Really. They were even training them to do various things. (Look for subs or something. I don't remember.) There was talk of training them to attach mines to enemy vessels. Then an outcry began--rightfully, as far as I'm concerned--that it was a Bad Thing to use such intelligent and simpatico animals for this. Now, I see, they've moved to sharks. No lobby supporting them, I'll bet, but the military also won't be able to train them to do much. Sharks are well below flounders in brain power.
They're not training them, they're remote controlling them
DARPA turned to Jelle Atema, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of biology at the Boston University Marine Program, who for many years has been researching how marine animals use their sense of smell. Atema proposed that because sharks are expert at tracking odors over very long distances, the key to steering a shark was to follow its nose. With more than a year of DARPA funding, which ended last year, Atema was able to use electrical stimulation of a sharks brain, mimicking odor, to guide the shark around a large tank.
So the simplicity of the shark's brain is actually an advantage. From the shark's point of view, it's chasing the smell, presumably, of prey.
Interestingly, something like this happens naturally. Parasitic wasps perform brain surgery to zombify roaches.
Makes you wonder if you could do it with higher animals actually. Even though we seem to have aa certain amount of free will about how we achieve our objectives of eating and reproducing and avoiding pain, there's probably low level hardware in our the oldest parts of our brains which enforces those objectives by sending reward/punishment signals 'up' to the high level, conscious bits of our brains. I can imagine that if you attached electrodes in the right places, you could run mammals and even humans in remote controlled zombie mode too. It would be a hellish experience though, since you'd know your free will had been strongly curtailed.
Still, look on the bright side, most/.'s seem to be quite skilled at ignoring the signals from their cerebellum to reproduce. So long as the evil scientists don't wire the neurons that reward you for successfully finding carbohydrate based junk food we should be immune.
The level of intelligence and self-awareness is not considered an over-riding factor in the karma of harming others, though it is not considered as harmful to harm smaller animals than larger or more intelligent beings. The difference is something akin to getting to reside in a less lower hell for a period of billions of years. Cheery thought.
Well I don't believe in life after death, so it's not something I'm concerned about.
But to me, harming things becomes more wrong as they become more sentient. Destroying a pocket calculator isn't morally wrong, neither is killing bacteria. As you go up the sentience scale it becomes more wrong. So I wouldn't experiment on people, or chimps or dolphins for example, regardless of the benefits. But I don't think mice are sentient enough that experimenting on them is automatically wrong, so long it's done in a humane way.
You know, a language were 50% of the words are 'Gundam' has too low a word entropy to be a real human language.
See the Voynich Manuscript for more information. It's a mysterious manuscript that has never been decoded. Interestingly, it has the right statistical properties to be a real document, e.g (from the wiki)
Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural languages.[3] For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf's law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts.
Now, if you look at computer to computer communication, there's a tendency to increased entropy over time. E.g. compare a 300 baud modem with a 8Mbit DSL one. The modulation has become more complex, and the modulated data looks more like white noise to someone who doesn't understand it. Even worse, techniques like Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum actually send a signal below the noise floor, before de spreading.
Which makes me wonder if we could even detect communications from ultra advanced civilisations, even if they happened to be still using wavelengths we have sensors for. Which doesn't seem likely either. E.g. a human civilisation would likely be unable to build sensors to detect a signal sent using technology from a hundred or so years in the future, and the likely difference in technology from an alien civilisation would likely be much greater than that.
Sorry, couldn't resist going off on a wild tangent, given the topic the article covers.
That's absurd. Surely if you have some case which has a downside - increased animal suffering and an upside - possibly decreased human suffering, you need to work out where the balance lies based on the information you have.
If you're wrong, you change your mind, but you made the world a worse place while you were wrong. But not deciding, having an opinion and trying to vote in government and/or buy products from companies which act according to your decision seems to be even more irresponsible to me.
E.g. we may find out that mice for example are much more self aware than I now believe, and I'd change my opinion on experimenting on them. But based on the evidence now, and the laws that govern their treatment now, I don't have any problem with it.
