Political Compass - Take The Test - Page 9 - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

Nate · #**121** 03-04-2006, 11:58 AM

With firefox I get a "problem loading page", with Internet exploder, i get cannot find server

What did I do wrong in my LIFE TO DESERVE THIS????????????????

~Nate

Botnst · #**122** 05-03-2006, 11:48 AM

The Compass is back!

It's like when a dog pukes and eats its own vomit.

Here's how I scored this time. I see to be getting closer to St Milton.

The Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: 7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.08

Botnst · #**123** 05-03-2006, 11:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Botnst

Hey, I don't care a fig for environmentalism. Those folks have mostly just substituted a modern polytheism (Gaia) for traditional superstitions.

I got no problem with drilling for oil just about anywhere it can be had. I'd love to see some (more) drilling off (say) Florida, Delaware, and California--but I wont hold my breath on that one.

Narwhal is on the right track with being suspicious about the carbon flux thing. Its pretty darned difficult to model the carbon budget and the current estimate could be off an order of magnitude. Everything from farting bovines to belching volcanoes contributes to it and putting numbers on the stuff is educated entrail reading. I don't place a lot of faith in either the predictive nor the physical models. Finally, I don't care particularly whether the global pattern is anthropogenic or natural, though I fervently hope its anthropogenic--that's something we can affect.

All I know is what the short term data indicate and that the various lines of long-term climate analogs (tree rings, ice layers, coral rings, trapped gasses, stalagtite rings, etc) seem to converge on a single answer: we are in a warming trend. The correlations are from such diverse sources that they are very, very compeling. Now I'll be the first to jump and say, "Correlation ain't causation!" But even without a provable causal relationship, I have yet to see any data so compelling from the other side as to make me at all suspicious that the data convergence is spurious.

What do we do about it? Damfino.

That's where the models come in. If the physical and predictive models become reliable and believable, they may point to effective measures. They also may indicate that it is completely out of our hands, which would be a bitter pill, indeed. In either case, the argument quickly enters the political domain. Also, if the models and data continue to point to the present rate of change, we may actually pass a point when man's efforts will have any effect, anyway.

If that's the case then all the chicken-littles will get the last-laugh and I-told-you-so's as we slowly warm, sea levels rise a meter or so from melting ice packs; most of Bangledesh, already in perpetual near starvation, floods; most of Florida and much of the Chesepeake go under;, and my own coastal Louisiana and TX, where most of the USA gets its natural gas, disappears to flood waters exposing the infra-structure to increasingly violent tropical storms.

It should be an interesting couple of decades coming up. The models will improve tremendously, but it may be that the trajectory that some predict, will have entered an exponential phase.

Or they may say, "oops, just kidding." Wanna bet? What have you got to lose?

Botnst

I wrote this in '03. I am more convinced now of the general warming trend and that there is a significant anthropogenic component.

B

Lebenz · #**124** 05-03-2006, 12:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Botnst

I wrote this in '03. I am more convinced now of the general warming trend and that there is a significant anthropogenic component.

B

Ya think?

http://www.livescience.com/environment/060411_global_warming.html

mikemover · #**125** 05-03-2006, 02:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lebenz

Ya think?

http://www.livescience.com/environment/060411_global_warming.html

This is not the unprecedented news that it is sensationalized to be.

Mass extinctions have happened on this planet before, a number of times, and they will happen again. Of all the species of life that have ever existed on this planet, only a small fraction of them survive today. Some will disappear. New ones will emerge. Such is life.

Mike

boneheaddoctor · #**126** 05-03-2006, 03:44 PM

Next thing somebodys going to blame man for dinosaur extinctions.

Botnst · #**127** 05-03-2006, 08:47 PM

Global Warming Cited in Wind Shift
May 03 4:36 PM US/Eastern
By MALCOLM RITTER
AP Science Writer

NEW YORK

An important wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean has begun to weaken because of global warming caused by human activity, something that could alter climate and the marine food chain in the region, new research suggests.

It's not clear what climate changes might arise in the area or possibly beyond, but the long-term effect might resemble some aspects of an El Nino event, a study author said.

El Ninos boost rainfall in the southern United States and western South America and bring dry weather or even drought to Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere in the western Pacific.

As for the Pacific food chain near the equator, the slowdown might reduce populations of tiny plants and animals up through the fish that eat them, because of reduced nutrition welling up from the deep, said the author, Gabriel Vecchi.

Vecchi, a visiting scientist at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Princeton, N.J., and colleagues present their results in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The slowdown was detected in shipboard and land-based data going back to the mid-1800s. It matches an effect predicted by computer climate simulations that trace global warming to a build-up of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, the researchers report. But simulations that consider only natural influences fail to produce the observed slowdown, Vecchi said.

So, it appears the slowdown is largely due to the man-made buildup of greenhouse gases, the researchers concluded. And the result lends more credibility to computer models that trace global warming to greenhouse gases, at least for their ability to forecast what will happen in the tropics, Vecchi said.

The study focused on what scientists call the Walker circulation, a huge wind pattern that covers almost half the circumference of Earth.

The pattern traces a huge loop. Trade winds blow across the Pacific from east to west. The air rises in the western Pacific and then returns eastward at an altitude of a few miles. Then it sinks back to the surface and starts the loop again.

The new study is based on barometric pressure readings, since differences in air pressure drive winds near the equator. Results suggest the average wind speed in the Walker circulation has weakened by about 3.5 percent since the mid-1800s. It has weakened faster since World War II than in the long-term trend since the mid-1800s, Vecchi said.

Computer simulations say the circulation might weaken another 10 percent by 2100, Vecchi said.

Dennis Hartmann, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, said the study makes a strong case that the Walker circulation has slowed. While such an effect had been predicted as a result of global warming, he said, "it's not been demonstrated before as clearly as they've done here."