Unfortunnatly, it's false...We know the outcome of the war without the nuke. Japan was seeking a way to end the war in a diplomatic way.
The most horrible outcome might have been a surrender on the terms the Japanese were discussing. The Japanese would have kept their military, their Imperial system, no war crime trials, no occupation of Japan. This way they would have written the history to be that Japan had won the war.
Also, no post war food aid, and ~20 million Japanese civilians would have starved to death after the war.
So hunting over the internet is "unsporting" but killing animals with high power, long range rifles isn't?
Never been hunting, I'd guess. It's not as easy as it might seem. Also, hunting doesn't mean just high power, long range rifles. In some areas, and for some types of game, rifles are not even allowed. Turkey season, which in this state lasts until the May 15th, is archery and shotgun only.
But maybe I'm wrong, and you have been hunting, and found it easy. Then perhaps you should try hunting in a more challanging way, with less power, less range, less noise and less crowded seasons. Get a few of these, practice until you can use them well, and go hunting a quiet way.
Where I live (Northwest USA), the ski areas are closed down this winter due to lack of snow. Guess what: local weather varies a lot more than global average temperature. Global warming means global, not local. Your backyard will vary a lot, and that variation tells us very little about the global trend.
Tropical forests on the north coast of Alaska would mean that much of the lower 48 would be unlivable. The economy might fail to grow. Horrors! Might even get smaller...
As for the joys of debt, I suspect that "really smart people" in 1935 had a rather different view of debt, after watching the effects of the "great deflation". Things owned free and clean are truly yours. Leverage is a sword with two edges: If you buy stock with 10% down (which you could do in 1929), yes, it is true if the stock doubles you make six times your investment. But what if it goes down? Stocks come with no promise of only rising prices. Real estate has no law that makes the price only go up, after all. Incomes come with no promise of only rising with time, after all. Incomes, real estate and stocks all fell in the 1930's.
We will always be able to find a way for the data to support the theory that there is no global climate change. First of all, there is just is not enough data on record to say anything with absolute certainty.
Yes. For there is no physical fact known to absolute certainty. None. Not one. Absolute truths are limited to geometry, mathamatics and logic. Gravity, speed of light, any idea based on measurements, all such ideas are are all subject to doubt. But I would not suggest jumping of any tall buildings. The odds are very very high that such a jumper would become a messy spot on the ground in just seconds.
Climate is a complex subject. Understanding it would be very unlikely to help you get an audition on the "O'Reilly" factor. It would be more likely to keep you off such shows. But if you did want to understand, here is the best overview I know of:
About 100 years ago, the "liberals" would have been the ones arguing that all changes are gradual in response to conservative nut cases talking great floods and cataclysmic events. Today, the conservatives seem to shut their eyes to the possibility of catastrophic changes, and the liberals are more likely to be talking about catastrophic change.
The world is a lot stranger than "liberal" vs "conservative". While climate change will probably look sudden on a geological time scale, on a human scale it probably will not look catastrophic until it is catastrophic. Which is exactly too late. Isn't preventing change what "conservatives" try to do?
"The Arctic Oscillation has been in a primarily moderate to high phase during the last decade or more, and the only way to reproduce this tendency in the oscillation using a numerical climate model is if you include the observed increase in greenhouse gases in the model."
Climate is more than temperature. Climate change will change more than temperature.
Wrong answer. A National Sales Tax is not a "fair tax".
Of course, adding rebates for the lowest income and an income tax for the upper and middle income, it could be part of a "fair tax system". I'm not sure that is any simpler. The problem is that a sales tax is regressive, and regressive taxes are not fair.
A sales tax is regressive because the lower the income, the more of that income is spend on taxable items. As an example: Lunch at a McD is fully taxable, lunch at a nice place isn't fully taxed (no sales tax on tip), and lunch served by the butler and cooked by a staff of cooks is almost not taxed at all (no sales tax on wages).
Sales and excise taxes are not "bad", unless these are the only kind of taxes. Taxes on goods with bad side effects (tobacco and alcohol are classic examples) are a way to more fully include all the costs of the good in the price of the good.
