Steady, I would like to offer some comments or corrections on the subject of where the wealth is.
Small businesses [Fifty employees or less] often have less wealth than career employees with secure pension plans and benefits. I had friends that were Engineers for the Los Angeles County Road department that retired with lifetime pensions yielding as much as
the then interest rates were yielding on $3 million dollars. Very few small business men retire with that much cash. During the years I was contracting, I knew more contractors that went broke, even losing their houses, than retired wealthy.
I have no figures on how many were Democrats or Republicans, but I think there were some of both.
Ownership of wealth is not stable. The young people that sold WhatApp to Facebook for 19 billion last week, were on food stamps five years ago, and if you recall the Tech crash about ten years ago, you will recall that many rich people went broke overnight. I also had several friends that lost all they had in the recent recession and housing bubble. The point I am making is that wealth constantly moves back and forth. It is not stable at all.
The people that have money saved and are collecting interest are receiving less return on their money than is being eroded by inflation, so they are getting poorer every day.
What is actually making everyone poorer is taxation, because all taxes are passed on to the consumers, eroding the wealth of both workers and businesses, transferring the money to the Government to pay the high salaries and pensions and entitlements.
Businessmen are not surprised when they get their tax bills. They knew when they set their prices that if they made $100.000.00 profit in CA, that between half and 60% would go to taxes, so they set their prices to cover their taxes and leave some for their profit. So the consumers are paying those taxes too.
have written before about the tremendous amounts of money it is costing all consumers which of course covers rich and poor alike, to pay for the unnecessary environmental rules and regulations. I will repeat, I want clean air and water and am willing to pay whatever that costs. But those rules and regulations are so far beyond what it would take to just provide what we need, it is part of what is bankrupting our country.
What you read about business investment, and the buyback of stock is not correct. Investments are made simply to make a profit commensurate with the risk. The higher the risk the more profit is expected. With so much uncertainty at this time, it is difficult to accurately calculate the risk, so people are holding money in reserve, until they can be sure the investments are worthwhile. This attitude is affecting not only funds owned by businesses, but also your Pension and IRA and other retirement funds. It is very difficult to find good investments now. So people are leaving their money idle, losing whatever the inflation rate is rather than to risk losing even more.
The reason Corporations buy back their own stock, is to benefit the stockholders. If a Corporation pays dividends, that money is double taxed by the Government. If they use the money to buy back the stock, that reduces the number of shares outstanding and thus increases the value of the stock each stockholder owns by the same amount the dividends would have been, but without the double tax.
Investment is at an all time low simply because there are not profitable investments to be made.
While it does seem logical that the 1% should be able to influence the Government, it has not been able to do so in recent years, as the regulations and taxes are certainly not good for businesses.
Vulture Capitalists, as unlikable as they are, eventually die like everyone else, and the money they have when they die is not taken with them. It is taxed, and spent by heirs and is quickly back in circulation. Very few rich people have piles of gold they sit and polish all day to watch it shine. They buy big houses and provide work for carpenters and interior decorators, or they spend it on other things. There is no such thing as a perpetual winner. We all lose it back sooner or later.
I clearly recall when Housing Developers were making all the money, then there was a time when Doctors were overcharging Insurance companies and the Doctors were raking it in. Then the Insurance companies took over and made the money, then the Government took over paying the Insurance companies and the Government raked in the money, and now the young guys inventing Facebook and Google are raking it in. But so far, it has all eventually gone back into circulation and someone else had the chance to grab some of it. But one reason most people never make it is they are afraid to risk everything they own on a chance to make a lot of it. That is not to disparage any one, that is just a simple fact of human nature. Some people are risk averse.
I hope this clarifies some of the things that many people just do not understand.
Ernie
Climate Change
Ernie,
It must be satisfying to know you built a business up that has been successful and blessed your life and met the needs of your family and those of your employees while providing an important service to your customers.
I grew up in University City which is right in between La Jolla and Miramar.
I will be in San Diego this weekend to celebrate my moms 80th birthday.
Look forward to many more discussions.
John
drobarr said:
>> Whether burning fossil fuel affects climate change or not it makes sense to use what we have wisely. Be more efficient and when cost effective use alternate forms of energy.
I can agree with that 100%! We should try to save SOME oil for petrochemical uses, not be burning it all up because it's relatively easy to pump..
>> But what one person thinks is intelligent isn't the same as another.
Agreed!
(I hope to go back and read from 7 pm Feb 22 to present, but need to reply to something in another thread:
>> RickCorey_WA wrote: "More violent storms will cause such coastal problems more often."
drobarr said: "Rick...Do you have a source?"
