Alright, I give up. Anyone who brings up the evacuation of New Orleans during Katrina as an example of migration due to climate problems gone well... I really can't take seriously. At least bring up the evacuations of Florida during hurricanes. But Katrina, by several accounts, cost 150-200 billion dollars. Millions of people were displaced, and were in dire straits. And this is one city (granted, a major one, complete with having the only deep water port in the area), hit by one unfortunate hurricane. If that stuff multiplies, you can get a complex system to collapse, even if previous hits were absorbed without problem.
I brought up specific examples of recent climate events that were generally thought to have been exacerbated by global warming, knowing full well that they were individual data points. The problem I guess is that the global climate is a complex enough system that it is impossible to pinpoint what is due to what. All you have is general trends, and it is easy to dismiss trees as not being part of the forest. Again, I don't doubt that you will generally not be affected by Global Climate Change. But don't take that to mean that no one else will be, or that no one else will care.
2) That's one hell of a funny cycle that occurs exactly once (two data points) over a 100K year time period. Or did everyone miss the warm periods 3000 years ago, 4500 years ago, and so on? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the guy is a crackpot. Just because someone has an opinion doesn't mean I need to take it seriously.
Let's take away hypotheticals and move to real examples (yeah,yeah, anecdote != data, but it's better than nothing).
1) You didn't pay attention to what happened in a country with low use of air-conditioning, like France. It is estimated that about 5000 seniors died over the span of about a week due to a heat wave. Since this is new, people haven't moved to the right places yet or invested in the right technologies. That is assuming that they have the money to do either, which is not a given.
2) I haven't built houses on permafrost. However, I did notice that when BP had to shut one of its Alaskan pipelines due to corrosion issues, that was a MAJOR deal. It actually impacted gas prices. In the meantime, while you build new houses, people will be sitting on a shifting house, or have to pay to move to a new house. Considering that their old house will be essentially worth zero, that's an expensive proposition.
3) Before people will grow crops that are better adapted to the new climate, they'll have to experience crop failures. Unfortunately, human nature is pretty resistent to change. Especially if it'll cost money. As for cropland expanding faster in the North than it shrinks in the South... I have no data on that, so I'll label it speculation and leave it there. However, I can tell you that for individual farmers in areas that aren't as low-density as middle America or Canada, that's going to be very difficult. In Europe, there's very little undeveloped land left. Moving farms is going to be essentially impossible. Yes, some people will be able to profit. See Greenland. However, a whole chunk of people will be left in the dust.
4) Change comes quickly, if you're talking tools. Wholesale migration of people though is expensive, fraught with logistical nightmares and is not available to everyone.
I most likely will profit from global warming as well. I can see it coming, I plan for it, I can make money off of it. Not everyone though is as mobile as me, nor as well educated. Not all industries will profit equally. Not all people will profit equally. The wealthy and educated ones won't have problems. But the less fortunate, less mobile and less educated ones will pay heavy prices. And I haven't even started to talk about the world outside the US.
Good point. Now that you have identified the problem, how about a solution? Here's one: don't buy newspapers with sensationalistic headlines. Talk to your friends and neighbors about not buying newspapers with sensationalistic headlines. Instead, buy newspapers with solid articles. Talk to your friends and neighbors about doing the same. It's amazing how quickly some markets will adapt.
Sorry, I assumed you were a little farther along in your education. You certainly can read through research papers yourself, even though that's gonna take quite some dedication. If you're less than 16, I'd say give the school some time to arm you with more of the math and physics behind Climatology. Then they can (and should) give you more of the discussion behind it.
However, I'll stand behind my initial assertion: if you are unhappy with how much information your school gives you, your best bet is to go and get that information yourself. Right now, this might simply mean to head to your local library and read up on general Climate theory. Then later, once you have the basic concepts and science down, you can start to read the actual papers. Knowledge is no one's responsibility but your own - and you certainly don't want to leave your education solely in the hands of what could be a bad school and bad teachers, do you?
