'Sinking' Pacific Nation Tuvalu Is Actually Getting Bigger (phys.org) 152
mi shares a report from Phys.Org: The Pacific nation of Tuvalu -- long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels -- is actually growing in size, new research shows. A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu's nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery. It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu's total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average. Co-author Paul Kench said the research, published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, challenged the assumption that low-lying island nations would be swamped as the sea rose. It found factors such as wave patterns and sediment dumped by storms could offset the erosion caused by rising water levels.
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... it is because the Earth is flat. Get with it, people.
What I don't get is how they change the bulb.
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An interesting prospect, but also an edge case (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: An interesting prospect, but also an edge case (Score:2, Informative)
Sea levels that have been rising at the same slow consistent rate since the end of the last ice age....
Re: An interesting prospect, but also an edge case (Score:5, Informative)
No they haven't. In the last couple of thousand years there's been a slight drop in sea levels. Until about 1900 that is when sea level rise has been consistent and accelerating. Here's an interesting article on SLR over the past several thousand years.
Sea level isn't level-Ocean siphoning, levered continents and the Holocene sea level highstand [skepticalscience.com]
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Skeptical science dot com? You might as well have posted from dailykos or Fox News for all those biased jerks are worth reading.
At least SkepticalScience references peer reviews scientific literature. If you dig into the scientific literature on sea level rise over the past 4 or 5000 years you find that sea level remained pretty steady and if anything dropped a bit during the Little Ice Age. Since 1900 sea level rise has gone from around 1 mm/year to 2 mm/year in the middle of the 20th Century and over 3 mm/year since around 1993. That looks like acceleration to me.
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Its a pop science, not pseudo-science site. Its accurate, but simplified, and its widely respected in the scientific community as a reliable and accurate public science site.
However. You want actual papers huh?
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/ [pik-potsdam.de]
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"Unless you can cite some real reason to discount the source"
Easy-peasy - it's all lies from the pit of Hell and God is still in charge
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Here's a reason. Take a pile of sand, put water around it, as the water level rise, so the sand pile subsides and look the sand is lower and more spread around. So take a sand island, with trees and stuff up to say 3m above high tide. Raise the water level and more and more of the land is washed into the sea at high tide. A low tide you might have a larger island but at high tide it is under water, not really all that useful. Raise the water level high enough and you might have quite a large sandbar that is
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Here in Sweden it's rather land which has lifted. Because the weight of all that ice matter.
Re: An interesting prospect, but also an edge case (Score:2)
"This" does not assume anything but a particular study. It's you who are presuming assumption.
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There could be inland areas below sea level.
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These atoll dwelling critters are a bunch of whining bowheads. They just need to put their villages up on stilts. Plenty of folks in South East Asia do that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Tourists love to stay in those waterworld resorts, so a foreign investor would probably bankroll it.
Additionally, they could just accept a super-container ship full of junk cars, and dump them on the atoll. Add a healthy tanker full of coral fertilizer and steroids from Monsanto, and the cars will be beautiful ree
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OTOH, at times in the past Atolls have grown when the sea rose (or the land subsided) because of increased coral growth. I have no idea, however, how rapidly that happened.
So someone ought to look for that. Probably, of course, far enough from the equator that the coral won't be experiencing bleaching events.
Re:An interesting prospect, but also an edge case (Score:5, Informative)
You're right about the peaks being worse than the mean, but the mean is bad enough.
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Except that the islands of Tuvalu are what is know as "floating islands", where the amount of solid matter rises and falls with the sea level. Basically, they exist at the balance point between erosion and deposition, and any change in sea level that shifts the balance point causes the island height to shift as well.
Tuvalu will be fine at 3-4mm per year. If it goes to 10x that, there'll be problems... but that's less likely than the next ice age rendering the entire problem meaningless in 10K years.
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So, a problem in 500 years or so, then? Yah, I'll remind my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren to remind their great-grea-great-great-great-great grandchildren to look into fixing things before they get out of hand....
Re: An interesting prospect, but also an edge case (Score:1)
So Tuvalu only has what, 590 more years before it's under water?
Re: An interesting prospect, but also an edge cas (Score:2)
Yeah, cause as long as your house is 4mm above *average* sea level, everything is fine. Duh.
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Re: An interesting prospect, but also an edge cas (Score:1)
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you're one of those people that find it convincing when someone on youtube pours water on an orange and screams "SEE, IT FELL OFF!??" aren't you?
