You are not alone with the droughts and deluge thing, the Atherton tablelands (up north) get about five meters of rain a year. The most severe downpour I have expenienced myself was about 25yrs ago in Eastern Victoria, 50mm in 20 minutes.
As a white Aussie living in Melbourne for 40+yrs I find nothing in the riots to be proud of. I can attest to the fact that Alan Jones spent a whole week on Sydney's talkback radio inciting those riots with lies and half-truths. Had it not been for his tireless racist diatribe and his organization of the "take back the beach" protest, none of this would have happened. If we need defending from anyone it would be against the minority of influencial far right nutjobs within our own society.
I agree with your point about rabid atheists but Stalin's reign of terror had about as much to do with Athesim as the KKK had to do with Christianity, or AQ has to do with Islam. The picures of Jesus hanging on people's walls were simply a competing icon to Stalin's manicured image. He wanted to be the "farther" and "saviour" of Russia and his propoganda machine swung into action putting pictures and statues of Stalin in the place of religious icons. Stalin was not an Atheist, he was a meglomaniac and master of public image who fancied himself as a God. Many of the people who died in the camps stubbornly refused to belive Stalin had anything to do with it.
Today you will also find that most people who claim to be Atheists do indeed have an "agenda" of promoting scientically based secular governments, personally I think that is a perfectly sensible thing to do.
I used to call myself an atheist but decided it was simply a religion in the negative, I realised that on some philosophical level everything is based on faith. The universe is almost entirely made up of hydrogen and ignorance. The glorious gas clouds seen in the Hubble pictures will be philosophising and chewing gum in a few billion years, my own consiousness has emerged from the interactions of normal matter and ended up ranting on slashdot. However, no matter how much religious awe I feel when looking at the heavens I still think that a god who "just is" clutters things up with redundant red tape and conflicting rules, for me it's much simpler to say the universe "just is" and attempt to demonstrate by my behaviour that religion does not have a monoploy on morals.
Melbourne is known for it's changeable weather, I have lived here for 40+yrs and the last few years have been "without a winter", this year you can taste the summer dust of jan-feb in the middle of springtime. However we did get a similar downpour, 1/4 of our annual rainfall in 36hrs during Feb last year (the middle of 2004-2005 summer), added something like 10% to our dam levels but I can't remember the last time they were over 70% (a regular occurence before the late 90's).
Yep, six months ago I would have agreed but there has been a remarkable turnaround lateley. I belive it was triggered by Bush and (more importantly?) Murdoch having recently both acknowledged AGW as a serious threat.
The "answer" that Bush, Murdoch, Howard and others are pushing is more nuclear and "clean coal". Clean coal does not yet exist so they can stall for time on that front by giving more corporate welfare to the polluters to study their own navels. When the stalling is no longer effective they envision moving into a millitarally enforced monopoly based on enriching uranium. The "trusworthy" countries will then sell fuel to "developing" and "untrustworthy" countries so they can build reactors instead of coal fired plants.
Australia is a major international exporter of both coal and yellowcake, our economy has always been based on the "dig it up and sell it" school of economics. The recent climate talks decensend into a NIMBY argument when the question of radioactive waste came up. But still, kudos to Blair and Kofi for their enthusiastic words over recent years.
My bet is the waste dump will go somewhere west of the Alice, where all those "unsustainable" aboriginal communites are. The sheer arrogance of labeling native tribes "unsustainable" after shoving them into tin huts is mind boggling. I also pity the stone age inhabitants of West Papua (aka: cannibals), thier pristine forests are being set up for two decades of legalalised rape./rant
There are too many stories that amount to nothing more than psudeo-scientific marketing spam, as you have so succinctly pointed out the summary is enough to debunk them.
Slashdot Bullsit Meter (SBM): I propose each story be displayed next to a thin vertical SBM, users can vote with either a lightbulb icon at the top or a steaming bullshit icon at the bottom. The benifit of a bullshit meter is that it would make reading the summary as redundant as reading TFA. Further, if you could sort stories by BS rating, you could pick out the best regardless of size. Of course this doesn't mean that there will be anything worth reading on slashdot but at least you could find that out faster.
I live in Australia, here are some recent anecdotes:
We are currently experiencing the "worst drought in 1000yrs", the Murray-Darling Basin has dried up, our major cities have permenant water restrictions and some rural towns are being abandoned. This years forecast grain harvest has been reduced by 50% (-12,000,000 Tonnes), our dairy herd has been culled by 20%, and half starved livestock have flooded the markets in expectation of an even drier summer.
