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The Sun Has First Spotless Month Since 1913
radioweather writes "August 2008 has made solar history. As of 00 UTC September 1st 2008 (5PM PST)
we just witnessed the
first spotless calendar month since June 1913.This was determined according
to sunspot
data from NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center, which goes back to 1749.
In the 95 years since 1913, we've had quite an active sun, but activity has been
declining in the last few years. The sun today is a nearly featureless sphere and has been spotless for 42
days total, but this is the first full calendar month since 1913 for a spotless
sun. And there are other indicators of the sun being in a funk. Australia's
space weather agency recently revised their solar cycle 24 forecast, pushing the
expected date for a ramping up of
cycle 24 sunspots into the future by six months."
As one of the links above indicate, there was a "sunspeck" reported August 21/22, though. Reader MikeyTheK adds a link to a story at Daily Tech on the spotless record.
The sun has discovered the best acne medication in the universe.
I am officially gone from
Great, now I know why summer this year was, well, pretty nonexistant really.
-- Cheers!
We're all going to die...!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
to 'prove' that global warming isn't manmade.
There we go, asking people to prove negatives again. Why don't you start by proving that it IS man-made?
Or conversely, prove that it ISN'T caused by the belly button lint of invisible space goats.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I keep telling her those unsightly blemishes will clear up in time - now I have proof!
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Anyone know if this means the Earth gets less solar energy? Will there be global cooling because the sun has less output?
"Sun Has First Spotless Month Since 1913"
... see, its not a black hole making machine, it actually washes whiter than white.
... zip ... crush]
Ok, who switched on the LHC!
Ha!, that'll stop the critics who think the earth will vanish in a instant... see nothing to worry ab.o.u..t... [KABOOOMMMMMM
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
When a big solar storm turns off GPS for a few hours or days. I know some people that have become dependent on their nav-computers.
A weak solar cycle may postpone this problem.
I can't wait to come back later and find out how this is caused by George W. Bush, the US, or Bush's failure to sign on to the Kyoto treaty (even though Clinton was president at the time).
Do you have ESP?
OH MY
So... CO2 causes global warming, apparently on Mars and Jupiter too. Yet when sunspot activity decreases, this whole global warming trend slows down (to the tune of no increase of global temperature in over 8 years). And in the 1990s when sunspot activity was some of the highest ever recorded, global temperatures rose. I wonder if this is a coincidence.... or is it?
So really... are you all still addicted to that theory? That it's all about the CO2?
So let me get this straight.
This has happened before, we're on the low point of a cycle according to even the wikipedia information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sunspot_Numbers.png
Is there really any significance other than that? I don't mean that in a smartass way, genuinely wondering here.
It seems to show the sun has active sunspot cycles, and less active sunspot cycles. Thus, we are at one of the less active cycles.
There we go, asking people to prove negatives again. Why don't you start by proving that it IS man-made?
OK, I confess... I knew it was wrong... I did it anyway.
Damn sunspots... I hate them all!
I know. How strange is it that they think that the largest source of heat in the entire solar system would have ANYTHING to do with one of the planets getting warmer...
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Funny ... I thought liberals were going to use it as proof that global warming was so out of control, it was affecting the sun. First it melts the polar icecaps, now the sunspots. ;)
Oh, crap, did I post this without checking the AC box?
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Am I the only one who read the headline and thought "Sun Microsystems actually had a profitable month?" Doh!
"There we go, asking people to prove negatives again. Why don't you start by proving that it IS man-made?"
The argument being made is that it HAS been proven, as far as one can prove anything in such indeterministic systems.
Of course, we had proof for years that ulcers were caused by stress. Nope - bacteria.
Proof that the continents were immobile in their positions. Well, not so much proof as that it was just so totally OBVIOUS that continents couldn't move, and that "continental drift" was a crackpot theory. Until it wasn't.
AIDS was a breakdown of the immune system because of IV drug use, exposure to multiple venereal diseases, and the generally unhealth lifestyle of the gay community. Until they isolated a virus.
The reality is that scientific "proof" consists of general agreement among communities of people about the interpretation of observed phenomena, and that agreement can be driven by MANY factors, not just how well the data fits. One CANNOT get to the level of mathematical proof. So there will always be a role for skeptics, and those that just won't accept that, if you have a square peg and a round hole, you just pretend the peg's squareness doesn't exist, because it MUST fit into the round hole.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I guess you missed the quotation marks. When you quote or italicize a word, it often means that it has a similar meaning, but not exactly the same (per the dictionary usage). It might also mean that the term was intended to be used ironically. In this context, it is actually sort of funny that you decided to go on a logic rant.
Could this coincide with the upcoming Apocalypse on December 21st 2012?
... researching any connection with global warming.
is that our temps are at all time highs. Yes, it is down SLIGHTLY i.e. a very small local minima, not even close to an absolute minima. So, if there is a correlation to temps the way that ppl like you push, what happens when sunspots increase?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Boy, I bet that left someone seeing black.
the Arctic ice refused to melt this summer. Does anyone remember the warning in June that the North Pole would be ice free?
Of course, their prediction was way off (as always). When someone realized how bad their prediction was, they fear monger some more with more dire warnings!
Remember that they have only been keeping sat. data for ice extent for a little over 3 decades, which of course is when the sun has been in a very active period.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Ah good - that gives me more time to get my HF antenna up. No sunspots - no HF radio propagation....now I can put off climbing up on the roof.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Who cares about calendar months- have there ever been any other 30 day periods (say the 10th through the 9th) without spots?
As to how the Earth is heating up due to there being too few sun spots or birds are falling out of the sky and little children are being eaten by monsters at the worlds edge.
I'm really interested in stories about science but every one like this seems to be taken as an excuse for the uninformed to come up with todays hair brained theory to scare the masses. I wonder if we can link this to terrorism in some way.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Tokes for everyone !!
Of course atmospheric/climate scientists have considered the impact of the sun. Please, don't assume they're complete idiots.
