Damn, you people are stupid! What a bunch of moronic statements, one after the other. You're the reason this country's going to hell in a handbasket, and I'd bet you'll be cheering the whole way down.
"Google can do whatever it likes, just like yourself at _your_ home, _your_ company.
It's Congress that cannot prohibit i with any law."
It's not quite that simple. Like TV and radio companies, Google provides a platform to disseminate political speech. It should be a neutral platform.
To remove its legal loophole, the Supreme Court should rule that trademarks aren't allowed for political organization names. MoveOn.org would just have to deal with it if someone started MovePawns.org.
But what my real problem is about, is all the responses that act like there is nothing wrong with squashing political speech in this way. The entire sarcasm I put in there was the exact same arguments made over the ban on flag burning that pissed everyone off. I was attempting to outrage people with those comments but it seems as if they are acceptable now. For some reasons, the majority of people don't seem to care when it works out to benefit a side they like.
Yes, the left in this country is the model of hypocrisy on this issue. It loves civil rights and free speech unless it disagrees with what's being said - then censorship is fine. Look at the concerted smear campaign against Rush Limbaugh right now. Totally contrived, and yet even Congress is wasting time with it.
One hopes the electorate is paying close attention.
As a libertarian, why aren't you applauding Google's ability to do what they want without government intervention? Criticizing them for this doesn't seem very libertarian to me.
A Libertarian (note capitalization) views the primary role of the government as protecting the civil liberties of the citizenry. Free speech is one of the most important civil liberties.
I hope this cleared things up for you. Pretty simple really.
It's just a trademark case. If the RNC told google to block any ads with the text 'republican national congress' in them, and they held a trademark for such, then Google would do so.
What a fool.
I can't think of any better way to eliminate political discourse than this. Every political entity should just trademark its name, and it can suppress any type of critical political ad. George Bush(tm). BS.
Trademarks were developed to eliminate brand confusion among commercial entities. They shouldn't be applicable to political entities. Use of any political organizations name should be fine on First Amendment grounds.
Google needs to start walking the 'do no evil' walk. It's not right for one of the world's biggest media companies to suppress protected political speech with which it disagrees.
only a MORON would pay $1000 a year for a 200K home. you know the idiots that buy those creative loans. a TRADITIONAL loan thatyou do not get screwed on your $200,000 home will cost you about $2100.00 a month even at 7%
k...looking at Quicken Loans, if you have good credit you can get a $190,000, 30 year fixed loan (you need at least a 5% down payment these days, $10,000) at 6.25% interest, which is $1,169 a month. That's with good credit of course, but that's a whole 'nother discussion. If you really want to get ahead of the curve, pay an extra $100 to $200 a month against the principle.
You can play around with the extra payments (prepayments) at Karl's Mortgage Calculator if you want. In the example above, an extra $100 from the start shortens the loan from 30 years to 24 years, 3 months. $200 a month would shorten the loan to 20 years 7 months.
So, in short, you're way off base.:-)
$200k will get you a nice house in a lot of the country...and it'll get you more in a few more months.;-)
This is a fuel-air bomb. It would be physically almost impossible for it to have the raw destructive power of the high explosives in the MOAB.
I hate to burst your "+5 Informative" bubble, but the advertised "ton-equivalent" for the MOAB is 11 tons of explosive, and for the FOAB it's 44. So, in fact, the chemical energy released is supposed to be 4x the MOAB.
One thing to consider is that the MOAB's mass includes its oxidizer, where the FOAB uses air. That alone is a big win for FOAB (when the wind isn't too high heh). That some fuel-based explosive has more energy release than the high explosive in the MOAB is unsurprising. Fuel air explosives are often referred to as the "poor man's nuke" for a reason.
I think the other thing you're referring to is the detonation speed of the explosive. For an explosive fuel-air mixture it's quite high as well.
One last thing - in general it's more efficient to drop more, smaller bombs rather than one big one. This is especially true given modern precision weapons. That's why the West generally ignored the USSR's fascination with building the 'biggest' H-bomb.
