Mercator's projection preserves angles at the cost of distorting size. Oh, and maybe you should look at the other hemisphere.
I'm sorry, but you will have to actually do the math like I did: even if there was just a band of arable land moving north, it would be a gain.
But climate history shows that increased carbon concentrations simply lead to overall warmer, wetter climates overall. (The great deserts are not due to temperature but due to lack of precipitation based on wind patterns.)
Then they realise that they've got an aging population and import people from undeveloped countries, who bring their population growth with them.
Those people adapt quickly to their new societies. Women have many children when they believe many of their children will die. Furthermore, there are fewer and fewer underdeveloped countries with high birthrates anyway.
It depends what you mean by doing fine. Is their birth:death ratio greater than 1:1?
Meaning they have been long term stable populations.
Populations in most developed countries are still growing, they just experience slower growth than underdeveloped countries.
World population growth is almost entirely due to demographics now; globally, children are born at close to replacement rates.
All I am saying, is that extinctions can happen really slowly. IF we do go extinct, it may not be noticeable. I am not saying that we are going extinct now.
Extinctions can't happen slowly; they happen when a small remaining population gets wiped out entirely. That's a nearly instantaneous event.
Population decline can happen slowly, but population decline is not a sign of extinction. Humans have bounced back from a worldwide population of 10000, and previous primates have been subject to even worse bottlenecks.
It is exactly as predicted. First deny it is getting warmer. Then later, deny the warming is due to human influences. The later, claim that nothing can be done anyway, we should curl up and die.
And what's your problem with that sequence? Until maybe 10 years ago, the evidence for anthropogenic effects was poor; there was no point in talking about the efficacy of various interventions before there was no evidence that there was a problem.
I don't give 2 figs for your political views and your manic obsession with the people you term progressives. I'm not an American, so I don't care what happens in US elections.
Progressivism has been a dominant feature of European politics since the beginning of the 20th century as well. Thinking that it's a US political phenomenon limited to US elections merely marks you out as totally ignorant.
the assumption that you gain arable land is a bad assumption.
It isn't an "assumption", it's a likely possibility based on observing what the earth was like the last times CO2 concentrations were high. Nobody has provided a compelling argument why high CO2 concentrations should lead to a different outcome now. All the credible arguments about the supposed evils of climate change are based on the costs of short term disruptions and change not long term outcomes.
(But we'd fine even if we overall lose significant arable land because we already have more than we need.)
Primates were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than any predicted by the IPCC.
Your idea of speciation is wrong; speciation happens when ecological niches open up; "reduced gene pools" and "habitat loss" don't prevent it, they encourage it.
The mass (near) extinction of humans need not be noticeable. All that is required is that the environment become inhospitable enough to humans to cause the birth:death ratio to drop below 1
And how "inhospitable" would that be? Both Eskimos and Berber are doing fine.
And climate change doesn't destroy climate globally anyway, it just changes it around. We'll likely end up with more arable land overall long term under the most severe climate change scenarios, even if the transition is more disruptive.
I suspect something far more normal will happen. We will simply hit an equilibrium point, where the world is just hospitable enough to cause humans to have about a 1:1 birth:death ratio
Actually, we already have effectively reached that point, and not through material privation, but rather development. Developed nations tend to stop having population growth.
The climate science is a curiosity but of no practical significance. Without government intervention, we're likely going to be carbon neutral by the end of the century. With government intervention, it's likely to take longer.
Ah yes, the sponsored astroturf argument that it's better to do nothing because the most extreme action is difficult.
The "extreme action" you advocate is not only difficult, it is ineffective, harmful, and counterproductive.
A lot of money was spent on brainwashing you to that view
Possibly. But it happens to be the rational, scientific view.
While all this childish denial has been going on the grown ups have been quietly cutting energy consumption in various ways, some blindingly obvious like LED lights, others less obvious like vastly cutting the energy input required to make microprocessors, sheet steel for car bodies etc.
Exactly right. And notice how all of that happened without the US ratifying Kyoto? Without Doha passing? That demolishes the position of climate alarmists that we need global treaties or heavy-handed government intervention in order to reduce carbon emissions.
