There is more to it: some countries have been emitting lots of CO2 for a large number of years and the effect is cumulative. So even if per capita limits are used for everyone, many countries - poor countries that are growing - will object.
I was not clear, these things would start to blow up for no reason, probably in the hands of handlers. Some turbulence? Boom! Random small loss of signal? Boom!
Your scenario wouldn't be too bad. But what will probably happen is that managers will get rid of even more developers to hire new managers with high pay checks to bring "new vision" to the project or some crap like that.
Yes you could apply this argument, but then, we are not talking about reason. Why should I take the bible seriously? There is no evidence that the bible describes the universe correctly. On the contrary, there lots of things in the bible that are scientifically wrong and that is why non-fundamentalists keep talking about metaphors in the Bible (or the Koran in this case). And in the case you cited specifically, most Christians did not agree with the end of the world predictions. Why should I? There is no evidence for that!
When I say dig deep enough, I am not talking about making up any odd "explanation". I'm talking science here and any new model of reality must be compatible with previous observations. Relativity did not do away with Newtonian mechanics. I'm a mechanical engineer working with fluid dynamics and I've never used relativity (or quantum mechanics) for anything and I get accurate results. Hell, for most of my work I don't even need the atomic theory of matter: the 4 Aristotelian elements with a few empirical parameters (viscosity and density) are enough!
You might be correct in your assessment that religious thinking is part of how our brains cope with reality and that is why we have tools such as science: even though our brains are impressive tools at assessing reality they make mistakes and science helps us become more reliable, it is a method to eliminate noise generated by our "religious" thinking and that is why the word believe has different meanings.
This is irrelevant because if there is no order or regularity you really can't reason about it can you? What science does is use the *only* approach to understanding a complex universe. If, somehow, a scientist initially fails to find order (observing behavior of electrons or turbulence in fluids for instance) he (or other scientists) will dig deeper and try to find regularity on another level (quantum mechanics for the electron or strange attractors for turbulence).
If we end up failing to find regularity maybe we just didn't dig deep enough. Might we give up at some point? If we do there won't be much left to reason about. In this context there is no "belief" in science, it is just a methodology.
OTOH we do science because we expect it to work. It has always worked and on the instances it appeared to not work it was always a matter of time until someone found some regularity (dug deeper). In this sense we "believe" in science. Notice that when I say I "believe" in the Flying Spaghetti Monster I'm using the same word "believe" but it has other meanings and I mean something different than when I say If I drop a pencil I "believe" it will fall, Am I 100% sure the pencil will fall? No but almost.
And what a coincidence: this shit comes up a couple of weeks after that ridiculously bogus attempt to frame Iran for trying to kill the Saudi Ambassador in the US. What are the evil Iranians going to do next???
I thought about it but it wouldn't be the first time I heard such nonsense at/. being taken seriously, even more considering that you posted well after all the story came out and few people would be able to "get it". But I stand corrected.
If fuel that leaves the most soot behind is used, that means the the combustion process is inefficient so to get the same useful energy output (that's what we want, isn't it?) you would need to burn more fuel under less than optimal efficiency so in the end you would produce more CO2 to accomplish the same thing. Oh,other pollutants such as NOx, SOx, CO and the soot itself (and many others) are really harmful - just checkout the air in any large city, or better yet, checkout the air in Beijing.
It is eugenics but it is not about population size but population "quality" (from their sick racist point of view). They wanted more people of the right kind and they were not using this to keep the total number of people in check. Increasing population was always their goal and to do this they needed more territory, one of the reasons for aggressive expansionism. Therefore this is irrelevant to the discussion.
It does not emit far less than other fossil fuels for same output energy. Since burning a gas is usually easier than burning a liquid, efficiency of natural gas engines is marginally better than gasoline for instance but nowhere close to "emit far less". Since natural gas is mostly methane (and that varies a lot from field to field), it might be simpler to use in fuel cells but most fuel cells use hydrogen anyway.
Brilliant! "Clean-burning natural gas" will help limit CO2 emissions??? You do realize that Natural Gas is a fossil fuel? What do you think natural gas is? When people say that natural gas is "clean" they are NOT talking about CO2 but of other pollutants that have local effects such as smog or even global effects such as acid rain. A fuel that releases only CO2 and water is called clean.
