The Great Global Warming Swindle

[TransformX]

Well, this goes down to what you define as habitable.
Yes, I am willing to sacrifice this planet for the technological leap we've made since the beginning of the last century till the end of this one, starting with the industrial revolution.

If you check top500.org, you'll see that no matter which date you pick and check the supercomputer power, it's 15 years ahead of the personal computer. This means that in 15 years from now, people will have tera-flop capable personal computers or even laptops. 15 years afterwards, well, you do the math. At that point, we'll be mathematically capable of talking about science fictional terms such as planet-engineering etc. Not too long afterwards, we should be able to go ahead and practically perform it.
You might say I've played too much Civ/Masters of Orion/GalCiv etc. but then again Jules Verne was far more radical than that.
Sorry if I'm going political now, but just like people accept the 'casualties of peace' which I personally don't, but have to live with, you'll have to accept the term 'casualty of progression', which sadly might be your beloved little blue planet.

[Gurm]

The anger of mother peace earth goddess will be righteous and swift, rising like an anger from the ancient love hate deep in the forest ocean mountain river. We are the voice of the mother sister daughter love hate and we strike at thee!

...

Err... oh, wait. I thik Pagans are f-ing ridiculous. *snicker*

[Brian Ellis]

Well, this goes down to what you define as habitable.
Yes, I am willing to sacrifice this planet for the technological leap we've made since the beginning of the last century till the end of this one, starting with the industrial revolution.

If you check top500.org, you'll see that no matter which date you pick and check the supercomputer power, it's 15 years ahead of the personal computer. This means that in 15 years from now, people will have tera-flop capable personal computers or even laptops. 15 years afterwards, well, you do the math. At that point, we'll be mathematically capable of talking about science fictional terms such as planet-engineering etc. Not too long afterwards, we should be able to go ahead and practically perform it.
You might say I've played too much Civ/Masters of Orion/GalCiv etc. but then again Jules Verne was far more radical than that.
Sorry if I'm going political now, but just like people accept the 'casualties of peace' which I personally don't, but have to live with, you'll have to accept the term 'casualty of progression', which sadly might be your beloved little blue planet.

What have you been smoking?

Even if, and it's a big if, computer power does increase as you say, what has that to do with setting up a human colony on another planet? A close relative to homo sapiens is the Mountain Gorilla. We have been struggling against all odds to maintain a stable population from the 600 survivors, although the gene pool is tiny. On this base, we would need to transport 600 persons to Planet X to start a primitive colony which would be viable only if no epidemics broke out. That is not all: you would need to transport all the materials to provide the infrastructure or to use available minerals to manufacture them. And the cost? It would be much cheaper to ensure we kept our own planet habitable, and it would be more technically feasible. If we just diverted all the money the world spends on armaments - and using them - to making the earth better to live in, we would have all the problems cracked in your lifetime, not in some hypothetical sci-fi scenario-type future.

[TransformX]

What have you been smoking?

Even if, and it's a big if, computer power does increase as you say, what has that to do with setting up a human colony on another planet? A close relative to homo sapiens is the Mountain Gorilla. We have been struggling against all odds to maintain a stable population from the 600 survivors, although the gene pool is tiny. On this base, we would need to transport 600 persons to Planet X to start a primitive colony which would be viable only if no epidemics broke out. That is not all: you would need to transport all the materials to provide the infrastructure or to use available minerals to manufacture them. And the cost? It would be much cheaper to ensure we kept our own planet habitable, and it would be more technically feasible. If we just diverted all the money the world spends on armaments - and using them - to making the earth better to live in, we would have all the problems cracked in your lifetime, not in some hypothetical sci-fi scenario-type future.

Brian, I don't know whether it's a matter of age, but you lack vision. Maybe you ought to smoke something from time to time..
As for your question, I think I'm smoking the same stuff Jules Verne was.
1. With the human genome known, we'll be able to synthesize all the genes we need.
2. Many planets can provide you with many of the base materials we might need.
3. For the missing materials, energy will suffice to transform existing materials to those needed, nano technology will one day equal "matter replication".
4. As for the computing power, see the points above. If you have the right algorithm, it's just a matter of building the apparatus to make things happen.

[Brian Ellis]

Stop winding me up.

[Marshmallowman]

The earth is the only known source of sumbiotic lifeforms to the human race. You known the things that beneifit our existance just by extisting in themselves.

I may be wrong but I do believe that there are a large number of life forms that we are intrinsically dependent on for our existant...getting down to the basics, that even includes those bacteria in our gut we RELY on for digestion.

You have of course noted the the complete failure of the (and a valid and important eforts) of the enclosed biosphere experiments.

There is nowhere in in the universe that we will find any life forms that are tuned and indeed supportive of our life form.

The chance that we can we can actually progress our civilisation to the point that we can exist for any sustainable timescale out of the earths biosphere is the only reason I can think of actualy existing.

But we rely on the only place I know of that actually has creatures/plants that are what we are, yeah you know that blue/green spud in the outer spiral arm of some galaxy, the only place where we can find those obscure life form's that may be the ONLY chance of our survival..for obscure and bizare reasons NONE of us can even discern before the fact we actually require them. But if you can claim you can assure me that you have an alternative , excuse me for laughing hysterically

Why would you not hedge our bets and keep the ONLY pharimcopia/cornicpia of things for as long as possible...I want us to move off earth, but i want earth to be the jewel of our existance not the remorsefull thing we lost. indeed CRITICAL thing we lost.

We can't replace any any life form after we have pushed to out of existance.

Sorry if I can't share reliance on religion as the "oops" escape. The way I see it if we F3<k up and remove a critical species to our existane we are gone...PUFF.

What is wrong with the SAFE option, man if I am wrong I will have red face...I can live with that(literally)

[TransformX]

Well, people can live in a space station in outer space for a year or so, bringing with them whatever organism live symbiotically with/on/within them, cultivating algae for food and oxygen and whatever. Noah's arc isn't sci-fi, it's easy to create at least in the level needed to sustain ourselves in a space station, the moon, mars or wherever.
Earth's biosphere is nothing we can't successfully recreate for our needs on the moon. If you want to talk about the hardship of existence on such a forbidding place, I'll remind you of the existence of coal miners and most people who hardly lived to the age of forty not too many years ago.

As for you Brian, I'm not winding you up more than Jules Verne winded up the French population in his time. You might want to forget how many "impossible" and "inconceivable" things were achieved during your lifetime, landing on the moon would be a nice highlight. If you're around in say 10-20 years, things that were science fiction 20-30 years ago will be reality. It took many decades for Jules Verne's ideas to become reality, but we are living in revolutionary times, and each cycle is getting shorter with the more computing power we have. With all due respect, you're a grumpy old man with a very serious lack of faith. As a person that lived through so many revolutions, I expected better.

[Marshmallowman]

Don't count your chickens before they are hatched.

[Brian Ellis]

You're wrong. I have my feet firmly planted on solid ground, unlike you, who delights to have his head in the ozone layer. BTW, I assume you have no scientific background, as you deny anthropogenic climate change, but espouse science fiction as if it were reality.

Anyway, you are way off-topic, which is about climate change, not dreams (or nightmares).

[TransformX]

You're wrong. I have my feet firmly planted on solid ground, unlike you, who delights to have his head in the ozone layer. BTW, I assume you have no scientific background, as you deny anthropogenic climate change, but espouse science fiction as if it were reality.

Anyway, you are way off-topic, which is about climate change, not dreams (or nightmares).

Well, I say climate change could happen more or less without our intervention, so in a way, we might be just making things happen sooner than they would otherwise naturally happen.
Unlike you, I don't see that as a complete black and white, tree-hugging way. I look at the broader picture and I see that humanity has still won a great deal many things during that time we've 'hurt the planet'. Without the industrial revolution, without all this technology, you wouldn't have all that computing power to pseudo support any of your claims. Those same people you like to throw dirt in their face, they gave you the tools which you use to measure the environment, they gave you that pacemaker that keeps your ticker going, they still have a lot to give way before the seas will rise as much as 6".

I'm way beyond counting chickens. So were the people that brought us this far.
You live in this world: http://www.sysprog.net/quothist.html (I don't refer to the rare few visionaries there)
I live in the real world, prove me wrong, please.

[Umfriend]

I live in the real world, prove me wrong, please.

You live in the real world yet rely on colonies light years away from here as the means of survival for human kind? Define real world please.

Yes, there have been visionaries called crazy first and been accepted later. Whit respect to scientists, the initial rejection of their ideas came mostly from lay-men. Might be a paralel with environmetalists today.

But take travelling to the moon for instance. Verne knew about ballistic technology at his era and extrapolated into shooting, from a canon, people to (well, [i]around[i/] the moon). Compare this to travelling to planets in other solar systems. The closets star is 4.3 light-years from here. Current tech is not even close to allow us to realistically expect us to reach the speed of light soon. Equating your vision today with that of Verne in the 1850-1900 era is a straw man.

We have not even found a planet that could support us in the sense that we could stand it's gravity, let alone that it would have materials easily available to enable an enduring stay,

You may live in the real world, but you live in another universe.

[schmosef]

Anyway, you are way off-topic, which is about climate change, not dreams (or nightmares).

While I agree that TX is off topic, so are you Brian.

The topic for this thread is the programme called "The Great Global Warming Swindle" and much like the climate change debate in general many of us are taking sides without having actually seen the show/gotten all the facts.

Via a blog post at HotAir, here is a link to the show: AllYourBaseAreBelongToGoogle

And here are the comments from Riehl World:

Brit Doc: Thatcher Started Global Warming Craze

I was able to view the British documentary The Great Global Warming Scandal which, interesting enough, contained more science in debunking Global Warming than I have yet to see produced by the Global Warming crowd. I'll bullet point the arguments against the Global Warming craze in a later post, but the most amazing revelation was that, indeed, in great part we do have Margaret Thatcher to thank for today's Global Warming theory.

