And yet water vapour is in short-term dynamic equilibrium in the atmosphere - excess is removed via precipitation, and shortage is made up via evaporation from the ground or the oceans. Thus relative humidity is self-regulating to be essentially constant. But with rising temperatures (due to e.g. increased CO2) the absolute humidity and hence the greenhouse effect is increasing. Water vapour is one of the best-known positive climate feedbacks, but, unlike long-living greenhouse gases like CO2, it is not a climate forcing.
Well, I don't know where you live, but I have a lot of experience in Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Munich - not exactly known as cheap cities -, and spending 5 EUR on any one-way travel in the extended inner city is nearly impossible.
Maybe your experience is outdated. Specifically if you just cross a "circle" for Munich the one-way ticket is 5.40... wait just for the next 2 days because then it goes up to 5.60, they were probably thinking it's too cheap...
Note that what they call "Inner District/Munich" is 4 circles and if you go again to the same circle you have to count it again. Like you go 2-1-2 it is 3 circles = 8.40 EUR.
I'm sorry, but that is wrong, and I hope you haven't overspend for long. There is a significant difference between rings and zones. There are just 4 zones (the coloured ones on this plan). For single-trip tickets, you only count the number of zones, not the number of rings. Anything in the white zone (which is all of the built-up area of Munich) is just one zone, and is (currently) EUR 2.70 per trip. The most you can pay is EUR 10.80, which is for "4+" zones, and allows you to travel, say, from Tutzing to the airport (nominally 7 zones). And you can get a group day ticket for the green and white zones for EUR 12.20, which gets you out to Lake Starnberg, then to the Garching campus of TUM, and back to Goetheplatz for Theatre...
The smaller rings are only used to calculate the price for subscriptions, not for single-trip and day tickets.
One-way one person is around 5 euros for anything but the shortest stretch (you can easily pay 4.65 euro even for just one stop if crossing the tariff zones). And there's no cheaper option for a return ticket so you're looking at 20 euros for a return trip for two persons. It just doesn't compare with 1 euro in gas plus 1-1.5 euro parking (if needed).
Well, I don't know where you live, but I have a lot of experience in Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Munich - not exactly known as cheap cities -, and spending 5 EUR on any one-way travel in the extended inner city is nearly impossible. I'd agree that it is still too expensive, but its not as bad as you say. For EUR 20 you can typically get a 5-person all-day unlimited ticket.
I'm glad if your car does not depreciate, needs neither oil changes nor other service, is untaxed, and the insurance is free. Otherwise, comparing the price just based on fuel and parking is like judging the calories of a triple-size double chocolate sundae with extra cream by ignoring everything but the cherry on top...
Of course when you dig up half a billion years worth of stored organic carbon and burn in in a century, the carbonate-silicate cycle ain't gonna fix that.
It quite probably will fix it - though of course it will take half a billion years, give or take a few orders of magnitude. It will probably not fix it in time for the human species.
Planet one: "I'm not feeling very well. I think I'm infected with humans!"
Planet two: "Don't worry - that always passes."
Who are they going to trade with, and for what? Other than South Korea, every other Asian country is dirt poor.
For highly developed nations, consider Japan, Singapore, Taiwan.
And then there are less developed large nations, like Indonesia.
And if you go by geography, beyond TPP candidates: Russia, Saudi Arabia, India (poor per person, but number 3 in the world by PPP GDP, number 7 by nominal GDP), and so on.
[...] germany where the well-intentioned but shortsighted Green party has put a ban on new nuclear power plants and they're driving the existing ones down.
The Green Party in Germany has never been in power. It has been the minority partner in a coalition with the Social Democratic Party for 7 years (1998 to 2005) - over ten years ago. The current exit from nuclear energy in Germany is due to a law supported CDU (conservatives), SPD, FDP (liberals) and Greens in 2001.
Very odd that this story comes out now, as I just read study about CO2 and fossil fuel emissions that concluded there is no correlation between emission and CO2 concentration. Here's a link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p...
