The only other city on this list that I've been to is the ontario area, which, while decent, was far from one of the most "intelligent" cities. How many of these "intelligent" cities have fostered innovative new companies in the last century? How many play host to world class universities? More innovative products come out every year from cities like Tokyo and New York than all the other cities on the list combined.
I assume you're referring to Waterloo. Waterloo is home to one fine technology university - the University of Waterloo is considered one of the top research and engineering institutions anywhere; IIRC, it is one of the few places where Microsoft keeps a permanent recruiter. It has another liberal arts college, Wilfred Laurier, which is pretty good for a town of less than 100,000.
As for innovative products, the RIM Blackberry was invented there, one of the eBay founders was educated there, there are many successful software firms, and I worked for a firm that developed a world-leading telephone management system when the city was much smaller than it is now. And I don't make it a practice to keep up on the area's technology firms.
Now, I would never compare Waterloo to New York or Tokyo, but then those cities are 100 times larger. I don't doubt for a second there are more smart people in NYC than in Waterloo, but having been there, I'll wager there are many, many more stupid people. Waterloo has no areas like NYC ghettos. I'd be willing to bet that the average level of education and intelligence in Waterloo is higher than in New York City; no comments on Tokyo, having never visited.
In addition to your fine points, having worked at a number of multi-national firms, pricing policy is based on maximizing revenue. For example, the firm I currently work for sells engraved pens, etc. for use as advertising giveaways in Canada and the US. American business people seem to like these things; we sell about 30 times more in quantity to the US than we do to Canada. But pricing in the US is much lower; pens go for $1.99 to $2.49 for the most part, whereas in Canada, we are charging $5-6 for the exact same pen. The US dollar is currently only 10% more valuable than the Canadian buck. Part of it is there is less competition in Canada; part of it is fewer Canadian businesses will buy them but those who will are willing to pay the higher prices. So the fact that Apple prices iPods differently in different countries could be the result of completely rational business practice unrelated to exchange rates.
Ottawa-Gatineau? The worst ten years of my life were the four years I lived there. There are a few high tech firms with some smart dudes, but most of the people are either boring, clueless morons with high school educations working as clerks for the federal government, or lying, thieving politicians and their cronies.
Not for a long time. Most do not pay dividends, and their value has little relation to any actual assets a company might have.
Er, if you take the time to read the business page of any reasonable newspaper, you will see a column on the stock page marked "Yield", which is the value of the dividend divided by the stock's current price, and from a quick glance I'd say 70% of the stocks have a figure listed. Some are quite small, admittedly, and I was looking at the Toronto Exchange; figures on the Nasdaq would probably be lower. But I believe a fair number of stocks on the NYSE pay dividends.
Wish I had mod points, brother. As a Canadian who knows and likes many different Americans, I worry about what is happening to your country. I used to be a fan of Bush, but over the past couple of years, he and his administration have become completely unhinged. The sad thing is I don't think Hillary or Obama will change the rules.
If they can make a reasonable electric battery for a car that provide power for trips up to 60 km or so without needing a recharge, transportation could change dramatically. Couple in a gasoline engine to recharge the battery for longer trips (like a hybrid vehicle) and you could probably cut oil use by the general population by half or more.
Um, you mean like the recently announced Chevy Volt (made by GM, the "company that killed the electric car"), which has a 40 km capacity on battery, and a small electric engine that kicks in as a generator when the battery runs out? They expect to be producing it in two or three years.
For example, as I understand it, here in Canada, our power companies are constantly trying to get us to use less power, because whatever power we don't use gets exported to the USA, and the markup and profits are higher for exported power sales than domestic sales.
Excuse me, but are you high? Here in Ontario, we are constantly short of power during hot summer days, and we have to pay to import power from Manitoba, Quebec, and New York State. Big industrial users have contracts that give them lower rates than standard, but allow Hydro One/OPG to cut them off on high demand days. And because we're still running all those coal-fired plants that the Liberals promised to shut, we continue to emit a lot of pollutants (cleaner than in years past, yes, but still major CO2 emitters).
The reasons for OPG to push conservation are 1) we're pretty much out of hydro options, 2) we don't want to burn more fossil fuels, 3) nuclear has those pesky NIMBY/waste disposal problems (overrated IMHO but a significant portion of people don't agree with me), and 4) it's cheaper to conserve a watt than it is to generate one. If people set their home AC to run at 75 F instead of 68 F, that saves a ton of generating capacity at a minimal loss of comfort. Many retail businesses reduce their lighting level, again with minimal impact on the business.
