Gerontion

I imagine it's pre-school, rather than school proper, and I don't think there's any danger of her becoming 'mentally unstable' but there is an unhealthy trend in Thailand - as in many countries - of unthinkingly sending children into the education system at a very early age. What pre-schoolers gain in academic benefits, they can to lose in social skills but it depends on the individual child, the school and the home environment and an anonymous internet forum is hardly the right place to make those judgements.

^^ I agree that you have to be careful about allowing these things to balloon out of proportion - and parents have to be careful that children aren't just copying their parents' responses - but the teacher is clearly and unarguably in the wrong. Showing that kind of insensitivity to a 4-year-old is not acceptable and the teacher should be dealt with for this, if for other reason than that it shows a pretty shocking lack of professionalism - and I've worked at a couple of Rajabhats so I'm not easily shocked by the lack of professionalism amongst Thai teachers. Dealing with her classmates is a bit more tricky but certainly, if the kids know that they can't take their lead from the teacher, the situation will be improved.

Nothing of interest. And that only very rarely.

Now your situation, its just thais being 3rd worlders.

i would tell her to be gentle to everyone and ask them everyday how it feels to live in a tin-foil shack on a pile of rubbish with their burmese neighbor and that if they want to be her friend they might be allowed to enter a home that has yet to see a cockroach.

The kids that are not going to finish as construction workers will not get mad because they wont be the ones making fun of your daughter. just the poor ones who will live off 5000baht for the rest of their lives. Like in the west, the poor kids and dumb ones making fun of the rich/bright ones.

Let's hope you don't manage to pass on those genes, eh.

And it's complete <deleted> to think that rich people don't bully. There's no end of bullying in public - or, for any Americans, private - schools. In fact, in British public schools it's part of the educational experience.

My hunch is that the teacher does not realize how her remarks are offending your daughter. On the other hand, I seriously doubt that the teacher would change her behaviour if she did in fact know.

I tend to read non-fiction - at the moment a few books on evolutionary psychology - but I read fiction from time to time. I think the last thing I finished was Resurrection by Tolstoy - assuming Lemony Snicket (my Thai reading practice) doesn't count. I started to read The Pope's Rhinoceros fairly recently but it's unbearably over-written and I couldn't build up a sufficient head of steam to plough through so it petered out after about 100 pages.

Probably best not to draw conclusions about an entire nation based on a sample size of 1.

That is why I prefer neighboring countries...before their culture is ruined by tourists...not travelers. There is a difference between the two with the later being less destructive to a given culture.

That's pretty debatable. I know it's comforting for 18-year old public school girls to believe that 3 months spent gawking at Karen villagers, smoking dope, fuc_king fishermen, and swanning around in bikinis is just getting in touch with a beautiful culture and it's really nothing like as destructive as a family spending three weeks alternating between the hotel beach and the hotel restaurant but it's probably not true.

Western work ethics are so important to keep

God. What a depressing thing to read. How many people lie on their death-bed saying "I wish I'd spent more time in the office"? Not many, I'd imagine. Relax. Get high. Get pissed. Ordain. Marry a lady-boy. Become a peasant farmer. Write a novel. Whatever. But don't don't don't keep working for the sake of working. That's a fuc_king terrible curse to be under.

And there was me thinking the police had gone on strike.

It's not a bad video but you'll find links to Triumph of the Will would be more in keeping with the spirit of the forum.

And the farce of Terminal 5 presumably means the British are incompetent oafs who can't be trusted to run a nuclear power station, either. Oh, hang on a second. They do? Windscale? What's that? A fire in the core of the reactor? In the 1950s? And between 1950 and 2000 there were another 20 serious accidents? And the Irish Sea is now the most irradiated sea in the world? Well I never.

Of course, British and American nuclear incompetence is largely caused by white people pulling the wrong levers or pushing the wrong buttons so it's just an unfortunate accident, nothing more. But when it's a <deleted> - that's the right term, isn't it? - the only logical explanation is that they're culturally incompetent. Nothing racist about that, is there. It's just the way things are.

SRWare Iron and FF.

Why make pointless posts like that? If you had compelling reasons to think that climate change isn't happening or is happening for reasons other than our increasing CO2 emissions then you would post it. You haven't so it's reasonable to assume that you don't and that your beliefs are therefore irrational. That's fine - perhaps - but you can''t expect others to share your belief that the tooth fairy lives under your pillow. You've had plenty of opportunities to post something of substance and you haven't. In fact, you've given no justification at all for your position so I can see no point in carrying on with this.

Exactly, so you are no more qualified than most of us who have given an opinion on this topic.

