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San Francisco, 10:27 AM
Fri Dec 4
28 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/10/09
11/10/09
11/10/09
11/11/09
"If that's not a good indicator that there's problems with the science..."
It isn't, for kindergarten-obvious reasons.
"...then I don't know what is."
That part I believe. #ecology
11/11/09
11/13/09
11/10/09
I think that 'denier' is an inappropriate term for skeptics, not because it might offend them, but because by implication the term assumes the answer to the matter being debated. It is logical cowardice.
Global warming skeptics tend to fall into two separate camps:
The first are those that legitimately object to the interpretation of data by the consensus. This is a valid scientific position. Science relies on falsification; to suggest that no one can legitimately object to the prevailing theory is a fundamentally anti-scientific position.
The second are those that object to the various policy prescriptions for combatting global warming. This is not a scientific position at all, but a social one. One can accept AGW theory totally, and yet object to public policies aiming to cut greenhouse gas emissions as impractical, inefficient, and unworkable.
The suggestion that adaptation or engineered solutions might be more cost effective or practical are anathema to some AGW proponents, not on a scientific basis, but because they have some sort of vested social interest in particular policy proposals. They may have an ideological, political, or pecuniary interest, or some other motive. But the motive isn't some sort of pure, disinterested, objective reverence for science.
I think an objective approach to policymaking would take practical and social obstacles into consideration. That the consensus does not do that, is telling. #ecology
11/10/09
It's important to remember that politics corrupts science at least as much as industry does, though. There isn't really a lot of scientific objectivity around, anymore.
-Kle. #ecology
11/10/09
AGW has become a religion, not a science. Anything which shows Global Warming may be due to any cause other than mankind will be met with pitchforks and burning stakes. Yet if other planets are experiencing the same effect, man cannot be the sole cause.
Reducing emissions and pollution must be done, but I don't expect it will affect the climate much at all. It is needed to fix the problems we have made, and to stop further damage, it most certainly needs to be done to ensure humans don't poison themselves, but unless we can geoengineer the Earth, we will always be at the mercy of external forces such as increased solar activity causing our atmosphere to warm.
As for Kurzweil, you are misrepresenting him. The Singularity is the point where predictive models breakdown because the pace of accelerating change becomes so great that it surpasses our best guesses.
I've been a studier of technology for forty years. I played the first video games on my brand new atari, watched as the 8088 became the 386, 486, and the various flavors of pentium.
Sure, chips reached a development wall. So rather than make them faster, they networked cores. dual core became quad, became... well the latest chip I saw was a 100 core micronetwork on a chip.
You can doubt accelerating change. I've watched it happen. As a race, humans refuse to accept limits, no matter how many individuals are willing to do so.
And it doesn't happen because people wish for it, it happens because people make it happen, not by a plan, but by doing what we do best, taking a little bit of this and mixing it with that.
Take that RepRap project, the rapid prototyper that will eventually be able to make every piece used to make a copy of itself. This site listed it as creepy, yet for a true Singularitarian, it represents the first step towards a concept Drexler came up with decades ago, the home fabrication unit.
20 years ago, that was pure hardcore sci fantasy, best guesses it would take a hundred years to make one. Now it's in development and only a few years from completion.
Dislike a journalist if you wish, but do not lump Singularitarians into "pie in the sky dreamers who want miracles with no effort." Most of us are engaged in actively pursuing every course of action possible to create the very advances we have envisioned. Clean technology is one of the central ideas, as is cleaning up the waste we have produced over the last several hundred years. Do not lump us in with polluters simply because we take a longer outlook and foresee solutions which may take longer to produce but will more thoroughly solve the problems, such as clean tech, carbon mining the atmosphere, and geoengineering.
We need to reduce pollution immediately, there is no argument there, but just because some of us are skeptical about MANS SOLE RESPONSIBILITY for AGW is no excuse for a witchhunt.
Because ask yourself this. What if Man isn't responsible, and cutting carbon emissions has NO EFFECT?
Geoengineering won't seem so ludicrous then will it? #ecology
11/11/09
However, yes, man is solely responsible for agw, but that's only because the definition of anthropogenic is "caused by humans." Therefore, you can not have anthropogenic global warming that is not caused by humans; you can have global warming not caused by humans.
If humans are not affecting the climate then geoengineering would still seem ludicrous. The reason for this being that the problem people have with agw is not that the Earth is getting warmer, but that humans are causing the Earth to get warmer. If the Earth began to get cooler because of humans, I would look at it with the same disdain as I would the Earth getting warmer because of humans. I don't think we should all run around naked in the woods and eat berries, but we should try to minimize our footprint (carbon or otherwise) as much as possible and live as a part of our ecosystem as much as reasonable rather than seeing the ecosystem as a resource solely existing for our exploitation. Intentionally trying to engineer the climate to be exactly the way we want it is not living as a part of the environment. #ecology
11/09/09
"Political science" isn't meant to be taken literally.
