Ruby is already having an impact on both Java and.NET developers.
There has been a lot of talk about Ruby in recent months, but there is little evidence that in reality is having any impact. But anyway, being influential does not mean success. For example, Smalltalk is an influential language but is rarely used. I'm sure Ruby will be far more used (I use it!), but I really can't see it taking away much jobshare from Java for a long time.
Once you can mix and match the vast perl, python and java libraries expect it to explode.
You already can, and have been able to for years. You can run Python, Ruby, perl and hundreds of other languages on the JVM. So where is the explosion?
Also the preliminary results suggest that parrot will be faster then the default interpreters. This means the performance difference between Java and Ruby will decrease as well
I'm sure it will, but getting a really fast cross-platform VM is incredibly difficult - Java has only been able to match C/C++ speed in the last year or so, and the work put into the JVM by many companies was vast.
The scientists commenting on global warming like to talk about record high tempuratures, and still increasing, but they like to omit that they're also finding certain years with below-normal tempuratures as well.
Where is the evidence that they are omitting such facts?
I love when it is completely neglected that mankind contributes less than 1% of greenhouse gases. It is never mentioned!
It is never mentioned because it is false. It is amazing how much CO2 we are pushing into the atmosphere. To compare with an important natural source: Volcanic activity and fires put several hundred million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every years. Human activity contributes about 6 billion tons.
I get the feeling parrot will put the final nail in the coffin of mono and kick both java and.net in the balls.
I agree that a free multi-language VM is a good thing, but to suggest that it is going to have any impact at all on the huge number of Java and.NET developers is wildly exaggerated to say the least.
How was it possible that WE survived all those years effectively at a huge disadvantage physically?
We didn't have a huge physical disadvantage. Compared to many animals we are very agile, very good at swimming, able to make tools.
That's a tough question that NO ONE has been able to answer definitively with facts.
Of course they have. Have a look at chimps. Our ancestors had a lot in common with them. A chimp with more intelligence and the ability to make weapons would be a very formidable creature.
Instead, what we get is "there was once this primordial soup in the oceans (what it was we couldn't tell ya but it was there! and we can't replicate it!) and then some shit went down and here we are."
Wow. I'm stunned by the brilliance of that.
We know a lot about that soup and what was in it. We know a lot about the various routes by which life could have formed from such a soup.
And you're right: gravity is based on theory, just like relativity, and most of the "hard" sciences. But there are smart people doing responsible tough science on those theories. And they don't just throw shit on the wall to see what sticks.
Smart people are doing tough science about evolution right now. Studies of RNA-based evolution in recent years have shown how even simple molecules can evolve and produce complex systems.
Big deal. If that's the case, then I believe it must have been God's hand that guided us along that path.
The problem with evolution is deeper than your post suggests. You may want to believe that God guided evolution (and I respect that view), but it seems as if evolution is perfectly capable of happening by itself. If you assume that God guided evolution, then He is responsible for the results. Darwin found this difficult to believe when he discovered how much of nature is painful and cruel.
What so many Christians fail to realize is that "science", that evil thing that threatens their beliefs, is the study of what He built in the first place. God himself set the properties of the universe... how can they argue against that?
The problem with the universe as we understand it is that the laws of physics mean that even setting up the initial properties doesn't mean that anything after that is predictable.
We must ask them for what they have spent $4.5B. I would not be a least bit surprised that the large portion of it went down to pay the salary for support staffs (*) to continue on science projects, not directly to the R&D for the telescope and its instruments.
You think that people go into science for the security of jobs and the pay, or to fund thousands of well-paid staff? Of course not - there are far easier ways of earning money and 'building empires'. People go into science and research because they want to explore nature. They want funding for experiments and instruments to help with this. There is no way that the the pay and staff costs would be billions or anything close: there are very few millionare scientists, or research teams consisting of thousands of staff.
By the way, compared to the defence budget, 4.5B is insignificant.
Needless to say had the study said what BP wanted to here he would never have had such a rapid removal from BP.
Unless you have direct evidence of this, you can't draw this conclusion. Any company the size of BP needs good accurate science, and would be very foolish to hire biased researchers (after all, there is a cheaper alternative - simply invent data).
True neutrality is impossible when you bread is buttered on one side, researching cannot help but know where their funding is coming from, and the human element will skew it, in hopes to get more research money from that source.
Sorry, but true research simply doesn't work like this. The reason is that the quality of your research is judged by those who are your competitors both in industry and science. They are out to try and prove you mistaken for their own benefit. Bias is almost always detected.
