I hope this monument to opulence fails miserably and the developers lose their shirts.
There’s no way they won’t damage or destroy that reef.
The first big storm is going to destroy much of the sand island.
But, 10% are special protection zones! Won’t matter, they can’t survive if huge amounts of the non protected reef are destroyed.

Not to mention sea level rise will put it underwater quickly, it’s barely above current sea level in the plans.

Look at Mexico, dozens of comparatively tiny resorts not even on the reefs, but on land, and that reef is not 10% what it was in the mid 80’s. Building ON the reef is guaranteed to destroy it, as is tourism.

I hate when companies are allowed to build on natural wonders to exploit the beauty, they invariably destroy that beauty within decades. That entire reef/coastline should be off limits to construction so the two desert properties have an attraction. When the reefs die from sun tan lotion poisoning, bleaching, sand displacement, accidents with supply ships, the first major fuel spill, etc, that place will be a $5 billion waste, abandoned to the desert.

Remember the “islands of the world” project in Dubai? This sounds even less thought out than they were, more ecologically disastrous, needing more infrastructure to be built, requiring ships to bring fuel as there’s no nearby port to run pipelines from (guaranteeing oil spills). All for what? So billionaires can get off their yachts for a while in luxury?

Wiki-Significant changes in the maritime environment [of Dubai]. As a result of the dredging and redepositing of sand for the construction of the islands, the typically crystalline waters of the Persian Gulf at Dubai have become severely clouded with silt. Construction activity is damaging the marine habitat, burying coral reefs, oyster beds and subterranean fields of sea grass, threatening local marine species as well as other species dependent on them for food. Oyster beds have been covered in as much as two inches of sediment, while above the water, beaches are eroding with the disruption of natural currents.

That was a $12 billion project to exploit the pristine coast and beautiful waters that no longer exist, the islands themselves are sinking and eroding, most were evacuated or never used at all, the water is now mud colored, the reefs are gone. An unmitigated disaster. This sounds extremely similar.

Oppose this and similar projects.

I mean not if I had a tank escort clearing the road for us.
I did off road desert racing for years, driving >75 mph through silt clouds so thick I couldn’t see my hood, but those drivers are nuts!

So strange to see Bob posting evidence of climate change since he denies it exists.

An important thing to note is most man made lakes are constantly filling with silt, and that’s not taken into account when determining %. If Oroville is 27% full, but 15% full of silt, it’s only 12% full of water. The older the lake, the more silt has displaced water and lowered actual capacity. Lake Mead is estimated to have 60-90 ft of silt, and based on water level above sea level is about 30% of capacity…but half or more may be silt. As bad as things look, they’re actually worse.

Edit: I would like to see large projects started removing that silt from the dry reservoirs, extending their lifespan and capacity without taking them out of service to do it. Crisis + opportunity = Crisortunity!

When racing, 2/3. No neck brace in those days. Once while training, no helmet either, but yes, 5 point harness in a full tube racing buggy.
Honestly, the only one that made a real difference was the cage. A 4 or 3 point seatbelt would have been sufficient thanks to a deep racing seat, and most rolls were due to super soft silt grabbing the outside tires in a turn....that scrubed a lot of speed right away and made the final hit extra soft, a few were on hardpacked dirt, but they were short course so maybe 30-40 mph entry speed instead of 60+, around 20 by the time my side hit ground.

It's a proposal, but at $3 billion price tag (meaning more like > $4.5 billion when finished), the plan to pump water 20 miles back up river into the already silting over lake Mead isn't likely to be adopted....at least I hope not. For one thing, it would mean the river would often end at the new pump station, which no one downstream would agree to and likely would be opposed on ecological grounds too.

The black is probably chemicals for fire retardant and antifreeze, or silt. Systems have to be tested and flushed at least annually around here; I don't know if other locales don't care about upkeep.

The highly specialized, unique ecosystems that existed there are gone forever.
...and many of the gorgeous slot canyons (pun intended) are permanently filled in with silt.

Go to Ostia Antica, the ancient (i.e. gladiator-era) port of Rome. It lay buried in accumulated silt for centuries but has relatively recently been excavated and is a beautiful and wonderful site to visit. If you go you'll see stone-paved streets that have never had a car drive on them, only gladiator-era horse-drawn wagons, and they have parallel ruts for the wheels of those wagons and aren't worn in the middle.

@BicycleRepairMan

Also vice versa. Which might sound circular, but isnt. Uniformitarianism is of course the simplest assumtion (occams razor) but it also correlates well with the available evidence. If natural laws acted differently in the past, we would presumably find EVIDENCE that it did. And correlating data is not a "hall of mirrors, it is evidence of correlation. This is basic statistics and empiri.

Thank you for your considered reply. Well see, here's the thing. Creationists and evolutionists are not looking at two sets of evidences. We are looking at the same evidence and interpreting it differently. There isn't creationist evidence and evolutionist evidence, there is just evidence which we both interpret according to the assumptions we bring to it. We are both looking at the same geologic record and saying it happened much differently. The evidence yields different conclusions depending on what assumptions you bring to it.

Uniformitarian is only the first assumption scientists bring to the evidence. The secondary assumption is that the different layers represent vast amounts of time. They come to this conclusion because they observe the rates of these processes are very slow today, and since in uniformitarian, the present is the key to the past, they assume that present day geological features must have taken millions or billions of years to form because of present day rates. Because of this, the completely exclude the hypothesis that the features we see could form very quickly. Therefore, they are biased in their interpretation and will miss the evidence which actually points to rapid formation. I'll give you a good example:

"Previously geologists had thought that constant, rapid water flow prevented mud's constituents -- silts and clays -- from coalescing and gathering at the bottoms of rivers, lakes and oceans. This has led to a bias, Schieber explains, that wherever mudstones are encountered in the sedimentary rock record, they are generally interpreted as quiet water deposits."

