The Trump Presidency

Discussion in 'Politics' started by joepistole, Jan 17, 2017.

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  1. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    If it is useless, present better, more actual data. BTW, the image was about sea level rise, which, it appears, is not rising everywhere.
    A horror in language, supported by nothing but words. No doubt, if volatility increases, there will be more extremal events, and, given that the extremal events create a lot of damage, some dams and water containment systems will be damaged too. But almost all dams remain stable enough, and will not be vulnerable to collapse. The rice field terraces seem, of course, extremely vulnerable, but can be easily protected too. All one has to care is to prepare places where too much water can flow down without destroying the whole construction.
    This is alarmism in pure form.
    Of course, to look at how the insurers expect their costs is the most reasonable way. Not that such markets cannot be manipulated too, and would not be vulnerable to errors in public expectations. If the whole population erroneously thinks something horrible will happen, insurance sellers will tend to follow this error too. The only difference would be that they know their results during the last years, thus, are much less vulnerable to overestimated media presentations of what has already happened up to now, and that they will have specialists who care about what scientists really predict, which differs from media presentations of such predictions too.

    The problem of Saudi Arabia is not that fossil fuel is no longer needed, but that their own reserves are limited. So, it makes sense for them to diversify. A lot of the US oil has a problem with being too expensive, or at least it was too expensive during the last years, and before giving such a firm new money one would better look very careful at the actual situation of the firm.
     
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  3. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    this Global chart may be useful. Keep in mind that the horror year of 2017. Over $300 billion is not charted.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    You will notice that the number of extreme weather events has increased from 412 (1990) to 797 in (2017)
     
    Last edited: Jun 27, 2018
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  5. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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  7. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    It functions as a deflection, and you have had that pointed out to you now at least four times.
    You spent a half dozen posts trying to reply as if I had claimed something about degree, and now that you're trapped you try to pretend your error about the direction of bias implies the people who get it correct are alarmists. .

    The direction of political pressure and consequent bias, if any, is a comment on US politics and governance. It has nothing to do with the alarming content of the research. It is a fact no matter what the research findings are.
    First, I correct your attempted deflection to media bias, and return to my subject - IPCC and research bias direction, due to the political and economic pressure on them.
    Then: Already did, at least three times, with specific names of officials in control of funding and specific government agencies and examples of pressure and analysis of status of researchers and comparisons of IPCC reports with the field reports and so forth. And added a lot later, bits and pieces, such as the link above about the choices of definition for "extreme" precipitation events. Pretty solid argument, four or five different kinds of supporting evidence and approach all three times, and you once again make it obvious that such arguments are a waste of time with you.
    You don't actually argue much. Mostly you try to deflect via strawmanning - pretending a post you don't like said something different than it did - or simple denial, usually justified by ignorance (you claim that what you don't know can be legitimately doubted on that ground). That degree vs direction of bias bullshit, for example, was never an argument.
    Examples:
    That is a strawman. You do almost nothing except parrot American wingnut media feeds, on climate change - that was the claim. I agree it is defamatory - but it's true.
    First, that's a strawman - the subject of the post you are answering was not media bias. It was your assignment of the wrong direction of pressure and presumed bias to the IPCC and research reports. And that kind of strawman and deflection is typical of your posting, as mentioned.

    Second, that's a joke - and you aren't joking. You actually think you can evaluate bias in media reports on climate change without the slightest reference to the research being reported or the physical reality it describes.
    Your presumption of those significant, newsworthy, definitely positive effects of AGW being discovered by researchers but not reported in the media was something you pulled out of your ass. You don't actually know of any.
    And your dismissal of my observation that in my media some positive news and information (or at least less alarming, reassuring) was frequent enough to notice (and I provided an example or two) was likewise arbitrary - only your media counted.
    Now all you need is some research and findings and reality based evidence to support your little daydream there, especially the part about it not making any difference how long things take to spread, or how many beneficial can spread compared to how many injurious, or how many of the good would be needed to break even replacing the good lost, and thereby provide a net benefit (the word was "beneficial", which is not the same as "good", and your little tactic of alteration there is not going to save you.) The diseases of the new mosquitos, for example, join rather than replace the local diseases of the local mosquito populations.

    And if you do, you could then bend your deflection back to Trump's Republican role in handling all this. For one thing, notice that if he really does fence off the Mexican landscape, the plants and animals impeded most will be the beneficial ones. Pests and vermin and diseases will cross the Wall much more easily than the larger plants and animals beneficial to people.
     
    Last edited: Jun 27, 2018
  8. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    5,003
    I acknowledge that my habit of answering almost every attack tends to lead to off-topic discussions. All one needs is somebody like you who likes to remember vaguely (and almost always wrong) what has been discussed elsewhere. The usual "you claimed" nonsenses disposed of.
    Fine. I do not object to claims that some officials are against AGW, so, do not question what you have supported with such evidence. This is what you can reach with arguments.
    Strawman arguments are wrong, but arguments. If they are really strawmen remains to be checked.
    A trivial repetition of the defamation shows that the counterargument was a strawman? LOL.
    Why do you classify an explanation how I identified the bias in question as a strawman? It is the media bias which is what I have identified. And it is the media bias in one particular question - silence about positive effects - which allowed me, without intensive scientific study, to identify it as biased, and the direction of the bias. I have not questioned any particular IPCC claim.

