Seems to me this points toward something other than CO2 causing the warming.
And you would be wrong. It helps if you read the research on the subject. Also, the IPCC report has some very good layman explanations of the phenomena involved with planetary warming.
Something like, I don't know, water vapor, of which there is little in the Asian highlands, but plenty around the much lower areas where the glaciers are melting.
Actually, it is far more likely a result of GHGs in the lower troposphere preventing thermal radiation from escaping, which is already a noted result in stratospheric cooling.
Even AGW people admit that water is the REAL problem, and that CO2 is just a trigger for increases in that heat-storing gas.
Water vapor isn't a problem. It is a result of higher temperatures induced by higher concentrations of GHGs. You have your feedbacks a little backward.
But for some reason they seem to chafe at the idea of using condensers and other methods to remove the water from the air.
I'm not aware of any scientist chafing at the idea, however water vapor isn't the problem. Water vapor has a very short atmospheric lifetime. If water vapor was the only cause of temperature increases, then the system would actually self correct in short order. The temperature trend is a long term increasing trend, which could not be sustained by water vapor alone.
Come on, you think scientists who have studied advance physics, chemistry, and other disciplines would miss something so obvious? Water vapor is a feedback. Besides, we have nowhere near the technology to scrub the amount of water vapor out of the air that would be necessary to lower atmospheric temperatures. You're talking about battling the sun AND the heat retention of the atmosphere when it comes to water evaporation.
And not to worry, trying to sequester CO2 is just as stupid and futile.
Install reflux condensers (which are super cheap) on factories and automobiles and you reduce the humidity by as much as a few percent, which should easily negate the last century of warming. The best part is that it is effective instantly--no need to wait for three hundred years for the CO2 to come out on its own.
The amount of water vapor produced by cars and factories doesn't even register in the Earth's water cycle. The increased water vapor from higher temperatures (approximately 4%) is several orders of magnitudes higher. You'd be more effective scrubbing CO2, which by ppm, is a smaller and more manageable problem (though still intractable without world cooperation).
This paper only addressed high-altitude glaciers, of which there had been some debate as to whether or not they would respond strongly or weakly to tropospheric warming. The paper shows the preliminary results that, at least in the Nepal mountains, that they respond weakly. In their conclusions they state that they would need more data to make a solid claim. The project lead also stressed the point that this was only for high-altitude glaciers, and that the lower tropospheric ice and glaciers are still melting.
There's also extremely solid evidence that the climate has been much warmer today with ten times the amount of CO2 in the air, and not only was life just grand then, life flourished, and was even more diverse then, then it is today.
Yes, AFTER life adapted to the environment. When the climate shifted rapidly it caused an extinction event. In fact, every time there has been a rapid climate change there has been an extinction event. Only when life has adapted to the new conditions does it "flourish".
You're also equating the world millions of years ago to the world of today, which is naive.
So, we're going to base all of our information on 150-200 years roughly.
Hardly. Paleoclimate reconstructions go back reliably for thousands of years.
With 20-30 years of 'goodish' data, with 5-15 years of not bad data, with 5 years of okay data.
You're confusing weather and climate. Don't do that.
That the earth is warming. Not forgetting that, it's been so much warmer when humans weren't even involved.
Beh.
No one is arguing that. However, the Earth does not warm up just because it wants to. Climate change happens when something about the planet changes. These can be volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, extended solar minimums, orbital variations, etc. .
Here's what we are observing. The planet is warming rapidly. The trend started about 100 years or so ago. We have not undergone any noticeable orbital or axial variations. Solar output has not significantly increased or decreased. The Earth does not produce a significant amount of surface heat.
Given all that, come up with a way for the planetary temperature to rise WITHOUT using the significant increases in GHGs and DOESN'T violate the laws of thermodynamics.
If you had read the research paper, this only addresses high-altitude glaciers which, up until the GRACE satellites were around, were extremely hard to estimate. There had already been disagreement in the climate community on high-altitude glaciers and whether or not they would be strongly affected by planetary warming. This study brings more accurate information and seems to support the thinking that high-altitude glaciers do not respond quickly to lower troposphere warming.
