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Newsweek Blames Midwest Floods on Global Warming | NewsBusters.org
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Since this assessment is so clearly biased, it should be rejected as
providing adequate climate information to policymakers. There also should be
questions raised concerning having the same individuals preparing these reports
in which they are using them to promote their own perspective on the climate,
and deliberately excluding peer reviewed papers that disagree with their
viewpoint and research papers. This is a serious conflict of interest.
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NYT: Maybe Greenland Isn't Melting After All | NewsBusters.org
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the study, which is being published in Friday’s edition of the journal
Science, throws into question the notion that abrupt ice losses in Greenland are
nigh.
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Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis | Environment | The Guardian
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Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously
estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the
Guardian.
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Technological singularity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A recent study of patents per thousand persons shows that human creativity does
not show accelerating returns, but in fact, as suggested by Joseph Tainter in his
seminal "The
Collapse of Complex Societies[4]" a law of diminishing returns.[citation needed] The
number of patents per thousand peaked in the period from 1850–1900 and has been
declining since.[citation needed] The
growth of complexity eventually becomes self-limiting, and leads to a wide
spread "general systems collapse". Thomas Homer
Dixon in "The
Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization"
shows that the declining energy returns on investment has led to the collapse of
civilizations. Jared
Diamond in "Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" also shows that cultures self-limit
when they exceed the sustainable carrying capacity of their environment,
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Extropianism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Extropianism, also referred to as extropism or extropy, is an evolving framework of values and
standards for continuously improving the human condition. Extropians believe
that advances in science and technology will some day let people live
indefinitely and that humans alive today have a good chance of seeing that day.
An extropian may wish to contribute to this goal, e.g by doing research and
development or volunteering to test new technology.
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THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
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Thirty years later, however, some leading physicists were again attempting to
declare the end of physical knowledge. This time, however, the claim was not so
much that physics had the means of explaining all phenomena, but that physics
had reached the limits of its capacity to explain. The search for causal laws
was declared fruitless because of the claim that the threshold of acausal
randomness had been discovered -- with the further implication that there is
ultimately no objective reality. This is the philosophical essence of the
Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory. And it is an interpretation which
does not follow strictly from physics.
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Wrongful ban on DDT costs lives
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In
Sri Lanka, in 1948, there were 2.8 million malaria cases and 7,300 malaria
deaths. With widespread DDT use, malaria cases fell to 17 and no deaths in 1963.
After DDT use was discontinued, Sri Lankan malaria cases rose to 2.5 million in
the years 1968 and 1969, and the disease remains a killer in Sri Lanka today.
More than 100,000 people died during malaria epidemics in Swaziland and
Madagascar in the mid-1980s, following the suspension of DDT house spraying.
After South Africa stopped using DDT in 1996, the number of malaria cases in
KwaZulu-Natal province skyrocketed from 8,000 to 42,000. By 2000, there had been
an approximate 400 percent increase in malaria deaths. Now that DDT is being
used again, the number of deaths from malaria in the region has dropped from 340
in 2000 to none at the last reporting in February 2003.
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On Biodiversity, Climate change and Sustainability - 11MAR2002
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Shaheed Naeem, a leading ecologist who has been working on the
biodiversity/ecosystem functioning area for a number of years, was asked for his
opinion on how to make Biosphere 2 viable. His answer? "Burn the whole thing
down, and let the system build itself up from scratch". This may sound like a
rash observation but it perfectly encapsulates what we ecologists know: that
using current knowledge, we cannot replicate a self-perpetrating, stable and
viable ecosystem, and that we won't have this "knowledge" in the near future,
either.
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Does Science Have the Answers
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Hawking asserts that any physical theory is always provisional and is never
proved (3), and he illustrates this copiously -
Having established evidence for his belief in black holes, Hawking then goes on
to discuss these phenomena in some detail, even though the whole idea is still
hypothetical. Some of what he says is, even in its language, wishful thinking:
"It is greatly to be hoped ...", "It is difficult to believe ...". (5) While all
of the argument leading to belief in black holes is internally consistent and
does not, violate anything one can see to be the case, it has to be noted that
neither is there much real evidence that they actually exist! It could be said,
to simplify Kuhn’s model, that the existence of black holes, if not all their
properties, is part of the current paradigm: scientists and laymen talk about
them as if they are real, scientists consider the effects they would have upon
the universe and then conduct experiments and study natural phenomena in an
attempt to discover these effects, thereby strengthening the belief in the
existence of black holes. My correspondence with an astrophysicist involved in
this field (See appendix) confirms that no experiment has yet found
evidence to destroy belief in black holes, but there is still a minority of
scientists who claim that other phenomena could account for the results upon
which others rely for their belief in black holes.
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