"Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it's slowed everything down, paradoxically... We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you're on to the next thing... "
+1 true. I had to post a reply to this even though I was right in the middl
"Do you think that lets us off having to do anything about it?"
Do, what exactly? Ask the sun nicely to stop being quite so hot?
OK, so say we stop using internal combustion engines tomorrow, and every economy on Earth crashes, and I have to eat you for dinner because there's no more food distribution.
No, instead of stopping tomorrow, let's say we aim for a few years, but let's at least stop dithering, because it's already too late to stop global warming altogether, and the longer we fuck about, the worse it will get, and the worst will come sooner.
How's that going to stop the sun from getting hotter?
You're just trolling, surely, but I'll bite: actually, "Mr Rocket Scientist":-), reducing greenhouse gas emissions won't have the slightest effect on the sun at all. See, the sun is hundreds of thousands of km away, and not noticeably affected by the changing composition of Earth's atmosphere.
But it would have the beneficial effect, on the Earth, of reducing the rate at which the environment is heating up, mitigating some economically harmful effects of global warming in the future (do I have to mention New Orleans?), and thereby just maybe keeping you in a job so you don't have to stoop to cannibalism, and I can remain a vegetarian.
Does the US or Europe offer a comparable "cheap" road to the sky?
The US military has also converted some of its old ICBMs into peaceful launch vehicles. I guess they are competing with NASA, because there's some regulation that these facilities can only be offered to US government or government-sponsored agencies.
Get used to it folks! What with the US anti-missile shield, in a couple of decades time there'll be thousands more missiles entering the second-hand market from such places as Russia, China, India, and North Korea.
Heh heh... god forbid you should give "equal time" to climatologists!
Personally I'm not too fussed whether this is "normal" climate... in fact I don't see why you are so keen to make the point - who cares?! I just like the fact that, at this temperature, the city where I live is above sea level. Maybe this is "abnormally cold" by long-term standards, but really, so what? Even if global warming were caused almost entirely by increased solar radiation (which it is not) - what does that matter? Do you think that lets us off having to do anything about it?
We are well advised to try to do our best to keep the global climate stable, whether that's (so-called) "normal" or not, and whatever is causing it. Sure we can't turn down the sun when it gets brighter, but we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions to compensate.
BTW, do you honestly doubt that the recently-enhanced CO2-levels in the atmosphere are warming up the Earth's surface? Seriously? I mean... do you think that paleoclimatologists are trying to hoax us? Didn't you study physics at school? Did you not cover the greenhouse effect? Are you just unaware of fossil evidence linking CO2 and temperatures, going back hundreds of thousands of years? http://www.cnrs.fr/cw/en/pres/compress/mist030699. html
You will always find some mavericks to dispute any science (see the Discover Institute), but you are kidding yourself if you think that climatologists in general are in doubt about it. Pretending that it's still too early to take seriously while there's not 100% consensus just makes you look naive and silly, frankly.
Also, I don't care that animals from millions of years ago wouldn't like today's climate - it doesn't matter now because those animals are extinct. In the long term, if the climate continues to warm, humans and other animals will continue to adapt. Polar bears will die out, but when the Earth cools down again similar animals will evolve to fill the polar niche again. A few tens of thousands of years should be ample. But your long-term sang-froid is not much comfort to people of the next 100 years having to live with the consequences of rapid global warming, though.
You sound very defensive in your eagerness to deflect the "blame" onto something other than humans - are you secretly a guilty SUV-driver or something?
BTW, perhaps we are due for a bit of global cooling... but remeber that right at the moment we are in fact in a period of rapid warming, correlated strongly with rapid increases in greenhouse-gas concentrations. Let's leave hypothetical problems of the future to the future, shall we, and instead try fixing the actual problem of the present? Because if it turns out that we are up for an ice age we will be fine because we now have an established technique for averting it - burning fossil fuel. You can get your SUV back out of the garage then.
Warmer than a Hot Tub: Atlantic Ocean Temperatures Much Higher - Scientists have found evidence that tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures may have once reached 107F (42C)--about 25F (14C) higher than ocean temperatures today and warmer than a hot tub.