    My point about IPCC and climate science is a different one - there is a suspicion of political pressure, and if there is such a suspicion, one needs intense studies to find out what the scientists really think. Which somehow in your claims transforms into some "assignment of the wrong direction of pressure and presumed bias to the IPCC and research reports", which is, indeed, a strawman.
    Again a strawman. I have described how I can get some information about the physical reality. By subdivision of the problems related to some climate change into costs of adaptation to new conditions and the question which climate would be better in the long range - a cooler or a warmer one. In the first case, the optimum is clearly no change at all. And for the second question, it seems quite clear that at least slightly warmer is better. Moreover, to establish the media bias I don't even need this answer - all I need is that there will be some positive effects too.
    There is nothing new to be discovered, obvious trivia do not deserve publication in scientific journals. Or do you think, say, that "if the climate is warmer, in some regions which allow now one harvest per year two harvests per year may become possible" is a news which deserves to be published in a paper? Your examples I have not classified as mass media, but media close to science, science journalism. Of course, I expect science journalism to be much closer to scientific truth than mass media. So, don't worry, I have recognized your examples and taken them into account.
    Nice way to produce defamations. Ok, there are certainly differences between the meanings of "beneficial" and "good". Is the difference relevant here? If yes, an example would be helpful - I'm not a native speaker, so I do make errors here. What do you make, instead? You suggest I have made, with some evil intent, some alteration, to save my flawed argumentation, but, given your cleverness, this does not save me. Note that this is not even formulated as a claim, a suspicion, that such a shift is more than economy of writing time or replacing a word I use passively with a word I use actively. No, it is mentioned as an established, unquestionable fact: "your little tactic of alteration".
    This would be necessary if I would make quantitative predictions. I can restrict myself to qualitative ones. For example, I look at your "diseases of the new mosquitos, for example, join rather than replace the local diseases of the local mosquito populations". And simple anti-propaganda techniques suggest me to consider the opposite at least as a possibility: Some local disease multipliers, faced by the new competition, do not survive the competition and die out.

    The first step was simple anti-propaganda technique - simply identify the opposite effect and think about it. So, let's think about it. The local mosquitoes were local. Why have they failed to go South in the past? There was no barrier preventing it - else, the new mosquitoes would have been unable to reach this region. So, something was bad for them in that warmer region where the new competitors come from.

    Now comes the mathematician/physicist, with the education which heavily overemphasizes to think about symmetries, and sees an approximate symmetry. There must be something which breaks this symmetry to get a difference. He thinks about what could be symmetry-breaking and does not find anything. At least not in the general picture. Of course, some particular important player, like mosquitoes, will have quite asymmetric properties, "not beneficial" or whatever, given that using the four letter word "evil" would be an evil tactic of alteration. But to name this evil single player is not sufficient. There are also some good, sorry, beneficial players, and for my main point all what matters is that they are not mentioned at all.
    Whole species (plants as well as animals) will not be influenced anyway.

    What would be a point is that climate change is in the interest of the globalists. Control of CO2 emission needs world government or something close to it. All the local things (dams, wells, air condition) which allow solving locally most problems are of no interest for the globalists. But it this globalist interest Trump's interest? I think no.
     
  9. Bells Staff Member

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    24,270
    What does that have to do with the Sahara?

    It is actually accelerating. Plus you also seem to be ignoring an important factor when it comes to rising sea levels.

    Global warming may cause sea-level rises that can worsen the effects of storm surges and tsunamis.
    A sudden swell in sea levels could be catastrophic for more than a billion people living in low-lying areas, according to researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey(USGS). In a study released on April 19, the team notes that rapid sea-level rises caused by warming can worsen the effects of storm surges and tsunamis in these areas, threatening the survival of nearly a quarter of the world’s population.

    The study uses new mapping technologies to identify places around the world at greatest risk of losing land to rising seas, and to estimate the number of people who would be adversely affected. It is just one of several recent studies demonstrating that sea-level rise is accelerating much faster than projected. The 2007 assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released earlier this month, reports that global sea levels rose at an average rate of 1.8 millimeters a year from 1961 to 2003, with the fastest growth occurring between 1993 and 2003 (an average rate of 3.1 millimeters a year).

    Scientists attribute the accelerated sea-level rise over the past decade to melting sea ice at the poles and to thermal expansion of the world’s oceans due to warming temperatures. According to the IPCC, satellite data since 1978 show that the annual average extent of sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk by 2.7 percent per decade, with losses of 7.4 percent per decade in the summer. The National Climatic Data Center and the World Meteorological Organization report that the annual summer ice loss now totals some 60,421 square kilometers, an area one-fifth the size of Germany.

