IGX

Alfred_E._Neuman wrote:

Sangoma wrote:

dead man walking wrote:so we've got nothing to worry about. good to know.

We should care about things we can influence. Not tossing the wrapper out of the car, not buying another piece of plastic that will eventually end up in the dumpster etc. As they say, you want to make the world better - start with yourself.

That's all well and good, but there comes a point where the things that need to change are beyond the power of the individual. I ride my bike to work, don't eat meat, reduce the amount of shit I buy and reuse and recycle as much as possible. But if I need to travel outside of my city I don't have a single option that's not fossil fuel powered. I could possibly afford solar for my roof, but I can't afford and certainly couldn't get city approval to cut down the trees that shade my roof.

Some infrastructure level improvements are simply too large to be funded by private enterprise. At that point it's up to our government to make decisions on and provide funding for infrastructure projects that will best prepare us for the future. And what's best for our future is not always aligned with what's best for corporate wallets short term, or even citizens' wallets and convenience short term. That's why we elect our supposed best and brightest to go and make the hard decisions based on the best information. Instead, what we get is a bought and paid for system to maintain the status quo.

I always get surprised when people come with the revelation expressed in the last two lines of your post. If it still is for you - grow up, man, that's how the system has worked for generations. Current system is the system of marketing designed to create the illusion of participation in major events. So yeah, the guy promises mountains, and when he is elected he does the exactly opposite. Since when this is news? When was it any different?

From here you can go in one of two ways. One - protest, participate in demonstrations and marches (by the way, for the benefit of another group of lying wankers who use the protest for their interests) and lose your sleep. Two - forget about this shit, stop reading newspapers and watching TV news and concentrate on things that are close to you. I don't think any one of us can honestly say that all of these things have been taken care of sufficiently so that we should now aim at larger targets.

I prefer looking after myself. Not in an egotistic way, but in terms of becoming a better person overall. After all, the better me - healthier, more educated, richer, more relaxed and mentally balanced - will make more difference when necessary.

One example to conclude. Couple of weeks ago I received the patient for a fractured hip operation from the ward where he spent couple of days. The patient stank of sweat and urine; in other words nursing care was bad. I know for a fact that every one of these nurses knows how bad Trump is and why, and you just have to ask one of them once to get the speech of "crazy Americans where such things are possible" etc. If, instead of concentrating on the News they took their own duties more seriously it would make a difference for that poor old guy, and the World would become a little better place. Obviously, cleaning shit is not as glamorous or fun as demonstrating one's political wisdom, but it is unfortunately much more important.

warming climate appears to be causing problems for migrating songbirds. not unexpected, but this study is worrisome.

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/05/16/so ... nt-spring/

what's happening to the antarctic ice sheet?

. . . some scientists fear that Antarctica’s ice sheet may have entered the early stages of an unstoppable disintegration.

Because the collapse of vulnerable parts of the ice sheet could raise the sea level dramatically, the continued existence of the world’s great coastal cities — Miami, New York, Shanghai and many more — is tied to Antarctica’s fate.

little is certain and no one is predicting immediate catastrope.

fun pictures (but not nudes)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... flood.html

http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/cl ... -saved-it?
Long read, but interesting in light of climate change.

thanks for posting that.

donnie dumpling pulls out of paris.

i look forward to the day mar a lago is inundated and fat donald sinks beneath the rising waters like a leaden turd

Trump is a fucking liar.

He said we're(America) gonna keep winning so much, I'll get tired of it.

I have not gotten tired of it whatsoever!

Climate of Complete Certainty

Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.

Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

The real fun of course is the barrage of the tangential attacks on the author's persona hours after the article has been published. Yet the funniest thing is that this guy is moderate at best, which is clear from his sequel to the article:

Answering Your Climate Questions

since you admire brett stephens, here's his most recent:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/opin ... eft-region

here is may's co2 news:

Carbon Dioxide Set an All-Time Monthly High

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/carb ... high-21507

the article includes a nice graph for the non-readers

and here is a clever graphic re increasing co2:

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/400- ... iral-20748

The No. 2 diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing resigned Monday, telling staff his conscience would not permit him to formally notify the Chinese that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord.

