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Everything posted by placeholder

  1. As you well know, this is what Morch was replying to:
  2. Well, for one thing anti-semitism has a racial tinge to it and the whole blood libel thing. You know, the claim that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzoh. In fact, a story from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales features the lie that Jews killed Christian children. It wasn't until the late 19th century that Musliims started to pick up on that thanks to European colonialism. Before that, in areas of the Muslim world where Jews weren't treated well, they weren't demonized the way they were in Christian Europe. Just looked down upon because the faith they subscribed to was incomplete. The same goes for Muslim treatment of Christians in those regions. Which doesn't make such statements by those such as proton's any more acceptable.
  3. For hundreds of years Jewish and Christian communities thrived in many Muslim ruled countries in the Mideast as well as in the Balkans and Andalusia. In fact, when Christian armies of Spain expelled hundreds of thousands of Jews, it was Muslim Turkey that welcomed them in.
  4. Actually, the people who know what they're doing have long been predicting that things are going to get worse.
  5. The claim that humans use only a small portion of their brain has long since been debunked. And it never made much sense. How would it make evolutionary sense for an organ that uses so much energy to grow so large if most of it was not used? "The notion that a person uses only 10 percent of their brain is a myth. fMRI scans show that even simple activities require almost all of the brain to be active." https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321060#takeaway "The brain requires a tremendous amount of energy to do its job. While it only represents 2 percent of the body mass of the average adult human, the brain consumes an estimated 20 percent of body’s energy supply. " https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/study-sheds-new-light-on-brains-source-of-power#:~:text=The brain requires a tremendous,percent of body's energy supply.
  6. Basically this petition is a scam. The linked to articles were written when the claim as that 1200 scientists had signed on to the petition. "Rather, they said, the post seems to be the latest iteration of a broader disinformation campaign that for decades has peddled a series of arguments long discredited by the scientific community at large. Furthermore, the experts told me, the vast majority of the declaration’s signatories have no experience in climate science at all, and the group behind the message—the Climate Intelligence Foundation, or CLINTEL—has well-documented ties to oil money and fossil fuel interest groups. “Looking at the list of signatories, there are a lot of engineers, medical doctors, and petroleum geologists and almost no actual climate scientists,” said Zeke Hausfather, a longtime research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-partisan nonprofit that specializes in analyzing climate data, and the former director of climate and energy programs at the Breakthrough Institute, another independent environmental research firm." https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23082022/experts-debunk-viral-post-claiming-1100-scientists-say-theres-no-climate-emergency/ "When looking closer at the list of signatories, there are precisely 1,107, including six people who are dead. Less than 1% of the names listed describe themselves as climatologists or climate scientists... According to an independent 2019 count of the declaration's signatories, 21% were engineers, many linked to the fossil fuel industry. Others were lobbyists, and some even worked as fishermen or airline pilots." https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/09/16/fact-check-did-1200-climate-experts-sign-declaration-denying-climate-emergency
  7. You sure about that? How Green Is Wind Power, Really? A New Report Tallies Up The Carbon Cost Of Renewables Citing data from the likes of National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Vestas, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, and Bernstein estimates, Venkateswaran determined that the biggest contributors to the carbon footprint of wind turbines are steel, aluminum and the epoxy resins that hold pieces together — with the steel tower making up 30% of the carbon impact, the concrete foundation 17% and the carbon fiber and fiberglass blades 12%. Good news: amortizing the carbon cost over the decades-long lifespan of the equipment, Bernstein determined that wind power has a carbon footprint 99% less than coal-fired power plants, 98% less than natural gas, and a surprise 75% less than solar. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2021/04/28/how-green-is-wind-power-really-a-new-report-tallies-up-the-carbon-cost-of-renewables/?sh=5897d36373cd Green or not? Environmental challenges from photovoltaic technology The booming demands for energy and the drive towards low-carbon energy sources have prompted a worldwide emerging constructions of photovoltaic (PV) solar energy facilities. Compared with fossil-based electrical power system, PV solar energy has significantly lower pollutants and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. However, PV solar technology are not free of adverse environmental consequences such as biodiversity and habitat loss, climatic effects, resource consumption, and disposal of massive end-of-life PV panels. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749123000684#:~:text=The booming demands for energy,greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. YSE Study Finds Electric Vehicles Provide Lower Carbon Emissions Through Additional Channels With new major spending packages investing billions of dollars in electric vehicles in the U.S., some analysts have raised concerns over how green the electric vehicle industry actually is, focusing particularly on indirect emissions caused within the supply chains of the vehicle components and the fuels used to power electricity that charges the vehicles. But a recent study from the Yale School of the Environment published in Nature Communications found that the total indirect emissions from electric vehicles pale in comparison to the indirect emissions from fossil fuel-powered vehicles. This is in addition to the direct emissions from combusting fossil fuels — either at the tailpipe for conventional vehicles or at the power plant smokestack for electricity generation — showing electric vehicles have a clear advantage emissions-wise over conventional vehicles. https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/yse-study-finds-electric-vehicles-provide-lower-carbon-emissions-through-additional
  8. You introduced this as an issue, not me. I do notice that you aren't pursuing your claim that that it's impossible to quantify the effect of CO2 on global temperature. Clearly it's not.