Let me get this straight: he is guilty of being "Self-aggrandizing asshole"? He should burn.
It gets worse: he is doing it in a society obsessed with celebrities!!!! 4/5 of critics on slashdot repeat something along this line.
I don't know, but this buzzing in the back of my head sure sounds like my "skeptometer" warning me of something. PR stunt? Getting everybody, *today* of all times, to dismiss a guy because he craves for attention sure is weird. Maybe it's just me...
So here we are talking in general terms and you come with one instance of one guy screwing up. Hitler obviously screwed up many more times - he lost the war and it certainly was not because of jet bombers. But at the beginning of the war many people saw that everything he did worked wonderfully even though in retrospect we might see the seeds of failure.
All this doesn't change the fact that there was a lot of innovation going on even if much was wasted by a single man. The relevant question is whether this innovation was a result of or at least amplified by Nazism. In my opinion there could have been a short term boost to innovation even though Germany was loosing many of its best minds throughout the 30's and in the long run (15 years only) it proved to be a disaster, not only for Germany but for much of Europe. In retrospect this end result might have been inevitable even in 1935 but it certainly wasn't obvious to people then in Germany and elsewhere. Some people saw it coming though - think of all the people from all over the world volunteering to fight in Spain in 1936 and 1937.
Your example is another evidence to my point. Thank you.
You have some interesting points but things are much more complicated. What about the Soviet Union? Were they not innovative in several fields? Hell, what about Nazi Germany?
You could argue that they were spending "innovation capital" acquired before. That could be true for Nazi Germany even though before WWI it was not much of a democracy. But Russia? It basically changed one nasty dictatorship for another.
On the other hand, often innovation (arts and literature) sometimes thrive in dictatorships, at least for a limited amount of time: Russia under the Czars and in the early Soviet period is an example, but the same could be said for much of Latin America under brutal military dictatorships.
Athens thrived under democracy but so did Florence under autocratic rule in the Renaissance.
But one thing seems clear, an open and free society favors the spread of innovation. For instance much development in technology in the last 50 years was the result of military equipment that was completely useless and expensive but the difference between the USSR and USA is that many of these new technologies were allowed to be used in other sectors of the economy. In the the USSR the technology was simply a drain in the country's human and material resources and their economy paid the price.
One thing that should not be forgotten is that dictatorships don't appear out of nowhere: they usually have support from large portions of society that only slowly erodes and the dictatorship provides a focal point for these portions of society. So for a limited amount of time (1 5, 10, 20, 40 years? Who knows) a dictatorship could stimulate innovation. And the fight to topple the dictatorship is obviously another focal point that might contribute in promoting creativity (very strong influence in the arts and literature).
Do you have any evidence for that or should I take your word for it? Long before the Nobel Peace prize (not physics!) climate change was an issue. The Kyoto Protocol is from 1997.
This is all irrelevant anyway because what you are doing is claiming that all these researchers are simply lying. Maybe the Nobel spurred some (a lot?) funding in research but from that to claiming that they are all lying or committing fraud is preposterous. And please don't mention the pathetic sham called "climategate".
Have you ever met any researcher? There have been isolated cases of fraud and one could say that there are flaws in the whole process but it works fairly well. Most researchers don't make big money and most funding goes to buy equipment and pay for graduate students and not for a new car at the end of the year. These people study hard for years and they almost always care deeply for what they are doing (understanding the basic processes and not maintaining the "orthodoxy") and it is appalling that people really believe all this bullshit conspiracy theory.
Parts of the media is doing this. I know a few climate researchers and I have *never* heard any of them attribute a drought or hurricane to global warming, on the contrary, any sane person knows this is absurd. I work in a wind tunnel, in particular an atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel. I don't do any work on climate change but I often talk to people doing this kind of work. They don't have any agenda. They won't make more money either way and they aren't any different from any other researcher I know. And since this is a very sensitive issue they usually go out of their in being conservative to ensure that whatever they say will not be blown out of proportion. Maybe that is just the people I know but even the few scientific papers I have read on the subject take the same approach. And there is more, climate change is a *very* multidisciplinary field involving meteorologists, biologists, oceanographers, experts on statistics and others. All these people work on other fields (that's how I know some of them) and only when working on climate change they are frauds, cheats or bastards with an agenda. What a conspiracy!!!
