I couldn't help but notice, by the way, that you have nothing to say even remotely acceptable by the standards you claim to espouse.
Again, you don't even try. I'll note in comparison, that I have this thread.
[david_thornley:]This got started in a discussion of funding research, so I assumed you were talking about benefits that could be used to direct funding. This means that I'm thinking of benefits that are at least an obvious potential before the work is done.
I'll point out that you've claimed a number of things weren't predictable. But given that they came so soon after the relevant basic science issues, then maybe they weren't so unpredictable in the first place. The TV, for example, had prototype equipment dating back to near the turn of the century and the cathode ray tube goes back further (it was even considered a rival to the light bulb for a time). But with the discovery of the electron and the development of quantum mechanics, they were able to understand far better what an electron beam was and how to steer it effectively.
That's what real argument looks like, responding to someone's argument with your comments, not empty name calling:
Exactly. The only thing that the developed world emits more of per capita.
And looking at issues like deforestation, species extinction, and fresh-water pollution, it is overwhelmingly the transnational corporations originating in the developed countries and supplying the developed countries which have had the largest destructive effects cumulatively, and are continuing to do so.
Exactly, these are issues of the developing world, caused by themselves. Just because it is the fad to find some way, no matter how contrived, to blame developed world countries, it remains that the developed world has in reality solved these problems.
You need to understand that just because, say, we've cleaned up the litter on our city streets better, and that we TALK about environmental issues more than the rest of the world, does not mean we are doing better than them on the serious global environmental destruction factors. We are still doing way worse, especially if you rate it on a per person basis. Way way worse. Orders of magnitude worse.
And you need to look at who's actually solving problems rather than spin tales.
The developed world has by far done and continues to do the most damage.
And by "damage" you mean? When I say damage, I mean actual harm now and in the future, not fantasy projections of the future based on exaggerated models.
Ok, so lack of political will made them financially unreachable. It still happened. It's worth noting that even with the long term funding rate since the mid-70s, NASA could have done a hell of a lot more than it has. Funding is not the only reason for failure here.
Not in your recent posts. It's a bunch of vapid quick posts as far as the eye can see. Why not practice what you preach instead of being another anti-scientific hack on the internet?
My point is most life will consume as much resources and space as it can, they just don't have parking lots. They don't live in harmony any more than we do, they just don't have the same power to alter environments or transport themselves as we do.
I think it is clear, if we look ahead to a far future - say in 500 to 1000 years - we will either have found a way to live sustainably on this planet, or we will be in rapid, possibly catastropihic, decline.
I believe the developed world already figured that out. It's just a matter of spreading that knowledge to the rest of the world.
We're killing this planet and I don't know what to do about it.
Well, how hard are we killing the planet? Global warming is pretty mild stuff as such things go.
We're the only organisms on the planet that can't live in harmony with it (with the exception of maybe beavers).
Except for all the many, many other plants and animals that don't live in harmony with Earth either. Unlike the vast majority of plants and animals, we've actually figured out how to control our population (in the developed world, of course).
I know I'm not going to have kids for this reason.
This got started in a discussion of funding research, so I assumed you were talking about benefits that could be used to direct funding. This means that I'm thinking of benefits that are at least an obvious potential before the work is done.
I'll point out that you've claimed a number of things weren't predictable. But given that they came so soon after the relevant basic science issues, then maybe they weren't so unpredictable in the first place. The TV, for example, had prototype equipment dating back to near the turn of the century and the cathode ray tube goes back further (it was even considered a rival to the light bulb for a time). But with the discovery of the electron and the development of quantum mechanics, they were able to understand far better what an electron beam was and how to steer it effectively.
The immediate benefit of Special Relativity, for example, was that it explained the Michelson-Morley experimental findings. It did so in a way that nobody was going to believe ahead of time, but it was an explanation. We still don't have that many practical uses for it, outside of making the GPS satellite clock rate work correctly.
The Michelson-Morley experiment killed off the aether model and thus, any concept of models of motion similar to supersonic motion in Earth's atmosphere.
Another technology spurred by special relativity was nuclear power (for example, one can determine the energy released in a fission or fusion process by determining how much lighter the final reaction products are than the original and then using E=mc^2).
And I think relativity had considerable power in filtering out bad scientific ideas. For example, if I claim to have faster than light (FTL) communication, I need to explain how I get around the obstacles that relativity puts in the way.