    At the current rate of warming, scientists forecast a sea-level rise 0.5 to 1.4 meters by the end of the century, far exceeding IPCC estimates of some 59 centimeters by 2100. The USGS researchers project that a rise of five meters could inundate 3.2 million square kilometers of coastal land, affecting close to 670 million people. They warn that if vast areas of land-based ice in Greenland and Antarctica are affected, the contribution to sea-level rise from melting ice and glaciers could magnify to global proportions.


    Now consider how much worse weather events have become. Storms are much stronger now, cyclones and hurricanes and typhoons (depending on where you live) are now more often severe than not. Low pressure systems sitting off the coast is now pushing the water higher and further inland. That rise in sea levels makes everything else much worse.

    Do you understand now why this is bad?
     
  10. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    It's rising on average, and the rise is on average accelerating. Remember about averages?
    It's your manner, not your habit, that deflects. You refuse to address the relevant implications.
    They are always checked, before being labeled. I posted several examples of the checks and results, above.
    They are evasions of argument about the matters at hand.
    But you did question it, see? For pages, complete with derogatory claims that I had failed to even post them.
    Meanwhile, it's not "some officials" (another strawman attempt) - it's the officials, the Federal ones with power over grants and careers. And they were only part of the pressure described - also the wealthy corporate powers, the members of your famous "deep state", the owners of the major media, the funders and intellectual minions of the major think tanks, and so forth. All of the neoliberals threatened in their hope of freeing global capitalist corporations from interference by governments, and their influence on the financial support of geophysical science.

    And that was just the naming of sources - there were other arguments establishing the direction of pressure. Five different chains of evidence, iirc.

    You got the direction of pressure completely wrong, backwards. Since that was the entire basis of your presumed "alarmism" and so forth, you got all that wrong as well. When you have corrected your presumptions in light of this information, you can claim to have no objections to this stuff - not before.
    Yes. It's central to your errors about domestic animal and plant distribution. Cows are "good", but a newly distributed heat adapted cow with lower milk yield replacing a higher yield cow that can't handle AGW is not a beneficial change from AGW.
    I can't anticipate the specifics of your attempts at deflection and evasion and creating extra work. Since all you would have to do is not change the terms in what you are responding you, cease altering and paraphrasing and strawmanning thereby, and I have already requested that a dozen times or more without effect (even meeting strong resistance and refusal), you can bite me.
    Yep. Because according to research so far it's probably not true on average, and doesn't always increase yields where it is true; if someone discovers it is likely to be more common and more beneficial than we now expect that would be news.
    Your qualitative predictions are wrong, according to the research you claim to accept.
    And your "explanation" was silly - hasn't worked, doesn't work, won't work.

    There's no propaganda involved - this is research reporting of actual events. You are once again committing your standard blunder of treating accurate and unbiased reporting as propaganda.
    Meanwhile: Sure. Everybody assumes the possibility of competition. That's all in the research.
    And some do just replace by competition - so the only problem is that the diseases are worse and more numerous, because that's how the world is: the insects in warmer areas carry more and worse human diseases.
    And some don't competitively exclude, but add in.
    Hence, a bad outcome on average. On average, got it?
    (btw: the new mosquitos are not usually in competition - as accurately described above, they join and add in).
    That has nothing to do with AGW.
    Your continual attempts to replace AGW with some imaginary situation in which the world is a little bit warmer are all strawmen, btw.

    And swinging to the thread, Trump's wall:
    You obviously have no idea how ignorant you have to be to post something like that. Why do you insist on making claims in matters you know absolutely nothing about?
    When the damage done by Republican governance is simply denied, rugswept, etc, it does not thereby vanish. We didn't get out from under the destruction and degradation of W by everybody sort of pretending it never happened. Fascists don't pull their punch, agree to go easy, come to their senses. Trump's Wall will do a lot of harm, if it is ever built. It's already doing a lot of harm by the mere threat.
     
    Last edited: Jun 28, 2018
  11. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,003
    Nothing but the point that "being a delicate ecosystem" is today zero nontrivial information. Ten years ago I would have thought it would be an interesting and important information. Today I have recognized that it is not.
    I do not need any information to understand that more storms are something negative. It is also a triviality that the same storm in a situation with higher sea levels can be worse. If nothing has been done. If the land nearby has also been better protected, even if only by putting some earth on the top, so that the difference between land and sea remains the same as now, or becomes even greater, then the storm will have the same effect as today.
    If one uses the same criteria used by that alarmist considerations, most of the Netherlands is already under water.

