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Dilbert Goes Flash, Readers Revolt
spagiola writes "The Dilbert.com website just got an extreme makeover. Gone is the old, rather clunky but perfectly functional, website, replaced by a Flash-heavy website that only Mordac the Preventer of Information Services could love. Users have been pretty unanimous in condemning the changes. Among the politer comments: 'Congrats. Vista is no more lonely at the top in the Competition For The Worst Upgrade In Computing Industry, this web site upgrade being a serious contender.' You have to register to leave comments, but many seem to have registered for the express purpose of panning the new design."
Clearly, there is some flash on the site, but I can still view all the comics without it.
Good thing you can still get your dilbert fix at http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/
Disable Javascript. All the old behaviour comes back. Alternatively, go into Help & Preferences, Posting and select Slashdot Classic Discussion System.
Goten Xiao
The site is still perfectly functional and showing the strips using plain old .GIFs... *if* you use NoScript.
Allow JavaScript to run and the whole thing blows up in your face and splatters flash everywhere.
Quite amazingly, it seems no one has pointed out that there is now an official RSS feed (in colour) for Dilbert at http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip
Try here. Not flash and he apparently has every Dilbert ever since the beginning of time.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
http://www.mruzik.com/CO2.html
There is a study for you that contridicts the CO2 theory.
Yeah, right. It's a pile of misleading statements to fool people who don't know any of the science. I think it's quite telling that you choose to cite a self-published web page which spends half its time deriding "left wing wackos", instead of citing any scientific studies. It's quite plain that your agenda is political in nature, not honest scientific skepticism.
Water vapor amplifies existing warming trends, but it cannot cause them; it is a feedback, not a forcing. You can't increase the average water vapor content of the atmosphere without first raising its temperature — otherwise, any excess water vapor would quickly precipitate back out. That's why you need forcings like long-lived greenhouse gases, solar irradiance, etc.
It's true that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere has less of an effect the more you add, because the adsorption bands start to saturate. This gives rise to the well known logarithmic relationship (Beer-Lambert law) between CO2 concentration and its radiative forcing. But it is nowhere near full saturation, which is why the curve is logarithmic rather than asymptotically constant. This is verified in laboratory experiments, in line-by-line radiative transfer codes, and IIRC in satellite observations of the atmosphere.
It is simply ridiculous to claim that CO2 causes cooling; it is at odds with both theory and observation. CO2 and warming exist in a feedback system: external influences (such as the orbital variations which set the timing for the ice age cycle) cause warming (or cooling), and CO2 amplifies that warming or cooling: warming brings more CO2 out of the oceans which leads to more warming; cooling has the opposite effect.
It is indeed quite possible that clouds contribute a negative feedback (cooling effect) in response to global warming, but that has nothing to do with the warming which is due to CO2. It just means that clouds may slow the warming beyond CO2's effect alone. There are a number of such feedbacks, both positive and negative. (Water vapor has already been mentioned as a positive feedback.) The instrumental temperature record indicates that the net feedback is significantly positive.
Let me know if you want any citations to journal articles regarding these topics. You can start with the latest IPCC report, Working Group 1.
A fact is that there is no sound scientific data that climate change and CO2 correlate.
The very web page you cite notes the strong correlation between climate change and CO2 in the ice core record. (It goes on to claim, incorrectly, that the causation is backwards, but it admits the correlation.)
Indeed, all the studies are either inconclusive or say the opposite.
Oh really? What "studies" are those? Certainly none of the ones documented here.
Studies of icecaps indicate that before every iceage the earth's CO2 levels were much higher then at any time...
As I said, this doesn't mean that CO2 causes ice age. CO2 helps to warm out of ice ages, finishing what orbital variations and other climate forcings started. You can't get the large amount of warming observed in the ice age cycle if you ignore the greenhouse effect of the excess CO2. Eventually, the orbital cycle shifts into a phase of declining solar irradiance (well, it's more complicated than that; where the sunlight is concentrated and the extremes of variations contribute at least as much as the raw insolation itself), which causes temperatures to drop. A few centuries to a millennium after that, the CO2 starts dropping too, which hastens the cooling.
How many examples must I give you about statistics and how they can be misused before you will see the light?
Whee, statistics can be misused. So can mathematics, experiments, observations, and t