Slashdot Mirror
New Climate Change Warning
sebFlyte writes "A new grid computing climate research project, climateprediction.net, has come up with its first major results, and they're really not good news for the planet according to the BBC. The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K, more than twice what was previously thought."
This thing was run on so many PCs. They obviously took the simulation itself into account -- good job!
Someday people are going to feel awfully silly that they were worrying about terrorism instead of the warning signs of ecological degeneration.
I suspect that the planet will be fine in either case. Now perhaps not good news for it inhabitants...
Disclaimer: I actually do think there's something in the global warming argument. I think putting loads more energy into a chaotic system gives that system the freedom to explore states in its phase space that could cause us some real grief. I actually don't care if "the planet will survive, it's seen worse". I'd prefer to survive personally, and I'd like to keep a few other humans around as well...
:-). I don't think that alarmist, over-the-top "reports" are doing any real good - in fact I think they harm the argument they try to represent.
However I think the results are pretty conclusive in their own right and right-minded politicians ought to be doing something on that basis alone (they're finally beginning to, as well
So, by varying the parameters in a simulation, they've found a range of temperature increases which we should engender reactions from "concerned" (2 degrees) through "terrified" (11 degrees). Hey, I admitted my bias in the first paragraph! The press reports the "terrified" figure and it's big news. Until someone points out that it's a Normal distribution, and the massively-more-likely figure is in the "worried" temperature range of (guessing here) 5-6 degrees.
The problem is not that the scientists are lying (they're not), and not that the press are lying either (they're not). The problem is a lack of understanding of the end-result in announcing a catastrophe and then saying "No, we'll be ok". There's a fable about this, and it involves a boy crying "wolf" too many times...
I'm not sure who's to blame. Should the scientists state more forcefully what their expectation is rather than the extremes of their results? Would they ever get published in that case ? Should journalists be held accountable for doing the equivalent of shouting "Fire" in a theatre ? Well, a journalist's job is not to report the news, it's to sell papers, and catastrophes sell better. Perhaps there's a need for a neutral ground, some sort of arbiter that can interpret the results in a way the public can understand (since no-one seems to take science these days), but *that*'s open to *easy* abuse as well.
Perhaps science was better off in its ivory tower after all. That's a depressing thought. Perhaps the best solution would be to comprehensively educate people about science (better, about statistics) and beat the snake-oil salesmen at their own game.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
11K? Is that 11 000 *unknown units* or 11 degrees kelvin? If 11 degrees kelvin, why not just say 11 degrees celsius...
Oh well. As long as it's the The Century After The Next, and not the day after tomorrow... not my problem.
If I have any kids, I'll be sure to painfully torture them myself long before climate becomes an issue.
Here's a graphic that shows the cause of all this, in a particularly vivid way.
Almost fell off my chair when I first saw this info...
All this snow in the northeast is really starting to piss me off.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Anyone else read Michael Crichton's latest novel State of Fear?
He has an interesting take on the subject, backed with documentation to his sources.
It was sunny today.
The news was unable to predict either of these to any accuracy only 24 hours prior to the weather event.
You want to believe that they can predict the weather 100 years from now?
Of course, measurement unit of kelvin does not carry the word DEGREE; it is 11 k, not 11 degrees kelvin...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
As if you can't figure that out. 11 Kelvin increase.
Out of sample results? Anything?
it shows there's no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide.
Uh. Ok.
Both.
... if you think ol' Sol has a constant output, I have a bridge to sell you.
Again, why do I have to keep posting the same thing: where are the scientists?
SHOW me a graph of solar infrared output versus Earth temperatures, over a period of at least 50 years.
THEN we'll see how much B.S. this global warming crap is.
Mankind doesn't have the ability to alter the planet in this way. We're off by dozens of orders of magnitude.
Get real, folks. It's all about the sun.
Kelvin and Celsius degrees are actually the same amount. The point at which they start is the only difference. One is absolute zero and the other is the freezing point of water. So the change will be 11C.
RTFA. It says ranging from 2 degrees Celsius, up to 11 degrees. I guess it doesn't help when the original submitter is an idiot and can't even get the facts straight. Incompetency on Slashdot. Sigh.
Looking out at the mountains of snow outside, I really have to ask myself whether I'd mind a few extra degrees right about now. This brings new meaning to the idea of fair-weather supporters...
None of this is going to be relevant a hundred years from now.
There are some theories that we don't have even 20 years, let alone 100.
It was pretty obvious to me at least that the submitter meant global_temperature += 11 kelvins. (Differences between Celsius temperatures are expressed in kelvins.)
Do conservatives just not think there are consequences, or does it just appear that way? "Pollute the environment? Don't worry about it. Dump motor oil on your lawn, screw it. Make a liberal cry. Hahaha. Torture innocents? Eh. Has to be done. Drive up the national debt? C'est l'vie. Declare war for no good reason? They love us for it, the liberal media lies if they say any different."
I thought America was founded by *scientists*, non? The prevailing scientific opinion is that global warming is real and dangerous. Where'd these religious zealots come from, and when do we start shooting?
Fairly obvious, they mean an 11 degree Kelvin rise, which is the same as 11 deg Centigrade or 19.8 F.
I am just trying to find a silver lining to all the gloom and doom.
It's better to deal with one issue then to not deal with any issues at all.
You have to prioritize based on immediate threat.
Life is not for the lazy.
uhh this is /. remember
The K stands for kilobyte
average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K
whoa whoa whoa... 11,000 degrees! Damn! I'm not even sure if you mean Fahrenheit or Celcius, but I know that's hot!
A few decades ago, it was global cooling, now they're all panicky about global warming. I wonder what it'll be next?? It's all just ridiculous scare tactics/political propoganda. The data they're citing isn't even standardized.
Don't worry people, sit tight, the sky isn't gonna fall down on us.
All those Pentium 4's running sure are a threat for the future.
the scientists who 30 years ago said we were starting experience global cooling. Or the intellectuals who said that the world couldn't support more than 2 billion people. Or, dare we mention, the people who claimed Y2K would matter.
Incompetency on Slashdot. Sigh
what - you're surprised?
...Canada will become warm and I can move there. GWB is doing atleast one good thing.
Um, how many libraries of congress are in an 11 kilobyte increase in temperature?
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
You ignorant fool, life doesn't ceace to exsist once you die.
How much is that in degrees Celcius? :)
Actually, based on this:
The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K
I can only conclude that the average annual rise in the average global temperature* will be up to 11 degrees Kelvin for the next 100 years. In other words, the average temperature will be up to 1100 degrees warmer in 2105 than it is now.
I'm no global warming expert or pundit, but that's certainly my interpretation of the story blurb that made the front page. Good work on the clarity, Slashdot submitters and editors!
* - Saying "temperatures" in the plural is misleading, as global warming is about global average temperature, and using the plural indicates local measurements are what is relevant, which is not the case.
Its 11 degree Celsius not Kelvin. 11 K is -262 degree C which does not make any sense.
Make one up!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Give me a break.
Here is an analysis of the "documentation" included with Crichton's novel.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
The scientists behind climateprediction.net believe their project, because it is distributed to individual PCs, can help inform people about climate change - and that, in turn could bring political change.
I hate to say it but people wont care. Youd have to ask for drastic changes in the way things are done, ranging from moving to lesser polluting cars to stronger pollution controls......People are resistant to this kind of change, and the controls enforced in the First World often are ignored in the Third World (ie-China, India, etc) A life-changing event (akin to that of the movie The Day After Tommorrow (minus the horrible science)) would be the only surefire way change people......
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
So we previously thought we'd be 5,500 degrees hooter than we are currently? (That's half of eleven kay.)
The surface of the sun is about 5,600 degrees.
I know, lame joke, but teh degree symbol is a standard HTML object (°).
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Ya, because the distruction of the twin towers on 911 was just a hoax.
Thank you for your trolling post. Move along now.
Life is not for the lazy.
It gets warmer. Plants start growing where they couldn't before, like in the arctic. They use up all of the carbon dioxide and make oxygen and we all live happily ever after.
Or we might have a nuclear war with the aliens. This will lead to nuclear winter, which will cancel out global warming. Presto-solvo!
"Stephen Byers claims to know that 400 ppm is the maximum 'safe' level; what we show is that it may be impossible to pin down a safe level, and therefore we should not focus exclusively on stabilisation."
Ok, so its impossible to pin down a "safe level" of greenhouse gas, so we already might be over the "safe level" or it might not be "safe" if there are only 200ppm, so what we need to do is build this huge CO2 sink that will draw down CO2 to nearly 0ppm, that will be safe right? It has to be!
This is the same logic that causes Superfund in the US to clean up toxins to lower than naturally occuring levels wasting billions of dollars digging tons of dirt and replacing it with new dirt just because arsenic is found in higher than 3ppb naturally in some area.
We don't know what's safe, but we know that at some level it becomes bad, so that means at any level it's bad right?
Just to clarify for all you US Customary unit folks; a temperature change of 1K is equal to a temperature change of 1C. The only difference between the two scales is the zero point. Celsius uses the freezing point of water, Kelvin uses absolute zero. The original submitter was absolutely correct.
Okay when I read this quote:
"The scientists behind the project, called climateprediction.net, say it shows there's no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide. "
I can't take the rest seriously. We must get global CO2 levels down to nothing. You stop breathing!
I'd like to see something more than the handwaving arguement of, scientists made a model and it says the earth's temperature will melt. Could somebody point to a real story that includes some detailed description of the climate model, the data set input into the it, and real results, not just fantastic end of the world predictions
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Lrrr: We will raise your planet's temperature by one million degrees a day... for five days.
I make sure to never eat my vegetables!
Rules for simulations of complex, chaotic systems:
1. The number of CPUs in the simulation do not influence accuracy.
2. The number of variables in the model do not influence accuracy.
3. Accuracy is generally total crap, and no better than random guessing.
As it stands, we don't even know what caused the gross climate changes that we know definitely occurred (such as the ice ages), so why should we take a simulation like this seriously?
I honestly do not understand how anyone can doubt that humans cause climate change. First of all, it is a fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Nobody can dispute this: you can prove it with a very simple experiment, and of course the planet Venus is a very vivid example. Therefore, all other things being equal, increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause the planet to heat up. It seems obvious that it's better to err on the side of caution than to say the future is too difficult to predict, and therefore we shouldn't do anything.
Have our approximation functions gotten that good such that the effect of small errors over 100 years' simulation time are not absolutely significant?
And of course, all of this is for no good if some major climate-changing event, up to the OMG-we're-fucked range, like this, were to happen. But that's not very likely, at least on the high end, riiight?
Until a model can take past data and accurately come up with conditions we have today, it's worthless other than as an interesting exercise in "what if?". More on this here.
Now climate prediction is complex and difficult, and I understand that you have to start somewhere, and that government-funded climatologists need something to do. But sensationalist media's penchant for crying "THE SKY IS FALLING!" and reporting these simulations as gospels of truth is not to be taken seriously.
Wow, I bet you believe your uploaded mind will be halfway to Alpha Centuri in your own personal picostarship by then too, right?
Nanotechnology might prove very useful for remediating certain kinds of pollution, making various types of industrial processes more efficient, etc., but counting on some kind of miraculous revolution to magically undue our mistakes is sheer chutzpah. No, it's stupidity. It's delusional.
Put away your Drexler books for a while and read Edward O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life, or Freeman Dyson's Imagined Worlds.
Stefan Jones
I hear the more PC's they added to the grid, the closer the answer approached 42. A little mouse told me. I swear.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Why aren't differences in Celsius temperatures measured in Celsius?
I suppose differences could be stated in centigrade or Fahrenheit too. It just so happens that 1 degree C == 1 degree K.
All those Pentium 4's "Prescott" running sure are a threat for the future.
Sadly, many aren't aware that alternative cooling for the prescotts is strongly reccomended. Then again, many have no clue what's even in their computer casing.
I was around when speculation about a new ice age was a topic of pop-science articles.
The concern over global warming is not in the same category.
The "chicken little" strawman is yet another entry in the stream of sophistry, twisted facts and lies that gets churned out by the Cato Institute, the Global Climate Coalition and other fossil fuel industry front groups and bought-out think tanks.
Hers is a specific refutation of the "global cooling" myth.
Stefan
With 10 warmer within the next hundred years (on average), people would theoretically either burn more calories trying to stay cool, or stay inside more. The first would actually make the US smaller on average, while the second would probably bulk them up to a new obesity high!
I've heard the book...