That being said (and this is noted in the research as well), the lower altitude glaciers and ice are still meting quite rapidly. Even if none of the high-altitude glaciers melt, that still only reduces projected sea level rise by 5 cm. So either way, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference but it does help shrink the error bars.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
"Rather than having a tax system based on how much money a person makes, why not have a tax system based on how much money people spend?"
Because doing so penalizes the poor greatly compared to the rich. Unless you rule out "necessity" spending, but then where do you draw the line there? What if you're a CEO with a headquarters in Europe and one in California? Could you not argue that owning a home in each place is a "necessity"?
Taxing spending has always been and will always be an incredibly bad idea. If you think there are loopholes now, just wait until someone tries a consumption tax.
As far as taxing wealth goes, we already have a precedent; real estate. The value of your house is based on the market in your area. If you owe less than what your house is worth, you can borrow against that value. However, everywhere I know of has a tax on some form on real estate based on some evaluation criteria. It would be far more reasonable to tax stock options and similar wealth vehicles in the same manner. It doesn't even need to be a high tax. Maybe cap it at a few percent based on the amount of holdings, and anything less than a certain amount you don't get taxed at all.
Abolished? That's what smart people would do. But in the real world where the number of dollars just about always wins out over doing what's right, what will happen is even more ridiculous patents being shoved through the system that are so general that it will prevent anyone from ever being able to come up with another "invention" without infringing on a dozen patents. This will effectively kill innovations and cement the position of the big boys at the top of the ladder.
Patents were designed to facilitate progress. Now they are abused to facilitate profits.
Hmm. In your (insightful? Really?) response, I see a lot of opinion and ranting, but I don't see a single cogent statement that refutes any of the claims in the paper. They explain the lags, the feedbacks, and the modeling they used in their paper. Real climate even has a more layman's description of the mechanism: http://www.realclimate.org/ .
Of course, you're probably counting on the fact that people rarely RTFA and fewer would RTFP. But basically your entire premise is incorrect and refuted in the paper itself.
I was perusing the shelves at my local library, When I saw something out of the ordinary, For in front of keyboard with eyes in a squint, Was a man watching porn and pitching a tent, And I said to myself as I was watching the scene, That someone might find that obscene, But where else should the poor in this city, Go to get their free ass and titty?
And why should we stop this manly fapper, with his mighty hand hitting the desk like a clapper, When fit on the shelves all nice in a row, Are books on how ladies to fuck like a ho.
There's books on porn, and books on sex, Books on how to do it on deck, How to fuck in pool, or fuck on plane, Or how to have orgasm that make you insane.
And if it's all too vague or perhaps too much, Or you don't know what you're doing as such, There are anatomy books that make it all clear, That you don't stick it in there, you stick it in here.
But what if instead of banging his knob, Our heroric spanker were watching some mob, Beheading some guy for some whatever reason, Or someone getting shot for the high crime of treason?
Or animals mating? That's always a kick, Did you know wild hogs have an 18 inch dick? Or how about a butcher, or some senseless slaughter? Or how many ways you can torture with water?
Oh, these things are just peachy kine fine, But no nipples or vulvae or women supine, Heaven forbid you see such muck, Better to see murder and slaughter than two people fuck.
So hear me great library, truthful and fair As my hand slides into my underwear, My cock is stiff and my eyes are bright, Thank you for defending my rights!
E = 160,000kg* 3.0*10^8m/s * 3.0*10^8m/s = 1.44*10^22 J
This is approximately 1/400th the energy we receive from the sun, which yields just enough additional warming to give us the positive global temperature anomaly we're seeing today.
Burning fossil fuels does not increase mass or energy. The additional energy trapped by additional GHGs is where the 160 tonnes figure comes from.
NASA is an enormously powerful agency with a massive budget?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Is that why NASA has to go to Congress every year and beg and plead for funding? Is that why we have satellites dying with no replacements? Is that why every year NASA can't spend it's full budget because half way through the year some bureaucrats go through with an ax to take BACK funding?
