I think as a party the GOP accepts climate change. It's just that they do the want to anything about it. It's like here in Canada. The Liberals are bringing in a carbon tax, the Conservatives are railing against it, but admit there's AGW is real, but don't seem to have a plan of any kind. Accepting the reality and having the courage to confront your bare are two different things. For liberal parties, the base largely accepts climate change, conservatives basically have a denier base.
Even without any other system in place, increasing CO2 increases the absorption of heat (think Venus). Adding CO2 will increase the amount of energy trapped. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, and while historical cloud cover is not known, it seems improbable that we will see such a large increase in cloud cover that albedo will be raised enough to effectively block solar radiation to the level to mitigate.
We've known the radiation absorption properties of CO2 since the 19th century, and we have in fact known since then that increasing CO2 PPM in the atmosphere inevitably leads to more solar radiation being captured. It's thermodynamics. You can't escape, the universe well and truly doesn't give a flying fuck about how you're going to be inconvenienced. Get over it. Thermodynamics is an immutable property of the univers.e
Scientists have known for several years that the oceans had a pretty vast capacity to absorb heat, and it's been the explanation for why atmospheric and land temperatures have risen as quickly as early models would have suggested. So no, no surprise. This study simply does a better job of quantifying what that thermal capacity is. Of course, while that may be saving our skins so far as atmospheric and land temperatures go (for now), heating oceans has its own set of serious consequences. Thermodynamics is not our friend, and make increasing the radiation absorption capacity of the atmosphere greater will inevitably add more energy (mainly thermal) to all other climate systems on the planet. You cannot escape it. The laws of the universe don't care about human beings or cheap energy.
Nuclear power is not renewable, and has its own pretty serious drawbacks. Solar power has been steadily dropping in cost for decades. There's also geothermal, tidal, various kinds of stored energy storage. Nuclear has its place, but sorry, fusion reactors are not the sole answer.
Most of these people have never actually been in any management position, and most of them, quite frankly, are all talk on anonymous forums, but when push comes to shove, if they're hauled to the mat by their HR department for being insufferable prats, they'll roll over.
I have a great deal of admiration for Linus. He's pulled off one of the most extraordinary technology achievements in history. He gave the still pretty young open source community a functioning *nix kernel unimpeded (no matter what SCO thought) by the crazy licensing issues which had prevented Unix's adoption beyond servers and high end workstations.
But he's a fucking asshole. There are ways to deal with people who are doing substandard work that doesn't involve vast streams of personal insults. There are even ways of basically telling someone who has clearly subpar skills to take a walk that don't involve public dressings down. That kind of behavior effects all the developers, even the ones who are doing a damned good job. And the realpolitik of the situation is pretty simple; much of Linux is being developed by developers in corporate environments, and those corporations pretty much all of have codes of conduct, and they have every right to expect that the maintainer and overall strategist for the project that they are contributing resources to abide by a similar set of rules. If Linus wanted to prevent forking of Linux, in effect he being fired, and someone else whose vision, quite frankly, might not be at all in the open source community's best interests, taking over the fork with the greater resources, he had to alter his behavior and demonstrate that he meant it.
So all the chest thumpers here can basically get stuffed. They're delusional beta male types who like to imagine themselves in some alternative universe being alpha males. They've got a massive inferiority complex that they betray every time they talk about SJWs. They're mean spirited fantasists who in all likelihood will never be in any kind of management position because, well, they're emotionally-fraught cunts.
I lost about 100 pounds over three years, by walking and now with running. Apart from the obvious health benefits , I actually find the running a very good stress reliever. Once you're in that zone, particularly with trail runs where you have to be observant of hazards likes roots and rocks, it really just makes whatever is bothering you disappear, at least for an hour.