Okay, great thanks guys for all the positive responses. If you ACTUALLY READ THE BOOK, you notice he has a huge section in the end where he explains this book is entirely his opinion on the subject matter.
I also find it humorous where some people label him as a wacko conservative, and other label him as a wacko liberal.
The authors urge all countries in the G8 group of rich nations to generate a quarter of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025,
Nothing like a 20 year plan to solve a problem that is unstoppable after 10.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
The climates models are computed using the BOINC platform (distributed computing in your PC, similar to SETI, etc.).
Please, help the project donating your idle CPU cycles, go to: the homesite of the project and download the client.
The client (BOINC) supports Linux, Windows, MAC OS, etc.
Well, in my part of Canada, the temp has not gone much above -20 all week. Raising the temperature 11 degrees is not helping much.
Too bad I have to wait 100 years.
We could all benefit from a few more minutes walking, a few less minutes driving, and a few less minutes using electricity each day. We all complain, let's personally do something about it.
Of course, you're forgetting the counterintuitive yet also highly likely result of global warming - an ice age.
Possibly just another one of those problems that we can deal with, but maybe not. At any rate, it debunks your argument that global warming is almost definitely a good thing.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
if there is more than one average rise in temperature from the globe, it denotes a change of temperature in a single location (i.e. from a single sensing station).
Had the article said "for the next hundred years", I'd have questioned its science rather than its grammar. Yes, it is confusing, but 11 Degress Celsius (as it is properly referred to) is still an outrageous increase, especially taking into account the fact that it is an average temperature. This means that the both the mean and extremes increase. Expect some very cold weather in parts due to "global warming". Also, expect scorchers. Of course, the significance is not so much the extremes as it is this mean temperature. Bird migration and plant budding schedules are already off-kilter. This isn't only an inconvenience for Dodo birds, its a serious hazard to the Earth's convenient biological balance. Watch for increased pollution in cities, species die-offs, catastrophic farming years, fisheries collapse, and increased natural disasters. It's in front of us right now. Those places least harmed by the full force of the tsunami had wave-breaking coral reefs and mangrove swamps in front of them. Without these, and many more, of nature's natural defenses, we're in major trouble.
It's not just "The Day After Tomorrow", people.
You totally missed my point, and it's obvious that you haven't read the book.
the past week the daytime highs here in Ottawa Canada were -20 deg. Celsius. Normals for this period, according to Environment Canada http://weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/city/pages/on-118_me tric_e.html, are daytime highs of -5 deg. Celsius. If the tempurature is going to be raised at most 11 deg. IT WILL STILL BE #$%*#$ COLD HERE!!!!
It's about the only thing the "global warming is our fault and it's going to kill us all" morons can agree with the "if the earth is warming why do we have record snowfall for the second straight year" idiots on.
There is still no certainty at all that a global warming is taking place. Refer to These skeptical documents.
I don't know if you joking, but maybe the meant 11 K (Kelvin). Kelvin is the same increments as C degrees but 0 is in a different place. 0 degrees C = 273.? Degrees Kelvin. Kelvin starts around absolute 0.
Maybe?
Put in the conditions for 50 years ago. Run the model forward 50 years. If the model correctly predicts the conditions today, report that. Then tell us what it predicts about the future.
Until you have a model that correctly predicts the present to a high degree of accuracy, shut up about the future..
Serious, too often ignored, questions:
1) Is it serious, i.e. causes big problems?
2) Is it caused by humans?
3) Is the cost of stopping negative effects lower than the cost of the negative effects?
4) Is there an alternative?
What is known now:
1) Who knows... worst case forecasts trumped up to guarantee continued funding for one's research projects are over-excited at best and morally bankrupt at worst.
2) Who knows... could be natural cycles or the sun.
3) Probably not...Kyoto would cost America $200-300B/yr for decades, and save little compared with money spent on research into alternative fuels or space energy mining.
4) Growth & Wealth
The real protection against nature is the wealth that arises from free societies. The third world would not only pollute less if they entered the first world, but they would also be much better prepared to handle any possible problems.
Compare the earthquakes in Iran last year to those in California. Or the system to prevent casualties from tsunamis in Japan to the non-existent system in nations recently affected.
The body count from the recent tsunamis is close to 300,000. Who are environmentalists kidding themselves to say potential global warming is a greater threat than other natural disasters, malaria, and poverty in general?
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Look, the one easy thing they could do to validate the model is run it for a hundred years starting at 1750 or so. We have reasonably accurate data for that time period, so we know what the model should produce. As far as I know, every climate model fails this test miserably, and it's not mentioned in this article. So what steps did they take to ensure the validity of the model?
The time to get excited is when we have a model that matches observed results. Until then there's no way I'm gonna support some kind of government action that'll bankrupt me.
In any event, we could fix any CO2 problem by going 100% nuclear power and running our engines off hydrogen. When the greenies support that option, I'll know it's serious. Until then, don't wake me up.
C02 is not the major contributor to global warming, either now (yes, we have quite a bit of us as it is, which is why it ain't -40C outside), nor under the projections. Rather, it is water vapor that is the real greenhouse gas. The problem with the simulations is positive feedback, and anyone who has ever dealt with such a phenomena knows how chaotic it can be. The simulations that predict these really high numbers essentially get caught in a loop - more C02 = slight rise in temp = more water vapor and C02 = more rise in temp = more water vapor and C02, etc However, we have been hotter than this before. If positive feedback was really that easy, we would have already triggered it and wouldn't be where we are now.
Celsius has parity with Kelvin. 1 C is equal to 1 Kelvin (no degrees in the Kelvin scale). To convert from Celsius to Kelvin, just add 273.15. Now from fahrenheit it's a bit more complex: (9/5)*XC + 32.
[QUOTE]The scientists behind the project, called climateprediction.net, say it shows there's no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide.[/QUOTE]
There are plenty of safe levels of carbon dioxide... how moronic. The actual quote from the scientists is later in the article,
[QUOTE]"However, with our current state of knowledge, we can't yet define a safe level in the atmosphere."[/QUOTE]
Ie they aren't certain what the safe level is, not that one doesn't exist. Yet more irresponsible journalism.
LetterRip
Why does this site consistently have to be filled with dweeby little pricks falling all over themselves to ridicule someone for a mistake?
Fortunately for the OP, he was right and you're the idiot in this case since a *differential* in Kelvin is equivalent to a differential in Celcius.
And for the other SI units geniuses that stepped up, small "k" is the prefix for kilo, not large K, which is the exclusive domain of Kelvin.
Damn, at least be right when insulting someone, dumbasses.
Teach me to /. in a state of near-unconciousness. When I first saw that I thought it said "11K" as in thousand not Kelvin. I thought we were REALLY in deep shit then! :)
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
book...I tend not to really take any of it that seriously.
It's called Fiction for some odd reason or another i've been told.
All your base are belong to Google.
"...SIMULATIONS SUGGEST that over the NEXT HUNDRED YEARS we COULD see AVERAGE rise temperatures of UP TO 11K" ::Simulations are not reality. ::Suggestions are not difinitive. ::100 years is a great deal of time to extend a simulation over. ::Potential outcomes are not a certain path. ::Averages mask information. ::Upper bounds are misleading.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
The events of 9/11 certainly happened. Does that indicate that there was a significant, immediate ongoing threat?
Does it indicate that Iraq posed a significant, credible threat?
A threat so real that one thousand four hundred and eighteen (to date) American lives should be spent stopping (somehow) that threat?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Liberals are not the only ones who are concerned. Even populists like Bill O'Reilly have cast their vote in support of efforts to reverse global warming.
Yet, why is Washington doing nothing? Just recently, there has been talk of easing emissions standards on SUVs and other toys of the rich Republicans. In the end, SUV sales will be phenomenal as long as they are amphibious.
No offense intended; but there's enough people out there who -do- use the SI measurement system, and -still- don't know the difference.
...we're gonna run out of energy one of these days, anyway, so we might as well encourage global warming, then get to work on efficent methods for converting the excess heat energy into a more usable form.
i e crowd?
Let's also not forget how the First Law of Cynicism in Science applies here: climatologists can most easily get funding for their research if they keep producing results sensational(ist) enough to merit front-page headlines on the NYT. Now who's gonna get the press and the money? The everything-is-fine-so-just-go-about-your-business crowd, or the oceans-are-going-to-boil-and-we're-all-going-to-d
You want to believe that they can predict the weather 100 years from now?
Yes, I do believe it, and so should you; it's far, far easier to predict something averaged over a wide scale, over a long period of time than it is to predict relatively minute, localized changes on a day to day basis.
It's sad to see so many people bury their heads in the sand and come up with all kinds of reasons to ignore this kind of data, simply because they don't like the implications.
It's been studied many, many times, and reported many, many different ways; massive ecological damage is occuring, and it could very well snowball out of control unless something changes, and soon. Ignoring it and coming up with baseless reasons to ignore the warnings isn't going to help.
Fight for something better: www.socialistalternative.org
T(100) = 0x + 11K
T(100) is the temperature in 100 years.
x is the input data.
That's just the CDC's estimate for the US. World-wide, it's 4 million a year and rising ...
Completely preventable. More than 100 times the casualties EVERY YEAR. So, why isn't the government grabbing the tobacco manufacturers and throwing them in jail? These guys make bin laden look like a wanna-be. More than 1000 Americans killed each and every day ...
I think it was Maxis. You know - the same guys who wrote Sim City.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
The difference between kelvins and degrees Celsius is much the same as the difference between a vector and a point. The kelvin scale has a thermodynamically significant origin, namely absolute zero, and kelvin temperatures act linearly in some ways, such as twice as hot meaning twice as much vibration of molecules. Celsius temperatures, on the other hand, are measured from an arbitrary origin, namely 27315/27316 of the triple point of DHMO. You can't add temperatures in degrees Celsius, but if you subtract them, you get a difference in kelvins; hence the nonstandard term "Celsius degree" (distinct from "degree Celsius") as a synonym for the kelvin.
average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K...
Wow! I suspected that global warming might be getting out of hand, but 11000 degrees is pretty big increase if you ask me. I mean, the Eskimos will have saunas where their igloos used to be. Spit will sizzle when it hits the sidewalk. The children won't have a snowball's chance in Hell of finishing their popsicles before they melt! Won't someone please think of the children?!?
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Wow, that is true faith in technology. However, optimism must be paired alongside with realistic expectations. I'm sure that 100 years ago people thought that by now we would be living in paradise. It hasn't happened. Paralleling this, in 100 years you predict that we will have the technology to fix whatever mistakes we have made. What if we don't? Should we take that chance? I would personally rather take precautions now rather than find out how screwed we are later.
...that we don't live in a computer simulation. Otherwise we would have destroyed our planet a dozen times already.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
A recent study suggests that global warming might have saved us from the next ice age.
Climate Change is a euphamism marketed by republicans to confuse the issue. Whichever side of the debate you are on, what we are talking about is Global Warming.
I am far more convinced that Peak Oil is going to be the next big catastrophe to hit humanity. Peak oil has far more evidence going for it in that oil supply's have followed the Hubbert's peak model in many different areas where oil has been discovered. Of course if world oil consumption falls this means that Global Warming is going to be a non-issue 100 years from now and we are either going to be somewhere in between the scenarios where we'll all be living in a nuclear powered hydrogen economy utopia where fossil fueled powered engines are as common as horse and buggy or living in poverty with 1/5 or less of the world's population due to mass starvation.
A recent study suggests that global warming might have saved us from the next ice age.
when your results come out as radically different from dozens of other scientific studies, that's a good reason right there to question the validity of your results. Doesn't mean you're not right, but I'd sure as heck be triple-checking my conclusions and methods.
-Jay
Jeeze, what does BUSH have to do with it? You can't quote a negative statistic without mentioning Bush in the same thought? How about this: 3.2 MILLION AMERICANS WERE KILLED BY CIGARETTES ON CLINTON'S WATCH!!! Makes no sense, right?
It's because millions of workers would be out of their damned jobs (assuming they weren't in jail) and ready to vote the jerks "in the government" out of office, if not start outright rebellion.
Dude, get real. Every smoker out there made a concious decision to light up for the first time. My father died at 46 due to a massive heart attack, massively influenced by his two or three pack a day habit. His father died at 40 for the same reason. But I know whose fault it was --- both of them knew it wasn't healthy. Nobody forced them to light up.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
Well you could, but I prefer to state the difference in degrees Rankine.