    It is all the same - simple and sufficiently cheap methods to prevent such harm exist but are of no interest to such globalist "Worldwatch institutes".
    Of course, I make claims that you failed to present evidence until you present evidence. That's the aim of making such claims. Unfortunately, one has to make this for pages, and most of them have no success at all.
    That's already a different claim, and I doubt you can present evidence which would allow me to check this - I would have to find out which people in the US are responsible for the distribution of money in climate science, and that they have been there all the time (that Trump would try to replace others is clear).
    This claim suggests that your claim is wrong, given that you have combined it with a claim which is wrong - what the media think about climate change is visible.
    Classical liberals have had such a hope. Neoliberals are quite different. Usually, they want even more government than some "left-libertarians".
    Quote or link, please.
    Cows don't have to handle AGW, they have to handle the temperature of the place where they live. With AGW, the same cow which is optimal now in some region will become the optimal one in a region closer to the poles. The majority is anyway all the time inside.
    First of all, this is what you can ask for in immediate replies. If I refer to something you have said earlier, I use my memory. Then, even in immediate replies, it is not a very reasonable requirement. Given your manners of a teacher, you should know about the value of exercises of type "describe what you have read in your own words". Such a description helps to clarify if the text was correctly understood. If some sort of propaganda is an issue, replacing words is a nice method to illustrate some propaganda, namely by replacing typical propaganda words by words used in normal speech. So, there are a lot of quite legitimate uses of word replacements. And therefore name-calling every replacement is not justified.
    This makes no sense. So, link to the research, please. (Of course, there are now regions where both are possible, and it depends on a lot of things if it makes sense to switch, and on average we can be sure that the decisions of the local peasants are optimal. The question was how this changes if the average temperature changes, everything else being equal.)
    You think so. I think it works nicely.
    You obviously don't understand how those anti-propaganda techniques work. They can be applied to every text. For example, "to consider the opposite at least as a possibility" is always useful. They are anti-propaganda because they are especially useful if applied to propaganda, optimized to such conditions. But if applied to normal texts they are fine and useful too.
    Once there are more animals and plants, there are also more diseases. Quite natural, as one would expect. You get your negative result by restricting your consideration to diseases.
    It is the natural scientific way to handle complex phenomena - subdivide them into many different parts, and handle each part, first, separately, leaving everything else unchanged. So, in this case, I split the problem of how to handle a climate change into different parts. Of course, the situations where only one parameter changes and everything else remains fixed are quite artificial, have not much to do with the real-life situation. But this is the whole point of experimental science: To prepare artificial situation where everything remains unchanged except for the single parameter of interest in this experiment. And to consider small changes is also an important part of the scientific approach. You know, almost all the evolution equations used in science fix how the situation changes for infinitesimal time steps. This, then, tells us how the system changes for small time steps, and what remains is mathematics to compute the result for large time steps.
    Of course, I have no idea, and once you don't explain why it is wrong, your childish attack changes nothing.
     
  12. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

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    23,328
    eh? you're kidding!
    They might be inside a building with only the apex of the roof showing perhaps....
    this info image below discusses the issue however fails to account for massive stock losses due to drowning:

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    src: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221209631730027X
     
  13. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,003
    I have explained what I do because this is the reasonable, scientific way. Split a complex problem into many simple parts. Alarmists have to do something different. Namely, giving long lists of problems to impress the propaganda victims.

    Compare: If you make long lists of negative effects, forgetting the equally long list of positive effects gives something impressive. In reality, in most complex problems, if one splits them into many and considers them separately, a large part of the problems appear to be small in comparison with others.

    And in the case of climate change, there is a simple method to subdivide the problems. The warming will lead to a shift of climate zones. If a climate zone shifts, there will be costs of adaptation to the change, but inside the zone, everything can remain unchanged. So, you can do the same what you have done in the old location of the zone in the new location too. Whatever the problems with the warming in the new location of the zone, we already have solutions, namely those used in the actual location of the zone. Yes, the costs of adaptation. But we are talking here about quite large timescales in comparison with the economic timescales. So, old investments which become useless in the new climate will be any way at least 30 years old, and in need to be replaced by something new. So, these are solutions based on old technologies and not that expensive.

    This method makes it also quite easy to predict the overall result: Once the agricultural result inside every single zone is proportional to its size, all one has to predict is how its size changes. If the size remains unchanged, the change will be zero too. So, it remains to look at the ends. In the polar end, there are regions which give zero today and will give something more after warming. On the other end, there are regions which become too hot to produce anything simply because human beings are unable to live there. Up to now, such regions do not exist. What you present here as a danger are far from a situation where humans would be unable to live. Why? Because humans have quite simple means to survive in much hotter environments. Homes with air condition, and going out of the home only at night, with most of the travel in cars with air condition too. This may sound quite uncomfortable. But compare this with the living conditions at the other end, in the polar region. Really that much worse?

