Sent to me by a friend, the World Clock is a sober reminder of the immensity of the reality of our existence on this tiny little planet. Go ahead and click the “Now” button to see these figures zero themselves out and begin counting from the current moment. If you’re like me you will be simply gobsmacked by the rate of births. Even realizing that these are merely statistical expressions (in real life you’d see periodic pauses and the occcasional great leap in the numbers) .
Of special note I’d like to highlight the deaths due to war and how disproportionately small this number is relative to a great many of the other, less popularly reported causes of death. Firearms aren’t listed but are subsumed by other categories and are far less common than the glaring media reports would lead one to believe, they are merely spectacular due to their infrequency and violence.
Traffic accidents, meanwhile, one of the most preventable causes of death (proper education, proper testing and then proper review every few years) gets a pass with a death rate (ignoring what must surely be a spectacular toll in injuries) that eclipses war, suicides, drownings, poisoning, falls or any non-disease.
This emphasizes what is surely one of the greatest ills of the American or any other government today, ignoring the practical, logical and mundane for the popular and the exciting. We can’t get our politicians to sponser and produce legislation that will simply be practical, they must forever be trying to woo us with our emotions and with whatever is simplest in order to keep their incumbencies secure.
The CO2 emmisions are interesting, but lack the global context of consumption (by plants) and destruction of CO2 by natural processes to help give a perspective – it’s a big planet relative to our conception. More relevant might be the % increase in CO2. The numbers may not be as exciting, but it would be consistent with the Earth’s temperature displayed which gives a much more useful value.
Kind of interesting.
Particularly the Earth Temperature line caught my eye.
Now I tend to see things differently than most people do. I’m pretty sure this was not the intent of the web page designers, but this just drove home graphically, just how ridicules this global warming craze has become.
We (in IT) hear a lot about 5-9’s of up-time, which is nearly impossible to achieve, and this page is showing the earth warming at the 10th decimal place.
14.6124298846 — Actual temperature cut-n-pasted
00.1234567890 — digits after decimal point
Now I know that the ‘fine print’ of the web page explains this is an extrapolation from the 1’C every 25 years, but that got me thinking, how does one quantify the degree of precision required to make this statement?
My first though was the simple fraction.
1 degree out of 14 = 0.0714 which I then realized is pretty meaningless, since the exact same thought process leads to 1 degree out of 287 degrees Kalvin = 0.0034
Therefore, how does one quantify the level of accuracy that the temperature measurements need to be to make such a claim as global warming.
Footnote– can you really believe that 50 years ago we were recording temperatures around the world any where near this level?
I just happened to come accross this story tonight. If they have the percision required to make the predictions that they clearly have made, how did the ‘warm monger-ers’ miss this error:
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/08/17/tech-nasatemp070817.html?ref=rss
Hmmm.. I don’t know. I know *I* certainly don’t have a great amount of faith in the accuracy of data beyond 100 years ago. But I’m assuming that temperatures taken with equipment from the pre-electronic era were grossly accurate enough such that annual trends (average daily temperatures) could be reliably collected and collated to yield whatever trend is being claimed.
I’m not sure I understand why Kelvin or Centigrade makes a difference? The claim is that the temperature is increasing by 1 degree every 25 years, that would be the same regardless of whether the scale was Kelvin or Centigrade. The starting point being the only difference between the two and the 1 degree figure being a relative difference over time.