The sad thing is, you're completely right, but everyone will jump on nit picky details like Opera being free as in beer rather than speech.
I think a better term would be Alternative Software, i.e. non mainstream stuff, both Open Source like Linux/Firefox and closed source like Opera. You're right that there's a wierd mindset which goes something like "OMG! I'm so smart, I know the way 90% of the world does it is wrong! I'll use something which only a tiny minority uses, an people don't bother to test with, and then complains about it not working"
The ironic thing is that the developers here use Firefox, and would probably not be too sympathetic if the maintainers of some other site they need to use told them to use IE.
But the web designers annoy me too, most of the stuff which is non portable is just plain annoying, once you get past the initial fascination with their uber l33t use of Javascript and CSS to make pages that morph around dizzyingly when you click on stuff. Often, it just barely works on any browser, and is totally unintuitive.
Can't you just right click, select Edit Site Preferences, Click the network tab, Select Identify as Firefox. Then you'll get the Firefox version, which sounds like it will work better with Opera.
And you get the speed, slick UI and peace of mind that a browser with a negligable market share is not a tempting hacker target. I like the Wand thingy, and the way you can click at the edge of the screen to get a links pane.
Yeah, exactly. The equations may have imaginary numbers and so on in them, but it doesn't have any physical meaning.
The only thing I can see is that if you had two theories, one which had outlandish things like parallel dimensions in it and one without and the nonintuitive one fit the experimental data better than the intuitive one, maybe with some advanced engineering you could do some cool stuff, like faster than light travel, that would be impossible in the intuitive but simplistic theory.
Maybe Dell install loads of demos, spyware and crap because the crap vendors pay them to do it?
Then after 6 months, the user sees a load of pop ups telling them that the demos have expired and they need to register, so the crap vendors probably make some money. I don't know, but it seems like if you can get your "Internet Safety Suite" time limited demo pre installed on every Dell, you can rely on a fairly high percentage of non technical users entering their credit card numbers when the time limit expires. In fact, it would seem a good business idea to pay Dell a few bucks to do it. Much better than selling it in a store, where non technical users probaby never visit.
And given the amount of crap on a Dell, and the fact that they haggle hard with Microsoft and all these companies, maybe they actually end up with y being negative.
A lot of the time, that's more expensive. E.g. WinModems were cheaper than hardware modems because the signal processing was done by Windows. But the specs were closed so it was hard to support them on Linux.
But if you're a PC manufacturer, it's not worth jeopardising your sales to people who want Windows by using a hardware modem rather than a software one, since that adds to the build cost. Microsoft being Microsoft, they will always try to create this sort of situation, where the PC manufacturers can save a few bucks at the cost of being able to run alternative OSs. And given that the vast majority of PCs run Windows, it will continue to work.
But it's always been possible to get a PC with no OS if you build it yourself. In fact, I've never bought a pre built desktop, since they tend to use cheaper chipsets and graphics cards than I want to use.
Laptops are harder of course, but there are whitebox laptops too, they're just harder to find, e.g.
Who are you debating this with? This isn't philospohy class. Who ever mentioned absolutism or perfection?
I offer a devil's advocate service. For a mere $100, I'll argue for the strawman position you are skilfully demolishing for 10 posts, and then admit you've changed my mind. But since you misspelled 'philosophy', you're clearly not worth debating.
Special offers this month: Free spelling flames, insults and ad hominems! Just $10/post to continue any argument!
Give windoze time stop dreaming of electric sheep and throwing invisible chairs in the screensaver.
Speaking of... I wouldn't be surprised if some jokester ms engineers embedded an invisible ballmer throwing invisible chairs in an invisible screensaver...
Philip K Dick managed to write works of complete genius whilst taking loads of very strong drugs, it's true. But you, my friend, are no Philip K Dick.
According to BBC News on 2005-11-14, Microsoft has decided to classify Sony BMG's software as "spyware" and provide tools for its removal. "Speaking about the suspension [Mark] Russinovich said: 'This is a step they should have taken immediately.'"
IIRC, Windows Defender removes the rootkit.
