You do realize that there are more possible solutions than requiring that we put entirely new people in every year, right? You do realize also that putting in new people each year is no guarantee that the puppet-masters will be unable to control the strings of government, right? Mull that over and then get back to me about your silly plan. No change is better than *bad* change. Good change is better than both.
As someone else pointed out, in what other field would it make sense to have the entire organization staffed with people who'd never done the job before? In the CS world, consider putting someone with a 4.0 GPA right out of college into a project lead position. Does that make sense? No, it does not. And it says nothing bad about the person's education. The fact of the matter is, running a large state, or even a small one, is no simple task, and the last thing we need is a bunch of naive, poorly-trained amateurs doing it (and certainly not as an irrational response to the very rational concern about the state of our government).
So now you have neither capable politicians nor capable bureaucrats and staff, but a bunch of newbies every year. And you claim this will create a working, stable government? Maybe that works in the early Roman Republic when a bunch of farmers can come together a few times a year to decide what to do about the weirdo who keeps stealing food from the marketplace. It won't work now. No large organization can function in such a fashion.
Well of course legal oppression only exists because of government. That's true by definition of "legal". That doesn't mean getting rid of government gets rid of the ability for groups of people to systematically oppress other people. If government laws oppress people, they are used as a tool by existing sets of people with power and money. The government doesn't do it in a vacuum, and a government given no power by the true elite has no ability to enforce these things. If there were no government, as indeed there generally hasn't been in most societies for most of human history, then there are other ways by which oppression can take place: religion, vigilantism, crime lords and syndicates, corporations of various types, etc. People *will* organize in groups to solidify power and they *will* use it against others.
No, it's arcane. You have to learn all the workarounds for the various gotchas, misfeatures and outright bad designs in SS*S. It is dark sorcery and I hate it, and having to report to the users that "no, I can't do that because SS*S is a pile of shit".
Most of the heavy-handedness has been on the part of the well-funded denial industry. Pretty much everything you said applies much more to the denier groups than to the pro-AGW groups.
The scientists do complain about the media, both with respect to AGW and other fields. Scientific journalism is notably awful.
I am also annoyed by the folks in the media that blame every severe weather event on AGW as if these things never happened before we started pouring excess CO2 into the air. But the media is not the science.
> No, it would not. The age of a 35 year old in minutes would be 18,408,600. 30 minutes would roughly 0.00163% of that. Terra is approximately 4 billion years old. Simple math yields 6,518 years, not one year. The time frame I provided was actually six times longer than the time frame looked at by the scientists. That also means that we should be looking at the last five minutes, not the last 30. In both cases, the time frame is too short
I don't think measuring by percentages really means anything. You can say it's really small, but you haven't said why that actually matters, especially given that the configuration of land and biosphere has been considerably different for most of Earth's history.
> Now, to your second point, seeing climate change and showing that it is caused by humans is different things. Most of what I see is people saying "the climate has changed in the last 200 years and the industrial revolution started 200 years ago so climate change must have been caused by humans", which is the questionable cause fallacy.
Okay, I'll qualify that: the fact that it snowed in DC does not count as a data point against the AGW theory. That is, it's not inconsistent with our understanding of day-to-day weather variability in a climate that is being affected by anthropogenic activity.
The equivalent of 30 minutes would be looking at the climate from the past year and extrapolating from that. But we aren't doing that. However, I can tell you that what was normal for me as a kid, or what was normal for one of my ancestors from two hundred years ago, really isn't relevant to what's normal for me now. And more importantly, the question isn't to find normal (because there is no such thing), but to figure out whether human activity is a significant factor in the climate trends we've observed, significant enough to warrant action. We don't have to know everything about the entire history of the climate to answer this question.
I don't know why the climate from 2 billion years ago is relevant to now. Do we need to measure the motion of every planet in the universe to decide that Kepler's Laws are correct? Do we need to have measured the amount of sunlight at night for the past 10,000 years to feel secure in predicting that it'll be dark tomorrow night? No, we don't. That's not science, that's the opposite of science. We understand the system based on laboratory experiments, math and models and then make predictions. The predictions are correct or not, and if they are, then we have more confidence in our theory. More importantly, we look at what's relevant to the theory. Whether people on Earth fart during its path around the sun is not something we need to measure when considering activities on the scale of planetary motion. Similarly, it's unnecessary to measure climate activity from time periods in Earth's history when the continents were laid out differently, when the sun produced different heat output, when the biosphere was composed differently, etc. It's certainly interesting, but not directly relevant, just like the weather on Mars isn't particularly relevant to the weather on Earth.
