OT: Greenland is literally cracking apart and flooding the world

Till the hurricanes came.

Reply to
Steve Wilson
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One has to wonder which link krw imagined that Steve might have read.

John Larkin doesn't post many links on anthropogenic global warming, and pretty much all of them are to denialist web-sites (which feed him the kind of fatuous pap that he finds plausible).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Why is a carbon tax "a tax on prosperity"?

And what tax isn't? A tax on poverty isn't going to raise enough money to b e useful.

The argument for a carbon tax is that burning carbon dumps carbon dioxide i n the atmosphere which costs us all money by changing the environment for t he worse. Putting at tax on carbon encourages people to get their energy in some other way that doesn't damage the environment.

Krw can't follow the argument - he doesn't understand how more carbon dioxi de in the atmosphere changes and damages the environment - but he doesn't w ant to pay more taxes on anything, so he knows he doesn't like the argument , even if he can't understand it.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Of course, this "tipping point" is nothing but a figment of your religion.

Of course, increased taxes are the *reason* behind the whole AGW scam to begin with. Gotta control the masses!

Reply to
krw

One of them might be getting enough global warming to start methane ice com ing apart. Methane is a greenhouse gas, so more methane means more warming, which melts some more methane ice, releasing even more methane.

Something like that seems to have happened at the start of the Paleocene-Eo cene Thermal Maximum (PETM).

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The global temperature went up five degrees Kelvin over 2000 years. Somethi ng was dumping 0.2 gigatons of carbon per year into the atmosphere in the f orm of methane (the carbon-13 to carbon-12 ratio shifts in the carbonate la yers laid down at the time in a way that says there was a lot of methane ar ound at the time). Methane ice is a plausible source.

The current warming in the Arctic seems to be boiling methane out of the pe rmafrost at a great rate, if not - yet - at PETM rates.

We are dumping around around 10 gigatons of carbon a year into the atmosphe re at the moment, which may be swamping the methane contribution. As we war m the place up, the methane ice contribution may become larger, more visibl e and lot harder to turn down.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

be useful.

in the atmosphere which costs us all money by changing the environment for the worse. Putting at tax on carbon encourages people to get their energy in some other way that doesn't damage the environment.

and the argument for income tax is that it encourages people to work less?

Reply to
Lasse Langwadt Christensen

Don't ask Bill questions about work.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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Reply to
John Larkin

Why not? The subject makes him ill. Maybe he'll go away.

Reply to
krw

t

We had one a while back

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The fact that krw doesn't know about it, and considers it a figment of some body else's imagination, isn't all that surprising. Most of the stuff he po sts about are figments of his imagination - he calls them "facts" - but he doesn't know enough to realise that some of his ideas are wrong, and others misleadingly over-simplified.

Krw does like to think that. It saves him from having to learn about the ob servations that makes anthropogenic global warming something that is happen ing right now. Since krw seems to have absolutely no capacity to learn anyt hing at all, he may not have the capacity to process a better-informed conc ept.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Oh, no, it's the possibility (in a complex system) that some phenomena have hysteresis,so happen abruptly and/or are very difficult to reverse.

Like, blowing a fuse: turn down the power, it doesn't repair the fuse. Or popping a popcorn kernel: you can't turn the heat down fast enough to stop it mid-pop. Or making toast 'just cook until it's burnt, and then twenty seconds less'.

You can argue that the Earth, atmosphere and surface rocks, waters, life, s such a well-understood system that this cannot happen unexpectedly.

But, that would be fatuous.

Reply to
whit3rd

Possibly? Yet you lefties rag on Christians. Amazing.

No, I'm arguing that you don't know. You're proposing that we give up trillion$ and keep billions in abject poverty because your religion says the alternative is the apocalypse. Gee, even Christians want to help people out of poverty.

Your "proof"? Certainly.

Reply to
krw

e.org:

te:

to be useful.

ide in the atmosphere which costs us all money by changing the environment for the worse. Putting at tax on carbon encourages people to get their ener gy in some other way that doesn't damage the environment.

s?

He might tell you about the most recent job he applied for - and probably w on't get.

I do keep applying for jobs - doing the sort of work I did for some forty y ears, with some success - but apparently I'm now too "senior" to get them . ..

