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Apple, Google, and Microsoft Among Companies Signing New White House Climate Pledge
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If you're referring to the Yucatan impact, you're incredibly wrong. If something like that occurred today, civilization as we know it would be completely destroyed and humanity would most likely go extinct - due to the billowing clouds of impact debris covering the sky causing a new ice age by blotting out the sun, and the rain of molten rock thrown up in the impact setting alight to forests around the globe and the resulting worlwide ash rain turning our waters acidic, tsunami smashing our coastline cities, and so on.
The only reason you seem to be under the impression we made it out "pretty alright" is because this all happened ~65 million years ago, and nothing even resembling humans existed at the time. Meanwhile, most land life died out in this near-cataclysmic event.
{SNIP} What would you know what "a few" carbon atoms would do anyway, what are your qualifications to make such a sweeping dismissal? We're releasing on the order of hundreds of billions of tons of fossile carbon into the air every single year. It does make a difference. We've measured it. Our mathematical models correlate with our real-world measurements.
Science has spoken. Maybe you should listen?
Oh yeah, sure. Let's all just "adapt", okay? But when places like southern Europe regularly starts hitting 50C during summers, and farming - especially further south - just won't be possible anymore in these regions, what will we do then when hordes of people, perhaps entire nations, are forced to abandon their native lands because they've become unsustainable?
Millions of people are going to die, but by then there's nothing that can be done about that. Now however, we still have time.
Oh, you had me going there for a while! Really; so, well trolled on you, I must say!
So, rampant trolling is allowed in this place then, is that right? I'm a little surprised, really.
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Lol..
So, you're saying that because we were hamsters back then, we do not possess the rational faculty now to avert another from hitting us in the first place, or to move underground and survive if we couldn't keep it from hitting us? We are obviously a bit more advanced now than we were before, our capacity to actively defend our survival is a bit greater now.
Again, this really doesn't have a whole lot to do with climate change, but if your contention is that people would die if we got hit by an asteroid, then, well... yeah. If your contention is that we would go extinct, then that would depend on the size, speed etc. but ultimately, if we had time to prepare we:
1. Could divert it.
and
2. Move under ground.
If we can put people in space and on the moon 50 years ago, I would think we could manage Sub-terrainian Earth no?
The same materials we used in the first place?
Why? Was there a ridiculously massive NAND Flash shorting EMP I missed? Doesn't seem likely..
Lol horrible.
All the ones that are worth reading are in English.
You know what's easier? Nuclear. LFTR MSR specifically. 0 Carbon emissions. I'll say it again because it's worth repeating. 0. Carbon. Emissions. Thank GOD the Apocalypse has been averted.
I will use the existence of this technology, and the refusal of the "green energy" life suck to embrace, or even acknowledge the existent of this technology as evidence that their agenda has nothing to do with logic, or climate change, or creating a better environment (I want to be clear that I am referring primarily to its intellectual leadership, who should, and probable do know better, but continue to perpetuate this agenda instead). I've literally heard 0 environmentalists even mention this technology. Not even one. Shows how much this movement really cares about the environment. This whole movement is a joke.
Well, you're all armed with Google and a 'tude that's for sure.
Is that right? So concerned that you're willing to waste billions on stupid awareness programs, and panels, and windmills etc?
Let's spell out for me, exactly how climate change is going to make it so that I literally won't have a future unless we get on top of this thing, like, now.
Furthermore, explain to me why the individuals involved in this movement, particularly its leadership, don't advocate for the adoption of LFRT MSR technology as immediately as possible? I mean, if they really just want to save the Earth and everything. To say nothing of the infinite levels of energy we could have.
You're completely ignoring the fact that we now possess the capacity to avert such impacts to begin with. Even if we didn't have time to go over the impact, we can still move underground and survive. To suggest that we would all go extinct is ridiculous on its face.
Because we're incapable of producing our own light.
So you're saying it would be bad to be hit by an asteroid? The same asteroid we could have detected and diverted? Yeah, probably. Unsurvivable? Probably not.
Still no relevance to the green/clean energy movements though.
{SNIP}
Gee, well I don't have a degree in global warming or anything, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that the one predicting a mass human extinction apocalypse maybe shouldn't be listened to so much? How about that?