  9. Do you have a problem with using champagne as a mouthwash? Because that makes more sense than using nuclear energy to make hydrogen. Not only would it be extremely costly, but why would you want to waste electricity that could go directly into the grid just to make a fuel?
  10. An excellent interview with Nathan Thrall about the uprising. He doesn't address this issue, but my take on the political future is that this situation will benefit the extreme right if the current govt falls. Which might give an incentive for those to the left of Netanyahu to remain in a coalition govt rather than face new elections. https://archive.ph/9BCY5 https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/could-the-attack-on-israel-spell-the-end-of-hamas He does predict the utter destruction of Hamas.
  11. This from the Wall St Journal Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group. Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said. Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said. https://archive.ph/XcaAJ Not a surprise to some of us.
  12. Well, not according to Hanaguma, whose post I was replying to.
  13. Really? I cherry picked a quote? You think Benny Morris and the other new historians would quarrel with that characterization? As for them going to the Oslo accords...maybe they ultimately decided not to because it was politically not possible to sell it to their people? And while Palestinian rejectionism may be unreasonable, is it unreasonable to expect people to behave that way when they are so badly treated? Are Palestinians the only people to behave unreasonably when they are treated so unjustly? These are people not AI bots. And bad governance is typical in such circumstances. Look at the corruption that plagues government that have have succeeded in casting off colonial powers in the 20th century. Maybe it's got something to do with the kind of people who gain access to power in such turbulent conditions?
  14. Oh, that's what it was? A strategic move by the Palestinian population to reap the rewards? I guess Palestinian civilians are different from other civilians who flee war zones. Not just that, but there's plenty of evidence that Israelis threatened Palestinians to leave. In 1985 a document was released that was created by the Israeli Defense Intelligence services in 1948 that listed the reasons why Palestinian civilians fled Israel during the 1948 war https://books.google.co.th/books?id=0nUqCwLOW-sC&pg=PA194&lpg=PA194&dq="The+Emigration+of+the+Arabs+of+Palestine+in+the+Period+1/12/1947+–+1/6/1948"&source=bl&ots=DT2jM-22kh&sig=ACfU3U1CF-HOWb8KzIxGJjSjvdVlWGG5BA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjal8HR_-eBAxW4bmwGHSd1DbcQ6AF6BAgIEAM#v=onepage&q="The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine in the Period 1%2F12%2F1947 – 1%2F6%2F1948"&f=false I don't think it's insignificant to note that Israel subsequently reclassified these documents as secret and historians no longer have access to them. https://www.972mag.com/classified-politicizing-the-nakba-in-israels-state-archives/
  15. Here once again is the quote from Benny Morris, the Israeli historian about how Palestinians were treated before the first Intifada https://archive.org/details/righteousvictims00morr_0/page/340/mode/2up And that period was relatively benign compared to more recent times. It's funny that people who complain about the tyranny of the EU somehow expect Palestinians to find tolerable they way they are treated.
  16. As I pointed out, before the intifada they were being treated very badly. What reason do they have to believe that reasonable behavior will get them anywhere? What government could act in a way that counters the sentiments of its people?