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

On Sunday, April 1, 2018 at 2:16:00 AM UTC+10, Lasse Langwadt Christensen w rote:

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to be useful.

de in the atmosphere which costs us all money by changing the environment f or the worse. Putting at tax on carbon encourages people to get their energ y in some other way that doesn't damage the environment.

?

No. Income tax is collected to pay for government services that keep societ y running well enough to let you earn that income. Sales taxes - now value added taxes - work the same way, but bear more heavily on the poor, which i s regressive, so get balanced by a progressive income tax whcih extracts mo re from the rich (who have more to spare).

Carbon tax is more like the high taxes on tobacco which are intended to dis courage people from smoking, and on ethanol which are intended to discourag e people from drinking too much. The side effect of encouraging smuggling i s unfortunate, and limits the magnitude and effectiveness of the tax.

Both pay off in fewer days of sickness and lower pressure on the health ser vices.

In Australia a carbon tax would pay off in fewer bush-fires and fewer tropi cal cyclone flood events (not that Australia's contribution to the global C O2 budget is all that impressive).

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Australia is at 16 in the would league table, responsible for 1% of the tot al emissions. China is the leader, with 28% of the emissions, and the US se cond at 15%.

Australia does rather better on a per head basis - it sits at 16.3 metric t ons of CO2 per capita, just behind the USA at 16.4.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

ee.org:

ote:

y to be useful.

xide in the atmosphere which costs us all money by changing the environment for the worse. Putting at tax on carbon encourages people to get their ene rgy in some other way that doesn't damage the environment.

ss?

Oddly enough, I know exactly why krw thinks that. He's a deeply unpleasant person who never misses an opportunity to post something offensive, no matt er how irrational his fantasy is.

In reality, thinking about work makes me nostalgic. I do stuff for the NSW banch of the IEEE, like editing our newsletter

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but there aren't enough of them to keep me busy.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

g it

Righties think that religion is real, rather than a form of comforting self

-deception.

s'.

,

The precautionary principle is the one that you apply when you don't know.

Cutting back on fossil fuels is certainly going to cost the Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers billions that they might have earned by digging up fossi l carbon and selling it as fuel. Letting them keep on doing it is going to cost the rest of us billions in paying for the damage created by the more e xtreme weather events driven by progressive global warming.

Using renewable energy sources isn't going to condemn anybody to abject pov erty. Solar power is now as cheap in Australian as power generated by burni ng fossil carbon. It isn't always there when you want it, but Elton Musk's battery pack in South Australia is storing a significant chunk of it to cov er some of the gaps.

The federal government is planning on spending a few billion to upgrade the Snowy Mountains hydroelectric scheme to serve for pumped storage.

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We can move over to renewable energy without compromising on our energy use or our standard of living. The process of investing in the renewable energ y generation is going to be expensive, but no more expensive than dealing w ith the consequences of unrestrained progressive global warming.

It doesn't take too many tropical cyclones to do a billion's worth of prope rty.

Hurricane Harvey was good for about $150 billion in property damage, Katrin a for $108 billion, and Sandy for $65 billion.

Global warming seems unlikely to make hurricanes more frequent, but it is e xpected to make them more powerful - they feed on ocean water warmer than a bout 26 degree Celcius, and the one degree of warming we've had so far mean s that there's rather more of that around every summer.

Usually by working at low wages in Christian-owned sweatshops.

As if krw knew what might constitute "proof" or how to test it. His sole te st is whether an idea matches his own delusions.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

In short, 'Ignoramus et ignoramibus'. That's dark-ges talki.

But the germ of truth is, it's an unknown, and it's dangerous. That's worth thinking about, and sane persons do not dismiss such things lightly.

Reply to
whit3rd

And they were *partly* right too. The insulin response is a big factor in longer term obesity leading to type II diabetes. It is presently reckoned that about 80% of type II diabetes cases are diet related.

To first order = - too.

There is some variation in base metabolic rate so some people stay naturally slim whatever. A rower friend of mine in the "increasing weight" cohort lost weight during the experiment because their diet plan was less than he would normally eat as a superfit national class rower.

US supersized junk food and the high fructose sugar lobby pretty much ensures that most Americans have a terribly unhealthy diet.

HEP has always been a bit like stamp collecting or more unkindly attempting to understand horology by smashing together clocks at ever increasing speeds. Some damn good physics involved in making the kit.

