Sigh. The point is that the usefulness of an unjammed cell phone post-crash is constrained by the number of cases it is useful, where a jammer would have made that useful communication impossible. Not just a crash, but a crash, with jammed doors (not all crashes) with nobody else around (not all crashes) where you can get coverage otherwise (the less popular the road, the less likely you'll get service), where the person with the phone is injured just enough to die without quick help, but at least for the moment they can still call (not all crashes).
And further, that the jammer, which is surely linked to the ignition, continues to operate even after the ignition is turned off (this should be a vanishingly small fraction of all crashes). And you are right -- a crash victim might not remember to turn off the ignition. Clearly, the jammer is also linked to the airbags; if they discharge, then the jammer is disabled. It's an obvious good idea that does not compromise the hang-up-and-drive features of the jammer, so it will happen.
The more contrived the example, the fewer useful cases it represents. And you're using a really contrived example, which also assumes the stupidest possible implementation of this jammer. It didn't take me long to think of an airbag linkage; if these jammers appear, that will surely be included. So poof, five minutes thinking about the issue, made your example 90% less relevant. An idiot thought of that, in just a few minutes; too bad you weren't smart enough, eh?
It's also worth noting that people will on the one hand claim the bogosity of comprehensive statistics collected over some amount of time, yet think that their contrived, it-could-happen-and-THEN-WHAT examples count as a convincing counterargument. Consider that the guys promoting this interlock have at least an estimate of how many lives it will save.
Note that I am perfectly willing to admit that someone, somewhere, might die a horrible death because of this regulation. Big deal. If it prevents a larger number of horrible deaths, that we have thus far proved unable to prevent by other means, it is a net win.
Last time I was in an accident, the door opened fine.:-)
And do you think that your remark made the excuses less lame? You're now assuming a crash, that jammed all the doors, where you are uninjured enough to use the phone, yet not able enough to get out the window or kick the door open, and nobody else around has a phone they can use instead of you. So essentially, a door-jamming solo crash -- and the car's jammer continues to work, even with the ignition off. And it's a full moon, and February 29, too, right?
And are we talking mortal injury, or mere inconvenience? Because, the car crash, that was convenient, but the inability to use the phone, whoa, now that is a problem.
Do you begin to understand how silly all this sounds?
Ever considered, no single silver bullet? Bike to the train station, for example -- that lets you get more people to the train, than any other method (walking is too slow, driving, you end up traffic and parking constrained, plus nobody wants to be near that many cars).
And babies and bikes are entirely compatible, provided you're not pretending to be Lance Armstrong. Our oldest rode in a trailer from an early age, so did the daughters of two sets of friends, or you can go for a bakfiets.
People with a gimped vestibular system (e.g., the late Sheldon Brown) use a tricycle. People bike with artificial legs (I've seen them). People bike with relatively trashed cardiovascular capacity -- it is, after all, obscenely efficient.
And you don't have to stay home when the weather is "bad", though it depends upon your definition of bad. Weathermen nowadays have totally bought in to the culture of fear -- nowadays, I just look at at the radar, and if it looks clean enough, I ride.
Seriously, there are cities in the Netherland that get their ride share over 50%; that doesn't sound like a "niche" to me.
Those feet things, if operated properly, can be used to "walk" away from the car, if it is still interfering. And surely you're not assuming a brute-force jam?
Bicycles. It's nicer with government help (bike-friendly laws and infrastructure), but not necessary.
And, counting all causes of death (in particular, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes) far safer than cars, busses, or anything else that has you sitting on your dead ass, because disease-of-the-unfit are far deadlier than car crashes.
What's interesting to me is how little love bikes get from libertarians -- cyclists evade all sorts of government restrictions (insurance, tax, registration, inspections -- this ought to make them super-popular with the don't-tread-on-me crowd), and actually allow you to be properly responsible for the consequences of your actions -- it's pretty easy to kill someone accidentally with a car, and once that's done, no amount of fines or jail time will un-kill that person. A car gives you the ability to easily cause damage far beyond what you can repair.
That's, shall we say, a rare case. A cell phone ban would not need to save many lives at all to be a net win if that's the live-saving example you can come up with.
