Yes I am aware of what the emissions from Nuclear Power plants are, my point was that the dangerous pollution is not just dumped in a big pile outside the reactors.
It is being reported that they have on the ground station more than 2 hours worth of data after huygens touched down ( presumably including all the data it collected on the way down ). I think they need to process this data before we can start to see just what Huygens was experiencing.
This looks like a total success for the team and everyone involved. Nice one.
From http://planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_blog.html/ it seems that Huygens has been transmitting it's carrier signal for over 5 hours, initially it was monitored from the US until Titan went below the horizon when an Australian telescope picked up.
It's weird, the reason we are cleaning up visible pollution is because we can see it and realise that 'smog' is generally bad for our health and not a good thing.
I don't think anyone thinks that CO2 pollution is in it's self a good thing but because we can't see it there is much less incentive to clean it up.
Nuclear Power stations can't just pump their waste into the environment surely it would be possible to collect and process greenhouse gasses at source rather than just dumping them in the atmosphere, who knows we may even find useful things to do them.
I honestly can't see any country in the world making any kind of serious effort to reduce emissions until some kind of catastrophe occurs which can be definitely linked to our emissions. At that point action will be taken but it will involve much bigger changes happening more quickly and have a bigger negative effect on our lifestyles than a gradual changover.
IF Global Warming is real and we do realise it at the last minute a world wide solution will be required which will require all the countries in the world to conform to the "rules to prevent a climactic disaster". What will happen to countries who aren't quite so eager to change their ways ? I predict WWIII.
The UK with a nice temperate climate supports a lot of farming but North Africa supports no farming except right next to major rivers such as the Nile. If the UK climate turns into a North African climate the area we have to farm will be vastly reduced to a small strip alongside the Thames, Severn and our other rivers. The amount of food we produce will therefore drop.
Places like Bangladesh are home to millions and millions of people, unless they evolve gills and learn to live under water they will need to move somewhere else. Everyone else living anywhere near the coast will also have to move.
With the food production system in chaos as it readjusts to a changing climate the arrival of millions of refugees wanting to eat will result in a widespread famine and a lot of deaths.
So it's not a catastrophe if only 49% of the worlds population is wiped out ?
Whether or not a 10 degree temperature rise is likely to happen or not aside if it did happen it would definitely be an enormous catastrophe for us humans.
Certainly it is possible for us to survive in places like Antartica, Siberia, Alaska and the Moon but this is only possible thanks to the infrastructure behind such settlements. That infrastructure depends on us having comfortable areas where we can grow food, manufacture equipment and live without dedicating every waking minute to day to day survival.
Even a fairly slow ( by human terms ) increase of 10 degrees would cause enormous problems, first of all the climate worldwide would totally change, farming areas would no longer be able to support farming, large populated flood plains would be under water, places which are already hard to live in e.g. parts of Africa would become completely uninhabitable.
All of this would cause an awful lot of social and politcal problems as countries fought to find habitable areas and farmland for their citizens, huge numbers of people would become migrants looking to move away from danger areas. Handled badly this would inevitabley lead to wars for what resources were left.
No doubt some people would remain alive and able to survive in niches they had been able to find and defend but an awful lot of humanity would end up dead in the process.
I think they ended up concluding that once the greenland ice cap had melted and the methane deposits trapped under the oceans had been released that the UK would have a North African desert climate during the summer with huge dust storms and catastrophic rain and flooding during the winter.
North Africa however would suffer a 10 degree increase in temperature and become totally unihabitable.
Yes, essentially the program says that we are getting less sunlight and the world is getting hotter.
They say we are getting less sunlight thanks the visible pollution in the atmosphere which encourages cloud formation in a fashion which reflects more sunlight than clouds formed around natural pollutants such as pollen.
We are making big steps to clean up the visible pollution and therefore bringing the amount of sunlight back to normal levels.
However given that the world is still warming up despite the cooling effect of this reduction of sunlight they are supposing this must mean that global warming is in fact a lot more powerful than they first thought since we can still detect noticable warming despite a reduction in sunlight.
As we clean up more and more of our visible pollution without cleaning up our CO2 pollution we may face a much bigger temperature increase than we were expecting.
The program was fairly sensastionalist and towards the end went through some highly speculative "we are all going to die" scenarios. I would have liked them to concetrate more on the evidence they have for global dimming and maybe some contrary evidence or any doubts the scientific community may have about the results of the scientists they did show.
Apparently they are still picking up the carrier signal from a telescope in Australia now which is an indication that the probe has survived it's descent through the atmosphere and has actually touched down on the surface and is still operational.
It depends on what the crap is floating in, if it's floating in more crap then the heavier crap will end up at the bottom but the light frothy crap will end up at the top.
