The constitution itself was intended to protect against all such human rights violations. The ninth amendment should protect against whatever rights violations were not specifically mentioned in the constitution. Remember that the constitution is mostly a list of things that the government is allowed to do, combined with a very short list of things it is not allowed to do, just to be certain that those particular rights are not violated. The constitution doesn't specifically mention grinding up babies and serving the meat in school lunches, but it is supposed to be understood that, since that government right was not listed they can't do it.
Ninth Amendment. Look it up. The government really doesn't have the authority to do most of what it does if you take what the constitution says literally and don't pretend that it doesn't say what it says or play word games. It's common knowledge that the founders were mostly Libertarians and it's pretty easy to see what they meant by various terms and phrases. The fact that supreme court justices simply choose to ignore those obvious meanings and replace them with their own pro-government ones is really nothing short of treason. Back in the 18th century I'd like to believe they would have been tarred and feathered and/or tried for treason.
What laws did Democrats pass that you think are unconstitutional?
Recently? The DMCA. Also many Democrats have voted for many unconstitutional laws. Are you seriously arguing that Democrats are pro-constitution? The document that was written to limit the government to essentially be Libertarian? The tyrannical police state we now live in was brought to us by both parties. Both are evil and anti-freedom, just in slightly different ways.
Well technically only the constitution protects the rights of the minority or anyone else. The supreme court is supposed to enforce the constitution to protect human rights. Unfortunately that rarely happens. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate are just forms of indirect majority rule. Instead of voting directly on issues and proposed laws we vote for someone to represent our interests in those matters. It is still supposed to be an indirect will of the people kind of thing. Senators don't win elections by arguing for unpopular positions. Of course politicians aren't known for their honesty. So in the end they may simply vote however they want or however a corporation will pay them to. Which is why, in the real world, representative democracy is horseshit. No matter how you do it democracy is still two wolves and a sheep deciding on what's for dinner, but at least with direct democracy citizens really do have a direct vote on every issue. The idea that some aristocrat is better able to make intelligent decisions is very 18th century. I certainly don't believe that rich people or attorneys make better decisions than, say, construction workers. The damage that the majority can cause is supposed to be limited by that piece of paper that the supreme court seems to prefer to toilet paper, but otherwise ignores.
So you believe that a representative democracy where the people often don't get what they want because they voted for a person instead of a specific issue is better than a pure democracy precisely because the representative democracy is less democratic? Then perhaps you would prefer a monarchy. The king would not have to listen to any special interest groups. He could just do whatever he wanted, perhaps only (theoretically) limited by a constitution in violating human rights.
I personally think either a constitutional monarchy or a pure constitutional democracy would both be better than the current system.
Think of some of the human rights violations that might be abolished if we could vote for individual laws instead of just for a person. You could say goodbye to the TSA and maybe the entire DHS. Laws like the DMCA and the Patriot Act and all of the various government spying on its own citizen programs might have a harder time. It's true that some poor laws might be passed which would have to be invalidated by the supreme court for human rights violations, but that happens even in the current system. Corporations would also have a much harder time buying laws. It's a lot more difficult to bribe 51% of the population than a single congressman.
Will those predictions still be accurate if petrol prices rise to $40/gallon by 2030? In any case, it wouldn't change the basic point that we will eventually have no choice but to either go nuclear or invent a new method of electricity production.
I am not disputing that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I am disputing that there is evidence that an increase of 0.01% has a noticeable effect on the temperature of the planet's atmosphere. In theory it should make a very slight difference, but the evidence that it actually has is pretty shaky. There is also no direct evidence that the entire 0.01% increase has been caused by humanity's use of combustion. No doubt combustion adds some amount of CO2 to the atmosphere, but determining the amount even to within an order of magnitude is close to impossible. The best anyone can do is a total guess. That we are producing enough for reverse terraforming seems implausible to me. It's certainly possible, but it must be proven and it has not been.
Take a look here [pik-potsdam.de]. Your intuition is irrelevant. Model and actual results matter.
Interesting article. Although still politically biased. I would have to investigate Svante Arrhenius's claims, although I can see right away that his predictions have not come to pass.Regardless of the excuses about "storage" his theory did not accurately predict experimental results. In other words it is false, or at least very incomplete. Like most AGW enthusiasts Rahmstorf's article lacks sufficient discussion of data. Of facts and evidence. That's what this debate is all about. Pretending to "educate" people does not change the fact that AGW has not been proven.
It is amusing that you believe my post is long. I notice that you have a high UID and that combination leads me to guess that you are of the Facebook generation. I hope you didn't have to read the whole thing. That would be so strenuous.
