Are solar flares and that type of activity the same as solar irradiance? Seems like an important distinction.
"Look, it is perfectly reasonable to argue for reduction of emissions. We have lots of right here, right now, reasons to so argue. Acid rain. Particulate levels of various unfriendly materials. Radioactivity from burning coal. Simple visibility beyond a mile or so in urban areas."
Don't forget increaseing acidity in the oceans due to more CO2 dissolving in the water.
"...speaking against the climate change faction is not any way to get funding..."
Oh, I'm sure a friendly oil company will step up with some cash.
"From strident predictions of an "immanent ice age" to "we're all gonna fry!" within the space of a few decades is a real bell-ringer. It seems to me that these folks need to spend a little more time looking at what is happening before we should pay them a whole lot of attention in terms of them having the definitive scoop on what's going to happen... or not."
I wonder how many of these kind of seemingly contradictory statements the world heard at any other time there were great controversy around a quickly advancing field of science. When Einstein and friends introduced modern physics I'm sure you had people saying one thing one day and another the next, to the bafflement of the public. As for waiting, I'm not comfortable with that. If 50 scientists say your house is perfectly safe and 50 scientists say it'll likely to collapse, would you wait until you were 100% certain or would you perhaps take some precautionary steps? The support for global warming isn't just 50% of scientists either. We can't turn out to be right about global warming, go "oops" and make everything right in 50 years. We have to start acting on imperfect knowledge, and considering what we risk losing and also what we stand to win, I say it's time to act.
And you question it with a hypothesis. Seems fair to me.
"Otherwise, why else would temperatures eventually drop while CO2 remained high?"
Because there are cooling effects that aren't connected to CO2 concentration? CO2 likely doesn't disappear overnight either, so a lag in concentration levels while CO2 trapping processes start is to be expected. How's that for a simple explanation?
"Also, do you remember the problem with the ozone-layer? A world-wide effort by most countries (that time including the USA) dealt with the problem and it worked amazingly well. Today the ozone-layer is almost back to normal."
Unfortunately, the Antarctic ozone hole will take many decades to close and before the ozone levels reach the levels before the depletion began. But it is a significant triumph of international cooperation and foresight to overcome a global problem.
"Things that can be done easily, without new technology and with modest investment:"
Don't forget low energy lightbulbs. Switching all your lightbulbs isn't a major investment or hassle for an individual, but the energy savings if everyone did it would be huge.
Realclimate.org explains it — basically, there are other factors besides CO2 that affect global temperature. CO2 is released when warming starts and drives the majority of the later warming. 800 years is a small part of the warming cycles and all this lag shows us is that historically, global warming has been triggered by other factors. There's no doubt that increased CO2 traps more heat and it's a fact that CO2 concentrations are at historical highs due to human emissions.
2.) Scientists do new measurements on old sources. We don't just rely on old measurements.
3.) Who says that? According to the World Radiation Center and the Max Planck institute, there has been no increase in solar irradiance since the 40s.
5.) Jupiter, the gas giant, which is so much like the earth? As for Mars, it's interesting how just a few snaps from space can make you think, while years and years of direct measurements and hundreds of thousands of years of proxy data from earth means nothing.
Noone is denying that natural cycles exist. But there is no theory to explain the observed climate changes based on natural cycles alone. They work on time scales of thousands of years, while we're seeing change on a scale of just decades or centuries. What natural cycles do show us, however, is that an increase in CO2 concentration means higher temperatures. That is a fact, just as the observed spike in CO2 concentration is a fact. The data also shows that natural CO2 fluctuations did have a strong effect on ice ages and warm periods, and now humans have increased CO2 levels to historical highs.
That humans are causing global warming is as good as proven. That you heard rumors of global cooling back in the 70s has absolutely nothing to do with it and is a logical fallacy. The "natural cycles" argument isn't a support for your case since it can go both ways. The worst case scenario is a natural heating trend boosted by human emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol's problem is that it isn't efficient enough. In 2005 there were talks about extentions and changes in the agreement, and to adapt to the development of countries such as China. China has signed, ratified and begun implementing the protocol already.
