The reality is that as it warms up the number of days that are much warmer than in previous averages will dramatically increase. That's one of things that has most thinking people concerned, since a 3-5 degree C rise over the next 50-100 years will make a place like Kansas City have more than 100 days out of the year with temperatures above 100 F. If you do any farming, as folks in Kansas do, one will recognize the impact that will have, for example on say wheat production and the impact will not be good. If you don't farm in Kansas, but still enjoy eating bread, chance are you will be affected.
Although there might be a minute percentage increase in the amount of carbon fixation as a result of higher carbon dioxide concentrations, it will be minuscule compared to the losses that can be expected from desiccation. People generally have such poor backgrounds in the biological sciences that they fail to understand well understood phenomena. Global warming will not mean that we can plant wheat at the North Pole and expect bumper crops.
The number of viewpoints is not what is important. What is important is being wise enough and educated enough to tell which things are factual and which are not. If you can not distinguish sophism from logical argumentation, then you haven't got a chance at figuring things out.
Probably, because they don't know nearly as much about science as the Wall Street Journal.
Hate to break it to you, but if the Wall Street Journal had to peer review its stories, you could probably put a weeks worth of newspapers on a postage stamp.
None of their listed facts tells us anything about the profound non-linear and highly sensitive response we are already seeing in the biosphere. Animal distributions, behaviors, species composition, and rates of extirpation all point to massive changes of at unprecedented rates, except during times of massive extinction. These guys wouldn't look so silly, if they would take time to look at the biological as well as the geophysical evidence.
All they did was sign an editorial. It does even say how much they were paid or if they were paid.
In any event, more importantly what these guys haven't provided is any kind of cogent explanation that if its not carbon dioxide that is heating the planet, then why on earth is virtually every single glacier on the planet that has been accurately measured for some time showing dramatic retreat. If the temperature were not getting warmer it would stand to reason that on average half the world's glaciers would be growing rather than melting and not only melting doing so at ever accelerating rates?
The fact these 16 guys are silent on this point and have no evidence, whatsoever to explain this, only shows that this isn't little more than the deniers forming their final "Alamo defense". Keep in mind its not as if the Wall Street Journal is a peer reviewed publication.
Methane breaks down into carbon dioxide in about 28-30 years actually. The fact that it is in a much smaller concentration actually means that its forcing effect on climate will be greater. Methane is about 30 times as powerful as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. The fact that huge amounts it stored in the arctic permafrost as well as in the form of methane clathrates on the shallow arctic ocean floor should not be discounted, since it could send as much as 90 billion tons into the atmosphere essentially spontaneously. If the entire clathrate reserve of the arctic goes up, which is possible in the arctic ocean unlike other oceans, because it is shallow (there is a termperature depth interaction that keeps it in a its clathrate bound form) the amount of methane released could be as high as 900 billion tons. Soviet scientists are now reporting massive methane degassing in bogs across virtually all of the Russian tundra.
" I don't understand the urge to compare the salary for jobs that take a high degree of training and skill with with the average salary,"
Perhaps it comes from the realization that in actuality even the janitor is as equally indispensable to the operation of any corporation as is the CEO and although may not be paid as much, should be recognized with a sufficient measure of dignity and salary necessary to keep civilization stable rather than heading pell-mell toward the dissolution of civilization because a few people have figured out by using the asymmetry of human interaction they can perpetually game the system to their advantage.
And the good news is that to be competitive with Chinese workers employees everywhere will soon have to get used to working 80 hr/wk for about $22.00 per day. Most corporations like Apple, which essentially employ Chinese under conditions that approach slavery, have figured out this is the easiest way to maximize profits and that is all that capitalism is about. Apple admitted to this, when they officially claimed in testimony to Congress that their role in society was not to benefit society as a whole, but merely to make "good products" (ie profitable ones).
Keep in mind that when you bite into that shiny apple, it is rotten at its core.
Shouldn't the best players in the league be paid more? Even sports teams have what are called free agents. If companies want to retain employees they need to get them to sign a contract that stipulates not only the amount of their pay, but also the duration. From a business perspective this would create more stability than trying to engage in non-poaching deals.