I do believe there is a consensus among climate scientists. That's what they are about. Achieving results that agree with the consensus. I think that any of their claims that rely on weather station thermometers from 1905 in Eastern Europe being accurate to greater than +/- 2 or 3 degrees celsius or any sort of computer model, or any sort of assumption about the cause of the alleged 0.01% increase in CO2 are rationalizations of religious/political belief and not science at all.
As far as a citation are you referring to my belief that a sufficiently high level of CO2 would cause warming? There are lots of simpleexperiments. CO2 molecules are just good at storing heat. It's just basic physics. No computer models are necessary.
For reasons he has never fully explained, he refuses to go to Sweden to be questioned.
I believe he did explain. Something about the fact that he was already questioned about the issue and was told he was free to go. Then the Swedish police suddenly changed their minds for reasons that were never fully explained. How many times is he supposed to go back to Sweden every time they change their mind? If they wanted to question Assange they could have done it while he was there. It's not like there is any new evidence. Maybe it has something to do with a new investigator that has close ties to the US. Who knows, but it smells awfully fishy given the political context.
With all due respect, I disagree with your "fix". If confidential information is released, it doesn't matter if you get caught or not. You've probably already made somebody's life miserable. Sure, you can argue that the person might deserve it, but that's an awful lot of judgement to make with no oversight.
It sounded like you were offering practical advice, but here you are offering moral advice. Whether or not releasing classified information is right or wrong depends entirely on the content. It has nothing to do with whether a government considers it "classified" or not.
Riight. He arranged to be accused of rape, a crime for which the entire world would hate you and for which people are typically considered guilty until proven innocent just for the publicity. Because, although he was already famous, he wasn't famous enough. You really expect anyone to believe that?
Nor that playing the 'don't extradite me' game is actually helping his case at all.
If Britain didn't allow the extradition it would most definitely help his case. What would you do? With one option you have a 100% chance of staying out of prison. With the other you have a chance that is less than 100%. While I'm sure Swedish prisons are relatively civilized places compared to US prisons for instance, I don't think any of us much relishes the prospect of being locked in a cage for years. Judging by past actions of the CIA I consider the idea that they may be involved in some way very plausible indeed. The US has shown itself to have a great deal of influence with the Swedish justice system in the past and police and prosecutors have shown that they are not immune to being bribed by an interested party. Yes I am referring to the Pirate Bay persecutions.
I presume he honestly and sincerely believes he won't get a fair trial in Sweden, but that to me seems like a bizarre assumption.
While I would be the first to admit that Swedes are a nice group of people, in a case like this where there is probably no hard evidence and where it is more of one person's word against another and where typically a person is considered guilty until proven innocent, I would not want to gamble my life on the idea that the judge or jury is going to automagically see the truth. The fact that the US government wants Assange so very badly does not bode well either. No one with a sense of self-preservation would want to submit themselves to a situation where you have nothing to gain, everything to lose, and a realistic suspicion that the result would be more about politics than justice. Unless the prosecution has evidence that I haven't heard about I don't see how there would be enough evidence even to go to trial in any sort of reasonable justice system.
Would a 36% increase from 0.000000000000000001% impress you? A 36% increase of a trace amount is still a trace amount. You're the one who should be in politics. Using ppm instead of percent for no good reason and only mentioning the percent increase of a tiny trace amount is clearly deceptive.
Some people might call that nitpicking of the data science. Science is all about the data. It isn't some kind of incidental irrelevant detail. I think the error that climate scientists have made is having too much trust in their own data. Not enough fact checking. A scientist must always maintain a basic skepticism especially toward his own assumptions. They should double and triple check the data and any assumptions that lead them to believe in its accuracy. Of course they might be right, but science is all about proving you are right. If you can't prove it then being right doesn't matter. It's also not the best idea to pretend you are more certain about something than you really are in order to achieve some political end.
See that's the problem of if I can't see it, its not happening.
Well that's how science works. Sorry about that. Either a theory/hypothesis has evidence to support it or it doesn't.
Or worse, if I don't understand it, its not a problem.
If you don't understand it then you cannot do anything. Then you cannot draw any rational conclusions about what should be done. You cannot know that there is even a problem. You think it is more rational/logical to just assume there is a problem without evidence?
Our planet functions on virtually countless feedback cycles, so when something over here shifts another system over there picks up the slack and tends to recenter the system. Increase the heat, more clouds and earth reflects more sunlight. Up to a point. Once you exceed the normal capacity for the "Global System" to absorb more energy/ CO2/ heavy metals/ plastic... whatever, then old systems breakdown and subtle but significant shifts begin to make themselves evident as fundamental perturbations in the existing system.
