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Global Dimming
wiredog writes "The Guardian reports on research which shows that the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface has decreased by 10% in 30 years. This has implications for global warming models and, especially, agricultural output."
I would say this is directly linked to our obesity problems
badum DUM
This is not a sig
my landlord told me not to touch that dial on the wall, but i couldn't resist
i'll set it back to the way i found it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
of Global Warming, we have to worry about Global Cooling. Is that why it is 45F out in S. Florida? :-)
I thought it referred to the result of Microsoft's Market share.....
Well I guess this means the prices of sunglasses will go up so invest in raybans now
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Since agricultural output has already multipled and skyrocketed over the years thanks to technology and IPM, this isn't necessarily a burning crisis..
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
This makes me wonder about the drive towards a hydrogen-powered economy. All that water vapour coming out of car exhaust pipes, etc. Probably a better form of pollution from a health perspective, but will it also result in limiting sun light or producing clouds that trap heat?
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I always felt that the world was a brighter place when I was a kid, now I have proof!
Each year less light reaches the surface of the Earth. No one is sure what's causing 'global dimming' - or what it means for the future. In fact most scientists have never heard of it. By David Adam
Thursday December 18, 2003
The Guardian
In 1985, a geography researcher called Atsumu Ohmura at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology got the shock of his life. As part of his studies into climate and atmospheric radiation, Ohmura was checking levels of sunlight recorded around Europe when he made an astonishing discovery. It was too dark. Compared to similar measurements recorded by his predecessors in the 1960s, Ohmura's results suggested that levels of solar radiation striking the Earth's surface had declined by more than 10% in three decades. Sunshine, it seemed, was on the way out.
The finding went against all scientific thinking. By the mid-80s there was undeniable evidence that our planet was getting hotter, so the idea of reduced solar radiation - the Earth's only external source of heat - just didn't fit. And a massive 10% shift in only 30 years? Ohmura himself had a hard time accepting it. "I was shocked. The difference was so big that I just could not believe it," he says. Neither could anyone else. When Ohmura eventually published his discovery in 1989 the science world was distinctly unimpressed. "It was ignored," he says.
It turns out that Ohmura was the first to document a dramatic effect that scientists are now calling "global dimming". Records show that over the past 50 years the average amount of sunlight reaching the ground has gone down by almost 3% a decade. It's too small an effect to see with the naked eye, but it has implications for everything from climate change to solar power and even the future sustainability of plant photosynthesis. In fact, global dimming seems to be so important that you're probably wondering why you've never heard of it before. Well don't worry, you're in good company. Many climate experts haven't heard of it either, the media has not picked up on it, and it doesn't even appear in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
"It's an extraordinary thing that for some reason this hasn't penetrated even into the thinking of the people looking at global climate change," says Graham Farquhar, a climate scientist at the Australian National University in Canberra. "It's actually quite a big deal and I think you'll see a lot more people referring to it."
That's not to say that the effect has gone unnoticed. Although Ohmura was the first to report global dimming, he wasn't alone. In fact, the scientific record now shows several other research papers published during the 1990s on the subject, all finding that light levels were falling significantly. Among them they reported that sunshine in Ireland was on the wane, that both the Arctic and the Antarctic were getting darker and that light in Japan, the supposed land of the rising sun, was actually falling. Most startling of all was the discovery that levels of solar radiation reaching parts of the former Soviet Union had gone down almost 20% between 1960 and 1987.
The problem is that most of the climate scientists who saw the reports simply didn't believe them. "It's an uncomfortable one," says Gerald Stanhill, who published many of these early papers and coined the phrase global dimming. "The first reaction has always been that the effect is much too big, I don't believe it and if it's true then why has nobody reported it before."
That began to change in 2001, when Stanhill and his colleague Shabtai Cohen at the Volcani Centre in Bet Dagan, Israel collected all the available evidence together and proved that, on average, records showed that the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface had gone down by between 0.23 and 0.32% each year from 1958 to 1992.
This forced more scientists to sit up and take notice, though some still refused to accept the change was real, and instead blamed it on inacc
Days were brighter when I was a kid.
And I thought it was only nostalgia that made it look that way. Well I guess it's time to stock up on flashlights and batteries.
No, thats what is probably causing this....
The light from the sun is absorbed by the junk we blow into the atmosphere and thus doesn't reach earth. The energy is still absorbed by the earth as a whole....
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
to get that even Atom tan.
great, i get a troll for this? it's a legitmate possibility. it's not the first time in science that someone has lied to make a name for themself. think about all those "breakthroughs" in quantum computing that were pronounced lies because they couldnt be reproduced. and thats definatley not the first time....
Light hitting the gasses in the atmosphere causes higher ambiant heat while letting in less light.
Sounds like a good time to buy a mushroom farm...
WAR TUX!
So the pollution that pumps out of power stations is making it too dark to switch to solar power. How convenient.
There may have been a few laws since the 70's but the amount of pollution now is way higher then it was in the 70's. And the biggest polluters don't seem to be in a hurry to really solve the problem.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
If you read the article, global dimming does not equal global cooling. It is, in fact, compatible with global warming. The theory is either that (as stated above) atmospheric pollutants are blocking sunlight, or that global warming is resulting in more water vapour being carried in the air - in other words, it's getting cloudier.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
Take a liquid pump, hook it to a wind mill. Have the liquid drain through a Tesla Engine and hook the engine up to a generator. Voila! Free electricity.
Have you done this at your house? Then don't gripe about everyone else using fossil fuels.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
There is no accurate model of the environment. Worse, its obvious a few of these guys have a serious attitude problem.
What it comes down to is, whose policies are most in favor with the scientific community will get results from that community supporting their position. Screw the fact they don't have all the facts, it doesn't prevent either camp from making claims.
Its Global Warming this pas 15 years, before then it was Global Cooling.
Environmentalism is much more about ideaology than realism.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
We can thus conclude that we know nothing. Weather patterns haven't been recorded for a long enough time to make any valid long time prediction of such things as global warming or freezing. Once they manage to consistently predict tomorrows weather successfully they may go onwards and claim they have a clue how the weather will be 100 years from now. For those screaming "Kyoto!" etc: yes, reducing pollution is good and should be something to strive for for every somewhat intelligent human being, but I wouldn't draw a conclusion about global warming from what was presented yet.
And here I thought that my SAT scores were the only ones going down.
Quite weird - there was an elderly farmer saying much the same thing this morning on my bus to work.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't a guardian reader, it's just something he'd noticed over the years.
At the time, I thought he was talking crazy talk...
research which shows that the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface has decreased by 10%
Maybe we already have that considering that the study has a margin of error of 10%
Who on /. actually spends more than absolutely necessary outside anyways.....
I better get some of those 800 speed films then for my next vacation...
If only we'd stuck to oil and coal as common sense dictates...
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
No, dimming and warmimg are not mutually exclusive... They go together quite happily...
Less light to the ground does not mean a colder climate, the heath from the sun is simply absorbed somewhere else like in an atmosphere full of greenhouse gasses.
The global warming fad won't be put away. The new data will simply be integrated into the models and will likely proove we screwed our environment up even further than we thought.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
I suspect that some of this global dimming is due to pollution from sulfates (coal), jet contrails, and dust from wind-borne erosion. Sulfate and particulate pollution provides nice nucleation sites for cloud formation. These pollution-created artificial clouds probably reduce global warming (the article mentions this effect and a correlated decrease in cloudiness and increase in temperatures in the 1990s).
The scary part comes if we reduce these forms of pollution, reduce cloudiness, and thus accelerate global warming. Whether we like it or not, humanity is changing the climate -- as attractive as it seems, preservation is impossible. At this point, it might be better to think about climate engineering -- deciding how we want to change the climate rather than holding on to the false hope that we can avoid changing the climate.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
sounds like complete bull to me... If ANYTHING there would be MORE now since the 70's when they implemented all the anti-smog and pollution laws. Whoever came up with these results is likely just trying to make a name for themself. Sounds like a pathetic attempt...
... the math ain't hard.
Did you RTFA? That's almost exactly the reaction a lot of senior scientists had, but it looks like the evidence is pretty overwhelming. (With the usual caveats about popular journalism being hard to trust when it comes to science reporting, etc.) The thing about pollution laws is, they've helped a lot, but a) a lot of pollution comes from Third World countries that have no pollution laws, or don't enforce the ones they have, and b) the effects of the laws have been pretty much overwhelmed by the fact that we have a lot more people now than we did two or three decades ago.