All these hypothetical save-lives-with-cell-phones scenarios are contrived, ridiculous, and innumerate. If you want to save lives, for a decent fraction of the trips out there (all the short ones), you want people to not do them in cars. The general lack of exercise in this country kills many more people than car crashes. "Disabling cars" would indeed save lives. (Example -- Danish study discovers that non-bicycle commuters have a 40% HIGHER mortality rate -- from diseases of the fat and unfit, not from car crashes.)
ALSO: Because I just bleeping love his videos, DannyMacAskill. Except, you don't want your eight-year-old to even look at this stuff, he might try to imitate it.
How about the guy who drank heliobacter pylori to prove it causes ulcers? He got a Nobel Prize, even.
Sylvia Earle, except she's about as old as my dad, and I'm 50 (she went to high school with my dad, I think she was even romantically involved with his best friend, Wallace, for some high school definition of "romance"). Deep sea exploration, Jim suits. Cool stuff.
Failing that, Ross Evans and Kipchoge Spencer. They're younger. They want to save the world with cargo bicycles. Get one of their bikes, you don't need a car.
Re:Possible professional sports abuse?
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Muscle Mice
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Not sure what you're saying. I've never done any of that stuff, if that's what you're implying, but it's entirely possible to enhance performance with drugs in ways that are not a health risk. So, that can't be the reason it's banned. Athletes could use testosterone and EPO to bring their personal levels right up the medically defined "upper limits", therefore not a health risk, yet under current rules it would still be illegal.
So it's about the cheating, not the health risk.
See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Riis#Doping_allegations .
He doped, but it's clear that there's a range of normal hematocrit, and that one could use EPO to titrate right up to the limit. And strictly speaking, high hematocrit is not dangerous till your blood starts to sludge up (quick internet research suggests, 70%, where 50% is the old threshold for a racing ban).
Re:For all the humor...
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Muscle Mice
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Not even a bike? I am so sorry. Maybe a recumbent tricycle? That's as low-impact as I can imagine, that still uses muscles at all, unless you swim everywhere (and even then, sometimes you kick the side by accident).
A friend, because of congenital circulatory problems that should have killed her as a child, is now wandering around (and riding a bike) with 40% of the CV capacity of a middle-aged woman. She gets winded sometimes. You think, some of those performance-enhancing drugs, can't we use them for good? Seems like a speck of EPO would be a real help, goose that RBC up to the higher end of the normal range.
Re:There is a little hurdle to clear....
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Muscle Mice
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Similarly, at a lake near where I grew up, kids with more money than sense would put ever-larger motors on tiny motorboat hulls (13' Checkmate, official limit was 55HP). Apparently, with a large enough motor (135HP) and the right prop, when you goose it from a standstill, the bow comes up, and just keeps on coming over. Oops.
Re:Possible professional sports abuse?
on
Muscle Mice
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· Score: 1
It's not just damaging to health. It's the cheating.
As far as "damaging to health" goes, the dose makes the poison. There's natural variation in testosterone levels; how do you argue damaging to health, if the least-chemically-manly merely doses up to the same level as the most-chemically-manly in an event? The result is the same as a naturally-occurring level, but it was obtained by doping, therefore it's illegal.
You could credibly argue, also, that any level of testosterone is hazardous to your long-term health (we do die sooner, statistically speaking), so clearly, we should just ban men's sports, right?
Similar arguments can be made for red blood cell count and EPO -- EPO's illegal, camping out for three months in La Paz or Quito (thin air), that's ok.
As opposed to the very late 70s. Summer job, guidance systems for ICBMs. A senior engineer was working on replacing a page full of electronics in tiny print, with a Z80 (it was a control system related to guidance). Temperature was tightly controlled, no problem there, but G-forces could be large and it had to tolerate radiation from both friendly and unfriendly fire. Even then, a Z80 was well behind the state of the market.
Note that post-65, the US also has "socialized medicine". Medicare is roughly equal to "single payer".
Focusing on pieces of the population also dodges the possibility that our system simply kills the weak, earlier, and the remaining cohort is quite a bit tougher, and lives longer.