11/09/09
11/10/09
[en.wikipedia.org]
The computer is your friend. #ecology
11/09/09
The singularity idea is plane crap. There I said it. Our resources are thinning out, and damn it, we need to do something about it.
As to the the whole global warming debate, I have a few questions I would like to be asked.
1) If global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, than why do all of the ice core samples taken have a four hundred year lag between a rise in temperatures and then an increase in CO2?
2) Is a paper sponsored by an environmental group or a left leaning organization is any more reliable than a paper sponsored by an energy or manufacturing company?
3) Since the world was warmer about eight hundred years ago, why didn't the polar bear population die out then instead of now?
4) Finally, if global warming is real, and it is caused by humans, why would a warmer world be a bad thing?
I have other things I could ask, but I think these are important questions that I have yet to hear a good answer to. The major problem I have found is that, like any self-contained system, the environment is constantly changing/evolving. If it didn't, then entropy would take over and life would cease.
So I wonder; is global warming a bad thing? Honestly, I don't know. #ecology
11/09/09
Oh really, 10,000 whole years? Wow, a species manages to stick around for a few millennia and and it's all set to discover perpetual motion, fairy dust, or whatever fantasy technology it's going to take to bring about his bright, exponentially expanding, no-strings-attached future.
Which is just going off his opening about how the critics of his Kurzweil love letter believe: "that, just as bacteria proliferating in a petri dish will eventually exhaust the resources, we too will hit a limit. I think these skeptics are missing the lessons of history"
What's the lesson? That just because humans haven't yet hit a limit on the finite amount of resources on the planet, that there must not be one?
And then there's this: "Unlike Malthus, we can look around and see that we already have the energy and technology to feed a larger population than exists on Earth today." Yes, I'm sure it's easy to see when you're sitting around in New York, in the United States, and not, say, some country where starvation is a routine occurrence. I'm sure JT can also see how much bigger a population we can feed and also when we'll have to stop the growth of the human population at its current rate, and also how to do this without hurting anybody's feelings. #ecology
11/09/09
Kurzweil's like Ayn Rand, with techno-utopianism instead of laissez faire economics. It's more about trauma in their own lives (In Kurzweil's case, the death of his father) than any real sound philosophical or academic basis.
But hell, let's just buy into flying car nonsense as far and hard as we can and ignore the half of the world without electricity and the diminishing returns we're being faced with in terms of the usability of increased processing power/hard drive capacity/etc. #ecology
11/09/09
Global Warming is happening-true. Why? We don't exactly know all the causes yet, man is one of many factors.
Should we all be moving onto communes and living the Amish lifestyle to save the planet?
Only if you're a dyed in the wool communist...otherwise I wouldn't.
I don't listen to the enviropreachers and the socialist leaders of tomorrow, I'll listen to the true, bona fide scientists about climate change not to lackwits with an agenda to move us back into the middle ages to appease their pagan worship of Mother Earth.
As for Kurzweil, I don't buy into the Singularity happening but I do like him for one reason, he isn't afraid of the future and isn't preaching for everyone else to be afraid as well. Unlike environmentalists who want to promote a sense of terror about the future to further their own agendas.
11/09/09
If history has shown us anything, it's that history yields most painfully to change and the pain often takes longer than brief spans allow us to see to sink in to the bone.
We must not fear progress, but we must fight for it and fear the effects of complacency. We must fear doing nothing in the face of the overwhelming evidence of anthropogenic climate change, we must fear failing to reform our dying institutions to survive beyond a system of capitalism as dated as the marxist-leninism that died before it, and we must fear the kind of thinking that lets us pidgeon hole those who disagree with us as lackwits with agendas, or to characterize any paradigm shift away from cancerous growth as luddism or paganism. #ecology
11/09/09
11/10/09
Sort of like when emo kids inherit the earth, we're all going to be in trouble.
11/10/09
Either a) your position is based entirely on political bias, and all you care about is calling those who disagree with you as many political names as possible to make them sound bad, or b) you have no idea what you are talking about in general. #ecology
11/09/09
Unfortunately this is pretty common--an unwavering faith in progress that denies the reality that nothing in this world comes without consequences. #ecology
11/09/09
11/10/09
11/09/09
Also, for anyone who knows Kurzweil and has read his book: is he totally unaware of sigmoidal functions? #ecology
11/09/09
(b) As I and every other mathematician keep saying, EXPONENTIAL GROWTH DOES NOT LEAD TO A SINGULARITY. THERE IS NO BLOW-UP IN FINITE TIME UNDER THESE CONDITIONS. THIS IS COVERED IN CALCULUS 2, PEOPLE! #ecology
11/09/09
The Dark Ages were a myth, expounded by Renaissance scholars and those with an axe to grind against the Roman Catholic Church.
Recent excavations and discoveries in Europe and England have revealed the whole idea that humanity dwindled into a technological and social backwater is, in the words on one scholar, pure bollocks.
Watch just one season of Time Team and you'll quickly come to realise the Europeans of that time were far from technologically and socially backwards. #ecology