IIRC, accessing memory outside of a restricted area is undefined behavior, meaning that an implementation can do anything and remain conforming, and that a future standard could define some behavior without changing the set of valid C programs.
Trees are good. However, there's matters of scale. If we're going to produce 30 billion tons of CO2 per year, we need to plant 15 million sequoias a year. Unfortunately, the things are climate-sensitive, and we don't have good growing conditions for that many.
In a spherical economy of uniform density in a frictionless vacuum, we would see a rapid movement of capital into renewables (and, to be honest, we are). In the real world, things move more slowly.
Within a few billion years, the Sun will expand and likely engulf Earth. At any rate, it should blast all the atmosphere off the planet, drastically lowering the CO2 level.
Assuming you're using the same source khallow used, and khallow quoted it properly, we're putting about 32 billion tons of CO2 into the air each year. That's enough to raise the atmospheric content by 4 ppm. There are absorbing mechanisms, but I don't know how they're going to work. They're not doing a great job, as is shown by the current rise.
Assuming no significant loss of CO2 by other means, 4 ppm a year for 200 years is 800 ppm. Add that to the current 400 and you get 1200 ppm, So, keeping emissions what they are now for 200 years, we've got a good shot at 1000 ppm.
We're not nearly at dinosaur-era CO2 levels yet. However, the Sun is significantly brighter than it was back then (and will keep getting brighter - unless we do something about it, all the water will be boiled off Earth within a billion years), so it takes less carbon dioxide to hit a given temperature.
The people speaking out against the science behind the IPCC reports are doing bad science, since the evidence is on the side of the IPCC. Bad scientists should not be funded. There is no global scientific conspiracy, and anyone familiar with scientists will realize that. There is no way to keep people from publishing papers somewhere or other. If some scientists made the earthshaking discovery that the IPCC's conclusions are wrong, and could back it up with evidence and reasoning, they couldn't be silenced, and they'd be famous.
It used to be that 1998 was the warmest year on record, so dishonest people would say there was no warming since then, exploiting a statistical fluke. (1998 was an unusually warm year.) The "tell" here is that they use a specific number of years, such as the "18" here. Since it's been warmer than 1998 lately, the statement is not only deceptive but a flat-out lie.
In the meantime, we're still burning billions of tons of fossil fuels each year, and so the CO2 content of the atmosphere continues to rise. In fact, earlier in your post you claimed that emissions have been about 32 billion tons in 2013, 2014, and 2015. This is pretty significant when you realize that one part per million of CO2 is about 8 billion tons.
In other words, the last paragraph of your post was nothing but lies and aspersions, and you are either a liar or a fool.
There are fairly urgent problems with global warming, just not here. The unrest in the Middle East was partly due to food shortages that are probably caused (more or less) by global warming. By the time there are urgent problems with global warming in the developed world, it'll be too late to avoid catastrophe.
The problem with attributing things to global warming is that the climate changes are statistical in nature. Was the California drought just something that happens very rarely, or is it going to happen more frequently now? Hurricane Sandy was more destructive than it would have been with a lower sea level, and that's about all I can think of that's definitely a global warming event.
Global warming isn't going to end the human race. It's going to cause a whole lot of very severe problems, but the species will pull through, perhaps massively reduced in number.
Individual action on global warming won't do anything noticeable. I live in the US, and my personal contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is negligible. The only thing that will work is collective action, which I am willing to pay for and participate in.
Overpopulation is a solvable problem, given the ability to encourage societies to have decent education and health care and some measure of sexual equality. This will also work to reduce corruption. Poverty, destruction of arable land, and habitat destruction are all linked to climate change. Environmental pollution would be helped by a move from coal power to renewables, which oddly enough mitigates global warming. At least in the long run, this change will be good for the world economy as well.
Human societies do not normally adapt to the rapid climate changes we're facing. We've got cities in places where they've been for centuries, sometimes millennia. We have farming communities that have been doing roughly the same thing for centuries. Changes are coming faster than they've happened before. People are going to have to move, adapt, or die, and some places won't have what it takes to adapt for the number of people they've already got.
Sure, what's actually happening is really messy. However, wouldn't it be wise to figure that climate might go more or less where the physics suggests, and prepare for that?