Ooops.. and that was normal back then? With oceans like that how much ice do you think was floating in them?
It seems so! Clearly there was precious little ice floating around in those oceans 100M years ago, and I'd hazard a guess that sea levels were many metres higher than today.
Interestingly, the scientists concerned drew the alarming conclusion that the current CO2-induced global warming may turn out to be much worse than is currently predicted. From the article:
If the scientists' interpretations of past ocean temperatures and carbon dioxide levels prove accurate, actual future warming from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations may be much greater than predicted by the [current] models, the scientists reported.
99% of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from non-human sources.
I think the correct figure is more like 70%, not 99%. It's true that human emissions are low, but they are accumulating in the atmosphere year by year, and over the last few hundred years they have built up to where they now represent a significant fraction of the total C02 in the atmosphere.
On the other hand, if you meant to assert that 99% of the C02 emitted into the atmosphere over any given period of time is from natural sources, then I believe you are wrong there too. The Canadian Met Office website I cited above says that the human emissions are about 5% of total, not 1%:
Human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, currently estimated at about 28 billion tonnes annually, represent approximately 5% of the average natural flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through plant and soil respiration and venting from the surface waters of the oceans (a total of about 550 billion tonnes each year).
Firstly, humans are emitting Gigatonnes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases per year.
Secondly, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing.
What do these 2 facts mean, taken together? They mean that humans are contributing to CO2 concentrations.
Thirdly, we know that CO2 levels are significantly higher than even a few hundred years ago - this is a very rapid rise.
Fourthly, we absolutely know that an increase in atmospheric C02 will enhance the greenhouse effect. There is a vast array of historical evidence for this, and also it is basic physics which is well understood.
Pretending that things are otherwise is just a wilful blindness.
We also know that the Earth is warming up extremely rapidly - more rapidly than it has at least for the last 20k years. This should be a matter for huge concern because even a couple of decades of stalling and global-warming-denial in the guise of scientific skepticism can allow for much more serious environmental and economic damage to accumulate.
The rest of your argument I think just misses the point. What you are not taking into account is that although anthropogenic C02 is small compared to C02 from natural sources, those natural emissions have historically been balanced by natural sequestration of C02. The historically new anthropogenic emissions are not, and hence over time these extra emissions are building up and up.
On a global scale, volcanoes release less than 1% of human emissions of carbon dioxide and hence are a minor contributor to changes in its atmospheric concentrations.... Most recent estimates by volcanic experts with the U.S. Geological Survey suggest that, globally, volcanoes release about 150 million tonnes (Mt) of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. By comparison, humans annually emit more than 22 billion tonnes (Gt) of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion alone, and another 6 or so Gt of CO2 from deforestation activities. That is more than 100 times as great as volcanic emissions.
... and specifically about individual volcanoes exceeding the USA's CO2 output:
Mount Etna, in Sicily, is the largest single volcanic emitter of CO2, estimated at 25 Mt of CO2 per year. By comparison, emissions from Mount St. Helens following its eruption several decades ago were less than 2 Mt of CO2/year.
The question that is interesting to see never asked is: "Even if climate change is not mankinds fault, would we still be interested in trying to keep the climate from changing."
A changing climate will introduce a lot of opportunity. The trick is investing in the right companies to cash in on the opportunity. Cooling systems, flood control, boats, soylent green, weapons, should all be good investments.
When the world's coastal cities are flooded, people will need to move inland. So start investing in real estate: hilly suburbs in major cities, hills near major cities, and construction companies.
It always amazes me when people go on about non-human factors. Clearly humans are contributing to global warming because we've increased the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. This is basic physics. You have to be wilfully ignorant not to understand that.
But even if non-human factors play the major part in global warming, that is totally irrelevant to the main question, which is WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING TO FIX IT? There's a huge environmental disaster happening right before our eyes, and we need to cool the Earth down NOW. Even if this were ENTIRELY "natural variation", it would STILL be a disaster, and we should STILL try to do something to counter it - shouldn't we? Or are we going to say (as the world's coastal cities subside into the sea) "it wasn't (all) our fault - the sunspots were involved too".
