People are getting dumber and dumber

[thegayhare]

Daylight exacerbates warning

You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two. This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they ? Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.
CONNIE M. MESKIMEN / Hot Springs

here is the news paper

http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Editorial/187608



I so wish this wasn't real

It seems like it should be physicly impossible to be this stupid

Now before anyone jumps on me I'm not calling her stupid because she doesn't belive in global warming.  what I'm saying is aperently she thinks Congress can control the speed that the earth rotates and it has nothing better to do with this emense power then to trick people into thinking global warming is real

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

It's the "hey, let's have another hour of daylight" meaning that we pulled one from nowhere, and suddenly it's much hotter...

Critical thinking is something sadly lacking, it appears, in much of the human race.

[bill]

I seem to remember a congressman saying that DST would cause furniture and curtains to fade faster.

[Aridas]

Let's blame those damn dirty liberals for using their internet machines to delay the sun an hour.

[Jim Halisstrad]

Ah, a shining example of the intelligence that my fellow Arkansas inhabitants are known for.

[Alondro]

The Clintons lived in Arkansas... nuff said.   

[Zedd]

I lost all faith in humanity again

[Zorro]

IT'S ARKANSAS!

So don't think that this is average intelligence in the USA.

[GabrielsThoughts]

what of the parts of the country that don't observe daylight savings time!!! they must be stealing all our mild weather forcasts!

[Kenji]

This is dumber? I dunno, seems about the same to me.

[superluser]

I seem to remember (from an old News of the Weird) that Qaddafi once declared that the west was stealing Libya's resources, including sunlight.  Maybe he took it back?

[Ryudo Lee]

That hurts my brain.

[ITOS]

That hurts my brain.

And that is how dumbness spreads. D:

[Alondro]

I lost all faith in humanity again

If you were like me, you wouldn't have had that faith to lose in the first place.   

[Zedd]

I lost all faith in humanity again

If you were like me, you wouldn't have had that faith to lose in the first place.   

Thanks sis your too kind..

[Alondro]

I lost all faith in humanity again

If you were like me, you wouldn't have had that faith to lose in the first place.   

Thanks sis your too kind..

O_o  Uhm... I'm a guy.

[Kenji]

I lost all faith in humanity again

If you were like me, you wouldn't have had that faith to lose in the first place.   

Thanks sis your too kind..

O_o  Uhm... I'm a guy.

Sometimes.

[Stygian]

You're indefinite, Alondro. Some have that problem. Maybe Charline is really taking over?

Oh. And people aren't really getting dumber in that sense that we're losing potential for intelligence. Quite the opposite. But it's the distractions...

We're actually gaining brainpower and mass, it seems, statistically. However, it seems that we're using less and less of it. And poisoning what we can't get rid of so easily. Go figure, evolution; you're failing... [sighs]

[Alondro]

You're indefinite, Alondro. Some have that problem. Maybe Charline is really taking over?

Uhm... no?  I plead the Fifth?   

No RPing outside the DMFA zone.  I'm just Charles here.   

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

No RPing outside the DMFA zone.  I'm just Charles here.   

Oooo, you're good. :-]

[superluser]

No RPing outside the DMFA zone.  I'm just Charles here.   

I thought you were Alondro here?  Who the heck *is* Alondro, then?

[Brunhidden]

whats almost as dumb as believing congress has the power to increase or decrease daylight is some of the ideas to combat global warming.

1- send up satellites to scatter small disks into the stratosphere to block a portion of our sunlight. problems include the disks are tiny, temporary, only kinda sorta work, need thousands of these satellites to spread enough, and the cost is pretty close to all the money in the world.

2- to mimic the cooling effects of volcanoes that shoot ash into the upper atmosphere we would FIRE MISSILES in order to dump tons of sulphuric dust into the sky creating an artificial nuclear winter.

3- set hundreds of whether balloons to distribute particles in the air that are highly reflective. downsides include the particles only stay up for a couple months and have to be spread constantly

all this in contrast to good ideas like introducing a iron oxide slurry into the ocean to increase algae growth, or siphon off excess CO2 by using very tall artificial trees to trap it and compress it into tanks. my personal favorite is the 'bio lung' which is a large and strategically placed shrubbery wall inside of cities to redirect winds, block noise pollution, provide fresh oxygen to nearby people in planned patterns- supposedly enough of these placed right can change the local climate.

When everyone is trying to kill you it means you are either doing something wrong or doing something very VERY right.

[superluser]

whats almost as dumb as believing congress has the power to increase or decrease daylight is

The Indiana state legislature defining pi to be exactly 3.2, 3.23, or 4, depending on how you calculate it?

some of the ideas to combat global warming.

1- send up satellites to scatter small disks into the stratosphere to block a portion of our sunlight. problems include the disks are tiny, temporary, only kinda sorta work, need thousands of these satellites to spread enough, and the cost is pretty close to all the money in the world.

Oh.

I knew a guy who was a major proponent of this idea.  To be fair, his point was that it might be too late to change our CO2 emissions (this was before the Stern Report came out), and that this way, we could mitigate the effects.

