No. Capitalism is simply the most effective means to an end, where the end is the best possible standard of living for the largest number.
That's an assertion. One much beloved by libertarians, but unproven.
Capitalism is locally Pareto efficient (with some assumptions), but Pareto efficiency should not be confused with a global optimum.
If it wasn't the most effective means we would try something else, but so far all the alternatives we've tried have been abject failures.
Uh, now that's a different assertion: not that capitalism is the most efficient, but that it is more efficient than other things that have been tried.
Since unregulated capitalistic systems fail very quickly, pretty much all "capitalist" economies are with regulated capitalism. When these succeed in improving the standards of living, the libertarians credit the capitalism... but economists credit the capitalism and the regulation.
Solar panels do not produce much more energy than they take to make.
I don't know where you got this information, but the best I can say is that you are way out of date. The energy payback time for solar panels is, depending on location, between 0.4 and 1.4 years. Since the lifetime of solar arrays is usually warrantied for 30 years, they produce much more energy than they take to make. See e.g., https://cleantechnica.com/2013...
Embedded in a quote, "[sic]" actually doesn't mean that the preceding word/phrase is 'correct' or 'incorrect' from a grammar, spelling (or factual) standpoint -- just that it IS an accurate quote even though the preceding might be incorrect OR be misinterpreted as incorrect.
A quote is correct when it accurately states what the quoted person said.
If I write the moon is made of ice cream, that is incorrect. If I write He said "the moon is made of ice cream," that is correct (if he actually said that.)
I know politicians are not very bright, and some, if not many, are corrupt, but how can they allow this to pass, especially when the alternative is coal powered power plants!
Wyoming is a major coal-producing state.
In the view of politicians, when you say "the alternative is coal powered power plants"-- that's exactly why they want to pass the bill.
depends on what you call "slightly" and what you call "significantly," I suppose. At the moment, the warming rate is 0.18C per decade. The projections for a century from now will depend on assumptions of what amount of greenhouse gasses we put into the atmosphere over the next century, which is going to be a guess.
"During San Diego Comic-Con, another teaser for the series was released — this one featuring the “test flight” of the U.S.S. Discovery, the space-traveling base of operations for the cast.
Thunderstorms are impressive, but at their basics, they are just a manifestation of the convective transfer that establishes and maintains the adiabatic lapse, which has been incorporated into climate models for the last fifty years. Convective heat transfer is the cause; thunderstorms are merely a manifestation. That's the way (or much of the way) heat is moved in the atmosphere: by convection. And, yes, convection is pretty well understood. Your proposal that convection represents a "new" feedback mechanism that atmospheric scientists have never thought about, and that therefore invalidates all the previous models, is a little naïve. In any case, however, precipitation represents 100% humidity. To "invalidate" the feedback effect of humidity, you need to show that humidity decreases with temperature. Saying that thunderstorms increase will, if anything, serve as a demonstration that humidity increased with temperature.
There are a HELL of a lot of steps between "mankind's activity affects the planet's temperature" and "It's a disaster that must immediately be fixed by crippling the economy and instituting totalitarian control on human activity by governments".
Right!!!! You got it!!
Stop attacking the science and the scientists when it's the policy you object to.
The fact that you don't like the proposed policy does not make the science wrong.
1) The Earth is usually a lot hotter than it is right now. We are climbing out of an ice age.
We "climbed out of an ice age" (that is, came out of the glaciation) ten thousand years ago.
You didn't look at the graphs in the referenced article, did you? >By those graphs we STARTED climbing out of an ice age back then but we still have a long way to go. So they support the poster's claim, not yours.
The graphs show nothing of the sort. Look at it more closely and pay attention to the scale. http://geology.utah.gov/wp-con... The smallest time division on that graph is 50,000 years, and the temperature has been warm for about a quarter of a division. The article summarizes it clearly: "Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago" which is pretty much what I just said.
Here's a good graph showing the sea level rise at the end of the glaciation. You can see the warming very clearly, and it's pretty much over by eight thousand years ago. http://cdn.antarcticglaciers.o...
The additional warming they're saying is going to happen comes from unproven, unsettled, feedback loop theories.
You're aware that the "feedback loop theory" you're referring to is the assumption of constant relative humidity, right?
If you want to suggest that this feedback doesn't exist, you are making the assumption that humidity decreases as temperature increases. Unless you can come up with a plausible mechanism for that, I'd call that an "unproven, unsettled" theory.
There is a time-series of global average temperature, but there is not a description of the error. I'd like a full statistical treatment, including the number of measurements varying as a function of time, as well as an assessment of the quality of the measurements (I'm sure the thermometer technology has changed in the last 100 years).