Indeed. An entire planet, especially a water planet like ours is an immensely complex system. Believing we can write a mere computer program to act just like the real thing with sufficient accuracy that we can predict exactly what a 0.01% increase in CO2 will do to global temperatures is the height of hubris. It certainly is not science, which is based on direct experiment and direct observation. Of course you could just start out by assuming that our data on global temperature since the 19th century is 100% infallible and believing that 100% of the change implied by the data is caused by combustion and then attempt to extrapolate from there, but that is not science. It's nothing more than a wild-assed guess, possibly one motivated by emotion and politics and faith.
The change in carbonate vs carbonic acid in the ocean is telling (and making life for carbonaceous shelled sea life growingly more difficult.) The loss of glaciers and polar marine ice while possibly enhancing navigation, is already having significant impact both in rising sea levels and changes in ocean salinity. In fact a recent report suggests that as much as 40% of the increased sea level and reduced salinity is directly attributable to human enterprises over the last 2 centuries.
You were just going on about how complex a system the planet is and now you believe you understand precisely what has caused these alleged changes?
CO2 is in fact toxic, but not in the quantities one is likely to see on an earth that isn't in catastrophic environmental meltdown.
So is oxygen and nitrogen. I haven't noticed anyone worried about a.01% change in either of those gases.
However there is a potential avalanche of greenhouse gases soon coming where the warming caused by CO2 triggers a sudden explosion of methane from decaying permafrost in the high latitudes and potential release of massive methane ice seeps in the ocean. Its all tied together.
I certainly believe that the greenhouse gas theory is real and compelling. If humans do eventually increase the percentage of CO2 to a high enough level it may even have precisely the effect you describe. The problem is we don't really know how high we can go with the gas before we notice a significant effect. And, no, I don't consider the less than 1 degree change in over a centure to be significant. We don't even really know if we are even capable of increasing the percentage high enough to cause a noticeable effect. As a skeptic (denier/heretic) all I ask is that we admit what we do not know. Admitting what we truly do not know is the start of all genuine science and all true knowledge.
Is it possible that human beings may be able to increase the percentage of CO2 to a high enough level to cause problems before we run out of stuff to burn? Maybe, but there is ins
You haven't provided a reference. So let's see if I can verify. Not that I am assuming the EPA website is correct, but I can attempt to check that later.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere increased from approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) in pre-industrial times to 382 ppm in 2006 according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Earth Systems Research Laboratory, a 36 percent increase.
1 PPM = 1/1000,000 1 Percent = 1/100 So the difference is 10^5. 280ppm/10^5 =.028% (just as you say) 382ppm/10^5 =.0382% (only slightly less than you say)
So the increase is 0.01% of atmosphereic C02 in (EPA doesn't specify exactly) 130 years or something like that. I'm sorry but that just doesn't seem like very much. Of course what is "a lot" of CO2 is simply undefined. As a percentage of the atmosphere neither 0.0382% nor 0.039% seem like a whole lot to me. Of course I could be wrong. Maybe it's such a huge amount and the greenhouse effect is sufficiently sensitive that the oceans should already be boiling. The question is whether or not anyone can answer that question solely relying on the scientific method and not on computer models. A twin earth would be a 100% congruent model and could be used to test exactly how much CO2 the atmosphere could take before some kind of runaway greenhouse effect took place.
100% nuclear powered electricity generation and 100% electric cars powered by batteries on secondary roads and overhead or ground level electricity delivery cables that vehicles can hook into for longer highway distances. In every or nearly every country on the planet. That last part is even harder than the first. And then even if every country agrees in theory, enforcement might be a problem. Not every country has money to build the number of jails that the U.S. has.
So what you are saying is that we need to terminate all of these billions of pollution production devices known as mammalian organisms or deadly pollution devices poisoning the planet. It could be said that nuclear energy is a solution to the problem of AGW and I concur. If the energy is released slowly it will terminate a large source of machine emissions. If the energy is released very quickly over a large percentage of the planet it would eliminate a large percentage of the animal emissions. As long as the most deadly menace the earth has ever known, AKA CO2, is reduced that is what is important. The first method will require cooperation from every country on the planet. Highly improbable. The second method only requires one country with a great many nuclear tipped ICBMs. If you really want to solve the problem I think the second option is more realistic. It wouldn't even be a war. It would be a purification or a extermination of a deadly menace to the entire planet. Dedicated CO2 production devices should never have been made in the first place. Maybe next time Nature 2.0 will get things right.