You make it all sound sinister. Supersymmetry has a range of masses, depending on the precise version. Currently, LHC's inability to find evidence of supersymmetrical partners at its current energy levels would appear to falsify some versions of supersymmetry, but not all. That being said, what I've read from some supersymmetry researchers seems to suggest that they are getting a bit worried, as what are viewed as the strongest supersymmetry contenders may already have to be abandoned. At the same time, pretty much all the researchers, while glum, are also in some ways excited, because the Standard Model clearly doesn't explain everything, so if not supersymmetry, then what?
In a technical sense, light didn't come into existence until about 370,000 years after the Big Bang when photons decoupled and could travel freely (this is where the CMBR comes from). Again, you end up having to try to force fit what is clearly an ancient cosmographic creation myth into what we actually know now.
He also mused that if there was a God, God had very little room to maneuver on what the starting conditions of the Universe would be like. In other words, if there is a God, maybe he got the ball rolling, but he didn't really have much choice in the speed and direction of that metaphorical ball. It's the trap that the Strong Anthropic Principle lays for any theist insistent that it is evidence of a Creator. If it is true that the fine structure constants are evidence of God, then they're also evidence that even God is constrained by mathematics. I suspect that's one of the reasons that a number of physicists of that bent have leaned more heavily towards some sort of Deism, as it makes virtually no presumptions about the nature of the Prime Mover, up to and including whether that Prime Mover is an intelligent being.
Or, alternatively, the rules that we see our universe don't apply to a "before", and maybe there isn't a "before". That's my point, if the Universe was fundamentally self-caused, there is no infinite regression. And really, stating there's a Prime Mover simply moves the problem back a step. Is there some reason I should favor a Prime Mover, for which I have no evidence and for which I have to essentially handwave away any questions about where that entity come from, over simply taking that property "uncaused" and asserting that that is a property of the Universe? I know the Universe exists. I can see no evidence that a Prime Mover exists.
I'm not trying to question or undermine anyone's belief in God. I have no interest in proselytizing, though I admit I enjoy the debate well enough. But I seek no converts. To my mind, the fact that the Universe, or at least the Universe we live in, might not have existed at all, whatever it's cause (or even if self-caused), leads me to view life, and in particular sentient life, as a precious and rare thing. Of course, I could even be wrong on the latter point. Maybe we're surrounded by intelligent races, and over the vast spans of time and space many such intelligent species have risen and fallen, and rise even now. But for the moment, we seem to be alone, so not having a backstop like an omnipotent God who, with the wave of a vast omnipotent hand can save even a few of the deserving, I feel quite keenly the notion that we are the only thing we can count on to save our species, and the vast array of other organisms on Earth.
If nothing else, it comes down to even being allowed to be a member of a society. You seem to have this strange notion that humans are completely independent actors. We are not. Like chimps, canines, and countless other species big and small we are social animals. It's literally in our DNA to work together. Chimps probably don't have anywhere near the neural hardware capable of concepts like God, and yet any primatologist will tell you they have codes of conduct, codes that can, on occasion, be ruthlessly enforced.
And as to the much vaunted human morality; the Spartans left unfit infants to die by exposure, the Romans enjoyed nothing better than a bit of gladiator blood sport, Ferdinand and Isabella, fine upstanding Catholics that they were ended up ordering the persecutions of every Jew and Moor they could lay their hands on. Need I mention all those Lutheran and Catholic Germans and Austrians who assisted in the killing of millions of Jews? All that high and mighty Biblical morality didn't stop the Holocaust, or all the anti-Jewish pogroms before it. Indeed, genocide is written right in to the Bible, if you believe the accounts about how the Israelites took the Promised Land (which I don't).
The one thing all these examples demonstrate is that there are very few "universal moral codes" out there; perhaps a few archetypal ones like the generally prevalent taboo on incest (though the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt practiced it, and the Habsburgs in Europe got pretty close). In fact, it appears morality is very dependent on time and place, and varies between societies, or even within societies over time. The most universal thing we can say is "Humans need rules to live by, but the rules themselves seem largely malleable".