    So, most of the alarmist scenario depends on ignorance of this simple scheme to think about the real costs. Instead of thinking in terms of a shift of climate zones, one thinks in terms of the most stupid reaction to climate change - leaving everything as it is now. Such stupid behavior would be indeed a problem if there would be a climate change.
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    No, they don't. Very expensive and quite complex methods exist to reduce or partially mitigate the incoming harms exist - politically they are almost impossible.
    Trying to change the subject and deflect this off onto "the media" again - you have yet to post on this fundamental blunder you made without invoking that strawman.
    What makes it doubly silly is that it is your unsupported assessment of the media, rather than the media itself, which is involved.
    (an assessment that has caused you to post mistakes, such as the perception of bias in the benefical vs harmful organism spread, although that is not conclusive evidence that you are wrong about the media overall).
    The evidence was presented multiple times and many pages before your claims. If you recall, I've been forced to actually formalize a rule: three repetitions, and then you have to find it yourself.
    Trolls pound sand.
    Your illegitimate and misrepresentative ones, however, earn their pejoratives.
    Bullshit. That was the original claim, and it was repeated more than five times
    I handed you several names of people and organizations. I repeatedly referred to them. I provided links - to corporations, think tanks, media operations, Republican Party wingnuts with power, all that stuff.
    I handed you the names and political affiliations and public bias of the heads of the Congressional subcommittees that control Federal funding for climate research, for example, with links, such as Congressman Lamar Alexander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamar_Alexander. This is your third time presented with that name, in this context, with a link. Three is my limit - from now on, you pound sand.
    Man oh man - I keep thinking you can't top the last one. Of all the goofy, city kid, brickheaded things to post - - - have you ever even set foot on a dairy farm?
    People you named "neoliberals" are the ones I'm talking about.
    It makes perfect sense. This has been explained to you, with examples etc. You blew them off. You are simply abysmally ignorant, and your silly daydreams conflict with the reality as described by research and observation.
    Dude, you got the entire direction of political and economic pressure on climate research completely backwards. And then you adopted that as a feature of your world, unarguable. So it's not working all that well.
    Discounting balanced and honest reports of reality as if they were propaganda is a serious blunder. You do it a lot - it's your standard mistake.
    No, you didn't. You imagined a situation that had nothing to do with AGW, and split it up in ways that made no sense.
    When you blow off all the actual research done by people who know what they are doing, and play around in ignorance with thought experiments, and don't check your facts or your conclusions, you will screw up.
    Nope. No such restriction.
    In this case, with more and different mosquitos (the animals) there are coming more diseases. Both the mosquitos and the diseases are and will be negative results. And for the next 50 - 100 years that kind of negative result from AGW is overwhelmingly more to be expected than anything positive, which is uncertain and predicted to be insignificant for a long time. It's just how the situation is. I'm sorry if it offends your presumptions of balance or whatever, but your philosophical requirements are not obligations on the real world.

    And thinking they are has blinded you to Trump and the Republicans. When Trump screws the pooch on climate change preparation and policy, you aren 't even going to able to tell who did it, or what was done wrong.
     
  15. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,328
    It is not a reasonable scientific way....
    First you have to fully appreciate the scale and gamut of the problem before you can break it down into pieces ...yes?
    You don't see the sheer scale of what you are trying to solve. Your solutions do not come even close to whats actually happening now let alone in just a few years from now.

    To acclimatize as you suggest requires strong Government, a strong UN, and a strong grasp of reality by the global population and a whole heap of time. We have none of those.
    The anarchy and chaos that is knocking on our door will not allow acclimatization, even if possible, which it isn't, in the overly simplistic form you present.

    Prove that you know what is involved. Post some recent stats on flooding, landslides, violent storms here at sciforums.
    Prove you know the sheer scale of what you are chronically underestimating.
    You wont and you can't. Because you simply do not want to know.
    I could post stats all night and you wouldn't even consider them.
    Well now it's your turn...
    maybe start here. I look forward to your post.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floods

    Research the extraordinary North Pole heat wave of 2018
    https://www.theguardian.com/environ...scientists-alarmed-by-crazy-temperature-rises

    I would be very interested on your thoughts about this particular event. BTW don't stop with just the Guardian article there are many more to consolidate your opinion.
    try also
    recent news:
    Coroners inquest : Thunderstorm asthma.
    https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/h...e/news-story/0588b4a870d625bae5f984ca5a86b79b
    an event I had to live through... btw
     
    Last edited: Jun 28, 2018
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    Yes, really, that much worse.
    You lack information. Everything you posted there is wrong.
    The alarmist scenario, in fact, in the real world, is based on the findings of research and the elucidation of trends and consequences. These findings do not match your fairy tale. Neither do the observations of people who look around and know stuff.

    Look, here's one: suppose the current corn belt climate zone centered on Iowa shifts north as a unit under 2C of AGW - as you described. That's silly, but let's pretend. What will be the new situation? Well, for starters, there won't be several meters of mollosoil - the rich black dirt under Iowa's fertility - in the middle of Minnesota around Mille Lacs. Outside of old pond bottoms and river valleys, there will be a couple of feet of clay loam or sandy loam, on top of glacial till or something like it. On the shield, there will be acidic detritus on top of granite rock. A lot of places, there will be peat - nutrient poor, soggy. There haven't been thousands of years of worms processing tall grass prairie sod and hardwood forest biomass into the richest soil on the planet for maize, in central Minnesota - all the worms in the State were imported by European immigrants starting in the 1700s. The drainage in much of Minnesota is what they call "deranged" - it hasn't had time to arrange itself into rivers and linked downhill flowages. The water tables are "perched", over large areas. There's standing water all over the place. Maize will grow, in Minnesota, and grow well, don't get me wrong - but not like it does in Iowa. And the agriculture in southern Minnesota shifted unto the granite shield and peat bog of the northland will be even more radically affected.

    It doesn't matter how warm it gets in Minnesota - Iowa's agricultural productivity will not just move north. The corn belt is likely to take a hit, under AGW. Similar circumstances hold worldwide.