The problem with global warming alarmism is not not the climate science is poor, but that it is used to rationalize unnecessarily intrusive interventions in people's lives that have little to do with preventing catastrophe, and very questionable impact on net emissions.
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax, and then apply the funds to mitigating the damage. Then, you don't have to do impossible calculations about which activities are "truly wasteful", and people can decide how they cut back. And even if they don't, such a solution is still robust, as such a decision would just generate more funds with which to handle the problem.
But the most vocal alarms don't want this. Instead, they propose a laundry list of intrusive interventions, and then want to pick and choose which technologies are the "right" ones. If they were honest about wanting to avert catastrophe, the debate today would be about the size of the tax or cap, not about whether we should ban this particular product on the grounds that it gets an emotional reaction out of some people. Alarmism has been more about whether you're "on the team" or not. If the most efficient solution for you is to get better insulation rather than a hybrid, well, the latter would signal that you're "one of them" and the former wouldn't, so ...
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
The argument being made is that it HAS been proven, as far as one can prove anything in such indeterministic systems.
If by GW you mean AGW then like hell it has. If you read ./ summaries, a few newspapers and A. Gore, then perhaps its a "fact". But read the source peer reviewed articles they claim to summarize. They use phrases like "it suggests", and "gives support to" rather than phrases like "statistically significant".
A good question to ask is how is the "mean" earth temperature measured, both current and Historic and whats the variance?
There are some facts out there that do matter (e.g. CO2 increases from industrialization). But thats not a proof of any claimed causal effects.
We simply have not been doing this sort of modeling long enough nor tested it enough to give credible confidence intervals yet. I'm not saying that mitigation programs now don't make sense. They do, but I can think of a lot of better reasons that AGW.
And in regard to general agreement in the scientific community WRT AGW? If you don't agree or are even just a little bit skeptical, you would have left that community a long time ago. Using a set of examples where there "was general agreement" that turned out to be wrong does not support the idea that "general agreement" on AGW is evidence of AGW.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
There are cooling trends, Vedic descriptions of the "Divine Day" and Easter calculations. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%2295+year+cycle%22&btnG=Search Ur Primitivz want theyr kalenderz back.
meh
Obviously caused by the people driving Hummers.
Read that as "The Sun has First Topless..", thought The Sun here in Toronto finally decided to spice up the Sunshine Girl.
History is not made by people, but by trends. The people who ride at the crest of the wave, and are in the spotlight, sometimes seem to be making history...but the only reason these people are in the position they are in, and the only reason their actions are effective, is because of the huge numbers of other people who empower them and obey them.
The current trends in America seem to be ignorance and pettiness tapered with sloth and fear. Bush and his antics are just a symptom of that, as will be Obama and his antics. I predict a lot of socialist posturing (because the majority of the American people today just want to be taken care of) and little that actually addresses any of the real problems of our day.
Eventually things will suck badly enough that the trends change. Until then, it will just be more of the same, no matter who is in office.
So,
I know sun spots are a different temp than the sun overall - has this had an effect on the energy output of the sun?
Clear, Dark Skies
I blame global warming.
Let me be the first to warn of impending global cooling. The increase of Arctic Ice by 30% in one year and the spotless sun, shows that the whole earth can be covered by ice sheets a mile thick in less than a decade. Everyone should run out and buy large SUVs to be able to negotiate the worsening road conditions for the few years we have left before glaciers destroy everything.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
There you go again, using logical fallacies about how you can't 'prove a negative'. That does not help your cause.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
(And moot now that the sunspeck appeared)
But presumably the sun is only spotless on the face that we can see, or do we know that the 'dark' side of the sun is also spotless. Given that it takes 25 days for the sun to rotate, a spot might flare up and we'd know nothing about it.
Or is there some solar observatory that I don't know about?
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
surely it must be so
I blame Bush. If he'd only signed the Kyoto Protocol everything would be just fine.
As a conservative I believe more power to the individual and local governments rather than federal, lower taxes, lower spending.
Conservatives are cautious about global warming because Liberals are trying to introduce legislation based on it. We are handcuffing business, raising taxes, and affecting our day-to-day lives because of "global warming."
If this is what has to be done, so be it. We have a federal government for a reason.
On the other hand there is plenty of evidence that Global Warming does not exist and it is being pushed by Liberals with an agenda. This is unacceptable. We should not be destroying our economy because of "maybes."
...my boyfriend panics.
After a bit of comment reading and Wikipedia reading, here's what has to be said to the global warning-related sarcasms. The sharp rise in temperatures is of course due to our activity, which is why we have nothing else like this rise in our long records of Earth temperatures dating back to hundreds of thousands of years ago (if I recall correctly). However, the high sun activity of the past century didn't help a bit, as it we reached at least 1,200 year activity high! Which means that if the downward trend is confirmed, this could be a God sent reprieve while we try to get hold of our gaseous emissions. In other words, yes it did contribute quite a bit to the problem, no it's not the sole root of the problem, or even the majority of it, and yes this is good news as the offset could be very beneficial to us. A fortunate coincidence of sorts.
I for one cannot wait until we can ice skate from New York City to London again!
You just got troll'd!
So many sign of the apocalypse to pick from this year!!!! lol
Since the sun rotates, the easiest it to just wait for it to turn around
You are arguing the point with the wrong person. My phrase "The argument being made is that it HAS been proven, as far as one can prove anything in such indeterministic systems" was playing devil's advocate - it is the argument used in favor of political action regarding Global Climate Change.
I then gave examples where such "proof" turned out to be illusory, and finished with a caution about dismissing skeptics. I'm not suer how you got the impression that I am a proponent of political action to address Global Climate Change.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Doesn't seem to stop people from believing there are no WMDs in Iraq. "I can't find any, therefore none exist!"
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
wtf is with these posts in every thread? I'm not that new here, but I dont get it.
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax, and then apply the funds to mitigating the damage.
Why don't you guys just admitt that you are using the "global climate change" as a tool to push socialism/communism.