There is a growing tidal wave of anger about roll over the fraudulent liars who constructed the lies of denialism.
Few people are denying that climate change is happening. People opposing action on climate change for the most part simply believe that the kind of interventions you obviously favor are ineffective and harmful. Accusing their opponents of holding ridiculous positions is a standard m.o. of progressives.
But there is indeed is some minority of people who are simply unwilling to listen to anything progressives say, and for good reason. Look at the evil progressives have promoted in the past in the name of science: eugenics, segregation, forced sterilization, Keynesianism, gold confiscation, and the list goes on. If Americans increasingly distrust science it is because progressives and Democrats have been using science as a propaganda tool for a century and doing grave harm to its reputation in the process; the fact that occasionally they get the science right doesn't make up for the many times that they get the science wrong.
You don't get to decide on our behalf whether we are prepared to make the changes necessary to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
Well, fortunately neither do you, nor Al Gore, nor Obama. It looks like Democrats are going to lose the mid-term elections, and there's a good chance they are going to lose the presidency next time around. I sure as hell am not going to vote for them anymore. Climate change is not high on the list of political priorities of voters either.
And there isn't much chance of the kind of dangerous nonsense you advocate turning into policy because there is neither enough money for it in the budget, nor would voters stand for the economic consequences.
Converting to CO2 neutral sources of energy is not scary.
No, it isn't. I emit very little carbon in my day-to-day life. How about you?
So it is irrational to say: it's not a problem science will solve everything yet simultaneously reject the prescription proscribed by the scientific method.
There are two sciences involved here: climate science and economics. Climate science only tells us what the climate might do under different emission scenarios. That's only a small part of the overall issue. You are completely ignoring the other, more important science. See, either you accept the scientific method wholly or you don't; you don't get to pick and choose.
It is not easy, but then we are supposed to be adults. We shouldn't shy away from something because it requires some effort or temporary inconvenience.
The issue isn't whether we should reduce carbon emissions, but how. You subscribe to the idea that somehow our governments pass some laws, sign some international agreements, we all accept some inconvenience, and then the problem gets solved. In different words, you are a moron completely unfamiliar with economics, history, or politics.
either you accept the scientific method and the upsides (and downsides) that go with it, or you reject it.
In 2393, people are going to look back at our obsession with climate change in the same way that we look back at the Middle Ages and their fear of witchcraft.
It's not even that all the phenomena ascribed to witchcraft were fictitious or harmless; there were a lot of real dangers and real phenomena people were seeing and were afraid of. But just like witchcraft, some of the fears will turn out to be nonsense, and the rest will be solved through scientific progress and economic development, not witch hunts.
Case in point, the DOE loan program. People like you like to cry "solyndra" all day long, but you conveniently ignore that the entire program on the whole has been an unqualified success,
Actually, that data tells you that the government is investing badly: the government is taking insufficient risks.
More importantly, though, even if the government had done a good job with those investments, you are still failing to account for opportunity costs; that is, what are all the businesses that haven't been created because the government redirected this money to other purposes.
If it didnt, the concept would have gone away years ago.
So you are saying that the status quo is evidence that something is working? Why do progressives want to change anything then?
Considering that this kind of policy is common throughout the world as a pretty uncontroversial part of government, I would say that the burden of proof of that statement is on you.
Are you serious? Every time the US government actually hands out large quantities of money to companies, the majority of people oppose it. For example for the auto bailout:
I mean, it defies belief for progressives to whine and complain about "big corporations" and the need for increased corporate taxes on the one hand and then turn around and shove massive amounts of money into the hands of corporations.
It is not clear to me why `picking winners and losers in the market place' is supposed to wrong. The government is a player in the marketplace with its own motivations.
If I have a million bucks, invest it in a creationist amusement park, and it goes belly up, I am very unhappy and I can't repeat that mistake; people who are bad at picking winners and losers soon lose their money. But if the government invests a million bucks and invests it in a creationist amusement park, and it goes belly up, no government employee hurts or gets punished, and they just raise taxes and do it again the next year.