The FOAB is mainly a sign of Putin's insecurities. I suppose it might make a good psychological weapon as well - as does the MOAB.
it's also faster. the B-1B's supersonic ability is a joke. mach 1.2, and it's not very useful at all. the B-1A would have been faster (mach 2 i believe), but the whole canceled, brought back, and remissioning kinda screwed that up. should probably be noted that when you designed a supersonic swing wing bomber, there arent too many shapes you can make. just like when you design a giant bomb. or a reusable space launch platform. soviet's did copy/steal a lot of stuff from us (good for them, it was a good use of their money), but not everything they do should be automatically ridiculed for being a 'cheap knockoff'.
There's now a proposal for a B-1R upgrade (see Wikipedia if interested) that'd upgrade the B-1 engines to the F-22 powerplants, and enable it to carry a bunch of AAMRAMs as well as more air-ground munitions. It'd also return the top speed to Mach 2+, supercruising at least with no external stores.
You are right about this - Solar adoption/growth will not be linear. It will snowball / logarithmically grow (unless some other market forces step in to derail it
It won't follow any kind of smooth mathematical function. It'll essentially be discontinuous when a tipping point is reached (cost/watt = conventional power). Look at the adoption rate for compact fluorescent light bulbs for an example.
Not in every key area, however. For instance, it has not required that new coal power plants utilize the cleanest technologies now available. Coal plants are among the largest emitters of CO2 in this country, the plants being built today are likely going to be in operation for many decades, and retrofitting is much more expensive than building the technology in from the start. Even more than trying to convert to nuclear power right away, we need to make sure new conventional plants are as clean as possible.
And in what way isn't that happening? However, I disagree with your premise anyhow, we should immediately limit construction of new conventional plants here, in favor of nuclear.
Ah yes, the libertarian resonse: everything can be solved by the free market and any kind of government coordinated effort is "heavy-handed wealth redistribution".
Not at all, but nice job putting words in my mouth. For instance, I'm all for a strong national defense. However, Kyoto and other similar schemes are little more than a naked money grab.
Technological advance is only part of the solution. In order for even the free market to work, it needs to be aware of the true cost of carbon. Right now carbon is an externality in the market: how much or how little you emit is economically irrelevant. That has to change. Once the market is aware of the cost of carbon -- and that basically boils down to either a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax -- only then can we expect efficient solutions. And that's not going to happen without government policy.
I disagree, and my solar fabric example made the point - better, cheaper, cleaner solutions will happen simply due to improving technology and competition.
There are also other factors at work. Responsible people want a clean environment and a good world for their kids. A government mandate isn't needed to get people moving in the right direction (look at some of the polls). Unfortunately, too many turn to government for every solution, while ignoring its huge cost and intrusion into every aspect of our lives. Government is generally the least efficient solution to a given problem.
And what is your basis for arbitrarily dismissing the model results?
I'm not dismissing the results, I simply feel the error bars don't represent the true error space for this massive of a problem. I'm also quite sure that even with the increased observational capabilities of the last three decades, we're still far short of sufficient data to understand the Earth. Hubris, as I said.
Even if the skeptics are right and the feedback effects aren't as strong as climatologists think, that still wouldn't turn cooling into warming, it would just turn it into less cooling (just as the skeptics argue that CO2 causes less warming). The direct evidence is simply that the natural radiative forcings have been net negative.
Once again, I'm quite unsure the current crop of science is accounting for every input. I'd prefer to see much better quantitative account of every significant environmental factor before rushing to judgment. We are talking about phenomena in which a century is an ephemera, after all.
Going by the ice age cycle, probably also a cooling trend. Not that that's terribly relevant.
Actually that's rather an interesting chart. It seems to show that in this cycle, we've been at a long equilibrium period, something I've heard brought up before. In many of the other ice ages (if one believes this hindcasting) there's been a precipitous drop to several degrees Celsius cooler. I'd not be so quick to dismiss the P/N scenario.;-)
I've read Fallen Angels. No, we are not going to see ice sheets covering Canada in the next century without global warming. Ice ages are not that abrupt. They take, as you note, on the order of 10,000 years. If you're worried about ice ages, that's an argument for conserving our fossil fuels to use when we need them the most, not emitting them into the atmosphere now and having half or more of them scrubbed out of the atmosphere by the next ice age.