They also hired Mark Russinovich. But yeah, enabling autoplay by default on CDs on machines that run Admin if you use the default installation was incredibly naive.
Click on the icon, and it loads. Oh, you don't have office installed? Or Windows either? Well you better get started on re-implementing both just in time for the next version starts being marketed. If you're anywhere near successful, the next version will be really different. Might as well just pop down to the store and pay your few hundred bucks for the real versions.
"According to Flannery, even if we reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 70 percent by 2050, average global temperatures will increase between two and nine degrees by 2100.
But there's absolutely zero chance that humans can organise reducing C02 emissions by 2050. Even if the US and Western Europe went back to a pre industrial civilisation, China and India will increase their emissions so much that there will still be an increase.
And look at the error bar on that - there's a big difference between 2 degress and 9 degrees I think. I looked up the Permian extinction, and one theory is a 5 degree C increase triggered it.
This rise could lead to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which the March 24 issue of Science reports is already shrinking at a rate of 224 ±41 cubic kilometers a year, double the rate measured in 1996 (Los Angeles uses one cubic kilometer of water a year). If it and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melt, sea levels will rise five to 10 meters, displacing half a billion inhabitants."
Well the Greenland ice shet is melting anyway. I've read wildely varying figures for sea level rise, some mm per year, some metres. Even if the sea levels rise, both of us work in countries which can afford low tech solutions like levies. Personally, I live in a country which can even maintain them correctly too.
But I don't trust Scientific American, that issue on Lomborg left a nasty taste in my mouth, even before I read Crichton's essay.
This is not necessary - all it will take is a change to renewable energy sources and perhaps nuclear, and a switch to cleaner cars and more economy. No need for serfdom or economic hardship. But, we have to start now.
Well no one's stopping you from walking to work, buying green electricity and so on.
I think to force everyone to take drastic action, e.g. by banning CO2 emissions from industry, I'd need all the experts to say "you'll get a 5 degree +- 0.2 degree change by 2050 is you leave things as they are. By doing these changes, cost $300Bn +- 50Billion, we can make it a 1 degree change +- 0.2 degree". Whereas what they acually say is like your quote "2 to 9 degrees with a 70% reduction". Actually, if they all said that, maybe I could take it seriously, but they all seem to have slightly different figures. Suspiciously, each new headline has slightly worse figures, and it's got to the point where we're basically screwed regardless of any conceivable reduction in CO2 emissions, like the figures you quote.
Look on the bright side even if the figures are correct, Earth will be far more hospitable than Venus for another few generations, I personally think for much longer than that. Even if it gradually turns into Venus over a few thousand years, it's still possible for humanity to survive, provided the change is gradual. In terms of our species, it's possible to survive things like the Black Death, which killed 30-60% of the population, so we're likely to survive short term knocks quite well too. All this will no doubt happen after we are both dead, so you can take a fairly cold hearted view of it all. The species will survive, and so will science and technology I suspect.
And before you mention the IPCC and Kyoto, I don't trust them either. Most of the extreme figures quoted in the media assume some kind of positive feedback system (based on methane hydrate gasification IIRC) and we don't know if that will happen.
"The IPCC is monolithic and complacent, and it is conceivable that they are exaggerating the speed of change" (John Maddox, a former editor of the journal Nature, quoted by David Adam in The Guardian, 28 January 2005).
I'm sure you'll tell me how he's no longer respectable, but he's ex editor of Nature, an "interdisciplinary journal of t
Of course you aren't! I really can't understand what you are trying to say here - that non-experts have views that should be taken into account? Why? Does not understanding something have some sort of merit?
My argument is that if you select for scientists called "experts on climate change", of course that person will believe that climate change is real and serious. Just like if you ask a professor of theology, of course they will believe in God. Their careers are essentially based on that axiom. It's also hard to get a grant if you don't believe in the thing you are getting paid to study.
But if you ask a statistician, or a biologist, a physicist or a chemist what they think of the arguments for climate change being real and serious, they are much more skeptical. But they're not skeptical of other bits of science outside their specialty. That makes me trust the study of climate change less than say physics. That and the fact that when I actually look at the data, it's mostly random with a slight trend. I can't really explain any further than that.
