It is by no means guaranteed that the sea level rise will be limited to 1 meter per century, even for this century. The IPCC predictions are conservative, don't include melting ice cap contributions, and assume that we would be more aggressively cutting emissions by now. From a paper on the subject:
"Rahmstorf (2007) made an important contribution to the sea level discussion by pointing out that even a linear relation between global temperature and the rate of sea level rise, calibrated with 20th century data, implies a 21st sea level rise of about a meter, given expected global warming for BAU greenhouse gas emissions. Vermeer and Rahmstorf (2009) extended Rahmstorf's semi-empirical approach by adding a rapid response term, projecting sea level rise by 2100 of 0.75-1.9 m for the full range of IPCC climate scenarios. Grinsted et al. (2010) fit a 4- parameter linear response equation to temperature and sea level data for the past 2000 years, projecting a sea level rise of 0.9-1.3 m by 2100 for a middle IPCC scenario (A1B). These projections are typically a factor of 3-4 larger than the IPCC (2007) estimates, and thus they altered perceptions about the potential magnitude of human-caused sea level change.
Alley (2010) reviewed projections of sea level rise by 2100, showing several clustered around 1 m and one outlier at 5 m, all of which he approximated as linear. The 5 m estimate is what Hansen (2007) suggested was possible, given the assumption of a typical IPCC's BAU climate forcing scenario. Alley's graph is comforting, making the suggestion of a possible 5 m sea level rise seem to be an improbable outlier, because, in addition to disagreeing with all other projections, a half-meter sea level rise in the next 10 years is preposterous.
However, the fundamental issue is linearity versus non-linearity. Hansen (2005, 2007) argues that amplifying feedbacks make ice sheet disintegration necessarily highly non-linear. In a non-linear problem, the most relevant number for projecting sea level rise is the doubling time for the rate of mass loss. Hansen (2007) suggested that a 10-year doubling time was plausible, pointing out that such a doubling time from a base of 1 mm per year ice sheet contribution to sea level in the decade 2005-2015 would lead to a cumulative 5 m sea level rise by 2095."
Additional caveats and quid quo pros follow in the paper, but it's safe to say that there's a bunch of scientists who would not bet much money on at most a meter of rise in this century.
It's not a simple use-all-oxygen-burning-fuel anoxia -- it is a bad interaction with ocean circulation, chemistry, and biology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event .
Given that we show every sign of running the CO2-enhancement experiment to completion, it is reassuring to know that this low-probability but extremely-high-cost outcome is that much more unlikely. (To my warmist comrades -- given a choice between losing a toe, a leg, or a life, we know which choice we would most want to avoid, but that does not mean the remaining choices are good. Anoxia is among the worst of the outcomes, far worse than the middle of the US becoming uninhabitable or the seas rising 100 feet. And to you denier bozos -- greenhouse science is cut-and-dried stuff, with only the detailed outcomes unclear, but it's also clear that between natural human greed and your foolish efforts, we will almost certainly burn all the fossil fuels we can until something truly alarming occurs. Perhaps we have overestimated the effects of the current CO2 levels -- but that's okay, we're just going to keep on burning it till we see an effect, and a big and unambiguous one.)
Yeah. Jeff Bauman, who looked at the guy who left the bomb, got his legs blown off, and remembered it all, and described him to the police after regaining consciousness. Or Carlos Arredondo, who held a big artery shut running beside him in the wheelchair (that, or a tourniquet, but it looked like an artery -- it's cropped out of most of the photos you see now). Flawless. All those legs blown off could easily have been deaths, except that people got to them in time and took care of them.
The terrorists are NOT especially smart. Sometimes they get lucky. Witness these two bozos in Boston, or the underwear bomber who about set his nads on fire, or the shoe bomber who failed to execute, or the butt bomber in the middle east who (ahem) blew his own ass up. The jerks who tried to bomb a terminal in Glasgow caught themselves on fire, and one of the people who caught them in the act kicked one of them so hard he tore a tendon in his own foot. Several of the otherwise successful bombers (Spain, London) got caught because they screwed up security with cell phones in traceable ways.
I also know a few people who may or may not have at one time worked for the NSA, and they're all smart, and one of them was kinda intense. Don't assume that you're smarter than them; the risks, if you're wrong, are high.
How about with bicycles, and with tablesaws? Report back to us on how that goes.
It cannot log the specifics of the information, since that defeats the entire point of avoiding a discoverable record of evil. The most it can do is count the number of times someone was warned, preferably at a very coarse granularity so that spikes in warnings cannot be correlated with other business activity.
Oil-sulfur plant spray IS just oil and sulfur. It's a fungicide. It also gets mixed with lime in another fungicidal formulation. And here: http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/pyrethrins-ziram/sulfur-ext.html . Especially: "There is slight oxidation of sulfur to the volatile oxide." Apparently the oil-sulfur mix of my youth is no longer recommended, but they would also spray the grove with parathion back then, and that's no longer recommended either.
I said not one darn thing about H2S, did I? This was a faint whiff of SO2, not the full on stuff. I was a kid before chemistry sets got safe, I know what SO2 smells like in quantity. Whatever the smell was, it was the same, and I'm pretty sure it was extremely dilute SO2
Or an orange grove -- they use oil-sulfur sprays on those, the whole thing has a faint whiff of SO2. Grew up in the middle of one, and years later someone opened up a bag of gardening sulfur near me, and "HOME!" hit me in the nose.
Avoid tobacco water, unless you like Tobacco Mosaic Virus in your plants.
It would be hysteria if the bees were not a big factor in keeping yields up, the bee population appears to be in trouble, and we don't understand why they're in trouble. You also propose a false choice -- there are other options between no-limits Frankenfood and mules we might allow GMOs for growing on poor soil, but not to carry pesticide genes, just for example. We might allow pesticides, but only those with an environmental half-life of one week
Your reasoning ignores externalized costs. Neonic insecticides may improve the quality of life of Bayer and the particular farmers that they sell to, but if pesticide use causes a greater harm to beekeepers and to other farmers whose crops bees pollinate, that's a net loss. Yet Bayer and their customers have no incentive to stop.
Plant nectar varies; I don't know exactly how it relates to HFCS, but it's not straight glucose, and has a fair amount of fructose, so it's probably not "completely different". You can see this in the way different honeys crystallize, or not -- tupelo's usually liquid, palmetto is usually crystallized. I think this means that tupelo has a lot of fructose in it, and palmetto does not.
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker
