Climate Scientists are trying to make very accurate predictions where they don't have the data to do so.
Predicting that a certain very precise scenario is the "most likely" given noisy data is not wrong, but it should be accompanied by an estimate of the range of errors. A mean and variance is pretty standard (works great with Gaussian predictions, for example).
Granted that most of the fear mongering worst case scenarios stuff isn't from the people doing the real science but from activists groups who pick and choose data to make people afraid so they do what they want.
Lots of very good scientists are making lots of very dire predictions. The problem with predicting the most likely outcome is that you ignore the cost. If you weight the likelihood of an outcome by the cost of the consequences of that outcome, that's the first step in "risk management", and it makes it completely valid, in the case of global warming, to cry gloom and doom.
But still the Scientists don't like saying to people Hey I could be wrong
Sorry, but that's nonsense. Scientists do not spend much time saying "Hey, I may be wrong" because it's science! You present the data and draw conclusions. OF COURSE you might be wrong, and that goes without saying. Everyone who matters knows that you might be wrong. Good scientists will pick a few ways in which their conclusions are probably tenuous and point them out in papers--this is a very precise "I might be wrong about X due to Y"--but blanket "I might be wrong" statements provide no additional information, and so they are useless.
Why has it escaped everyone's notice that a computer quite trivially meets the definition of "Circumvention Device" under the DMCA? Of course, so does a brain. I kind of like the idea of suing everybody with a brain.
Oh, wait. The DMCA doesn't apply outside the USA. Never mind.
Of course, arresting everybody is a great way to arrest thieves and murderers. But there's a downside. I'll leave figuring that out as an exercise to the grader.
BTW arresting jaywalkers is how Rudy Giuliani cleaned-up downtown New York. It may seem anal, but in the process of arresting jaywalkers and subway barrier jumpers, he also caught a lot of thieves and murderers.
Check out Ch. 4 of Freakonomics. It claims (and backs it up pretty thoroughly) that Giuliani didn't do much to clean up New York--the crime wave dropped nationwide at that time. "That time" was roughly 16 years after Roe v. Wade.
In the flatlands, velomobiles are pretty sweet when it's cold and windy. I don't ride my bike when it's below -5C, personally, although I have friends who do (all I'd really need that I don't have is overboots). Ice is another barrel of monkeys entirely, although tricycles (velomobiles) with studded tires are probably about as agile as cars and of course safer due to lower speeds. But they're heavy, and so a pain if it's hilly; and they're big, so they're not as easy to park as bikes; and they're expensive. The alternative--warm clothing--is easy, cheap, versatile, and completely up to the job, if you don't feel threatened by the fashion police for biking in ski gear.
In these parts, they do maintain the bike paths almost as well as the car paths. I was assuming that if the subjects of the article had money for infrastructure for neosegways, putting some into path maintenance would be reasonable. And of course adding bike paths to the normal city snow removal budget shouldn't make much of a difference. In an ideal world...
What's wrong with bikes? If you've got the cash to put up the infrastructure for these things, why not lay down some bike paths instead? Bikes are far safer than anything that weighs 500kg and moves (if you question the safety of bikes, look it up before making a fool of yourself), cheaper, simpler, have vastly fewer toxic nasties floating around in their power cells, can be parked without causing urban sprawl and massive parking infrastructure costs, and incidentally would eliminate about 85% of the health crisis within a year.
But I suppose nobody is interested in solutions that have been around for a century.
It was my impression that they were. Please point me to your sources. Needless to say, to be worth anything they must be peer-reviewed, and not paid for by grants from fossil-fuel companies, but I can't think of any other requirements.
You raise a valid point. But you are overstating your case somewhat. To wit:
Most electronic systems do not provide general oversight. It is not hard to invent one that does (elsewhere I have described such a beast--simple, anonymous and yet verifiable--and I'm sure you can come up with something just as good), but there is little chance of actually getting such a system deployed.
Every fucking problem the United States is facing right now is because of these unvalidatable electronic vote tabulation devices.
Indeed? So the USA is not facing any problems that came about in the time before electronic voting machines? I know Bush and electronic voting happened at about the same time, but this last paragraph is disingenuous. Furthermore, exit polls show that even if there was some voter fraud, there isn't that much. The fact is that about half of the USA voted for Bush, and again half voted for McCain. That's a very serious problem, and 20% voter fraud one way or another would be pretty immaterial.