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Great. I'm glad you're so eager to start relocating people away from the coasts.
How many refugees are you willing to board in your home?
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Great. I'm glad you're so eager to start relocating people away from the coasts.
How many refugees are you willing to board in your home?
Of course he didn't mean to relocate them to where he lives; that would be silly.
Surely there must be a shithole country that will take them
Re: Bleeding hearts for the stupid (Score:1)
Are you sure? (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you already tried altering the original data? Maybe by photoshopping the picture of the island so that it's smaller after all. That seems to be the generally accepted go-to plan when data doesn't support the worst-case scenario. (I'm referring, of course, to the satellite temperature measurements being altered because they don't show warming. That was after ground temperature measurements were altered.... Whoops, forgot to save the original data, guess you'll just have to trust us!)
Hey, now.... (Score:2, Insightful)
A brief recap:
There have been wild predictions of "runaway greenhouse effects" and of "new ice ages", back-and-forth, for 35+ years now.
The people making these claims have been consistently wrong, within just one or two years of making their great predictions.
So then they got the bright idea to change to warning of "climate change", so then they don't need to predict what will happen at all... They want yo
cherry picking data (Score:1)
Literally here today, gone tomorrow (well sometime soon in the future).
Totally bogus conclusion.
This is a new twist on climate denial.
If the authors are so confident they should be buying land in Tuvalu, everyone there is trying to sell to get out.
the story is BULL$#1T
Scientists vs slashdot troll (Score:1)
Scientists say it's growing. Slashdot troll trolls.
Or we could cherry pick and only listen to scientists when they say what matches our religious beliefs.
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Actually, I would bet that what they said is that "it has been growing", which is a very different statement.
OTOH, I do wonder is there is a lot of new area suitable for the growth of coral, which would create a barrier reef around the atoll. Of course, this assumes that Tuvalu is far enough from the equator that the water doesn't get too warm for the corals. And I also wonder how fast that would happen.
Turnabout is fair play (Score:2)
If you try to sway public opinion by using extreme and corner cases to alarm them, then it's hypocritical to cry foul when extreme and corner cases are used to refute you. Stick to using median and mean data and you won't have this problem.
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All of their island is literally a sediment. For it is a dead coral reef.
Coral reef is not sediment. FWIW my house is built on sediment. It is 600 feet aboove present day sea level in hills of red sandstone, sandstone being sand compressed and re-crystalised until it has become rock. Sandstone, limestone, chalk and slate are all sedimentary rocks.
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If it's an atoll, then it's broken up coral skeletons. But that's not the whole story, coral only grows in shallow water, so underneath there must have been a volcano. It may once have extended above the then current sea level, with coral growing on it's sides. As it eroded away the sediments were caught by the coral to form a shallow plateau just under the surface of the water, and coral grew on top of that until it got too shallow. Over time the sea level rose and fell. Rising sea levels would put ev
Size doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
Coral reefs are alive (Score:5, Informative)
These islands don't happen to be just above the water by pure chance, but because coral reefs grow until they hit the surface and then stop. When the sea level rises, the reefs will grow to match it.
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Unless coral bleaching kills the reef before that can happen
Re:Coral reefs are alive (Score:5, Informative)
These islands don't happen to be just above the water by pure chance, but because coral reefs grow until they hit the surface and then stop. When the sea level rises, the reefs will grow to match it.
Eventually. But coral reefs grow very slowly, so it could be that rising sea levels will outpace reef growth and the island will sink for a few thousand years, then reappear. Also, it may take time for corals to adapt to rising temperatures and declining pH levels, further delaying reef growth.
Re:Coral reefs are alive (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes, but it depends on the rates. Reefs also drown in such settings if they can't keep up with the pace of sea level rise or subsidence. There are many examples of seamounts (peaks below sea level) with coral reef deposits on top of them that are hundreds of metres below where the reefs can actually grow anymore. These are examples of situations where the seamount used to be an ocean island but sank beneath the waves faster than the corals could grow upwards.
An additional factor is coral bleaching events
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Exactly. The whole 'global sea level rise means island nations will drown' narrative is fake news.
It's more complicated than that
https://news.nationalgeographi... [nationalgeographic.com]
NOOO! (Score:2, Funny)
You meab California won't be sucked into the ocean after all?
