40 karma · joined December 15, 2016
There's something you notice if you read a whole lot of Wodehouse in quick succession: I'd estimate that there are about 20 plots among the ones I've read -- that is to say, the same situations, characters and plot devices are reused often, and if you removed the redundancy, you'd end up with about 20 novels. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Even if warming stopped now, Arctic and Antarctic would continue to melt for decades to come. Rate of change is key.
Your reference is also local (to the arctic), not global.
Again, what argument are you making here?
Is it: 1: It was warmer in the past / 1a: but nothing bad happened / 1b: therefore current warming is not due to human activity / 2: therefore there is no need to reduce CO2 levels.
Misleading. You have to appeal to pre-history to find temperature levels similar to current.
> Eventually we'll plunge into another glacial period, and no amount of CO2 will stop it.
Eventually, i.e. 10's or 100's of thousands of years, if CO2 levels revert to preindustrial.
You are appealing to timescales of thousands of years, but the timescale relevant to the problem and our response is years and decades. Is your comment intended to minimise the problem of current warming? If so why?
> There's no doubt we have impact, but it's not certain that it's the major driving force
Just false. There is no reasonable doubt that human activity is responsible for about 100% (could be less, could be more) of the current warming.
I'll be watching Dotty macros with keen interest, as I have found the current scala macro system very useful despite it remaining experimental. One thing I couldn't do with current macros was provide any kind of generic wrapper around macro methods in the same library, due to the separate compilation pass requirement. I hope this is what staging will address.
If micropayments were ever to really take off, it would shift the balance of power on the internet in an interesting way.
A forcing is anything that moves the temperature away from the equilibrium between radiative losses and insolation, whether higher or lower. Additional CO2 is itself a forcing.
You missed a carbon tax, in my opinion the mechanism most likely to make a difference.
> In my opinion, advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed.
I agree with you to this extent: with the current state of affairs, only advanced (and as yet untried) technology can avert disaster. I don't think it is at all likely to happen, and major policy changes were needed twenty years ago.
I think the papillon dog breed has big, butterfly-like ears!
I'd love to hear a linguistic explanation for this.
EDIT: Latin: "papilionem" (papilio?), so at least French and Catalan have conserved it, and I can see that Italian "farfalla" could be cognate.
EDIT EDIT: All the Slavic languages known to Google Translate have a word related to motyl, except for Russian: бабочка (butterfly) (but мотылек (moth)), so there is less to this phenomenon than meets the eye!
I don't doubt that there is a shit-ton of political trolling, which degrades discourse even if it does not persuade.
The Paris Accord, by itself, cannot do nearly enough to avert disaster, but it was the best that could be done diplomatically (especially in the light of US domestic politics). As such, it's better than nothing. No question that the whole subject has become very toxic and politically polarised, and that people have hair-trigger responses that sometimes misfire.
Your characterisation of the controversy as religious is interesting to me. We would both probably apply the adjective "religious" to firmly held beliefs that are unsupported by the facts, but would disagree as to the facts. And we would both not apply the "religious" adjective to ourselves.
I think you're right about the one language thing. If you're developing a system in Scala, you might as well do scripts in the same language, with API access to your system. (Real world example: server deployment script prompts for initial admin password, computes and persists hash using server API).
> The conditions required for the amount of land-based ice to melt [in order for coastal cities to flood] will have meant that the extinction of most (if not all) life on this planet would have occurred long ago.
I suppose your calculations are simply the energy required to melt the additional volume of water required to raise sea level by x meters, and that the increased rate of heat retention due to AGW could not supply the heat required in y years, for some reasonable values of x and y. I'm prepared to stipulate that that is so. (I would set x=2 to flood some major cities, and y = 2100 - 2017 = 83).
Well, melting all that ice is not the concern, although no doubt it will happen in a few thousand years. The concern is that ice which is currently above sea level will slide into the sea, as the NY Times article discusses. Calculating that would require a whole lot of modelling and detailed knowledge, well beyond a fifth grader (whatever that is in your country), or even a lone genius with superb arithmetical skills.
I very much doubt that you could support this statement. The geological record shows huge variations in sea-level, sometimes much higher than now, without any massive extinction.
> It is simple enough to do the calculations, but I have rarely ever come across anyone (who promulgates the anthropogenic climate change agenda) to do them for themselves.
Please share your calculations with us.