Just because no-one spoon-fed you the debate that went (note the past tense) on about Global Warming doesn't mean it didn't exist. I suggest you delve into the actual research papers and do some reading on your own. Anything else just screams lazyness.
OK - this is getting easier and easier, since more and more people have extensively answered your questions before.
1) This is why people prefer global climate change rather than global warming, because it gives people who read only headlines the wrong idea. What that article refers to is thermohaline inversion and the stopping of the Atlantic conveyor belt, which is responsible for a good chunk of the nice coastal temperatures in Europe. For more details, and just because I can, I'll point you to alink that is in the same article you just quoted.
2) The Clean Air act is supposedly responsible for this nice little event. As for whether this would be able to affect the global climate in the level that we're seeing it, I'll refer you to this link.
3) Nice little effort at cherry-picking your events. For an actual event, you can go to Greenland and see how their farming efforts are a little easier now. However, the bad events far outweigh any positives we've gotten so far, primarily because it takes time to profit from change. Until we learn to take advantage of what Global Climate Change can do for us, we'll have seniors dying in droves from heat waves, pipelines and houses buckling due to vanishing permafrost and crops dying in areas that are getting too hot for comfort.
4) Since this is the same exact point as in 2) (complete with link to article that has the same quote), I'll refer you to the link I posted there. Besides, that article is a complete light weight when it comes to determining how much more light has reached the earth, its causes (which, btw, include reduced albedo, which is a side-effect of Global Climate Change) or its impact on what we're seeing.
Newsflash: Methodology is EVERYTHING in science. If your methodology is bad, your data is less than bad - it is misleading. Hence why so much revolves around whether people followed proper methodology when presenting their data.
The reason that the "save the rainforests" is quieter now is because people are actually doing something about it.
Finally, this entire "you have to present both sides of a story" has to stop. Now. This is not a game show where you get to choose which door to open. There is a public debate on an important topic, and that debate needs to happen in public. That's true. However, debating something in public does not mean that you simply pick a side you like and then clamor that everyone needs to listen to you "because all sides need to be heard". It means debating the theory, the data, the methodology, investigating problems and striving towards finding the most reasonable answer or theory. Granted, most news stories don't get this either, but that doesn't mean that we can't tell them to stop being idiots about the way they present science debates.
Since you are very proud of your rational approach to life, you might want to go a step further and investigate a-priori an a-posteriori knowledge. You'll find out that the only things that are provable are the ones that are uninteresting - bachelors are single, and stuff like that. Belief is an intrinsic part of everyone's life, because outside of the mathematical and the semantic, nothing can actually be proven. It can only be inferred with a degree of certainty.
Even though you believe (yes, believe) that your approach is based on rationality, it isn't. Furthermore, you also haven't figured out the reason that religion exists - to provide answers to questions we can't answer, and where the answers provide peace of mind. Your blanket categorization of all things believed as stupid, less than worthy and below you on the totem pole of human quality therefore does cast a bad light on others who might believe similar things, but who do it without the snobbery that you display.
I don't think your approach is wrong, but I think you stopped a little early in your decision making process.
I don't think it's designed to replace a battalion of humans guarding the border. If that's their idea, you're right - the sentry robot is terribly unsuited for that. More likely though is that it is supposed to prevent infiltration. The Nort Koreans have a long history of trying to sneak into South Korea for a number of reasons - see mini-subs and tunnel digging. This would mean they can post a sentry every 100 feet, and have that area completely covered, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Someone tries to sneak through DMZ? Shoot first, investigate later. someone tries to get out of the river into Seoul? Shoot first, investigate later. And if someone tries to actually invade South Korea and take those suckers out? Well, a couple of sentries in the same area that stop working will be damn good sign that something's up, and that you should get ready to fight. And if there's a large-scale assault... well, I hope the South Koreans haven't sold all their battle tanks, artillery and other nifty gizmos.