Er no, I don't know who that company is. I worked for a major out sourcer of companies IT helpdesks and like I started from the point of view that I want to help the person calling me unless they have been or are being especially obnoxious.
If it's something I've done previously or something the companies done previously then I am willing to accept a certain amount of abuse for that and will do what I can to fix our mistake but I see no reason why I should pander to peoples ego's that they are pissed off and that if they shout loud enough I should bend over backwards to help them.
If I hadn't already posted I would have modded up that up because it's absolutley correct.
I have worked in various kinds of tech support for 6 years and it's just simple human nature; if people are nice to you - polite and helpful you are much more likely to be the same with them.
Whenever anyone in the office got a call from a particulary abusive, annoying or arrogant customer they would make sure everyone got the name so regular callers did get very definite widespread reputations.
People who were constantly annoying got a pretty awful service from us since no one saw any reason to help those people whilst people who were polite and helpful would have everyone going out of their way to be helpful to them - they could even have the odd tantrum but we'd understand because usually they would apologise afterwards - unlike the assholes.
Just remember it costs you nothing to be polite to people and you will always be able to find out a lot more about what is happening with your query if you are polite than if you spend your time cursing the person you are talking to, their company and life in general.
I don't know what kind of call monitoring they are using but I guess it depends a lot on what kind of switches the business is using.
I can say that this is not always the case, the call recording system we installed on our switch would not record the caller when they were on hold. They would however record the caller when our analyst had put them on Mute rather than hold which leads a lot of customers to assume they are on hold and can't be heard.
When I was an analyst myself I would say to people I am putting you on Hold and then just mute my phone ( because the button was bigger and easier to hit than the Hold button ). When I had a particulary obnoxious or abusive caller I would put them on speaker phone so we could all hear how they were "...going to give those useless b#stards on this f#ckin helpdesk a piece of their f#ckin mind".
Most amusingly was some guy who was calling me for a password reset one night, after listening to a minute or so of how useless and dumb we all were he asked his mate "So what was Ted's login anyway, can you remember ?". Obviously I cannot reset peoples passwords unless I am sure I am talking to the correct owner of that login and password and he'd given me good reason to believe that wasn't the case here. How we laughed.
Another reason calls are recorded is because customers, or whoever it is ringing in to use your service can on occasion become abusive and lie about the actual cause of their problems. At least where your callers are from other companies you have some kind of contract with it protects your staff from abuse and when customers later say a member of staff abused them you can easily prove this wasn't the case.
I think that there is so much evidence of Global Warming now that we have to accept that it's real. We can argue about what is causing it as much as we like but it will still effect our lives whether we come to a conclusion about that or not. It might be a just a natural part of the Earths cycle or it might be kick started by us but the most important thing is that we prepare for it's effects as soon as we can.
In the UK that may mean a lot of investment in flood defences and in the worst case preparation for life in a much colder climate but we should start stock piling money and resources in order to do something to protect ourselves right now.
Whether or not our pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is a trigger it's still not a good for our environment. In the long run we can't lose if we invest in cleaner or more efficient sources of energy. The only people who may lose in the short term are companies whose business relies on our current methods of energy production but any company or country which does make the investment in cleaner more efficient energy will be in good position in the future.
The earthquake was a natural event which every scientist in the world will agree is unrelated to anything we may have done. Global warming is a natural event which a lot of scientists in the world believe we may have a part in creating.
That is blatantly not true. I was watching BBC News 24 for long periods following the Tsunami and there were constant reports about the US resorces being moved into the area, this included plenty of coverage of what those resources consisted of and how useful the helicopters would be to the relief effort.
I don't know who Christopher Brooker ( the journalist ) is but I think he must have some axe to grind.
Also I don't actually know anyone who thinks the BBC has any kind of Anti American bias.
Where I once worked we had to manage some phone lines to call centre in the Highlands of Scotland somewhere so for 'redundancy' we bought lines off both BT and C&W.
We looked at the exact setup and found that BT had just two lines to this place and C&W just used one of those BT lines for it's services and pointed this out to the people running the show. Unfortunately they didn't really seem to understand and kept saying "But if BT breaks down then we still have C&W" - "Not if is the BT line which C&W use which breaks we don't, you fools".
I think there is a 300KM long Iceberg blocking the Ross Sea which is causing the Sea Ice formed in the sound during the winter not to melt or drift back out too sea. I am guessing any bases on McMurdo sound rely on the sea being ice free in summer for resupply which this summer it's not.
On the whole I think that is pronounced "burra" in BE. It is perhaps an Iceburgh in Americanese though, which we would on the whole pronounce as Iceburra. Edinburgh for example.
Slashdot Mirror
It's obvious that you have rejected education at every turn.
Yes I am aware of what the emissions from Nuclear Power plants are, my point was that the dangerous pollution is not just dumped in a big pile outside the reactors.
Yes I was trying be sensationalist.