I find it funny that you call this a religion since I hardly believe you have studied meteorology and climate to evaluate the evidence. Any way, would any evidence be enough to change your mind?
Don't confuse sensationalist TV hosts with climate researchers.
By the way, I avoid doing interviews because the reporter usually has something on his mind already and he will, basically, often only listen to what confirms his view on any subject and ignore the rest.
Climate and weather are not the same thing. A flood, or storm does not characterize the climate. You can come up with some parameter that correlates with climate, mean annual temperature of the planet for instance. This is a number that doesn't say anything about floods, droughts, snowstorms during the year. Not only that, we can not measure this number exactly, we can only estimate it.
Now, is this number relevant? Not for local weather. Not even for a few years. It can go down or up whether there is global warming, global cooling or nothing at all. But over a long period of time (we are talking decades here) this number is useful to detect changes in climate. What are the consequences of those changes? This single parameter doesn't say but models suggest a few outcomes.
The problem is more complicated than that because even *if* some *new* equilibrium could be reached, that is going to take and, probably, until this new equilibrium is reached, extreme weather conditions could be more common whatever the new equilibrium conditions are (if we can talk about equilibrium conditions).
If your feet are at 0 degrees and your head at 200 degrees, your mean temperature is 100 degrees, but it isn't pleasant in any way.
It is not possible to determine if an individual flood is the result of global warming or not. Floods have always happened and will continue to happen. But global warming tends to produce more floods *and* more droughts, often in different regions but sometimes in the same place. This is has been know for a while and nothing has changed after "floods started hitting the news".
Slashdot Mirror
There is more to it: some countries have been emitting lots of CO2 for a large number of years and the effect is cumulative. So even if per capita limits are used for everyone, many countries - poor countries that are growing - will object.
I was not clear, these things would start to blow up for no reason, probably in the hands of handlers. Some turbulence? Boom! Random small loss of signal? Boom!
Easier said than done. Just think about it, any problem and the thing would blow up!
At least they provided some evidence to their claims.
Your scenario wouldn't be too bad. But what will probably happen is that managers will get rid of even more developers to hire new managers with high pay checks to bring "new vision" to the project or some crap like that.
Another lawsuit on the horizon...
It is an iPhone therefore it is a feature.
Yes you could apply this argument, but then, we are not talking about reason. Why should I take the bible seriously? There is no evidence that the bible describes the universe correctly. On the contrary, there lots of things in the bible that are scientifically wrong and that is why non-fundamentalists keep talking about metaphors in the Bible (or the Koran in this case). And in the case you cited specifically, most Christians did not agree with the end of the world predictions. Why should I? There is no evidence for that!
When I say dig deep enough, I am not talking about making up any odd "explanation". I'm talking science here and any new model of reality must be compatible with previous observations. Relativity did not do away with Newtonian mechanics. I'm a mechanical engineer working with fluid dynamics and I've never used relativity (or quantum mechanics) for anything and I get accurate results. Hell, for most of my work I don't even need the atomic theory of matter: the 4 Aristotelian elements with a few empirical parameters (viscosity and density) are enough!
You might be correct in your assessment that religious thinking is part of how our brains cope with reality and that is why we have tools such as science: even though our brains are impressive tools at assessing reality they make mistakes and science helps us become more reliable, it is a method to eliminate noise generated by our "religious" thinking and that is why the word believe has different meanings.
This is irrelevant because if there is no order or regularity you really can't reason about it can you? What science does is use the *only* approach to understanding a complex universe. If, somehow, a scientist initially fails to find order (observing behavior of electrons or turbulence in fluids for instance) he (or other scientists) will dig deeper and try to find regularity on another level (quantum mechanics for the electron or strange attractors for turbulence).
If we end up failing to find regularity maybe we just didn't dig deep enough. Might we give up at some point? If we do there won't be much left to reason about. In this context there is no "belief" in science, it is just a methodology.