Considering some of those single-celled organisms can kill an adult human in less than a day, I'm thinking, even from an aesthetic angle, your argument is pretty damned faulty.
So if your argument is the Strong Anthropic Principle, then what you're really saying is that God is as bound by a set of fundamental principles as any other entity. If only a narrow set of values for the fundamental parameters will lead to complex structures like life, then clearly God's omnipotence is highly overrated. If all those values like the speed of light in a vacuum must be set at some fundamental number so that a universe stable enough and complex enough to produce the necessary structures for life, then what is it that you've argued for?
You're missing the nuance of the argument. Hawking has made it clear elsewhere that the real issue, as I state elsewhere, isn't whether God exists or not, but rather what is the point of invoking God at all? In one of his books of essays, he makes it pretty clear that judging by how the universe works, God would have been heavily constrained in what the starting parameters would even be. That's one of the weakest aspects of the Strong Anthropic Principle as used as a justification for God (ie. if the starting conditions weren't JUST right, there wouldn't be a Universe capable of supporting life, so therefore God!). If it is true, then God Himself is limited by a set of mathematical principles that mean only certain types of Universes within a fairly narrow grouping of all the possible universes will permit complex structures to form. That being the case, claiming God created the Universe has very little utility at all, and then you're faced with asking the question whether such an entity, however envisioned (the sort of distant and unpersonified Prime Mover by the Deists or the much more involved God of the Judeao-Christian religions), is even necessary? In other words, what particular problem is solved by invoking God, that doesn't in fact just push the question back?
Causation is a property of the universe. I can think of no reason, at least an empirical one, to assume it was a property of what came before, if the concept of "before" even has any meaning. And your solution only pushes the problem back, and still requires you to assert some entity was not bound by causation.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the definition of "competent" is to be totally okay with sexual harassment.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/rese...
In other words, clouds are not the problem for climate modeling that you seem to think they are.
I think as a party the GOP accepts climate change. It's just that they do the want to anything about it. It's like here in Canada. The Liberals are bringing in a carbon tax, the Conservatives are railing against it, but admit there's AGW is real, but don't seem to have a plan of any kind. Accepting the reality and having the courage to confront your bare are two different things. For liberal parties, the base largely accepts climate change, conservatives basically have a denier base.
Even without any other system in place, increasing CO2 increases the absorption of heat (think Venus). Adding CO2 will increase the amount of energy trapped. Water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, and while historical cloud cover is not known, it seems improbable that we will see such a large increase in cloud cover that albedo will be raised enough to effectively block solar radiation to the level to mitigate.
We've known the radiation absorption properties of CO2 since the 19th century, and we have in fact known since then that increasing CO2 PPM in the atmosphere inevitably leads to more solar radiation being captured. It's thermodynamics. You can't escape, the universe well and truly doesn't give a flying fuck about how you're going to be inconvenienced. Get over it. Thermodynamics is an immutable property of the univers.e
Scientists have known for several years that the oceans had a pretty vast capacity to absorb heat, and it's been the explanation for why atmospheric and land temperatures have risen as quickly as early models would have suggested. So no, no surprise. This study simply does a better job of quantifying what that thermal capacity is. Of course, while that may be saving our skins so far as atmospheric and land temperatures go (for now), heating oceans has its own set of serious consequences. Thermodynamics is not our friend, and make increasing the radiation absorption capacity of the atmosphere greater will inevitably add more energy (mainly thermal) to all other climate systems on the planet. You cannot escape it. The laws of the universe don't care about human beings or cheap energy.
Nuclear power is not renewable, and has its own pretty serious drawbacks. Solar power has been steadily dropping in cost for decades. There's also geothermal, tidal, various kinds of stored energy storage. Nuclear has its place, but sorry, fusion reactors are not the sole answer.
That kid must go through a lot of controllers
Most of these people have never actually been in any management position, and most of them, quite frankly, are all talk on anonymous forums, but when push comes to shove, if they're hauled to the mat by their HR department for being insufferable prats, they'll roll over.