Either you haven't bothered to read my posts or you haven't understood the astonishingly simple point I made, so to summarise: It's not my opinion which counts, it's the opinions of those with expertise which count and it is far more rational to believe that theories of climate change are true than it is to believe - in the absence of any supporting evidence - that there is either an epic mistake or an epic con. Now, many people aren't rational - evolution, for example, is a minority belief in the US - so I understand that many are happy in their irrationally. I don't really expect to change the minds of denialists any more than I expect to change the minds of creationists so if you want to wallow in your fundamentalist hatred of science and love of bovine stupidity, you go right ahead. After all, what do I care? Either way, the world's almost certainly fuc_ked and if you want to entertain your idiotic ideas, well, who gives a toss?

Your post is just another one of the unsubstantiated blanket smears that are so common on TV. Maybe this will give you an answer to your "What is it that some folks find so offensive?....." topic - I don't actually find it offensive - I find these generalized all-encompassing derogatory comments about Thais to be childish, petty, narrow minded,ignorant, revealing & a whole lot more. The "my ex girlfriend & her family fuc_ked me over so all Thais are money grubbing whores" type shit is getting rather old. For fuc_k's sake!

It's a shame this forum doesn't use reputation points because that certainly deserves one.

The problem I see is that aside form the deniers who believe nothing is wrong, many of those who do believe there is a problem see it as too big for a solution, so they are paralyzed. Or they are looking for one big fix, so they ignore Priuses/wind turbines/cleaner coal plants/tidal power/rooftop farming/etc as none of them will do much more than make a small dent on the problem. But each of these are today's technology, and all can be implented right now. And taken together, they will have an impact while we still research for better ways to deal with the situation while trying to shift the mindset of the people of the world to live a more sustainable life.

Well, some of those things are good (rooftop gardening), some mistaken (Priuses, for example) but there's a fairly low limit on how much individual actions can achieve. For example, I'm in the middle of building an adobe house and when that's done I'm going to be as self-sufficient in food as I can because by doing so I can prevent a few tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere but I'd be a fool to think that this is of any real consequence compared to the actions of states and large corporations. By comparison to what we do, "if the US military operations in Iraq were ranked as a country in terms of emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world's nations do annually. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war emits more than 60% of all countries." America - and China and India and the EU - need to do a lot as governments and I just don't see much evidence of it happening. If you take South Africa out of the equation, gas flaring in the Niger Delta is the principle source of CO2 emissions in sub-Saharan Africa. How much is Shell going to do about this? Not much, I expect. And at the same time, the latest research is showing that the safe level for emissions is 350ppm, when, rather unfortunately, we're at about 390 right now (and 460ppm when you take into account the CO2e values of methane and the rest) so we need somehow to pull a negative carbon economy out of the air. We have to try - with localisation and renewables and the dismantling of the consumer economy and everything else - but it would be foolhardy to have unduly high expectations of success and if I had children, I'd be preparing them to inhabit a far more unpleasant and unstable world than they do now.

To a certain extent I agree but the solution to the problem of SUVs isn't a Prius, it's abandoning the model of society which says everyone gets a car and they can do with it what they like. I'm pretty sure - but could be wrong - that there's no permutation of factors which is going simultaneously to allow some variant of our current living arrangements and - more importantly - an environment which we're not degrading and thereby reducing the long-term carrying capacity of the planet. More fuel efficient planes and Priuses for all might slow very slightly the rate of degradation but that's not really an adequate solution.

It is therefore reasonable to accept the results as being honest.

Which seems more likely?

(i) Five climate scientists are registered at Thaivisa. (All of whom are, by an odd statistical quirk, denialists yet none of whom contribute to the thread.)

(ii) Five members of Thaivisa have lied about being climate scientists.

Surely if you are taking the position that it is an incontrovertable truth then the actions we take should be far more important. To just argue the existance of AGW seems like a pointless exercise if we are not looking at the options we have for dealing with it unless the aim is to be able to say 'I told you so' in a few years.

I wouldn't say it's an incontrovertible truth because all theories are subject to revision but, yes, I obviously think we should try to fight. I sincerely hope that a worthwhile deal is made in Copenhagen, that emissions peak within the next 5 years and thereafter decline at a rapid rate. It's certainly possible and I do what I can in my personal life but I think that of the potential outcomes, this has to be one of the least likely. The fact that this thread exists is testament to the improbability of success.

Toyota is selling more and more hybrid cars, each one a tiny boost to the economy. With growing companies making wind-power equipment and infrastructure, not only are jobs created, but oil dependency is lessened.

I discovered the other day that every car tire consumes seven barrels of oil in its manufacture. As long as we have an socio-economic system predicated on digging stuff out of the ground, using it or burning it, and throwing it away, and doing this is in increasing numbers each year, we're going to be in trouble.

