It doesn’t matter if the burning of fossil fuels causes climate change or not

Or, more politely: Climate change, and why we shouldn’t worry so much about what causes it and spend our efforts finding alternatives to fossil fuels instead.

Is the climate changing?

The first step when having a climate change discussion is, of course, to determine if the climate is changing or not.

According to NASA (see their Climate Webb for details) the following signs exist that something is indeed happening to our climate:

  • The global sea level rose twice as much during the last decade, as it did during the last century.
  • The Earth has warmed since 1880, most of the warming occurring in the last 35 years, with record temperatures after 2001. At the same time, the oceans have warmed since 1969.
  • Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic regions are losing their ice sheets and glaciers worldwide is retreating. The amount of spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere has decreased the past five decades, and the snow is melting earlier.
  • The weather is getting more extreme with increasing number of high-temperature events.

The Climate Reality Project supplies diagrams for most of the above claims and adds that the humidity is also increasing, and water vapor in the air contributes to the greenhouse effect.

The U.S. Geological Survey lists the following additional signs the climate is changing:

  • Droughts are becoming longer and more extreme around the world.
  • Tropical storms are becoming more severe due to warmer ocean water temperatures.
  • Permafrost is melting, releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

If you want to find a similar list of reasons the climate is not changing… I can’t seem to help you. That information does not seem to exist.

However, the big discussion isn’t so much if the climate is changing or not, but if it is caused by human activity or not.

Did humans cause the climate change?

The climate could be changing due to human activity or, it could simply be a natural variation in temperature slated to coincide with the industrial revolution and our increasing consumption of fossil fuels and rising levels of CO2.

If you need a graphical illustration of how extreme and unusual the change in temperature the last 35 years are, check out xkcd’s average temperature timeline.

A meta-study shows that 97% of all climate scientists agree that humans are causing climate change in one way or another.

The coincidences are a bit too much to just dismiss, but if you are the kind of person that likes to dismiss anything that doesn’t fit with your predefined world view (this psychological deficit is called confirmation bias) I have a shocking new question for you (and everyone else, I am sure):

Does it matter what causes climate change?

People who want to feel they are in control will probably say: of course it does! If the climate change is caused by humans, we might be able to stop it.

The same goes for the oil/fossil fuel lobby. They also feel it is very important to prove that humans do not cause climate change, that the burning of fossil fuels and the increasing CO2 levels have not been proven to cause climate change.

However, one factor alone shows that regardless of what or who caused the climate change, the path forward can only be one.

Fossil fuels, whose future are so furiously defended by the oil lobby, aren’t an endless resource.

How many years of fossil fuel consumption do we have left?

Fossil fuels were created a very long time ago (some 150-300 million years) and it will take a very long time for vegetation and animals that die today to become fossil fuel.

In all practical aspects what’s in the ground is all there is. The question is when, not if, the fossil fuel will run out.

Some estimates suggest that our currently known oil deposits will, given that our oil consumption stays the same, be gone by 2052. At that point in time, it’s reasonable to assume we’ll use gas and coal to fill in the gaps left by the depleted oil. But gas will only last another 8 years and coal will be depleted by 2088. (Source: ecotricity.co.uk).

All this assumes the consumption will stay at the level it is today. Which, of course, is wrong. With an increasing population, the demands will most likely go up, rather than stay still or go down.

Regardless of how effective we become at extracting fossil fuels from the ground or burning it in our cars and industries, it will run out.

The interesting aspect is that even if everybody became environment aware today and all old farts in the oil lobby keeled over and died, we wouldn’t be willing or able to change over to renewable energy much faster than the absolute deadline dictated by the diminishing fossil fuel reserves.

Can we replace fossil fuels in less than a century?

If the burning of fossil fuels causes climate change or not, we burn them, and they, as a limited resource is running out. It may take 50 years, with a lot of luck a 100, most likely somewhere closer to the former than the latter.

What happens when the fossil fuel runs out?

I think a climate change activist’s worst nightmare scenario will be bleak in comparison to what nations and individuals will do if our world runs out of power.