It's not convincing to me, it's not convincing to the people I discuss it with. It is convincing to people who are basically acivists who I suspect have a vested interest in it existing, and who use extremely dishonest techniques when arguing.
The problem with Crichton is that his views get unfairly publicised because he is a well-known author, and a science fiction writer. The addition problem is that he writes very bad science in his fiction - if anything that should be a reason to reject his views.
I can't stand his books, but the arguments he uses in his essay are convincing to me. E.g. the analogy with Nuclear Winter, and quotes from people like Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson on the science there. Or really the whole history of fashionable ideas in popular science being disasterously wrong.
There are no appeals to authority - the appeals are to data and statistics that are there for anyone to analyse.
No respectable scientist is denying that climate is changing..
"No respectable scientist is denying" is an appeal to authority. There's also an implicit ad hominem there, since you're calling all the scientists who disagree with you non respectable.
And yeah, I realise that my distrust of climate change specialists borders on being based on an ad hominem, but it's also based on the fact that I've never seen any data that supports the more apocalyptic predictions I see.
The issue is by how much it will change. Predictions range within a series of extremes, from a few degrees C to 5,6 or more.
Well I found that it changed 0.6+- 0.2 degrees C in the 20th Century, which doesn't set alarm bells ringing to me. If someone could convince me it will change by 5 or 6 degrees over my lifetime, that's obviously much more serious, but so far no one has.
But even then, it's a question of if we can avoid it, and if we can live with it and so on.
No, it isn't. One can run models against what is there, and correct if the model doesn't reproduce it. For example, in the astrosciences models are run of galaxy formation. We can't run actual experiments on galaxies, but that does not make the models any less valid.
Galaxy models are probably simpler in some way. I think they climate is big, chaotic and not all of the mechanimsms are understood. Galaxies seem to follow some kind of well defined life cycle - they all end up looking much the same shape.
Well, many who are lifelong experts in these subjects do think we know enough about them - who are you to say this?
I've read a load of stuff on this, and I'm not convinced that the end is nigh.
I can't see the point here.... is it that because the Chinese have poorly implemented population control, that unlimited growth of population is good?
If there had been no intervention, unlimited growth wouldn't have happened. There seems to be a mechanism that causes population growth to drop as societies get richer. At least the current UN prediction is that population will level off
There was no consensus on global cooling in the 1970s. This is a myth.
That article confirms that the popular media hyped global warming while the real scientists were more cautious. The same thing is happening now with global warming I think.
But my point is that if you'd asked a climate change researcher who tended more towards activism, they would probably have claimed there was an overwhelming consensus that agreed with them, just like they do now about global warming. Now if we'd decided to increase greenhouse gases as a way to head off the ice age, where in fact the climate was warming up, this would not have been good.
But the policies would be extremely beneficial, encouraging energy economy and a reduced reliance on oil and gas from unstable regions.
If they are beneficial for those reasons, we should do them anyway. I'd definitely like to cut off money to the Saudis for example, and make the West energy independant. The problem is, green ideas won't necessarily achieve that since they are based on avoiding CO2 emissions.
I read that there have been calls to close Drax, Britains largest coal fired power station. There are also calls to not build any more nuclear power stations. All this comes from greens, and all of it is counterproductive in starving the Saudis, which is what I'm interested in.
Global warming is not some sort of proposal that needs to be tested and corrected, it is unquestionably actually happening.
The stuff I've seen is 0.6 ± 0.2 Celsius in the 20th century, or something like that. Which doesn't seem to indicate immininent environmental collapse to me. The proposal I'm skeptical about is that of imminent collapse, not that the world will be 0.6 degrees warmer in our lifetimes.
Seems a bit religious to declare this in "unquestionably actually happening". I thought science was about finding holes in theories and then improving them, not proving them to be the truth.
I don't think dinosaurs are a good comparison, since they occured in the past.
