I will believe global warming is a real threat when the governments of the world deploy nuclear power in large numbers. Presumably these government officials have more information on the threat than any one reading this forum. The zero CO2 output of nuclear power is undeniable, or rather it's as close to zero as any other energy source that's being called "zero carbon".
There are a lot of climate activists who agree with you.
That is BS.
Still can't tell me 100% what the weather is going to like tomorrow.
GET REAL!!!
1. Weather is not climate. Climate is a long term average. It is much easier to predict averages than to predict individuals: I can't predict how tall you are, but I can very accurately tell you how tall the average American male is.
When erosion was a problem in the American South, we brought in kudzu as a solution, and look how marvelously that turned out. We quenched forest fires in Yellowstone for a century and look how well that went. Gosh.
Yep. That's an argument against geoengineering proposals to "fix" the climate; you have to examine the side-effects of the proposed solutions. The proposals that say "why worry about global warming, we'll just fix it with engineering" need to be very very carefully examined.
Gosh. It's almost as if Mother Nature is unpredictable, as if the climate has been changing since the beginning
Climate has been changing since the beginning. The human contribution isn't instead of natural variations, it is in addition to natural variations. It turns out that this human contribution is somewhat faster than historical climate changes we see in the fossil record, so right now it's the driver. But that doesn't mean that in the long term there aren't other effects as well.
, as if we are barely impacting and certainly not in control of things...
Two different things. We are definitely changing the average temperature, by about 1C so far (with more to come if we keep burning fossil fuels); the basic science of that is really very well understood at this point, although there is still quite a bit of uncertainty in the exact figure. Whether you call 1C "barely impacting" or not is a judgement call.
Overall, we are not "in control of things." We are, however, in control of some things, such as how much fossil fuel we burn.
Now Slashdot has become a mouthpiece for Leftist Luddites. It is now the handmaiden to a New World Order of oligarchs and bureucrats enriching themselves thourgh manipulatioin of the truth and scare tatics. Fact: there is no global warming. The world is getting cooler, and as sunspot activity ceases, we enter another Maunder Minimum.
Scientists have been searching for a correlation between sunspot activity and climate for over a hundred years, and not found one. It's one of the most heavily researched topics in climate science. (And do note, that the Maunder minimum occurred well after the beginning of the so-called "little ice age".)
We measure the solar output from satellites, and have been doing so for many decades. One thing that measurements tell us with certainty is that the global temperature rise is not due to increases in solar output.
Next time Al Gore or Hillary Clinton tell you about "Global Warming", remember cui bono? Who benefits?
Al Gore is not a climate scientist, and, you know what? He isn't even cited by climate scientists. In fact, the only people I ever hear mention him are people trying to deny climate science.
In answer to your "cui bono" question, fossil fuels are a trillion dollar per year industry. Who do you think benefits?
...by the Scientific calisthenics required derive a working AGW theory, that hasn't been show to be true by any empirical evidence.
The basic global circulation model incorporating the effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (what you call "AGW theory") has been around for fifty years now (the peer-reviewed publication was in two papers by Manabe and Wetherald, in 1967). That's long enough for the predictions to be compared with measurements.
Guess what? Over fifty years, the theory is pretty well matching measurements.
Anytime some authority insist that you give up freedom or money and the best they can do to justify it is to say, "It's complicated and you wouldn't understand, Trust Us", you know that something isn't right.
As it turns out, climate scientists have published extensive explanations of what they do, how they do it, how the models work, and all of the source code for their models. They don't say "trust us", they say "here's all the work we did, take a look at it."
As a starting point, look here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 and then for the actual details, start reading some of the thousand references cited.
I do think that it's amusingly oxymoronic that in an attempt to reduce drunk driving, states have a policy that you must show a driver's license to buy a drink.
The principle reason for "Senior discounts" is that elderly folks are often poorer (Not always, theres plenty of rich old folk), and...
Sorry, but older folks being poorer is a relic of the past. Today, the boomer generation is the "old folks" (which are arguably the richest senior citizens ever, and most likely going to remain it) while "generation internship" is what you find among the younger workforce.
I haven't seen any evidence that Russia ever attacked us in any way,
Depends on what you mean by "attacked". What they did was spread disruptive messages primarily through social media, with the apparent intent of sowing discord and animosity. If you "haven't seen evidence", I take it to mean that you haven't actually looked at any of the evidence.
I will point out, however, that what they seem to have done here is not actually illegal. They posted messages. Turns out it's legal to post messages of almost any sort. (They may have violated terms of service by using a bot army to do a lot of this... but it's not clear that violating terms of service is actually a crime).
