Again it shows just how low the education level here is…
In fact is is a digital signal that can be made virtually invincible to EMP, save for total jamming. You can lose 99% and still recover everything; military signals work this way. Not not providing similar to common citizens is INDEED a disgrace.

Without Christianity imposing Jews-Hating, Hitler woulkd NEVER occure.
Though many other nasty(er) things could, indeed.
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I have a name for my own public system: Shit Hit The Fan Morality. At some point, there will be a major societal disaster. Certain types of social systems do better in those circumstances than others.
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Self-Filfulling prophecy. Societies prone to disasters are very likely to cause them if unchecked.

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There is, however, a presumption that there is a Darwinian process at work producing the society we see around us – hence a trajectory.
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Yes, and one point is: what was good before, can be bad now.
What you miss is the new rules arn’t “enabled” by new situation, they are FORCED by it. If we behave like we are 10000 on Earth, then very soon we WILL be 10000, or zero. Especially, low birth rates are nececcery now we are 6000 000 000 (!) . And unmarried children are also caused by it, as lone mothers are happier with 1 child whereas married want 3.
Likewise the rule “eat all you can” is crucial in a post-disaster society, but it would be suicidal to live by it now.
The real problem is exactly the opposite – we must FIGHT our instincts as they draW us back.

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The issue of marriage and childbearing is more complicated than the treatment here, which presumes that it is constant throughout history and different social organizations.

Women having children outside of marriage was very widespread in some agrarian societies, and marriage institutions were more loosely organized as well…//
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VERY true. Many thing you brand as “tradition breaking” is just return to old values. Surely you consider nudists a “rule breaker”, but in 16th century it was common for men and women to bathe naked… and so on

Thanks a lot for the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

“Rawls argues that the representative parties in the original position would select two principles of justice:

1. Each citizen is guaranteed a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties, which is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all others;
2. Social and economic inequalities must satisfy two conditions:
* All offices and positions must be open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity;
* Economic inequalities are only permitted insofar as they are to the greatest benefit of the least well off members of society.”

“a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties”

I love it!! ‘Adequate.’ I can just picture Hillary drolling that out too.

“* Economic inequalities are only permitted insofar as they are to the greatest benefit of the least well off members of society.”

So at the end of the day he’s just a Marxist with lipstick. I don’t see how that can be read any other way.

How many non-Christians a day do you generally see raping and murdering? Oh, maybe we have morals, too. In fact, there’s nothing innovative or special about Judeo-Chistian morality – it was copied from first the Babylonians and then the Romans. And said imperials must’ve been following said morality to some degree for it have been observed.

Hitler is only one of many. We remember him and Stalin because they had big populations to work with. But earlier tyrants have killed bigger percentages of their populations and made them even unhappier.

> Many on the Left see something wrong, and they want it corrected right now.

Or like we lefties when the Administration kept infringing our privacy and ignoring that bit in the Constitution about a lawyer for Padilla. Why on earth would we want these things corrected right now?

What you’re refering to is more the Iron Curtain of information flow (or the Bamboo one). I’ll have to write about that sometime, as I was in the USSR as that curtain was starting to crumble.

I pick on Japan, the USSR and China a lot in my examples because I’ve lived and worked in the former two and I’m married to someone from the latter – so I know them well.

By comparison, man made global warming, if it is occurring, will do what exactly? Today’s news is that people living in near desert areas will face desert conditions. Doubtless some will die and some will migrate, but civilization will not be any more affected than it has been by previous such occurances.

The biggest issue I have with those concerned about global warming is their logic. If man made gases cause global warming, and global warming is bad, then we should stop producing these gases entirely. Otherwise we have delayed the problem, not solved it. To do that the population of the earth will have to revert to abject poverty, or be substantially reduced. See part A above.

We had huge opium use in America between 1860 and 1900. It caused barely a ripple in America. Why?

This is conjecture but my guess is that the Brits didn’t control the price.

Opium is less deleterious than alcohol (which America also consumed in vast quantities).