As I see it, climate is like share prices. Not all of the mechanisms are understood, like solar variability, whether there's positive or negative feedback in CO2. It's also chaotic.
So given that we can't predict where the FTSE 100 share index will be in a day, or a week, or a century, I'm not at all convinced that we have the technology to model it. Granted if you have a model and some evidence from the past you can jiggle the parameters until it matches, but I'm not convinced it can predict the future reliably.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not training them, they're remote controlling them
http://www.bu.edu/alumni/buforward/archives/Dec_2
So the simplicity of the shark's brain is actually an advantage. From the shark's point of view, it's chasing the smell, presumably, of prey.
Interestingly, something like this happens naturally. Parasitic wasps perform brain surgery to zombify roaches.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/03/wasp_perform
Makes you wonder if you could do it with higher animals actually. Even though we seem to have aa certain amount of free will about how we achieve our objectives of eating and reproducing and avoiding pain, there's probably low level hardware in our the oldest parts of our brains which enforces those objectives by sending reward/punishment signals 'up' to the high level, conscious bits of our brains. I can imagine that if you attached electrodes in the right places, you could run mammals and even humans in remote controlled zombie mode too. It would be a hellish experience though, since you'd know your free will had been strongly curtailed.
Still, look on the bright side, most
The level of intelligence and self-awareness is not considered an over-riding factor in the karma of harming others, though it is not considered as harmful to harm smaller animals than larger or more intelligent beings. The difference is something akin to getting to reside in a less lower hell for a period of billions of years. Cheery thought.
Well I don't believe in life after death, so it's not something I'm concerned about.
But to me, harming things becomes more wrong as they become more sentient. Destroying a pocket calculator isn't morally wrong, neither is killing bacteria. As you go up the sentience scale it becomes more wrong. So I wouldn't experiment on people, or chimps or dolphins for example, regardless of the benefits. But I don't think mice are sentient enough that experimenting on them is automatically wrong, so long it's done in a humane way.
See the Voynich Manuscript for more information. It's a mysterious manuscript that has never been decoded. Interestingly, it has the right statistical properties to be a real document, e.g (from the wiki)
Now, if you look at computer to computer communication, there's a tendency to increased entropy over time. E.g. compare a 300 baud modem with a 8Mbit DSL one. The modulation has become more complex, and the modulated data looks more like white noise to someone who doesn't understand it. Even worse, techniques like Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum actually send a signal below the noise floor, before de spreading.
Which makes me wonder if we could even detect communications from ultra advanced civilisations, even if they happened to be still using wavelengths we have sensors for. Which doesn't seem likely either. E.g. a human civilisation would likely be unable to build sensors to detect a signal sent using technology from a hundred or so years in the future, and the likely difference in technology from an alien civilisation would likely be much greater than that.
Sorry, couldn't resist going off on a wild tangent, given the topic the article covers.
That's absurd. Surely if you have some case which has a downside - increased animal suffering and an upside - possibly decreased human suffering, you need to work out where the balance lies based on the information you have.
If you're wrong, you change your mind, but you made the world a worse place while you were wrong. But not deciding, having an opinion and trying to vote in government and/or buy products from companies which act according to your decision seems to be even more irresponsible to me.
E.g. we may find out that mice for example are much more self aware than I now believe, and I'd change my opinion on experimenting on them. But based on the evidence now, and the laws that govern their treatment now, I don't have any problem with it.
Maybe they don't like mice?
Quite right too. Nasty, scurrying creatures that spread disease. And you can't eat them either.
He wouldn't need a gas card though. If he can turn water into wine, ethanol or crude oil shouldn't be a problem.
Plus he could do Force Lightning too, IIRC.
The sad thing is, you're completely right, but everyone will jump on nit picky details like Opera being free as in beer rather than speech.
I think a better term would be Alternative Software, i.e. non mainstream stuff, both Open Source like Linux/Firefox and closed source like Opera. You're right that there's a wierd mindset which goes something like "OMG! I'm so smart, I know the way 90% of the world does it is wrong! I'll use something which only a tiny minority uses, an people don't bother to test with, and then complains about it not working"
The ironic thing is that the developers here use Firefox, and would probably not be too sympathetic if the maintainers of some other site they need to use told them to use IE.