The model involved in this research was tweaked to reproduce the climate data for the last 50 years. I do make the presumption that if the model can do so with reasonable accuracy that it can predict the future with reasonable accuracy.
Only if you want to be modded up as Insightful, which is a synonym for Cynical. ;)
The upcoming energy crisis will help reduce some of our harmful emissions.
This reminds me of something...
"Will the compensation payouts as a result of deaths and injuries caused by our car's tendency to exploade outweigh the cost of the recall and design changes required to fix the problem?"
I don't doubt it'd cost more to fix the problem than ignore it and deal with the consequences. I just don't think "the consequences" are something we'll *want* to live with.
That said, like you I want to see a few more people playing devil's advocate on both sides - especially global warming advocates attempting to find evidence *against* their theories (as they should do anyway).
As for the threat level, I think the issue is not so much how major a threat it as as its potential for *extremely* long term and widespread effects that could be essentially permanent, or at least last for *many* generations.
I, for one, am unwilling to write off the potential issues of coastline change and the resulting squabbles (probably wars) over terriory, starvation due to lost productive growing area, population displacement, oceanic ecology changes (and potential for displacement/loss of fish stocks), economic damage, etc. *if* sea level change happens as some think it may, it might make the recent tsunami look like a splash in a pond.
Nature is Nature; we just have to be aware of what it's doing and stay clear of the major risks (quake-proof buildings, stay out of low-lying areas and flood plains during hurricanes, etc). Terrorists are another matter; Al Qaeda has the avowed goal of killing as many Americans as possible. The damage they will do is limited only by their capability. If they laid their hands on a nuke, you can bet they'd use it. If they got Sarin, ditto. The only way to protect against terrorists such as Al Qaeda is to make certain that they do not acquire such capabilities. Unfortunately, such insurance is not cheap or easy.
For some reason there are people who don't even think it's "socially acceptable"; there are lots of people who will condemn you for taking the threat seriously, despite the indisputable history (embassy bombings, USS Cole, WTC, numerous public statements from Osama bin Laden declaring his intent). There is no way to have a reasoned argument with someone who denies historical fact.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yes, but is that in 1024 = 1K or 1000 = 1K units? Sure we'll all be glowing plasma but 264 less would give me comfort.
I'm not sure what the original citation is, but Andrew Sullivan claims over 30 prisoners died at the hands of American interrogators.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Shucks, Team Slashdot is still running and their score is up to 55K! Those others are way behind!
A higher concentration of CO2 means that the plant doesn't need to keep its stomata open as far or as long, which limits its water losses. But if evaporation increases due to higher temperatures, it would not be difficult to consume all the water savings and then some. Less available water means less growth.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yeah, I don't care if I'm burning Karma here. The parent makes alot more sense than the GP... it's sad that ideology is used as the basis moderation here, in place of science. This is evidence of impending catastrpohic ecological disaster here, not a pissing contest over gerrymandering. I weep to think that the capitalists and thier supporters are going to doom the whole world, using logic like the GP's to avoid ever having to make sacrifices or curtail thier exploitive behavior.
Fight for something better: www.socialistalternative.org
You don't get it do you? People need protection from themselves. No one has the right to put their life at risk when an addiction is involved. Your father and grandfather didn't make a choice. They were hooked. It was intentional. They were given a substance that made them crave more. of that substance A substance that was designed to make people crave more. That substance was designed to make money for the people who own cigarette companies. A few million dead people don't matter when you're making a lot of money at their expense. Right? They were forced to smoke due to the addictive nature of nicotine. If I gave someone who was curious a few free rocks of crack (a Slashdot moderator for example) and they got hooked. Then I charged them for all future crack rocks. I'd be making a pretty nice income. You can't say that those people had a choice. Using an addictive substance ceases to be a choice one it enters your body.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Bad presumption. Many people have lost fortunes on Wall Street in the mistaken belief that economic models that predict past behavior can be used to predict future behavior. I can write an equation that almost perfectly predicts the behavior of X (temperature, rainfall, GNP, etc.) over the last 100 years. That same equation has absolutely no predictive value for the future.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Does anybody remember how Chaos Theory was first postulated?
Yes, I seem to recall reading about Henri Poincare finding a "homoclinic tangle" while trying to solve the problem of the stability of the Solar System (to win a prize put up by the King of Sweden). It amounted to a strange attractor, and a chaotic system. That probably wasn't "the first" being only around 1890, but it was one of the earlier points. Why what did you have in mind?
The crux of Chaos Theory is that some systems will NEVER be predictable because there are so many variables that it is impossible to know all the starting conditions.
Not really. Chaos Theory generally has more to say about what you can predict/say about such systems, and the fact that your predictions will have to be formed differently than those of nice classical linear systems.
Or were you talking about "Popular Chaos Theory" where people who don't know what they're talking about make vague generalisations about what they think "Chaos Theory" probably means, largely based on a few half assed descriptions from MIchael Crichton books and Hollywood films?
If a computer model can't even predict weather more than a few days out, how is it that it can predict weather a hundred years from now?
Really? I can make quite a few fairly accurate predictions about the weather over the coming year: It will be (in the northen hemisphere) warmer over June July and August, but will cold come the end of the year. On average Florida will be warmer than Maine this year. Seattle will see a lot of days with rain this year.
You see, despite it being a chaotic system, it's still possible to discuss some of the more qualitive aspects with some accuracy. I can't predict exactly what the weather will be like on July 23rd, but I can make a fairly accurate guess that it will be warmer than the weather tomorrow (unless you're in the southern hemisphere). They can't tell you exactly what the weather will be like 100 years from now, but they can make qualitive broad statements about it.
Chaos Theory has to be the single most misunderstood and misrepresented theory next to Quantum Physics. Could you please refrain from further spreading this bizarre contaminated view of what is, actually, an interesting field of mathematics.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Read the grandparent post again. I think you missunderstood it.
....the planet will be fine ....
... they want to have super GOD like microregulation powers over every single man woman and child on the planet to save us from our imminent doom. In fact, they absolutely positively insist that super regulation is the ONLY solution, and nothing else will be "good" enough.
And we will be to.
In the last 100 years we have had 2 world wars, 100 military conflicts, created the bomb and nuclear power, landed a man on the moon and sent space craft to the far reaches of our solar system. The US the and USSR came within inches of total nuclear annialation, and we have effectively wiped out polio and small pox. Allot can happen in 100 years, allot will happen, and it never ceases to shock me how people make these kind of predictions, call them absolute and proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and then worst of all
Dare I suggest, maybe the people who are pushing this the hardest just see that kind power as the ends and not the means, and if it wasn't global warming - they'd find some other excuse.
Computer models have always been fun and games, so it is gospel...
Oh well, what the hell...
And what happened on 9/11? The death rate in the USA approximately doubled for a day. And the politicians piled on to make hay, and stupid laws, regulations, and loss of liberties.
Have you ever heard about trade? That is when you barter goods, services and money for goods, services and money from other people.
A lot of the people that ctizens of the United States of America trade with live outside the United States of America.
If you attack your trading partners you and they lose money and everyone is worse off.
Where do you think the money that pays for the US army comes from?
no offense, but no one on this site has enough knowledge or understanding to talk about this subject.
it seems like there'd be less bullshit being posted if the topic were creationsm or some bollocks like that.
Its a choice weather to do the drugs or not. The first time and every time after that, its still a choice. Many people choose not to do them, many more quit after becoming addicted. Choice.
... move to china. Or keep voting for people like Bush.
People have the right to choice. Good or bad. You take away choice, you take away freedom. You wanna do that
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Sing it with me... "And the men who hold high places, must be the ones who start.. to mold a new reality.. closer to the heart."
Or, Perhaps...
AF2K.com (A Farewell To Kings), my Hypernovel, the kernel of which was written in 1990, before I knew what a distirbuted grid was, addresses this issue and quotes Rush along the way. In the novel, the simulation, SYnergistic Resource for INformation eXchange (SYRINX
Oddly, the 11 years to go from 378ppm to a "dangerous level" of 400ppm at 2ppm per year is 2015! Lucky guess? You decide...
What makes this post 'on-topic' is this quote from the article:
The scientists behind climateprediction.net believe their project, because it is distributed to individual PCs, can help inform people about climate change - and that, in turn could bring political change.
When one thinks about how to remedy the situation, you often end up with such resistance that the will to make it so causes "political change". That went to an extreme in the novel, trust me. The key was three-fold:
- Michael Gavon made then think
- Marena San Leoni made them feel
- Adrienne made them get off their a55s and do something
Perhaps we need to adopt this model as well. "Knowing the answer isn't all there is... you have to get someone to listen to you. And to make someone listen to what they don't want to hear, takes a gift..."starglider29a
author, A Farewell to Kings
http://www.af2k.com
Here in America more than anywhere we are oil, literally.
The people who run our government are oil. The oil industry staged a coup in 2000 and literally stole an election. But It's not just the repubs though, it's almost every politician in Washington, see Robert Baer's book, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Sole For Saudi Crude. Condi Rice, while working at Chevron had an oil tanker named after her and Haliburton's CEO is now the brains of our operation. Even the puppet man himself has deep ties to oil, albiet his oil company Arbusto failed, miserably. As a sidenote on the bush dynasty, all you Nascar loving Bush fans realize that Prescott Bush (JR's grandpa) did the banking for the Nazi's in WWII, right? Read House of Bush, House of Saud to find out why the ambassador from Saudi Arabia, Prince Bandar has the nickname Bandar Bush.
All the plastics we use are made from Oil. Every tire uses 7 gallons of oil in it. All the fertilizers we use are made from natural gas. All the pesticides are made from Oil. Because we have raped our land, and it is nothing more than a sponge onto which we pour oil to make it arable again, without this production would drop from 130 bushels per acre down to 30 bushels per acre. Transportation of the food on the roads that take tremendous amounts of oil to build and maintain in trucks that burn oil to factories that burn oil to process the food and package it in plastic made from oil then shipped out in more oil burning trucks to McDonald's where we drive our oil burning SUV's through the drive thru and take it home and sit in front of a brainwashing device powered either by coal or natural gas, all so we don't have to conversate with our neighbors. It's an elegant Orwellian scheme really. Not only do we eat oil, we think it.
The fantasy is good for business, but folks, this way of life aint real.
Welcome to the desert of the real. Climate change, destruction of the biosphere, air pollution, water pollution, drained aquafirs, dead coral reefs, wiped out fisheries, no more rain forrests, overpopulation, massive trade deficit leading to more debt that will have to be paid off by your kids because you are an irresponsible fool, dollar collapse, housing bubble burst, pension plans gone, resource wars -iraq is but a prelude to what is coming-,diseases, and mass famine. Subsequent generations 100 generations down the line will hate us.
If you don't belive in the destruction of our environment to the point of not being able to sustain human life then I'll kindly point you to Peak Oil. The Saudi's have an expression for it. My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies in a jet, his son will ride a camel. Peak Oil is going to reverse globalization, yah everyone knows there is plenty of the stuff left in the ground, the problem is oil production follows a bell curve, be it a single well, or a nation's production. After you extract 1/2 of the oil production declines, forever, every gallon of oil is harder to extract and of a lesser quality. Net energy (energy spent for energy returned) gets closer and closer to zero and when it becomes 1:1, the well is put out of production, that is why wells never really get sucke
And the civil unrest in the Congo has killed about 10 times as many people as were killed by last month's earthquake and tsunami. There has been very little international outcry over those death tolls.
Somewhere between 20 million and a 100 million people died from the Great Influenza of 1918-20. A good share of the blame for the spread of that pandemic belongs to the Wilson administration's obsession with the war effort - the US would have been much better off letting the Europeans destroy themselves.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I always hear the same thing on Slashdot: "We need more mirrors!"
If we should need to solve the issue of global warming, it should be fairly easy:
- Set up solar reflection panels to direct concentrated rays of sun towards the ice caps, so that not only will the ice melt, it will evaporate as well.
- Set up a huge thermal vent so that evaporated water can waft up to space and out of our orbit.
- The planet will naturally start to spin faster as a result of reduced mass.
- A planet that spins faster will expose any given portion of the planet to the sun for shorter increments, allowing the sun less time to "heat up" the atmosphere.
- Furthermore, the evaporated water will freeze once it reaches space, making a nice little shiny reflector shield to block out some of the sun's radiation.
I honestly don't understand why no one consults me about this problem. Thank gosh I can share my productive fruits with the slashdot population.and the facts of what happened to temperature range in North America during the days after 9/11, when (almost)no jets were flying.
