Climate and sea levels do fluctuate naturally but not spontaneously, ie. there's usually an identifiable reason - big period of volcanic activity, new species of extra virile plants sucking out the CO2, stuff like that.
Or, in this case, a new species finding ways to put enormous amounts of CO2 in the air.
How exactly do you expect the marketplace to sort it out? It needs some sort of stimulus. Personally my favourite is simply to tax everything that pollutes in ratio to how polluting it is. That makes clean technology more profitable, and will allow the market to sort out the rest.
The marketplace was well on the way to sorting it out at $140/bbl oil.
By accident, temporarily, and still not very well. It's true that higher prices for burning fossil fuels and other polluting activities is part of the solution, but the market on its own doesn't necessarily guarantee those higher prices.
The economic crisis and subsequent drop in oil prices has likely set this process back -- but I don't buy that the marketplace can't provide a solution to this problem. Taxing carbon sources is a legitimate idea that I could support -- but you'd have to find a way to do it that wouldn't disadvantage the economy in the global marketplace.
Reduce taxes elsewhere. Preferably in places where it stimulates the economy more. Places where economic growth doesn't mean more pollution. Or just cut income taxes to almost nothing and use eco-tax as the government's main source of income. This will give people more money to spend on higher gas prices. Or on more environmental alternatives.
China wants our standard of living. The world simply cannot cope with 1.2 billion Chinese living at the current American/European standard of living.
I would disagree. Your statement is probably accurate with existing technology but I don't see why our standard of living would be unsustainable with greener/carbon neutral technology.
That's why I said current. If you take the amount of oil, gas and coal we burn per American/European, and multiply that by 1.2 billion Chinese and 1 billion Indians, we're going to need a whole lot more fossil fuels than there currently is in the world. It would also triple the world's CO2 emissions.
I agree Kyoto is a terrible (and quite possibly harmful) compromise. We do need some sort of international agreement, though. Hopefully Kyoto is a step towards something better.
So if you think it's a harmful compromise why should we ratify it? Wouldn't it be better to come up with something better?
It might give a signal that you care about the issue at least. But it really shouldn't be seen as the final solution. Coming up with something better is obviously better.
Or just invest the money into green technology and let the marketplace sort it out?
How exactly do you expect the marketplace to sort it out? It needs some sort of stimulus. Personally my favourite is simply to tax everything that pollutes in ratio to how polluting it is. That makes clean technology more profitable, and will allow the market to sort out the rest.
I hate to break it to you but Mother Nature/Gaia will always win. You might get lucky and never see that day but all the Netherlands is doing is postponing the inevitable.
Don't worry. We've got lots of lifeboats in case our country sinks. Which has already been happening for quite some time now, by the way. Even when you're not comparing with the sea level, our land in sinking. The continental shelf is moving downward, the soil is drying out. Were sinking it at least three different ways at the same time. We're good at sinking.
Here's a recent example - New Orleans was almost destroyed _by a storm._ Building a city in a region that is dangerous is stupid. Sorry to be so blunt, but it is.
Not at all. It's quite often very profitable to build a city in a dangerous area. Slopes of volcanoes are very fertile, for example. The mouth of a river (like Netherland or New Orleans) is a great place for a port.
I don't know about New Orleans, but Netherland is rich enough to continue fighting for a few more centuries.
Instead of hiding on high ground we beat the water and founded a nation that is mostly below sea level. It takes a certain state of mind to do this. Once you start surrendering to the water, you lose. And you will keep on running from any danger that comes in your path.
One island at a time, it must be too expensive. Perhaps building a large encircling seawall which connects only the outermost islands of archipelago isn't so expensive? If even that is too impractical, there is always possibility of piling more material on top of existing islands. In Emirates they build new islands, why in Maldives couldn't they raise existing ones some more?
Compared to over 7,000,000? I hope to god you don't work in any job involving maths or statistics if 2.3% of something is your idea of 'a lot'.
Do you have any idea how many nationalities there are in the world? 2.3% coming from a tiny country on the other side of the world is most definitely a lot.
Inability to grasp the meaning of numbers is unfortunately a common affliction.
I'm a Democrat and think of myself as an environmentalist and even I'm skeptical about the value of the Kyoto Protocol. What's the point in the Western countries tanking our economies to bring down emissions if China is bringing dozens of new coal power plants online and adding millions of new vehicles to the road?
China wants our standard of living. The world simply cannot cope with 1.2 billion Chinese living at the current American/European standard of living. But if we clean up our act, then China may simply follow suit.