I don't recall where I saw this - I think it was The Atlantic - but the average US air conditioner has a SEER less than 8 (this was a few years back, the stats have doubtless changed), and that 30% of US power generation (admittedly a much warmer country than Canada) wouldn't be needed if they were at the new standard of 12 SEER. The EPA estimates that a change from 12 SEER to 13 SEER would save 39 400-megawatt power plants from being built.
Now, I'm going to go out on a limb, and suggest it costs $1 billion to build one of those power plants, plus tons of on-going operating expenses. That's $39 billion. If the 1/3 of US households with air conditioners operating at less than 12 SEER (estimate 12 million houses) were upgraded to 13 SEER units, at a cost of $3,000 each, the total spending would be less and far fewer emissions would be observed. That sounds like a more cost-effective strategy to me.
You also missed the word "from" in your first clause. Mod me flamebait all you want; one of the major problems with engineers (and that's what I studied at school) is their inability to communicate properly in English. You can't write a single sentence without two glaring errors, so lick yourself.
I graduated the EDDT (Engineering Design and Drafting Technology) course at TRU, and so far I have not done ONE thing that have been trained to do there.
However, I am glad to see that much the good english learned you there.
I worked at a place that abused accounting principles. They'd book revenue on hardware that hadn't shipped or even been made, software that wasn't installed or even sold yet, and move all kinds of valid and imaginary revenue from the vague future to the current quarter like crazy.
Oh yeah baby! In the wild days of telecom in the late 80's, a company called Datapoint had a bonus structure based on revenue billed in the quarter. One group of sales managers booked millions of dollars of orders to "Joe Customer", "A. Warehouse", etc., in order to meet or beat their numbers. They collected hundreds of thousands in bonuses, and then quietly shipped the machines to real customers over the next quarter, at which point, they would start the whole game again.
I'm not a Sarb-Ox expert, but the fines and possible jail sentences are bad enough that a company already under scrutiny over options pricing would be pretty careful to err on the side of caution.
Here's another point in favour of the highway analogy. Both it and the Internet were nurtured by the US Defence Department. Not many people know that the official name of the Interstate system is "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defence Highways". Ike, who had endured a marathon crossing of the US in 1919, and observed first hand the German autobahns, championed the Interstate system to ensure there was a quick and easy way to transport troops and equipment. DARPA championed the internet to ensure that its many scientists had a quick and easy way to exchange data and ideas.
Of course, once both networks got into the hands of consumers, they morphed into completely different things. But that's just another similarity.
/. is and other forums where uneducated people post their opinion is the only place where people doubt that the current global warming is not man made.
First, nice syntax. Took me three reads to understand that your acquaintance with the English language is slight at best.
Second, there are many distinguished scientists who doubt the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. Yesterday's National Post in Toronto had an article about an Oxford professor, reknowned for his studies of solar activity, who believes our current warming is driven by intense sunspot activity, and that we will experience cooling when this activity dies down. He has at least as much data to support his hypothesis as the man-made GW activists do.
To me, this is the 'second-hand smoke'(SHM) fiasco all over again. If you read the SHM studies, the only people at real risk are the non-smoking spouses of smokers. The risk, IIRC, is that 50 of 100,000 such people are twice as likely to contract cancer each year than spouses of non-smokers. People exposed to SHM on a casual basis (bars, clubs, etc.) showed neglible increases in risk. But the SHM Nazis are working to the goal where you can't smoke except in hermetically sealed chambers at your home. (There are proposals to prevent people from smoking at their homes or in their cars if there are children present.) Now, I'm not, and have never been, a smoker. But the Draconian limitations on forced on smokers, in the name of SHM, are as scary to me as the measures taken by Homeland Security. What's the next activity that the government is going to demand to regulate?
GW believers predict that each 10% rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would result in 30 cm rise in sea levels. But atmospheric CO2 has risen 100% in the last 100 years. Thus, we should see sea levels 3 m, or more than 10 feet, higher than they were a century ago. But the actual rise in sea level is less than 5 cm. When your hypothesis is off by a factor of 60, I would suggest that it is very much open to question.
