It's no new frontier. [...] it was just a commercially viable solution
0
Ok, why do you think this isn't a valid frontier? It fits the definition as commercially viable light bulbs hadn't been developed before. This was indeed new ground that was being explored.
Every time we have an earth quake around here everyone looks at the Golden Gate Bridge to sees if it still standing. Because if it is not, it's time to head for high ground.
Are you seriously claiming that the bridge can actually dam up the San Francisco Bay, should it fall? The problem with your assertion is that the bay is very deep under the bridge - 113 meters according to Wikipedia. So no, people don't do that.
The first American rockets weren't based on Nazi funded research. And it's worth noting that a number of rocket technologies such as hybrid rocket motors and balloon-launched rockets haven't seen a lot of NASA money nor picked up help from Nazi scientists.
The reason why getting rid of fossil fuels is hard is that there is a huge industry that doesn't want us to.
This "huge industry" is actually most of human civilization. Economics of fossil fuels especially when coupled with existing infrastructure still makes them a pretty competitive alternative especially oil products and natural gas at the moment.
As the other replier noted, Musk is "chief designer" at SpaceX. SpaceX has developed three different engines and two different launch vehicles. He's also running Tesla Motors and proposed a novel, high speed transportation system called "Hyperloop".
Inventing a light bulb is not exactly breaking new frontiers
Investing the first commercially viable light bulb is.
But going to Mars does not even require a big scientific breakthrough. We know how rockets work, we know how to get a load to Mars. It's done before. It will need lots of little improvements and innovation to get a person there, for sure. But what it really requires is lots and lots of funding.
It needs infrastructure. NASA doesn't provide and even at times has inhibited the creation of infrastructure.
And you won't see a return of investment in the next decades
Then you're doing it wrong.
Sure, I agree that a government can take an unworthy or even actively harmful goal and chuck vast sums of money at it. But what is the point of doing so aside from a display of status?
There's no reason that putting a person on Mars has to be in the realm of government-only spending. I'd rather private industry first greatly lowered the cost of this activity, then see what happens.
Commercial business can never be and has never been trustworthy when it comes to public safety.
Compared to who? Government hasn't been trustworthy either. I see you mentioned Chernobyl which was government run.
It's all safety related and it's all because people didn't want to spend enough money on safety.
What makes you think more money would have spent effectively? There's so much misunderstanding about what was going on with Fukushima. The reactors were being decommissioned. Then they weren't because the next generation which was going to replace Fukushima was canceled all at once. This shuffling of future plans probably contributed since why should one build a higher seawall for nuclear reactors that are to be decommissioned?
Keep in mind that there is ANOTHER nuclear plant no too far from Fukushima which survived the same tsunami specifically because the wall was higher and stronger.
No, it survived a smaller tsunami. It would have been inundated if it had been subject to what hit Fukushima Daiichi.
Nuclear safety. There is NOTHING more important. Nothing.
Yea, I'm sure empty slogan ranks pretty up on that list of important things. So how many deaths is nuclear safety worth?
The interesting thing here is that BP and TEPCO are the only groups who actually have a clue how to clean their own messes up. Despite the drama of a "level 3 serious incident", I don't see evidence that TEPCO should be removed from the clean up of the Fukushima site or the surroundings.
Your choice to compare the Fukushima clean up to the Deepwater Horizon spill is telling. While there was considerable incompetence and criminal actions going into the causes, that oil spill was competently handled after the fact. The US government wouldn't have done any better.
These are examples of the observer bias I mentioned in my reply to your earlier post.
We already discussed the oyster farm example. It's a recurring problem of the area that doesn't have anything to do with ocean acidification from CO2 sources.
Weird weather is normal. We haven't had particular weird weather over the past few years either.
And drought conditions in the American Southwest? That's normal especially given the water consumption in the region.
I have my ideas on why the media, scientists, activists, and politicians are so eager to portray such events as due to climate change.
It's the EPA's fault that some random people decided to do whatever they wanted without considering the rules and regulations that might be applicable?
Well, I hadn't considered this matter in my post. But I'd have to say here that the EPA shouldn't have jurisdiction over local pollution issues. But that's because I interpret the US Constitution's Commerce Clause much more narrowly than the Supreme Court does.
BUT... to re-iterate this discussion is not about climate science.
Sure, it's about a political hack playing pop psychology on his opposition. That discussion is fundamentally a joke.
The issue isn't the paucity of evidence. The issue is how people are able to ignore the overwhelming evidence available.
