I don't think the plants mind the angle of the light. Crops that do grow well in the north, like strawberries, are much, much, much better grown in the north than in the south. So, yes, the extra hours matter. A lot. Give us the southern warmth and we'd grow oranges the likes of which you've never before tasted.
I don't doubt that the far north is getting greener, but don't think for a moment that it'll lead to food crops way up north
You think wrong. The North has far more sunlight in the summer (which is the crucial point in time) than does the south. In the early growing period my home town sees sunlight until 9pm, in the crucial summer months, we see sun from about 4am until about midnight. Strawberries from around here are, due to the significant amount of sun light, sweeter than you could possibly imagine. With increased temperatures, our oranges would give you a sugar orgasm.
Don't forget, the world has always been a much nicer place for plants in the warm periods than in the ice ages. We are currently at the tail end of an ice age, and we are moving to a time with no polar ice, human activities or not. That is the natural cycle in which this planet has always existed. Perhaps human activities are speeding things along, but there is no reason to think a warm planet is going to be uninhabitable, it wasn't before and it was a lot warmer. It was also, when being a lot warmer, a lot nicer place to live.
The inevitable coming warm period is going to be followed by another ice age. I'd worry a lot more about the Northern Hemisphere being under kilometers of ice than I'd worry about New Orleans being under water.
SimEarth is probably wrong. It doesn't seem to have been a giant desert in the previous warm periods (quite the opposite). CO2 increases plant life since an increase in CO2 allows plants go grow with significantly less water. Also, as the earth warms, it will get more humid. Desertification happens when the air goes dry, not when it goes wet. Ice ages are dry periods, ice ages makes deserts, warm periods (counter-intuitively) does not.
That migration will be nothing compared to the one that comes after. When the normal and inevitable warm period ends and the ice comes back, covering most of the populated northern hemisphere.
Increased CO2 doesn't lead to desertification. Other human activities clearly do, but increased CO2 does not. Increased CO2 means plant life can get by with significantly less water, so if you want to reduce the size of a desert you will increase the amount of CO2 in the air (green house effect, get it?). Also, the cold weather we have in our current ice age makes for drier air, which is also detrimental to plant growth. As history has shown us, the periods between the ice ages are highly fertile and good for bio diversity, particularly plant bio diversity.
As our current ice age comes to an end (defined as when the polar ice has melted) we'll probably be in a similar situation to the last time we were there, a planet with a much larger "greee zone" and plant growth where it is currently impossible. This should lead to a significant increase in bio diversity. We should see rain forests expand significantly.
Sure, some humans will have to move. A little. Not as much as they will have to a few thousand years after the end of the current ice age though. Then it is going to be really terrible, as the ice comes back and slowly starts to cover all of the Northern Hemisphere. That's when people need to worry. A little warming might do us all some good.
It used to be a lot warmer than it is now. In fact, we are still in an ice age. Getting warmer is normal and inevitable. We might have sped the process up a bit by dumping CO2 into the air, but the ice would have melted anyway, like it always does when an ice age ends. That't the definition of the end of an ice age. The ice has melted.
Now, your depressing notions about what it will be like in the warm period in the post-ice-age are probably wrong. Why? Because in the last few warming periods, it doesn't appear to have been like that. Quite the opposite. The ice ages (like the one we're in now) means drier climes, less plant growth, less animals, less variety. In the in-between-ice-ages periods we have a significant increase in bio diversity. It's called the "green house effect" for a reason. It is desirable for plant life and therefore also for animal life.
I'd worry a lot more about the ice age we are eventually going to enter after the coming warm period. Warm periods on earth are short and sweet, the ice ages are long and terrible. Where warm periods lasts tens of thousands of years, ice ages lasts hundreds of thousands of years. I'd worry less about New Orleans under water than I'd worry about the Northern Hemisphere under kilometers of ice.
And it won't do anything like kill stuff -- it will increase plant cover as large land masses become better able to support plant life
People tend to forget this despite the fact that it is called "the green house effect". Now why do we have green houses? Also, ice ages are relatively dry while warmer periods are more humid. Plants can grow where they currently can't when the temperature goes up.