And if we do manage to slow or halt global warming... what happens when the next ice age hits? If the earth doesn't warm up as much as normal between ice ages, maybe the ice age following this warm spell will be that much colder.
Let's burn a whole lot fossil fuels then shall we? There'll be plenty of time to create a greenhouse effect if we ever need one - we know how it's done now.
damn - Google's not too helpful actually... lovely images of cloud cover and
We are sorry, but we don't have maps at this zoom level for this region.
... and you can't even get there from here...
We could not calculate driving directions between wellington, new zealand and -2 28' 60.00", +138 0' 0.00" (-2.483333, 138.000000) @-2.483333,138.000000.
while my rant hardly depends on bunker-busters, it'd be an exaggeration to say that they have been killed for good. Your article for instance says:
"My problem is I can only be chairman for six years," Hobson said. "That's why I'm trying to lock in place a footprint for the future. I'm trying to kill things so they don't come back."
But California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a member of the Senate's energy and water appropriations subcommittee, said she did not trust the administration and expected to fight the same battle again.
"This administration continues to try to reopen the nuclear door," she said. "So we must remain vigilant in ensuring that the reliable replacement warhead program does not lead to the development of new nuclear weapons and the resumption of nuclear testing."
So to my mind, cheaper, and more automated weapons systems are dangerous in that they lower the cost (esp the political cost) of military adventurism, and therefore increase the power of hawks in the US govt and increase the likelihood of aggression, and the potential for really large-scale disaster that would make the military's financial incontinence the least of your worries:-)
Every dollar saved by running Linux on a military robot is a dollar spent for your benefit instead.
Leaving aside the "your benefit" assumption (not everyone is an American, even on/.), I rather think that the $$$ saved by running a free OS on military hardware will generally be spent buying more military hardware... stupid, pointless, and destabilizing ABM systems, bunker-busting nukes, etc, etc. Why? Because the size of the military budget is not dependent on what military force the US needs - to the contrary - the military takes whatever it can get away with.
So cheaper militarism should just lead to more militarism... bad news for the 95% of the world that isn't in the US, but neither is it good for US citizens who want to live in peace and security.
Is this evidence that the media has an anti-American bias, or is this evidence that the facts have an anti-American bias?
Exactly. But oddly I think the GP's bizarre delusion (that it would be fair or correct if there were an exact balance of positive and negative news stories about Iraq) actually articulates one of the basic operational principles of Western (esp US) news journalism; that their duty is to mediate opposing points of view within the power elite... rather than to approximate the unpleasant truth about the progress of the war.
Because let's face it, the US position in the current US/Iraq war is definitely deteriorating. Sun Tzu would not have been surprised:
When you do battle, even if you are winning, if you continue for a long time it will dull your forces and blunt your edge; if you besiege a citadel, your strength will be exhausted. If you keep your armies out in the field for a long time, your supplies will be insufficient.
When your forces are dulled, your edge is blunted, your strength is exhausted, and your supplies are gone, then others will take advantage of your debility and rise up. Then even if you have wise advisors you cannot make things turn out well in the end.
Therefore I have heard of military operations that were clumsy but swift, but I have never seen one that was skillful and lasted a long time. It is never beneficial to a nation to have a military operation continue for a long time.
The fact is, voter fraud is fairly uncommon in the US...
You are begging the question! How do you know that? You don't. With black box voting systems like this you have no way to tell. Because Diebold won't let you see the data! To me, that's prima facie evidence of fraud in itself.
... largely because it's cheaper and easier in the long run to win elections by other means. Why try to steal an election for $100 million when you can just buy it on the open market? (By hiring media consultants and spin doctors, blanketing the airwaves with ads, commissioning push-polls, buying off bloggers, yadda yadda.)
What if your opponent also has a mega-budget? Won't you need plutocracy and fraud?