I'm not a statistician, so I can't attest to it's accuracy or validity, but it was an interesting read.
It's not a study, but just an analysis. And it is neither peer-reviewed nor properly published, but just uploaded to the Social Science Research Network - think arXiv, but without any pedigree for natural sciences. The author is an Emeritus - and was a professor of Business Administration (!). Google Scholar shows an h-index of 6, with a153 citations in total. But nearly all the publications are on SSRN or equivalent, and nearly all the citations are self-citations - indeed. ResearchGate computes the h-index without self citations as 1. These are not numbers your average research assistant would be happy about.
I'm not a statistician, either, but I can see at least one obvious problem (apart from data quality): He uses CO2 measurements from a single source, Mauna Loa, and works on an annual time scale. But CO2 does not magically spread around the world - it takes about a year until a pulse has reasonably mixed world-wide. Also, of course, human emissions are only a small part of the total flow of CO2 (although significant because they only go one way). So the signal he is looking for is quite small.
We have several ways to know that atmospheric CO2 increase is largely anthropogenic. The easiest is simple accounting. We know that the increase in atmospheric CO2 corresponds to about half of our emissions (much of the rest is currently absorbed by the oceans). If the cause of the increase is not our emissions, then a) they need to magically vanish somewhere and b) an equivalent amount has to magically appear from somewhere. Oh, and the new magic source has to magically match the isotope ratio of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion.
First off. I wrote it. I figured that I should "improve it" to refute your supposed refutations.
Well, as far as I can tell, so far you haven't - you just repeat it. But I'd suggest you first try to figure out how valid (or invalid) your point is before you work on the details.
But you fucking people are god damned worthless anyways. You never offer solutions to your AGW. If you have no solutions and the solution is to remove mankind, [...rest of the rant deleted]
The scientific truth of a statement has nothing to do with the question of an adequate way to handle the problem identified in the statement. I'd love to have Star-Trek-like superluminal travel, but that wish has nothing to do with the validity of the theory of relativity.
I happen to think that it is better to know and understand a problem even if we don't yet have a perfect solution to it - indeed, I find that usually that is a necessary precondition for addressing the problem. And even if we never come up with an acceptable way to at least partially control global warming (I think there are plenty, and the side benefits alone probably outweigh the associated costs), I still would want to understand the mechanisms that cause it. Indeed, if ever they drag me to my execution, I'd still like to know how the guillotine works. Hi, my name is Stephan and I'm a scientist.
How often do you repeat this canned nonsense and where did you get it? It've rebutted a previous incarnation here. Of course, it's not atypical for creationists and similar groups to keep repeating refuted arguments over and over again - it is, of course, much easier than to come up with real arguments. And chances are your audience does not know enough to understand the state of the art and the quality (or lack of same) of the argument. So while intellectually dishonest, it may be an economically efficient strategy if you are interested in propaganda more than in understanding...
The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times!
The Jurassic period was really quite long, and long ago. Long enough for solar evolution to be significant. At the beginning of the Jurassic, the sun was about 2% fainter than now, at the end about 1.5% fainter. That is about 26W/sqm on the solar constant, or about 4.6 W/sqm of radiative forcing if corrected for albedo and averaged over the whole surface of the Earth. 5 times modern CO2 is about a radiative forcing of ln(5)*5.35, or 8.6W/sqm. So just the change in the sun cuts the effect into half, leaving 4W/sqm, which our current climate models translate into 3.2K of temperature difference. So even without taking other effects (minor orbital variations, configuration of the continents) into account, your claim agrees quite nicely with our current theoretical results. Of course, the sun is unlikely to get significantly fainter or stronger over the the next few thousand years, so there will be no free lunch from that angle. If we go back up to 5 times current CO2, we can expect about 7K of temperature increase.
And who wants more CO2 @1950 ppm, you know, to make all those plants and trees convert that CO2 into a higher O2!
