Claiming that they need a lot of new observational evidence is similar to the creationist who argues evolution is not proven yet because there are missing fossils and we need more missing links. The creationist won't be happy until literally the evolution science has provided every single fossil that ever existed (including the fossils grinded up and digested by other animals which can never be recovered, since they were, uhm, eaten).

The climate models do have their errors, and we might even eventually go into a global cooling stage if some completely unpredictable event happens (like the flying spaghetti monster blocks the sunlight from shining on earth since he is so big and takes up so much space in the sky)... But even if this is so, we shouldn't block new technology from coming about and just sit back and say "everything will be okay if we just burn more coal and oil". And no buying Tesla cars is not going to solve the problem: the batteries need to be thrown away and fill up landfills, the hydro dams destroy our fish reserves, wind mills annoy people with large shadows from the blades of the turbine, solar panels get covered in snow in the winter and have to be continually shoveled off). We can figure out better solutions like safe nuclear star power (NIF, california), or even strange things like second law violating devices in nano technology.

Tesla cars are an example of the stupidity of the industry: charge a huge amount of money for an electric car that only rich people can afford, while pretending to be liberal and helping the world.

Even if global warming was not happening at all (which it is), why discourage new technology that solves pollution problems? For example let's pretend that we are in global cooling and not global warming (which we aren't, but let's pretend: a hypothetical). This doesn't change the fact that there is pollution from gasoline causing toxic substances in the air. If we understood the climate more, we could battle global cooling, ice ages, global warming, we could even change the weather with the right technology by dumping heat into cold spots, and extracting heat (cooling) the hot spots to create the exact weather patterns we want. This sounds like a science fiction idea, and maybe a control freak who wants to literally control the weather so that it is always 20 degrees celsius outside and consistent (while skiiers want it to be -8 celsius in the mountains or so). But to just deny global warming because maybe warming means things will get better (which it won't, look at the melting ice) is naive.

Safe nuclear power (NIF National Ignition Facility) or second law violating devices would be a solution to the problem because with nuclear power that is safe (star power on earth) or with second law violating devices, one could literally control the temperature to what he wanted, any time he wants.

Since we are all going to die eventually due to heat death (equilibrium death) via the second law of thermodynamics, there really is no point in continuing life anyway. We consider ourselves significant, but we aren't. The only possible reason to continue living would be to violate the second law and save the universe, as in Isaac Asimov's The Last Question. Fighting global warming and pretending it's not of concern, is the same as fighting global cooling science because you think an ice age is of no concern. Believe me, they are both concerns. Global warming doesn't just warm the climate, it cools things drastically during the down stages - that's why you see more extreme weather patterns. But there is no point in living life, if the second law holds true 100 percent of the time, because we are doomed. Posting messages on slashdot is literally insignificant and pointless, unless the second law could be violated - then humans will be significant, because we would figure out how to control the universe and make it live instead of die in equilibrium.

Some articles on the subect:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.5056...

http://mdpi.org/entropy/papers...

http://olsonb.com/articles/hea...

Hydropower doesn't even count as renewable energy in USA..

http://www.governing.com/topic...

"Several large dams block migrating fish from reaching their spawning grounds. Dam reservoirs impact flows, temperatures and silt loads of rivers and streams. Over the years, these factors have drastically reduced fish populations. At one time, the Klamath River in Oregon and California had salmon runs in the millions. The construction of four dams along the river reduced the fish runs to a fraction of that."

"That’s why hydropower doesn’t count toward utilities’ renewable energy mandates in most states—that, and the fact that there is already so much hydro out there"

You know you're on Slashdot when the left wing liberal hippies post stuff to the firehouse that appears to be nice and liberal, while actually thinking about it deeper means killing all the fish in our oceans, rivers, and lakes. You also know when you are on slashdot when you get a bunch of people upvote all the comments that encourage damaging the environment in massive scale, because it seemed liberal and right at the time... you know you are on slashdot when you see people downvoting anyone who criticizes this damage to the environment as "a moron" and "a troll". Because left wing liberal hippie slashdotters can't distinguish what's actually good for the environment, and what isn't. Go out and buy a Tesla car - it'll save the environment! No, wait, let's think about this carefully.

http://www.governing.com/topic... "Several large dams block migrating fish from reaching their spawning grounds. Dam reservoirs impact flows, temperatures and silt loads of rivers and streams. Over the years, these factors have drastically reduced fish populations. At one time, the Klamath River in Oregon and California had salmon runs in the millions. The construction of four dams along the river reduced the fish runs to a fraction of that."

so consider a website like youtube: people are going to start uploading their videos as HTML and javascript hacks, instead of just using flash player.. all our videos will turn into a bunch of baroque HTML? Or worse: XML videos. Almost as bad as physicists using XML instead of math to describe the universe..

Is an alternative to flash for youtube, VLC embedded player (videolan)?

So if flash is dead, how come all the trolls on youtube are still on youtube... did youtube disable flash and the trolls didn't notice? Ugh wait maybe you are talking about flash as in the nude thing you do to people via the glass window in your car; I didn't get the memo that people stopped that either. Wait, which flash is dead again?

it's not a case of the equations being correct or not, it's whether they are useful models (approximations). An example is the speed of light constant. It may be a white lie that it is a constant. It probably is constant, but it also could just be an approximation.. maybe it fluctuates such a small amount that it is undetectable. Also the theory of gravity when Newton started out, wasn't correct 100 percent, but was a useful model for the time being.