How can you stay neutral when one side is funding your research?
Because if you don't, no-one will fund your research again. Anyone can find marketing people and spin doctors. Quality researchers are hard to find, and if there is evidence of biased or forged research, their career is at an end.
We are killing the oceans as we speak. We are depleting them of biodiversity (reducing nutrient density) and poisoning them with industrial waste.
This is irrelevant to the argument. We are killing some species (such as via overfishing), and reducing some biodiversity. However generally, we are having no negative impact at all on nutrient density - if anything we are increasing it due to run-off and nitrogen-based fertilisers. But even then, this is of minor significance compared with natural nutrient supplies.
Can you give a citation for that figure. I can believe double, but not an order of magnitude more. I am happy to be proved wrong, but would need scientfic data to back it up.
Sure. Obviously, the exact amount depends on the year, but typical annual CO2 production by volcanic and similar activity (including natural fires) is of the order of several hundred million tons. Human activity currently produces billions of tons. (http://www.answers.com/topic/carbon-dioxide)
While this will not do much to encourage the Unwashed Masses to embrace Linux, it certainly shows that Linux is a serious operating system suited to high-powered computing (or at least to hosting high-powered computing applications). I hope at least a few Fortune 500 CIOs will take notice.
Actually, it doesn't show that at all. Supercomputing is a very specialised niche use of hardware. Generally, this sort of software wants the operating system to get out of the way as much as possible and allow the fastest possible access to memory and processors and (depending on the situation) I/O systems. In the past major supercomputer applications have required very little operating system functionality to back them up.
There is little comparison between specialised numerical supercomputing and general multi-processor mainframe use, which requires concurrent multiuser access to app servers, general filesystems, databases etc. This is where older OSes such as IBM operating systems and Solaris work very well, and where Linux is now making inroads.
It is rather like comparing a formula one racing car to a truck. I agree that Linux is suited to both purposes, but working well in one environment does not indicate usefulness in another.
But nature has an established history of going through these gyrations without our help. Are our actions adding fuel to the fire? Perhaps. But the evidence simply does not conclusively establish that man alone is the moving force behind warming trends generally or this one specifically.
You make a lot of accurate points, but they are all irrelevant!
It doesn't matter if the current CO2 level is (in the long term) abnormally low, or if nature goes through such changes normally.
What matters is what happens to the climate over the next few decades and centuries. The problem is that we have had a period of stability for a millenia or two. During that time we have grown to rely on certain climatic patterns and sea levels. Even minor changes in these, if they happen rapidly, would be disastrous and affect hundreds of millions if not billions of us to some extent.
We need to know a lot more about the climate and how it works in order to try and protect ourselves even from inevitable natural changes. To mess around with concentrations of greenhouse gasses could trigger the kind of natural changes that have happened in the past, but in a timescale that is too rapid for us to cope with.
But the evidence simply does not conclusively establish that man alone is the moving force behind warming trends generally or this one specifically.
Sorry, but it does! You list times when past CO2 levels were higher. They were periods of substantially higher temperatures. We have a rather low CO2 level (well, until recently) because we are effectively still in an ice age period (the ice has just receded for a while). Increasing CO2 will warm the Earth. The major factor on this planet increasing CO2 right now is us.
If you don't believe this you have to come up with some other factor that has increased global temperatures over a period that co-incides well with human industrial growth. Volcanic activity hasn't changed. Solar radiation has, but not by enough.
"It has always been understood that global warming is complex"
No, it hasn't. There is even now wide spread thinking that it's simple.
Not by those who have really understood it. Models of global warming have always involved CO2, methane, sulphates, water vapour, solar intensites etc.
Damn, we better plug those volcanoes then! Until recently they put more CO2 into the atmosphere than we did
And the CO2 level was stable up to that point. It isn't now.
How do you know this? Every living organism on this planet that uses photosynthesis (such as plankton and trees) inhales or absorbs CO2. Maybe if we stopped killing those organisms, then they would suck up the CO2 like good uns?
We aren't killing the ones that such up most of the CO2. The main CO2 uptake is via plankton, which precipitate CO2 as carbonates on the sea floor.
It's not worse at all. It's exactly the same. The earth (for some reason) maintains a dynamic equilibrium.
You are right. It does. But on a timescale of millenia. The problem is that during that timescale there can be sea volume increases and climatic change. Even a sea rise of a few metres would inundate major cities and cause major disruption. But I guess that this is all OK if it settles back in a few thousand years?
By putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, other systems will respond to that, and change the weather in ways we can't really predict on a micro scale, but have some idea of what will happen on the macro scale.