From an article by Mark Slouka, in the February issue of Harpers:
One out of every four of us believes we've been reincarnated; 44 percent of us believe in ghosts; 71 percent, in angels. Forty percent of us believe God created all things in their present form sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the same number--not coincidentally, perhaps--are functionally illiterate. Twenty percent think the sun might revolve around the earth. When one of us writes a book explaining that our offspring are bored and disruptive in class because they have an indigo "vibrational aura" that means they are a gifted race sent to this planet to change our consciousness with the help of guides from a higher world, half a million of us rush to the bookstores to lay our money down.
I suggest that most of the current problems in the USA are more closely tied to those facts than to the fact of unverifiable electronic elections.
(Apparently) little-known fact: coffee is brewed at water temperatures well above what human skin can stand without scalding injuries. Temperatures of around 50C injure us very quickly. Coffee is brewed at around 85C--95C, and is best consumed shortly after brewing, lest it lose flavour. Therefore, if you buy a coffee, you know for sure that it was recently hot enough to scald you, and it may still be so. The wise will take the necessary precautions. The foolish will become extremely wealthy.
Of course, Americans are born into a bit of a nanny state. Furthermore, there is a tendency here for parents to be somewhat overzealous about protecting their children from any possibility of even minor injury, and the consequences are obvious: Americans are raised to be babies, always looking to blame someone else when they make a stupid mistake, because they were never given responsibility to make their own decisions and discover the consequences and learn.
This goes back to one of the biggest differences that I have found between Americans and other peoples: on average Americans are far more concerned with "rights" and far less concerned with "responsibilities" than any other culture I know.
Talking about the scale of populating space in terms of lifetimes is pretty useless. The New World took centuries to populate to a degree that had any meaning, and is still less densely populated than Europe or Asia.
Populating the New World was not a means to reduce population burden on Europe. It was a means to escape from religious nutcases. I thought you had advocated moving off-planet in order to bypass an eternally growing population.
And please, you go from talking about the demise of humanity at less than 7 billion to postulating a future of 510 billion people? 5 trillion? On one planet? Talk about thinking two dimensionally.
Humanity is already running into population problems. We have been for a while. Don't you read the news? However, my argument stands--if our population doubles every 30 years, and we're now at 7 billion, how long before we reach 510 billion? 5 trillion? If your answer isn't "forever", then you must see that there's a wee little problem.
Millionfold? Really, you're not letting hyperbole run away from you at all? Looking at the past century the term 'threefold' would be most realistic. Christ. How many fingers am I holding up? One million?
Oops, my mistake with the math. But you are making a bigger mistake: if you expect that the population can keep growing indefinitely, then how many threefold--or millionfold--improvements are needed in order to keep us fed? How many are you counting on? We have already gone way beyond what we can sustain with current technology, as evidenced by the problems I mentioned earlier. And as the climate goes fubar, this will get much, much worse.
And you want to insult my thought process?
I'm only insulting your thought process because of the things that you wrote.
[deranged rant about global warming]
Read the fucking research, shitwit. Fox News is not science. Or are you the only climatologist in the world right now who doesn't think that this is going to be a serious problem for us? Could you please send along some of your publications? Or perhaps you're taking the reasonable view that humans can kill off most of the higher life on the planet, including themselves, and that life will go on elsewhere? That's fine, except that I kind of like some of those humans that you don't mind inconveniencing.
Higher temperatures might be bad for some species, any environmental change is going to bad for something somewhere, but the net effect in the fossil record is positive.
I still have to respond to this: "positive net effect on the fossil record" means--as you said--lots of evolutionary pressures happening on evolutionarily plausible timescales, or sudden vacancies in some niches. Is that a good thing? Go check up on the effect on the fossil record that humans are having.
salinization from irrigation has been a problem since people started doing it in Neolithic Mesopotamia. Remember that hydroponics thing I mentioned? Solves that.
Ah, good, glad we no longer have to worry about that, since hydroponics (with full pollutant reclamation systems) are already deployed everywhere. But I suppose a great climatologist like yourself would overlook the small logistical and financial problem of universal deployment on the scale we'd need. Or perhaps you are a hitherto unknown global supplier of fine hydroponic supplies, and you just happen to have a large amount of stock available to donate?
Implying that the process is going to suddenly stop is as stupid as Malthus' having completely ignored it.
(1) Malthus didn't completely ignore it, but it was irrelevant for his argument. While you address only food (one of Malthus's four), you ignore not only his other three but also the host of others that large-scale deployment of various "solutions" has caused. Check out J
So we just keep growing forever? Maybe we can get into space by the thousands in our lifetimes, but probably not by the tens of billions. And just how many people do you want? Will you be happier, lead a richer life, when you have one square meter allocated to you? A tenth of one?