It's a local phenomenon! (Score:1)
Sure, in some places the sea level is dropping, but in others it is rising much more. You have to look at the global picture! ;-)
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Where is the sea level dropping? I know it's rising more slowly along the US East Coast, but I didn't know it was dropping anywhere.
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Las Vegas
Tuvalu (Score:2, Offtopic)
Rye aye, and we can sing just like our fathers. Come on, Eileen.
Must we debunk this one again!?! (Score:1)
This video discusses the research about atolls (Tuvalu is referenced around the 7:00 mark):
Climate Change -- Hurricanes, atolls and coral [youtube.com]
HINT: This was a video published in late November 2010.
The headline omits what's important (Score:5, Insightful)
Stability and agriculture are the primary concerns, not just landmass. If the ocean is washing up new sandbars from storms while the island is sinking, and there's saline intrusion into the soil, the land area can increase while the island loses its arable soil, which is going to sap the islander's means to feed and support themselves.
So, representing this as any counter to Tuvalu's crisis is obtuse.
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First, moving the bar. The previous research predicted sinking islands, this new research refutes that. The important point is that "Climate Change" hysteria is overblown, and that nature has automatic processes to lessen the effects of the change.
Second, how much "agriculture" was going on previously? Are you saying that previously, there was no salt at all, and their major export was grain?
I grew up on a tropical island. It has always rained salt during the storms. Many plants can't grow because of that,
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Well, I think coconut trees can grow right on the beach, so that's something. And I hear that in places mangrove trees even grow out into the ocean.
OTOH, it probably takes a whole bunch of coconut trees to support one person (and that would require trading off the island) and I don't know what the economic utility of mangroves is. But they do require fresh water to reduce the salinity, and an underlying layer of mud.
how can sea level rise twice the global average? (Score:2)
Science Barbie says (Score:1)
So, if carbon emissions are reduced or somehow mitigated, global warming will be reversed, and the land area of those island groups will get smaller?
Science Barbie says: "Science is hard."
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Uh, this isn't a boat or an iceberg we're talking about. An island that is getting bigger, by definition, isn't sinking, because 'island' only refers to the part above water.
But it seems some people would rather attack the messenger, rather than look for a scientific way that both things might be true, or otherwise not conflict. (I mean come on, it's right there in the summary, a suggestion that the bigger storms -- you know, the ones that global warming people say are the bad outcome of global warming -- a
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Nature isn't linear, despite us constantly trying to model it linearly. Tuvalu isn't rising and it isn't sinking. Sedimentation raises and extends its shores some, but overall It's still the same height, and the water surrounding it is still rising. The highest point of the entire country is 5 meters above sea level. A larger but (relatively) shallower island will be much more prone to flooding.
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It's likely to create lagoons on land that had previously been coastal.
Re: Sediment use? Already Jesus was smarter than t (Score:1)
The island Nation of Tuwalu did not originate on the island in the first place. They settled there. So.
Just board their fast proa and move to another island, with better social security that's what them should do.
Instead we will be imposing costly policies on the developing world and painful policies to ourselves in a futile attempt to stop the Natures work.
Re: Sediment use? Already Jesus was smarter than (Score:1)
Well these are British Commonwealth Subjects so it is NZ or Australia. They do welcome boatloads of Arabs and East Indians so a few Polynesian Proas will not make any marked difference.
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The global warming the US caused by Nixon opening up to China?
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Well first, that was supposed to be a metaphor for faith, and second, the world's tallest skyscraper is now built on sand, so any practical message in the metaphor is just another thing in the Bible that's hilariously outdated, like its complete lack of criticism for the institution of slavery.
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If by "on sand", you mean on top of nearly a thousand pilings that go up to 282 feet down into the sand, then yes. :-) I think that stretches the metaphor a bit much, though.
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Do you remember Sunday School?
No, luckily my parents did not take me to be brainwashed into an ancient cult as a child.
Re: Can you believe these lying Republican punkass (Score:1)
The Netherlands is mostly below the sea level, and it is an OK place to live.
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Yup. It turns out that if you can think and plan ahead it's possible to live below sea level with much more primitive technology than we have today - basically earth walls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The construction method of dikes has changed over the centuries. Popular in the Middle Ages were wierdijken, earth dikes with a protective layer of seaweed. An earth embankment was cut vertically on the sea-facing side. Seaweed was then stacked against this edge, held into place with poles. Compression and rotting processes resulted in a solid residue that proved very effective against wave action and they needed very little maintenance. In places where seaweed was unavailable other materials such as reeds or wicker mats were used.