It doesn’t matter if fossil fuel causes climate change or not. They have to be replaced and the research for making this replacement must be fully funded right now today!

Update

Here’s a few sources that claims we wont be able to go over to renewable energy by 2050. Of course, that doesn’t mean the apocalypse will come… only that there will be an increase in nuclear power plants (and that is likely an apocalypse pushed into the far future, but who cares about those losers, right?)


Header image: By LucAleria (Template:Turning the tide on climate change) [GFDL or CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons (image has been edited)

Is The Swedish Government Covering Up Immigrant/Islamic Crime?

The claim that the Swedish government is covering up immigrant crimes or Islamic crimes has appeared now and again in foreign media, from Fox News commentary on Ami Horowitz documentary to “comedians” like Pat Condell.

Pat Condell, in his video “Bye, Bye Sweden” states that the Swedish government covers up Islamic crimes, because there are no stats on the religious affiliation of criminals, and American commentators are baffled to learn that there are also no documentation of ethnicity, or as they like to call it, race, in crime reports or crime statistics.

Side note: Pat Condell, claims that Sweden is the “rape capital of Europe.” He may be right in the sense that Swedish women are much more likely to report sexual assaults, and the definition of rape is so wide it might even classify Donald Trump as a rapist! The Local answers the question of if Sweden is the “rape capital” of Europe, or not.

You may already have understood why we don’t register religious affiliation or ethnicity in Swedish crime statistics, but if not, here’s a quick fresher on basic democratic rights:

Sweden has freedom of religion. This means that registering a person’s religious affiliation can only serve one purpose: infringing on that freedom in some way.

Swedish police should not care if a person is a Jew, Christian or Moslem. They should book the person, investigate them and if a crime can be proven, that person should face the Swedish court, which also should not care if the person is this or that religion.

The question of ethnicity is a bit more infested…

Slavery was formally abolished in Sweden in 1335, although there have been periods of slavery after that date. This means we don’t have the same kind of ethnicity based discussions some countries still have. We don’t think of people as this or that “race”. In other places where slavery is more recent, a neglect to keep ethnicity at the center of discussions of discrimination might be seen as a sign of discrimination in itself.

Even if Sweden have a substantial immigrant population, these people come from all over the world, from Chile and Turkey in the 70ies, to the former Yugoslavia in the 90ies, to Syrians, Afghans, and Sudanese people nowadays. Just to mention the major immigrant populations.

Further taking into consideration that, with family immigration, there is a spread in age, and that a single country can never be homogenous so a few people from all over that country will say very little about the population in said country. The statistical foundation simply becomes shoddy at best.

Having a representative sample when performing statistics are fundamental if any conclusions or other extrapolations from said statistics is ever going to be meaningful or significant.

Using an insufficient number of individuals to represent a whole nation is probably the very definition of insular bigotry and racism.

So we don’t do it.

Having a government that registers it’s citizens’ ethnicity or religious affiliation is a much, much larger problem than not having access to substandard statistics.

After all, justice is supposed to be blind. It goes for ethnicity and religious beliefs just as much as anything else.


Header image based on original works by Stux and Clker-Free-Vector-Images courtesy of Pixabay and CC0 Public Domain licensing.

This Previous Weekend, the Swedish Trumpathon

Last Friday the following aired on Fox News (here’s a bit of a fact check on the “increase” of rape and violence in Sweden… and here is another produced in Sweden):

And then, in his Saturday speech, Donald Trump reiterated with the, now infamous words: “You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?”

On Sunday, John Oliver offered some theories on how a segment from Fox News made a reappearance in Trump’s speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh5DAOeqkMU

Then on Monday, this happens in Rinkeby, a suburb of Stockholm:

Riots! Burning cars and stone throwing.

Was Donald Trump right?!

Did Islamic immigrants riot… just because… Trump? Or was it right-wing extremists that arranged the riots to make sure Trump was right? Or… was it none of the above?

Well, of course: No, no and we don’t actually know, but applying Occam’s Razor… ah never mind!

If you think about it, the first alternative would suggest Islamic immigrants would be so dumb, putting a leash on them and tying it to a tree would solve all problems. (OK, all you KKK-types: put the leashes down! Now!)