We're seeing the same thing with the "EM drive" and conservation of momentum that has been bouncing around for a few years. They still haven't explained where they're getting their thrust from. One of the best current explanations is that it's very inefficient photon thrust with photons tunneling through the chamber in pairs.
At the performance/cost level of NASA spacecraft, there's a huge tradeoff between cost and mass (this review indicates a factor of 2-3 drop in cost of development of a scientific spacecraft for a 50% increase in mass, retaining the same capabilities of the original scientific mission).
There is no fixed cost per unit mass. However, most mission designers cost out a spacecraft so that launch costs are 10-20% of the entire mission cost.
The funny part is where the Brits seem to think they have a choice on whether they get a "hard" or "soft" Brexit: As Al Jazeera's commentator argues, the EU is going into negotiations with such a hilariously imbalanced advantage -- the negotiations are likely going to be conducted in French -- that the UK really should consider itself lucky if they can manage to walk away with any agreement at all (instead of the entirely possible scenario of them being booted from the EU and concomitantly the WTO and having to renegotiate all their agreements with everybody).
If the EU is going to make this "hard", then the UK isn't the only country that should be looking for the exit. The first rule of being a parasite: make it as hard as possible to get of the parasite. If the EU reaches for the iron gauntlet, it means that they don't have enough benefits to offer in the first place (a situation which will probably just get worse over time) and they're just another tapeworm which the UK (and probably most of the rest of the EU members) would be better rid of.
The forces that led to a narrow Brexit "Leave" are not unique to the UK. Perhaps, it's better to fix those problems than to brag on how hard your side is going to crush the rebellion while simultaneously watching the rebellion spread to other countries in and out of the EU.
I'm not deriding the system. I'm embracing it, even the traits that people criticize it for having.
Maybe. Perhaps next time, you should say that instead of what you apparently originally posted.
I would actually say you're the one deriding capitalism, because in the link you provided, it suggested wealth redistribution to speed up eliminating poverty
I didn't link to the article for that reason and I routinely link to articles with which I don't wholly agree. But even so, how does that deride capitalism?
It also had a bit on slamming fossil fuel subsidies
Is that deriding capitalism either? And most fossil fuel subsidies, like most subsidies in general, are rather pointless.
Under our glorious capitalist system, we consider the poor to be responsible for their own plight, and we have no obligation to help them.
It's worth noting that whatever the cause, there has been a huge decline in global extreme poverty. I believe capitalism, global trade, and use of fossil fuels deserve the lion's share of the credit for that. For example, in East Asia
Here's an amazing fact: The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 114 million from 2012 to 2013.
That is a simply massive one-year decline, and it's not even the biggest drop in recent years. From 2010 to 2011, global poverty fell by 132 million people. From 2008 to 2013, the number fell by an average of 88 million people per year. If that rate of progress keeps up, global poverty will be eliminated in less than a decade.
Spoiler: They don't expect the trend to continue because of Sub-Saharan Africa which is far less tractable than East Asia is.
The purple line representing East Asia shows the most striking trajectory. In 1990, a large majority â" 60.2 percent â" of people in the region lived in extreme poverty. In 2013, only 3.5 percent did. Thatâ(TM)s a shift of mind-boggling scale. And it means that extreme poverty in that area is now a rather small part of the overall global problem.
Of course, it's worth noting that China which has most of the population of the area introduced massive pro-capitalism and trade liberalizing reforms at the beginning of this period.
You can be as sarcastic as you'd like, but it doesn't change that the world is improving at an enormous rate due to the very systems you deride and the very fossil fuel use that is supposedly such a good idea to reduce. Yet as usual, we have a bunch of would-be environmentalists who remain ignorant of the most important improvement in the well-being of humanity in history.
Relativity didn't explain why radio waves traveled at the speed of light. It was not developed for any near-term applications. It was developed as a response to the Michelson-Morley experiment, which had no practical applications. Quantum mechanics was a way to explain some puzzling results, but didn't do anything useful for some time, nor was it clear what use it was.
And I already have corrected this assertion. I might add that explaining puzzling results that just so happen to then result in considerable near future economic value is precisely why scientific research gets funded.