We've seen this on a small scale where I live, in Denver, the city that gave the world the phrase "brown cloud." When I was a kid in the Seventies, the population of the Denver metro area was about half what it is now, and the pollution was just terrible. During the Eighties, as tougher laws kicked in (AFAIK, Colorado was the second state in the western US, after California, to really get serious about this) things improved dramatically. But through the Nineties, air quality started to get worse again, and we're now just about back to where we were when the laws came into effect. Halve the average emissions, double the population
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm pretty sure you're joking, and I like the tone of your sarcasm! I think that the environment is pretty damn important, and that backing out of the Kyoto treaty pissed off the rest of the world, but as it says here (from the article):
Tiny particles of soot or chemical compounds like sulphates reflect sunlight and they also promote the formation of bigger, longer lasting clouds.
And that soot was one of the biggest issues the US had with the treaty! I STILL think that we should be in there working with the world on treaties like Kyoto, but pushing for reduced CO2 output from the big guys without putting some checks on the increasing soot and particulate output of industrializing nations is a hard sell over here.
And I do agree that the so-called "Clear Skies" initiative is complete crap, and that it would increase our output of soot and particulates as well, and that is a BIG step backwards.
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I wonder if this is similar to a greenhouse. This would explain both the dimming AND the global warming. The glass from a greenhouse (comparable to the atmospheric gasses) undoubtably blocks some of the sunlight getting to the plants/surface. Yet we all know it's a bit warmer in the greenhouse than in the surrounding area outside.
If this analogy is correct, we really do have a lot to fear. Not only will we continue to have global warming but it seems as if the humidity level of the planet may rise too. Of course, at some point (if we're losing 10% a decade) you would think there is a break-even point and we'll start experiencing global cooling because it'll be like putting the shades down on the windows.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
So the bigger problem here is that it's getting increasingly harder for information to penetrate the thick skulls of humans. Looks to me like the number of thickheads is growing at a rate faster than 3% a decade, more like 300%
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
or perhaps a better quote from Futurama.
"I'm glad global warming never happened. It did, but nuclear winter canceled it out."
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"The global warming fad won't be put away. The new data will simply be integrated into the models and will likely proove we screwed our environment up even further than we thought."
It hasn't happened yet. The "man-made global warming" allegations are all politics and are not science, since there is no evidence of human effects and what they are (if there even ARE any). The "global warming" fad IS on its way out: the cooling claims are already starting. They will gain ground when these can be used by someone to blame on political enemies. Just like the global warming claims have been.
The "global cooling" fad of the 1970s too was put forth by ideologically-minded scientists who were so sure that they were right. Just like today's ideologically-minded global warming scientists.
It is all politics. No where is this more apparent than the Kyoto Accords, where the "good" countries are allowed to greatly increase their supposedly global-warming causing pollution while the "bad" countries must damage their economies and cut their emissions. If Kyoto was serious about its environmental claims, it would have demanded reductions on all countries involved.
Look, while there are plenty of documented cases of faking data, I think this is the exception, rather than the rule. Most scientists aren't in it for the money; if they were, they wouldn't bother being scientists- they'd become sell-outs like myself, or study a more lucrative field like economics.
As for your logic that this doesn't make sense, consider the possibility that the increase in global sulphur emissions from, say, 1940 to 1990, induced enough reduced sunlight to roughly offset the potential warming effect of CO2 emissions, but since 1990 CO2 emissions have increased more rapidly as advanced economies move to less carbon-intensive (coal->oil->nat. gas) fuels. I don't have the data to back this up, but it's one possible reason that the observed warming patterns don't match what you might expect from increased CO2 concentrations alone (global warming critics love to point out that there was disproportionately more warming in the 1st half of the century than the 2nd).
I admit that this is a half-cocked theory. But my point is that you failed to understand all of the factors at hand. Climate science is complicated; that's whay no one knows for sure what the f--- is going on.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
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Didn't you people see Animatrix? We HAD to do this to prevent the robot takeover, but it will only cause them to come after us for batteries.
That said, there has been an increase in the solar output. The number of sun spots at solar peak is increasing steadily. And the Mars polar cap is melting, which is consistent with the solar output increase observation.
Note that currently, the sun is close to its radiation peak. Which means that since the high atmosphere is acting like a bubble chamber, we will see more ice crystals and water droplets at high altitude (and more precipitations). Which raises the Earth's albedo (reflectivity) and could decrease the amount of solar light reaching the ground. So at least, the findings don't contradict atmospheric physics.
But I still want to see these measurements done over an 11-year solar cycle, otherwise it's gimme-a-grant voodoo, not science.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
I live the fact that this seemingly serious comment was modded Funny. Look out for the purple Teletubbies too! In fact, maybe THEY are responsible for global warming!
Not a reduction in actual light, but in "Solar Radiation". Solar Radiation includes UV which has been going steadily down since CFC's were banned (in the 60's?). The hole in the ozone is even starting to repair itself!!!!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
why we didn't invest in solar cell research, produce a decent/cheep cell, and build huge arrays in southern Arizona
There are two (related) problems with that theory.
1. Solar cells are inefficient. Only a small amount of the sun's energy is converted to electricity. The rest is waste heat adsorbed by the panels.
2. The efficiency of solar cells drops quickly when the panels get dirty. It would take quite a bit of energy to keep the panels clean.
Between these two problems a panel farm is not going to be worth the cost to set it up.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
So, if I get this right, global dimming and global warming are compatible, possibly complementary phenomena. This would mean that the world is getting warmer & darker.
Now, I'm not a scientist, but this sort of implies to me that things will get more humid as well. So, we're setting up for living in a big ole' sauna. So, let's look at the ups and downs:
Good: We'll all have great skin for starts.
Bad: Lots of very fat men walking around in flip-flops with small towels around their waists.
Good: Girls will wear less clothing to cope with the heat & humidity--we'll have a population of nice-skinned chicks dressed like the love-slaves from planet Triton. Misquoting Mary Carey: "Global warming? Never heard of it, but I guess we'll all have to wear less". Woo!
Bad: Killer hangovers, massive ring around the collar.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Every day, we get enough sunlight to power 27 years worth of the world's energy needs. Now, I thought about the implications of that. Obviously, we couldn't absorb/store the entire amount, but if we could put a dent in it, we'd have some global cooling. That is what this article is about.
On a similar note, the US could obtain all energy from the sun if it were to install a 200 mile square solar installation (assuming 15 percent efficiency... easily doable today). I say, put a dime of tax on each gallon of gas and use this money to subsidize solar generation - one of the only energy producers out there with net positive energy (more energy produced in the cell's lifetime than it takes to produce the cell itself). Hydro, wind and solar... I can't wait for the day.
On yet another related note, I'm in the process of building a solar/NiMH PC. I'm simply going to use store-bought NiMH rechargables to store excess daytime solar input. It certainly won't be cost effective but it'll be pretty high on the geek factor.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Gaia is getting hot from global warming, so she is turning down the blinds.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Well then, surely the incidence of skin cancer should be on the decrease. Skin cancer is caused by and large by increased sun radiation. Clearly a drop in sunshine as large as this (10%, to think of it) would translate into a measurable drop in sun exposure and skin cancers (among people under 30 anyway).
Sadly, there isn't any drop and, if anything, skin cancer is on the rise consistently (which other scientists connect with the thinning ozone layer when it's time to scare governments into some more research financing). So this is no different. Any "scientific discovery" that has the following attributes:
1. Peruses a scary prospect of global doom or change
2. Is developed by a "few and special"
3. Is published extensively in a news articles world over (as opposed to specialty magazines)
is achieving one thing - lots of grants for the guys that do it.
Think for yourself...
Don't kid yourself. The US is responsible for a very large chunk of the greenhouse gas output of the world. It is something like 40%. That is despite the fact that the US has around 5% of the world's population.
Don't forget that average fuel economy of cars sold in the US is at its lowest level in 20 years. Think about that for a moment. The average car sold today has roughly the same fuel economy as a car sold in 1983! Why? Looser resrtictions on "light trucks", because they were used for work purposes. Then the automakers realized they could make glorified station wagons and call them SUVs and sell them as "light trucks", as though they were being used for work. Heck, the Chevy Suburban is so big that it isn't even considered a "light truck" and is therefore not subject to fuel economy regulations at all. For fuel economy purposes, a Suburban is treated as though it were the same type of vehicle as a dump truck.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
1. In general, studies of this type are very difficult to do. One has to take into account:
-
the non-continuity of the measurements (they're not measuring everywhere, they are probably tending to measure near cities; cities cause definite local effects over time, but they are only a small percentage of Earth's surface area.