But the web designers annoy me too, most of the stuff which is non portable is just plain annoying, once you get past the initial fascination with their uber l33t use of Javascript and CSS to make pages that morph around dizzyingly when you click on stuff. Often, it just barely works on any browser, and is totally unintuitive.
Opera has been free since 8.5, over a year now.
Can't you just right click, select Edit Site Preferences, Click the network tab, Select Identify as Firefox. Then you'll get the Firefox version, which sounds like it will work better with Opera.
Opera 9.02 works with all the sites I visit regularly. This wasn't true of 8.x admittedly.
And for things that don't, notably ytmnd, there's a "View in Internet Explorer button" you can install.
And you get the speed, slick UI and peace of mind that a browser with a negligable market share is not a tempting hacker target. I like the Wand thingy, and the way you can click at the edge of the screen to get a links pane.
Yeah, exactly. The equations may have imaginary numbers and so on in them, but it doesn't have any physical meaning.
The only thing I can see is that if you had two theories, one which had outlandish things like parallel dimensions in it and one without and the nonintuitive one fit the experimental data better than the intuitive one, maybe with some advanced engineering you could do some cool stuff, like faster than light travel, that would be impossible in the intuitive but simplistic theory.
I make it 0.42, a bit like Boxing Helena.
Maybe Dell install loads of demos, spyware and crap because the crap vendors pay them to do it?
Then after 6 months, the user sees a load of pop ups telling them that the demos have expired and they need to register, so the crap vendors probably make some money. I don't know, but it seems like if you can get your "Internet Safety Suite" time limited demo pre installed on every Dell, you can rely on a fairly high percentage of non technical users entering their credit card numbers when the time limit expires. In fact, it would seem a good business idea to pay Dell a few bucks to do it. Much better than selling it in a store, where non technical users probaby never visit.
And given the amount of crap on a Dell, and the fact that they haggle hard with Microsoft and all these companies, maybe they actually end up with y being negative.
A lot of the time, that's more expensive. E.g. WinModems were cheaper than hardware modems because the signal processing was done by Windows. But the specs were closed so it was hard to support them on Linux.
But if you're a PC manufacturer, it's not worth jeopardising your sales to people who want Windows by using a hardware modem rather than a software one, since that adds to the build cost. Microsoft being Microsoft, they will always try to create this sort of situation, where the PC manufacturers can save a few bucks at the cost of being able to run alternative OSs. And given that the vast majority of PCs run Windows, it will continue to work.
But it's always been possible to get a PC with no OS if you build it yourself. In fact, I've never bought a pre built desktop, since they tend to use cheaper chipsets and graphics cards than I want to use.
Laptops are harder of course, but there are whitebox laptops too, they're just harder to find, e.g.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/56/1/
Who are you debating this with? This isn't philospohy class. Who ever mentioned absolutism or perfection?
I offer a devil's advocate service. For a mere $100, I'll argue for the strawman position you are skilfully demolishing for 10 posts, and then admit you've changed my mind. But since you misspelled 'philosophy', you're clearly not worth debating.
Special offers this month:
Free spelling flames, insults and ad hominems!
Just $10/post to continue any argument!
Give windoze time stop dreaming of electric sheep and throwing invisible chairs in the screensaver.
Speaking of... I wouldn't be surprised if some jokester ms engineers embedded an invisible ballmer throwing invisible chairs in an invisible screensaver...
Philip K Dick managed to write works of complete genius whilst taking loads of very strong drugs, it's true. But you, my friend, are no Philip K Dick.
Touch the monolith, monkey boy.
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Sony_BMG_CD_cop
IIRC, Windows Defender removes the rootkit.
They also hired Mark Russinovich. But yeah, enabling autoplay by default on CDs on machines that run Admin if you use the default installation was incredibly naive.
Probably a conspiracy between Microsoft and Sony to put dirt into their clean rooms.
I take it you're not familiar with the Sony Bono Reanimation Act.
