Of course Edge is struggling, its not yet got a good plugin system, and by extension no decent ad blocker yet.
Actually, it does have extensions, albeit just a tiny selection (although it does include Adblock Plus). That said, even going to a page without ads I still find Edge to be an appallingly slow browser. I just can't stand to use it. It is slow to load, slow to open even simply web pages, and it lacks basic features that every single desktop browser has like F11 to enter full screen mode. (Didn't that start on Internet Explorer?)
If I ever have to open something in a browser that isn't one of the other three that I have loaded, I always choose Internet Explorer rather than Edge. I'll give them credit for trying to shake off the problems that IE had, but I consider Edge to be version 0.1 and not yet ready for real use.
It's just an incredibly stupid and embarrassingly dated name to use. Microsoft is always about 10 years late on everything and when they try to be "hip", they just expose what huge dorks and losers they are.
So what name for a browser do you think they would be allowed to use? Of all the dumb and annoying things that Microsoft has done, choosing the name Edge is not one of them. I think that this is a case of wanting to find fault in absolutely everything that Microsoft does whether they deserve it or not.
I find it particularly confusing how a game rated "Mostly Negative" still had the highest sales revenue.
Maybe it is because a significant portion of owners have not played the game yet. There are a lot of gamers who buy more games than they can play (especially indie titles). If you already have a large backlog of games and then you hear reports that the game hasn't delivered on all the features they claimed it would have, then it isn't a problem to put it on your backlog and wait for future patches to improve the gameplay wasting time on a half-finished game.
Now if you don't mind, I must go and try this Half Life 2 that they came out with. I hear that it's going to be the next big thing!
Im going with steamOS being the pusher, and valve's clout behind it.
I think that the reason is more simple than that. Steam got a client on Linux before SteamOS became a thing. Ever since then, the number of Linux games on Steam has doubled each year. SteamOS got a lot of press (and I am sure that has had some effect), but just offering an easy way to sell and install Linux games made the platform more viable for the smaller developers.
Add to this the ease to develop for Linux by just selecting another target platform with the game engines (which also now have free versions). Where you would once have to make a carefully considered decision to support the OS, now it is almost a no-brainer. You don't have to be an expert in porting games to Linux. You don't have to deal with the complexity of installing to different flavours of Linux. You don't have to make your own store (or use some lesser known one) to be able to sell to gamers on Linux.
If SteamOS had been a driving factor in all this, then surely Value would highlight its use on the Steam Survey. Instead, it is an unlisted also-ran in the already tiny proportion of gamers that use Linux. This small number of users is why it has to be so easy for developers to be able to support the OS, as there simply aren't enough gamers on it to make it worth the expense of much more than ticking an extra box on their development system to add support for Linux.
Of course not. A funding agency doesn't keep funding research into areas that don't need it.
But as I said, there would be a whole new realm of climate science to study if something was found that could disprove all the existing science that we have. There would definitely be a need for more funding. How do you think that we found that global warming was happening without having a goal of needing to save the world? It was that pure science happens even without a goal. You only need to look at the Ig Nobel Prize winners to see the kind of things that get funding that are not aimed at saving the world.
What evidence do you have that their funding would stop? You have none; it's just your assumption.
Twenty five years working in academic research funded by federal and private grants, seeing what does get funded, what doesn't get funded, and what loses funding.
I simply don't believe that for a second. If you have spoken to academics you know that they genuinely believe that global warming is real and poses a danger to our way of life. If they were so cynically and fraudulently manipulating the science to get funding, then why don't more of them take advantage of the money that places like the Heartland Institute are willing to spread around to scientists who are willing to write papers denying climate change? If it is all just one big con, then why is what those small few who do "heroically" get paid by the conservative groups who represent big business produce such woeful science. Surely if they have truth on their side then it should be easy to pick holes in the massive amount of climate science that is out there?