Unfortunately, this would destroy one of the cool developments in the DMZ: a refuge for wild animals. Occasionally, they seem to lose some animals to tripwires and landmines, but nothing too much. This stuff would just mean that the DMZ would become a dead zone. I hope that the pattern recognition they use can actually distinguish a crane from a human (and a human camuflaged as a crane from a crane).
I'm just wondering what you'll say when one of those cops goes ape-shit on you. Oh, I forgot - stuff like that only happens to other people, because you're a good, patriotic American.
This also assumes that the masses want to be educated. Judging from my experience here, the majority of people are happy wallowing in blissful ignorance.
Man. I feel bad for anybody who modded me informative. Got my sunspots wrong, got the quote wrong... last time I state anything categorically without actually verifying my facts.:)
* farms in Greenland, chinese expeditions to the arctic.
Yes, farms used to be in Greenland. As a matter of fact, they have been there for a while, even during recent cooling periods. It's not pretty, and it certainly doesn't look like a farm you're used to. As for the Chinese naval expedition to the arctic, I've not heard of them. There's Zhang He's expeditions in the early 1400s, but none of them mention reaching the arctic. Got a source? Furthermore, I'd like to find out exactly where ice was found by the Chinese, and when. During the summer, large chunks of the arctic ocean free up, even if it doesn't mean you can just sail right across it. As a result, this information means basically nothing in the context of a discussion on global Climate change. Care to elaborate?
* Sunspot activity
Nobody is ignoring solar forcing. For some extended calculations on the impact of solar irradiation on temperatures, see Lassen and Thejll. Furthermore, total solar output varies by about 0.1% during solar cycles, which some people don't consider to be enough to affect temperatures on earth.
As you can tell, the only one who doesn't talk about counterpoints is Monckton. As a matter of fact, science papers do a better job at presenting their uncertainties and outstanding issues than Monckton, whose purpose is not to present finding for a study, but to present a summary of the whole research on Climate Change. Quite frankly, he fails on that attempt.
* Medieval warming period
According to current papers (feel free to dig through the IPCC report), the medieval warming period did not reach current temperatures. Feel free to provide counter points.
You're right. There's plenty of discussion that still goes on. To say though it is "up for grabs" is disingenious at best. We certainly can describe current weather with certainty, and the main outstanding question is "what's going to happen next?" Quite frankly, the debate over whether the temperatures have increased is over. It's merely a question of how much, how fast and how much we'll pay for it in the future. Monckton, in his lame attempt to show controversy, simply manages to show how little controversy there actually is.
Eh. That's what I get for skimming through the article.
I wonder then what he thinks of the independent studies that show that solar radiation does influence for global warming, but is not the most significant factor, and cannot account for the sharp increase we have seen recently? It's all swell to quote stuff, but it's kinda idiotic to ignore any counter points.
I guess I'll have to dig through the Lyman paper. Sigh. Don't have high hopes for it, but it means I also need to dig through the articles that stated that ocean temperatures have been rising.
As for the semantics of proving climate-change consensus vs climate change.... that's the entire point of the debate, isn't it? If we have a consensus, we have climate change? Without one, we don't have climate change? Furthermore, if all 10 points are about proving consensus, why does he need 9 more after the first point? Either he thought 1 point wouldn't be dramatic enough, or he wanted to show something more.
However, bringing up that point opens you up to exactly that kind of comparison. The odds that someone actually got bought is far higher when the result just so happens to coincide with the position of someone with loads of cash and lots of vested interests. You don't even want to go down that road. I guess I missed that part in your post.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, I give up. Anyone who brings up the evacuation of New Orleans during Katrina as an example of migration due to climate problems gone well... I really can't take seriously. At least bring up the evacuations of Florida during hurricanes. But Katrina, by several accounts, cost 150-200 billion dollars. Millions of people were displaced, and were in dire straits. And this is one city (granted, a major one, complete with having the only deep water port in the area), hit by one unfortunate hurricane. If that stuff multiplies, you can get a complex system to collapse, even if previous hits were absorbed without problem.