I would like to see progress made on green technology (which will translate into more jobs and economic recovery) so that we can bring emissions down and sell that technology to the rest of the World -- but why all of this focus on Kyoto when the protocol itself is inherently unfair to developed countries?
I agree Kyoto is a terrible (and quite possibly harmful) compromise. We do need some sort of international agreement, though. Hopefully Kyoto is a step towards something better.
I really don't get why people are so reluctant to consider that burning 80 million barrels of oil each day does not affect the climate. I keep hearing those "Oh, I don't believe it" voices on/.,
That argument is a good enough to deny evolution, so why not global warming?
You mean it's real, and it's probably man-made. There is still some discussion about that last part because climate and sea levels fluctuate naturally, but theory has predicted that rising CO2 levels will cause oceans to rise, and now that it's actually happening, that same theory is still the best explanation. There's also sun spots and stuff like that, but those explanations leave a gap. A gap that's nicely filled by the theory that rising CO2 levels cause global warming.
Obviously the islamists are helping their librul friends with their global warming scam by scraping the top off the island so that they can claim it is disappearing!
If you'd RTFA, you'd know that it were the Gayoom cronies who were skimming off the top of the islands.
Gayoom is out of power now, but the islands now have to deal with his legacy.
Most people are not running for office. Most people can't handle double entry book-keeping either, but they're not accountants. When I hire someone to develop software I expect a certain amount of professional knowledge, why would you expect less of a President or Vice-President?
Because people want to relate to their president or vice-president. People don't like to feel stupid, and making stupidity the norm is a very effective way of not getting confronted with your own stupidity quite as often.
If you want unbiased though you need to go to BBC I think.
Having lived in London recently for a few years I can categorically state that the BBC is heavily left-biased. When any racial attacks occur in London (and they happen more frequently than any Brit would admit) the colour of the perpetrator is rarely, if ever, mentioned if it wasn't white.
But did they mention skin colour if the perpetrator was white?
Obviously Im conservative......If you want unbiased though you need to go to BBC I think.
I choked on my morning coffee on that one... the BBC?
Forward your quote to every conservative you know and ask if they would agree. I bet you get 0 hits. American conservatives are still outraged for the BBC exposing Bush lies before and during the Iraq war.
Exposing political lies means a news outlet is biased? I'd say not exposing them is a lot more biased.
Keep repeating that and keep showing your ignorance. Nazi's were socialists...
Nationalsozialist
You obviously don't know what a "right" or "left" wing is. The ultra right are.... anarchists. Ultra left are government solutions to every problem under the sun.
The Democrat party of today has more in common with Nazis than the Republican party, though not by much.
How the hell did this ever get modded Insightful? The Nazis hated the left-wing parties, and got into power through a coalition with conservatives. The Communist Party was high on the list of things to be banned.
You have as little idea what left and right are as the GP. Left and right are not absolute terms, but highly relative and subjective. Political ideology isn't 1-dimensional. You've got authoritarians and libertarians, you've got progressive versus conservative social ideas, and governments can support the rich and powerful or the underdogs. All of these are completely orthogonal.
Hitler, for example, was authoritarian, conservative, and supports the rich and powerful. Stalin was just as authoritarian, but not actually all that progressive or pro-underdog (that was mostly Lenin, actually). American libertarians tend towards libertarian (duh), progressive (although some are conservative), and pro-rich. European libertarians are similar but pro-poor. Bush is authoritarian, conservative and pro-rich, but fortunately not nearly as much as Hitler (except for the pro-rich part where he was a bit over the top).
European social democrats tend to be mildly authoritarian, mildly progressive, and reasonably pro-underdog. European liberals tend to be mildly authoritarian, progressive or conservative varies wildly per country (or even within a country), and pro-rich.
In fact, most politicians tend to be slightly authoritarian. To find political figures who aren't, you have to look at people like Ghandi and Nelson Mandela, both of whom were reasonably libertarian, progressive and pro-underdog.
Cleaning up litter on your property is vigilantism?
Of course it is! Only the proper authorities should be allowed to clean up litter. Why, if everybody were to clean up litter whenever they felt like it, this country would turn into a huge mess.
connectingsingles.com is also a 100% free dating site (it's funded with google ads).
Why didn't I think of that? Google Ads is the perfect way to fund your dating site, because people already have to fill in all their interests there. So Google will know what ads you'll be interested in. It's a perfect match!
It's called applying critical thinking to actually think it through.
Any dead body that has passed cell death, brain death and organ death can't rise from the dead as processes have stopped and won't start again, brain death has occured and won't start again, organ death has occured and they won't start again, and cell death has occurred and all your trillions of cells won't ever start again. They turn to goo and information is lost forever.