It's a great illusion, isn't it? But there are several obvious problems with the claim. First, we don't know key properties of climate to the accuracy desired such as temperature sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of CO2. It's worth noting here that the typical figure used (which bounced around between 2C and 4C per doubling of CO2) has not actually been observed because it allegedly takes centuries for temperature changes to settled down.
What we can observe is transient sensitivity which is much lower (recent research claims around 1.3-1.8C right now). That's the observation of short term change of temperature to the small increase of CO2 over the past century or two.
Note the games played here. This is supposedly the most reliable part of the AGW theory, but we have both huge error bars and a result reported in a way that will take centuries to verify.
Second, let us consider what data is actually out there over the time frames we need. We have roughly 35 years of satellite data. That's the only way currently to directly measure a global mean temperature. That's our sole high quality data for the AGW theory. Then there's around a century and a half of weather station data. And then temperature proxy ("paleoclimate") data stretching out hundreds of thousands of years (with some shaky geological data going back hundreds of millions of years).
That's your "overwhelming data". It's not.
Third problem is the gatekeepers of this data. The key bottleneck is the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the 1990s and 2000s. While there are several holders of paleoclimate data, the more I read of this period the more I'm struck by how dominant the CRU was over this time.
They had access to station data for most nations of the world which no one else had (crucial data for bridging temperature proxy data to modern satellite data) and their interpretations of this data were taken by many researchers wholesale. They along with allied researchers decided what was the effect of phenomena like urban heat islands, the extent and characteristics of the notorious Medieval Warm Period, tree ring data, etc and their resulting aggregation of data was used to vet climate models.
And they were heavily biased in favor of the AGW theory, even to the point of breaking UK law in order to deny data to critics.
So this is why I will wait for supporting evidence rather than merely assume that the current "overwhelming evidence" is accurate and trustworthy.
With that amount of money spent, there shouldn't a terrorist left breathing on the face of the planet.
That's crazy talk. If they did that, then how would they get $52 billion next year? The US government is a place where one gets paid generously to not do their job.
As I said before, I look forward to a valid case for this theory. A few decades should be enough time to provide the evidence it'll need. It'll also be enough time for your emotions to cool and you to get some perspective on this debate.
But this isn't a discussion about climate science. This is a discussion about whether it is appropriate to deploy psychology to explain the surprising level of inaction in the face of very clear science pointing to the danger of such inaction, or whether this is merely an attempt at medicalising dissent. And as the example of Jobs illustrates, this tendency to reject reality for wishful thinking is hardly confined to climate change.
So when are these psychologists going to study your preference for a good story over science? When such research gimmicks are blatantly biased against one side of a crucial debate such as this, something is going on other than scientific research.
The problem is an issue from British Columbia through Washington into Oregon but I suppose you would consider all of that area local too.
Of course, I would. If you look at the link you provided, you would see that they even attribute the increased CO2 to deep water currents running ashore and note these haven't been exposed to atmospheric CO2 for many decades.
Basically, it's yet another ancient phenomenon being blamed on anthropogenic activity.
Since I'm no expert on the subject I'll continue to listen to what scientists studying the problem have to say but there appears to be no doubt that acidification is going to affect ocean ecosystems as it progresses.
I quite agree. This story does demonstrate that it can cause trouble at high enough CO2 concentrations. But let's look at what has happened in this thread. You claimed you had evidence that oysters were being disrupted in your state by ocean acidification from human activities. And you were right. There was an article that claimed just that.
But when we look at it in a little more depth, we see that it had nothing to do with ocean acidification by human activity and that the reporter (and perhaps others) had grossly misrepresented what had taken place. I'll note here that they weren't alone in such a practice. This particular story had legs.
Now, I don't think this particular article was part of a conspiracy though I do think some rather ugly and deceptive political machinery had sprung up over the years and tainted a lot of research associated with climatology.
The problem as I see it, is that anthropogenic global warming makes for a great epic story. And a lot of people believe in it because they want it to be true. It's the hubris of people you don't like, the wealthy, the overly smart, the overworking industrious, the ostentatious, the rude SUV drivers, the heartless CEOs, etc getting their comeuppance. It's gotten to the point that reporters seed much of their scientific stories with allusions to climate change even when there isn't a credible link - I think to increase reader interest and feed this morality play.