We aren't sure what happens on the macro scale. We don't know if increased overall global warming will even create localised cooling!
There were oil fires before we started putting the stuff in automobiles. There are coal seams that have been burning for at least thousands, but perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Volcanoes spew CO2 by the ton, and all of the non=photosynthetic organisms are breathing the stuff into the atmosphere as you read this. Perhaps if you stop breathing, my childrens future is assured?
The problem is that we are now dumping far, far more CO2 into the atmosphere from industrial processes than from volcanoes, coal seams etc. Not just a little more, but orders of magnitude more. If this were not the case, the CO2 level would be stable. It isn't.
CO2 is a non-issue.
Having the concentration of a major greenhouse gas potentially double within a few decade is a non-issue? Not by my definition.
If you can figure out how to do this without starving about 5 billion people to death then my hats off to you.
We have made very little effort to cut back on CO2 production by economising on oil. New styles of nuclear power generation may be the answer, or at least part of it.
All other enegry sources now have serious transportation, avaliablity, or waste problems.
And CO2 production to the extent where it may result in serious climate change is not a 'waste problem'?
Almost identical thinking powers the global warming debate. A correlation of one variable to global warming has been discovered and it has been "decided" that all we need to do is restrict that one variable and global warming will reverse. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the actual situation is probably considerably more complex than that and very possibly outside our control.
It has always been understood that global warming is complex. However it is not a good idea to mess about seriously with any of the factors that influence climate. It is potentially damaging to dump large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere no matter how complex things are. In a way, it is worse because we know it is complex - so the long term effects can't be easily predicted. Not dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is definitely within our control.
If we're talking about the potential viewpoint of a "Supreme Being", it is certainly relevant to assume that the being exists in some n-dimensional space which allows it to exhibit all of its "Supreme" qualities. To me, it seems like you keep trying to apply the physical limits that we can observe in our own universe to the theoretical "Supreme Being".
This seems to me that you are trying to apply pseudo-physical term in a meaningless way. Simply bringing up n dimensions does not help things.
As a result of this sensitivity, the observed behavior of physical systems that exhibit chaos appears to be random, even though the model of the system is 'deterministic' in the sense that it is well defined and contains no random parameters."
I see where we may not be understanding each other here. I am not saying that systems aren't deterministic - what I am saying is that they are not predictable even with infinite accuracy. In other words, you can know in principle that a future state of the system depends on past states, but it is impossible to know, given the past state, what the future state is. This sounds paradoxical, but it is similar in some ways to cellular automata systems in which the only way to know what a system will do is to run it, even though it is deterministic.
I think we're about reaching the limits of this discussion - it seems to me that we have both reached some personal fundamental assumptions about this issue that we are not likely to change.
I was hoping I could persuade you that you can't just bolt-on ideas about additional dimensions in order to try and get a non-quantum and clockwork system.
My view is that the universe seems (paradoxically) almost designed not only to run itself, but to be resistant to the interventions of a deity. There just aren't any 'levers' in the system that such a being could use to predict and control things except in the most vague ways.
While Global Warming may be a fact, its anthropogenic nature is still reasonably disputed for several reasons. First, there have been many climatic swings of warming and cooling since before man even existed. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that this current warming spell is not a natural occurrence.
This is a very outdated view. The anthropogenic nature is no longer much disputed. There have been major climatic swings, before but they have rarely occurred so fast. The only reasonable causative factor for this one is CO2 increase in the atmosphere. Recently, the only other sensible possibility - solar activity changes - has been shown to have some contribution to global warming, but insufficient to explain more than a fraction of it.
So, there is global warming co-inciding with a major CO2 increase which is almost all due to human activity. This is compelling evidence.
The Intergovernmenal Panel on Climate Change says "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities".
Recorded human history is merely a blink of an eye in geologic terms. Recorded *climatic* history has only started in the modern times (last 500 years). Our frame of reference is short.
No. Recorded climatic history goes back a very long way. Ice cores show a huge amount about climate and give information over thousands of years.
As for your statements about CO2 release and plankton, this just doesn't fit. Atmospheric CO2 levels have risen over a long period matching the increase in human output. The Solar Dimming effect has been over too short a period.
Since a multi-dimensional clockwork universe is not necessarily limited to exchanging information between its bits at the speed of light (since as a whole it doesn't have follow the same physical laws that we can observe in our bit of the universe)
This is irrelevant. As I said in an earlier post, having the wrong number of dimensions just doesn't work physically. You can't arbitrarily assume a viewpoint in some higher number of dimensions, because such a viewpoint would be meaningless.