I brought up specific examples of recent climate events that were generally thought to have been exacerbated by global warming, knowing full well that they were individual data points. The problem I guess is that the global climate is a complex enough system that it is impossible to pinpoint what is due to what. All you have is general trends, and it is easy to dismiss trees as not being part of the forest. Again, I don't doubt that you will generally not be affected by Global Climate Change. But don't take that to mean that no one else will be, or that no one else will care.
2) That's one hell of a funny cycle that occurs exactly once (two data points) over a 100K year time period. Or did everyone miss the warm periods 3000 years ago, 4500 years ago, and so on? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the guy is a crackpot. Just because someone has an opinion doesn't mean I need to take it seriously.
Let's take away hypotheticals and move to real examples (yeah,yeah, anecdote != data, but it's better than nothing).
1) You didn't pay attention to what happened in a country with low use of air-conditioning, like France. It is estimated that about 5000 seniors died over the span of about a week due to a heat wave. Since this is new, people haven't moved to the right places yet or invested in the right technologies. That is assuming that they have the money to do either, which is not a given.
2) I haven't built houses on permafrost. However, I did notice that when BP had to shut one of its Alaskan pipelines due to corrosion issues, that was a MAJOR deal. It actually impacted gas prices. In the meantime, while you build new houses, people will be sitting on a shifting house, or have to pay to move to a new house. Considering that their old house will be essentially worth zero, that's an expensive proposition.
3) Before people will grow crops that are better adapted to the new climate, they'll have to experience crop failures. Unfortunately, human nature is pretty resistent to change. Especially if it'll cost money. As for cropland expanding faster in the North than it shrinks in the South... I have no data on that, so I'll label it speculation and leave it there. However, I can tell you that for individual farmers in areas that aren't as low-density as middle America or Canada, that's going to be very difficult. In Europe, there's very little undeveloped land left. Moving farms is going to be essentially impossible. Yes, some people will be able to profit. See Greenland. However, a whole chunk of people will be left in the dust.
4) Change comes quickly, if you're talking tools. Wholesale migration of people though is expensive, fraught with logistical nightmares and is not available to everyone.
I most likely will profit from global warming as well. I can see it coming, I plan for it, I can make money off of it. Not everyone though is as mobile as me, nor as well educated. Not all industries will profit equally. Not all people will profit equally. The wealthy and educated ones won't have problems. But the less fortunate, less mobile and less educated ones will pay heavy prices. And I haven't even started to talk about the world outside the US.
Good point. Now that you have identified the problem, how about a solution? Here's one: don't buy newspapers with sensationalistic headlines. Talk to your friends and neighbors about not buying newspapers with sensationalistic headlines. Instead, buy newspapers with solid articles. Talk to your friends and neighbors about doing the same. It's amazing how quickly some markets will adapt.
Since my HTML and proofreading skills apparently suck, here's the link for point 2 again in slashdot format: http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/448.htm/
Sorry, I assumed you were a little farther along in your education. You certainly can read through research papers yourself, even though that's gonna take quite some dedication. If you're less than 16, I'd say give the school some time to arm you with more of the math and physics behind Climatology. Then they can (and should) give you more of the discussion behind it.
However, I'll stand behind my initial assertion: if you are unhappy with how much information your school gives you, your best bet is to go and get that information yourself. Right now, this might simply mean to head to your local library and read up on general Climate theory. Then later, once you have the basic concepts and science down, you can start to read the actual papers. Knowledge is no one's responsibility but your own - and you certainly don't want to leave your education solely in the hands of what could be a bad school and bad teachers, do you?
So a system that hits the same point twice in a random time period is cyclical? Nice. I don't think I'll go through the pain of reading that book.