What does that have to do with a proof of the non-existence of God? All it proves is that according to the laws of physics a dead body can't come alive. It says nothing whatsoever about the existence of a God, who, if he has created the universe, has to be above the laws of physics anyway.
Clinging to the laws of physics won't help you when you're trying to prove or disprove God.
It's only your hope that there is a god that keeps your pathetic attempts to claim there is one alive.
I'm not claiming anything here. I'm just pointing out your logical fallacy. Presumably a pathetic attempt caused by your hope that there is no God. But hope doesn't prove a thing. You need logic and critical thinking.
Your wishful thinking and blind hope that what you know is all there is, won't help you with deeper philosophical issues like this. Your excessively lame proof of the non-existence of God might be good enough for people with a medieval mindset, but once you're capable of thinking in layered levels of reality, it's cute and funny, but just not very relevant.
All you've proven is that, assuming the laws of physics are universal in our level of reality (and they do seem to work quite nicely), a God as described in the bible can't exist in this reality. But it says nothing about what might exist "outside" our universe. Of course you probably believe there is nothing outside this universe, but then you've got a proof that's based on assumption and belief. Not unreasonable assumption and belief, but it's hardly a proof. It's wishful thinking.
Under Bush we all got "Stimulus checks" redistribution of wealth, we "nationalized banks", we "nationalized insurance companies", we "nationalized brokerage houses", and we gave trillions in welfare to Iraq...
And now you're worried about socialism?
Welcome to last year.
Except that in Bush' case, it's not the people who benefit from it, but the corporations. And that, according to Mussolini at least, amounts to fascism, not socialism.
Slashdot Mirror
Climate and sea levels do fluctuate naturally but not spontaneously, ie. there's usually an identifiable reason - big period of volcanic activity, new species of extra virile plants sucking out the CO2, stuff like that.
Or, in this case, a new species finding ways to put enormous amounts of CO2 in the air.
I wonder what we, or any nation, would do if China didn't follow suit, and really started wrecking the planet with their pollution?
Would nations go to war with each other over pollution?
I hope not. But if the rest of the world is really unified on the issue, a boycott might work.
How exactly do you expect the marketplace to sort it out? It needs some sort of stimulus. Personally my favourite is simply to tax everything that pollutes in ratio to how polluting it is. That makes clean technology more profitable, and will allow the market to sort out the rest.
The marketplace was well on the way to sorting it out at $140/bbl oil.
By accident, temporarily, and still not very well. It's true that higher prices for burning fossil fuels and other polluting activities is part of the solution, but the market on its own doesn't necessarily guarantee those higher prices.
The economic crisis and subsequent drop in oil prices has likely set this process back -- but I don't buy that the marketplace can't provide a solution to this problem. Taxing carbon sources is a legitimate idea that I could support -- but you'd have to find a way to do it that wouldn't disadvantage the economy in the global marketplace.
Reduce taxes elsewhere. Preferably in places where it stimulates the economy more. Places where economic growth doesn't mean more pollution. Or just cut income taxes to almost nothing and use eco-tax as the government's main source of income. This will give people more money to spend on higher gas prices. Or on more environmental alternatives.
China wants our standard of living. The world simply cannot cope with 1.2 billion Chinese living at the current American/European standard of living.
I would disagree. Your statement is probably accurate with existing technology but I don't see why our standard of living would be unsustainable with greener/carbon neutral technology.
That's why I said current. If you take the amount of oil, gas and coal we burn per American/European, and multiply that by 1.2 billion Chinese and 1 billion Indians, we're going to need a whole lot more fossil fuels than there currently is in the world. It would also triple the world's CO2 emissions.
I agree Kyoto is a terrible (and quite possibly harmful) compromise. We do need some sort of international agreement, though. Hopefully Kyoto is a step towards something better.
So if you think it's a harmful compromise why should we ratify it? Wouldn't it be better to come up with something better?
It might give a signal that you care about the issue at least. But it really shouldn't be seen as the final solution. Coming up with something better is obviously better.
Or just invest the money into green technology and let the marketplace sort it out?
How exactly do you expect the marketplace to sort it out? It needs some sort of stimulus. Personally my favourite is simply to tax everything that pollutes in ratio to how polluting it is. That makes clean technology more profitable, and will allow the market to sort out the rest.
What happened to the "$100 laptop"?
Inflation.
I hate to break it to you but Mother Nature/Gaia will always win. You might get lucky and never see that day but all the Netherlands is doing is postponing the inevitable.
