UK To Spend $1.6 Billion on World's Best Climate Supercomputer (bloomberg.com) 126
The U.K. said it will spend 1.2 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) on developing the most powerful weather and climate supercomputer in the world. From a report: The program aims to improve weather and climate modeling by the government forecaster, the Met Office, Business Secretary Alok Sharma said in a statement Monday. The machine will replace the U.K.'s existing supercomputer, which is already one of the 50 most powerful in the world. "Come rain or shine, our significant investment for a new supercomputer will further speed up weather predictions, helping people be more prepared for weather disruption from planning travel journeys to deploying flood defenses," said Sharma, who will preside over the annual round of United Nations climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, in November. With Britain hosting the year-end climate summit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is seeking to showcase the U.K.'s leadership in both studying the climate and reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. His government plans to use data generated by the new computer to inform policy as it seeks to spearhead the fight against climate change.
Oh the irony... (Score:1, Insightful)
How much "greenhouse gas" will the energy requirements of this system generate per year?
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They just love spaffing money up the wall on pointless stuff like this.
Once it mattered to have independent and accurate weather forecasting. Never mind that the Met Office has been consistently quite poor compared to other weather prediction services, and likes to charge for information others give away for free despite being tax funded.
But now we would do better to simply cooperate with other countries on this. The EU has fostered a lot of cooperation in weather forecasting. But of course now we have to d
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:1)
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I quite like sovereignty, which is why I'm sad that the UK is giving so much of its sovereignty away now.
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:1)
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Exactly. The US, China, EU, Australia, Japan, basically everyone is lining up to bully the UK, and the UK is so desperate for trade deals it will just have to take it.
The EU was protecting us, giving us the strength to stand up to others. We had a powerful veto and a huge market to bargain with.
All lost now.
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:1)
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My evidence is the statements and actions of those countries.
The US says chlorine chicken and the NHS must be on the table, and that the UK is second in the queue behind the EU. Australia put in a complaint to the WTO about our allocation. Just read the news!
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:1)
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:2)
You're not even free to refrain from insults after losing the argument.
Tell us about all these terrible EU laws you were willing to destroy UK trade for
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The British Empire? That shitty time when we went around fucking over half the world for our own benefit? When we engaged in slavery and colonialism and invented concentration camps?
Anyway WTO rules would be a disaster for us, the economic damage would be far far worse than the 2008 financial crash.
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I suggest you read the wiki article on concentration camps. They have some unique characteristics that mean earlier camps were excluded from the classification.
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The UK is free to accept such terms. Reject. Suggest changes.
All part of not having trade terms set by the EU.
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It's the classic rock and a hard place. "Free" to reject the terms but only if the UK is willing to accept economic ruin as it cuts itself off from its largest trading partner.
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Actually the UK will have to accept far more EU limits on trade when it is outside the single market. The whole point of the single market is to remove limitations and barriers.
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Doing what the EU wanted was not protection.
Now the UK is free to invest in any type of science it wants using any type of computer system it wants.
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:2)
The UK was the biggest player in EU science. We needed free movement of scientists.
The facepalming of the science community has yet to stop.
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You see to be under the impression that the UK was simply forced to take rules from the EU. That's not how the EU works.
The UK was a member and thus involved in the creation of new rules. In fact it wrote many of them, e.g. the infamous "bendy bananas" was actually a British rule that the EU adopted. And then there is a vote and the UK has a veto, so it can reject anything it doesn't like. And even then the EU doesn't make law, it's up to the UK to implement those rules as it sees fit and often it goes beyo
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Been part of the EU was accepting EU rules.
You don't understand what the EU is or how it works. I tried to explain it to you and you ignored it. There is no point continuing until you understand why this is wrong.
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You obviously don't know what the word "sovereignty" means. You should read a dictionary.
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The funniest part about it is the Galileo project. Back in the day the UK insisted that only EU members could access the law enforcement and military part of it (the PRS signal).
