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Originally posted by yinyang:
::whoosh::

That's the sound of something going over my head.

So, somebody want to explain this real slow, in terms I can understand? Please?

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Originally posted by Sassalicious:
Don't worry about it being over your head. My head was starting to hurt everytime PN blathered on and I LOVE physics.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love science. I'm going home and having sex with my PS2!

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Originally posted by rue:
Not just that. By having independent representations for things, we can put those representations together in ways that might not exist in real life. Hence, we can have 'ideas' of things that don't exist. A form of lie.

added: if you want to get biblical, it's the knowledge of good and evil.

Maybe we should be autochthons.

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Originally posted by rue:
shoulda' stuck with grunts and pointing

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And somehow most of the rest of humanity went down the wrong path when they got those things. It IS possible to have the fruits of technology without the downside. We just need to figure out how.

For example, it's been said that large-scale war wouldn't be possible without agriculture. That agriculture allowed for concentrated excess, which was cornered by a ruling class in a positive-feedback cycle. That the ruling class was then able to direct society to use its excess for war on others. So agriculture was necessary for hierarchies and war.

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Originally posted by BattlestarMinnesotia:
The thing I think that gets lost about scientific stuff in the regular public is; It's the questions that the scientists get all liquidy about. So it sorta makes then come across as indecisive.

The particular thing about global warming "theory" that makes me crazy, is that the only system we have to observe is the actual biosphere, so it's not possible to "prove" something in climate sciences in that super rock-solid way that everyone seems to demand for "theories" they don't like. So yeah, you do need to make a judgement call on some of these things. But it doesn't make them unscientific. It's simply not possible to "prove" global warming as human caused because there is no way to test alternative hypothesis objectivley in a controlled way. But one cannot simply throw up their hands and say "we cannot ever know for sure!" because most phenomenon fall into the latter category. We'd never figured anything about the universe at all with that attitude. So you have to start going with likelyhoods. Percent possiblity and all that.

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Originally posted by BattlestarMinnesotia:


It's kinda like the "Without a shadow of a doubt" threshold in criminal cases vs "Preponderance of evidence" in civil trials.

Think for a second about hte fact that most people--even in the suburbs--won't let their kids out to play in the park and be home by dinnertime; like we did when I was a kid. Why not? Parents are scared of their kid's safety. Child molestors lurk in every park and drive-by shooters are waiting on every street, right? Well, of course not. But the thing is there ARE child molestors and shooters, and most parents figure that even given the relativly SMALL chance their kid will cross one, the potential CONSEQUENCE of that possible event make the rational choice to drive their kids everywhere and supervise everything. Most parents would not argue with me on this I think.

Extrapolating this idea to the ENTIRE GLOBE, doesn't it seem a litttle silly to hold scientists to some unattainable standard of proof, given the catastrophic consequnces at stake? Would you wait for rock-solid proof (letters and photographs, say) of a specific child molestor targetting YOUR kid before you'd START supervising them very closely?

The simple fact is that yeah, they ALL may be wrong about global warming. But the consequences of doing nothing--if humans are causing it--socially, economicly, etc is so severe, so damaging, that even if they ARE wrong we still need to do something. Besides, cleaning up pollution, abandoning fossil fuels, all that stuff is ultimately good for us either way anyway.

BSG-38 Minnesotia

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Originally posted by rue:
Hi Jasonzzz,

But there ARE facts which are indisputable.

One is that there are greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They are 'greenhouse' gases b/c they don't let the IR radiation (heat) re-radiate back into space. They absorb the radiation instead, trapping the heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise escape back into space.

The other is that those greenhouse gases - CO2 especially, are now at levels not historically compatible with our current climate.

The third is that the geological carbon cycle takes millions of years. And that is what we humans are messing with - we are taking large quantities of carbon which were stored for millions of years as oil and gas, and releasing it into the atmosphere as CO2. It will be millions of years before it is geologically stored again, if ever.

Given that, that humans are having a measurable and unprecedented effect on CO2 (greenhouse gas) levels in the atmosphere, and that that CO2 is not likely to re-equilibrate to normal levels any time soon, prudence would seem the wisest course.

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Originally posted by piratenews:
So Einstein (the homosexual plagerist) was wrong, ...

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Originally posted by piratenews:
Einstein was a non-Semitic Jewish deadbeat dad, a liar and plagerist who liked it up the tailpipe at Jewish Bohemian Grove, whose thefts helped genocide 200,000 Christians in Japan. That's history.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Piratenews,

I'm still waiting for you to admit that your lightspeed/frequency shift/kodak argument is craptastically wrong.

You know, the one where all visible light that reaches the moon is upshifted into becoming invisible light.

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Originally posted by citizen:
Hmm, Necroposting.

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