Comment Re:So it has come to this (Score 1) 531
If the US gets to that point, then it probably ought to be discontinued.
Probably true, but the discontinuation process will be pretty horrible for everyone who's around to see it.
If the US gets to that point, then it probably ought to be discontinued.
Probably true, but the discontinuation process will be pretty horrible for everyone who's around to see it.
What makes you think the US Military, Cops, Sheriffs, etc. would attack their own people?
I was talking with a friend from Serbia about this a while back; for obvious reasons, he has a perspective on such matters that most Americans don't. I expressed my opinion that at least half, maybe more, of the US military would refuse to go along with an imposition of martial law against the US population, which would make such an action difficult or impossible. His answer gave me a lot of food for thought:
"When Milosevic cracked down, half the Army deserted overnight. Of those who were left, about half were too dumb to know what was going on, and the other half were the assholes, you know, the crazy ones who just wanted to kill people and they didn't care who. So Milosevic shipped the dumb ones off to border areas where they wouldn't get in the way, and then had the crazy ones go out and recruit more crazy ones, petty criminals and psychopaths who just didn't give a shit. And those were the ones who did the killing."
He was firmly of the opinion that the same thing would happen here. I really, really hope he's wrong
Oh, don't worry, you'll be getting another big pile of taxpayers' cash from the socialist in the White House soon enough. BTW, I'm having trouble coming up with fake results for my latest destroy-Americans'-faith-in God-and-reduce-us-all-to-the-level-of-monkeys-to-pave-the-way-for-the-commie-muslim-takeover paper in the Journal Of Evilutionary Research; got any tips?
(Yes, I am a biochemist.)
Well, then, obviously you're just part of the arrogant, insular, ivory-tower scientific priesthood, using fancy jargon to baffle and mislead people instead of terms acceptable to $RANDOM_SLASHDOT_USER! Probably to protect your revenue stream from payrolled articles and wasteful government grants, since as a scientist you spend a significant portion of your day rolling around naked on piles of money. You ivory-tower eggheads with your fancy degrees instead of real-world experience and common sense, I tell you
After some adjustment, I can say I sleep like a baby now
You wake up every few hours screaming because you need your diaper changed?
That sound you heard was my point going over your head. You win at knowing facts, you fail utterly at allusion.
Or maybe it was just a really lousy allusion.
Only so long as the bonuses keep flowing. Once you've paid the Danegeld... stopping isn't so easy.
Okay, did you just seriously compare a CEO giving his employees bonuses with paying protection money to a hostile foreign power?
How fast do you nuts drive? 70 mph (112 kph) is plenty fast enough. The speed limits should be set to what the majority of drivers on the road feel safe driving at. If 90% of the drivers think that 70 is plenty (and they drive at or under that regardless of the speed limit) -- then that should be the limit.
It's actually the 85th percentile that has been found as the safest speed limit to set.
For a multi-lane, divided, limited-access freeway, the 85th percentile tends to be around 130-140km/h. This is, not coincidentally, the speed you'll find most vehicles travelling on the unrestricted portions of the German Autobahns.
Hah! Very true.
I'd take AGW arguments more seriously if they weren't so dependent on rhetorical fallacies.
You've already amply demonstrated that no amount of evidence will ever make you take a scientific analysis of climate change seriously.
Ad hominem attacks such as the above ("shrieking denialists") and appeals to authority ("97% of scientists") are ridiculously common.
"Ridiculously common" is an apt description of the denalist tendency to shriek "ad hominem!" every time somewhat accurately identifies them, and their constant pretense that appeal to authority is at the basis of scientifically based climatological arguments.
Protip: when you have been thoroughly pwned, all you accomplish by whining about it is to embarrass yourself and everyone else around you.
Trees, over their life span, may sequester carbon. But forests do not. They are carbon neutral.
This is true over the very long term--in the extreme case of Carboniferous forests, 300 million years or so; we're only now getting around to releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere by burning coal. Obviously in most cases dead trees rot and release their carbon faster than that, but "fast" is relative, and it's still a very slow process by human standards. And most of the carbon from a dead tree doesn't go straight back into the atmosphere; it's taken up by other organisms, and ultimately goes back into the soil as part of the organic waste that makes forest floors into fertile ground for the next generation of trees. Rotted wood, bits of smaller plants, bug poop
It's a combination of factors, of which warming is one. Probably the best summation from TFA:
"When you look at the long record, you see fire and climate moving together over decades, over centuries, over thousands of years," said pyrogeographer Jennifer Marlon of Yale University, who earlier this year co-authored a study of long-term fire patterns in the American West.
"Then, when you look at the last century, you see the climate getting warmer and drier, but until the last couple decades the amount of fire was really low. We've pushed fire in the opposite direction you'd expect from climate," Marlon said.
The fire debt is finally coming due.
This is pretty much what you'd expect. Leaving aside the question of the human contribution to warming and what we can do about it, the fact of global warming is established to all but the shrieking denialists; it's also a fact that under normal circumstances, ecosystems adapt to any change in climate--sometimes better than others, but they do adapt. Our fire suppression policies for the last century or so have prevented what would have been the normal adaptation from taking place. So now we're getting it all at once.
Just in case anyone wants to actually, you know, read the article rather than being taken to a login screen.
I want to engrave this post on the insides of the eyelids of every single person who pushes the "poor people are just lazy and stupid" meme. Well said.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