I assume that you noticed my disclaimer, that I do not necessarily believe the baseline date, and that it might be more than 16 years (that is, I find it highly likely that the USDA continued to print a map based on old observations). However, it is probably less than 40, because I recall stuff getting frozen out in the 60s.
I did in fact post links to discussions and aggregations of references, suggesting that warming lags CO2 content by 40 years. Add to that, that we cannot turn the economy on a dime, and that a lot of our efforts are (and will be) boneheaded anyway. So add a decade. That means, we get to see 50 years of additional change AFTER we are certain, and then we get to live in those conditions for about a hundred years, maybe more.
And, we have a pile of relatively recent (hence, best quality) climate simulations suggesting drought conditions for almost the entire US (excepting Alaska) 20-50 years from now, and continuing to worsen after that. (Link appears above, somewhere, it's a PDF.) Canada, Scandinavia, Russia do fine. China, not so much. India, wins in some simulations, not in others. I assume that there will be geo-engineering if things turn out badly for China or India, and I would be surprised if they were not already studying the problem.
So how, exactly, is it not too late already? I believe your counterclaim is "we don't know that will happen", and you are, strictly speaking, correct, since nobody can predict the future with complete accuracy.
Do note, that the IPCC has demonstrated this already -- where their predictions have been tested, they have mostly been exceeded by reality. That's not the sort of error I want to see -- ideally, they would overshoot something like 1/3 of the time.
The difficulty is, if those simulations (and it is an overview of multiple simulations) are correct, or even near-correct, then it's too late already, and we will end up not just relocating people from barrier islands (they moved there once, they can move away again), but also abandoning farmland in huge hunks of the center of the country. It's a combination of what I would call middling (40-80%) probability with a terrible outcome. Me, personally, I will probably make out ok -- high ground near Boston, and as a colleague remarked, "One thing I noted when I moved here was that they have a really robust water supply".
Arbor day map (follow links in previous posts) shows their changes from the 1990 map. It is not the USDA map. On-the-ground observation shows that in at least one instance, the Arbor Day map is the more accurate one, though the reasons for this in northern Pinellas County surely do include more urbanization. St. Pete itself, a pretty good-sized area, has been Florida-urban since I was a kid.
Whoops, mistake in my reply. Bigger mistake in your reply. The Arbor day map, purports to tell you where you can plant stuff. They say "climate change", but strictly speaking, either they are not qualified to make that judgement, or they define the term broadly. What they ARE experts on, is what will grow where -- the intended audience for that map, is people who want to grow stuff, and if they are wrong, they will waste gardeners' time and money.
And in the one place where I am able to check their data directly, comparing what-grew-then with what-grows-now, I see that they are correct. Whether this is caused by urbanization or by climate change where I observed it, is irrelevant -- what is important is that the data in the map is confirmed (at least in that place). This suggests that perhaps they did their homework.
However, the changes in the rest of the map, do not look like patterns from urbanization; this suggests that we are looking at climate change, in the global warming sense. And, since we know that they have an incentive not to screw over gardeners, and because in at least one instance they were proven right in the details, I think we have to suspect that it might be correct.
Having seen this map, I've been trying to get a fix on the exact location of the 6a/6b line (Japanese maple is an indicator species -- this is where I live now), to see if it has moved, too. This is a little tricky, because the existence of a tiny plant might merely imply that a gardener is being adventurous, and got lucky for a couple of winters -- but because the change is recent, there will not be large plants.
Well, it's clear that you've explained it to your satisfaction. Of course, that leaves all the other data untouched, in particular our good friend the Keeling Curve.
Unfortunately, St. Pete has been consistently urban since I was a wee tot. The areas to the north, they have developed since then, but St. Pete WAS a zone 9 (urban as it was and is), and is NOW a zone 10 (still urban). It is of course confounding that areas to the north are both warmer and more developed, but the change in St. Pete seems indicative, since it has been consistently "urban" for some definition of the word. In any case, the nearby water has a huge effect throughout the region; that's why south of Tampa Bay was (and still is) a zone 10.