That's just another act in the marketplace.
No, it is not, because unlike other market participant, government employees don't have anything at stake and governments only go bankrupt after the entire economy has been destroyed.
No, it was a (failed) attempt to make you think about your position.
You need to think about your position. Here's a good start:
So your stance is that Kentucky citizens should all just sit there, being unhappy and grumpy about their poor economy, and do nothing to fix it or foster growth?
There are plenty of things the Kentucky government can do to foster growth. Handing large amounts of money to people building monuments to creationism isn't among those things.
Ah, who am I kidding? I'm stopping hte list there.
Yeah, who are you kidding, you keep proving you are an utter moron who doesn't understand the difference between government spending on basic shared infrastructure (good) and crony capitalism (bad).
Repeat after me. SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE! It's not a hard concept to grasp.
Repeat after me: taking tax dollars and shoving them into the hands of private developers is not a proper function of government. Whether those developers are motivated by Jesus or science is irrelevant. It's not a hard concept to grasp.
Sadly, a huge percentage of the population is too stupid to realize that they're morons.
More importantly, a huge percentage of intellectuals, politicians, government advisers, economists, regulators, and administrators are too stupid to realize that they're morons in almost everything other than a (usually irrelevant) narrow specialty.
People have understood this for a long time. This is what people refer to when they call our current president "the anointed one", someone whose incorrectly judges himself, and is judged by others, to be an expert on a lot of things he knows next to nothing about.
That is why many people want small government, because a large part of the so-called "experts" in government clearly don't know what they are doing; by that I mean that they fail to deliver what they promise. You have a better chance making decisions for yourself than having them imposed on you by a president, cabinet, or other meddling government expert with Dunning-Kruger effect.
That seems kinda stupid. Why announce that they're 'watching you' and give you evidence that they're doing so?
Presumably they didn't want to spy on her (why should they? they already knew what she was likely to find), they wanted to intimidate her.
"Hey Agent P, I got a great idea. Let's h4xx0r her laptop, wipe out data, and let her know we're watching her. A member of the press would take that as a warning and not report on it, right?"
I'm sure many would. But apparently reporting on it isn't doing her much good since you don't actually believe her.
That is exactly how markets work in cases where you don't want to end up with multiple competing systems. We've seen this with the Bluray/HD-DVD debacle, with VHS vs. Beta vs. V2000, and in the financial sector with credit cards.
I fail to see any "debacle" in any of those cases. We have had multiple standards and the better ones won.
The end goal of all participants is a monopoly, and the quickest way to get there is by forming alliances or buying out the competition.
No, the quickest way to a monopoly is to get government to impose one, which, coincidentally, is exactly what you are advocating.
All I'm saying is that this isn't the best way to decide which system should be used for important, big-impact items such as payment systems. There should be standardization, not a commercial free-for-all.
A commercial free-for-all is exactly what should be there.
Because, in this case, it seems like social pressures may be pushing a group out of lucrative, high-benefit career paths. We, as a society, may consequently be excluding a large number of highly talented people from those jobs and making [CS or other male-dominated field] less productive
First, you go from something that is merely influence to pushing. Then you escalate it even a step further into excluding. Your entire case is based on this kind of tendentious and misleading language.
I only know that, when my friends' daughters go for the dolls, my friends coo just a little louder
Yes, they do. That is neither "pushing" nor "excluding", that is merely influencing. You prefer a different influence because you prefer a different outcome, but these are not your kids; it's none of your business when their parents coo and when they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but you will have to actually do the math like I did: even if there was just a band of arable land moving north, it would be a gain.
But climate history shows that increased carbon concentrations simply lead to overall warmer, wetter climates overall. (The great deserts are not due to temperature but due to lack of precipitation based on wind patterns.)
Those people adapt quickly to their new societies. Women have many children when they believe many of their children will die. Furthermore, there are fewer and fewer underdeveloped countries with high birthrates anyway.
Meaning they have been long term stable populations.
World population growth is almost entirely due to demographics now; globally, children are born at close to replacement rates.
Extinctions can't happen slowly; they happen when a small remaining population gets wiped out entirely. That's a nearly instantaneous event.
Population decline can happen slowly, but population decline is not a sign of extinction. Humans have bounced back from a worldwide population of 10000, and previous primates have been subject to even worse bottlenecks.
And what's your problem with that sequence? Until maybe 10 years ago, the evidence for anthropogenic effects was poor; there was no point in talking about the efficacy of various interventions before there was no evidence that there was a problem.
Progressivism has been a dominant feature of European politics since the beginning of the 20th century as well. Thinking that it's a US political phenomenon limited to US elections merely marks you out as totally ignorant.
It isn't an "assumption", it's a likely possibility based on observing what the earth was like the last times CO2 concentrations were high. Nobody has provided a compelling argument why high CO2 concentrations should lead to a different outcome now. All the credible arguments about the supposed evils of climate change are based on the costs of short term disruptions and change not long term outcomes.
(But we'd fine even if we overall lose significant arable land because we already have more than we need.)
Primates were doing fine during periods that had higher CO2 concentrations than any predicted by the IPCC.
Your idea of speciation is wrong; speciation happens when ecological niches open up; "reduced gene pools" and "habitat loss" don't prevent it, they encourage it.
Help! We are going extinct! There are too many of us!
Do you seriously believe your nonsense?
If climate change really caused serious problems, it would just cause human populations to die back. Extinction simply isn't in the cards.
And how "inhospitable" would that be? Both Eskimos and Berber are doing fine.
And climate change doesn't destroy climate globally anyway, it just changes it around. We'll likely end up with more arable land overall long term under the most severe climate change scenarios, even if the transition is more disruptive.
Actually, we already have effectively reached that point, and not through material privation, but rather development. Developed nations tend to stop having population growth.
The climate science is a curiosity but of no practical significance. Without government intervention, we're likely going to be carbon neutral by the end of the century. With government intervention, it's likely to take longer.
The "extreme action" you advocate is not only difficult, it is ineffective, harmful, and counterproductive.
Possibly. But it happens to be the rational, scientific view.
Exactly right. And notice how all of that happened without the US ratifying Kyoto? Without Doha passing? That demolishes the position of climate alarmists that we need global treaties or heavy-handed government intervention in order to reduce carbon emissions.
Few people are denying that climate change is happening. People opposing action on climate change for the most part simply believe that the kind of interventions you obviously favor are ineffective and harmful. Accusing their opponents of holding ridiculous positions is a standard m.o. of progressives.
But there is indeed is some minority of people who are simply unwilling to listen to anything progressives say, and for good reason. Look at the evil progressives have promoted in the past in the name of science: eugenics, segregation, forced sterilization, Keynesianism, gold confiscation, and the list goes on. If Americans increasingly distrust science it is because progressives and Democrats have been using science as a propaganda tool for a century and doing grave harm to its reputation in the process; the fact that occasionally they get the science right doesn't make up for the many times that they get the science wrong.
Well, fortunately neither do you, nor Al Gore, nor Obama. It looks like Democrats are going to lose the mid-term elections, and there's a good chance they are going to lose the presidency next time around. I sure as hell am not going to vote for them anymore. Climate change is not high on the list of political priorities of voters either.
And there isn't much chance of the kind of dangerous nonsense you advocate turning into policy because there is neither enough money for it in the budget, nor would voters stand for the economic consequences.
No, it isn't. I emit very little carbon in my day-to-day life. How about you?
There are two sciences involved here: climate science and economics. Climate science only tells us what the climate might do under different emission scenarios. That's only a small part of the overall issue. You are completely ignoring the other, more important science. See, either you accept the scientific method wholly or you don't; you don't get to pick and choose.
The issue isn't whether we should reduce carbon emissions, but how. You subscribe to the idea that somehow our governments pass some laws, sign some international agreements, we all accept some inconvenience, and then the problem gets solved. In different words, you are a moron completely unfamiliar with economics, history, or politics.
I accept it already. You obviously don't.
In 2393, people are going to look back at our obsession with climate change in the same way that we look back at the Middle Ages and their fear of witchcraft.
It's not even that all the phenomena ascribed to witchcraft were fictitious or harmless; there were a lot of real dangers and real phenomena people were seeing and were afraid of. But just like witchcraft, some of the fears will turn out to be nonsense, and the rest will be solved through scientific progress and economic development, not witch hunts.
You mean this talking point?
http://mediamatters.org/resear...
Actually, that data tells you that the government is investing badly: the government is taking insufficient risks.
More importantly, though, even if the government had done a good job with those investments, you are still failing to account for opportunity costs; that is, what are all the businesses that haven't been created because the government redirected this money to other purposes.
So you are saying that the status quo is evidence that something is working? Why do progressives want to change anything then?
You're living in an economic fantasy world.
Are you serious? Every time the US government actually hands out large quantities of money to companies, the majority of people oppose it. For example for the auto bailout:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes....
I mean, it defies belief for progressives to whine and complain about "big corporations" and the need for increased corporate taxes on the one hand and then turn around and shove massive amounts of money into the hands of corporations.
If I have a million bucks, invest it in a creationist amusement park, and it goes belly up, I am very unhappy and I can't repeat that mistake; people who are bad at picking winners and losers soon lose their money. But if the government invests a million bucks and invests it in a creationist amusement park, and it goes belly up, no government employee hurts or gets punished, and they just raise taxes and do it again the next year.
No, it is not, because unlike other market participant, government employees don't have anything at stake and governments only go bankrupt after the entire economy has been destroyed.
You need to think about your position. Here's a good start:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There are plenty of things the Kentucky government can do to foster growth. Handing large amounts of money to people building monuments to creationism isn't among those things.
Yeah, who are you kidding, you keep proving you are an utter moron who doesn't understand the difference between government spending on basic shared infrastructure (good) and crony capitalism (bad).
We call these opinions "values".
Actually, it's a majority opinion.
Yes, the general idea for government to pick winners and losers in the market place is wrong because it doesn't work.
I'm sorry, is that supposed to be some lame attempt at an insult? Or what?
Nye is a pretend-scientist just like Ham, so you have two fakes debating science. Who cares?
Repeat after me: taking tax dollars and shoving them into the hands of private developers is not a proper function of government. Whether those developers are motivated by Jesus or science is irrelevant. It's not a hard concept to grasp.
If there was any sanity anywhere, government wouldn't be funding theme parks, sports stadiums, or other kind of entertainment anywhere.
More importantly, a huge percentage of intellectuals, politicians, government advisers, economists, regulators, and administrators are too stupid to realize that they're morons in almost everything other than a (usually irrelevant) narrow specialty.
People have understood this for a long time. This is what people refer to when they call our current president "the anointed one", someone whose incorrectly judges himself, and is judged by others, to be an expert on a lot of things he knows next to nothing about.
That is why many people want small government, because a large part of the so-called "experts" in government clearly don't know what they are doing; by that I mean that they fail to deliver what they promise. You have a better chance making decisions for yourself than having them imposed on you by a president, cabinet, or other meddling government expert with Dunning-Kruger effect.
I should add that I don't necessarily believe her. But your argument isn't valid, which makes the question of whether your argument is sound moot.
Presumably they didn't want to spy on her (why should they? they already knew what she was likely to find), they wanted to intimidate her.
I'm sure many would. But apparently reporting on it isn't doing her much good since you don't actually believe her.
I fail to see any "debacle" in any of those cases. We have had multiple standards and the better ones won.
No, the quickest way to a monopoly is to get government to impose one, which, coincidentally, is exactly what you are advocating.
A commercial free-for-all is exactly what should be there.
First, you go from something that is merely influence to pushing. Then you escalate it even a step further into excluding. Your entire case is based on this kind of tendentious and misleading language.
Yes, they do. That is neither "pushing" nor "excluding", that is merely influencing. You prefer a different influence because you prefer a different outcome, but these are not your kids; it's none of your business when their parents coo and when they don't.