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NASA Releases Free Global Climate Model Software
ink_polaroid writes "NASA has released its Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM) for high school and university desktop computers. The software incorporates a 3-D climate model developed at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York. It wraps complex computer modeling programs with a graphical interface familiar to most PC users."
It would be pretty cool to simulate enviromental doomsday scenarios such as the one seen in the movie The Day after Tomorrow.
And it does what exactly?
Is there a mac version?
That's great. One of my favorite software packages in the world is Nasa's World Wind, but when I tried to show it to my parents (both high school science teachers), the reaction was the same: we don't have time or computers to use this.
The state of public education (at least in California) is so poor that this is going to be great for college-level students, but much of the target audience will be left out due to budgets and a testing-centric curriculum.
2advanced.net - Business Quality Hosting
Is it fsp or rts? Is it multi-player and/or single player? And is there a God mode?
I mean we all have a few unused exaflops of processing power lying around for this kind of thing. And now, with a PC interface!
Post a 65 mb file to slashdot without a .torrent?!?!
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
"News for Nerds". Okay, I know there is considerable overlap between 'green tech' and /. subjects (and people interested in them), but 1 or 2 of these stories a day is enough, don't you think? Nerd != environmentalist (would be nice, though).
More interesting would be simulating the terraforming of mars. Could we raise the temperature sufficiently by introducing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? How about if we used a massive orbital mirror? Or maybe we could grind one of the moons into dust and make an artificial ring to increase ambient light. Inquiring minds want to know.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
Here is the story which just hit the wire:
In further news today: 1000's of computer's around the World today began running climate modeling software.
The Combined heat output from all this extra computer processing is expected to bring most model predictions forward by several years due to the extra heat expended.
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SETI - The project were you can look for life on another planet whilst help kill off the current one quicker. I mean would an `intelligent` form of life be chucking out loads of extra signals wasting resources; Search for dead planets maybe, but intelligent life, HA.
I wish it had the source.
It would be pretty cool to simulate enviromental doomsday scenarios...
I thought they already said that in the story outline - yes, here it is:
It wraps complex computer modeling programs with a graphical interface familiar to most PC users
Obviously here they are talking about the Blue Globe of Death.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
LOL, maybe but we dont care about the stats anymore :D
We ARE ALL DoooooooMED!!!
Would be nice if they had a Linux port. Or if the source code is made freely available, someone would have written a clone [or hopefully nicer ;-)] UI!
Phew! I read "climax control software" first.
Use the same inaccurate software global warming hoaxers use to make their claims! Ignore the fact that the software isn't even able to predict cloud cover!
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Is a screensaver that shows the effects of global warming (rising sea levels, climate change, etc).
See Jimmy? This is where New York used to be...
The good news is that south Arkansas will have some very nice oceanfront property.
I dream in binary.
You might also want to check out the following (Distributed Computing) project:
ClimatePrediction.net
more like a "critical upgrade alert" from the real kings of kode. consult with/trust in yOUR creators, "predicting" the "weather" since/until forever. see you there?
The whole nature of chaotic systems is that iterative models cannot be used to predict future events. You can create models that demonstrates a theory, but the model is of little use in predicting what will actually happen.
Some things never change - death, taxes, and the fact that the climate is always changing.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
They have a followup article here., in which they comment a little more on the book, and they also comment on Crichton's lecture Aliens Cause Global Warming.
If you're not RealClimate.org, here's how the site describes itself: "RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science." I really think it's one of the better sites on the topic.
My personal take on it? Based on themes present in almost all of his fiction, Crichton really doesn't like scientists.
Hey, there is more OS X stuff there than Win32! No linux version, but hey, it still feels fucking cool.
Although everyone needs to stop copying the brushed metal and aqua buttons. If you are going to do it, don't make it look like shit.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
http://www.edgcm.org slashdotted?
It is on NetBSD/OpenBSD according to netcraft.
Must be a small budget project. Low end server hardware?
It depends on the area, but in Texas, high school football often runs a surplus, especially at the schools that have the star athletes you speak of.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You mean, adapting people to make them more like those found on earth?
Who's side are you on, anyway?
Scientist: "Global Warming is real, and we must study it more"
Liberal: "The world will end next week! Stop using oil"
Conserv^H^H^H^H^H Republican: "Global warming is a myth created to hinder my business"
Nerd: "I wonder if there is any software that can be used for climate modeling"
Not sure if it's the same thing, but Lawrence Livermore National Labs have done a Python-based set of tools for climate analysis called CDAT (http://cdat.sourceforge.net/) which is open source as well.