Show the raw temperature measurements NASA! We don't want to see those "corrected" data sets from James Hansen et al. anymore.
All of the data is available on the GISS site, which I assume you haven't bothered to look at: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/ The site includes the source code for the analysis and a discussion of what all the data corrections are, why they were done, and what the data looks like before and after corrections. You might want to start with the FAQ on how the data analysis is done, here: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...
If you don't like the way NASA does the data analysis, there's an independent analysis from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, here: http://berkeleyearth.org/
And that, I think, is fair enough, as there is no real difference between the "individual" and "society", as ideological categories, because we are always both, we are all individuals and we all live in society and are part of social institutions.
And there's no real difference between a "spark plug" and an "automobile," because a spark plug is part of both, it is an individual spark plug and it also lives in an automobile and is part of automobile systems.
A society is composed of individuals, but a society and an individual are not the same thing.
So if fewer people are dying of cancer, it should mean that more people are dying from other causes
Usually the figures quoted are age-adjusted death rates. So, no, death rate from cancer can go down without other (age adjusted) rates going up. What happens is that there are more older people.
...there's no chance that Dream Chaser will be ready before the others. Nor will Blue Origin.
well, BO's new shep. capsule will not work for orbital work. As such, they are not in the running on this.
Blue Origin has announced follow-on to the New Shepard spacecraft, the "New Glenn", which will be designed for orbit: http://www.space.com/34034-blu...
However, I think the original poster is correct: New Glenn is not anticipated to be operational on a fast enough schedule for space station crew launch, which needs a vehicle in 2018.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Capitalism is simply the most effective means to an end, where the end is the best possible standard of living for the largest number.
That's an assertion. One much beloved by libertarians, but unproven.
Capitalism is locally Pareto efficient (with some assumptions), but Pareto efficiency should not be confused with a global optimum.
If it wasn't the most effective means we would try something else, but so far all the alternatives we've tried have been abject failures.
Uh, now that's a different assertion: not that capitalism is the most efficient, but that it is more efficient than other things that have been tried.
Since unregulated capitalistic systems fail very quickly, pretty much all "capitalist" economies are with regulated capitalism. When these succeed in improving the standards of living, the libertarians credit the capitalism... but economists credit the capitalism and the regulation.
Solar panels do not produce much more energy than they take to make.
I don't know where you got this information, but the best I can say is that you are way out of date.
The energy payback time for solar panels is, depending on location, between 0.4 and 1.4 years. Since the lifetime of solar arrays is usually warrantied for 30 years, they produce much more energy than they take to make.
See e.g., https://cleantechnica.com/2013...
You got it.
Embedded in a quote, "[sic]" actually doesn't mean that the preceding word/phrase is 'correct' or 'incorrect' from a grammar, spelling (or factual) standpoint -- just that it IS an accurate quote even though the preceding might be incorrect OR be misinterpreted as incorrect.
A quote is correct when it accurately states what the quoted person said.
If I write the moon is made of ice cream, that is incorrect. If I write He said "the moon is made of ice cream," that is correct (if he actually said that.)
Thank you.
I couldn't understand why they didn't just say "30 baud" instead of "30 bps".
I have a feeling [sic] that no one [sic] actually knows [sic] what [sic] means!
"reconnection" is a word...
Latin, "thus".
"(Sic)" after a word means "thus", a statement that the word used is correct as written and not an error.
I know politicians are not very bright, and some, if not many, are corrupt, but how can they allow this to pass, especially when the alternative is coal powered power plants!
Wyoming is a major coal-producing state.
In the view of politicians, when you say "the alternative is coal powered power plants"-- that's exactly why they want to pass the bill.
That's because it's much easier to predict an average over a long term than a specific point at a specific place.
depends on what you call "slightly" and what you call "significantly," I suppose.
At the moment, the warming rate is 0.18C per decade.
The projections for a century from now will depend on assumptions of what amount of greenhouse gasses we put into the atmosphere over the next century, which is going to be a guess.
"During San Diego Comic-Con, another teaser for the series was released — this one featuring the “test flight” of the U.S.S. Discovery, the space-traveling base of operations for the cast.
http://www.startrek.com/articl...
http://www.digitaltrends.com/m...
Thunderstorms are impressive, but at their basics, they are just a manifestation of the convective transfer that establishes and maintains the adiabatic lapse, which has been incorporated into climate models for the last fifty years. Convective heat transfer is the cause; thunderstorms are merely a manifestation. That's the way (or much of the way) heat is moved in the atmosphere: by convection.
