I'll add that I don't think humanity is ready for what amounts to not only a universal grand plan, but also a multi-generational grand plan at that. Good luck keeping democracies focused for that long a period of time. Other than some kind of multi-national overseer with punitive powers (which I and many others would oppose vigorously) how do any of you see this working? Do you really think people will sacrifice for 2-3 generations just to see if there's evidence that their sacrifices are working? Not only that, but the underdeveloped countries would be locked in stasis with no hope of catching up. I'm sure their people will be ecstatic about 'taking one for the team'. I'd rather not have us taking a hit on the carbon-tax, penalize people for using energy, crack-pipe but rather focus on finding and utilizing alternative energy sources. Once that happens we'll know soon enough if the CO2 levels start dropping.
I'll resist the temptation to respond to your point about CO2 levels - the causation process has already been covered in earlier posts / links though if you're really interested.
In relation to your question about action I don't see that as an insuperable problem at all. - proposals on reducing greenhouse gases thus far have not included any international enforcement mechanism (though some individual countries have put them into domestic legislation) and I don't see the need for one in future. - I don't see a need for anyone to sacrifice anything. Renewable sources of power are already pretty competitive with fossil fuels and nuclear and I'm quite sure that the economic case, as well as the environmental one, for burning fossil fuels as the main source of power in the world will be clearly dead in my lifetime. - with quite limited international help it's entirely realistic to expect that currently undeveloped countries could bypass the sort of industrial revolutions that western countries and China have gone through. Even today, if we were designing a power system for a country, it wouldn't be the top-down national grid approach, but a much more dispersed solution. In countries that already have such infrastructure moving away from that is likely to be a long process, but there's no need to put it in where it doesn't currently exist. I mentioned before the need for further research on energy storage systems, but there are already plenty of options in this area - see this article for instance.
No explanation as to why not even one attempt to explain rising CO2 as a RESULT of global warming instead of a CAUSE? Why no attempt? Sorry, real science doesn't work that way. Lack of scientific curiosity = politics.
Yes, like our brightly coloured paper now plastic bills, Canada also enjoys colourful coins from time to time which started in 2004 with a red poppy. Allegedly, the Australian mint infringed on this patent when they created Possum Magic coins.
This may seem frivolous, however both Mints are part of their respected federal governments and both compete internationally to secure minting rights for other countries currencies.
The Royal Canadian Mint is considered a world leader in innovation of coinage. From patenting the process of bi-metallic coinage (think Twoonie if you ever saw one), to colour, to minting the largest gold coin, to now even minting glow in the dark coins, Canada is serious about its place in the coin world.
Canada is serious about its place in the coin world.
That's cool. Today it came out that our president felt it was really important to tell our FBI director that Putin had told him that Russia had the best looking hookers in the whole wide world. This happened because one of our political parties leaked some memos in hopes to sabotage an investigation into the President and his people.
So we're looking at a few minutes and a huge cleansing of our government before we can worry about things like coins.
@Balrog99 I certainly agree that lack of scientific curiosity is a bad thing, but you're suggesting that there's still a scientific issue about the direction of causation and I don't think that's the case.
Points relevant to this that immediately occur to me include: - if global warming were the cause of CO2 emissions, not the result, we would expect the earth and surrounding atmosphere to warm equally. In fact the stratosphere has been cooling down, just as expected from the theoretical models and small-scale experiments of greenhouse warming. - we have good estimates about how much CO2 humans are producing and can track what's happened to that in terms of concentrations in the air, sea and plants. If global warming were causing CO2 increase through natural mechanisms the amounts we produce would be on top of that - we don't find that pattern. - carbon atoms included in CO2 can be heavier or lighter. We know that burning fossils fuels produces a higher proportion of heavier carbon atoms than CO2 from natural sources. The concentration of heavier carbon atoms in the atmosphere has been increasing because so much of the CO2 is derived from fossil fuels. - the theoretical method by which CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) trap heat from the sun is well understood. This will happen irrespective of whether increasing heat leads to higher CO2 production (if that were true it would be easy to get into a spiral that would make predictions of future global warming much worse). - climate models have been developed on the basis of whether their predictions match actual events over the last 100 years or so. A range of models have been tried, but only those including human caused emissions have been able to track reality accurately. The models can also separate out the extent of variability caused by natural factors (like solar intensity and volcanic activity) - while there are fluctuations up and down those natural factors have been broadly neutral over the last 50 years. - as @ThacoBell points out the earth has been significantly warmer in the past than it is now. However, CO2 concentrations are unusually high now. We have good evidence that they're currently higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years and possibly higher than in the last 15 million years. If temperature were driving CO2 levels that wouldn't be the case.