Has anybody gotten this working in Wine or WineX? Whenever I try to run it wine just immediately executes, reporting that the program exited with a successful status.
"We recommend that you NOT leave the GCM running on a Windows laptop unattended. We have found that some Pentium laptops have difficulty dissipating heat and may shutdown (hibernate) without warning causing the climate model to crash. This does not appear to harm the laptop, but can corrupt GCM output files."
You heard it here first, laptop heat can cause infertility and crash the planet!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Seriously, they should open source all this :) :(
Also, they should make the stuff at http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Research/Software/ Open Source too (like binaudit, deszip, lsu, mftp, noshell etc)
For some wierd reason you gotta jump through hoops to download anything good from NASA
Ouch. Pretty harsh condemnation, from someone who invents polysyllabic words in an attempt to sound intelligent.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Chrichton is not a climatological scientist - he's an author with an interest in selling books. Do you seriously think all hospitals are like E.R., or that there are islands with genetically-resurrected dinosaurs on them?
Get your *facts* at the source - from the science journals, and not through the reality-distortion lens of fiction.
If you're having trouble downloading it, you can get it here.
http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
Well, now that we all have a climate simulation software on our computers we can all backup our claims what will happen to earth with good simulation data.
Dr Cox probably has something to do with this software. This article in Nature seems to fit the overal description of the model the software uses. Some people have used this model to suggest that trees should be cleared so as to stop them becoming a source of CO2 others have used it to suggest he is a stooge. I don't know much about Dr. Cox but it seems he is attacked by the fringe from both sides of Climate politics, normally a sign that someone is at least honest. Your quote directly relates to the "tree" debate and will drive both sides into a frenzy.
"The climate will warm more in the future but the ability of the land to store carbon dioxide will be compromised," he said, adding that warmer soil was less able to hold the greenhouse gas.
Now I'm no climatologist but it gets hot here in Australia. When the Roo's, Sheep, Cows, Dogs, and other big animals want to escape the afternoon heat, guess where they go. They even scratch at the dust every now and then to reveal cooler earth underneath. Experienced farmers (rancher's if you like) leave at least one big tree accessable to thier stock.
I recognise some of Dr Cox's research and I think his "complexity" approach to the Climate is very interesting. The "dimming" effect seems to me well documented but poorly explained by anything else other than soot from coal & oil. Just like I doubt he is advocating mowing down trees, I also doubt he is advocating pumping soot into the air to keep cool by "almost canceling out the greenhouse effect".
I think his message is that humans can influence the climate but at the moment that is sort of accidental, hard to quantify and potentialy very dangerous for Humanity. So we should aim to learn about the factors and how they interelate before we try "hacking" the Climate, say by suddenly eliminating soot without considering CO2 & methane concentrations, "cloud seeding", and all manner of biofeedback.
I think we are learning (possibly the hard way) that we do have a significant and often detrimental impact on the biosphere and if we continue to ignore it Humanity will end up like a neglected Goldfish.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Crichton's "State of Fear" is fiction, and should be treated as such.
That doesn't mean that the crowd which is arguing against doing anything about global warming is nuts.
The most accepted consensus out there is that Earth's climate changes. It may change relatively fast (dryads, little ice age, etc).
Less accepted (but still widely supported) is the idea that earth's climate is getting warmer.
I agree with the first point, and find the second point rather likely.
The evidence seems to indicate the earth's climate is naturally getting warmer, and, in addition, human pollution is further raising the temperature.
This brings up an interesting issue: Earth's climate will change even in the absence of human pollution. In short, we can't stop the climate from changing.
The question is: How much and how fast will human pollution change the climate by?
This is where I disagree with people and say: We don't know.
I've seen reasonable proposals that suggest normal volcanic activity produces greenhouse gasses on an order of magnitude far greater than human activity. If so, changing our habits will only have an effect until some ubervolcano erupts someplace, dumping a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere. Others disagree, saying that human activity dwarfs volcanic CO2 activity. (Interesting link how 1/10th of a square mile in Italy releases 150 tons of CO2 a day! Mt Etna releases 35k tons of CO2 a day. Here's another link about the over 2 million tons of CO2 (if my math is right) a day emitted by waterways in tropical forests.)
People who disagree with me tend to reply "But if we don't know, shouldn't we err on the safe side?"