Now it comes back to bite them in the arse.
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Brexit in a nutshell. We wrote Article 50 too.
The UK is the first country to declare sanctions on itself.
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:2)
Yes, the EU has done a lot for weather forecasting, investing a lot of money in people and computing power in a centre just west of London:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
They've done a pretty good job too at times, and were even able to correctly predict weather in the US better than the US could (at the time):
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Re: Oh the irony... (Score:2)
Ahh, the stereotypes :). But I live in London, and this doesn't hold true: did you know that we get less rain than that drought-ridden wild fire threatened city of Melbourne? Ironically, when I lived in Denver, a city with the most boring unchanging 300+ days a year of blue skies and sunshine, people talked incessantly about how wild and unpredictable their weather was. Itâ(TM)s relative to what you know.
Paint it green (Score:3)
And it will be considered environmentally-friendly.
Also, it will be interesting to see the fight over who will get the contract. Also, the fact that the announcement happened right after a cabinet re-shuffle makes it smell fishy.
Maybe the new Chancellor want to do a favour to a friend.
Misleading headline (Score:5, Interesting)
The same GCM models are used for both, of course, but the media loves to put 'climate' in the headline, while weather prediction is too boring to mention.
An alternate source here: https://eandt.theiet.org/conte... [theiet.org]
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How much "greenhouse gas" will the energy requirements of this system generate per year?
Close to zero if you plug it into a wind farm or a hydro plant compared to powering it with nat-gas or coal. If you build the thing in the Scottish Highlands you can also save tons of energy on cooling. That aside, your question is about as pointless as asking whether bringing the fire truck to the pile of burning plastic garbage up wind of your house to put out the fire will cause more emissions than letting the crap burn and inhaling the toxic smoke.
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Not true - there is only so much energy which can be generated yearly. While you may plug it directly into a windmill, it will then replace another device which will now require coal or nuclear energy. So the question is definitely less pointless than that crap about burning plastics you suggest.
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Don't need to build it in the Scottish Highlands.The EPCC (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) is moving to compressor free cooling year round. The irony of saving CO2 emissions by using water in flooded coal mines under their data centre. They are located just south of Edinburgh, and will have a PUE as good if not better than the likes of Google, AWS, Azure etc.
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If you only count electricity, maybe. How much carbon gets produced to manufacture 1 CPU? IIRC it was close to 4 metric tons of various raw materials to be refined, processed, extracted, to make one modern CPU. The concrete to build the building? Steel for the construction? Mazute to ship it by sea? Copper and aluminum for the wiring? Plastic? All the comforts for the employees, their cars... The hydro plant won't be built with shovels, out of dirt, it's going to be thousands if not millions of tons of conc
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Not that much.
The current #1 needs 13 MW. Assuming this power would be provided by a jet engine derived powerplant (which is quite inefficient) it would be about half the electrical power one single aisle aircraft (say Boeing 737 or Airbus A320) derived engine could provide. An airplane has two of them, but the average aircraft utilisation rate is just over 12 hours and the aircraft doesn't need full power all the time.
Hence, in the worst case, this system would generate as much greenhouse gas as just one s
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:1)
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Yes... about as much as one of the singular worst offenders in CO2 production...
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:1)
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I am not a claim, I am a human being.
Also I am not retracting anything, I am simply stating that I am not happy with your approval. Both because I generally agree with environmentalists, even though this particular case is not a big deal, and because I disagree with almost everything you generally write.
I also consider your point about virtue signalling hypocritical.
Re: Oh the irony... (Score:1)
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13MW .. we pay approx. €0.21 per KWh. So that comes to EU 2,700.00 per hour. Or EU 65,000 per day. Not that power hungry indeed.
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The industry pays far less than that.
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A customer who predictable draws power at certain times, pays perhaps 7cents, probably less, and not 21cents.
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They could greatly simplify the logic by making it more power hungry...