Consequently resource efficiency keeps going up, more food is produced more quickly in less space with less spoilage for instance decade after decade
Ah, that explains why as humanity expands, we have never had to cut down any forest to turn it into crop land? Because "one-in-a-million" geniuses would need to produce food efficiency increases on the order of a millionfold in order to pay their way in your scenario. Logistics don't really play much of a role in your thought processes, do they?
What about global warming? Food production is about to go down, not up. What about increasingly toxic processes? Almost every new technology has unexpected negative consequences. Fertilisers create dead zones in the oceans and less nutritious crops, our need for packaged energy poisons our air and water, creates incentives for wars, and is now causing global climate destabilisation, irrigation poisons our topsoils, genetic engineering kills diversity (even aside from the obvious socioeconomic problems of the legal framework that makes them profitable), and perhaps you've heard of pesticides? Those are just off the top of my head; there are thousands more examples.
Show me a stable society. We haven't had one yet, so I find your blind optimism simply idiotic. If we can manage to stabilise our way of living, then perhaps we can talk about safe growth. But to assert that growth is always OK because there will be a yet-to-be-discovered magic solution is moronic.
It could indeed have helped. There was a proposal a few years ago to inject water into faults, the idea being that this would lubricate the faults and trigger quakes sooner. That, of course, means more smaller quakes, rather than fewer really big ones.
Probably never came to anything due to liability concerns. Letting nature kill a few thousand is better than a human doing something that kills one who has a good lawyer. Woot. Unless it's burning fossil fuels, I suppose... never mind...
Yup. I was working on a project that greatly enhanced a certain medical diagnosis (made it quick, accurate, non-invasive, cheap, etc). The inventor (I was merely the coder) ended up selling the patent to the company whose device we made obsolete, and they just buried it. Not a very good feeling, but it happens all the time.
The same weather forecast system that cannot predict the weekend's weather is used to predict 5, 10, 50, 100 and 1000 years out. Any errors made are carried over and compound the overall error.
Nope. Check your facts before you make such an idiotic claim. You are right that weather forecasting systems are useless a few weeks out, but day-to-day weather forecasting has little in common with climate forecasting. I'm surprised that you are so arrogant as to think that you alone (or perhaps Republicans generally) know that climatologists are such idiots.
The Sun's output is not a constant, nor has it ever been, nor is it likely to stabilize anytime soon. In fact, we have seen near record setting declines in Sunspot activity. Sunspots generate a LOT of energy, look it up.
Your point? "We can dump shitloads of greenhouse gases into the air, to the point that if reasonable probabilistic predictions suggest that we will stew ourselves, but we can count on the sun to suddenly produce so little energy that we will be saved!" The kind Sun God will save us from our stupidity!!!
- Mars has lot it's polar ice cap. Is this our fault too?
Two things.
First, nobody claims that climate is constant. Of course it varies. The relevant claim is that since we are running the Earth well beyond its carrying capacity, if climate changes much, then we will have a very serious problem no matter whose fault it is. Finger-pointing is fine in politics, but finding solutions works better in real life.
Second, there is overwhelming evidence that humans are responsible for a very large amount of Earth's climate change. Not that it really matters whose fault it is, but for the record, it's quite well established that it's ours. We have models showing the mechanism, we have predictions, we have data that fit those predictions (Train the model on years 1600-2000, test it in 2001-2008. Train the model on years -6000000-0, test it on recent history. You get the idea).
Third (bonus thing!): look up how to use an apostrophe. But it's probably more important that you learn something about climate science first.
Who gains from spreading this myth? A similar myth produced the EPA, a group of unelected people, who answer to no one, who can declare your house an environmental impact zone and have it condemned without trial, jury nor a right to appeal.
You're barking up the wrong tree. Few people have much to gain by spreading the "myth" of global warming. Who stands to gain by denying it? People who get rich through trade in fossil fuels, governments whose revenue depends on fossil fuel use, governments who want to stay in power and know that to do so they need to tell their voters that they have rights but not responsibilities, people with small penises who need to compensate by driving SUVs, tire companies, asphalt and road maintenance companies, car manufacturers,...
That alone is strong evidence of the reality of global warming. Few gain by promulgating it. On the other hand, many very rich entities gain by convincing their supporters that there isn't a problem--just look at the propaganda campaigns, the political lobbying, the funding sources of the studies "proving" that global warming is a hoax,... And yet it is well-established scientific fact (which, as I hope you know, means "the best-trained experts we have have worked hard on figuring this out, and they have found a hell of a lot of very strong evidence").
