I don't usually reply to ACs but this level of stupid needs a rap on the knuckles. You do realise that covering a single digit portion of the uninhabited sections of the Sahara desert with inefficient old PV cells could supply enough power to satisfy the needs of the European Union right? We haven't even BEGUN to tap into the potential of renewables.

And before you start paddling your keyboard about how the sun goes down at night, rap yourself on the knuckles and think.

The writing's been on the wall for decades now and the process has been visible to anyone who cared to look - fossil fuel sources are being phased out entirely long term. The only thing objectionable about this story is the idea that Merkel could claim any sort of responsibility for it.

http://www.maglaunch.com/

Or instead of descending to outright misanthropy we could look at the political climate and situation in Rome at the time, where lots of citizens lived largely on state handouts and whose main entertainment was the Colosseum, bread and circuses. Bored and indolent, they needed continually escalating spectacles - they actually flooded the Colosseum and lifted ships in to do battle, naumachiae - so is this period in Roman history a warning about meaningless lives lived without industry, Roman culture, or human nature?

I don't care what you say. Read even further down would be my advice, or just read the bit I quoted again: "Broad regions of the Earth experienced almost synchronous changes over periods of 0 to 30 years (Severinghaus et al., 1998), and changes were very abrupt in at least some regions (Bard et al., 1987), e.g. requiring as little as 10 years off Venezuela (Hughen et al., 1996)." It's well known that sudden temperature increases and decreases have happened with some regularity in recent history, geologically speaking. Well known by those who care to actually learn the science, of course.

That moment when you realise you're as ideologically hidebound as any denier.

You mean larger than this: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...

Not really, no. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...

You realise you just said, "we wouldn't be keeping the climate static, we'd be keeping it pretty static over millennia".

Wiki says 21cm to 34cm by 2100. It's really not an incipient threat, which is why we'd best start making longer term plans for adjusting to it, for ourselves and the other inhabitants of this blue marble. And once again we don't really know how everything fits together so the acceleration might not be constant. It might get worse of course but it's all speculation at this point.

Hold up there a minute mister scientist, where I'm sitting at the moment was buried under a few kilometers of glacier a hundred thousand years ago, and humans didn't contribute a thing to the sequence of events that caused it to melt. We are in a perfectly natural interglacial, something that's happened before. That's not to say human civilisation isn't contributing to climate change but what's up for debate is just how much of a contribution we're making.

Secondly I find the notion that we can just stop the earth's climate from changing quite suspect - it's not stable or in equilibrium and never has been, with a few possible exceptions. A nudge in the wrong direction and we might find ourselvs back in an ice age, and if you think global warming is bad believe me it doesn't hold a candle to global cooling. Maybe we want to warm things up.

Either way the situation is going to change, so it seems as though the best policy would be to preserve as much biodiversity as possible and ready ourselves for flooding and so on. Not anytime soon mind you, even the worst realistic predictions of sea level rise give us centuries before we start to see significant changes. As things stand I can see all fossil fuel energy sources being phased out by the end of this century, and I fully expect to see widespread adoption of electric vehicles within my lifetime, so it's not so bad. Devastation is going to happen and has happened many, many times in the earth's history, long before humanity made an appearance, but we can minimise it this time round.

And even if we stopped all emissions right now, as far as I'm aware the earth will continue to warm anyway, so perhaps the minor effects of a century of declining emissions versus causing economic chaos right now are a pretty good tradeoff.

I tell clients they can pay for the mobile upgrade or suffer a loss of Google ranking. It's working out well so far.

Another stride forward for Womens Rights!1

*starts playing feminist anthem*

No no you've got it all wrong, evil capitalist companies have no interest in ethics, they should all become good marxists and get busy with the mass murdering.

They hate him because of the petroleum dependencies in their retirement investments.

Who said anything about making a living doing it? How about making what you can doing it, a pursuit aided not in any way by piracy.

Great, my maiden aunt is a kung fu ninja. Even if some very unusual literary agents organise marketing teams you can bet your ass they aren't doing it out of their own pocket.

Who really cares, stealing from authors in one way or another is as low as it gets.

Right, so now book piracy is actually helpful. Are there any further moral pretzels you'd like to wheel out, inquiring minds want to know.

This debacle was almost (almost) worth it just to watch the komrades losing their shit on slashdot trying to blame the fat cat CEO though. Worker protections are important but France is in a league of its own.

Just so I've got this straight, you're using a story about how a middling hard leftist legal system and business environment wiped out an open source company to take a poke at capitalism? Good job, and modded up to 5 no less.