The troll thread

[trebuchet03]

Originally Posted by SVOboy

Very nice! What's the goal?


That's an interesting question. I'm not old enough to really know the answer, though. I will ponder though.

But you can't really blame japan, they're just better at things! Well, actually, it's prolly just that they try harder.

The goal is not to fuel up until the 12th of September - I will then make a new goal on my next tank. I'm really stretching thin though, I think it's going to be tougher than I thought considering some of my obligations coming up.

I don't blame Japan.... I'm saying that we've been given some 30+ years to rise to the challenge.

Interestingly, LEGO has such quality -- they produce on the 6 Sigma level (that is, 3.4 defects per million opportunities), or at least very near to it.

[Hockey4mnhs]

That goal its awesome man keep us posted!

[cfg83]

skewbe -

Originally Posted by skewbe

I wonder if folks ever considered that these 2500 scientists might be doing it for altruistic reasons?

Doing it for money was always a stretch, but if one cannot even comprehend altruism as a motive then they may be led to such a conclusion, and they have my pity, like it or not.

From my POV, this is at least a 30 year old issue, starting with the Greenhouse Effect. The whole "scamming for money" argument doesn't make sense because the vested interests that stand to lose have way more money than the scientific community. If I was a scientist that only cared about the money, it would be much more beneficial to me to churn out anti-GW research.

I remember way back in the 1980's, I was at a Green Party booth handing out fliers. A man came up to me and said "convince me why I should vote Green". I couldn't give him a good answer. Later on I figured out that I would present a hypothetical argument that goes something like this :

Let's say that the Green Party wins the election but is wrong about global warming. What will happen over the next 100 years? The environment will be protected but the economy will suffer. The forests will grow, the rivers will get cleaner, and the pollution will be diminished. We won't have a go-go economy, but we will have a more healthy environment to live in. If the Green Party is wrong, then after 100 years, we will have oodles of restored resources to exploit. Lot's of trees to cut down, lots of clean water to bottle and sell to the rest of the world, unspoiled tourism locations, unused coal to strip mine to our heart's content, yada yada yada...

But, let's say that the Green Party loses but is correct in terms of it's environmental platform. What will happen over the next 100 years? The environment will be devastated. The underwater aquifers will be polluted. The Dust Bowl will return to stay. Kids will grow up with health problems and learning disorders from pollution that damages their organs and nervous system. The health care system will collapse from all the pollution-based cancers that come along. The frequency of Hurricane-Katrina-style natural disasters will increase.

From my POV, it's much easier for society to recover from me being wrong than the other way around.

CarloSW2

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Whooo boy.

That much fresh water is really gonna screw with thermohaline circulation. Warmer warms and cooler cools baby.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia paraphrasing Schiermeier

Modelling suggests that increase of fresh water flows large enough to shut down the thermohaline circulation would be an order of magnitude greater than currently estimated to be occurring, and such increases are unlikely to become critical within the next hundred years; this is hard to reconcile with the Bryden measurements.

If this trend continues over the next decade or so, could there be an order of magnitude more fresh water dumped in than there has been circa 2005/2006?

[skewbe]

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/stor...x_N.htm?csp=34
"Tuesday was historic for two reasons: It was the first time on record that two Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes made landfall in the same year, with Felix coming two weeks after Hurricane Dean slammed into southern Mexico.

And Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes had never made landfall on the same date, according to records that began in 1949. However, at 5 a.m. on Aug. 24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew devastated southern Florida 23 hours after Lester hit Mexico's Baja California, the Hurricane Center said."

And a reminder to folks who can only think in black and white (or right and left), GW's own EPA admitted that the majority of the climate change is induced by human activity. Some more info and tips on what you can do to help. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/

[psyshack]

skewbe

No bodys ever said there isn't a problem in this thread,, or for that matter on this board. I think everybody for the most part is listening, looking into and thinking about it. Maybe not at your level of concern. But many see that as fear mongering.

[jwxr7]

Originally Posted by omgwtfbyobbq

Oh, well, from the be all and end all standpoint, of course man isn't solely responsible for GW. If the sun would just decrease the energy transmitted to us proportionally to the extra amount we're trapping, there would be no problem. Why don't you head over to the center of the solar system and have a talk with 'em? Or, if you wanna stay local, reduce the amount of water on the Earth. Just chuck it out of the atmosphere little by little.

