There is More CO2 in the Atmosphere Today Than Any Point Since the Evolution of Humans (cnn.com) 357
According to data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is over 415 parts per million (ppm), far higher than at any point in the last 800,000 years, since before the evolution of homo sapiens. From a report: Holthaus spotted the new high on Sunday when it was tweeted out by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which measures daily CO2 rates at Mauna Loa along with scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Measurements have been ongoing since the program was started in 1958 by the late Charles David Keeling, for whom the Keeling Curve, a graph of increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, is named. "This is the first time in human history our planet's atmosphere has had more than 415ppm CO2," Holthaus said in a widely shared tweet. "Not just in recorded history, not just since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Since before modern humans existed millions of years ago," added Holthaus.
You don't care, why should we? (Score:5, Insightful)
We could cut CO2 emissions drastically by switching to nuclear power, but the environmental lobby refuse to accept this solution and would rather burn coal. What this tells us is that climate change is a very minor issue; so minor that having a nuclear power plant built is worse than climate change.
If nuclear power is worse than climate change then clearly there's nothing to worry about.
Re:You don't care, why should we? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll bite. What, in particular, do you find "not exactly environmentally friendly" about nuclear power?
Is it the incredibly small number of deaths it causes (fewer deaths from nuclear power in all of history than died in traffic this morning)? Or the zero carbon emissions?
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How about CO2 emissions from the gigantic concrete construction required to build a reactor, cooling towers, and all the other stuff that goes with it?
There's also that it's simply not competitive. Unsubsidized solar+storage is cheaper, by a fair margin. Particularly if you remove the subsidy for nuke plants, like the government covering all the risk while the business keeps all the profit.
There's also that if we start TODAY, you will be lucky to start the reactor in 10 years. We can build a LOT of renewabl
Ignoring nuclear prolongs fossil fuels (Score:3)
... you will be lucky to start the reactor in 10 years. We can build a LOT of renewable power and have it online in less time.
But not enough renewables, and not enough storage for when renewables are down, and not enough as demand for electricity increases (ex electric vehicles go mainstream, the developing worlds emerging middle class gets EVs, ...).
Nuclear is part of the CO2 solution, get over it, ignoring nuclear only prolongs fossil fuels. It wasn't Trump that gave US coal a new lease on life, it was in part EU shutting down nuclear capacity. US coal exports to Europe doubled.
And as an added environmental benefit, new r
Nuclear is safe until it isn't (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll bite. What, in particular, do you find "not exactly environmentally friendly" about nuclear power?
You cannot possibly be that naive. Nuclear power has lots of nasty waste and other problems including but not limited to nuclear weapon proliferation. The waste doesn't come in the form of carbon and the waste is normally comparatively contained (except when it isn't) but it is acutely toxic and long lasting and challenging to mitigate. Let's not pretend that nuclear waste isn't a real problem. Not to mention when things go wrong with nuclear power they can go REALLY wrong.
Is it the incredibly small number of deaths it causes (fewer deaths from nuclear power in all of history than died in traffic this morning)?
This is a bogus and disingenuous statistic. Directly attributable deaths are only one of the failure modes for nuclear power. Let's look at Chernobyl. To this day Ukraine spends 5-7% of their GDP on recovery activities. Belarus has estimated to have spent $235 billion on the disaster as of 2005. Hundreds of billions have been spent on dealing with the disaster. Nearly 2 million acres of farm land was removed from production for a significant period of time. A 30km area around the plant has been permanently evacuated and rendered unihabitable. Over 500,000 people have been resettled. And they were lucky that they were able to contain the explosion when they were or a far wider area would have been seriously contaminated.
Nuclear power is very safe until it very much isn't. Pretending otherwise is foolish even if we concede that it's still the least worst option. (which I think is true) There also is the problem of nuclear weapon proliferation which is hard to separate from nuclear power generation.
Or the zero carbon emissions?