Even though I think there are valid issues somewhere beneath all of this, the fundamental problem is that a lot of society is acting on these issues on an irrational basis without reflection of what actually is going on and that this behavior is being fed by a lot of people who have a variety of interests in keeping it going. That's really dangerous when the resulting meddling is with the economic fabric of our society, particularly, energy and transportation.
My view on this is that no one has demonstrated that anything needs to be done to address AGW prior to 2050. There's no tipping points, no hidden heat sinks, no sharp increase in sea level, no considerable increase in extreme weather, etc to drive a mitigation or adaptation effort. Most of these appear to me to be used as mere rhetorical tricks to exaggerate the risks of AGW.
Thus, I think the best approach is to wait a few decades and see what happens. I think this will be enough time to see the difference between irrational behavior and genuine, scientifically-based environmental threats.
High liability jobs will still probably go to professional drivers. An automated car manufacturer isn't going to deliberately take on arbitrary levels of risk just because some customer wants to automate the movement of hazardous waste.
Also, it doesn't take that long to move to other work.
He doesn't give a shit about anything (other than starting another middle-east war which his citizens don't want).
If that's what he wants, then he's not trying very hard. It's been a year since Obama's "red line" speech on Syrian chemical attacks and all we've gotten in the meantime is a bunch of talk. If he really wanted a war, then the casus belli has happened. Where's the shock and awe?
Come next election, he'll just be another half-caste doing the dinner talk circuit to make a living.
So we don't have even a scrap of evidence that there was ever life on Mars, but evidence is "building" that we come from there. No, that's not science.
And how are organic molecules going to turn into tar in the presence of ample water and little heat (such as the case on the surface)? He seems to have neglected that high levels of liquid water (yet another oxide, but one which was prevalent in the early Earth environment) also inhibits the formation of tar.
The only argument against water as the tar-inhibitor agent is that it is "corrosive" to RNA. But which of these three compounds (including oxides of boron and molydenum) are currently found in living cells in quantity?
Slashdot Mirror
It's no new frontier. [...] it was just a commercially viable solution
0 Ok, why do you think this isn't a valid frontier? It fits the definition as commercially viable light bulbs hadn't been developed before. This was indeed new ground that was being explored.
If you say so. But we've been circling the drain ever since President Buchanan let the South get out of hand.
Every time we have an earth quake around here everyone looks at the Golden Gate Bridge to sees if it still standing. Because if it is not, it's time to head for high ground.
Are you seriously claiming that the bridge can actually dam up the San Francisco Bay, should it fall? The problem with your assertion is that the bay is very deep under the bridge - 113 meters according to Wikipedia. So no, people don't do that.
The first American rockets weren't based on Nazi funded research. And it's worth noting that a number of rocket technologies such as hybrid rocket motors and balloon-launched rockets haven't seen a lot of NASA money nor picked up help from Nazi scientists.
The reason why getting rid of fossil fuels is hard is that there is a huge industry that doesn't want us to.
This "huge industry" is actually most of human civilization. Economics of fossil fuels especially when coupled with existing infrastructure still makes them a pretty competitive alternative especially oil products and natural gas at the moment.
If that money gets Musk on Mars in his lifetime, then it has return.
Last time I checked you need to have a degree in Physics to be called a physicist...
Well, you heard wrong. Just look up the definition. Anyone who studies or is well versed in physics is a physicist.
One wonders how the ancients ever managed to do any physics without any Physics degrees lying around.
As the other replier noted, Musk is "chief designer" at SpaceX. SpaceX has developed three different engines and two different launch vehicles. He's also running Tesla Motors and proposed a novel, high speed transportation system called "Hyperloop".
Inventing a light bulb is not exactly breaking new frontiers
Investing the first commercially viable light bulb is.
But going to Mars does not even require a big scientific breakthrough. We know how rockets work, we know how to get a load to Mars. It's done before. It will need lots of little improvements and innovation to get a person there, for sure. But what it really requires is lots and lots of funding.
It needs infrastructure. NASA doesn't provide and even at times has inhibited the creation of infrastructure.
And you won't see a return of investment in the next decades
Then you're doing it wrong.
Sure, I agree that a government can take an unworthy or even actively harmful goal and chuck vast sums of money at it. But what is the point of doing so aside from a display of status?
There's no reason that putting a person on Mars has to be in the realm of government-only spending. I'd rather private industry first greatly lowered the cost of this activity, then see what happens.
Commercial business can never be and has never been trustworthy when it comes to public safety.
Compared to who? Government hasn't been trustworthy either. I see you mentioned Chernobyl which was government run.