Just because no-one spoon-fed you the debate that went (note the past tense) on about Global Warming doesn't mean it didn't exist. I suggest you delve into the actual research papers and do some reading on your own. Anything else just screams lazyness.
1) This is why people prefer global climate change rather than global warming, because it gives people who read only headlines the wrong idea. What that article refers to is thermohaline inversion and the stopping of the Atlantic conveyor belt, which is responsible for a good chunk of the nice coastal temperatures in Europe. For more details, and just because I can, I'll point you to alink that is in the same article you just quoted.
2) The Clean Air act is supposedly responsible for this nice little event. As for whether this would be able to affect the global climate in the level that we're seeing it, I'll refer you to this link.
3) Nice little effort at cherry-picking your events. For an actual event, you can go to Greenland and see how their farming efforts are a little easier now. However, the bad events far outweigh any positives we've gotten so far, primarily because it takes time to profit from change. Until we learn to take advantage of what Global Climate Change can do for us, we'll have seniors dying in droves from heat waves, pipelines and houses buckling due to vanishing permafrost and crops dying in areas that are getting too hot for comfort.
4) Since this is the same exact point as in 2) (complete with link to article that has the same quote), I'll refer you to the link I posted there. Besides, that article is a complete light weight when it comes to determining how much more light has reached the earth, its causes (which, btw, include reduced albedo, which is a side-effect of Global Climate Change) or its impact on what we're seeing.
Try again.
I wasn't sure whether to mod you informative, funny, or insightful. Sadly, there is no option for "rock on, brother!"
Newsflash: Methodology is EVERYTHING in science. If your methodology is bad, your data is less than bad - it is misleading. Hence why so much revolves around whether people followed proper methodology when presenting their data.
The reason that the "save the rainforests" is quieter now is because people are actually doing something about it.
Finally, this entire "you have to present both sides of a story" has to stop. Now. This is not a game show where you get to choose which door to open. There is a public debate on an important topic, and that debate needs to happen in public. That's true. However, debating something in public does not mean that you simply pick a side you like and then clamor that everyone needs to listen to you "because all sides need to be heard". It means debating the theory, the data, the methodology, investigating problems and striving towards finding the most reasonable answer or theory. Granted, most news stories don't get this either, but that doesn't mean that we can't tell them to stop being idiots about the way they present science debates.
Since you are very proud of your rational approach to life, you might want to go a step further and investigate a-priori an a-posteriori knowledge. You'll find out that the only things that are provable are the ones that are uninteresting - bachelors are single, and stuff like that. Belief is an intrinsic part of everyone's life, because outside of the mathematical and the semantic, nothing can actually be proven. It can only be inferred with a degree of certainty.
Even though you believe (yes, believe) that your approach is based on rationality, it isn't. Furthermore, you also haven't figured out the reason that religion exists - to provide answers to questions we can't answer, and where the answers provide peace of mind. Your blanket categorization of all things believed as stupid, less than worthy and below you on the totem pole of human quality therefore does cast a bad light on others who might believe similar things, but who do it without the snobbery that you display.
I don't think your approach is wrong, but I think you stopped a little early in your decision making process.
I don't think it's designed to replace a battalion of humans guarding the border. If that's their idea, you're right - the sentry robot is terribly unsuited for that. More likely though is that it is supposed to prevent infiltration. The Nort Koreans have a long history of trying to sneak into South Korea for a number of reasons - see mini-subs and tunnel digging. This would mean they can post a sentry every 100 feet, and have that area completely covered, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Someone tries to sneak through DMZ? Shoot first, investigate later. someone tries to get out of the river into Seoul? Shoot first, investigate later. And if someone tries to actually invade South Korea and take those suckers out? Well, a couple of sentries in the same area that stop working will be damn good sign that something's up, and that you should get ready to fight. And if there's a large-scale assault... well, I hope the South Koreans haven't sold all their battle tanks, artillery and other nifty gizmos.
All in all, not a bad deal for 200k a pop.