The problem is that changing our ways has a cost. Or, as I like to put it: How many lives should we sacrifice in order to prevent a .1C rise? How many acres of wilderness do you propose destroying in order to prevent a .1C rise? How can we assess the risk and figure out what we are willing to spend and how far we should go? We can't.
Instead, we seem to run around trying to pass "feel good" treaties such as Kyoto without considering their effectiveness on global warming or their human cost.
I think it's based on dynamic equilibrium, note that the "environment which is not in equilibrium" is the Sun. The broader chaos theory. states that even chaotic systems are deterministic, so in principle are predictive. Without some sort of "model" you would be unable to get out of bed, as for the validity of any model refer to the genius of Godel.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The way I read it is that it is a powerfull model wrapped in a simplified GUI so that users can get a "taste" on a home PC. Not a UI you would use on one of them new fangled cluster things. Rip of the face and add $$$X in hardware and $$$Y in configuration. Think of it like a free "Doom engine" (pun intended) for researchers who have access to hardware but not the $$$ to develop serious tools.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
...and you would realise that Crichton is dragged up and shot down in nearly every one of them. Someone please mod the parent to hell.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
100,000 armchair climatologists fiddling with their own simulations, proving their theories to themselves.
At last my plans to dominate the world are complete. With this software I will be able to
place my chaos butterflies with precision and inflict devastating storms on my enemies!!!!!
Watashi wa chikyubutsurigakusha desu.
DAMN. That was funny. One of those rare instances where + 5 just isn't enough.
Laws are for people with no friends.
http://www.whrc.org/resources/online_publications/ warming_earth/skeptics.htm
s cience.php
"Laypeople frequently assume that in a political dispute the truth must lie somewhere in the middle, and they are often right. In a scientific dispute, though, such an assumption is usually wrong." - Paul Ehrlich
"It is human nature to protect your own interests. We may recall the extensive and incredibly successful campaign of the American tobacco companies to conceal the link between cancer and the use of tobacco products. For decades, they knew the reality of the addictive nature of nicotine and the carcinogenic effects of tobacco use. For decades, they successfully kept that reality hidden from the American public.
The oil, coal, gas, and mining industries stand to lose tremendously if the truth about global warming becomes accepted by American society. As the tobacco industry invested millions in keeping its deadly secret, so also have the oil, coal, gas, and mining industries attempted to hide and discredit the link between CO2 emissions and a warming earth. They have funded, promoted, and used as witnesses a handful of greenhouse skeptics, who have widely and loudly proclaimed that global warming is a myth."
Here is a mainline anti-global warming site. How long does it take to ferret out the who is doing it and if they have an agenda. Is this the future of dis/information???
http://www.globalwarming.org/
How can we combat disinformation campaigns in science with a puplic increasingly ignorant of scientific process (scientific method, peer review)?
To back up the parent poster, consider the following:
We are unable to predict the electron density at a specific point in a a metal wire, at a given time.
Yet, we _are_ able to predict the total behaviour of electricty in a wire. Given that electricity is motion of electrons, how does this arise?
Well, this is a common situation, where models of behaviour at different scales are related only through a very small number of parameters.
For example, we can predict the magnetic behaviour of a system from just two parameters (for an binary antiferromagnet), yet to calculate the behaviour of the electrons (which cause said magnetism) takes of the order of 100 or so (and about 15 orders of magnitude longer).
So for practical calculations on magnatic things, you don't need to do the quantum mechanical calculations, just the much simpler ones.
Sure, technically these are inaccurate. In my experience, we're off by 0.001%, and by about 3-5% in the second derivative. That's so accurate, that there are very many additional cases where the calculations show two possible results, and the experiments arn't accurate enough to tell these apart. Or, in plain terms, good enough.
I use magnetism and electricity as examples here, because if these agrregate models didn't work, then the computer that you are using to read these works also wouldn't work. That's a pretty solid argument for the usefulness of these types of models.
Brining this back to weather and climate, the weather researchers call 'weather' individual and specific data points, like cloud cover, rainfall on a day, and so on. 'Climate' is things like total rainfall per year, average temperature in a month - much broader, less specific information.
The SW is attractive partly for 4D visualizations of climate data in the NASA rendering model on desktops outside the Agency. It also includes a feature to generate a report from the data, within the model, and export it back to the NASA server, presumably retrievable by other people on the "extranet". But it's unclear how "trustworthy" the distributed models can be. Not that the NASA model is inaccurate (though it might be, perhaps as proven by such distributed experiments). But is there a way to crack the model, and send back reports of rigged experiments? If NASA turns this project into "Greenhouse@Home", the aggregated results could be used in research as serious as the distributed protein folding data consumed by pharmacos in a similar project.