The IPCC predictions for 2100 are pretty dire if we do nothing, and we're likely to hit a tipping point somewhere along the way if we don't do something about AGW. Your idea is to totally disregard the best scientific conclusions so far and wait until we're absolutely sure a catastrophe has happened before we start mitigating it, assuming that there's a significant chance that a large number of really smart people who devote their lives to studying climate might be more or less right about it.
You blithely disregard the best science available. You're not a skeptic, because a skeptic is one who's not convinced one way or another. You're prepared to act on the basis that Climate Science has to be wrong.
You're also making up that thing about proposed solutions. We don't have a complete solution yet, and some of the ones that have been proposed to mitigate things, such as increased use of renewable energy, are economically sensible even ignoring AGW.
What's happening is a scientific issue, and what it means is that we're warming up the surface of the planet very fast and we'll have very serious problems stemming from that. What we're gong to do about it is a political issue, but it's very unlikely to be helpful as long as so many politicians (at least in the US) deny the science.
So look at what happened when we had a Republican President with the same Republican Congress. We found a lot of new ways to spend trillions of dollars, and the deficit went way up.
No, you're detecting virtual photons. You're constantly pushed from your normal path through spacetime by electromagnetic repulsion between you and things like floors, the ground, chair seats, etc. What you know is that your chair is accelerating at about 9.8 m/s^2 relative to your unaccelerated path. What you can't detect by sitting on your ass is whether you're on a planet big enough to produce a significant acceleration field (involving gravitons, if there is such a thing), or in an accelerating spaceship (not involving gravitons), or maybe sitting in a very large centrifuge. Now, I'm fairly sure I'm on a planet of one Earth mass, and therefore I can infer that I'm under the influence of gravity and get a decent estimate of how much by sitting on my ass
Quite the contrary, but you'd need a background in physics and technology, and experience, to understand that observing gravity waves and conducting space exploration in general cannot help us to address a single pressing or practical problem here on Earth in the foreseeable future.
You have just described all forms of basic research, not just gravity waves and space exploration. There was no particular use for lasers when they were discovered, but last night I watched episodes of the 1960s Batman TV show by using one. There was no particular use for electricity when the Leyden jar was invented.
Now, as far as space exploration goes, we have solved some practical problems already, most obviously with communications and GPS satellites. I believe the idea of communication satellites is older than actual space exploration, but it was space exploration that pushed development of rockets that could put something in geosynchronous orbit. GPS satellites are a combination of space exploration and development in other areas. By the time we could realistically plan them, we already had proven ways of putting things into low earth orbit.
The problem with "for the foreseeable future" is that in many ways that's a pretty darn short time. I'm nearing retirement age, but "the foreseeable future" is still considerably shorter than my expected remaining lifespan.
When were the early electricity experiments done? When did electricity become seriously useful? Depending on the dates you assign, there's likely to be a century's worth of difference there, and Benjamin Franklin would have completely failed to expect most of the uses we put it to. When were the early gravity wave experiments done? What new stuff will we find out that works with gravity wave research by 2100 or 2150? I don't know.
You're suggesting that one in twelve potential welfare recipients can get away without it so they can spend their nonexistent money on drugs. I don't think that's the case.
I live in the US, and I've heard of utopian societies where filing taxes is not an onerous chore for the vast majority of the population. My wife and I make good money, and our finances are unstressed. We're not in the top 5%. I still get grouchy for a few days each year because of the hassle, and I use tax preparation software.
I actually agree somewhat on the war on drugs, but only unreasonable searches and seizures require a warrant with probable cause. Read the Fourth Amendment sometime.
You know where the apparatchiki come from? Regulations. The Social Security administration is highly efficient and effective with old-age pensions, since it's a matter of paying people money as long as they're alive, with no hassle. Any similar system would be as efficient. However, since people aren't rational in this country, a lot of effort goes into making sure nobody gets any welfare they're not entitled to, and that's where the apparatchiki live.
You seem to be thinking that the government can't have tax breaks that are conditional on something. There are tax breaks that are conditional on putting a child through school, for example. Why can't deductions over a certain amount call for drug testing? We're not making anyone submit to testing, only those who want extra deductions on their taxes.
And, if the poor person does that, odds are that the poor person will remain poor. The poor can't deal with financial shocks, because they don't have the money. The poor person is probably nominally working a 30-hour job at minimum wage, except that to keep the job the person has to work a lot of extra unpaid hours. That's not a way to get out of poverty.