The cooling period we say in 2008 more than made up the difference for over 20 years worth of the increase that Global Warming fanatics have been prancing about.
No.
We constantly move through climatic change, we always have, we always will. There is nothing you can do about the weather, other than to talk about it.
That kind of puts the rest of today's news into perspective. We're not all gonna die of the wars and famines and such, but a hell of a lot of us are.
Unless we fix things. We fucked them up (even though we've known for over 100 years that this could be a problem, and for 40 years that it actually was happening) and we had better spend every bit of our ability trying to fix them. Go plant a tree, work on clean power, kill someone in an SUV, insulate your house, design robots or processes that can do more good than humans can...
This one study isn't necessarily correct. But it is more evidence that things are very likely really bad and that we need to bust our asses to fix things.
Fix? If the Earth heats up, there's no way it will support billions of people. The whole ecosystem will crumble. Even if it could support us, billions of people would be displaced--who's going to pay for that, give them a place to live, etc? Those responsible? Yeah, right.
The action the police took here was wrong - but that by no means justifies the actions of the violent individuals who would look to bypass the legal process via threats and intimidation.
I call bullshit. When the government ignores the law, or when the law is unjust, you'd have to be pretty stupid to try to bring justice while working within the law. In fact, in the USA, it's the citizens' contractual duty to overthrow the government. Good luck doing that legally.
Of course, there's a problem when those acting outside the law don't have their own strong ethics--they can easily go too far. It's easy for vigilantes to get carried away. Of course, just because the government gets carried away rewriting laws rather than just ignoring them doesn't mean the government isn't also going too far.
My tirade could be used as justification for any action for any cause. I know that. Just because there's a slippery slope there doesn't make it wrong.
I'm also treating "the government" as a monolithic body here. If any part of a government can be used to bring the rest of it in check, that is probably usually preferable to working outside the law (people are more likely to fight vigilantes, and turn things bloody, than they are to fight the overwhelming force of government). But make no mistake: making people behave is always a form of violence, no matter who does it. See also "Stop, or I'll say stop again!"
Yup. Sounds like a great incentive to structure a society in which people can easily stay healthy, no? And of course there's the benefit of people being able to live knowing that their whole retirement savings will not disappear overnight due to a surprise cancer.
I'm pretty sure I'm off-topic. Unless we're debating political theory again...:)
Joe Next Door loses when electricity rates go up in reponse to the increased electricity demand.
That makes sense, but it's still reasonable for rates to go up. Joe Next Door also needs to be efficient. What's the correct price for power? One that involves full cleanup costs from production. If we were producing completely clean and harmless power, then there would be no reason to use less of it. And if we're not, then we should continue to raise prices until we are. Joe Next Door is not exempt from that process.
Of course, getting the price of power generation back to the cleanup effort is somewhat complex and rarely done in practice (when taxpayers pay for oil spill cleanup, is that from a gasoline tax?). But I'm talking about what should happen, not what does.
For example: in Boulder, CO, the water rate is nonlinear: the first 8000 gallons or so (sorry for the archaic units; that's the way things still work here) are at a base rate, the next 5000 at a higher rate, etc. Superlinear electricity fees strike me as a fine idea. Of course, what I'd really like to see is superlinear gas prices at the pump (to take into account the extreme hazard of allowing SUVs on the road--global warming is just one of many costs there (eg. the USA alone could reduce the number of traffic-related deaths by at least one World-Trade-Center-Bombing-Unit PER YEAR if we got all the SUVs off the road, and hybrid SUVs won't help at all)). But superlinear pricing has other problems--in the SUV example it would reduce sticker shock and increase congestion at the pump when people started filling up twice as often, and the Boulder water example does not take into account the efficiency gains of living with roommates, etc.
The whole foundation of our legal system is this: write a law, and then pay lawyers shitloads of money to debate exactly what the law says. Where in there do you see anything about trying to make sure that the law supports justice?
Expect Microsoft to offer to ship a version of Windows without any web browser. So you won't be able to download firefox either!
I seem to recall getting all excited at what a huge improvement ncftp was over standard unix ftp... I won't say things haven't improved, but all this talk about needing a browser to download a browser is making me think of chickens. And eggs.
Slashdot Mirror
Climate Scientists are trying to make very accurate predictions where they don't have the data to do so.
Predicting that a certain very precise scenario is the "most likely" given noisy data is not wrong, but it should be accompanied by an estimate of the range of errors. A mean and variance is pretty standard (works great with Gaussian predictions, for example).
Granted that most of the fear mongering worst case scenarios stuff isn't from the people doing the real science but from activists groups who pick and choose data to make people afraid so they do what they want.
Lots of very good scientists are making lots of very dire predictions. The problem with predicting the most likely outcome is that you ignore the cost. If you weight the likelihood of an outcome by the cost of the consequences of that outcome, that's the first step in "risk management", and it makes it completely valid, in the case of global warming, to cry gloom and doom.
But still the Scientists don't like saying to people Hey I could be wrong
Sorry, but that's nonsense. Scientists do not spend much time saying "Hey, I may be wrong" because it's science! You present the data and draw conclusions. OF COURSE you might be wrong, and that goes without saying. Everyone who matters knows that you might be wrong. Good scientists will pick a few ways in which their conclusions are probably tenuous and point them out in papers--this is a very precise "I might be wrong about X due to Y"--but blanket "I might be wrong" statements provide no additional information, and so they are useless.
Why has it escaped everyone's notice that a computer quite trivially meets the definition of "Circumvention Device" under the DMCA? Of course, so does a brain. I kind of like the idea of suing everybody with a brain.
Oh, wait. The DMCA doesn't apply outside the USA. Never mind.
BTW arresting jaywalkers is how Rudy Giuliani cleaned-up downtown New York. It may seem anal, but in the process of arresting jaywalkers and subway barrier jumpers, he also caught a lot of thieves and murderers.
Check out Ch. 4 of Freakonomics. It claims (and backs it up pretty thoroughly) that Giuliani didn't do much to clean up New York--the crime wave dropped nationwide at that time. "That time" was roughly 16 years after Roe v. Wade.
In the flatlands, velomobiles are pretty sweet when it's cold and windy. I don't ride my bike when it's below -5C, personally, although I have friends who do (all I'd really need that I don't have is overboots). Ice is another barrel of monkeys entirely, although tricycles (velomobiles) with studded tires are probably about as agile as cars and of course safer due to lower speeds. But they're heavy, and so a pain if it's hilly; and they're big, so they're not as easy to park as bikes; and they're expensive. The alternative--warm clothing--is easy, cheap, versatile, and completely up to the job, if you don't feel threatened by the fashion police for biking in ski gear.
In these parts, they do maintain the bike paths almost as well as the car paths. I was assuming that if the subjects of the article had money for infrastructure for neosegways, putting some into path maintenance would be reasonable. And of course adding bike paths to the normal city snow removal budget shouldn't make much of a difference. In an ideal world...
What's wrong with bikes? If you've got the cash to put up the infrastructure for these things, why not lay down some bike paths instead? Bikes are far safer than anything that weighs 500kg and moves (if you question the safety of bikes, look it up before making a fool of yourself), cheaper, simpler, have vastly fewer toxic nasties floating around in their power cells, can be parked without causing urban sprawl and massive parking infrastructure costs, and incidentally would eliminate about 85% of the health crisis within a year.
But I suppose nobody is interested in solutions that have been around for a century.
They are NOT agreed.
It was my impression that they were. Please point me to your sources. Needless to say, to be worth anything they must be peer-reviewed, and not paid for by grants from fossil-fuel companies, but I can't think of any other requirements.
You raise a valid point. But you are overstating your case somewhat. To wit:
Most electronic systems do not provide general oversight. It is not hard to invent one that does (elsewhere I have described such a beast--simple, anonymous and yet verifiable--and I'm sure you can come up with something just as good), but there is little chance of actually getting such a system deployed.
Every fucking problem the United States is facing right now is because of these unvalidatable electronic vote tabulation devices.
Indeed? So the USA is not facing any problems that came about in the time before electronic voting machines? I know Bush and electronic voting happened at about the same time, but this last paragraph is disingenuous. Furthermore, exit polls show that even if there was some voter fraud, there isn't that much. The fact is that about half of the USA voted for Bush, and again half voted for McCain. That's a very serious problem, and 20% voter fraud one way or another would be pretty immaterial.
From an article by Mark Slouka, in the February issue of Harpers:
One out of every four of us believes we've been reincarnated; 44 percent of us believe in ghosts; 71 percent, in angels. Forty percent of us believe God created all things in their present form sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the same number--not coincidentally, perhaps--are functionally illiterate. Twenty percent think the sun might revolve around the earth. When one of us writes a book explaining that our offspring are bored and disruptive in class because they have an indigo "vibrational aura" that means they are a gifted race sent to this planet to change our consciousness with the help of guides from a higher world, half a million of us rush to the bookstores to lay our money down.