Yuppie kids or their parents also produce more in a day than people in Brazil produce in a year. Hence, they get paid more. Brazil's economic woes are due to a) their economic policy and b) the fact that their people produce less than the western setup
You don't get out of Mommy's basement much, do you? My wife is from the Philippines - about as poor as Brazil - and I have visited there frequently. Yes, there are people, like my wife's brothers, who run a successful chain of department stores, and who make relatively lots of money. There are also many people, like virtually every politician and government officer, who live on graft, corruption, and crime. For example, we were introduced to the governor of her province, who also runs the meth trade. Police and armed forces officers supplement their incomes by kidnapping and ransoming rich kids. Ever practical, the Chinese, who run much of the trade, form associations that routinely pay local police and army officers protection money so that their children will not be touched.
Although the Philippines has lots of laws to provide services, they don't have the money. One reason is rich businessmen routinely "negotiate" their tax payments with the local official. Such negotiations always include a thick envelope for the official. So when you live in a country where the rich avoid their taxes, where the people who are supposed to uphold the law break it, and the government that is supposed to work for you steals from you, there is going to be a lot of crime because the social contract is routinely betrayed.
All you need to know as a marketeer is the unique ID of the FOB. When the FOB was registered your name, etc. goes into the master DB in the sky
How long before Homeland Security demands these on all cars, and starts tracking your movements at all times? Or before some state transportation agency decides to install them on license plates, and automatically detect speeding, running yellow lights, etc.? That thing disappearing in your rear view mirror is freedom.
But price-conscious consumers won't be the initial market; it will be security conscious businesses that don't want to risk losing valuable data worth much than $600. They will buy enough of them for the price to move down the demand curve, and into the consumer market. Look for them to be standard issue in 3-5 years.
From a Republican standpoint, this administration has gone so far off from Republican ideals, that it is not even funny.
As a Canadian conservative, I strongly agree. As much as I loathe the Democrats, Bush has shown contempt for the constitution, and allowed a truly frightening Thought Police to emerge, so that I'm now beginning to wonder what has
happened to the United States; it used to be respected, and now it is only feared.
Of course, when China really gets on it feet, we'll look back at Bush as a piker. Those people wrote the book on ruthlessness.
When I go to NJ from NYC, there's few things more annoying than the river of $1 coins that the ticket machine vomits as change when you put a $20 in to buy a $10.25 ticket!
Well, the very popular "Men's Health" magazine named the Zune the "#1 must have tech product of 2007" in its most recent issue. So some people seem to like it.. of course, the promise of a big advertising push might have swayed their opinion.
But in the shopping madness of the past weekend, I saw hordes around iPod displays, and no one around Zune. Survey size of three stores, so take that for what it's worth..
Much of the explanation for the abject poverty in many parts of the world is a local social/political system that keeps the people in poverty. And the main tool for doing this is ignorance. People in power tend to understand the old "Knowledge is power" saying, and maintain their hold by blocking general access to information from the outside world.
Spot on, and already proven by history. I can't remember when I read the article - it was at least 20 years ago - but when the author correlated specific technology with economic growth in the Third World, he found that communications technology (telegraph or telephone) was by far the most positive contributor. As an example, he discussed the case of an African village where locals were selling lumber for much less than it would cost farther down river. Once they got a telegraph station, they were able to compare rates downstream with their prices, and relatively quickly adjust their prices to get a larger profit. Any new communications technology, as MacLuhan pointed out, results in increased wealth.
The potential benefits of the $100 laptop are enormous. Let's just look at AIDS; the amount of disinformation in Africa is legend. Some men believe having sex with a virgin will cure them; this often leads to the rape of young girls. Having access to reliable information may save thousands of young girls from needless pain.
Let's use another metaphor: irrigation. We have made enormous gains in agricultural productivity thanks to irrigation. And that's just adding water to a field. Now, we're talking about irrigating villages with knowledge. Surely even the most Philistine must admit that the potential benefits are without limit. These are minds thirsting for knowledge, and we can now turn on the spigot.
There is a generation of killers being trained in Africa today. Our best hope of combatting them is to provide more and more African people with access to knowledge, information, and communication.
I agree we can't predict exactly what will happen, or what the rate of change of will be, but that doesn't stop the fools from trying. Here's what Jeremy Siegel, Ph.D., posted on Yahoo's Finance site last week:
In the last century, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have shot up from 285 parts per million (ppm) to 377 ppm. Historically, carbon dioxide levels had averaged between 180 and 290 ppm. Every 10 ppm increase in CO2 concentration is associated with a half a degree Centigrade increase in temperature and a 10 meter increase in sea levels.