No, and that is a good catch. Thank you! I did say "will cause", not "have already caused", so historical data doesn't prove or disprove such a belief.
The only source I COULD have for that is climate models, and those are still struggling to describe the present accurately, let alone predict the future accurately and reliably.
I've tried to distinguish between "what I think" about climate change, and what seems proven (what seems TO ME to be fairly well proven) . Late last week I got impassioned and probably blurred that distinction. As the evidence accumulates, well-intentioned people can disagree about "how proven" any given degree of climate is. Or whether "it is upon us now", "seems likely to occur over the next decade or five" or "is still purely speculative".
Many different climatologists expect weather extremes and more violent storms as more heat collects in the atmosphere and ocean surface. That seems more than plausible - likely or very probable - because the mechanism is direct and simple. As with toxicology studies, usually the correlations are not clear until you get a big enough dose for the effect to be obvious. The climate models predict more storms as the air and ocean warm further.
(I ought to go hunting for reports about those climate models, but do we already agree that "Warmie Alarmists" have been guessing that for some years now?)
Ignoring the models of the future for the moment and switching to recent trends (last few 100 years), I didn't have any statistical proof, but the link you provided has some evidence for both sides.
The link you provided only counts cyclonic storms and "Accumulated Cyclone Energy" in the Atlantic basin so it is limited, whichever of us is using to support whatever claim.
Looking at the graphs by clicking on the table headers, it looks to my eye like an uptick in "Atlantic Basin Major Hurricanes" , "Atlantic Basin Hurricanes" and "named Storms" in the last 5-10 years.
Also, for a long-term trend, the left-most column ("Named Storms") lists double-digits for the last 15 years (except for a "9" in 2009). There were very few double digits before 1878. In-between those time periods, there are an intermediate number of double-digit-counts of named storms.
If you did a moving average to smooth out the rapid high-and-lows, I would eye-ball fit a shallowly rising line to fit that data from 1850 to around 1975, then a steeper rising line. That horse-back curve-fit would support my claim, not yours ... but I admit, what are "named storms"? Observer bias is likely. Or better monitoring could account for those.
Most of the other graphs look like most climate data, or toxicology data: chicken pox, proving nothing but hinting "not much change yet".
If your point is that the Atlantic cyclone data does not (yet) give any clear indication of markedly rising cyclonic Atlantic storms, certainly not as clear as the Keeling curve is, you are right.
Maybe the climatologists are right and the effect will become visible as heating progresses.
Maybe the models will get closer to reality as more and more factors are taken into account (like the three-factor combo of CFCs, Ozone, cosmic rays and the sunspot cycle ... no, our FOUR main factors are ...)
Or maybe Warmie Alarmists just change their story from year to year from nefarious motives.
Some things that make me think we have reached the tipping point already:
Unusual droughts, unseasonal rains, and unseasonal winters are medium-strength indicators. For a few years, I bought "random weather variation", but now we've had several more years of "the worst X in Y years".
Melting glaciers are a dead give-away - what I would call incontrovertible proof.
The warming ocean surface is a hard fact.
The slight rise in ocean height is a hard fact.
Whether we are in the tipping point already, or it is still10-20 (or 50) years away is subject to debate.
Indeed, the whole idea of "tipping point" (delayed change followed by accelerated change and difficulty in reversing climate change after new regimes are settled into) is only a set of theories derived from models. I bought into that concept for an illogical reason: ice ages seem to occur that way. There are several lines of evidence pointing to ice age onset being very sudden - like some years, not some centuries for a big part of the temperature change to occur. All that proves is that some climate changes are very non-liear and can have a "gotcha" aspect.
Anthropogenic climate change in the long-term warming direction is quite different from ice ages.
It may give some perspective into my thinking (and fear) if I comment that it seems to me as if we are debating about "proving" how many bullets are in the gun with which we are playing "global Russian roulette".
The unarguable Keeling Curve where you can see atmospheric CO2 shooting up like a rocket convinced me back in the 1980s or 1990s that there are at least 2-3 bullets in the gun. Seeing glaciers retreat convinced me that there are 3-5 bullets, or perhaps that the loaded chamber is getting closer to the hammer. Admittedly, the time scale of climate change is so long that each pulling of the trigger might take 20-50 years.
But that doesn't seem like a reason for complacency to me, when the remedial efforts will take so long, and since there are almost no international mechanisms to deal with long-term, hard-to-prove serious risks, and hugely EXPENSIVE changes.