Don't worry - we'll be able to mitigate excessive warming very effectively long before those time scales come into play, or we'll be extinct.
The "wait and see" argument is an excuse for indefinite inaction with no real criterion for how long we need to wait before actually doing something.
That's untrue. What's needed is a true bound of when scientific understanding is up to the challenge, coupled with effective policy.
If projections really were as uncertain as you believe, that would be an excuse for MORE action, not less: skeptics always make the classic mistake that uncertainty will always err on the side of less impacts, but uncertainty doesn't favor one or the other: it's equally possible that the impacts will be worse than is currently believed.
Not true. If (just bear with me) global warming were predominantly a natural phenomenon, what would your policy be? Mess with Mother Nature?
The sensible course of action is to work out a sliding policy: start doing something capable of addressing the issue using mainstream estimates. If things turn out better than expected, scale down the mitigation; if they turn out worse, scale it up. Simply doing nothing increases the risks. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: there are high potential costs to procrastination.
I, however, would posit that we are already doing quite a lot. I note you've omitted my entire point about nuclear power, what's your stance on that? Surely any good Global Warming aficionado advocates nuclear power these days, correct? It's clearly a viable way to a decent standard of living along with zero carbon footprint.
I see you also ignored my points about disruptive technologies. That most likely places you in the ranks of Luddites who were worried about buggy whips when they should have been hoping for automatic tranmissions. The future will either be amazing and bountiful, or we'll be extinct. I don't really see much middle ground, but the way forward is not "conservation", at least for the US. We n
Yeah, let's hope for that. In fact, what we really need is less of this annoying scientific data proving that humans are causing unprecedented global warming, and more hope! Some kind of future technology will surely come along to save us, right? It happens in the movies all the time so why not?
Your rant would be more meaningful if the US were doing nothing. In fact, the US is aggressively cleaning up it's environmental footprint. If it weren't for environmentalist stupidity on nuclear power plants, the US would have an even cleaner footprint. Many now feel that a rapid buildup of nuclear power is the best way for the US to move towards a cleaner environment (coupled with plug-in hybrid cars).
What I'm saying (which perhaps I wasn't clear enough about) is that I feel the progress to less environmental impact is happening at a reasonable pace in the US. What's not happening is a move to cleaner energy in the rest of the world. Why should we cripple our economy when our economic competitors are already given an advantage by our environmental laws?
The other thing to remember is the idea of disruptive technologies. What if high-efficiency, cheap solar fabric becomes available tomorrow? It might replace 10-20% of our daytime electric needs in short order, with a clean alternative. No legislation or government involvement needed, just the good old market economy. Those kinds of breakthroughs are more than possible, they're almost inevitable. What's not needed is heavy-handed government intervention and wealth redistribution. What would help this country more than anything is smaller, leaner government, coupled with a 90% reduction in national lawyer head count.;-)
At any rate, you really need to focus on China with your environmental concerns. It's now the #1 carbon polluter.
[snip]
I'm going to wait until I personally see a lot of people actually dying from global warming before I do anything.
What if the majority of global warming is natural? Are you still willing to change it?
Right now, models predict that we would be cooling slightly, post 1950, without human influence. See Figure SPM.4
Well, those are pretty graphs...if you believe the error bars. Color me a skeptic.
Regardless, there's also the question of time scales. Cooling trend over what time scale? What's the long-term trend, over say 10,000 years?
Is it possible that anthropogenic warming might save us from an Ice Age, a la Pournelle/Niven?
At any rate, I submit that 1) more data is needed before taking drastic measures 2) technology will inevitably become more capable of providing mitigation, and 3) the main area of concern at this point is in the 2nd and 3rd world, in other words China, India and the other rapidly rising polluters of record. Don't forget the "Asian brown cloud", recently anointed as a GWC (Global Warming Contributor).
Yes, we know that natural warming can exist, and in fact, climate models predict the natural warming in the early 20th century. That doesn't change the evidence that the late 20th and 21st century warming cannot be adequately explained by natural effects.
OK, that's at least a concrete statement, though I don't agree with it at this point. Before we discuss anything else further though, I'd like you to tell me if we're in a period of natural cooling, equilibrium, or warming, absent human involvement. That should be straightforward for one with your intimate knowledge of these issues.