I suppose I am being unfair there. Deniers and those with vested interest have actually done proper science. For example, Exxon did early work in this field until management shut it all down in the 90s, but that work still agreed with the other science being done at the time despite the different funding sources. Also the Koch Brothers funded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project run by skeptic Richard Muller. So why is it that even when a study is divorced from traditional funding sources and is paid for by some well-known deniers, it still confirms what the other scientists say? Richard Muller went from being the darling of the deniers (because he publicly said that he doubted the science) to become a reviled pariah who will never get funding from the conservative organizations again because he was willing to risk his funding source to publish a study that concurred with the overwhelming science of the link between CO2 and warming as well as its human source.
Over the years, the IPCC has been shown to have made a number of mistakes. Virtually ever single time this has been pointed out, it has been done by a scientist, or by a new study that has disproved an old one.
If you really want to provide evidence that the entire scientific community of completely corrupt, you have to provide more than just "[I have talked] with program managers who have the responsibility to make sure the limited budget their programs have gets distributed to important research". You need some actual evidence. Fortunately, it shouldn't be hard. There have been an enormous amount of emails leaked from climate scientists, so there has to be something that proves that scientists have defrauded the entire world for their own self-interests. And this has long been a hot issue (no pun intended) that climate science must attract idealists who want to save the world. That means there must be quite a lot of disillusioned, young scientists who, when confronted with the alleged rampant corruption in their field, have become whistle-blowers who blow the lid of this entire scam. Surely you could quote one of those people.
Surely you have something better than "It's true because I know that it's true".
And it also isn't producing endless pronouncements of The End Of Days with no concrete solutions for avoiding it. With AGW/GCC, we get an endless string of:
THE END IS NIGH!
What do we do about it?...THE END IS NIGH!
That's an utter lie. Do you have no shame?
Have you heard anyone mention carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes, incentives for industry to reduce their carbon footprint, the move to cleaner power sources like wind/solar/nuclear, international agreements to cap carbon emissions, creation of carbon sinks to offset emissions, reducing meat intake to avoid all those farting cows, promoting the construction of sustainable buildings including homes with eaves and intelligent ventilation to reduce the reliance on artificial heating & cooling, the use of locally produced goods to avoid transporting them over long distances, etc.
There is an entire third of the IPCC report devoted to the Mitigation of Climate Change. Here is what the report says that means:
Climate Change Mitigation is a "human intervention to reduce the
sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases" (GHG) (See Glossary
(Annex I)). The ultimate goal of mitigation (per Article 2 of the
UNFCCC) is preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with
the climate system within a time frame to allow ecosystems to adapt,
to ensure food production is not threatened and to enable economic
development to proceed in a sustainable manner.
Where will their next grant come from, and for what research, if they disprove one of biggest crises in the last few decades?
The grant would come from the same place that they had before. What evidence do you have that their funding would stop? You have none; it's just your assumption.
As long as the science is done properly and doesn't collapse under scrutiny, the fame (and the fact that the scientists would have to have opened up a whole new aspect to climate science) would undoubtedly ensure their funding for quite some time. Universities and research groups don't judge a scientist's work by what their conclusions say. They judge their worth by the number of citations they receive. It's a poor practice really, but it would mean that such a highly controversial and ground-breaking finding would be used as a basis for a lot of new research; first to replicate the findings and then to study it further to find out how it relates to all the other research that has been done.
If climate change is disproved, it will be a huge boon to the scientists.
Scientific method doesn't required finding the One True Source for a phenomena when one disproves a prior hypothesis for the cause
Then who do they give Nobel prizes to, if not those who have made revolutionary discoveries? Sure, they don't just take the word of one person, but they also don't forget who came up with it first.
Yes, it's correct. It might surprise you, but there really isn't a grand oil funded conspiracy. The grant money you get if you toe the party line is by orders of magnitude bigger than if you dare being a contrarian.
funding for high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message. At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals, but we will consider expanding it, if funding can be found.
Linking to wikipedia marks one out as intellectually deficient.
Do you have a citation to back up this claim? You might think that linking to Wikipedia may be bad (even though this is not a controversial topic), but providing no links at all just makes you a time-wasting troll.
Did they just download an old MSResearch paper and scratch out "By Microsoft" and crayon "By Apple" over it?
No. They just got a pair of scissors and rounded the page corners. They just hope that everyone looks at the stylish paper and ignores the "By Microsoft".