Some humans will adapt, as has always been the case. Those nations and groups of people that are proactive about their condition, be it environmental, economic or cultural, will, in the end, fare better than those that don't. Since the world we live in is fickle and complex, even great empires are not immune, though they may take longer to succumb.
No, it's really going to be extremes in certain directions. We wouldn't expect a lot of colder extremes, and indeed, we generally haven't seen as many in the past few decades. Of course, the day-to-day variability of the weather will result in some places getting particularly cold, and that'll always happen, AGW or not.
It's cold in Canada in the winter? Well butter my buns and call me Shirley!
There's been plenty of warmth in November and into December, including in Canada. Also, please remember the difference between weather and climate. Blurring the two sure is a religion for the denialists.
Well, there has been an increase since the 90s, but there are two things: (1) the increase isn't as big as it was, but it's still happening and (2) 1998 was such an extreme year that if you use it as an beginning point, you will see a flatter trend. The actual temperature trend, and the proxies, such as sea ice, glaciers, etc. continue to show a steady warming trend. The fact that it snowed in DC is irrelevant, nor is the fact that there are shorter term (on the order of a decade or two) warming and cooling trends driven by regional oscillations that don't really make a big difference in the long-term climate trends.
The article's headline is "Small influence of solar variability on climate over the past millennium". You could have read that before mouthing off, but you chose not to. What does that say about you?
> If the sun isn't the major driver of temperature then why is it colder at night?
They said that solar variability is not a major driver of climate change trends in the past century. Nowhere are they denying the sun plays a role in temperatures and weather.
> Also why isn't the effect of carbon dioxide cumulative? How can we have colder years... shouldn't every year have to be warmer than the past?
Why would you expect it to be such a simple trend? We're talking about a non-linear dynamic system, not heating up food in a microwave.
> Somewhere, there are people who took the science out of science --- maybe to argue with religious people or something --- but this social consensus crap isn't how real science is done.
Yes, it's your friends in the denial industry, not those doing the actual research.
Variations in solar output are not a major driver for the last century. That's what the article's about. It's clear you can't be bothered to read it because you already know the answer, spoonfed to you, no doubt, by the well-funded (http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/billion-dollar-climate-denial-network-exposed/) denialist industry.
I'm not sure how you can argue that "INSERT INTO foo VALUES (bar)" is anything other than a command to do something. The subpieces of DML may be declarative, but then again, to some extent, so are big groups of mathematical operations in C (if they don't have side-effects).
I keep seeing these quotes from Linux fanbois about those difficult and counter-intuitive wizards on Windows, but I've never encountered any issue of significance when installing drivers on Windows, and most stuff really does work out of the box (also generally true on modern Ubuntu and halfway modern hardware, but wasn't true even a few years ago). I mean, I'm sure there are some pieces of hardware that misbehave or create issues on any OS, but I really have a tough time believing clicking next through wizards for a few minutes or maybe downloading a special patch or version is in any way harder than grabbing Git versions of drivers and compiling them yourself, or having to remember the Magic SysRq key sequences to reboot when that last modprobe fucked up your video card.
Chrome is becoming a bloated piece of shit too. It used to start up quickly and load pages quickly. That's going out the window in my experience. They are also starting to have bugs that never resolve, or take a long time to resolve. One that's been bothering me recently is that YouTube videos playing in other tabs skip when you do pretty much anything in another tab. It's 2013 and it can't play sound properly under a modicum of load. Ridiculous.
That is incorrect. It has nothing to do with "would", but rather an alternative form of "will" which was "wol", quite common in Middle English (Chaucer uses it a lot).
Slashdot Mirror
Irony. So much of it.
