The current estimate of maybe a meter over the next century includes quite a few things. They may have missed some important stuff, and a couple of scientists have proposed they did. There is no double-booking. There is ice melt, and then there is the possibility of ice sliding from the land to the sea without melting first.
One characteristic of most large coastal cities is that they are ports. Last I looked, ships didn't casually sail through four-meter walls. The ports themselves would have to be moved to higher ground, and that isn't going to work well with the cities themselves being in a bathtub.
Why do you think runaway warming isn't happening? Because it would be painful to your little world-view if it were? It looks like it's happening to me.
Bear in mind that the Sun was a bit dimmer fifty million years ago, so with the same carbon dioxide level we'd expect to be hotter.
Bear in mind that some of our food crops have evolved over the last fifty million years, and won't thrive in Jurassic conditions. If it takes another fifty million years to get there, no problem. If it takes a thousand, problem.
How do you intend to remove incredible amounts of water from Earth? The oceans cover something like 360 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface. Eleven feet (not meters) is a little over three meters. One meter of water over a square kilometer is a million tons. One meter of water across the oceans is about 360 trillion tons. We're talking about something over a quadrillion tons here that we'd have to get off-planet somehow Doing a quick Google search, it appears that NASA is hoping to get cost to low earth orbit down to tens of dollars per pound by 2060. Assuming we can do that, a quadrillion tons is two quintillion pounds, so we're looking at something like a hundred quintillion dollars. Top world national GNPs are in the dozen trillion dollar range, so we're talking about roughly eight million years of current US production.
We're not going to be a Kardashev Type II civilization in any time frame that's relevant for climate change. There's also going to be cheaper ways of getting water where we need it.
There's one thing in common with almost all the predictions you list: they haven't failed. What we have already done will have effects that last and build up for a long, long time. It may well be that it's too late to avert disaster, even if the disaster is still decades or even centuries away, and that therefore those predictions (not usually by scientists, I note) are correct.
Okay, what predictions of complete collapse are you talking about? How many were made up by reporters to capture eyeballs, as opposed to predictions made by actual scientists looking at the evidence? How many predictions of complete collapse were made that would come true by, say, 2020?
You're right to be skeptical of this individual result. So far, it's a couple of scientists with a new model that may or may not be more accurate in this case. It's definitely worth further research.
Trust in individuals is bad for science. Everybody screws up from time to time, and some individuals are downright dishonest. Trust in the process, and the general community of science, is important. The process has evolved so that science can go forward without trusting specific people.
All scientific advances begin with scientists doing research. They don't always get their interpretations and predictions right. That's why there's always follow-up research.
What this says is that two scientists, making a new model that considers different things, have made a prediction that's different from those made by other scientists with other models. There's no observational evidence right now showing that one is right and the other is wrong.
It's certainly too soon to panic, but equally it's too soon to dismiss the possibility.
Personally, I live something like a couple hundred meters above sea level, and I have no intention of moving to a coast.
Have you taken control groups of scientists in other fields and analyzed their emails? If not, you don't know if all other scientists are paragons of virtue, or maybe like the ones whose internal private emails were published for political effect. Scientists are human, and have all sorts of failings. Despite this, science as a whole has been extremely productive.
You have no reason to think that climate science is any worse off than any other scientific field. Get yourself a control group.
The basic science is settled. Nobody in the field seriously disagrees with it, and scientists take it for granted when doing their research. That's pretty much the definition. Like anything else in science, it could become unsettled again, but that happens only very rarely, and almost never rejects the evidence.
How bad is it going to be? Nobody really knows. If you go to the IPCC report, you'll find lots of predictions carefully assigned levels of confidence. Anything that's labeled "very high confidence" is almost certainly going to happen, and anything labeled "more likely than not" could easily not happen. We do know it's going to be bad, just not how bad.