Look, NASA may not be the most efficient organization but saying they're powerful with buckets of money is absolutely ridiculous. Their budget makes up 0.6% of the national budget, and they've been facing cuts on almost every front. They can't even get half of congress to listen to science, let alone get funding out of them.
Oh, you misunderstand. You see, climate change isn't bad for the planet. The planet will keep doing what it's doing, regardless of the climate on the surface. The life forms, on the other hand, are fucked. Including us if we aren't careful.
The entire world's agricultural production depends on relatively stable climate expectations. In some areas, the availability of fresh water is dependent on climate. And there are many other fundamental elements of human society that depend on a relatively stable climate. So any substantial changes to climate would be a "bad thing". For humans at any rate.
I appreciate your fervor, but facts build a much stronger argument.
Global average temperatures over the past century have increased by about 0.8C. An increase of 4C would have been so devastating and obvious that only a complete idiot would claim that nothing was happening. Also, the current average ocean height increase is occurring at between 2 and 3mm per year, mostly due to heat expansion. So over a decade you'd be talking about and inch or a little more of sea level rise.
Also, getting the Earth into a runaway greenhouse effect is a very low probability event. The mechanics of the Earth's system makes it improbable, as opposed to Venus where events were more favorable.
Climate change is a major concern and actions should be taken. However, exaggeration, no matter how well intentioned, only gives deniers more ammunition to use.
Several studies, the US government agencies that track such things (NOAA, NWS, etc.), and world orginizations that track such things (ECMWF, WMO), all contradict your statement.
Good bit warmer than now. We can tell because in Greenland receding glaciers are exposing Viking settlements, where beech tree stumps can be found in permafrost.
False. Every reconstructed data set shows global average temperatures COLDER than current temperatures by a fair margin. At the peak of the MWP (900-1100AD), temperatures were.1C to.2C colder than the 1960-1990 average. If you include the 1990-2010 data it's even colder. By 1300AD the temperatures had cooled off considerably from the peak.
... Before 800?
Good bit warmer than it was just before 1300. We can tell because receding glaciers in the Alps are exposing Roman trading routes through passes that were considered permanently glaciated until the last few years; and unknown in the records extant at the time of moderate climate in Greenland, evidenced above.
Pure nonsense. 800AD and 1300 AD were similar as far as global temperatures are concerned.
>... Before 300?
It is generally suspected that the Minoan Warm Period was warmer than both the Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period because of descriptions of crops grown, but there's no "go look for yourself" smoking guns like the above.
Again, pure nonsense. No scientifically validated reconstruction comes even close to what you are claiming. Your other claims are also used out of context or are seriously overblown. McIntyre and Watt's sites are not peer reviewed sources of information.
Natural cycles don't heat the planet up this rapidly. It takes a lot of excess energy to raise the global planetary temperature by a.8 C. This isn't subtle. Within the last 100 years something has fundamentally changed about our planet to cause it to heat up.
Now if you rule out the significant increases in greenhouse gasses as the culprit, then provide another explanation that doesn't violate the fundamental laws of physics.
I believe the regulations he was referring to had to do with OSHA, EPA, and labor laws. You know, the rules and regulations that prevent our country from turning into a cesspool full of slaves.
Yes, some regulations probably aren't well thought out. But what Apple gets from Foxconn in China are workers in dorms working 12 hour shifts, 6 or 7 days a week, stuffed 8-10 to a room, for 22 cents an hour with few environmental and/or work related costs or concerns.
Jobs was basically saying "I would build factories here, but unfortunately I'm not allowed to treat workers like shit and the environment like my own personal toilet paper."
Companies are for profit. If that means feeding amphetamines to 12 year old workers in some sweatshop that dumps toxic waste directly into the water table in some third world country, then a company will do it. We either have to lower ourselves to their level or these countries will have to raise to ours. Take a wild guess which way we're going to head.