When it is going to hit (if it does) is known down to minutes NOW. That and knowing which way it is coming from allows us to exclude half the planet from worries other than climatic. As someone has already pointed out, that means both NY city and Texas are safe from this rock.
The uncertainty is a long strip that is 0.018 (see NEODyS) of the Earth's radius wide, and many times the Earth's radius long. Go look at:
I'd say that the quiality of the current data isn't good enough to predict where it will be in 25 years
If it hits, we know fairly closely when.
The uncertainty in the orbit of the asteriod is a function of the observations. If we project these uncertainties into the future, the usual shape of volume of space the asteroid will be is long (much larger than the Earth's radius) and narrow (in this case about 1% of the Earth's radius). Uncertainty in impact time is less than minutes, if it was more than that the odds of an impact would be smaller. Best bet is that more observations will exclude the change of an impact, leaving just a cool telescope target.
The Universal Service Fund (USF) -- the you have money, so you must pay for those that don't have money -- is the most un-American thing on the phone bill.
Well, no. The cost to install and to maintain a phone line isn't constant. A phone line to a house ten or twenty miles out of town costs serious money both to install and to maintain, and the price of the phone service is the same as in town, where phone service is cheap to install and maintain.
If the city people all change over to VOIP over broadband, phone service to the farms will be not subsidized by the USF, and will be priced at cost, hundreds of dollars per month, or more.
Of course, there isn't any cheap broadband in farm country as well. So telling the farmers to change to VOIP is just stupid. I'd bet you can get cell phone service in your home. What if you had to drive miles to get a signal? It is not a good alternative.
If you're too poor to afford a phone, just open your window and yell. Write a letter. Do whatever you did before the device existed. Keep your hand out of my pocket.
Why don't we bring back an unregulated telecom monopoly? The reason why the Bell system installed phone lines into the country was the network effect: the phone service was more valuable to the city people when they can talk to their friends on the farm. While the phone line to the country was an individual loss, the added value to the rest of the network allowed higher prices for the monopoly. Mail service is the same thing. In town, the post office makes money. When a postman has to drive miles to visit a few mail boxes, there is no way that the post office can make money on 37 cents. But if you had to look at a map every time you mailed a letter to determine if you could send a letter at all to someone, or to see how big of stamp to put on it, mail would be less useful.
Of course, a monopoly doesn't work with a competitive telecom world. So if VOIP takes off, then rural phone service is going to go away, or become far too expensive, or become cell phones only.
Correction: the ice replaces exactly the amount of water it occupies when floating (=law of Archimedes). Proof: take a glass of water, put in ice cube, fill up glass to the edge (but not overflowing!). Ice melts, and water is still exactly up to the edge.
If the oceans were fresh water, yes, but they are not. The oceans are salty. Salty water is denser than fresh water. When the ice melts, as it is mostly fresh water, it will fill a space slightly larger than the space it displaces in the salty water.
As you point out, this effect is minor compared with the ocean rise potential of ice on land. There is about 0.4 cm of potential sea level rise from sea ice, and about 4 cm from ice shelves. These are minor compared with the 5 meters from Greenland, and the 75 meters from Antarctica.
Like you said: "That cycle was discovered a long time ago during the IGY. The "Ozone Hole" over the Antarctic was larger in the mid-50's than it is today."
"you pick your data carefully and you can justify any theory you want."
Some theories are clearly unjustified when we look at all of the data. Like, for example: "The "Ozone Hole" over the Antarctic was larger in the mid-50's than it is today."
It would be interesting to discuss why October, as then we could discuss the way that CFCs cause the ozone hole. Discussing the centuries before 1956, the first year with ozone data from Halley Bay, Antarctica, without data, is pointless. As for data between 1982 and 2004, feel free to educate yourself and us.
Oh, and one more thing. There are no ice core records of ozone as there are no glaciers in the stratosphere. If that changes, let us know.
