I took away from her study that, as far as she could extrapolate from the available data on climate/temperature cycles going back 2 million years, that we were pretty much smack at the point of the two curves one would expect during this point in time, so to speak, on both CO2 and temperature, and from that lack of deviation from expected norms then suggesting that humans have had little if any significant effect on global temperature averages, and that the warming that is occurring and will continue for a long time at pretty much the same average rate is pretty well inevitable given past history with or without human industrialization.

Seeing as how industrialization in it's entirety has failed to have been shown to appreciably affect global temperature changes then massive, costly, and punitive CO2 mitigation schemes become pointless and wasteful. The problem being that a non-existent 'climate crisis' allows governments, politicians, and their bureaucracies unprecedented powers and control that they will never willingly give up.

And so the beat goes on...

Strat

Been there, done that. Basically had to go to the max dose of oxycontin just to take the edge off the pain.

This page you can see some pictures of the procedure and instruments people used on kidney stones in the 1600s. It seems unimaginable that anyone would subject themselves to that -- without anesthetic -- unless you've actually experienced it.

As a first step you could roll back vehicle weights to what they were 40 years ago.

No, you can't. Vehicles 40 years ago were much smaller inside, much noisier, and far less comfortable. (I assume you're talking about European cars; 40 years ago was 1976, and the American cars of the time were gigantic, although there again they weren't that large inside, but had gigantic engine compartments, and were quite heavy.) People now expect larger, more comfortable vehicles which can seat people who are both taller and fatter than 40 years ago.

Depends on streamlining, and on what "useful speed" means (you said highway speed, not me -- the solar challenge vehicles go much faster than bicycles but not highway speeds),

I'm sorry, the general public does not want to travel at 25mph.

"The point of writing a religious book is to control people"

That's a rather narrow way of looking at it. Ignoring the possibility that authors sometimes write what they believe to be true to inform others is convenient for the denier, but that does not, by itself, make their assertion true.

The trouble is that often the denier solves this 'lack-of-truthful-assertion' problem by attacking/ostracizing/persecuting/killing any who dare disagree with their assertions, and nearly as often, that includes said author.

There have been voices already calling for jailing 'climate deniers' if they publish opinions, arguments, and evidence opposing 'Established Science!' on AGW.

I'd say the process seems well underway.

Strat

Of course, it may be that she is right and he is wrong.

I hope not...

Wait, what?

Why would you hope that he is right and she is wrong?

If he and GISS are right it means that in order to even have any measurable effect on global temperatures would require in practice an immense forced downsizing of industrialization and population/agriculture resulting in huge conflicts, rebellions, forced famines, wars, etc and with those actions cripple the advancement of civilization. If he's wrong, we've wasted unimaginable wealth, resources, and lives for nothing.

If she's right it means we can concentrate our efforts and resources more on the gradual adaptation necessary and having a pretty good model of the time curve and likely temperature rise boundaries to work with, thus saving immense wealth, resources, and lives and restricting freedom the least.

Didn't realize forced famines and wars were that popular on /.

Strat

People forget that personal rights come with personal responsibilities, one of which being called to serve in the unorganized militia (if one fits stated criteria to serve, age, etc) and fight in combat if required to do so. It is compulsory. Refusal during wartime (only scenario where the UOM would be activated and this would apply in) could result in immediate execution or imprisonment.

Nobody requires you to own a firearm. However, you may still be called to serve. If nobody has a spare firearm and ammo to lend you, you may find yourself charging a defended position as the 'meatshield'.

Choose wisely.

Strat

That's a good point, but it's going to be a while before we get to that point. A lot of people are going to insist on keeping their non-autonomous cars. But you still have to worry about things like the car sliding off the road due to icy roads, and crash resistance is important there too. Finally, you can't shave *that* much weight off the car even if you stopped worrying about crashworthiness altogether; you can only make a steel box for 4/5 people so light, and still make it ride nicely, not be noisy inside, have comfortable seats, be able to fit people over 6' tall, etc.