Since our increase of CO2 produced by burning fossil carbon with atmospheric oxygen, at best we'll get back the O2 we sucked from the atmosphere. Not that a significant quick increase would be advantageous - it would play havoc with the biosphere and massively increase the risk of and by fires.
Venus is much closer to the sun. Of course it's warmer.
Mercury is even closer to the sun than Venus, yet Venus is hotter than Mercury (at the equator) by about 120K. Insolation is not the only factor determining surface temperature.
Socialized Heath Care is more efficient too. The waiting rooms double as morgues!
Socialised health care is not perfect, but it typically has a much better outcome for the average patient - both per dollar and absolutely. The US is neck and neck with Cuba in health care effectiveness (see e.g. this Forbes article). It spends 17.9% of the GDP on health care - Cuba spends 10% And since GDP per person is around US$55000 for the US, US$6700 for Cuba, the Cuban system is about 15 times more efficient.
Are we talking about the same CO2 that we use in fire extinguishers?
To quote Babbage: "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question". But yes, the CO2 we exhale and the CO2 we produce by burning hydrocarbons and many other carbon-based materials is chemically the same substance that is used in some kinds of fire extinguishers, that is used to carbonate soda pops, and that is released by baking powder to raise a cake.
rapid increase in global population=more co2=climate change
kill 1/2 the population=fighting climate change
am i doing it right?
No. People's biological processes are part of a short-term closed loop. The CO2 they exhale has been recently extracted from the atmosphere by plants (and maybe went through an animal or a few). If you don't understand that, your opinion is entirely spurious. See carbon cycle and Dunning-Kruger effect.
It repeat after me: only needs a "great deal of development" because of safety concerns. Lock some engineers in a room overnight and tell them to build a reactor with zero safety concerns and it will be quite simple. I'm not terribly familiar with breeder technology but it cannot possibly be remotely as expensive as uranium centrifuging.
Here's my breeder reactor design and I'm 70% sure it'll work despite my knowing almost nothing: aerosolize the U238 or other isotope-to-transmute of choice. Set up a convection system that thoroughly mixes and circulates the powder near your neutron source--this could be done in a relatively neutron-transparent liquid or (maybe) a gas. Set up your neutron detectors and thermal imaging all around the area. When fission rates increase and/or when it starts looking hot, your neutron source retracts into its safety chamber and a series of fans blows away any residue dust off of it. Resulting powder is measured and melted or compressed into appropriate ingots for fuel usage. If it's going too slow, increase rate of neutron flow. If it's too fast, reduce it. If it's so fast that it blows up, oh well, stuff blows up with oil and coal all the time. None of this is prohibitively expensive unless/until you try to make it super safe.
By that design principles, I have three better proposals: First, lets go to fusion directly. We only need to set up a containment field for Deuterium plasma, heat the plasma with lasers until there is ignition, and then keep running the plasma through an magnetohydrodynamic generator which we can also use (with some tricks) to separate out the fusion products (heavier nucleus = less deviation in the electric or magnetic field). Easy peasy! Or we could go to an antimatter reactor - just feed hydrogen and antihydrogen into the reactor core in a controlled manner, and use the trilithium crystals to convert the resulting gamma- and neutrino flux to usable energy. The last option, and maybe the best one, would be a perpetuum mobile. I have a design with magnets and a wheel with paddles on hinges that only needs a little tinkering before it becomes a better-than-unity device!
More seriously, have you considered the problem of induced radioactivity? Everything in your reactor with be "hot", so that it will be extremely hard to do maintenance. Most sensors will not work well when constantly bombarded with neutrons and various forms of radiation - and neither will computers. Indeed, any serious neutron flux will make most construction material brittle over time, so they need extremely careful selection on materials, careful monitoring (with sensors being susceptible to radiation damage themselves, as stated above) and frequent replacement - leaving you with a heap of radioactive waste.