You seem not to have read my message in context. You saw the phrase "trickle down" and went off on some tangent about trickle-down economics.
This has absolutely nothing to do with whether rich people spend their money or hoard it, or whether they buy things from poor people or only from other rich people. It is all to do with determining what the money is spent on, and what sort of advances in medical science flow from that investment.
I was replying to the views of a right-winger who asserted that in some countries rich people are forbidden to invest in their own health, and that if these rich people were allowed to invest in their own health (for purely selfish reasons), it would, as a side-effect, advance medical science in ways that would ultimately benefit the poor. I pointed out that this wasn't automatically true... that actually rich people's spending on health tends to drive investment in medical research that advances the treatment of the medical problems of the rich, rather than the treatment of the medical problems of the poor, which are often very different medically.
This is why the treatment of malaria and TB are so chronically underfunded.
Actually, to benefit the health of the poor, we should invest money directly in the health of the poor. Kudos to Bill Gates for spending some of his ill-gotten gains on the treatment of malaria etc. Truly, my hat goes off to him. But this philanthropic investment is not at all the "trickle-down" phenomenon described by the person I was replying to.
Don't get me wrong, I think email and IM should be treated as inherently private - so much so that the usage of encryption seems wrong, insomuch as it implies that only encrypted email/IM should be covered by privacy laws.
Laws?!
Didn't you get the memo? The law doesn't apply to the Bush administration because it is at war and at times of war the laws are made to be broken.
Laws will certainly give you a semblance of privacy, but if you want actual privacy you are barking up the wrong tree putting your faith in the privacy laws.
I'm still waiting for the rich to fund profound things like treatments for malaria, which kills a million people per year, or tuberculosis, which kills about 2 million people per year. What's that you say? Those aren't rich people? Guess we could be waiting a while then won't we?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Do not underestimate the power of groupthink!
"Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it's slowed everything down, paradoxically ... We never concentrate on one task anymore. You take a little chip out of it, and then you're on to the next thing ... "
+1 true.
I had to post a reply to this even though I was right in the middl
Zhou En Lai was deliberately misquoting Clausewitz. Read the quote again and you'll see that Zhou inverted it.
No, instead of stopping tomorrow, let's say we aim for a few years, but let's at least stop dithering, because it's already too late to stop global warming altogether, and the longer we fuck about, the worse it will get, and the worst will come sooner.
You're just trolling, surely, but I'll bite: actually, "Mr Rocket Scientist" :-), reducing greenhouse gas emissions won't have the slightest effect on the sun at all. See, the sun is hundreds of thousands of km away, and not noticeably affected by the changing composition of Earth's atmosphere.
But it would have the beneficial effect, on the Earth, of reducing the rate at which the environment is heating up, mitigating some economically harmful effects of global warming in the future (do I have to mention New Orleans?), and thereby just maybe keeping you in a job so you don't have to stoop to cannibalism, and I can remain a vegetarian.
The US military has also converted some of its old ICBMs into peaceful launch vehicles. I guess they are competing with NASA, because there's some regulation that these facilities can only be offered to US government or government-sponsored agencies.
Get used to it folks! What with the US anti-missile shield, in a couple of decades time there'll be thousands more missiles entering the second-hand market from such places as Russia, China, India, and North Korea.
Heh heh ... god forbid you should give "equal time" to climatologists!
... in fact I don't see why you are so keen to make the point - who cares?! I just like the fact that, at this temperature, the city where I live is above sea level. Maybe this is "abnormally cold" by long-term standards, but really, so what? Even if global warming were caused almost entirely by increased solar radiation (which it is not) - what does that matter? Do you think that lets us off having to do anything about it?
... do you think that paleoclimatologists are trying to hoax us? Didn't you study physics at school? Did you not cover the greenhouse effect? Are you just unaware of fossil evidence linking CO2 and temperatures, going back hundreds of thousands of years? http://www.cnrs.fr/cw/en/pres/compress/mist030699. html
... but remeber that right at the moment we are in fact in a period of rapid warming, correlated strongly with rapid increases in greenhouse-gas concentrations. Let's leave hypothetical problems of the future to the future, shall we, and instead try fixing the actual problem of the present? Because if it turns out that we are up for an ice age we will be fine because we now have an established technique for averting it - burning fossil fuel. You can get your SUV back out of the garage then.