Except for the part about breaking into the DNC email system. That part actually was illegal.
nor that they hacked our elections,
Depends on what you mean by "hacked our elections". There's no evidence, for example, that they ever successfully broke into voting machines to change votes (although there is some evidence that they did some probing). What they did was use their army of bots to spread disruptive messages. Is that "hacking an election?" Well, if social hacking is "hacking."
something Obama and Clinton said could not happen when it was them being accused of it before the election.
Interesting, but, no, neither one of them ever said that it's impossible to hack an election. They did not say this.
Given the proclivity of the Left to accuse others of being Russian whenever they hear an opinion they don't like, I wonder how they actually know if it's a"Russian" account or not.
Hmm-- did you try, perhaps, actually following the links to the articles that answer that question? No?
So, you didn't actually want to know, did you.
F'ing anonymous cowards. I expect you are a Russian troll.
In fact, it's pretty clear that they were targeting America in general.
Despite the popular thinking, all the evidence is that they weren't actually trying to help one political party over another-- their intent was just to disrupt American society, and the democratic process, any way that they could.
(and not just America-- they wanted to disrupt western European countries as well. And, of course, it all stems from their attempts to destabilize Ukraine.)
Back in the day, it was joked that "NSA" stood for "No Such Agency," because even the name of the agency was secret. It's silly for an agency whose entire mission is secret to put in their purported mission statement that "honesty", "openness", and "transparency" are their objectives; that would be a contradiction, and the only thing it would do would be to make the people who work for the agency understand that they are required to ignore the mission statement to do their jobs.
So, I applaud their honesty and openness in removing honesty and openness from their mission statement. This is, in fact, not their mission statement.
I remember that Ged was explicitly described as brown-skinned in the second book, The Tombs of Atuan. Was his skin color given in A Wizard of Earthsea? I can't recall it being mentioned at all one way or another.
I'd have to double-check to be certain, but I seem to remember him being described that way in the first book, when he was first introduced (which would be the logical place to do so).
Hmm. I checked the opening, and there is very little description of Ged. This is the only description of him: "He grew wild, a thriving weed, a tall, quick boy, loud and proud and full of temper."
Lunar Scout is scheduled to launch in March on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. This is still a chance they'll make the deadline.
Unfortunately, "However, a person familiar with the Electron rocket said the Moon Express lander is too heavy for the Electron rocket, making it physically impossible to put the spacecraft into an orbit capable of reaching the moon."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/2...
I expect he did; the post was clearly intended to be at least partly parody.
Interesting, though, it's parody that is based on an actual knowledge of what the space visionaries talk about. Notice that nobody mentioned radiation anywhere in the hundred-odd responses to this thread, but his comment discusses regolith shielding.
...But I bet you're proud of this. It's what you do after all - its what gives you meaning in life.
Spoken like a true existentialist. And I agree. We all do what we can to keep the existential blackness at bay.
And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.
$6.5 B was the cost of the whole Saturn program, not the per-vehicle cost. The Google X-prize contestants aren't developing a rocket, they're buying a launch on a vehicle developed by somebody else.
And the Google X-prize contestants aren't sending a human mission to the moon, they don't need a Saturn class booster. They're more like the Surveyor missions, which launched on Atlases. But you can do it with a much smaller vehicle now-- electronics are a lot better than in the Surveyor program in 1964. You don't need an Atlas.
Slashdot Mirror
Things always continue upwards.
False.
Depends on whether the initial thrust was sufficient to achieve orbital velocity.
I will believe global warming is a real threat when the governments of the world deploy nuclear power in large numbers. Presumably these government officials have more information on the threat than any one reading this forum. The zero CO2 output of nuclear power is undeniable, or rather it's as close to zero as any other energy source that's being called "zero carbon".
There are a lot of climate activists who agree with you.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2017/08/03/the-real-climate-consensus-nuclear-power/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/03/climate-scientists-support-nuclear-power
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/189068-climate-scientists-to-green-activists-embrace-nuke-power
https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists/index.html
https://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/nuclear-power-and-global-warming
the climate isn't broken
Yet.
That is BS. Still can't tell me 100% what the weather is going to like tomorrow. GET REAL!!!
1. Weather is not climate. Climate is a long term average. It is much easier to predict averages than to predict individuals: I can't predict how tall you are, but I can very accurately tell you how tall the average American male is.
2. Actually, we're pretty good at tomorrow's weather. Check https://www.wunderground.com/ or https://www.accuweather.com/ , they're pretty good
Besides which, almost any film can be improved by simply adding "vs Godzilla" to the end of it.
etc., etc., etc...
You know, most of these I'd pay the price of a movie ticket to see!
and "African Queen versus Godzilla" I might even see twice, just for the look on Katherine Hepburn's face.
So Twitter should just ask all accounts to indicate their real country of origin. Problem solved right? ;)
Exactly. Just like Facebook asks all accounts to use their real name, so there aren't any trolls or bots on facebook.