The only connection Chaos Theory has with "reality" is when we take the results from applying Chaos Theory to the models & try to figure out what that would look like in our universe.
No - much of chaos theory is far more than this. It is more than just fitting data to models. It helps define the limits of knowledge.
I think you are trying to find some viewpoint from which our universe will seem to be a deterministic 'clockwork' mechanism. Don't think such a viewpoint can exist.
I think you're assuming too much about quantum mechanics being a fundamental description of the ultimate nature of reality. Bear in mind that quantum mechanics is simply a "best" model-to-date that fits what we can observe from our perspective in the universe.
Good point. However, the Bell Inequality has a deeper meaning than Quantum Mechanics.
It is quite possible that the universe is not random at all, but from the right dimensional perspective is a completely predictable clockwork mechanism
Not really. The Bell Inequality contradicts this.
Similarly, chaos theory is merely a field of study that says that the behaviour of certain mathematical models is beyond our ability to calculate with absolute accuracy. A "Supreme Being" would have no such limitation.
No, it is not about mathematical models. It is about the behaviour of real objects, and the lack of use of even infinite precision.
A truly "Supreme Being" is not going to have any of _our_ limitations.
There is a lot of theological thinking that implies that any supreme being is indeed going to have limitations (the classic 'can God make a stone so heavy he can't lift it?' is one).
Well, you're using a different definition of "perfect" than I am. My definition of "perfect" would include complete & utter knowledge of the entire state of the universe (including all of the relevant quantum states) throughout all of its existence.
Well, I hope this blows your mind, as it does mine, but even that isn't possible, as there is no way you can specify the time period of the existence of a universe. Not only does time vary (for example, for things that travel at the speed of light, time does not exist), but there is a good possibility that the future can effect the past (the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics). Even if you could have the entire history universe laid out before you, you would not be dealing with a fixed thing!
There is also the possibility that the universe really IS a clockwork mechanism-type universe in some kind of meta-dimensional space, and we _have_ to model it as based on randomness merely because we are incapable (and never will be capable) of seeing all the pieces that we would need to be able to predict things via calculation.
Even this won't work! With chaos, adding more dimensions makes the unpredictability worse, not better. With quantum mechanics, if you add change the number of dimensions, it again makes things worse, as without a certain number of dimensions things just can't exist.
It is useless to try to apply quantum mechanics & chaos theory to a Supreme Being. _We_ have to use such models since we, by definition, will never have perfect knowledge of the universe. There is no such constraint on a Supreme Being.
This is an interesting philosophical debate - but it is still my view that you are missing the deep implications of recent findings in chaos theory and quantum mechanics.
Even perfect knowledge isn't enough!
You simply can't, even with perfect knowledge, kick of a universe like ours and be able to have any idea of how things will go.
The only way that a God could make things go in any particular way would be to regularly intervene to keep things on track.
So, if you want to assume that we are the intentional product of some God, then you can't assume that He simply set things in motion at the Big Bang and stood back.
You may ask how such limits can be put on a supreme being, but there is a good theological basis for this. You may remember the old question "can God make a stone so heavy He can't lift it?"
Anyway, thanks for an intelligent debate. A rare thing with this subject.
It means God created a universe that's so in tune* that it doesn't require his influence.
I see where you are coming from, but I think you are still missing the point. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory means that the universe is not 'in tune' with anything. They mean that even an infinitely accurately determined initial state of the universe would still basically go its own way.
* "In tune" means everything from super black holes to quantum mechanics all exist and function in a predictable way (well, maybe except for quantum mechanics, but since we've only been working on it for what, 15 years? it's hard to say...)
Closer to 100, so it isn't that hard to say. Anyway, it is not just quantum mechanics. Chaos theory now shows that there are some common phenomena where even an infinite amount of knowledge isn't sufficient to determine future behaviour to any degree of accuracy.
Things simply don't behave predictably.
(Maybe you do get it, but I'm reading in your responses that you don't believe God exists because you believe science can at least infer that he doesn't... which just wouldn't be possible.)
No, I don't believe science can infer that at all. What I do believe is that science can show that for describing how things happen - including evolution - you simply don't need to involve a God.
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Ruby is already having an impact on both Java and .NET developers.
There has been a lot of talk about Ruby in recent months, but there is little evidence that in reality is having any impact. But anyway, being influential does not mean success. For example, Smalltalk is an influential language but is rarely used. I'm sure Ruby will be far more used (I use it!), but I really can't see it taking away much jobshare from Java for a long time.