You do realize that there are more possible solutions than requiring that we put entirely new people in every year, right? You do realize also that putting in new people each year is no guarantee that the puppet-masters will be unable to control the strings of government, right? Mull that over and then get back to me about your silly plan. No change is better than *bad* change. Good change is better than both.
As someone else pointed out, in what other field would it make sense to have the entire organization staffed with people who'd never done the job before? In the CS world, consider putting someone with a 4.0 GPA right out of college into a project lead position. Does that make sense? No, it does not. And it says nothing bad about the person's education. The fact of the matter is, running a large state, or even a small one, is no simple task, and the last thing we need is a bunch of naive, poorly-trained amateurs doing it (and certainly not as an irrational response to the very rational concern about the state of our government).
They're quite competent; they just don't do what's in the best interest of all the stakeholders.
So now you have neither capable politicians nor capable bureaucrats and staff, but a bunch of newbies every year. And you claim this will create a working, stable government? Maybe that works in the early Roman Republic when a bunch of farmers can come together a few times a year to decide what to do about the weirdo who keeps stealing food from the marketplace. It won't work now. No large organization can function in such a fashion.
Well of course legal oppression only exists because of government. That's true by definition of "legal". That doesn't mean getting rid of government gets rid of the ability for groups of people to systematically oppress other people. If government laws oppress people, they are used as a tool by existing sets of people with power and money. The government doesn't do it in a vacuum, and a government given no power by the true elite has no ability to enforce these things. If there were no government, as indeed there generally hasn't been in most societies for most of human history, then there are other ways by which oppression can take place: religion, vigilantism, crime lords and syndicates, corporations of various types, etc. People *will* organize in groups to solidify power and they *will* use it against others.
No, it's arcane. You have to learn all the workarounds for the various gotchas, misfeatures and outright bad designs in SS*S. It is dark sorcery and I hate it, and having to report to the users that "no, I can't do that because SS*S is a pile of shit".
Most of the heavy-handedness has been on the part of the well-funded denial industry. Pretty much everything you said applies much more to the denier groups than to the pro-AGW groups.
The scientists do complain about the media, both with respect to AGW and other fields. Scientific journalism is notably awful.
I am also annoyed by the folks in the media that blame every severe weather event on AGW as if these things never happened before we started pouring excess CO2 into the air. But the media is not the science.
> No, it would not. The age of a 35 year old in minutes would be 18,408,600. 30 minutes would roughly 0.00163% of that. Terra is approximately 4 billion years old. Simple math yields 6,518 years, not one year. The time frame I provided was actually six times longer than the time frame looked at by the scientists. That also means that we should be looking at the last five minutes, not the last 30. In both cases, the time frame is too short
I don't think measuring by percentages really means anything. You can say it's really small, but you haven't said why that actually matters, especially given that the configuration of land and biosphere has been considerably different for most of Earth's history.
> Now, to your second point, seeing climate change and showing that it is caused by humans is different things. Most of what I see is people saying "the climate has changed in the last 200 years and the industrial revolution started 200 years ago so climate change must have been caused by humans", which is the questionable cause fallacy.
It's also a fallacy to argue at strawmen.
Okay, I'll qualify that: the fact that it snowed in DC does not count as a data point against the AGW theory. That is, it's not inconsistent with our understanding of day-to-day weather variability in a climate that is being affected by anthropogenic activity.
The equivalent of 30 minutes would be looking at the climate from the past year and extrapolating from that. But we aren't doing that. However, I can tell you that what was normal for me as a kid, or what was normal for one of my ancestors from two hundred years ago, really isn't relevant to what's normal for me now. And more importantly, the question isn't to find normal (because there is no such thing), but to figure out whether human activity is a significant factor in the climate trends we've observed, significant enough to warrant action. We don't have to know everything about the entire history of the climate to answer this question.
I don't know why the climate from 2 billion years ago is relevant to now. Do we need to measure the motion of every planet in the universe to decide that Kepler's Laws are correct? Do we need to have measured the amount of sunlight at night for the past 10,000 years to feel secure in predicting that it'll be dark tomorrow night? No, we don't. That's not science, that's the opposite of science. We understand the system based on laboratory experiments, math and models and then make predictions. The predictions are correct or not, and if they are, then we have more confidence in our theory. More importantly, we look at what's relevant to the theory. Whether people on Earth fart during its path around the sun is not something we need to measure when considering activities on the scale of planetary motion. Similarly, it's unnecessary to measure climate activity from time periods in Earth's history when the continents were laid out differently, when the sun produced different heat output, when the biosphere was composed differently, etc. It's certainly interesting, but not directly relevant, just like the weather on Mars isn't particularly relevant to the weather on Earth.