This is indeed a reasonable argument, and one that I had in my mind as I made the post you were replying to. I don't think that I am qualified enough to make an accurate statement at this point. However, I think there are rather significant differences in the examples that you pose.
In your second example, the equation that you suggest writing incorporates no general understanding of the underlying economic principles at work. Essentially, you would be curve-fitting an enormous number of data points. Its no wonder that the resulting equation has no predictive power.
The idea behind the climateprediction.net model is that it incorporates actual science in its predictions. Scientifically established rules and concepts are actually written into the model first, and then the model is tweaked to fit historically known data. The model has some idea of the underlying principles at work. In other words, its much more like educated guessing where you already have some idea of what is supposed to happen.
For example, let's try and model two balls colliding. If you built a model incorporating inelastic/elastic collision laws and fed it data, you would have a fairly reasonable prediction of what will happen. Meanwhile, if you attempted to extrapolate the position of the balls without knowing any laws, you may have the balls passing through each other.
Personally I also feel that scientists have a much better understanding of the fundamentals of weather than the fundamentals of economics. Weather arises simply from physical laws that can never be violated, and can be measured and quantified directly. You can't quite say the same thing about economics. Its true that both systems are chaotic. However, I feel that we can study one better than the other.
I wish I had a better understanding of both fields to say more. I am not aware of the circumstances surrounding any failed economic models, and so I cannot really comment. All I can say is that the climateprediction.net project appears to have something going for it since it has international backing. It's also an evolving project, and so has the potential to succeed.
"The real protection against nature is the wealth that arises from free societies"
Protection against nature? the problem isn't "nature", it's the distinctly unnatural effects of dumping billions of tons of extra carbon into the atmosphere.
The deepest irony is that right now in the US we've got a sweet deal, climate-wise, in the status quo, with our temperate climate and fertile breadbaskets. From purest self-interest, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we continue to perturb the system. On a geological time frame most of the time the earth has either been incredibly hot with no ice caps, or frozen in ice ages; our current temperate, interglacial state is the exception, not the rule, and while it won't last forever, we still have a huge vested interest in keeping it that way as long as possible. It's true that we really don't know how the system works, but dumping tons of carbon into the air is equivalent to blindly conducting a major climatological experiment. While it's theoretically possible that we could introduce enough "dimming" from particulate pollution to counterbalance greenhouse effects, the presence of many positive-feedback systems (melting ice sheets releasing stored CO2, forests switching from carbon sinks to carbon sources, etc) make that rather unlikely. It's like saying that the best way to good health is to drink lots of beer, lots of coffee, smoke lots of opium and lots of crystal meth because they'll all cancel each other out, instead of not doing any of them and maybe get out of the house every now and then.
This happened before with CFCs--the scientific community pointed out the harmful effects of CFCs on the ozone layer, the world acted to reduce CFCs, and it appears like we might have acted in time--the ozone holes seem to be shrinking.
Maybe we'll act in time for climate change. Or perhaps invading Iran would be a better use of our time.
Is the model at all accurate? Before anything should be asked based on the results, we need ot establish as to why we should believe the model. People tend to put a bit too much faith in computer models. They hear the term, and assume (since computers are such logical devices) that the results MUST be the truth. The computer doesn't lie!
Well, no, computers on't lie, but garbage in, garbage out. I could design a model that shows that the sun is going to turn purple next year. I could have this bigass simulation with all sorts of data that gets processed and a nice set of stastics and graph that show the progression of the purpleification of the sun. None of that, of course, has any bearing on if the sun will actually turn purple or not. If my model shows it will, clearly the model is flawed. I'm processing the wrong data, processing it in the wrong way, making invalid assumtions, and so on.
People need to understand that because something was modeled on a computer is no bearing on it's accuracy or precision. You can model anything you want on a computer. If the results are useful and accurate depends on how good your model is, how good the data you give it is, and how correct your assumptions are for the data that isn't known.
True. But then, there's no oil in the Congo. That's why the US hasn't set up a dictatorship there that they can later remove under the banner of "liberation".
This is the big argument for the bloody nanny state: "people need protection from themselves." Go ahead, extend the argument; why stop with tobacco? In fact, extending the principle is essential, because PEOPLE ARE DYING OUT THERE!
I have a wonderful idea! Why not prohibit manufacture and importation of alcohol? It's addictive, isn't it? Booze kills thousands of people a year, too, doesn't it?
News flash, dude: it's been tried. Didn't work with booze! It wouldn't work with tobacco, either!
So go ahead: put the tobacco company owners in prison; close the factories; burn the crop (no, wait, that might not be a good idea); throw everyone in jail who won't quit smoking.
That's the way to turn an unfortunate addiction into a new illegal substance problem, as if we needed another.
The only way to stop tobacco addiction is to effectively educate people as to the perils of the activity. But guess what, some people just won't stop, and some who don't smoke will start.
Go ahead and tax it to death, too. Next thing you know people will be growing it in their bedrooms instead of pot, and the black market price will be only just a little lower than the taxed price. You may think that people need protection from themselves, but creating a totalitarian state for the purpose of your oh-so-noble cause will demonstrate to you that those people won't be at all grateful for the favor.
Besides, it's not so addictive that people can't quit if they want to bad enough. My sister quit after 30 years of puffing away, one of my brothers (who started when he was 6, for cryin' out loud) quit finally at age 40, the other one quit at 55. I never started, thank heaven.
Finally, you say "No one has the right to put their life at risk" ? BS, buddy. You want to live my life for me? Addiction or not, it is my life to live, and I REFUSE to allow you or any other Hitler-Stalin-Mao wannabe the power to take that away from me.
Ooops. Sorry for the heat -- got a little ruffled there for a moment.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
I will need to make an amendment to this post. Rereading the website, it turns out that the model has been tweaked to fit current day weather. It has yet to be tested with the data set from 1950-2000. This testing is set to begin this year.
Which means that I have no idea how accurate the current findings of this project are. Its a good idea and I'm sure that reasonable accuracy will eventually be there, but I can't comment on how accurate it is at the moment.
As Patrick Moore so aptly said "Nobody's going to listen to you if you say the world is not going to come to an end, but if you say that the world is comming to an end, you get headlines." It's just another case of only bad news being news.
Now this specificly applies ot research in the form of being able to get money to do research as well. If you do a bunch of careful research and simulations and it shows that know what? Humand have jack diddly impact on the planet, wether we are fine or not is all at the mercy of mother nature, we should just stop worrying, well you are pretty much out of bussiness right there. No more work is needed then from you. Just need to see if your work survives peer review and they you can pretty much pack up your shit and go home, since studying the climate for how humans impact it is pointless if they don't.
So this creates an additonal incentive to have disaster scenarios. Disasters scenarios = headlines = research money.
It's sad that things like this influence scientists, but they do. In all fields of science you can find scientists skewing their results because the outcome is likely to lead to the termination of the flow of money, either because it shows there's nothing more ot research in that area or because it pisses off a sponsor and so on.
It's even more tricky in climate research since it's all speculation and computer models. With physics, it's a question of repeatable fact. I believe I've discovered a relation in nature that is described by theory X. I test it, find out that's the case. Others then test it, see if they find it's the case too. Simple. If I make shit up, they'll be unable to replicate it and it'll be pretty apparant.
Well with climate research, it's all based on computer models, which are all based on incomplete data and assumptions about things we don't know. No one can say which, if any models, are close to being right. There's none out there that are complete enough to do something like predict the weather on a daily basis for an extended period of time or anything.
Well, that makes repeatability hard. Sure I can re-run your simulation, but that doesn't mean anything. If the simulation is wrong, doesn't matter how many times I run it, the result is still wrong. I can design my own simulation, but then we are back to square one. Just because two wrong simulations agree doesn't make either one more right.
It's very difficult to do any sort of empirical testing of things relating to climate research, given that we don't have a bunch of test Earth's sitting around to do it on. Thus it's easy for a researcher to tinker witht their model until it gives them results they like, and it's hard for anyone to call that out.
According to Google, the natural death rate in the U.S. is 0.121879864 hertz. What this means for humanity at large, I couldn't say.
The problem here is that you're answering the wrong question. It's true that the fact we can't predict the weather accurately ten days in advance has no bearing on whether we can predict the weather accurately ten years in advance--but that's not the question.
The question is, can climatological models predict weather ten years in advance?
My answer is "I don't know. Let's get the best climatologists together and sponsor a year of research. At the end of that, they give us a ten-year projection. We keep on going. Ten years later, if their projection is accurate to within ten percent, we say their model has merit and go on from there."
We live in an era where we can send a probe across millions of kilometers to touch down on an icy moon circling Jupiter, and our biggest surprise isn't that we're able to hit it at all but that we got to transmit longer than we thought. The standards set by physics, by chemistry, by biology, by the other hard sciences are extraordinarily high. Demanding ten percent accuracy from climatology just means we're giving them ten times more leeway than we'd give NASA for a space shot.
The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K, more than twice what was previously thought.
What I find shocking is that someone previously thought the temperature could rise as much as 5,500 degrees! No wonder there is so much concern about this Global Warming thing!!
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
Which leads us back to the original topic of the thread: Global Warming. I know you all appear to have forgotten that, since the whole thread seems to have been hijacked by empty-headed Bush-ite cheerleaders,
The point is, the US is not going to be able to just "babysit" the rest of the world as temperatures and sea levels rise. Like it or not, the US is going to have to deal with the environmental situation it helped cause, along with everybody else.
The problem here is that you're answering the wrong question.
Mostly I was trying to correct the glaring misuse of "Chaos Theory" which, being a mathematician by trade, I found to be quite irritating.
The question is, can climatological models predict weather ten years in advance?
Indeed, that is the important question.
My answer is "I don't know. Let's get the best climatologists together and sponsor a year of research. At the end of that, they give us a ten-year projection. We keep on going. Ten years later, if their projection is accurate to within ten percent, we say their model has merit and go on from there."
You seem to presume we haven't been doing that for the last 10 years. Okay, the model at the level of detail used in this compute hasn't been tried before, but it is, I presume, simply a refinement of previous climatic models which have been in use for the last 20 years or so. Personally I don't know how well climatic modelling has gone for the last 10 years, nor how accurate any predictions were. I expect it is all in the literature from 10 years ago though, and you can probably look it up.
I'm pretty neutral on this debate for now, but I think the dismissals of "we can't predict the climate" are awfully premature. If they showed that predictions of global warming from 10 years ago have proved to be complete crap... well, then I'd start listening. I've never heard that particular argument trotted out though. Instead I've mostly seen a lot of climatologists who seem pretty confident that their models (up to a reasonable margin of error) are reasonably good. Apparently this particular model was used to predict the weather for the last 50 years based on data from 50 years ago and did a decent job. That's no guarantee that the model works, but its not a bad pointer that maybe they're onto something.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
well, if one reads the bible, it seems we have -5 years until the apocalypse.
I witnessed it, didn't you?
Apparently this particular model was used to predict the weather for the last 50 years based on data from 50 years ago and did a decent job.
Color me skeptical, still. I'm not a mathematician; I'm a cryptographer. (Which is a fancy way of saying I'm a computer scientist with delusions of being really good with math theory, I guess.) I can look at random noise and come up with some equation which will successfully 'predict' it; and if I'm allowed to make my model arbitrarily complex, in the name of 'well, a complex system demands a complex model', then it's very easy to fool myself into thinking I'm actually doing something.
Meanwhile, the reality is the next bit to come down the wire is going to be random noise and I'll have just a 50/50 chance of getting it right.
If I'm right, my instinct is to take that as vindication. "My idea is right!" I say. If I'm wrong, I still win, because I get to tell the NSF "more study of this new phenomenon is needed".
And all the while, random bits keep on coming across the wire, and I keep on fooling myself into thinking I can predict them. And I can't.
This is a really hard problem in cryptography; how do you know when you're fooling yourself?
I don't doubt the sincerity of the climatological community. However, they have yet to show me they have any effective mechanism in place for finding out when they're fooling themselves--and for that reason I have to consider their models suspect.
What makes you so certain he's being disingenuous? Instead of being so quick to point fingers, let's for once give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's merely stupid.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Except that neither "K" nor "C" is a unit. Both indicated the system NOT the unit.
You really had me going there for a second. You should have tried harder on number 4, though, that one kind of gave it away.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Bad presumption, I'm afraid. I've explained that a bit in an earlier reply, see here.
What it boils down to is the model is only assured to be good for the range of data that you fitted it to. Plug in data that is outside that range (which you must do, if you believe that the future will be significantly different than the present!) and the model is suddenly unreliable.