I assume you know that in most cases, "freezes" in Central Florida are radiative, meaning the air gets dry, clear, and still, and the temperature just drops at night (the freeze Christmas Eve of 1989 was an exception, but I am sure you knew this already). This means that "frost protection" can be as trivial as a sheet tossed over a tender plant. It seems unlikely that the re-radiation of heat from excess CO2 would blunt this (to do so, it would have to be a huge effect, I think), but it would be fun to know the exact answer.
More likely is that it always was a mixture of zone 9 and zone 10 plant life, but you didn't notice until you started looking for things to validate your belief system.
Untrue. Banyan trees could not survive in St. Pete when I was a kid, but could south of Tampa Bay. They now grow 35 miles north of St. Pete. That Passiflora (you DID click the link, right?) is not a subtle indicator, either. Furthermore, the gardening world is full of people who try to push the limits with interesting stuff, looking for microclimates where they can find them. My dad tried to grow papayas, and failed because they froze. They survive now, in the very same neighborhood. Your claim of a zone 9/10 mix also contradicts the climate charts; there are indeed plants that can grow in multiple zones, but for each zone (and even each half-zone) there are indicator species, that grow in one zone, but not the next. If you've got banyan trees, papayas, and passiflora alata, your zone is not 9, it is 10.
I also note you conveniently snipped out the bit about the trees. It is well known that annual weeds are happy colonizers; trees are a good deal slower. If climate zones are really moving 100 miles every 16 years in the Southeast (I actually doubt that, I think the 1990 baseline was not kept up to date), I think that some tree crops may cease to be viable economically because of the long "investment" time.
As to the matter of "waiting for certainty is too late", that derives from two things. #1,the excess CO2 will be with us for a long time (centuries -- see, was that so hard?). #2, the temperature increase lags the CO2, because so much heat is sunk into the oceans. #3, as someone noted, you cannot turn an economy on a dime, so even once we decide to cut back, it will take years to do so. So, whatever observed temperature rise it takes for us to decide to put on the brakes, it will take us years to activate the brakes, AND we will have that higher level of CO2 for a century or so, AND the temperature will continue to rise for decades.
The one place I don't have good data, is on what constitutes "certainty", nor on how fast we could actually turn the economy. If our threshold for "certain" is actually not that far from where we are now, then I am wrong, assuming we flipped from skeptic to certain (as a society) in the space of five years (and stayed there). But as near as I can tell, that is not how things are -- you are certainly an example of someone who has taken the tribal approach (to an insulting level, I might add) and cloaked it in a bogus reverence for Science.
You are confused about who is claiming what, though it is likely that I, too, have reduced my CO2 footprint by about a ton per year.
"Gradual" is in the eye of the beholder. My childhood home was a zone 9, now it is a zone 10; I have seen the changes with my own eyes. Plant zones have moved about 100 miles north in 16 (?) years.
(The baseline might be from earlier, so perhaps it is longer.)
Assuming this continues, this should put pressure on peaches and pecans in Georgia and South Carolina in a few decades -- those are two crops that I know don't do especially well in zone 9. We can, of course, move our orchards north, but we had better start soon; some trees take a long time to grow to full production. Other annual crops, we can move more quickly.
My "feelings" are backed by scientific evidence, I merely did not include links. An earlier version of this is what first caught my attention, back in the early 1990s. That does not establish a causal link, but it does establish both an increase in CO2 and a hemisphere-wide warming trend. This is a nice discussion (with references) of direct measurements of predicted CO2 greenhouse effects; so it is a greenhouse gas, both in the lab, and in the atmosphere.
SO. Do you have scientific evidence that (a) it is not getting warmer or (b) there is not more CO2 in the air or (c) CO2 is not a greenhouse gas? I am quite familiar with all the usual claims about water vapor, alternate sources of CO2, solar radiation, etc, and would rather not preemptively post links to debunking sites, but seriously, what is the case for your position? Could you, perhaps, define "gradual", "long", and "adaptable"? Those are mighty squishy words from someone who insists on the use of Science.
Maybe. Note that the shear is not uniformly reduced, and that reference at least predicts no change north of Miami, so any storms forming or surviving in that part of the ocean, are thus predicted to be stronger than usual because of warmer water.