In that case are you also willing to admit that oxygen and nitrogen are also pollutants? I don't think most 'deniers' are claiming that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist or that enough CO2 will not create it. If you could show that we had increased CO2 to say 5% of the atmosphere I would find AGW to be a lot more plausible. The part about going from TRACE_AMOUNT to 2x TRACE_AMOUNT is just not all that persuasive of an argument that we are about to become Venus. The less than 1 degree increase over more than a century is kind of lacking in persuasive power as well.
BTW, you are 100% correct about nuclear power. If all AGW enthusiasts want is for the whole planet to convert to a French level of nuclear power I'd be in favor of it. Short of a new power source being invented, it's going to have to happen anyway. Fossil fuels will not last forever. Certainly not at current prices. I think we'll be lucky if we get another quarter century out of oil and another 50-75 years out of coal. I'm not sure about natural gas or propane except that that cannot last forever either. With nuclear fission we'll have centuries more of high-tech life before we finally have to come up with something brand new or revert to a near pre-industrial society relying only on hydro, wind, and solar.
Most pro-AGW arguments that I have seen are usually appeals to authority or overly simplistic arguments that because CO2 can cause a greenhouse effect then any amount of CO2 increase = armageddon. No matter how infinitesimal the amount. The truth is there is no real scientific argument. The evidence is not sufficiently strong to support the varying conclusions of AGW enthusiasts. So what little evidence that does exist is often not even trotted out. It is so much more convenient to combine argument from authority with ad hominem attacks. "Everyone knows" that AGW is 100% proven. Only an ignorant, anti-science, bible thumper could possibly not see how incontrovertible it is." Even when such enthusiasts claim to offer evidence it is usually just the assertions of another, more authoritative, true believer, whether climate scientist or not, reiterating the same beliefs without evidence. For that tiny minority of AGW enthusiasts who want to convince the rational skeptics who are only skeptics because they haven't examined the raw data you don't need any fancy rhetoric. Just present the data. All of the data that you believe supports your argument. You don't need to even write a single word.
In the end, the argument nearly always boils down to, "Trust us. We know more than you. We are professional climate scientists!" Usually it is not even necessary to mention the existence of computer models. All they have to do is say that they are "climate scientists" and the deniers are not. And then mention evolution and moon-landing skeptics and flat-earthers for good measure. So much better than an argument to just show that in the past skeptics have sometimes been wrong. If only theists found it so easy to dismiss atheists. Not everyone is deterred by the browbeating. Atheists are used to it. It has only been quite recently that we haven't had to worry about being burned at the stake or forced to drink hemlock for not seeing the truth.
It would be interesting to see if AGW enthusiasts are actually more likely to believe in a god or other supernatural, unprovable things. It would also be interesting to see what percentage of "deniers" are in fact some flavor of scientist or engineer themselves. I suspect you would find that the same free thinkers that are atheists because they evaluate facts and truth for themselves and are not influenced by the beliefs of society are more likely to ask for evidence instead of just accepting opinion polls as science. I would have no problem whatsoever accepting the truth of AGW if I were presented with irrefutable scientific evidence. I find the idea that human beings currently have the power to essentially terraform our own planet with relatively great speed (i.e. in less than 10,000 years) to be a rather extraordinary claim, and I believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And the evidence for AGW, hell even the evidence just for GW, is far from extraordinary. In fact if climate science were any sort of real science it would be considered quite pathetic. If climate scientists (and I use that term loosely) were any sort of real scientists they would be skeptics themselves instead of true believers just looking to rationalize what they had always believed anyway.
As of my last month's bill I am paying 28.8 cents per kWh. I'm not sure how much power my computer uses, but with my Nvidia GTX280 and an overclocked 4 Ghz dual core CPU I would assume at least 400 watts. Particularly while playing a game. So let's say 12 hours for a day of gaming. So 4.8 kWh or $1.38 per day of marathon gaming. If you assume 4 days per week that would be $22.12 per month or $265.42. Of course my computer may actually use 500 or 600 watts while gaming. What interests me more is how much power my computer uses when I'm not gaming. There have been times when I've just left my computer on all the time. I would suspend to RAM, but I usually run Windows and I have yet to find a version of Windows that will properly wake up from an STR properly. That's why I'm thinking of switching to Linux. Suspend to RAM works perfectly for me in Linux.