Don't worry. We've got lots of lifeboats in case our country sinks. Which has already been happening for quite some time now, by the way. Even when you're not comparing with the sea level, our land in sinking. The continental shelf is moving downward, the soil is drying out. Were sinking it at least three different ways at the same time. We're good at sinking.
Here's a recent example - New Orleans was almost destroyed _by a storm._ Building a city in a region that is dangerous is stupid. Sorry to be so blunt, but it is.
Not at all. It's quite often very profitable to build a city in a dangerous area. Slopes of volcanoes are very fertile, for example. The mouth of a river (like Netherland or New Orleans) is a great place for a port.
I don't know about New Orleans, but Netherland is rich enough to continue fighting for a few more centuries.
Instead of hiding on high ground we beat the water and founded a nation that is mostly below sea level. It takes a certain state of mind to do this. Once you start surrendering to the water, you lose. And you will keep on running from any danger that comes in your path.
And then the terrorists win!
If Denmark was a series of extremely tiny islands, you'd have a point.
What does Denmark have to do with it?
Besides, Denmark has 1419 islands, which is more than the 1192 islands of the Maldives.
One island at a time, it must be too expensive. Perhaps building a large encircling seawall which connects only the outermost islands of archipelago isn't so expensive? If even that is too impractical, there is always possibility of piling more material on top of existing islands. In Emirates they build new islands, why in Maldives couldn't they raise existing ones some more?
Because they're not as rich as Dubai.
Compared to over 7,000,000? I hope to god you don't work in any job involving maths or statistics if 2.3% of something is your idea of 'a lot'.
Do you have any idea how many nationalities there are in the world? 2.3% coming from a tiny country on the other side of the world is most definitely a lot.
Inability to grasp the meaning of numbers is unfortunately a common affliction.
Should the Greenland ice cap melt again, then they may rise up to another 7 meters. That is the maximum.
7 metres is not the maximum. It may be unlikely, but the Antarctic ice *could* melt eventually (since it has in the distant past).
If I'm not mistaken, the ice on East Antarctica is already melting. That's another couple of meters.
The really big one is West Antarctica, which is worth about 30 meters of sea level. That would wipe a number of densely populated areas off the map.
(It's possible I'm mixing up east and west here. Can't be bothered to check.)
I'm a Democrat and think of myself as an environmentalist and even I'm skeptical about the value of the Kyoto Protocol. What's the point in the Western countries tanking our economies to bring down emissions if China is bringing dozens of new coal power plants online and adding millions of new vehicles to the road?
China wants our standard of living. The world simply cannot cope with 1.2 billion Chinese living at the current American/European standard of living. But if we clean up our act, then China may simply follow suit.
I would like to see progress made on green technology (which will translate into more jobs and economic recovery) so that we can bring emissions down and sell that technology to the rest of the World -- but why all of this focus on Kyoto when the protocol itself is inherently unfair to developed countries?
I agree Kyoto is a terrible (and quite possibly harmful) compromise. We do need some sort of international agreement, though. Hopefully Kyoto is a step towards something better.
I really don't get why people are so reluctant to consider that burning 80 million barrels of oil each day does not affect the climate. I keep hearing those "Oh, I don't believe it" voices on /.,
That argument is a good enough to deny evolution, so why not global warming?
No it's real (probably), but it's not man-made.
You mean it's real, and it's probably man-made. There is still some discussion about that last part because climate and sea levels fluctuate naturally, but theory has predicted that rising CO2 levels will cause oceans to rise, and now that it's actually happening, that same theory is still the best explanation. There's also sun spots and stuff like that, but those explanations leave a gap. A gap that's nicely filled by the theory that rising CO2 levels cause global warming.
only 150 centimeters
Obviously the islamists are helping their librul friends with their global warming scam by scraping the top off the island so that they can claim it is disappearing!
If you'd RTFA, you'd know that it were the Gayoom cronies who were skimming off the top of the islands.
Gayoom is out of power now, but the islands now have to deal with his legacy.
Most people are not running for office. Most people can't handle double entry book-keeping either, but they're not accountants. When I hire someone to develop software I expect a certain amount of professional knowledge, why would you expect less of a President or Vice-President?
Because people want to relate to their president or vice-president. People don't like to feel stupid, and making stupidity the norm is a very effective way of not getting confronted with your own stupidity quite as often.
If you want unbiased though you need to go to BBC I think.
Having lived in London recently for a few years I can categorically state that the BBC is heavily left-biased. When any racial attacks occur in London (and they happen more frequently than any Brit would admit) the colour of the perpetrator is rarely, if ever, mentioned if it wasn't white.
But did they mention skin colour if the perpetrator was white?
Obviously Im conservative... ...If you want unbiased though you need to go to BBC I think.