And, yes, convection is pretty well understood. Your proposal that convection represents a "new" feedback mechanism that atmospheric scientists have never thought about, and that therefore invalidates all the previous models, is a little naïve. In any case, however, precipitation represents 100% humidity. To "invalidate" the feedback effect of humidity, you need to show that humidity decreases with temperature. Saying that thunderstorms increase will, if anything, serve as a demonstration that humidity increased with temperature.
Yea. What happened before 1950?
The Second World War.
There are a HELL of a lot of steps between "mankind's activity affects the planet's temperature" and "It's a disaster that must immediately be fixed by crippling the economy and instituting totalitarian control on human activity by governments".
Right!!!! You got it!!
Stop attacking the science and the scientists when it's the policy you object to.
The fact that you don't like the proposed policy does not make the science wrong.
We "climbed out of an ice age" (that is, came out of the glaciation) ten thousand years ago.
You didn't look at the graphs in the referenced article, did you? >By those graphs we STARTED climbing out of an ice age back then but we still have a long way to go. So they support the poster's claim, not yours.
The graphs show nothing of the sort. Look at it more closely and pay attention to the scale. http://geology.utah.gov/wp-con... The smallest time division on that graph is 50,000 years, and the temperature has been warm for about a quarter of a division.
The article summarizes it clearly: "Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago" which is pretty much what I just said.
Here's a good graph showing the sea level rise at the end of the glaciation. You can see the warming very clearly, and it's pretty much over by eight thousand years ago.
http://cdn.antarcticglaciers.o...
All of this fear mongering is just to push forward the globalist agenda of bringing down western civilization.
So, have you considered attacking the "globalist agenda," rather than attacking the science and the scientists?
Climate fluctuations are cyclical, and solar output DOES have a lot to do with the climate.
Of course it does. Nobody is challenging that point. But we measure solar output, and it is not the cause of the current warming.
Cycles have been consistent over centuries and it looks like they are changing now due to more limited solar input.
We have very good measurements of solar output. We know with very high certainty that the current warming is not due to a change in solar output.
The additional warming they're saying is going to happen comes from unproven, unsettled, feedback loop theories.
You're aware that the "feedback loop theory" you're referring to is the assumption of constant relative humidity, right?
If you want to suggest that this feedback doesn't exist, you are making the assumption that humidity decreases as temperature increases. Unless you can come up with a plausible mechanism for that, I'd call that an "unproven, unsettled" theory.
There is a time-series of global average temperature, but there is not a description of the error. I'd like a full statistical treatment, including the number of measurements varying as a function of time, as well as an assessment of the quality of the measurements (I'm sure the thermometer technology has changed in the last 100 years).
So, look on their site.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...
Show the raw temperature measurements NASA! We don't want to see those "corrected" data sets from James Hansen et al. anymore.
All of the data is available on the GISS site, which I assume you haven't bothered to look at: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/
The site includes the source code for the analysis and a discussion of what all the data corrections are, why they were done, and what the data looks like before and after corrections.
You might want to start with the FAQ on how the data analysis is done, here: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...
If you don't like the way NASA does the data analysis, there's an independent analysis from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, here: http://berkeleyearth.org/
Maybe msmash could find the same article on a more reputable site, like Buzzfeed or CNN.
Easy enough. Don't Anonymous Cowards have google?
Buzzfeed: https://www.buzzfeed.com/peter...
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/18/...
I was disappointed that the article didn't provide links to NASA's and NOAA's findings.
The Goddard Institute for Space Science data is here: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gis...
A press release from Columbia University about the findings is here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/...
WE'RE ALL GONNA BE DEAD IN 10 YEARS! Isn't that the oft-repeated timeline?
No.
This is a long term effect. The timeline is many decades.
We're all going to be slightly warmer in 10 years.
And that, I think, is fair enough, as there is no real difference between the "individual" and "society", as ideological categories, because we are always both, we are all individuals and we all live in society and are part of social institutions.
And there's no real difference between a "spark plug" and an "automobile," because a spark plug is part of both, it is an individual spark plug and it also lives in an automobile and is part of automobile systems.
A society is composed of individuals, but a society and an individual are not the same thing.
So if fewer people are dying of cancer, it should mean that more people are dying from other causes
Usually the figures quoted are age-adjusted death rates. So, no, death rate from cancer can go down without other (age adjusted) rates going up. What happens is that there are more older people.
...there's no chance that Dream Chaser will be ready before the others. Nor will Blue Origin.
well, BO's new shep. capsule will not work for orbital work. As such, they are not in the running on this.
Blue Origin has announced follow-on to the New Shepard spacecraft, the "New Glenn", which will be designed for orbit: http://www.space.com/34034-blu...
However, I think the original poster is correct: New Glenn is not anticipated to be operational on a fast enough schedule for space station crew launch, which needs a vehicle in 2018.