    Multiply by a planet. It's negative, this prospect.

    And Trump will be useless. This is what we need government for, and until we get rid of the Republicans ours will be missing in action - as far as anything beneficial.
     
  17. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,003
    Because you say so?
    No. Most of what I have proposed can be easily done locally and by private firms. They will do this because they see the local problems and solve them. The only thing which would need world government is a control of CO2 emissions. Which is, therefore, the preferred solution of the non-problem for the globalists.
    It is not my obligation to prove that problems do not exist, the burden of proof have those who make the claims that there is a problem.
    Indeed, why I should consider pointless stats which are not even stats but lists some events?
    Note: You don't have to prove to me that there will be more volatility of the weather and that this aspect is negative - I have not questioned this.
    Because you say so.
    About discussions, for beginners: If you think something is wrong, say what is wrong, correct the error, and present evidence for this.
    Fine. As expected, it is easy to find local differences. And, as expected from you, everything will be negative in this example. But what is ignored is that the good soil of Iowa will not be wasted. It will be used to grow something different. What will be grown there? I don't know. But, if the climate seriously changes, something different. The people of Iowa will care, and find good replacements. Is there any reason to believe that the replacement will be worse, not better, than the actual situation?

    This, again, shows the power of the idea to subdivide the problems. You can consider the problem of shifting climate zones assuming that everything else is equal. The simplified problem, with a simple solution. Iceaura has nothing to object here. So, an example is introduced which depends on different soil quality in different regions. Ok, the example shows that in some situations the simple straightforward solution - to simply take over everything from the previous location of that climate zone, will not be optimal. Again, what one has to use is the same technique already described - think about the same effect in the other direction. The Iowa farmers starting to plant something which needs a higher temperature. Something which is grown now South of Iowa. On soil worse than in Iowa. And the loss in the shift Iowa-Minnesota will be compensated by some gains of other shifts, where the shifted territory is located on better soil. In the average, there is no reason to assume that shifting the territories toward the poles will make the soil worse. Again, if we consider soil quality, good soil is shifted from one climate zone to another one, but in the average remains in some other use.

    Different from this posting, #3011 contains nothing worth to answer, so it is disposed of.
     
  18. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,882
    There is a line in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about Arthur Dent's house, and how it almost perfectly failed to please the eye; the line stands out because it was one of the first times I noticed the formulation.

    Our neighbor, to the other, undertakes wild digressions that, as a rule, almost perfectly manage to fall on the precisely wrong answer. Social contract? Global warming? It's all the same, as such. The point is that we're not talking about willful cruelty, victimizing children, almost precisely the manner of defining corruption Republicans constantly accuse of everyone else, and other such things some people support but do not wish to defend.

    Remember, we already have on record an episode of actually explicitly pointing to the boundary, and the immediate response was to leap outside and never return. One of the easiest comparisons is to juxtapose his talk of people's rights with the outcomes of governance he advocates; if we attend his pandering to tyrants, his entire libertarian critique falls apart.

    The point is just to watch everyone else run around and waste their time because then they're talking about him instead of anything real or substantial.

    Global warming? Why not? He will continue to be almost perfectly wrong because that gets attention.

    And, yes, for the record, this is almost precisely what the rules mean by rational argument. See, what you're talking about, those circumstances where two plus two equals four, are inconvenient to the grift our neighbor is pushing.

    I don't know how ridiculous a particular circumstance gets in your circles, but every once in a while, and yes, even and especially about important stuff, someone you know will take an otherwise inexplicable contrarian position, and instead of admitting that something or someone makes them uncomfortable, they say something about how someone needs to stand in this role because it's not right if nobody does.

    Like that person who says a child could have done that. Maybe. Okay, so why is it a masterwork? It isn't. What is it, even? It doesn't look like anything. It's not supposed to. And what they really don't want to admit is that they think painting is stupid; if you press them on the point, they will even remind there is an "impressionism" function in photo manipulation software. And when they ask why anyone would pay three thousand dollars for it, they don't really care that it doesn't. At no point, though, will the damning critique recognize the artwork for what it is, a cheap piece of color intended to break up plain planes of walls that nobody would ever put in their home, and doesn't cost three grand, but if someone paid three hundred dollars it's because the businesspeople who buy that stuff for their business facilities don't really know or care, and whatever is about the market price for that kind of crap.

    Look at the last two and a half weeks in this thread: While most who pay attention to history recognize the "agreement" signed in Singapore is even less substantial than failed agreements of the past, why not presume this is the one that will work? The presumption here is more capricious than arbitrary, but at the very least coincides with our neighbor's established political framework. And from there, it's just a rabbit hole tumble through a breakwind tunnel: We all see the Trump context, but what, for instance, of your own government? How does it compare to Kim Jong-un's regime in North Korea? Well, our neighbor just happens to overlook such basic functional aspects, and insistently so. Imagine that. Throughout the social contract portion of this discussion, there is no functional difference between your government and Kim's, and apparently the idea of equivocation just coincidentally happens to confuse our neighbor. (Okay, that last is unfair; I've lost track of the things he declares himself incapable of understanding, as there is just so much and it keeps coming up, well, right about when you would expect it to if I was reciting a stupid joke.) The global warming digression arises out of the social contract discussion, which in turn arises from an equivocation of Kim's government with, say, actual democratic republics.