It's all safety related and it's all because people didn't want to spend enough money on safety.
What makes you think more money would have spent effectively? There's so much misunderstanding about what was going on with Fukushima. The reactors were being decommissioned. Then they weren't because the next generation which was going to replace Fukushima was canceled all at once. This shuffling of future plans probably contributed since why should one build a higher seawall for nuclear reactors that are to be decommissioned?
Keep in mind that there is ANOTHER nuclear plant no too far from Fukushima which survived the same tsunami specifically because the wall was higher and stronger.
No, it survived a smaller tsunami. It would have been inundated if it had been subject to what hit Fukushima Daiichi.
Nuclear safety. There is NOTHING more important. Nothing.
Yea, I'm sure empty slogan ranks pretty up on that list of important things. So how many deaths is nuclear safety worth?
Of course, without the government, we wouldn't have roads or the internet but I'm sure those things don't matter to you.
Without government we wouldn't even have the concept of Godwin's law. You kill six million Jews this one time and they never let you forget it!
The interesting thing here is that BP and TEPCO are the only groups who actually have a clue how to clean their own messes up. Despite the drama of a "level 3 serious incident", I don't see evidence that TEPCO should be removed from the clean up of the Fukushima site or the surroundings.
Your choice to compare the Fukushima clean up to the Deepwater Horizon spill is telling. While there was considerable incompetence and criminal actions going into the causes, that oil spill was competently handled after the fact. The US government wouldn't have done any better.
These are examples of the observer bias I mentioned in my reply to your earlier post.
We already discussed the oyster farm example. It's a recurring problem of the area that doesn't have anything to do with ocean acidification from CO2 sources.
Weird weather is normal. We haven't had particular weird weather over the past few years either.
And drought conditions in the American Southwest? That's normal especially given the water consumption in the region.
I have my ideas on why the media, scientists, activists, and politicians are so eager to portray such events as due to climate change.
It's the EPA's fault that some random people decided to do whatever they wanted without considering the rules and regulations that might be applicable?
Well, I hadn't considered this matter in my post. But I'd have to say here that the EPA shouldn't have jurisdiction over local pollution issues. But that's because I interpret the US Constitution's Commerce Clause much more narrowly than the Supreme Court does.
BUT ... to re-iterate this discussion is not about climate science.
Sure, it's about a political hack playing pop psychology on his opposition. That discussion is fundamentally a joke.
The issue isn't the paucity of evidence. The issue is how people are able to ignore the overwhelming evidence available.
It's a great illusion, isn't it? But there are several obvious problems with the claim. First, we don't know key properties of climate to the accuracy desired such as temperature sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of CO2. It's worth noting here that the typical figure used (which bounced around between 2C and 4C per doubling of CO2) has not actually been observed because it allegedly takes centuries for temperature changes to settled down.
What we can observe is transient sensitivity which is much lower (recent research claims around 1.3-1.8C right now). That's the observation of short term change of temperature to the small increase of CO2 over the past century or two.
Note the games played here. This is supposedly the most reliable part of the AGW theory, but we have both huge error bars and a result reported in a way that will take centuries to verify.
Second, let us consider what data is actually out there over the time frames we need. We have roughly 35 years of satellite data. That's the only way currently to directly measure a global mean temperature. That's our sole high quality data for the AGW theory. Then there's around a century and a half of weather station data. And then temperature proxy ("paleoclimate") data stretching out hundreds of thousands of years (with some shaky geological data going back hundreds of millions of years).
That's your "overwhelming data". It's not.
Third problem is the gatekeepers of this data. The key bottleneck is the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the 1990s and 2000s. While there are several holders of paleoclimate data, the more I read of this period the more I'm struck by how dominant the CRU was over this time.
They had access to station data for most nations of the world which no one else had (crucial data for bridging temperature proxy data to modern satellite data) and their interpretations of this data were taken by many researchers wholesale. They along with allied researchers decided what was the effect of phenomena like urban heat islands, the extent and characteristics of the notorious Medieval Warm Period, tree ring data, etc and their resulting aggregation of data was used to vet climate models.
And they were heavily biased in favor of the AGW theory, even to the point of breaking UK law in order to deny data to critics.
So this is why I will wait for supporting evidence rather than merely assume that the current "overwhelming evidence" is accurate and trustworthy.
Can you say the same for scientific type of news?
Apparently, all it has in common is the name.
I guess you've never heard of them before. I consider the CSM currently one of the most reliable and unbiased of US media sources out there.