I would rather take measures to slow or hopefully reverse the process before unusual weather variability cause crop failures leading to famines. Hopefully, coast-devastating, island-drowning violent cyclonic storms and sea level changes will come later than mere crop-failure-weather variability.
For a while, I hoped that increased rainfall would make more deserts arable than increased heat would make mid-western states into dust bowls. Then I read about the (obvious) effect of increased weather variability and had to agree that would cause more crop failures sooner than the long-term changes. How can you plan a crop if one year has a record-breaking drought, the next year later frosts than ever seen, and the year after that multiple exceptionally hot days?
Ernie...very well said your reply to steadycam...I am in total agreement. Taxes reduce investment because they reduce capital. They also reduce a persons take home pay which then has a ripple affect on the rest of the economy. As my taxes have increased I am unable to invest as much of my income.
Unions artificially raise the cost of an employee above what the market value of the employee is. This makes consumers foot the bill and many union jobs are the reason many jobs moved overseas or many industries simply went bankrupt or closed all together.
John,
You are certainly correct in that i have surely been blessed. I am not religious but i am spiritual and i have understood for forty years that whatever power is up there somewhere, has certainly blessed me. I appreciate that every day.
You would not recognize the weather this year for where you grew up. We have had less than an inch and a half of rain since last May, and you will not be seeing the Emerald colored hillls you might expect for this time of year when you fly into San Diego.
As to my reply to Steady, I do not think there would be so much distrust and antagonism towards business if people understood how closelly intermingled and similar our interests are. It should be People and Business versus Big Government, as Government takes money from both of us by Taxes, without returning equal value.
Rick,
While i do not always see things exactly like you do, I always enjoy what you write and i never doubt your sincerity.
Ernie
This message was edited Feb 24, 2014 9:31 PM
RickCorey...
Did you know its actually the deserts that cool the earth. Deserts reflect large amounts of light and heat back into the atmosphere. Increasing rainfall and irrigating deserts and growing crops will warm the earth because less light and heat will be reflected back in space. Look up albedo.
The largest desert in the world is not the Sahara...but actually in Antarctica.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert
Rick,
During the night i was thinking about what you said concerning 2 Billion tons of Carbon being deposited in the Ocean annually, and realized I do not know much about how that happens. I have known that it is measure by tons, and is a gas, but have never seen any thing about how it is calcuated, nor how many cubic yards or meters is required to hold a ton of it.
Other questions I have, is the Carbon dispersed evenly before it settles into the ocean, or does it have a limited carry distance from where it was released.
And the third thing i wondered about, has there been any effect yet on the Sea life, or change in the water?.
You do a good job o describing things like this so we can understand them, and i hope you do that, as i am sure other readers of this thread are also curious about this.
Anyone else that does know is welcome to chime in, and any Links to info, would also be useful'
thanks,
Ernie
http://news.yahoo.com/geoengineering-ineffective-against-climate-change-could-worse-164200912.html
"One strategy, known as afforestation, would irrigate deserts, such as those in Australia and North Africa, to promote the growth of vegetation that can absorb carbon dioxide. However, this vegetation would also absorb sunlight the deserts currently reflect back into space, thus actually contributing to global warming. That finding supports the results of previous studies."
How many deserts around the world have been turned into irrigated farmland? Obviously that in and of itself is contributing to "global warming" according to scientists....and has nothing to do with CO2, rather, sunlight and heat absorbed by plants instead of reflected back to space. In fact, plants no matter where they are on earth, absorb sunlight and heat...so do solar panels...and when they do the earth warms up. Plants are causing global warming folks. We need more deserts and less vegetation to cool the earth. If we really care about global warming or climate change we should actually convert our forests into deserts...support deforestation.
All you selfish gardeners growing your fresh vegetables are causing climate change!
This message was edited Feb 25, 2014 5:21 PM
I plead guilty-as-charged. I just wish this "warming-tread" would hurry up and get to us in Mississippi. It feels here like we are slipping back into another ice-age. We are back into the mid to lower 20's mid-week. Enough already!
Ken
Ken,
As we see more and more hybrid cars on the road I think we will really see a turnaround in global warming. I think we have seen some of the results with this winters chill.
John
Ernie said:
>> 2 Billion tons of Carbon being deposited in the Ocean annually,
>> You do a good job o describing things like this so we can understand them, and i hope you do that
Darn! Flattery will get you everywhere. I'll try. P.S. That is the kind of detailed enquiry that good science attempts to pursue. Not just plugging new numbers into old models, but asking "reality" questions like "where does it go next" and "you might expect to see something like X, but what do you actually see?"
... how many cubic yards or meters is required to hold a ton of it.