If I were running a coal company, or other Greenhouse denier, I'd surely be jumping at the chance to throw some money at programmers to crack the clients. I'd throw thousands of crooked PCs at generating cooked data designed to demonstrate the safety of pumping billions of tons of C02 into the air. If I were as crooked as these companies already are, I'd infiltrate unsuspecting teams with crooked members and software, tainting all the data. If NASA doesn't have some kind of security check on the data they aggregate, this scenario is practically certain, as I'm not even crooked enough to be in the CO2 biz at all, let alone directing their PR.
At the very least, NASA should require code signatures to accompany any data submissions, and tightly analyze any submitted code for such bias. Scientists are used to trusting, but verifying, data - peer review and grant competition. But this system might turn out to be so informal, so cheap, and so nonthreatening to the funding process (to the contrary: it's great promotion) that it slips through the usual vetting system. So it will be less trustworthy, but more trusted, than the normal science that protects us, that it sells out. Caveat Computor!
--
make install -not war
Be careful of the quality of software. In the 80s there was a lot of hype about climate modeling based on a simple planetary weather program. The software represented the atmosphere as a single vertical profile of physical conditions. When modelers plugged in the post-nuclear dust clouds it prodicted huge temperature drops. However, more sophisticated "3D" models thta inorporated oceans and continents and wind currents found much smaller effects. These defects didnt really slow down biased scientists who kept on promoting their political agendas nonetheless.
>Use the same inaccurate software global warming hoaxers use to make their claims! Ignore the fact that the software isn't even able to predict cloud cover!
The only hoax being perpetrated is by those few delusional Limbots and fringe right-wingers who have yet to look at the actual data. The Arctic ice cap is thinning, the Antarctic ice cap is breaking up and melting where it is over water, sea temperatures are rising, and if you want to see glaciers in the US's Glacier National Park, you'd better go soon.Whether the observed golbal warming is a function of human activity, strictly natural processes, or a mixture of both is still an open question. That it is occurring is an observed fact. Claims to the contrary have all of the intellectual rigor of Holocaust Denial, Creationism, and Geocentrism. Sheesh!
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I assume this will accurately model the impact of CGI wolves on the world's population?
If this is of interest to you, you might want to check out www.climateprediction.net, the BOINC based screen saver project that's like SETI, runs on your system in it's spare time.
When a simulation run finally runs out of gas / data / whatever, does it return a 42?
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
Can I set up a climate that makes Greenland hospitable, run it forward 700 years, and find that the Hudson River freezes hard enough to haul cannons across?
If, given historical conditions, it can't predict the more recent past, then it's nothing but a propaganda tool. It's pretty simple to set up a model that doesn't work (ie its predictions don't match known conditions and outcomes) but either confirms or denies global warming. It's so simple I'll prove it:
f(x)=68 (Look! this model predicts that the average global temperature is about 68 degrees and is not increasing!)
f(x)=68+.02x (Look! This model predicts an average rise in global temperature of about 2 degrees per century!)
I've seen reasonable proposals that suggest normal volcanic activity produces greenhouse gasses on an order of magnitude far greater than human activity. If so, changing our habits will only have an effect until some ubervolcano erupts someplace, dumping a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere. Others disagree, saying that human activity dwarfs volcanic CO2 activity.
Realclimate.org has an article titled "How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?". Maybe it will make the CO2 situation less ambiguous in your mind.
The question is: How much and how fast will human pollution change the climate by?
This is where I disagree with people and say: We don't know.
There are wide variations in the historical climate record that we can't explain yet, so clearly we don't know everything. But this doesn't change the fact that our best computer models, with the most conservative settings, all predict that CO2 will cause global warming. We don't know exactly how much, but most of the better models (the ones that have survived being challenged and questioned constantly by their peers) actually agree to a large amount. The scientists on realclimate often make this point: just because we don't know everything doesn't mean we can't say some things with a high degree of certainty.
Instead, we seem to run around trying to pass "feel good" treaties such as Kyoto without considering their effectiveness on global warming or their human cost.
I think this is an exaggeration: the costs were considered--in fact, the majority of the debate around Kyoto is centered on that very issue.
"But this doesn't change the fact that our best computer models, with the most conservative settings, all predict that CO2 will cause global warming."