People seem to forget that we are in an ice age at the moment. The air is (relatively) cold and dry. It is going to warm up and get more humid. That is normal. It has many, many times before. Then after a while it will get colder again, it will get drier, the huge swaths of land that is going to be fertile in the non-ice age is again going to become infertile (Sahara) and ice is again going to cover the north.
We should worry less about preventing the normal warming period from occurring (even if there is a chance we are hurrying it along with our CO2 emissions) and a little more about what to do when the inevitable next ice age comes along. New Orleans and parts of New York for that matter, being under water is going to be a walk in the park compared to the entirety of the northern hemisphere covered in a few kilometers of ice. Perhaps an amount of artificial warming of this planet is just what the doctor ordered.
Yes, and no. Depends. If CO2 is leading temperature increase, perhaps, if it is trailing, no way.
Does the theory of greenhouse gases predict this? Yes.
You are correct, but so does the theory that temperature increase is causing (as opposed to caused by) the CO2 increase in the cycle of warming/cooling that this planet has always experienced (humans or not).
It's not a big, complex theory with many variables/unknowns
Well, actually it is. It is a big complex model where probably most of the variables are still quite uncertain.
The amount of CO2 is precisely measurable and quantifiable. Result: It's rising.
I doubt anyone has ever said it didn't, however, it has been rising significantly in the past decade, where we have not measured temperature increases that the model appears to say should have resulted.
The only thing left is to figure out when the ice will melt
Of course it will melt. It always does. It did long before there were humans around. This is one of those odd t hings about Gaia proponents. They drew a line in the sand at some presumably important point in time, and then they say: "This is the normal state of our planet". That is not only absurd, it is certifiably insane. The earth has never been in a "balanced" state. Ever. It has cycled through hugely different climatic "normals", and it has since long before there were humans around.
Here's a clue. We are currently in an ice age. At the very tail end of it in fact. This ice age will, as did all of the ice ages preceding this, terminate when the ice has melted (that's in fact the definition). So, human contributions or not, the ice is going to melt. There is nothing we can do about it (unless we want to pump the air full of aerosols and stuff). The ice melting completely is normal. The question is mostly "did we do something to speed it up?" Perhaps we did, perhaps not.
Oh, and don'f forget, the earth is more fertile, can support more life, has had more life in fact, in the in-between ice ages, not in the ice ages. There is a reason we call it the green-house effect, it mimics a green-house. Why is it that farmers grow thing in green-houses now?
Miguel has contributed more to Linux while sleeping than you have to anything while working at your hardest. Honestly, if you feel like making a contribution to the world, why don't you dig a hole by a tree, put your self in it and shoot your self in the head. As fertilizer you'd contribute to the world in more ways than you ever have before, and you'd stop being a useless sack of methane-producing meat.
Wow. You're a moron. Everyone very clearly didn't notice since it didn't disappear for "nearly everyone". In fact it disappeared for almost nobody. Your ignorance is even worse than your ability to convert EUR to USD.
I think we have found what is basic requirement for membership in the (R) party: Brain removal surgery. For the leadership, the brain will be replaced with a Timex Calculator Watch anno somewhere in the 1980s. The purpose of the Timex is to give the leadership at least the needed faculty for counting members and money. For most of them, an upgrade from a Brain to a Timex would also of course result in a significant jump in intelligence.
IBM's problem with OS/2 was they viewed it as a profit-making enterprise.
Yeah, you want to make a profit when you sell stuff.
You don't have to make a profit on everything you sell. IBM knows about loss-leading. The OS/2 people were never allowed to run their business like that.
Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop
You need to get back on your meds. I was a strong OS/2 advocate at the time, and MS did no such thing. MS was just a lot better at this kind of business than IBM was.
You are still missing my point. We need to get rid of existing crap
I would not call Java crap, and for the enterprise, removing it isn't an option. Tons of enterprise apps are still relying on ancient ActiveX enabled browsers. Re-writing simply isn't an option. Since Java is not going to go away - we'll have to have that fixed and not add new problems.
How many people do you actually know with Silverlight installed?