... is the Carbon dispersed evenly before it settles into the ocean, or does it have a limited carry distance from where it was released.
>> has there been any effect yet on the Sea life, or change in the water?.
But please allow me to come back to this as I find time, All I can say off the top of my head is that some surface ocean pH change has been alleged to be due to increased atmospheric CO2. I don't know enough about that to have an opinion other than "OMIGOD, PLEASE don't let the deep ocean pH go down enough to make CO2 less soluble THERE!"
... aaaaand spinning of in a background direction first ... looking at the Carbon cycle and scientists trying to "balance the books" and figure it all out ...
The idea of trapping CO2 in vegetation or in soil (instead of desert sand) might have some promise for reducing CO2 slightly (even if it does reduce the albedo of deserts).
Even more promising would be convincing the deep ocean to capture (AND HOLD) a little more carbon than it already does.
That kind of "geoengineering" REALLY makes climate-conservative liberals terrified and climate-adventuresome conservatives eager! The scientists in the field are split between "social conscience pants-wetters" and "boys-just-want-to-have-fun meddlers". When politicians start getting advice like "this geoengineering scheme might cure our droughts but incinerate the tropics", I start trying to remember which tropical countries have nuclear weapons and which only have biological and chemical weapons (i.e. "any who want them"). But then, I do tend to panic when a situation could go very badly if politicians make bad decisions.
The following numbers are just one pot-shot from one site, cross-checked with Wikipedia for ball-park-plausibility. Now I see it may be a biased website - but which numbers would they tweak which way to exacerbate the issue? Human emission rates, for one. But the actual size of each 'reservoir" might be "just science" and not yet a highly-tweaked number by one side, or a "denied" number by the other side. As far as my memory goes, the numbers are mostly within ballparks of what i recall from a less-partisan era.
http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/carbon/effig11_full.html
(or any diagram of the carbon cycle or biogeochemical cycles.)
The thing is, SOIL plus duff holds around TWICE as much carbon as the atmosphere!
Say maybe around 1,400 GigaTons soil and 745 Gt in the air.
That may surprise gardeners who have to feed a couple of inches depth of compost every year - we think that hungry soil microbes digest that carbon as fast as we feed it! However, the (???) 0.5% to 5% organic content of soil, multiplied by the huge number of tons of fertile soil, translates into much more carbon than is in the atmosphere at any one time.
As with many geoengineering schemes, the problem is not to CAPTURE more CO2. It's to HOLD it for several centuries.
Let's not let fertile areas desertify. Besides cutting our food supply, it could triple the amount of CO2 in the air.
Even the near-surface ocean holds a little more carbon than the air. Maybe 960 GT ocean surface vs 745 air.
Intermediate ocean depths plus deep ocean is where almost ALL the carbon is: , maybe 36,000 GT . That is 48 TIMES as much as the atmosphere holds! That's why I pray that we don't have any "whoopsies" that affect the deep ocean. Are you listening, British Petroleum?!?
Deep ocean sediments, allegedly only hold 150 GT of carbon. (I thought that carbonate sediments were HUGE. Maybe that was terrestrial sediments? Acid rain, rain, go away. Come again some other eon.)
If the pH of the total ocean and some ocean sediments climbed to the point where that dissolved and suspended CO2 came bubbling out like a warm bottle of soda, that might in theory add 37,000 Gt of carbon to the atmosphere, multiplying the CO2 level by FIFTY-fold. The Keeling Curve would have to be viewed on logarithmic graph paper!
The good news is that I saw a phrase somewhere that hinted that every greenhouse spectral band can be "saturated" to the point that ALL re-radiated IR heat in that one band is already being absorbed and more greenhouse gas won't make it worse. So we would not need to worry about FURTHER global warning, (only about dead fish and mammals all gasping due to high CO2 levels, hopefully being facetious).
(I'm sorry, now I see that web site is all about climate change, so they might be slanting numbers to bias them "pro Warmie". Probably the most contentious numbers would be rates of human production of CO2 from fossil fuels and deforestation.)
http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/carbon/efcarbon.html
The Wiki page uses a DOE diagram that isn't TOO different, though it puts 2,300 Gt in soil and 800 Gt in air and 37,000 + 6,000 in deep ocean plus "reactive sediments". All higher numbers...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_cycle.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle
steadycam said:
>> so no "different" mindset is introduced until very late when character and mindset and worldview are already hardened. Once a person has "solidified" in a mindset, they tend to seek information that confirms what they believe
That is a big problem. One "side" mostly believes Fox "News" and the other side mostly believes the Huffing Post. Neither of them learn anything or change at all.