The carbon footprint of nuclear power is not zero. It's obviously far lower than fossil fuels and doesn't have direct emissions but it does have carbon in the cycle. Carbon is released in the concrete and steel and other materials used to make the power stations. The mining and processing of the ores for uranium and other fuels typically involves the use of internal combustion engines and fossil fuels. Nuclear is far better for carbon emissions than fossil fuels but it isn't carbon neutral or carbon free. That said, it's kind of obviously the best available choice and a necessity for combating climate change at least until we can figure out fusion power (if we ever do).
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Chernobyl is a bogus argument. Shitty design that hasn't been used by any normal country since the 1950s. Even Chernobyl would have been fine with a few caveats:
(1) The engineers in charge not disabling critical safety systems for testing purposes.
(2) Proper control rod design to avoid increasing power when power is supposed to be reduced.
(3) A containment building
Either of the three would have prevented the accident from happening or would have mitigated its effects.
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Nuclear power has lots of nasty waste and other problems including but not limited to nuclear weapon proliferation.
Weapon proliferation has incredible environmental benefits. Dumping a few nukes on major cities would do wonders for our over populated planet.
Not to mention when things go wrong with nuclear power they can go REALLY wrong.
Yeah but it's no where near as bad as when things go right with fossil fuels. And lets face it those green things like hydro power, well when that goes wrong it does more damage in one go than all the world's nuclear incidents combined.
Let's look at Chernobyl
Why? Chernobyl has nothing to do with nuclear power. It has to do with colossal idiots doing colossally idiotic things. In fact they
Stop judging nuclear by Soviet design & operat (Score:3)
You cannot possibly be that naive. Nuclear power has lots of nasty waste and other problems including but not limited to nuclear weapon proliferation. The waste doesn't come in the form of carbon and the waste is normally comparatively contained (except when it isn't) but it is acutely toxic and long lasting and challenging to mitigate. Let's not pretend that nuclear waste isn't a real problem.
You might want to reconsider who is the naive and misinformed party in this conversation. Modern molten salt reactors "can be designed to burn (convert to energy) spent nuclear fuel and weapons-related materials and not produce nuclear materials with proliferation risks."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Not to mention when things go wrong with nuclear power they can go REALLY wrong.
Modern molten salt reactor designs (MSRs)
"Pressure
MSRs operate at low (although above ambient) pressure. In the event of a malfunction, this means that the risks of an explosion are low.
Cooling
Most MS
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Who cares? Most countries that are technologically advanced enough for nuclear power could already make nukes if they desired.
Put it this way -- US, Russia, China, France, UK, India, Pakistan are already nuclear weapons states and hold 50% of the world's population. Breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing won't change much. France and China already do reprocess. US doesn't because of a peanut farmer 40 years ago.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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One line in a Wikipedia page with no source given. Wow. PROBLEM SOLVED!
Since you apparently haven't mastered google yet here is a google search on scholarly articles on molten salt reactors and proliferation.
"Non-proliferation attributes of molten salt reactors"
U Gat, JR Engel
Nuclear Engineering and Design, Volume 201, Issues 2–3, October 2000, Pages 327-334
"These denatured MSRs would also have favorable resource-utilization characteristics and substantial resistance to proliferation of weapons-usable nuclear materials."
"Development status and potential program
Molten salt consumes waste, non-proliferating (Score:2)
It's what you do with the waste. Either it's stored, or if you've effectively built a breeder reactor, well then I guess you can make nukes.
Modern molten salt reactor "can be designed to burn (convert to energy) spent nuclear fuel and weapons-related materials and not produce nuclear materials with proliferation risks."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It's what you do with the waste.
Bury it in containers that will last a couple hundred years. After that, let the future take care of the stuff.
At any rate, it's also obscenely expensive, and at the price points it isn't going to replace gas generation.
I think, but don't know for certain, that the cost is mostly due to regulation -- safety and otherwise. Eliminate the safety regs and it gets cheaper. Again, let the future take care of itself. The immediate concern is to show a profit and have enough spin to blame someone else for any troubles. Taa-daa! Americas' great again.
Re:You don't care, why should we? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, seriously no. Nuclear power is not exactly environmentally friendly, and nuclear power is obscenely expensive (and no, I don't want reactors deregulated.
No indeed, it's not. But of all current options, it's the lesser evil until we got fusion power up and running.