OTOH we do science because we expect it to work. It has always worked and on the instances it appeared to not work it was always a matter of time until someone found some regularity (dug deeper). In this sense we "believe" in science. Notice that when I say I "believe" in the Flying Spaghetti Monster I'm using the same word "believe" but it has other meanings and I mean something different than when I say If I drop a pencil I "believe" it will fall, Am I 100% sure the pencil will fall? No but almost.
Paraphrasing Mark Twain, it was darkness for billions of years before I was born and it didn't bother me a bit.
And there is more to it, the Russian Nuclear scientist is not a nuclear scientist at all:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105776
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/14/the-holes-in-the-iran-nuke-report/
And what a coincidence: this shit comes up a couple of weeks after that ridiculously bogus attempt to frame Iran for trying to kill the Saudi Ambassador in the US. What are the evil Iranians going to do next???
I thought about it but it wouldn't be the first time I heard such nonsense at /. being taken seriously, even more considering that you posted well after all the story came out and few people would be able to "get it". But I stand corrected.
If fuel that leaves the most soot behind is used, that means the the combustion process is inefficient so to get the same useful energy output (that's what we want, isn't it?) you would need to burn more fuel under less than optimal efficiency so in the end you would produce more CO2 to accomplish the same thing. Oh,other pollutants such as NOx, SOx, CO and the soot itself (and many others) are really harmful - just checkout the air in any large city, or better yet, checkout the air in Beijing.
It is eugenics but it is not about population size but population "quality" (from their sick racist point of view). They wanted more people of the right kind and they were not using this to keep the total number of people in check. Increasing population was always their goal and to do this they needed more territory, one of the reasons for aggressive expansionism. Therefore this is irrelevant to the discussion.
It does not emit far less than other fossil fuels for same output energy. Since burning a gas is usually easier than burning a liquid, efficiency of natural gas engines is marginally better than gasoline for instance but nowhere close to "emit far less". Since natural gas is mostly methane (and that varies a lot from field to field), it might be simpler to use in fuel cells but most fuel cells use hydrogen anyway.
Brilliant! "Clean-burning natural gas" will help limit CO2 emissions??? You do realize that Natural Gas is a fossil fuel? What do you think natural gas is? When people say that natural gas is "clean" they are NOT talking about CO2 but of other pollutants that have local effects such as smog or even global effects such as acid rain. A fuel that releases only CO2 and water is called clean.
Let me get this straight: he is guilty of being "Self-aggrandizing asshole"? He should burn.
It gets worse: he is doing it in a society obsessed with celebrities!!!! 4/5 of critics on slashdot repeat something along this line.
I don't know, but this buzzing in the back of my head sure sounds like my "skeptometer" warning me of something. PR stunt? Getting everybody, *today* of all times, to dismiss a guy because he craves for attention sure is weird. Maybe it's just me...
So here we are talking in general terms and you come with one instance of one guy screwing up. Hitler obviously screwed up many more times - he lost the war and it certainly was not because of jet bombers. But at the beginning of the war many people saw that everything he did worked wonderfully even though in retrospect we might see the seeds of failure.
All this doesn't change the fact that there was a lot of innovation going on even if much was wasted by a single man. The relevant question is whether this innovation was a result of or at least amplified by Nazism. In my opinion there could have been a short term boost to innovation even though Germany was loosing many of its best minds throughout the 30's and in the long run (15 years only) it proved to be a disaster, not only for Germany but for much of Europe. In retrospect this end result might have been inevitable even in 1935 but it certainly wasn't obvious to people then in Germany and elsewhere. Some people saw it coming though - think of all the people from all over the world volunteering to fight in Spain in 1936 and 1937.
Your example is another evidence to my point. Thank you.
You have some interesting points but things are much more complicated. What about the Soviet Union? Were they not innovative in several fields? Hell, what about Nazi Germany?
You could argue that they were spending "innovation capital" acquired before. That could be true for Nazi Germany even though before WWI it was not much of a democracy. But Russia? It basically changed one nasty dictatorship for another.
On the other hand, often innovation (arts and literature) sometimes thrive in dictatorships, at least for a limited amount of time: Russia under the Czars and in the early Soviet period is an example, but the same could be said for much of Latin America under brutal military dictatorships.