I'm aware that some politicians in the US have suggested in the past that there is historic evidence that the causal link goes the other way - particularly in response to Al Gore's statements on climate change. However, there have been a number of studies in recent years confirming that's not the case - see for instance here.
I'm not suggesting that there's nothing further for science to learn about how the climate operates, but I am suggesting that we're already well past the point at which the scientific evidence should be used as an input to policy. Let's think of gravity as an analogous situation. Newton's theory of gravity was helpful in providing predictions about how the world worked. We now know that theory was wrong, but for most practical purposes the theory still gives good enough predictions for us to take action on. Einstein's theory of gravity improved those predictions, but scientists now believe that theory is also wrong - though of course we haven't stopped using it for predictions. It's hard to think of anything in science where we can say that we now understand all there is to know, but in most areas that doesn't prevent us from making use of our current knowledge.
No explanation as to why not even one attempt to explain rising CO2 as a RESULT of global warming instead of a CAUSE? Why no attempt? Sorry, real science doesn't work that way. Lack of scientific curiosity = politics.
This is like saying "you don't know how to juggle!" to someone who has been juggling for hours and now is too exhausted to continue. I will try to avoid posting more about global warming here. Because there is no point. First we hear that there is no proof. And when we have scientific proof from thousands of sources across the entire world it just gets called an echo chamber. People are genuinely concerned about how nature and humanity will cope in the future and provide both proof of the problem and possible solutions (just see @Grond0 s post). And they get called dishonest and accused of just wanting money.
Think what you will, but please, it's just very disrespectful to claim that people who are warning of man-made climate change aren't into "real science", or lack scientific curiosity.
Reading the Comey memos now. Just want to point out that this paragraph is off, considering that McCabe's own wife was a "political person" running for office at the time.
I'm dying to know who the redacted leader is. I'm sure many people on the left will speculate that its Putin, which I guess is possible. Not surprising that Trump had reservations about Flynn's judgment considering what went down.
Pretty remarkable that someone would worry about their wife believing a hooker story, even "1%"
I donno... "Putin" "President" and "Russia" seems to fit nicely when just copy pasting the words from the two documents. The word under the pasted Russia is "personally" IMO. I do however want to know what country he is dissing with the "This is 'BLANK' we are talking about."
I'll add that I don't think humanity is ready for what amounts to not only a universal grand plan, but also a multi-generational grand plan at that. Good luck keeping democracies focused for that long a period of time. Other than some kind of multi-national overseer with punitive powers (which I and many others would oppose vigorously) how do any of you see this working? Do you really think people will sacrifice for 2-3 generations just to see if there's evidence that their sacrifices are working? Not only that, but the underdeveloped countries would be locked in stasis with no hope of catching up. I'm sure their people will be ecstatic about 'taking one for the team'. I'd rather not have us taking a hit on the carbon-tax, penalize people for using energy, crack-pipe but rather focus on finding and utilizing alternative energy sources. Once that happens we'll know soon enough if the CO2 levels start dropping.
I'll resist the temptation to respond to your point about CO2 levels - the causation process has already been covered in earlier posts / links though if you're really interested.
In relation to your question about action I don't see that as an insuperable problem at all. - proposals on reducing greenhouse gases thus far have not included any international enforcement mechanism (though some individual countries have put them into domestic legislation) and I don't see the need for one in future. - I don't see a need for anyone to sacrifice anything. Renewable sources of power are already pretty competitive with fossil fuels and nuclear and I'm quite sure that the economic case, as well as the environmental one, for burning fossil fuels as the main source of power in the world will be clearly dead in my lifetime. - with quite limited international help it's entirely realistic to expect that currently undeveloped countries could bypass the sort of industrial revolutions that western countries and China have gone through. Even today, if we were designing a power system for a country, it wouldn't be the top-down national grid approach, but a much more dispersed solution. In countries that already have such infrastructure moving away from that is likely to be a long process, but there's no need to put it in where it doesn't currently exist. I mentioned before the need for further research on energy storage systems, but there are already plenty of options in this area - see this article for instance.
No explanation as to why not even one attempt to explain rising CO2 as a RESULT of global warming instead of a CAUSE? Why no attempt? Sorry, real science doesn't work that way. Lack of scientific curiosity = politics.
Whenever a climate skeptic says "but they did not at X", it is safe to assume that climate scientists looked at X in detail.
The cause of rising CO2 is (mostly) humans burning fossil fuel.
One strong piece of evidence is that looking at the distribution of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere. CO2 omitted by burning fossil fuel has a different distribution that the pre-existing distribution in the atmosphere and the distribution of C02 produced by burning plants.