And your assertion that quantum mechanics didn't do anything "for some time" ignores the near future applications I have already mentioned. The TV was invented (1925) about a decade after the Bohr model of the atom and 30 years of the discovery of the electron, for example. The first electron lens (which became key parts of the electron microscope developed within the decade) was developed the next year.
Newtonian gravity didn't affect gun accuracy before the very long ranged guns in WWI, for which the difference between an elliptical and a parabolic trajectory mattered. Gravity and air resistance determine the trajectory, but at least through WWII shell trajectories were not calculated from first principles. They fired guns with different elevations at different times, and interpolated to create tables showing the important features of the trajectories. These tables were nearly useless in the Italian mountain fighting, since it was very common for the target to be at a significantly different elevation from the guns.
And yet we have "New Principles of Gunnery" published in 1742 which researched exactly these points and was based on research that apparently was conducted during the previous decade, including development of a timing "ballistic pendulum" for determining the speed of projectiles.
It's ridiculous to say that such research "didn't matter at the time" when it was so quickly transformed into inventions and further discoveries. Funders would have been quite aware of this. It's also not that hard to see that research in the areas you mentioned would result in new important inventions and discoveries in the near future even if no one truly wasn't sure what they'd be.
Compare that to now. There are whole, very pricey fields such as space sciences, fusion research, and subatomic physics that have effectively abandoned any claims to near future progress. Meanwhile fields such as high frequency trading risk which have enormous near future benefit are threatened with destruction because they benefit rich people and a large part of the world can't have that.
My view is that we are seeing in this a growing sickness over so much of science and perhaps the coming end of a golden age of science. So I believe we should continue to hold high expectations of scientific research. It should continue to benefit us in this life with concrete near future benefits just like it has for centuries. Low expectations on the other hand, results in useless science of no value to us or to future generations. Disengaging science from its utility is an ongoing disaster.
So by your logic, Denmark and Germany should have worse poverty than less green countries such as the US and Somalia.
Not by my logic. But speaking of Somalia, what would happen should its electricity prices double? Are we going to see increased adoption and use of electricity by the poor?
it is undisputed and aggressive actions are needed now, if not better yesterday.
You had me to this point. Evidence please. Not 300 references that would have happened anyway.
Notice how unscientific the pro-urgent action arguments get in this discussion. It's all fallacy, arguing from authority, consensus, and obfuscation, or ad hominem. If the science on climate change was that clear, we could just argue from the evidence. But who understands it? It's all just a black box that is merely accepted to be true.
My view is that there are several huge warning flag here: poor climate data before about 1850 coupled with firm certainty about what happened; opaque research data and models; the strategy of urgent mitigation is sold hard, but adaptation is downplayed; research on demand combined with errors of research, presentation, or prediction that always favor the more extreme story; and a huge conflict of interest.
The car analogy is running full speed into a traffic jam. When do you start to brace -- at the latest point feasible or by reducing your speed to a decent level first?
We're a few billion people too late for a sudden stop here. Adaptation is on the table no matter what happens. And I guess I still need to point out that non-greenhouse gas pollution remains a more serious problem? We can fix all that with wealthier societies, but it requires people to have priorities over urgent climate change mitigation.
That is, a low carbon, breathable air, greener world is a better world anyway, so we are right to start down this road, with or without AGW.
Billions of poor people would disagree with your breezy dismissal of their problems. Poverty is the obvious rebuttal to the unfounded assertion a greener world is a better world. Poor people are higher fertility than rich people and they care far less about the environment than about getting their next meal.
While the claim that a greener environment means less poor people has been sold hard, it remains in the real world that attempts to mitigate CO2 emissions result in the sort of stuff, like Denmark and Germany almost doubling the cost of their electricity, that makes more poor people rather than less.
The thing is, if you think that all advice, expert opinion, statistical data, scientific inquiry and journalistic investigation is biased, misleading and only believed by gullible people then you enter a post-factual realm.
"Enter" implies that you weren't in there at one time. We've never been factual in the first place.
But people have given up even trying to find an objective truth.
Self-interest is too subjective to be an objective truth. And really your sudden realization that expert advice is often bullshit is rather late in coming.
In the past, politicians and the electorate were much more accepting of carefully collected data from reputable organisations.