There may be reasons to consider nuclear to be better than coal, but it's not remotely as simple. To use an analogy, we don't have to chose buying "protection" from Luigi or from Guido - we can just invest in a working society with a working police force. It may be a little bit more expensive in the short term, but it has plenty of secondary advantages, and certainly is cheaper in the long term.
Can you explain the ridiculous dancing in the background? Did people really think we'd dance like that in the future?
I think this is just intended to show that it's different from today. But if you look at history, I don't think this is too far from the envelope of human behaviour:
Only seven episodes? Guess it was like "The Prisoner", where it establishes its premise and then wraps everything up.
I wonder if the series ended when the spaceship achieved a victory -- or peace -- with the Frogs. (See Star Trek VI...) Surely it's just a coincidence that "frogs" is also a derogatory slang word for French people...
Actually, it ended because it was too expensive to produce - especially the special effects. They are not great, but then it was 1966, and Orion showed a lot more space action than Star Trek, where the redshirts beam down to whatever stage setting was available from the latest western or mobster movie.
The series used the English term "Frogs" even in German. Neither Frogs not "Frösche" is now or was then a derogative term for the French in German.
Wind is cheaper (in optimal cases) where you don't consider the cost of indetermittancy and reserves. But actual cost of wind in most real world large projects, even the most recent, it higher than nuclear. You just oversimplify things by using capacity cost rather than cost per MWH.
First, wind is only one part of a diversified energy portfolio. And secondly, no-one so far has solved the nuclear waste disposal problem, and hence no-one knows what it will cost. But we do know that it will be very expensive indeed. Current nuclear technology is a child of both cold war military subsidies and plenty of civilian subsidies, so complaining about subsidies for renewables now is a bit hypocritical.
The purpose of the government is not to be your conscience and humor your universalist fantasies. It is to protect the way of life of our unique, and exceptional people. And it is absolutely not to impose burdens on our people in order to serve foreigners.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". -- Thomas Jefferson, with some help from Franklin and Adams, 1776, before there even was a United States you or anyone could be a citizen of.
"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. [....] Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights." -- Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." -- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
Those are exceptional thoughts by exceptional people. What you exhibit is small, petty and shortsighted egoism. Life is not a zero sum game.
Why is that wrong? I live in the USA. I am an American citizen. It is wrong for the government to have policies that benefit its own citizens instead of those of other countries?
If you go by Adam Smith, in a voluntary exchange, both sides win. The university could argue that it has a fiduciary duty to spend taxpayer money as efficient as possible, and if they can buy the same service abroad cheaper, that's the way to maximise the amount of education it can provide for a given budget. So they can either give a better education to their students or increase the revenue of US companies. And the universities job is education, not subsidising the economy.
And on a national level, if the university needs fewer local IT people for comparatively low-paying jobs like IT infrastructure maintenance and help desks, that leaves more well-trained US people to go to Silicon Valley and invent the next high-value product. iPhones are made in China, but only 1.8% of the price stays with Chinese labourers, while nearly 60% are profits realised by Apple in the US. If Apple made the iPhones in the US, they would probably go broke, and neither side had any of the revenue (or phones).
This university should lose it's state and federal funding for doing something like this.
Horrible insult to the USA, our students, and our educators.
Terrible.
That "argument" boils down to "USA! USA! USA!" - might fit a Trump rally, but really is not argument at all.
What is an argument is that service from abroad is likely to be unsatisfactory - at least because of distance, time zones, and the cultural differences, even if the provider is competent in general. And that last point is not a given.
Of course, the UC also thinks its ok to let torture lawyer John Yoo teach constitutional law to impressive young students. On the other hand, they gave us UCSD Pascal and BSD UNIX. Overall, it looks like some talents, no judgement to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The greatest green house gas is water vapor.
And yet water vapour is in short-term dynamic equilibrium in the atmosphere - excess is removed via precipitation, and shortage is made up via evaporation from the ground or the oceans. Thus relative humidity is self-regulating to be essentially constant. But with rising temperatures (due to e.g. increased CO2) the absolute humidity and hence the greenhouse effect is increasing. Water vapour is one of the best-known positive climate feedbacks, but, unlike long-living greenhouse gases like CO2, it is not a climate forcing.