Some humans will adapt, as has always been the case. Those nations and groups of people that are proactive about their condition, be it environmental, economic or cultural, will, in the end, fare better than those that don't. Since the world we live in is fickle and complex, even great empires are not immune, though they may take longer to succumb.
No, it's really going to be extremes in certain directions. We wouldn't expect a lot of colder extremes, and indeed, we generally haven't seen as many in the past few decades. Of course, the day-to-day variability of the weather will result in some places getting particularly cold, and that'll always happen, AGW or not.
It's cold in Canada in the winter? Well butter my buns and call me Shirley!
There's been plenty of warmth in November and into December, including in Canada. Also, please remember the difference between weather and climate. Blurring the two sure is a religion for the denialists.
Well, there has been an increase since the 90s, but there are two things: (1) the increase isn't as big as it was, but it's still happening and (2) 1998 was such an extreme year that if you use it as an beginning point, you will see a flatter trend. The actual temperature trend, and the proxies, such as sea ice, glaciers, etc. continue to show a steady warming trend. The fact that it snowed in DC is irrelevant, nor is the fact that there are shorter term (on the order of a decade or two) warming and cooling trends driven by regional oscillations that don't really make a big difference in the long-term climate trends.
The article's headline is "Small influence of solar variability on climate over the past millennium". You could have read that before mouthing off, but you chose not to. What does that say about you?
> If the sun isn't the major driver of temperature then why is it colder at night?
They said that solar variability is not a major driver of climate change trends in the past century. Nowhere are they denying the sun plays a role in temperatures and weather.
> Also why isn't the effect of carbon dioxide cumulative? How can we have colder years ... shouldn't every year have to be warmer than the past?
Why would you expect it to be such a simple trend? We're talking about a non-linear dynamic system, not heating up food in a microwave.
> Somewhere, there are people who took the science out of science --- maybe to argue with religious people or something --- but this social consensus crap isn't how real science is done.
Yes, it's your friends in the denial industry, not those doing the actual research.
Variations in solar output are not a major driver for the last century. That's what the article's about. It's clear you can't be bothered to read it because you already know the answer, spoonfed to you, no doubt, by the well-funded (http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/billion-dollar-climate-denial-network-exposed/) denialist industry.
Grasping at straws indeed. This is the map for November, and you're telling me that the AGW folks are grasping at straws?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/map-percentile-mntp/201311.gif
I'm not sure how you can argue that "INSERT INTO foo VALUES (bar)" is anything other than a command to do something. The subpieces of DML may be declarative, but then again, to some extent, so are big groups of mathematical operations in C (if they don't have side-effects).
I keep seeing these quotes from Linux fanbois about those difficult and counter-intuitive wizards on Windows, but I've never encountered any issue of significance when installing drivers on Windows, and most stuff really does work out of the box (also generally true on modern Ubuntu and halfway modern hardware, but wasn't true even a few years ago). I mean, I'm sure there are some pieces of hardware that misbehave or create issues on any OS, but I really have a tough time believing clicking next through wizards for a few minutes or maybe downloading a special patch or version is in any way harder than grabbing Git versions of drivers and compiling them yourself, or having to remember the Magic SysRq key sequences to reboot when that last modprobe fucked up your video card.
Chrome is becoming a bloated piece of shit too. It used to start up quickly and load pages quickly. That's going out the window in my experience. They are also starting to have bugs that never resolve, or take a long time to resolve. One that's been bothering me recently is that YouTube videos playing in other tabs skip when you do pretty much anything in another tab. It's 2013 and it can't play sound properly under a modicum of load. Ridiculous.
That is incorrect. It has nothing to do with "would", but rather an alternative form of "will" which was "wol", quite common in Middle English (Chaucer uses it a lot).