[lug] Anyone else hate to get rid of old equipment?

Wed May 26 08:46:03 MDT 2010

It's 'climate change' because a lot more is happening than the temperature
outside going up a few degrees.  Heck, aren't we already told to bump our
thermostats up a few degrees in the summer anyway, to cut our electric bill?

No, we're talking about significant changes in precipitation and cloud
cover.  Think rivers drying up or areas getting hit with "100 year" flash
floods(*) every few years.  Think forests drying out and runaway
infestations (pine beetles, perhaps) and massive firestorms.  Think
municipal water systems failing so cities with millions of people can't
provide water.  (Atlanta, iirc, came very close to that a few years ago
during the peak of the regional drought.)

This also brings up an issue that's a sore spot with my fiancee - soil
depletion.  We've had really bad agricultural practices in the past and
aren't doing a hell of a lot better now.  Soil depletion is real but 1) is
masked by petrochemical fertilizers and 2) the 100- to 200-year time frame
until when farmland is trash is far beyond most people's ability to be
concerned about.

But put in climate change, parasite/infection changes, increased oil
consumption making fertilizers more expensive and massive eco-refugees and
there's the potential for some real pain food-wise.  Nothing that couldn't
be handled with a few centuries to prepare, but over a 20-year timespan?

(*) I think this is a key concept.  The "100 year" and "500 year" markers
aren't really 1% and 0.2%, they're 3 and 4 sigma from the mean (I think -
the numbers may be a little off).  Move the mean just a little and your 4
sigma event may become a 2 sigma event.  So you get things like more
hurricanes (a bit of a pain but we already handle them) AND more importantly
more cat5 hurricanes.  More summer thunderstorms AND more F5 tornadoes.

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 6:44 AM, Stephen Queen <svqueen at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've enjoyd reading all the posts in  this discussion. It has given me much
> food for thought. I just wanted to make three unrelated/related comments:
>
> In the year 1800 the population of the planet was around 1 billion people.
> In the year 2000, the population was around 6 billion people. Is this not
> one of the major causes of our environmental issues.
>
> If Americans were truly interested in minimizing their environmental
> impact, they would not have lawns in their front yards. They would have
> vegetable gardens. The impact of this would far out weigh the impact of
> converting to solar power for houses.
>
> Humans don't even take care of their bodies, much less the planet!
>
> Steve
>
>
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 11:50 PM, Maxwell Spangler <
> maxlists at maxwellspangler.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 2010-05-25 at 17:30 -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
>>
>> > There's a lot of evidence that the planet, being a closed system other
>> > than the effects of more or less energy output from the Sun (cool data
>> > on that too, lately... now that we're able to measure that!), will
>> simply:
>> >
>> > - Melt more of the icecaps, resulting in more water in the oceans.
>> > - Which results in more surface area of water worldwide.
>> > + higher temperatures, means more evaporation.
>> > - Meaning more clouds, and more rainfall where it never fell before.
>> > - Meaning more plants, which need CO to survive.
>> > - Meaning more CO scrubbed from the air, and put into the ground in
>> > those areas covered in plant life.
>> >
>> > * Is the melting of the icecaps a "disaster"? (Emotional answer, not a
>> > scientific one from most folks... "Oh no, the polar bears may go
>> extinct!")
>>
>> You lost me on the first bullet because you failed to mention all of the
>> impact of melting icecaps.
>>
>> Did you know, for example, that icecaps reflect 90% of the sunlight that
>> shines on them?
>>
>> This was an amazing yet somewhat obvious fact when I learned it.  A cold
>> black rock at the same location would absorb all the sunlight's heat and
>> become warm.  But a block of ice and snow of the same size doesn't
>> absorb that heat and stays cold much, much longer.
>>
>> Because of this, every time you see a huge chunk of ice cap fall off
>> into the sea, it means that square footage is now absorbing heat into
>> the water instead of reflect it back up and out to space.  So it's not
>> just ice turning to water, but geographic areas turning from heat
>> reflection to heat absorption.
>>
>> What bothers me about the bulleted list of ideas above is that it is not
>> supported by science, but just a set of ideas.  Imagine if we computer
>> professionals let users set forth their ideas as fact about how
>> computers work.  Is it true that pressing the ENTER key when a program
>> is slow will make it wake up and go faster?  "Yes!" said the user
>> because that's what makes sense to them.
>>
>> It makes sense to them because they don't understand much else and when
>> a human being is given a situation they don't understand they will often
>> fill the void with facts to make sense out of it.  Add some bias or
>> preference for a certain outcome and a distrust in science and you don't
>> get truth, you get rumors and falsehoods.
>>
>> I mean no insult to you Nate, but your are a computer professional and
>> not a climatologist so I can't put much faith in the ideas you describe
>> above.   Very interesting ideas, but ideas, not facts.
>>
>> --
>> Maxwell Spangler
>> ========================================================================
>>        Linux, Unix and Database Administration
>>        Currently: Boulder, Colorado
>>        LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwellspangler
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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