Maybe your experience is outdated. Specifically if you just cross a "circle" for Munich the one-way ticket is 5.40 ... wait just for the next 2 days because then it goes up to 5.60, they were probably thinking it's too cheap...
Note that what they call "Inner District/Munich" is 4 circles and if you go again to the same circle you have to count it again. Like you go 2-1-2 it is 3 circles = 8.40 EUR.
I'm sorry, but that is wrong, and I hope you haven't overspend for long. There is a significant difference between rings and zones. There are just 4 zones (the coloured ones on this plan). For single-trip tickets, you only count the number of zones, not the number of rings. Anything in the white zone (which is all of the built-up area of Munich) is just one zone, and is (currently) EUR 2.70 per trip. The most you can pay is EUR 10.80, which is for "4+" zones, and allows you to travel, say, from Tutzing to the airport (nominally 7 zones). And you can get a group day ticket for the green and white zones for EUR 12.20, which gets you out to Lake Starnberg, then to the Garching campus of TUM, and back to Goetheplatz for Theatre...
The smaller rings are only used to calculate the price for subscriptions, not for single-trip and day tickets.
One-way one person is around 5 euros for anything but the shortest stretch (you can easily pay 4.65 euro even for just one stop if crossing the tariff zones). And there's no cheaper option for a return ticket so you're looking at 20 euros for a return trip for two persons. It just doesn't compare with 1 euro in gas plus 1-1.5 euro parking (if needed).
Well, I don't know where you live, but I have a lot of experience in Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Munich - not exactly known as cheap cities -, and spending 5 EUR on any one-way travel in the extended inner city is nearly impossible. I'd agree that it is still too expensive, but its not as bad as you say. For EUR 20 you can typically get a 5-person all-day unlimited ticket.
I'm glad if your car does not depreciate, needs neither oil changes nor other service, is untaxed, and the insurance is free. Otherwise, comparing the price just based on fuel and parking is like judging the calories of a triple-size double chocolate sundae with extra cream by ignoring everything but the cherry on top...
Of course when you dig up half a billion years worth of stored organic carbon and burn in in a century, the carbonate-silicate cycle ain't gonna fix that.
It quite probably will fix it - though of course it will take half a billion years, give or take a few orders of magnitude. It will probably not fix it in time for the human species.
Planet one: "I'm not feeling very well. I think I'm infected with humans!"
Planet two: "Don't worry - that always passes."
Who are they going to trade with, and for what? Other than South Korea, every other Asian country is dirt poor.
For highly developed nations, consider Japan, Singapore, Taiwan.
And then there are less developed large nations, like Indonesia.
And if you go by geography, beyond TPP candidates: Russia, Saudi Arabia, India (poor per person, but number 3 in the world by PPP GDP, number 7 by nominal GDP), and so on.
[...] germany where the well-intentioned but shortsighted Green party has put a ban on new nuclear power plants and they're driving the existing ones down.
The Green Party in Germany has never been in power. It has been the minority partner in a coalition with the Social Democratic Party for 7 years (1998 to 2005) - over ten years ago. The current exit from nuclear energy in Germany is due to a law supported CDU (conservatives), SPD, FDP (liberals) and Greens in 2001.
Very odd that this story comes out now, as I just read study about CO2 and fossil fuel emissions that concluded there is no correlation between emission and CO2 concentration. Here's a link: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/p... I'm not a statistician, so I can't attest to it's accuracy or validity, but it was an interesting read.
It's not a study, but just an analysis. And it is neither peer-reviewed nor properly published, but just uploaded to the Social Science Research Network - think arXiv, but without any pedigree for natural sciences. The author is an Emeritus - and was a professor of Business Administration (!). Google Scholar shows an h-index of 6, with a153 citations in total. But nearly all the publications are on SSRN or equivalent, and nearly all the citations are self-citations - indeed. ResearchGate computes the h-index without self citations as 1. These are not numbers your average research assistant would be happy about.