Interesting that this came up...
Last night I saw a show on this subject. The sun's energy that reaches the ground is reducing according to a PBS show on global dimming. It said particulate pollutants have decreased the sun's radiation by up to 30% in some locations since the 1950s. Here's wikipedia's version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
and some about it from PBS' site http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/
Apparently it is masking the full effects of GW.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

Yup. Even with global dimming our Carbon emissions have still managed to heat stuff up. I read some USAF (IIRC?) page on cloud seeding to reduce incoming radiation if climate change became too much of a threat. And there's no question that climate change will present a significant risk according to our own military given our energy needs.

The Army's former chief of staff, Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, who is one of the authors, noted he had been "a little bit of a skeptic" when the study group began meeting in September. But, after being briefed by top climate scientists and observing changes in his native New England, Sullivan said he was now convinced that global warming presents a grave challenge to the country's military preparedness.

"The trends are not good, and if I just sat around in my former life as a soldier, if I just waited around for someone to walk in and say, 'This is with a hundred percent certainty,' I'd be waiting forever," he said.

Regarding fear mongering... Well, it's usually done by those who have an accurate picture of what will likely happen. If we stopped using all fossil fuels this very second, we would still see a temperature increase through the rest of this century along with the increase in damage associated with a relatively rapidly changing climate. Meaning even if we stopped right now, it'll still get worse before it'll get better. And from all accounts, we aren't going to stop any time soon, so it's probably going to get much worse before it gets better unless we see some significant intervention on our part.

[stinkindiesel]

Trebuchet-
I've just been reading and enjoying everyone's rants, but I must take exception with your assertion that the US is "slow to give equal rights to targeted groups". Have you been anywhere else? France has no "equal right amendment" analog and the French can legally not hire people or rent/sell real estate to someone because of their ethnicity. Mexico expects us to treat illegal aliens as visiting ambassadors, but Mexico treats the Guatemalans jumping their southern border like criminals. And let's not forget the way most middle-eastern countries treat their women. Some say that "Islam" means "peace". Unless you're Christian, or Jewish, or... hell, anything but Islamic. They hate everyone. Their own clerics teach from the Koran that it's acceptable to treat "infidels" as cattle, to be used for the benefit of Islamic believers. Africans hate Africans (if they're from a different tribe) and that's the biggest obstacle to any kind of African unity.
And you think America is "slow" with equal rights? That the government systemically allows people of a preferred status to repress others? Do you have any significant data, or are you going by pictures in history books of "white only" and "colored" bathrooms...
Money is the motivator- the great majority of Americans are NOT bigoted or racists, and won't deal with companies with racist tones. How many times have you seen a PR guy fall all over himself at a press conference denying allegations of racism?
Jesse Jackson wants the color "black" to be stricken from Crayola's pallet of colors and replaced with "ebony" because black carries negative connotations. That's the pot calling the kettle.. uh, ebony. JJ called New York City "Hymietown" and never apologized, btw.
There is a great, big, whoppin' difference between "(racist, sexist, age-ist, same-sex-partnered-hating)" and "sensitive", and if you think the US is "slow" in granting equal rights, you may be a bit sensitive.
Ask a gay man in Iraq how HIS parade was. Ask a female rape victim in Jordan if she fears reporting the assault because her family may kill her for bringing them shame. Ask a Spaniard in France how the job search is going.
Then tell me how backward we are.
I think we've gone the other way. We have the Black Music Awards, and the word "niggardly" (sound slike but isn't anywhere near) got a white man roasted over coals.
Travel, see the world. When your passport is as well stamped as mine, we'll sit down and discuss how the US stacks up in the equal rights department.

[skewbe]

Still, it could be better here. There are alarming cases of rape victims in the US being told by their family (cult/whatever) not to say anything. I think women still have to deal with various permutations of being blamed for that original sin crap every day, regardless of their own spiritual beliefs, and were even the last group given the right to vote. I would not mind if Hillary took the oval office just on principal, hard to imagine the next person could possibly do a worse job