That the US emits less CO2 than china is nothing but a lie — the US is the world's #1 polluter by a good margin. Not by capita (only #5), but that's basically a counting trick. What matters for the environment is the actual amount of CO2 pumped out.
Reducing CO2 emissions and increasing energy efficiency does not necessarily mean economical doom. There's millions to be earned and saved and big companies are already doing so. Then there's also carbon trading, which is also profitable. The problem is that big oil and the politicians in their pockets don't get their hands on all that money, so they protest and call it all a hoax.
A freely scalable browser viewport is a killer feature in Opera, IMO. It's perfect for my high-res screen that otherwise makes most web pages very small. If I understand correctly, you'll be able to scale things freely in IE9 with Vista, however.
To be fair, it's for a younger audience, likely less concerned with finding true innovation or great art in manga than with finding something that speaks to them. Even if that happens to have been said before in various forms.
I've recently been in Japan and my impression from seeing people read on the subway is that there's a good amount of just-words books as well.
However, like other posters have already said, manga isn't seen as the childish medium it's still viewed as in the west. It's more viewed as what it really is — a form of art. There's little of the sad, narrow-minded and conservative cultural elitism you see in the west. The ratio of good manga to bad manga is likely very close to the ratio of good literature to bad.
Even if there's nothing we can do about the global warming per se, we can use these discussions to single out the people who stood in the way of preventive action. Then we can shoot them into space for their crimes and we'll all feel a bit better.
There's a comment on Realclimate.org saying McIntyre and McKitrick are wrong about this. They say that the claim that '"Hockey Stick" patterns arise naturally from application of non-centered PCA to purely random "red noise"... are of course false, were made in a comment on MBH98 by MM that was rejected by Nature, and subsequently parroted by astronomer Richard Muller in a non peer-reviewed setting'. Back to the drawing board, eh?
The nazis went after homosexuals too, so even if it's not right in a literary sense it's not wrong if you take the few groups mentioned in the poem as symbolical for all the victims of the Holocaust.
Not necessarily true. Energy conservation and efficiency, and thereby CO2 emission cuts, can save billions for companies: More Profit with Less Carbon (Scientific American)
If I get to live 500 years (with a healthy, youthful mind and body) I promise to kill myself after my 500th birthday for the good of the world, if needed. Hell, I'll do the same at 150 years if 500 is too much.
Deal?
PS. It is a little presumptuous to assume that humanity can't come up with a system to control such problems as overpopulation and stagnation with a 1000-year lifespan. Considering how many children suffer needlessly today, maybe we could give them a better life if they were 10 times fewer.
There was a Scientific American article about this not long ago. There's not many practical tips, but it shows that going green and efficient can be very profitable indeed.
Please, read up on what you're criticizing. For example:
"the OFFP enabled the importation of enough food to feed all 27 million Iraqis. During its existence, the average daily caloric intake of the people of Iraq increased 83 percent, from 1,200 kilocalories to 2,200 kilocalories per person per day. In addition, malnutrition rates in 2002 in the central and southern part of the country were half those in 1996 among children under the age of five; in the three northern governorates, chronic malnutrition decreased 56 percent." www.oilforfoodfacts.org
The World Food programme is one of the most effective international organizations.
The UNHCR helps millions and millions of refugees each year.
UNICEF - nuff said.
Peacekeeping. Without the UN, nobody would be in the world's trouble spots, definitely not the US.
Running elections, like in Iraq.
Reproductive Health and Population Management, the one the US put a global gag rule on.
War crime persecution, like in Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Cambodia.
Fighting disease like AIDS, tbc and malaria through WHO and UNAIDS
And just by being there, the UN makes us aware of otherwise invisible issues that few would care about - landmines, disease, child soldiers.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a newer study from the World Radiation Center that shows that solar irradiance has been constant.
Are solar flares and that type of activity the same as solar irradiance? Seems like an important distinction.
"Look, it is perfectly reasonable to argue for reduction of emissions. We have lots of right here, right now, reasons to so argue. Acid rain. Particulate levels of various unfriendly materials. Radioactivity from burning coal. Simple visibility beyond a mile or so in urban areas."
Don't forget increaseing acidity in the oceans due to more CO2 dissolving in the water.
"...speaking against the climate change faction is not any way to get funding..."