Slashdot Mirror
The most horrible outcome might have been a surrender on the terms the Japanese were discussing. The Japanese would have kept their military, their Imperial system, no war crime trials, no occupation of Japan. This way they would have written the history to be that Japan had won the war.
Also, no post war food aid, and ~20 million Japanese civilians would have starved to death after the war.
Never been hunting, I'd guess. It's not as easy as it might seem. Also, hunting doesn't mean just high power, long range rifles. In some areas, and for some types of game, rifles are not even allowed. Turkey season, which in this state lasts until the May 15th, is archery and shotgun only.
But maybe I'm wrong, and you have been hunting, and found it easy. Then perhaps you should try hunting in a more challanging way, with less power, less range, less noise and less crowded seasons. Get a few of these, practice until you can use them well, and go hunting a quiet way.
http://www.newarchery.com/images/th100.jpg
Where I live (Northwest USA), the ski areas are closed down this winter due to lack of snow. Guess what: local weather varies a lot more than global average temperature. Global warming means global, not local. Your backyard will vary a lot, and that variation tells us very little about the global trend.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/snowsports/2 002157838_skiworkers22.html
That's much better than the best cast scenario.
Worse case scenario would be enough warming to trigger the methane hydrates.
For a geologic preview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_ther mal_maximum
Tropical forests on the north coast of Alaska would mean that much of the lower 48 would be unlivable. The economy might fail to grow. Horrors! Might even get smaller...
As for the joys of debt, I suspect that "really smart people" in 1935 had a rather different view of debt, after watching the effects of the "great deflation". Things owned free and clean are truly yours. Leverage is a sword with two edges: If you buy stock with 10% down (which you could do in 1929), yes, it is true if the stock doubles you make six times your investment. But what if it goes down? Stocks come with no promise of only rising prices. Real estate has no law that makes the price only go up, after all. Incomes come with no promise of only rising with time, after all. Incomes, real estate and stocks all fell in the 1930's.
Sig? What is a sig?
Yes. For there is no physical fact known to absolute certainty. None. Not one. Absolute truths are limited to geometry, mathamatics and logic. Gravity, speed of light, any idea based on measurements, all such ideas are are all subject to doubt. But I would not suggest jumping of any tall buildings. The odds are very very high that such a jumper would become a messy spot on the ground in just seconds.
Climate is a complex subject. Understanding it would be very unlikely to help you get an audition on the "O'Reilly" factor. It would be more likely to keep you off such shows. But if you did want to understand, here is the best overview I know of:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
About 100 years ago, the "liberals" would have been the ones arguing that all changes are gradual in response to conservative nut cases talking great floods and cataclysmic events. Today, the conservatives seem to shut their eyes to the possibility of catastrophic changes, and the liberals are more likely to be talking about catastrophic change.
The world is a lot stranger than "liberal" vs "conservative". While climate change will probably look sudden on a geological time scale, on a human scale it probably will not look catastrophic until it is catastrophic. Which is exactly too late. Isn't preventing change what "conservatives" try to do?
"The Arctic Oscillation has been in a primarily moderate to high phase during the last decade or more, and the only way to reproduce this tendency in the oscillation using a numerical climate model is if you include the observed increase in greenhouse gases in the model."
Climate is more than temperature. Climate change will change more than temperature.
Of course, adding rebates for the lowest income and an income tax for the upper and middle income, it could be part of a "fair tax system". I'm not sure that is any simpler. The problem is that a sales tax is regressive, and regressive taxes are not fair.
A sales tax is regressive because the lower the income, the more of that income is spend on taxable items. As an example: Lunch at a McD is fully taxable, lunch at a nice place isn't fully taxed (no sales tax on tip), and lunch served by the butler and cooked by a staff of cooks is almost not taxed at all (no sales tax on wages).
Sales and excise taxes are not "bad", unless these are the only kind of taxes. Taxes on goods with bad side effects (tobacco and alcohol are classic examples) are a way to more fully include all the costs of the good in the price of the good.