Now I'm just an engineer, not a climatologist, but if the highest levels in the past were 290 ppm, and we are now at 377 ppm, we are 87 ppm over the past high. If each 10 ppm increase is associated with 0.5 C increase in temp, and a 10m increase in sea level, shouldn't average temps be some 4 C higher, and sea level 87m higher, instead of the negligible 0.3 C rise in temp, and the 17 cm rise in sea level the Earth has experienced over the last 100 years?
Some wags have told me that we're not seeing the total effects because of "time lags" in the system. But, from 1900 to 1910, we saw a 10 ppm rise in CO2 levels. It's been one hundred years since that rise, and we haven't seen 2% of the expected rise in sea level. Of course for the last 90 years, we've been continuing to pump CO2 into the air, so one would think the integral effect of all those events would be even larger than the single 10 ppm increase from 1900-10.
GW may yet prove to be a problem, but we're not seeing effects anywhere near the levels the scaremongers are throwing out. And, we have yet to prove that GW is anthropogenic; the Earth has gone through these cycles before, long before man was around. But as usual, the "Big Lie" propagandists are winning the battle.
And, frankly, I could care less where Mike Moore or Ann Coulter stand on this, or any other issue. Do you seriously decide your position on an issue on the basis of who supports it, or do you look at the facts and theories, and try to choose the set that makes the most sense?
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you're referring to Waterloo. Waterloo is home to one fine technology university - the University of Waterloo is considered one of the top research and engineering institutions anywhere; IIRC, it is one of the few places where Microsoft keeps a permanent recruiter. It has another liberal arts college, Wilfred Laurier, which is pretty good for a town of less than 100,000.
As for innovative products, the RIM Blackberry was invented there, one of the eBay founders was educated there, there are many successful software firms, and I worked for a firm that developed a world-leading telephone management system when the city was much smaller than it is now. And I don't make it a practice to keep up on the area's technology firms.
Now, I would never compare Waterloo to New York or Tokyo, but then those cities are 100 times larger. I don't doubt for a second there are more smart people in NYC than in Waterloo, but having been there, I'll wager there are many, many more stupid people. Waterloo has no areas like NYC ghettos. I'd be willing to bet that the average level of education and intelligence in Waterloo is higher than in New York City; no comments on Tokyo, having never visited.
In addition to your fine points, having worked at a number of multi-national firms, pricing policy is based on maximizing revenue. For example, the firm I currently work for sells engraved pens, etc. for use as advertising giveaways in Canada and the US. American business people seem to like these things; we sell about 30 times more in quantity to the US than we do to Canada. But pricing in the US is much lower; pens go for $1.99 to $2.49 for the most part, whereas in Canada, we are charging $5-6 for the exact same pen. The US dollar is currently only 10% more valuable than the Canadian buck. Part of it is there is less competition in Canada; part of it is fewer Canadian businesses will buy them but those who will are willing to pay the higher prices. So the fact that Apple prices iPods differently in different countries could be the result of completely rational business practice unrelated to exchange rates.
Also, I believe African elephants don't carry coconuts.
Ottawa-Gatineau? The worst ten years of my life were the four years I lived there. There are a few high tech firms with some smart dudes, but most of the people are either boring, clueless morons with high school educations working as clerks for the federal government, or lying, thieving politicians and their cronies.
Er, if you take the time to read the business page of any reasonable newspaper, you will see a column on the stock page marked "Yield", which is the value of the dividend divided by the stock's current price, and from a quick glance I'd say 70% of the stocks have a figure listed. Some are quite small, admittedly, and I was looking at the Toronto Exchange; figures on the Nasdaq would probably be lower. But I believe a fair number of stocks on the NYSE pay dividends.
Wish I had mod points, brother. As a Canadian who knows and likes many different Americans, I worry about what is happening to your country. I used to be a fan of Bush, but over the past couple of years, he and his administration have become completely unhinged. The sad thing is I don't think Hillary or Obama will change the rules.
I for one welcome our new googlecapacitor overlords.
Um, you mean like the recently announced Chevy Volt (made by GM, the "company that killed the electric car"), which has a 40 km capacity on battery, and a small electric engine that kicks in as a generator when the battery runs out? They expect to be producing it in two or three years.
Excuse me, but are you high? Here in Ontario, we are constantly short of power during hot summer days, and we have to pay to import power from Manitoba, Quebec, and New York State. Big industrial users have contracts that give them lower rates than standard, but allow Hydro One/OPG to cut them off on high demand days. And because we're still running all those coal-fired plants that the Liberals promised to shut, we continue to emit a lot of pollutants (cleaner than in years past, yes, but still major CO2 emitters).