Another system used much and for a long time was that of a vertical screen of timbers backed by an earth bank. Technically these vertical constructions were less successful as vibration from crashing waves and washing out of the dike foundations weakened the dike.
Much damage was done to these wood constructions with the arrival of the shipworm (Teredo navalis), a bivalve thought to have been brought to the Netherlands by VOC trading ships, that ate its way through Dutch sea defenses around 1730. The change was made from wood to using stone for reinforcement. This was a great financial setback as there is no natural occurring rock in the Netherlands and it all had to be imported from abroad.
Current dikes are made with a core of sand, covered by a thick layer of clay to provide waterproofing and resistance against erosion. Dikes without a foreland have a layer of crushed rock below the waterline to slow wave action. Up to the high waterline the dike is often covered with carefully laid basalt stones or a layer of tarmac. The remainder is covered by grass and maintained by grazing sheep. Sheep keep the grass dense and compact the soil, in contrast to cattle.
But hey, not everyone can pass the marshmallow test [youtube.com] like Northern Europeans I suppose. So they blame Northern Europeans for climate change and demand cash.
Re: Can you believe these lying Republican punkass (Score:5, Insightful)
But hey, not everyone can pass the marshmallow test [youtube.com] like Northern Europeans I suppose. So they blame Northern Europeans for climate change and demand cash.
The U.S. is failing the marshmallow test as we speak - huge tax cuts and massive spending increases at a time when the economy is already strong, and the GOP controls ALL branches of government. Apparently there are no longer any adults in charge who realize that if you don't pay down your debt during the good times, things will get really ugly in the bad times.
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Yup, that budget is a travesty.
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Correction for You (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.thebalance.com/us-... [thebalance.com]
It's a single source, so of course could be complete hogwash, but it's a start. According to the records there, every single US president all the way back to Herbert Hoover [directly before Franklin D. Roosevelt] added to the US Debt.
Unfortunately, even these figures don't tell the whole story, because we have to consider both debt and deficit, in which the former is the amount the US owes, and the latter is the rate with which the former is changing.
I make this distinction because, in recent memory, Bill Clinton has been the only US president who has actually decelerated the increase in US national debt. When he left office [IIRC] he did so leaving his successor, George W. Bush, with a tiny budgetary surplus. It's also instructive to look at the scale of the change in the debt position between Presidents. For example, George H.W. Bush left office with a national debt 54% greater than the one he inherited. Bill Clinton had trimmed that to a 32% increase. George W. Bush doubled-down on his Father's spending policies and managed a 101% increase in national debt. In the case of the two Bush Presidents, the increases were likely driven mainly by military spending to support the wars that they started.
Now, I'd absolutely have to agree with you if we look at Obama's record. He added $7.917 trillion to the US national debt, a 68% increase, which puts him somewhere between Bush Father and Bush Son and way beyond Clinton's record. However, it has to be remembered that Obama won office in late 2008 and became President in Januaru 2009. In other words, less than 6 months after the 2008 financial crash had really hit home.
What Obama did during his 8 years in office was, in economic terms, kick the can down the road. These are unarguable facts - the record speaks for itself. The reason *why* this is the case is obviously going to be highly partisan and subject to fierce debate. But the fact remains that the chief reason that Obama's record on the economy stands where it does is simply because he inherited one of the worst financial crises in living memory from his predecessor. The damage was done during the 8 years that George W. Bush spent in office [with increased military spending and tax cuts]. Obama just papered over the cracks and kicked the can down the road.
But the record is pretty clear - with the exception of Coolidge and Warren Harding [who served immediately before him] every US President from the First World War to the present day has added to the US debt.
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Talking about nation debt without reference to GDP or economic growth says little or nothing about the relative wealth and power of nations. Moreover, the exact size of the debt is somewhat uncertain because a large portion of it exists in the form of future liabilities whose final present value cost is uncertain. This is especially true with Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security obligations which comprise a lion's share of the debt. This is not to say that debt cannot be a problem, especially when it beco
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In fact, the only thing you state which I'm not in complete agreement with [because I just don't have the facts to understand the accuracy of the statement] is when you say that the US is "very far from being unable to service the national debt".