If this computer were to be the dominant contributor to CO2 generation, then they could simply calculate it from the amount of power needed for the computer and spit out that number.
Other options include making the atmosphere uniformly 100% CO2, also known as the spherical cow theorem.
(No, this is not a serious suggestion; please don't do this.)
Oh the ignorance... (Score:2)
The intro, following the article, refers to "the most powerful weather and climate supercomputer in the world".
I hope most readers of Slashdot understand that weather (or climate) forecasting, like all other computing, is done by software. True, all software needs hardware to run it - but the relationship is similar to that between a car and the fuel that powers it. (Where computer hardware is analogous to the fuel).
There is literally no such thing as a "weather and climate supercomputer". Although there ar
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What about my analog climate prediction supercomputer with 10 million racks, pinions, and cams, you insensitive clod?!
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...There is literally no such thing as a "weather and climate supercomputer"....
A van that is used for delivery is a delivery van. A supercomputer that is used for weather and climate forecasting is a weather and climate supercomputer.
Obviously the speed and power of the hardware is useful, in that it allows the software to model more factors and with a finer resolution in space and time.
You got it exactly. Weather modeling (and also climate modeling, although this particular supercomputer is to be mainly a weather forecasting machine) is done with finite element computations. Once you move up from a mesh of a few million elements to one of billions, yes, you need a supercomputers.
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It is most certainly possible to build special purpose computers for weather forecasts.
So it is not just software. However I did not read the article (yet) and don't know if it is a special purpose computer, aka special GPUs or special vector processors.
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then 42 was my next thought; apologies the dougles adams estate.
then i thought, "ok, a real answer." fuel cells put water back into the air; useful for dry areas. solar and wind are currently the only power converters that get the job done. googling about MIT students that did their grad work on the various forms of batteries would be useful.
basically, if investors shift their paradigm from fossil fuels to energy industry, it would open door
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On the plus side, we can both confirm faster that we are screwed, and we will be screwed faster!
Re:Oh the irony... (Score:5, Insightful)
The era of people being free to criticize science is over. This is the era of "fuck off, you ignorant cunt". How to become less ignorant without asking ignorant questions is not explained, but perhaps science is only for the privileged few, and it requires a certain political conviction before it becomes clear.
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Except that the AC is at -1 troll and both you and Pyramid are enjoying positive moderation. So apparently you can criticise science, and many people regularly do.
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No, there will never be and era where science cannot be criticized.
Do keep in mind that there have always been an uphill battle for progress. Yes uphill, sure sometime that battle goes crazy like Climate Change has but regardless of which side you are on the research needs to continue. They do not have proof, but until they do, they need to keep searching, there is nothing wrong with this at all. What I hate about the Church of AGW is that their solutions are all politically motivated. Yea, I want renew
Re:Oh the irony... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right: there will never be an era where science cannot be criticized. Nor should there be.
But ... if you want other scientists to take your criticism seriously, you need to do what they do: bring evidence, be prepared to be proven wrong, and act in good faith. If you don't, well, understand that scientists have only so much patience with people who insist on being ignorant. You may very well find yourself on the receiving end of a dismissive response, but hopefully not an expletive-laden one such as the down-modded AC uttered.
I am very much inspired by scientists such as Einstein and Dyson who happen(ed) to be spiritual. Bu I am also inspired by atheistic scientists such as Hawking and Dawkins. They all follow the scientific covenant of demanding evidence in order to accept new theories and laws of the universe. AGW research, like all science, is most definitely not a church.
And not all scientific theories and laws die with their creators. Just the wrong ones.
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The only cultists are the denialists, AGW is well proven, that's why crackpots like you have been pushed to extreme fringes and even many former hardline denialists have come to accept the scientific evidence is so sufficiently overwhelming that you have to be pretty fucking special to deny the science at this point - you might as well deny the existence of gravity, or pursue flat earth theories whilst you're at it.