Of course, I've assumed that the model isn't suffering from spurious correlation or over-fitting. In those cases, it could be wrong for the range of data you fitted it to!
See what I've been reading.
Just to clarify for all you non-US folks that think the US Customary temperature unit is Celcius... (/sarcasm off)
We in the U.S. generally use a unit called a degree Fahrenheit. The big exception here are those in the scientific community. 0 Celcius = 32 degrees Farhenheit. 100 C = 212 degrees F. ( we mark the degrees with a superscript "o", so "32^o F" we'd use if you can imagine the superscipt there.)
Anyhews, so to further clarify for all parties:
The original poster was fine, though why they converted TFA's Celcius into Kelvin, I'm not sure. For measuring the change in temperature, 1 C = 1 K
For us (US,) a 1 C change is a 1.8 degree F change. So the 2-11 C difference is equivalent to saying a predicted change of 3.6-19.8 degrees F.
groan. If you believe this, I have a bridge in NY and a house in Bagdad for sale. I am very interested to see the current sunspot cycle and its temperature results. After removing the urban heat islands from the data, I think the last cycle (1990s into ~2002) will be a local temperature maximum similar to the 1930s. A degree up, a degree down - plenty complaints and blame will follow, I'm sure. Oh, yes. Sol is getting brighter even if we aren't.
A while ago I was inspired to create this blog, and ever since it seems to be writing itself. I have set up Super Scary Climate Blog. I've got an Instiki Wiki started there for the purpose of tracking climate variability. Please feel invited to contribute.
It is quite likely also the atmosphere will become unbreathable to humans.
I would love to see the study that gave a valid reason why THAT would be so.
Humans have shown a great ability to tolerate wide ranges of oxygen, what study claims that the atmosphere, even in worst case, will beome unbreathable?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The british often use Fahrenheit as well, and always use it when talking about the weather, except for the forecasters, who mix everybody up by using Centigrade. Some pedants in Britain also correct you use the term Centigrade, because they reckon it should be Celcius, but Centigrade was taught for years in schools, and nobody uses Celcius except for a few boffins. Also, only boffins use Kelvin, which is odd because it is named after a British scientist, (Lord Kelvin). The British generally use imperial measures (inch/foot/yard/pint/pound/stone/mile/gallon/furlo ng(!)) interchangeably with metric (or SI) units, so there is a generally air of confusion about the exact size of things in the UK. Multiple trips back to the hardware store are required to get the part you need.
The government has tried for years to make a conversion, but it has resulted in a kind of permanent half-way house situation. I believe the same thing is happening in Canada.
There was a case a few years back when a probe to mars hit the surface at 10 thousand miles an hour because of a units mix up between british and american boffins!
I stole this
This study is interesting as it posits that in fact the rise of CO2 levels really began 8000 years ago when people began clearing large tracts of land for farming.
That accounts for half of the CO2 changes from the norm; the last 150 years accounts for the other half.
He also notes that from climate models it seems the rise in CO2 has served to shield us from a large scale glaciation phase that was scheduled to hit long before now, and kept the climate more stable!
The study is rather interesting (full link to study in article, check end) as he really ties together a wide variety of data from different sources.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Fuck the revolution." - Bono, Rattle & Hum Video.
11 yrs of history lessons in the Australian school system gave me the knowlage that McArthur started our wool industry and very little else. History and Geography (as taught in govt schools) is mainly raw nationalisim. The story of how we ALL got to where we are now is OUR story, but I don't recall learning "the story of humanity" in school. We were taught that every nation has it's own history but "nations" have not really been around that long. Every culture does have it's own history but all the cultures are intertwined and can change rapidly or slowly. Here in Australia the natives have a culture going back 40,000yrs, we didn't hear about that in the 1960's. We were taught that they were all lazy drunkards, incapable of voting or raising children. The govt sometimes built corragated iron houses (kind of like a sweat box) and gave them "jobs". It only strengthened the govt's bullshit when the natives used them for antything but a house and went "walkabout" instead of working. This also encouraged child welfare to take thier kids away and give them to white people for adoption. People have treated each other like this for, well forever, we all think our particular tribe/culture/nation/footy club is pretty much the way things "should be". Many turn to religion in an attempt to have the authority of Gosh on thier side to help send thier "shouldn't be" opponents to heck.
Unfortunately because of this basic human trait I doubt we will be able to organise an effective response to the mess we have made off the planet. The industrial revolution (and thus modern civilization) will come to an end either clogged in it's own gunk or blown up by it's own weapons.
Mother Nature will put our species firmly back in it's place and she has no idea why child abuse is bad.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
godwin!
My parents got me addicted to food!
Oh God!!! I need protection from myself? And who the FUCK is going to decide what to protect me from? You?
You do realize that a difference of 11C is exactly equal to a difference of 11K, do you? The sole difference is that Celsius starts at the freezing point of water (0C, which is, afair, 273K). Kelvin starts at 0K, which is absolute zero, which is therefore accordingly around -273C. The scale is identical, the starting point is not.
If you believe that humans cause global warming, it means the evil Earth has won! Fight for your freedom guys! We must not let Earth destroy our freedom! It hates us for our freedom.
No one is saying that the attacks were a hoax, just that the organisation behind those attacks was actually small and ad-hoc, rather than some huge and highly centralised evil empire. The name Al Qaeda was actually made up by the FBI in order to make the anti-mafia laws applicable to the radical islamist movement, but they have since taken the name as their own. It suits their goals to pretend to be bigger and more dangerous than they are, and it suits the goals of the western politicians to have an identifiable enemy on whom to wage an unwinable war, because that gives them an excuse to weild draconian powers and it unites the people behind a sense of a God given mission to fight evil.
read up on it here and download the torrents somewhere. I can't find them now because of my employers damn content filters but I strongly urge you to get them somewhere.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Yeah, I also learned from Chrichton that Japan is a nation of sadistic, murderous and xenophobic bastards bent on world domination who will own all of America by 2005, making us minority citizens and leaving the majority of the workforce starving.
The cute kitten cartoons are just a cover. Beware.
C'mon the if the trend is to attack a threat pre-emptively, then why is nothing being done? Or would that be too much like being productive?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
...that the models aren't very accurate. While some produce expected results of one to two degrees, others produce wild swings. It may also be that the large shifts are outside the standard deviation of the model, and represent a minority of the cases. Of course, there's not mention of the models that predicted cooling, or nothing happenning at all.
You must belong to the older generation, us youngsters think in celcius and get very confused when people start banging on about this farenheit thing.
As for the other units we are comfortable using both feet and inches or metres, weights are understood in pounds and stone and volumes are understood in metric.
My favourite fact was the Al Quaeda secret bases hidden in the Afghan mountains. They were constructed on 10 levels with the bottom level being given over to the generators and plumbing system, the levels above contained vast warehouses holding Al Queada's terrible weapons ( parcel cutters, paper knives etc ), satellite and internet communication floors where the Al Quaeda controllers organised their millions of foot soliders, dormitories for all the Al Quaeda staff and of course secret tunnels for entry and exit.
Al Quaeda doesn't just have one of these complexes, it has dozens ! Unfortunately we have yet to find any so that would mean the threat is still just as deadly, maybe even more so since they have obviously hidden these bases a lot more cleverly than we thought possible.
Not true WMD definitely exist, I think we are all beginning to realise now that not only did Saddam obviously ship all his WMD's to Iran but that Iran is also a much greater support of terrorism and evil than we previously suspected, after all what else would it buy the WMD's for if it didn't plan on using them it's self or selling them on to Al Quaeda.
Well a lot of us are used to that new-fangled celcius/centigrade scale (1742) instead of the old-fashioned fahrenheit scale (1726). But if you were brought up in the 1730s (like the USA) I can understand why you'd be reluctant to modernise :-)
Nope--Canada has pretty much converted when it comes to temperature, weights, and distance. The only holdover is a person's own weight. For some reason we still hold on to pounds (more so when we get older!)
Maturity will come when it's good and ready.
I believe the same thing is happening in Canada.
...and we don't say "boffin". I couldn't even guess what that is.
Pretty much, except if you say "Centigrade" instead of "Celsius" over here, most folks will look at you like you're purple.
Who's going to protect me from the protectors?
Nobody forced me to start smoking. I did that myself. Some days I'm addicted, some days I'm not (or so it seems when I only light up one or two the whole day).
The great thing is that I can decide. Now I have people trying to make the decision for me? Life is full of dangers. Some of them are self inflicted, some of them aren't. Just deal with it. I'm not forcing you to smoke don't try to [get somebody to] force me to stop. Beyond that, lets not even go into the second hand smoke bit. When I (personally) blow smoke toward you then you can complain. If somebody else does? complain to them. I'll bet if you do it politely they'll even apologize. (certain jerks excepted of course)
Additionally, I don't believe addictions are instant. Addictions take at least a fairly regular repeat usage to take hold. I may be wrong (and often am) but I don't believe anything is a one shot addiction. Therefore the statement that it's not a choice once it enters the body is a really cool buzz-phrase, is in my personal opinion incorrect. It's an addiction when a person chooses to introduce it into the body often enough that their body no longer allows the choice. They still made the choice during the time their body was saying "Hrm.. what is this stuff?!?"
The world according to SComps
wow... did you guys get off topic or what?!
oh, oh, wait! i want to talk about something else to distract everyone from the fact that we're locking ourselves in our own microwave oven:
Q: why do you think W is straining to get to the moon?
A: because that's where he and "his base" are headed while us poor folk fry down here!
discuss!
The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic.
The term "prejudice" implies an irrational dislike. But our dislike of pollution (including many plastics) is quite rational: it has negative effects on our health and our quality of life.
The earth doesn't care whether we blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, poison ourselves with pollution, or live in filth. People do care, though, and people have a brain that, at least in principle, lets them foresee and avoid those consequences.
We don't know what's safe, but we know that at some level it becomes bad, so that means at any level it's bad right?
No, not at any level. But, when it comes to toxins, the conservative and prudent thing to do is to go far below the levels that we know are dangerous, because we already have seen many examples that toxins are dangerous at far lower levels than at those where we first observed toxicity.
When it comes to greenhouse gases, there isn't even a question: we are far above the emission levels that are safe. In fact, enough CO2 has accumulated in the atmosphere already, and it is persistent enough (halflife of the order of centuries), that anything we add is a problem, and any reduction we can make is going to make things better.
So, what you try to portray as fear and hysteria is the prudent and conservative thing to do, both in the case of toxins and in the case of greenhouse gases.
Geez, both your arguments are just so off-base. No, an 11 degree rise in temperatures will probably not make the atmosphere unbreathable. Neither will it magically transform the tundra into farmland.
An 11 degree rise in average global temperature is, however, extremely serious: it would radically alter weather patterns, create far more weather related natural disasters than we have now that destroy cities and infrastructure, flood and destroy the coastal areas, where most people live, and destroy most agriculture without creating new arable land (other areas may eventually become arable, but that takes centuries or millennia). The result would likely be an end to civilization, although humans would probably survive as nomadic tribes with stone age technology.
Afraid you'll have to do without your SUV?
The real bullshit comes from people who refuse to listen to these reports, just because it might make their life a little less comfortable in the short run.
You just wait until it becomes a whole lot worse than that.
Meep.
If that worked, then people could create computer models that reproduced stock market data for the last 50 years and get rich.
If you are so sure that computer models are infallible, why don't you write one for the stock market and bet all your assets on it?
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
from the article summary (http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050124/full/05012 4-10.html)
The project's final predictions are based on the 2,017 simulations that were able to mimic the current climate. All predicted temperature rises. Most were about 3.4 C, the average value predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; many were far more severe.
The amount of CO2 put into the air by humans is by far the highest amount of CO2 put into the air by any other source and simply didn't exist prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Since the Industrial Revolution more and more CO2 finds its way into the atmoshpere every single year. At the same time, fewer and fewer plants are available to remove that CO2 from the atmoshphere, due in part to Rain Forest Deforrestation.
I would imagine that any human of average intellect would be capable of understanding with that, rather simplistic, bit of evidence that the world is heading towards a radically sped up Global Warming period that will result in drastic environmental changes and not for the better of humanity.
We, as a species, simply have nothing to lose by taking this seriously and have potentially everything to gain by acting upon the evidence pointing to CO2 production as being a source of Global Warming. To that end, we must cut down and nearly eliminate our CO2 production, stop the deforestation of the Rain Forests and seek other methods of removing CO2 from the air.