I'm not doubting the truth of what you write, but I'm less certain about the way that conditions might have to change before that
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I make this distinction because, in recent memory, Bill Clinton has been the only US president who has actually decelerated the increase in US national debt. When he left office [IIRC] he did so leaving his successor, George W. Bush, with a tiny budgetary surplus.
The US government when Clinton was POTUS didn't run a surplus because the government collected more taxes than it spent - it hasn't done that for a long time. Rather it borrowed money from the social security trust fund and spent it. Well it's a bit more complex than that, but that was the net result :
http://www.craigsteiner.us/art... [craigsteiner.us]
Notice that while the public debt went down in each of those four years, the intragovernmental holdings went up each year by a far greater amount--and, in turn, the total national debt (which is public debt + intragovernmental holdings) went up. Therein lies the discrepancy.
When it is claimed that Clinton paid down the national debt, that is patently false--as can be seen, the national debt went up every single year. What Clinton did do was pay down the public debt--notice that the claimed surplus is relatively close to the decrease in the public debt for those years. But he paid down the public debt by borrowing far more money in the form of intragovernmental holdings (mostly Social Security).
Update 3/31/2009: The following quote from an article at CBS confirms my explanation of the Myth of the Clinton Surplus, and the entire article essentially substantiates what I wrote.
"Over the past 25 years, the government has gotten used to the fact that Social Security is providing free money to make the rest of the deficit look smaller," said Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Interestingly, this most likely was not even a conscious decision by Clinton. The Social Security Administration is legally required to take all its surpluses and buy U.S. Government securities, and the U.S. Government readily sells those securities--which automatically and immediately becomes intragovernmental holdings. The economy was doing well due to the dot-com bubble and people were earning a lot of money and paying a lot into Social Security. Since Social Security had more money coming in than it had to pay in benefits to retired persons, all that extra money was immediately used to buy U.S. Government securities. The government was still running deficits, but since there was so much money coming from excess Social Security contributions there was no need to borrow more money directly from the public. As such, the public debt went down while intragovernmental holdings continued to skyrocket.
The net effect was that the national debt most definitely did not get paid down because we did not have a surplus. The government just covered its deficit by borrowing money from Social Security rather than the public.
The last time the US government ran a true surplus was in the 60's.
https://www.answers.com/Q/When... [answers.com]
Clinton did not have a surplus of $230B in the year 2000 because he had to borrow $246.5 From numerous other off budget funds. Clinton NEVER ran a surplus during his 8 years in office, he just borrowed yearly from different budgets, (primarily the SS budget) to offset the general fund losses. In 2000 the following funds were borrowed which resulted in a $16.5 deficit.
$152.3B from Social Security
$30.9B from Civil Service Retirement Fund
$18.5B from Federal Supplementary Medical insurance Trust Fund
$15.0B from Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund
$9.0B from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund
$8.2B from Military Retirement Fund
$3.8B from Transportation Trust Funds
$1.8B from Employee Life Insurance & Retirement fund
$7.0B from others
Total borrowed from off budget funds $246.5B, meaning that his $230B surplus is actually a $16.5B deficit.
($246.5B borrowed - $230B claimed surplus = $16.5B actual deficit).
The last time the federal government ran a true suplus was 1969, the total surplus was $3.2B and before that was $1960, $.3 B
I'd be very surprised if the US government runs a surplus again until it h
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Lots of interesting additional material here, but I'd just like to make one key observation. You have responded to a statement that I did not make.
At no point did I claim that Clinton ran a surplus. I'm not qualified as a forensic auditor, so any attempt on my part to try and interpret or argue the addition material you share here is, I think, a wasted exercise. I was actually looking at this from a slightly different perspective - and ironically one I see being mirrored in the UK at the moment.
War, what's it good for? (Score:2)
An interesting article. Most I've seen don't go back that far.
I think the take away is that modern politicians have looked back and figured out that if you want to spend a lot of money, having a war is a good way to justify it.
Although I don't think it was George W Bush's legacy of military spending or tax cuts that screwed Obama. Sure it was a lot, but no more than (relatively speaking) a lot of other instances. What screwed Obama was either deregulation or a lack of policy to create needed regulation in t
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Worse, they'll use the money to buy votes or to prosecute yet more foreign wars. How many did Obama start, 7 in 8 years?
Really, what seven or eight wars did Obama start?
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Let's count Obama's wars: begin!
Scandal-free president, everyone. Nobel Peace Prize president, everyone.
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Let's count Obama's wars: begin!