Climate models project increased aridity in the 21st century over most of Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East, most of the Americas, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Regions like the United States have avoided prolonged droughts during the last 50 years due to natural climate variations, but might see persistent droughts in the next 20–50 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. The point is that the usefulness of an unjammed cell phone post-crash is constrained by the number of cases it is useful, where a jammer would have made that useful communication impossible. Not just a crash, but a crash, with jammed doors (not all crashes) with nobody else around (not all crashes) where you can get coverage otherwise (the less popular the road, the less likely you'll get service), where the person with the phone is injured just enough to die without quick help, but at least for the moment they can still call (not all crashes).
And further, that the jammer, which is surely linked to the ignition, continues to operate even after the ignition is turned off (this should be a vanishingly small fraction of all crashes). And you are right -- a crash victim might not remember to turn off the ignition. Clearly, the jammer is also linked to the airbags; if they discharge, then the jammer is disabled. It's an obvious good idea that does not compromise the hang-up-and-drive features of the jammer, so it will happen.
The more contrived the example, the fewer useful cases it represents. And you're using a really contrived example, which also assumes the stupidest possible implementation of this jammer. It didn't take me long to think of an airbag linkage; if these jammers appear, that will surely be included. So poof, five minutes thinking about the issue, made your example 90% less relevant. An idiot thought of that, in just a few minutes; too bad you weren't smart enough, eh?
It's also worth noting that people will on the one hand claim the bogosity of comprehensive statistics collected over some amount of time, yet think that their contrived, it-could-happen-and-THEN-WHAT examples count as a convincing counterargument. Consider that the guys promoting this interlock have at least an estimate of how many lives it will save.
Note that I am perfectly willing to admit that someone, somewhere, might die a horrible death because of this regulation. Big deal. If it prevents a larger number of horrible deaths, that we have thus far proved unable to prevent by other means, it is a net win.
Last time I was in an accident, the door opened fine. :-)
And do you think that your remark made the excuses less lame? You're now assuming a crash, that jammed all the doors, where you are uninjured enough to use the phone, yet not able enough to get out the window or kick the door open, and nobody else around has a phone they can use instead of you. So essentially, a door-jamming solo crash -- and the car's jammer continues to work, even with the ignition off. And it's a full moon, and February 29, too, right?
And are we talking mortal injury, or mere inconvenience? Because, the car crash, that was convenient, but the inability to use the phone, whoa, now that is a problem.
Do you begin to understand how silly all this sounds?
Ever considered, no single silver bullet? Bike to the train station, for example -- that lets you get more people to the train, than any other method (walking is too slow, driving, you end up traffic and parking constrained, plus nobody wants to be near that many cars).
And babies and bikes are entirely compatible, provided you're not pretending to be Lance Armstrong. Our oldest rode in a trailer from an early age, so did the daughters of two sets of friends, or you can go for a bakfiets.
People with a gimped vestibular system (e.g., the late Sheldon Brown) use a tricycle. People bike with artificial legs (I've seen them). People bike with relatively trashed cardiovascular capacity -- it is, after all, obscenely efficient.
And you don't have to stay home when the weather is "bad", though it depends upon your definition of bad. Weathermen nowadays have totally bought in to the culture of fear -- nowadays, I just look at at the radar, and if it looks clean enough, I ride.
Seriously, there are cities in the Netherland that get their ride share over 50%; that doesn't sound like a "niche" to me.
Those feet things, if operated properly, can be used to "walk" away from the car, if it is still interfering. And surely you're not assuming a brute-force jam?
Bicycles. It's nicer with government help (bike-friendly laws and infrastructure), but not necessary.
And, counting all causes of death (in particular, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes) far safer than cars, busses, or anything else that has you sitting on your dead ass, because disease-of-the-unfit are far deadlier than car crashes.
What's interesting to me is how little love bikes get from libertarians -- cyclists evade all sorts of government restrictions (insurance, tax, registration, inspections -- this ought to make them super-popular with the don't-tread-on-me crowd), and actually allow you to be properly responsible for the consequences of your actions -- it's pretty easy to kill someone accidentally with a car, and once that's done, no amount of fines or jail time will un-kill that person. A car gives you the ability to easily cause damage far beyond what you can repair.
That's, shall we say, a rare case. A cell phone ban would not need to save many lives at all to be a net win if that's the live-saving example you can come up with.