People ran the numbers and windmills&solar alone simply won't suffice our needs. We really need something else. I'd rather take reasonable local risks of nuclear than global risks of climate change. People in 100 year from now will thank us if we do go nuclear.
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How is it the lesser evil? When renewables are certainly more cost effective than nuclear, it seems the worst option as an alternative to fossil fuels.
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What criteria did they use to quantify how much energy storage is needed?
Let's say current levels of consumption throughout the winter.
Harassment helped drive up costs (Score:3)
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Expensive - to whom? France pays less than 0.15 Euro per kWh [selectra.info], and Germany pays over half that [cleanenergywire.org]. The typical German pays around 0.07 Euro per kWh just to subsidize "green" power (well, it is green - in that there is a ton of cash just thrown at it). The share of just the renewable subsidy the typical German pays alone would pay HALF the power bill of their French neighbors.
That doesn't seem really pretty cheap, does it? The German consumer is literally paying in just subsidies (not power, not delivery, n
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Socialism done right can be a very good and positive thing.
How do you know that it is possible to do it "right" ? Every single time people have tried it, it failed in short order.
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Why is "socialism" such a nasty word. Socialism done right can be a very good and positive thing.
It's the done right part that's hard. Done wrong socialism produces millions dead. Seems like a big risk. Especially since the current leftists in the US are far more interested in identity politics than economics.
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Re:Nothing positive about Theft. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, providing you define theft as any government with taxation powers. The Founding Fathers did not intend no taxation, they intended that there be no taxation without representation. Since the US is a democracy where the body that has taxation powers, Congress, is elected, you have a free society. That you don't want to pay taxes and you somehow feel that's theft is because you're operating from a private definition of "theft" which has nothing to do with what taxation is, or what theft is. You're just a greedy sociopath trying to cover up that fact by invoking absurd definitions.
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The Founding Fathers intended tax on commerce, not on incomes or wealth. It's why it took a Constitutional amendment (in the former) and quite a few acts of Congress (in the latter) to actually start that kind of collection. The Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 [justia.com] made all Federal taxes uniform throughout the States. Which means that if the Federal Government - at the time of the Founding Fathers - was to tax "income", it would have to do so evenly across the States, by population.
Taxation was t
Re:Nothing positive about Theft. (Score:5, Informative)
Of course Congress is a democracy, it's just that First Past the Post is not optimal. There's no black and white in the real world, just shades of grey. Trying to define Congress is anything but a democratically selected body just shows that you're either ignorant, or just simply lying.
Actual governments have to function. The US learned that very early on when it became clear the Articles of Confederation, which tried to preserve the notion of the states as sovereign entities, rendered the Federal government so impotent that nothing could be done. Trying to get thirteen states to agree on even lending powers was impossible.
This is why absolutism in ideology is always a fail, why these un-nuanced ideological positions either lead to tyranny or to chaos. The Framers saw the problem and fixed it with a proper constitution, rather than just letting the young union fly to pieces. If the Articles of Confederation had stayed in place, it's probable the United States would have collapsed, and Britain and France would probably have hoovered up the pieces.
You can either have a functional government, or whatever the fuck it is you think should be in its place.
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No you are absurd.
Go and look up the Definition of a Democracy. Also, go and look up the founding fathers writing on Democracy. They actively worked to prevent a Democracy in American and the reason the Government is setup this way is expressly to prevent a Democracy.
In order for a Democracy to exist something has to be put into place by a Majority Vote AND WITHOUT the possibility of a counter control that works on minoity mechanism.
Remember California Prop 8 their Marriage proposal? It was "Democratical
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If you want *your* definition of a democracy. I have no reason to accept private definitions of a word, nor do I have to adhere to your concept, which would be unworkable and lead to chaos.
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Okay this is the Definition of Democracy I have.
"From Middle French democratie (French démocratie), from Medieval Latin democratia, from Ancient Greek ÎÎμÎÎÏαÏÎα (dÄ"mokratÃa).
Surface analysis: demo- (âoepeopleâ) +âZ -cracy (âoeruleâ)"
PeopleRule
In the united States "The People" do not rule. They are RULED over. Here is the pecking order in America.