AMOUNT or degree of climate change is not capable of establishing that a cause of a change is due to humans. You think that CO2 is the only thing released into the atmosphere, and Humans are the only things affecting the composition of the atmosphere and dissipation of sunlight/energy?
Really? On one had we have mountains of theories and studies filled with facts & figures, tables & graphs, predictions & observations; all of which are summarised in the IPCC reports. On the other hand, we have an unverified claim based on.... what, your gut feeling??
Large volcanic eruptions are completely natural and can have a huge impact for centuries.
What makes you think that scientists haven't thought of the influence of volcanoes? Oh wait, they have:
Volcanoes produce abrupt climate responses on short time scales. The surface cooling effect of the stratospheric aerosols, the main climatic forcing factor, decays in one to three years after an eruption due to the lifetime of the aerosols in the stratosphere. It is possible for one large volcano or a series of large volcanic eruptions to produce climate responses on longer time scales, especially in the subsurface region of the ocean (Delworth et al., 2005; Gleckler et al., 2006b).
As you see, the main climatic forcing factor of volcanoes is to cool the surface, and it usually dissipates relatively quickly. That is because it prevents the heat from the sun hitting the surface, which is the opposite of the greenhouse effect. Of course, volcanoes also release greenhouse gases like CO2, but human emissions dwarf those of volcanoes. A few years ago when that volcano in Iceland erupted and shut down airline flights across Europe, it actually have a positive effect on the climate because the amount of greenhouse gases emitted were offset by the savings caused by shutting down all the airlines. Also, from the link above:
Scientists tracking the effects of the major 1991 eruption of the Philippines' Mt. Pinatubo found that the overall effect of the blast was to cool the surface of the Earth globally by some 0.5 degrees Celsius a year later, even though rising human greenhouse gas emissions and an El Nino event caused some surface warming during the 1991-1993 study period.
First of all by default the assumption should not be No man-made factor at all; the assumption should be No major new man-made factor, or No conclusively man-made major influence.
That is a good assumption, and it was one that the scientists had when the idea that our emissions could enhance the natural greenhouse effect was first proposed 120 years ago. It was either dismissed or assumed that this would be a benefit. As the decades went by, the accumulation of evidence and our understanding of the scientific principles have convinced those experts that not only is this happening, but it will not be an overall benefit. If you want to come in now and assume that it isn't happening, then you are 120 years late.
Over that period, our technology has progressed so that much of our lives is dependent on using power that generates greenhouse gases. Over that period, the human race has nearly quadrupled in size. We went from just under 2 billion to 7.5 billion people. Is it really so hard to believe that all those people using all that power would be unable to affect the environment in which we live?
Skepticism against some theory which has been inadequately proposed does not require proof.
When that skepticism goes against established scientific understanding then yes, it does require proof. You might think that the theory has been inadequately pr
No, video professionals used Betacam, which is not the same as Betamax. See the Wikipedia entry:
Although there is a superficial similarity between Betamax and Betacam in that they use the same tape cassette, they are really quite different formats. Betamax records relatively low resolution video using a heterodyne color recording system and only two recording heads, while Betacam uses four heads to record in component format, at a much higher linear tape speed of 10.15 cm/s (3.99606 in./s) compared with Betamax's 1.87 cm/s (0.7362205 in./s), resulting in much higher video and audio quality.
Beta was better than VHS too. Who won that war again?
The one with the longer running time that could actually fit an entire movie on a single tape when the formats were originally released. The cheaper one. The one that was licensed to any manufacturer who wanted it rather than just a single supplier. Which format had all that? Not the "better" Betamax. While Beta had a slightly better picture quality, it lost out in every other way to VHS.
Once again, Sony had a great product, but was ultimately hampered by the fact that it was Sony.
At this point, that is still in the realms of science fiction. And if you can change the climate to such an extent, any mistake could cause absolutely catestrophic effects that would be completely irresponsible. Maybe one day we will have to knowledge to manipulate the environment like this, but that won't be until long after the time that we need to do something about climate change.