All these hypothetical save-lives-with-cell-phones scenarios are contrived, ridiculous, and innumerate. If you want to save lives, for a decent fraction of the trips out there (all the short ones), you want people to not do them in cars. The general lack of exercise in this country kills many more people than car crashes. "Disabling cars" would indeed save lives. (Example -- Danish study discovers that non-bicycle commuters have a 40% HIGHER mortality rate -- from diseases of the fat and unfit, not from car crashes.)
Based on my extensive study of debris on the road, either nobody calls, nobody responds, or both.
And how did people live before cell phones? I must have been pretty horrible.
Use that door thing, and step outside the car before calling.
People make the lamest excuses for continuing to use their cell phones.
ALSO: Because I just bleeping love his videos, Danny MacAskill. Except, you don't want your eight-year-old to even look at this stuff, he might try to imitate it.
How about the guy who drank heliobacter pylori to prove it causes ulcers? He got a Nobel Prize, even.
Sylvia Earle, except she's about as old as my dad, and I'm 50 (she went to high school with my dad, I think she was even romantically involved with his best friend, Wallace, for some high school definition of "romance"). Deep sea exploration, Jim suits. Cool stuff.
Failing that, Ross Evans and Kipchoge Spencer. They're younger. They want to save the world with cargo bicycles. Get one of their bikes, you don't need a car.
Not sure what you're saying. I've never done any of that stuff, if that's what you're implying, but it's entirely possible to enhance performance with drugs in ways that are not a health risk. So, that can't be the reason it's banned. Athletes could use testosterone and EPO to bring their personal levels right up the medically defined "upper limits", therefore not a health risk, yet under current rules it would still be illegal.
So it's about the cheating, not the health risk.
See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Riis#Doping_allegations . He doped, but it's clear that there's a range of normal hematocrit, and that one could use EPO to titrate right up to the limit. And strictly speaking, high hematocrit is not dangerous till your blood starts to sludge up (quick internet research suggests, 70%, where 50% is the old threshold for a racing ban).
Not even a bike? I am so sorry. Maybe a recumbent tricycle? That's as low-impact as I can imagine, that still uses muscles at all, unless you swim everywhere (and even then, sometimes you kick the side by accident).
A friend, because of congenital circulatory problems that should have killed her as a child, is now wandering around (and riding a bike) with 40% of the CV capacity of a middle-aged woman. She gets winded sometimes. You think, some of those performance-enhancing drugs, can't we use them for good? Seems like a speck of EPO would be a real help, goose that RBC up to the higher end of the normal range.
Similarly, at a lake near where I grew up, kids with more money than sense would put ever-larger motors on tiny motorboat hulls (13' Checkmate, official limit was 55HP). Apparently, with a large enough motor (135HP) and the right prop, when you goose it from a standstill, the bow comes up, and just keeps on coming over. Oops.
It's not just damaging to health. It's the cheating.
As far as "damaging to health" goes, the dose makes the poison. There's natural variation in testosterone levels; how do you argue damaging to health, if the least-chemically-manly merely doses up to the same level as the most-chemically-manly in an event? The result is the same as a naturally-occurring level, but it was obtained by doping, therefore it's illegal.
You could credibly argue, also, that any level of testosterone is hazardous to your long-term health (we do die sooner, statistically speaking), so clearly, we should just ban men's sports, right?
Similar arguments can be made for red blood cell count and EPO -- EPO's illegal, camping out for three months in La Paz or Quito (thin air), that's ok.
As opposed to the very late 70s. Summer job, guidance systems for ICBMs. A senior engineer was working on replacing a page full of electronics in tiny print, with a Z80 (it was a control system related to guidance). Temperature was tightly controlled, no problem there, but G-forces could be large and it had to tolerate radiation from both friendly and unfriendly fire. Even then, a Z80 was well behind the state of the market.
Note that post-65, the US also has "socialized medicine". Medicare is roughly equal to "single payer".
Focusing on pieces of the population also dodges the possibility that our system simply kills the weak, earlier, and the remaining cohort is quite a bit tougher, and lives longer.
