Posts by OsamaBinLogin

just sit there, slack jawed

"Why would we cause the problem and then just sit there, slack jawed"

Because we don't have control over it.

Yes, humans created all the excess CO2, but not intentionally, in order to alter the climate. And in fact we can't stop burning it on a dime and reverse it - we're too hooked on the fossil energy that's causing the problems. And all the solutions we're trying just seem to not work well.

- Hybrid cars give off a little bit less CO2, not half as much.

- Electric cars still get most of their energy from burning carbon.

- Canadian tar sands take so much energy to produce, they generate about the same as coal.

- Carbon sequestration is smoke-and-mirrors; it would take almost as much energy as the CO2 it's storing.

- So many of the solutions tend to need fossil fuels somewhere along the way, or at least their own energy as overhead.

If we stopped carbon burning tomorrow, the temperature would still continue to rise - it's just that the rate of rising would level off.

The hottest year on record (at the time) was 1998. It broke the record of the previous hottest year, 1997. Which broke the previous record from 1995. Lately, it's cooled off so we've only had three years above 1998. But every year since 2001 has been hotter than the 1997 record - every single year. This ain't no interglacial warming; it's happening a lot faster, and it's starting at a warmer time, that's already interglacial.

suntan lotion

"Plants love heat"... True. And many of the new plants that will crowd in, will compete with whatever plant we were hoping would grow better. This is why biologists talk in terms of ecological niches - like an area of mountain, low enough to support, for instance, Engelmann Spruce, but high enough to eliminate competing trees, which grow one km downhill. You increase the average temperature, and maybe they both start growing higher on the mountain. Or maybe the mountain ends if it's not high enough, and the Englemann Spruce gets squeezed out. Or maybe some of the trees can't stand the thinner air, or the thinner soil, or maybe the wasps that pollenate them can't fly that high. So some plants will thrive, some will fade, and some will go extinct.

So do bugs love heat. Many of the new bugs that show up, will eat the plants or trees, where they didn't before. I remember reading about one kind of beetle; if there's a frost below -2C, the larvae, who have dug into tree bark, die that year, just like how the citrus fruit harvest gets wiped out upon a frost. Temperatures rise, and the beetle can munch trees a few degrees further north.

Our flora and fauna will tend to move away from the equators, and further up the mountainsides. The ones that can't adapt to their new neighbors, and the new soil, and the new humidity, will fade away. The ones that survive will tend to be the more flexible ones, the ones that are harder to kill - weeds, wasps, termites, ants, rats, and pigeons.

So be sure to smear on some bug repellant along with your suntan lotion.

Re: "nobody ever tampered with a paper election."

An audit trail - I don't see why this can't be done with a (partial) computerized voting system. Yes I do know why - the people who set up the election systems fully intend to tamper with the results. Any voting system without some sort of double-checking, you might as well get out the yellow tape, because it's a crime scene. 2+2.

Money is handled through totally computerized systems, from the cashier to the bank to the CEOs paycheck, with audit trails and security that's solid enough to keep corporate losses to a minimum. Yes there are breakins, yes cashiers regularly have discrepancies in their dimes and shillings. But with someone's bottom line in jeopardy, there's plenty of effort put in to making it as secure as possible and keeping the mayhem to small amounts.

Now, the managers at retail locations understand the cash registers and understand all the ways they can be hacked and customers, or cashiers, can cheat. We don't have that at electronic voting sites. obviously. If we have to simplify the system down to make people understand it, so be it, that's why so many are still voting with paper. The security is more obvious with paper. I think a significant part is getting voting machines managed by people who can competently keep people from hacking in by wire or by air or by finger.