Did those models/measurements predict the apocalypse too?
Yeah, um, have you not heard of, or even conceived of importing food? Or like... Capitalism? where you produce other things that you can't produce here, and then trade? I'm about to eat some chocolate right now (in my air conditioned house, I might add) and guess where the key ingredients were grown? Not here.
{SNIP}
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Tim Cook:
Supports climate pledge in the USA...
...Outsources heavily to one of the worst polluting nations in the world
Supports climate pledge in the USA...
...Outsources heavily to one of the worst polluting nations in the world
Deflection theory's pretty sound. One of the nice things about space is that there's a lot of it, and we can see something big coming from a good distance away. Since a collision would require a meteor to be traveling at the right angle, hitting us at the just the right spot of
Of course, there's a huge margin of error too, but we do have the technology to save ourselves from a direct meteor strike.
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Sorry but in what world is 16% pretty small? A pretty small percentage would be something like .02%.
We do? We can? Since when?!
What's your source for any of these prepostrous claims? I can promise you, you won't find a single (knowledgeable) astronomer who would agree we now have the infrastructure and personnel and monetary resources to reliably detect asteroids crossing earth orbit. These things are incredibly small, and most of them have incredibly low albedo. They're really hard to spot, and if we do spot them we absolutely do NOT have the tech to divert them.
Quite the opposite in fact! Many astronomers such as Phil Plait for example, frequently warn about that we expend entirely too little effort watching our skies, AND the fact if we do find anything dangerous coming our way there's almost certainly nothing we can do to stop it. You should read this guy's blog if you're interested. He's an educated liberal, obviously someone a clueless person like you would despise and hate, but he knows his **** when it comes to astronomy because he has actually studied his subject for many years. He doesn't just spout bollocks on the internet!
And how exactly would we "move underground and survive" by the way? You seem to completely lack concept of what such an endeavor would entail, and how would it help us if while we sit in a shelter and meanwhile the planet outside dies?
You're spreading nothing but misinformation and BS.
To feed billions of people?! Prepostrous!
Every relevance you could possibly think of!
Even if global warming didn't exist, or was of no concern whatsoever (antarctic ice melting... Ho hum de dum...), judiciously rationing our hydrocarbon supplies so they'll last as long as possible is the smart thing to do, rather than just burn the stuff in furnaces and engines willy-nilly. Hydrocarbons are used as base feedstock in almost every branch of the chemical industry, including agricultural chemicals production and medicines for example. When we run out of this stuff, we will be in big trouble, regardless of the state of our climate. And naturally, we will run out faster if we keep wasting it like we do now.
There's also the matter of ocean acidification caused by human carbon dioxide emissions, which is perhaps as serious a matter as global warming itself, although much less well-researched or talked about.
Finally, pollution. Burning fossile fuels kills hundreds of thousands of people outright every single year and injures far more - millions of people at the very least. Especially children, the elderly and the already sick and infirm. This pollution is wrecking our environment by fouling air, water and soils with poisonous or acidic fallout from combustion by-products. It also erodes buildings and monuments, including ancient relics from early history of man.
{SNIP}
I haven't mentioned any extinction or "apocalypse". Cut out the stupid strawman crap, alright?
Mankind will very likely survive, after a fashion. Many individual humans will not of course, and our current civilization certainly won't either on a timescale of a hundred fifty years or so unless we do drastic measures to change our irresponsible ways, especially not when rising oceans start putting multi-million coastal metropolitans under meters of water (eventually tens of meters), and warming climate makes farming impossible in large parts of the earth as I just mentioned in my previous post. Just the economic impact of the United States is almost immeasureable, much less for the rest of the world. Low-land countries like many island nations, the Netherlands or Bangladesh would be hugely impacted.
That you seem unable to comprehend the cause and effect relationship of our own actions to the results it will have on our only home in this entire universe is an indicator of how little your understanding is on this matter. Your reaction "even thinking this could be bad is dumb" shows how poor your understanding is.
You don't know jack, yet you not only dismiss the findings of far smarter people than you who have studied this subject for decades, you also sweepingly proclaim nothing of any importance is happening at all. How stupid is that, really?