  17. Had the Israelis followed international law in the first place, there would be no isolated Gaza.
  18. Funny how human caused climate change denialists call the overwhelming majority of climatologists and those who accept the results of their research alarmists, but call "human made climate change" a dictatorship. Hysterical much?
  19. It's truly bizarre the double standards that Trump supporters adopt. Unemployment has never been below 4% for such a long stretch since 1969. The same people who credit Trump with the low unemployment rate, would deny that credit to Biden. And a significant difference being that the world economy was in much better shape when Trump was President than it is now.
  20. For instance, those claiming that Biden building a wall in certain specific locales is the same as Trump's plan to build a wall 1945 miles long.
  21. Thanks for the counterfactual argument. Basically, your claim is that if the Palestinians had behaved better, or the Palestinian government had been better run, then the Israelis would have been less repressive and a happier outcome would have been achieved. What about an alternative counterfactual argument? That if the Palestinians had remained acquiescent, their position today would be even worse? Or that if the Palestinian government had been acquiescent, given the economic and social conditions imposed by the Israelis would have led their own people to revolt against them? This from the historian Benny Morris concerning the situation before the first intifada. https://archive.org/details/righteousvictims00morr_0/page/340/mode/2up Or how about this, if the Israelis had from the start treated the Palestinians in a way that promoted their economic and social welfare, then good governance would have been possible? I don't claim to know the answer to these counterfactual propositions. But at least I acknowledge the ones I advance as such. What we do know from modern history, is that ethnicity and nationalism began to play a far stronger role in the 20th century than they had previously. And with enormously improved communications, this trend has escalated sharply. Given that, does it seem likely that an agreement acceptable to the Palestinian populace and the Israelis could have been reached?
  22. Well, I'm sure it's all old hat to you.. But it's apparent that lots of the members posting here don't seem to have a clue about the role that the Israelis have played in stoking the hatred that leads to this violence. They just call it terrorism. And I, for one, didn't know about all the incidents chronicled in that article.
  23. Here's a rather interesting article that addresses some of the factors that have led to this latest conflict This Gaza war didn’t come out of nowhere https://www.vox.com/2023/10/7/23907912/israel-palestine-conflict-history-explained-gaza-hamas It could been seen as running counter to the narrative the mostly implicates Iran. Still, it's possible for there to be more than one reason for the current conflict. A case of parallel interests coinciding.
  24. We also know that CO2 is lowering the Ph of the oceans. Which is going to have unhappy consequences for the huge number of organisms that depending on building shells. These range from microscopic foraminifera to mollusks and also to coral reefs which are the incubators and nurseries of a huge variety of animals. https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-coasts/ocean-acidification#:~:text=Because of human-driven increased,the ocean becomes more acidic. Also, as far as the foods which currentlly sustain most of humankind, namely grains, the effects of CO2 are not all beneficial. Increased Levels of CO2 Are Proving to Be Too Much of a Good Thing For Plants https://www.sciencealert.com/increased-levels-of-co2-are-proving-to-be-too-much-of-a-good-thing-for-plants
  25. Really? As Zeke Hausfather study shows, most early models from the 60's and 70's re the effect of fossil fuels were astonishingly accurate. And this in an era when computing power was primitive compared to the resources available now. It does become progressively more difficult the more local the predictions become. Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections Climate models provide an important way to understand future changes in the Earth's climate. In this paper we undertake a thorough evaluation of the performance of various climate models published between the early 1970s and the late 2000s. Specifically, we look at how well models project global warming in the years after they were published by comparing them to observed temperature changes. Model projections rely on two things to accurately match observations: accurate modeling of climate physics and accurate assumptions around future emissions of CO2 and other factors affecting the climate. The best physics-based model will still be inaccurate if it is driven by future changes in emissions that differ from reality. To account for this, we look at how the relationship between temperature and atmospheric CO2 (and other climate drivers) differs between models and observations. We find that climate models published over the past five decades were generally quite accurate in predicting global warming in the years after publication, particularly when accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric CO2 and other climate drivers. This research should help resolve public confusion around the performance of past climate modeling efforts and increases our confidence that models are accurately projecting global warming. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085378
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