I suggest that most of the current problems in the USA are more closely tied to those facts than to the fact of unverifiable electronic elections.
I'm beginning to like Bill Gates???
Any time a site throws a popup at you, send them an email explaining that you are boycotting their site until they fix it?
Just silently boycotting is not enough--they will never know the difference.
(Apparently) little-known fact: coffee is brewed at water temperatures well above what human skin can stand without scalding injuries. Temperatures of around 50C injure us very quickly. Coffee is brewed at around 85C--95C, and is best consumed shortly after brewing, lest it lose flavour. Therefore, if you buy a coffee, you know for sure that it was recently hot enough to scald you, and it may still be so. The wise will take the necessary precautions. The foolish will become extremely wealthy.
Of course, Americans are born into a bit of a nanny state. Furthermore, there is a tendency here for parents to be somewhat overzealous about protecting their children from any possibility of even minor injury, and the consequences are obvious: Americans are raised to be babies, always looking to blame someone else when they make a stupid mistake, because they were never given responsibility to make their own decisions and discover the consequences and learn.
This goes back to one of the biggest differences that I have found between Americans and other peoples: on average Americans are far more concerned with "rights" and far less concerned with "responsibilities" than any other culture I know.
Talking about the scale of populating space in terms of lifetimes is pretty useless. The New World took centuries to populate to a degree that had any meaning, and is still less densely populated than Europe or Asia.
Populating the New World was not a means to reduce population burden on Europe. It was a means to escape from religious nutcases. I thought you had advocated moving off-planet in order to bypass an eternally growing population.
And please, you go from talking about the demise of humanity at less than 7 billion to postulating a future of 510 billion people? 5 trillion? On one planet? Talk about thinking two dimensionally.
Humanity is already running into population problems. We have been for a while. Don't you read the news? However, my argument stands--if our population doubles every 30 years, and we're now at 7 billion, how long before we reach 510 billion? 5 trillion? If your answer isn't "forever", then you must see that there's a wee little problem.
Millionfold? Really, you're not letting hyperbole run away from you at all? Looking at the past century the term 'threefold' would be most realistic. Christ. How many fingers am I holding up? One million?
Oops, my mistake with the math. But you are making a bigger mistake: if you expect that the population can keep growing indefinitely, then how many threefold--or millionfold--improvements are needed in order to keep us fed? How many are you counting on? We have already gone way beyond what we can sustain with current technology, as evidenced by the problems I mentioned earlier. And as the climate goes fubar, this will get much, much worse.
And you want to insult my thought process?
I'm only insulting your thought process because of the things that you wrote.
[deranged rant about global warming]
Read the fucking research, shitwit. Fox News is not science. Or are you the only climatologist in the world right now who doesn't think that this is going to be a serious problem for us? Could you please send along some of your publications? Or perhaps you're taking the reasonable view that humans can kill off most of the higher life on the planet, including themselves, and that life will go on elsewhere? That's fine, except that I kind of like some of those humans that you don't mind inconveniencing.
Higher temperatures might be bad for some species, any environmental change is going to bad for something somewhere, but the net effect in the fossil record is positive.
I still have to respond to this: "positive net effect on the fossil record" means--as you said--lots of evolutionary pressures happening on evolutionarily plausible timescales, or sudden vacancies in some niches. Is that a good thing? Go check up on the effect on the fossil record that humans are having.
salinization from irrigation has been a problem since people started doing it in Neolithic Mesopotamia. Remember that hydroponics thing I mentioned? Solves that.
Ah, good, glad we no longer have to worry about that, since hydroponics (with full pollutant reclamation systems) are already deployed everywhere. But I suppose a great climatologist like yourself would overlook the small logistical and financial problem of universal deployment on the scale we'd need. Or perhaps you are a hitherto unknown global supplier of fine hydroponic supplies, and you just happen to have a large amount of stock available to donate?
Implying that the process is going to suddenly stop is as stupid as Malthus' having completely ignored it.
(1) Malthus didn't completely ignore it, but it was irrelevant for his argument. While you address only food (one of Malthus's four), you ignore not only his other three but also the host of others that large-scale deployment of various "solutions" has caused. Check out J
So we just keep growing forever? Maybe we can get into space by the thousands in our lifetimes, but probably not by the tens of billions. And just how many people do you want? Will you be happier, lead a richer life, when you have one square meter allocated to you? A tenth of one?
