Not all of them though.

http://theloveofsports.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/t...

Been looking for a Sebastian Janikowski draft picture but couldn't find one.

"There's nothing new under the sun"

... except for all the new stuff, of course. The fact that Da Vinci dreamed of flying machines doesn't diminish the significance of the actual invention of the airplane or modern commercial air travel.

> The most recent studies suggest one degree of warming per decade on average

There's been a total of approximately 0.8 degrees C increase in temperature since about 1880, at about 1.5 degrees C per doubling of CO2 concentration. Although part of that increase may be due to the increase in solar activity over the period. And, it hasn't gotten any warmer since 1998.

I'm no big proponent of fracking, but in general peak oil/gas is a much more pressing issue than global warming. I'm pretty much convinced at this point global warming is just a front used to push anti-peak oil policies.

So, you're sitting in a car driving 100mph towards a wall. The car's safety system warns you, saying 'collision ahead, break NOW'. You're thinking "hey, no problem, no car since 1880 has driven into this wall, it must be a hallucination - I'm keeping my foot down baby".

Analogies used here:

The car - Energy policies

The safety system - Climate models

The warning - Result of these models

You driving into a wall - Laymen's opinions about why these models don't apply.

To put it differently:

1) There's a time delay of several decades between putting out the CO2 and temperature rise. What we're feeling now is the effects of energy policies in the 60ies and 70ies.

2) Since the 70ies our CO2 output has risen considerably, mainly due to emerging markets.

3) Most of this 0.8 degree warming you're talking about has occurred in the last 30 years.

Well - would you bet on the wall being an illusion, or would you rather brake just in case?

If my car's system had the same track record and fundamental flaws as the climate models commonly cited, I would be inclined to ignore it. By track record I mean predicting a 3 degree C increase per doubling of CO2 and experience showing only half of that. The fundamental flaw is the assumption that positive feedback effects will triple the 1 degree C per doubling CO2 greenhouse effect, when these feedback effects (clouds and water vapour) are so difficult to model correctly.

Pretty sure the time lag of decades for temperature increase is simply false. Most of these models were predicting temperature increases since 1998 which haven't happened.

Finally, I probably would consider not braking at all if I couldn't possibly come close to stopping in time to prevent a fatal impact. If you really think a 3-6 degree C temperature increase is coming, the only thing that is going to do anything is something like a 50% drop in fossil fuel consumption. The world can't even agree on a 10% cut that won't do anything. EDIT: That's why I think these are really anti-peak oil policies, because a 10% cut actually helps there.

I see where you're coming from. When it comes to climate models, lots of feedback loop, both positive and negative ones, are being thrown around - you can basically adjust models arbitrarily to your political liking. Adjusting these models to real data is a never-ending process as long as we don't have the computational power to both resolve much denser grids and timesteps and include more parts of the equation than we do now. However, when it comes to balancing these things out to give an accurate prediction, I tend to trust organizations like NASA, IPCC and NOAA over the typical right wing think tanks that you see throwing together these denialist reports. Yes, we do know about negative feedback loops, the scientific consensus is just that they're much weaker than what we're doing to the atmosphere. Also, the 1998 measurement that gets thrown around is very misleading - have a look at [1].

Noone is claiming these models are perfect and the temperature increase estimates may be off by some margin - all I'm saying is that as long as we're sure current CO2 levels aren't going to kill our future, we better stop increasing them, given scientific consensus. When the doomsday scenarios come from scientific studies and stop including low probabilities, it's better to take them seriously rather than bet our home planet on them being all wrong.

[1]http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/upsDownsGlobalWarm...

I don't trust the IPCC because the actual results haven't matched their models, regardless of what the "scientific consensus" is on negative feedback loops.

And again, stopping the increase of CO2 would require massive global emissions cuts, which would require a new energy infrastructure.

This stuff makes me laugh looking back on it. Also teachers saying stuff like, "If you do all of your homework, no matter what you will get at least a B."

Pretty much high school was an obedience test. "Monkeys, if you do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you, I will rate you all 'Above Average'."

I just read "Hell is the Absence of God". I just can't understand or relate at all to the "slave morality", as Nietzsche might put it, of that story, or wrap my head around why people choose to worship a creature roughly equivalent to the one imprisoned at the center of the galaxy in Star Trek V.

This seemed cute the first time I read it, and it explains the "why I am me?" question that most religions just don't.

But I realized, this is would be an absolute disaster if true. True story: life more or less sucks if you aren't near a local maximum of a food chain.

I always thought the point of he story was to call attention to that fact and plead for empathy and compassion.

I think there's an inevitability to his eventual hatching of superpowers. Whether or not he's good, bad, or indifferent to people, all he has to do is wait it out —til they're all dead — and he hatches into super universe monster. Pretty sweet.

Yeah, but then you hatch into a megabeing that can make and destroy universes. Swings and roundabouts.

I really don't get people who think consciousness emerges from an algorithm basically, that can be transferred to software.

If someone built a gigantic abacus and used to slowly simulate a brain, would that cause a consciousness to emerge?

If you're a materialist, yes, as far as I can tell simulating a brain or running any sort of equivalent software must cause consciousness to arise. Speed is not really part of the question. It's the shape of the computation that determines consciousness.

A lot of that is due to the strategy shift from trying to aggresively expand your business by adding as much value as possible, to trying to extract as much rent from the market as possible once you've achieved a dominant position in the market.

This is exactly the sort of problem that convinced me that consciousness/mind must be a fundamental part of the (multi/uni)verse, and not something that "emerges" from matter.

I find it terribly unconvincing that a specific arrangement of matter, or even an algorithm in software, just simply "spawns" a discrete consciousness from nothing. It might make sense if there was an underlying "consciousness field" or some such concept that the matter-arrangement tapped into in some manner.

> I find it terribly unconvincing that a specific arrangement of matter, or even an algorithm in software, just simply "spawns" a discrete consciousness from nothing.

It's not only unconvincing but unscientific, a pseudo explanation.

If we assume that, could a machine then tap this field?

Great post. It really comes down to morality and "cooperation" in the sense of the Prisoner's Dilemma. The more people see defectors succeed, the more likely they are to defect themselves. But once enough people are defecting, almost everyone is worse off.