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The constitution itself was intended to protect against all such human rights violations. The ninth amendment should protect against whatever rights violations were not specifically mentioned in the constitution. Remember that the constitution is mostly a list of things that the government is allowed to do, combined with a very short list of things it is not allowed to do, just to be certain that those particular rights are not violated. The constitution doesn't specifically mention grinding up babies and serving the meat in school lunches, but it is supposed to be understood that, since that government right was not listed they can't do it.
The People's Republic of Amerika is the correct spelling.
Ninth Amendment. Look it up. The government really doesn't have the authority to do most of what it does if you take what the constitution says literally and don't pretend that it doesn't say what it says or play word games. It's common knowledge that the founders were mostly Libertarians and it's pretty easy to see what they meant by various terms and phrases. The fact that supreme court justices simply choose to ignore those obvious meanings and replace them with their own pro-government ones is really nothing short of treason. Back in the 18th century I'd like to believe they would have been tarred and feathered and/or tried for treason.
What laws did Democrats pass that you think are unconstitutional?
Recently? The DMCA. Also many Democrats have voted for many unconstitutional laws. Are you seriously arguing that Democrats are pro-constitution? The document that was written to limit the government to essentially be Libertarian? The tyrannical police state we now live in was brought to us by both parties. Both are evil and anti-freedom, just in slightly different ways.
Well technically only the constitution protects the rights of the minority or anyone else. The supreme court is supposed to enforce the constitution to protect human rights. Unfortunately that rarely happens. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate are just forms of indirect majority rule. Instead of voting directly on issues and proposed laws we vote for someone to represent our interests in those matters. It is still supposed to be an indirect will of the people kind of thing. Senators don't win elections by arguing for unpopular positions. Of course politicians aren't known for their honesty. So in the end they may simply vote however they want or however a corporation will pay them to. Which is why, in the real world, representative democracy is horseshit. No matter how you do it democracy is still two wolves and a sheep deciding on what's for dinner, but at least with direct democracy citizens really do have a direct vote on every issue. The idea that some aristocrat is better able to make intelligent decisions is very 18th century. I certainly don't believe that rich people or attorneys make better decisions than, say, construction workers. The damage that the majority can cause is supposed to be limited by that piece of paper that the supreme court seems to prefer to toilet paper, but otherwise ignores.
So you believe that a representative democracy where the people often don't get what they want because they voted for a person instead of a specific issue is better than a pure democracy precisely because the representative democracy is less democratic? Then perhaps you would prefer a monarchy. The king would not have to listen to any special interest groups. He could just do whatever he wanted, perhaps only (theoretically) limited by a constitution in violating human rights.
I personally think either a constitutional monarchy or a pure constitutional democracy would both be better than the current system.
Think of some of the human rights violations that might be abolished if we could vote for individual laws instead of just for a person. You could say goodbye to the TSA and maybe the entire DHS. Laws like the DMCA and the Patriot Act and all of the various government spying on its own citizen programs might have a harder time. It's true that some poor laws might be passed which would have to be invalidated by the supreme court for human rights violations, but that happens even in the current system. Corporations would also have a much harder time buying laws. It's a lot more difficult to bribe 51% of the population than a single congressman.
Will those predictions still be accurate if petrol prices rise to $40/gallon by 2030? In any case, it wouldn't change the basic point that we will eventually have no choice but to either go nuclear or invent a new method of electricity production.
I am not disputing that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. I am disputing that there is evidence that an increase of 0.01% has a noticeable effect on the temperature of the planet's atmosphere. In theory it should make a very slight difference, but the evidence that it actually has is pretty shaky. There is also no direct evidence that the entire 0.01% increase has been caused by humanity's use of combustion. No doubt combustion adds some amount of CO2 to the atmosphere, but determining the amount even to within an order of magnitude is close to impossible. The best anyone can do is a total guess. That we are producing enough for reverse terraforming seems implausible to me. It's certainly possible, but it must be proven and it has not been.
Take a look here [pik-potsdam.de]. Your intuition is irrelevant. Model and actual results matter.
Interesting article. Although still politically biased. I would have to investigate Svante Arrhenius's claims, although I can see right away that his predictions have not come to pass.Regardless of the excuses about "storage" his theory did not accurately predict experimental results. In other words it is false, or at least very incomplete. Like most AGW enthusiasts Rahmstorf's article lacks sufficient discussion of data. Of facts and evidence. That's what this debate is all about. Pretending to "educate" people does not change the fact that AGW has not been proven.
It is amusing that you believe my post is long. I notice that you have a high UID and that combination leads me to guess that you are of the Facebook generation. I hope you didn't have to read the whole thing. That would be so strenuous.