Deniers are people who don't look at the evidence, and who are willing to construct any structure of thought that saves them from thinking something inconvenient. Nobody practicing the scientific method is a Denier. There are skeptics, and they generally get convinced of the serious problems caused by AGW when they look at the evidence. There are people who interpret the evidence with different outcomes, worse or not as bad as the usual ideas.
I haven't read the paper, but this is at least science being done. Never assume general principles because of one paper. If the paper is good, other people will look into it and publish.
And don't take what the media says too seriously. Scientific journalism is not reliable, and I'm not aware of a time where it has been reliable. Journalists publish what will give them clicks or eyeballs or whatever, and sensation sells.
It's all very well to say "well, don't do that" about things....
We're talking about simple code style rules, easily enforced with code reviews or static checkers. These are easier to do in larger projects than in one-person ones. These rules won't make people write good C++, but they will eliminate some large classes of errors.
If you've got a lot of legacy code that is in the wrong style, and it's C++, you can change it slowly and make it more reliable. We found a few bugs simply by adding "override" to our function definitions, for example.
If you can't get your programmers to follow a few simple rules of style, you're screwed no matter what language you're using. If nothing else, you'll find yourself with piles of code you can't read easily that could hide myriads of bugs.
Lisp is very difficult to write without some sort of prettyprinter in the editor. I usually use emacs. Lisp programmers normally recognize structure by the indentation, not the parentheses. C++ does have the advantage here in that it is easy to write with any editor, unlike Lisp, but with the right editor it's just as easy to write Lisp.
So, by (1) are you complaining that the C++ standard library is too small? Anywhere you go, you will find libraries that work better with one platform or another.
In (2), you are describing implementations, not standards. If there is a reason to compile C or C++ to some sort of byte code, it could be done. C and C++ are normally cross-platform in the sense of recompiling for each platform, which isn't typically a big problem.
They also use references, which are semantically equivalent.
Yeah, and Java and C# have tons of pointers. If it isn't a native type in Java, it's a pointer type with enough syntax to make it not immediately obvious. Also, a for loop is semantically equivalent to some tests and gotos, so we can't program without gotos, right?
You can't do everything with references that you could do with a raw pointer. Semantically, a reference is the same as the object itself. Similarly, "this" is an rvalue, and therefore can't be changed. These are not the same as raw pointers.
If you can't enforce simple rules like that, your project is in serious trouble, no matter what language it's written in. Every language has its infelicities, and if you can't keep programmers away from them by whatever means you're not writing good software.
What I'm getting out of that is that you carefully constructed a string library that needs some conventions to be safe, and doesn't do complicated things because that gets buggy.
I'm not knocking your achievement, but you get most or all of that in C++ for free with simpler syntax. With C++, you get a lot of it in template format, not function-calling, and that might run faster. You don't need to use more C++ than that to get a significant benefit.
That's an awfully content-free posting to get (4, Interesting), given that it boils down to "I don't like C++ because it's complex". If you read Stroustrup's Design and Evolution book, you can actually find out why Stroustrup added what he did and rejected what he did.
IOW, promoting the idea that houses would eventually be infinite in price while everything else would stay the same.
And people believed it.
The frightening thing is not that some people bought into that, but which people bought into it. I had a front-row seat of the start of the burst, making C++ repayment models for mortgages at the home mortgage arm of General Motors. Scary.
It's called authoritarianism, and exists all over the spectrum. The industrialists were somewhat freer than the US variety during WWII, under the War Production Board. Fascists tend to woo the industrialists and throw sops to the workers.
It's part of the mainstream of historical thought, not an inattention to history. Fascism included nationalism and capitalism. It often included the traditional religion. It was normally racist. These are primarily right-wing things. National Socialism, in particular, was hard right wing. The left is more socialist, as opposed to capitalist, It tends to be classist, as opposed to racist and/or nationalist. It tends to be anti-religion.
I'm getting real tired of this intellectually dishonest attempt to make right-wing politics look better at the expense of history.
Slashdot Mirror
The current estimate of maybe a meter over the next century includes quite a few things. They may have missed some important stuff, and a couple of scientists have proposed they did. There is no double-booking. There is ice melt, and then there is the possibility of ice sliding from the land to the sea without melting first.