There is additional evidence that the additional CO2 is not coming from the oceans (because it is increasing there) and it is not coming from plants (would have more C14).
In addition, CO2 is MUCH less noisy than global temperature, so that we can see how closely the increase coincides with human emissions. If you claim the CO2 increase was driven by a temperature increase (which was not observed at time, by the way) then the coincidence with our emissions is a huge and very unlikely coincidence, unless you want to claim that the increasing temperature caused us to build more factories and cars?
Of course there are potential mechanism of causality in both direction: increased temperature causes forest fires -> CO2 increase and CO2 causes temperature increases by the greenhouse effect. Evidence shows that the second mechanism is what happen with both AGW and historical nonA GW, see above for a small part of the evidence for AGW. I am sure you can find more yourself if you try.
Given the above (for disclosure, I found this on the net) claiming that a causal effect of temperature on CO2 is an argument against AGW driven by human CO2 emission is similar to claiming that chickens do not lay eggs because they hatch from them.
FWIW, at least one of the articles @semiticgod posted opens with a discussion of earth's temperature before the first ice age. So its establishing the scale I've been wanting to see. I don't know what conclusions they have drawn yet, as I'm reading it more slowly and deliberately.
@Thacobell: You can probably find sources that are more relevant to your interests and questions than the ones I've posted. I just grabbed the first few sources I found--not because those few articles were the best evidence around, but simply to illustrate the scale of the research.
Audio recording of "John Barron" (aka Trump pretending to be his own publicist) is out today in which Trump tries to get one of his famous confidentiality agreements out of a reporter by saying "this is off the record right?" and the lies by inflating his wealth to the reporter by hundreds of millions of dollars. Reminder that his youngest son is named Barron. Trump had his affair with Stormy Daniels a few months after Barron was born.
Audio recording of "John Barron" (aka Trump pretending to be his own publicist) is out today in which Trump tries to get one of his famous confidentiality agreements out of a reporter by saying "this is off the record right?" and the lies by inflating his wealth to the reporter by hundreds of millions of dollars. Reminder that his youngest son is named Barron. Trump had his affair with Stormy Daniels a few months after Barron was born.
That rating among Evangelicals comes in the wake of the fact that not only did Michael Cohen cover up Trump's affairs, but he facilitated a multi-million dollar payment to the mistress of the Finance Chair of the RNC, a relationship which resulted in an abortion, which is a far more tangible link to that actual procedure taking place than any Democratic politician of I have yet heard of.
The problem is that so many religious people are used to "not thinking" and just going with what they are told. Its a trend that confounds me to no end, and I always challenge the people in my church to give a critical thought to everything they are told.
The problem is that so many religious people are used to "not thinking" and just going with what they are told. Its a trend that confounds me to no end, and I always challenge the people in my church to give a critical thought to everything they are told.
No idea how people are hoodwinked by this guy hook, line, and sinker.
For clarification: that phone conversation the reporter, Jonathan Greenblatt, mentions took place back in 1984--34 years ago--and serves only to give supporting evidence to the conclusion that Trump has a large ego and will lie to make himself look better than he actually is, which are things we all already knew.
I cannot figure out why evangelicals are so supportive of Trump, either, despite my efforts to try and understand it. He isn't one of them and certainly hasn't done anything for them so it must be a case of "at least he isn't the other guy".
For clarification: that phone conversation the reporter, Jonathan Greenblatt, mentions took place back in 1984--34 years ago--and serves only to give supporting evidence to the conclusion that Trump has a large ego and will lie to make himself look better than he actually is, which are things we all already knew.
I cannot figure out why evangelicals are so supportive of Trump, either, despite my efforts to try and understand it. He isn't one of them and certainly hasn't done anything for them so it must be a case of "at least he isn't the other guy".
I just heard that phone conversation on the radio and.....it's quite revealing as to the inner workings of someone who is not right in the head. For one thing, it's clear as day it's Trump, and I have to assume the reporter knew that. But beyond that, his pathological need to inflate his wealth and accomplishments to the point of creating an alter-ego who feeds information to reporters is just bizarre. And the kicker is, he doesn't even try to disguise his voice or do anything to cover his tracks. It's just Trump talking on the phone pretending to be someone else. It's bizarre and weird. There is something seriously wrong with him, and there always has been.
I cannot figure out why evangelicals are so supportive of Trump, either, despite my efforts to try and understand it. He isn't one of them and certainly hasn't done anything for them so it must be a case of "at least he isn't the other guy".