Changing jobs may get you a salary increase, but it doesn't come without costs. In reality this creates at some point an equilibrium. An employee who bounces from one job to the next is not likely to be viewed as that attractive to an employer unless they have a very special and unique talent. In that case, why shouldn't they be allowed to use it as part of their negotiation? Sports teams confront this issue all the time. They make contracts to lock people in. This would be far preferable arrangement all around rather than letting the owner's to collude so that players must play for next to nothing, simply because of their ability to lock anyone out of the game. Its a question of balance. Its not simply a question of what is good for one company or another, because there are third and fourth parties here, namely the employee and the general consuming and non-consuming public, which although not necessarily buying what either of the litigants are selling may still be affected by the transaction.
I see. Google benefits by being sued by Apple. From Apple's perspective this is perfect logic and reinforces their walled garden mentality concerning the internet.
The reality is that every corporation is exploiting someone to make money and soon the consumers at the bottom of the food chain will have all been consumed essentially crashing the entire ecosystem.
At least among all the politicians out there Al Gore was the one who first saw the potential of the internet and was a leading advocate in Congress pushing for it to be funded in a very dramatic way. He was successful in that effort, so I guess in a sense he has every right to claim credit for helping to invent the internet. Keep in mind he was doing this in the 1970's, long before many of us were using computers.
No, Azolla deposits from the Azolla Event during the Middle Miocene are believed to contain huge amounts of crushed plant material that would likely make it rich oil and gas strata. The problem will be, however, the anthropogenic reverse Azolla event that will likely speed the thawing of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets should this material be extracted and burned.
Actually, the earth was warmer in the Eocene than it was now. The clincher is that it took tens of millions of years to get that way and reverse after the Azolla Event. Human induced carbon dioxide pollution is forcing the system at a rate of 100-1000 times the natural rate. If you throw in the release of 90 GT of methane from clathrates on the arctic ocean floor and methane in from the melting of the permafrost, perhaps you add another 900 GT of methane, more or less all at once, which eventually becomes C02 as methane degrades in about 30 years, such as occurred during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum then we may see as much as 6 C increase in global warming in a very short period of time. This has some scientists worried that we may soon pass or that we may have already passed a tipping point toward runaway heating.
To put that into perspective that means sea temperatures could rapidly return to mid-Eocene levels at the North Pole, about 55 F. Unless you are Santa, it would probably be much warmer at your house. Needless to say, growing food in much of the US or perhaps almost anywhere would be no easy task, especially since much of the mid-west will likely again be underwater.
Clearly, there has to be a balance. Things are rapidly changing and people have to keep abreast of research. However, the best researchers, although perhaps poor lecturers need to communicate new ideas. There is much need for more education everywhere in all disciplines, since this will lead to more work and more productivity hence an expanding economy and jobs. Given the threat global warming poses there simply isn't much time left to get people thinking about the consequences of technology on our lives.
'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
In that case as an American, my obligation is to make sure I avoid buying any Apple products. Thank you for drawing attention to the fact that Apple officially regards itself as unamerican.
Unless, American consumers choose actively to buy and invest in companies that hold America in higher regard than Apple, America will continue to be burdened by corporations like Apple that feel its fine to accept a broad range of tax credits from the American taxpayer, without providing anything in return that they wouldn't also provide to Iran or North Korea. Essentially, Apple's official policy is that it doesn't give a shit about Americans. All that it wants is their money.
Personally, I make it my business to avoid doing business with corporations such as this, lest I suffer even more from their malevolence in the future.
No, this is symptomatic of a much larger issue. Humans are dramatically altering the planet in ways that are detrimental to all life forms, including humans. It needs to be addressed because with respect to environmental problems this is the primary issue. In many ways it brings the issue to sharper focus, as there is simply no way of avoiding the reality that the planet is not only getting hotter, its getting hotter very, very quickly and this has broad implications for all environmental management issues for all species on the planet.
This is the great new ploy by the Koch-suckers. Keep shrinking the number of available data points from the analysis so that the statistical variability will make the signal "disappear". The problem of course is that there are far many data points for which the data are valid and no reason to ignore. As pointed out in the article, another more serious problem with this approach is that the natural combined oscillations of both the solar cycle and ENSO fully account for this slight "statistical pause" and this will no longer be a tenable position as 2 or 3 more years of data are accumulated.