1st Class citizen: Members of the elected gov
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These "America is not a democracy" claims are absurd.
We're a Constitutional Federal Republic [wikipedia.org]. And furthermore, we have guaranteed rights that a majority cannot overturn (which can happen in a Democracy). It's why a State like Wyoming has as much sway in the Senate as a State like California. That's not democratic, that's republican in nature.
but I don't think there's anyone out there that imagines that any state made up of hundreds of millions of citizens could ever function as a direct democracy.
That is EXACTLY what is being attempted via the national popular vote compact [wikipedia.org]. Democracy, most votes wins all, even if your State didn't vote that way.
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You're invoking a rather limited definition of a democracy that could best be described as a direct democracy. There are other forms of democracy. After all, the UK, Israel and New Zealand actually have parliamentary supremacy (their constitution is whatever their parliament says it is), and yet they still have democratically-constituted legislative bodies. Hence, they are democracies; representative democracies. They also have elements of their governments that are not elected; in particular the judiciary
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If you think socialism is theft you really don't understand either term.
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Well, it isn't socialism. However, the Free Market more or less presumes that the feedback loop is quite quick. If all the CO2 + methane in the atmosphere causes a runaway greenhouse effect 20 years from now, all the Free Market drivel in the world won't stop it. How could that happen? The increased heating causes the permafrost to de-perma and release a lot more greenhouse gas...which causes more warming...which causes more to de-perma...you get the idea.
then we'd better get hot ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then we'd better get hot ... start getting some technological solutions in place.
We're not going to stop using energy, so we'd best find ways to sequester CO2.
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We can stop using fossil energy, and sequester CO2 at the same time. This is the only scenario that could turn human activity carbon-negative.
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Energy can be effectively carbon neutral RIGHT NOW, if we fund that, ...
Let's see... According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, from their "U.S. Battery Storage Market Trends", from May 2018, the average cost of a kilowatt-hour of battery storage is about $1,500. This is to produce the battery capacity. Since we're looking at MWh of storage, we'll scale it up, getting $1,500,000 per MWh of storage. A smallish wind-generation farm, roughly 100 MW, costs around $150 million, which is what a single hour's backup battery cost for that production capacity is. If we wan
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Then don't be an idiot and use one of the large scale commercially viable, economically sound energy storage solutions in use all over the world today instead of batteries. Batteries are great if you need to take them along or if you're called Tesla and see a marketing opportunity but otherwise they're not too interesting as you've just found out.
Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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age of modern humans (Score:2)
Modern humans are less than 500,000 years old and probably much younger. Homo Erectus (known for his correct erect posture) arose about 2 million years ago. Australopitheus Afrarenis is roughly 3.4 million years old. Apes themselves are about 8 million years old.
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Who in Africa is Sarah and why does she have a submarine?
I think I found the fermi paradox (Score:3)
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You violated Newtons 3rd law. Just because we fail to find the optimal solution to a problem does not mean it does not exist. It just means you are either too stupid to find it or easily give up like a wimp. Neither of which suits the scientific approach.
Additionally, the Fermi Paradox is a joke and is pure BS psychology and relies heavily on the idea that the universe, life, and other potential civilizations only operate within the scopes of our own understanding. Our planets might be "theoretical part
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where is the apology?
Additionaly, warmer is just warmer, it speakes nothing to the cause or what the belief in that cause may be.
So lets break it down.
I do not believe in "GW" as the rest of you religous zealots believe in it.
I just accept that GW is possible, but refuse to accept that the "pseudo-scientists" are correct about the cause and I have even more disbelieve that they even believe in their garbage science when they put the problems in front of politicians... people KNOWN to do nothing but get it w
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The problem is still having to pay for it being connected and them using the excuse that they cannot guarantee a de-engerized line to CONTROL what I can or cannot do. The fact that I can control the main breaker is immaterial to the problem at hand.
Try to keep up here... if you keep erecting strawman arguments you are only going to... o wait.. you do want to derail the conversation don't you?
Okay, which company do you work for?
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Yep. As importantly as energy, in the process, they use up all of the ready iron in the crust. It oxidizes away into dust...