The reasons for OPG to push conservation are 1) we're pretty much out of hydro options, 2) we don't want to burn more fossil fuels, 3) nuclear has those pesky NIMBY/waste disposal problems (overrated IMHO but a significant portion of people don't agree with me), and 4) it's cheaper to conserve a watt than it is to generate one. If people set their home AC to run at 75 F instead of 68 F, that saves a ton of generating capacity at a minimal loss of comfort. Many retail businesses reduce their lighting level, again with minimal impact on the business.
I don't recall where I saw this - I think it was The Atlantic - but the average US air conditioner has a SEER less than 8 (this was a few years back, the stats have doubtless changed), and that 30% of US power generation (admittedly a much warmer country than Canada) wouldn't be needed if they were at the new standard of 12 SEER. The EPA estimates that a change from 12 SEER to 13 SEER would save 39 400-megawatt power plants from being built.
Now, I'm going to go out on a limb, and suggest it costs $1 billion to build one of those power plants, plus tons of on-going operating expenses. That's $39 billion. If the 1/3 of US households with air conditioners operating at less than 12 SEER (estimate 12 million houses) were upgraded to 13 SEER units, at a cost of $3,000 each, the total spending would be less and far fewer emissions would be observed. That sounds like a more cost-effective strategy to me.
You also missed the word "from" in your first clause. Mod me flamebait all you want; one of the major problems with engineers (and that's what I studied at school) is their inability to communicate properly in English. You can't write a single sentence without two glaring errors, so lick yourself.
However, I am glad to see that much the good english learned you there.
Oh yeah baby! In the wild days of telecom in the late 80's, a company called Datapoint had a bonus structure based on revenue billed in the quarter. One group of sales managers booked millions of dollars of orders to "Joe Customer", "A. Warehouse", etc., in order to meet or beat their numbers. They collected hundreds of thousands in bonuses, and then quietly shipped the machines to real customers over the next quarter, at which point, they would start the whole game again.
I'm not a Sarb-Ox expert, but the fines and possible jail sentences are bad enough that a company already under scrutiny over options pricing would be pretty careful to err on the side of caution.
Of course, once both networks got into the hands of consumers, they morphed into completely different things. But that's just another similarity.
First, nice syntax. Took me three reads to understand that your acquaintance with the English language is slight at best.
Second, there are many distinguished scientists who doubt the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. Yesterday's National Post in Toronto had an article about an Oxford professor, reknowned for his studies of solar activity, who believes our current warming is driven by intense sunspot activity, and that we will experience cooling when this activity dies down. He has at least as much data to support his hypothesis as the man-made GW activists do.
To me, this is the 'second-hand smoke'(SHM) fiasco all over again. If you read the SHM studies, the only people at real risk are the non-smoking spouses of smokers. The risk, IIRC, is that 50 of 100,000 such people are twice as likely to contract cancer each year than spouses of non-smokers. People exposed to SHM on a casual basis (bars, clubs, etc.) showed neglible increases in risk. But the SHM Nazis are working to the goal where you can't smoke except in hermetically sealed chambers at your home. (There are proposals to prevent people from smoking at their homes or in their cars if there are children present.) Now, I'm not, and have never been, a smoker. But the Draconian limitations on forced on smokers, in the name of SHM, are as scary to me as the measures taken by Homeland Security. What's the next activity that the government is going to demand to regulate?
GW believers predict that each 10% rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would result in 30 cm rise in sea levels. But atmospheric CO2 has risen 100% in the last 100 years. Thus, we should see sea levels 3 m, or more than 10 feet, higher than they were a century ago. But the actual rise in sea level is less than 5 cm. When your hypothesis is off by a factor of 60, I would suggest that it is very much open to question.
You don't get out of Mommy's basement much, do you? My wife is from the Philippines - about as poor as Brazil - and I have visited there frequently. Yes, there are people, like my wife's brothers, who run a successful chain of department stores, and who make relatively lots of money. There are also many people, like virtually every politician and government officer, who live on graft, corruption, and crime. For example, we were introduced to the governor of her province, who also runs the meth trade. Police and armed forces officers supplement their incomes by kidnapping and ransoming rich kids. Ever practical, the Chinese, who run much of the trade, form associations that routinely pay local police and army officers protection money so that their children will not be touched.