And that does't change the fact that current models, when fed historical data, cannot predict accurately the data that we already have. Nor do we have anywhwere enough data to predict anything. Our sample set is miniscule.
Firstly the masking effect of pollution on the suns rays is not new. It was a big concern in the 1970s when some in the press believed science was predicting a new ice age.
The important part is this sentence:
" Take away fossil fuel by-products like sulfur dioxide without tackling greenhouse gas emissions"
But if the source of both is fossil fuels then taking away one will tend to reduce the other.
To get students more interested in using this, imagine giving it a "Sim" or "Civ" feeling. You'd get students staying up until 3 AM playing with it who would learn far more than a more traditional technical simulation.
NASA also has free Satellite Image software too. Including some awesome 1 meter resolution scans of the United States.
Here: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
If you want to see a dramatic display of just how much we've changed our environment over the last 200 years, just look at this chart.
"Arctic average temperature has risen at almost twice the rate as the rest of the world in the past few decades"
2 003.gif
Exactly, they look at data in the past few decades, when you look at longer time scales you see that the slope of the line (Increase) is much less than it has been in the past.
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/64N-90N1880-
As shown, it is worming less than it did in the past. It's all in what you take for a point of reference. And if you map from peak temp in 1938 to today you see a small decrease.
I think this is an exaggeration: the costs were considered--in fact, the majority of the debate around Kyoto is centered on that very issue.
.1 degree C over two decades?
And the decision that was reached was, "Let the U.S. pay for it." One of the main reasons that the U.S. backed out of Kyoto was that the most conservative estimates put the cost of compliance at 2 TRILLION (and that's a U.S. Trillion, 10^12) DOLLARS. That represents the entire U.S. federal budget. So, to comply with Kyoto, we could have cut all government services for a year, or doubled the national debt, or collapsed our economy in the middle of a recession.
So, the original point is still valid. How many jobs, industries, services, and lives are you willing to sacrifice to cut
The question no one ever asks is: Warmer than what?
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Considering that the average north american produces 5 tons of CO2 a year (that is approximately 1.6 billion tons for canada and the US alone) the influence of humanity on green house gasses is obviously significant.
It may well be that more CO2 is produced by natural oxidation of organic material, such as occurs in tropical waterways, and from volcanic outgassing, but those CO2 sources are part of the carbon cycle that has existed for an extremely long time. The data you posted is useless without similar data showing how much carbon is sequestered by those same mechanisms.
There is no question of destroying wilderness to limit carbon dioxide emissions since wilderness has a close to zero influence on the net levels of greenhouse gasses.
The real question is how many lives will be lost if a rise in temperature is not prevented. The amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of the world by 1degree C is equivalent to the energy put out by hundreds of thousands of nuclear reactors running at maximum output for an entire year. This qualitative description is a useful measure when one considers that that added energy finds it's way into wind and rain. How many lives will be lost due to the increased intensity of weather? How much property damage will result? Weather damage is not a one time charge, it will continue as long as the temperatures are elevated. How many years till the cost of rebuilding damaged infrastructure and homes outpaces the costs of implementing renewable energy programs?
By adopting efficient and far sighted energy practices now we build productive infrastucture that benefits ourselves and spurs economic growth by usefully expanding our energy capacity. The status quo leads to more violent weather, widespread destruction, and rebuilding costs, which do nothing to increase our economic output and only lead to inflation and wasteful spending.
Pay now or pay more later.
Two trillion also represents the amount of new debt under the Bush administration.
So under your worst-case scenario, we could have completely paid for Kyoto with 8 years of not having Bush as president.
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
Do you also believe that we can revive extinct species from fossilized tree sap?
That would be a good argument against the endangered species act, wouldn't it?
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
The data sourrce is listed on the top of the graph, or did ou not notice it?
Arbitrary start and stop points are the hallmark of the global warming movement.
We know what the climate for the Earth was over the last few hundred years.
Can you model it with this program, using only historical data? That is, can you successfully model the climate on, say, 23 October 1859, using only data from before that date?
Can you model TODAY'S climate, using only data collected up to yesterday?
If you can't do this, what might this suggest about the program's actual ability to predict climate in the future?
For extra credit: Can you run the model backwards? Knowing today's climate, can you tell what yesterday's climate must have been?
(Note for the Judges: No climate-modelling package has EVER successfully done either of these things. So far, no one has produced a climate model that can be run forward with known data to arrive at a known condition, and no one has ever managed to run one backwards.)