We had a record heat wave in october (37C) followed by two cold snaps with snow falling on bushfires and hail the size of cricket balls. The unseasonal frost killed, apples, pears, grapes and other temperate fruit crops that flower in spring. Oh yeah, a cyclone wiped out our bannana crop earlier this year.
As for TFA: The Earth is not a fucking toaster, the last thing it needs is a "darkness knob".
I have been contracting as a developer for 15+yrs, I agree with the GP as to the multitude of O/S's in large corporations, the projects I currently look after compile on Windows, Linux, HPUX, Solaris and AIX.
I had a large customer the other day complaining that our sofware wouldn't work on two of his "older" servers. I scratched my head for a little while until I realised he was running NT4.
First of all nobody has predicted disaster to strike tommorow, now to your individual points:
Disruption of the gulf stream current - it has already slowed down, nobody expects it to stop.
Deep freeze in Europe - Is the same issue as the gulf stream.
Desertification of the US midwest - When is this supposed to happen, btw Australia is experiencing the "worst drought in 1000yrs", - score 1 for climatoligists.
US crop failures - same issue as the one above, so score another 1 for climatoligists since Australia's crop forcast has been halved (ie: they will loose 12 million tons of wheat this year)
More frequent/severe Atlantic hurricanes (were there any this year?) - one year is an anecdote although the pacific season this year was bad in S.China and Australia.
Inundation of coastal cities - Who said that would happen before 2050. btw: costal villages in Bangladesh have been pushed up to 5km inland due to rising sea levels - score another 1 for climatoligists.
Decline of coral reefs - Yep, by all accounts many are declining and may be gone in under 20yrs - score another 1 for climatoligists.
Disruption of Antarctic ice shelves - Perhaps you missed the ice shelf that fell to bits on the Antartic peninsuala - score another 1 for climatoligists. BTW: nobody predicts the imminent collapse of the larger shelves.
Pandemic skin cancer outbreaks (remember the ozone crisis?) - This is like saying the Y2K problem was a hoax because nothing bad happened. In case you hadn't noticed CFC's have been banned worldwide for over a decade and have nothing to do with GW.
Some other predictions that have panned-out in the climatoligists favour, melting of glaciers, a 40% reduction in the volume of ice in the north pole, hot-spots such as the Antartic penninsula and greenland's coastal areas av. +3C compared to gloabl av. +1C, increased precipitation in central greenland and east antartic, permafrost receding northward by 100km, earlier on set of spring and delayed onset of winter (about 2 weeks each so far), migration of species to new territories, massive increase of freshwater from Russian rivers entering the Artic sea.
Of course the outstanding bit of predictive work was done by Mann and his "hockeystick graph" in the early eighties, correctly predicting the increase in global average temps for almost 30yrs now!
As for peak-oil predictions an article in scientific american in the mid-nineties predicted that mining oil sands and extracting the oil would be economical in 2010 and oil would reach $100/barrel, guess what they are minning in Canada? BTW: Many of my climate claims above are backed up by peer-reviewed research available here, so go ahead tell me again how thousands of scientists are all fools becuse you can't be bothered to actually read what they say.
Just out of curiosity do you have air-bags and/or seatbelts in your car?
Yep, operations research, cryptography, matrix algebra, stats, logic and some physical stuff like trig and calculus were all in my CS degree (89-91). I don't remeber much about the formulas but it has served me well to know what can and can't be done and why.
Slashdot Mirror
"Rape is punishable by death in Islam"
Yep, in some parts they regularly execute the victims.
You are not alone with the droughts and deluge thing, the Atherton tablelands (up north) get about five meters of rain a year. The most severe downpour I have expenienced myself was about 25yrs ago in Eastern Victoria, 50mm in 20 minutes.
As a white Aussie living in Melbourne for 40+yrs I find nothing in the riots to be proud of. I can attest to the fact that Alan Jones spent a whole week on Sydney's talkback radio inciting those riots with lies and half-truths. Had it not been for his tireless racist diatribe and his organization of the "take back the beach" protest, none of this would have happened. If we need defending from anyone it would be against the minority of influencial far right nutjobs within our own society.
