Cite? I've generally heard 2020s or 2030s but that might be true and they might have been right. For all we know we're already past the tipping point and are going to get hit no matter what.
Just say No to this.
The U.S. is doing fairly well on pollution, It's the third world up-and-comers with a massive increase in their oil budgets and no, or suppressed, or wholly state-owned, watchdogs who are polluting the world.
A pork fund by any other name is still a pork fund.
Yeah, you're only the 2nd highest gross emitter responsible for ~18% of the worldwide emissions (and probably a lot more of the cumulative emissions already there). You're practically a nation of vegan hippies!
Using your logic:
There's been massive flooding in the UK in recent weeks. So if the government allocate a significant budget to deal with the problem, that means that there wasn't really any flooding, it's just that there's money available for people to shout "Flood!"
1) Nobody is claiming that climate doesn't change - the debate is over the source(s) of that change.
I still see lots of people claiming that it's mostly due to the urban heat island.
2) Flooding is a present problem that causes damage, and is quite demonstrable as to its immediacy and even its sources. AGW theory on the other hand promises problems later down the road... maybe, well, if their models are proven to be correct.
Try again?
Well AGW theory promises problems like flooding, and preparing for AGW can help us mitigate or even reduce those problems.
As for your skepticism over the theories, the only way to truly prove the models correct is to wait for the consequences to happen, and at that point it might be too late to act.
For a country the size of the US $1 billion is minuscule, even if the skeptics were right and the science was shoddy group think and the models were wildly inaccurate, the potential size of the problem is so big that this would still be a good investment.
>If we are living in a simulation there's really not a lot we can assume about what's going on outside.
I beg to differ. We can probably infer a lot. For instance:
- Considering the amount of injustice, starvation, and people killed in wars we can assume that the programmers are indifferent to us , much as we would be indifferent to the millions of bacteria colonies killed off when we test a new antibiotic.
Maybe, but perhaps it's the purpose of the experiment and they make up for it with an awesome afterlife, which sounds like 'god works in mysterious ways' except in this case god might be a grad student.
- We can infer that time runs much slower for the programmers (or perhaps that they are almost unimaginably long lived and patient) because why run a simulation that only runs in real-time?
Depends what they're interested in, we'll run simulations of proteins that take months to simulate a few microseconds.
- We can infer that (unless the simulation started very recently and is going to end in a relatively short time that the universe that the programmers live in is far more information dense than our own. The number of particle interactions which need to be simulated is limited by the light cone in the time frame from which the simulation (i.e. our earth) starts to the time that it ends. Unless this period is relatively short ( a thousand years, a million years??? ) then the number of particles which need to be simulated is enormously large. If that were the case then the "programmers" must live in an entirely different kind of universe with more dimensions than 3 (or 11 of you go string theory - whatever) otherwise there would be no room in the parent universe to keep the simulation machine. So either our "simulation" is going to be short lived or the programmers are unimaginably different from us.
I bet there are a lot of other things one could reasonably infer as well.
Most of our games only render the part of the game world that the user is actively interacting with, why wouldn't they do the same? If we're the point maybe the moon as a fully rendered object only existed when we were walking on it.
I am not stressed out by the notion we might live in a simulation because it changes nothing about the fundemental questions about the nature of reality, it only changes the context in which we ask them. It does add a whole new layer of interesting questions to examine, but strip away the stimulation and you are left where you were before.
Maybe, but if we are living in a simulation maybe the real world has characteristics that change the question.
Maybe the real world has deities that are regularly and obviously involved with the running of the reality and our universe is the results of an experiment that says "what happens if there are no visible gods?"
Or maybe they're mostly happily atheistic and they're wondering what would happen if people were given a more superstitious nature.
Maybe they're energy beings wondering what would happen if you change the laws of physics to allow these massive fireballs they called stars to form, and we're some kind of weird phenomena that's popped up in the simulation. Our consciousness isn't really a feature of our universe but a flaw the simulation that they don't notice because in the real world consciousness is a phenomena that occurs everywhere and is easily explainable.
If we are living in a simulation there's really not a lot we can assume about what's going on outside.
I can recall a lot of sports broadcasts where the announcers mention how an athlete has made an adjustment to their technique, sometimes trying to get better results, sometimes working with new equipment. It's not that uncommon but they usually do it at the start of the season.