- astonishingly few "scientists" actually understand how to use instrumentation. (Yeah, flame me - but it's true - I've done a lot of teaching and mentoring in this area). One of the problems of our age is that we all have access to sophisticated equipment, but few actually know what the results mean.
2. It occurs to me that if the Earth's atmosphere were soaking up all of that energy, astronemers (one group that actually does know how to use instrumentation) would have noticed spectral changes years ago. But we haven't heard from them. (They could be part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to prop up the Bush and Cheney crew, I suppose, and are just not telling us.)3. I haven't done the calculations (has anybody?) but it also occurs to me that if Earth's atmosphere were soaking up all of that energy, there'd be some SERIOUS global warming occuring.
4. In the article, the "discoverer" of our newest Earth-dooming catastrophe seems to indicate that he was amazed to have found this issue in the mid-80's when "there was undeniable evidence that our planet was getting hotter". As some of us will recall, the dominant paradigm in the mid-80's was global cooling. Global cooling in the '80s was as obvious and well-proven as global warming is today. And, actually, diminishing sunlight reaching the Earth would be consistent with global warming (see point 3).
Dimming != Cooling
The article is about less sunlight reaching the earth's surface. Nothing about the earth cooling down....
Lets have an experiment:
1 Take a black (or very dark) plastic bag.
2 Go stand in the sun.
3 Pull the bag over your head (not to tight you are not going for a Darwin Award)
4 Stand for a while
You will notice the following:
1 You don't see much since the sunlight does not reach your eyes. (Lets call this 'dimming')
2 It gets hot in the bag. (Lets call this 'warming')
Conclusion:
You can have dimming and warming at the same time.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
[...] a lot of pollution comes from Third World countries that have no pollution laws, or don't enforce the ones they have [...]
Yeah, right! Sure it's those ultra-developed industries in unregulated Third World countries producing all the polution. I'm sure that the fact that countries like the USA or Russia are conveniently not abiding by the Kyoto Treaty has nothing to do with it.
"Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two."
Sen. James "Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" Inhofe and I claim my $5.
RTFA, the light output from the sun is the same...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Actually, when one puts it that way, it doesn't sound too bad ...
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Using your classroom analogy, it is a set of school rules where some kids have to stop hitting others over the head with their school books, and other kids are encouraged to do this more.
To go further in this analogy: In society some kids need to be thought how to stand up for themselves (be a little bit more assertive) and others need to be thought that bullying is bad.
Same for pollution: A little bit is accepted and countries are allowed to pollute that much in order to develop sufficiently. Some are now under that level and are allowed (not encouraged ass in the class) to pollute a bit more.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
So I blame jet airplane contrails.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
As stated in Paradigms Lost, modern science has come to use the media as a place to get their ideas heard and published instead of using the traditional review by peers approach. In other words, until this story is subjected to peer review and is something that peers in that field agree with, then I don't believe it's completely true. It may, however, have some truth in it, just not enough to make headlines.
I hate modern science.
-gam
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
The sun is the source of all of our energy. Every energy cycle on Earth is ultimately perpetuated by the light we get from the sun. 10% is a huge difference. I wouldn't just be concerned about less crop growth, I would be concerned about what exactly that means.
Everything living thing on earth depends on the heat of the Earth, and depends on consuming energy from the sun itself, or from comsuming something that consumes energy from the sun.
It's not like if dimming continues our kids will be in the dark; they'll die from lack of food first.
Right now I'm most concerned with what this will do to the current developing policy of searching for renewable resources. We lose sunlight, there aren't any. Heck, then why bother. It's fossils and fusion time...
/dev/psychic: No medium found
The night was moist.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Don't kid yourself. The US is responsible for a very large chunk of the greenhouse gas output of the world. It is something like 40%. That is despite the fact that the US has around 5% of the world's population.
Ok, then just replace "Third World country" by "country whose leader has not been democratically elected", and it again fits...
According to the article, UV radiation has not decreased, and that's where most of the skin cancr comes from. It's visible and IR that have fallen.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
First, solar energy is not reliable enough to be used as a primary energy source. Second, large scale solar plants are too inefficent. It think it mostly has to do with the fact that the output of cells is low voltage, and thus has to be upcast to get it to travel long distances (but i may be completely wrong on this one). Third transporting energy long distances is both wastefull (you loose some on the way) and very hard on the electrical grid. Arizona producing energy for a huge portion of the US would be a bad thing.
:)
In addition to the fact that it is more efficient for the power from solar cells to be used locally, it also provides some independence from the national grid in the case that something goes wrong with it. In fact, a system where power generation was completely distrubted would be ideal, the only reason we don't use it is because our primary power sources either need large centralized plant or the economies of scale of a large centralized plant outweighs the distribution losses. Neither of these apply to solar. So why would you want to use it in an inferior centralized system, when it is so well suited for a distributed system?
"...a lot of pollution comes from Third World countries that have no pollution laws, or don't enforce the ones they have..."
The USA is the largest polluter and consumer of resources on the planet. Since bush came to power he has also helped to relax a number of environmental pollution laws _and_ withdrawn the USA from the Kyoto aggreement, so don't go blaming other countries when your own is also guilty.
10% is such a HUGE amount that we'd have noticed.
a lot of pollution comes from Third World countries that have no pollution laws, or don't enforce the ones they have..
Sure... didn't you know that the biggest polluter is the United States? I wont bore u with the stats, but guess which country releases the most amount of carbon dioxide? And guess if it is the third world countries which send their polluting ships to be broken down in third world countries....
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
I invite you to come down here to Austin, Texas this summer (on your own nickel, of course. Sorry times are tough) and then tell me about global dimming. :) Heck, even now in December. You'll get a nice tan real quick like down here.
What, me Tweet?
"This new evidence proves global warming is bunk because now we know the scientists don't know everything."
To me this makes just as much sense as rejecting biology as soon as scientists discover a new species. "See! The proves the bible was right!"
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Exactly. But many "experts" know that continuing to say it, or simply behaving in such a way as to imply it's inevitability they can leave the perception that it's a fact. It's worked for macro-evolutionary theory so why not global warming. The truth is, there are numerous global changes because the globe changes. Changes to magnetic polarity, climate, ozone, etc. will have effects on humans in generations to come. Cancer will increase, but will likely decrease at times. The Earth will cool and warm. Granted we must, as humans, be good stewards of our home but we must be realistic as well. Frantically tying some global change to an agenda we may have serves no one but ourselves. This is, perhaps, the great lesson we as the "ignorant masses" need to keep in mind when we hear projections of doom. Take an educated look at all sides, challenge and think, and don't forget to follow the money.
If you ask me, it seems like the amount of sunlight has increased, but that's probably just related to the fact that I'm indoors 90% of the day looking at an electron gun.
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Also, it seems that the assumption has been made that the sun produces constant output. I don't think we can make this assumption. The sun, as a system, is way bigger than our atmosphere. Until we have thousands of years worth of data, observed from outside the atmosphere, we can't prove that solar radiation is a constant. In fact, since solar flares temporarily increase solar output, you could postulate that thousand year trends in flare frequency and magnitude could affect the overall output of the sun.
So, while global dimming may or may not affect us in the short term (on the scale of centuries) and pollution is still bad (again very long term effects are unrecorded, but it's obviously very bad in the short term (again measured in centuries) and it is ugly), I'm still not all that concerned that the world is going to ice over or boil away any time soon.
i don't like my old sig.
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I am no expert on global climate change but we have been told that the amount of UV radiation has be increasing considerably due to ozone depletion. We are now told that the amount of light reaching the surface of the earth is going down. This means one of two things. Either one or both of the studies are wrong or we can now buy some of those cheesy posters that glow when exposed to UV light and not have to buy that stupid uv light. Think of the savings. We might eventually be able to hang them outside in the middle of the day and still see them glow.
We will all have tans and nobody will be able to see them.
LEPP
The important point here is: we are altering the planetary system, but can not predict the effects.
There is no doubt that we are changing the planetary system. If nothing else, CO2 concentrations are rising dramatically and human activity is definitely the culprit. And global temperatures are definitely rising. Humans may or may not be the culprit, but a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that more CO2 should cause higher temps.
The problem is that we can't predict the effects of these changes. It isn't like there's a global thermostat that we can turn up or down a half-degree by altering our industrial output. Rather, it is like throwing random chemicals into a bowl in a closed room, hoping you don't create toxic fumes. You might, you might not, but you don't know one way or the other, and you can't get out in any case.
I spent several months looking into climate models and concluded that they're complete bunk. We can't predict the weather a week out, but people use the very same techniques to "predict" the climate a century out. Consider this: if you believe in a human activity-climate link, then in order to predict climate, you have to predict human activity. So predicting the behavior of the entire world economy is just one small source of the uncertainty in these models! They're garbage! Computer climate models just create a false sense of predictability about climate change.
