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Originally Posted by oil pan 4
Then what is global warming? If it's not polar bears dieing and ice caps melring what it?
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The ice caps are not the globe. But the melting of the landlocked ice sheets won't be good for those of us who live in low-lying areas.
Again, what you *perceive* as being said by certain people and what is actually being said by the science are not the same thing.
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Originally Posted by oil pan 4
If rapid change is the worry then volcanos should be the main worry. Anything that could be misconstrued as man driven climate change gets blown away by vulcanism.
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The amount of vulcanism does seem to increase slightly due to the minimum, but the amount of cooling related to the solar minimum, based on historical and prehistoric data, as discussed maybe a million pages back, is not enough to counter the current rise in temperature.
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Originally Posted by All Darc
In other words, a bad culture can screw up as deep as the own society genes. When a society really evolves, I think it's fair to consider that the genes incidence can evolve too.
The quetion is : Do we really evolve in the last 45 years ?
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The problem with the start of your question is: How do you define race? There are many different ethnic groups within each general, nebulous 'race', and even genetic physical factors vary wildly within each.
When you factor everything in, the difference in intelligence quotients between countries with similar ethnic make-up can vary wildly due to socioeconomic factors, and the spread in IQ *within* each ethnic group is very, very wide.
While there is some genetic predisposition towards intelligence and behavior, society plays a big role in how a person turns out. Numerous studies on the "IQ gap" between blacks and whites in America have shown that it's environmental factors rather than genetic factors that dominate that discussion (numerous studies have documented that black children adopted by white parents perform in the same range as the adoptive parents... not the biological ones... one particular study, which I can't find at the moment... showed that adopted black male children performed very well until their teenage years, when negative societal expectations started to affect their academic achievement).
If you are pointing out that stupid people are surviving more now... well... stupid people have ALWAYS survived. It doesn't take much intelligence to plant a turnip patch and eat out of the dirt. The only difference nowadays is that you actually get to hear these people talk or see them act due to social media.
In reality, intelligence has been rising across the board, thanks to modern education, medicine and nutrition, for the past hundred odd years.
And violence has been dropping, as well. While crimes will always increase along with the population, the incidence rate as a percentage of that global population is dropping.
However, the perception of crime is that it is always rising. Whether or not it actually is. The dangers of a well-connected world, a 24-hour news cycle, and a populace that not only no longer reads past the first paragraph of a news story... they don't even get past the title.
This is not to say that the intelligence of news consumers is dropping. It's that there's such a surfeit of information out there, most people can no longer process it properly. Hence, the world seems dumber, more chaotic, and more violent... even if the chances of any one of us dying in a violent crime or war are less now than they've been in the past.