Once you can mix and match the vast perl, python and java libraries expect it to explode.
You already can, and have been able to for years. You can run Python, Ruby, perl and hundreds of other languages on the JVM. So where is the explosion?
Also the preliminary results suggest that parrot will be faster then the default interpreters. This means the performance difference between Java and Ruby will decrease as well
I'm sure it will, but getting a really fast cross-platform VM is incredibly difficult - Java has only been able to match C/C++ speed in the last year or so, and the work put into the JVM by many companies was vast.
The scientists commenting on global warming like to talk about record high tempuratures, and still increasing, but they like to omit that they're also finding certain years with below-normal tempuratures as well.
Where is the evidence that they are omitting such facts?
I love when it is completely neglected that mankind contributes less than 1% of greenhouse gases. It is never mentioned!
It is never mentioned because it is false. It is amazing how much CO2 we are pushing into the atmosphere. To compare with an important natural source: Volcanic activity and fires put several hundred million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every years. Human activity contributes about 6 billion tons.
So much for 1%!
I get the feeling parrot will put the final nail in the coffin of mono and kick both java and .net in the balls.
.NET developers is wildly exaggerated to say the least.
I agree that a free multi-language VM is a good thing, but to suggest that it is going to have any impact at all on the huge number of Java and
How was it possible that WE survived all those years effectively at a huge disadvantage physically?
We didn't have a huge physical disadvantage. Compared to many animals we are very agile, very good at swimming, able to make tools.
That's a tough question that NO ONE has been able to answer definitively with facts.
Of course they have. Have a look at chimps. Our ancestors had a lot in common with them. A chimp with more intelligence and the ability to make weapons would be a very formidable creature.
Instead, what we get is "there was once this primordial soup in the oceans (what it was we couldn't tell ya but it was there! and we can't replicate it!) and then some shit went down and here we are."
Wow. I'm stunned by the brilliance of that.
We know a lot about that soup and what was in it. We know a lot about the various routes by which life could have formed from such a soup.
And you're right: gravity is based on theory, just like relativity, and most of the "hard" sciences. But there are smart people doing responsible tough science on those theories. And they don't just throw shit on the wall to see what sticks.
Smart people are doing tough science about evolution right now. Studies of RNA-based evolution in recent years have shown how even simple molecules can evolve and produce complex systems.
Big deal. If that's the case, then I believe it must have been God's hand that guided us along that path.
The problem with evolution is deeper than your post suggests. You may want to believe that God guided evolution (and I respect that view), but it seems as if evolution is perfectly capable of happening by itself. If you assume that God guided evolution, then He is responsible for the results. Darwin found this difficult to believe when he discovered how much of nature is painful and cruel.
What so many Christians fail to realize is that "science", that evil thing that threatens their beliefs, is the study of what He built in the first place. God himself set the properties of the universe... how can they argue against that?
The problem with the universe as we understand it is that the laws of physics mean that even setting up the initial properties doesn't mean that anything after that is predictable.
We must ask them for what they have spent $4.5B. I would not be a least bit surprised that the large portion of it went down to pay the salary for support staffs (*) to continue on science projects, not directly to the R&D for the telescope and its instruments.
You think that people go into science for the security of jobs and the pay, or to fund thousands of well-paid staff? Of course not - there are far easier ways of earning money and 'building empires'. People go into science and research because they want to explore nature. They want funding for experiments and instruments to help with this. There is no way that the the pay and staff costs would be billions or anything close: there are very few millionare scientists, or research teams consisting of thousands of staff.
By the way, compared to the defence budget, 4.5B is insignificant.
Good biased research is done by actually conducting serious research and then selecting the most skewed way to interpret the data.
This is a waste of time - what is the point of conducting serious research in this case? Why not just make it up?
Needless to say had the study said what BP wanted to here he would never have had such a rapid removal from BP.
Unless you have direct evidence of this, you can't draw this conclusion. Any company the size of BP needs good accurate science, and would be very foolish to hire biased researchers (after all, there is a cheaper alternative - simply invent data).
True neutrality is impossible when you bread is buttered on one side, researching cannot help but know where their funding is coming from, and the human element will skew it, in hopes to get more research money from that source.
Sorry, but true research simply doesn't work like this. The reason is that the quality of your research is judged by those who are your competitors both in industry and science. They are out to try and prove you mistaken for their own benefit. Bias is almost always detected.
Do any of these names ring a bell? all but the last on claims to be unbaised but their reports can be shown in minutes to us predetermined Data.