So are you going to begin, or what?
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Is it a declared war? Where the US Congress has formally declared war? That's easy. No wars under Obama.
That's an extremely outdated definition of war anyway. None of our wars have been against a specific foreign government with a leadership structure capable of declaring war or ending a war in surrender.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan.
These are not different conflicts, all of these have been against the same opponent -- a people who do not recognize country borders, so they operate across many countries where the actual government is too weak to fight them.
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Democrats don't hold a candle to Republicans when it comes to increasing national debt. It's already been said, but it's worth noting that the last Republican to lower the deficit on average was Nixon, yet Clinton and Obama both managed it. Reagan started what's now a time-honored tradition of Republican presidents dicking over the next generation by driving up the deficit through some combination of unfunded tax cuts and increased spending.
Dispute this with "alternative facts" all you want, but there's not
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Democrats don't hold a candle to Republicans when it comes to increasing national debt. It's already been said, but it's worth noting that the last Republican to lower the deficit on average was Nixon, yet Clinton and Obama both managed it.
Each one of those increased the debt
https://www.thebalance.com/us-... [thebalance.com]
Barack Obama: Added $7.917 trillion, a 68 percent increase from the $11.657 trillion debt at the end of George W. Bushâ(TM)s last budget, FY 2009.
Bill Clinton: Added $1.396 trillion, a 32 percent increase from the $4.4 trillion debt at the end of George H.W. Bush's last budget, FY 1993.
Richard Nixon: Added $121 billion, a 34 percent increase from the $354 billion debt at the end of LBJ's last budget, FY 1969.
And if you don't trust that, you can check the figures here
https://www.treasurydirect.gov... [treasurydirect.gov]
and
https://www.treasurydirect.gov... [treasurydirect.gov]
E.g. Nixon you subtract 1974's debt from 1969's. I.e. $475B - $353B = $121B
For Clinton you subtract 2001's debt from 1993's, i.e. $5.807T - $4.411T = 1.396T
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It's already been said, but it's worth noting that the last Republican to lower the deficit on average was Nixon, yet Clinton and Obama both managed it.
Each one of those increased the debt
https://www.thebalance.com/us-... [thebalance.com]
If you actually read what I wrote, you'll notice that I made a claim regarding deficits, not debt. Debt tells you very little about a given president's influence - because frequently a president inherits a massive deficit, so it's more or less a given that the debt will increase under their tenure. What you should really look at is whether the deficit is increasing, which tells us whether the president is moving the trend towards a balanced budget, or turning towards higher levels of debt. Republican presid
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The debt is just the sum of all the deficits. And Clinton never run a surplus
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Clinton did not have a surplus of $230B in the year 2000 because he had to borrow $246.5 From numerous other off budget funds. Clinton NEVER ran a surplus during his 8 years in office, he just borrowed yearly from different budgets, (primarily the SS budget) to offset the general fund losses. In 2000 the following funds were borrowed which resulted in a $16.5 deficit.
$152.3B from Social Security
$30.9B from Civil Service Retirement Fund
$18.5B from Federal Supplementary Medical insurance Trust Fund
$15.0B from Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund
$9.0B from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund
$8.2B from Military Retirement Fund
$3.8B from Transportation Trust Funds
$1.8B from Employee Life Insurance & Retirement fund
$7.0B from others
Total borrowed from off budget funds $246.5B, meaning that his $230B surplus is actually a $16.5B deficit.
($246.5B borrowed - $230B claimed surplus = $16.5B actual deficit).
The last time the federal government ran a true suplus was 1969, the total surplus was $3.2B and before that was $1960, $.3 B
If you look here you can see the debt increased each year he was in office. Which means he ran a deficit
E.g. from
https://www.treasurydirect.gov... [treasurydirect.gov]
and
https://www.treasurydirect.gov... [treasurydirect.gov]
you get
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The debt is just the sum of all the deficits. And Clinton never run a surplus
09/30/2001 5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2000 5,674,178,209,886.86
09/30/1999 5,656,270,901,615.43
09/30/1998 5,526,193,008,897.62
09/30/1997 5,413,146,011,397.34
09/30/1996 5,224,810,939,135.73
09/29/1995 4,973,982,900,709.39
09/30/1994 4,692,749,910,013.32
09/30/1993 4,411,488,883,139.38
09/30/1992 4,064,620,655,521.66
09/30/1991 3,665,303,351,697.03
Each year the debt increased because each year a deficit was run. Including 2000, Clinton's claimed 'surplus year'.