The word is "gullible" not "accepting". Too many of these "reputable organizations" are simply propaganda outlets that haven't yet found a cause to burn their reputation for. That's why they keep creating them. When the Anerica for a Prosperous Future burns its reputation, they'll move on to Americans for Future Prosperity and try again.
The EU itself is one of these organizations, but one without a replacement. It and predecessor organizations have undergone more than half a century of mission creep. Where's it going to end?
I get that people want to question everything and be sceptical, but at some point you have to accept that while gravity might be "just a theory" put forward by "biased scientists in the pay of big airlines" it is none the less true. Just because you would like to flap your arms and fly with the birds doesn't change reality, or making ignoring expert advice not to leap off that bridge any less valid.
What evidence to support your hand wringing? Let us keep in mind that expert advice in politics and economics is far more biased and unsubstantiated than expert advice on gravity. The benefits of lying and exaggerating are bigger as well. This all shows up in the Brexit propaganda on both sides.
You're counting things that could not be foreseen as near-future applications
You can't evaluate the near future application of technologies by ignoring them.
Relativity has nothing to do with radio communications
It explained why radio waves propagated at the speed of light and implied that it would be fruitless to look for faster than light communications with the physics of the time.
The more accurate cannon fire didn't matter until the Twentieth Century
Needless to say, it mattered at the time which was well before the 20th Century. For example, a key observation was that no matter how the cannon was designed, the range of the weapon was fixed by the initial velocity of the projectile. Second, Newtonian gravity and air resistance meant that the cannon ball would come down at a steeper angle than it was fired at. This also matters when timing fuses on explosive ordnance.
If research criteria were the likely consequences of discoveries, none of these would have been funded.
To the contrary, these near future applications were exactly why such stuff was funded.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't help but notice, by the way, that you have nothing to say even remotely acceptable by the standards you claim to espouse.
Again, you don't even try. I'll note in comparison, that I have this thread.
[david_thornley:]This got started in a discussion of funding research, so I assumed you were talking about benefits that could be used to direct funding. This means that I'm thinking of benefits that are at least an obvious potential before the work is done.
I'll point out that you've claimed a number of things weren't predictable. But given that they came so soon after the relevant basic science issues, then maybe they weren't so unpredictable in the first place. The TV, for example, had prototype equipment dating back to near the turn of the century and the cathode ray tube goes back further (it was even considered a rival to the light bulb for a time). But with the discovery of the electron and the development of quantum mechanics, they were able to understand far better what an electron beam was and how to steer it effectively.
That's what real argument looks like, responding to someone's argument with your comments, not empty name calling:
Liar
Well, looking at greenhouse gas emissions:
Exactly. The only thing that the developed world emits more of per capita.
And looking at issues like deforestation, species extinction, and fresh-water pollution, it is overwhelmingly the transnational corporations originating in the developed countries and supplying the developed countries which have had the largest destructive effects cumulatively, and are continuing to do so.
Exactly, these are issues of the developing world, caused by themselves. Just because it is the fad to find some way, no matter how contrived, to blame developed world countries, it remains that the developed world has in reality solved these problems.
You need to understand that just because, say, we've cleaned up the litter on our city streets better, and that we TALK about environmental issues more than the rest of the world, does not mean we are doing better than them on the serious global environmental destruction factors. We are still doing way worse, especially if you rate it on a per person basis. Way way worse. Orders of magnitude worse.
And you need to look at who's actually solving problems rather than spin tales.
The developed world has by far done and continues to do the most damage.
And by "damage" you mean? When I say damage, I mean actual harm now and in the future, not fantasy projections of the future based on exaggerated models.
Ok, so lack of political will made them financially unreachable. It still happened. It's worth noting that even with the long term funding rate since the mid-70s, NASA could have done a hell of a lot more than it has. Funding is not the only reason for failure here.
I offer many ideas (good ones) and lots of facts.
Not in your recent posts. It's a bunch of vapid quick posts as far as the eye can see. Why not practice what you preach instead of being another anti-scientific hack on the internet?
What's so difficult to understand about the process of learning?
The part where you call it "learning". Words have meaning.
Controlling global warming is the only way to ensure continued industrial society.
And adaptation is the obvious way to do that.
When they jam it IS possible and in fact inevitable to reach criticality
Because? Last I heard, it was not possible, much less inevitable. And air cooling was enough to prevent said heat build up.