Quite a few since a few fairly high profile websites require it, but that's irrelevant. Whether people use Silverlight or not is not an argument for adding yet another attack vector. Since NaCl promises cross-platform abilities, gode-gen is required - compile time or run time. Whether that code gen happens only at compile time (which was the case for Java a few years back) or goes through optimizations at run-time is not particularly relevant. There will be (and have been in NaCl) security holes. To think that we have nailed them all is absurd. There is always problems in software, some turn out to be serious. Remember, NaCl will be updated in the future and new errors will be added. That is always the case. You can't verify that software is safe. Not even theoretically. There is only one kind of bug-free software, the kind that doesn't do anything.
The way to stay safe is to add no new, or at least as few as possible, attack vectors. NaCl doesn't solve any problem that isn't already solved - I don't buy your argument that we need native-level performance in a browser, so it is not needed. Adding something that is not needed but is or will become an attack vector is fundamentally flawed (and stupid).
if you don't like [JavaScript's] semantics, that's too bad, because trying to wrap it in another layer results in pretty bad perf
Not true. Look at what Anders Hejlsberg (of Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C# fame) is doing with JavaScript right now. It's good and it adds no performance penalties since it compiles to good (and readable) JavaScript.
Silverlight could have been it, if it was portable
The CIL is, but Silverlight uses some Windows only features, so that is out.
It is yet another attack vector in the browser. There have been many, they have all had serious problems. NaCl is certainly not more secure than Java, and look at that track record. Now there will be (for most people) JS, Java, Silverlight, Flash etc, and for Chrome users, all of the above PLUS NaCl. That makes the browsing experience less secure. We need fewer attack vectors, not more. NaCl doesn't solve a single problem that wasn't already solved, and it is therefore utterly unneeded. Adding unneeded attack vectors to browsers is just plain stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the plants mind the angle of the light. Crops that do grow well in the north, like strawberries, are much, much, much better grown in the north than in the south. So, yes, the extra hours matter. A lot. Give us the southern warmth and we'd grow oranges the likes of which you've never before tasted.
I don't doubt that the far north is getting greener, but don't think for a moment that it'll lead to food crops way up north
You think wrong. The North has far more sunlight in the summer (which is the crucial point in time) than does the south. In the early growing period my home town sees sunlight until 9pm, in the crucial summer months, we see sun from about 4am until about midnight. Strawberries from around here are, due to the significant amount of sun light, sweeter than you could possibly imagine. With increased temperatures, our oranges would give you a sugar orgasm.
Don't forget, the world has always been a much nicer place for plants in the warm periods than in the ice ages. We are currently at the tail end of an ice age, and we are moving to a time with no polar ice, human activities or not. That is the natural cycle in which this planet has always existed. Perhaps human activities are speeding things along, but there is no reason to think a warm planet is going to be uninhabitable, it wasn't before and it was a lot warmer. It was also, when being a lot warmer, a lot nicer place to live.
The inevitable coming warm period is going to be followed by another ice age. I'd worry a lot more about the Northern Hemisphere being under kilometers of ice than I'd worry about New Orleans being under water.
the equator becomes a giant desert
SimEarth is probably wrong. It doesn't seem to have been a giant desert in the previous warm periods (quite the opposite). CO2 increases plant life since an increase in CO2 allows plants go grow with significantly less water. Also, as the earth warms, it will get more humid. Desertification happens when the air goes dry, not when it goes wet. Ice ages are dry periods, ice ages makes deserts, warm periods (counter-intuitively) does not.
That migration will be nothing compared to the one that comes after. When the normal and inevitable warm period ends and the ice comes back, covering most of the populated northern hemisphere.
desertification nearer the equator.
Increased CO2 doesn't lead to desertification. Other human activities clearly do, but increased CO2 does not. Increased CO2 means plant life can get by with significantly less water, so if you want to reduce the size of a desert you will increase the amount of CO2 in the air (green house effect, get it?). Also, the cold weather we have in our current ice age makes for drier air, which is also detrimental to plant growth. As history has shown us, the periods between the ice ages are highly fertile and good for bio diversity, particularly plant bio diversity.
As our current ice age comes to an end (defined as when the polar ice has melted) we'll probably be in a similar situation to the last time we were there, a planet with a much larger "greee zone" and plant growth where it is currently impossible. This should lead to a significant increase in bio diversity. We should see rain forests expand significantly.
Sure, some humans will have to move. A little. Not as much as they will have to a few thousand years after the end of the current ice age though. Then it is going to be really terrible, as the ice comes back and slowly starts to cover all of the Northern Hemisphere. That's when people need to worry. A little warming might do us all some good.
