of the puzzle that basic biologists have known for years, in that the life on this planet waxes and wanes based on what the planet gives life (possibly vice versa). Plants are known to use less water, and grow faster with more CO2, which is why NASA found what they did in that study.
We shouldn't be afraid of climate change, we should be afraid that plants will take it all over and control us someday in the future. I don't know about you, but I for one bow to our new green overlords.
How do you know that our current administration is not doing just this? If they used the material they collected illegally, we could already be seeing this at the higher ends of the spectrum with politicians buying votes on bills based on blackmail or even buying compliance on certain issues through the same.
And the rest of us peons wouldn't have a clue.
I agree, I don't think republicans are the issue, but democrats are not either. This particular issue seems to vary between rep to rep. Obama himself voted for the patriot act extension back when he was a senator. I don't think either party is really for or against this issue quite yet. The reason nonsense like this gets passed is because we have so many false democrats and false republicans who vote to increase their own power at the expense of the people. Until the people start voting because of this issue, neither party will take a definite stance on this issue.
If we want things to change, the best thing we can do is to start voting big Government idiots out of office such as Obama, George W., and of course McCain who in my mind is one of the worst neocons we have in congress currently.
What does creationism have to do with human caused global warming?
I think you are confused on that topic for one. Two, my views and the views of most skeptics are not because "the GOP told us so". I have yet to meet one skeptic out of the hundreds I know that has ever made that kind of connection. We believe that humans are not causing witnessed change because we have looked at the data, at the computer models, and have found them to be lacking. Following the scientific method, we as skeptics are just asking for science, namely that warmists prove the null hypothesis incorrect before sprouting off that global warming is a fact. You do realize that no one has proven that the changes we have witnessed are not natural, correct?
And finally: Big oil is not on the side of skeptics. Its on your side of the argument. Big oil gives 100 times more money to big green in donations than they do to skeptics and yet you still parrot that wrong line. Big oil also publicly declares that they believe global warming is the fault of evil man. Why would you post such an untrue statement that would have taken 10 seconds to look up? http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/the-energy-future/climate-change.html
Does that mean you are drinking the kool-aid from big oil than? Its actually a relevant question.
You mean like the decade long of no warming we have seen?
I would hope people would bet heavily on climate change. Because the climate on this planet has been changing drastically for the last 4 billion years and I doubt it will suddenly decide to STOP changing because humans now inhabit this planet. We have seen vast hot times, vast ice ages and even a probable snow-ball Earth where the entire planet was covered in ice. We have even seen atmospheres that would poison humans, and atmospheres without oxygen even.
This planet has been changing since day 1. So yes, you are throwing out a red herring here either through ignorance on what climate skeptics believe, or because you just want to insult half the US through your "talking points." Serious climate skeptics do not believe the warming we have seen is the fault of man, but rather natural warming that the planet is giving us through processes that we do not quite understand yet. Most of us also believe as a rule that CO2 DOES have an effect, but that its been over-emphasized by political organizations that take the normal 1C per doubling of CO2 and simply multiply it by some figure to make it worse with zero proof that water will amplify the effect instead of moderating the effect of CO2 increases which is what water normally behaves. (Hello, we use water as a temperature moderator in nuclear power plants, so we do know it behaves like this)...
In any event, the last 15 years are showing that the climate models which were never more than a weak hypothesis were in fact wrong. If CO2 did drive temperatures, the temperatures would have kept on increasing as long as CO2 was increasing in our atmosphere. That failure of the models in essence shows us that CO2 has a more minor impact on temperatures which kind of leaves the only alternative left:
That the climate is changing due to reasons we do not understand.
The experts are the ones stuck on the dying horse. The rest of us have moved on and are trying to figure out what is causing the current stagnant temperatures. As for future temperatures, Ill flip the coin and tell you what the future holds. And I hope these companies are also planning for a cooling world, because frankly we are in what is called an inter-glacial and at some point regardless of man we will be thrust back into an ice age that will be much worse than the supposed catastrophe of warming. We can adapt to warming. We can not adapt to cooling as well. Think about that.
Every insurance worker in the world is going to claim disasters are worse today than in the past and getting worse. This is because he makes money on maximizing risk. If the risk is great for disasters, he can bilk you out of even more money because you are scared he might be correct. Its a gamble as always with insurance, and he wants you to fork over more money. I wouldn't trust an assertion like that from someone in the insurance industry anymore than I would trust a tobacco industry rep who tells me cigarettes are safe.
In every case, MAKE him back-up his assertions with facts and figures that show that disasters by number really are increasing.
Fear is the justification that these insurance companies are going to use to jack people's rates up. We have seen fewer hurricanes, fewer tornadoes and sea level rise is still about the same as it has been for the last 100 years, and yet people are more than willing to pay more for insurance simply because these disasters "must be in the pipeline."
Here is the secret:
People will always take advantage of you if you let them for monetary gain. And people will always side politically with the group that benefits them the most. Who benefits from climate change hysteria?
Or perhaps the insurance companies are doing both...being prudent just in case temperatures do start rising from our stagnant levels over the last 15 years, and if it turns out to be wrong, those rate increases can be blamed on the scientists. Its really win-win for them, and I would be careful if I was predicting doom and gloom, because if people get screwed out of money that goes into insurance companies, those people might be a little pissed in the end. So keep your predictions and projections on a realistic level is the moral there. People do tend to get over-excited about being made to be chumps with money.