It wouldn't be surprising if there were, since there was warming in the 1920s. What is your point?
That there was warming in the '20s, when human greenhouse gas inputs were far less of a factor. See my point in the grandparent post regarding "natural" warming.
"The warmest year in US history" is utterly irrelevant to any warming trend and the two top years were statistically tied both before and after the revision.
It's relevant to the extent that recent record US temperatures have been tied to "Global Warming" in the press - which is to say, frequently. It also calls into question the published global temperature means - surely the best record keeping and science occurred at least in first world countries. There's also the issue of weather stations being affected by urban heat islands over time.
Yes, we know that climate change has occurred in the past, and there have been large, rapid changes in Greenland temperatures associated with, for instance, the shutdown/restart of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. However, that doesn't change the evidence that the current warming is not largely due to such natural events.
Really? And how do we "know" this exactly? Perhaps you'd care to share with us the percentage of worldwide yearly C02, H2O vapor, and methane emissions for which humans are responsible? I'm also sure you can guarantee that there've been no unaccounted for inputs or effects in the system, that aren't currently modeled correctly... It was widely reported this week that a new, major current had been discovered off Madagascar that's responsible for major climate effects. How can current models be accurate when not taking this current into account? In some models, reduced rainforest area is associated with reduced greenhouse gas sinking. Yet real world observation indicates that rainforests are net greenhouse gas producers, due to methane from decomposition (methane is a 40 times stronger greenhouse gas than CO2).
My view is that no drastic action (or expense) should be taken in the West over global warming. I think there should be a continuing move to cleaner energy production and industry, though unfortunately nuclear plant construction has been slower than desirable. In the future, technology will give us tremendous leverage over many problems...in the meantime we need to ensure that the developing nations don't continue to become major polluters. What we really need is a constructive plan for China that doesn't involve hundreds of new coal fired powerplants.
Give me a break. Yes, it's impossible to forecast the weather more than a couple weeks in the future, due to chaos. But you can forecast the climate, which is a temporal and spatial average of all possible weather events, out much farther. The ability of climate models to do this has been demonstrated in hindcasting and out-of-sample validation experiments.
Sure...26 times further would be one year. Now tell me the story about 93 years...
Your point about hindcasting actually damages your case. The "hindcasting" allowed researchers to modify "fudge factors" that made things more closely approximate historical behavior. The lack of first principles models, however, makes the climate forecasts that much more suspect. Further, the complexity of the environment is still just not well understood - for instance there is no consensus on the mechanism of the natural ice age cycle, completely absent human involvement. That cycle of warming and cooling has been going on for millions of years...
The bigger issue is the cloak of secrecy around the data and the algorithms used to generate the outputs. I do not understand why all data wouldn't be publicly available. Is there one place to go to see the data used to make the dire predictions I hear all over the place? I generally accept global warming as a fact, but when I see the amount of contortions one person had to go through to figure out there was a problem in the first place, I start to get suspicious.
There are many 'big issues' with the Global Warming (aka Global Climate Change) crowd. Global Warming is still the best term, since the main thesis is clearly increasing global mean temperature. Of course this implies nothing about local climate variation.
First of all, there's the question of whether Global Warming is a real, long-term trend. It's at a minimum interesting that there were reports in the 1920s of widespread arctic ice melting, followed in the 1970s by a "Global Cooling" scare. This recent revision of which was the warmest year in US history casts even more doubt. Looking further back into history, there has been historical warming in Greenland that exceeds the current trend, well before human produced greenhouse gasses could have been a factor.
I think the global warming skeptics are correct in viewing the results of the various computer models with a wary eye. The models are only as good as the data and assumptions fed into them, as well as the actual algorithms used to model absorption, reflection and emission. Further, they are modeling inherently chaotic systems which we have trouble forecasting only a week into the future. Hubris, anyone?
I wonder what the stance of the environmentalists will be if it's scientifically determined that the current climate trends are a natural phenomenon? Surely we shouldn't mess with Mother Nature...;-)
I personally think the United States, in particular, is doing quite a bit to address greenhouse gas emissions in particular, and pollution in general. If you really want to make a difference, lobby for more nuclear power going forward. What really needs scrutiny now is China (who just passed the US as a CO2 polluter) as well as the other developing nations with little money but a big hunger for energy. So, all you "anti-Western-industrialism" types, you have a new target.