I have a great deal of admiration for Linus. He's pulled off one of the most extraordinary technology achievements in history. He gave the still pretty young open source community a functioning *nix kernel unimpeded (no matter what SCO thought) by the crazy licensing issues which had prevented Unix's adoption beyond servers and high end workstations.
But he's a fucking asshole. There are ways to deal with people who are doing substandard work that doesn't involve vast streams of personal insults. There are even ways of basically telling someone who has clearly subpar skills to take a walk that don't involve public dressings down. That kind of behavior effects all the developers, even the ones who are doing a damned good job. And the realpolitik of the situation is pretty simple; much of Linux is being developed by developers in corporate environments, and those corporations pretty much all of have codes of conduct, and they have every right to expect that the maintainer and overall strategist for the project that they are contributing resources to abide by a similar set of rules. If Linus wanted to prevent forking of Linux, in effect he being fired, and someone else whose vision, quite frankly, might not be at all in the open source community's best interests, taking over the fork with the greater resources, he had to alter his behavior and demonstrate that he meant it.
So all the chest thumpers here can basically get stuffed. They're delusional beta male types who like to imagine themselves in some alternative universe being alpha males. They've got a massive inferiority complex that they betray every time they talk about SJWs. They're mean spirited fantasists who in all likelihood will never be in any kind of management position because, well, they're emotionally-fraught cunts.
I lost about 100 pounds over three years, by walking and now with running. Apart from the obvious health benefits , I actually find the running a very good stress reliever. Once you're in that zone, particularly with trail runs where you have to be observant of hazards likes roots and rocks, it really just makes whatever is bothering you disappear, at least for an hour.
Thanks Ivan. Blaming Jews is an age old Russian pasttime.
You make it all sound sinister. Supersymmetry has a range of masses, depending on the precise version. Currently, LHC's inability to find evidence of supersymmetrical partners at its current energy levels would appear to falsify some versions of supersymmetry, but not all. That being said, what I've read from some supersymmetry researchers seems to suggest that they are getting a bit worried, as what are viewed as the strongest supersymmetry contenders may already have to be abandoned. At the same time, pretty much all the researchers, while glum, are also in some ways excited, because the Standard Model clearly doesn't explain everything, so if not supersymmetry, then what?
In a technical sense, light didn't come into existence until about 370,000 years after the Big Bang when photons decoupled and could travel freely (this is where the CMBR comes from). Again, you end up having to try to force fit what is clearly an ancient cosmographic creation myth into what we actually know now.
Deism merely strips God of any human attributes. It doesn't really make God's existence any more probable.
He also mused that if there was a God, God had very little room to maneuver on what the starting conditions of the Universe would be like. In other words, if there is a God, maybe he got the ball rolling, but he didn't really have much choice in the speed and direction of that metaphorical ball. It's the trap that the Strong Anthropic Principle lays for any theist insistent that it is evidence of a Creator. If it is true that the fine structure constants are evidence of God, then they're also evidence that even God is constrained by mathematics. I suspect that's one of the reasons that a number of physicists of that bent have leaned more heavily towards some sort of Deism, as it makes virtually no presumptions about the nature of the Prime Mover, up to and including whether that Prime Mover is an intelligent being.
Or, alternatively, the rules that we see our universe don't apply to a "before", and maybe there isn't a "before". That's my point, if the Universe was fundamentally self-caused, there is no infinite regression. And really, stating there's a Prime Mover simply moves the problem back a step. Is there some reason I should favor a Prime Mover, for which I have no evidence and for which I have to essentially handwave away any questions about where that entity come from, over simply taking that property "uncaused" and asserting that that is a property of the Universe? I know the Universe exists. I can see no evidence that a Prime Mover exists.
I never asserted any such thing.