You're attacking a point that is at best tangential to my contention: that the GOP is the party of debt. Your own figures illustrate my point perfectly - look at the derivative of the debt figures you provide (just subtract one from the next, to find the deficit), and you'll see that the growth of the debt is shrinking, on average, throughout Clinton's administration. By your numbers, at the beginning, the deficit inherited from GHWB was adding ~$400B/yr to the national debt. At the end of Clinton's adminis
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If you care about the national debt, you should never, ever vote a Republican into the Oval Office. Their stated goal ("starve the beast" philosophy) is to increase the debt to try to force the government to shrink. Like increasing your credit card debt to force yourself to be more frugal.
You can see the debt increase by president here
https://www.thebalance.com/us-... [thebalance.com]
Obama D 68%
Bush R 101%
Clinton D 32%
HW_Bush R 54%
Reagan R 186%
Carter D 43%
Ford R 47%
Nixon R 34%
LBJ D 13%
JFK D 8%
Eisenhower R 9%
Truman D 3%
FDR D 1048%
Hoover R 32%
Coolidge R -26%
Harding R -7%
Wilson D 727%
So that's 8 Democrats who added 1942% to the debt, or an average of 242.75% each. And 9 Republicans who added 430% to the debt or 47.78% each.
The only real outlier is Reagan who spent a tonne of cash. Still that caused the USSR
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If you care about the national debt, you should never, ever vote a Republican into the Oval Office. Their stated goal ("starve the beast" philosophy) is to increase the debt to try to force the government to shrink. Like increasing your credit card debt to force yourself to be more frugal.
The only real outlier is Reagan who spent a tonne of cash.
The Republicans DID actually have a claim to the "fiscal conservative" label prior to Reagan. Trickle-down economics, unfunded tax cuts, and the intentional deficits of "starve the beast" changed all that. So again, you aren't actually addressing my argument, which is about Reagan-era Republicans, and the Republicans of today in particular. In the OP, I made the claim that no Republican since Nixon has lowered deficits on average, so attempted rebuttals based on Democrats and Republicans from more than 50 y
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Yeah? And did they get that way by doing nothing?
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It found factors such as wave patterns and sediment dumped by storms could offset the erosion caused by rising water levels.
Please explain how you got "totally negated oceanwide" from the study's conclusion.
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I thought it was funny when Gaddafi fell and a load of millennials found out what the .ly in vb.ly stood for.
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
That follows the abrupt enforced shutdown of vb.ly, a "link shortening" site run by Ben Metcalfe and Violet Blue, after it was declared that the content of the site was "against Sharia law".
An image of Violet with bare arms, drinking from a bottle of lager, was emblazoned across the front page of the site when the government-owned Libya Telecom & Technology got in touch earlier this month. "Pornography and adult material aren't allowed under Libyan law, therefore we removed the domain," the letter said, adding: "The issue of offensive imagery is quite subjective, as what I may deem as offensive you might not, but I think you'll agree that a picture of a scantily clad lady with some bottle in her hand isn't exactly what most would consider decent or family friendly at the least."
But other moves made by the ministry could threaten the business of another web startup, bit.ly, which has had millions of dollars of investors' money poured into it - including funding of $10m (£6.3m) received earlier this week - following the announcement in June by the Tripoli regulator for domain registry that domain registrations with fewer than four characters were restricted for use by registrars "having presence" in Libya - that is, based in the country - where they would be under local Sharia jurisdictions.
I.e. it turns out that 'respecting' cultures on the other side of the world that you know nothing about by denying that they are in any way different from yours is not a good idea. Who'd have thought it?
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It's post modernist thinking, that's what it is [dailymotion.com]
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According to Algore we're all dead by now if you look at his inconvenient "truth". None of his stuff he predicted has happened.
Still ice in the artic.
Kilimanjaro still has snow.
The weather hasn't been worse. In fact it's been about the same or better.
15 year hiatus in "warming."
Satellite-derived temperature data showed, until the recent El Niño, no statistically significant warming trend for more than 21 years.
And so on.
His money scheme has worked. He has been paid about a billion dollars over somethin
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Let me guess, you didn't RTFA.
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Whoa? Someone on /. RTFA? Really? Shocked I am!
I think we're actually saying the same thing. It's not man made GW, it's a normal process.
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