Comment $480 fines? (Score 2) 98
That would have gutted me when I was at uni.
huge amounts of deforestation (nine thousand acres worth),
Really?
It looks from the aerial photography you link to that they just cut tracks to each turbine.
Wind power is a joke regardless of how you look at it.
I look at it from price per unit, insulation from oscillating fuel prices, greenhouse emissions, and production of harmful waste.
It's not as funny as you seem to think.
You're reasoning in isolated abstractions: "biodiversity is good for humans"
That's pretty well accepted.
The argument you see in textbooks is that the interdepedence of ecological systems is such that at it is difficult to know what species are key to our own survival. so dropping biodiversity is like playing Russian Roulette. (Of course the rich will be able to supplement, but I mean key to our own cheap survival).
But more importantly to me is the intellectual resource. Each species comes with it's unique proteins and biological processes. Losing them without studying them is a permanent loss to our knowledge, and future study is more likely to have useful results than current study, as our understanding of the biochemistry allows fuller understanding and so utilization of the processes observed.
"tigers dying reduces biodiversity"
I linked to a paper with this (generalized) result: reduced genetic diversity withing species reduces biodiversity of other species in the ecosystem.
"ice sheets move slowly and allows migrations"
The species in current existence have survived the repeated glaciation cycle of the holocene. The current warming is more rapid, and in the wrong direction.
With that kind of superficial reasoning, you can "prove" anything in any complex problem by just picking out the right abstractions.
I think you're ignoring the proofs. If you think one of them is wrong, we can delve into it. But read the paper linking genetic diversity to biodiversity first.
Large predators are usually already evolutionary dead ends, candidates for natural extinction
That seems like an isolated abstraction. Do you have any science-based evidence of this claim?
Humans have killed off many apex predators in many environments over the past few millennia.
Can you give a few examples?
Generally, the main effect has been that human livestock and humans have become safer.
Do you have any science-based evidence of this claim? I think that it is wrong. When you remove an apex predator, biodiversity crashes.
Historically speaking, were in the "colder than usual" range of the bell curve today, and thats with using ice cores to detect CO2 levels and temperature histories.
This is not true, using the data set [s]he mentions. We're much warmer than normal, according to the ice core record.
This is not, as you seem to have been suggesting that the Earth is less than a million years old, but that Ice Cores don't go back further than that.
That's what I thought, but the link he gives only shows a 400,000 year window.
The link to the ice-core temperature reconstruction data from the Vostok Ice cores?
They only go back 400,000 years. EPICA cores go back a bit further.
How many posts until someone finds a way to still hate on him, despite the fact that he's done more for the poor than all of us put together?
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.
Yes, there are a half-dozen names most geeks know.
I would hope most geeks could name a few of the nobel laureates from the past few years.
That has nothing to do with day-to-day work in the field.
It has everything to do with what is considered successful in science.
Species don't adapt to ice sheets that are a mile thick.
Yes they did. They adapted by migration, generally.
The glaciations are recurring ecological disasters by the standard of global warming alarmists.
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.
So what? What is your point?
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.
Help us? In what way do you imagine the loss of tigers hurts humans?
Loss of an apex predator in particular has a devastating effect on biodiversity. Do you know why dropping biodiversity hurts humans?
They are going away because their ecological niche has been filled by us.
Indeed no. They are suffering habitat loss and having their parts being valuable for TCM in china.
Futhermore, if we really wanted to fill that ecological niche, we could easily do it on human time scales.
How?
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
