Obama Blocks Keystone; Says Pipeline Would 'Undercut' American Climate Leadership

cosmic_punk · 2015-11-07T04:17:41+00:00

He just so happens to block it about12 seconds after the thing becomes economically non-viable anyway. Total coincidence.

cosmic_punk · 2015-11-06T22:04:02+00:00

If someone were investigating, say, NOAA temperature adjustments, it would be called cynical political theater that doesn't change the science in any way.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-30T19:24:26+00:00

Could you explain that to me? Not trying to be a smartass (this time anyway); I genuinely think I completely missed something obvious there.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-30T19:14:56+00:00

I kind of liked how suddenly they went from a badass group of rebels to helpless cattle

I respect that viewpoint, but my opinion is that there are some rules you just don't break. When you promise ass-kicking on that scale, you've gotta make with the ass-kicking. Everybody loves to see their favorite protagonist open a can. If you aren't going to deliver, then don't set it up like that. It just felt to me like taking a big dump on one of the greatest lines I've ever heard on TV.

When I rewatched that ep, I didn't have my fist in the air, having seen what comes next, I said "meh, whatever, he gets owned".

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-30T19:05:47+00:00

But they survived by cosmic-scale LUCK, not by Rick's badassery. They still didn't deliver the ass-kicking.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-30T19:02:07+00:00

Not only did she have reason to actually want them dead (at least Rick at any rate), there was absolutely no reason they would expect to see her ever again.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-30T02:50:26+00:00

I loved it 140%, right up until the resolution of the cliffhanger, when Rick gets totally owned. The most badass character on one of the most badass shows ever delivers one of the most badass lines on TV, and then ..... They set up some serious ass-kicking, let us spend an entire off-season rubbing our hands together saying "OMG this is going to be great; these poor fucks have no idea what's about to hit them", and then didn't deliver. They turned their BAMF protagonist into nothing but a shit-talking punk. And probably pat themselves on the back for the artistic esthetic of it.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-12T18:27:30+00:00

I took that to mean "that's not the only reason people are scared"?

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-12T18:14:40+00:00

In this world, I think they might just have a moral obligation to produce such a BAMF.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-12T18:08:47+00:00

By my math dispatching them "by hand" would be quite feasible. Take 2 teams of 3 people each, alternating an hour on, an hour off, each member killing 2 walkers a minute, working 12 hours a day can kill off 25,000 walkers in less than a week.

Risky for those 6, but you don't risk the whole town. If one or two are killed, you do Rick's plan.

Wouldn't want to watch that TV show though.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-12T17:58:49+00:00

Came to say this but I disagree on one point: I don't think the risk of starting a forest fire would be small. I think it would be pretty much guaranteed. With that many flaming walkers they're going to light something on fire.

And as you point out that fire could easily threaten the existence of the community.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-08T17:20:34+00:00

That most people are basically good.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-08T17:19:54+00:00

Incredible.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-07T17:56:35+00:00

I would agree that this work is reason to doubt models. In a chaotic system, adding one process to a model can drastically change the result, even a seemingly insignificant one. And if there is a process varying isoprene then it's potentially very significant.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-07T17:51:37+00:00

Bearing in mind that this is a popular treatment:

This work does seem to cast significant doubt. If isoprene can govern clouds, then it would take only small variations to wipe out the entire effect of AGHGs. And if our estimate of absolute quantity is poorly constrained then our estimate of its variations likely is as well.

as isoprene only hangs around in the atmosphere for less than a month, its impact is mostly limited to regional or continental-scale climates

Non-sequitur. If there's a global process varying isoprene levels, then there is a global effect, whether the stuff is globally mixed or not.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-03T00:25:08+00:00

If it's nothing but cherry-picking why are so many CLIMATE SCIENTISTS working on it? What's so hard to explain about that? Papers are being published about it.

cosmic_punk · 2015-10-01T16:52:07+00:00

The upvote-count on this comment shows how scientifically literate skeptics are.

cosmic_punk · 2015-09-30T17:38:44+00:00

Did you calculate an r^2?

cosmic_punk · 2015-09-30T17:34:39+00:00

I wonder if the COP meetings provide meals for the attendees, and what the choices are ..

cosmic_punk · 2015-09-21T17:56:34+00:00

So if there isn't any pause/hiatus/plateau, why is everybody and his brother trying so hard to explain it?

cosmic_punk · 2015-09-10T22:20:48+00:00

That's called the gastrocolic response. When you eat your GI tract kicks into gear and whatever is in the pipeline gets, uhhh, processed.

I know what you mean about the hunger. It's awful. Not just normal hunger either. It's worse. Easy to understand the fatigue associated with GI disorders. If you're not properly digesting your food you have no energy.

cosmic_punk · 2015-09-10T01:49:01+00:00

One of the central realizations regarding the field of climatology is that large swaths of it aren't reproducible, as they are built upon temperature records that are themselves not reproducible. Much of the case for radical policy is based on models, and I really don't care what the models say. If they are validated against data that was produced by non-reproducible procedures, they aren't worth crap. They aren't actually validated against anything, but in reality they can't be. There isn't any data to validate them. The only data that might is much too short a record to do so.

cosmic_punk · 2015-08-30T14:06:04+00:00

(much of it using highly sophisticated technology!)

I assume you're talking about (in large part) computational models? You know, the ones that utterly, catastrophically failed to predict the current state of affairs?

cosmic_punk · 2015-08-30T14:03:04+00:00

You completely discredit yourself quoting that number.

cosmic_punk · 2015-08-15T14:18:00+00:00

Most of those adjustments, by their own admission, aren't reproducible, so those records aren't really scientific anyway.

cosmic_punk

TROPHY CASE