While I agree with your sentiment (war is good for profit), Kuwait didn't bend over for Saddam. Saddam (who we supported and put in power) was planning to invade Kuwait. The US initial gave it's typical "turn a blind eye" response since he was our puppet in the area. But when Kuwait was invaded and there was a world-wide outcry, the US was pretty much cornered into taking action.
We aren't the world police. We've just caused so many messes across the world that it just seems like we are the world police.
"Besides that US, I don't think any other country has the kind of robotic arsenal you're dreaming of."
The US spends almost as much each year on the military as the entire rest of the world combined. It's hard to even count how many conflicts we're currently involved in. We're the trendsetters. And robotic warfare is the trend we're setting.
The U.S. spends 5% of GDP on military endeavors, down from 10% 50 years ago. Perhaps still too much, but less than a lot of countries.
Your using percentage of GDP to make it seem like the US spends hardly anything on the military. That is, at best, misleading. Half of our national budget goes to the military.
The US military budget exceeds the rest of the world's combined military budget by $200 billion. Our military budget represents about 43% of world military spending. We spend 586% more than China, which is second place (our budget is about $700 billion, theirs is about $120 billion). The only country that spends more as a percentage of GDP is Saudia Arabia (10.4%) and their GDP is considerably smaller than the US.
No matter how you look it, we spend A LOT more on our military.
The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club.
No, I thought Bush was an idiot and Cheney was Darth Vader. But neither Bush nor Cheney have the history of the blatant sociopathic behavior, hypocrisy, ego, and corruption of Gingrich. He's more like a combination of Cheney, Rove, and Whitney Houston, without the singing talent. And not married to Bobby Brown.
You know, it says a lot about this country when someone with a history like Newt's can be a serious candidate for president. Vote Cthulu for 2012! It will be the lesser evil!
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me this points toward something other than CO2 causing the warming.
And you would be wrong. It helps if you read the research on the subject. Also, the IPCC report has some very good layman explanations of the phenomena involved with planetary warming.
Something like, I don't know, water vapor, of which there is little in the Asian highlands, but plenty around the much lower areas where the glaciers are melting.
Actually, it is far more likely a result of GHGs in the lower troposphere preventing thermal radiation from escaping, which is already a noted result in stratospheric cooling.
Even AGW people admit that water is the REAL problem, and that CO2 is just a trigger for increases in that heat-storing gas.
Water vapor isn't a problem. It is a result of higher temperatures induced by higher concentrations of GHGs. You have your feedbacks a little backward.
But for some reason they seem to chafe at the idea of using condensers and other methods to remove the water from the air.
I'm not aware of any scientist chafing at the idea, however water vapor isn't the problem. Water vapor has a very short atmospheric lifetime. If water vapor was the only cause of temperature increases, then the system would actually self correct in short order. The temperature trend is a long term increasing trend, which could not be sustained by water vapor alone.
Come on, you think scientists who have studied advance physics, chemistry, and other disciplines would miss something so obvious? Water vapor is a feedback. Besides, we have nowhere near the technology to scrub the amount of water vapor out of the air that would be necessary to lower atmospheric temperatures. You're talking about battling the sun AND the heat retention of the atmosphere when it comes to water evaporation.
And not to worry, trying to sequester CO2 is just as stupid and futile.
Install reflux condensers (which are super cheap) on factories and automobiles and you reduce the humidity by as much as a few percent, which should easily negate the last century of warming. The best part is that it is effective instantly--no need to wait for three hundred years for the CO2 to come out on its own.
The amount of water vapor produced by cars and factories doesn't even register in the Earth's water cycle. The increased water vapor from higher temperatures (approximately 4%) is several orders of magnitudes higher. You'd be more effective scrubbing CO2, which by ppm, is a smaller and more manageable problem (though still intractable without world cooperation).
This paper only addressed high-altitude glaciers, of which there had been some debate as to whether or not they would respond strongly or weakly to tropospheric warming. The paper shows the preliminary results that, at least in the Nepal mountains, that they respond weakly. In their conclusions they state that they would need more data to make a solid claim. The project lead also stressed the point that this was only for high-altitude glaciers, and that the lower tropospheric ice and glaciers are still melting.