I assume that you noticed my disclaimer, that I do not necessarily believe the baseline date, and that it might be more than 16 years (that is, I find it highly likely that the USDA continued to print a map based on old observations). However, it is probably less than 40, because I recall stuff getting frozen out in the 60s.
I did in fact post links to discussions and aggregations of references, suggesting that warming lags CO2 content by 40 years. Add to that, that we cannot turn the economy on a dime, and that a lot of our efforts are (and will be) boneheaded anyway. So add a decade. That means, we get to see 50 years of additional change AFTER we are certain, and then we get to live in those conditions for about a hundred years, maybe more.
And, we have a pile of relatively recent (hence, best quality) climate simulations suggesting drought conditions for almost the entire US (excepting Alaska) 20-50 years from now, and continuing to worsen after that. (Link appears above, somewhere, it's a PDF.) Canada, Scandinavia, Russia do fine. China, not so much. India, wins in some simulations, not in others. I assume that there will be geo-engineering if things turn out badly for China or India, and I would be surprised if they were not already studying the problem.
So how, exactly, is it not too late already? I believe your counterclaim is "we don't know that will happen", and you are, strictly speaking, correct, since nobody can predict the future with complete accuracy. Do note, that the IPCC has demonstrated this already -- where their predictions have been tested, they have mostly been exceeded by reality. That's not the sort of error I want to see -- ideally, they would overshoot something like 1/3 of the time.
The difficulty is, if those simulations (and it is an overview of multiple simulations) are correct, or even near-correct, then it's too late already, and we will end up not just relocating people from barrier islands (they moved there once, they can move away again), but also abandoning farmland in huge hunks of the center of the country. It's a combination of what I would call middling (40-80%) probability with a terrible outcome. Me, personally, I will probably make out ok -- high ground near Boston, and as a colleague remarked, "One thing I noted when I moved here was that they have a really robust water supply".
Arbor day map (follow links in previous posts) shows their changes from the 1990 map. It is not the USDA map. On-the-ground observation shows that in at least one instance, the Arbor Day map is the more accurate one, though the reasons for this in northern Pinellas County surely do include more urbanization. St. Pete itself, a pretty good-sized area, has been Florida-urban since I was a kid.
Whoops, mistake in my reply. Bigger mistake in your reply. The Arbor day map, purports to tell you where you can plant stuff. They say "climate change", but strictly speaking, either they are not qualified to make that judgement, or they define the term broadly. What they ARE experts on, is what will grow where -- the intended audience for that map, is people who want to grow stuff, and if they are wrong, they will waste gardeners' time and money.
And in the one place where I am able to check their data directly, comparing what-grew-then with what-grows-now, I see that they are correct. Whether this is caused by urbanization or by climate change where I observed it, is irrelevant -- what is important is that the data in the map is confirmed (at least in that place). This suggests that perhaps they did their homework.
However, the changes in the rest of the map, do not look like patterns from urbanization; this suggests that we are looking at climate change, in the global warming sense. And, since we know that they have an incentive not to screw over gardeners, and because in at least one instance they were proven right in the details, I think we have to suspect that it might be correct.
Having seen this map, I've been trying to get a fix on the exact location of the 6a/6b line (Japanese maple is an indicator species -- this is where I live now), to see if it has moved, too. This is a little tricky, because the existence of a tiny plant might merely imply that a gardener is being adventurous, and got lucky for a couple of winters -- but because the change is recent, there will not be large plants.
Well, it's clear that you've explained it to your satisfaction. Of course, that leaves all the other data untouched, in particular our good friend the Keeling Curve.
Unfortunately, St. Pete has been consistently urban since I was a wee tot. The areas to the north, they have developed since then, but St. Pete WAS a zone 9 (urban as it was and is), and is NOW a zone 10 (still urban). It is of course confounding that areas to the north are both warmer and more developed, but the change in St. Pete seems indicative, since it has been consistently "urban" for some definition of the word. In any case, the nearby water has a huge effect throughout the region; that's why south of Tampa Bay was (and still is) a zone 10.