Oh, I'm sure a friendly oil company will step up with some cash.
"From strident predictions of an "immanent ice age" to "we're all gonna fry!" within the space of a few decades is a real bell-ringer. It seems to me that these folks need to spend a little more time looking at what is happening before we should pay them a whole lot of attention in terms of them having the definitive scoop on what's going to happen... or not."
I wonder how many of these kind of seemingly contradictory statements the world heard at any other time there were great controversy around a quickly advancing field of science. When Einstein and friends introduced modern physics I'm sure you had people saying one thing one day and another the next, to the bafflement of the public. As for waiting, I'm not comfortable with that. If 50 scientists say your house is perfectly safe and 50 scientists say it'll likely to collapse, would you wait until you were 100% certain or would you perhaps take some precautionary steps? The support for global warming isn't just 50% of scientists either. We can't turn out to be right about global warming, go "oops" and make everything right in 50 years. We have to start acting on imperfect knowledge, and considering what we risk losing and also what we stand to win, I say it's time to act.
"They "explain" it using a hypothesis."
And you question it with a hypothesis. Seems fair to me.
"Otherwise, why else would temperatures eventually drop while CO2 remained high?"
Because there are cooling effects that aren't connected to CO2 concentration? CO2 likely doesn't disappear overnight either, so a lag in concentration levels while CO2 trapping processes start is to be expected. How's that for a simple explanation?
"Also, do you remember the problem with the ozone-layer? A world-wide effort by most countries (that time including the USA) dealt with the problem and it worked amazingly well. Today the ozone-layer is almost back to normal."
Unfortunately, the Antarctic ozone hole will take many decades to close and before the ozone levels reach the levels before the depletion began. But it is a significant triumph of international cooperation and foresight to overcome a global problem.
"Things that can be done easily, without new technology and with modest investment:"
Don't forget low energy lightbulbs. Switching all your lightbulbs isn't a major investment or hassle for an individual, but the energy savings if everyone did it would be huge.
Realclimate.org explains it — basically, there are other factors besides CO2 that affect global temperature. CO2 is released when warming starts and drives the majority of the later warming. 800 years is a small part of the warming cycles and all this lag shows us is that historically, global warming has been triggered by other factors. There's no doubt that increased CO2 traps more heat and it's a fact that CO2 concentrations are at historical highs due to human emissions.
2.) Scientists do new measurements on old sources. We don't just rely on old measurements.
3.) Who says that? According to the World Radiation Center and the Max Planck institute, there has been no increase in solar irradiance since the 40s.
5.) Jupiter, the gas giant, which is so much like the earth? As for Mars, it's interesting how just a few snaps from space can make you think, while years and years of direct measurements and hundreds of thousands of years of proxy data from earth means nothing.
Noone is denying that natural cycles exist. But there is no theory to explain the observed climate changes based on natural cycles alone. They work on time scales of thousands of years, while we're seeing change on a scale of just decades or centuries. What natural cycles do show us, however, is that an increase in CO2 concentration means higher temperatures. That is a fact, just as the observed spike in CO2 concentration is a fact. The data also shows that natural CO2 fluctuations did have a strong effect on ice ages and warm periods, and now humans have increased CO2 levels to historical highs.
That humans are causing global warming is as good as proven. That you heard rumors of global cooling back in the 70s has absolutely nothing to do with it and is a logical fallacy. The "natural cycles" argument isn't a support for your case since it can go both ways. The worst case scenario is a natural heating trend boosted by human emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol's problem is that it isn't efficient enough. In 2005 there were talks about extentions and changes in the agreement, and to adapt to the development of countries such as China. China has signed, ratified and begun implementing the protocol already.
That the US emits less CO2 than china is nothing but a lie — the US is the world's #1 polluter by a good margin. Not by capita (only #5), but that's basically a counting trick. What matters for the environment is the actual amount of CO2 pumped out.
Reducing CO2 emissions and increasing energy efficiency does not necessarily mean economical doom. There's millions to be earned and saved and big companies are already doing so. Then there's also carbon trading, which is also profitable. The problem is that big oil and the politicians in their pockets don't get their hands on all that money, so they protest and call it all a hoax.
Maybe you should defrost your freezer more often than once every 800,000 years?