I'm not a statistician, either, but I can see at least one obvious problem (apart from data quality): He uses CO2 measurements from a single source, Mauna Loa, and works on an annual time scale. But CO2 does not magically spread around the world - it takes about a year until a pulse has reasonably mixed world-wide. Also, of course, human emissions are only a small part of the total flow of CO2 (although significant because they only go one way). So the signal he is looking for is quite small.
We have several ways to know that atmospheric CO2 increase is largely anthropogenic. The easiest is simple accounting. We know that the increase in atmospheric CO2 corresponds to about half of our emissions (much of the rest is currently absorbed by the oceans). If the cause of the increase is not our emissions, then a) they need to magically vanish somewhere and b) an equivalent amount has to magically appear from somewhere. Oh, and the new magic source has to magically match the isotope ratio of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion.
You said: 1. All of Trump's campaign promises violate the constitution. (wrong). 2. But he won't do any of them anyway.
So according to you, Trump will actually follow the constitution. Looks like that puts him ahead of the current administration.
Logic fail. He can do (or at least try) unconstitutional things he did not promise.
The Jurassic period. [...]
Yawn.
Donald? Shouldn't you be stumping in Texas to avoid losing that one, too?
First off. I wrote it. I figured that I should "improve it" to refute your supposed refutations.
Well, as far as I can tell, so far you haven't - you just repeat it. But I'd suggest you first try to figure out how valid (or invalid) your point is before you work on the details.
But you fucking people are god damned worthless anyways. You never offer solutions to your AGW. If you have no solutions and the solution is to remove mankind, [...rest of the rant deleted]
The scientific truth of a statement has nothing to do with the question of an adequate way to handle the problem identified in the statement. I'd love to have Star-Trek-like superluminal travel, but that wish has nothing to do with the validity of the theory of relativity.
I happen to think that it is better to know and understand a problem even if we don't yet have a perfect solution to it - indeed, I find that usually that is a necessary precondition for addressing the problem. And even if we never come up with an acceptable way to at least partially control global warming (I think there are plenty, and the side benefits alone probably outweigh the associated costs), I still would want to understand the mechanisms that cause it. Indeed, if ever they drag me to my execution, I'd still like to know how the guillotine works. Hi, my name is Stephan and I'm a scientist.
The Jurassic period. [...]
How often do you repeat this canned nonsense and where did you get it? It've rebutted a previous incarnation here. Of course, it's not atypical for creationists and similar groups to keep repeating refuted arguments over and over again - it is, of course, much easier than to come up with real arguments. And chances are your audience does not know enough to understand the state of the art and the quality (or lack of same) of the argument. So while intellectually dishonest, it may be an economically efficient strategy if you are interested in propaganda more than in understanding...
The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere was 130% modern levels. CO2 was at 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. The temperature was a whole 3 DEGREES C over modern times!
The Jurassic period was really quite long, and long ago. Long enough for solar evolution to be significant. At the beginning of the Jurassic, the sun was about 2% fainter than now, at the end about 1.5% fainter. That is about 26W/sqm on the solar constant, or about 4.6 W/sqm of radiative forcing if corrected for albedo and averaged over the whole surface of the Earth. 5 times modern CO2 is about a radiative forcing of ln(5)*5.35, or 8.6W/sqm. So just the change in the sun cuts the effect into half, leaving 4W/sqm, which our current climate models translate into 3.2K of temperature difference. So even without taking other effects (minor orbital variations, configuration of the continents) into account, your claim agrees quite nicely with our current theoretical results. Of course, the sun is unlikely to get significantly fainter or stronger over the the next few thousand years, so there will be no free lunch from that angle. If we go back up to 5 times current CO2, we can expect about 7K of temperature increase.
And who wants more CO2 @1950 ppm, you know, to make all those plants and trees convert that CO2 into a higher O2!