Personally I'm not too fussed whether this is "normal" climate
We are well advised to try to do our best to keep the global climate stable, whether that's (so-called) "normal" or not, and whatever is causing it. Sure we can't turn down the sun when it gets brighter, but we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions to compensate.
BTW, do you honestly doubt that the recently-enhanced CO2-levels in the atmosphere are warming up the Earth's surface? Seriously? I mean
You will always find some mavericks to dispute any science (see the Discover Institute), but you are kidding yourself if you think that climatologists in general are in doubt about it. Pretending that it's still too early to take seriously while there's not 100% consensus just makes you look naive and silly, frankly.
Also, I don't care that animals from millions of years ago wouldn't like today's climate - it doesn't matter now because those animals are extinct. In the long term, if the climate continues to warm, humans and other animals will continue to adapt. Polar bears will die out, but when the Earth cools down again similar animals will evolve to fill the polar niche again. A few tens of thousands of years should be ample. But your long-term sang-froid is not much comfort to people of the next 100 years having to live with the consequences of rapid global warming, though.
You sound very defensive in your eagerness to deflect the "blame" onto something other than humans - are you secretly a guilty SUV-driver or something?
BTW, perhaps we are due for a bit of global cooling
It seems so! Clearly there was precious little ice floating around in those oceans 100M years ago, and I'd hazard a guess that sea levels were many metres higher than today.
Interestingly, the scientists concerned drew the alarming conclusion that the current CO2-induced global warming may turn out to be much worse than is currently predicted. From the article:
I think the correct figure is more like 70%, not 99%. It's true that human emissions are low, but they are accumulating in the atmosphere year by year, and over the last few hundred years they have built up to where they now represent a significant fraction of the total C02 in the atmosphere.
On the other hand, if you meant to assert that 99% of the C02 emitted into the atmosphere over any given period of time is from natural sources, then I believe you are wrong there too. The Canadian Met Office website I cited above says that the human emissions are about 5% of total, not 1%:
Where did you get your figures from?
Firstly, humans are emitting Gigatonnes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases per year.
Secondly, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing.
What do these 2 facts mean, taken together? They mean that humans are contributing to CO2 concentrations.
Thirdly, we know that CO2 levels are significantly higher than even a few hundred years ago - this is a very rapid rise.
Fourthly, we absolutely know that an increase in atmospheric C02 will enhance the greenhouse effect. There is a vast array of historical evidence for this, and also it is basic physics which is well understood.
Pretending that things are otherwise is just a wilful blindness.
We also know that the Earth is warming up extremely rapidly - more rapidly than it has at least for the last 20k years. This should be a matter for huge concern because even a couple of decades of stalling and global-warming-denial in the guise of scientific skepticism can allow for much more serious environmental and economic damage to accumulate.
The rest of your argument I think just misses the point. What you are not taking into account is that although anthropogenic C02 is small compared to C02 from natural sources, those natural emissions have historically been balanced by natural sequestration of C02. The historically new anthropogenic emissions are not, and hence over time these extra emissions are building up and up.
I recommend you check out the website of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre, and the Candadian Meteorological Service - which incidentally contradicts your opinion about volcanism:
compare with the 5 Gigatonne figure which the US Dept of Energy gives for US emissions.
Those damn "scientists" with their "thinking"! Where do they get off?
When the world's coastal cities are flooded, people will need to move inland. So start investing in real estate: hilly suburbs in major cities, hills near major cities, and construction companies.
It always amazes me when people go on about non-human factors. Clearly humans are contributing to global warming because we've increased the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. This is basic physics. You have to be wilfully ignorant not to understand that.