>> Once in a great while I see someone who ... listen for different views and open their mind to new ideas, new experiences from which they can learn to be different from all those around them. It's a wonderful thing to see but it does not happen often. I wish I knew what the secret is.
If I have any openness of mind, it came from three or four main sources.
1. Robert Heinlein, who usually preaches that the majority is wrong more often than they are right
2. Heinlein, a few Jr. High School teachers, and Jr. High school textbooks that convinced me that textbooks are often wrong and never have the WHOLE story.
3. A nightmare that I had as a kid, maybe after reading an adaptation of the Shirley Jackson short story "The Lottery". I "went along with everyone else" and The Bad Thing Happened to the nice little girl. I woke up sweating and filled with shame that I hadn't stopped it, and swore never to "go along to get along".
4. I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and the flavor of the "counter-culture" was appealing until it turned into heavy-handed liberal PC conformism in the late 70s and 80s.
"It's no longer politically correct to say ""politically correct".
Now we say "politically sensitive."
drobarr / John said:
>> Did you know its actually the deserts that cool the earth. Deserts reflect ...
Clouds, ice, snow and clouds reflect much better than deserts. Of course, sand-deserts tend to exist in hot latitudes, while snow and ice are more often found in cold latitudes with low sun angles. You're right that the very dry Antarctic reflects a lot of the low-intensity or low-angle sunlight that falls on it!
A very quick web search reinforces my prior impression that albedo is surface reflectance .
"Surface Reflectance" (not re-emission of absorbed heat)
"Surface Reflectance" (not addressing atmospheric reflection, absorption, and re-emission)
That narrow definition of albedo ignores absorbed heat re-radiated from the surface and later absorbed by the atmosphere ("on its way back to space"). Hence it also also ignores the greenhouse effect. (But I'm not at all sure how the term is used in studies that DO address the difference between surface absorption/reflection/re-emission and atmospheric ab/reflect/re-imm).
It wouldn't surprise me if climatologists used the word to mean 'reflection from land and ocean surfaces", treating the atmosphere as a different compartment. Maybe astronomers use it to mean reflectance from the planet-as-a-whole, modeling the planet as a billiard ball they are not especially interested in the internals of. After all, astronomers coined the term to describe mostly airless rocks, and mostly surface-less gas giants.
Anyway, either way, light-colored surfaces like dry sand, ice and snow do reflect more than dark surfaces (forest, grassland, cultivated land, lakes, rivers, seas and oceans, roads, cities etc).
My impression is that deserts (traditionally) reflected AND re-radiated heat to space faster than most other regions because the air above them was clear (no clouds) and dry. Now that it is clear and dry and has 50% to 100% more CO2 than it ever had in the past , going back through many ice ages and interglacial eras, much more of the re-radiated heat from deserts tends to transfer to the atmosphere above a desert instead of radiating away to space.
My guess is that sunlight REFLECTED from desert sands has much the same spectrum as the incoming solar radiation (minus UV caught by ozone and some water and CO2 absorption). Hence that energy (non-UV, non-greenhouse wavelengths) probably still escapes faster from deserts to space than from most places.
I'm not sure what % of total incoming solar energy gets absorbed by deserts (becoming atmospheric greenhouse heat after re-radiation) and what % is reflected. Presumably 60-70% is reflected without changing spectrum, so it escapes despite greenhouse gases. Of the 30-40% absorbed energy, I think almost all of that re-radiates as IR, and then it depends on how many "greenhouse windows" are closed by different greenhouse gases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
This Wiki page suggests that deserts reflect around 28%, far below "dry sand" at 40%. I wonder what parts of deserts are not dry sand? Anyway, ice, snow and clouds reflect much more than deserts OR dry sand.
steadycam said:
>> Then we invite other scientists and students to replicate our experiment
I think that's the part of science that makes it self-correcting. Any one team or group of researchers who think they know what's what is constantly being sniped at by other teams and up-and-comers who need to make a reputation by discovering something themselves (really, really hard and rare), or at least shooting down someone else's mistake (really easy and common), or extending someone else's work a little by applying it more widely than the original authors did), or narrowing it down by showing somewhere it does NOT hold true, that people had started to think that it did.
If it was all one team relying on their own super-human ability to transcend bias, ego and preconception, we would still believe in phlogiston and "humors". Instead scientific progress depends on their human need to say "naah naah nye naah naah" to the other kids, and publish papers that let them keep their jobs.