If that is difficult for you to understand, then understand that by researching and then implementing technology that not only cuts CO2 emissions, but also helps remove CO2 from the air, there will be another massive rise in the economy. Creating and building new technologies creates jobs, opportunities and economic boons.
In this case, it doesn't matter if people don't believe they need or should use such technology. Whether they like it or not, this technology will only be for the benefit of all humanity and help ensure that it is more likely that the human race will continue to exist, as we know it today.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
A 'delta' of 11K (elvin) == a delta of 11C (elsius)
K = C + 273.15
1418. Not that much. 56,000 Americans died in Vietnam for something that was just a policing effort, and never actually at war. 400,000 Americans died in WWII, and fighting for real reasons. 116,000 in WW1, and over 750,000 in the Civil war.
Anyway, seems the Americans are getting pretty good at fighting wars, and not actually having anyone die. Maybe in 20 years, they can just take over the world, and only 7 people will die in the process. 1418 is very few lives to lose in a war.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So I should have froze my ass off at -36 today, but thank god for the global warming it was only -25.
It's -1F here in Detroit area today, we have had lots of snow and lots of super cold days.. i don't think there is a global warming, it's just that the cold currents change over time... Bring on the heat!!
also it will help with the heating bills!
-b
Please, do the world a favour, and don't use that particular argument when criticising governments. It's seriously fucked up, and it merely advocates making the war on (some) drugs even more draconian, overbearing, and far reaching.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The simulations suggest that over the next hundred years we could see average rises of average temperatures of up to 11K, more than twice what was previously thought.
Ok, who else besides me read that as 11 Thousand Degrees, instead of the intended 11 Degrees Kelvin?
Come on, admit it!
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
Global climate change won't make Siberia a new tropical destination. It will make climate more unpredictable, leading to famine and disease. It will melt the polar ice caps and cause the ocean to rise, leading to mass migrations from low-lying coastal areas.
Don't like snow? How about instead of getting a few minor storms a year we get one in April that dumps four feet of snow across most of the food-producing regions of the country just as they're gearing up for production? How about we get freezing temperatures in early September in Florida and destroy the citrus harvest? How about we totally shut down the entire Northeast for two weeks to dig out of a storm. What kind of effect will these things have on our economy and our well-being?
If you thought 9/11 was bad, wait until we have a massive hurricane flooding New Orleans and killing 10,000-30,000 people. Or maybe you'd prefer a heat wave that crashes the electrical distribution system and kills thousands of people from heat stroke.
This is the kind of effect we're talking about, not having spring-like weather in January. Our society requires that we can accurately predict the weather and have a steady climate.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Global warming - I've been saying for a while that we've already passed the "tipping point". If you talk to the people doing the research, they'll tell you that they have to be very conservative, because what hey REALLY think is going to happen will scare the living shit out of everyone, and be rejected as "too extreme".
We're going to see +50C days in the American mid-west within 20 years (possibly within 10). Crop failures, dustbowl conditions, cattle dying from the heat, people dying like cattle ...
... even then, I doubt that people will want to give up their canyoneros.
These results were collated from approx. 60,000 separate climate model runs. Here's a link to the actual paper published in Nature (PDF). ClimatePrediction.net passed the 50,000 run mark only a month ago, so it looks like participation is on the up. Kudos to everyone running it! Personally I've switched from SETI@Home to this project. (Of course, you may feel that cancer research into protein folding is more important. One of the nice things about the BOINC framework is that you can contribute to multiple projects at the same time.)
The 'eleven degrees rise over the next century' is of course the worst-case scenario. Of course, climate disruptions of that magnitude really would be catastrophic to human civilisation - for one thing, massive loss of agricultural production, the loss of large areas of expensive real-estate (many of the world's great cities would certainly be under water. I don't know precisely what magnitude of sea level rise 11 degrees would produce but consider that the Greenland ice sheet, which is already showing signs of increased melting, would produce approx. 7m rise - that's goodbye to London and New York and Amsterdam for starters.) Here's a chart from the IPCC's 2001 report showing the various scenarios they based their predictions on. As you can see, the worst-case they foresaw was about 5 or 6 degrees C. The significant thing about these results is that the upper bound of the range of possible temperature rises is shown to be about twice as severe as previously thought. Not only is more and more solid evidence being produced to back the fundamental prediction that human CO2 emissions are causing significant changes in our climate, but the magnitude of those predicted changes is getting greater and greater as time goes on. Note as well that the charts don't suddenly flatline at the year 2100...
Finally I'm looking forward to a discussion on RealClimate.org on this. I've found it to be utterly addictive to see discussions amongst actual researchers in the field, not only showing the areas of legitimate disagreement, debate and uncertainty, but also the solidity of the scientific consensus, as well as busting various common myths - the Crichton garbage, the hockey-stick stuff etc etc. Strongly recommended.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
This may or may not be obvious, but I have to say that not everyone in this country agrees with the Bush administration and what is going on in Iraq. I actually was impressed with his actions in regards to Afganistan initially. He seemed to be calculating and cautious before attacking them. Now I know he was just an idiot and didn't have a clue.
Bush obviously has some kind of complex where he has to prove himself to his daddy. Remember, you can't spell WAR without W.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Quoting the site http://climateprediction.net/info/part_faq.php/ ,
t ran90/ ,
"The programming and resources involved in running a full-scale climate model is tremendous, as well as the peer-review required over years of academics using something like the UK Met Office model. The UK Met Office model is not "open source" -- it is an extremely large, complicated system (something like 500,000 lines of Fortran; two miles of continuous paper if printed out and laid end-to-end). The UK Met Office has been superb in allowing us to bring it over to run on a Windows platform and distribute to the world. They are certainly not getting any money out of it."
I think they ought to disclose what Fortran compiler and what options were used to create the Windows executables.
According to http://www.meto.gov.uk/research/nwp/numerical/for
"The Unified Model was originally written in the Fortran 77 programming language with some low level routines written in C to aid portability. Now however, Fortran 90 is increasingly used to take advantage of its new features and to facilitate exchange of code between different international meteorological organizations. Some components of the Unified Model such as the observation processing system and the variational data assimilation system have been written entirely in Fortran 90."
Every one of you who replied to my previous post is a complete idiot. Yes, I do believe in what I stated above. I also believe that if you don't understand what I said, then you are in definite need of protection from your own incompetence to handle your own life. That is all.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
If we were to ban substances based on risk, tobacco would be banned, and booze would be encouraged (in moderation).
And for those who say that people knew what they were doing the first time they lit up, most of them started when they were still minors. Not exactly capable of "informed consent" when subject to peer pressure.
The first step is to make the packaging more unattractive, like in Canada
(warning - this one is rated by smokers as the most visually repulsive)
or this one
or the complete list
or policy paper
or as reported by cnn
If someone has inoperable cancer, we don't ignore the fact they have a hangnail. We take care of what we can, because that's what we do. "We" meaning humanity.
As for particulates, humanity has pushed more then enough particulates into the air through our industrial activities, which acts much like the particulates kicked into the air by volcanos. However, we have started to significantly decrease the emission of those particulates, but not CO2 and subequently have witnessed an increase in the rate of Global Warming.
We know the causes of the rise in Global Temperatures. That really isn't part of the debate. We have control over nee of the MAJOR Contributing factors of Global Warming, which is the production of CO2 and the destruction of CO2 cleansing forests. Both activities greatly increase the parts per million of CO2 in the air.
There are many factors that affect the temperature of the Earth. That is not in dispute any climate scientist will tell you that. There's nothing we can do about the increase or decrease of solar activity. What that scientist will also tell you is that CO2 will trap in heat and thus greatly increase the effect and speed of Global Warming.
Since it goes without saying that we do have the option of controlling our production of CO2 and do have technology available to remove CO2 from the air, we should do it.
Otherwise we may as well stop providing any other kind of medical care to someone that has been diagnosed with a fatal disease. What's the point in taking care of some medical condition we can control if the patient will succumb to something doctors can't control anyway? IN fact, since every human has been diagnosed with the eventually fatal disease of life, we may as well stop all medical care altogether.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Are you being sarcastic or callous?
The Americans are getting pretty good at fighting wars and not actually having any *American* die.
One million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam "policing effort" and estimates of 50,000 Iraqis have been killed so far in the conflict. Mostly civilians.
Main exports: Diamonds, copper, coffee, cobalt, crude oil
Tobacco companies specifically increased nicotine levels so as to make a more addictive product.
The only way my father was able to give up smoking was by coming down with pneumonia. It hurt him just to breathe. Smoking made him feel like he was dying. Combine that with peer pressure from our whole family, and he has been able to keep from smoking for over a year.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
More exactly, we've learned that changing that periodicity is a bad thing, from our having turned it too far down; turning it way up isn't good, either, in more obvious ways.
As an Analog SF editorial noted a few months back, fire may be considered analagous to a super-predator. It has a niche in the ecosystem, and removing it causes the system to unbalance in similar ways. Of course, over predation is a lot more obvious in its harmful effects. As a quick analogy, it seems plausible. Proof would be a good subject for a NSF grant research proposal-- perhaps even with the current administration.
While the original claim about double risk for 5 degree change is unsourced, imprecise (try "doubles the Erlang distribution frequency"-- which, yes, has several implicit plausible but unproven assumptions), and certainly has an elasticity range if you go 50 degrees either way, it's not inconsistent with what I recall an ex-GF prattling about from the forestry class she was taking at the time. The responding comments on "0%/100%" risk can be answered by reading about Erlang distribution stochastic processes.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
"The original poster was fine, though why they converted TFA's Celcius into Kelvin, I'm not sure."
It's better to use K, because you can't perform calculations on the Celsius scale. For example, 20 C + 30 C != 50 C. It is in fact well over 300 C.
20 C + 30 K = 50 C, however.
My Sig: SEGV
They can't even predict what the weather will be like this weekend.
How are we expected to believe then with forcast that far out?
I think I remember hearing somewhere that some think that the great Permian Extinction, the greatest extinction of all times, may have been triggered by great volcanism (the Siberian Traps) which might have raised the global temperature by about 5 degrees (centigrades)... which in turn whould have caused the release of Methane from the sea, which would have caused another 5 degrees increase in temperature (or so).
An 11K increase in temperatures is therefore nothing to sneeze at. Of course, that all depends on the base temperature you are starting from, but I still hope we (or our children) are not going to see anything near that kind of global temperature change.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Believe what you want about global warming, it is hard to respect an article on climate change that begins by concluding there is "no such thing as a safe level of carbon dioxide."
There are many positive and negative feedbacks. My point was that the simulations that get really high numbers get caught in the positives. Having so much feedback is why it is so difficult to predict. I really don't put much stock in any of the simulations because of this. It is simply too complex to model. Instead, I look at the facts. Temperatures have increased about 1 degree C and sea levels haven't changed at all. I am not even sure that this is bad. I'd be surprised to see a global mean temperature rise of more than 2C. The effects of such a temperature change are not particularly bad and definitely not worth the enormous costs of putting the smallest dent in the increase. With the money Kyoto costs, for example, we could provide clean water and food to everyone on earth that doesn't have it, with billions to spare. Which is a better investment?
Yeah, I was referring to how Americans fight wars and no americans die. I wasn't speaking about the other side. When I hear on Fox news every day about how 3 or 4 americans died that day, I just can't feel sympathetic, as this is a very low death count for a war. 20 (on average) americans died every day of the vietnam "war". That isn't even that many.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A Kelvin is the unit of measurement, as well as the scale. q.v.
Ceci n'est pas un sig
Is not capitalized. You'd have a point if it was "11k".
FRA: STFU GTFO
Dude, get real. Every smoker out there made a concious decision to light up for the first time. My father died at 46 due to a massive heart attack, massively influenced by his two or three pack a day habit. His father died at 40 for the same reason. But I know whose fault it was --- both of them knew it wasn't healthy. Nobody forced them to light up.
You see, years ago when tobacco companies advertised to children and those children subsequently thought it was soooo cool to smoke and then died from a massive heartattack at 40 - is *THAT* your idea of a conscious decision? At 7?
Dweeby?
Did I miss the John Hughes film festival?
I drank what? -- Socrates
There was a fuzz made a couple of years back when the temperature in Brighton hit 100 degrees for the first time ever. I expect there was confusion about the scale in some quarters, although it was obviously Centigrade because the sea hasn't boiled over. Not yet, anyway!