Consequently resource efficiency keeps going up, more food is produced more quickly in less space with less spoilage for instance decade after decade
Ah, that explains why as humanity expands, we have never had to cut down any forest to turn it into crop land? Because "one-in-a-million" geniuses would need to produce food efficiency increases on the order of a millionfold in order to pay their way in your scenario. Logistics don't really play much of a role in your thought processes, do they?
What about global warming? Food production is about to go down, not up. What about increasingly toxic processes? Almost every new technology has unexpected negative consequences. Fertilisers create dead zones in the oceans and less nutritious crops, our need for packaged energy poisons our air and water, creates incentives for wars, and is now causing global climate destabilisation, irrigation poisons our topsoils, genetic engineering kills diversity (even aside from the obvious socioeconomic problems of the legal framework that makes them profitable), and perhaps you've heard of pesticides? Those are just off the top of my head; there are thousands more examples.
Show me a stable society. We haven't had one yet, so I find your blind optimism simply idiotic. If we can manage to stabilise our way of living, then perhaps we can talk about safe growth. But to assert that growth is always OK because there will be a yet-to-be-discovered magic solution is moronic.
It could indeed have helped. There was a proposal a few years ago to inject water into faults, the idea being that this would lubricate the faults and trigger quakes sooner. That, of course, means more smaller quakes, rather than fewer really big ones.
Probably never came to anything due to liability concerns. Letting nature kill a few thousand is better than a human doing something that kills one who has a good lawyer. Woot. Unless it's burning fossil fuels, I suppose... never mind...
Nice try, but the proliferation of the species is exactly what is responsible for its demise.
Yup. I was working on a project that greatly enhanced a certain medical diagnosis (made it quick, accurate, non-invasive, cheap, etc). The inventor (I was merely the coder) ended up selling the patent to the company whose device we made obsolete, and they just buried it. Not a very good feeling, but it happens all the time.
Only if it's the Liberty Bell.
The same weather forecast system that cannot predict the weekend's weather is used to predict 5, 10, 50, 100 and 1000 years out. Any errors made are carried over and compound the overall error.
Nope. Check your facts before you make such an idiotic claim. You are right that weather forecasting systems are useless a few weeks out, but day-to-day weather forecasting has little in common with climate forecasting. I'm surprised that you are so arrogant as to think that you alone (or perhaps Republicans generally) know that climatologists are such idiots.
The Sun's output is not a constant, nor has it ever been, nor is it likely to stabilize anytime soon. In fact, we have seen near record setting declines in Sunspot activity. Sunspots generate a LOT of energy, look it up.
Your point? "We can dump shitloads of greenhouse gases into the air, to the point that if reasonable probabilistic predictions suggest that we will stew ourselves, but we can count on the sun to suddenly produce so little energy that we will be saved!" The kind Sun God will save us from our stupidity!!!
- Mars has lot it's polar ice cap. Is this our fault too?
Two things.
First, nobody claims that climate is constant. Of course it varies. The relevant claim is that since we are running the Earth well beyond its carrying capacity, if climate changes much, then we will have a very serious problem no matter whose fault it is. Finger-pointing is fine in politics, but finding solutions works better in real life.
Second, there is overwhelming evidence that humans are responsible for a very large amount of Earth's climate change. Not that it really matters whose fault it is, but for the record, it's quite well established that it's ours. We have models showing the mechanism, we have predictions, we have data that fit those predictions (Train the model on years 1600-2000, test it in 2001-2008. Train the model on years -6000000-0, test it on recent history. You get the idea).
Third (bonus thing!): look up how to use an apostrophe. But it's probably more important that you learn something about climate science first.
Who gains from spreading this myth? A similar myth produced the EPA, a group of unelected people, who answer to no one, who can declare your house an environmental impact zone and have it condemned without trial, jury nor a right to appeal.
You're barking up the wrong tree. Few people have much to gain by spreading the "myth" of global warming. Who stands to gain by denying it? People who get rich through trade in fossil fuels, governments whose revenue depends on fossil fuel use, governments who want to stay in power and know that to do so they need to tell their voters that they have rights but not responsibilities, people with small penises who need to compensate by driving SUVs, tire companies, asphalt and road maintenance companies, car manufacturers, ...
That alone is strong evidence of the reality of global warming. Few gain by promulgating it. On the other hand, many very rich entities gain by convincing their supporters that there isn't a problem--just look at the propaganda campaigns, the political lobbying, the funding sources of the studies "proving" that global warming is a hoax, ... And yet it is well-established scientific fact (which, as I hope you know, means "the best-trained experts we have have worked hard on figuring this out, and they have found a hell of a lot of very strong evidence").