The second theory would, on the other hand, suggest that all conspiracy theories you’ve ever heard of are right and, argh we’ve all been body snatched by aliens (from outer space!) — OK. Now I’m exaggerating… a bit.

This is an ongoing police investigation. All we know as of now are that the police arrested (or attempted to arrest) someone for drug-related crimes, and some other people rioted.

The Swedish police are not likely to tweet and Instagram from the investigation room… the one with all the pictures on the wall — you know, like on TV? I know they have those! — will they? So, we don’t know. As of now.

But a competent guess would be, alternative 3…

I think the following report summarizes what actually happened in Rinkeby on Monday quite nicely (not to mention debunking some of the “facts” presented in the first segment on Fox News):

 

Facerape – No you weren’t fucking raped!

This week’s unrecommended word: Facerape

Facerape: The act of abusing someone’s Facebook account on a computer where they have left themselves logged in. (Urban dictionary).

So, what’s so wrong with this expression then? (I am sure someone “just has to ask.”)

Well, where I come from (Sweden) the combination of the words “Facebook” and “rape” took on a pretty different meaning just a couple of weeks ago when three morons allegedly live-streamed a rape on Facebook.

Or perhaps that is the meaning the expression “Facerape” should have?

And seriously, rape?

Whoever coined the expression “Facerape” either speaks English as a second language and doesn’t fully understand the meaning of the word “rape” or they haven’t even been near a discussion of rape, not to mention knows someone who has been a victim of rape, or been a rape victim themselves, or been anywhere near any form of sex involving more than one person at all… one might guess.

And of course the same goes for those who uses the expression.

The justice systems in most countries are already making good headway on watering down the meaning of the term rape.

They don’t need your help.

If someone breaks into your Facebook account, changes a bunch of things, sends messages in your name, and/or changes your relationship status you’ve been exposed to something unpleasant, abusive, fucked up, sure, but for fuck’s sake, you haven’t been raped!

Being “hacked” is not the same as being raped.

Besides, if we were to continue this tradition of insane overcharging of meanings… what about:

  • House rape – breaking and entering
  • Car rape – someone nabbed your car stereo
  • Pocket rape (ewww) – being pick pocketed
  • Mind rape – copyright infringement (although, I can see the record companies wield that one…)
  • Thread rape – when someone asks about the pros and cons of instant facelift serums in your “all my disks crashed and the computer is burning! help!”-forum discussion

No. A rape is a rape is a rape. Nothing can be used as a comparison.

Besides. I’m pretty sure no one would give a shit if you changed your Facebook settings back to what they were before you were “Faceraped.” And if they tried to sue you, it wouldn’t even be legal in fucking Arkansas!

The Fucking Goat Problem

Now, a trauma from my school years.

No, it doesn’t involve goats, and it doesn’t involve fucking! I’m no fucking hillbilly! No goat fucking!

However, the question at hand involves goats and farmers and circular pastures and shit all…

Ok, moving on.

The Fucking Goat Problem

How do you make young people feel like idiots?

You throw the fucking Goat Problem at them. (No, not the Goat Fucking Problem, that’s another problem involving a couple of other farmers… and possibly a Dutch racist or two…)

This problem can be summarized as:

Two farmers share a circular pasture. One farmer can tie a goat at one of the poles in the fence around the pasture to allow his goat to graze it.

How long should the rope be to allow the goat to graze only half the area of the pasture?

You might think, easy peasy! It’s a circle and a radius and shit. I know this.

Well, you’d be wrong. Because it’s a circle bisected by another circle and wee hoo… the solution to this ought to shut you up for about half of the rest of your life.

This one calculates the area. Now all you have to do is find r or R or d or what-fucking-ever. Yeah, right.

Reality Check

Ok. Time for a reality check.

Circular pasture? Really?

Obviously, this is either some form of insult to farmers or someone has been in a place where they don’t know how to set up pastures!

I think the moron that came up with the question should be asked to calculate the area between the circular pastures… given that the total land containing pastures in the village where the farmers live is shaped like an upside down Prince symbol! (Yeah, that totally looks like a dick with a really scary piercing and funky pubes…)

Next.