Since our increase of CO2 produced by burning fossil carbon with atmospheric oxygen, at best we'll get back the O2 we sucked from the atmosphere. Not that a significant quick increase would be advantageous - it would play havoc with the biosphere and massively increase the risk of and by fires.
Venus is much closer to the sun. Of course it's warmer.
Mercury is even closer to the sun than Venus, yet Venus is hotter than Mercury (at the equator) by about 120K. Insolation is not the only factor determining surface temperature.
Socialized Heath Care is more efficient too. The waiting rooms double as morgues!
Socialised health care is not perfect, but it typically has a much better outcome for the average patient - both per dollar and absolutely. The US is neck and neck with Cuba in health care effectiveness (see e.g. this Forbes article). It spends 17.9% of the GDP on health care - Cuba spends 10% And since GDP per person is around US$55000 for the US, US$6700 for Cuba, the Cuban system is about 15 times more efficient.
Are we talking about the same CO2 that we use in fire extinguishers?
To quote Babbage: "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question". But yes, the CO2 we exhale and the CO2 we produce by burning hydrocarbons and many other carbon-based materials is chemically the same substance that is used in some kinds of fire extinguishers, that is used to carbonate soda pops, and that is released by baking powder to raise a cake.
Well, he's not entirely wrong. More people use more fossil fuels, so fewer people would mean less introduction of CO2 to the atmosphere.
Agreed, but the problem is not the CO2 they exhale, it's the CO2 they make by digging up fossil reserves of C and adding atmospheric O to.
rapid increase in global population=more co2=climate change kill 1/2 the population=fighting climate change
am i doing it right?
No. People's biological processes are part of a short-term closed loop. The CO2 they exhale has been recently extracted from the atmosphere by plants (and maybe went through an animal or a few). If you don't understand that, your opinion is entirely spurious. See carbon cycle and Dunning-Kruger effect.
It repeat after me: only needs a "great deal of development" because of safety concerns. Lock some engineers in a room overnight and tell them to build a reactor with zero safety concerns and it will be quite simple. I'm not terribly familiar with breeder technology but it cannot possibly be remotely as expensive as uranium centrifuging. Here's my breeder reactor design and I'm 70% sure it'll work despite my knowing almost nothing: aerosolize the U238 or other isotope-to-transmute of choice. Set up a convection system that thoroughly mixes and circulates the powder near your neutron source--this could be done in a relatively neutron-transparent liquid or (maybe) a gas. Set up your neutron detectors and thermal imaging all around the area. When fission rates increase and/or when it starts looking hot, your neutron source retracts into its safety chamber and a series of fans blows away any residue dust off of it. Resulting powder is measured and melted or compressed into appropriate ingots for fuel usage. If it's going too slow, increase rate of neutron flow. If it's too fast, reduce it. If it's so fast that it blows up, oh well, stuff blows up with oil and coal all the time. None of this is prohibitively expensive unless/until you try to make it super safe.
By that design principles, I have three better proposals: First, lets go to fusion directly. We only need to set up a containment field for Deuterium plasma, heat the plasma with lasers until there is ignition, and then keep running the plasma through an magnetohydrodynamic generator which we can also use (with some tricks) to separate out the fusion products (heavier nucleus = less deviation in the electric or magnetic field). Easy peasy! Or we could go to an antimatter reactor - just feed hydrogen and antihydrogen into the reactor core in a controlled manner, and use the trilithium crystals to convert the resulting gamma- and neutrino flux to usable energy. The last option, and maybe the best one, would be a perpetuum mobile. I have a design with magnets and a wheel with paddles on hinges that only needs a little tinkering before it becomes a better-than-unity device!
More seriously, have you considered the problem of induced radioactivity? Everything in your reactor with be "hot", so that it will be extremely hard to do maintenance. Most sensors will not work well when constantly bombarded with neutrons and various forms of radiation - and neither will computers. Indeed, any serious neutron flux will make most construction material brittle over time, so they need extremely careful selection on materials, careful monitoring (with sensors being susceptible to radiation damage themselves, as stated above) and frequent replacement - leaving you with a heap of radioactive waste.