One characteristic of most large coastal cities is that they are ports. Last I looked, ships didn't casually sail through four-meter walls. The ports themselves would have to be moved to higher ground, and that isn't going to work well with the cities themselves being in a bathtub.
Why do you think runaway warming isn't happening? Because it would be painful to your little world-view if it were? It looks like it's happening to me.
As a software guy, I say we put all that ice back into the cliffs and see if it happens again. Then we file a bug report.
Bear in mind that the Sun was a bit dimmer fifty million years ago, so with the same carbon dioxide level we'd expect to be hotter.
Bear in mind that some of our food crops have evolved over the last fifty million years, and won't thrive in Jurassic conditions. If it takes another fifty million years to get there, no problem. If it takes a thousand, problem.
How do you intend to remove incredible amounts of water from Earth? The oceans cover something like 360 million square kilometers of the Earth's surface. Eleven feet (not meters) is a little over three meters. One meter of water over a square kilometer is a million tons. One meter of water across the oceans is about 360 trillion tons. We're talking about something over a quadrillion tons here that we'd have to get off-planet somehow Doing a quick Google search, it appears that NASA is hoping to get cost to low earth orbit down to tens of dollars per pound by 2060. Assuming we can do that, a quadrillion tons is two quintillion pounds, so we're looking at something like a hundred quintillion dollars. Top world national GNPs are in the dozen trillion dollar range, so we're talking about roughly eight million years of current US production.
We're not going to be a Kardashev Type II civilization in any time frame that's relevant for climate change. There's also going to be cheaper ways of getting water where we need it.
There's one thing in common with almost all the predictions you list: they haven't failed. What we have already done will have effects that last and build up for a long, long time. It may well be that it's too late to avert disaster, even if the disaster is still decades or even centuries away, and that therefore those predictions (not usually by scientists, I note) are correct.
Okay, what predictions of complete collapse are you talking about? How many were made up by reporters to capture eyeballs, as opposed to predictions made by actual scientists looking at the evidence? How many predictions of complete collapse were made that would come true by, say, 2020?
You're right to be skeptical of this individual result. So far, it's a couple of scientists with a new model that may or may not be more accurate in this case. It's definitely worth further research.
Trust in individuals is bad for science. Everybody screws up from time to time, and some individuals are downright dishonest. Trust in the process, and the general community of science, is important. The process has evolved so that science can go forward without trusting specific people.
All scientific advances begin with scientists doing research. They don't always get their interpretations and predictions right. That's why there's always follow-up research.
What this says is that two scientists, making a new model that considers different things, have made a prediction that's different from those made by other scientists with other models. There's no observational evidence right now showing that one is right and the other is wrong.
It's certainly too soon to panic, but equally it's too soon to dismiss the possibility.
Personally, I live something like a couple hundred meters above sea level, and I have no intention of moving to a coast.
Have you taken control groups of scientists in other fields and analyzed their emails? If not, you don't know if all other scientists are paragons of virtue, or maybe like the ones whose internal private emails were published for political effect. Scientists are human, and have all sorts of failings. Despite this, science as a whole has been extremely productive.
You have no reason to think that climate science is any worse off than any other scientific field. Get yourself a control group.
The basic science is settled. Nobody in the field seriously disagrees with it, and scientists take it for granted when doing their research. That's pretty much the definition. Like anything else in science, it could become unsettled again, but that happens only very rarely, and almost never rejects the evidence.
How bad is it going to be? Nobody really knows. If you go to the IPCC report, you'll find lots of predictions carefully assigned levels of confidence. Anything that's labeled "very high confidence" is almost certainly going to happen, and anything labeled "more likely than not" could easily not happen. We do know it's going to be bad, just not how bad.