David H. Rank, a career Foreign Service officer of 27 years, had been acting ambassador until former Iowa governor Terry Branstad (R) was confirmed as the new ambassador last month. Rank held a town meeting with embassy employees to explain he had offered his resignation and it had been accepted.

As the head of the embassy until Branstad arrives, it was Rank’s responsibility to deliver a formal notification of the U.S. intention to withdraw from the climate pact.

According to a State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid, Rank was unwilling to deliver the demarche.

He told his staff that as “a parent, a patriot and a Christian,” he could not in good conscience play a role in implementing President Trump’s decision to withdraw, according to a colleague familiar with Rank’s comments.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... 80cf618920

the weather channel comments on how trump's climate policy could undermine his businesses:

Oh, the Irony: Trump May Have Sped Up Damage to His Real Estate Holdings By Pulling Out of the Paris Accord

https://weather.com/science/environment ... ate-change

with a graphic showing how sea-level rise will affect mar-a-lago

it's even hotter than you thought

After correcting for problems caused by the decaying orbit of satellites, as well as other factors, they have produced a new record showing 36% faster warming since 1979 and nearly 140% faster (i.e. 2.4 times larger) warming since 1998. This is in comparison to the previous version 3 of the lower tropospheric temperature (TLT) data published in 2009.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-corre ... since-1998

with graphs

Do penises cause climate change? Discuss

But two US academics, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, recently came up with an even better one. They managed to get published in a social sciences journal a paper arguing that the penis is not in fact a male reproductive organ but merely a social construct and that, furthermore, penises are responsible for causing climate change.

It ought to go without saying that their paper, ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’, was a spoof. Yet it was peer-reviewed by two supposed experts in gender studies, one of whom praised the way it captured ‘the issue of hypermasculinity through a multidimensional and nonlinear process’, and the other of whom marked it ‘outstanding’ in every applicable category.

There are similar problems with her particular area of interest, global warming. A scare industry worth an annual $1.5 trillion has been built on the notion that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for unprecedented and catastrophic changes to the world’s climate. Yet the scientists promoting this hypothesis are a fairly small, closed shop who validate one another’s work in a process which has been nicknamed ‘pal review’ and whose response to criticism from dissidents is to bully them, smear them and have them denied access to mainstream science journals.

But what should disturb us almost more, I think, is the broader problem that generation after generation of impressionable kids are now paying good money — and expecting good jobs afterwards — to study pure, unmitigated, mind-warping drivel.

Stephen Hawking speaking to the BBC on his 75th birthday:

"We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid," he told BBC News.

"Climate change is one of the great dangers we face, and it's one we can prevent if we act now. By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children."

who should i believe, hawking or sangria?

dead man walking wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2017 4:40 pm Stephen Hawking speaking to the BBC on his 75th birthday:

"We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid," he told BBC News.

"Climate change is one of the great dangers we face, and it's one we can prevent if we act now. By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children."

who should i believe, hawking or sangria?

Based on the evidence shown, I recommend sangria. I've never read a single article suggesting that AGW will turn us into Venus. I think Hawking's speaking device may have been hacked.

If you wear a hat, you don't get any sun. Therefore climate change is not an issue.

Science.

dead man walking wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2017 4:40 pm Stephen Hawking speaking to the BBC on his 75th birthday:

"We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid," he told BBC News.

My theory is that if the Earth had a tipping point, we've had hit it multiple times due to asteroids or volcanism or sun flares or other big pulses to the system. No geologic signs of that.

medium term, climate change is a hyooge risk.

short term, pompadour donnie and kim jong-un constitute a more worriesome threat. i doubt turd has a hat that will protect him from that pair.