The original theory was from a fringe scientist and when it surfaced nearly all mainstream scientists found it laughable. Man's contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere is so small when compared to the contributions from volcanoes, plants and especially the oceans, it's doubtful man could effect anything, let alone climate, by producing CO2. But Thatcher had a problem and a plan.

The previous government had been brought down by a devastating and violent coal mine strike and another strike came along as she was in office. Being determined to break the cycle of labor, a large part of it being coal miners, reeking such havoc and ultimately dictating terms to the government, she was determined to move the country away from coal as a power source.

Not trusting Middle Eastern oil as a power source that would produce stability , she wanted to move Britain toward nuclear energy in a major way. The strongest selling point was that nuclear energy was clean and she seized upon the CO2 theory, reasoning that if she could increase concern over coal, she'd be able to implement plans to begin building nuclear reactors.

Millions of government dollars were placed on the table at Britain's National Academy of Science to produce specific science that heightened concerns over CO2 as a serious health and environmental concern. The meme, if you will, and the dollars available to scientists for such work grew, in Britain and across Europe and even in the US. It was the seed of the Global Warming industry we see today.

The film, relying upon several credible scientists, pretty much destroyed the current theory of Global Warming, including Gore's film, repeatedly citing specific science from MIT to the National Academy that conflicts with the theory and demonstrates how science is being manipulated to support the GW movement today.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences.

Update: Irony - from today's headlines:

Europe agrees to embrace nuclear option in battle to save the planet

I haven't seen the show yet. I'll try to catch it later tonight. Let's watch it and then maybe get the discussion back on topic.

[schmosef]

and here are Melanie Phillip's Comments:

March 9, 2007
The emperor’s green new clothes

Channel Four’s devastating documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle has blown an enormous hole in every fundamental claim made to support the climate change obsession — including the claim that the argument is over. A procession of eminent scientists — climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, geologists, biogeographers, astrophysicists, professors of earth science, plus the former head of Greenpeace, who said that the global warming proponents were ‘anti-human’ — showed on the contrary that the theory bore no relation to science whatsoever. The earth was much warmer during many periods in the past; the ice caps were always expanding and contracting and Greenland was much warmer 1,000 years ago; most of the atmosphere was not warming as much as surface temperatures; volcanoes, animals and vegetation each produced infinitely more carbon dioxide than human activity; carbon dioxide could not possibly be the culprit for climate change since historically the warming of the atmosphere preceded any increases in carbon dioxide, thus showing up a central claim made by Al Gore in his movie to be utter rubbish; and so on.

Moreover, they also testified that the computer models which produced all the forecasts of climate apocalypse were rigged to produce the results that would attract official funds for climate change research, which had increased a thousandfold over the past 20 years; and that any scientists who tried to expose the monumental fraud of global warming theory stood to lose not only funding but also his reputation, which would be instantly trashed by the climate change zealots. As one of the sceptical scientists said on the film, the alarm over global warming was now ‘beyond reason’.

Most amusingly of all, they also explained that the midwife to the anti-capitalist global warming industry was one Margaret Thatcher, who seized the opportunity to screw the British miners once and for all by using the panic over global warming to replace coal by nuclear power and threw money at the scientists to make it all happen. Thus an obsession was born, and a myriad scientific reputations now hang perilously by an ever-fraying thread.

Glorious. And terrifying; and shameful.

[schmosef]

Brian, I'd really like you to watch the video I linked above.

Not because I think it will convince you of anything, but because, like a Michael Moore movie, I'm sure that there are lots of little tidbits that are misconstrued.

I'm very eager to hear your take on it.

[TransformX]

You live in the real world yet rely on colonies light years away from here as the means of survival for human kind? Define real world please.

Yes, there have been visionaries called crazy first and been accepted later. Whit respect to scientists, the initial rejection of their ideas came mostly from lay-men. Might be a paralel with environmetalists today.

But take travelling to the moon for instance. Verne knew about ballistic technology at his era and extrapolated into shooting, from a canon, people to (well, around the moon). Compare this to travelling to planets in other solar systems. The closets star is 4.3 light-years from here. Current tech is not even close to allow us to realistically expect us to reach the speed of light soon. Equating your vision today with that of Verne in the 1850-1900 era is a straw man.

We have not even found a planet that could support us in the sense that we could stand it's gravity, let alone that it would have materials easily available to enable an enduring stay,

You may live in the real world, but you live in another universe.

In this case, I'm proud to present you - MARS! There is even evidence of water on mars.
As for technology, please read about ion engines, solar sails etc, threads posted here by Dr. Mordrid as far as my memory serves me.
Also, please check the latest articles about nano-bots etc. With enough matter and energy, you can create most anything.