There's also extremely solid evidence that the climate has been much warmer today with ten times the amount of CO2 in the air, and not only was life just grand then, life flourished, and was even more diverse then, then it is today.
Yes, AFTER life adapted to the environment. When the climate shifted rapidly it caused an extinction event. In fact, every time there has been a rapid climate change there has been an extinction event. Only when life has adapted to the new conditions does it "flourish".
You're also equating the world millions of years ago to the world of today, which is naive.
So, we're going to base all of our information on 150-200 years roughly.
Hardly. Paleoclimate reconstructions go back reliably for thousands of years.
With 20-30 years of 'goodish' data, with 5-15 years of not bad data, with 5 years of okay data.
You're confusing weather and climate. Don't do that.
That the earth is warming. Not forgetting that, it's been so much warmer when humans weren't even involved.
Beh.
No one is arguing that. However, the Earth does not warm up just because it wants to. Climate change happens when something about the planet changes. These can be volcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, extended solar minimums, orbital variations, etc. .
Here's what we are observing. The planet is warming rapidly. The trend started about 100 years or so ago. We have not undergone any noticeable orbital or axial variations. Solar output has not significantly increased or decreased. The Earth does not produce a significant amount of surface heat.
Given all that, come up with a way for the planetary temperature to rise WITHOUT using the significant increases in GHGs and DOESN'T violate the laws of thermodynamics.
If you had read the research paper, this only addresses high-altitude glaciers which, up until the GRACE satellites were around, were extremely hard to estimate. There had already been disagreement in the climate community on high-altitude glaciers and whether or not they would be strongly affected by planetary warming. This study brings more accurate information and seems to support the thinking that high-altitude glaciers do not respond quickly to lower troposphere warming.
That being said (and this is noted in the research as well), the lower altitude glaciers and ice are still meting quite rapidly. Even if none of the high-altitude glaciers melt, that still only reduces projected sea level rise by 5 cm. So either way, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference but it does help shrink the error bars.
"Rather than having a tax system based on how much money a person makes, why not have a tax system based on how much money people spend?"
Because doing so penalizes the poor greatly compared to the rich. Unless you rule out "necessity" spending, but then where do you draw the line there? What if you're a CEO with a headquarters in Europe and one in California? Could you not argue that owning a home in each place is a "necessity"?
Taxing spending has always been and will always be an incredibly bad idea. If you think there are loopholes now, just wait until someone tries a consumption tax.
As far as taxing wealth goes, we already have a precedent; real estate. The value of your house is based on the market in your area. If you owe less than what your house is worth, you can borrow against that value. However, everywhere I know of has a tax on some form on real estate based on some evaluation criteria. It would be far more reasonable to tax stock options and similar wealth vehicles in the same manner. It doesn't even need to be a high tax. Maybe cap it at a few percent based on the amount of holdings, and anything less than a certain amount you don't get taxed at all.
Abolished? That's what smart people would do. But in the real world where the number of dollars just about always wins out over doing what's right, what will happen is even more ridiculous patents being shoved through the system that are so general that it will prevent anyone from ever being able to come up with another "invention" without infringing on a dozen patents. This will effectively kill innovations and cement the position of the big boys at the top of the ladder.
Patents were designed to facilitate progress. Now they are abused to facilitate profits.
Hmm. In your (insightful? Really?) response, I see a lot of opinion and ranting, but I don't see a single cogent statement that refutes any of the claims in the paper. They explain the lags, the feedbacks, and the modeling they used in their paper. Real climate even has a more layman's description of the mechanism: http://www.realclimate.org/ .
Of course, you're probably counting on the fact that people rarely RTFA and fewer would RTFP. But basically your entire premise is incorrect and refuted in the paper itself.
An Ode To The Library
I was perusing the shelves at my local library,
When I saw something out of the ordinary,
For in front of keyboard with eyes in a squint,
Was a man watching porn and pitching a tent,
And I said to myself as I was watching the scene,
That someone might find that obscene,
But where else should the poor in this city,
Go to get their free ass and titty?