There is far better ways to lower the carbon dioxide levels that a trade cap or a tax. How about incentives rather than penalities?
Give companies or people tax breaks if they implement a "green" technology or if they can prove the they are producing less carbon dioxide.
If lowering the carbon dioxide level is SO important destroying the economy or even crippling it is NOT going to help the situation. Where do you think all the money is going to come from to implement all these neat new green technologies?
"Continental drift theory still hasn't actually been conclusively proven either."
You are either slyly reinforcing my point or it went right over your head, and I really can't tell which. Well played, sir!
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Sorry, I did in fact miss that completely then.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Why is everyone missing the obvious? The greenhouse gasses on earth are actually CAUSING the lack of sunspots! Don't you see? Not only will greenhouse gasses destroy our planet, they will destroy our solar system, our galaxy...and beyond. More proof of the terrible consequences of driving SUVs and using air conditioning.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
A bit of a tangent, but thank you for providing me an excellent link on why militant atheists are just as insane as fundamentalists. Aside from the fact that this guy abuses the hell out of what the word "theory" means, he takes a pretty screwball approach to saying you can prove a negative. Really it all boils down to splitting hairs and saying "close enough" in an elaborate attempt to mock Christianity. The fact that he would dedicate so much time to building up this construct to attack Christainity (which according to him is irrelevant because the Christian god can't exist) pretty much proves how irrelevant he really is.
I'm not even Christian and I find this kind of tripe unbelievably ignorant.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
And I thought it was because I parked my SUT all month last month.
"Of course atmospheric/climate scientists have considered the impact of the sun. Please, don't assume they're complete idiots."
Just like NASA scientist would never confuse meters with feet.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
There we go, asking people to prove negatives again.
Phew. I've always had this feeling sqrt(2) was rational, but there was never a solid argument until now.
Here:
to 'prove' that global warming is natural.
Better? You don't have to believe in Big Green hysterics to maintain logical integrity.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Is this going to be one of those "Look the tide just went out further than it's ever gone before!" things?
Could marveling at our wonderfully spotless sun be sort of like saying, "Let's all skip down on to the beach and pick up the pretty fish!"
Maybe I'm just a doom-and-gloom type, but when the source of all life on Earth suddenly changes it's behavior in some very perceptible way... I think that's maybe, you know... 'bad'.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax, and then apply the funds to mitigating the damage.
I generally agree with your intrusiveness arguments. But disagree with the whole carbon dioxide plan.
Carbon dioxide markets obfuscate and reward the grossest polluters who have the most wealth and power. I would argue the flipside, an oxygen market. Which is more quantifiable and not as corruptable as a carbon dioxide market and increases the supply of oxygen.
1. Cap and trade is a political problem exposed to all of the usual failures associated with political problems. Corruption, centralization of influence, etc.
2. Carbon dioxide credits don't attach a value to oxygen production. The rest of the world _still_ rewards turning the oxygen producing forests into more economically viable operations like farms, mining, harvesting the timber or industrial parks. And the citizens of that formerly forested country are enriched and in theory lead more comfortable lives by industrializing the formerly oxygen producing lands.
3. Carbon dioxide markets disprove a negative which is why the grossest polluters don't mind the discussion. It's a guaranteed political firestorm with no logical basis. Start a discussion about wealth generated by oxygen production and it is *much* more politically viable.
4. Focusing on carbon dioxide markets creates expensive schemes like pumping carbon into holes in the earth instead of focusing on increasing the supply of oxygen.
Force the grossest consumers of oxygen (co2
makers) to pay rent for oxygen production as a natural resource like oil and natural gas and it becomes wealth-building exercise admittedly fraught with the usual political problems.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
You unscientific clod! The is clearly yet another symptom of man made global warming!! Our population is now so big, and the number of cows we raise is so large, and the quantity of their flatulence is so great that the methane is reaching all the way to the sun!!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I wonder if this will have an impact on global cooling. There was a correlation between a lack of sunspots during the little ice age in the 17th - 18th centuries.
So whether or not people could view small sun spots in the early 1900's aside. what does it all mean? Is there some sort of environmental changes (or otherwise) we can expect to see on the Earth as a result?
Adrian Cronauer: Excuse me, sir. Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P., shouldn't we keep the P.C. on the Q.T.? 'Cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could end up M.I.A., and then we'd all be put out in K.P.
WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!
Has anyone asked Ken Shatten about this? For the latest weather on the sun -- http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/.
As for global warming, I was reminded by a friend that "the maximum temperature of Earth can be no higher than the maximum temperature of an equivalent black body, and the earth is approximately spherical and receives light from the sun on a cross-sectional area of a circle, but radiates thermal energy from the area of a sphere. The ratio of the spherical area to the circular area is four. Dividing the incoming energy flux by that gives the Earth an approximate maximum temperature of 285Kelvin. Again we have another inconsistency as this maximum temperature is below the widely reported global average temperature of 288Kelvin (17C). The maximum temperature found on the moon is approximately 390Kelvin." On Earth our maximum, like that of the moon, could be 117C. The official highest is around 57C, so we have another 60C possible increase!
Its not about pushing socialism, its about introducing new trade tariffs.
hahah, if i had mod points.... I wouldn't be able to do anything :(
Point taken.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
It's funny - instead of getting involved in the scientific process, most of you AGW skeptics would prefer to try to CHANGE PUBLIC OPINION. Or, you just harp on about how "liberal" or "biased" the scientists doing the work are, implying there is some sort of conspiracy at work.
The irony is, when Intelligent Design people make the same accusations ("conspiracy", "errors", "no proof"), you ridicule them for not doing science.
Try doing some science!
The next solar sunspot peak was supposed to be around that time. Thats when there is the most solar storms and interference with satellites and electric grids.
It would either be "El Niño" or "La Niña", to match genders.
You were trying to refer to "La Niña", or a sustained sea surface temperature anomalies of magnitude greater than -0.5C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean.