Although the Philippines has lots of laws to provide services, they don't have the money. One reason is rich businessmen routinely "negotiate" their tax payments with the local official. Such negotiations always include a thick envelope for the official. So when you live in a country where the rich avoid their taxes, where the people who are supposed to uphold the law break it, and the government that is supposed to work for you steals from you, there is going to be a lot of crime because the social contract is routinely betrayed.
How long before Homeland Security demands these on all cars, and starts tracking your movements at all times? Or before some state transportation agency decides to install them on license plates, and automatically detect speeding, running yellow lights, etc.? That thing disappearing in your rear view mirror is freedom.
Hold out for the blow to the head."
Why not the dagger up the clitoris? Oh, wait; this is /. The OP couldn't possibly be a girl.
Er, how did you think cellphones worked? They - well, some - do cycle through a range of frequencies, searching for a free one.
But price-conscious consumers won't be the initial market; it will be security conscious businesses that don't want to risk losing valuable data worth much than $600. They will buy enough of them for the price to move down the demand curve, and into the consumer market. Look for them to be standard issue in 3-5 years.
As a Canadian conservative, I strongly agree. As much as I loathe the Democrats, Bush has shown contempt for the constitution, and allowed a truly frightening Thought Police to emerge, so that I'm now beginning to wonder what has happened to the United States; it used to be respected, and now it is only feared.
Of course, when China really gets on it feet, we'll look back at Bush as a piker. Those people wrote the book on ruthlessness.
Serves you right for going to Jersey!
But in the shopping madness of the past weekend, I saw hordes around iPod displays, and no one around Zune. Survey size of three stores, so take that for what it's worth..
Spot on, and already proven by history. I can't remember when I read the article - it was at least 20 years ago - but when the author correlated specific technology with economic growth in the Third World, he found that communications technology (telegraph or telephone) was by far the most positive contributor. As an example, he discussed the case of an African village where locals were selling lumber for much less than it would cost farther down river. Once they got a telegraph station, they were able to compare rates downstream with their prices, and relatively quickly adjust their prices to get a larger profit. Any new communications technology, as MacLuhan pointed out, results in increased wealth.
The potential benefits of the $100 laptop are enormous. Let's just look at AIDS; the amount of disinformation in Africa is legend. Some men believe having sex with a virgin will cure them; this often leads to the rape of young girls. Having access to reliable information may save thousands of young girls from needless pain.
Let's use another metaphor: irrigation. We have made enormous gains in agricultural productivity thanks to irrigation. And that's just adding water to a field. Now, we're talking about irrigating villages with knowledge. Surely even the most Philistine must admit that the potential benefits are without limit. These are minds thirsting for knowledge, and we can now turn on the spigot.
There is a generation of killers being trained in Africa today. Our best hope of combatting them is to provide more and more African people with access to knowledge, information, and communication.
Shaddup!
In the last century, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have shot up from 285 parts per million (ppm) to 377 ppm. Historically, carbon dioxide levels had averaged between 180 and 290 ppm. Every 10 ppm increase in CO2 concentration is associated with a half a degree Centigrade increase in temperature and a 10 meter increase in sea levels.
Now I'm just an engineer, not a climatologist, but if the highest levels in the past were 290 ppm, and we are now at 377 ppm, we are 87 ppm over the past high. If each 10 ppm increase is associated with 0.5 C increase in temp, and a 10m increase in sea level, shouldn't average temps be some 4 C higher, and sea level 87m higher, instead of the negligible 0.3 C rise in temp, and the 17 cm rise in sea level the Earth has experienced over the last 100 years?
Some wags have told me that we're not seeing the total effects because of "time lags" in the system. But, from 1900 to 1910, we saw a 10 ppm rise in CO2 levels. It's been one hundred years since that rise, and we haven't seen 2% of the expected rise in sea level. Of course for the last 90 years, we've been continuing to pump CO2 into the air, so one would think the integral effect of all those events would be even larger than the single 10 ppm increase from 1900-10.
GW may yet prove to be a problem, but we're not seeing effects anywhere near the levels the scaremongers are throwing out. And, we have yet to prove that GW is anthropogenic; the Earth has gone through these cycles before, long before man was around. But as usual, the "Big Lie" propagandists are winning the battle.
And, frankly, I could care less where Mike Moore or Ann Coulter stand on this, or any other issue. Do you seriously decide your position on an issue on the basis of who supports it, or do you look at the facts and theories, and try to choose the set that makes the most sense?