Condensed version of the Open XML spec:
Click on the icon, and it loads. Oh, you don't have office installed? Or Windows either? Well you better get started on re-implementing both just in time for the next version starts being marketed. If you're anywhere near successful, the next version will be really different. Might as well just pop down to the store and pay your few hundred bucks for the real versions.
But there's absolutely zero chance that humans can organise reducing C02 emissions by 2050. Even if the US and Western Europe went back to a pre industrial civilisation, China and India will increase their emissions so much that there will still be an increase.
And look at the error bar on that - there's a big difference between 2 degress and 9 degrees I think. I looked up the Permian extinction, and one theory is a 5 degree C increase triggered it.
This rise could lead to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which the March 24 issue of Science reports is already shrinking at a rate of 224 ±41 cubic kilometers a year, double the rate measured in 1996 (Los Angeles uses one cubic kilometer of water a year). If it and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melt, sea levels will rise five to 10 meters, displacing half a billion inhabitants."
Well the Greenland ice shet is melting anyway. I've read wildely varying figures for sea level rise, some mm per year, some metres. Even if the sea levels rise, both of us work in countries which can afford low tech solutions like levies. Personally, I live in a country which can even maintain them correctly too.
But I don't trust Scientific American, that issue on Lomborg left a nasty taste in my mouth, even before I read Crichton's essay.
This is not necessary - all it will take is a change to renewable energy sources and perhaps nuclear, and a switch to cleaner cars and more economy. No need for serfdom or economic hardship. But, we have to start now.
Well no one's stopping you from walking to work, buying green electricity and so on.
I think to force everyone to take drastic action, e.g. by banning CO2 emissions from industry, I'd need all the experts to say "you'll get a 5 degree +- 0.2 degree change by 2050 is you leave things as they are. By doing these changes, cost $300Bn +- 50Billion, we can make it a 1 degree change +- 0.2 degree". Whereas what they acually say is like your quote "2 to 9 degrees with a 70% reduction". Actually, if they all said that, maybe I could take it seriously, but they all seem to have slightly different figures. Suspiciously, each new headline has slightly worse figures, and it's got to the point where we're basically screwed regardless of any conceivable reduction in CO2 emissions, like the figures you quote.
Look on the bright side even if the figures are correct, Earth will be far more hospitable than Venus for another few generations, I personally think for much longer than that. Even if it gradually turns into Venus over a few thousand years, it's still possible for humanity to survive, provided the change is gradual. In terms of our species, it's possible to survive things like the Black Death, which killed 30-60% of the population, so we're likely to survive short term knocks quite well too. All this will no doubt happen after we are both dead, so you can take a fairly cold hearted view of it all. The species will survive, and so will science and technology I suspect.
And before you mention the IPCC and Kyoto, I don't trust them either. Most of the extreme figures quoted in the media assume some kind of positive feedback system (based on methane hydrate gasification IIRC) and we don't know if that will happen.
John Maddox, who I do trust said
I'm sure you'll tell me how he's no longer respectable, but he's ex editor of Nature, an "interdisciplinary journal of t
Of course you aren't! I really can't understand what you are trying to say here - that non-experts have views that should be taken into account? Why? Does not understanding something have some sort of merit?
..
My argument is that if you select for scientists called "experts on climate change", of course that person will believe that climate change is real and serious. Just like if you ask a professor of theology, of course they will believe in God. Their careers are essentially based on that axiom. It's also hard to get a grant if you don't believe in the thing you are getting paid to study.
But if you ask a statistician, or a biologist, a physicist or a chemist what they think of the arguments for climate change being real and serious, they are much more skeptical. But they're not skeptical of other bits of science outside their specialty. That makes me trust the study of climate change less than say physics. That and the fact that when I actually look at the data, it's mostly random with a slight trend. I can't really explain any further than that.
It's not convincing to me, it's not convincing to the people I discuss it with. It is convincing to people who are basically acivists who I suspect have a vested interest in it existing, and who use extremely dishonest techniques when arguing.