Worked before. But copying pasting seems to tigger it up. Edit what you paste so that the last says -2003.gif
Eternal vigilance is necessary.
LONDON (Reuters) - Tobacco companies tried to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer by funding projects that challenged the findings of a landmark study, scientists said on Friday.
The study concerned the link between tobacco and cancer-causing changes in a gene called p53. In 1996, researchers showed that a chemical in cigarette smoke caused mutations in the gene that were the same as those found in lung cancer tumors.
Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco said the tobacco industry tried to counter the findings for a long time after the study was published,
"The tobacco companies claim they are now working with the public health community 'to support a single, consistent public health message on the role played by cigarette smoking in the development of the disease in smokers,"' said Dr Stanton Glantz.
"But their multifaceted response to p53 research as recently as 2001 suggests that they have not changed their practice."
The Tobacco Manufacturers Association said it was not able to comment on the report.
Damage to p53 leads to uncontrolled cell division. Mutations in the gene are found in more than half of all cancers and 60 percent of lung cancers.
In a report published online by The Lancet medical journal, Glantz and his colleagues examined 43 previously confidential tobacco industry documents about p53 and tobacco smoke.
They said they found evidence that the tobacco industry planned and carried out research programs after the 1996 study to counter the scientific link between smoking and cancer.
"We have identified two instances where research arguing against the connection between tobacco smoke and patterned p53 mutations was undertaken and published by individuals with links to the tobacco companies," Glantz said in the report.
Cancer Research UK, a leading charity, said the study demonstrates that the scientific community must be continually vigilant against the tobacco industry's attempts to influence and distort scientific research.
"Research into p53 is crucial to our understanding how cancer develops and could help us find ways to prevent and treat the disease," Jean King, the charity's director of Tobacco Control, said in a statement.
"Cancer Research UK strongly encourages universities to shun funding from the tobacco industry," she added.
The main reason that it works out that the US should pay for it is because, per capita at least (and possibly overall), the US is the single largest source of CO2 (25% of human-caused CO2 is a figure that popped into my mind, but it may be incorrect). Most western European countries have already done the hard work of reducing their emissions significantly.
The thing people like you seem to ignore is that, if the environment is fucked, the economy simply doesn't exist any more.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Nice try, unfortunately for you, there is now data (a 5 year satellite study by NASA) that shows that CO2 levels fall by 2-3% as the air passes over the United States. In short, we are a net consumer of CO2, and not vice versa. On the other hand, Europe produces 38% more CO2 then it absorbs and China produces more CO2 than most of the rest of the world. They just get to say "we have a low per capita production" because they get to divide by a billion people who live just above the stone age.
The 25% figure comes from the fact that we burn 25% of the fossil fuel consumed by the world. In return, we produce 50% of the world's food. You really want to make the trade?
As for saying I am "one of those people", I find it interesting that this comes from [an aparent] European who spent 2000 years destroying everything they came in contact with. In the late middle ages, it was called the Sahara Jungle. Then Europeans decided that jungle wood was just the thing to panel their study with. Give me a break.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Okay, so, what's your point. I gave you a reference to cigarettes as being commonly referred to as "Cancer sticks" in the nineteenth century. You site a study used by a tobacco company to try to not pay a multi-billion dollar settlement that the states have since squandered on things like executive parking lots and new traffic lights.
Don't try to hold up a legal pleading attempting to create a plausible doubt against 150 years of common knowledge.
My uncle died of lung cancer when I was 10. I watched him whither and die while still smoking cigarettes up until the day before he died. Guess what, I know cigarettes are bad for you. So does everyone else. That's my point. No one grabs a pack of smokes and says, "Boy, I'll feel healthier after one of these!"
But, the real crime is that the cigarette companies are making 20-25 cents a pack on them, while we, the American People, are taking about $1.40 a pack in blood money [read taxes] from each and every pack. You and people like you scream about the dangers of tobacco. Well fine, BAN IT! So long as you still take money from the sale and production of tobacco, I will continue to say, "screw you," to every anti-cigarette zealot that comes along.
FYI. I do not smoke. That would be stupid. Apparently, such personal responsibility is beyond you.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Yeah, except, oh yeah, it was 19 terrorists who started the war on terror. Maybe you should be pissed off with them.
Had the attack not staggered the economy, had we not gone to war to protect ourselves, had the tax base continued to grow at the predicted rate, we wouldn't have run up any deficits.