(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o-Southern_Oscillation)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Name a more vocal alarmist than Al Gore. Or name the most vocal alarmist who isn't directly selling "carbon offset certificates" or trying to?
I've never heard of complaints about CO2 use making the atmosphere have insufficient oxygen, so I don't follow that point you're making. Even extreme environmentalists don't seem to be worried about that, not yet anyway. I will however, respond to this point you made:
Carbon dioxide markets obfuscate and reward the grossest polluters who have the most wealth and power.
I think you're equating "cap and trade" with one specific implementation of it, in which emission rights are given to those already emitting. But that's just one way of initially allocating the caps. A different, preferable way would be to give them out via periodic (annual, biannual, whatever) auction in which everyone is on equal footing and no one gets a freebie. (Of course, the restrictions would probably have to be applied at the earliest point where the fuel is known to be burned, meaning only the companies extracting the natural gas/oil would be bidding anyway, so it's not like individuals are going to be bidding anyway.)
Also, if there's a concern about impact on the poor or whatever, you can simply (p)refund a proportional share to each person, equal to the added cost of using some minimum amount of fossil fuel. Then if you use less than that threshold, you get money back.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Actually, my tinfoil hat is much, much bigger than yours. The Powers That Be [PTB] (the queen, the rothchilds' the Colonel, etc.) control both the conservatives and liberals at the highest levels. They play us off each other and maintain their own power my ensuring the general public is clearly divided against each other, ignoring the rich and powerful who are the real problem.
Here's how it works:
The 'PTB' have recently given a lot of money and power to the libs to promote the global warming idea base on "science". This is a check on the conservatives, whom they slowly put in power over the last few decades in order to check the liberals they let in in the 60s and 70s, and so on. The dems will continue to gain power in congress and win the presidency this year, but the failure of Global Warming models, which all assume a constant input from the sun, and failed policies based on the incorrect global warming/evil CO2/oil shortage assumption, will give the 'PTB' the opening they need to put the conservatives back in power, thereby checking the soon-to-be-powerful dems. What's more, the failure of "science" will foster a mistrust of real science in the general public, keeping us ignorant and controllable.
Some of you might point out that even if the top 1% have a greater portion of the wealth now than they did 50 years ago, our standard of living has steadily improved (at least in Europe and America). This is true in many respects, such as the portion of our income we spend on food, access to communication, healthcare technology, etc. It's false in many others, however, such as quality of food (tasted a tomato lately?) and quality of communication (TV, blogs, and underfunded print media narrowly focused on national issues, vs. community clubs like the Elks and Lions and well funded print media focused on local issues). Plus, you have to take into account opportunity cost. How much more could our lives have improved had government made better decisions.
What's more, we've become dependent on a system controlled by a select few. Healthcare is better, but you'd better keep working or you won't be able to see a doctor when you need to. Home 'ownership' is up when you ignore mortgages, but real debt-free ownership is way down. Water and Mineral rights are independent of land, so even those who think they own land can have it effectively taken away at any time. They're handing out plenty of fish but jealously guarding the poles and nets.
Remember, it's not the guy with the thin black mustache you've got to watch out for. If he were evil, he'd be a complete failure because he looks it. The truly successful evil person is the ones that convinces his victims that he's not good. As I said, my tinfoil hat is the 10-gallon kind.
blah blah yada yada global warming give me a break.
They use phrases like "it suggests", and "gives support to" rather than phrases like "statistically significant".
Actually, the Fourth Assessment Report produced in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report with several hundred scientific contributors and co-authors, uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
"There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming" (p. 37)
"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations" (p. 39)
personally I blame solar warming and all the crap we're dumping in space
...how does it relate to the price of oil?
(That is the criteria for a news story these days, right?)
Best technique: Wait two weeks. The Sun's rotation is about 27 days.
My test of whether someone is genuinely concerned about catastrophe rather than power over others, is not passed by offering voluntary "carbon offsets" that have questionable impact anyway and aren't subject to 3rd party auditing.
To pass it, the alarmist would have to advocate replacing all measures to combat CO2 emissions, with some method of internalization of the environmental costs (possibly with a subsidy to those that remove it from the atmosphere). That means they would advocate:
-No subsidies for specific technologies.
-No efficiency mandates.
-No banning of products on the grounds that they are "inefficient".
-No subsidies for ethanol.
In other words, make people pay for the mess they make, and then let the market, armed with this price signal, ferret out the easiest places to make the reductions. (90% of them happen before any end user actually makes a decision: Wal-mart reducting truck wind drag, Tide shipping a more concentrated detergent, products being shipped from nearer places, etc.)
Al Gore therefore does not pass. And "buying" credits from your own business certainly doesn't qualify for praise.
There's a general point to made here: unilateral reduction of fossil fuel use is really an empty gesture. Since there are millions of uses that fossil fuels could be put to, you're simply allowing some person with different ethics to go buy what you didn't so they can go ahead with the use they had planned for it. So unless we all act in unison to internalize the CO2 emission costs for everyone, all we're really doing is turning over the fuel to someone else.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Which is just another way to avoid saying the specific phrase "statistically significant" because there are no such credibility intervals.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I blame Windex and their new, improved glass polishing formula.
The focus is on CO2 because that's the variable we can most control to a degree that would make a difference. We can quantify the impact of other natural phenomena such as sunspots and, in fact, need to do so carefully in order to separate out human influence from nature. This is already being done, however, and is a core part of climate research.
As it turns out, change in solar output or in sunspots is not enough to account for the climate change trend. The former is very minor (the sun is quite stable) and the latter affects us in a minor way by blowing away (reducing) cloud cover and thus reducing the amount of energy that these clouds reflect back into space. A sunspot minimum thus ought to lead to cooling and yet our present average global temperature is higher than would be expected in the presence of this cooling despite being cooler than the past few years have been. That is, subtract out the known effects (which are cyclical and temporary)and you're left with a clear warming trend.