I honestly can't believe this either. He is so, so far from sharing their values. I think its sad that many evangelicals are so supportive of him, despite his behavior being antithetical to their purported values.
To be fair he has been politically supportive of their interests on the issues of religious liberty and abortion (remarkably). For all his failures, he does know which side his political bread is buttered.
His pick of Mike Pence as VP must also be important. This may indeed go down in history as one of the most politically astute VP picks of all time.
I cannot figure out why evangelicals are so supportive of Trump, either, despite my efforts to try and understand it. He isn't one of them and certainly hasn't done anything for them so it must be a case of "at least he isn't the other guy".
I honestly can't believe this either. He is so, so far from sharing their values. I think its sad that many evangelicals are so supportive of him, despite his behavior being antithetical to their purported values.
To be fair he has been politically supportive of their interests on the issues of religious liberty and abortion (remarkably). For all his failures, he does know which side his political bread is buttered.
His pick of Mike Pence as VP must also be important. This may indeed go down in history as one of the most politically astute VP picks of all time.
Unless a good portion of his values ARE shared. By which I mean he hates (or pretends to hate) all the right people. There is a constant paranoia on the religious right of being besieged and aggrieved, that despite there being a Christian church on nearly every city block in this country, they are under attack. And Trump pretty much does nothing but feed into it.
And when we talk about Evangelicals as a political voting bloc, let's be clear that we are talking about WHITE evangelical voters. African-American Evangelicals by and large don't support him AT ALL. This is the same phenomena that affects the discourse when the "working class" is discussed. That is almost ALWAYS meant to imply white blue-collar workers and no one else in political science terms.
I also saw poll numbers (and I can't actually verify their veracity as it was in passing) yesterday that parsed out that Trump has an over 75% approval rating with religious right voters, and a 35% approval rating with the rest of the country.
I cannot figure out why evangelicals are so supportive of Trump, either, despite my efforts to try and understand it. He isn't one of them and certainly hasn't done anything for them so it must be a case of "at least he isn't the other guy".
I honestly can't believe this either. He is so, so far from sharing their values. I think its sad that many evangelicals are so supportive of him, despite his behavior being antithetical to their purported values.
To be fair he has been politically supportive of their interests on the issues of religious liberty and abortion (remarkably). For all his failures, he does know which side his political bread is buttered.
His pick of Mike Pence as VP must also be important. This may indeed go down in history as one of the most politically astute VP picks of all time.
Unless a good portion of his values ARE shared. By which I mean he hates (or pretends to hate) all the right people. There is a constant paranoia on the religious right of being besieged and aggrieved, that despite there being a Christian church on nearly every city block in this country, they are under attack. And Trump pretty much does nothing but feed into it.
And when we talk about Evangelicals as a political voting bloc, let's be clear that we are talking about WHITE evangelical voters. African-American Evangelicals by and large don't support him AT ALL. This is the same phenomena that affects the discourse when the "working class" is discussed. That is almost ALWAYS meant to imply white blue-collar workers and no one else in political science terms.
Two words: Muslim bashing. That's about all Trump has to do to keep my parents' support. My dad still thinks Dearborn, MI is under Sharia law and won't believe me that it's not even though I literally live 10 miles away and drive there to shop and eat quite often...
I cannot figure out why evangelicals are so supportive of Trump, either, despite my efforts to try and understand it. He isn't one of them and certainly hasn't done anything for them so it must be a case of "at least he isn't the other guy".
I honestly can't believe this either. He is so, so far from sharing their values. I think its sad that many evangelicals are so supportive of him, despite his behavior being antithetical to their purported values.
To be fair he has been politically supportive of their interests on the issues of religious liberty and abortion (remarkably). For all his failures, he does know which side his political bread is buttered.
His pick of Mike Pence as VP must also be important. This may indeed go down in history as one of the most politically astute VP picks of all time.
Unless a good portion of his values ARE shared. By which I mean he hates (or pretends to hate) all the right people. There is a constant paranoia on the religious right of being besieged and aggrieved, that despite there being a Christian church on nearly every city block in this country, they are under attack. And Trump pretty much does nothing but feed into it.
And when we talk about Evangelicals as a political voting bloc, let's be clear that we are talking about WHITE evangelical voters. African-American Evangelicals by and large don't support him AT ALL. This is the same phenomena that affects the discourse when the "working class" is discussed. That is almost ALWAYS meant to imply white blue-collar workers and no one else in political science terms.
Two words: Muslim bashing. That's about all Trump has to do to keep my parents' support. My dad still thinks Dearborn, MI is under Sharia law and won't believe me that it's not even though I literally live 10 miles away and drive there to shop and eat quite often...