The cooling period we say in 2008 more than made up the difference for over 20 years worth of the increase that Global Warming fanatics have been prancing about.
No.
We constantly move through climatic change, we always have, we always will. There is nothing you can do about the weather, other than to talk about it.
See above
That kind of puts the rest of today's news into perspective. We're not all gonna die of the wars and famines and such, but a hell of a lot of us are.
Unless we fix things. We fucked them up (even though we've known for over 100 years that this could be a problem, and for 40 years that it actually was happening) and we had better spend every bit of our ability trying to fix them. Go plant a tree, work on clean power, kill someone in an SUV, insulate your house, design robots or processes that can do more good than humans can...
This one study isn't necessarily correct. But it is more evidence that things are very likely really bad and that we need to bust our asses to fix things.
Fix? If the Earth heats up, there's no way it will support billions of people. The whole ecosystem will crumble. Even if it could support us, billions of people would be displaced--who's going to pay for that, give them a place to live, etc? Those responsible? Yeah, right.
The action the police took here was wrong - but that by no means justifies the actions of the violent individuals who would look to bypass the legal process via threats and intimidation.
I call bullshit. When the government ignores the law, or when the law is unjust, you'd have to be pretty stupid to try to bring justice while working within the law. In fact, in the USA, it's the citizens' contractual duty to overthrow the government. Good luck doing that legally.
Of course, there's a problem when those acting outside the law don't have their own strong ethics--they can easily go too far. It's easy for vigilantes to get carried away. Of course, just because the government gets carried away rewriting laws rather than just ignoring them doesn't mean the government isn't also going too far.
My tirade could be used as justification for any action for any cause. I know that. Just because there's a slippery slope there doesn't make it wrong.
I'm also treating "the government" as a monolithic body here. If any part of a government can be used to bring the rest of it in check, that is probably usually preferable to working outside the law (people are more likely to fight vigilantes, and turn things bloody, than they are to fight the overwhelming force of government). But make no mistake: making people behave is always a form of violence, no matter who does it. See also "Stop, or I'll say stop again!"
Yup. Sounds like a great incentive to structure a society in which people can easily stay healthy, no? And of course there's the benefit of people being able to live knowing that their whole retirement savings will not disappear overnight due to a surprise cancer.
I'm pretty sure I'm off-topic. Unless we're debating political theory again... :)
Joe Next Door loses when electricity rates go up in reponse to the increased electricity demand.
That makes sense, but it's still reasonable for rates to go up. Joe Next Door also needs to be efficient. What's the correct price for power? One that involves full cleanup costs from production. If we were producing completely clean and harmless power, then there would be no reason to use less of it. And if we're not, then we should continue to raise prices until we are. Joe Next Door is not exempt from that process.
Of course, getting the price of power generation back to the cleanup effort is somewhat complex and rarely done in practice (when taxpayers pay for oil spill cleanup, is that from a gasoline tax?). But I'm talking about what should happen, not what does.
For example: in Boulder, CO, the water rate is nonlinear: the first 8000 gallons or so (sorry for the archaic units; that's the way things still work here) are at a base rate, the next 5000 at a higher rate, etc. Superlinear electricity fees strike me as a fine idea. Of course, what I'd really like to see is superlinear gas prices at the pump (to take into account the extreme hazard of allowing SUVs on the road--global warming is just one of many costs there (eg. the USA alone could reduce the number of traffic-related deaths by at least one World-Trade-Center-Bombing-Unit PER YEAR if we got all the SUVs off the road, and hybrid SUVs won't help at all)). But superlinear pricing has other problems--in the SUV example it would reduce sticker shock and increase congestion at the pump when people started filling up twice as often, and the Boulder water example does not take into account the efficiency gains of living with roommates, etc.
The whole foundation of our legal system is this: write a law, and then pay lawyers shitloads of money to debate exactly what the law says. Where in there do you see anything about trying to make sure that the law supports justice?
Expect Microsoft to offer to ship a version of Windows without any web browser. So you won't be able to download firefox either!
I seem to recall getting all excited at what a huge improvement ncftp was over standard unix ftp... I won't say things haven't improved, but all this talk about needing a browser to download a browser is making me think of chickens. And eggs.
Whoaaaaaaaaaaa.
10% is a minority. 50% is almost a majority, you incompetent moron.