"Even so, there is a bit more intentionality in downloading and executing a file and at least some users understand the danger involved."
No, there's the same degree of intent involved in JWS, you get prompted with a clear warning of the issues. In fact, it's more information than you get with a traditional app.
"The only nit I have is that there may very well be future moments when nuclear weapons are our best alternatives, Barack "Osama" Obama notwithstanding."
lol. OK, I reply on the same topic on which the parent got a +5 insightful, and get modded offtopic.
Must have been an Obamasama lover. Too bad your guy will never be President.
Under MacOS, the dock and top bar are still visible, and it's trivial to kill the browser.
There's virtually no chance anyone would be fooled into doing anything but killing their browser, and Java is by no means alone in causing that kind of issue.
The only nit I have is that there may very well be future moments when nuclear weapons are our best alternatives, Barack "Osama" Obama notwithstanding.
Slashdot Mirror
My, what a well-reasoned and spoken rebuttal.
Perhaps you'll do better next time...
It's not quite that simple. Like TV and radio companies, Google provides a platform to disseminate political speech. It should be a neutral platform.
To remove its legal loophole, the Supreme Court should rule that trademarks aren't allowed for political organization names. MoveOn.org would just have to deal with it if someone started MovePawns.org.
Yes, the left in this country is the model of hypocrisy on this issue. It loves civil rights and free speech unless it disagrees with what's being said - then censorship is fine. Look at the concerted smear campaign against Rush Limbaugh right now. Totally contrived, and yet even Congress is wasting time with it.
One hopes the electorate is paying close attention.
A Libertarian (note capitalization) views the primary role of the government as protecting the civil liberties of the citizenry. Free speech is one of the most important civil liberties.
I hope this cleared things up for you. Pretty simple really.
It's just a trademark case. If the RNC told google to block any ads with the text 'republican national congress' in them, and they held a trademark for such, then Google would do so.
What a fool.
I can't think of any better way to eliminate political discourse than this. Every political entity should just trademark its name, and it can suppress any type of critical political ad. George Bush(tm). BS.
Trademarks were developed to eliminate brand confusion among commercial entities. They shouldn't be applicable to political entities. Use of any political organizations name should be fine on First Amendment grounds.
Google needs to start walking the 'do no evil' walk. It's not right for one of the world's biggest media companies to suppress protected political speech with which it disagrees.
The most humorous thing has been the complete lack of an electable Dem candidate...and it's happening again! Hillary Clinton?!? Bwahahaha!
That is the Dem idea of 'change'. Bush, Clinton, Bush...Clinton. Terrific.
k...looking at Quicken Loans, if you have good credit you can get a $190,000, 30 year fixed loan (you need at least a 5% down payment these days, $10,000) at 6.25% interest, which is $1,169 a month. That's with good credit of course, but that's a whole 'nother discussion. If you really want to get ahead of the curve, pay an extra $100 to $200 a month against the principle.
You can play around with the extra payments (prepayments) at Karl's Mortgage Calculator if you want. In the example above, an extra $100 from the start shortens the loan from 30 years to 24 years, 3 months. $200 a month would shorten the loan to 20 years 7 months.
So, in short, you're way off base. :-)
$200k will get you a nice house in a lot of the country...and it'll get you more in a few more months. ;-)
I hate to burst your "+5 Informative" bubble, but the advertised "ton-equivalent" for the MOAB is 11 tons of explosive, and for the FOAB it's 44. So, in fact, the chemical energy released is supposed to be 4x the MOAB.
One thing to consider is that the MOAB's mass includes its oxidizer, where the FOAB uses air. That alone is a big win for FOAB (when the wind isn't too high heh). That some fuel-based explosive has more energy release than the high explosive in the MOAB is unsurprising. Fuel air explosives are often referred to as the "poor man's nuke" for a reason.
I think the other thing you're referring to is the detonation speed of the explosive. For an explosive fuel-air mixture it's quite high as well.