Making a change that requires a change a month before the Olympics, that is uncommon and obviously a bad idea.
It's not telling them to change their form, it's just that if the new material feels different it might throw off their form. They're not changing anything, but they might have to get used to something that feels slightly different.
I don't think that's anything new for a top athlete, they're constantly refining their equipment and technique, but doing it that close to the games is a bad idea.
As a guy who understands the effects of cold temperatures I'm going to say that's a bad idea for the winter Olympics.
As person of either gender who watches the games I'm going to say that's a bad idea for the winter Olympics.
FTA:
These people [close to team USA] said that vents on back of the suit, designed to allow heat to escape, are allowing air to enter the suit and create drag that keeps the skaters from staying in the "low" position they need to achieve maximum speed. One skater said team members felt they were fighting the suit to maintain correct form.
The vent thing if true could be an R&D screwup but the form effect might be more important. Maybe the suits are great but have a different feel and response and that affected their technique. Depending when in January they got the suits that might not have been enough time to tweak their form.
Well if Darwin wasn't a Sedaris fan he sure didn't know what he was missing.
Why couldn't the manufacturer set up dealerships with the ability to respond to their local communities? Why couldn't they improve on the efficiency by analyzing data on the large scale? If the local dealership model is that much superior why don't the manufacturers embrace it without the aid of legislation?
It might be that forcing manufacturers to use 3rd party dealerships is somehow better for the economy as a whole and ends up better for the manufacturer as well by forcing them away from irrational actions but it's a fairly interventionist conclusion.
That doesn't mean it's not useful. For one we've seen a lot of evidence that population levels on the island are too small to offer positive selective pressure. This is pretty important when designing parks or wildlife habitats, you need a large competitive population to maintain the genetic fitness of the population. That's some critically important information if we want to keep our ecosystems functional. And if we see another ecosystem showing similar issues we might know to look for some kind of island effect.
Particularly look at urban parks, say the raccoons in Central Park in New York aren't doing well. Is that from stress from human visitors? Pollution? Something else? This experiment might suggest the population is just too small to sustain the gene pool, you import a few outside raccoons and suddenly the population is doing fine.
I'm tempted to agree. I'm not sure that they were explicitly confused but they may have been mostly ignorant, ie they rated astrology highly not because they confused it with astronomy, but because they associated with astronomy.
I actually saw a similar thing with a fairly well educated co-worker. We had a discussion one day and I discovered that he believed in homeopathy, as it turned out this was just because he didn't know what homeopathy was. He thought it was just another form of naturopathy (which is better... though not much), he did some research after our discussion and realized homeopath was nonsense.
The only time I hear of astrology is from skeptics making fun of astrologers, I'm not sure ordinary young people really know what astrology is.
I think that's a point that perhaps deserves more emphasis. We always view it as a fairly straightforward establishment clause issue, schools are secular and only science belongs in the science classroom. But for biblical literalists teaching evolution feels like a violation of the establishment clause. Their kids go to a public school are literally being taught that their religion is wrong. (and I mean literally mean literally, not just figuratively)
I don't think for a second we should 'teach the controversy' or even back away from the teaching of evolution, but it is worthwhile to acknowledge that a strict separation of church and state is no longer possible the way it was when the US constitution was written. Back then you didn't have evolution or a great understanding of the age of the earth, it was possible to both deliver a good education and not contradict anyone's faith. But now delivering a high quality education means teaching that some religions are wrong.
I'm not surprised we're finding new species back then as we're still finding new species now.
Also consider between Yoho and Kootnay we may not be getting precisely the same habitat. Just go for a walk outside and the ecosystem can vary wildly within a small geographic area. And with a 100,000 year gap (not sure how accurate that number is) that's enough time for a few new species to evolve, go extinct, or even migrate into or out of that ecosystem depending on climate conditions. Just 10,000-12,000 years ago we had megafauna like mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and giant beavers roaming North America, over the history of the earth I'd expect there's been a LOT of different species.
There's also the number of species to choose from, in both Yoho and Kootnay only a small subset of the species from those ecosystems were preserved and recovered, even if it was the same ecosystem and habitat you'd expect to get different subsets.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
