IntenseDebate - johnny

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Brave new pot world: O... · 1 reply · 0 points

You're right. Here's the graph, from a recently released federal report:

http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monograph...
Sure, the pot today is stronger, but people use what they need to use to get to the level of 'high' they need, so it's kind of like pointing out that vodka is stronger than beer. No one stops after, say, six shot glasses of beer, any more than they sit down to drink six12 ounce bottles of vodka. They drink, or smoke, until they're at the desired level of buzz, in 1977 or today.

The other interesting bit is this - tobacco and binge alcohol use are way down among this crowd over that period, too, much more than marijuana. According to the same report, both are just over half what they were around 1980 among 12th graders. I'd say that far lower alcohol and tobacco use, and steady but lower-than-thirty-years-ago pot use, is on balance real progress.

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Traveling U.S. 36 betw... · 0 replies · +13 points

If our needs change unpredictably for this road say 20 or 30 years out, are we locked in to the contract with this private group? Have we done the same thing we did for the Brazilian investors who get to veto any nearby high-speed roads that might take traffic from E-470? If computer-linked car 'trains' can speed through, in a few years, for example? 50 years is a long time to pretend everything is going to stay just as we forecast it today.

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Dick Regan: When enoug... · 3 replies · -1 points

Morse was elected in an election in which 70.8% of Coloradans voted. He was recalled in an election in which 11% of those in his district voted.

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Mike Taylor: COGA has ... · 0 replies · +4 points

The ACLU doesn't sue on its own behalf, it finds people who have been injured by whoever and offers them legal help in suing.

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Judy Weiss: Climate ch... · 9 replies · +3 points

Imagine if our grandparents had had the same attitude towards the Nazi conquest of Europe. Not my problem, let the kids deal with it.

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Judy Weiss: Climate ch... · 0 replies · +4 points

Only if you're Catholic, not Protestant, because Catholics believe good works without sincere belief will add to your credit, while real Lutherans and other hard-edged Protestants believe that only pure belief, regardless of your crimes and sins, can save you. For the real hard cases, it's predestined whether you will be saved or not, not a thing you can do about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sola_fide

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Judy Weiss: Climate ch... · 0 replies · +5 points

The only thing that discusses is hurricanes, not CO2 or global temperatures or droughts or floods or sea ice or winter storms or ocean acidification or desertification or any of the many other climate events that are set to change in one direction or another. I don't know anything about hurricanes, haven't lived near a seacoast, and while I think the climate models say they'll increase in strength, dramatically after a while, I don't think the models have claimed a consensus that they'll necessarily increase in frequency with rising CO2., so I think your attorney is slaying another straw man. And I certainly don't know - nor does he, at least as far as he discusses in the article - whether the changes or lack of changes observed are statistically significant or statistically noise.

Bottom line: I don't see a need to waste my time reading a Colombian attorney writing way outside his area of expertise, printed in a tabloid newspaper published by a biased publisher, when I have real scientific journals available instead. If you give credence to that kind of opinion, rather than actual scientists, that's the tiny bubble. I notice you didn't defend what he said OR his credentials, either one, just disliked that I pointed out that it wasn't exactly peer reviewed science.

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Judy Weiss: Climate ch... · 2 replies · +4 points

Sure, but it doesn't happen this fast when it's due to natural causes, and the world's ecosystems have enough time to adapt when natural cycles spin up. The only things that change the world's climate this fast are enormous meteors (the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs), similarly enormous volcanoes but those effects are temporary, and humans, currently on track to more than double atmospheric CO2 in 150 years, C)2 that will take at least hundreds of thousands of years to naturally come back down out of the atmosphere and be re-buried by the same process that laid down the oil and coal in the first place.

At least try to go to real scientific sources, not paid propaganda ones, for your info. Here's a good place to start, a new report issued just Tuesday.
http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2013/12/abrupt...

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Judy Weiss: Climate ch... · 11 replies · +4 points

We have to do what we can without tanking world economic growth. Which will be complex. The faster we start, the less drastic the action we eventually have to take. The longer we do nothing, the more the world's ecosystem, and the humans who depend on it - our grandkids - will suffer.

The first place to start would be to replace other taxes with a revenue neutral carbon tax, so the world's engineers and businessmen can do the most cost-effective actions first. It's possible to design such a tax to take into account carbon-intensive products produced elsewhere and imported, like aluminum or concrete, so it will have a beneficial effect even in places where such taxes aren't imposed, though that would require a change in the GATT, I understand.

10 years ago @ Daily Camera.com: - Judy Weiss: Climate ch... · 2 replies · +6 points

Right. You read the New Murdoch Post for your science news, posting columns by Colombian attorneys. I'll stick to Nature and Science and other actual science journals, with articles written by actual scientists.
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