Ernie said:
>> It is pretty well accepted that some of the Siberians, after crossing, adapted to the Ice, ... Coastal Indians. Some went East, some went South to the Deserts, adapting to whatever they found. ... Mayans adapting to the Jungle and Inca adapting to the high altitudes, And they did all this with just Stones and Sticks for tools. So I just do not have any doubt that humans can continue to adapt to whatever is required for survival.
By that standard, sure, OK, I can agree with you there will be some human survivors of any conceivable climate change including the planet being covered with ice everywhere but near the equator, or 80% of the land surface becomes sandy desert and the rest arid plains.
Nomadic hunter-gatherers have a relatively easy civilization to support, and they would probably withstand huge changes sufficient to destroy industrial civilization and make agriculture difficult and only erratically productive. Even if climate change becomes so severe that world population crashes and we revert to savagery and hunter-gatherer tribes or just a few small patches of subsistence farming, the species would survive and come back in a few or 5 or 10 centuries.
But just because humans COULD re-populate a continent even if reduced to a few small tribes of hunter-gatherers, doesn't mean that is a desirable outcome, or preferable to some international cooperation and reducing carbon emissions. I guess the upsides would be solving the over-population problem, and pushing Justin Beiber out of the news.
>> Another of your worries that I do not believe will happen is sudden massive deaths. If the climate reduces the crops, it will be gradual, and as the food base shrinks, Pregnancy rates of all mammals will decline, so fewer babies will be born,
Here, I disagree with you strongly.
If climate change or even rapid variability of extreme weather becomes sudden, like on a scale of years or decades, regional famines will certainly occur faster than possible drops in birth rates can affect population levels. World population is projected to do the same thing it has done for centuries: rise steadily. Until we run out of food, suddenly or slowly.
Fast or slow, years, decades or even over a century, if agriculture falters or the population grows beyond its capacity, the population will decrease through starvation (famines), not through the pregnancy rates of all mammals declining. I never heard of that ecological theory but I'm willing to read some links if you have them.
Anyway, even if agricultural productivity yields stop increasing, and then decline GRADUALLY due to increased CO2 and weather variability, and famines occur GRADUALLY, global famines are still bad things and well worth avoiding.
Someone just sent me a link about someone shooting himself in the head while demonstrating that all three of his guns were unloaded. That's about how I see the climate change debate. One side says that we have not yet PROVEN that any of the guns ARE loaded, so it's an OK idea to put the guns to our collective heads and pull the triggers.
That does treat the harm of certain, serious, economic dislocations as much less harmful than possible global famines. But I don't think the climate disaster is speculative, only the time of onset and the severity of the first 30-90 years is arguable. YMMV.
(I guess I am already "globally overheated" on this subject. I can only repeat that one glance at the curve of growing CO2 concentrations instantly convinced me that, unless God or Nature deals us a royal flush, global climate is BOUND to have conniption fits as soon as the inertia of the atmosphere and ocean let it. If I were God, I don't think I would give a second chance to a society so short-sighted that it would ignore the Keeling Curve or think "it can't happen to us". Or pay attention to Justin Beiber OR Molly Cyrus.)
Again, YMMV.
drunk man shoots self while demonstrating that
"the guns are all unloaded":
http://www.theoaklandpress.com/general-news/20140224/independence-township-man-shoots-kills-himself-while-demonstrating-gun-safety-deputies-say
Hey! Wait a minute. Phlogiston is definitely real. Every time I get a cold I cough up a lot of it. You $^@(*)^%@^ non-scientific people!
Good point. "Medical Phlogiston". I wonder if we could get that legalized.
Reminds me of a billboard I saw (for an Italian restaurant):
"Legalize Marinara!"
Who is Molly Cyrus?
Seriously? A child star who transitioned directly to a slutty star. She caused millions of people to look up the word "twerking" and may have even managed to stretch its definition.
If you're interested, Goggle "wrecking ball video", but I would summarize it as "so very incompletely dressed".
Rick.
I am learning a lot from what you have fouund working on the inside, so the only comment i have now is i will give you a chance to learn something from me working on the outside. The only link i have showing how food shortages reduce mammalian pregnancy rates is to my personal past experience as a hunter, farmer, and sheep breeder.
When a drought hits an area and food is scarce all summer, the breeding Does will be thin in October and November when they normally breed. If they are real thin they do not get pregnant and the followiing Spring the Fawn count is way down. If food for rabbits becomes scarce there are few babies born, and that in turn causes Coyotes to not have large litters so the Coyote population drops. That is well known to hunters, as it is often mentioned as the reason for drops in the deer population.