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Quite possibly. To use Nick Bostrom's balls-in-an-urn analogy, fossil fuels are a very dark gray ball.
Great news - for plants (Score:3, Insightful)
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While I'm not going to argue about rainforests, "forests" generally is not quite so clear?
There are more trees in North America today than 100 years ago, and annually forest growth exceeds harvesting by something like 40%.
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There are more trees in North America today than 100 years ago, and annually forest growth exceeds harvesting by something like 40%
Okay, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I think I'll need a source for that if you have one at the ready.
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Unfortunately, no. Climate change affects plants in lots of ways. Increased CO2 is a slight benefit to some plants. Less freezing in the winter can also have some benefit in some places. But higher summer temperatures stunt their growth. More frequent droughts in some places hurt them a lot. After factoring in everything, climate change is expected to be a net negative [time.com] for worldwide plant growth.
Uh oh Huston we have a problem... (Score:3)
Great, so that means we're going to end up changing the climate into something that our species has never experienced. Hopefully we're going to be comfortable with that because it's the equivalent of experimenting with the climate controls on your spacesuit while you're out in space with it
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I doubt the species will have too much trouble adjusting to the climate. It's not as if the CO2 is going to poison us all, and much of the planet will have a climate we find comfortable.
The actual problem is that our civilization is rather dependent on stable climate.
Arithmetic denial (Score:3)
Once again, mention "Nuclear" and the arithmetic deniers start in a chorus of denying arithmetic, pretending to believe that industrial/technological civilization can survive on power only on sunny days when the wind is blowing.
"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic." -- Stuart Brand.
Drill, burn and be happy (Score:4, Funny)
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Live another 40 years.
In Georgia.
Heat waves > 130 F are INEVITABLE at this point.
Georgia peaches are going to be very expensive.
NOW do you see why "profit rights" are inferior to "Solving the problem"?
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Live another 40 years. In Georgia. Heat waves gt 130 F are INEVITABLE at this point.
Given that the highest temperature ever recorded in Georgia was 112 citation [usatoday.com], that seems like a bit of a stretch. We aren't going to see that much warming, no scientist predicts it.
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The universe doesn't care about your libertarianism. CO2 has the properties it has, regardless of what particular ideology you adhere to. The laws of physics aren't contingent on your feelings on government.
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Re:Western peoples care. Chinese don't. So... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh yeah, the very same China which has outpaced the US in the installation of 43 GW of solar power, and produces 25% of their power via renewable sources [wikipedia.org]
And the very same China that has 46 operating nuclear plants, with another 11 under construction... [wikipedia.org]
For a very long time, China (and the other BRICS nations) has been given leeway to 'catch up' with the Western word, and lookee there... they are
It just makes the US look pathetic when the US President decides to make improving profits for coal mine owners a priority over the financial well being of the entire country.
China is working on it (Score:5, Insightful)
... if you're China, you can ramp up your development by dumping toxins in the air; not only will China become more powerful due to the increased productivity, but the Western nations will fall over themselves in an effort to curb their own emissions, despite the fact that BILLIONS of Chinese people (and other 3rd-world folk) will not be inspired to do the same.
Sort of kinda, but actually, no.
China is way below the U.S. [worldbank.org] in terms of carbon emission per capita. If you are talking about "ramping up development by dumping toxins in the air," the U.S. has already done this, and is way ahead of China, by about a factor of 2.5.
Yes, China is working hard on raising their standard of living, and part of this is increasing their energy consumption. But nevertheless, they are way behind the U.S.
And, they are working at putting renewables in to the mix. [cnn.com]
China will rise, because productivity is all that matters. The West will fall by its own sword.This is why the U.S. pulled out of the Paris "agreement"; it was literally just an agreement that China would keep doing what it was already doing, and the U.S. would cut off its right arm (but are you surprised? The "agreement" was signed by America's left arm).
What makes addressing carbon emission so hard is that everybody else in the world is suspicious that the U.S. and Europe are saying "well, we will be grandfathered in at 16 metric tons of carbon per person, but you have to live at a quarter of that. Ha, ha, good luck, suckers."