This is confusing the researcher with the subsequent spin put on the data.
How can you stay neutral when one side is funding your research?
Because if you don't, no-one will fund your research again. Anyone can find marketing people and spin doctors. Quality researchers are hard to find, and if there is evidence of biased or forged research, their career is at an end.
Errp. Wrong answer.
Great way to debate.
We are killing the oceans as we speak. We are depleting them of biodiversity (reducing nutrient density) and poisoning them with industrial waste.
This is irrelevant to the argument. We are killing some species (such as via overfishing), and reducing some biodiversity. However generally, we are having no negative impact at all on nutrient density - if anything we are increasing it due to run-off and nitrogen-based fertilisers. But even then, this is of minor significance compared with natural nutrient supplies.
Can you give a citation for that figure. I can believe double, but not an order of magnitude more. I am happy to be proved wrong, but would need scientfic data to back it up.
Sure. Obviously, the exact amount depends on the year, but typical annual CO2 production by volcanic and similar activity (including natural fires) is of the order of several hundred million tons. Human activity currently produces billions of tons.
(http://www.answers.com/topic/carbon-dioxide)
While this will not do much to encourage the Unwashed Masses to embrace Linux, it certainly shows that Linux is a serious operating system suited to high-powered computing (or at least to hosting high-powered computing applications). I hope at least a few Fortune 500 CIOs will take notice.
Actually, it doesn't show that at all. Supercomputing is a very specialised niche use of hardware. Generally, this sort of software wants the operating system to get out of the way as much as possible and allow the fastest possible access to memory and processors and (depending on the situation) I/O systems. In the past major supercomputer applications have required very little operating system functionality to back them up.
There is little comparison between specialised numerical supercomputing and general multi-processor mainframe use, which requires concurrent multiuser access to app servers, general filesystems, databases etc. This is where older OSes such as IBM operating systems and Solaris work very well, and where Linux is now making inroads.
It is rather like comparing a formula one racing car to a truck. I agree that Linux is suited to both purposes, but working well in one environment does not indicate usefulness in another.
But nature has an established history of going through these gyrations without our help. Are our actions adding fuel to the fire? Perhaps. But the evidence simply does not conclusively establish that man alone is the moving force behind warming trends generally or this one specifically.
You make a lot of accurate points, but they are all irrelevant!
It doesn't matter if the current CO2 level is (in the long term) abnormally low, or if nature goes through such changes normally.
What matters is what happens to the climate over the next few decades and centuries. The problem is that we have had a period of stability for a millenia or two. During that time we have grown to rely on certain climatic patterns and sea levels. Even minor changes in these, if they happen rapidly, would be disastrous and affect hundreds of millions if not billions of us to some extent.
We need to know a lot more about the climate and how it works in order to try and protect ourselves even from inevitable natural changes. To mess around with concentrations of greenhouse gasses could trigger the kind of natural changes that have happened in the past, but in a timescale that is too rapid for us to cope with.
But the evidence simply does not conclusively establish that man alone is the moving force behind warming trends generally or this one specifically.
Sorry, but it does! You list times when past CO2 levels were higher. They were periods of substantially higher temperatures. We have a rather low CO2 level (well, until recently) because we are effectively still in an ice age period (the ice has just receded for a while). Increasing CO2 will warm the Earth. The major factor on this planet increasing CO2 right now is us.
If you don't believe this you have to come up with some other factor that has increased global temperatures over a period that co-incides well with human industrial growth. Volcanic activity hasn't changed. Solar radiation has, but not by enough.
"It has always been understood that global warming is complex"
No, it hasn't. There is even now wide spread thinking that it's simple.
Not by those who have really understood it. Models of global warming have always involved CO2, methane, sulphates, water vapour, solar intensites etc.
Damn, we better plug those volcanoes then! Until recently they put more CO2 into the atmosphere than we did
And the CO2 level was stable up to that point. It isn't now.
How do you know this? Every living organism on this planet that uses photosynthesis (such as plankton and trees) inhales or absorbs CO2. Maybe if we stopped killing those organisms, then they would suck up the CO2 like good uns?
We aren't killing the ones that such up most of the CO2. The main CO2 uptake is via plankton, which precipitate CO2 as carbonates on the sea floor.
It's not worse at all. It's exactly the same. The earth (for some reason) maintains a dynamic equilibrium.
You are right. It does. But on a timescale of millenia. The problem is that during that timescale there can be sea volume increases and climatic change. Even a sea rise of a few metres would inundate major cities and cause major disruption. But I guess that this is all OK if it settles back in a few thousand years?
By putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, other systems will respond to that, and change the weather in ways we can't really predict on a micro scale, but have some idea of what will happen on the macro scale.
We aren't sure what happens on the macro scale. We don't know if increased overall global warming will even create localised cooling!
There were oil fires before we started putting the stuff in automobiles. There are coal seams that have been burning for at least thousands, but perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. Volcanoes spew CO2 by the ton, and all of the non=photosynthetic organisms are breathing the stuff into the atmosphere as you read this. Perhaps if you stop breathing, my childrens future is assured?
The problem is that we are now dumping far, far more CO2 into the atmosphere from industrial processes than from volcanoes, coal seams etc. Not just a little more, but orders of magnitude more. If this were not the case, the CO2 level would be stable. It isn't.
CO2 is a non-issue.
Having the concentration of a major greenhouse gas potentially double within a few decade is a non-issue? Not by my definition.
If you can figure out how to do this without starving about 5 billion people to death then my hats off to you.
We have made very little effort to cut back on CO2 production by economising on oil. New styles of nuclear power generation may be the answer, or at least part of it.
All other enegry sources now have serious transportation, avaliablity, or waste problems.
And CO2 production to the extent where it may result in serious climate change is not a 'waste problem'?
Almost identical thinking powers the global warming debate. A correlation of one variable to global warming has been discovered and it has been "decided" that all we need to do is restrict that one variable and global warming will reverse. I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the actual situation is probably considerably more complex than that and very possibly outside our control.
It has always been understood that global warming is complex. However it is not a good idea to mess about seriously with any of the factors that influence climate. It is potentially damaging to dump large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere no matter how complex things are. In a way, it is worse because we know it is complex - so the long term effects can't be easily predicted. Not dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is definitely within our control.
If we're talking about the potential viewpoint of a "Supreme Being", it is certainly relevant to assume that the being exists in some n-dimensional space which allows it to exhibit all of its "Supreme" qualities. To me, it seems like you keep trying to apply the physical limits that we can observe in our own universe to the theoretical "Supreme Being".
This seems to me that you are trying to apply pseudo-physical term in a meaningless way. Simply bringing up n dimensions does not help things.
As a result of this sensitivity, the observed behavior of physical systems that exhibit chaos appears to be random, even though the model of the system is 'deterministic' in the sense that it is well defined and contains no random parameters."
I see where we may not be understanding each other here. I am not saying that systems aren't deterministic - what I am saying is that they are not predictable even with infinite accuracy. In other words, you can know in principle that a future state of the system depends on past states, but it is impossible to know, given the past state, what the future state is. This sounds paradoxical, but it is similar in some ways to cellular automata systems in which the only way to know what a system will do is to run it, even though it is deterministic.
I think we're about reaching the limits of this discussion - it seems to me that we have both reached some personal fundamental assumptions about this issue that we are not likely to change.
I was hoping I could persuade you that you can't just bolt-on ideas about additional dimensions in order to try and get a non-quantum and clockwork system.
My view is that the universe seems (paradoxically) almost designed not only to run itself, but to be resistant to the interventions of a deity. There just aren't any 'levers' in the system that such a being could use to predict and control things except in the most vague ways.
It's been fun though, thanks for the discussion.
It has! Thanks.
While Global Warming may be a fact, its anthropogenic nature is still reasonably disputed for several reasons. First, there have been many climatic swings of warming and cooling since before man even existed. There is no compelling evidence to suggest that this current warming spell is not a natural occurrence.
This is a very outdated view. The anthropogenic nature is no longer much disputed. There have been major climatic swings, before but they have rarely occurred so fast. The only reasonable causative factor for this one is CO2 increase in the atmosphere. Recently, the only other sensible possibility - solar activity changes - has been shown to have some contribution to global warming, but insufficient to explain more than a fraction of it.
So, there is global warming co-inciding with a major CO2 increase which is almost all due to human activity. This is compelling evidence.
The Intergovernmenal Panel on Climate Change says "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities".
Recorded human history is merely a blink of an eye in geologic terms. Recorded *climatic* history has only started in the modern times (last 500 years). Our frame of reference is short.
No. Recorded climatic history goes back a very long way. Ice cores show a huge amount about climate and give information over thousands of years.
As for your statements about CO2 release and plankton, this just doesn't fit. Atmospheric CO2 levels have risen over a long period matching the increase in human output. The Solar Dimming effect has been over too short a period.