I assume you know that in most cases, "freezes" in Central Florida are radiative, meaning the air gets dry, clear, and still, and the temperature just drops at night (the freeze Christmas Eve of 1989 was an exception, but I am sure you knew this already). This means that "frost protection" can be as trivial as a sheet tossed over a tender plant. It seems unlikely that the re-radiation of heat from excess CO2 would blunt this (to do so, it would have to be a huge effect, I think), but it would be fun to know the exact answer.
More likely is that it always was a mixture of zone 9 and zone 10 plant life, but you didn't notice until you started looking for things to validate your belief system.
Untrue. Banyan trees could not survive in St. Pete when I was a kid, but could south of Tampa Bay. They now grow 35 miles north of St. Pete. That Passiflora (you DID click the link, right?) is not a subtle indicator, either. Furthermore, the gardening world is full of people who try to push the limits with interesting stuff, looking for microclimates where they can find them. My dad tried to grow papayas, and failed because they froze. They survive now, in the very same neighborhood. Your claim of a zone 9/10 mix also contradicts the climate charts; there are indeed plants that can grow in multiple zones, but for each zone (and even each half-zone) there are indicator species, that grow in one zone, but not the next. If you've got banyan trees, papayas, and passiflora alata, your zone is not 9, it is 10.
A second datapoint, not plant related, is the water supply. There's also been recent predictions of widespread drought in the 20-40 year future, based on climate models. We can "fix" this with population migration. Tampa, FL, is looking into recycling sewage into drinking water.
I also note you conveniently snipped out the bit about the trees. It is well known that annual weeds are happy colonizers; trees are a good deal slower. If climate zones are really moving 100 miles every 16 years in the Southeast (I actually doubt that, I think the 1990 baseline was not kept up to date), I think that some tree crops may cease to be viable economically because of the long "investment" time.
As to the matter of "waiting for certainty is too late", that derives from two things. #1,the excess CO2 will be with us for a long time (centuries -- see, was that so hard?). #2, the temperature increase lags the CO2, because so much heat is sunk into the oceans. #3, as someone noted, you cannot turn an economy on a dime, so even once we decide to cut back, it will take years to do so. So, whatever observed temperature rise it takes for us to decide to put on the brakes, it will take us years to activate the brakes, AND we will have that higher level of CO2 for a century or so, AND the temperature will continue to rise for decades.
The one place I don't have good data, is on what constitutes "certainty", nor on how fast we could actually turn the economy. If our threshold for "certain" is actually not that far from where we are now, then I am wrong, assuming we flipped from skeptic to certain (as a society) in the space of five years (and stayed there). But as near as I can tell, that is not how things are -- you are certainly an example of someone who has taken the tribal approach (to an insulting level, I might add) and cloaked it in a bogus reverence for Science.
You are confused about who is claiming what, though it is likely that I, too, have reduced my CO2 footprint by about a ton per year.
"Gradual" is in the eye of the beholder. My childhood home was a zone 9, now it is a zone 10; I have seen the changes with my own eyes. Plant zones have moved about 100 miles north in 16 (?) years. (The baseline might be from earlier, so perhaps it is longer.) Assuming this continues, this should put pressure on peaches and pecans in Georgia and South Carolina in a few decades -- those are two crops that I know don't do especially well in zone 9. We can, of course, move our orchards north, but we had better start soon; some trees take a long time to grow to full production. Other annual crops, we can move more quickly.
My "feelings" are backed by scientific evidence, I merely did not include links. An earlier version of this is what first caught my attention, back in the early 1990s. That does not establish a causal link, but it does establish both an increase in CO2 and a hemisphere-wide warming trend. This is a nice discussion (with references) of direct measurements of predicted CO2 greenhouse effects; so it is a greenhouse gas, both in the lab, and in the atmosphere.
SO. Do you have scientific evidence that (a) it is not getting warmer or (b) there is not more CO2 in the air or (c) CO2 is not a greenhouse gas? I am quite familiar with all the usual claims about water vapor, alternate sources of CO2, solar radiation, etc, and would rather not preemptively post links to debunking sites, but seriously, what is the case for your position? Could you, perhaps, define "gradual", "long", and "adaptable"? Those are mighty squishy words from someone who insists on the use of Science.
If you drove more slowly, perhaps it would improve your aim.
The problem is that it's not just hurricanes; climate models also predict widespread drought (pdf):