And for a more detailed example. I bred and improved Coopworth Sheep. On cheap heavily grazed pasture in New Zealand, the ewe lambs would not breed until they were 19 months old. Gestation period for sheep is 5 months, so they would lamb as two years old.
In Idaho, where there is no pasture in the winters, feeding ewe lambs 2 years was not feasible, so by increasing their feed my ewe lambs would breed at 7 months. That shows the difference between ample feed and just enough to survive. The basic marker was that the ewe lambs would not breed unless they weighed close to 66% of their mature body weight, and the amount they weighed had a big influence on whether they twinned or had singles.
I am sure there are many links that will confirm what i have said about Deer, but i do not happen to have any at hand.
And as the population drops from the low birthrate, it will also drop on the other end because with food shortages there will be very few people live into their 70s and 80s, as only the strongest humans will survive.
I assume, since you are a scientist too, you respect Charles Darwin, and the work he did, so the idea that every human, even the very weakest, should live forever goes completely against what he documented about the birds and animals that adapted to changes in their environment were the strongest and fittest.
I agree as climate changes to either hotter or colder, there will be changes severe enough that not everyone will survive, but every one is going to die sooner or later anyway.
Ernie
Oh Rick!, you mean Miley Cyrus!
Other than her name you got incorrect you seem to know a lot about her...even her songs lol
With humans the more affluent a society becomes, birthrates decrease.
Developing nations tend to have higher birthrates.
Even within an industrialized nation the more affluent families have lower the birth rates.
Seems we are opposite animals...
Perhaps on the surface, but i was continually amazed at the similarities between the sheep and humans in many ways.
But perhaps rich people are different as the richer the women are the thinner they seem to be, too. but i do not think being hungry is the reason rich women stop having babies,
Ernie
Birth Control is expensive and in many countries it is only widely avaliable to the rich...or those that live in cities...religion and cultural differences also play a role. I still believe that no matter how much food is produced human population will always grow to #s that are higher. Another words, we will never catch up...if we do it will only be temporary.
Lisa, I agree as long as there is food and the living is easy the population will expand to consume it, just like the animals i referenced.
But when the food supply declines, so will the population. Seems simple enough to me.
And when food supplies decrease or there is a famine, the strongest will be the ones that eat.
It bothers me to see the starving babies in the ads asking for donations for African Famines when the starving babies are being held by well fed mothers. But that is the way humans are.
Ernie
In countries like Japan and Italy the death rate is higher than the birth rate. This is detrimental to society....particularly ones with strong social programs in place that require some growth to remain sustainable.
They have delt with the issue two ways...goverment payments for 2nd and 3rd children to promote more births ...and immigration...mostly from middle eastern nations. This has happened all over Europe.
Babies are much more expensive than birth control. Which makes me think there are other reasons.
This thread , reminds me of everything from Human Ant Farms , to making plans for living on Mars or Waterworld ,,
Wild isn't it ?
I have also read that when food is scarce, birthrates go up with humans and as food supplies increase and more of the children live as opposed to dying before age 4, the birthrate goes down. It has to do with survival rates of children. The logic? is that if only a few of your children make it, you must give birth to more. If you want two children and your can get two children who live, no need to have any more. If you want 4 children (to help farm) and only half survive, you have to produce 8 to balance the death rate due to bad conditions (not totally because of low food supply but also sanitation, contagious diseases, etc.)
Steadycam....I have read the same thing. I believe that one of the reasons it is so essential that you have some children survive in many poor or developing nations is because that is where your social security comes from...your kids...not the government. So if survivability is low...one would need to have many kids to ensure that some of them survived to adulthood. People are different than animals. Well some of the time. ;)
You are both talking about functioning societies, Not starvation situations. When entire societies run out of food, as Rick forecasts, and it becomes a matter of individual survival, the strongest survive, not the weakest.
You both need to get out in the woods more and see how nature handles things. lol,
People just do not worry about having more babies when they are all starving.
Ernie
John,
There is really not much difference between People and other animals when it comes to survival.
Read about the Donner Party, when they were starving they were thinking about helping their friends and relatives die first so they could eat them for dinner. They were not sitting around thinking about how many children they were going to have to help them run their farm,
I do agree mostly with what you and Steady read, as it pertains to normal times. My comments were directly in reference to Rick's sincere concern that our population will be rapidly decimated, or entirely wiped out, by widespread floods and famines
Ernie
Ernie,
I understand nature pretty welll...spend plenty of time in the woods and understand what you are saying. Makes sense with deer and rabbits etc. I dont have any problems with that. Of course you are also talking about animals that may be predators or predated on which can influence populations differently than humans. And I can see that if a woman is mal nourished enough she wont be able to get pregnant. I understand your point strictly from a biological perspective.