    It seems to me that compared to the last three years, there is pretty much nothing new about Schmelzer's latest routine; it has two functions, which is pretty much the whole of what terminally irrational arguments have for purpose: creating noise to dilute signal, and distracting discourse from more functionally and consequentially important subjects.

    I have a joke about the idea that I score around half what I should on Zener cards; that is, if random is twenty percent, I hit around ten. I've also witnessed, in a basic science experiment about statistics, a string of seventeen consecutive "heads" in the middle of a twenty-five coin toss data set; and, yes, that extraordinary anomaly disappeared into the larger set of over five hundred results. The connection 'twixt the ideas is something I said to a troll recently, hammering on perpetual botchery and bludgeoning the point about failing over and over again. There is always a question of probability and odds, as each coin toss really is fifty-fifty, but it is also true that at some point the pattern must necessarily break, else no amount of statistical noise can hide the result.

    Watch for antithesis. At some point, people accidentally break form. Complaining about scientists↱, for instance, is easy enough but doesn't really make for rational argument. So instead he's just making it up as he goes, as if he's presenting some manner of argument, much like his rejection of social contract. This is intellectually lazy trolling; the only labor is the effort of typing it up and, I don't know, I can imagine there being some internal artistic reward in how one goes about it, but the whole point is just to get everyone to waste their time while breaking up an already disorganized discussion into islands of struggling discourse amid a sea of thin, putrid, corrosive excrement. But you can watch the antithetical sandboxing throughout. And like I told our neighbor in the question of social contract, cynicism versus multiple societies that have survived multiple human lifetimes isn't much of a contest. It's one thing to challenge iterations of social contract—(it occurs to me that I don't think I have properly answered you on rule of law, an overlapping range)—but much easier to skip past the intricacies with capricious antithesis dismissing the object of inquiry as illegitimate. Just like it's easier to sit back and let other people try to explain the functional differences 'twixt Kim Jong-un's government and, say, a normal American government, or the Australian government. Even China has some manner of social contract, and therein lies the next part: It's easier to simply pretend a question doesn't exist. And from that emerges this climate digression in which it's easier to simply make it up as he goes. The old saying used to go that one should attack the argument and not the person; what happens when we replace the word attack with address or attend? I don't have a good answer, but it just seems that there isn't really much to be had in addressing the troll; simply attending the point of what he says reiterates that the choice seems to be between how much effort anyone wants to put into documenting the correct information for future audiences, and simply not wasting our time on such willful demonstrations of futility as our neighbor presents.
     
  19. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,003
    Tiassa has written now something which was easy to understand, but not worth to be answered. It clarifies that he has not understood completely why I object against social contract theory. Yet another attempt to explain it makes no sense - I have seen other opponents have at least understood my point very well, so this failure of understanding does not seem to be my fault. What remains are cheap attacks about my "pandering to tyrants" and similar nonsense.
     
  20. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    I'm going to regret responding to a complete propagandist, but the entire Bering Sea is about to shift to an Atlantic mode of mixing and salinity, altering a large and vital fishing ground for the first time in observable history. You can choose to be as alarmed as you want, but things are changing rapidly, and such ecosystem changes are usually behind the collapse of many historical civilizations, to say nothing of species, which are disappearing at a rate also unprecedented in human history. Why does anyone bother to respond to a guy that's 40 years behind current science?
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    30,994
    You didn't. You assumed shifting climate zones with everything else altered to match, and quite different from what it started as. And you failed to describe the climate zones you were shifting. And so forth.
    Because all the researchers and informed people say so.
    You first, this time and the next thirty. You have a backlog, and I have credit on account.
    That would be a different question. What I addressed was your fundamental error in thinking that climate zones can shift around on the globe and remain the same for agriculture.
    But when I point out that your silly mistakes are consequences of complete ignorance, you object. Likewise when I refer to your penchant for using your ignorance as evidence of something in the world.
    Iowa agriculture will probably be harmed by AGW. On average. Overall.
    And if you compile them, planet wide, you discover that the likely effects of AGW on agriculture will probably be strongly negative on average. It's called information. That's what the various researchers have done and are doing. Their reports are what you dismiss as "alarmism".
    The example I just handed you involved one of the half dozen highest productivity and most important agricultural zones on the planet. The effect on the "average" of having its climate suddenly shift north a full "zone" would be disproportionate.
    It shows that one needs information to do that, by demonstrating the consequences of ignorance.

    And in this case, ignorance about the US Republican Party and its President. Because this isn't really about climate change - this is about denial of the existence of problems that can only be handled by government. If climate change did not require competent governmental response, including the restriction of capitalist corporate business and taxation of the wealthy, thereby threatening the Republican regime, none of this wingnut crap would be happening.
     