Of course the CO2 emissions have been almost flat under the environment friendly Bush administration versus the vicious Earth-rapers Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Look at this speadsheat.
Great, now I know why summer this year was, well, pretty nonexistant really.
It was just a cooler than normal summer. That's natural. It happens. The climate is not a static model that never changes, and frankly some of it's workings we don't understand yet, and may not for many years. But having the occasional cooler summer is no more worrisome than the occasional warmer summer. Frankly, living in the deep south, I appreciated the break this year, although it probably means we're in for a bitter winter.
Kinda funny though, how we had a mild summer, and yet in spring, you had all those people predicting that the arctic would be ice-free by July.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I guess this had to happen eventually - the Sun, mother to our own Mother Earth, is having a "spotless" month - the great change is upon her. It can be a difficult adjustment - but it is, after all, a part of life...
Bow-ties are cool.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't UTC analogous to GMT? In that UTC == +0 GMT? That would put it at 4PM PST (-8 GMT). I suspect the poster/editor meant to say 5PM PDT (-7 GMT).
If you read ./ summaries
There's a ./?? What's there? What else are you guys hiding from me?!?
Until Netcraft confirms this, it hasn't happened.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Yup, completely unbiased there. No Problem. We'll just go with what you said.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
> All joking aside, does anyone else get the feeling they're changing the definition of a sunspot just so they can claim it was a spotless month?
Actually my thought was more the opposite. I have made spaceweather.com one of my daily visits. When it looked like a sunspot MIGHT be forming the official sunspot number went from zero to three. Eh? Don't you actually have to have a spot to count it? Then the area of interest went away and they put the number back at zero. Looks like somebody decided somebody jumped the gun and corrected the records.
Now why might this have happened? Why do papers predicting a period of low solar activity fail to be published (see the full articles)? Could it be the same reason scientific papers questioning global warming end careers without ever seeing the light of day? And of couse the refrain from the warmers is "all peer reviewed science supports man made Global Warming!" Science isn't becoming politicized, it IS politicized. Global Warming is the vehicle whereby "Scientific Socialism" is to bring untold political power to the 'elite educated and wise' few, and a rational planned and controlled world to the poor miserable peasants who would otherwise revert to cannibalism (or worse, a life of free markets without the elites) without their enlightened rule. Thus whether it is true or just a fairy tale is a question that must not be permitted to be entertained by 'serious people.' And the quickest way to ensure that is to define the phrase 'serious people' such that it excludes all who disagree with the official party policy.
Democrat delenda est
All, Interesting story but the official numbers are in and there were two days with spots for August (21,22). You can follow all the action at our http://spidr.ngdc.noaa.gov/ website which has SSN back to 1610 (among other indices). No doubt this cycle is unusual in its delayed start though. Regards, Eric
Isn't sun a bsd unix? Well, it's dying. This is further proof.
... Global Warmi... uh, Climate Change predicts this.
If DailyTech's nutter (Michael Asher / "masher2") says something is true, there's a pretty good chance that it isn't. That guy makes Fox News and Steven Milloy seem respectable. As such, it's safe to assume that, in reality, last month the Sun looked like a dalmatian.
A good question to ask is how is the "mean" earth temperature measured, both current and Historic and whats the variance?
A less statistical variation of this question is: "What is the temperature of the Earth SUPPOSED TO BE?"
Before we go trying to optimize it all, that might be some good knowledge to have (regardless of what side of the debate you might be on).
Where is your evidence of valid "scientific papers questioning global warming ending careers without ever seeing the light of day"?
We have lots of real evidence of oil corporations funding fake science to deny climate change. Do you have real evidence of your conspiracy theory claims?
--
make install -not war
STEREO A and B are more than 70 degrees apart, so you'd only need to wait 8.25 days from when it leaves the sight of STEREO A 'til it's seen by STEREO B. In a few years, we'll have real-time view of the far side of the sun. (until they come back around near Earth again)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You are a fucking moron.
I can't believe all these science geniuses can't think to include precipitation into the predictions!
Last year was a very dry summer. This year was very very wet. So it would figure that more precipitation, or at least water vapour in the air would help keep the ice mass. Rain on ice in sub-zero temperature = more ice.
That, and socialism.
Ah -- 6 billion humans, eh?
Don't forget the multi-billions of termite mounds and herds of flatulent herbivores that have been cranking out the methane long before humans figured out fire -- way back when forest and prarie fires ran unchecked for years at a time.
In a deck of 100,000 cards, it can be a mistake to concentrate on just one being responsible for all the action.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
Wasn't there an incident last year where NASA was corrected by an independent climatologist because they'd made some basic error in normalizing their data?
Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody has motives.
To the guy who says not to assume climate scientists are idiots: I don't think they're idiots, but I allow for the possibility (probability?) that they're missing something. In addition, I make no assumptions about their motives, given the politically charged issue at hand.
The IPCC report is actually written by beuracrats from several countries, often with very strong political bias, not by scientists.
Of the actual scientific studies involved with the process, the beuracrats selectively choose which of those reports to incorporate into the final product and have absolutely no discernable criteria (except for their own opinions) as to how that selection is made.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
I re-reply to your comment in a more professional tone. This time I will grade your paper as I would have one of my students responding to an AGW question on one of my exams. Ahem.
Mars: correct — atmospheric CO2 causes global warming. Your supposition between a causal link between sunspot activity and the temperature of Mars is simplistic, in light of the fact that a) the Martian orbit is highly elliptical, changing the solar input over a factor of about 1.5 over the Martian year, resulting in b) CO2 does not remain in a gaseous state over the course of this year.
Grade: D
Jupiter's atmosphere contains almost no CO2; thus it cannot be used as a greenhouse gas. Also, Jupiter gives off twice as much energy as it receives, due to ongoing differentiation in its interior. The effects of this energy input into the atmosphere is complicated, and unlikely to causally affected by sunspot activity. Grade: F.
You attempt to prove your assertion that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas by begging the question. I've taught you better than that. Grade: F.