So, one farmer gets to let his goat graze the pasture until it has eaten all the grass and only then can the other farmer let his goat graze the rest?

Or are we suggesting the other goat should be tied with a rope that contracts and expands to keep it off the area the first goat can graze? (I think that’s how the west deals with the third world, right?)

I’m not a country bumpkin, by any means, but even I know a goat might take weeks to graze a whole pasture, maybe even the whole summer.

But both goats have to eat at the same time or the other fucking goat will be dead long before the first one is done! 

Fucking goat killing!

We don’t do that… part from when we totally do that to eat the fucker… or maybe… goat cheese? Possibly… Goat milk? Yech! Goat pie? Fuck no!

Ok. We don’t kill goats!

Maybe we should just put a fence in the middle of the pasture? Or?

Sorry. I know. That would totally remove all the brain torture qualities of the question.

Real Goat Farmers

Here’s what a real goat farmer would do once he’s spent all his money building a worthless circular pasture so he can’t afford a fence along the middle:

Tie each goat at opposite ends of the pasture with ropes that makes it possible for the goats to graze all the way to the middle of the pasture.

Then he would pray the fucking goat doesn’t bite off the rope… maybe a chain instead?

When the grass has been grazed, move the ropes 90 degrees along the fence in the same direction, placing the goats once again at the opposite side of one another, and allow them to graze the rest of the pasture.

No, I’m not going to draw you a fucking picture!

And besides. Goat farmer? I thought they were goat herders! But, sure, that’s the least surreal thing about the whole question.

Reality check, part 2

Did you really buy all that crap about ropes/chains and moving around and shit?

Do you want to know what two really real goat farmers/herders would do if they, by some bizarre circumstance ended up with a circular pasture that had to be shared by two goats?

Can you guess?

Really? No?

They would put the two fucking goats in the fucking pasture and let them have at it.

The only reason to keep them apart is if they were of opposite sex and would mate otherwise. Or perhaps if they fight too much.

But as I said. Goat cheese. Ok. Goat pie, not so much. So they both have to be females. And I am pretty sure females wouldn’t fight much.

So, no ropes, no chains, no fences, two goats and a fucking circular pasture.

And you wonder why people hate math?

Will mankind die out or are we in a computer simulation?

The Fermi Paradox is, in essence an assumption (via for instance the Drake Equation) that, because our galaxy contains a large number of stars like our sun that are billions of years older than our sun, and that some of those stars have earth-like planets, and that those planets, in turn, might give rise to intelligent life, then the galaxy should, by now be overrun by extraterrestrial intelligent life.

One possible solution to the Fermi Paradox, as stated by Elon Musk in the following video would be that we’re living in a computer simulation:

In this clip, Elon Musk asks if he’s missed something.

Well, the argument (as can be heard in the video) goes that given enough time, we would also be able to create games indistinguishable from reality. 

It seems logical, except for a few things.

We’re talking about time as if the universe has been existing for a very long time.

Compared to the time we’re given, that’s right, however, there are stars today, that will exist for a 100 billion years. That’s more than 7 times the time the universe has existed so far. This could indicate that we’re in fact in the infancy of the universe.

What would that suggest?

Perhaps we’re among the first intelligent beings to exist in the universe? Or perhaps those that exist hasn’t reached the star travel potential yet?

On the other hand, how long does a civilization need to start travel among the stars? If it can be done, can it be done in a million years? If so we’ve had about 13 000 × a million years of time so far.

Perhaps we’re young among civilizations, but then we have to question some of our basic assumptions about how to contact extraterrestrial intelligent life.  Who says they’re using radio signals? Perhaps radio signals are as archaic a communication medium to them as smoke signals or cave paintings are to modern man?

Regardless, I think it’s a bit early in the day to throw in the towel and assume the Fermi Paradox must be answered with a computer simulation or we’ll all be doomed.

I feel a quote coming on, this one from Anteaus of the Nox in Stargate SG-1:

“Maybe one day you will learn, that your way is not the only way.”