It is being reported that they have on the ground station more than 2 hours worth of data after huygens touched down ( presumably including all the data it collected on the way down ). I think they need to process this data before we can start to see just what Huygens was experiencing.
This looks like a total success for the team and everyone involved. Nice one.
From http://planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_blog.html/ it seems that Huygens has been transmitting it's carrier signal for over 5 hours, initially it was monitored from the US until Titan went below the horizon when an Australian telescope picked up.
Better Solution: Clean up both at the same time.
It's weird, the reason we are cleaning up visible pollution is because we can see it and realise that 'smog' is generally bad for our health and not a good thing.
I don't think anyone thinks that CO2 pollution is in it's self a good thing but because we can't see it there is much less incentive to clean it up.
Nuclear Power stations can't just pump their waste into the environment surely it would be possible to collect and process greenhouse gasses at source rather than just dumping them in the atmosphere, who knows we may even find useful things to do them.
I honestly can't see any country in the world making any kind of serious effort to reduce emissions until some kind of catastrophe occurs which can be definitely linked to our emissions. At that point action will be taken but it will involve much bigger changes happening more quickly and have a bigger negative effect on our lifestyles than a gradual changover.
IF Global Warming is real and we do realise it at the last minute a world wide solution will be required which will require all the countries in the world to conform to the "rules to prevent a climactic disaster". What will happen to countries who aren't quite so eager to change their ways ? I predict WWIII.
The UK with a nice temperate climate supports a lot of farming but North Africa supports no farming except right next to major rivers such as the Nile. If the UK climate turns into a North African climate the area we have to farm will be vastly reduced to a small strip alongside the Thames, Severn and our other rivers. The amount of food we produce will therefore drop.
Places like Bangladesh are home to millions and millions of people, unless they evolve gills and learn to live under water they will need to move somewhere else. Everyone else living anywhere near the coast will also have to move.
With the food production system in chaos as it readjusts to a changing climate the arrival of millions of refugees wanting to eat will result in a widespread famine and a lot of deaths.
So it's not a catastrophe if only 49% of the worlds population is wiped out ?
Can you expand on the elements of the show which were junk science and those which were real science ?
Whether or not a 10 degree temperature rise is likely to happen or not aside if it did happen it would definitely be an enormous catastrophe for us humans.
Certainly it is possible for us to survive in places like Antartica, Siberia, Alaska and the Moon but this is only possible thanks to the infrastructure behind such settlements. That infrastructure depends on us having comfortable areas where we can grow food, manufacture equipment and live without dedicating every waking minute to day to day survival.
Even a fairly slow ( by human terms ) increase of 10 degrees would cause enormous problems, first of all the climate worldwide would totally change, farming areas would no longer be able to support farming, large populated flood plains would be under water, places which are already hard to live in e.g. parts of Africa would become completely uninhabitable.
All of this would cause an awful lot of social and politcal problems as countries fought to find habitable areas and farmland for their citizens, huge numbers of people would become migrants looking to move away from danger areas. Handled badly this would inevitabley lead to wars for what resources were left.
No doubt some people would remain alive and able to survive in niches they had been able to find and defend but an awful lot of humanity would end up dead in the process.
I think they ended up concluding that once the greenland ice cap had melted and the methane deposits trapped under the oceans had been released that the UK would have a North African desert climate during the summer with huge dust storms and catastrophic rain and flooding during the winter.
North Africa however would suffer a 10 degree increase in temperature and become totally unihabitable.
Yes, essentially the program says that we are getting less sunlight and the world is getting hotter.
They say we are getting less sunlight thanks the visible pollution in the atmosphere which encourages cloud formation in a fashion which reflects more sunlight than clouds formed around natural pollutants such as pollen.
We are making big steps to clean up the visible pollution and therefore bringing the amount of sunlight back to normal levels.
However given that the world is still warming up despite the cooling effect of this reduction of sunlight they are supposing this must mean that global warming is in fact a lot more powerful than they first thought since we can still detect noticable warming despite a reduction in sunlight.
As we clean up more and more of our visible pollution without cleaning up our CO2 pollution we may face a much bigger temperature increase than we were expecting.
The program was fairly sensastionalist and towards the end went through some highly speculative "we are all going to die" scenarios. I would have liked them to concetrate more on the evidence they have for global dimming and maybe some contrary evidence or any doubts the scientific community may have about the results of the scientists they did show.
Apparently they are still picking up the carrier signal from a telescope in Australia now which is an indication that the probe has survived it's descent through the atmosphere and has actually touched down on the surface and is still operational.
Look ! Look at the shiny rock. In the meantime the Martians will be sneaking away behind them.
It depends on what the crap is floating in, if it's floating in more crap then the heavier crap will end up at the bottom but the light frothy crap will end up at the top.