And why should we stop this manly fapper,
with his mighty hand hitting the desk like a clapper,
When fit on the shelves all nice in a row,
Are books on how ladies to fuck like a ho.
There's books on porn, and books on sex,
Books on how to do it on deck,
How to fuck in pool, or fuck on plane,
Or how to have orgasm that make you insane.
And if it's all too vague or perhaps too much,
Or you don't know what you're doing as such,
There are anatomy books that make it all clear,
That you don't stick it in there, you stick it in here.
But what if instead of banging his knob,
Our heroric spanker were watching some mob,
Beheading some guy for some whatever reason,
Or someone getting shot for the high crime of treason?
Or animals mating? That's always a kick,
Did you know wild hogs have an 18 inch dick?
Or how about a butcher, or some senseless slaughter?
Or how many ways you can torture with water?
Oh, these things are just peachy kine fine,
But no nipples or vulvae or women supine,
Heaven forbid you see such muck,
Better to see murder and slaughter than two people fuck.
So hear me great library, truthful and fair
As my hand slides into my underwear,
My cock is stiff and my eyes are bright,
Thank you for defending my rights!
Math and science fail.
E = mc^2
E = 160,000kg* 3.0*10^8m/s * 3.0*10^8m/s = 1.44*10^22 J
This is approximately 1/400th the energy we receive from the sun, which yields just enough additional warming to give us the positive global temperature anomaly we're seeing today.
Burning fossil fuels does not increase mass or energy. The additional energy trapped by additional GHGs is where the 160 tonnes figure comes from.
NASA is an enormously powerful agency with a massive budget?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Is that why NASA has to go to Congress every year and beg and plead for funding? Is that why we have satellites dying with no replacements? Is that why every year NASA can't spend it's full budget because half way through the year some bureaucrats go through with an ax to take BACK funding?
Look, NASA may not be the most efficient organization but saying they're powerful with buckets of money is absolutely ridiculous. Their budget makes up 0.6% of the national budget, and they've been facing cuts on almost every front. They can't even get half of congress to listen to science, let alone get funding out of them.
Oh, you misunderstand. You see, climate change isn't bad for the planet. The planet will keep doing what it's doing, regardless of the climate on the surface. The life forms, on the other hand, are fucked. Including us if we aren't careful.
The entire world's agricultural production depends on relatively stable climate expectations. In some areas, the availability of fresh water is dependent on climate. And there are many other fundamental elements of human society that depend on a relatively stable climate. So any substantial changes to climate would be a "bad thing". For humans at any rate.
But like I said, the planet will be just fine.
I appreciate your fervor, but facts build a much stronger argument.
Global average temperatures over the past century have increased by about 0.8C. An increase of 4C would have been so devastating and obvious that only a complete idiot would claim that nothing was happening. Also, the current average ocean height increase is occurring at between 2 and 3mm per year, mostly due to heat expansion. So over a decade you'd be talking about and inch or a little more of sea level rise.
Also, getting the Earth into a runaway greenhouse effect is a very low probability event. The mechanics of the Earth's system makes it improbable, as opposed to Venus where events were more favorable.
Climate change is a major concern and actions should be taken. However, exaggeration, no matter how well intentioned, only gives deniers more ammunition to use.
Several studies, the US government agencies that track such things (NOAA, NWS, etc.), and world orginizations that track such things (ECMWF, WMO), all contradict your statement.
> What was it like ... Before 1300?
Good bit warmer than now. We can tell because in Greenland receding glaciers are exposing Viking settlements, where beech tree stumps can be found in permafrost.
False. Every reconstructed data set shows global average temperatures COLDER than current temperatures by a fair margin. At the peak of the MWP (900-1100AD), temperatures were .1C to .2C colder than the 1960-1990 average. If you include the 1990-2010 data it's even colder. By 1300AD the temperatures had cooled off considerably from the peak.
... Before 800?
Good bit warmer than it was just before 1300. We can tell because receding glaciers in the Alps are exposing Roman trading routes through passes that were considered permanently glaciated until the last few years; and unknown in the records extant at the time of moderate climate in Greenland, evidenced above.