With that amount of money spent, there shouldn't a terrorist left breathing on the face of the planet.
That's crazy talk. If they did that, then how would they get $52 billion next year? The US government is a place where one gets paid generously to not do their job.
But this isn't a discussion about climate science. This is a discussion about whether it is appropriate to deploy psychology to explain the surprising level of inaction in the face of very clear science pointing to the danger of such inaction, or whether this is merely an attempt at medicalising dissent. And as the example of Jobs illustrates, this tendency to reject reality for wishful thinking is hardly confined to climate change.
So when are these psychologists going to study your preference for a good story over science? When such research gimmicks are blatantly biased against one side of a crucial debate such as this, something is going on other than scientific research.
The problem is an issue from British Columbia through Washington into Oregon but I suppose you would consider all of that area local too.
Of course, I would. If you look at the link you provided, you would see that they even attribute the increased CO2 to deep water currents running ashore and note these haven't been exposed to atmospheric CO2 for many decades.
Basically, it's yet another ancient phenomenon being blamed on anthropogenic activity.
Since I'm no expert on the subject I'll continue to listen to what scientists studying the problem have to say but there appears to be no doubt that acidification is going to affect ocean ecosystems as it progresses.
I quite agree. This story does demonstrate that it can cause trouble at high enough CO2 concentrations. But let's look at what has happened in this thread. You claimed you had evidence that oysters were being disrupted in your state by ocean acidification from human activities. And you were right. There was an article that claimed just that.
But when we look at it in a little more depth, we see that it had nothing to do with ocean acidification by human activity and that the reporter (and perhaps others) had grossly misrepresented what had taken place. I'll note here that they weren't alone in such a practice. This particular story had legs.
Now, I don't think this particular article was part of a conspiracy though I do think some rather ugly and deceptive political machinery had sprung up over the years and tainted a lot of research associated with climatology.
The problem as I see it, is that anthropogenic global warming makes for a great epic story. And a lot of people believe in it because they want it to be true. It's the hubris of people you don't like, the wealthy, the overly smart, the overworking industrious, the ostentatious, the rude SUV drivers, the heartless CEOs, etc getting their comeuppance. It's gotten to the point that reporters seed much of their scientific stories with allusions to climate change even when there isn't a credible link - I think to increase reader interest and feed this morality play.
Even though I think there are valid issues somewhere beneath all of this, the fundamental problem is that a lot of society is acting on these issues on an irrational basis without reflection of what actually is going on and that this behavior is being fed by a lot of people who have a variety of interests in keeping it going. That's really dangerous when the resulting meddling is with the economic fabric of our society, particularly, energy and transportation.
My view on this is that no one has demonstrated that anything needs to be done to address AGW prior to 2050. There's no tipping points, no hidden heat sinks, no sharp increase in sea level, no considerable increase in extreme weather, etc to drive a mitigation or adaptation effort. Most of these appear to me to be used as mere rhetorical tricks to exaggerate the risks of AGW.
Thus, I think the best approach is to wait a few decades and see what happens. I think this will be enough time to see the difference between irrational behavior and genuine, scientifically-based environmental threats.
High liability jobs will still probably go to professional drivers. An automated car manufacturer isn't going to deliberately take on arbitrary levels of risk just because some customer wants to automate the movement of hazardous waste.
Also, it doesn't take that long to move to other work.
He doesn't give a shit about anything (other than starting another middle-east war which his citizens don't want).
If that's what he wants, then he's not trying very hard. It's been a year since Obama's "red line" speech on Syrian chemical attacks and all we've gotten in the meantime is a bunch of talk. If he really wanted a war, then the casus belli has happened. Where's the shock and awe?
Come next election, he'll just be another half-caste doing the dinner talk circuit to make a living.
I look forward to that time.
Why wouldn't humans exist? We're not talking of conditions that would kill humans after all. Just merely warm enough to melt ice on Greenland.
So we don't have even a scrap of evidence that there was ever life on Mars, but evidence is "building" that we come from there. No, that's not science.
And how are organic molecules going to turn into tar in the presence of ample water and little heat (such as the case on the surface)? He seems to have neglected that high levels of liquid water (yet another oxide, but one which was prevalent in the early Earth environment) also inhibits the formation of tar.
The only argument against water as the tar-inhibitor agent is that it is "corrosive" to RNA. But which of these three compounds (including oxides of boron and molydenum) are currently found in living cells in quantity?
In present money. Remember that will be more money by the time that ice gets "stacked".