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No, paradoxically, one of the biggest problems is that space is big. There's a LOT of sky to search, and asteroids are teensy-tiny objects even if they're "big" (say, hundreds of meters across, and far smaller asteroids could cause nuke-sized damage if they were to strike a population center), and typically also very dark, making them harder still to spot.
Not at all. Do we know the asteroid is solid? It might not be. If we nuke it, it might just shatter, and instead of getting hit by a single bullet we get a shotgun blast of space matter instead, spreading the damage even wider.
The sad fact is, basically we don't have the tech needed to save us. If we against all odds were to find an earth-orbit asteroid before it's about to hit us, we statistically won't find it before it's so close it's too late to do anything about it (except in a Hollywood movie), and if we against odds do find it far away, we don't have any decent tools to deal with it.
Asteroids come at us at an orbital velocity of about 30km/s. That's a hell of a clip. Just blowing up a nuke near enough to affect it is no simple matter. Let alone have the explosion do the desired effect. There's no air in space of course so the shockwave of only vaporized nuclear warhead will have almost zero impact on any decent-sized asteroid. Certainly not enough to deflect it entirely. Blowing the nuke so close that it heats and vaporizes part of the asteroid, causing thrust in the opposite direction might not do all that much either; big asteroids are really heavy, and a nuke doesn't produce that much thrust. While tiny course differences magnify with enough distance, you first have to get your nuke out there, and if the asteroid is far away it takes time to get there. Meanwhile our nuke is puttering its way towards the asteroid, it too closes the distance to us, reducing whatever margins we may have had.
It took about nine years for New Horizons to fly to Pluto, and that's the fastest vehicle we have ever launched into space (it took a slingshot around Jupiter to reach top velocity, by the way.) Now, Pluto is very very far away, much farther than we would realistically discover any asteroids coming our way, but it illustrates the challenges of getting basically anywhere in a place which is so damn big.
Bigger isn't always better, heh!Other ideas have involved shining powerful lasers at impactors, vaporizing the surface where the beam strikes, thus creating thrust, or sending up a satellite equipped with an ion drive engine to rendez-vous with the asteroid to "tug" it off-course via gravitational influence. These ideas are all experimental though (as are flinging nukes by the way.) We've got no genuine way of knowing if they will actually work in reality.
Exactly.
Your bank: "We're raising the interest rate on your loans by a small amount, only 16%. You're totally down with that, right?"
And what will we eat? That's why I bring up the hamsters - not because they're smarter or faster or anything than us. They survived disasters that killed the dinosaurs because they were small enough that they didn't need to eat much to survive. We are larger. We require more to survive. Just moving people underground isn't enough. We'll need to take plants and animals with us as our fuel source. We'll need some way for the plants to grow.
You're going with the assumption that the survivors are fluent in English, then.
Sure, if it were legal I'd use my own personal nuclear reactor. I'd be supportive of legislation to allow people to have personal nuclear reactors.
Last I checked, it wasn't. So I'll take the next best thing: solar power (AKA, capturing a bit of the nuclear energy from that giant nuclear reactor a few million (billion?) miles away.)
Exactly. There is no one single source "fix". There are a number of sources of CO2, and all the major ones need to be fixed. We do know where to start, though. Coal.
BTW, I love the $20 visits to the gas station in the Prius. Sure, it still emits CO2. But, at 1/5 the rate of a 1990's "gas guzzler" (2009-2010 tax credit) SUV. Every little bit helps.
Exactly. It would be like saying, "I'd like to save up $1 million for retirement but I can't do it all at once so I won't bother." Every little bit counts. Unless your retirement is invested in big oil. Then I at least understand why someone would deny climate change.
Sure it is. What is the proper temperature for Earth. And its not a straw man in the least.
My evidence is that I realize that we do not have the ability to predict the weather, except southern California, (which may in turn be all that matters) for tomorrow. I live in the midwest, and the prediction accuracy with all of the latest models can be terrible for only one day out with regard to rainfall, temperature, wind, cloud cover, etc. There is no accepted mathematical theory that says you can average that level of unpredictible error and come up with a sane projection based on averages over a long time. Of course, if climate researchers admitted that, they would be out of funding.