But even if non-human factors play the major part in global warming, that is totally irrelevant to the main question, which is WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING TO FIX IT? There's a huge environmental disaster happening right before our eyes, and we need to cool the Earth down NOW. Even if this were ENTIRELY "natural variation", it would STILL be a disaster, and we should STILL try to do something to counter it - shouldn't we? Or are we going to say (as the world's coastal cities subside into the sea) "it wasn't (all) our fault - the sunspots were involved too".
Let's burn a whole lot fossil fuels then shall we? There'll be plenty of time to create a greenhouse effect if we ever need one - we know how it's done now.
damn - Google's not too helpful actually ... lovely images of cloud cover and
... and you can't even get there from here ...
Also, they have nukes.
while my rant hardly depends on bunker-busters, it'd be an exaggeration to say that they have been killed for good. Your article for instance says:
So to my mind, cheaper, and more automated weapons systems are dangerous in that they lower the cost (esp the political cost) of military adventurism, and therefore increase the power of hawks in the US govt and increase the likelihood of aggression, and the potential for really large-scale disaster that would make the military's financial incontinence the least of your worries :-)
Leaving aside the "your benefit" assumption (not everyone is an American, even on /.), I rather think that the $$$ saved by running a free OS on military hardware will generally be spent buying more military hardware ... stupid, pointless, and destabilizing ABM systems, bunker-busting nukes, etc, etc. Why? Because the size of the military budget is not dependent on what military force the US needs - to the contrary - the military takes whatever it can get away with.
So cheaper militarism should just lead to more militarism ... bad news for the 95% of the world that isn't in the US, but neither is it good for US citizens who want to live in peace and security.
Like half of slashdot posters, you seem to have a difficulty with "ridiculous" too.
Exactly. But oddly I think the GP's bizarre delusion (that it would be fair or correct if there were an exact balance of positive and negative news stories about Iraq) actually articulates one of the basic operational principles of Western (esp US) news journalism; that their duty is to mediate opposing points of view within the power elite ... rather than to approximate the unpleasant truth about the progress of the war.
Because let's face it, the US position in the current US/Iraq war is definitely deteriorating. Sun Tzu would not have been surprised:
You are begging the question! How do you know that? You don't. With black box voting systems like this you have no way to tell. Because Diebold won't let you see the data! To me, that's prima facie evidence of fraud in itself.
What if your opponent also has a mega-budget? Won't you need plutocracy and fraud?
Off topic to point out that legal protection is not a guarantee of privacy? WTF?
:-)
Oh well! Looks like I pissed off some red-staters
You seem not to have read my message in context. You saw the phrase "trickle down" and went off on some tangent about trickle-down economics.
... that actually rich people's spending on health tends to drive investment in medical research that advances the treatment of the medical problems of the rich, rather than the treatment of the medical problems of the poor, which are often very different medically.
This has absolutely nothing to do with whether rich people spend their money or hoard it, or whether they buy things from poor people or only from other rich people. It is all to do with determining what the money is spent on, and what sort of advances in medical science flow from that investment.
I was replying to the views of a right-winger who asserted that in some countries rich people are forbidden to invest in their own health, and that if these rich people were allowed to invest in their own health (for purely selfish reasons), it would, as a side-effect, advance medical science in ways that would ultimately benefit the poor. I pointed out that this wasn't automatically true
This is why the treatment of malaria and TB are so chronically underfunded.
Actually, to benefit the health of the poor, we should invest money directly in the health of the poor. Kudos to Bill Gates for spending some of his ill-gotten gains on the treatment of malaria etc. Truly, my hat goes off to him. But this philanthropic investment is not at all the "trickle-down" phenomenon described by the person I was replying to.
Laws?!
Didn't you get the memo? The law doesn't apply to the Bush administration because it is at war and at times of war the laws are made to be broken.
Laws will certainly give you a semblance of privacy, but if you want actual privacy you are barking up the wrong tree putting your faith in the privacy laws.
Ooh, the trickle-down theory! Nice!
I'm still waiting for the rich to fund profound things like treatments for malaria, which kills a million people per year, or tuberculosis, which kills about 2 million people per year. What's that you say? Those aren't rich people? Guess we could be waiting a while then won't we?