22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to resume

[John]

22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to resume in Cairo on Tuesday


New climate change circus in progress

** 22-Sep-14 World View -- Israeli-Hamas peace talks to resume in Cairo on Tuesday
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e140922



Contents:
Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels occupy Sanaa, then sign peace agreement
Israeli-Hamas peace talks to resume in Cairo on Tuesday
New climate change circus in progress


Keys:
Generational Dynamics, Yemen, Houthi, Ansarullah, Sanaa,
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP,
Gaza, Israel, Hamas, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, Fatah,
climate change, horse manure, People's Climate March, Singularity

[zzazz]

You are quite wrong about climate change not being the biggest threat. The danger is not merely that temperatures will rise or that sea levels will rise or that crops will fail but that atmospheric and ocean chemistry will be so changed that complicated forms of life, such as mammals, are extincted. Read up on the Permian extinction to see some of the changes increased CO2 might cause. The methane hydrate is already melting.

As for the singularity, don't hold your breath. If your analyses concerning the singularity had merit, there would have been signs of its approach long before now. It is true that AI is search and that computing power is increasing, but reasoning from that to the singularity is preposterous. For one thing, real intelligence and AI are not the same thing. For another, real search spaces are so large that search alone will never be a solution. (There are many computational tasks that computers will never be able to preform, no matter how powerful they become--simulating the atomic interactions in a glass of water for example.) It is a lot easier to argue that climate change will release the methane will poison the oceans will poison the atmosphere will extinct human kind. Indeed, given generational dynamics, it probably can't be stopped. And we are both likely to live to see the day when it is manifest to everyone on earth.

[JULLIEN1]

To John,

There's a historical precedent for this dispute. A century ago, analysts were debating whether the world would be covered with horse manure, especially in big cities, because of the increased volume of horses for transportation. They didn't know that new technology (the automobile) would make all those concerns moot

I wonder what is your source for claiming people in the beginning of the XXth century feared they would end covered with horse manure: at the time railways and tramways were in common usage and far more used than in our time.

[jimw4881]

You are quite wrong about climate change not being the biggest threat." and "The methane hydrate is already melting."

I note you have changed "global warming" to "climate change" and added a Methane Hydrate kicker. Yet.... from WORLD OCEAN REVIEW (IMO a must read for general audience inquiry) comes this... "..anaerobic oxidation of methane in the sediment ... would make the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4) harmless." ( http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/oc ... -hydrates/ )

"Biggest threat" is not the same as a far away possible threat .... all things being possible of course. You may be right about much, but not in the case of methane hydrates ..... and "biggest threat" rhetoric only adds to my skepticism concerning climate change. The pot will not come to a boil due to climate change in any event.

[John]

> There's a historical precedent for this dispute. A century ago,
> analysts were debating whether the world would be covered with
> horse manure, especially in big cities, because of the increased
> volume of horses for transportation. They didn't know that new
> technology (the automobile) would make all those concerns
> moot

> I wonder what is your source for claiming people in the beginning
> of the XXth century feared they would end covered with horse
> manure: at the time railways and tramways were in common usage and
> far more used than in our time.

The Horse Manure Crisis is quite interesting. Here are a few
sources.

IN 1898, DELEGATES FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE
gathered in New York City for the world's first international urban
planning conference. One topic dominated the discussion. It was not
housing, land use, economic development, or infrastructure. The
delegates were driven to desperation by horse manure.

The horse was no newcomer on the urban scene. But by the late 1800s,
the problem of horse pollution had reached unprecedented heights. The
growth in the horse population was outstripping even the rapid rise in
the number of human city dwellers. American cities were drowning in
horse manure as well as other unpleasant byproducts of the era's
predominant mode of transportation: urine, flies, congestion,
carcasses, and traffic accidents. Widespread cruelty to horses was a
form of environmental degradation as well.

The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that
by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in
horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that
by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-stor y
windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable
dimensions loomed.

And no possible solution could be devised. After all, the horse had
been the dominant mode of transportation for thousands of
years. Horses were absolutely essential for the functioning of the
nineteenth- century city -- for personal transportation, freight
haulage, and even mechanical power. Without horses, cities would quite
literally star ve.