Deniers are people who don't look at the evidence, and who are willing to construct any structure of thought that saves them from thinking something inconvenient. Nobody practicing the scientific method is a Denier. There are skeptics, and they generally get convinced of the serious problems caused by AGW when they look at the evidence. There are people who interpret the evidence with different outcomes, worse or not as bad as the usual ideas.
I haven't read the paper, but this is at least science being done. Never assume general principles because of one paper. If the paper is good, other people will look into it and publish.
And don't take what the media says too seriously. Scientific journalism is not reliable, and I'm not aware of a time where it has been reliable. Journalists publish what will give them clicks or eyeballs or whatever, and sensation sells.
We're talking about simple code style rules, easily enforced with code reviews or static checkers. These are easier to do in larger projects than in one-person ones. These rules won't make people write good C++, but they will eliminate some large classes of errors.
If you've got a lot of legacy code that is in the wrong style, and it's C++, you can change it slowly and make it more reliable. We found a few bugs simply by adding "override" to our function definitions, for example.
If you can't get your programmers to follow a few simple rules of style, you're screwed no matter what language you're using. If nothing else, you'll find yourself with piles of code you can't read easily that could hide myriads of bugs.
I believe FORTRAN got decapitalized with Fortran 77. I've used FORTRAN, but I prefer Fortran.
Lisp is very difficult to write without some sort of prettyprinter in the editor. I usually use emacs. Lisp programmers normally recognize structure by the indentation, not the parentheses. C++ does have the advantage here in that it is easy to write with any editor, unlike Lisp, but with the right editor it's just as easy to write Lisp.
So, by (1) are you complaining that the C++ standard library is too small? Anywhere you go, you will find libraries that work better with one platform or another.
In (2), you are describing implementations, not standards. If there is a reason to compile C or C++ to some sort of byte code, it could be done. C and C++ are normally cross-platform in the sense of recompiling for each platform, which isn't typically a big problem.
Yeah, and Java and C# have tons of pointers. If it isn't a native type in Java, it's a pointer type with enough syntax to make it not immediately obvious. Also, a for loop is semantically equivalent to some tests and gotos, so we can't program without gotos, right?
You can't do everything with references that you could do with a raw pointer. Semantically, a reference is the same as the object itself. Similarly, "this" is an rvalue, and therefore can't be changed. These are not the same as raw pointers.
If you can't enforce simple rules like that, your project is in serious trouble, no matter what language it's written in. Every language has its infelicities, and if you can't keep programmers away from them by whatever means you're not writing good software.
What I'm getting out of that is that you carefully constructed a string library that needs some conventions to be safe, and doesn't do complicated things because that gets buggy.
I'm not knocking your achievement, but you get most or all of that in C++ for free with simpler syntax. With C++, you get a lot of it in template format, not function-calling, and that might run faster. You don't need to use more C++ than that to get a significant benefit.
I can understand why you'd prefer Java. C++11 and the following standards make it a much different and easier-to-use language.
That's an awfully content-free posting to get (4, Interesting), given that it boils down to "I don't like C++ because it's complex". If you read Stroustrup's Design and Evolution book, you can actually find out why Stroustrup added what he did and rejected what he did.
The frightening thing is not that some people bought into that, but which people bought into it. I had a front-row seat of the start of the burst, making C++ repayment models for mortgages at the home mortgage arm of General Motors. Scary.
The ideology was mystical. Exactly who believed it is another question.
It's called authoritarianism, and exists all over the spectrum. The industrialists were somewhat freer than the US variety during WWII, under the War Production Board. Fascists tend to woo the industrialists and throw sops to the workers.
It's part of the mainstream of historical thought, not an inattention to history. Fascism included nationalism and capitalism. It often included the traditional religion. It was normally racist. These are primarily right-wing things. National Socialism, in particular, was hard right wing. The left is more socialist, as opposed to capitalist, It tends to be classist, as opposed to racist and/or nationalist. It tends to be anti-religion.
I'm getting real tired of this intellectually dishonest attempt to make right-wing politics look better at the expense of history.
Not equally.
If you can determine where the free() goes, you can solve the Halting Problem.