Why not ?
Er no, I don't know who that company is. I worked for a major out sourcer of companies IT helpdesks and like I started from the point of view that I want to help the person calling me unless they have been or are being especially obnoxious.
If it's something I've done previously or something the companies done previously then I am willing to accept a certain amount of abuse for that and will do what I can to fix our mistake but I see no reason why I should pander to peoples ego's that they are pissed off and that if they shout loud enough I should bend over backwards to help them.
If I hadn't already posted I would have modded up that up because it's absolutley correct.
I have worked in various kinds of tech support for 6 years and it's just simple human nature; if people are nice to you - polite and helpful you are much more likely to be the same with them.
Whenever anyone in the office got a call from a particulary abusive, annoying or arrogant customer they would make sure everyone got the name so regular callers did get very definite widespread reputations.
People who were constantly annoying got a pretty awful service from us since no one saw any reason to help those people whilst people who were polite and helpful would have everyone going out of their way to be helpful to them - they could even have the odd tantrum but we'd understand because usually they would apologise afterwards - unlike the assholes.
Just remember it costs you nothing to be polite to people and you will always be able to find out a lot more about what is happening with your query if you are polite than if you spend your time cursing the person you are talking to, their company and life in general.
I don't know what kind of call monitoring they are using but I guess it depends a lot on what kind of switches the business is using.
I can say that this is not always the case, the call recording system we installed on our switch would not record the caller when they were on hold. They would however record the caller when our analyst had put them on Mute rather than hold which leads a lot of customers to assume they are on hold and can't be heard.
When I was an analyst myself I would say to people I am putting you on Hold and then just mute my phone ( because the button was bigger and easier to hit than the Hold button ). When I had a particulary obnoxious or abusive caller I would put them on speaker phone so we could all hear how they were "...going to give those useless b#stards on this f#ckin helpdesk a piece of their f#ckin mind".
Most amusingly was some guy who was calling me for a password reset one night, after listening to a minute or so of how useless and dumb we all were he asked his mate "So what was Ted's login anyway, can you remember ?". Obviously I cannot reset peoples passwords unless I am sure I am talking to the correct owner of that login and password and he'd given me good reason to believe that wasn't the case here. How we laughed.
Another reason calls are recorded is because customers, or whoever it is ringing in to use your service can on occasion become abusive and lie about the actual cause of their problems. At least where your callers are from other companies you have some kind of contract with it protects your staff from abuse and when customers later say a member of staff abused them you can easily prove this wasn't the case.
I think that there is so much evidence of Global Warming now that we have to accept that it's real. We can argue about what is causing it as much as we like but it will still effect our lives whether we come to a conclusion about that or not. It might be a just a natural part of the Earths cycle or it might be kick started by us but the most important thing is that we prepare for it's effects as soon as we can.
In the UK that may mean a lot of investment in flood defences and in the worst case preparation for life in a much colder climate but we should start stock piling money and resources in order to do something to protect ourselves right now.
Whether or not our pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere is a trigger it's still not a good for our environment. In the long run we can't lose if we invest in cleaner or more efficient sources of energy. The only people who may lose in the short term are companies whose business relies on our current methods of energy production but any company or country which does make the investment in cleaner more efficient energy will be in good position in the future.
The earthquake was a natural event which every scientist in the world will agree is unrelated to anything we may have done. Global warming is a natural event which a lot of scientists in the world believe we may have a part in creating.
Peanuts, Monkeys ?
That is blatantly not true. I was watching BBC News 24 for long periods following the Tsunami and there were constant reports about the US resorces being moved into the area, this included plenty of coverage of what those resources consisted of and how useful the helicopters would be to the relief effort.
I don't know who Christopher Brooker ( the journalist ) is but I think he must have some axe to grind.
Also I don't actually know anyone who thinks the BBC has any kind of Anti American bias.
Where I once worked we had to manage some phone lines to call centre in the Highlands of Scotland somewhere so for 'redundancy' we bought lines off both BT and C&W.
We looked at the exact setup and found that BT had just two lines to this place and C&W just used one of those BT lines for it's services and pointed this out to the people running the show. Unfortunately they didn't really seem to understand and kept saying "But if BT breaks down then we still have C&W" - "Not if is the BT line which C&W use which breaks we don't, you fools".
It hasn't happened yet so it's hardly old news, it seems to me it is a theory which deserves a lot more investigation.
I think there is a 300KM long Iceberg blocking the Ross Sea which is causing the Sea Ice formed in the sound during the winter not to melt or drift back out too sea. I am guessing any bases on McMurdo sound rely on the sea being ice free in summer for resupply which this summer it's not.
On the whole I think that is pronounced "burra" in BE.
It is perhaps an Iceburgh in Americanese though, which we would on the whole pronounce as Iceburra. Edinburgh for example.