Well there you have it. And then the question becomes, it it the fault of your parents for thinking that's the case despite their son (who I assume they trust to some degree) telling them it isn't true, or the people who are purposefully feeding them that information?? This is exactly what I mean when we talk about how poisonous FOX News and AM radio have become. Because that is where this stuff comes from. It's been being fed by IV drip directly into the head of people like your parents for 20-30 years.
I just heard that phone conversation on the radio and.....it's quite revealing as to the inner workings of someone who is not right in the head. For one thing, it's clear as day it's Trump, and I have to assume the reporter knew that.
The reporter didn't realize it at the time: "When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him."
The "John Miller" interview that came out in 2016 was even more ridiculous. In that one he's using an alter ego to brag and lie about his love life instead of his wealth.
There is no place in the United States which is under sharia; anyone who says differently is pushing an agenda which you should question.
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Today is the 19th anniversary of Columbine--there is another round of school walkouts happening. It's fine if the students want to walk out, of course--at least some teenagers are starting to find their political voice--but we need to advise them that they shouldn't set their expectations too high--nothing will happen because of these walkout protests.
Incidentally, many students these days are upset about "clear backpack" policies which schools are implementing because they feel that the negative actions of some students who bring drugs or weapons to school should not infringe upon their right to have an opaque backpack or purse. *laugh* The irony is delicious--that is exactly how gun owners feel--the negative actions of a few rotten apples should not result in the infringement of everyone's rights.
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The DNC has filed a lawsuit naming the Trump Campaign, Russia--good luck suing a foreign nation, Julian Assange--founder of WikiLeaks (good luck extraditing him), and "associates" of Trump for racketeering (the legal term used for "organized criminal activity, usually conducted as if it were a business"), computer hacking, and conspiracy to undermine the Democratic Party because of the internal DNC e-mail messages which WikiLeaks released back in 2016. This is nothing more than the DNC trying to deflect away from the fact that it conspired with the Clinton Campaign to arrange the debate schedule to favor her and lock Bernie Sanders out of the nomination process by any means necessary.
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Finally, Eric Schneiderman, Attorney General for New York State, is urging the State Legislature to amend the law so that a Presidential pardon will not shield people from being charged with State crimes. As the laws in NY currently exist, if you get charged for Federal crime x which also happens to be a State law but the President pardons you, the State cannot subsequently charge you with x. This dovetails with the recent raid on Cohen's office as well as potential fallout from the Mueller Investigation.
This is nothing more than the DNC trying to deflect away from the fact that it conspired with the Clinton Campaign to arrange the debate schedule to favor her and lock Bernie Sanders out of the nomination process by any means necessary.
Very strange take. I'm pretty sure the DNC is suing Trump because Democrats loathe Trump, not to distract from an intra-party conflict that peaked two years ago.
Yes, they loathe him, but the stated reason cited in the CNN article notes the internal e-mail messages WikiLeaks released.
In the summer of 2016, the Democratic National Committee went public with claims that Russians hackers had gained access to their computer systems, obtaining emails and opposition research against Trump.
Then, just days before the Democratic National Convention when Clinton was set to receive the party's presidential nomination, WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of hacked DNC emails.
The release of the emails, which included messages disparaging Bernie Sanders, threw the Democratic Party into turmoil at a moment when the party was supposed to be coming together in support of a nominee, and intensified in-fighting between supporters of Clinton and Sanders.
In my opinion, the DNC did that to itself. Sure, the WikLeaks dump didn't help--and if the servers were hacked then some criminal activity definitely took place--but trying to pin it on the Trump Campaign is pretty thin and that will be a difficult accusation to prove.
Sanders should have sued the DNC back then, heh . It seems neither party of politicians can let that election go. What bugs me about the Russia thing, is that there are more lies being told, and underhanded shenanigans being pulled by people and organizations here in the US during election time than Russia could even think of. Well, it seems like that anyway (social media, tremendous donations, backroom deals, TV ad smears, and as Dr. Mary Francis Berry said, Five dollars and a pork chop for a persons vote, etc., etc.).
I get the attack on institutions thing, but it seems to me like we attack our own far more than any other country does, in the end. The whole dern higher office political system almost seems like one big corrupt house of cards at times.
The DNC has filed a lawsuit naming the Trump Campaign, Russia--good luck suing a foreign nation, Julian Assange--founder of WikiLeaks (good luck extraditing him), and "associates" of Trump for racketeering (the legal term used for "organized criminal activity, usually conducted as if it were a business"), computer hacking, and conspiracy to undermine the Democratic Party because of the internal DNC e-mail messages which WikiLeaks released back in 2016. This is nothing more than the DNC trying to deflect away from the fact that it conspired with the Clinton Campaign to arrange the debate schedule to favor her and lock Bernie Sanders out of the nomination process by any means necessary.