Pure nonsense. 800AD and 1300 AD were similar as far as global temperatures are concerned.
> ... Before 300?
It is generally suspected that the Minoan Warm Period was warmer than both the Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period because of descriptions of crops grown, but there's no "go look for yourself" smoking guns like the above.
Again, pure nonsense. No scientifically validated reconstruction comes even close to what you are claiming. Your other claims are also used out of context or are seriously overblown. McIntyre and Watt's sites are not peer reviewed sources of information.
Natural cycles don't heat the planet up this rapidly. It takes a lot of excess energy to raise the global planetary temperature by a .8 C. This isn't subtle. Within the last 100 years something has fundamentally changed about our planet to cause it to heat up.
Now if you rule out the significant increases in greenhouse gasses as the culprit, then provide another explanation that doesn't violate the fundamental laws of physics.
I believe the regulations he was referring to had to do with OSHA, EPA, and labor laws. You know, the rules and regulations that prevent our country from turning into a cesspool full of slaves.
Yes, some regulations probably aren't well thought out. But what Apple gets from Foxconn in China are workers in dorms working 12 hour shifts, 6 or 7 days a week, stuffed 8-10 to a room, for 22 cents an hour with few environmental and/or work related costs or concerns.
Jobs was basically saying "I would build factories here, but unfortunately I'm not allowed to treat workers like shit and the environment like my own personal toilet paper."
Companies are for profit. If that means feeding amphetamines to 12 year old workers in some sweatshop that dumps toxic waste directly into the water table in some third world country, then a company will do it. We either have to lower ourselves to their level or these countries will have to raise to ours. Take a wild guess which way we're going to head.
While I agree with your sentiment (war is good for profit), Kuwait didn't bend over for Saddam. Saddam (who we supported and put in power) was planning to invade Kuwait. The US initial gave it's typical "turn a blind eye" response since he was our puppet in the area. But when Kuwait was invaded and there was a world-wide outcry, the US was pretty much cornered into taking action.
We aren't the world police. We've just caused so many messes across the world that it just seems like we are the world police.
Eh? Ok. Here some quick numbers from the GOA for 2010:
Total tax receipts: $2.162 trillion
Total military expenditures 2010: $1.2 trillion
You can't just look at the dollars going to the defense department. That is just a fraction of overall military expenditures.
Oops. Was looking at two different charts. I should really get caffeine into my system before posting. :P
Government is always a good idea until people realize they can make money from it.
"Besides that US, I don't think any other country has the kind of robotic arsenal you're dreaming of."
The US spends almost as much each year on the military as the entire rest of the world combined. It's hard to even count how many conflicts we're currently involved in. We're the trendsetters. And robotic warfare is the trend we're setting.
The U.S. spends 5% of GDP on military endeavors, down from 10% 50 years ago. Perhaps still too much, but less than a lot of countries.
Your using percentage of GDP to make it seem like the US spends hardly anything on the military. That is, at best, misleading. Half of our national budget goes to the military.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
The US military budget exceeds the rest of the world's combined military budget by $200 billion. Our military budget represents about 43% of world military spending. We spend 586% more than China, which is second place (our budget is about $700 billion, theirs is about $120 billion). The only country that spends more as a percentage of GDP is Saudia Arabia (10.4%) and their GDP is considerably smaller than the US.
No matter how you look it, we spend A LOT more on our military.
To quote Brother George Carlin:
The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
You know what they want? Obedient workers people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club.
This country is finished.
No, I thought Bush was an idiot and Cheney was Darth Vader. But neither Bush nor Cheney have the history of the blatant sociopathic behavior, hypocrisy, ego, and corruption of Gingrich. He's more like a combination of Cheney, Rove, and Whitney Houston, without the singing talent. And not married to Bobby Brown.
You know, it says a lot about this country when someone with a history like Newt's can be a serious candidate for president. Vote Cthulu for 2012! It will be the lesser evil!
You're right. She looks better in a bed.