One last thing - in general it's more efficient to drop more, smaller bombs rather than one big one. This is especially true given modern precision weapons. That's why the West generally ignored the USSR's fascination with building the 'biggest' H-bomb.
The FOAB is mainly a sign of Putin's insecurities. I suppose it might make a good psychological weapon as well - as does the MOAB.
There's now a proposal for a B-1R upgrade (see Wikipedia if interested) that'd upgrade the B-1 engines to the F-22 powerplants, and enable it to carry a bunch of AAMRAMs as well as more air-ground munitions. It'd also return the top speed to Mach 2+, supercruising at least with no external stores.
Pretty interesting idea, really. :-)
Personally, I think there are more than two.
(The variation I prefer is "There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't!")
Is there a scanner and fix available? It does require executing an email attachment, right?
It really shouldn't be called a worm unless it can worm its way in without social engineering...
Nope. The second one was to prove we had more.
Less people died in those bombings than in some of the conventional bombing missions at any rate.
It's one thing to be a Monday morning quarterback. It's another to do it 62 years after the fact. ;-)
I'm sure you're suitably thankful for nuclear weapons, they've prevented another world war (so far at least).
It won't follow any kind of smooth mathematical function. It'll essentially be discontinuous when a tipping point is reached (cost/watt = conventional power). Look at the adoption rate for compact fluorescent light bulbs for an example.
And in what way isn't that happening? However, I disagree with your premise anyhow, we should immediately limit construction of new conventional plants here, in favor of nuclear.
Ah yes, the libertarian resonse: everything can be solved by the free market and any kind of government coordinated effort is "heavy-handed wealth redistribution".
Not at all, but nice job putting words in my mouth. For instance, I'm all for a strong national defense. However, Kyoto and other similar schemes are little more than a naked money grab.
Technological advance is only part of the solution. In order for even the free market to work, it needs to be aware of the true cost of carbon. Right now carbon is an externality in the market: how much or how little you emit is economically irrelevant. That has to change. Once the market is aware of the cost of carbon -- and that basically boils down to either a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax -- only then can we expect efficient solutions. And that's not going to happen without government policy.
I disagree, and my solar fabric example made the point - better, cheaper, cleaner solutions will happen simply due to improving technology and competition.
There are also other factors at work. Responsible people want a clean environment and a good world for their kids. A government mandate isn't needed to get people moving in the right direction (look at some of the polls). Unfortunately, too many turn to government for every solution, while ignoring its huge cost and intrusion into every aspect of our lives. Government is generally the least efficient solution to a given problem.
I'm not dismissing the results, I simply feel the error bars don't represent the true error space for this massive of a problem. I'm also quite sure that even with the increased observational capabilities of the last three decades, we're still far short of sufficient data to understand the Earth. Hubris, as I said.
Even if the skeptics are right and the feedback effects aren't as strong as climatologists think, that still wouldn't turn cooling into warming, it would just turn it into less cooling (just as the skeptics argue that CO2 causes less warming). The direct evidence is simply that the natural radiative forcings have been net negative.
Once again, I'm quite unsure the current crop of science is accounting for every input. I'd prefer to see much better quantitative account of every significant environmental factor before rushing to judgment. We are talking about phenomena in which a century is an ephemera, after all.
Going by the ice age cycle, probably also a cooling trend. Not that that's terribly relevant.
Actually that's rather an interesting chart. It seems to show that in this cycle, we've been at a long equilibrium period, something I've heard brought up before. In many of the other ice ages (if one believes this hindcasting) there's been a precipitous drop to several degrees Celsius cooler. I'd not be so quick to dismiss the P/N scenario. ;-)
I've read Fallen Angels. No, we are not going to see ice sheets covering Canada in the next century without global warming. Ice ages are not that abrupt. They take, as you note, on the order of 10,000 years. If you're worried about ice ages, that's an argument for conserving our fossil fuels to use when we need them the most, not emitting them into the atmosphere now and having half or more of them scrubbed out of the atmosphere by the next ice age.
Don't worry - we'll be able to mitigate excessive warming very effectively long before those time scales come into play, or we'll be extinct.
The "wait and see" argument is an excuse for indefinite inaction with no real criterion for how long we need to wait before actually doing something.
