Are you counting creating poor as doing something for the poor?

His management of the Gates Foundation is not great for the poor. He is maintaining the unaffordable costs of medicines.

Doctors Without Borders criticizes Gates-backed global vaccine strategy

If his intention is to spend his ill-gotten gains to the benefit of humanity, he should put a humanitarian at the helm. Gates was very good at bullying governments and businesses, and illegal attacks on competition to drain the profits from businesses all over the world, but he's no manager.

I would hope most geeks could name a few of the nobel laureates from the past few years.

It has everything to do with what is considered successful in science.

Yes they did. They adapted by migration, generally.

I'm not familiar with "global warming alarmists". Could you point me to a link where one calls the reoccurring glaciations ecological disasters?

The reason that glaciations are less disastrous than the current warming, is that the species involved had co-evolved with that climate, the change was a few orders of magnitudes slower than the current warming, and the species involved weren't already under pressure from habitat loss, over exploitation and pollution.

The point is that your claim "There is no "state" to return to" is not really true. The aspect of the climate defined by that atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses is a state of the global climate that defines it in many ways. And that state doesn't suit existent species.

Loss of an apex predator in particular has a devastating effect on biodiversity. Do you know why dropping biodiversity hurts humans?

Indeed no. They are suffering habitat loss and having their parts being valuable for TCM in china.

How?

How many is "Almost no one"?

If there are almost no slots, then this politics will arise almost never.

It's meant to be a guarantee against holding unpopular opinions. It means you can't be fired without "just cause". Which means that if you do your teaching and don't commit academic fraud, you do have guarantee of a job.

No, that's precisely what you don't have to do.

I think its common and I've been paying some attention. What specifically would I have paid attention to to conclude that academic freedom is rare on campus these days?

No, the Earth is over 4.5 billion years old.

The 10-12 degree temperature drop took that 100,000 years, so ecosystems could migrate at a leisurely pace.
They were like that 100,000 years earlier too, so the species on the planet had co-existed with that climate.

OP is samzenpus.

The carbon in fossil fuels is from that time. A time of far greater CO2 concentration than the Holocene.

The species that we lose today are lost with respect to humanity. Cats won't speciate again on human time scales. Depending on the climate in 10 million years, a mammal or reptile might fill that niche, but that won't help Homo sapiens.

The greenhouse effect?

Some of these ones? It looks like an increase to me.

It's unique in the past several million years.

*sigh*

Using ice cores, we're much warmer than usual.

So we should warm the earth much faster than it warms naturally, and upwards from the top of an interglacial when all the existent species on the planet, plus all our infrastructure have never co-existed with the new temperature?

Surely we can do a bit better than "Earth's temperature isn't stable, so everything might be all right". Why don't we use that science thing that has been so good for our species? We can look at what will happen to which species, and what will happen to regional climate under global warming and ocean acidification.

So you're saying that if we return those carbon atoms to the biosphere, then because they were there in the carboniferous era, current species will be all right?

That's a bold and unproven claim that goes against current estimates of extinction risk.

Do you have a little bit more evidence or detail, or (god forbid) a scholarly paper that supports your claim that "because carbon is in the ground it must be safe to burn it"?

Great.

Not generally, no. The Carboniferous had about 50 million years of build up of wood, because nothing could break down the newly evolved bark. Not a mass extinction event. Just a lot of dead trees lying on the ground. It's not cyclical, and it won't happen again until trees evolve Kevlar coating.

How the hell did you get "attack the character of an individual" from the GP post? :

There's no attack there. There's the observation that current atmospheric CO2 concentration rise is an order of magnitude faster than rapid increases at the end of the last interglacial.
It didn't mention people, much less attack them. If your income was based on the proportion of climate change denial comments on slashdot, then you might feel personally attacked by it, but that's not the same thing.

It's not a step function. The lower the peak atmospheric CO2 is, the fewer the problems.

If we put a price on carbon, and let the economy decarbonise, the economy continues to grow just fine, thank you very much

.

Because climate change is going to affect the species that currently exist.

The fact that the we are returning the climate to a state is was a couple of hundred million years ago is bad because the species that exist now aren't the ones that can survive in that climate.

Yes. That particular mammal is not threatened, and will probably outlast all the others barring Rattus Rattus and Rattus Norvegicus.

Why are your long extinct vertebrates relevant?

The question is:
Can existent species survive?

The current climate change is faster and in the wrong direction to conclude that the end of the last glaciation was "far more devastating climate change". Certainly the long descent into the glaciation wasn't devastating. That took the lions share of the 100,000 years. It was relaxing.

OP didn't imply that. The book is written from the perspective of a non-extinct human 300 years after the collapse.

Low genetic diversity means low internal variation, because the variation is caused by genetic diversity. (Plus epigenetics also that are also genetically determined for given environmental factors).

I didn't say that they had. However the drop of biodiversity in Tigers in the taiga will mean that taiga species vulnerable to the particular genetic configuration of existent taiga Tigers will suffer, and others will be under selection pressure in only one direction from Tigers, and that will tend to reduce their genetic diversity. (And with it their capacity to evolve in response to changing environment, and to speciate).