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Taylor Varga (Worm/Luna Varga)

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FaerieKnight79 said:
I have a somewhat antagonistic relationship with mornings. I can be up during one, when i need to be. But generally speaking mornings are too bright and entirely too early. I'm much more comfortable going to bed as the sun is rising.
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I'm up. If you want bright eyed and bushy tailed, go catch a squirrel. (My tail isn't bushy until noon -- if then.)

mp3.1415player said:
Occam's Razor would suggest that the simplest, and therefore most plausible, explanation is that it's exactly what it looks like. This is obviously completely wrong, but it's also something that a lot of people would believe and I think even Taylor would have a hell of a time managing to convince everyone that it was all an accident to start with. Especially now, even if she wanted to, which she doesn't.
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I think that if she shifted to her other forms in front of a crowd and on camera, she would convince a lot of people.

Frogs321 said:
I worked with engineers that were on the job, facts, nothing but facts and data. Off the job, tin foil hats all the way. It was almost as if it were some form of over compensation. :confused:
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They're engineers. They're well educated and succeed in their careers by applying critical thinking. Maybe they're right and the rest of the world is wrong.

But hey, what do you BELIEVE?

Troy Guffey said:
The whole idea is ludicrous, the climate changes all the time, and it takes a heck of a lot more than 2degrees over 100years to submerge cities. Even if it did, it's not Day After Tomorrow fast, people can adapt. Current Beach front property might be worth a bit less, though.
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Seeing is believing. The Waterworld movie gave everyone a clear vision of a flooded planet. The fact that, even when there were no ice caps at all, we had dry land, is not going to convince someone who saw it on the silver screen.

They lost me with the whole "settled science" shtick. Even Einstein's theories are constantly being retested. There is no such thing as settled science.

Actually, they lost me long before that. Sure, the Earth is warming up right now. It has been ever since we came out of the mini ice age. We still aren't enjoying the balmy temperatures that they enjoyed in the middle ages, though.

And then, we have the former president and founder of Greenpeace giving a good talk on the subject: Former President of Greenpeace Scientifically Rips Climate Change to Shreds


But yeah, I like to laugh at a lot of the wilder conspiracy theories, like chemtrails, flat earth, and the whole "moon mission was staged" thing.

If you want to figure out if there is a conspiracy, one of the first thing to ask yourself is, "who benefits?"

History tells us that there have been many people who sought world domination -- Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin... the list goes on. The idea of an overarching 'Illuminati,' however, strains credibility a bit because Caeser-type people are not known to band together and come up with long term plans for world domination. After all, there can be only one™.

But when the President of the United States of America utters the term "New World Order," the whole idea gets some credibility.

So it's an interesting intellectual exercise to go through each of the conspiracy theories and ask yourself who benefits.

If I was privy to some overarching conspiracy or set of conspiracies, and I wanted to keep it hidden, I would invent a whole bunch of conspiracy theories and disseminate them. Some would be totally ridiculous, like the faked moon landing. Some would be intriguing but improbable, like the idea that we are using HAARP to control the weather. And some would make a lot of sense, but still be wrong.

The idea would be to introduce so much noise into the system that the real conspiracies would be hard to dig out. And, with the ridiculous ones, any theory is more likely to be ridiculed.

I had someone tell me that every time I use GPS, the government uses that to tell exactly where I am. I guess he doesn't know that GPS receivers are just that -- receivers.

On the other hand, Snowden let loose with the fact that our metadata is being kept.

So go get your copy of Tinfoil Hat Linux. Tinfoil Hat Linux - Wikipedia

Or Tails Linux: Tails - Privacy for anyone anywhere
 
mp3.1415player said:
Based on that, I have no doubt that the trend is warmer, and it's very definitely causing sea levels to rise at a rate that's unprecedented in human history. How much of it is something we can affect is subject to argument, of course, but the end results could quite rapidly be awkward.
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Considering past ocean levels (as indicated by the geologic record), it is unlikely the current set of climate changes will be setting new records in the next few million years. It is also unlikely to continue to involve continuing raising temperatures for most of the planet.

After all, all of human history has been in a warm period of an ongoing ice age. Currently major ocean currents distribute heat well enough so most of the planet is not frozen. One of the driving forces for these currents is the cooling and hypersalination of water from the Gulf Stream as it enters the Arctic Circle. If things continue to warm the way they are, then we will lose that switch over from warm surface current to cold bottom current, and the Gulf Stream will be lost. This will see temperatures rapidly drop in North America and Europe, massive increases in glaciation, and a new 100,000 year cold period will set in. Eventually, new temporary currents will form to re-warm the frozen areas leading to a new warm period.

Current predictions have the Ice Age end when most of Antarctica moves clear of the Antarctic Circle, and it's extensive ice cap begin to melt off. This will lead to widespread shallow seas and a re-connection of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in tropical regions, allowing large scale temperature exchange between the major bodies of water and providing the shallow seas that provide near ideal heat absorption and retention from sunlight.

So, in as little as 40-50 million years, there will no longer be any risk of those pesky glaciers showing up and ruining your lawn....
 