While you're looking through those rose-colored glasses, why not tell me how good Michael Jackson is with kids, too.
Oh, and your beloved Clinton hid a 500 billion dollar deficit in the last year of his term. But you won't bother to go and check that fact, or that he strong-armed the CBO into covering it up through the election. Unfortunately the article (published August 8, 2002 in the Chicago Sun Times) is no longer available on-line, but here's a quick excerpt.
Robert Novak reports that, during Bill Clinton's last two years as CEO of the nation, "the announced level of before-tax profits was at least 10% too high - a discrepancy rising close to 30% during the last presidential campaign. Most startling, the Commerce Department in 2000 showed the economy on an upswing through most of the election year, while in fact it was declining."
Of course, I'm sure you'd have rather had Al Gore, who would have made gas $5 a gallon and outlawed SUVs and raised the MPG rate to a minimum of 50. And he would have been "saddened and angered" at the events of 9/11. He might even have written a letter.
Thank god we had a Texas Cowboy in the White House.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
A good model of a chaotic system is pathalogically sensitive to its starting state and some of its parameters. Each iteration is based on the results of the previous one. The iterations must be fine enough and the model complex enough to address all the important movements of heat in air and water in the world. After a dozen or a hundred iterations, you start seeing the extreme sensitivity to the initial conditions.
If you model weather, you can only get useful results for a couple of days out. Everything after that is basically an extrapolation of what is know to be occuring at the time.
Another reason climate change is hard to predict is that there are a number of buffering effects that interact with each other... you know... the warmer it is, the more water evaporate, making more clouds that reflect more sunlight and cause cooling. Or, the more CO2 in the air, the more plants, including ocean algae, and the faster plants grow, which uses up more CO2.
I believe the climate is changing. I believe that it has always been changing. Getting a bit warmer is a lot better than getting a bit cooler.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
I'm not European (except by some of my ancestry, which happens to include, but is not limited to, Italian, French, Scottish, English and Cherokee), I'm Australian (and yes, my government is at least as intransigent as yours about global warming - I didn't vote for the fuckers, as I still haven't forgiven them for trying to conscript me for Vietnam). I'd _love_ you to be able to back up those figures you've so blithely quoted. (You'll note that I admitted the figure I plucked from my memory could have been wrong.) I doubt that the US actually produces 50% of the world's food (I'm pretty sure fish don't grow in the midwest, just for a start).
I'm pretty sure, also, that the Sahara jungle was largely destroyed by the locals grazing goats, not a European lust for exotic wood.
Another question people like you avoid - can we really afford China to have a lifestyle like those of us in the developed world? (answer: no.) In which case, is it fair of us to insist that we keep our standard of living at their expense? (answer: no.) We Australians are big on a fair go (although you wouldn't think so looking at our current government who are a bunch of neo-liberal arseholes).
I note with interest that you haven't addressed my main point - without an environment, there is no economy.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Please provide the evidence of that peer reviewed scientific concensus in 1970 was that we had global cooling and we should dump soot on the ice caps as this is news to me. Please notice the word concensus. I would be most interested in seeing this.
Since the real controversy around global warming is injected at the political and corporate level, peer review serves as our best defence. Peer reviewed science remains as one of the most corruption free sources of information.
This is the best source of information we have on climate. The rational thing to do is act on the best information available.
Now if we had peer review in the intelligence community, perhaps there would have been no need for invasions of foreign lands on truly faulty information. Unfortunately there is no peer oversite and political pressures weigh heavily.
LIke the typical liberal over here (and that's the opposite of the liberals down in Oz) your answer is never to improve the lives of those who are miserable, but to drag everyone else down into misery. Several of your other statements are just frightening. Guess what, the U.s. doesn't grow fish in the Midwest. We fish them on the East and West COast and off the Alaskan coast and around Hawaii and Puerto Rico and along the thousands of other miles of coast line that the U.S. controls. Do we ship it Australia? Probably not. However I do know that somethng like 80% of the foodstuffs that are produced in America go for export. In other words, we feed four people in the world for every one American citizen. Damn us to hell.
France alone dragged millions of board feet from the Sahara every year for nearly a century. The participated in clear-cutting and burned the earth behind them to create those goat grazing areas.