Also, the figures that he found (by fairly reputable sources) put the giant Fresnel lens project at something like $20B.  The cost of switching completely to wind and solar is within a couple orders of magnitude of that.

Of course, the trouble with such projects is that they don't stop the CO2 buildup and don't help us in the Long Emergency.  Also, nothing is completely optically transparent, and so we're going to be stopping certain wavelengths from hitting the Earth, and who knows what that's going to do.  And when we do fix global warming, we have to decommission the lens.

Also, I heard about the idea of seeding the ocean to grow more plankton.  Unfortunately, I think that the expected result was an ice age.

[Valynth]

Okay people lets look at this logically.

CO2 is NOT a pollutant.  CO2 is a nessescary product of animal life.  Hell, the animal world produces more CO2 in one month than human industry produces in one year.  If the earth gets warmer, plants become active longer with less winter and drain the CO2 out of the atmosphere yet again.  After all, CO2 levels have been over 10 times our current level before and yet life continues onward.

I also wonder why you guys haven't thought about the fact that volcanoes produce a HUGE amount of CO2 and yet every time there's an erruption, surrounding lands experience a severe DROP in temperature.

CO2 has some impact on our world's temperature, but thats going to happen regardless of wether our industry continues or not, so I say keep the factories runing.

[Alondro]

No RPing outside the DMFA zone.  I'm just Charles here.   

I thought you were Alondro here?  Who the heck *is* Alondro, then?

*whistles innocently and acts nonchalant...*  Alondro wouldn't be my zanpaktou, not at all.   

Yes, that should be confusing enough.  My secret is safe!   

[Zedd]

No RPing outside the DMFA zone.  I'm just Charles here.   

I thought you were Alondro here?  Who the heck *is* Alondro, then?

*whistles innocently and acts nonchalant...*  Alondro wouldn't be my zanpaktou, not at all.   

Yes, that should be confusing enough.  My secret is safe!   

Not quite...

[superluser]

CO2 is NOT a pollutant.  CO2 is a nessescary product of animal life.  Hell, the animal world produces more CO2 in one month than human industry produces in one year.  If the earth gets warmer, plants become active longer with less winter and drain the CO2 out of the atmosphere yet again.  After all, CO2 levels have been over 10 times our current level before and yet life continues onward.

I don't think that anyone here has called CO2 a pollutant.  It's necessary for photosynthesis, so at least one large inhabitant of the planet loves the stuff.

The problem is that too much CO2 will (A) suffocate the animals (B) radically alter the climate, flora and fauna.  Which I suppose is fine if you want to completely change your diet every few years as different animals go extinct.

I'm having trouble finding a cite for respiration producing more CO2 than factories, so I'll let that go for now.  I'll probably bring it back up later.

Yes, we've had higher levels of CO2, but that was during the Jurassic (I think) period.  So yeah, if we want to go back to the age of the dinosaurs, I guess more CO2 is great.

Volcanoes produce a drop in temperature not because of the CO2 production, but because they produce a large plume of dust, which blocks some sunlight.

[Valynth]

it makes sense, all you need to do is find the air capacity of the average human lungs and determine what portion of the oxygen inhaled is replaced by CO2.  You then multiply this average amount of CO2 produced by one human and multiply it by 6 BILLION.  Then you get how much CO2 humanity produces when everyone takes a breath.  Then multiply this figure by how many breaths the average human takes per day.  Then multiply this number by the amount of days in a month.

You'll find that this is a significant amount of CO2 being put into the atmosphere by breath alone.  So if the environmentalists really want to stop CO2 emmissions, they would stop breathing, or go on a genocidal rampage to kill off the excess humans.

In short, it's probably the sun that is changing, after all, it's hardly a constant variable.

[Aridas]

you haven't taken into account what the plants take in >_>

[superluser]

it makes sense, all you need to do is find the air capacity of the average human lungs and determine what portion of the oxygen inhaled is replaced by CO2.  You then multiply this average amount of CO2 produced by one human and multiply it by 6 BILLION.  Then you get how much CO2 humanity produces when everyone takes a breath.  Then multiply this figure by how many breaths the average human takes per day.  Then multiply this number by the amount of days in a month.

According to Oak Ridge National Library, respiration (from all faunae) gives off 50 Gigatonnes of carbon per year.  Fossil fuels and cement production give off 6 Gt/y.

The thing to remember, though, is that the plants absorb about 100 Gt/y, and when you add in release of CO2 from decomposition the whole thing is essentially a wash.

Except that the manmade carbon is not being absorbed.  The ecosystem has not yet adjusted to all of the carbon that we've introduced in the last 150 or so years (since Edwin Drake started his business) or 50 years (since we started mass-producing cars).

In short, it's probably the sun that is changing, after all, it's hardly a constant variable.

This is highly unlikely.  If this were the case, we would have detected it, since in the past few years, we have been studying something called the Solar Neutrino Anomaly.  Had the sun been changing its output or the way in which it generates energy, we would have noticed it.

In fact, we have noticed something called Global Dimming.  We are now getting less sunlight than 50 years ago.  So not only are we getting less energy from the sun, but it's warming us more than we've been warmed in the past.