I do believe there is a consensus among climate scientists. That's what they are about. Achieving results that agree with the consensus. I think that any of their claims that rely on weather station thermometers from 1905 in Eastern Europe being accurate to greater than +/- 2 or 3 degrees celsius or any sort of computer model, or any sort of assumption about the cause of the alleged 0.01% increase in CO2 are rationalizations of religious/political belief and not science at all.
As far as a citation are you referring to my belief that a sufficiently high level of CO2 would cause warming? There are lots of simple experiments. CO2 molecules are just good at storing heat. It's just basic physics. No computer models are necessary.
For reasons he has never fully explained, he refuses to go to Sweden to be questioned.
I believe he did explain. Something about the fact that he was already questioned about the issue and was told he was free to go. Then the Swedish police suddenly changed their minds for reasons that were never fully explained. How many times is he supposed to go back to Sweden every time they change their mind? If they wanted to question Assange they could have done it while he was there. It's not like there is any new evidence. Maybe it has something to do with a new investigator that has close ties to the US. Who knows, but it smells awfully fishy given the political context.
With all due respect, I disagree with your "fix". If confidential information is released, it doesn't matter if you get caught or not. You've probably already made somebody's life miserable. Sure, you can argue that the person might deserve it, but that's an awful lot of judgement to make with no oversight.
It sounded like you were offering practical advice, but here you are offering moral advice. Whether or not releasing classified information is right or wrong depends entirely on the content. It has nothing to do with whether a government considers it "classified" or not.
Riight. He arranged to be accused of rape, a crime for which the entire world would hate you and for which people are typically considered guilty until proven innocent just for the publicity. Because, although he was already famous, he wasn't famous enough. You really expect anyone to believe that?
They wouldn't take him to the US. They would take him to Cuba.
Perhaps I can help you out as far as the American citizen. He may be referring to Anwar al-Awlaki.
Nor that playing the 'don't extradite me' game is actually helping his case at all.
If Britain didn't allow the extradition it would most definitely help his case. What would you do? With one option you have a 100% chance of staying out of prison. With the other you have a chance that is less than 100%. While I'm sure Swedish prisons are relatively civilized places compared to US prisons for instance, I don't think any of us much relishes the prospect of being locked in a cage for years. Judging by past actions of the CIA I consider the idea that they may be involved in some way very plausible indeed. The US has shown itself to have a great deal of influence with the Swedish justice system in the past and police and prosecutors have shown that they are not immune to being bribed by an interested party. Yes I am referring to the Pirate Bay persecutions.
I presume he honestly and sincerely believes he won't get a fair trial in Sweden, but that to me seems like a bizarre assumption.
While I would be the first to admit that Swedes are a nice group of people, in a case like this where there is probably no hard evidence and where it is more of one person's word against another and where typically a person is considered guilty until proven innocent, I would not want to gamble my life on the idea that the judge or jury is going to automagically see the truth. The fact that the US government wants Assange so very badly does not bode well either. No one with a sense of self-preservation would want to submit themselves to a situation where you have nothing to gain, everything to lose, and a realistic suspicion that the result would be more about politics than justice. Unless the prosecution has evidence that I haven't heard about I don't see how there would be enough evidence even to go to trial in any sort of reasonable justice system.
Would a 36% increase from 0.000000000000000001% impress you? A 36% increase of a trace amount is still a trace amount. You're the one who should be in politics. Using ppm instead of percent for no good reason and only mentioning the percent increase of a tiny trace amount is clearly deceptive.
Therefore, I will nitpick the data
Some people might call that nitpicking of the data science. Science is all about the data. It isn't some kind of incidental irrelevant detail. I think the error that climate scientists have made is having too much trust in their own data. Not enough fact checking. A scientist must always maintain a basic skepticism especially toward his own assumptions. They should double and triple check the data and any assumptions that lead them to believe in its accuracy. Of course they might be right, but science is all about proving you are right. If you can't prove it then being right doesn't matter. It's also not the best idea to pretend you are more certain about something than you really are in order to achieve some political end.
See that's the problem of if I can't see it, its not happening.
Well that's how science works. Sorry about that. Either a theory/hypothesis has evidence to support it or it doesn't.
Or worse, if I don't understand it, its not a problem.
If you don't understand it then you cannot do anything. Then you cannot draw any rational conclusions about what should be done. You cannot know that there is even a problem. You think it is more rational/logical to just assume there is a problem without evidence?