And without an economy, we can all just go back to feudalism perhaps? Maybe we should all go back to sustinence farming and wearing robes? The fact is that without the U.S. there would be no "Environmental movement" because we are the only nation on earth so advanced that we can spend time worrying about the environment rather than worrying about where the next meal is coming from. You don't see people in Africa who are starving worried about global warming. They're the ones who are begging for a filth-belching tractor to help them plant food.
On top of that, it's our technology, and our advances that will make environmental management a reality. Without NASA satellites and the science of the U.S. there would be no awareness of global temperatures. Without the Internet to share data, there would be no collaboration to create the global outcry about global warming. But you're right. Let's go back to the middle ages. Everything was so much better when the average life span was 35. Why don't you start by throwing that evil computer of yours into the trash. Go ahead, I'll wait...
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Your ignorance of history is matched only by your ability to fail to get the point.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
From a green web site:
.. "the original forests that once stretched from Morocco to Afghanistan even as late as 2000 BC ..."; "The deserts, the bad fields of the maghreb countries of Northern Africa are still, 2,000 years later, to a large extent the sad outcome of anti-ecological practices, of the way the corn was ground in order to be shipped to Rome, to be the panem part of the panem et circenses formula. And there it was eaten, and it went down the sewers into the Mediterranean, and that was where the fertilizer went instead of being recycled back into the ground from which it was taken."
The sahara was once a luxurious Forest teeming with a wide array of Wildlife
From the Xenophile: African history site:
5. The reason why the land between the Mediterranean and the Atlas Mts. is near-desert today is because it has been so misused over the past 2,000 years. Forests were cleared, because of the need for both farmland and wood, and bad farming practices ruined the fertility of the soil, while much of the wildlife was slaughtered, hunted for sport or taken to arenas like the Colosseum in Rome for entertainment. Fields lost their protective ground cover to overgrazing, especially from sheep and goats, which do a more thorough job on the roots of plants than cattle. In the fourth century B.C., Plato described the ecological damage done to Greece with these words: "What now remains, compared with what existed, is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth wasted away and only the bare framework of the land being left." By the time the Romans were finished, the same could be said for the whole Mediterranean basin.
But gosh, you are right, the French didn't plunder the Saharan hardwoods, nope. They plundered the Sahelan hardwoods. And now the Sahel is one of the largest regions of ongoing desertification on the planet. So, gosh, I was wrong. Curse me for confusing the Sahara and the Sahel. They do bump up against each other, and their names sound really similar. And the last time I listened to my grandfather talk about the French ships loaded with tropical hardwoods was before he died, nearly twenty years ago. Unfortunately, first-hand evidence is no good to you and the people who think their climate models are right, screw the world outside the window...
But my point remains the same. Climate change has happened throughout history. In fact you're ignoring the Sahara itself, which was the victim of climate change from 6000BC (Lush, tropical rainforest) to 2000BC (Dry, sandy desert.) That occurred completely without human intervention. What was left was plundered by the Europeans (Yes, Rome is in Europe.)
You stated that no one should be better off than a Chinese sustinance farmer. You stated that living at any level beyond that is "unsustainable". I ask you then, are you part of the solution or part of the problem. Have you gone to live in a mud hut and eked out a living on the soil? Have you beaten your car's door panels into a plow to grow living things? Have you shut off your water and your electricity? Have you stopped eating anything you didn't harvest or kill yourself?
My point has been fixed like a stone through this whole argument. The current warming trend is due to increased solar activity. History shows (Site 1, Site 2) that solar input has far more to do with global temperatures than human produced greenhouse gasses ( Site 3).
You have failed to get this point all along. Collapsing economies, relegating 90% of the world population to starvation and medieval lifestyles is not the answer. The answer is to apply our *BRAINS* to find the solution. Not simply go off on knee-jerk reactions to today's "Prophet of Doom".
But I'm sure I'll get your knee-jerk reaction, backed with no facts, no research, not five minutes of reading or attempting to comprehend, presently.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Thank you for making my point. Clearly we are and have a lot to learn about the world we live on. There is so much that we don't know and when we react with emotion and don't step back to look at the bigger picture we fail to grasp the true issues we are dealing with.
I would rather we spend our time looking for solutions and learn from our mistakes than to sit by and let others decide what is best for us. I think that you need to also look at the long history of the Chinese culture. They have been around for a long time and have kept growing continually through-out the ages.
I believe the point of the book as will all of Crichton's novels are to examine a topic and bring to light the ideas that don't usually get press or aired completely. His research his style of prose allows us to imagine the world we live in the true sense of SciFi.
You should also read what Crichton has to say at the end and what he believes.