So this leaves us in a scary place. Here we are on earth. If we screw it up, we have nowhere else to go. We're making changes, but we don't know the effects. Since we don't understand the planetary system, we can't necessarily undo the effects. It's like remodeling an aircraft in flight.
The Kyoto accords rightfully acknowledged that some countries are underdeveloped right now.
Forcing them to stay at the same level would destroy any chance of getting to a higher development level in the short term (although unviable in the long term allowing pollution does have positive economic effects in short term).
Others who are already developed far enough don't need this extra breathing space and should work to get their pollution down to a sustainable level.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Soon outdoor lighting conditions will be about the same as indoor, and f/2.8 lenses won't have a wide enough apeture.
I guess the lens makers don't mind this news, though. Too bad Canon discontinued their 200mm f/1.8 lens, it will be needed by everyone soon!
and I assume this is coming from someone in the cogs of organized religion.
In other news: Sales of sunglasses have fallen 10% in 30 years.
If we make it easier for the stupid people to survive, then of course Global Dimming will occur.
Play Well
I really don't believe anything the Bush administration says about the Kyoto treaty.
Even if the developing countries agreed to the "global" cap idea on pollution, the Bush administration would find another reason why the U.S. won't support the treaty. The _real_ problem they have with the treaty is that it will cost polluters (i.e., cronies & campaign contributors) a lot of money to clean up their own messes.
My meteorology is not that great, and my physics is rusty. But if the mean surface temp of the planet is around 300K, and we're getting 10% less solar energy, shouldn't our temp have dropped to about 270K by now? I think we'd have noticed a lot more problems than we have so far.
And this goes to show that scientists still can't decide if global warming is real or not, so all the environmentalists ought to just lay off.
Constitutionally Correct
Another correction - I believe the US is accountable for 30% of greenhouse gas production - story from CNN a couple of days ago - no link though (read em and dump).
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Isn't that how the story goes?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You are quite correct; I don't think any educated person would disagree with your assertion that environmentalism is not a science. :
From WordNet (r) 2.0
environmentalism
n 1: the philosophical doctrine that environment is more
important than heredity in determining intellectual
growth [ant: hereditarianism]
2: the activity of protecting the environemnt from pollution or
destruction
The inductive approaches to physics, biology, and chemistry are sciences. These form the basis of all scientific research concerning the environment of our planet.
To learn more about the scientific method you will want to read this article about Francis Bacon and his advocacy of an inductive method (which is now generally called "the scientific method"), and a more detailed article describing the scientific method in some detail.
We do not get all our energy from the sun. Some of it comes from the decay of naturally radioactive isotopes in the earth's core. That is why the earth's core is still liquid. There are 10^24 kg of material making up the earth, and if even a small percent were radioactive (as it is), this would be a great source of energy.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"It's entirely because one guy who used to be heavily involved in the oil business happens to be the current President of the US."
Tell me about it. I was happily driving along on a pollution-free highway in my wind-powered automobile when I heard on the radio that Bush had been elected. In a matter of minutes, the police pulled me over and then escorted me to a Ford dealership, where they then forced me to buy something never seen before the year 2000: something called an SUV.
I'm no climate scientist, or climate engineer, but it seems to me that dark |= cold. A greenhouse can be dark but hot. The gasses keep in the heat, yet keep out the light. Venus springs to mind.
Scientists have been debating this one quite a bit -- whether cloud's reflection of the sun light creates more cooling than the cloud's night-time heat-trapping abilities. The suspension of airtravel around 9-11 gave scientists a chance to study this. They found that the absence of contrails created pronounced higher daytime highs and slightly lower nighttime lows. At least for contrails, the net effect seems to be a reduction in average temperture.
Admittedly, this is only a single study. The point is that intuitions about clouds reflecting energy vs. greenhouses retaining energy only provide insight into potential qualititive outcomes. The real quantitative answer may be different depending on the numerical balance of all the effects.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
And i thought i was going blind! ...very slowly
"In wine there is wisdom. In beer there is strength. In water there is bacteria." --Old German Proverb
Doh! Of course Sun is getting dimmer.
I'd blame it on Micro$oft.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Damn it, I knew trying to close that ozone hole was a mistake
If you would have RTFA you would have noticed that is appears that it has started to come down, but it is too difficult to tell since there is not enough data - we'll have to wait five years to tell if the trend has changed.
"Between these two problems a panel farm is not going to be worth the cost to set it up."
Here in Tucson AZ, we have a 2.5 Megawatt solar array, that will be 4 MW by next spring. That's just a drop in the bucket, of course, but it does have an impact.
Lots of houses have passive solar, mostly for heating water. Some of these water heaters have heat exchangers for warming the house too. (It does drop below the 30's in Tucson, and it gets real cold in the mountains here).
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Arizonians Rejoice!!
Unfortunately, real environmental problems are usually created locally*. Fixing them means taking the economic hit locally -- losing factory jobs in your own city, reducing the fertilizer-driven crop yield on your own farm, having a smaller engine in your own car, whatever.
It's much better to deal with global environmental issues, which are, by definition, somebody else's fault. "It's not me, it's those darned Amazonian loggers! I can't do anything by myself, the world's governments need to get together and make everyone do things differently."
[* important exception: rivers. Rivers carry and in some cases even concentrate pollution from large distances upstream]
I knew I shouldn't have spent the extra money for the 'nice' pair of Revos.
Wait...I don't beleive in the science of this. Until we build a time machine, and go back and *accurately* measure with the same instruments, I'm going to believe that light levels remain constant, global warming causes cloud cooling, and Swamp coolers are better than AC, because they just sound cooler.
1. Solar cells are inefficient. Only a small amount of the sun's energy is converted to electricity. The rest is waste heat adsorbed by the panels.
/. article about more efficient solar cells. Of course /. has a truly shitty search feature, so I gave up. Google turned up some articles on Boeing having cells with >30% efficiency, which is twice what is currently in use. There is more research going on, but dangit, we need more.
:)
Sounds like a great opportunity to set a research priority to me. In the quest for the holy grail of an infinite renewable energy source, the sun is so obvious that it seems silly that we have apparently given up so easily on harnessing it.
I remember a
By the way, current solar panels tend to produce a net benefit in terms of cost versus output, so I don't believe your last statement is correct today, and I want it to be even less so in the future.
The enemies of Democracy are
Are you kidding me? Here in Arizona we were still in the 100's in mid October, with not a cloud in sight.
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
Don't be silly. Emissions from newer cars is far better than it was 20 years ago, having a bigger effect than fuel economy.
You've let the anti-SUV crowd 0wn you. What would REALLY improve city air quality would be to get rid of stinky diesel buses (replace with natural gas versions, I suppose), and subsidize poor folks so they could get new cars, instead of using the 10+ year old beater with the shitty exhaust system.
Call me too lazy to look it up, but a quantitative study I read (put out by Cato, I believe) said replacing the oldest 5% of cars on the road will do more for air quality than kicking the SUVs off the road.
Give me a break, next it will be Global [something].
I am still wanting for the promise of Global Warming, I really hate snow.
Get over it, thr enviomentlests always will be screamming about something. They have screammed wolf to much for me.
The sky is falling, get on the anti-radiation suits.
initial planning, design, materials and implementation, maintenance and repair...good idea but I doubt it would come close to paying for itself.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
I wonder if this is part of the answer.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Just about everybody who does anything is in it for the money.
If you want to do Big Science, you need research grants. If you want research grants, you need attention. If you generate hype from alarming and scary predictions, you get attention, which leads to grants.
I'm not saying that this report is B.S. I'm just pointing out why many people choose not to get all flustered just because another climate research team has told us that the sky is falling. You can find plenty of reports from the same institutions 20 years ago which paint a very different picture than what happened.
So far, the only thing global climate researchers have demonstrated beyond debate is that mankind still doesn't understand global climate very well.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I thought for a minute there that "Global Dimming" was referring to the decrease in average human intelligence in proportion to the global increase in lawyers!
I'm not sure how it was said in English, but here it is:
"We don't know who started, but it was us that obscured the sky."
(I hope I'm not being redundant either.)
Can we PLEASE move to a friendly energy source now?
... you've got your money and the customer just runs away with the item.
What, solar? No. You can't put a meter on the (evidently, decreasing) sunlight. Your industries are addicted to getting people on payment plans, and once you've sold that solar cell, buddy, that's it
What, wind? No. You can't put a meter on the wind, blah blah blah like above. Beside, wind is powered by the sun, and as we can see, that's decreasing.