Then you bring in statistics, which as normally used in climate modeling, is based on physical properties that obey a normal distribution. The errors in predicting weather do not behave according to a normal distribution, at least in my area based on what we know today, and provided that you use all knowledge and don't drop out the inconvenient data points (which statisticians like to do in order to make their point.) Normal statistics also don't consider Black Swan events, which volcanos could be considered. If we did know all of the factors effecting climate change, then it is possible that the errors are normally distributed, but the mathematical hocus pocus required to get their today is amazing.
I've read a number of the original research reports regarding Climate Change and each one has had flawed assumptions or flawed statistics. For example, there is graph that shows the CO2 hockey stick. Look at the data behind that report. You will find that if that chart was formed showing the plus and minus probability of error in the pre 20 century data it no longer looks like a hockey stick. It looks pretty normal because the old data within the margin of error could be much higher than the value they choose to use. The probably of error changed grossly over time in that chart, but no sane Doomsayer will show that data, they simply choose the data values (manipulated by flawed statistics) that signaled doom.
My point about volcanos is that since we don't know how to predict volcanos we don't have any idea that, for example, high levels of CO2 may cause more volcanos which in turn may cause the earth to cool and may cause CO2 to eventually reduce. Is that likely, probably not, but the point is we don't know. But we do know that volcanos effect the climate. Maybe short term, or maybe longer, we don't know yet.
It may be that high levels of CO2 cause other things that we don't know about to change. We don't know! Because we don't know, changing the level of CO2 artificially might well cause other problems we don't see right now. Why? Because we don't know.
The problem with the climate change debate is that no one that is predicting doom will enter into an honest discussion about what we really know. Why? Because so many people are faking the statistics to get funded, no one wants to admit that we really don't know and no one funding the research is going to pay for an answer that says, "We don't know that answer!" or "We can't find any statistical confidence in that prediction."
Oh and the final nail in the climate change coffin, all of the major prediction from 80's that we were doomed by 2010 have turned out wrong. When predictions are made and they don't come true, it tells any sane person the science behind the prediction was either wrong or falsified.
Except that you have been fed a bunch of lies that the wealthiest pay the least amount of taxes....
According to Pew research (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...-pay-most-income-taxes-but-enough-to-be-fair/)
So the wealthiest pay the most.
But keep repeating the BS you've been fed rather than educate yourself. Playing the victim is not cool.
That's easy to disprove. The average amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been steady and relatively constant for the last few thousand years at least. During that time, the Earth has probably played hosts to hundreds, maybe thousands of volcano eruptions.
Now remember. Mark this. All this time, the average CO2 content of the atmosphere has remained steady.
Then, we suddenly see a sudden, incredibly sharp upswing of CO2 in the 20th century.
Have there been more volcano eruptions than usual in the 20th century to explain this change?
And forget CO2.... Superimpose this graph:
onto the "CO2 from the 1900s" and you can draw the same conclusion.
But this is the population growth of the Earth. Perhaps we have too many people on this planet and that is causing climate change? Remember back to High School Biology. People take in O2 and create, wait for it, CO2 in our breaths!!!
Or it's a combination of both? Or its how we rotate around the Sun? Or the Sun?
But nobody wants to say "No more kids - reduce the population" so we don't look there cause there is no $$ in finding a study that says cap the # of kids, de-populate, etc.
No but we sure have put billions more people on this Earth in that same exact time period.
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Again, far easier to say it's CO2 rather than people...
You're claiming that, for the last 100 years, people breathing is what's caused the CO2 content in the air to double over the last 450,000 years?
Sure, read my quote. It took ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY until 1800 to put 1 billion people on this planet. From 1800 to today we added another 6 BILLION PEOPLE for 7 BILLION. All of us breathing in O2 and turning that into CO2, the reduction in plant life needed to support those people (turning forests into houses), etc has had a HUGE effect on the planet.
If that were the case, and it were that easy for people and animals to effect such profound changes in the atmosphere just by breathing, wouldn't we be seeing an overall decrease in oxygen as the population expands, and plant life scales back?