Unfortunately the people who actually study this sort of thing full time have looked at the numbers and found that this isn't the case regarding climate change. The warming that we are experiencing exceeds the rate that could happen with just natural variance. If you want to convince anyone there is no man-made factor to climate change then you will need to come under with some compelling figures to prove it. You can't just claim that it is a fact without any evidence.
You also need to explain how it is that all the CO2 that we know we are releasing into the atmosphere and that we know is accumulating there is not having the effect on temperature that the physics says that it will.
The problem is that on one side you have those who yell with absolute certainty that they are right, while on the other side there are scientists with their margins-of-error and weasel-words like "may" and "could". I can understand the attraction of believing the one who sounds the most confident, even if they don't have the facts to back up their opinions.
That seems reasonable. Geoengineering should be treated with skepticism. I consider it to be on the same level as clean coal. It would be a great it could work, but it would only ever be a band-aid solution and no substitute for actually reducing the emissions in the first place. And you don't want to deploy some not-well-tested solution simply because some politician wants a quick fix to look like they are doing something (left) or wants to avoid making real changes that could cost their industry buddies money (right).
I thought our magnetic field was caused by our molten iron core. Which is not something to undergo rapid changes.
It is called Geomagnetic reversal. The cause is still up for debate, but the magnetic field is produced precisely because the molten core is not static. Have a look at the Wikipedia page for a summary of the phenomenon.
You are mistaken about all of that. Current warming is decidedly NOT within the limits and extents of natural variation. The hockey stick graph was not "clearly untrue" and has been supported by more than two dozen reconstructions. The Medieval Warm Period was not a global phenomena and is therefore not comparable. Even if it was global, it still doesn't prove that the current warming is not the result of the greenhouse gases that we produce. That would be the same as saying the since people died before the invention of the gun then being shot won't kill you. Your opinion that the Medieval Warm Period has any relevance here is really down to the likes of Willie Soon, who has since been found to have received money from vested interests like Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute; a fact that he forgets to mention when he publishes papers on this subject.
If that is the basis of your claim then I stand by my statement that you are inferring the media's cover-up of this based on faulty assumptions.
Unfortunately, this is about the most on-topic post for this story so far! Now I better go and bury my magnetic pillow. It's a worry, because it stimulates the blood flow to my brain and without it I won't believe in homeopathy.
Nobody has ever said that it is only man who is causing climate change
Actually the tsunami of climate change bollocks in the media and on most websites 24/7 implies precisely that.
No, you inferred it; they didn't imply it.
Nobody talks about natural variation at all.
What would you like them to say about it? It's not like we can petition the world to stop changing. However, the rate that the world is warming is way above what might occur naturally. Just because the climate could change naturally doesn't mean that we should be make it worse. Besides, don't deniers like to say that global warming is good because we should actually be moving into an ice age and that this warming actually stops that? You can't have it both ways! Is the "natural" climate change supposed to be getting hotter or colder?
Ah, no they don't. If your entire proof is to ignore the actual temperature readings completely then you can hardly claim that this debunks what the scientists say about the role of greenhouse gases on the climate. You also can't link to an article that claims a link between sunspots and evaporation (based on only six years of observations - don't deniers say that 150 years of records is not enough time??) as proof that it is the Earth's magnetic field "letting things in". How would changes in our magnetic field affect the number of sunspots?
Sorry, but cherry-picking your data just isn't good enough. Why ignore temperature readings? In the crucial graph that "proves" the sunspots link, why does it only cover only a few years. The pan evaporation graph states that an average of 93 weather stations were used. That would only cover the mainland United States; certainly not global readings! That's a small area in a small timeframe recording just one data point. That proves nothing.
Wow. I had considered coming here to joke about whether the anti-science deniers would come out of the woodwork to claim that the magnetic field wasn't changing at all and they were just after funding, but it looks like the bullshitters are still fixated on climate change.
that is equally as important as co2, but climate change pushers put all the burden on man.
We can't change the magnetic field (as far as we know), but we can change what we do to the environment. Nobody has ever said that it is only man who is causing climate change, but only man can actually do something about it.
i'm no climate change denier...
Yes you are
i just know ther is way more to this than the gov't and most gov't funded scientists pushing the man made global warming agenda would lead you to believe. follow the $.