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IIRC, accessing memory outside of a restricted area is undefined behavior, meaning that an implementation can do anything and remain conforming, and that a future standard could define some behavior without changing the set of valid C programs.
Trees are good. However, there's matters of scale. If we're going to produce 30 billion tons of CO2 per year, we need to plant 15 million sequoias a year. Unfortunately, the things are climate-sensitive, and we don't have good growing conditions for that many.
In a spherical economy of uniform density in a frictionless vacuum, we would see a rapid movement of capital into renewables (and, to be honest, we are). In the real world, things move more slowly.
Within a few billion years, the Sun will expand and likely engulf Earth. At any rate, it should blast all the atmosphere off the planet, drastically lowering the CO2 level.
Assuming you're using the same source khallow used, and khallow quoted it properly, we're putting about 32 billion tons of CO2 into the air each year. That's enough to raise the atmospheric content by 4 ppm. There are absorbing mechanisms, but I don't know how they're going to work. They're not doing a great job, as is shown by the current rise.
Assuming no significant loss of CO2 by other means, 4 ppm a year for 200 years is 800 ppm. Add that to the current 400 and you get 1200 ppm, So, keeping emissions what they are now for 200 years, we've got a good shot at 1000 ppm.
We're not nearly at dinosaur-era CO2 levels yet. However, the Sun is significantly brighter than it was back then (and will keep getting brighter - unless we do something about it, all the water will be boiled off Earth within a billion years), so it takes less carbon dioxide to hit a given temperature.
The people speaking out against the science behind the IPCC reports are doing bad science, since the evidence is on the side of the IPCC. Bad scientists should not be funded. There is no global scientific conspiracy, and anyone familiar with scientists will realize that. There is no way to keep people from publishing papers somewhere or other. If some scientists made the earthshaking discovery that the IPCC's conclusions are wrong, and could back it up with evidence and reasoning, they couldn't be silenced, and they'd be famous.
It used to be that 1998 was the warmest year on record, so dishonest people would say there was no warming since then, exploiting a statistical fluke. (1998 was an unusually warm year.) The "tell" here is that they use a specific number of years, such as the "18" here. Since it's been warmer than 1998 lately, the statement is not only deceptive but a flat-out lie.
In the meantime, we're still burning billions of tons of fossil fuels each year, and so the CO2 content of the atmosphere continues to rise. In fact, earlier in your post you claimed that emissions have been about 32 billion tons in 2013, 2014, and 2015. This is pretty significant when you realize that one part per million of CO2 is about 8 billion tons.
In other words, the last paragraph of your post was nothing but lies and aspersions, and you are either a liar or a fool.
There are fairly urgent problems with global warming, just not here. The unrest in the Middle East was partly due to food shortages that are probably caused (more or less) by global warming. By the time there are urgent problems with global warming in the developed world, it'll be too late to avoid catastrophe.
The problem with attributing things to global warming is that the climate changes are statistical in nature. Was the California drought just something that happens very rarely, or is it going to happen more frequently now? Hurricane Sandy was more destructive than it would have been with a lower sea level, and that's about all I can think of that's definitely a global warming event.
Global warming isn't going to end the human race. It's going to cause a whole lot of very severe problems, but the species will pull through, perhaps massively reduced in number.
Individual action on global warming won't do anything noticeable. I live in the US, and my personal contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is negligible. The only thing that will work is collective action, which I am willing to pay for and participate in.
Overpopulation is a solvable problem, given the ability to encourage societies to have decent education and health care and some measure of sexual equality. This will also work to reduce corruption. Poverty, destruction of arable land, and habitat destruction are all linked to climate change. Environmental pollution would be helped by a move from coal power to renewables, which oddly enough mitigates global warming. At least in the long run, this change will be good for the world economy as well.
Human societies do not normally adapt to the rapid climate changes we're facing. We've got cities in places where they've been for centuries, sometimes millennia. We have farming communities that have been doing roughly the same thing for centuries. Changes are coming faster than they've happened before. People are going to have to move, adapt, or die, and some places won't have what it takes to adapt for the number of people they've already got.
Sure, what's actually happening is really messy. However, wouldn't it be wise to figure that climate might go more or less where the physics suggests, and prepare for that?