All ef for ts to mitigate the problem were proving woefully
inadequate. Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference
declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the
scheduled ten. ...

http://www.uctc.net/access/30/Access%20 ... 0Power.pdf

The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894
http://bytesdaily.blogspot.com/2011/07/ ... -1894.html

Great moments in failed predictions
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/19/g ... edictions/

[John]

> If your analyses concerning the singularity had merit, there would
> have been signs of its approach long before now.

I don't know what you're talking about. Almost every week there's a
new story about some robot taking over some previously human-only
activity. In 2010 I was very impressed with IBM's Watson, and wrote
about that.

The pieces are coming into place. Sophisticated software like Watson
is being developed in research labs around the world. 3D printers
will permit intelligent robots to manufacture more intelligent robots.

These technologies are under rapid development. Within ten years,
I expect these technologies to have improved to the point that we
have things like intelligent robots filling roles like plumber,
nursemaid, and soldier (killing people). By 2030, I expect the
Singularity to have occurred.

Even if you don't want to "believe" that the Singularity is coming,
there's no question that many of the coming technology changes will
make "climate change" a moot issue, just as the automobile made the
horse manure problem a moot issue. In the meantime, there's no need
to fall for absurd financial and political scams.

** 27-Dec-10 News -- IBM vs Jeopardy! brings robotic warfare and the Singularity closer
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e101227

** 19-Feb-11 News -- IBM's Watson supercomputer bests human champions on Jeopardy!
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... tm#e110219

** Book II - Chapter 7 - The Singularity
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/ ... 2.next.htm

[Anon]

John, sometimes I think you just like to stir the pot a bit.

The North American climate has certainly averaged warmer over the 60 odd years I've been alive, when I was a kid the range of armadillos was lower Texas, South Florida and some bits of Louisiana. Now, they are quite common to find in St. Louis. Armadillos don't survive extended periods of below zero weather. It's not that hard to connect those dots, especially given I could name many other animals and insects that have done exactly the same thing, moved north as the winters grew less harsh. It's possible to conceive of large numbers of people lying for money, but how did they persuade the animals to lie about surviving the winters?

As for technology that generates power without CO2 emissions, we've had that for most of a century now, it's called nuclear fission. That we don't use it, especially in the face of the very well documented hormetic effect of low level radiation exposure is a mystery to me.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/

And doubtless the singularity is going to give us many more means by which weather/climate can be controlled or modified. OFC, the simple method would be to just fly large aluminized balloons full of hydrogen at their natural height of 20 miles or so, they'd simply send most of the light hitting them right back into space. Tie a few thousand of them together into a network and hang them over a city, you'll get both cooling overall and a reduction of the heat island effect, an air conditioned city for summer. The residents would probably give you a medal.

I would imagine it will take quite a bit longer for the tunnels to be reestablished than you think, there's the new wall to consider, plus the greatly expanded no mans land near the border. Any tunnels dug now, they'll be much longer and much deeper. And if you go very deep there, you'll be below the water table, which would be a major problem without a LOT of waterproof cement and some big pumps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Gaza_barrier

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... risis-gaza

Note the "shallow water table" remarks. Thirty meters deep is about it, IMHO.

[zzazz]

I read the article ( http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/oc ... -hydrates/ ) from WOR. It does describe a bacterial process that can consume as much as 90% (by its estimate) of the released methane, sequestering some of it safely in calcium carbonate and converting the rest into CO2 in the ocean, which would slow the transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere to ocean, making the atmospheric imbalance worse. It goes on to say that the effect of the bacteria is completely nil for any methane released as bubbles, which I believe is already happening, and much reduced for methane released at shallow depths. This work does not bring any doubt into my mind. More alarming, it mentions that the methane stabilizes the continental shelves and when it melts there is a threat of landslide tsunamis. They make no estimate about how large these might be, but the potential is enormous---so thank you, yet another reason to fight climate change.

[zzazz]

software is getting better, *Humans* are finding new uses for computers---that's evidence of the singularity?

By that kind of reasoning, I have much better evidence of a much more important singularity. Just look at the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere for the last 1000 years. The CO2 singularity clearly indicated.

[zzazz]

If the Gaza war proved anything, it is that they should have built tank traps. The tunnel work was all waste.