Whether life in general lives in harmony or not
My point is most life will consume as much resources and space as it can, they just don't have parking lots. They don't live in harmony any more than we do, they just don't have the same power to alter environments or transport themselves as we do.
I think it is clear, if we look ahead to a far future - say in 500 to 1000 years - we will either have found a way to live sustainably on this planet, or we will be in rapid, possibly catastropihic, decline.
I believe the developed world already figured that out. It's just a matter of spreading that knowledge to the rest of the world.
We're killing this planet and I don't know what to do about it.
Well, how hard are we killing the planet? Global warming is pretty mild stuff as such things go.
We're the only organisms on the planet that can't live in harmony with it (with the exception of maybe beavers).
Except for all the many, many other plants and animals that don't live in harmony with Earth either. Unlike the vast majority of plants and animals, we've actually figured out how to control our population (in the developed world, of course).
I know I'm not going to have kids for this reason.
There you go.
This got started in a discussion of funding research, so I assumed you were talking about benefits that could be used to direct funding. This means that I'm thinking of benefits that are at least an obvious potential before the work is done.
I'll point out that you've claimed a number of things weren't predictable. But given that they came so soon after the relevant basic science issues, then maybe they weren't so unpredictable in the first place. The TV, for example, had prototype equipment dating back to near the turn of the century and the cathode ray tube goes back further (it was even considered a rival to the light bulb for a time). But with the discovery of the electron and the development of quantum mechanics, they were able to understand far better what an electron beam was and how to steer it effectively.
The immediate benefit of Special Relativity, for example, was that it explained the Michelson-Morley experimental findings. It did so in a way that nobody was going to believe ahead of time, but it was an explanation. We still don't have that many practical uses for it, outside of making the GPS satellite clock rate work correctly.
The Michelson-Morley experiment killed off the aether model and thus, any concept of models of motion similar to supersonic motion in Earth's atmosphere.
Another technology spurred by special relativity was nuclear power (for example, one can determine the energy released in a fission or fusion process by determining how much lighter the final reaction products are than the original and then using E=mc^2).
And I think relativity had considerable power in filtering out bad scientific ideas. For example, if I claim to have faster than light (FTL) communication, I need to explain how I get around the obstacles that relativity puts in the way.
We're seeing the same thing with the "EM drive" and conservation of momentum that has been bouncing around for a few years. They still haven't explained where they're getting their thrust from. One of the best current explanations is that it's very inefficient photon thrust with photons tunneling through the chamber in pairs.
At the performance/cost level of NASA spacecraft, there's a huge tradeoff between cost and mass (this review indicates a factor of 2-3 drop in cost of development of a scientific spacecraft for a 50% increase in mass, retaining the same capabilities of the original scientific mission).
There is no fixed cost per unit mass. However, most mission designers cost out a spacecraft so that launch costs are 10-20% of the entire mission cost.
The funny part is where the Brits seem to think they have a choice on whether they get a "hard" or "soft" Brexit: As Al Jazeera's commentator argues, the EU is going into negotiations with such a hilariously imbalanced advantage -- the negotiations are likely going to be conducted in French -- that the UK really should consider itself lucky if they can manage to walk away with any agreement at all (instead of the entirely possible scenario of them being booted from the EU and concomitantly the WTO and having to renegotiate all their agreements with everybody).
If the EU is going to make this "hard", then the UK isn't the only country that should be looking for the exit. The first rule of being a parasite: make it as hard as possible to get of the parasite. If the EU reaches for the iron gauntlet, it means that they don't have enough benefits to offer in the first place (a situation which will probably just get worse over time) and they're just another tapeworm which the UK (and probably most of the rest of the EU members) would be better rid of.
The forces that led to a narrow Brexit "Leave" are not unique to the UK. Perhaps, it's better to fix those problems than to brag on how hard your side is going to crush the rebellion while simultaneously watching the rebellion spread to other countries in and out of the EU.
I'm not deriding the system. I'm embracing it, even the traits that people criticize it for having.
Maybe. Perhaps next time, you should say that instead of what you apparently originally posted.
I would actually say you're the one deriding capitalism, because in the link you provided, it suggested wealth redistribution to speed up eliminating poverty
I didn't link to the article for that reason and I routinely link to articles with which I don't wholly agree. But even so, how does that deride capitalism?
