“The Ann Arbor News reports Orange Taylor has been found guilty on all counts…”
http://www.woodtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=8128005
http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/04/taylor_guilty.html
“He was charged in the December 2006 death of 22-year-old Laura Dickinson of Hastings. He faces a mandatory term of life in prison when sentenced May 7.”
It is done. Some closure.
Whenever I begin to say the term “saving the…” the first thing that comes to mind is “saving the planet,” or some other such environmentalist phrase (”save the whales,” &c.). But there is also a new phrase which is gaining popularity, “saving the internet.”
Net neutrality is a new hot topic on the internet. A “neutral internet” is one that “is free of restrictions on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, on the modes of communication allowed, which does not restrict content, sites or platforms, and where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.” This is how the internet has been run. But there are several lobbyists who would like to change this, and restrict our internet usage.
Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, has stated, “The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. A lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive.”
Though, interestingly, the internet has thrived quite well, at least over the past eleven years I’ve been on it. Sure there was the “dot-com bubble burst” back around seven years ago, but even since then the internet has been doing quite well.
There are already some instances of anti-network-neutrality showing up, like in the case of Verizon, which blocks port 80, so you have to upgrade their services just to run the simplest of websites.
The internet should stay neutral, open, and “free.” We can’t live in a society where everything we touch is monitored or restricted. Net neutrality = freedom.
A great video of Sen. Ted Kennedy supporting net neutrality:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UlCXXZTTh8
Barack Obama stating that he supports net neutrality:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd8qY6myrrE
A good website to check out:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/
This topic has come up recently for me because of a person’s away message on AIM (not entirely sure why I even have that person on my list still, as they’ve proven no interest in speaking to their old friends). The away message was as follows:
I’m so glad global warming is real, what with all these below average temps and all… oh wait…
I’ve seen something to the effect of that many times. People seem to actually believe that global warming is not real simply because they don’t notice it. Another type of statement which bothers me goes something along the lines of:
It’s warmer this summer than last. Yay for global warming!
Both of these statements shows a true ignorance (I’d stop there, but I’ll be nice) of global warming. These are the types of people who assume too much, and learn too little.
Global warming “is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s near-surface air and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation.” It is a very slow and gradual increase in temperatures across Earth over a very long period of time (a geologically short period a time for Earth). It is not the sudden warming of the Earth to the point where you can easily tell the effects of it. Temperatures have always varied from year to year, regardless of global warming. Just simply reading the top part of the Wikipedia page should suffice in snuffing the aforementioned ignorant statements. In fact, I’ll just copy and paste that section of Wikipedia, so as to not waste more of my own time on the ignorance of others:
The global average air temperature near the Earth’s surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the hundred years ending in 2005. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” via the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least thirty scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC, the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions.
Climate model projections summarized by the IPCC indicate that average global surface temperature will likely rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C (2.0 to 11.5 °F) during the twenty-first century. The range of values results from the use of differing scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions as well as models with differing climate sensitivity. Although most studies focus on the period up to 2100, warming and sea level rise are expected to continue for more than a thousand years even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilized. The delay in reaching equilibrium is a result of the large heat capacity of the oceans.
Increasing global temperature will cause sea level to rise, and is expected to increase the intensity of extreme weather events and to change the amount and pattern of precipitation. Other effects of global warming include changes in agricultural yields, trade routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors.
Remaining scientific uncertainties include the amount of warming expected in the future, and how warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe. Most national governments have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but there is ongoing political and public debate worldwide regarding what, if any, action should be taken to reduce or reverse future warming or to adapt to its expected consequences.
To think, simply because it is warmer one summer than it may have been in the previous year or in recent years past, that global warming is the culprit of the sudden increased temperatures, is a blatant misunderstanding of global warming. And to think, simply because it is colder this winter than it may have been in the previous year or in recent years past, that global warming must not exist, is also a blatant misunderstanding of global warming.
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Edit:
I was also “shown” this image as an apparent downplay of the existence of global warming:
Note: I was only shown this graph, with no other data to go with it, and nothing actually explaining what it was. It was almost as if they found a fancy picture on a website that may have claimed that it had to do with something that it actually had nothing to do with. And then they took the graph believing (or hoping) it was somehow showing that there was a lack of a trend in global warming and simply linked just the image. I had to look it up.
The image above is the TNI Index of El Niño, which is a “global coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon,” and is a “global and natural part of the Earth’s climate.”
What is TNI?
“To characterize the nature of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in different regions of the Pacific have been used. We suggest that an optimal characterization of both the distinct character and the evolution of each El Niño or La Niña event requires at least two indices: (i) SST anomalies in the N3.4 region (referred to as N3.4), and (ii) a new index we call the Trans-Niño Index ( TNI ), which is given by the difference in normalized anomalies of SST between Niño 1+2 and Niño 4 regions. “
It currently is not known whether it has a direct relation to global warming. What is being studied is whether it increases in intensity or frequency as a result of global warming.
“A few years ago, attribution of recent changes (if any) in ENSO or predictions of future changes were very weak. More recent results tend to suggest that the projected tropical warming may follow a somewhat El Niño-like spatial pattern, without necessarily altering the variability about this pattern, while the ENSO cycle may be minimally shortened.”
The page in which that image comes from:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/catalog/climind/TNI_N34/
Global warming is indeed a fact, a fact that will occur over many centuries and one where we will most likely never directly notice most of the severe changes taking effect. From that very same website where that image is from, speaking of El Niño, it states:
“The reasons why the change in evolution with the 1976/77 climate shift occurred are quite uncertain but appear to relate to changes in the thermocline (Guilderson and Schrag 1998) which could be linked to climate change and global warming.”
They even state that it could, in fact, be related to global warming! The very same website in which that graph comes from!
After all, it wouldn’t be the first global warming/cooling for the Earth.
I also found this interesting PDF:
http://royalsociety.org/downloaddoc.asp?id=1630
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Some people will also use the “global cooling” argument when debating global warming. Meaning, they will throw around the 1970’s popular global cooling theory, which did not gain the significant scientific support that today’s global warming has gained (it was more of a media thing). It seems it wasn’t a significant enough of an issue for my parents to even remember, and they obviously grew up through the 70s. Technology and science (especially climate science) has also improved greatly since the 70s.
If you wish to debate something, you’d do better to debate the actual cause of global warming, its future effects on the world (also see this), and what to do (if anything) about it.
“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.”
-Isaac Asimov
Sources:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
2. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/catalog/climind/TNI_N34/
3. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/jclim2001b/ENflavorsr.html
Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.
— Edward Sapir, 1921