See you next semester. Or you could drop the class altogether and take up cleaning out horse stables. You seem familiar with the basics.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Selling CO2, selling O2...
Don't you guys listen to yourselves? On one hand you talk about how corrupt and evil corporations are, and how all the ills of the world are caused by lobbyists, and on the other hand you want to create YET ANOTHER multi-trillion dollar market and have YET ANOTHER lobbyist in DC lobbying for Big Oxygen or Big CO2?
What if, in the future after you've created your trillion-dollar market selling artificial commodities you find that shit, we made a mistake, and we need to stop doing whatever it is we're doing -- increasing O2, decreasing CO2, etc. Do you think that this trillion dollar market will just give up and self-terminate at the first utterance of your intellectual brilliance?
Do you even think past the first step?
** Election season, so modded troll in 3..2..1...
Al Gore was right. We will burn.
Why, because I know they are human and have a pattern of being idiots at one time or another? Isn't everyone. But I do appreciate your post for it's directness when I point out the obvious that folks have proven that everyone at some point is an idiot.
Perhaps you are more offended by the term idiot then I am. Or I get called it more.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
The sun has finally gotten a good monthly review. We were *this* close to firing it.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
AIDS was a breakdown of the immune system because of [snip] and the generally unhealth lifestyle of the gay community. Until they isolated a virus.
No, that was GRIDS, the Gay Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Only after the virus was discovered was the relation to IV drug use made, and was then termed AIDS.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
On one hand you talk about how corrupt and evil corporations are, and how all the ills of the world are caused by lobbyists, and on the other hand you want to create YET ANOTHER multi-trillion dollar market and have YET ANOTHER lobbyist in DC lobbying for Big Oxygen or Big CO2?
The human condition is full of inconsistency and contradiction. Ideally, your concerns are somewhat allayed by a system that rewards or emphasizes transparency. If one were to monetize oxygen production, then there will be a "big oxygen." If the oxygen market is structured correctly, then their harm will be minimized. Obviously much easier said than done.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Yeah, I never quite understood how you could come to conclusions that are 'very likely' or with 'very high confidence' when you depend on a good amount of proxy measurements with significantly lower levels of confidence to reach those conclusions. Come on people, this is science 101; your conclusion can't have a higher level of confidence than the data you base it on. These are obviously purely political terms (especially seeing as they were used in a 'summary for policy makers' before the actual report was even completed)
Oh, and on a side note, I also don't understand why they would even use proxy CO2 measurements for the past 200 years when actual measurements exist. Wouldn't you want to use the best data possible?
It doesn't matter what the US and Western Countries do, the whole globe has got to be on board, or at least a SIGNIFICANT portion of it.
The problem with Global Climate Change fanatics, is they want only WESTERN countries to change, with little or no expectation of change from the REAL polluters (China, India and third world countries).
No, Global Climate Change isn't about climate change, it is about government change.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You forgot the red and blue logo thing too.
Unfortunately, I think we are just seeing Adam Smith's invisible hand; the problem is its the invisible hand of the top 0.1% holding down the other 99.9% of us. Money is power, and money will subvert any mechanism available to it to generate more money. We can make inferences to a certain ring here; all evil behaves the same way.
andy
Maybe the sun is pregnant!
No, you are a moron because you were born that way.
You were called a moron in this thread because you lied in order to make a sarcastic remark about NASA scientists.
King Arthur: [about the inscription on the rock] What does it say, Brother Maynard? ... I thought liberals were going to use it as proof that global warming was so out of control, it was affecting the sun. First it melts the polar icecaps, now the sunspots. ;)
Brother Maynard: It reads, "Funny
Oh, crap, did I post this without checking the AC box?â ...
King Arthur: What?
Brother Maynard: "Oh, crap, did I post this without checking the AC box?"
Sir Bedevere: What is that?
Brother Maynard: He must have forgot the check the AC box.
King Arthur: Oh come on!
Brother Maynard: Well, that's what it says.
King Arthur: Look, if he forgot to check the box, he wouldn't have bothered to carve 'Oh, crap, did I post this without checking the AC box?'. He'd just say it.
Sir Galahad: Maybe he was dictating it.
King Arthur: Oh shut up!
Sir Robin: Well does it say anything else?
Brother Maynard: No, just "Oh, crap, did I post this without checking the AC box?".
[knights making groaning sounds]
Sir Bedevere: Do you think he could have mean, 'Global warming is so far out of control that Greenland is going to melt completely in the next 10 years'?
Sir Galahad: Where's that?
Sir Bedevere: France, I think.
yeah I can't think of where to go from there =P
Decreased sunspots results in reduced solar output according to the article. Reduced solar output might very well mean...COLD. Serious cold. A major planetary climate change to much colder winters and shorter summers might be only a year or two away. What might this mean? Some areas of Europe and North America would become uninhabitable. Shelters and transportation would need to be provided for migration from those areas. There would be a worldwide shortage of food due to crop failure in the newly-cold areas. Other areas that are currently poor for agriculture due to limited precipitation and excessive heat would improve and become new fertile areas, provided that equipment and resources can be sent there quickly. Global cooling would be a much bigger problem than global warming because it would happen relatively quickly giving us little time to prepare.
I bet those pesky Hydrogues are at it again. First they blow up our fleet at Jupiter and now they want to wreck our sun. How big of a deal is it to just let a few ekti harvesters float around in the planetary atmosphere?
The lazy ass Verdani remind me of the apathetic American society. Get off your ass and don't be such a burn out. Step into the the ring and swing and put the lights out on these mofo's.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
Just wait until she begins having hot flashes. Then we're in trouble...
Smell that? You smell that? Burning karma, son. Nothing in the world smells like that...
Tell her to reread the part about being 'good stewards' of the Earth. Most Christians are pretty sure that means we have responsibility towards the environment.
Yes, there are some people so mired in politics that they can't separate the good from the bad. But I don't think most Christians want that, whatever others say of them.