It also had a bit on slamming fossil fuel subsidies
Is that deriding capitalism either? And most fossil fuel subsidies, like most subsidies in general, are rather pointless.
Under our glorious capitalist system, we consider the poor to be responsible for their own plight, and we have no obligation to help them.
It's worth noting that whatever the cause, there has been a huge decline in global extreme poverty. I believe capitalism, global trade, and use of fossil fuels deserve the lion's share of the credit for that. For example, in East Asia
Here's an amazing fact: The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 114 million from 2012 to 2013.
That is a simply massive one-year decline, and it's not even the biggest drop in recent years. From 2010 to 2011, global poverty fell by 132 million people. From 2008 to 2013, the number fell by an average of 88 million people per year. If that rate of progress keeps up, global poverty will be eliminated in less than a decade.
Spoiler: They don't expect the trend to continue because of Sub-Saharan Africa which is far less tractable than East Asia is.
The purple line representing East Asia shows the most striking trajectory. In 1990, a large majority â" 60.2 percent â" of people in the region lived in extreme poverty. In 2013, only 3.5 percent did. Thatâ(TM)s a shift of mind-boggling scale. And it means that extreme poverty in that area is now a rather small part of the overall global problem.
Of course, it's worth noting that China which has most of the population of the area introduced massive pro-capitalism and trade liberalizing reforms at the beginning of this period.
You can be as sarcastic as you'd like, but it doesn't change that the world is improving at an enormous rate due to the very systems you deride and the very fossil fuel use that is supposedly such a good idea to reduce. Yet as usual, we have a bunch of would-be environmentalists who remain ignorant of the most important improvement in the well-being of humanity in history.
Well it does when a pebble strikes your condensor and leaks POISONOUS REFRIGERANT into the atmosphere.
You realize you can purge any R134A AC system and fill it with propane who no loss in performance or seal integrity??
Except when a pebble strikes your condenser and leaks HIGHLY FLAMMABLE REFRIGERANT into the hood of your car.
They have more kids because they have no social security.
Last I checked, social security is not at the top of the green agenda for mitigating climate change.
Relativity didn't explain why radio waves traveled at the speed of light. It was not developed for any near-term applications. It was developed as a response to the Michelson-Morley experiment, which had no practical applications. Quantum mechanics was a way to explain some puzzling results, but didn't do anything useful for some time, nor was it clear what use it was.
And I already have corrected this assertion. I might add that explaining puzzling results that just so happen to then result in considerable near future economic value is precisely why scientific research gets funded.
And your assertion that quantum mechanics didn't do anything "for some time" ignores the near future applications I have already mentioned. The TV was invented (1925) about a decade after the Bohr model of the atom and 30 years of the discovery of the electron, for example. The first electron lens (which became key parts of the electron microscope developed within the decade) was developed the next year.
Newtonian gravity didn't affect gun accuracy before the very long ranged guns in WWI, for which the difference between an elliptical and a parabolic trajectory mattered. Gravity and air resistance determine the trajectory, but at least through WWII shell trajectories were not calculated from first principles. They fired guns with different elevations at different times, and interpolated to create tables showing the important features of the trajectories. These tables were nearly useless in the Italian mountain fighting, since it was very common for the target to be at a significantly different elevation from the guns.
And yet we have "New Principles of Gunnery" published in 1742 which researched exactly these points and was based on research that apparently was conducted during the previous decade, including development of a timing "ballistic pendulum" for determining the speed of projectiles.
It's ridiculous to say that such research "didn't matter at the time" when it was so quickly transformed into inventions and further discoveries. Funders would have been quite aware of this. It's also not that hard to see that research in the areas you mentioned would result in new important inventions and discoveries in the near future even if no one truly wasn't sure what they'd be.
Compare that to now. There are whole, very pricey fields such as space sciences, fusion research, and subatomic physics that have effectively abandoned any claims to near future progress. Meanwhile fields such as high frequency trading risk which have enormous near future benefit are threatened with destruction because they benefit rich people and a large part of the world can't have that.
My view is that we are seeing in this a growing sickness over so much of science and perhaps the coming end of a golden age of science. So I believe we should continue to hold high expectations of scientific research. It should continue to benefit us in this life with concrete near future benefits just like it has for centuries. Low expectations on the other hand, results in useless science of no value to us or to future generations. Disengaging science from its utility is an ongoing disaster.