What, nuclear? BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAAAA!
Still wind power is promising enough. The physics of wind demands centralized facilities, which means distribution too, and hoo boy, can we ever charge you for that! After all, if you can't make a quick buck and then continue to soak your alleged customers, then why bother?
Can we PLEASE move to a friendly energy source now?
That sounds suspiciously like an anti-Capitalist whine. What's not friendly about your local energy utility? They provide your power (and who knows or even cares about how it's generated -- ask California) and you pay through the nose for it. That's exactly how your culture is organized. If you don't think that's friendly, citizen, then we have a re-education cell all ready for you at Guantanamo Bay. It's pretty damned sunny there, too!
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
In some other discussions they got in to the validity of the statement, from how its measured to who did it to where it took place... BLAH BLAH BLAH... no one really looked into the possibility that they may have been 10% more Ripped on Pot they they are today.. it was the fabulous 60's and bell bottoms were in. It may be a government plot to drive us all insane!
In the book of Revelations it talks about the Sun losing 33.3% of it's light in the end times. Take heed, Jesus's return is fast approaching.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
Please note here, much of this 10% is being reflected. There are people in this thread pointing out how untrue the observations must be because if 10% of the sun's energy was being absorbed by the atmosphere, the Earth would be getting a heck of a lot warmer than it is. Instead, the Earth should be getting 10% brigher from the moon or anywhere else in space. Particulates are reflecting and clouds are forming (which look very bright to me when I fly over them).
I've been wondering about this. Would global warming end up creating enough clouds to reflect enough energy from the sun that it balances itself out after a few decades? Or will global warming cause an imbalance in the sun's reflected energy after a few decades that causes a swing on the cold side? How much does the CO2 green house effect compare to the particulate / cloud reflector effect?
Actually you can mine H, it is a waste by product of most natural gas production. It currently gets wasted, but it can be mined
I wonder if this will have any sort of noticeable effect on Seasonal Affective Disorder. It has been shown that people feel more depressed with less exposure to the sun (this disorder is especially common in winter).
It's funny, everyone talks about how people seem sadder and grumpier "these days". I wonder if there could be an actual link to this "global dimming".
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
That would be decay releasing energy our planet originally got from the sun. It is not a renewable resource.
Your estimate of the Earth's energy potential is interesting, but think of the energy required to actually filter the material you speak of from the earth.
My concern is that I don't think we're quite ready to grow the corn alone we need using nonrenewable resources.
/dev/psychic: No medium found
Interesting, if I read this thread correctly, you are implying that Mr. Gore is dimmer than President Bush.
If dimness refers to success then there can be no doubt that you are correct. But then selection bias has ensured this and makes it irrelevent.
If dimness refers to intellegence, then you are deeply misinformed. Aside from partisan fools, no one seriously thinks that President Bush is a dunce... far from it, he is clearly a clever and intelligent man. However, he is not in the same league as Mr. Gore. Can you honestly imagine President Bush giving university lectures?
Solar cells are inefficient. Only a small amount of the sun's energy is converted to electricity. The rest is waste heat adsorbed by the panels
The inefficiency of solar cells is a bogus argument. The fact is, from a solar point of view, we're at zero percent right now. So anything > 0 is an improvement.
If every rooftop in america had some solar cells on it, and a way to feed the grid, we'd be set. Yes, yes, it would require maintenance, but it wouldn't be all that bad.
say you can get about 10 watts out of a square foot of solar cells (you can do this today, for about $60 per square foot).
now let's say on the average you'll get 1000 watts per roof. I don't know how many houses there are in america, and condos and apartment building work against this idea, but let's say there are 30 million useful roofs, and 8 hours of useful sunshine per day.
That gives 240,000 megawatt-hours per day. The power capacity of florida's plants is about 19,000 megawatts.
Stephan
I am so taking my camera to Central Park today.
No, the radioactive elemants in the earth's core did not come from the sun. They formed from the same cloud of gas as the sun did (from the remains of a supernova IIRC).
As to saying that radioactive decay is non-renewable, that is rediculous. It will always be there (unless you're looking at millions/billions of years in the future, and you might as well be worried about the sun burning out or exploding by then. You might as well consider the sun to be non-renewable on that timescale, as well.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Oh, I'm also interested in what environmental laws Bush has relaxed, if you have some reliable information on that I would like to see it. I'm genuinely curious.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
I spent several months looking into climate models and concluded that they're complete bunk. We can't predict the weather a week out, but people use the very same techniques to "predict" the climate a century out.
.. well anywhere :) I realize I'm using extreme examples, but I doubt that many Slashdotters would know where the heck Dryden, Ontario is, for example.
:)
Common misconception. "Weather" is the local, day-to-day state of your environment. "Climate" is more of an averaging of many, many days' weather, over large areas.
Simple trick: try to predict the exact temperature, winds, precipitation for 3 weeks from now in the city where you live. Kinda hard, right?
Watch me predict, very accurately, the climate. Central Canada: snow in the winter, temperatures below freezing. Warm, dry summers with many sunny days. Sahara desert: hot and very low precipitation for the next 5 years. Brazilian rainforest: warm and rainy. We can even do some very accurate climate comparisons: California warmer than Alaska. Chicago windier than
Anyway, long-term climate modelling is rather accurate, because for the most part, our climate doesn't change all that quickly in comparison to a human lifetime. The day-to-day weather? Good luck, you'd be better off predicting the stock market
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
If the sunlight reaching the surface has gone down 10% in the last 40 years and at the same time the solar input has actually increased then the energy is going somewhere.
Is there any data on how much energy is being reflected and/or emitted into space?
I would think it would be a nice satellite that took measurements pointing toward and away from the planet in a variety of wavelengths. And yes I know it's not exactly that easy.
It's really a simple thing. Energy in and energy out. Of course in practice it's a bit more difficult. How much energy is from inside the planet for instance.
It's time they asked a lot more questions and then attempted to find answers.
Ok, I'll come quietly, just have my thorazine ready...
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
They found that in some areas the contrails reduced the daytime high temperatures by 10 degrees F or so. The effect of course varied from place to place, depending on how common contrails are there in the first place.
I wonder how much these observations explain the global dimming.
The following link is to Steve Malloy's junkscience expose website. He is very clear when he shows the whole Global Warming model to be the bunk it is. Further, The Guardian is often show as a model of a junk science periodical.
http://www.junkscience.com/
Only if the junk is reflective.....
Anything 'darker' then the earths surface (and water is very reflective) is going to result in a net heating effect.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Not exactly. Conventional wisdom states that if sunlight is being blocked, then that acts as a counter to Global warming because less energy makes it to the surface to heat it. However, blocked energy must still go somewhere. If it is reflected back into space (aka the increased albedo case) it does not cause warming. If it is absorbed by increased levels of pollutants in the atmosphere, then the energy is reradiated as heat from inside the atmosphere. In this case, the surface is not directly heated - but the atmosphere is, manifesting itself as global warming.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Yes, I know only one of the verses has to do with the article, I just copied in some context. I guess I could have highlighted the relevant portion better.
/. is the wrong place to be analyzing current scientific findings from a Biblical-literalist point of view.
Perhaps my point was/is that while 100 years ago if you asked someone what could cause the listed judgements a person would likely answer "a miracle" or only some super-natural intervention. Now we might say "pollutants in the atmosphere caused by industrial emissions could reduce the sun's brightness by 1/3 from the levels a few thousand years ago." i.e. With greater knowledge, it becomes easier to explain away the divine (in some cases).
If/When the events listed in Revelation come true, people will just explain them away with purely physical, mechanistic causes. Any Christians left pointing to the Bible saying "told you so" will be deemed too annoying to tolerate and promptly locked up, beaten and/or executed.
Or, the judgements could be very dramatic and unmistakably the hand of God; people will just be too proud to acknowledge Him.
- Jasen.
P.S. Yeah. I realize
You could get the same results by replacing the dirtiest 1% of the cars on the road. In California, at least 10% of the pollution comes from small gas engines, i.e. lawn mowers, leaf blowers, etc. - and narrowly avoided losing the right to regulate small gas engines.
I've been saying for years that the solution to global warming was to increase the earth's albedo and that we all ought to start putting as much particulant matter as possible into the air. The big fires in Southern California last month were a good start.
Can someone please come up with a plausable explanation for how this phenomenon is Microsoft's fault?
Some of the quotes in the article indicate some pretty narrow thinking.
First, less light == cooling down? "If that was the case then we'd all be freezing to death."