The problem with that theory is that when the deniers fund their own study, it also comes to the same conclusion; that climate change is real and that the carbon dioxide curve is the best match to global warming. So following the $ is meaningless, unless you can show evidence that anyone has falsified their climate research to get funding. If not, then there is no basis to the corruption claim. With all the leaked emails in the world, and the massive number of people who would have to collude to perpetrate a hoax, it's amazing that nobody has found any proof to this claim. And that is despite the efforts of the well-funded denial groups out there. Sure, follow the $!
Slashdot Mirror
Of course Edge is struggling, its not yet got a good plugin system, and by extension no decent ad blocker yet.
Actually, it does have extensions, albeit just a tiny selection (although it does include Adblock Plus). That said, even going to a page without ads I still find Edge to be an appallingly slow browser. I just can't stand to use it. It is slow to load, slow to open even simply web pages, and it lacks basic features that every single desktop browser has like F11 to enter full screen mode. (Didn't that start on Internet Explorer?)
If I ever have to open something in a browser that isn't one of the other three that I have loaded, I always choose Internet Explorer rather than Edge. I'll give them credit for trying to shake off the problems that IE had, but I consider Edge to be version 0.1 and not yet ready for real use.
It's just an incredibly stupid and embarrassingly dated name to use. Microsoft is always about 10 years late on everything and when they try to be "hip", they just expose what huge dorks and losers they are.
So what name for a browser do you think they would be allowed to use? Of all the dumb and annoying things that Microsoft has done, choosing the name Edge is not one of them. I think that this is a case of wanting to find fault in absolutely everything that Microsoft does whether they deserve it or not.
I find it particularly confusing how a game rated "Mostly Negative" still had the highest sales revenue.
Maybe it is because a significant portion of owners have not played the game yet. There are a lot of gamers who buy more games than they can play (especially indie titles). If you already have a large backlog of games and then you hear reports that the game hasn't delivered on all the features they claimed it would have, then it isn't a problem to put it on your backlog and wait for future patches to improve the gameplay wasting time on a half-finished game.
Now if you don't mind, I must go and try this Half Life 2 that they came out with. I hear that it's going to be the next big thing!
Im going with steamOS being the pusher, and valve's clout behind it.
I think that the reason is more simple than that. Steam got a client on Linux before SteamOS became a thing. Ever since then, the number of Linux games on Steam has doubled each year. SteamOS got a lot of press (and I am sure that has had some effect), but just offering an easy way to sell and install Linux games made the platform more viable for the smaller developers.
Add to this the ease to develop for Linux by just selecting another target platform with the game engines (which also now have free versions). Where you would once have to make a carefully considered decision to support the OS, now it is almost a no-brainer. You don't have to be an expert in porting games to Linux. You don't have to deal with the complexity of installing to different flavours of Linux. You don't have to make your own store (or use some lesser known one) to be able to sell to gamers on Linux.
If SteamOS had been a driving factor in all this, then surely Value would highlight its use on the Steam Survey. Instead, it is an unlisted also-ran in the already tiny proportion of gamers that use Linux. This small number of users is why it has to be so easy for developers to be able to support the OS, as there simply aren't enough gamers on it to make it worth the expense of much more than ticking an extra box on their development system to add support for Linux.
Of course not. A funding agency doesn't keep funding research into areas that don't need it.
But as I said, there would be a whole new realm of climate science to study if something was found that could disprove all the existing science that we have. There would definitely be a need for more funding. How do you think that we found that global warming was happening without having a goal of needing to save the world? It was that pure science happens even without a goal. You only need to look at the Ig Nobel Prize winners to see the kind of things that get funding that are not aimed at saving the world.
What evidence do you have that their funding would stop? You have none; it's just your assumption.
Twenty five years working in academic research funded by federal and private grants, seeing what does get funded, what doesn't get funded, and what loses funding.