Athens thrived under democracy but so did Florence under autocratic rule in the Renaissance.
But one thing seems clear, an open and free society favors the spread of innovation. For instance much development in technology in the last 50 years was the result of military equipment that was completely useless and expensive but the difference between the USSR and USA is that many of these new technologies were allowed to be used in other sectors of the economy. In the the USSR the technology was simply a drain in the country's human and material resources and their economy paid the price.
One thing that should not be forgotten is that dictatorships don't appear out of nowhere: they usually have support from large portions of society that only slowly erodes and the dictatorship provides a focal point for these portions of society. So for a limited amount of time (1 5, 10, 20, 40 years? Who knows) a dictatorship could stimulate innovation. And the fight to topple the dictatorship is obviously another focal point that might contribute in promoting creativity (very strong influence in the arts and literature).
But on the long run you are probably right.
Do you have any evidence for that or should I take your word for it? Long before the Nobel Peace prize (not physics!) climate change was an issue. The Kyoto Protocol is from 1997.
This is all irrelevant anyway because what you are doing is claiming that all these researchers are simply lying. Maybe the Nobel spurred some (a lot?) funding in research but from that to claiming that they are all lying or committing fraud is preposterous. And please don't mention the pathetic sham called "climategate".
Have you ever met any researcher? There have been isolated cases of fraud and one could say that there are flaws in the whole process but it works fairly well. Most researchers don't make big money and most funding goes to buy equipment and pay for graduate students and not for a new car at the end of the year. These people study hard for years and they almost always care deeply for what they are doing (understanding the basic processes and not maintaining the "orthodoxy") and it is appalling that people really believe all this bullshit conspiracy theory.
Parts of the media is doing this. I know a few climate researchers and I have *never* heard any of them attribute a drought or hurricane to global warming, on the contrary, any sane person knows this is absurd. I work in a wind tunnel, in particular an atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel. I don't do any work on climate change but I often talk to people doing this kind of work. They don't have any agenda. They won't make more money either way and they aren't any different from any other researcher I know. And since this is a very sensitive issue they usually go out of their in being conservative to ensure that whatever they say will not be blown out of proportion. Maybe that is just the people I know but even the few scientific papers I have read on the subject take the same approach. And there is more, climate change is a *very* multidisciplinary field involving meteorologists, biologists, oceanographers, experts on statistics and others. All these people work on other fields (that's how I know some of them) and only when working on climate change they are frauds, cheats or bastards with an agenda. What a conspiracy!!!
I find it funny that you call this a religion since I hardly believe you have studied meteorology and climate to evaluate the evidence. Any way, would any evidence be enough to change your mind?
Don't confuse sensationalist TV hosts with climate researchers.
By the way, I avoid doing interviews because the reporter usually has something on his mind already and he will, basically, often only listen to what confirms his view on any subject and ignore the rest.
Climate and weather are not the same thing. A flood, or storm does not characterize the climate. You can come up with some parameter that correlates with climate, mean annual temperature of the planet for instance. This is a number that doesn't say anything about floods, droughts, snowstorms during the year. Not only that, we can not measure this number exactly, we can only estimate it.
Now, is this number relevant? Not for local weather. Not even for a few years. It can go down or up whether there is global warming, global cooling or nothing at all. But over a long period of time (we are talking decades here) this number is useful to detect changes in climate. What are the consequences of those changes? This single parameter doesn't say but models suggest a few outcomes.
The problem is more complicated than that because even *if* some *new* equilibrium could be reached, that is going to take and, probably, until this new equilibrium is reached, extreme weather conditions could be more common whatever the new equilibrium conditions are (if we can talk about equilibrium conditions).
If your feet are at 0 degrees and your head at 200 degrees, your mean temperature is 100 degrees, but it isn't pleasant in any way.
It is not possible to determine if an individual flood is the result of global warming or not. Floods have always happened and will continue to happen. But global warming tends to produce more floods *and* more droughts, often in different regions but sometimes in the same place. This is has been know for a while and nothing has changed after "floods started hitting the news".
Macs with linux are for gay hipsters!
Luke??? Any one on slashdot would beat the fsck out of him.