Unfortunately, this would destroy one of the cool developments in the DMZ: a refuge for wild animals. Occasionally, they seem to lose some animals to tripwires and landmines, but nothing too much. This stuff would just mean that the DMZ would become a dead zone. I hope that the pattern recognition they use can actually distinguish a crane from a human (and a human camuflaged as a crane from a crane).
I'm just wondering what you'll say when one of those cops goes ape-shit on you. Oh, I forgot - stuff like that only happens to other people, because you're a good, patriotic American.
This also assumes that the masses want to be educated. Judging from my experience here, the majority of people are happy wallowing in blissful ignorance.
Man. I feel bad for anybody who modded me informative. Got my sunspots wrong, got the quote wrong... last time I state anything categorically without actually verifying my facts. :)
Good point. And probably a better way to go about it.
No worries. There was no sign in my post that said "ignore post location - poster is on crack." :)
* farms in Greenland, chinese expeditions to the arctic.
Yes, farms used to be in Greenland. As a matter of fact, they have been there for a while, even during recent cooling periods. It's not pretty, and it certainly doesn't look like a farm you're used to. As for the Chinese naval expedition to the arctic, I've not heard of them. There's Zhang He's expeditions in the early 1400s, but none of them mention reaching the arctic. Got a source? Furthermore, I'd like to find out exactly where ice was found by the Chinese, and when. During the summer, large chunks of the arctic ocean free up, even if it doesn't mean you can just sail right across it. As a result, this information means basically nothing in the context of a discussion on global Climate change. Care to elaborate?
* Sunspot activity
Nobody is ignoring solar forcing. For some extended calculations on the impact of solar irradiation on temperatures, see Lassen and Thejll. Furthermore, total solar output varies by about 0.1% during solar cycles, which some people don't consider to be enough to affect temperatures on earth.
As you can tell, the only one who doesn't talk about counterpoints is Monckton. As a matter of fact, science papers do a better job at presenting their uncertainties and outstanding issues than Monckton, whose purpose is not to present finding for a study, but to present a summary of the whole research on Climate Change. Quite frankly, he fails on that attempt.
* Medieval warming period
According to current papers (feel free to dig through the IPCC report), the medieval warming period did not reach current temperatures. Feel free to provide counter points.
You're right. There's plenty of discussion that still goes on. To say though it is "up for grabs" is disingenious at best. We certainly can describe current weather with certainty, and the main outstanding question is "what's going to happen next?" Quite frankly, the debate over whether the temperatures have increased is over. It's merely a question of how much, how fast and how much we'll pay for it in the future. Monckton, in his lame attempt to show controversy, simply manages to show how little controversy there actually is.
Shit happens when you don't deal with a topic for ten years. I suspect the same will happen to you at some point.
Ahem.... I think I wanted to post this as a response to your parent. Sigh. Not my day.
Eh. That's what I get for skimming through the article.
I wonder then what he thinks of the independent studies that show that solar radiation does influence for global warming, but is not the most significant factor, and cannot account for the sharp increase we have seen recently? It's all swell to quote stuff, but it's kinda idiotic to ignore any counter points.
I guess I'll have to dig through the Lyman paper. Sigh. Don't have high hopes for it, but it means I also need to dig through the articles that stated that ocean temperatures have been rising.
As for the semantics of proving climate-change consensus vs climate change.... that's the entire point of the debate, isn't it? If we have a consensus, we have climate change? Without one, we don't have climate change? Furthermore, if all 10 points are about proving consensus, why does he need 9 more after the first point? Either he thought 1 point wouldn't be dramatic enough, or he wanted to show something more.
Damn - $50 million grants? I obviously worked in the wrong field. :(
However, bringing up that point opens you up to exactly that kind of comparison. The odds that someone actually got bought is far higher when the result just so happens to coincide with the position of someone with loads of cash and lots of vested interests. You don't even want to go down that road. I guess I missed that part in your post.