I agree with your point about rabid atheists but Stalin's reign of terror had about as much to do with Athesim as the KKK had to do with Christianity, or AQ has to do with Islam. The picures of Jesus hanging on people's walls were simply a competing icon to Stalin's manicured image. He wanted to be the "farther" and "saviour" of Russia and his propoganda machine swung into action putting pictures and statues of Stalin in the place of religious icons. Stalin was not an Atheist, he was a meglomaniac and master of public image who fancied himself as a God. Many of the people who died in the camps stubbornly refused to belive Stalin had anything to do with it.
Today you will also find that most people who claim to be Atheists do indeed have an "agenda" of promoting scientically based secular governments, personally I think that is a perfectly sensible thing to do.
I used to call myself an atheist but decided it was simply a religion in the negative, I realised that on some philosophical level everything is based on faith. The universe is almost entirely made up of hydrogen and ignorance. The glorious gas clouds seen in the Hubble pictures will be philosophising and chewing gum in a few billion years, my own consiousness has emerged from the interactions of normal matter and ended up ranting on slashdot. However, no matter how much religious awe I feel when looking at the heavens I still think that a god who "just is" clutters things up with redundant red tape and conflicting rules, for me it's much simpler to say the universe "just is" and attempt to demonstrate by my behaviour that religion does not have a monoploy on morals.
"Oh, wait, we don't have a clue about any of that..."
Just because you don't have a clue does not mean everyone else is similarly clueless.
Sorry to answer twice, here is a sattelite picture of the downpour.
That's no cockroach, that's just grandad.
Melbourne is known for it's changeable weather, I have lived here for 40+yrs and the last few years have been "without a winter", this year you can taste the summer dust of jan-feb in the middle of springtime. However we did get a similar downpour, 1/4 of our annual rainfall in 36hrs during Feb last year (the middle of 2004-2005 summer), added something like 10% to our dam levels but I can't remember the last time they were over 70% (a regular occurence before the late 90's).
Yep, six months ago I would have agreed but there has been a remarkable turnaround lateley. I belive it was triggered by Bush and (more importantly?) Murdoch having recently both acknowledged AGW as a serious threat.
/rant
The "answer" that Bush, Murdoch, Howard and others are pushing is more nuclear and "clean coal". Clean coal does not yet exist so they can stall for time on that front by giving more corporate welfare to the polluters to study their own navels. When the stalling is no longer effective they envision moving into a millitarally enforced monopoly based on enriching uranium. The "trusworthy" countries will then sell fuel to "developing" and "untrustworthy" countries so they can build reactors instead of coal fired plants.
Australia is a major international exporter of both coal and yellowcake, our economy has always been based on the "dig it up and sell it" school of economics. The recent climate talks decensend into a NIMBY argument when the question of radioactive waste came up. But still, kudos to Blair and Kofi for their enthusiastic words over recent years.
My bet is the waste dump will go somewhere west of the Alice, where all those "unsustainable" aboriginal communites are. The sheer arrogance of labeling native tribes "unsustainable" after shoving them into tin huts is mind boggling. I also pity the stone age inhabitants of West Papua (aka: cannibals), thier pristine forests are being set up for two decades of legalalised rape.
There are too many stories that amount to nothing more than psudeo-scientific marketing spam, as you have so succinctly pointed out the summary is enough to debunk them.
Slashdot Bullsit Meter (SBM): I propose each story be displayed next to a thin vertical SBM, users can vote with either a lightbulb icon at the top or a steaming bullshit icon at the bottom. The benifit of a bullshit meter is that it would make reading the summary as redundant as reading TFA. Further, if you could sort stories by BS rating, you could pick out the best regardless of size. Of course this doesn't mean that there will be anything worth reading on slashdot but at least you could find that out faster.
Ruddock has been pushing these copyright reforms. It makes my blood run cold when the architect of the pacific solution wants to "reform" anything.
I'm also from Melb. The sulphur thing is not a new idea, it would be about as effective as the darkness knob on a cheap toaster.
Good grief, where the hell have you been. I thought that level of ignorance was peculiar to the 1990's.
Weather != Climate: Climate is the long term statistics of weather.
Computer models: The computer chip that allows you to display your ignorance would not be possible without computer models.
Bullshit, everyone knows clouds are red!.