  22. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,328
    Thank you so much for your erudite post Tiassa. It is a real pleasure to read such articulation.
    The insight offered by Douglas Adams is with out doubt extraordinary. Using such extreme humor is often tremendously valuable as a vehicle to learning so much about self. Displaying how humanity deals with the fundamental paradox that drives this universe by utilizing humor to do it with. "I think therefore I am" ergo sum, may seem a straightforward statement of existence yet on closer examination the depths of intense paradox hidden in all things is evident. Just as this simple mathematical statement:
    x + (-)x = 0 is fundamentally a statement of paradox.
    ( How can a value plus a value exist if it amounts to zero?)

    So enough of Hitchhikers guide and move forward....

    Pre-amble:
    Relational Interpersonal Psychosis:

    Over the years posting here at sciforums you may have noticed that when discussing issues of reason and logic or anything of a controversial nature that challenges mainstream thought, I have been repeatedly and in some cases viciously attacked. In the early days it was obvious to me, at least that a new field of psycho analysis needed to be developed. I called it "Relational Interpersonal Psychosis" a state that current science would be very reluctant to take on board due to their current believe that all persons are individually standing and are not connected by some invisible to science method. ( re: collective consciousness etc)
    A good article to have a read if you are inclined would be:
    https://www.counselling-directory.o...onal-psychoanalytic-perspectives-on-psychosis
    as it is relevant from an individualistic perspective.

    My own interest in this arena started whilst performing volunteer advocacy and "feeding" help at a local psychiatric facility for seriously challenged patients ( including high security patients)
    I sat "spoon" feeding patients and observed the interactions taking place both in the food hall's and in the recreation areas.

    It became increasingly evident to me that patients formed relationships that were in themselves psychotic, perhaps a culmination of both patients psychosis perhaps as some times observed a inexplicable psychotic relationship that had no reasonable explanation. ( most often violent but sometimes affectionate)
    It was with some surprise that when venturing on to the net for the first time in 2000 ish that psychotic relationships became even more evident in many net based relationships that had nothing but "written chat" to form with. ( one of the reasons I use a photo of my self as an avatar is to bring a focus and yet simultaneously and ultimately minimize this issue.)

    The best way, I found, to describe this issue is to separate the relationship ( bond) and strike the formula:
    person A <=> Bond A,B <=> person B
    (<=> indicates - leads to - with the bond being the center/sum of the formula like x<=>z<=>y, z being the result of x & y.)
    and consider the Bond to be a separate "energy field" for want of better terms that is formed and exists between all people known or not but highlighted and somewhat amplified once conscious knowledge of that person is available.

    Other wise called agreement, rapport, affinity, empathy, sympathy, affection, love, etc... ( oblique reference to Hitchhikers Guide)

    How is this relevant to what is currently happening here at sciforums?

    Over the years I have observed a number of members that appear to be locked into constant non-productive discussion that goes no where and will never go any where simply because they fail to acknowledge that a relational psychosis is present, as if they are feeling compelled with little to no ability to stop, and continue an inexplicable futility.

    I think it is not so much a deliberate intent as this would be able to be considered as rational in a nefarious way, but a person who is caught up in his relational psychosis as is the respondent, once an attempt to reset the rational aspect of the relationship. Psychosis challenged and corrections attempted, usually with a genuine desire to help, compels that psychosis to abuse the good intent, as if it has a life of it's own independent of both parties and seeks nothing but ongoing survival.

    The issue of dealing with relational psychosis is extremely challenging in itself perhaps mainly because we can sense the distress and only wish to help that person out of the quagmire of insanity they appear stuck in.

    In this case the issues of
    • Climate change
    • Social contract
    • Anarchism
    • Multi polar utopian ( responsibility driven) political structures ( now there's a paradox..politics vs responsibility)
    • Means to and end morality of the Syrian conflict.
    • and so on,
    have been addressed ad nauseum and continue to be re-addressed over and over again by certain participants in this psychotic bonding of which we all have some implication in.

    There are ways to break or change this bond, however the question is really why bother? For surely any attempt to aid the situation will only bring the problem to a head leading to two possible outcomes. Failure and failure with only a slight improvement possible. ( see what happens from next post)
    One method is to break the one on one intensity and always post knowing that the entire discussion is being observed for what it is by many
    To ask the poster to address the board and not a single member and invite others to respond on the issues.
    Example:
    "Does it matter to you what other members on this board believe?"
    "Are we just as entitled to our beliefs as you are?"
    "Why are you discussing this subject?"
    "What do you hope to achieve here at sciforums?"

    There is a little ditty I wrote years ago,
    "It not about YOU or ME
    It is always about US and WE."

    So... when ever there is an over emphasis on "I" you know you have a problem.

    with all due respect it is obvious to me at least that two particular posters are effectively trapped in a continuous cycle fed by ego that will go no where unless one of them realizes the futility of his quest.
    "With out knowing futility, wisdom is absent"
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2018
  23. Quantum Quack Life's a tease... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,328
    iceaura, Schmelzer,
    Why are you filling up this thread with repetition? Are you both wayward programs ( bots) or what?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    wait for it......
     
    Last edited: Jun 29, 2018
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