Conservation of energy has already been violated by virtual particles popping in to existence temporarily and then disappearing. The laws of thermodynamics are models or approximations. The second law especially is violated all the time microscopically, but macroscopically it holds true in engineering

A macroscopic equation can be correct to a degree, but break down in other cases. So to claim that it is either correct or not, is simply naive - math is a model, it doesn't represent reality exactly. If we ever are able to represent reality exactly, it might be something like Leibniz's dream.

maybe information gives us the illusion that there is physical matter here... If you were the character running around in grand theft auto and you bent down to touch your shirt pocket, does your shirt pocket actually exist physically in grand theft auto? The information is stored on a hard drive and in the computer memory, but the character inside grand theft auto doesn't have an actual shirt that he is touching... So if you give the character A.I. where he can think about his universe, does he think his shirt is information, or is it physical?

the problem with particles not being information, is something string theory is trying to solve where everything is just composed of bits or qubits, but the question is, do these bits of information exist as physical dots, substrings that are part of the string - what are the bits? This is an open area of study and anyone who claims to know everything about the subject is ignorant (not saying you are)

I'm not a huge fan of string theory since it isn't so testable (it's more like String Hypothesis).

You end up with a tautology, where information is represented physically, but are physical things represented by information

Then you end up with meta information about the information - where are these Hidden Variables that einstein spoke of? Is there state, like a C program, and is someone keeping track of the state using assignment in a procedural program, or monads in a functional program?

Again this brings us to silly things like the simulation argument (Nick Bostrom) which are so silly they could be true.

When Einstein spoke of hidden variables, he was unknowingly implying that we are living in a C or Lisp program. Or something like it. variables

" A state variable is one of the set of variables that are used to describe the mathematical 'state; of a dynamical system. Intuitively, the state of a system describes enough about the system to determine its future behaviour in the absence of any external forces affecting the system." --Wikipedia, not realizing they are describing the universe as a computer system..

the past, present, and future of a system can be described by its information only if you store that information somewhere: example taking a video tape of a soccer game means you can relive the soccer game over and over again, but only because you stored that information on the video tape or SD card. So where is the universe storing all this meta information about information?

Once you delete files off your hard drive, the information becomes scrambled - but you could only get the data back if you video taped every particle movement(heat) coming from the hard drive, but that video tape you took required you to store all the information! So without the video camera, how are you going to find out the information? the universe has no video camera unless humans make video tapes.. This is an interesting area of physics that people don't fully understand. As Daniel Sheehan says, the universe is actually getting richer with more entropy. If we were just a low entropy system we would be in a boring universe that looked like a clump of mass and nothing else (before the big bang).

If you accept the statistical nature of QM, then you might want to consider that we are just apes trying to understand QM. What if QM has a random number generator seed behind it (i.e. a C program) or the random number generator is encrypted with something we just haven't quite figured out yet? The hidden variables theory from Einstein implies that there might be state (i.e. Einstein was literally claiming we are a C program, but he didn't know how to program.. so he didn't realize what he was implying, only I realize it...well me and Nick Bostrom).... While people are busy cracking games and creating keygens, some of us are busy cracking the universe encryption... script kiddies become universe kiddies.

http://simulation-argument.com...

Enjoy the red pill - I'll give you some milk so that the pill goes down well.

In math it would be stated as:
money = happiness

In a C program this could imply that money is a variable that becomes happiness, not that it equals happiness. Which is it?

confusing assignment with equality, one step at a time. Thanks Dennis Ritchie

The CO2 sometimes gets delayed - coal and oil sit in the ground for MILLIONS of years and there is no CO2 coming from that oil or coal until you burn it.. Plants turn into oil and coal.... So the idea that CO2 comes from the rotting of trees is not really true, if, and this is an important if, you can keep the coal and oil the way it is without burning it. An example is the dinosaur times: the dinosaurs ran around without burning things in combustion engines. They burned some food to live in their mitochondria, but a lot of the plants got trapped underground and turned into coal and oil, stopping the CO2 from coming up (oil stores the carbons in itself).

So if we could generate electricity without burning coal or oil, by using gravity (water damn) or violating the second law (Sheehan and Capek, challenges to second law of thermodynamics), then we could literally take CO2 and turn it into other chemicals and store all the Carbon underground like how oil and coal have been sitting underground for millions of years undisturbed (until we f**ked it all up and used much of it)

It says they have embraced electric vehicles, which just means you'll end up burning more coal, and coal is very bad for the environment.

Unless they have access to niagra falls type electric water generators (potential gravity), it doesn't really help to just drive more electric cars.

The only way you could really solve the problem of electricity causing pollution is to somehow generate electricity without using Coal! i.e. violate the second law of thermodynamics.

The original poster of this article says the "followers of the religion" but Buddhism is compatible with atheism, agnosticism, antitheism, it's not even a religion as much as a bunch of philosophies.

Example: Sam Harris, is an atheist (actually he doesn't like that word though) who supports much of buddhism ideas (but is also critical of some of buddhism)

Buddhism and non religious people are compatible with each other... becuase buddhism is not about worshiping an invisible man in the sky

Disclaimer: I am not a buddhist and don't want to be, as I reject the label.