When erosion was a problem in the American South, we brought in kudzu as a solution, and look how marvelously that turned out. We quenched forest fires in Yellowstone for a century and look how well that went. Gosh.
Yep. That's an argument against geoengineering proposals to "fix" the climate; you have to examine the side-effects of the proposed solutions. The proposals that say "why worry about global warming, we'll just fix it with engineering" need to be very very carefully examined.
Gosh. It's almost as if Mother Nature is unpredictable, as if the climate has been changing since the beginning
Climate has been changing since the beginning. The human contribution isn't instead of natural variations, it is in addition to natural variations. It turns out that this human contribution is somewhat faster than historical climate changes we see in the fossil record, so right now it's the driver. But that doesn't mean that in the long term there aren't other effects as well.
, as if we are barely impacting and certainly not in control of things...
Two different things. We are definitely changing the average temperature, by about 1C so far (with more to come if we keep burning fossil fuels); the basic science of that is really very well understood at this point, although there is still quite a bit of uncertainty in the exact figure. Whether you call 1C "barely impacting" or not is a judgement call.
Overall, we are not "in control of things." We are, however, in control of some things, such as how much fossil fuel we burn.
CO2 emissions from rotting plant matter are minimal. Most of the carbon is gobbled up by the bacteria, mold and bugs that are eating the dead plants.
Uh, when bacteria, mold, and bugs "gobble up" dead plants, they convert the organic carbon into carbon dioxide. That's what the word "eat" means.
A tree will take in far more CO2 during it's lifespan than it will emit after dying.
Turns out not. When they rot, they return to the atmosphere exactly the same amount of carbon dioxide that they originally removed from it.
Unless they are sequestered, for example, by being buried and converted into peat, or for that matter, coal.
Of course, in the short term, trees do remove carbon dioxide, and "short term" here may mean a century or so-- it's possible that may be good enough.
Now Slashdot has become a mouthpiece for Leftist Luddites. It is now the handmaiden to a New World Order of oligarchs and bureucrats enriching themselves thourgh manipulatioin of the truth and scare tatics. Fact: there is no global warming. The world is getting cooler, and as sunspot activity ceases, we enter another Maunder Minimum.
Scientists have been searching for a correlation between sunspot activity and climate for over a hundred years, and not found one. It's one of the most heavily researched topics in climate science. (And do note, that the Maunder minimum occurred well after the beginning of the so-called "little ice age".)
We measure the solar output from satellites, and have been doing so for many decades. One thing that measurements tell us with certainty is that the global temperature rise is not due to increases in solar output.
Next time Al Gore or Hillary Clinton tell you about "Global Warming", remember cui bono? Who benefits?
Al Gore is not a climate scientist, and, you know what? He isn't even cited by climate scientists. In fact, the only people I ever hear mention him are people trying to deny climate science.
In answer to your "cui bono" question, fossil fuels are a trillion dollar per year industry. Who do you think benefits?
...by the Scientific calisthenics required derive a working AGW theory, that hasn't been show to be true by any empirical evidence.
The basic global circulation model incorporating the effect of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (what you call "AGW theory") has been around for fifty years now (the peer-reviewed publication was in two papers by Manabe and Wetherald, in 1967). That's long enough for the predictions to be compared with measurements.
Guess what? Over fifty years, the theory is pretty well matching measurements.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/03/15/the-first-climate-model-turns-50-and-predicted-global-warming-almost-perfectly/
https://climategraphs.wordpress.com/2017/11/06/evaluating-the-prediction-of-manabe-and-wetherald-1967/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/mar/19/global-warming-accurate-prediction-1972
Anytime some authority insist that you give up freedom or money and the best they can do to justify it is to say, "It's complicated and you wouldn't understand, Trust Us", you know that something isn't right.
As it turns out, climate scientists have published extensive explanations of what they do, how they do it, how the models work, and all of the source code for their models. They don't say "trust us", they say "here's all the work we did, take a look at it."
As a starting point, look here: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 and then for the actual details, start reading some of the thousand references cited.
The Russian trolling, basically, was to amplify all divisive comments (from either direction-- they didn't care.).
I do think that it's amusingly oxymoronic that in an attempt to reduce drunk driving, states have a policy that you must show a driver's license to buy a drink.
The principle reason for "Senior discounts" is that elderly folks are often poorer (Not always, theres plenty of rich old folk), and ...
Sorry, but older folks being poorer is a relic of the past. Today, the boomer generation is the "old folks" (which are arguably the richest senior citizens ever, and most likely going to remain it) while "generation internship" is what you find among the younger workforce.
Please provide evidence of your assertion.
That's an answerable question. Here's data: http://www.rcaemergingwealth.c...
Looks like income rises until about age 35, then flattens out somewhere between 35 and 45, but does not go down significantly for old people.
That graph is median income, by the way, so this effect is not just a small number of "rich" old people skewing the average up.