It used to be a lot warmer than it is now. In fact, we are still in an ice age. Getting warmer is normal and inevitable. We might have sped the process up a bit by dumping CO2 into the air, but the ice would have melted anyway, like it always does when an ice age ends. That't the definition of the end of an ice age. The ice has melted.
Now, your depressing notions about what it will be like in the warm period in the post-ice-age are probably wrong. Why? Because in the last few warming periods, it doesn't appear to have been like that. Quite the opposite. The ice ages (like the one we're in now) means drier climes, less plant growth, less animals, less variety. In the in-between-ice-ages periods we have a significant increase in bio diversity. It's called the "green house effect" for a reason. It is desirable for plant life and therefore also for animal life.
I'd worry a lot more about the ice age we are eventually going to enter after the coming warm period. Warm periods on earth are short and sweet, the ice ages are long and terrible. Where warm periods lasts tens of thousands of years, ice ages lasts hundreds of thousands of years. I'd worry less about New Orleans under water than I'd worry about the Northern Hemisphere under kilometers of ice.
And it won't do anything like kill stuff -- it will increase plant cover as large land masses become better able to support plant life
People tend to forget this despite the fact that it is called "the green house effect". Now why do we have green houses? Also, ice ages are relatively dry while warmer periods are more humid. Plants can grow where they currently can't when the temperature goes up.
People seem to forget that we are in an ice age at the moment. The air is (relatively) cold and dry. It is going to warm up and get more humid. That is normal. It has many, many times before. Then after a while it will get colder again, it will get drier, the huge swaths of land that is going to be fertile in the non-ice age is again going to become infertile (Sahara) and ice is again going to cover the north.
We should worry less about preventing the normal warming period from occurring (even if there is a chance we are hurrying it along with our CO2 emissions) and a little more about what to do when the inevitable next ice age comes along. New Orleans and parts of New York for that matter, being under water is going to be a walk in the park compared to the entirety of the northern hemisphere covered in a few kilometers of ice. Perhaps an amount of artificial warming of this planet is just what the doctor ordered.
Do the overall trends match? Yes.
Yes, and no. Depends. If CO2 is leading temperature increase, perhaps, if it is trailing, no way.
Does the theory of greenhouse gases predict this? Yes.
You are correct, but so does the theory that temperature increase is causing (as opposed to caused by) the CO2 increase in the cycle of warming/cooling that this planet has always experienced (humans or not).
It's not a big, complex theory with many variables/unknowns
Well, actually it is. It is a big complex model where probably most of the variables are still quite uncertain.
The amount of CO2 is precisely measurable and quantifiable. Result: It's rising.
I doubt anyone has ever said it didn't, however, it has been rising significantly in the past decade, where we have not measured temperature increases that the model appears to say should have resulted.
The only thing left is to figure out when the ice will melt
Of course it will melt. It always does. It did long before there were humans around. This is one of those odd t hings about Gaia proponents. They drew a line in the sand at some presumably important point in time, and then they say: "This is the normal state of our planet". That is not only absurd, it is certifiably insane. The earth has never been in a "balanced" state. Ever. It has cycled through hugely different climatic "normals", and it has since long before there were humans around.
Here's a clue. We are currently in an ice age. At the very tail end of it in fact. This ice age will, as did all of the ice ages preceding this, terminate when the ice has melted (that's in fact the definition). So, human contributions or not, the ice is going to melt. There is nothing we can do about it (unless we want to pump the air full of aerosols and stuff). The ice melting completely is normal. The question is mostly "did we do something to speed it up?" Perhaps we did, perhaps not.
Oh, and don'f forget, the earth is more fertile, can support more life, has had more life in fact, in the in-between ice ages, not in the ice ages. There is a reason we call it the green-house effect, it mimics a green-house. Why is it that farmers grow thing in green-houses now?
Any nerd who hates an operating system or a company is a virgin and a moron.
I suggest rebuilding the goodness that was Gnome 2 in Gnome 3
Funny you should say that intending to "hit" Miguel. Sadly for you, you praised him. Gnome 1 and 2, Miguel. Gnome 3, nothing at all of Miguel.