Ray Drouillard said:
Seeing is believing. The Waterworld movie gave everyone a clear vision of a flooded planet. The fact that, even when there were no ice caps at all, we had dry land, is not going to convince someone who saw it on the silver screen.

They lost me with the whole "settled science" shtick. Even Einstein's theories are constantly being retested. There is no such thing as settled science.

Actually, they lost me long before that. Sure, the Earth is warming up right now. It has been ever since we came out of the mini ice age. We still aren't enjoying the balmy temperatures that they enjoyed in the middle ages, though.

And then, we have the former president and founder of Greenpeace giving a good talk on the subject: Former President of Greenpeace Scientifically Rips Climate Change to Shreds
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This one is easy to test.

We wait.

Then, if it is happening, in n years (n is very variable depending on who you talk to) people start finding their basements are getting flooded more often. And their coastal cities. And their islands seem to be slowly disappearing. And... Etc.

If it's not happening, none of this occurs. And we proceed merrily burning all the fossil fuels we want, content in the knowledge that it was all a trick for some reason and we were smart enough not to fall for it! Hurrah! :)

Jacen1 said:
Considering past ocean levels (as indicated by the geologic record), it is unlikely the current set of climate changes will be setting new records in the next few million years. It is also unlikely to continue to involve continuing raising temperatures for most of the planet.
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Agreed, in historical terms a couple of feet of extra sea level, or a couple of degrees of heat here or there is nothing. Admittedly, with a couple of feet or so, a lot of island nations essentially cease to exist, cities like London and others on low lying coastal areas end up in a bad situation that will cost astronomical amounts to deal with, and depending on how fast it happens, may not be able to be dealt with, and the impact of storms on coastlines will be that much greater, but in the grand picture it's nothing. And a couple of degrees melting half the permafrost, or the methane clathrates on the continental shelves, well... It'll settle down again sooner or later ;)

Again, all we have to do is wait.

Jacen1 said:
So, in as little as 40-50 million years, there will no longer be any risk of those pesky glaciers showing up and ruining your lawn....
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Don't you hate it when that happens? You spend half a million years getting the landscape just right then some annoying bastard of a huge lump of ice scrapes it all away... :mad:

Now I must get back to doing what I'm supposed to being paid to do. Damn it, SV, why tempt me like this?
 
There is one thing you are overlooking about climate change here, the problem is not so much that the temperature changes or sea levels rise but that it is changing so rapidly. The historical changes in temperature you are referencing take place over hundreds or thousands of years allowing species like pine trees to migrate north or south without much problem. In this case however the changes are in the span of decades to a century, making it hard for the long lived species to make the same shift and putting stress on human infrastructure that relies on environmental conditions like permafrost of sea level. Just to emphasize the point, the issue with human caused global warming is not the warming itself or the knock on effects but the speed that it is happening at.
 
Global Warming/Climate Change happens to be within the bounds of my specialist subject (I am a qualified geologist). So.


1) CO2 causes warming of the planet. This is settled fact, and by "settled fact" I mean "proven both observationally and from first principles" - if it did not the world would be considerably colder.
2) Human activity is generating CO2 which is causing a rise in CO2 levels. This is also settled fact, because we have actual air bubbles preserved in ice cores to measure, plus direct measures from the last several decades.
Both of these first two points are rock-solid observationally and theoretically.
3) The sole remaining point of debate on climate change in the very broad strokes is what is called the sensitivity. This is a question of how much warming results from a given amount of CO2, over and above the amount of warming the CO2 itself directly causes (since we can determine the amount of warming the CO2 itself causes).

Sensitivity these days has a fair consensus that a doubling of CO2 results in an increase of about 3 degrees C - some estimates are higher, others lower.

But the chain of logic is simple and strong that CO2 emission causes climate change, and that humans are causing CO2 emission, therefore humans are causing climate change.

There is also a broad consensus that the effects of this would be negative. I have entire well-sourced books on the topic, but I don't think they'd really be in-topic for the thread.
Nevertheless, it is worth taking into consideration that the amount of CO2 we are releasing is geologically unprecedented in rapidity and to some extent in volume as well. The scary thing is that some geologists who study ancient mass extinctions have looked at the current CO2 situation and said "that's what caused just about every mass extinction apart from the dinosaur one, only faster". (If you want more details for this one, Under a Green Sky is a rather good - if scary - book to read about the understanding of mass extinctions.)

As to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for the planet? Well, aside from the (distinct possibility, it holds up to the best of my understanding) risk of a mass extinction, the planet probably won't care too much on a geological timescale. But it's generally considered to be a bad idea to do an irreversible major destructive test on something you are currently riding, especially when you have no backup.
 
Ray Drouillard said:
I think that if she shifted to her other forms in front of a crowd and on camera, she would convince a lot of people.
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True, but she has no interest in doing so. You would also get a lot of people saying it was all CGI, or a Master effect, or a PRT trick, or a Family trick, or bad lighting, or swamp gas, or Venus refracted through the upper atmosphere, or...