The Nixon speedrun continues. The DNC won a similar suit during Watergate.
TIL that the DNC filed a civil suit against Nixon's Re-election Committee because the Republican president attempted to cover up election related crimes.
@Mathsorcerer "I cannot figure out why evangelicals are so supportive of Trump, either, despite my efforts to try and understand it. He isn't one of them and certainly hasn't done anything for them so it must be a case of "at least he isn't the other guy". A lot of it is willfull. It IS obvious what is going on, but these people WANT to believe that the conservative party is religious, and @jjstraka34 has been harping on part of the reason for quite awhile. Fox News is THE default conservative "news" program. It also ties into the Chrisitanity under attack mentality, they feel that if they give any ground to the "godless" liberals, then the next day, the government will be storming the churches to arrest people.
The DNC has filed a lawsuit naming the Trump Campaign, Russia--good luck suing a foreign nation, Julian Assange--founder of WikiLeaks (good luck extraditing him), and "associates" of Trump for racketeering (the legal term used for "organized criminal activity, usually conducted as if it were a business"), computer hacking, and conspiracy to undermine the Democratic Party because of the internal DNC e-mail messages which WikiLeaks released back in 2016. This is nothing more than the DNC trying to deflect away from the fact that it conspired with the Clinton Campaign to arrange the debate schedule to favor her and lock Bernie Sanders out of the nomination process by any means necessary.
The Nixon speedrun continues. The DNC won a similar suit during Watergate.
People often forget that Watergate started with a burglary of the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate Hotel looking for dirt. Nixon probably would have survived if he hadn't personally endorsed and directed the cover-up, on tap no less. This is indeed where the phrase "cover-up is worse than the crime" worked it's way into the lexicon.
@Mathsorcerer "I cannot figure out why evangelicals are so supportive of Trump, either, despite my efforts to try and understand it. He isn't one of them and certainly hasn't done anything for them so it must be a case of "at least he isn't the other guy". A lot of it is willfull. It IS obvious what is going on, but these people WANT to believe that the conservative party is religious, and @jjstraka34 has been harping on part of the reason for quite awhile. Fox News is THE default conservative "news" program. It also ties into the Chrisitanity under attack mentality, they feel that if they give any ground to the "godless" liberals, then the next day, the government will be storming the churches to arrest people.
What gets me about this is that absolutely no one is telling these people what to do in their churches. They are, have, and always will be free to worship as they please. Far, FAR more free than any Muslim in this country is to do so without fear of reprisal. But that isn't really enough. For a good portion of the religious right (speaking of them as a political demographic group), culture and society at large must be bent to their will as well. Mind you, most parts of the Bible are completely ignored (how many hardcore Christians you know of refrain from eating shellfish, for instance??). The focus is on abortion and gay marriage, and beyond gay marriage, the idea that LGBT citizens should have any rights at all. The first can be seen as a principled stand depending on the reasons even if I totally disagree with it. The seeking out of persecution of sexual minority groups remains unforgivable and repulsive.
Mind you, in the United States, THE major holiday event each year is literally a celebration of the birth of the Christian messiah, and is an event that doesn't just consume one day, but nearly the entirety of the months of November and December. How anyone can live in this country a Christian and feel any actual, tangible sense of persecution is mind-blowing. And even during that time when the religion maintains an almost absolute cultural supremacy, every year, like clockwork, we hear about what an affront the phrase "Happy Holidays" is, as if Thanksgiving, Hannukah, and New Year's don't exist. There is nothing wrong with being comfortable being in a majority (massive majority) group. It's quite another to be completely oblivious as to how good you have it.
Comments
Canadaerr Australia:The Royal Canadian Mint is suing the Australia Mint over patent infringement of coloured coins.
Yes, like our brightly coloured
papernow plastic bills, Canada also enjoys colourful coins from time to time which started in 2004 with a red poppy. Allegedly, the Australian mint infringed on this patent when they created Possum Magic coins.This may seem frivolous, however both Mints are part of their respected federal governments and both compete internationally to secure minting rights for other countries currencies.
The Royal Canadian Mint is considered a world leader in innovation of coinage. From patenting the process of bi-metallic coinage (think Twoonie if you ever saw one), to colour, to minting the largest gold coin, to now even minting glow in the dark coins, Canada is serious about its place in the coin world.
So we're looking at a few minutes and a huge cleansing of our government before we can worry about things like coins.