But point out the part in Revelation about, "[...] and that You should reward Your servants the prophets and the saints, and those who fear Your name, small and great, and should destroy those who destroy the earth." Not to mention all the talk about 'stewardship'. All normal churches say that it applies to the environment and that we have a duty to care for it.
Even fringe groups like RaptureReady say they're only against liberal environmental politics, not against saving the environment. Of course, they're one of the groups too tied to politics so it's hard for them to separate the two.
Most of us are more normal than that. Most of us don't give a damn about the politics and just want to do what makes sense to protect our environment.
But you don't hear about most of us, because we don't make the news by doing idiotic things like protesting funerals, praying for storms to rain on our political enemies, or whatever other mean-spirited nonsense those "Christians" are doing today.
Obviously, you don't make the news by being normal.
holly cow, it must be pregnant.
I've never heard of complaints about CO2 use making the atmosphere have insufficient oxygen
It's not about insufficient oxygen. It's about creating value processing carbon-dioxide. An oxygen market creates wealth in developing nations as a "CO2 processor" in place of the traditional resource extraction industries normally used to develop a higher standard of living in developing nations. Ideally, there's incentives in there to maintain biological diversity too...
Of course, anyone satisfied with our current method of sustaining the human race will call it crazy. And there's a strong contingent of economists that will fall back on the "infinite substitutions" argument. Which is a very potent form of circular logic bordering on the religious.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Where did I lie?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/686674.stm
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
"No, that was GRIDS, the Gay Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome. Only after the virus was discovered was the relation to IV drug use made, and was then termed AIDS."
Nope. While GRIDS did exist prior to AIDS, scientists made the epidemiological connection between whatever was killing gay men and HIV drug users and Haitians, and then called it AIDS. The virus wasn't isolated until years later, and even then it was possible that HIV was simply an opportunistic infection. They didn't figure out the disease mechanism until after that.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
we most likely will die out, does not mean that we MUST hasten the process along. That is why we need to get off this rock.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The one constant in the human condition is greed. There's no such thing as an idealized system, and if a market for waste gases is created, it *will* be manipulated to suit the needs of the investors.
That's why some people are pushing for it so hard. Don't be fooled, the basis of this CO2 credit market idea is about making money at the expense of industry, and ultimately, the public at large. It is NOT a legitimate solution to the problem, if such a problem exists at all.
This is one of those ideas where the AGW crowd shows their true colors and reveals what's really behind the hype and hysteria. It's all about socialism, power consolidation, and money.
Think about this economically. You are trading a commodity, but this isn't a standard commodity where scarcity of resources limits the supply. This is an artificially created commodity where nothing more substantial than words determine the supply. If the person in charge decides that he can make money by creating more credits to sell, what's to stop him? His honesty, integrity, and desire to save the planet? Forgive me if I'm skeptical, but you're essentially giving yet another person a license to print money and impose additional taxes on industry and the public at large.
Well, you might want to look up Bioequivalence for methods to prove negatives. statistics at your service.
When resounding current evidence supports a theory that something in particular is causing a disease (or problem)- we naturally tend to act preemptively.
With Global Warming we have an overwelming majority of experts agreeing it is human induced. Should we continue business-as-usual and blindly see what happens, or should we pro-actively follow what are initial evidence tells us?
I believe we would be fools to not take steps to reduce our impact- particularly when it is feasible.
"The precautionary principle is a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action."
In the 95 years since 1913, we've had quite an active sun
Could the active Sun and not mankind be the reason for global warming? Discuss
Respect the Constitution
The Powers That Be [PTB] (the queen, the rothchilds' the Colonel, etc.) What are you, some sort of La Rouche idiot?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
"There is very high confidence that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming"
1.) Population in 1750 multiplied by human body temperature (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 37.0 degrees Celsius).
2.) Population "since the mid-20th century" multiplied by human body temperature (98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 37.0 degrees Celsius).
Give me the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Nobel Prize in Climatology, the Nobel Peace Prize, and hopefully one day the Nobel Prize in Medicine. I say this with the utmost sincerity and seriousness. Gimme my bonus Triple Crown Nobel Trophies and Moneys. My FTL demonstration is already being ripped off by physicists who used to ridicule with their now beginning to hedge their prior claims with now "cheating" of bending "space-time". :P
I recommend the book, "When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management" for an overview of completely bogus mathematical models that have infected academic discipline after academic discipline. This is a perfect template for the coming crash of credibility for climatology. It's going to be brutal, and I'm going to push for penalties stripping all NSA funding for Universities who have funded prominent politicized climatology research in the same manner as their football teams are banned from receiving television money for recruiting violations. If you work in academia or for the Chronicle of Higher Education, consider your institution put on notice, and hope you like the payback of 5-7 years of no government grants (do not doubt that I will succeed in harnessing divisive politics to accomplish this).
http://www.amazon.com/When-Genius-Failed-Long-Term-Management/dp/0375758259
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
That was truly excellent. My hat is off to you.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Actually you're very wrong on all 3 counts.
Muslims don't believe they're stewards of the earth, they don't believe they have any control at all (given their average government, that may be a truth however). Muslims have predatory farming practices. Only Jews really believe in their stewardship of the earth, and Christians believe they're stewards, not of the earth, but of Gods people, for them earth is a tool to grow humanity. Sure, abuse is to be prevented, and it must remain possible to keep doing that in the long term, but that's it. If that means covering the planet in solar panels, eradicating all but token forests, then that should be fine with Christian theology. The main difference between muslim views and christian ones is that Christians believe they can change the earth to do their bidding. So do Jews, but they try to change the earth only insofar necessary to protect what is already there.
In the Dharmic faiths certainly the Sikh, but they're not alone in this don't believe they steward the earth.
And Taoic religions don't even believe the earth exists, never mind that it is to be cared for. Their "average" principle is that the earth will die anyway - a millenia earlier or later doesn't really change things. Neither does a million years earlier. Every last Taoic faith agrees with Christianity in that it considers human concern superior to nature's concerns.