Miguel has contributed more to Linux while sleeping than you have to anything while working at your hardest. Honestly, if you feel like making a contribution to the world, why don't you dig a hole by a tree, put your self in it and shoot your self in the head. As fertilizer you'd contribute to the world in more ways than you ever have before, and you'd stop being a useless sack of methane-producing meat.
it's a very incomplete .NET 4.0 missing huge parts of the framework
Rubbish.
at work I'm using a 5 year old, cast-off desktop that was deemed too slow for Windows
I think he might have been referring to that part of your post, but perhaps you didn't remember you wrote it.
Examples?
Google is a service which gets its audience by doing nice things for people
You couldn't possibly be this dumb.
Wow. You're a moron. Everyone very clearly didn't notice since it didn't disappear for "nearly everyone". In fact it disappeared for almost nobody. Your ignorance is even worse than your ability to convert EUR to USD.
I think we have found what is basic requirement for membership in the (R) party: Brain removal surgery. For the leadership, the brain will be replaced with a Timex Calculator Watch anno somewhere in the 1980s. The purpose of the Timex is to give the leadership at least the needed faculty for counting members and money. For most of them, an upgrade from a Brain to a Timex would also of course result in a significant jump in intelligence.
In an ideal world, we would be able to eliminate CO2 from our atmosphere completely
Are you insane or just suicidal? Funny fact, CO2 isn't a poison, but (at the right partial pressure level) O2 is.
IBM's problem with OS/2 was they viewed it as a profit-making enterprise.
Yeah, you want to make a profit when you sell stuff.
You don't have to make a profit on everything you sell. IBM knows about loss-leading. The OS/2 people were never allowed to run their business like that.
Excepting, MS paid off IBM to kill it so it wouldn't interfere with their race to the desktop
You need to get back on your meds. I was a strong OS/2 advocate at the time, and MS did no such thing. MS was just a lot better at this kind of business than IBM was.
You are still missing my point. We need to get rid of existing crap
I would not call Java crap, and for the enterprise, removing it isn't an option. Tons of enterprise apps are still relying on ancient ActiveX enabled browsers. Re-writing simply isn't an option. Since Java is not going to go away - we'll have to have that fixed and not add new problems.
How many people do you actually know with Silverlight installed?
Quite a few since a few fairly high profile websites require it, but that's irrelevant. Whether people use Silverlight or not is not an argument for adding yet another attack vector. Since NaCl promises cross-platform abilities, gode-gen is required - compile time or run time. Whether that code gen happens only at compile time (which was the case for Java a few years back) or goes through optimizations at run-time is not particularly relevant. There will be (and have been in NaCl) security holes. To think that we have nailed them all is absurd. There is always problems in software, some turn out to be serious. Remember, NaCl will be updated in the future and new errors will be added. That is always the case. You can't verify that software is safe. Not even theoretically. There is only one kind of bug-free software, the kind that doesn't do anything.
The way to stay safe is to add no new, or at least as few as possible, attack vectors. NaCl doesn't solve any problem that isn't already solved - I don't buy your argument that we need native-level performance in a browser, so it is not needed. Adding something that is not needed but is or will become an attack vector is fundamentally flawed (and stupid).
if you don't like [JavaScript's] semantics, that's too bad, because trying to wrap it in another layer results in pretty bad perf
Not true. Look at what Anders Hejlsberg (of Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C# fame) is doing with JavaScript right now. It's good and it adds no performance penalties since it compiles to good (and readable) JavaScript.
Silverlight could have been it, if it was portable
The CIL is, but Silverlight uses some Windows only features, so that is out.
Email is (yuck) Lotus 123 for legacy reasons
Intentionally obtuse here: Why would you use an old piece of spreadsheet software to read email?
Spreadsheets, we never see them
Wow, must be the only company in the world. You guys not have a finance department?
What exactly are your problems with NaCl?
It is yet another attack vector in the browser. There have been many, they have all had serious problems. NaCl is certainly not more secure than Java, and look at that track record. Now there will be (for most people) JS, Java, Silverlight, Flash etc, and for Chrome users, all of the above PLUS NaCl. That makes the browsing experience less secure. We need fewer attack vectors, not more. NaCl doesn't solve a single problem that wasn't already solved, and it is therefore utterly unneeded. Adding unneeded attack vectors to browsers is just plain stupid.