Points relevant to this that immediately occur to me include:
- if global warming were the cause of CO2 emissions, not the result, we would expect the earth and surrounding atmosphere to warm equally. In fact the stratosphere has been cooling down, just as expected from the theoretical models and small-scale experiments of greenhouse warming.
- we have good estimates about how much CO2 humans are producing and can track what's happened to that in terms of concentrations in the air, sea and plants. If global warming were causing CO2 increase through natural mechanisms the amounts we produce would be on top of that - we don't find that pattern.
- carbon atoms included in CO2 can be heavier or lighter. We know that burning fossils fuels produces a higher proportion of heavier carbon atoms than CO2 from natural sources. The concentration of heavier carbon atoms in the atmosphere has been increasing because so much of the CO2 is derived from fossil fuels.
- the theoretical method by which CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) trap heat from the sun is well understood. This will happen irrespective of whether increasing heat leads to higher CO2 production (if that were true it would be easy to get into a spiral that would make predictions of future global warming much worse).
- climate models have been developed on the basis of whether their predictions match actual events over the last 100 years or so. A range of models have been tried, but only those including human caused emissions have been able to track reality accurately. The models can also separate out the extent of variability caused by natural factors (like solar intensity and volcanic activity) - while there are fluctuations up and down those natural factors have been broadly neutral over the last 50 years.
- as @ThacoBell points out the earth has been significantly warmer in the past than it is now. However, CO2 concentrations are unusually high now. We have good evidence that they're currently higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years and possibly higher than in the last 15 million years. If temperature were driving CO2 levels that wouldn't be the case.
I'm aware that some politicians in the US have suggested in the past that there is historic evidence that the causal link goes the other way - particularly in response to Al Gore's statements on climate change. However, there have been a number of studies in recent years confirming that's not the case - see for instance here.
I'm not suggesting that there's nothing further for science to learn about how the climate operates, but I am suggesting that we're already well past the point at which the scientific evidence should be used as an input to policy. Let's think of gravity as an analogous situation. Newton's theory of gravity was helpful in providing predictions about how the world worked. We now know that theory was wrong, but for most practical purposes the theory still gives good enough predictions for us to take action on. Einstein's theory of gravity improved those predictions, but scientists now believe that theory is also wrong - though of course we haven't stopped using it for predictions. It's hard to think of anything in science where we can say that we now understand all there is to know, but in most areas that doesn't prevent us from making use of our current knowledge.
Think what you will, but please, it's just very disrespectful to claim that people who are warning of man-made climate change aren't into "real science", or lack scientific curiosity.
I do however want to know what country he is dissing with the "This is 'BLANK' we are talking about."
The cause of rising CO2 is (mostly) humans burning fossil fuel.
One strong piece of evidence is that looking at the distribution of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere. CO2 omitted by burning fossil fuel has a different distribution that the pre-existing distribution in the atmosphere and the distribution of C02 produced by burning plants.
There is additional evidence that the additional CO2 is not coming from the oceans (because it is increasing there) and it is not coming from plants (would have more C14).
So we know exactly where the additional CO2 in the atmosphere comes from. It is nicely summarized here:
https://skepticalscience.com/anthrocarbon-brief.html
You might claim this is not a neutral site. They have references to the original scientific articles, which you can follow up if so inclined.
There are also papers investigating the matter from a purely statistical perspective, i.e. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21691.
In addition, CO2 is MUCH less noisy than global temperature, so that we can see how closely the increase coincides with human emissions. If you claim the CO2 increase was driven by a temperature increase (which was not observed at time, by the way) then the coincidence with our emissions is a huge and very unlikely coincidence, unless you want to claim that the increasing temperature caused us to build more factories and cars?
Of course there are potential mechanism of causality in both direction: increased temperature causes forest fires -> CO2 increase and CO2 causes temperature increases by the greenhouse effect. Evidence shows that the second mechanism is what happen with both AGW and historical nonA GW, see above for a small part of the evidence for AGW. I am sure you can find more yourself if you try.
Given the above (for disclosure, I found this on the net) claiming that a causal effect of temperature on CO2 is an argument against AGW driven by human CO2 emission is similar to claiming that chickens do not lay eggs because they hatch from them.
Earth Temperature Timeline at XKCD
FWIW, at least one of the articles @semiticgod posted opens with a discussion of earth's temperature before the first ice age. So its establishing the scale I've been wanting to see. I don't know what conclusions they have drawn yet, as I'm reading it more slowly and deliberately.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/384105-reporter-trump-lied-to-me-for-spot-on-fortune-400
In other news Trump's approval among White Evangelicals is at an all time high. HAhahahahaah omg...