:D
 
mp3.1415player said:
True, but she has no interest in doing so. You would also get a lot of people saying it was all a Family trick
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"Yeah, good one Saurial!"
"No, really. I'm a teenage girl."
"Yeah, alright. We get it. So, how'd you pull it off?"
"Uh...no, I'm really actually just a shape changing teenage girl."
"If you don't want to tell us, just say so."
"...Maybe I shouldn't have spent the last few months trolling everyone all the time."
 
saphroneth said:
As to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for the planet? Well, aside from the (distinct possibility, it holds up to the best of my understanding) risk of a mass extinction, the planet probably won't care too much on a geological timescale. But it's generally considered to be a bad idea to do an irreversible major destructive test on something you are currently riding, especially when you have no backup.
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Bing bing bing- this is the big point. Even if climate change is something we can handle, it's one of a dozen possible extinction events that, while improbable on their own, look pretty scary when you look at the number and variety.

We don't need to focus on desperately trying to patch a ship that may or may not be sinking in an oceanful of reefs swimming with things that make sharks look friendly- we need another ship.

Preferably a whole armada, really.
 
Troy Guffey said:
There are an AWFUL LOT of those! The Obummer administration fell for it wholesale! They declared it was a worse threat than terrorism! You get savagely attacked if you point out their nonsense!

The whole idea is ludicrous, the climate changes all the time, and it takes a heck of a lot more than 2degrees over 100years to submerge cities. Even if it did, it's not Day After Tomorrow fast, people can adapt. Current Beach front property might be worth a bit less, though.
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This just shows you are completely ignorant. Just as an FYI, a 6C change is predicted to have the potential of causing near extinction level damage.
There are already island nations losing whole islands due to sealevels rising, and in case you didn't know it, the majority of the world populace lives on lowland.
2 degrees is plenty enough to drown a number of cities(or large parts of them) that are built close to sealevel. It's also going to make a BIG chunk of farmland useless.
You have no clue what the difference is between weather and climate.

Well DUH, anyone not considering climate change worse than terrorism has no sense of priorities or reality. Terrorists could start doing a 9/11 once a month and it would still be a drop in the ocean. Current level of terrorism? Decade with worst level of terrorism in the last century? Barely noticeable in comparison to what climate change may bring.

Also in case you missed it, funny thing about climate right now? IF the external factors were actually the more important ones, we SHOULD currently be in the middle of 3 cooler periods of various length(the sun' s primary 11 year period for one). Except we're NOT. Which is one reason why a lot of scientists are starting to freak out.
20 years ago, the HOPE was that we MIGHT just be able to keep the warming down to 1-2 degrees longterm. Noone is really expecting that any more.

You might also be interested to know that in many countries, local authorities have started spending time, effort and money on disasterproofing against expected future weather patterns. In many places, fervently so because they are already seeing things that are not normal.
 
I always thought that the research into global warming and climate change was a good thing. Even if we humans are only responsible for 1% of carbon emissions, if we can reduce 2% or more, we are that much closer to global terraforming and weather control. Am I the only one who wants to live on Mars?
 
Discussing divisive issues tends to cause hard feelings among people who are otherwise getting along and having a good time, and also makes things a bit unpleasant for bystanders. Nobody changes their minds and everyone gets upset. I want to talk about trolling lizards. And Danny scaring mobsters.
 
Inv1ctus6243 said:
I always thought that the research into global warming and climate change was a good thing. Even if we humans are only responsible for 1% of carbon emissions, if we can reduce 2% or more, we are that much closer to global terraforming and weather control. Am I the only one who wants to live on Mars?
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If the Moon's gravity maintains human health, short term becoming a Luna-jin (Loonie) looks attractive...

(Hint: dig the habitat deep enough to protect from CMEs.)
 
Inv1ctus6243 said:
I always thought that the research into global warming and climate change was a good thing. Even if we humans are only responsible for 1% of carbon emissions, if we can reduce 2% or more, we are that much closer to global terraforming and weather control. Am I the only one who wants to live on Mars?
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The problem is that these researches usually are financial black holes that don't produce practically applicable results, only perpetuating the process of research.

A road to nowhere may take forever.
 
QinetiQ said:
The problem is that these researches usually are financial black holes that don't produce practically applicable results, only perpetuating the process of research.

A road to nowhere may take forever.
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Admittedly all research paths are the same right now. Cheaper ways of producing and using graphene and carbon nanotubes. And those are black holes of money pits right now.
 
mp3.1415player said:
There is also the thing about how many people will absolutely refuse to believe things that they don't want to believe. Even if you can provide proof. Often especially if you can provide proof, because at that point it's obviously a trick.
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Besides, DNA evidence will support that Taylor is an alien, even if it's proven that there is only one of her that can only be in two places at once and that she shape shifts. Anyone that she's told the truth to that decides to speak up can be dismissed as simply having been lied to by Taylor. And even if there's only one alien about in evidence, there could be more where she came from, and the literary evidence suggests there are indeed others. Saurial probably ate the real Taylor and replaced her, explaining the drastic personality shift afterwards. Eating people doesn't exactly make you a popular figure though, but maybe if Taylor Prime was dying from the locker incident it could be looked over...
 
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