Oh yeah, the very same China which has outpaced the US in the installation of 43 GW of solar power, and produces 25% of their power via renewable sources [wikipedia.org] And the very same China that has 46 operating nuclear plants, with another 11 under construction... [wikipedia.org]
For a very long time, China (and the other BRICS nations) has been given leeway to 'catch up' with the Western word, and lookee there... they are. It just makes the US look pathetic when the US President decides to make improving profits for coal mine owners a priority over the financial well being of the entire country.
Re: China is working on it (Score:3)
the U.S. and Europe are saying "well, we will be grandfathered in at 16 metric tons of carbon per person, but you have to live at a quarter of that. Ha, ha, good luck, suckers."
*Who* says that? (EU is around 6 metric tonnes per capita, BTW.)
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In any case, you don't disprove the point: China is laying waste to the environment in order to build itself up with better tech. And, the West can't even start to do the same because of the environmentalist outcry.
And you're missing the point. The west is already way ahead of China in emissions per capita. We "can't even start to do the same" because, in terms of carbon emissions, we already started over a century ago.
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Nice strawman you got there.
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If I shoot you, your body is still 99.9585% lead-free.
When can I shoot you?
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Re:Air is still 20+% oxygen (Score:5, Insightful)
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Empathy (Score:5, Insightful)
I have about 30 years left on the planet. Tops. And I have no kids. So why the hell should I give a shit?
So you have no compassion for your fellow humans current and future? Nobody can force you to care but if you don't it means you are a selfish asshole.
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So you have no compassion for your fellow humans current and future?
Fellow humans have no compassion for themselves.
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So why the hell should I give a shit?
You shouldn't. Doing so would be a display of empathy and thus force you to give up your lifetime membership of the Association of Sociopathic Shits, commonly referred to as being an ASS.
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We don't know how much carbon was in the air when the dinos were wiped out
But we do know how much carbon was in the air during evolution of humans, which is what the article is about.
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A when someone 1 million years from now does an ice core sample they will not see our global warming crisis either.
CO2 diffusion in ice records results in smoothing on decadal scale. Our current peak will last more than 1000 years, and will be easily visible for a million years in the ice record (assuming there's enough ice left for such a record)
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All assumptions, you cannot prove a single bit of any of it. And that is the problem. We will all be dead before you can, and you require that "perk" to peddle your religion around.
People are beginning to think forensics is an exact science... it's just NOT. It is ignorant people like you that get innocnet people thrown in jail because you think the word "evidence" is the same as "proof".
You are exactly why this has become a religion. It is all 100% confirmation bias where everything you think supports
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Curious... why do you think this is a "garbage legend?"
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Curious... why do you think this is a "garbage legend?"
Probably because it's true [bbc.com].
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The problem is that even well educated guesses are often wrong.
Science is often wrong and that is just a fact, what makes science great is that it accepts these things and will adjust when new evidence comes along. But the pseudo-scientists... the ones that say the earth is flat, said we could never travel faster than sound, laughed at Ford, called Tesla crazy, and now say that our first global cooling, now global warming, now climate change, is 100% undeniably this one thing we are doing. No matter how m
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is 100% undeniably this one thing we are doing
I'm sure you understand that CO2 is the main thing that is causing warming. [skepticalscience.com] In that CO2 absorbs longer wavelengths of solar radiation from the sun and emits it in all directions including back towards the Earth. We can see this in that on a very minuscule level we can see the Earth dimming from space, becomes less bright. We know that it is CO2 from spectral analysis. [wikipedia.org] More and more of the wavelengths that aren't getting back out into space match up with wavelengths you'd expect from CO2.
So that brings u
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First and this is just to point out something, Slashdot supports HTML tags like <quote> which will allow your replies to have formatted quotes within your reply. I didn't have any problems reading your reply and I don't want to dive too deep into this, but I did want to point it out just in case you weren't aware. Okay, with that said.
And we both know that in order for a statement to be false only 1 element needs to be wrong... even if 99% of it is correct
That's not exactly correct. Good example of such Einstein's cosmological constant. He had at first added it to make equations work, then later removed it, and now wi
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First we have to assume that the carbon stored in a core extraction is actually the trapped air from "years and years ago" - its just a bunch of assumptions.