Old: Cheese-eating surrender monkeys
New: Fast-surfing surrender monkeys
Maybe I should read the article first, eh? It seems like IE9 supports Opera-like page zooming. Now we only need it for Firefox...
A freely scalable browser viewport is a killer feature in Opera, IMO. It's perfect for my high-res screen that otherwise makes most web pages very small. If I understand correctly, you'll be able to scale things freely in IE9 with Vista, however.
To be fair, it's for a younger audience, likely less concerned with finding true innovation or great art in manga than with finding something that speaks to them. Even if that happens to have been said before in various forms.
I've recently been in Japan and my impression from seeing people read on the subway is that there's a good amount of just-words books as well.
However, like other posters have already said, manga isn't seen as the childish medium it's still viewed as in the west. It's more viewed as what it really is — a form of art. There's little of the sad, narrow-minded and conservative cultural elitism you see in the west. The ratio of good manga to bad manga is likely very close to the ratio of good literature to bad.
Even if there's nothing we can do about the global warming per se, we can use these discussions to single out the people who stood in the way of preventive action. Then we can shoot them into space for their crimes and we'll all feel a bit better.
There's a comment on Realclimate.org saying McIntyre and McKitrick are wrong about this. They say that the claim that '"Hockey Stick" patterns arise naturally from application of non-centered PCA to purely random "red noise"... are of course false, were made in a comment on MBH98 by MM that was rejected by Nature, and subsequently parroted by astronomer Richard Muller in a non peer-reviewed setting'. Back to the drawing board, eh?
Now, if only the same would work for the death penalty and equal rights for homosexuals. The US could become civilized in my lifetime!
Market distortion isn't automatically a bad thing. If taxes can "distort" the market away from CO2 emissions, I say go for it.
The nazis went after homosexuals too, so even if it's not right in a literary sense it's not wrong if you take the few groups mentioned in the poem as symbolical for all the victims of the Holocaust.
Digital Illusions, as in the creators of the Battlefield series? They're Swedish.
Not necessarily true. Energy conservation and efficiency, and thereby CO2 emission cuts, can save billions for companies: More Profit with Less Carbon (Scientific American)
If I get to live 500 years (with a healthy, youthful mind and body) I promise to kill myself after my 500th birthday for the good of the world, if needed. Hell, I'll do the same at 150 years if 500 is too much.
Deal?
PS. It is a little presumptuous to assume that humanity can't come up with a system to control such problems as overpopulation and stagnation with a 1000-year lifespan. Considering how many children suffer needlessly today, maybe we could give them a better life if they were 10 times fewer.
There was a Scientific American article about this not long ago. There's not many practical tips, but it shows that going green and efficient can be very profitable indeed.
Please, read up on what you're criticizing. For example:
"the OFFP enabled the importation of enough food to feed all 27 million Iraqis. During its existence, the average daily caloric intake of the people of Iraq increased 83 percent, from 1,200 kilocalories to 2,200 kilocalories per person per day. In addition, malnutrition rates in 2002 in the central and southern part of the country were half those in 1996 among children under the age of five; in the three northern governorates, chronic malnutrition decreased 56 percent."
www.oilforfoodfacts.org
The World Food programme is one of the most effective international organizations.
The UNHCR helps millions and millions of refugees each year.
UNICEF - nuff said.
Peacekeeping. Without the UN, nobody would be in the world's trouble spots, definitely not the US.
Running elections, like in Iraq.
Reproductive Health and Population Management, the one the US put a global gag rule on.
War crime persecution, like in Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Cambodia.
Fighting disease like AIDS, tbc and malaria through WHO and UNAIDS
And just by being there, the UN makes us aware of otherwise invisible issues that few would care about - landmines, disease, child soldiers.
Etc, etc
Arctic ice shrinking as it feels the heat
Antarctic Peninsula glaciers in major retreat
Wikipedia: Ozone depletion
Arctic ozone hole could reach record size
Pinatubo Volcano Research Boosts Case For Human-Caused Global Warming
It seems it is you who should preface your statements with a warning label of your ignorance.
Read up on paleoclimatology on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology
As for not being able to tell the weather next week, that has very little to do with climate. You have to distinguish between weather and climate.