There may be reasons to consider nuclear to be better than coal, but it's not remotely as simple. To use an analogy, we don't have to chose buying "protection" from Luigi or from Guido - we can just invest in a working society with a working police force. It may be a little bit more expensive in the short term, but it has plenty of secondary advantages, and certainly is cheaper in the long term.
Can you explain the ridiculous dancing in the background? Did people really think we'd dance like that in the future?
I think this is just intended to show that it's different from today. But if you look at history, I don't think this is too far from the envelope of human behaviour:
Only seven episodes? Guess it was like "The Prisoner", where it establishes its premise and then wraps everything up. I wonder if the series ended when the spaceship achieved a victory -- or peace -- with the Frogs. (See Star Trek VI...) Surely it's just a coincidence that "frogs" is also a derogatory slang word for French people...
Actually, it ended because it was too expensive to produce - especially the special effects. They are not great, but then it was 1966, and Orion showed a lot more space action than Star Trek, where the redshirts beam down to whatever stage setting was available from the latest western or mobster movie.
The series used the English term "Frogs" even in German. Neither Frogs not "Frösche" is now or was then a derogative term for the French in German.
Wind is cheaper (in optimal cases) where you don't consider the cost of indetermittancy and reserves. But actual cost of wind in most real world large projects, even the most recent, it higher than nuclear. You just oversimplify things by using capacity cost rather than cost per MWH.
First, wind is only one part of a diversified energy portfolio. And secondly, no-one so far has solved the nuclear waste disposal problem, and hence no-one knows what it will cost. But we do know that it will be very expensive indeed. Current nuclear technology is a child of both cold war military subsidies and plenty of civilian subsidies, so complaining about subsidies for renewables now is a bit hypocritical.
The purpose of the government is not to be your conscience and humor your universalist fantasies. It is to protect the way of life of our unique, and exceptional people. And it is absolutely not to impose burdens on our people in order to serve foreigners.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". -- Thomas Jefferson, with some help from Franklin and Adams, 1776, before there even was a United States you or anyone could be a citizen of.
"Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. [....] Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights." -- Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." -- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
Those are exceptional thoughts by exceptional people. What you exhibit is small, petty and shortsighted egoism. Life is not a zero sum game.
Why is that wrong? I live in the USA. I am an American citizen. It is wrong for the government to have policies that benefit its own citizens instead of those of other countries?
If you go by Adam Smith, in a voluntary exchange, both sides win. The university could argue that it has a fiduciary duty to spend taxpayer money as efficient as possible, and if they can buy the same service abroad cheaper, that's the way to maximise the amount of education it can provide for a given budget. So they can either give a better education to their students or increase the revenue of US companies. And the universities job is education, not subsidising the economy.
And on a national level, if the university needs fewer local IT people for comparatively low-paying jobs like IT infrastructure maintenance and help desks, that leaves more well-trained US people to go to Silicon Valley and invent the next high-value product. iPhones are made in China, but only 1.8% of the price stays with Chinese labourers, while nearly 60% are profits realised by Apple in the US. If Apple made the iPhones in the US, they would probably go broke, and neither side had any of the revenue (or phones).
This university should lose it's state and federal funding for doing something like this.
Horrible insult to the USA, our students, and our educators.
Terrible.
That "argument" boils down to "USA! USA! USA!" - might fit a Trump rally, but really is not argument at all.
What is an argument is that service from abroad is likely to be unsatisfactory - at least because of distance, time zones, and the cultural differences, even if the provider is competent in general. And that last point is not a given.
Of course, the UC also thinks its ok to let torture lawyer John Yoo teach constitutional law to impressive young students. On the other hand, they gave us UCSD Pascal and BSD UNIX. Overall, it looks like some talents, no judgement to me.