How would you explain that a core from Greenland shows the same patterns as a core from Antarctica, if they didn't contain trapped air from the atmosphere at that time ?
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That is a straw-man argument.
Just because he called in the question that source has not been proven to be only from air does not suddenly make the problem a local only one.
Right now, we can only say this is "evidence". It is not proof, and matching records from multiple locations is not proof of anything specific, though it is more "evidence".
Additionally, it is unfair for them to be expected to explain something when all they are expressing is doubt. Remember, proof is on the burden of the people making
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Hurr durr wut is paleoclimatology durr?
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Not really, we've already passed the point of diminishing returns (400ppm) for CO2-boosted plant growth. To say nothing of all the other negative effects including those on actual food production:
https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
Also, this is nothing but extremely bad news for ocean life due to the effects of ocean acidification.
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"Most CO2 ever for humans is fake news! Lyin' CNN is hiding the fact that cavemen had bigly doses of CO2 and loved it, really really loved it, believe me! It made their skin have a nice glow to it, just like mine, and fruit grew bigger and taller than ever, taller than my wall even, coming soon by the way. None of these puny fruits that the liars on CNN love eating so much. Small fruits make their balls small too. So sad and puny. Without lots of CO2 cavemen wouldn't be strong enough to kill dinosaurs; we w
Re: (Score:2)
Where are you getting these statistics? I question some.
Regardless, the problem is mostly about how this affects humans. The rest of the planet will eventually adapt to change, but the transition will be rough on humans also. One example is the dropoff of bees. Farms depend on bees. If most bees die off, farming becomes more difficult and more expensive. There are probably other unanticipated side-effects, probably worse.
Most past transitions were relatively gradual so that life had time to adapt. If life d
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
95% of the last 10,000 years the earth was warmer than it is now.
This is outright false [climate.gov]
90% of the time since creation the earth was warmer than it is now.
This is questionable, because it really depends on where you are drawing the line of "creation". If you mean it in the most absolute terms, than yeah, but that's mostly because the planet was a giant ball of fire for a large amount of time.
We're at one of the lowest levels of CO2 in earth's history.
Again, depends on what you are using as a measuring stick (see ball of molten metal in space point I previously mentioned). But that aside, the more alarming thing isn't the absolute value of CO2, it's the amount of increase in CO2. The rate of increase is fast. It took the Earth around 120 centuries to go from -4C back to 0C on the last ice age. We've done +1.5C in about 2 centuries, with the vast majority of that +1.5C increase happening in the last 0.5 centuries.
During the Andean-Saharan ice age CO2 was 1100% higher than now.
Yeah and the ice ace falls within the standard Quaternary glaciation as we understand it. So the forces of cooling would have easily out weighed the forces of warming contributed by CO2. However, we are currently not within one of those cycles, so I fail to understand why you believe the same process that lead to a cooling there would be applicable here? Just because you have a ton of CO2 does not always mean global warming. Likewise, just because you are in a glaciation period doesn't mean your CO2 is incredibly small. Funny how things can be independent variables of each other. So that said, there's not any known counter-balance to our current emptying of CO2 into the atmosphere leading to a warming, I wonder which force cooling versus warming will win out since warming is currently unopposed as we currently understand it?
Re: (Score:3)
95% of the last 10,000 years the earth was warmer than it is now.
Totally false. Here is a graph of actual temperature variation over the last 12,000 years [wikipedia.org]. Notice the arrow at the right edge showing the 2016 temperature. After the end of the Holocene climatic optimum about 5000 years ago, temperatures started gradually decreasing and had reached about half a degree below the maximum. Then in just the last 150 years, they've gone back up by over a degree, blowing past anything in the last 10,000 years.
90% of the time since creation the earth was warmer than it is now.
How interesting, and also totally irrelevant. The earth was warmer
Re: (Score:3)
Here's a page at NASA [nasa.gov], and another at NOAA [climate.gov] both discussing the dramatic temperature increase since 1880. But I suppose you'll reject those too. Much easier to reject all sources you don't like, while posting made up numbers without bothering to give any source for them.