Recent Comments

Egbert, if you want to continue to defend that the unprecedented growth at LU has not been problematic, feel free. I have seen enough evidence to the contrary to feel pretty confident in my position. If your interested I can pull the growth rate numbers at work on Monday for LU over the last 30 years and you'll see that it's heavily concentrated in the last eight. If you like, we can meet up for a beer somewhere and discuss this further. You could drop some of your extensive brewing knowledge on me, I would love to soak some of that up. I really don't want to leave any hard feelings.

Virginugh needs to be become a thing

Well, when a mommy and daddy love each other very much...

Because shit happens when you party naked.

They have escaped last place with a moral victory!

<3. Virginiugh (0-3)

After embarrassing losses to Richmond and Oregon, the Hoos rebounded with a moral victory, losing 13-10 at UConn. As UVa founder Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "Sometimes, in the face of troublesome times, it can be best for man to take pause and appraise his moral victories. Oh, what a bunch of #^&@. You think we beat the British with a bunch of moral victories?!" Wait, actually I think it was my middle school football coach, Mr. Jefferson, who said that second part./blockquote>

"I'm looking at the mediums...and I don't know how to extra it!"

Funny thing is, I did read through the comments first. *sigh*

Great minds think alike?

Nothing is massively going under water for a long, long time. Yes, the North pole is melting, but the North pole is not on land. It's total weight displacement is already compensated for by the ice being in the water (just as a glass with ice does not overflow when the ice melts).

I've heard this argument before. It's a false analogy.

The ocean isn't a glass of water, and the polar ice caps aren't ice cubes floating in it. The water locked up in the polar ice caps are kept out of the oceanic currents and held in place at the pole. If those ice caps melt, that water escapes and enters the currents, which does elevate sea level. And the math is irrefutable. There is enough water trapped in the ice caps to submerged heavily populated areas if they melt.

I don't know the origin of this argument, so I can't say if it's intentially misleading or innocently misguided. But it's a dangerous fallacy that tries to give people false hope that no threat exists when one most certainly does. I feel compelled to refute it whenever I see it brought up.

You seem to want to discuss global warming, so here is an alternate opinion:

(1) If you would just leave it at saying it's a bad idea to have an excessive amount of CO2 in the air, I'd go along with you: however, it's normally presented as man-made global warming. Any good geologist will tell you that between 90 to 95% of the CO2 in the atmosphere is put there by volcanoes erupting. Last time I checked man does not control when volcanoes go off.
(2) The earth has been going between heating and freezing phases long before man was ever on the planet. Like a spinning top, the earth's rotation changes back and forth slightly about every 20,000 years. The sahara desert has shifted between being a desert and a jungle many times (again long before man was here).
(3) Nothing is massively going under water for a long, long time. Yes, the North pole is melting, but the North pole is not on land. It's total weight displacement is already compensated for by the ice being in the water (just as a glass with ice does not overflow when the ice melts). The largest mass of water trapped in ice is not located at the north poll, but at the south poll. This ice is located on land and if it melted, we would have sea levels rise substantially; however, it is still 30 below zero and is a long way from melting.
(4) I also feel that there are much better long term solutions to reducing CO2 in the air than our current government policies are pursing without having such a stark effect on our lives and economy. Unfortunately, this is the point in the conversation at which one normally expects to be personally attacked as a global warming "denier" rather than actually having a productive discussion.

I would like to know many of the things you point out as well. Our discussion earlier was centered more around what makes it to earth thru our protective atmosphere. CO2 (and many other things as eshiben5 points out) have an effect on this.

I like the edit.

For what it's worth, I work at a coal power plant so I'm very in tune with publicly perceived "facts" if you catch my drift. :)

It's ok, man. You can't be perfect everyday..