I stole this
what i don't understand is that you make make big powerful cars which are (relvativly) fuel effcient. The europeans do it. don't know why the US makers dont
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Those who took applied physics, chemistry and other things have now chance to lead themselves into new market that will emerge real soon. No one really talks about it as a market, but developing stuff, bits , even software about energy conservation is the future. VTEC is computer software/hardware by honda makes fossil fuel powered carriges more efficent. What will you develop? Patent it! You are one suppose to benefit from patents not patent holding corporations.
At any rate if you start slowly rolling company about something tangible like , house power management computer. Anything that prys ones dependance away from fossil fuels, you might strike rich.
Truth is , when people already talking about the market its already too late.
"Why not just say 11C?"
:-)
Eleven hundred degrees' rise is still awfully hot.
Why not say "11 degrees K" if, like me, you can't figure out the compose sequence to give a degree symbol?
(As bad as CNN saying "31/2 years". Why didn't they just say "15.5 years" like normal people?
My brother, who started smoking at age 6, thought it was sooooo cool that our dad was smoking, so he got into the stuff when dad was not around. He never saw a lick of advertising. His was a concious decision. Maybe uninformed. But concious. So he should blame our dad. Who died of a massive heart attack at age 46 -- but then he had a congenital heart condition, so the cigarettes might have merely hastened his death a little.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
While you're informing us US Customary unit folks, you might go ahead and remind us that 1 degree C or K is about 1.8 degrees F. So, we're looking at average temperatures up to twenty Fahrenheit degrees warmer, about the difference between "I might need a jacket" and "man, it's hot today."
There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity.
2 0dioxide/CO2.html and http://www.mindfully.org/Air/CO2-US2000-DOE.htm US CO2 production is about 1.3 to 1.5 Billion tons each year. Given that the US produces about %25 of CO2, that means that Global CO2 production is at most 6 Billion tons or about 55 times as much as volcanic eruptions. Hardly anywhere near the 10,000 number you and they throw out.
If the above were completely true, humans would produce about 1 TRILLION tons of C02 each year. according to http://www2.biotech.wisc.edu/jeffries/faq/carbon%
Using the USGS All of humanity produces 22 Billion a year and volcanoes 130-220, that is 100-170 times the volcanoes, still much less than 10,000.
Now for large volcanic explosions such as Mt. Saint Helens and, Krakatoa? Still trying to find info on them, but has to be much more than their average.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
What's interesting is that this study does not include a very important greenhouse gas, DMS (dimethyl sulfide), which is responsible for cloud condensation among other things, and thus plays a major role in greenhouse effects. The degradation of oceanic DMSP (dimethylsulfonopropionate) to DMS is one of the major factors being studied in the two labs I work for. Actually I work for the SIMO project, which is a joint project between these two labs.
I'm sure there were other factors not incorporated into this model that would be of use to consider. Hopefully, as the average user's computer becomes more powerful, the researchers behind ClimatePrediction.net will incorporate more factors and a more complex model to help give even more likely results.
It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.
Yup, bird migration and plant budding schedules are already different from what they were on the day we started thinking it would be good to know what they are. There's no reason to think that the observations back then are any more "correct" than today's. Back then was correct for then, today's are correct for today.
It's depressing to see how many people who will jump up and down and scream if someone so much as suggests that evolution might not be true, assume that all change ended the day science began.
The important thing is, what's this going to do to us, and what are we going to do about any parts of that we don't like? How do we need to adapt to our ever-changing environment, and (since we can) how might we adapt it to our requirements?
Antartica is, among other things, getting COLDER not WARMER. As for melting in the Antartic, the northern most tip, you know that thing that sticks out south of South America? Is the only part that is melting. The rest of Antartica is getting colder and the ice is growing.
2 0822.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/antarctic_0
http://www.globalwarming.org/article.php?uid=192
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Just to put the "experts'" level of real knowledge on the issue of climate change in perspective, just look at how the expert predictions panned out for the so-called Y2K crisis. And to top it off, Y2K was a problem that could be assessed much better by surveying the existing software systems that were in use at the time. The "experts" predicted doom even with all of that real-world, real-time data available to them, but Y2K turned out to be a dud. Climate change "experts" are now attempting to predict something far more difficult with much shakier data available to them. Their predictions and models are no more than guesswork at this point.
You ignorant fool, you totally missed my point.
Typical
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Nobody said we shouldn't do what is necessary to be efficient and correct in our current technological capabilities.
That said, remember Malthus - he was wrong, and people who predict catastrophe in 100 years are going to be wrong, too. Remember Paul Erhlich? He predicted most of the world would be starving NOW if we didn't immediately kill off three or four billion people to reduce the Earth's population to five hundred million tops. That was literally crank literature - but he spent more time on the late Johnny Carson's talk show than Tiny Tim did...
I get criticized for predicting things will be solved - why is it nobody gets criticized for predicting chaos that never seems to happen?
I'll tell you why - because people want to believe chaos will happen first because it makes things interesting, and second because then they can proclaim that if we all do things "their way", we can avoid the catastrophe - and incidentally put them in charge.
The same people who criticize extending technological progress on a linear or exponential scale gleefully accept putting problems on the same scale without any regard for the effects of economics or technology.
Bullshit.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
US cars are gas-guzzlers. They cause most of the pollution on this planet. Maybe Osama needs to blow another town up.
I will respectfully sidestep the evolution debate, as there is none to be had. As for the remaining poiints:
* It matters not only that the patterns have changed but also that they've changed in a predictable manner, in line with the measured results of human impact on particular ecosystems.
* Evolution is different from hybridization. The same forces are at work, but hybridization is on a far smaller scale. The famous example of moths turning black to match the soot-filled air of the industrial age was in an isolated area. Migratory patterns shifting this dramatically, observed worldwide is unheard of. We're not only seeing a difference between what they were 200 years ago when we began counting and what they are today, we're noticing a marked shift in a far more compressed time period. This time is too short to pin the label of "evolution" on. It simply does not happen that quickly. This is a direct result of human activity that could, ultimately, do us in.
*I listed several things this is going to do to us in a parent post. What we should do about any parts we don't like is change them back. This can be done, first of all, through the signing of the Kyoto climate treaty. How the United States can get away with saying that biodiversity and stable ecosystems are "too expensive"? What's expensive is our shortsightedness and belligerent politics.
*How can we adapt, though? That's a good question. On the personal scale, you can burn your fossil fuels to heat your home and run your air conditioner when required. But again, billions of people doing so only serves to speed up the downward spiral. On the global scale, assuming health is non-negotiable, the only feasible adaptation would be put into effect NOW.
In summary: It becomes very clear that this is not "normal" change when you realize that species are just flat-out dying. No significant evolution occurs in decades.
To date, has any published global warming model predicted accurately global warming in the future?
Scientists have been doing these models for several years, it would be interesting if one actually made an accurate forward-looking prediction.
Cigarette makers have been found guilty in a court of law of putting additives in cigarettes that makes them addictive.
Concerning addiction, not everybody is created equal. For some people quitting is easy and for others it is impossible. Many people started smoking while under the age of 18 due to peer pressure and then found themselves unable to quit later.
The point is to stop smoking may not be as easy as to choose the colour of one's car.
Anyway, seems the Americans are getting pretty good at fighting wars, and not actually having anyone die.
Reputable, independent sources estimate that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the current war. Nobody contests that more than 15,000 have died.
My favourite fact was the Al Quaeda secret bases hidden in the Afghan mountains.
You forgot to mention the ninja quarters, the shark tank, the giant laser, and the kung-fu army training grounds.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
No. 11K (kelvin) degrees. Still ouch.
x kelvin = x Celsius + 273.15
I strongly disagree. It is my opinion that your body is yours, and you may do whatever you wish with it. Addiction does not surpass free will (if it did, a crackhead could commit a crime and say "I was high, it was the corporation's fault"). When one goes through the long and arduous process of ceasing use of an addictive substance, it is not for any other reason than free will. If free will causes someone to start using an addictive substance, and free will causes one to stop (cessation must be a choice), where is choice not involved?
I believe that your view on this is systemic of one of the problems that American society is facing. People want to blame everyone for their problems but themselves. It's a sad state of affairs, because we will end up with a nannying state, and freedom will continue its trend toward just being a bunch of government rhetoric. When I was addicted to nicotine, I took full responsibility. When I quit -- it was all me.
I also believe that the problem tends to be circular. The more that we take individual responsibility away, the more helpless people will feel. We will see more need for nannying labels and tort suits, and less common sense ("well the electrical socket didn't specifically tell me not to put my tongue in it...it's their fault for not warning me!"). Do we want to encourage dumb behavior, or smart behavior?
Give people the tools to do the right thing, and more often than not, I believe that they will.
-Turkey
I'm late to the game but, as a service to sanity, could the horde of kneejerk posters who have spewed variations on:
* Michael Crichton says its a con
* They were talking about an ice age in the 1970s why can't they get their story straight?
* Its all fluctuations in the sun's output
* Volcanoes produce way more CO2 than us
* They can't tell if it'll rain tomorrow, how can they talk about a hundred years from now?
* There isn't a solid consensus about climate change
* So what if all the scientists agree? Science isn't a popularity contest
* We'll farm the tundra
* The scientists are all in it for the grant funding
* Climate Change is an anti-american plot
and similar rants check out the relevant RealClimate.org articles so that next time they'll be a bit more informed on the subject.
Thanks.
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
I find it great that the side with the loudest voice for revolution also votes to outlaw the only tool that will allow said revolution.
Someday the Left will learn that change comes from bullets not protest signs.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Wow...those are strong words. So everyone who doesn't agree with your opinion is a complete idiot. I think that you were clear about what you said. I still disagree. I'd leave it there, but since you are unable to have a polite discussion without caling people who disagree with you an idiot, I just thought that I'd point out that this makes you an asshole. Good luck with that, kid.
-Turkey
I wish there were a -1 Absurd moderation.
You ALWAYS have choice. It's purely a matter of willpower. You're taking the absurd position that the choice did not exist because someone didn't have the willpower to make the hard decision. Both my parents smoked for 15 years, and they both JUST QUIT when they decided they were going to have children. Because they understood something that you don't:
THEY understood that they had a choice. It was their future children that didn't have the choice about being born, or enduring a pregancy under constant assault from nictoine.
Just because you REALLY want something doesn't mean your decision making capacity is gone. Check yourself into a clinic. Get help. Or use good old-fashioned willpower and STOP. The choice is always there. In fact, you make a choice every time you do something that you know is wrong or bad. Your first statement says it all:
People need protection from themselves.
That runs contrary to everything I believe in and stand for. People NEVER need protection from themselves. People do not need to be coddled or protected. Even children, who do need to be guided and taught, make decisions and should be held accountable for them. Children are people, just like everyone else. They may need more guidance and have less experience, but they still have the ability to reason right from wrong, and understand consequences. Addicts are the same way. They don't get a free pass to do whatever they want because they're an addict. They are a person who can make decisions, and that cannot be taken away. The first step to giving people the respect that they deserve is to hold them accountable for what they do. Freedom and responsiblity go hand-in-hand, and by taking away one, you necessarily take away the other.
There are those in the world that want to find a way to shed personal responsiblity at every opportunity, and there are those who take charge of their lives and claim responsiblity. Which are you?
I meant without having any of their own soldiers die
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
No they would never introduce something like that in the states!
I've done some cryptology too - enough to know that your analogy is rather unfair. Here's a better one:
You have a new unknown crypto algorithm to analyse. You know some basic facts about the structures of the algorithm (stream or block, etc.) and a fairly large sample of encrypted text, but nothing else. Based on what you know about the algorithm you try to make logical guesses about roughly how the whole should work, and construct a broad model algorithm. The goal now is not to match bit by bit the output of your sample ciphertext (you'd need the keys and IV for that anyway) but simply to try and make qualitive predictions about the characteristics of the resulting cipher. For instance you might, based on your model, say that you would expect a higher than normal occurrence of the bit sequence 11010. If when you go through your sample data you find that to be true you would probably suspect you may be on the right track in the reconstruction of the algorithm.
That's basically what the Climatologists are doing. They aren't predicting what the next bit will be (the temperature tomorrow), but they are trying to predict what broad patterns will be apparent in the system. They are making the model not just from prior data, but from knowledge and understanding of how the atmosphere and the climate ought to work based on what we do know about air masses, heating, cooling, and all the associated dynamics (equivalent to knowing a little about the crypto algorithm, and having to fill in the details to make your model).
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
In [the case of kelvin temperatures], we're looking at absolute zero.