I choked on my morning coffee on that one... the BBC?
Forward your quote to every conservative you know and ask if they would agree. I bet you get 0 hits.
American conservatives are still outraged for the BBC exposing Bush lies before and during the Iraq war.
Exposing political lies means a news outlet is biased? I'd say not exposing them is a lot more biased.
Keep repeating that and keep showing your ignorance. Nazi's were socialists ...
Nationalsozialist
You obviously don't know what a "right" or "left" wing is. The ultra right are .... anarchists. Ultra left are government solutions to every problem under the sun.
The Democrat party of today has more in common with Nazis than the Republican party, though not by much.
How the hell did this ever get modded Insightful? The Nazis hated the left-wing parties, and got into power through a coalition with conservatives. The Communist Party was high on the list of things to be banned.
You have as little idea what left and right are as the GP. Left and right are not absolute terms, but highly relative and subjective. Political ideology isn't 1-dimensional. You've got authoritarians and libertarians, you've got progressive versus conservative social ideas, and governments can support the rich and powerful or the underdogs. All of these are completely orthogonal.
Hitler, for example, was authoritarian, conservative, and supports the rich and powerful. Stalin was just as authoritarian, but not actually all that progressive or pro-underdog (that was mostly Lenin, actually). American libertarians tend towards libertarian (duh), progressive (although some are conservative), and pro-rich. European libertarians are similar but pro-poor. Bush is authoritarian, conservative and pro-rich, but fortunately not nearly as much as Hitler (except for the pro-rich part where he was a bit over the top).
European social democrats tend to be mildly authoritarian, mildly progressive, and reasonably pro-underdog. European liberals tend to be mildly authoritarian, progressive or conservative varies wildly per country (or even within a country), and pro-rich.
In fact, most politicians tend to be slightly authoritarian. To find political figures who aren't, you have to look at people like Ghandi and Nelson Mandela, both of whom were reasonably libertarian, progressive and pro-underdog.
Because you won't pass on your genes?
Your brothers and sisters share many of those same genes. Hook them up with someone and let them do your work for you, so you can continue coding.
Cleaning up litter on your property is vigilantism?
Of course it is! Only the proper authorities should be allowed to clean up litter. Why, if everybody were to clean up litter whenever they felt like it, this country would turn into a huge mess.
connectingsingles.com is also a 100% free dating site (it's funded with google ads).
Why didn't I think of that? Google Ads is the perfect way to fund your dating site, because people already have to fill in all their interests there. So Google will know what ads you'll be interested in. It's a perfect match!
It's called applying critical thinking to actually think it through.
Any dead body that has passed cell death, brain death and organ death can't rise from the dead as processes have stopped and won't start again, brain death has occured and won't start again, organ death has occured and they won't start again, and cell death has occurred and all your trillions of cells won't ever start again. They turn to goo and information is lost forever.
What does that have to do with a proof of the non-existence of God? All it proves is that according to the laws of physics a dead body can't come alive. It says nothing whatsoever about the existence of a God, who, if he has created the universe, has to be above the laws of physics anyway.
Clinging to the laws of physics won't help you when you're trying to prove or disprove God.
It's only your hope that there is a god that keeps your pathetic attempts to claim there is one alive.
I'm not claiming anything here. I'm just pointing out your logical fallacy. Presumably a pathetic attempt caused by your hope that there is no God. But hope doesn't prove a thing. You need logic and critical thinking.
Your wishful thinking and blind hope that what you know is all there is, won't help you with deeper philosophical issues like this. Your excessively lame proof of the non-existence of God might be good enough for people with a medieval mindset, but once you're capable of thinking in layered levels of reality, it's cute and funny, but just not very relevant.
All you've proven is that, assuming the laws of physics are universal in our level of reality (and they do seem to work quite nicely), a God as described in the bible can't exist in this reality. But it says nothing about what might exist "outside" our universe. Of course you probably believe there is nothing outside this universe, but then you've got a proof that's based on assumption and belief. Not unreasonable assumption and belief, but it's hardly a proof. It's wishful thinking.
Those "certain inalienable rights" you may have heard of - they went out the window as soon as Obama and McCain became the two choices.
They've been out the window for a number of years already. I'm hoping Obama will restore them again.
Under Bush we all got "Stimulus checks" redistribution of wealth, we "nationalized banks", we "nationalized insurance companies", we "nationalized brokerage houses", and we gave trillions in welfare to Iraq...
And now you're worried about socialism?
Welcome to last year.
Except that in Bush' case, it's not the people who benefit from it, but the corporations. And that, according to Mussolini at least, amounts to fascism, not socialism.