I simply don't believe that for a second. If you have spoken to academics you know that they genuinely believe that global warming is real and poses a danger to our way of life. If they were so cynically and fraudulently manipulating the science to get funding, then why don't more of them take advantage of the money that places like the Heartland Institute are willing to spread around to scientists who are willing to write papers denying climate change? If it is all just one big con, then why is what those small few who do "heroically" get paid by the conservative groups who represent big business produce such woeful science. Surely if they have truth on their side then it should be easy to pick holes in the massive amount of climate science that is out there?
I suppose I am being unfair there. Deniers and those with vested interest have actually done proper science. For example, Exxon did early work in this field until management shut it all down in the 90s, but that work still agreed with the other science being done at the time despite the different funding sources. Also the Koch Brothers funded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project run by skeptic Richard Muller. So why is it that even when a study is divorced from traditional funding sources and is paid for by some well-known deniers, it still confirms what the other scientists say? Richard Muller went from being the darling of the deniers (because he publicly said that he doubted the science) to become a reviled pariah who will never get funding from the conservative organizations again because he was willing to risk his funding source to publish a study that concurred with the overwhelming science of the link between CO2 and warming as well as its human source.
Over the years, the IPCC has been shown to have made a number of mistakes. Virtually ever single time this has been pointed out, it has been done by a scientist, or by a new study that has disproved an old one.
If you really want to provide evidence that the entire scientific community of completely corrupt, you have to provide more than just "[I have talked] with program managers who have the responsibility to make sure the limited budget their programs have gets distributed to important research". You need some actual evidence. Fortunately, it shouldn't be hard. There have been an enormous amount of emails leaked from climate scientists, so there has to be something that proves that scientists have defrauded the entire world for their own self-interests. And this has long been a hot issue (no pun intended) that climate science must attract idealists who want to save the world. That means there must be quite a lot of disillusioned, young scientists who, when confronted with the alleged rampant corruption in their field, have become whistle-blowers who blow the lid of this entire scam. Surely you could quote one of those people.
Surely you have something better than "It's true because I know that it's true".
I think your quote proved my point well.
Then you are simply not paying attention.
And it also isn't producing endless pronouncements of The End Of Days with no concrete solutions for avoiding it. With AGW/GCC, we get an endless string of: ...THE END IS NIGH!
THE END IS NIGH!
What do we do about it?
That's an utter lie. Do you have no shame?
Have you heard anyone mention carbon taxes, emissions trading schemes, incentives for industry to reduce their carbon footprint, the move to cleaner power sources like wind/solar/nuclear, international agreements to cap carbon emissions, creation of carbon sinks to offset emissions, reducing meat intake to avoid all those farting cows, promoting the construction of sustainable buildings including homes with eaves and intelligent ventilation to reduce the reliance on artificial heating & cooling, the use of locally produced goods to avoid transporting them over long distances, etc.
There is an entire third of the IPCC report devoted to the Mitigation of Climate Change. Here is what the report says that means:
Where will their next grant come from, and for what research, if they disprove one of biggest crises in the last few decades?
The grant would come from the same place that they had before. What evidence do you have that their funding would stop? You have none; it's just your assumption.
As long as the science is done properly and doesn't collapse under scrutiny, the fame (and the fact that the scientists would have to have opened up a whole new aspect to climate science) would undoubtedly ensure their funding for quite some time. Universities and research groups don't judge a scientist's work by what their conclusions say. They judge their worth by the number of citations they receive. It's a poor practice really, but it would mean that such a highly controversial and ground-breaking finding would be used as a basis for a lot of new research; first to replicate the findings and then to study it further to find out how it relates to all the other research that has been done.
If climate change is disproved, it will be a huge boon to the scientists.
Scientific method doesn't required finding the One True Source for a phenomena when one disproves a prior hypothesis for the cause
Then who do they give Nobel prizes to, if not those who have made revolutionary discoveries? Sure, they don't just take the word of one person, but they also don't forget who came up with it first.
Yes, it's correct. It might surprise you, but there really isn't a grand oil funded conspiracy. The grant money you get if you toe the party line is by orders of magnitude bigger than if you dare being a contrarian.
I don't know, you can make a pretty good living being a climate change denier. And those leaked documents from the Heartland Institute show that they can be quite generous:
Linking to wikipedia marks one out as intellectually deficient.