There isn't less radiation coming from the sun, just less reaching the earth's surface ("there has been a general increase in overall solar radiation over the past 150 years"). This means it's probably being absorbed in the atmosphere, probably being converted to heat. By preventing that sunlight from being converted to non-heat energy (photosynthesis, evaporation), this might be heating up the atmosphere even more. I don't know where this heat goes, but it *might* be possible that less surface light means increased global warming. I guess the real questions regarding surface light and temperature is: How does a decrease in surface light affect the amount of energy that escapes the earth?, and Are we storing energy and remaining cool, or letting more energy be converted to heat?
Second, "I don't think that aerosols by themselves would be able to produce this amount of global dimming." Aerosols "by themselves" might not filter that much light, but pollution does lead to "bigger, longer lasting clouds." It sounds like the "global dimming" just means less direct sunlight, not necessarily dimmer direct sunlight.
For all you sarcastic (I sure hope you're being sarcastic) and nameless people, that's what the analogy was pointing to. Yes, greenhouse gases. Duh.
The discussion of greenhouse gases and the greenhouse effect has been going on for years now. But it hasn't been tied to the global dimming phenomenon yet. People tend to assume greenhouse effect equals warmer planet and they stop there. The dimming is yet a new piece of the puzzle that ties it all together and makes it that much more of a concern.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Modded as troll, you have my sympathy. Moderation around here has gone to hell lately. There's endless crud modded as funny and insightful yet any thoughtful post not fitting with someone's canned views they've dutifully been indoctrinated with by Barney the purple dinosaur is modded as troll or flamebait.
Give it up, already. Your guy lost three years ago. Besides, the US hasn't democratically elected a president since the Electoral College began.
I know it's more fun to spout off, but it really doesn't have the effect you're hoping for.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
What was the saying du jour (pardon my french, I mean my cheese-eating-surrender-monkeyese...) in the sunny, southern and neo-conservative Texas again? Oh yes, "Bring it on!"
But wait, there can't be anything to "bring on" in this particular "war" since bush just recently sent his neo-con gov't rep to a climate conference in Europe to enlighten everyone that the climate change is in reality just a silly conspiracy theory by some loony green meanies.
There's nothing here. Just go fill up the tank of your SUV and don't forget to support the Commander-in-Chief also through your votes and campaign donations. Thank you.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
That warmer al around means a better environment for disease breeding bugs, like mosquitos.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
10% reduction in light can be easily explained since the satelite they are using hasn't had it's lenses cleaned in 30 years.
Sooo.... what? I'm less likely to get skin cancer?
I live in Seattle you insensitive clod!
Aside from partisan fools, no one seriously thinks that President Bush is a dunce... far from it, he is clearly a clever and intelligent man. However, he is not in the same league as Mr. Gore.
... you just need extremely intelligent people advising you.
True, but I wanted to clarify a bit. According to this article, Al Gore has an IQ of 133-134, but no IQ data is available for Bush. It's assumed that he's around 119-125, but no hard evidence is available. Certainly by no means a dunce, considering the average IQ is supposed to be 100 (although it's more likely around 96). No matter what estimate you use, GW Bush is not an idiot. Besides, as was mentioned quite a bit in the California recall election, you don't need to be extremely intelligent
Also, as you pointed out, you don't need incredible intelligence to be successful.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Do you even know what Troll is. It obviously wasn't Troll, geeze!
This means, as has been often noted, the atmosphere is absorbing more energy. That in turn is great news for wind power, a renewable industry which is growing rapidly and in fact is expected to be the dominant form of power production in less than 30 years.
Sean
It's a good strategy, though. GB Shaw already remarked that democracy makes sure that a people gets no better government than they deserve. It's not surprising that many voters choose a "dim light" to represent them, if given the chance.
Offtopic: Yes! The Netherlands is smarter than Belgium, France, and the USA! I already suspected that!
Actually, the entire electricity requirements of the United States could be served by wind turbines with a combined land-use footprint of only 14,000 acres, including enough grid redundancy to provide 99.5% uptime through long grid transmission to areas experiencing calm winds. (The remaining 0.5% backup could be hydro or whatever.) That area is only twice the size of the Stanford campus, and as large as the amount of Oak forest that California loses each year.
Some people consider turbines ugly at first glance, but more people want wind turbines in their neighborhood than want mercury-spewing coal smokestacks in their state.
Wind power is the fastest growning renewable industry and is expected to be the dominant form of power production in less than 30 years.
Please see the Windpower FAQ for more information.
It's interesting to note that Earth's closest twin planet in terms of position and size is Venus, where a runaway Greenhouse Effect keeps surface temperatures around Venusian a toasty 480C (894F) but the entire planet is mired in a perpetual twilight gloom (verified by the Russian landers) due to the extraordinarily thick atmosphere (around 9000 kPa or around 90 times Earth's atmospheric pressure). Venus's oceans long ago boiled away in this runaway Greenhouse Effect. The oceanographic runaway Greenhouse Effect begins to occur over large bodies of water at around 27C (80F). Even ignoring current human-directed climate change, the increasing solar output of the Sun as it moves along a typical Main Sequence stellar evolutionary path means that sooner or later the Earth's oceans will also vaporise and temperatures soar quickly to Venusian levels. Strange days indeed lie ahead of us...
Da Blog
> Gore never said he invented it. He did say he created it. He did create it when he was a Senator
Just like the Tesla Coil was not invented by Tesla, he created it... wait, that's the SAME FUCKING THING. Either way, regardless of context, what he said is, at worst, a lie and, at best, deceitful.
I told you to stop messing with the opacity on my applications! How can I see my pr0n wallpaper if Sky 3.0's opacity is 90%? HUH?
Global trade is nothing more than the freedom of individuals to make mutually beneficial economic decisions without being harassed by nosy local governments. There is nothing wrong with this.
You capitalists might learn something if you left your caves once in a while. Yes, trade is a mutual thing (even socialists like me are not against it). However, what passes for trade now is neither FREE nor FAIR. The countries that are making the trade decisions are run by autocrats and other corrupt individuals who don't care about their citizens.
You say that trade will result in less harassment from governments. Well, maybe. But now you will get more harassment from corporations and bodies like the WTO.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
"If photosynthesis is good enough for Fossil Fuels, then it's good enough for hydrogen generation."
Um, sure, if you're willing to wait a few million years.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Is Earth's albedo (brightness from outside, from reflected light" increasing? If so, at least some of the "lost" surface incident radiation might be heading to space, as Earth is more reflective, possibly from increased cloud cover. However, I bet the albedo is *decreasing*, from reduced snow/ice/lake/tree cover, and possibly even dirtier clouds. With decreased albedo and surface incidence, that's a lot more (constant) solar radiation pumping into the atmosphere, heating it, and driving it in tighter, faster spirals. Someday, all of Texas through Indiana will resemble a Martian Grand Canyon. Yippeekaiyea!
--
make install -not war
You mean like the USA after the 2000 election?
(ducks)
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
That's the kind of data that really makes you ponder. What happen back then? Is the sun going postal on us periodically or something?
If you want to look it up, it's a rather dry read but very interesting: Dansgaard, W., Johnsen, S.J., Clausen, H.B., Dahl Jensen, D., Gundestrup, N.S., Hammer, C.U., Hvidberg, C.S., Steffensen, J.P., Sveinbjornsdottir, A.E., Jouzel, J., Bond, G., Evidence for general instability of past climate from a 250 kyr ice core record, 1993, Nature, 364, 218. I tried to find a URL on nature.com, no luck though.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Windmill farms are regarded as many to be ugly so people don't want them around their houses.
They'd prefer six gigantic cooling towers, a huge pile of coal and a big pipe full of waste chemicals, all laid on a tasteful bed of concrete? Wind farming is the best-looking system of electricity generation in the world.qntm.org
He claimed, truthfully, that he was into the possibilities of the net way before his fellow congress critters, and supported it. He didn't claim to have invented it.
t hreadid=297&start=1
But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."
The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."
From http://www.lostcommunity.org/bbs/thread-view.asp?
'But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, "The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator."
The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet "would not be where it is today."Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University, claims that Gore "was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?" '
He's a fundy - doubts evolution, has no patience for doubt, no use for curiosity. He thinks he knows all he needs to. He doesn't want to hear from anyone but those who will reinforce his preconceptions. "I get all my news from unbiased sources: my staff."
This twit was born a member of the ruling class and has inherited all the pointy-haired bossiness. Total failure in business, despite massive advantages. Most of us can't raise capital on the strength of our dad's political connections. He got rich as a tax-fattened tick. Emminent domain was used as a tool to bludgeon property from private citizens to benefit other private citizens in building a new stadium for the Texas Rangers. Additional property was stolen in this manner for development AROUND the stadium.