So what did China do wrong? In a word prohibition. Prohibition increased the amount of money extracted from the Chinese economy.

Solar output has increased .5% over the last 100 years. On a strictly radiation basis that accounts for at least 50% and probably more like 2/3s of the estimated temperature increase in that period. The remainder is well into the noise level of variability.

A Geologist Looks At Global Warming

Demographics

This thread is becoming an anti-Kyoto echo chamber. Opposing views?

Cheers,
Me

Going back a few posts in response to Josh’s statement that “weather forecasting is very accurate for big systems, but doesn’t work so well in very ‘local’ cases due to certain local behaviours falling through the ‘cracks’ of the (numerical) weather grid”:

What’s the confidence level for the predictions? What’s the step-size for each variable? What are the initial conditions? How is smoothing (filtering) accomplished?

Hurricane prediction amply illustrates the head-on collision between scientific modeling and policy-making. Anyone who’s spent a half-hour reading NOAA’s website will realize that the highest-accuracy hurricane models (wind-speed, storm surge, track) are really only any good for about 24 hours. “Any good” meaning do I pack up and leave 72 hours from landfall or 24 hours from landfall? Katrina, sadly, demonstrated the folly of relying too much on prognosticators and policy-makers instead of gut instinct. As you recall, the heavier localized destruction was in Miss., which was not very densely populated. It was logistically easy for the state authorities there to issue evacuation warnings early on (when the confidence level of the storm hitting their state was still in the 50-50 ballpark). Why? Not that much impact to get a few thousand mainly-rural/small town folks to move out of possible harm’s way–people who are also generally more aware of the weather and their gut instincts when it comes to weather impacts on their day-to-day lives. New Orleans, on the other hand, was a human disaster precisely because the state and local authorities waited until it was too late to issue the “get out of the way!”. They missed the political window of opportunity between evacuating too early (i.e. getting egg on their face if the storm missed) and evacuating people too late–which they obviously did (hence Mayor Nagin’s fleets of sunken school buses).

The problem that climate skeptics like myself have with the current political debate is that the computer-generated crystal ball is murkier and murkier the bigger the model gets, since ALL models are by nature imperfect. They are usually intended to generate optimized results: optimized for speed of calculation, single- or couple-variable resolution (i.e. micro-scale accuracy), cost, etc. And modeling the earth’s climate is–ooooh, boy–complex. So I have a HUGE problem with how politicized the climate debate has become. The “big system” weather models that your average NOAA weather forcaster uses are “good enough” for what we use them for (navigation and observation-augmented local forecasting). I.e. pilots, high-seas and coastal shipping, trucking, railways are the primary beneficiaries. That’s because the cost-benefit analysis for more accurate models weighs heavily toward low-cost. For instance, as someone who lives along the Rocky Mountains, it would be ridiculous for me to ask the government to sponsor a highly-accurate model for my low-population-density locale. It’s much easier and cheaper for the gubmint to issue a blanket “hey dumbasses, look out there’s a 800-mile-long cold front coming through sometime in the next two to four days and you might get a sh*tload of snow all over your street.” When it doesn’t materialize, no big deal, because you can safely bet your entire savings account that the trend over my stay in the Rockies will be to get hammered with snow much more than, say, Arizona. From a policy perspective, it is very easy to sympathize with the historically dim view toward self-endangerment on a local scale: building stupidly-placed S California foothills subdivisions where wildfires sweep through every 10 or 20 or even 50 years; mudslides and flash floods knocking over homes at the feet of steep, loosely-congomerated hillsides; coastal beach houses on stilts washing away when the wind kicks up some big waves; or a city that’s below freakin’ sea level having a few dikes give way in a Category 5 hurricane.

If the models are so good, then why did FEMA get heavily criticized, but not NOAA??