I'm not trying to question or undermine anyone's belief in God. I have no interest in proselytizing, though I admit I enjoy the debate well enough. But I seek no converts. To my mind, the fact that the Universe, or at least the Universe we live in, might not have existed at all, whatever it's cause (or even if self-caused), leads me to view life, and in particular sentient life, as a precious and rare thing. Of course, I could even be wrong on the latter point. Maybe we're surrounded by intelligent races, and over the vast spans of time and space many such intelligent species have risen and fallen, and rise even now. But for the moment, we seem to be alone, so not having a backstop like an omnipotent God who, with the wave of a vast omnipotent hand can save even a few of the deserving, I feel quite keenly the notion that we are the only thing we can count on to save our species, and the vast array of other organisms on Earth.
I tend to be pretty utilitarian. I'm an advocate of Lord Bentham's view; "The greatest good for the greatest number".
If nothing else, it comes down to even being allowed to be a member of a society. You seem to have this strange notion that humans are completely independent actors. We are not. Like chimps, canines, and countless other species big and small we are social animals. It's literally in our DNA to work together. Chimps probably don't have anywhere near the neural hardware capable of concepts like God, and yet any primatologist will tell you they have codes of conduct, codes that can, on occasion, be ruthlessly enforced.
And as to the much vaunted human morality; the Spartans left unfit infants to die by exposure, the Romans enjoyed nothing better than a bit of gladiator blood sport, Ferdinand and Isabella, fine upstanding Catholics that they were ended up ordering the persecutions of every Jew and Moor they could lay their hands on. Need I mention all those Lutheran and Catholic Germans and Austrians who assisted in the killing of millions of Jews? All that high and mighty Biblical morality didn't stop the Holocaust, or all the anti-Jewish pogroms before it. Indeed, genocide is written right in to the Bible, if you believe the accounts about how the Israelites took the Promised Land (which I don't).
The one thing all these examples demonstrate is that there are very few "universal moral codes" out there; perhaps a few archetypal ones like the generally prevalent taboo on incest (though the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt practiced it, and the Habsburgs in Europe got pretty close). In fact, it appears morality is very dependent on time and place, and varies between societies, or even within societies over time. The most universal thing we can say is "Humans need rules to live by, but the rules themselves seem largely malleable".
Considering some of those single-celled organisms can kill an adult human in less than a day, I'm thinking, even from an aesthetic angle, your argument is pretty damned faulty.
So if your argument is the Strong Anthropic Principle, then what you're really saying is that God is as bound by a set of fundamental principles as any other entity. If only a narrow set of values for the fundamental parameters will lead to complex structures like life, then clearly God's omnipotence is highly overrated. If all those values like the speed of light in a vacuum must be set at some fundamental number so that a universe stable enough and complex enough to produce the necessary structures for life, then what is it that you've argued for?
You're missing the nuance of the argument. Hawking has made it clear elsewhere that the real issue, as I state elsewhere, isn't whether God exists or not, but rather what is the point of invoking God at all? In one of his books of essays, he makes it pretty clear that judging by how the universe works, God would have been heavily constrained in what the starting parameters would even be. That's one of the weakest aspects of the Strong Anthropic Principle as used as a justification for God (ie. if the starting conditions weren't JUST right, there wouldn't be a Universe capable of supporting life, so therefore God!). If it is true, then God Himself is limited by a set of mathematical principles that mean only certain types of Universes within a fairly narrow grouping of all the possible universes will permit complex structures to form. That being the case, claiming God created the Universe has very little utility at all, and then you're faced with asking the question whether such an entity, however envisioned (the sort of distant and unpersonified Prime Mover by the Deists or the much more involved God of the Judeao-Christian religions), is even necessary? In other words, what particular problem is solved by invoking God, that doesn't in fact just push the question back?
Causation is a property of the universe. I can think of no reason, at least an empirical one, to assume it was a property of what came before, if the concept of "before" even has any meaning. And your solution only pushes the problem back, and still requires you to assert some entity was not bound by causation.
You can object all you like. Morality and its enforcement is the most fundemental power of the body politic.