Our planet functions on virtually countless feedback cycles, so when something over here shifts another system over there picks up the slack and tends to recenter the system. Increase the heat, more clouds and earth reflects more sunlight. Up to a point. Once you exceed the normal capacity for the "Global System" to absorb more energy/ CO2/ heavy metals/ plastic... whatever, then old systems breakdown and subtle but significant shifts begin to make themselves evident as fundamental perturbations in the existing system.
Indeed. An entire planet, especially a water planet like ours is an immensely complex system. Believing we can write a mere computer program to act just like the real thing with sufficient accuracy that we can predict exactly what a 0.01% increase in CO2 will do to global temperatures is the height of hubris. It certainly is not science, which is based on direct experiment and direct observation. Of course you could just start out by assuming that our data on global temperature since the 19th century is 100% infallible and believing that 100% of the change implied by the data is caused by combustion and then attempt to extrapolate from there, but that is not science. It's nothing more than a wild-assed guess, possibly one motivated by emotion and politics and faith.
The change in carbonate vs carbonic acid in the ocean is telling (and making life for carbonaceous shelled sea life growingly more difficult.) The loss of glaciers and polar marine ice while possibly enhancing navigation, is already having significant impact both in rising sea levels and changes in ocean salinity. In fact a recent report suggests that as much as 40% of the increased sea level and reduced salinity is directly attributable to human enterprises over the last 2 centuries.
You were just going on about how complex a system the planet is and now you believe you understand precisely what has caused these alleged changes?
CO2 is in fact toxic, but not in the quantities one is likely to see on an earth that isn't in catastrophic environmental meltdown.
So is oxygen and nitrogen. I haven't noticed anyone worried about a .01% change in either of those gases.
However there is a potential avalanche of greenhouse gases soon coming where the warming caused by CO2 triggers a sudden explosion of methane from decaying permafrost in the high latitudes and potential release of massive methane ice seeps in the ocean. Its all tied together.
I certainly believe that the greenhouse gas theory is real and compelling. If humans do eventually increase the percentage of CO2 to a high enough level it may even have precisely the effect you describe. The problem is we don't really know how high we can go with the gas before we notice a significant effect. And, no, I don't consider the less than 1 degree change in over a centure to be significant. We don't even really know if we are even capable of increasing the percentage high enough to cause a noticeable effect. As a skeptic (denier/heretic) all I ask is that we admit what we do not know. Admitting what we truly do not know is the start of all genuine science and all true knowledge.
Is it possible that human beings may be able to increase the percentage of CO2 to a high enough level to cause problems before we run out of stuff to burn? Maybe, but there is ins
You haven't provided a reference. So let's see if I can verify. Not that I am assuming the EPA website is correct, but I can attempt to check that later.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere increased from approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) in pre-industrial times to 382 ppm in 2006 according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Earth Systems Research Laboratory, a 36 percent increase.
1 PPM = 1/1000,000 .028% (just as you say) .0382% (only slightly less than you say)
1 Percent = 1/100
So the difference is 10^5.
280ppm/10^5 =
382ppm/10^5 =
So the increase is 0.01% of atmosphereic C02 in (EPA doesn't specify exactly) 130 years or something like that. I'm sorry but that just doesn't seem like very much. Of course what is "a lot" of CO2 is simply undefined. As a percentage of the atmosphere neither 0.0382% nor 0.039% seem like a whole lot to me. Of course I could be wrong. Maybe it's such a huge amount and the greenhouse effect is sufficiently sensitive that the oceans should already be boiling. The question is whether or not anyone can answer that question solely relying on the scientific method and not on computer models. A twin earth would be a 100% congruent model and could be used to test exactly how much CO2 the atmosphere could take before some kind of runaway greenhouse effect took place.
100% nuclear powered electricity generation and 100% electric cars powered by batteries on secondary roads and overhead or ground level electricity delivery cables that vehicles can hook into for longer highway distances. In every or nearly every country on the planet. That last part is even harder than the first. And then even if every country agrees in theory, enforcement might be a problem. Not every country has money to build the number of jails that the U.S. has.
So what you are saying is that we need to terminate all of these billions of pollution production devices known as mammalian organisms or deadly pollution devices poisoning the planet. It could be said that nuclear energy is a solution to the problem of AGW and I concur. If the energy is released slowly it will terminate a large source of machine emissions. If the energy is released very quickly over a large percentage of the planet it would eliminate a large percentage of the animal emissions. As long as the most deadly menace the earth has ever known, AKA CO2, is reduced that is what is important. The first method will require cooperation from every country on the planet. Highly improbable. The second method only requires one country with a great many nuclear tipped ICBMs. If you really want to solve the problem I think the second option is more realistic. It wouldn't even be a war. It would be a purification or a extermination of a deadly menace to the entire planet. Dedicated CO2 production devices should never have been made in the first place. Maybe next time Nature 2.0 will get things right.