Header image: used and modified under Creative Commons license thanks to Tony Werman

New way to perform online commerce

Tidbit

In November 2013, Jeremy Rubin, a 19 year old MIT student, developed a JavaScript program called Tidbit. This program was a concept/pilot, but the idea behind it was to use JavaScript to mine for Bitcoins.

It was thought as a replacement for advertisements. Instead of being overwhelmed by ads, a user visiting a site using this script would lend part of their processor cycles to mine for Bitcoins while surfing on the site.

In the case of Tidbit, the saga came to an abrupt end when in December that same year the New Jersey Attorney General’s office issued a subpoena to Rubin and Tidbit. All said and done, the Tidbit project was canceled. You can read more about it here.

The user must be in control

Now, I can understand what the Attorney General was up to. I wouldn’t like malicious JavaScript code to bog down my already stumbling computer, however, the basic idea of replacing ads with Bitcoin mining is intriguing. If it can be done in a way that puts the user in control.

This control could be by using HTML5 instead, putting the browser in control of who gets to mine Bitcoins and how many at the same time – in order to prevent every site from mining at the same time and making the computer deadly slow.

A user could potentially say no to mining altogether and get served ads instead.

The important thing would be, that there was a setting for this in the browser, and using JavaScript not utilizing this setting and/or any API would be illegal and classified just the same as any other malicious code.

A new way to perform online commerce…

In fact. Why stop at replacing ads with this kind of technology? In essence, it could be used to pay for online content of any kind. Even make purchases (however at that point we’re blurring the line between mining for bitcoins and having ones own bitcoin wallet).

…and perhaps a new way to decrease the power usage of bitcoin?

According to motherboard.vice.com the usage of 1 bitcoin could rake up as much as the whole power consumption for 1.5 American households, so decentralizing the mining might be one way to solve that problem.

However, others argue that the whole technical architecture of bitcoin won’t be able to handle such amounts of transactions, that in fact, the whole currency is doomed.

The same HTML5 API should, however, be able to do other decentralized work such as analyzing SETI data, process data for cancer research or any other distributed computing project.

The crucial question is, of course, if a browser based distributed computing platform could outperform other solutions on the capacity and electricity consumption scales.


Header image: used and modified under Creative Commons license thanks to BTCKeychain

The Whole World In Your Hands

Whenever you shampoo your hair, you’ve got the whole world in your hands…

I was thinking about a TV-show where a character was shaving and singing “He’s got the whole world in his hands.”

Apparently, he was also putting on the aftershave belonging to his girlfriend’s ex-husband.

I was thinking about this while in the shower and it hit me. Given his cocky behavior, the “he” in his song might have referred to he, himself.

I.e. “I’ve got the whole world in my hands…”

At that moment I was shampooing my hair and I realized that, indeed, I did have the whole world in my hands. At least as far as to the concept of you all being in my world. (Woahahaha).

Of course, when you think about the world, we’re all in your world. However, of course, I’m always in my world because I’m special! 😀

Changes!

I have decided to perform some changes. In effect this means moving all the short snippets to their own site, keeping the longer pieces (whenever that happens) on this site.

I will keep it political, technical, humoristic, but not so short and “tweet”-like.

I guess the logical move would be to move those short snippets to twitter, but I am not. Instead, I’m moving them over to one of my oldest sites: hoakz.com. Check it out.

This also means I may not be able to put anything on this site on a weekly basis, but hey! Quality counts too!

Hope you like it!

Catastrophe Alarm the Samsung Way

So, I’m on the phone and it starts vibrating worse than ever, and I’m like: WTF? No indications or “popups” or whatever.

Then when I’m done talking the phone vibrates again, this time accompanied by the patented “worst ringtone ever”:

This time when I check the phone it turns out the Samsung Zone Alarm is warning about “ice and snow” in Stockholm.

That’s great to know, but seriously… THAT RINGTONE?

I mean imagine, people in floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and storms hearing THAT RINGTONE? Can you sue for psychological abuse?

Ok. Snow storms in Sweden are OK if you keep off the roads and you don’t have the bad luck to get hit by something like “Gudrun,” that may, in fact, bring you off the power grid for a couple of weeks (if you live in the more rural parts of Sweden…)