As for solar panels, again, no, it's completely impossible. At highway speeds, you need tens of horsepower to overcome air resistance. There's no way you'd get even 10kW out of solar panels on a car's roof and hood, you need a house-size roof for that much. And that's just steady-state cruising, with no acceleration.

It sure would be nice if our OS ran every single program and app in its own private VM, with individually tailored permissions.

You could do this on linux if you wanted. Using a tool like firejail, you can run all your software in lightweight sandboxes (linux namespaces). It comes with custom profiles for 100+ desktop/server applications and it's easy to write more. I wouldn't recommend converting all of /usr/bin to run under firejail as this would certainly cause issues but, I run all my desktop applications with it and it's worked well.

I believe FreeBSD/PC-BSD have a robust jail system as well. FreeBSD also has 'bhyve' and 'iohyve' which together can now support recent Windows versions that require UEFI support emulation.

Howto here: http://pr1ntf.xyz/windowsunder...

Haven't attempted it myself so I have no personal experiences or information on Windows versions and compatibility other than the blog article linked above, but it looks fascinating.

Strat

US freight rail used to be a lot better. The problem was that back in the 50s, rail was highly regulated, but trucking was then deregulated, so it became cheaper to ship a lot of stuff by truck.

I'm guessing the reason freight rail isn't that great in Europe is because Europe isn't a single country (yet), so getting so many squabbling nations to agree on things and build a continental rail network hasn't been easy. Even worse, the continent was split in two by the Cold War until ~1990, and IIRC, Russia and its buddies used a different rail standard than the western nations which all used the UK standard. We never had either of these problems in the US. Being a single nation, composed of federal states with rather limited power, and occupying a whole continent, has been the biggest factor in our economic success. We tried letting the states have a lot more power back in the late 1700s under the Articles of Confederation and it didn't work out because no one could agree on anything and the central government didn't have the power to overrule them.

Vertical-axis mills should be better for another reason, however: they don't care which direction the wind is traveling. Regular (fan-looking) windmills have to be actively turned into the wind. Also, they should have lower maintenance requirements as they should be mechanically simpler (just a straight vertical shaft, no 90-degree turn at the top).

You can't, unless you're proposing to have vehicles that can't go faster than bicycle speed. The size and weight of modern cars stems directly from crash-safety requirements.

Yeah, the guy in the video I linked to was probably the most powerful climate scientist in the world for a couple decades. (I've been worried about the next billion years, I'm considering becoming a prepper. How many gallons of water do you think I should save up?)

Even in Europe and Japan, where trains are really good, people still take airplanes (for example, from France to Spain).

I live not too far from major highway. Noise and pollution from automobiles worry me. The electric revolution cannot come soon enough

Electric cars aren't going to help your noise problems. With modern cars, most of the noise comes from the tires at high speeds. Electric cars use the same tires as gas cars.

And why the hell do these riders intentionally make their bikes so loud?

Two reasons: 1) many of them actually believe (or claim to believe) all the noise makes them more visible to car drivers, even though it doesn't (it's mainly people behind them who hear all the noise; that isn't helpful for safety), and 2) they're obnoxious people who like to make a nuisance of themselves for attention.

As for beating the shit out of them, they only really annoy me if I'm outside my car, such as when they pull into a gas station or parking lot that I'm at. When I'm inside my car, the noise is a little annoying but generally short-lived and not that high in volume; outside, it's deafening.

No, what GM needs to do is license their technology from the Volt to other automakers. The biggest problem with the Volt is that it's made by GM, the same company that made defective ignition switches for years and intentionally hid this and murdered people so they wouldn't have to pay for a recall. They're also known for making cars that don't last long and have crappy interiors that fall apart in a few years, and very ugly exteriors too, not to mention very poor driving dynamics.

If I could get that technology in a car made by Honda or Mazda, I'd buy one.