But historically...in places where food is often scarce or in short supply or famine is a regular ocurrance...women are still having numerous births.There may be some declines when times are tough.
I can think of many reasons why humans react one way and animals another.
One is that animals rarely care for their aged parents.
Also famines or food in short supply tends to be temporary for humans...generally they can migrate or find food or something changes where they can produce food or get aid. Animals have a harder time doing this. Many women may have already been pregnant prior to the scarcity of food. In animals gestation periods are much shorter so lack of food more quickly affects births.
So I understand what you are saying...that you want to extrapolate what animals are doing and say the same thing would happen to people...But I only think it would occur except under very intense starvation over a very prolonged period.
One reason I am a little doubtful about the science solving the climate problem. I know this really doesn't apply to climate change, but you can see the need for some constraint in jumping to solutions.
http://ksn.com/2014/02/25/great-wall-of-kansas-professor-proposes-tornado-walls/
I am a little surprised it has not been suggested to just pass a law against them.
Donner party was a short event...relatively. I don't think short term events change much how many babies a woman has...are you saying that the women who survived went on to have fewer babies once they made it to California?
Though there are some similarities I think there is a huge difference between animals and people. Think of the Titanic...it was women and children (and few wealthy men) that had priority on the rescue boats. People can think and make concious decisions that animals cant. People can make decisions that arent in their best self interest...like keep having kids when food is scarce...because they are thinking about their long term survival more than their short term.
Now there is a study out, well more like a theory, that wind turbines can greatly reduce the velocity and surge of hurricanes. I'm talking about those huge turbines, sitting on 50' platforms. Just build enough of them, and IF they happen to be in the path of an incoming hurricane, voila', little or no damage. Of course you would need perhaps 100,000 of those wind turbines to do the job and in the right area. I wonder if we build a million wind turbines (conservative number) to handle some the hurricanes, would that alter our overall global weather? Generally speaking, for every positive there will be a negative. We know how the (few) land-based wind turbine "communities" have killed thousands of birds including the eagle. Would be lose all the pelicans, sea gulls, and other water-based birds?
Ken
Seedfork,
A law against tornados?That would get the tornado lovers and the people for the ethical treatment of tornados upset. Why don't we just tax them.
I agree with the article that though the walls could hinder the locations of the tornados I think it might just alter their locations or cause other problems. It is true they tend to form in areas that are more "rural". Downtown areas have too many obstacles and buildings for very many to form there.
I think the best bet would be to use better construction techniques than using toothpicks and foam to build houses in those areas.
John,
What you are saying in your context is correct, but as with your use of the "Historically", the situation that RIck is describing and i am res[ponding to, has never happened historically on a big scale. Women that are pregnant when a one year famine strikes may well carry to term, but with no food for her, there will be no milk for the baby, so visualize what Rich believes will happen at the same time over most of the world, so there will be no disaster relief, not a matter of things getting better next year or the next few years, and we will all revert to our basic instincts tryiing to survive. And some will survive longer than others and a few will find a way to adapt.
If you consider Eskimos and Early American Indians as humans which they are, both cultures, because of lack of abundant food and other reasons, allowed their parents to fall behind when they could no longer keep up on their own, just like herd animals do when on migration. Eskimos also left their older people to die peacefully in a snowbank. Taking care of our parents is only done by a funtioning society with ample resources.
As i answer down your post, i see your final sentence puts us into complete agreement. >>>>
>>>>"But i onlythink it would occur under very intense starvation over a very prolonged period."
Those are exactly the conditions Rick foresees and to which i was basing my comments on.
Ernie
This message was edited Feb 26, 2014 9:58 AM
I just thought of something about the wind turbine idea. Hurricane Camille came ashore with 200+ mph winds. I say 200+ because all the wind velocity instruments, including those of NSAA, were blown away. Apparently these instruments were built to withstand 200 mph winds, but not stronger ones. We really can only guess at Camille's strength. How strong would a wind turbine have to be to withstand that kind of wind?
Another thought. Hurricane Camille was a very compact storm, perhaps only about 100 miles in diameter. Hurricane Katrina was four times that size. Thus not only would we have to build much stronger wind turbines but a lot more of them. The problems just go on and on.
Diverting the Tornadoes from your property to your neighbors is the good old American way.
That is what some people do with nuisance wild animals and problem pets, so why not Tornados.
lol.
I have to go plant some potatoes. Sorry to go off subject and mention potatoes but i guess i am just a rule breaker.
Ernie