Only an idiot would buy a piece of ice on ebay that would just come back the next winter.
8000 years ago, during the Holocene climate optimum which was warmer than we are today, it is widely thought that all arctic sea ice melted every summer. The polar bear survived this, so the only conclusion one could make is that since the polar bears are not depended on year-round sea ice for survival. That is unless you are insinuating that the polar bears evolved in just 8000 years?
That is why this claim that polar bears need sea ice has always seemed silly to me.
What, you mean like record high antarctic ice extents that are yearly over-looked? Or how temperature in the arctic have been running below average for 2 years now?
There are plenty of facts that are over-looked by both sides truth be told. and yes, I would hardly call this year a recovery or a two year trend the sign of things to come, but I think everyone should keep an open mind and keep an eye on the data over the next couple of years. A cooling arctic is hardly consistent with the theory of catastrophic global warming, and if indeed it turns out skeptics are right, it might be best to not say things you regret later. IE: don't call someone a fool who might end up being correct. The conclusion might be premature, but if they are correct, well what does that make you?
In other words, this debate could use a lot more decorum on both sides.
You have to start shooting libertarians first sir. And fair warning, we shoot back.
I never knew a libertarian who stated that all Government is bad, and that capitalism is always good. Of course, when you make generalizations on subjects you don't know anything about, you are liable to get it completely wrong. Libertarians are not anarchists period. That might be part of your confusion. Libertarians believe in SMALL Government, not NO government which is what differentiates libertarians from anarchists. You can thank me for this lesson on terms, but like always, look the word up if you don't know what it means! Please.
As for Government intervention, if a problem is large enough, I don't as a libertarian see an issue with a massive Government project. If a meteor is coming towards the Earth and the proof is easy to see, I would be the first to support massive Government spending to attempt to save the planet. The problem that most people who are skeptics on global warming is that the evidence for "catastrophic" climate change is not in evidence. You expect us to believe and trust you and others like you when all along every prediction and projection even has ended up being wrong. If CO2 did indeed have an amplification effect on water as proposed by global warming catastrophe believers, we would have seen much higher temperature than what we have so far. Now, if CO2 has a more minor inpact as the physics tells us (1.0 degrees C of warming per doubling) or even less, the models would diverge from reality like they have recently simply because the effect of CO2 is too small to over-come natural variation.
Where is the proof? That is the question all of us skeptics are asking and we are willing to discuss radical ideas to fix this problem when the proof arrives, but over the last 5 years we have seen nothing but obfuscation, insults and downright dirty behavior including scientists keeping their methods to themselves and simply publishing papers that no one else can duplicate. If you instead of spending time insulting us and obfuscating the truth went out and attempted to prove your case minus insults and full of dialogue, you might not be losing numbers like you have. That kind of behavior simply turns normal people off. So what about it? are you willing to have a discussion on this subject, or are you just going to call me "true believer" and other insulting terms and insult anyone who questions a certain orthodoxy. Because in my experience the person throwing out the insults is the one who tends to have nothing else to say.
I did ask myself that very question. What could possibly cause increased contact between humans and polar bears? And it dawned on me that if their numbers were becoming smaller, contact between them and humans would be rarer and rarer even if they are pushed out of one ecosystem. You can not have contact with a species that basically does not exist. In that sense, the best bet is to indeed look to the experts and see what they say.
I saw a wide variety of reports, but the latest research that I could find says this (the link is rather harsh and opinionated, but the facts stand) And it seems that their numbers are indeed increasing. You see, a metric such as "polar bear clashes with humans" tells you nothing about their actual numbers when you really think about it. Scientists indeed study this very problem by taking population numbers. In reality, their numbers are up and it seems that the number one cause of their original demise was probably human hunting of them to begin with. now that we protect them, their numbers are going up...and yes contact between them and humans are also going up as their populations increase. I expect their numbers to continue to increase which is the correct thing to do until they do reach a number that is satisfactory. Of course, this has nothing to do with sea ice or the extent as the polar bear numbers seem to correlate much better with the amount of hunting we do on them. And since global warming is so politicized, no one wants to study the salient facts.
I realize you won't take my word for it or even the peer-reviewed literature that the link I gave talks about, so ask yourself this, if their numbers really are decreasing, why are people thinking of increasing quotas for hunting them?
http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674nunavut_wildlife_board_considers_request_to_up_foxe_basin_polar_bear_q/
Police departments of all stripes can make more money for their departments through property seizure, so why would they waste time with actual criminals which actually costs them money?
The second we allowed as a society police departments to confiscate individuals' wealth was the second we lost our way as a society. It does not help that tickets and other roadside violations are also money that goes to the local police department directly. And so we have police in this country whose jobs are directly depended on outside revenue streams and so their employers are no longer every citizen, but rather those who they imprison and fine. They are constantly looking for additional people to finance their jobs like that. And what does all of this money that they confiscate give them? Military level arms, body armor, and all sorts of little toys that make breaking into someone's house a quite large ordeal. So next time someone "swats you" you can thank the illegal confiscations and mountains of traffic violations that made it possible for semi-trained idiots to go around with military level machine guns and body armor.