The uncertainty is a long strip that is 0.018 (see NEODyS) of the Earth's radius wide, and many times the Earth's radius long. Go look at:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/2004mn4b.gif
If the odds don't go down to zero soon, someone will calculate where the stripe of uncertainty is on the globe. It wouldn't be hard to do.
If it hits, we know fairly closely when. The uncertainty in the orbit of the asteriod is a function of the observations. If we project these uncertainties into the future, the usual shape of volume of space the asteroid will be is long (much larger than the Earth's radius) and narrow (in this case about 1% of the Earth's radius). Uncertainty in impact time is less than minutes, if it was more than that the odds of an impact would be smaller. Best bet is that more observations will exclude the change of an impact, leaving just a cool telescope target.
Well, no. The cost to install and to maintain a phone line isn't constant. A phone line to a house ten or twenty miles out of town costs serious money both to install and to maintain, and the price of the phone service is the same as in town, where phone service is cheap to install and maintain.
If the city people all change over to VOIP over broadband, phone service to the farms will be not subsidized by the USF, and will be priced at cost, hundreds of dollars per month, or more.
Of course, there isn't any cheap broadband in farm country as well. So telling the farmers to change to VOIP is just stupid. I'd bet you can get cell phone service in your home. What if you had to drive miles to get a signal? It is not a good alternative.
If you're too poor to afford a phone, just open your window and yell. Write a letter. Do whatever you did before the device existed. Keep your hand out of my pocket.
Why don't we bring back an unregulated telecom monopoly? The reason why the Bell system installed phone lines into the country was the network effect: the phone service was more valuable to the city people when they can talk to their friends on the farm. While the phone line to the country was an individual loss, the added value to the rest of the network allowed higher prices for the monopoly. Mail service is the same thing. In town, the post office makes money. When a postman has to drive miles to visit a few mail boxes, there is no way that the post office can make money on 37 cents. But if you had to look at a map every time you mailed a letter to determine if you could send a letter at all to someone, or to see how big of stamp to put on it, mail would be less useful.
Of course, a monopoly doesn't work with a competitive telecom world. So if VOIP takes off, then rural phone service is going to go away, or become far too expensive, or become cell phones only.
The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, who was not a Christian.
"I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature." - Thomas Jefferson
If the oceans were fresh water, yes, but they are not. The oceans are salty. Salty water is denser than fresh water. When the ice melts, as it is mostly fresh water, it will fill a space slightly larger than the space it displaces in the salty water.
As you point out, this effect is minor compared with the ocean rise potential of ice on land. There is about 0.4 cm of potential sea level rise from sea ice, and about 4 cm from ice shelves. These are minor compared with the 5 meters from Greenland, and the 75 meters from Antarctica.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_mon itoring/regional_monitoring/palmer.gif
Fire danger is low.
Like you said: "That cycle was discovered a long time ago during the IGY. The "Ozone Hole" over the Antarctic was larger in the mid-50's than it is today."
The earliest year with data is 1956.
1956 321 DU
1957 330 DU
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ozone-depletion/antarctic /
As was pointed out in the topic, this year is looking rather better than recent history, starting the month at 150 DU:
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/jds/ozone/images/z oz0405.JPG
(Historic data is the average of 1957-72)
"you pick your data carefully and you can justify any theory you want."
Some theories are clearly unjustified when we look at all of the data. Like, for example: "The "Ozone Hole" over the Antarctic was larger in the mid-50's than it is today."
It would be interesting to discuss why October, as then we could discuss the way that CFCs cause the ozone hole. Discussing the centuries before 1956, the first year with ozone data from Halley Bay, Antarctica, without data, is pointless. As for data between 1982 and 2004, feel free to educate yourself and us.
Oh, and one more thing. There are no ice core records of ozone as there are no glaciers in the stratosphere. If that changes, let us know.
http://www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/images/easoe/total_ozo ne.gif
"This is a myth, arising from a misinterpretation of an out-of-context quotation from a review article by Dobson."
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ozone-depletion/antarctic /