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/383886-poll-white-evangelical-support-for-trump-at-record-high
I cannot figure out why evangelicals are so supportive of Trump, either, despite my efforts to try and understand it. He isn't one of them and certainly hasn't done anything for them so it must be a case of "at least he isn't the other guy".
I honestly can't believe this either. He is so, so far from sharing their values. I think its sad that many evangelicals are so supportive of him, despite his behavior being antithetical to their purported values.
To be fair he has been politically supportive of their interests on the issues of religious liberty and abortion (remarkably). For all his failures, he does know which side his political bread is buttered.
His pick of Mike Pence as VP must also be important. This may indeed go down in history as one of the most politically astute VP picks of all time.
And when we talk about Evangelicals as a political voting bloc, let's be clear that we are talking about WHITE evangelical voters. African-American Evangelicals by and large don't support him AT ALL. This is the same phenomena that affects the discourse when the "working class" is discussed. That is almost ALWAYS meant to imply white blue-collar workers and no one else in political science terms.
I also saw poll numbers (and I can't actually verify their veracity as it was in passing) yesterday that parsed out that Trump has an over 75% approval rating with religious right voters, and a 35% approval rating with the rest of the country.
The "John Miller" interview that came out in 2016 was even more ridiculous. In that one he's using an alter ego to brag and lie about his love life instead of his wealth.
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Today is the 19th anniversary of Columbine--there is another round of school walkouts happening. It's fine if the students want to walk out, of course--at least some teenagers are starting to find their political voice--but we need to advise them that they shouldn't set their expectations too high--nothing will happen because of these walkout protests.
Incidentally, many students these days are upset about "clear backpack" policies which schools are implementing because they feel that the negative actions of some students who bring drugs or weapons to school should not infringe upon their right to have an opaque backpack or purse. *laugh* The irony is delicious--that is exactly how gun owners feel--the negative actions of a few rotten apples should not result in the infringement of everyone's rights.
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The DNC has filed a lawsuit naming the Trump Campaign, Russia--good luck suing a foreign nation, Julian Assange--founder of WikiLeaks (good luck extraditing him), and "associates" of Trump for racketeering (the legal term used for "organized criminal activity, usually conducted as if it were a business"), computer hacking, and conspiracy to undermine the Democratic Party because of the internal DNC e-mail messages which WikiLeaks released back in 2016. This is nothing more than the DNC trying to deflect away from the fact that it conspired with the Clinton Campaign to arrange the debate schedule to favor her and lock Bernie Sanders out of the nomination process by any means necessary.
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Finally, Eric Schneiderman, Attorney General for New York State, is urging the State Legislature to amend the law so that a Presidential pardon will not shield people from being charged with State crimes. As the laws in NY currently exist, if you get charged for Federal crime x which also happens to be a State law but the President pardons you, the State cannot subsequently charge you with x. This dovetails with the recent raid on Cohen's office as well as potential fallout from the Mueller Investigation.
It is not about Bernie Sanders. Well it is also about a successful attack on American institutions.
It seems neither party of politicians can let that election go. What bugs me about the Russia thing, is that there are more lies being told, and underhanded shenanigans being pulled by people and organizations here in the US during election time than Russia could even think of. Well, it seems like that anyway (social media, tremendous donations, backroom deals, TV ad smears, and as Dr. Mary Francis Berry said, Five dollars and a pork chop for a persons vote, etc., etc.).
I get the attack on institutions thing, but it seems to me like we attack our own far more than any other country does, in the end. The whole dern higher office political system almost seems like one big corrupt house of cards at times.
A lot of it is willfull. It IS obvious what is going on, but these people WANT to believe that the conservative party is religious, and @jjstraka34 has been harping on part of the reason for quite awhile. Fox News is THE default conservative "news" program. It also ties into the Chrisitanity under attack mentality, they feel that if they give any ground to the "godless" liberals, then the next day, the government will be storming the churches to arrest people.
Mind you, in the United States, THE major holiday event each year is literally a celebration of the birth of the Christian messiah, and is an event that doesn't just consume one day, but nearly the entirety of the months of November and December. How anyone can live in this country a Christian and feel any actual, tangible sense of persecution is mind-blowing. And even during that time when the religion maintains an almost absolute cultural supremacy, every year, like clockwork, we hear about what an affront the phrase "Happy Holidays" is, as if Thanksgiving, Hannukah, and New Year's don't exist. There is nothing wrong with being comfortable being in a majority (massive majority) group. It's quite another to be completely oblivious as to how good you have it.