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/web/page/normal/7022.html

For a long time geologists believed that mudstones could only form a certain way, which is by slow moving water. They had completely ruled out that it could be formed rapidly. Therefore, whenever they saw mudstones the "story" the rocks told them was that of a slow process taking vast amounts of time. Yet, mudstones, they have found, can be deposited very rapidly. This is actually evidence for a global flood because mudstones make up 2/3s of the record for sedimentary rock. Yet they never saw that because of their assumptions of everything taking vast amounts of time to form. This is a classic example of how the assumptions you bring changes the interpretation of the data. Same mudstones, but the different assumptions yielded a different conclusion from the same evidence.

This is further complicated by the matter of evolution. Biostratigraphy has played a decisive role in determining the relative ages of rock layers around the world, which brings with it a whole other host of assumptions. Because evolution requires vast amounts of time, and they interpret a certain evolutionary progression through the fossil record, therefore they again make the assumption different layers must represent vast amounts of time, based on their evolutionary assumptions. They then use that assumption to validate their uniformitarian assumptions and call this evidence.

The main issue is the assumption of uniformitarian to explain the fossil record. It denies that a catastrophe like a global flood could have caused the features we see today. The geologists believe things happened very slowly, whereas creation geologists believe they have formed very quickly. There is a whole lot of evidence which shows that layers could be laid down rapidly, and canyons and other features could have been cut very quickly. Geologists do acknowledge this, which is why there is another branch of geology called Catastrophism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophism

They can not deny that many of the things they thought took millions of years "stalactites forming, fossilization, formation of oil and precious metals) can actually happen very quickly. They still deny, however, that a global catastrophe could have been responsible for all of it, despite the fact that the whole Earth is covered by sedimentary rock which is primarily laid down by water.

And this is where we are with fossils and dating. We dont just make wild guesses on the basis of 2 or 3 fossils and one shitty chemistry experiment involving half-lives; We have literally thousands of datapoints. If this is a hall of mirrors, then Satan is truly one crafty bastard making a pretty impressive one for us.

Again, it is the assumptions you bring to that data which colors the interpretation. I can also tell you that the assumption that decay rates never change is wrong:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/286/5441/882.summary

Pressure and chemistry can alter decay rates according to that experiment. In that instance, they were able to alter the decay rate by 1.5 percent. In much more extreme conditions, however, the decay rate could change significantly. It shows that the uniformitarian assumptions of radiometric dating can and will produce unreliable data.

These are things that they don't teach you in science class. When it comes down to it, there is no actual proof for deep time in the fossil record, when we're talking about actual empirical evidence. We only have circumstantial evidence based on assumptions which I have shown to be faulty. That is where the hall of mirrors comes in, where everything you see is reflecting the assumptions you make. It is what is called a worldview, which is like a set of glasses you use to see the world. Everyone has a worldview. The apriori assumptions you make about reality constitutes your worldview. That is what is going on here..their worldview of the world forming from purely naturalistic processes, and that slowly over vast amounts of time, is a bias which skews all of their data to that direction, when as I showed previously with the mudstones that it could just as easily point in the other direction.

>> ^demon_ix:

To me it sort of looks like the robot's base shifts, and so the camera and arm go down together, making the sea floor appear to rise... Then the robot tilts back to normal, and the floor appears to sink.
Can we please find a version of this without the retarded commentary? Also, with actual facts about what happened there?


Yeah you nailed it... the arm, the camera, the whole thing is one unit.. the mini sub lifts itself off the ground for a moment (hence the silt gets disturbed and it gets murky).

GOD the narrator is annoying... I'm || close on a downvote just because of it combined with the misinterpretation of what he's looking at. Not to mention the VERY annoying URLs that are constantly blocking the view of the video.

Here's a weird idea. We know that air becomes denser if filled with suspended particles. So might a "dust storm" simply be some dense air rolling down a slight incline? If true, the storm might keep itself going by stirring up more dirt, which creates more wind as it then flows downhill. Like a river, it picks up silt and then deposits it again downstream. But unlike a river, the silt itself is the mass driving the downhill flow.

In other words, are some dust storms really a kind of landslide?

>> ^ponceleon:
What floors me the most is the clarify of the water. I've never seen flooding which was this clean before...


Absolutely, I'm astonished by that. The water must pour in very gently and something about the geology (very rocky, poorly developed soils?) must prevent it from silting up.

Amazing sift, should be #1. Any time I see some new phenomena that I didn't know the Earth could produce I'll sift it very enthusiastically

I do not want the monolith. Not to say that i'd rather have $27, but more to say that the State of Georgia can handle its environmental problems more efficiently with my $27 dollars than the EPA ever could. This could be said of for most of the other mentioned organizations. For example, over 1/3 of taxes paid into entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security is lost to administrative costs of maintaining such a large organization. Anyone who has taken an economics course will understand this as diseconomies of scale. I see firsthand the results of the national EPA in my back yard, where lake lanier is suffering from silt runoff, extreme drought, and still draining into the Chattahoochee like there's no tomorrow.
I vote to expand my local and state government, where programs are customizable and flexible. Let my Federal Government do what they were supposed to do, per the U.S. Constitution.
Please explain the benefits of having one giant attempt at efficiency as opposed to 50 smaller tries.
upvote for debate purposes, not this misleading horse crap.