Although, I do look forward to the day that IE falls to 2nd, then 3rd, and then to 4th place. Just doesn't matter who is in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd!
+1 It is nice to see IE dropping, no matter what happens with the rest of the browser world.
Been meaning to do some recreational reading, think I'll re-read some of her work.
RIP Anne McCaffrey and thank you
Trust data that is manually manipulated, incomplete, inaccurate, disparate, and only goes back a blink of the eye in terms of the planet's history.
800,000 years may be a blink of an eye compared to the life of the planet, but the changes on C02 since the industrial revolution, are certainly more than has been seen in a long time. This video does a nice job of visualizing the recent changes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Roa73Q8qZtA
higher temperatures are when life flourished
Plant life, insects, microorganisms, and dinosaurs flourished, although they also had higher concentrations of oxygen. With the huge numbers of people who live within a few feet of sea level, an increasing warming trend, resulting in rising sea levels, will kill many people, and seriously f*ck up the lives of those above the high water mark. Sea ports underwater, huge numbers of refugees, major pollution caused when low lying industrial areas are flooded, will certainly not cause life to flourish, at least not human life.
The bottom line is that acting as if the changes were brought about by humans and may result in bad things happening, will have good effects in the long run, even if the predictions are all wrong. Ignoring them until it may be too late could cost millions of lives. I prefer the idea of erring on the side of the issue that will have good effects either way.
"Because if what we've found so far is at least a somewhat representative sample, the overwhelming majority of planets tend to be either gas giants, frozen balls of rock and ice, or roasted balls of rock and lava. You have to be terribly imaginative to see life coming up on worlds like that."
There are plenty of life forms that live in unusual environments right here on this planet. Geothermal vent ecosystems for example:
Deep-sea bacteria form the base of a varied food chain that includes shrimp, tubeworms, clams, fish, crabs, and octopi. All of these animals must be adapted to endure the extreme environment of the vents -- complete darkness; water temperatures ranging from 2C (in ambient seawater) to about 400C (at the vent openings); pressures hundreds of times that at sea level; and high concentrations of sulfides and other noxious chemicals.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast13apr_1/
There are also bacteria that live in sulphuric acid in caves.
http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/planet-earth/guide/caves.html
It isn't unreasonable to think that life may have evolved in unusual environments elsewhere.
We need a "National Record the Police in Public Day". I think that a public event like this would enforce the point far more strongly that the police losing an occasional lawsuit.
This sounds like a very good idea! It would be good to pick a day with some historical significance. None springs to mind at the moment, but something that would make it very ironic (and maybe newsworthy) if someone got bothered by the police for taping them.
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell