Well, we know that the US had nuclear-armed B-52s and nuclear xommamd and control EC-135s airborne 24/7 until at least 1992. That led to a couple of scary accidents. Google "Chrome Dome" for more information. That was one leg of the nuclear triad - subs, missiles, and bombers on alert 24/7. The bombers periodically received a "do not attack" signal.

What the strategic command has been up to since 1992 we don't know. They keep such things secret when possible, for obvious reasons.

There was, and probably still is, far more nuclear material airborne 24/7 in standby aircraft. That's in actual bombs, too, with all the many other components assembled to cause it to explode, whereas the thruster would be contained to provide protection as used in currently launched devices.

What you said is certainly true, and has been for a long time. Now, psyops is even more important. The US and UK could have turned Iraqi cities into glass parking lots very quickly, if they decided to do mass bombings like WWII. Germany had serious air defenses, yet the allies utterly destroyed large sections of major cities. Undefended Iraqi cities would be like bombing fish in a barrel. Destroying the enemy is no longer considered an allowable goal, though. The new goal is to persuade the general population to see things our way.

You don't win friends by exploding them. Hardware can remove the existing leadership, but the rest is PR.

>> Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection.

>. That is precisely what a control freak is

Suppose someone wants perfection, so they hire the very best for everything - they have Pavarotti do the voices, and put Ted T'so in charge of designing their storage. They then trust Pavarotti and T'so to do their jobs well. Would that not be a passion for perfection, but not being a control freak?

That was a very rough estimate, just to get a general idea of about what a good public safety program might achieve per dollar. You might want to calculate a few more, it's just division. Look up the cost of some program - a safety program such as requiring seatbelts perhaps, or vaccine research, or whatever. Then look up the number of lived saved and divide the dollars by the lives to get the cost per person saved.

I'd bet that requiring seatbelts cost a lot less than $10,000 per life saved. Airbags have probably been pretty cost effective too. Air bags and seat belts were not required one day, then were required the next day, so the difference should be clear.

In calculating the cost of Iraq, be sure to include the facts that a) Saddam was going around invading neighboring countries, gassing the Kurds etc, so going in did save some people and b) to be intellectually honest you have to account for the deterrent effect - what would dictators have done if the the US minded their own business. I would bet that you'll still have a strong argument, and a more balanced one.

I gave one example of the cost of a campaign and the lives saved, the campaign to reduce drunk driving. You can easily calculate a few more, it's just division. Look up the cost of some program - a safety program such as requiring seatbelts perhaps, or vaccine research, or whatever. Then look up the number of lived saved and divide the dollars by the lives to get the cost per person saved.

I'd bet that requiring seatbelts cost a lot less than $10,000 per life saved. Airbags have probably been pretty cost effective too. AIDs treatments have really helped people live longer, better lives, while safe sex initiatives have saved many lives. I bet the whole safe sex initiative cost a few billion, while saving few million people, so it might be an interesting one to find numbers on.

Okay, two people remember the conversation differently - one after having been thoroughly embarrassed by the reporter's recollection. Let's give Hansen the benefit of the doubt and assume he conditioned it on co2 at 560 the article you linked suggests. In other words, let's have a look at what Hansen now claims to have said.

CO2 levels have been above 350 for a good while now, right? Correct me of I'm wrong on that, I'm going by memory. That's an increase of around 50% from preindustrial levels as opposed to doubling. At the time, the West Side Highway was an elevated freeway, so Hansen was saying the water would rise twenty or thirty feet with CO2 at 560. CO2 is at 350 and how many feet has it risen? Zero feet. Hansen's claim still sounds rather fishy to me.

Certainly we agree that the reporter's quote of the scientist is crap, and that's what most people read - quotes from scientists, or claimed scientists, as reported by the media.

>. Although I still give opposing scientific views strong consideration - it's just so hard to find them in all the crap published.

Well we agree on that much. I'm just real clear that neither side has a monopoly on crap.

Dang it, you're right. Now that's the eighth time I've been wrong.

You might enjoy the post more if you pay attention to the "will happen by" dates. Things are all things leading climate researchers were saying would happen by 2000, or 2010 or whatever - all dates that have come and gone. Amazingly, it's 2015 and California is still here, not underwater. Whether that's a good thing or bad you can decide for yourself.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

We spent $100 million per year on the campaign to reduce drunk driving. Drunk driving deaths were reduced by 10,000 per year. So roughly speaking, if you're willing to spend $100 million, you can save about 10,000 people every year. Campaigns to get people to stop smoking, disease and health research, and traffic safety programs can achieve similar results, for the good programs - about $10,000 per life saved.

Depending on how you count, global warming initiatives of various types such as research, PR, and new regulations cost us $100 billion - $280 billion per year. That's billion with a B, compared to $100 Million to drastically drunk driving. We know that when we use our resources wisely, we can save one person per $10,000, so $100,000,000,000 can save 10 million people if spent wisely. That's the true cost of spending $100 billion on mostly alarmist hype. We could instead divide that money as follows:

$10 billion for cancer research
$5 billion for traffic safety
$5 billion to reduce child abuse
$2 billion to fight teen smoking
$1 billion to help alcoholics and addicts who wish to stop
$1 billion for heart disease and health initiatives
And 75 more such programs.

How many millions of people have died because you'd rather play hippy than deal with the issues that are actually killing millions of people every year? Well, about 10 million people every year, the math shows. Do you want to keep playing silly politics, or should we put the resources toward actually saving lives, maybe yours.

>. Do you even know how many people 50 million represents? Its LA and NYC combined.

>. You are making the claim. Please point to us with citations, the mass climate exodus you claim has been happening.

No, I'm pointing out that it didn't happen. The UN climate panel said it would happen, the date in question has passed, and nothing like that happened. Ergo, the UN climate change panel is full of it.

First, come back when you know the difference between herbicide and pesticide.

Secondly, this isn't 1815, it's 2015. In America, we don't clear a 100 acre farm by picking weeds by hand. Maybe at one organic granola farm in the People's Republic of California, but not in the bread basket midwest, or here in Texas.

> So tell my why addressing CO2 emissions is a bad idea (not that you explicitly stated as much in your comments)

Indeed, I've said the opposite, right here in this thread. In the thread last week I said it over and over and over, while the alarmists in the thread just couldn't hear that. To them, it has to be either believe everything you hear and panic, or complete denial. No room for thought, for considering the veracity of the claims, or considering past claims the source has made. Odd.

There are, however, a lot of ways of "addressing the problem" that are REALLY bad ideas. I don't know if you are clear that there is a lot of hype an gross exaggeration, along with some reason for concern. If that's not a point we can readily agree on, I'll refer you to post also in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I think that post pretty well establishes that there are definitely plenty of people making wacko claims who have "respectable" titles - that there's plenty of extreme alarmist BS mixed in with more reasonable analysis.

We spent around $100 million per year to reduce drunk driving, and that saved 10,000 lives per year. So by that example, when spending wisely, saving lives costs about $10,000 per life. In other words, if you spend $1 million on the right things, you can expect to save 1,000 people. Maybe you spend it on stop-smoking initiatives, CPR training, driver training, whatever is shown to work best.

Based on the mix of science and alarmism, we're spending up to* $360 billion dollars per year, several thousand dollars per family in the US. I say "up to" because it's from source that will tend to count high. Let's guesstimate that source quadrupled the real amount, and the real cost that we should be using is only around $100 billion. We know that a $100 million drunk-driving campaign saved 10,000 people, so $100 BILLION spent wisely could save about 10,000,000 people. Ten million lives saved. Per year. That's the opportunity cost of devoting those resources to climate change related initiatives rather than health initiatives, or cancer research, or wherever they would make the most difference. That's why I think we should be very careful not to allocate huge amounts of resources based on alarmist, political, and clearly biased studies - because by doing so we're choosing to NOT use those resources on things proven to save many lives. To put it very bluntly, people are dying as a result of poor decisions made by politicians, based on exploiting and manipulating the emotions of their constituents.

What if I'm wrong, and not just a little bit wrong, but wrong by an order of magnitude. If I'm really, really wrong, only 1 million people would be saved each year by using these resources more wisely. When you're talking about major US government initiatives, hundreds of billions of dollars, the consequences are enormous. Putting $100,000,000,000 toward the wrong program means a lot of people die needlessly, because that $100,000,000,000 spent wisely could save a lot of people.

> What "leading climate researchers" said this?

Here are a few examples. You can of course easily find more. Just Google for "global warming" and set it to show results from whatever time you desire. I wanted to see predictions for 2000-2015, so I Google "global warming" for resources published in 1995 or earlier.

  Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich:
By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people"

United Nations Environmental Program, in 2005:
"Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of refugee."

    Cristina Tirado (University of California) again made the claim of 50 million climate refugees, changing it to "by 2020" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

James Hansen headed NASA's Goddard Institute for 30 years before moving to University. In 1988, Hansen was asked by a journalist how the greenhouse effect would affect New York by 2008. "The West Side Highway [an elevated freeway] will be under water" , Hansen said.

UN IPCC author Michael Oppenheimer was "chief scientist" for the Environmental Defense Fund in 1990. He said that by 1995 global warming will be "desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots."

Just for fun, along with all of these climate scientists, let's throw in our favorite leader of the global warming movement, Al Gore. Oppenheimer (above) was also an advisor to Al Gore, who claimed:
        "The entire North Polar ice cap will disappear in five years. Five years is the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear." (The polar ice caps have actually INCREASED since then, significantly).

United Nations Environmental Program, Director of New York office in 1989:
Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000

We're spending $360 billion dollars a year based on these people's predictions - several thousand dollars per family in the US.

I'm going to repeat once more, it is true that today it is warmer than it was 500 years ago, and much colder than it was 1,000 years ago. So yes, the climate changes in cycles, absolutely. Stanford, Berkeley, and Princeton have just ridiculously exaggerated the effect, while pitching for yet another $10 million grant to continue their work.

> Rising CO2 levels and climate change are politically controversial only because the fossil carbon industry hired a bunch of PR firms to sow public doubt. Who needs science, when industry PR is gospel?

Indeed, who needs this "science" from NASA, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, and the UN, when Comedy Central is gospel?