The only money he ever made has a real stench to it.
Whaaat-ever. You're full of baloney. At this time, I have a score of 2, and you have a score of 0. There's something to be said there about who's getting more attention, eh?
... what, "reasonable citizen"? ... who clearly doesn't give a shit about the people downwind from a bomb.
... and that's where the nuclear should head if they expect my support.
... the prevailing orgs have little interest in generating power so cheaply. Like the usual terrors invoked by profit motives, they continue to support their usual profit margins ... and even worse, this deregulation fiasco, with all this "stranded costs" bullshit, is making them cling to status quo as hard as ever.
... and the bubbles of the 90s (as well as the still expanding housing bubble of the early 00s) more than demonstrate that investors have wholly unreasonable demands that obliterate all sensible and sustainable investments. To toss out numbers like some fool, investing in a wind tower may get your money back in 15 years (including maintenance costs), but investing in a power company that chomps through oil and coal can get you your money back in 5. Those kinds of numbers are the things holding up wind power. To a sensible man (why, yes, like myself), putting up a generator is a great investment, considering all the things that can't be put into a goddamned spreadsheet and put into an annual report.
But these things are details. I am angry about the energy situation in America, and there are rafts of people (you are probably one of them) who don't want to deal with the anger and the philosophies behind it. As I stress time and time again, the raised fist has a point and it's pointless to argue that it doesn't.
I live in Ohio. Do you see where this is going? No? Well, I'll continue. I happen to live upwind (thank the very gods) from a certain power plant. Are those enough hints yet? No? Well, I'll come out with it. It's all about Davis-Besse, and we came to within 1/4-inch of one of America's most severe nuclear accidents. People I know would have been irradiated from that one. If the concern about that incident makes me some hippie, then I accept the moniker. I'd rather be a hippie with concern about my fellow man, than some
Nuclear power is a great idea. Even now, the basic idea's awesome. But the real "retards" are the people who designed and ran our nuclear industry. That's why I laugh at it. Their creation is a monstrosity that must be changed. Economics alone say the present nuclear installed plant is a bad idea now. Waste handling also says it's a bad idea. These can all change, but as August's blackout showed, the all-encompassing overdrive of profit motives won't allow that to happen.
There are some rumblings about safer nuclear facilities, using pebble beds, and even scaled-down types that can be run on city-block scales. I think those are great ideas
South of Toledo (where I am currently cursed to live) is Bowling Green. I clipped out a news article recently, which told of a 700kW wind generator farm that was installed nearby there. Wind power is a no-brainer -- generator, blades, tower, power lines. It only poses a hazard to birds and "visual environment". But it's acceptance is so obviously held back by the power companies that I'm likely to jump up and down, fit to burst over the issue. Wind power involves installations of certain sizes, and considering the size of the blades and the height of the tower, this places it outside any individual's capacity to install (excepting farms). We must rely on organizations for wind power. And there's the very problem
So, not just no, but hell no, they won't be brought into the fold until there's cultural change. Wind power should have been deployed over a decade ago. What's holding it up are investment expectations
To sum up what I just said for you: blah blah blah. There, that'll save time for my future postings.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
This link will get you to the article on Junkman Steve Milloy's background and connections
Diesel buses and trucks are not terribly polluting. Natural gas is better, but the filthy cloud emitted from diesel exhaust is mostly just soot, and they are much cleaner than similarly sized gasoline vehicles.
The soot does make a mess, but until natural gas or electric powered vehicles come into the scene, dirty-looking diesel is much better than clean-looking gasoline.
I'm done with my nitpick, now.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
I am terrified, but not because of the long term benefits of what he does. History might accurately evaluate the long term effects of the (note that I do not say his as I think he is manipulated) current policies. Today, the really frightening observation is that:
- a few jingoistic speeches can pursuade so many Americans to accept the dismantling of the constitution and invasion of Iraq in the face of world opposition, and to accept the branding any domestic opposition as unpatriotic;
- a state governor can be seen as strong for glorying in the number of executions carried out on his watch (I doubt he ever, for a moment, considered any of the appeals to him on these cases -- that would have been weakness);
- a president can get away with rewarding his pals for their financial and other support in getting him to the White House (define "corruption") -- or maybe the huge deficits and environmental damage that ensue will be proved to be beneficial in the end;
I do not know about global dimming, but it seems to apply to the United States of America.The article quotes that the experts don't have any clue to why this is happening, but wouldn't it make sense that all the gasses that are causing the greenhouse effect (like carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide) are also causing the a slight blockage of sunlight?
More fool me - I always thought that scientists used cesium clocks when trying to detect temporal changes. It turns out that they just use a black plate.
Sigs are bad for your health.
"Solar radiation is measured by seeing how much the side of a black plate warms up when exposed to the sun, compared with its flip side, which is shaded. It's a relatively crude device, and we have no way of proving how accurate measurements made 30 years ago really are. "To detect temporal changes you must have very good data otherwise you're just analysing the difference between data retrieval systems," says Ohmura."
Measurement is data COLLECTION, not RETRIEVAL.
Does this bonehead seriously believe there's some sort of magical barrier between different forms of data collection?
1. Set up both old and new devices and take measurements. Compare results. If there's a systematic difference, apply the approriate correction factor to the old data, OR
2. USE THE OLD DEVICE.
The former is what any decent scientist would do when confronted with new technology, without waiting for some situation to occur which would call his measurements into question. The latter is always possible by going to the undergraduate labs and taking back the old stuff you've given them to learn with. If the old stuff isn't available any more, have the undergrads build some. They'd learn more from that than from using your old junk anyway.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I wasn't planning on replying, as I knew I'd get "troll" moderated. I actually was +3 for about 20 seconds, heh.
The reality is I could have tried to type enough information to refute the environmentalists, but in the twenty minutes it would take to write that post, all the greenies would have 10 word replies that would end up being moderated as "Interesting" or whatever at +5. I had precious little time to get my word in, and all I would have said would have mimicked the links.
Actually I heard recently (but can't recall the source) that Dubya has an IQ of about 92, and Bush Snr has one of about 97. So that makes him of below-average intelligence.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Hmm, fair enough. A worthy nit to pick, and you did it without belittling my point or giving me some new colorful titles. I think I might have to 'fan' you just for that. Thanks for the tidbit, good to know. :)
There is no accurate model of the environment.
Of course, there isn't. Environmentalists aren't claiming there is. They are saying: "if we continue doing this, these are the bad things that can happen to us".
That is, environmental models showing global warming over the short term are plausible. That alone should be sufficient to take them seriously; absolute proof that this model or that model is correct just isn't needed.
The burden of proof in such cases simply isn't symmetric. People wanting to emit large amounts of some substance into the environment need to provide clear and convincing proof that it is safe. People who want to stop such emissions should only be required to raise plausible objections. That's because the risks from emitting something harmful are so much greater than the losses associated with simply not emitting it.
Its Global Warming this pas 15 years, before then it was Global Cooling.
And they may well have been right, since the nature of pollution has changed greatly since the 1950's and 1960's.
Screw the fact they don't have all the facts, it doesn't prevent either camp from making claims.
That's like having unprotected sex with a prostitute and arguing that it's harmless because, after all, nobody can prove that you are going to get sick. Or it's like drinking a bottle of cleaning fluid and arguing that it's harmless because, after all, nobody can prove to you that it is going to kill you by causing internal bleeding (maybe it will just destroy your liver).
Environmentalism is much more about ideaology than realism.
Your supposed "realism" is about ignoring the possible consequences of your actions. You use the demand for "all the facts" to excuse irresponsible actions and irresponsible risk taking. And for what? Slightly increased short-term consumption.
the ultraviolet light increasingly penetrating the leaky ozone layer is not affected.
Please mod this guy up. The grandparent poster is either a troll or a lazy fool who completely disregarded the RESEARCH being reported in the article. Look, the article states that sunny days are JUST AS SUNNY as they've ever been. UV rays are what cause the burns. When you wrote:
In the early eighties I needed to use suncream in the summer and had a few cases of vicious sunburns when I did not. Nowdays I no longer need it unless I go as far south as the tropics.
You were reporting an anecdotal, non-statistical observation that completely discounted the actual data being presented in the article. Your comment basically said, "Rah rah, I have the same superstitions myself, hurray!" but you obviously didn't even READ THE ARTICLE. Man -- it wouldn't be so bad but this means you get your news from SLASHDOT SUMMARIES...Not the actual articles, but the misspelled, error ridden written-for-the-Editors summaries And that is frightening!