In the other, we're looking at the freezing/melting point of water.
In thermodynamics, absolute zero is a much more fundamental origin for a temperature scale than the freezing point of water at 101 kPa. For instance, Charles' law states in part that a gas with twice the temperature in kelvins will take up twice the volume.
Hell, celcius was based on water.
Ultimately, other than that one specific planet is 70 percent covered by it, what's so special about dihydrogen monoxide? Besides, don't those freezing and boiling temperatures change somewhat based on pressure?
...and how did we know the stratospheric concentration of CO2 in the 1800's? Its things like this that make me call 'bullshit' everytime a new chicken-little prediction about global warming comes out.
I beg to differ - he most *definitely* saw plenty of advertising - whether it be on TV, in magazines, or in the form of your dad smoking. I cannot for a second believe that at the age of 6 kids know what's good for them and how to make a conscious decision. I know I saw the world differently at 6.
Simple restatment:
2 million Americans completed their slow suicide since Bush took office.
The tobacco companies did not kill anyone. They sold the product these individuals used to kill themselves. There is a fundamental difference there.
"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."
--Robert Frost
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
That said, I read it as 11,000 degrees, too, then realized that they must mean Kelvin.... It's a natural tendency for computer folks to see K and interpret it as kilo. Thus, it's a bad choice of units for Slashdot....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
My parents quit smoking a couple decades back. I never heard that they had any difficulty doing so.
Same with my siblings, though they quit in the last five years.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Oh, if I had my computer-folks hat on, I'd have read 11K as 11,264 degrees. :-)
Damn. I keep forgetting that after this past election, I've decided to stop caring about people. It's so hard to just say "fuck you" to the rest of humanity. But I must. It's apparent that they don't need compassion for the stupid things they do individually and should instead be left to suffer for their own wrong choices. Oh well... old habit die hard. Thanks for reminding me why I despise 51% of America.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
If there was a way for people who commit suicide to be punshied for their stupidity, I'd personally bring them back from the dead to do it. If there is one thing I can't stand it's people doing stupid things:
Smoking:stupid
Screwing lots of people without a rubber:stupid
Buying products from a company that is ruining small businesses and the American economy (Walmart):stupid
Suicide:stupid
Drunk Driving:stupid
Supporting big business:stupid
Supporting corrupt governments (Hello Mr. Cheney):stupid
Claiming personal responsibility when you don't do your own surgery, dental and financial planning at home while still having a real life: stupid
That's just a small list of things that are irrefutably stupid. That's what I dislike the most: stupid actions. Those actions, in my worldview make those who commit them: STUPID.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I think it's quite fair. You're assuming that there's an algorithm to analyze, but that's not where you start from. Where you start from is trying to find out whether there's anything to analyze at all. If you have contextual information, great--but when all you can mount is a known-ciphertext attack, your first job is figuring out whether it's ciphertext at all.
... from knowledge and understanding of how the atmosphere and the climate ought to work", you're bang-on right: it's the way we think the world ought to work, but not necessarily how the world does work; and it doesn't appear to me that you're considering that difference.
It does no good to jump straight into the "we know there's a pattern, we just have to find it" method of thinking until and unless it's proven there is a pattern. If you know there's a pattern, then it's really, really easy to find that pattern--even if what you're looking at is statistical noise.
When you say "they are making the model
Given all the times climatological predictions have been staggeringly wrong and how many times models have been radically altered to accomodate new understandings, I find it hard to believe that our current models are in the promised land of predictability.
That's part of the deal with freedom. With freedom comes freedom to be stupid. I'm all for it, as long as you're only hurting yourself.
-Turkey
I also have no problem with assisted suicide, if that is what the person truly wants, and is rational.
The sad fact is that many smokers want to quit, but can't. They don't want to kill themselves through smoking.
So, would you accept a paycheck from a tobacco manufacturer? I wouldn't. There's a moral and ethical problem there. It's the same as my choosing not to eat at McDonald's for more than a decade, before it was fashionable.
The founders of America were puritans. That's pretty much opposite to "scientists". Their descendants voted for Bush because of "moral values". America never really experienced an "age of reason", and it shows.
The Raven
Saddly, discussion on things like global warming is seeming (to me) to increasingly resemble those highschool prom orgizational meetings... You know: the ones where there are FAR too many people with different ideas and oppinions. The jocks want to crash the party (don't know really, never was one) the cheerleaders want it to be a miraculous event, someone wants it to be commemorative... whatever. Point is that nothing gets done because of the sheer volume of parcipitants.
My logic is along these lines: Science is (among other things) an amazing way to apply order to seemingly chaotic environs. Scientists can accurately control an SUV sized vehicle from earth to Titan... Their jobs are based on bringing order to disorder. --I'm sure that deserves a rebuttal or something, but whatever.
So the scientists are saying that things "may" be going awry in terms of climate? and they tell us that there "may" be dire consequences? And they've given us a list of things that may help or possibly even fix the problem? Cool beans!
So these guys no how to keep the party going... it's their job. But we have in the boardroom, Cheerleaders, religious people, jocks, Carrie... ect.
In the end, we already have an idea as to how this can be fixed, but practically no one but the scientists want to bother with/believe in best course of action.
So I think what will happen is that we stupid, stubbern humans will continue to do what we've always done. THen at some point, things will get bad and we'll turn to the guys who knew about the potential concequences all along and ask them to fix it...
or... yeah, Carrie goes haywire and kills us all at the prom.
um... ok, I'm done.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
Yeah, there are shooting ranges that advertise in San Francisco papers. So you drive to the valley, no problem!
It's the new Michael Crichton book, and is an action/thriller as most of his are, except it deals with a band of ecoterrorists and the people trying to thwart them. What's interesting is how many graphs, charts, and footnotes he has in there that point to the idea that global warming really isn't occuring. I just got done reading it, and it was a pretty good story. Haven't had time to look at any of the footnotes first hand yet, but seems to present a pretty strong argument. One of the big points he makes in the appendix is that all these studies are biased in some way or another, and that unless there are true double blind studies done, it will stay that way. Industry of course wants to discredit global warming, and beaurocrats want to see reports like this. It's silly to think either end is going to be totally honest.
...maybe its immune system is simply trying to shake off the virulent infection called mankind?
One of my two parents quit, with little effort. The other wont quit cause he doesnt see the point, its his choice.
Not everyone has problems with addiction. Treating everyone like they have problems with it by trying to control what choices they make based on your opinion is no different than telling someone what religion to follow, what church to go to, what to eat, who to marry or anything else along these lines. Smoking is a nasty habit that can cause cancer and many other problems. That doesnt mean everyone is affected by its side affects, and it certainly doesnt mean you should try to play parent to the world and make anything that MIGHT cause a problem illegal. If you go down that road we wouldnt be having this conversation because the internet can be harmful, and addictive. It can also be used to commit crimes.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
A warmer planet will change the earth but will it hurt it?
It will good news for some. A lot of Canada and Russia will do better if this happens.
Not saying we should ignore it but for some places people and animals it will be good.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I know I am getting into this debate late, in terms of /. experience, but here is my personal take on the whole thing:
I actually sat down and downloaded the climate modeling software and put it on the computer that I am writing this reply on. I even ran it through a whole cycle and one of those "50,000" modeling runs was done on this computer.
I was willing to try and get it to do a couple more "runs" on my computer, but the software had a serious bug in it when you have a hard crash on your computer, like getting struck by lightning, or otherwise from a blackout condition where the computer shuts down hard and quick. Windows in general doesn't do too well when that happens either [yes, it is a Windows box... sue me if you like], but when that happened, I couldn't get the software up and going. I was going to delete and reinstall the software hoping to solve the problem, but I simple killed the software altogether after what happened next.
I spent some time on the message boards looking around at the basic assumptions behind the climate model being used. I also spent some time reading from the software designers, and really tried to dig around the website, asking a few very good hard questions. I've also spent some time studying climatology, and even spent some time helping to gather and input some historical weather data for the Utah Climate Center where we gathered weather data going back to the late 19th Century and put it into a machine-readable format. BTW, this is rather unusal to do this to have daily weather, temperature, and precipitation data going back that far. Most climate data used in modeling goes only back to the 1970's at best.
From what I saw on the website, it was politically motivated from the start to prove that there was global warming occuring. On the basis of all of the sensationalist news stories that seems to be coming out right now, it seems to confirm my theory.
There were legitimate items that were missed in the model, and ways to improve to modeling that may or may not prove global warming and/or cooling. Variations of things like increases in solar radiation, increased volcanic activity (over multi-annual periods of time), and assumptions regarding human impact on the environment were totally missed, or at least ignored and put into context of something that doesn't affect the climate. Some posters on the web pages proved that it wouldn't take that much additional processing to add these extra variables, and that is the point too: There are a bunch of variables that affect the outcome of the climate and for the most part these variables are just guesses in the dark. Even a true understanding of what the interaction between different things like how warming of the ocean off the coast of Chile affects weather in London is still not totally understood, even though there are some pretty good theories.
This whole idea was a nice try, but I am no longer involved simply because of the political angle that I got from reading the major participants, not to mention the leading researchers involved in this whole mess. In other words, I consider this to be bad science on the whole, and in the politically charged "atmosphere" of the global warming hypothesis, it is very difficult to keep a scientifcally neutral attitude regarding anything. From my experience as well, most of the schools also have professors that encourage the "solid" basis of human-influenced global warming, so it is very difficult to counter that culture if you are a student trying to study climatology that has a viewpoint counter to the prevailing attitude in acedemia. Simply put, if you don't publish a thesis or other papers that support global warming, you won't get a PhD.
This project, unfortunately, is an extension of that attitude, although I will admire a basic attempt to try and solve a difficult problem. The basic user interface for this software was cool, and it was neat to see a model of the Earth
It's hard to tell... do you know that "K" is kelvin in this usage and the "k" in "killobyte" (etc) is suppposed to be written in lower case (Modern Komputer mis-Marketing asside 8-) as in "640k"?
I bemoan the death of precision... and the fact that I am the kind of guy likely to use the word "bemoan" 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Uhm, assuming we keep having MORE & MORE WARS, the numbers of cold dead bodies laying around will keep environmental in balance. http://www.newpath4.com/01stsolutiontowar_binarypa thwayanswertoworldpeace.htm . Every cloud has a silver lining. We can learn the ways of Peace and die, or keep killing each other off in droves and enjoy the Bahamas year round.
And thanks to you, too! You remind me why I just have to keep watching my back, because 49% of America (your fellow travelers, I presume) want the power to run my life for me, if they happen to think I'm being self-destructive.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
I'd not thought of that, and it does make perfect sense! Thank you =)
You could, however, perform some calculations because it is a linear scale. For instance, the average temperature of a few measurements. ie, (20 + 30) / 2 = 25 C average.
in the contexts the poster used it, my guess would be "geeky scientist type person."
However, IANAL(inguist of British slang.)
Yes, I was simplifying my statement too much.
My Sig: SEGV
Wait, aren't we due to have a global ice age? It's supposed to happen the day after tomorrow if I'm not mistaken. According to environmentalist experts in Hollywood, it's more real than you think. Better move to Mexico everyone.
Don't laugh! Our forecast: eleven thousand degrees! Crispy critters, all
without line breaks, my
seventeen syllables will
not a haiku make
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I'd mod this up
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Humans annually consume 20 per cent of NPP generated on land (the models did not take into account ocean production). Consumption varies by region. Humans in sparsely populated regions place little demand on local production, however urban areas may consume 300 times what is produced locally. East and South Central Asia contains about half the world's population and consumes 72 per cent of the region's NPP.
--00--
The study found that humans, which represent roughly half of 1 percent of the total biomass on Earth, appropriate about 20 percent of this primary resource annually. In addition, consumption among regions varies widely. Western Europe and South Central Asia consume more than 70 percent of what their regions produce, while in South America just 6 percent is consumed.
--00--
I remember the club of rome in the 70s. THey predicted that by the turn of the century there would be no oil left, we'd be dieing of air pollution and water pollution by the billions and unless we implemented draconian communist restrictions on people we would be in a downward spiral. Well, these were MIT and other professors. They played with models in many ways and they all showed ridiculous results. Models are ridiculous. The IPCC models have been way off the mark. The 1990 model not only mis-predicted wildly the results from 1990-2000 it couldn't predict any climate before 1990. This is junk science at its worst. People who base their thinking on these models are going to look like idiots. Those who based their lives on IPCC models in 1990 look like idiots already.