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What I hate about the Church of AGW is that their solutions are all politically motivate
In other words, you think that you are smarter than thousands of scientists and so they must be politically motivated. Duh.
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Einstein and Freeman are 2 of my favorite Famous Scientists, but they piss a lot of Atheists off because both believed that a God exists and both were wise enough to understand the Science and Religion are not at odds with each other
You are badly misrepresenting Einstein's views on God here. A direct quote from the man himself:
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - Feel f
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The era of people being free to criticize science is over.
You might want to stop clutching your pearls so hard: you're starting to lose circulation in your hand.
You're perfectly free to criticise science. And if you choose to engage in denialism, people are perfectly free to criticise you.
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There is nothing wrong with criticizing science. If you do it with a scientific sound argument, that is. As most people are not capable of making these (simply because most people are not scientists and have no appreciation for the complexity, details and border-conditions for scientific finds), most people cannot really criticize science in any meaningful way.
UK? Supercomputer? (Score:2)
We've seen how this ends...
42.
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Wellllll... have you seen Boris?
Do you want to know what's under the mop?
Wrong H2G2 Ending (Score:2)
We've seen how this ends...
Yes, it will all get derailed by the crash of Boris' Brexit (or B^2) Ark.
Climate? Weather? (Score:2)
Which one is it?
Prime Minister Boris Johnson
We don't need a computer to tell him that it's going to be another bad hair day.
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And we also know he's full of hot air.
Seriously, I'm convinced we can end climate change if we just get him to shut up for a day.
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And we also know he's full of hot air.
Well that rules out using Boris as an air source to cool down that super-computer. Look on the bright side though, at least your clown king isn't insisting on powering the thing with coal as part of his ongoing campaign to return the country to the steam age.
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Re:Climate? Weather?
Which one is it?
The same Global Circulation Models are used for both, but from the body of the article, the main use of this particular supercomputer seems to be for improving weather forecasts, not for running climate models.
But the news media can't get people excited about a new supercomputer for weather forecasting, so they mention "climate" in the headline.
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reminds me of ... (Score:2)
Much better article here (Score:2)
The article wasn’t very good. Here is the much more informative and exciting press release.
https://www.gov.uk/government/... [www.gov.uk]
I didn’t get everything out of it but their Cray is EOL in 2 years but the release talks about case studies that seem to be about 30M pounds for strategic HPC services to be built by various academic consortia with support from ARM and Nvidia... sounds like a good time to be a software engineer in the UK!
Here is a little part of the article. The case studies are fascinating
Isn't there already a distributed computing proj (Score:2)
Is this specific super computer doing nothing but crunching information 24/7 that much better then what can be achieved using the distributed home computers?
I am sure I will get flamed and made a fool of for asking such a question. Thats ok, really don't care anymore.
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For all the deniers (Score:1)
Can you give me some real data to look at besides that NASA PhD who starts talking about Jesus and creation?
Solves the surplus of Raspberry Pi's after brexit (Score:2)
Raspberry Pi's suddenly became much harder to sell after Brexit.
They can connect them all together to make a "Supercomputer" ;)
https://www.techworm.net/2018/... [techworm.net]
How many GHz do you need (Score:2)
In order to draw an exponentially increasing curve in flashing red, with "EMERGENCY!" in all caps?
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Hrrmm... Perhaps we should ask HAL-9000
Weather models are most supercomputer funding (Score:2)
Historically any non military computer research has been through promises of weather forecasting. This is nothing new. Weather forecasting is a huge suck of all governments R&D budgets with usually little improvement. The article's abuse of climate ideology is not too new either.
It Seems a Colossal Waste (Score:1)
Used to race go-karts as a kid. Adults would tell us as racers, we should not be looking back to see who was gaining on us, but instead forward at the track, to drive as hard as we possibly could. That was the way to go our fastest.