When it comes to trolling, I will be most grateful if anyone presents clear-cut example(s) of what Russians are alleged to have exposed to us.
So, I take it you didn't follow any of the links in the summary, like say this one https://www.theverge.com/2018/... or this one https://blog.twitter.com/offic...
Why are you bothering to comment if you aren't even interested enough to follow the links?
you could have tried a google search, too: https://www.google.com/search?...
Put a flag icon of the accounts country of origin over their tweets. That way you can see where it's coming from.
Yes, because the internet is so well regulated that you can't disguise country of origin using, say, a VPN or an anonymous relay.
Oh, wait, that was sarcasm. Yes, in fact you can disguise country of origin.
I haven't seen any evidence that Russia ever attacked us in any way,
Depends on what you mean by "attacked". What they did was spread disruptive messages primarily through social media, with the apparent intent of sowing discord and animosity. If you "haven't seen evidence", I take it to mean that you haven't actually looked at any of the evidence.
I will point out, however, that what they seem to have done here is not actually illegal. They posted messages. Turns out it's legal to post messages of almost any sort. (They may have violated terms of service by using a bot army to do a lot of this... but it's not clear that violating terms of service is actually a crime).
Except for the part about breaking into the DNC email system. That part actually was illegal.
nor that they hacked our elections,
Depends on what you mean by "hacked our elections". There's no evidence, for example, that they ever successfully broke into voting machines to change votes (although there is some evidence that they did some probing). What they did was use their army of bots to spread disruptive messages. Is that "hacking an election?" Well, if social hacking is "hacking."
something Obama and Clinton said could not happen when it was them being accused of it before the election.
Interesting, but, no, neither one of them ever said that it's impossible to hack an election. They did not say this.
Given the proclivity of the Left to accuse others of being Russian whenever they hear an opinion they don't like, I wonder how they actually know if it's a"Russian" account or not.
Hmm-- did you try, perhaps, actually following the links to the articles that answer that question? No?
So, you didn't actually want to know, did you.
F'ing anonymous cowards. I expect you are a Russian troll.
Wonder who they were targeting...
In fact, it's pretty clear that they were targeting America in general.
Despite the popular thinking, all the evidence is that they weren't actually trying to help one political party over another-- their intent was just to disrupt American society, and the democratic process, any way that they could.
(and not just America-- they wanted to disrupt western European countries as well. And, of course, it all stems from their attempts to destabilize Ukraine.)
Many palliative treatments exist, but it's often recurring.
Efficiencies including automation has a net economic increase.
Yep. And that economic increase goes entirely to the people who own the robots. Basically: the rich get richer, and the working class gets unemployed.
Back in the day, it was joked that "NSA" stood for "No Such Agency," because even the name of the agency was secret. It's silly for an agency whose entire mission is secret to put in their purported mission statement that "honesty", "openness", and "transparency" are their objectives; that would be a contradiction, and the only thing it would do would be to make the people who work for the agency understand that they are required to ignore the mission statement to do their jobs.
So, I applaud their honesty and openness in removing honesty and openness from their mission statement. This is, in fact, not their mission statement.
I remember that Ged was explicitly described as brown-skinned in the second book, The Tombs of Atuan. Was his skin color given in A Wizard of Earthsea? I can't recall it being mentioned at all one way or another.
I'd have to double-check to be certain, but I seem to remember him being described that way in the first book, when he was first introduced (which would be the logical place to do so).
Hmm. I checked the opening, and there is very little description of Ged. This is the only description of him: "He grew wild, a thriving weed, a tall, quick boy, loud and proud and full of temper."
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4704490
Lunar Scout is scheduled to launch in March on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. This is still a chance they'll make the deadline.
Unfortunately, "However, a person familiar with the Electron rocket said the Moon Express lander is too heavy for the Electron rocket, making it physically impossible to put the spacecraft into an orbit capable of reaching the moon." https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/2...
Do you giggle to yourself when you write this?
I expect he did; the post was clearly intended to be at least partly parody.
Interesting, though, it's parody that is based on an actual knowledge of what the space visionaries talk about. Notice that nobody mentioned radiation anywhere in the hundred-odd responses to this thread, but his comment discusses regolith shielding.
...But I bet you're proud of this. It's what you do after all - its what gives you meaning in life.
Spoken like a true existentialist. And I agree. We all do what we can to keep the existential blackness at bay.
And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.
$6.5 B was the cost of the whole Saturn program, not the per-vehicle cost. The Google X-prize contestants aren't developing a rocket, they're buying a launch on a vehicle developed by somebody else.
And the Google X-prize contestants aren't sending a human mission to the moon, they don't need a Saturn class booster. They're more like the Surveyor missions, which launched on Atlases. But you can do it with a much smaller vehicle now-- electronics are a lot better than in the Surveyor program in 1964. You don't need an Atlas.