The problem with Crichton is that his views get unfairly publicised because he is a well-known author, and a science fiction writer. The addition problem is that he writes very bad science in his fiction - if anything that should be a reason to reject his views.
I can't stand his books, but the arguments he uses in his essay are convincing to me. E.g. the analogy with Nuclear Winter, and quotes from people like Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson on the science there. Or really the whole history of fashionable ideas in popular science being disasterously wrong.
There are no appeals to authority - the appeals are to data and statistics that are there for anyone to analyse.
No respectable scientist is denying that climate is changing
"No respectable scientist is denying" is an appeal to authority. There's also an implicit ad hominem there, since you're calling all the scientists who disagree with you non respectable.
And yeah, I realise that my distrust of climate change specialists borders on being based on an ad hominem, but it's also based on the fact that I've never seen any data that supports the more apocalyptic predictions I see.
The issue is by how much it will change. Predictions range within a series of extremes, from a few degrees C to 5,6 or more.
Well I found that it changed 0.6+- 0.2 degrees C in the 20th Century, which doesn't set alarm bells ringing to me. If someone could convince me it will change by 5 or 6 degrees over my lifetime, that's obviously much more serious, but so far no one has.
But even then, it's a question of if we can avoid it, and if we can live with it and so on.
No, it isn't. One can run models against what is there, and correct if the model doesn't reproduce it. For example, in the astrosciences models are run of galaxy formation. We can't run actual experiments on galaxies, but that does not make the models any less valid.
Galaxy models are probably simpler in some way. I think they climate is big, chaotic and not all of the mechanimsms are understood. Galaxies seem to follow some kind of well defined life cycle - they all end up looking much the same shape.
Well, many who are lifelong experts in these subjects do think we know enough about them - who are you to say this?
I've read a load of stuff on this, and I'm not convinced that the end is nigh.
I can't see the point here.... is it that because the Chinese have poorly implemented population control, that unlimited growth of population is good?
If there had been no intervention, unlimited growth wouldn't have happened. There seems to be a mechanism that causes population growth to drop as societies get richer. At least the current UN prediction is that population will level off
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
There was no consensus on global cooling in the 1970s. This is a myth.
That article confirms that the popular media hyped global warming while the real scientists were more cautious. The same thing is happening now with global warming I think.
But my point is that if you'd asked a climate change researcher who tended more towards activism, they would probably have claimed there was an overwhelming consensus that agreed with them, just like they do now about global warming. Now if we'd decided to increase greenhouse gases as a way to head off the ice age, where in fact the climate was warming up, this would not have been good.
But the policies would be extremely beneficial, encouraging energy economy and a reduced reliance on oil and gas from unstable regions.
If they are beneficial for those reasons, we should do them anyway. I'd definitely like to cut off money to the Saudis for example, and make the West energy independant. The problem is, green ideas won't necessarily achieve that since they are based on avoiding CO2 emissions.
I read that there have been calls to close Drax, Britains largest coal fired power station. There are also calls to not build any more nuclear power stations. All this comes from greens, and all of it is counterproductive in starving the Saudis, which is what I'm interested in.
Global warming is not some sort of proposal that needs to be tested and corrected, it is unquestionably actually happening.
The stuff I've seen is 0.6 ± 0.2 Celsius in the 20th century, or something like that. Which doesn't seem to indicate immininent environmental collapse to me. The proposal I'm skeptical about is that of imminent collapse, not that the world will be 0.6 degrees warmer in our lifetimes.
Seems a bit religious to declare this in "unquestionably actually happening". I thought science was about finding holes in theories and then improving them, not proving them to be the truth.
I don't think dinosaurs are a good comparison, since they occured in the past.
As I see it, climate is like share prices. Not all of the mechanisms are understood, like solar variability, whether there's positive or negative feedback in CO2. It's also chaotic.
So given that we can't predict where the FTSE 100 share index will be in a day, or a week, or a century, I'm not at all convinced that we have the technology to model it. Granted if you have a model and some evidence from the past you can jiggle the parameters until it matches, but I'm not convinced it can predict the future reliably.