That's untrue. What's needed is a true bound of when scientific understanding is up to the challenge, coupled with effective policy.
If projections really were as uncertain as you believe, that would be an excuse for MORE action, not less: skeptics always make the classic mistake that uncertainty will always err on the side of less impacts, but uncertainty doesn't favor one or the other: it's equally possible that the impacts will be worse than is currently believed.
Not true. If (just bear with me) global warming were predominantly a natural phenomenon, what would your policy be? Mess with Mother Nature?
The sensible course of action is to work out a sliding policy: start doing something capable of addressing the issue using mainstream estimates. If things turn out better than expected, scale down the mitigation; if they turn out worse, scale it up. Simply doing nothing increases the risks. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: there are high potential costs to procrastination.
I, however, would posit that we are already doing quite a lot. I note you've omitted my entire point about nuclear power, what's your stance on that? Surely any good Global Warming aficionado advocates nuclear power these days, correct? It's clearly a viable way to a decent standard of living along with zero carbon footprint.
I see you also ignored my points about disruptive technologies. That most likely places you in the ranks of Luddites who were worried about buggy whips when they should have been hoping for automatic tranmissions. The future will either be amazing and bountiful, or we'll be extinct. I don't really see much middle ground, but the way forward is not "conservation", at least for the US. We n
Your rant would be more meaningful if the US were doing nothing. In fact, the US is aggressively cleaning up it's environmental footprint. If it weren't for environmentalist stupidity on nuclear power plants, the US would have an even cleaner footprint. Many now feel that a rapid buildup of nuclear power is the best way for the US to move towards a cleaner environment (coupled with plug-in hybrid cars).
What I'm saying (which perhaps I wasn't clear enough about) is that I feel the progress to less environmental impact is happening at a reasonable pace in the US. What's not happening is a move to cleaner energy in the rest of the world. Why should we cripple our economy when our economic competitors are already given an advantage by our environmental laws?
The other thing to remember is the idea of disruptive technologies. What if high-efficiency, cheap solar fabric becomes available tomorrow? It might replace 10-20% of our daytime electric needs in short order, with a clean alternative. No legislation or government involvement needed, just the good old market economy. Those kinds of breakthroughs are more than possible, they're almost inevitable. What's not needed is heavy-handed government intervention and wealth redistribution. What would help this country more than anything is smaller, leaner government, coupled with a 90% reduction in national lawyer head count. ;-)
At any rate, you really need to focus on China with your environmental concerns. It's now the #1 carbon polluter.
[snip]
I'm going to wait until I personally see a lot of people actually dying from global warming before I do anything.
What if the majority of global warming is natural? Are you still willing to change it?
Well, those are pretty graphs...if you believe the error bars. Color me a skeptic.
Regardless, there's also the question of time scales. Cooling trend over what time scale? What's the long-term trend, over say 10,000 years?
Is it possible that anthropogenic warming might save us from an Ice Age, a la Pournelle/Niven?
At any rate, I submit that 1) more data is needed before taking drastic measures 2) technology will inevitably become more capable of providing mitigation, and 3) the main area of concern at this point is in the 2nd and 3rd world, in other words China, India and the other rapidly rising polluters of record. Don't forget the "Asian brown cloud", recently anointed as a GWC (Global Warming Contributor).
OK, that's at least a concrete statement, though I don't agree with it at this point. Before we discuss anything else further though, I'd like you to tell me if we're in a period of natural cooling, equilibrium, or warming, absent human involvement. That should be straightforward for one with your intimate knowledge of these issues.
That there was warming in the '20s, when human greenhouse gas inputs were far less of a factor. See my point in the grandparent post regarding "natural" warming.
"The warmest year in US history" is utterly irrelevant to any warming trend and the two top years were statistically tied both before and after the revision.
It's relevant to the extent that recent record US temperatures have been tied to "Global Warming" in the press - which is to say, frequently. It also calls into question the published global temperature means - surely the best record keeping and science occurred at least in first world countries. There's also the issue of weather stations being affected by urban heat islands over time.