Since a multi-dimensional clockwork universe is not necessarily limited to exchanging information between its bits at the speed of light (since as a whole it doesn't have follow the same physical laws that we can observe in our bit of the universe)
This is irrelevant. As I said in an earlier post, having the wrong number of dimensions just doesn't work physically. You can't arbitrarily assume a viewpoint in some higher number of dimensions, because such a viewpoint would be meaningless.
The only connection Chaos Theory has with "reality" is when we take the results from applying Chaos Theory to the models & try to figure out what that would look like in our universe.
No - much of chaos theory is far more than this. It is more than just fitting data to models. It helps define the limits of knowledge.
I think you are trying to find some viewpoint from which our universe will seem to be a deterministic 'clockwork' mechanism. Don't think such a viewpoint can exist.
I think you're assuming too much about quantum mechanics being a fundamental description of the ultimate nature of reality. Bear in mind that quantum mechanics is simply a "best" model-to-date that fits what we can observe from our perspective in the universe.
Good point. However, the Bell Inequality has a deeper meaning than Quantum Mechanics.
It is quite possible that the universe is not random at all, but from the right dimensional perspective is a completely predictable clockwork mechanism
Not really. The Bell Inequality contradicts this.
Similarly, chaos theory is merely a field of study that says that the behaviour of certain mathematical models is beyond our ability to calculate with absolute accuracy. A "Supreme Being" would have no such limitation.
No, it is not about mathematical models. It is about the behaviour of real objects, and the lack of use of even infinite precision.
A truly "Supreme Being" is not going to have any of _our_ limitations.
There is a lot of theological thinking that implies that any supreme being is indeed going to have limitations (the classic 'can God make a stone so heavy he can't lift it?' is one).
Well, you're using a different definition of "perfect" than I am. My definition of "perfect" would include complete & utter knowledge of the entire state of the universe (including all of the relevant quantum states) throughout all of its existence.
Well, I hope this blows your mind, as it does mine, but even that isn't possible, as there is no way you can specify the time period of the existence of a universe. Not only does time vary (for example, for things that travel at the speed of light, time does not exist), but there is a good possibility that the future can effect the past (the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics). Even if you could have the entire history universe laid out before you, you would not be dealing with a fixed thing!
There is also the possibility that the universe really IS a clockwork mechanism-type universe in some kind of meta-dimensional space, and we _have_ to model it as based on randomness merely because we are incapable (and never will be capable) of seeing all the pieces that we would need to be able to predict things via calculation.
Even this won't work! With chaos, adding more dimensions makes the unpredictability worse, not better. With quantum mechanics, if you add change the number of dimensions, it again makes things worse, as without a certain number of dimensions things just can't exist.
It is useless to try to apply quantum mechanics & chaos theory to a Supreme Being. _We_ have to use such models since we, by definition, will never have perfect knowledge of the universe. There is no such constraint on a Supreme Being.
This is an interesting philosophical debate - but it is still my view that you are missing the deep implications of recent findings in chaos theory and quantum mechanics.
Even perfect knowledge isn't enough!
You simply can't, even with perfect knowledge, kick of a universe like ours and be able to have any idea of how things will go.
The only way that a God could make things go in any particular way would be to regularly intervene to keep things on track.
So, if you want to assume that we are the intentional product of some God, then you can't assume that He simply set things in motion at the Big Bang and stood back.
You may ask how such limits can be put on a supreme being, but there is a good theological basis for this. You may remember the old question "can God make a stone so heavy He can't lift it?"
Anyway, thanks for an intelligent debate. A rare thing with this subject.
It means God created a universe that's so in tune* that it doesn't require his influence.
I see where you are coming from, but I think you are still missing the point. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory means that the universe is not 'in tune' with anything. They mean that even an infinitely accurately determined initial state of the universe would still basically go its own way.
* "In tune" means everything from super black holes to quantum mechanics all exist and function in a predictable way (well, maybe except for quantum mechanics, but since we've only been working on it for what, 15 years? it's hard to say...)
Closer to 100, so it isn't that hard to say. Anyway, it is not just quantum mechanics. Chaos theory now shows that there are some common phenomena where even an infinite amount of knowledge isn't sufficient to determine future behaviour to any degree of accuracy.
Things simply don't behave predictably.
(Maybe you do get it, but I'm reading in your responses that you don't believe God exists because you believe science can at least infer that he doesn't... which just wouldn't be possible.)
No, I don't believe science can infer that at all. What I do believe is that science can show that for describing how things happen - including evolution - you simply don't need to involve a God.