The IPCC predictions for 2100 are pretty dire if we do nothing, and we're likely to hit a tipping point somewhere along the way if we don't do something about AGW. Your idea is to totally disregard the best scientific conclusions so far and wait until we're absolutely sure a catastrophe has happened before we start mitigating it, assuming that there's a significant chance that a large number of really smart people who devote their lives to studying climate might be more or less right about it.
You blithely disregard the best science available. You're not a skeptic, because a skeptic is one who's not convinced one way or another. You're prepared to act on the basis that Climate Science has to be wrong.
You're also making up that thing about proposed solutions. We don't have a complete solution yet, and some of the ones that have been proposed to mitigate things, such as increased use of renewable energy, are economically sensible even ignoring AGW.
What's happening is a scientific issue, and what it means is that we're warming up the surface of the planet very fast and we'll have very serious problems stemming from that. What we're gong to do about it is a political issue, but it's very unlikely to be helpful as long as so many politicians (at least in the US) deny the science.
So look at what happened when we had a Republican President with the same Republican Congress. We found a lot of new ways to spend trillions of dollars, and the deficit went way up.
No, you're detecting virtual photons. You're constantly pushed from your normal path through spacetime by electromagnetic repulsion between you and things like floors, the ground, chair seats, etc. What you know is that your chair is accelerating at about 9.8 m/s^2 relative to your unaccelerated path. What you can't detect by sitting on your ass is whether you're on a planet big enough to produce a significant acceleration field (involving gravitons, if there is such a thing), or in an accelerating spaceship (not involving gravitons), or maybe sitting in a very large centrifuge. Now, I'm fairly sure I'm on a planet of one Earth mass, and therefore I can infer that I'm under the influence of gravity and get a decent estimate of how much by sitting on my ass
You have just described all forms of basic research, not just gravity waves and space exploration. There was no particular use for lasers when they were discovered, but last night I watched episodes of the 1960s Batman TV show by using one. There was no particular use for electricity when the Leyden jar was invented.
Now, as far as space exploration goes, we have solved some practical problems already, most obviously with communications and GPS satellites. I believe the idea of communication satellites is older than actual space exploration, but it was space exploration that pushed development of rockets that could put something in geosynchronous orbit. GPS satellites are a combination of space exploration and development in other areas. By the time we could realistically plan them, we already had proven ways of putting things into low earth orbit.
The problem with "for the foreseeable future" is that in many ways that's a pretty darn short time. I'm nearing retirement age, but "the foreseeable future" is still considerably shorter than my expected remaining lifespan.
When were the early electricity experiments done? When did electricity become seriously useful? Depending on the dates you assign, there's likely to be a century's worth of difference there, and Benjamin Franklin would have completely failed to expect most of the uses we put it to. When were the early gravity wave experiments done? What new stuff will we find out that works with gravity wave research by 2100 or 2150? I don't know.
You're suggesting that one in twelve potential welfare recipients can get away without it so they can spend their nonexistent money on drugs. I don't think that's the case.
I live in the US, and I've heard of utopian societies where filing taxes is not an onerous chore for the vast majority of the population. My wife and I make good money, and our finances are unstressed. We're not in the top 5%. I still get grouchy for a few days each year because of the hassle, and I use tax preparation software.
I actually agree somewhat on the war on drugs, but only unreasonable searches and seizures require a warrant with probable cause. Read the Fourth Amendment sometime.
You know where the apparatchiki come from? Regulations. The Social Security administration is highly efficient and effective with old-age pensions, since it's a matter of paying people money as long as they're alive, with no hassle. Any similar system would be as efficient. However, since people aren't rational in this country, a lot of effort goes into making sure nobody gets any welfare they're not entitled to, and that's where the apparatchiki live.
You seem to be thinking that the government can't have tax breaks that are conditional on something. There are tax breaks that are conditional on putting a child through school, for example. Why can't deductions over a certain amount call for drug testing? We're not making anyone submit to testing, only those who want extra deductions on their taxes.
And, if the poor person does that, odds are that the poor person will remain poor. The poor can't deal with financial shocks, because they don't have the money. The poor person is probably nominally working a 30-hour job at minimum wage, except that to keep the job the person has to work a lot of extra unpaid hours. That's not a way to get out of poverty.
You have noticed, I hope, that welfare recipients have drug use rates far lower than the general population.