I'm ambivalent about string theory. One of my contemporaries is now a leading string theorist - until it makes testable predictions that are different to conventional Big Bang cosmologies it is an interesting novelty but nothing more. We are about due for a paradigm shift though and they do usually come from a new branch of mathematics finding a symmetry fit with existing physics that allows for new insights. It could be string theory, spinors or some other Clifford algebra that eventually breaks down the door and unifies gravity with quantum theory.

Arguably science is always wrong in the sense that there is never any possibility of proof of correctness like you have in mathematics. It is never exact but the best approximation that we have at present to describing how nature works but it is always possible to force a rethink by a clever experiment or new data that refutes an established theory.

The Michelson-Morely ether drift experiment being one of the most famous and incredibly sensitive null results.

The new theory will contain the old one as a weak field limiting case but also explains the newest contradictory observations as well. It is always a case of progressive refinement toward some unknown goal.

Most physicists would consider the various conservation laws to be pretty close to inviolate (at least their GR equivalents are). Putting them almost into the same category as axioms in mathematics.

Most science courses do at least touch on the history of how we got to the the present level of understanding. The newest stuff these days is just too difficult to teach to undergraduates!

Dodgy claims like "physics will be completely solved in twenty years" made just before the discovery of radioactivity for instance.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown
Reply to
Martin Brown

Bullshit. It's scientific talk. You don't and can't know but want to reverse the course of civilization anyway. You want to starve people for something that even you admit that you can't know. That's genocide.

You don't (can't) know but it's dangerous anyway. That's what passes for science, in your world. Amazing.

Just like all religions. You can't know but worry about appeasing your Gods anyway. ...and you disparage Christians. Amazing, really. I guess Christians should demand increased taxes and maybe they'd get your respect.

Reply to
krw

Reversing anthropogenic global - or at least slowing it right down - doesn' t involve starving anybody. What krw hasn't noticed is that solar power is now roughly as cheap as power-generated by burning fossil carbon. It's not always there when you want it, and battery packs and various forms of pumpe d storage add a minor cost, but at the moment we generate about 1.3% of our power from solar cells. Bumping that up to 13% will probably halves the pr ice, and the cost due to the economies of large scale manufacturing. It wor ked for the last two factor of ten scale-ups and will probably work again f or the subsequent scale up, when we start installing solar cells in places that have never had electric power before.

In a sense, slowing down anthropogenic global warming is an incidental adva ntage of spreading really cheap electric power across the globe. Far from s tarving people, it's going to improve their lives no end.

We do know that the anthropogenic global warming that we have had so far - about one degree Celcius - has markedly increased the frequency of extreme weather events.

Even krw should be able to appreciate that Hurricane Harvey was dangerous, as Katrina had been earlier.

Krw doesn't know much, so the evidence that anthropogenic global warming is dangerous has escaped him. Anything he doesn't already know isn't "true" a nd anybody who tells him a "fact" that he doesn't know (and doesn't want to know) is a "liar".

He's a lunatic, but not obviously dangerous enough to get put away - or eve n deprived of his guns.

Krw can't tell the difference between religion and science - how could he?

Some Christians do need to be disparaged. John Christy and Roy Spencer are top flight climate scientists who don't actually believe in anthropogenic g lobal warming - which makes them two of the ten out of the top three hundre d climate scientist who don't. Their scepticism isn't driven by rational co nsiderations, but rather by their sincere - if demented - born-again Christ ian beliefs. I think I can identify two of the remaining eight holdouts, an d both of them have similarly bizarre and irrational motivations.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Yeah, I don't know for sure, but he (Gary Taubes) gives several examples of populations getting access to raw sugar/corn syrup and getting obese/ diabetes in ~20 years. It might just be correlation and not causation. Multiple year nutrition studies are hard, (and rats don't always behave as humans.)

In the late 90's I was at Vanderbilt, which had a decent HEP group. Every ~third colloquium would be HEP, which all had the same ending. Everything still fits in the standard model. (Except for neutrino mass that seems interesting.)

I think it mostly fits JL's model of science losing it's way without any new data.

We are about due for a paradigm shift though

Yeah we need some smart kid to have some new ideas. At the moment I like MOND or MOGR (modified general relativity) but who knows.

George H.

Reply to
George Herold

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