This isn't the sort of critical thinking that I used to come to Slashdot for. This is rabble that gets modded up because someone likes the conclusion. Well, so what?! Oh well. I'll get modded flamebait. Figures.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Don't forget that average fuel economy of cars sold in the US is at its lowest level in 20 years. Think about that for a moment.
China has just passed mandatory new-car fuel-efficiency standards that in 2005 will be *MORE STRICT* than in the USA.
Fines are mouting following Sol's blatant disregard of the C&D order. And the newly implemented blocking filters just aren't 100% effective, yet.
Rest easy, this should all be resolved as soon as designs for the fusion reactor, Iter (pronounced, unless my Latin is rusty, as "eater"), are accepted as prior art and all sunlight users pay appropriate licensening fees.
Iter
Well, he DID manage to weasle his way out of Watergate, didn't he?
NOTE: smart does not mean morally good...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
You are confusing DC with low-voltage and AC with high-voltage. At any given voltage, it is more efficient to transfer DC than AC. Historically it was only possible to get a high enough voltage with AC transformers, but with power electronics you can do high voltage DC. As a bonus you do not have to synchronize a DC grid, so major blackouts are unlikely.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
From the Vancouver Sun,
The most promising source of the hydrogen may be geological "traps" similar to those now drilled for natural gas. Professor Freund said: "One of these natural hydrogen fields is already known to exist in North America, and extends from Canada to Kansas."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
No, wait, not lawyers, those other soulless bloodsucking freaks of nature. Vampires, that's it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
anything more than he worked for a company?
You have to understand that I do more than just look at the website. I have an understanding of the proper use of statistics and scientific method. And his articles on global warming are right on track.
It is the organizations that hide the base info that one must watch out for. If you have the base info, you can check the assumptions and perform the same calculations.
I did catch him on being too skeptical on one point, but it caused me to check up on a future cure for cancer. So, overall, I rate teh junkscience website as an order of magnitude better than the Guardian, which was the point of this whole exercise.
lol yall sound like a bunch of conspiracy theorists... *oh no, the earth is going to die* people have been whining about this stuff for decades and the bottom line is that things are only getting better. you whining about the "american companies that won't change" is a bunch of bull. if people would start looking at what *IS* being done and not at what is *NOT* then you might have a drip of optimism in your factless blathering....
couldn't we just build a giant Clapper to turn the lights back on?
Unlike "normal" moderation models (and I was one in the dim Internet past (and good bloody riddance to that form of moderation, bleah!)), Slashdot hands out moderation duties to registered readers. So, it mostly complies with popular controls. If in light of this you consider Slashdot to be populated by "mindless automatons and lemmings" ... well, the best I can say is that that speaks for your intestinal fortitude.
I knew you'd like the blah blah blah part. Such is the fate of reason to splash through the sieves of lesser minds. [sigh]
If you can put aside issues of anger, would you care to address any of my statements lacking "rationality"? You scorn the fist, so how about the word? I am prepared to defend any of mine. Are you really prepared to attack them? Let's find out, Roscoe.
In case your memory is bad, here's what I said to prompt your smug and dismissive little posting: LINK
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Maybe you saw it here? Or maybe here?
To be fair, though, this satire was picked up by many newspapers, including the Guardian, which to their credit published a retraction.
IQ results for Bush are not available, but his SAT score was 1206 or mid 80-percentile compared to current SAT test-takers. The SAT is not an IQ test, but it has a positive correlation with IQ tests of about 0.7 to 0.8. Also, note that the percentile refers to test-takers, not the general public, and test-takers are going to on average have higher IQs than non-test-takers.
That makes it very unlikely he has below-average intelligence. You might want to examine your news sources a little more carefully.
No, no, no, you have it backwards: bananas are Earth-shaped. ;)
What do you mean, "no evidence," pardner? Historically (e.g., throughout the late Pleistocene), every time there has been a significant decrease in CO2 concentrations, global temperatures fell significantly (think ice ages) and every time CO2 concentrations rose significantly, global temperatures rose (end of ice ages).
The tight correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature does not prove causality (in fact, the relation between temperature and CO2 seems to be a loop, with causation going in both directions), but even without being 100% conclusive, this is certainly powerful evidence for believing that increasing CO2 levels beyond anything the world has seen in the last 500,000 years will indeed have a significant effect on climate.
Umm have you actually watched Bush speak? He tends to stutter a lot...and it's real easy to see how uncomfortable he feels when asked about WMD in Iraq and such...
What the hell are you talking about? Nothing he's done has worked out right at all! Afghanistan hasn't gone anywhere, we still don't know where Osama is and al Queda is still going strong. Iraq is also going nowhere, there are no WMD, only so far a weak attempt at forging documents to try and make it right (gee I wonder where those originalted from). The capture of Saddam was rather irrelivant, it's not like he even had a chance to regain power...he's really old and probably really tired. He wasn't a terrorist, had no connection to 9/11 or al Queda or anything at all except that yes he was a dictator. If we hadn't found him he probably would have spent the rest of his days living in that shithold shack they found him in or some similar place. And lets take a look at the cost of this escapade in Iraq....$87billion....and of course he "had no idea the cost" until after the fact...yeah right bullshit the government can't estimate the cost of a war, especially one like Iraq with little overall resistance...remember we overrran the country in a week. This whole war in Iraw is like Veit Nam all over again. All his "environmenal" legislation has been geared toward the destruction of the environment rather than it's preservation: the Environmental Procestion Agency ought to be renamed the Envirnmental Destruction Agency since Bush has been in power. The E."P".A is headed by former execs from power companies. His "tax cuts" were a joke, they were only meant to benefit those who need them the least, the rich, and only left a few small crumbs for the average person.He has no common sense at all, he only has a very narrow sense geared toward his and the upper class's wants and needs, which is by far the smallest group of people in America. Bush is yet to be correct about anything. Also, what's this set of balls you're talking about? Attacking random countries preemptivly does not mean you have balls, it shows you are overly worried someone else (insert country we're attacking here) might have bigger balls, so you have to go ahead and destroy them. That's not how an intelligent leader of a country operates. War ought to be the last resort, not the first as Bush has used it. Bush is a dictator himself in some sense...he basically robbed Congress of war powers through fear. Took the country into war, fueled again by fear. Mounted an attack on civil rights (Patriot Act, anyone?) once again fueled by fear. Not to mention that the election in the first place was a rather sketchy one. There's no way of knowing anymore what really happened, but the evidence seems to lean toward showing that something ill was afoot at the 2000 elections. My point, is that Bush runs this country using fear as his primary fuel for getting his way. No good leader would do this, only a dictator would. How do you think Saddam kept control of Iraq until we foolishly stepped in?
Well, I'm glad to see one more piece of the puzzle come to light, or loose some light as it were.
I would link this directly to global warming, due to CO2 emissions. More CO2 equals more greenhouse effect, more evaporation, more cloud cover, less surface light. Those cloudes sure do help keep in the heat. Here in my big city it warms up durring the day, but if there is no cloud cover the temp drops like a rock at night. Our lack of cloud cover is unusual, and may seem contrary to the expected trend, but keep in mind that global warming doesn't mean that it will be warmer, just different.
Consider that I once heard stories of blizzards in my grandfathers and fathers time, and I experenced a few in my childhood. But there hasn't been much snow to speak of lately.
Keep in mind that humanities effects are just a part, a small part, of a very large system.
We have unnaturally been removing astonishing ammounts of oil and coal for the past 100 years.
All those billions of tons of Fossil-Fuels we have converted into mostly CO2.
We have Deforested much of our planet, reducint the available carbon sinks.
We have contributed already to the extinction of thousands of species whose roles we many never know.
But there are other factors, which are entirely out of our control.
We are long overdue for our scheduled Ice-Age.
We are beginning to experience a shift of our magnetic pole, which is also overdue.
Meteors are sure to strike our planet, as they have many times in the past.
There can be no doubt that we have become a major player with respect to our environment. No other animal has so dramaticly manipulated it's surroundings. Only time will tell if we will survive the rapidly approaching changes.
I for one would like to see us colonize the moon in an attempt to develope technologies to better sustain a closed environment. From there we can try our hand at living on other space rocks. Our only hope in the very long run is to leave earth just to be sure we will survive catastrophic events that are sure to hinder life on earth.
We also need to stop burning so much darn dino-war-fuel. There are alternatives available today, we just need to recognize and utilize them.
L8r
Ryan
PS.
Keep in mind that our Earth is a closed system,
with the exception of the energy we recieve from
our great burning fision reactor in the sky.