Do you have a citation to back up this claim? You might think that linking to Wikipedia may be bad (even though this is not a controversial topic), but providing no links at all just makes you a time-wasting troll.
But if you want more information, try this.
Did they just download an old MSResearch paper and scratch out "By Microsoft" and crayon "By Apple" over it?
No. They just got a pair of scissors and rounded the page corners. They just hope that everyone looks at the stylish paper and ignores the "By Microsoft".
AMOUNT or degree of climate change is not capable of establishing that a cause of a change is due to humans. You think that CO2 is the only thing released into the atmosphere, and Humans are the only things affecting the composition of the atmosphere and dissipation of sunlight/energy?
Really? On one had we have mountains of theories and studies filled with facts & figures, tables & graphs, predictions & observations; all of which are summarised in the IPCC reports. On the other hand, we have an unverified claim based on.... what, your gut feeling??
Large volcanic eruptions are completely natural and can have a huge impact for centuries.
What makes you think that scientists haven't thought of the influence of volcanoes? Oh wait, they have:
As you see, the main climatic forcing factor of volcanoes is to cool the surface, and it usually dissipates relatively quickly. That is because it prevents the heat from the sun hitting the surface, which is the opposite of the greenhouse effect. Of course, volcanoes also release greenhouse gases like CO2, but human emissions dwarf those of volcanoes. A few years ago when that volcano in Iceland erupted and shut down airline flights across Europe, it actually have a positive effect on the climate because the amount of greenhouse gases emitted were offset by the savings caused by shutting down all the airlines. Also, from the link above:
First of all by default the assumption should not be No man-made factor at all; the assumption should be No major new man-made factor, or No conclusively man-made major influence.
That is a good assumption, and it was one that the scientists had when the idea that our emissions could enhance the natural greenhouse effect was first proposed 120 years ago. It was either dismissed or assumed that this would be a benefit. As the decades went by, the accumulation of evidence and our understanding of the scientific principles have convinced those experts that not only is this happening, but it will not be an overall benefit. If you want to come in now and assume that it isn't happening, then you are 120 years late.
Over that period, our technology has progressed so that much of our lives is dependent on using power that generates greenhouse gases. Over that period, the human race has nearly quadrupled in size. We went from just under 2 billion to 7.5 billion people. Is it really so hard to believe that all those people using all that power would be unable to affect the environment in which we live?
Skepticism against some theory which has been inadequately proposed does not require proof.
When that skepticism goes against established scientific understanding then yes, it does require proof. You might think that the theory has been inadequately pr
No, video professionals used Betacam, which is not the same as Betamax. See the Wikipedia entry:
Beta was better than VHS too. Who won that war again?
The one with the longer running time that could actually fit an entire movie on a single tape when the formats were originally released. The cheaper one. The one that was licensed to any manufacturer who wanted it rather than just a single supplier. Which format had all that? Not the "better" Betamax. While Beta had a slightly better picture quality, it lost out in every other way to VHS.
Once again, Sony had a great product, but was ultimately hampered by the fact that it was Sony.
At this point, that is still in the realms of science fiction. And if you can change the climate to such an extent, any mistake could cause absolutely catestrophic effects that would be completely irresponsible. Maybe one day we will have to knowledge to manipulate the environment like this, but that won't be until long after the time that we need to do something about climate change.
Unfortunately the people who actually study this sort of thing full time have looked at the numbers and found that this isn't the case regarding climate change. The warming that we are experiencing exceeds the rate that could happen with just natural variance. If you want to convince anyone there is no man-made factor to climate change then you will need to come under with some compelling figures to prove it. You can't just claim that it is a fact without any evidence.
You also need to explain how it is that all the CO2 that we know we are releasing into the atmosphere and that we know is accumulating there is not having the effect on temperature that the physics says that it will.
The problem is that on one side you have those who yell with absolute certainty that they are right, while on the other side there are scientists with their margins-of-error and weasel-words like "may" and "could". I can understand the attraction of believing the one who sounds the most confident, even if they don't have the facts to back up their opinions.