Scientists Criticize Stephen Hawking’s ‘Bizarre’ Claim Trump Will Push Earth ‘Over The Brink’

Climate scientists, even those usually worried about future global warming, pushed back against Hawking’s claims that Earth would become like Venus.

Meteorologist Ryan Maue called Hawking’s statements “bizarre,” and professor and environmental activist Bjorn Lomborg noted how the Paris agreement would only avert 0.2 degrees of projected global warming.

Ah yes, Stephen "new world order guy" Hawking. Fuck that commie trash.

nafod wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2017 7:32 pm

dead man walking wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2017 4:40 pm Stephen Hawking speaking to the BBC on his 75th birthday:

"We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump's action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees, and raining sulphuric acid," he told BBC News.

My theory is that if the Earth had a tipping point, we've had hit it multiple times due to asteroids or volcanism or sun flares or other big pulses to the system. No geologic signs of that.

In my lifetime it's been one tipping point after another. Miraculously, we survived them all.

Western climate change alarmists won’t admit they are wrong

When the scientists are the main contributors to the script, the tipping point will be something like the forever forthcoming moment when the Gulf Stream turns upside down or the Antarctic ice sheet comes off its hinges, or any other extreme event which, although it persists in not happening, could happen sooner than we think. (Science correspondents who can write a phrase like “sooner than we think” seldom realise that they might have already lost you with the word “could”.)

When the politicians join in the writing, the dramatic language declines to the infantile. There are only 50 days (former British PM Gordon Brown) or 100 months (Prince Charles wearing his political hat) left for mankind to “do something” about “the greatest moral challenge … of our generation” (Kevin Rudd, before he arrived at the Copenhagen climate shindig in 2009).

American physicist Richard Feynman said that if a fact doesn’t fit the theory, the theory has to go. Feynman was a scientist. Einstein realised that the Michelson-Morley experiment hinted at a possible fact that might not fit Newton’s theory of celestial mechanics. Einstein was a scientist, too. Those of us who are not scientists, but who are sceptical about the validity of this whole issue — who suspect that the alleged problem might be less of a problem than is made out — have plenty of great scientific names to point to for exemplars, and it could even be said that we could point to the whole of science itself. Being resistant to the force of its own inertia is one of the things that science does.

When the climatologists upgraded their frame of certainty from global warming to climate change, the bet-hedging man­oeuvre was so blatant that some of the sceptics started predicting in their turn: the alarmist cause must surely now collapse, like a house of cards. A tipping point had been reached.

Unfortunately for the cause of rational critical inquiry, the campaign for immediate action against climate doom reaches a tipping point every few minutes, because the observations, if not the calculations, never cease exposing it as a fantasy.

Michael Mann contempt of court???

I don't know who PSI is (clearly has a dog in the fight) or the validity of the article, but if true America's most litigious climate scientist looks to be in contempt of court because he refuses to turn his data over to the courts. As Arsenio Hall used to say, makes you want to go hmmmmm.

Penn State climate scientist, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann commits contempt of court in the ‘climate science trial of the century.’ Prominent alarmist shockingly defies judge and refuses to surrender data for open court examination. Only possible outcome: Mann’s humiliation, defeat and likely criminal investigation in the U.S...
...A bitter and embarrassing defeat for the self-styled ‘Nobel Prize winner’ who acted as if he was the epitome of virtue, this outcome shames not only Michael Mann, but puts the climate science community in crisis. Many hundreds of peer-reviewed papers cite Mann’s work, which is now effectively junked. Despite having deep-pocketed backers willing and able to feed his ego as a publicity-seeking mouthpiece against skeptics, Mann’s credibility as a champion of environmentalism is in tatters.

He looks something like Couch FWIW.

Sangoma wrote: ↑Tue Jul 04, 2017 12:30 am global warming. A scare industry worth an annual $1.5 trillion

Who's paying or getting $1.5T?