If this proves true as it undoubtedly will, this can only lead to the realization that the deniers fall into one of two groups. They are intentionally denying reality for their own personal benefit, which in this case amounts to crimes against humanity or they are completely delusional and need to be placed in a psychiatric hospital for care, hopefully on an outpatient basis. In either case, as the severity of the consequences of carbon dioxide pollution unfold, society as a whole will recognize that those who either advocate more carbon dioxide pollution intentionally or out of psychiatric problems will probably require incarceration as a necessary, yet perhaps most cost effective way of addressing the problems that result from carbon dioxide pollution.
As much as many of us abhor the thought of having to build more prisons and hope that education will alter the nature of their misperceptions, this may ultimately prove necessary and perhaps may prove ultimately, the most cost effective way of addressing the overall problem in a timely enough fashion to save the vast majority of humanity.
Leave it to the American Taliban to think that we can drop a few nuclear warheads on Canada and then immediately proceed to start farming at ground zero.
That's La Nina. Nonetheless a good post. Its obvious that this is going on. We need web crawlers to identify these folks so that their disruptive and destructive influence on the democratic process can be minimized.
When talking about "fractions of a degree", you are confusing the change in global mean temperature with the extremes that can be expected as the mean rises. Kansas City will within 100 years time, if not sooner, be experiencing as a result of only a 3 C global mean temperature rise, 100 days out of the year that exceed 100 F.
From a biological and ecological perspective that means turning Kansas, with an agricultural economy of $9,502,727,000 or 3.94% of all US agriculture production into a state with a much lower level of agriculture than a state like Arizona, which produces $3,653,431,000 or 1.51% of the the total US agricultural production. Of course Arizona's own agricultural production will go like that of Texas and much of the Southeast and Southwest, toward zero.
People like to think about the cost of addressing the cost of carbon dioxide pollution as too great to do anything about it. However, the reality is that if we don't the costs will be far, far higher.
Slashdot Mirror
The reality is that as it warms up the number of days that are much warmer than in previous averages will dramatically increase. That's one of things that has most thinking people concerned, since a 3-5 degree C rise over the next 50-100 years will make a place like Kansas City have more than 100 days out of the year with temperatures above 100 F. If you do any farming, as folks in Kansas do, one will recognize the impact that will have, for example on say wheat production and the impact will not be good. If you don't farm in Kansas, but still enjoy eating bread, chance are you will be affected.
Although there might be a minute percentage increase in the amount of carbon fixation as a result of higher carbon dioxide concentrations, it will be minuscule compared to the losses that can be expected from desiccation. People generally have such poor backgrounds in the biological sciences that they fail to understand well understood phenomena. Global warming will not mean that we can plant wheat at the North Pole and expect bumper crops.
The number of viewpoints is not what is important. What is important is being wise enough and educated enough to tell which things are factual and which are not. If you can not distinguish sophism from logical argumentation, then you haven't got a chance at figuring things out.
"I wonder why Science did."
Probably, because they don't know nearly as much about science as the Wall Street Journal.
Hate to break it to you, but if the Wall Street Journal had to peer review its stories, you could probably put a weeks worth of newspapers on a postage stamp.
None of their listed facts tells us anything about the profound non-linear and highly sensitive response we are already seeing in the biosphere. Animal distributions, behaviors, species composition, and rates of extirpation all point to massive changes of at unprecedented rates, except during times of massive extinction. These guys wouldn't look so silly, if they would take time to look at the biological as well as the geophysical evidence.
All they did was sign an editorial. It does even say how much they were paid or if they were paid.
In any event, more importantly what these guys haven't provided is any kind of cogent explanation that if its not carbon dioxide that is heating the planet, then why on earth is virtually every single glacier on the planet that has been accurately measured for some time showing dramatic retreat. If the temperature were not getting warmer it would stand to reason that on average half the world's glaciers would be growing rather than melting and not only melting doing so at ever accelerating rates?
The fact these 16 guys are silent on this point and have no evidence, whatsoever to explain this, only shows that this isn't little more than the deniers forming their final "Alamo defense". Keep in mind its not as if the Wall Street Journal is a peer reviewed publication.