James Hansen on the runaway greenhouse effect:

Now the danger that we face is the Venus syndrome. There is no escape from the Venus Syndrome. Venus will never have oceans again. Given the solar constant that we have today, how large a forcing must be maintained to cause runaway global warming? Our model blows up before the oceans boil, but it suggests that perhaps runaway conditions could occur with added forcing as small as 10-20 W/m2. There may have been times in the Earth’s history when CO2 was as high as 4000 ppm without causing a runaway greenhouse effect. But the solar irradiance was less at that time. What is different about the human-made forcing is the rapidity at which we are increasing it, on the time scale of a century or a few centuries. It does not provide enough time for negative feedbacks, such as changes in the weathering rate, to be a major factor. There is also a danger that humans could cause the release of methane hydrates, perhaps more rapidly than in some of the cases in the geologic record. In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale (a.k.a. oil shale), I think it is a dead certainty.That would be the ultimate Faustian bargain. Mephistopheles would carry off shrieking not only the robber barons, but, unfortunately and permanently, all life on the planet.

There's a very good book called Six Degrees which goes into some detail about what happens with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 degrees of warming. It's well written and extensively foot noted. Of course the author, Mark Lynas, is obvioulsy part of the great global warming conspiracy (funny hand shakes and rolled up trouser legs) so whether you believe him or not is up to you.

The scientist quoted in the Guardian article is Bob Watson, the ex-Chair of the IPCC.

Whether our governments respond properly or not is a totally separate issue than about the truth of the theory.

Indeed so.

the Warmists are more wacko and religiously deluded than even I thought.

Why even pretend? Someone gives you a link with a government advisor, clearly someone who's qualified to talk on this, saying that 4 degrees is possible. The fact that their predictions conflict with your beliefs - which as far as I can tell are grounded on nothing more than personal prejudice - doesn't make them "wacko and religiously deluded". Your stance against ACC is, however, pretty close to being exactly that. Posting youtube videos of an insane Lord and rubbish about Al Gore is hardly impressive, is it? And "wacko and religiously deluded" is as good a description as any to describe that kind of behaviour.

I agree that governments won't do what's required but this isn't entirely a failing of politicians. I think in this regard they're actually representing their constituents fairly well; nobody wants to do what's required.

Climate change isn't a problem which exists in isolation. It stems from the fact the human economy - in the sense of all productive human activity - is a subset of the world ecology, to which it's connected via sources (the raw inputs into the economy) and sinks (where we dump our waste). Climate change is a result of the human economy overwhelming the sinks and this has happened because we utterly ignore the fact that the economy exists within the boundaries of the world at all but any number of other problems could also arise to derail the economy. Water shortages are pressing in many parts of the world, and resource constraints - most obviously oil - are running into a wall. But taking account of these means cutting our cloth according to what the world gives us, not according to what we desire, and who wants to do that? Pretty much nobody I know.

Politicians are obviously well aware of the fact that promising hardship is not a big vote winner but at the same time they need to do something so I think the most likely outcome is a deal at Copenhagen which is superficially appealing. America promises to cut emissions by 20% by 2020 but the small print says this is only on 2005 levels so it's really a 3% cut; China promises to reduce growth in carbon emissions and reduce the carbon intensity of its economy but growth in its economy overwhelms this and its emissions actually grow; the EU promises bigger cuts but this is nearly all offsetting in the global South and the accounting for this is so obscure that nobody really knows what's going on. And what happens in 2020 when, instead of emissions peaking and going into decline, we discover that - hang on a sec - they're still going up? Someone - or more likely everyone - is cheating. I can't see a way out of this. It needs a revolution in our conceptions of the world which is on a par with the shift from the mediaeval to the modern but instead of running over hundreds of years, we've got a decade or two. It's not going to happen.

It's a very good point and, as you say, something which everyone ducks. I remember reading on The Oil Drum someone pointing out that if you point out to most environmentalists "I've just heard the remainder of the Larsen Ice Shelf is disintegrating" they will unanimously be unhappy; if you say "the recession's over and the economy's growing", they'll - probably - unanimously be happy. This doesn't make any sense because - as sure as eggs is eggs - a growing economy is bad news for the Larsen Ice Shelf. There's a lot of talk about the green economy, green collar jobs, green growth but that all strikes me as <deleted>. How can, for example, we expect the British economy to be in 40 years time using 10% of the fossil fuel it currently uses and this not to have consequences for the economy? A healthy economy needs to grow at something like 2 or 3% per annum. That means doubling in size every 25 to 35 years. And doubling the size of the economy means, if not doubling, at least increasing dramatically inputs, including energy...but the world is a finite place. You can't grow indefinitely in a finite environment. That's obvious. A hundred years ago, economic growth had only a relatively slight impact on the global environment and it was possible - it probably even made sense - to ignore it. That's no longer the case. We need to convert very rapidly to a steady state economy and that poses very serious, in fact almost certainly fatal, consequences for capitalism. Your second point about poverty is also valid. Wealth inequalities and poverty survive because of economic growth. Without economic growth you have a hel_l of a problem and the only solution is wealth redistribution, both within and between nations. It means - for the West and elites in the global South - getting a lot poorer. Well, tough shit.

Of course, I don't expect this to happen; countries go to war for an awful lot less (as this decade has shown, as if it needed any more evidence). I can't imagine that in a choice between giving up wealth now and bequeathing a damaged world to our children later, anyone other than a small majority is going to select the former.