So by your logic, Denmark and Germany should have worse poverty than less green countries such as the US and Somalia.
Not by my logic. But speaking of Somalia, what would happen should its electricity prices double? Are we going to see increased adoption and use of electricity by the poor?
it is undisputed and aggressive actions are needed now, if not better yesterday.
You had me to this point. Evidence please. Not 300 references that would have happened anyway.
Notice how unscientific the pro-urgent action arguments get in this discussion. It's all fallacy, arguing from authority, consensus, and obfuscation, or ad hominem. If the science on climate change was that clear, we could just argue from the evidence. But who understands it? It's all just a black box that is merely accepted to be true.
My view is that there are several huge warning flag here: poor climate data before about 1850 coupled with firm certainty about what happened; opaque research data and models; the strategy of urgent mitigation is sold hard, but adaptation is downplayed; research on demand combined with errors of research, presentation, or prediction that always favor the more extreme story; and a huge conflict of interest.
The car analogy is running full speed into a traffic jam. When do you start to brace -- at the latest point feasible or by reducing your speed to a decent level first?
We're a few billion people too late for a sudden stop here. Adaptation is on the table no matter what happens. And I guess I still need to point out that non-greenhouse gas pollution remains a more serious problem? We can fix all that with wealthier societies, but it requires people to have priorities over urgent climate change mitigation.
That is, a low carbon, breathable air, greener world is a better world anyway, so we are right to start down this road, with or without AGW.
Billions of poor people would disagree with your breezy dismissal of their problems. Poverty is the obvious rebuttal to the unfounded assertion a greener world is a better world. Poor people are higher fertility than rich people and they care far less about the environment than about getting their next meal.
While the claim that a greener environment means less poor people has been sold hard, it remains in the real world that attempts to mitigate CO2 emissions result in the sort of stuff, like Denmark and Germany almost doubling the cost of their electricity, that makes more poor people rather than less.
The thing is, if you think that all advice, expert opinion, statistical data, scientific inquiry and journalistic investigation is biased, misleading and only believed by gullible people then you enter a post-factual realm.
"Enter" implies that you weren't in there at one time. We've never been factual in the first place.
But people have given up even trying to find an objective truth.
Self-interest is too subjective to be an objective truth. And really your sudden realization that expert advice is often bullshit is rather late in coming.
In the past, politicians and the electorate were much more accepting of carefully collected data from reputable organisations.
The word is "gullible" not "accepting". Too many of these "reputable organizations" are simply propaganda outlets that haven't yet found a cause to burn their reputation for. That's why they keep creating them. When the Anerica for a Prosperous Future burns its reputation, they'll move on to Americans for Future Prosperity and try again.
The EU itself is one of these organizations, but one without a replacement. It and predecessor organizations have undergone more than half a century of mission creep. Where's it going to end?
I get that people want to question everything and be sceptical, but at some point you have to accept that while gravity might be "just a theory" put forward by "biased scientists in the pay of big airlines" it is none the less true. Just because you would like to flap your arms and fly with the birds doesn't change reality, or making ignoring expert advice not to leap off that bridge any less valid.
What evidence to support your hand wringing? Let us keep in mind that expert advice in politics and economics is far more biased and unsubstantiated than expert advice on gravity. The benefits of lying and exaggerating are bigger as well. This all shows up in the Brexit propaganda on both sides.
You're counting things that could not be foreseen as near-future applications
You can't evaluate the near future application of technologies by ignoring them.
Relativity has nothing to do with radio communications
It explained why radio waves propagated at the speed of light and implied that it would be fruitless to look for faster than light communications with the physics of the time.
The more accurate cannon fire didn't matter until the Twentieth Century
Needless to say, it mattered at the time which was well before the 20th Century. For example, a key observation was that no matter how the cannon was designed, the range of the weapon was fixed by the initial velocity of the projectile. Second, Newtonian gravity and air resistance meant that the cannon ball would come down at a steeper angle than it was fired at. This also matters when timing fuses on explosive ordnance.
If research criteria were the likely consequences of discoveries, none of these would have been funded.
To the contrary, these near future applications were exactly why such stuff was funded.
Personal belief trumps all reason, logic, measurements and data, the scientific method means nothing in the face of gut feeling.
Funny how you have yet to show that this was relevant to the Brexit vote.