In that case are you also willing to admit that oxygen and nitrogen are also pollutants? I don't think most 'deniers' are claiming that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist or that enough CO2 will not create it. If you could show that we had increased CO2 to say 5% of the atmosphere I would find AGW to be a lot more plausible. The part about going from TRACE_AMOUNT to 2x TRACE_AMOUNT is just not all that persuasive of an argument that we are about to become Venus. The less than 1 degree increase over more than a century is kind of lacking in persuasive power as well.
BTW, you are 100% correct about nuclear power. If all AGW enthusiasts want is for the whole planet to convert to a French level of nuclear power I'd be in favor of it. Short of a new power source being invented, it's going to have to happen anyway. Fossil fuels will not last forever. Certainly not at current prices. I think we'll be lucky if we get another quarter century out of oil and another 50-75 years out of coal. I'm not sure about natural gas or propane except that that cannot last forever either. With nuclear fission we'll have centuries more of high-tech life before we finally have to come up with something brand new or revert to a near pre-industrial society relying only on hydro, wind, and solar.
Most pro-AGW arguments that I have seen are usually appeals to authority or overly simplistic arguments that because CO2 can cause a greenhouse effect then any amount of CO2 increase = armageddon. No matter how infinitesimal the amount. The truth is there is no real scientific argument. The evidence is not sufficiently strong to support the varying conclusions of AGW enthusiasts. So what little evidence that does exist is often not even trotted out. It is so much more convenient to combine argument from authority with ad hominem attacks. "Everyone knows" that AGW is 100% proven. Only an ignorant, anti-science, bible thumper could possibly not see how incontrovertible it is." Even when such enthusiasts claim to offer evidence it is usually just the assertions of another, more authoritative, true believer, whether climate scientist or not, reiterating the same beliefs without evidence. For that tiny minority of AGW enthusiasts who want to convince the rational skeptics who are only skeptics because they haven't examined the raw data you don't need any fancy rhetoric. Just present the data. All of the data that you believe supports your argument. You don't need to even write a single word.
In the end, the argument nearly always boils down to, "Trust us. We know more than you. We are professional climate scientists!" Usually it is not even necessary to mention the existence of computer models. All they have to do is say that they are "climate scientists" and the deniers are not. And then mention evolution and moon-landing skeptics and flat-earthers for good measure. So much better than an argument to just show that in the past skeptics have sometimes been wrong. If only theists found it so easy to dismiss atheists. Not everyone is deterred by the browbeating. Atheists are used to it. It has only been quite recently that we haven't had to worry about being burned at the stake or forced to drink hemlock for not seeing the truth.
It would be interesting to see if AGW enthusiasts are actually more likely to believe in a god or other supernatural, unprovable things. It would also be interesting to see what percentage of "deniers" are in fact some flavor of scientist or engineer themselves. I suspect you would find that the same free thinkers that are atheists because they evaluate facts and truth for themselves and are not influenced by the beliefs of society are more likely to ask for evidence instead of just accepting opinion polls as science. I would have no problem whatsoever accepting the truth of AGW if I were presented with irrefutable scientific evidence. I find the idea that human beings currently have the power to essentially terraform our own planet with relatively great speed (i.e. in less than 10,000 years) to be a rather extraordinary claim, and I believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And the evidence for AGW, hell even the evidence just for GW, is far from extraordinary. In fact if climate science were any sort of real science it would be considered quite pathetic. If climate scientists (and I use that term loosely) were any sort of real scientists they would be skeptics themselves instead of true believers just looking to rationalize what they had always believed anyway.
As of my last month's bill I am paying 28.8 cents per kWh. I'm not sure how much power my computer uses, but with my Nvidia GTX280 and an overclocked 4 Ghz dual core CPU I would assume at least 400 watts. Particularly while playing a game. So let's say 12 hours for a day of gaming. So 4.8 kWh or $1.38 per day of marathon gaming. If you assume 4 days per week that would be $22.12 per month or $265.42. Of course my computer may actually use 500 or 600 watts while gaming. What interests me more is how much power my computer uses when I'm not gaming. There have been times when I've just left my computer on all the time. I would suspend to RAM, but I usually run Windows and I have yet to find a version of Windows that will properly wake up from an STR properly. That's why I'm thinking of switching to Linux. Suspend to RAM works perfectly for me in Linux.