Methane breaks down into carbon dioxide in about 28-30 years actually. The fact that it is in a much smaller concentration actually means that its forcing effect on climate will be greater. Methane is about 30 times as powerful as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. The fact that huge amounts it stored in the arctic permafrost as well as in the form of methane clathrates on the shallow arctic ocean floor should not be discounted, since it could send as much as 90 billion tons into the atmosphere essentially spontaneously. If the entire clathrate reserve of the arctic goes up, which is possible in the arctic ocean unlike other oceans, because it is shallow (there is a termperature depth interaction that keeps it in a its clathrate bound form) the amount of methane released could be as high as 900 billion tons. Soviet scientists are now reporting massive methane degassing in bogs across virtually all of the Russian tundra.
The way Fox News markets idiocy these days I would have to agree with you.
"In any case, antitrust is a waste of resources since cartels are inherently unstable barring state intervention."
Unstable? LOL. Tell that to OPEC.
" I don't understand the urge to compare the salary for jobs that take a high degree of training and skill with with the average salary,"
Perhaps it comes from the realization that in actuality even the janitor is as equally indispensable to the operation of any corporation as is the CEO and although may not be paid as much, should be recognized with a sufficient measure of dignity and salary necessary to keep civilization stable rather than heading pell-mell toward the dissolution of civilization because a few people have figured out by using the asymmetry of human interaction they can perpetually game the system to their advantage.
And the good news is that to be competitive with Chinese workers employees everywhere will soon have to get used to working 80 hr/wk for about $22.00 per day. Most corporations like Apple, which essentially employ Chinese under conditions that approach slavery, have figured out this is the easiest way to maximize profits and that is all that capitalism is about. Apple admitted to this, when they officially claimed in testimony to Congress that their role in society was not to benefit society as a whole, but merely to make "good products" (ie profitable ones).
Keep in mind that when you bite into that shiny apple, it is rotten at its core.
Shouldn't the best players in the league be paid more? Even sports teams have what are called free agents. If companies want to retain employees they need to get them to sign a contract that stipulates not only the amount of their pay, but also the duration. From a business perspective this would create more stability than trying to engage in non-poaching deals.
Changing jobs may get you a salary increase, but it doesn't come without costs. In reality this creates at some point an equilibrium. An employee who bounces from one job to the next is not likely to be viewed as that attractive to an employer unless they have a very special and unique talent. In that case, why shouldn't they be allowed to use it as part of their negotiation? Sports teams confront this issue all the time. They make contracts to lock people in. This would be far preferable arrangement all around rather than letting the owner's to collude so that players must play for next to nothing, simply because of their ability to lock anyone out of the game. Its a question of balance. Its not simply a question of what is good for one company or another, because there are third and fourth parties here, namely the employee and the general consuming and non-consuming public, which although not necessarily buying what either of the litigants are selling may still be affected by the transaction.
I see. Google benefits by being sued by Apple. From Apple's perspective this is perfect logic and reinforces their walled garden mentality concerning the internet.
The reality is that every corporation is exploiting someone to make money and soon the consumers at the bottom of the food chain will have all been consumed essentially crashing the entire ecosystem.
I think the above is an indication of the size of the science education process that remains on this issue.
At least among all the politicians out there Al Gore was the one who first saw the potential of the internet and was a leading advocate in Congress pushing for it to be funded in a very dramatic way. He was successful in that effort, so I guess in a sense he has every right to claim credit for helping to invent the internet. Keep in mind he was doing this in the 1970's, long before many of us were using computers.
No, Azolla deposits from the Azolla Event during the Middle Miocene are believed to contain huge amounts of crushed plant material that would likely make it rich oil and gas strata. The problem will be, however, the anthropogenic reverse Azolla event that will likely speed the thawing of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets should this material be extracted and burned.
Actually, the earth was warmer in the Eocene than it was now. The clincher is that it took tens of millions of years to get that way and reverse after the Azolla Event. Human induced carbon dioxide pollution is forcing the system at a rate of 100-1000 times the natural rate. If you throw in the release of 90 GT of methane from clathrates on the arctic ocean floor and methane in from the melting of the permafrost, perhaps you add another 900 GT of methane, more or less all at once, which eventually becomes C02 as methane degrades in about 30 years, such as occurred during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum then we may see as much as 6 C increase in global warming in a very short period of time. This has some scientists worried that we may soon pass or that we may have already passed a tipping point toward runaway heating.
To put that into perspective that means sea temperatures could rapidly return to mid-Eocene levels at the North Pole, about 55 F. Unless you are Santa, it would probably be much warmer at your house. Needless to say, growing food in much of the US or perhaps almost anywhere would be no easy task, especially since much of the mid-west will likely again be underwater.
What's the problem with their "Enroll" Button? This isn't exactly a good start for a course called CS101.
Clearly, there has to be a balance. Things are rapidly changing and people have to keep abreast of research. However, the best researchers, although perhaps poor lecturers need to communicate new ideas. There is much need for more education everywhere in all disciplines, since this will lead to more work and more productivity hence an expanding economy and jobs. Given the threat global warming poses there simply isn't much time left to get people thinking about the consequences of technology on our lives.
'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
In that case as an American, my obligation is to make sure I avoid buying any Apple products. Thank you for drawing attention to the fact that Apple officially regards itself as unamerican.
Unless, American consumers choose actively to buy and invest in companies that hold America in higher regard than Apple, America will continue to be burdened by corporations like Apple that feel its fine to accept a broad range of tax credits from the American taxpayer, without providing anything in return that they wouldn't also provide to Iran or North Korea. Essentially, Apple's official policy is that it doesn't give a shit about Americans. All that it wants is their money.
Personally, I make it my business to avoid doing business with corporations such as this, lest I suffer even more from their malevolence in the future.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9kFHQpZpgdg
No, this is symptomatic of a much larger issue. Humans are dramatically altering the planet in ways that are detrimental to all life forms, including humans. It needs to be addressed because with respect to environmental problems this is the primary issue. In many ways it brings the issue to sharper focus, as there is simply no way of avoiding the reality that the planet is not only getting hotter, its getting hotter very, very quickly and this has broad implications for all environmental management issues for all species on the planet.
This is the great new ploy by the Koch-suckers. Keep shrinking the number of available data points from the analysis so that the statistical variability will make the signal "disappear". The problem of course is that there are far many data points for which the data are valid and no reason to ignore. As pointed out in the article, another more serious problem with this approach is that the natural combined oscillations of both the solar cycle and ENSO fully account for this slight "statistical pause" and this will no longer be a tenable position as 2 or 3 more years of data are accumulated.
If this proves true as it undoubtedly will, this can only lead to the realization that the deniers fall into one of two groups. They are intentionally denying reality for their own personal benefit, which in this case amounts to crimes against humanity or they are completely delusional and need to be placed in a psychiatric hospital for care, hopefully on an outpatient basis. In either case, as the severity of the consequences of carbon dioxide pollution unfold, society as a whole will recognize that those who either advocate more carbon dioxide pollution intentionally or out of psychiatric problems will probably require incarceration as a necessary, yet perhaps most cost effective way of addressing the problems that result from carbon dioxide pollution.
As much as many of us abhor the thought of having to build more prisons and hope that education will alter the nature of their misperceptions, this may ultimately prove necessary and perhaps may prove ultimately, the most cost effective way of addressing the overall problem in a timely enough fashion to save the vast majority of humanity.
Leave it to the American Taliban to think that we can drop a few nuclear warheads on Canada and then immediately proceed to start farming at ground zero.
That's La Nina. Nonetheless a good post. Its obvious that this is going on. We need web crawlers to identify these folks so that their disruptive and destructive influence on the democratic process can be minimized.
When talking about "fractions of a degree", you are confusing the change in global mean temperature with the extremes that can be expected as the mean rises. Kansas City will within 100 years time, if not sooner, be experiencing as a result of only a 3 C global mean temperature rise, 100 days out of the year that exceed 100 F.
From a biological and ecological perspective that means turning Kansas, with an agricultural economy of $9,502,727,000 or 3.94% of all US agriculture production into a state with a much lower level of agriculture than a state like Arizona, which produces $3,653,431,000 or 1.51% of the the total US agricultural production. Of course Arizona's own agricultural production will go like that of Texas and much of the Southeast and Southwest, toward zero.
People like to think about the cost of addressing the cost of carbon dioxide pollution as too great to do anything about it. However, the reality is that if we don't the costs will be far, far higher.