That seems reasonable. Geoengineering should be treated with skepticism. I consider it to be on the same level as clean coal. It would be a great it could work, but it would only ever be a band-aid solution and no substitute for actually reducing the emissions in the first place. And you don't want to deploy some not-well-tested solution simply because some politician wants a quick fix to look like they are doing something (left) or wants to avoid making real changes that could cost their industry buddies money (right).
a fact that he forgets to mention when he publishes papers on this subject.
I missed a word there. I should have said that he sometimes forgets to mention that. He hasn't been completely hiding it.
I thought our magnetic field was caused by our molten iron core. Which is not something to undergo rapid changes.
It is called Geomagnetic reversal. The cause is still up for debate, but the magnetic field is produced precisely because the molten core is not static. Have a look at the Wikipedia page for a summary of the phenomenon.
You are mistaken about all of that. Current warming is decidedly NOT within the limits and extents of natural variation. The hockey stick graph was not "clearly untrue" and has been supported by more than two dozen reconstructions. The Medieval Warm Period was not a global phenomena and is therefore not comparable. Even if it was global, it still doesn't prove that the current warming is not the result of the greenhouse gases that we produce. That would be the same as saying the since people died before the invention of the gun then being shot won't kill you. Your opinion that the Medieval Warm Period has any relevance here is really down to the likes of Willie Soon, who has since been found to have received money from vested interests like Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute; a fact that he forgets to mention when he publishes papers on this subject.
If that is the basis of your claim then I stand by my statement that you are inferring the media's cover-up of this based on faulty assumptions.
Unfortunately, this is about the most on-topic post for this story so far! Now I better go and bury my magnetic pillow. It's a worry, because it stimulates the blood flow to my brain and without it I won't believe in homeopathy.
Nobody has ever said that it is only man who is causing climate change
Actually the tsunami of climate change bollocks in the media and on most websites 24/7 implies precisely that.
No, you inferred it; they didn't imply it.
Nobody talks about natural variation at all.
What would you like them to say about it? It's not like we can petition the world to stop changing. However, the rate that the world is warming is way above what might occur naturally. Just because the climate could change naturally doesn't mean that we should be make it worse. Besides, don't deniers like to say that global warming is good because we should actually be moving into an ice age and that this warming actually stops that? You can't have it both ways! Is the "natural" climate change supposed to be getting hotter or colder?
The Pan Evaporation rate explains it all.
Ah, no they don't. If your entire proof is to ignore the actual temperature readings completely then you can hardly claim that this debunks what the scientists say about the role of greenhouse gases on the climate. You also can't link to an article that claims a link between sunspots and evaporation (based on only six years of observations - don't deniers say that 150 years of records is not enough time??) as proof that it is the Earth's magnetic field "letting things in". How would changes in our magnetic field affect the number of sunspots?
Sorry, but cherry-picking your data just isn't good enough. Why ignore temperature readings? In the crucial graph that "proves" the sunspots link, why does it only cover only a few years. The pan evaporation graph states that an average of 93 weather stations were used. That would only cover the mainland United States; certainly not global readings! That's a small area in a small timeframe recording just one data point. That proves nothing.
Wow. I had considered coming here to joke about whether the anti-science deniers would come out of the woodwork to claim that the magnetic field wasn't changing at all and they were just after funding, but it looks like the bullshitters are still fixated on climate change.
that is equally as important as co2, but climate change pushers put all the burden on man.
We can't change the magnetic field (as far as we know), but we can change what we do to the environment. Nobody has ever said that it is only man who is causing climate change, but only man can actually do something about it.
i'm no climate change denier...
Yes you are
i just know ther is way more to this than the gov't and most gov't funded scientists pushing the man made global warming agenda would lead you to believe. follow the $.
The problem with that theory is that when the deniers fund their own study, it also comes to the same conclusion; that climate change is real and that the carbon dioxide curve is the best match to global warming. So following the $ is meaningless, unless you can show evidence that anyone has falsified their climate research to get funding. If not, then there is no basis to the corruption claim. With all the leaked emails in the world, and the massive number of people who would have to collude to perpetrate a hoax, it's amazing that nobody has found any proof to this claim. And that is despite the efforts of the well-funded denial groups out there. Sure, follow the $!