So, count me a heavy skeptic when I hear politically-minded climate scientists spout policy opinion. The global climate models are simply incomplete, and the debate should remain in the journals–NOT in the media or at world economic fora–until the model have been correlated with enough empirical data that the confidence interval is something that venture capitalists are willing to throw money at (say, the 3-sigma level). And what will it take to get there? A heck of a lot more than the dataset we have now. Don’t believe me? Go read the latest articles in Science about things like solar flux input, which is itself highly dependent on current SOLAR models and some (in my very humble opinion) very sparse sunspot data from the last 1000 years. I’m NOT saying that “oh, those dumbasses don’t have their solar model right.” I’m saying, hmm, how confident am I that the astrophysics community has a good understanding of not only the interior workings of the sun, but how the sun’s radiation couples to the earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere, and furthermore how the atmosphere couples to the magnetosphere? So I go read those journals and realize that, geez, there’s a heck of a lot we don’t know. So now, can you seriously look me in the face and tell me you think sea level is going to rise by anywhere from X to Y centimeters in the next Z years to even 1-sigma confidence–when they’ve only very recently become cognizant of changes in, say, the polar caps–is comical. I get criticized because I lend serious credence to (in fact, complete trust in) the written testimony of some people who say they saw someone living after he had been crucified, and _I’m_ derided as “religious”? Under those rules, Kyoto adherents should be registered as a cult.

Summary: do I think the climate is warming? The short-term trend is undeniable. Is this warming trend long term and unprecedented? Don’t know, probably not (geologically speaking). How will it impact humanity? Don’t know, have some guesses, all with decent probabilities of occurring–I’m a natural scientist not a sociologist. Can we refine the model and predict better before the mythical 100-year mark, and furthermore does it matter? Probably not, since if the climate can change very quickly in one direction, with the current poor models who’s to say it can’t cool back down quickly? So what can we do in the interim? Continue to encourage conservation, free the global energy markets, pass out more disaster preparedness kits, and aggressively pursue more transparency and less reactionism on the part of gov’ts worldwide, so that we don’t hyperventilate ourselves into stupor.

Done,
Me

There is a long chain of questions that must be answered before one decides that a Kyoto-style remediation attempt makes any sense whatsoever.

Just a few:

1. Is global warming measurable on a deeply historical basis? Can tree rings, ice cores and like really provide decent comparable data to Mr. Fahrenheit’s invention? How do you measure oceanic temperatures from 400 years ago?

2. If warming is measurable, what time period is sufficient for us to draw important conclusions?

3. Can we project this forward ala Mann’s hockey stick, or is the system to varying degrees self-correcting?

4. If the planet is warming, is this necessarily a bad thing?

5. If it is a bad thing, is man to blame? Are we sure it isn’t, say, the sun?

6. Can this be proven using backtested data?

7. If man is proven to be the cause, is there a solution that man can undertake that will actually have a material impact on mean global temperatures?

8. If there is such a solution, can it be implemented equitably and cost-effectively on a global basis?

Note that the non-linear-thinbking liberal-leftists simply assume the warming and leap all the way to the end of the questions. Some go even further than that and imagine using it as a way to tax the United States and give the money to the United Nations. Their dreams and our nightmares.

I’ve observed that when the ca-ca hits the wind propulsion device, how you feel about the resultant situation depends on how the distribution of the ca-ca post impact with wind propulsion device directly affected you?\. In other words, when TSHTF, the result is usually not evenly distributed. The more ca-ca you catch, the less you like the event.

On climate models, even the simplest are pretty complicated and don’t predict the current situation very well when using the past 100 or so years of pretty good data. This strongly implies the models are mis-specified in some important ways. What’s interesting is how vigorously the True Believers on Anthropogenic Global Warming push the ‘consensus’ argument from authority. This is usually indicative of an otherwise weak position.

I have no doubt that global warming has happened over the past 40 or so years. Since that doesn’t correlate very well with the increases in human-caused CO2 (especially given that we had global cooling for a few decades prior to the most previous 40 years of warming), it is not up the the critics to prove AGW wrong, it is incumbent that AGW proponents decisively prove that it is. Since they appear both unable to do this and unwilling to debate the point, I dismiss their claims pending a better effort on their part.