Yes, we know that climate change has occurred in the past, and there have been large, rapid changes in Greenland temperatures associated with, for instance, the shutdown/restart of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. However, that doesn't change the evidence that the current warming is not largely due to such natural events.
Really? And how do we "know" this exactly? Perhaps you'd care to share with us the percentage of worldwide yearly C02, H2O vapor, and methane emissions for which humans are responsible? I'm also sure you can guarantee that there've been no unaccounted for inputs or effects in the system, that aren't currently modeled correctly... It was widely reported this week that a new, major current had been discovered off Madagascar that's responsible for major climate effects. How can current models be accurate when not taking this current into account? In some models, reduced rainforest area is associated with reduced greenhouse gas sinking. Yet real world observation indicates that rainforests are net greenhouse gas producers, due to methane from decomposition (methane is a 40 times stronger greenhouse gas than CO2).
My view is that no drastic action (or expense) should be taken in the West over global warming. I think there should be a continuing move to cleaner energy production and industry, though unfortunately nuclear plant construction has been slower than desirable. In the future, technology will give us tremendous leverage over many problems...in the meantime we need to ensure that the developing nations don't continue to become major polluters. What we really need is a constructive plan for China that doesn't involve hundreds of new coal fired powerplants.
Give me a break. Yes, it's impossible to forecast the weather more than a couple weeks in the future, due to chaos. But you can forecast the climate, which is a temporal and spatial average of all possible weather events, out much farther. The ability of climate models to do this has been demonstrated in hindcasting and out-of-sample validation experiments.
Sure...26 times further would be one year. Now tell me the story about 93 years...
Your point about hindcasting actually damages your case. The "hindcasting" allowed researchers to modify "fudge factors" that made things more closely approximate historical behavior. The lack of first principles models, however, makes the climate forecasts that much more suspect. Further, the complexity of the environment is still just not well understood - for instance there is no consensus on the mechanism of the natural ice age cycle, completely absent human involvement. That cycle of warming and cooling has been going on for millions of years...
There are many 'big issues' with the Global Warming (aka Global Climate Change) crowd. Global Warming is still the best term, since the main thesis is clearly increasing global mean temperature. Of course this implies nothing about local climate variation.
First of all, there's the question of whether Global Warming is a real, long-term trend. It's at a minimum interesting that there were reports in the 1920s of widespread arctic ice melting, followed in the 1970s by a "Global Cooling" scare. This recent revision of which was the warmest year in US history casts even more doubt. Looking further back into history, there has been historical warming in Greenland that exceeds the current trend, well before human produced greenhouse gasses could have been a factor.
I think the global warming skeptics are correct in viewing the results of the various computer models with a wary eye. The models are only as good as the data and assumptions fed into them, as well as the actual algorithms used to model absorption, reflection and emission. Further, they are modeling inherently chaotic systems which we have trouble forecasting only a week into the future. Hubris, anyone?
I wonder what the stance of the environmentalists will be if it's scientifically determined that the current climate trends are a natural phenomenon? Surely we shouldn't mess with Mother Nature... ;-)
I personally think the United States, in particular, is doing quite a bit to address greenhouse gas emissions in particular, and pollution in general. If you really want to make a difference, lobby for more nuclear power going forward. What really needs scrutiny now is China (who just passed the US as a CO2 polluter) as well as the other developing nations with little money but a big hunger for energy. So, all you "anti-Western-industrialism" types, you have a new target.
"Even so, there is a bit more intentionality in downloading and executing a file and at least some users understand the danger involved." No, there's the same degree of intent involved in JWS, you get prompted with a clear warning of the issues. In fact, it's more information than you get with a traditional app.
lol. OK, I reply on the same topic on which the parent got a +5 insightful, and get modded offtopic.
Must have been an Obamasama lover. Too bad your guy will never be President.
Why is that? What is "worse" about it than Ecmascript?
For extra credit, explain why Java Web Start is worse than downloading a traditional application and installing it...
Lemmings...gotta love 'em.
There's virtually no chance anyone would be fooled into doing anything but killing their browser, and Java is by no means alone in causing that kind of issue.
Nothing to see here, move along...
The only nit I have is that there may very well be future moments when nuclear weapons are our best alternatives, Barack "Osama" Obama notwithstanding.