I live in Australia, here are some recent anecdotes:
We are currently experiencing the "worst drought in 1000yrs", the Murray-Darling Basin has dried up, our major cities have permenant water restrictions and some rural towns are being abandoned. This years forecast grain harvest has been reduced by 50% (-12,000,000 Tonnes), our dairy herd has been culled by 20%, and half starved livestock have flooded the markets in expectation of an even drier summer.
We had a record heat wave in october (37C) followed by two cold snaps with snow falling on bushfires and hail the size of cricket balls. The unseasonal frost killed, apples, pears, grapes and other temperate fruit crops that flower in spring. Oh yeah, a cyclone wiped out our bannana crop earlier this year.
As for TFA: The Earth is not a fucking toaster, the last thing it needs is a "darkness knob".
"I love it when physicists, computer guys..."
I love it when art snobs think their opinion matterrs.
I agree, it's a false dichotomy. The "algorithm" for critical thinking is useless when there is no "data" to think about.
Irony: The fact that your bullshit detector is as broken as the collage idiots in TFA.
I won't bother arguing with you about a crackpot such as Lomborg, plenty of others have done a better job than I could.
True, I haven't seen (or heard of) a Xenix installation for quite a while now.
I have been contracting as a developer for 15+yrs, I agree with the GP as to the multitude of O/S's in large corporations, the projects I currently look after compile on Windows, Linux, HPUX, Solaris and AIX.
I had a large customer the other day complaining that our sofware wouldn't work on two of his "older" servers. I scratched my head for a little while until I realised he was running NT4.
First of all nobody has predicted disaster to strike tommorow, now to your individual points:
Disruption of the gulf stream current - it has already slowed down, nobody expects it to stop.
Deep freeze in Europe - Is the same issue as the gulf stream.
Desertification of the US midwest - When is this supposed to happen, btw Australia is experiencing the "worst drought in 1000yrs", - score 1 for climatoligists.
US crop failures - same issue as the one above, so score another 1 for climatoligists since Australia's crop forcast has been halved (ie: they will loose 12 million tons of wheat this year)
More frequent/severe Atlantic hurricanes (were there any this year?) - one year is an anecdote although the pacific season this year was bad in S.China and Australia.
Inundation of coastal cities - Who said that would happen before 2050. btw: costal villages in Bangladesh have been pushed up to 5km inland due to rising sea levels - score another 1 for climatoligists.
Decline of coral reefs - Yep, by all accounts many are declining and may be gone in under 20yrs - score another 1 for climatoligists.
Disruption of Antarctic ice shelves - Perhaps you missed the ice shelf that fell to bits on the Antartic peninsuala - score another 1 for climatoligists. BTW: nobody predicts the imminent collapse of the larger shelves.
Pandemic skin cancer outbreaks (remember the ozone crisis?) - This is like saying the Y2K problem was a hoax because nothing bad happened. In case you hadn't noticed CFC's have been banned worldwide for over a decade and have nothing to do with GW.
Some other predictions that have panned-out in the climatoligists favour, melting of glaciers, a 40% reduction in the volume of ice in the north pole, hot-spots such as the Antartic penninsula and greenland's coastal areas av. +3C compared to gloabl av. +1C, increased precipitation in central greenland and east antartic, permafrost receding northward by 100km, earlier on set of spring and delayed onset of winter (about 2 weeks each so far), migration of species to new territories, massive increase of freshwater from Russian rivers entering the Artic sea.
Of course the outstanding bit of predictive work was done by Mann and his "hockeystick graph" in the early eighties, correctly predicting the increase in global average temps for almost 30yrs now!
As for peak-oil predictions an article in scientific american in the mid-nineties predicted that mining oil sands and extracting the oil would be economical in 2010 and oil would reach $100/barrel, guess what they are minning in Canada? BTW: Many of my climate claims above are backed up by peer-reviewed research available here, so go ahead tell me again how thousands of scientists are all fools becuse you can't be bothered to actually read what they say.
Just out of curiosity do you have air-bags and/or seatbelts in your car?
Stop watching Fox and go and talk to real people.
Nice attempt at a flame but your vocabulary sucks. Grab a dictonary and look up the words "irony", "religion", "perfect" and "science".
Yep, operations research, cryptography, matrix algebra, stats, logic and some physical stuff like trig and calculus were all in my CS degree (89-91). I don't remeber much about the formulas but it has served me well to know what can and can't be done and why.
"What effect on the rest of the world does the death of 30% of Botswana have?"
The plight of the poor and downtrodden is the "Shakespear's spot" of my soul, what about you?