This is similar. It doesn't appear to add anything to our effort to cut GHG emissions to be looking at how much are in the atmosphere. Those are already there, they are history, they are looking back. What we need to do is put our heads down, do everything we can to reduce
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If that was the case, we wouldn't ever have heard about climate change. You know how deep the pockets of oil companies are?
Re: It will tell them what they want to hear (Score:1)
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Yes, and do you know how long they managed to silence the connection between tobacco smoking and cancer? "German scientists identified a link between smoking and lung cancer in the late 1920s, leading to the first anti-smoking campaign in modern history, albeit one truncated by the collapse of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II. In 1950, British researchers demonstrated a clear relationship between smoking and cancer." (source [wikipedia.org]).
They managed to keep the lid on that for almost a century, or half a centur
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The Germans must have been as bad at keeping a lid on it as they were at getting technological innovations out to the battlefield. You need to consider that cigarettes were nick-named "Coffin nails" by Americans in the first World War?
https://tobacco.harpweek.com/h... [harpweek.com]
Not sure who you think was silenced.
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Nice conspiracy theory. You know how rich and powerful the tobacco companies were?
Yes.
About 1/20th of the revenue of the oil companies.
Re: It will tell them what they want to hear (Score:1)
firehouse of falsehood [Re: It will tell them...] (Score:2)
And that's why we never hear anything about CO2 and global warming
That's why, even though the greenhouse effect is well understood, and has been well understood for decades, there are still people saying "it's all a hoax!" and propounding a hundred different and contradictory reasons to disregard the science and consider it controversial.
and scientists who propose a link between petroleum, CO2 and AGW have been utterly silenced. -eye roll-
"utterly silenced"? No, that's not the way they work. What they do is drown out the science with a tidal wave of bullshit. It's called the "firehouse of falsehood" [rand.org] technique-- if you flood the conversation with bullshit, you don't have
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If that was the case, we wouldn't ever have heard about climate change. You know how deep the pockets of oil companies are?
So you're saying scientists can do no wrong? If scientists are in the pockets of oil companies then doesn't that mean scientists _can_ do wrong when paid money?
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Sure they can. But if money is their goal, they sure are batting for the wrong team.
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Sure they can. But if money is their goal, they sure are batting for the wrong team.
So you argued both sides that the scientists couldn't be manipulated by money (parent's argument) and that they could also be manipulated by money (wrong team)? Great job!
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You asked whether scientists can do no wrong. And yes, they can. Science is not about morality, it's about finding stuff out. Science gave us rockets that flew us to the moon... right after they flew to London.
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You asked a question that I answered. You did not answer whether scientists are good or bad, right or wrong. You asked whether they can do no wrong. And they can do that. That is what I said. Nothing more. Nothing less. If you interpret something into this, this is you thinking, not me saying.
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Sure they can. But if money is their goal, they sure are batting for the wrong team.
This. Scientists aren't in it for the money. The vast majority make comfortable middle-class incomes, but no more than that.
Scientists are in it because (to paraphrase Richard Feynman) they enjoy finding things out.
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Funny that the oil companies themselves predicted climate change in the 1980s and suppressed the results. https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
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If it's a lie wouldn't you prefer that the best tools and knowledge be used to prove it?
Re: There are a lot of people getting really rich (Score:2)
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Applying foil to your head will clear up those pesky doubts.
Re: There are a lot of people getting really rich (Score:1)
Re: There are a lot of people getting really rich (Score:1)
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[There are a lot of people getting really rich] off of this climate change lie.
Correct, Mr. Anonymous Coward. And these people being paid to lie about climate are being paid by the fossil fuel industry, which is a multi trillion dollar industry.
Mull over the implications of an industry with several trillion dollars a year in revenue at stake for a while. It's hard for many people to think about trillions.
"dump trucks full of their money because you've scared them shitless."
Yeah.
A cubic meter of hundred dollar bills, neatly stacked, is about 70 million dollars. Depending on which model, a typical dump truck might be about 12 cubic meters. So a dump
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But for green politics rather than keeping up with NSA networking.