Even your "not being wiped off the planet" stuff is ridiculous. In an extremely broad sense you're perhaps right, but then you'd have to include the hindu ideal, put somewhat disrespectfully : to pursue money, sex and enlightenment (which used to be in practice equivalent to holding political power, even if not in theory).
That's how a Hindu prevents himself from being "wiped off the earth" : money, sex and power. Christians would advise abstention from same (esp. power) in order to prevent being wiped off the earth. Sorry if I offend anyone's sensibilities, but I am trying to make the point that there are differences between religions, that can often spill over, esp. with a certain religion, into the political realm, GW policy being part of that.
So really you're only right for a single, tiny religion, Judaism.
There is no absolute data on temperatures.
At least, after years of searching, I haven't found any.
I thought about keeping my own list. But it wouldn't be ultraprecise nor cover every day, and only cover my little region.
All the carts are in relation to cold periods. Because god forbid politicians in science lose.
Try doing some science!
Nice variables, weightings, and models (whether linearly "crude" or non linearly complex), showing the respective effect on the output average Earth temperature in your post.
What's funny is there are thousands of threads and millions of posts with no such "science", most especially from the "believers". But keep barking loudly about your hick opponents.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Fool! Lyndon is one of them. In fact, he's likely one of their leaders. It's like those vampire movies when they think they kill the head vampire and then at the very end, the person you least suspect, the one you though was helpless, the one that escaped the vampires at the last second only by the daring heroics of the protagonist, turns out to be the real head vampire and, visible only to the audience, not the main characters, escapes, ensuring fertile ground for a sequel.
No, the IPCC defines those terms carefully. They use everyday language like "very likely" so that their reports can be read and understood by non-statisticians, but they have defined specific confidence intervals for these terms. Details are given in the working group reports but for example "the following likelihood ranges are used to express the assessed probability of occurrence: virtually certain >99%; extremely likely >95%; very likely >90%; likely >66%; more likely than not > 50%; about as likely as not 33% to 66%; unlikely 33%; very unlikely 10%; extremely unlikely 5%; exceptionally unlikely 1%." (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf, p. 27)
Furthermore, probabilities have been assigned to some specific phrases used in the report.
"In this Summary for Policymakers, the following terms have been used to indicate the assessed likelihood, using expert judgement, of an outcome or a result: Virtually certain > 99% probability f occurrence, Extremely likely > 95%, Very likely > 90%, Likely > 66%, More likely than not > 50%, unlikely 33%, Very unlikely 10%, Extremely unlikely 5%."
Summary for Policymakers, A report of Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Fourth Assesment Report.
No. The sun has shown a slight cooling trend over the last 3 decades. Not only is the sun not contributing to global warming, it has had a slight, long term cooling effect.
Determining the long term solar trend
(There are numerous peer reviewed science journal papers referenced in that link.)
To pass it, the alarmist would have to advocate replacing all measures to combat CO2 emissions, with some method of internalization of the environmental costs (possibly with a subsidy to those that remove it from the atmosphere). That means they would advocate:
-No subsidies for specific technologies.
-No efficiency mandates.
-No banning of products on the grounds that they are "inefficient".
-No subsidies for ethanol.
Yeah, that sounds fantastic, except for the whole "internalizing externalities" thing. How exactly are you going to determine what the environmental impact of everything is, convert that into a "cost", and force everyone to pay it every time they do something with such a cost such that economics automatically gives incentives to lower environmental impact?
And remember, you have to do it in such a way that the definition of environmental cost can't be manipulated and skewed to the benefit of some at the expense of others, or it's no better than the techniques you disdain.
Wal-Mart and Tide are becoming more efficient because of the rising price of fuel, and the price of fuel has very little if anything to do with the environmental impact of fossil fuels. If it did, the price would be even higher. But how much higher? Do you know? Does anyone? What should the price of gas be in order to fully internalize the environmental impact so as to make your vision a reality?
While you're figuring that out, over the last 20+ years efficiency and emissions mandates have made a real impact -- ask anyone who lived in LA in the 80s. And subsidies for 'green' energy have caused the amount of energy produced in the U.S. through clean methods to increase much faster than it would have otherwise. I'd argue that those subsidies at least for wind power are no longer necessary, but I also can't deny their effects. On the other hand ethanol in this country is nothing but a cynical gift to the already fat and bloated corn lobby that will hurt more than it helps.
So in theory I agree with you 110%. The ultimate solution is to internalize environmental costs. But until you can turn the buzzword into a practical plan, don't go around saying that anyone who is proposing some other specific method of helping the environment doesn't really care about the environment and is only after power. Some are bad -- ethanol is purely a power/money grab, and carbon credits are a silly idea. Others aren't -- emissions and efficiency standards have a real impact, and subsidies for clean energy help replace dirty energy when it's otherwise not economical to do so. Perfect? No. Practical? Can be. Real? Yes, which is more than I can say for the ideal solution, as great as it is in theory.
The enemies of Democracy are
(Sorry, I wasn't paying attention, this should be further on. I was agreeing with the GP but placed the post wrong. Mod offtopic?)
To pass it, the alarmist would have to advocate replacing all measures to combat CO2 emissions, with some method of internalization of the environmental costs (possibly with a subsidy to those that remove it from the atmosphere
That's simply unrealistic. As far as I am concerned carbon taxes, suitably levied, or cap and trade schemes, are definitely the way to go, so in some sense I agree with you. In the real world, however, idealism isn't going to cut it, and from a pragmatic point of view we should expect to temporarily supplement carbon tax measures with other approaches to get the job done. Yes, the market is a fine thing for finding and maintaining a suitable equilibrium, but it doesn't always get there fast (i.e. markets often take quite some time to adjust as information and adjustments cascade/percolate through the system). If we know the general direction we want things to go and can give the market a nudge in that direction, I don't see that as disasterous. Yes such measures are going to be a little ad hoc and arbitrary, but you shoudl also expect them to be temporary, and a little bit of ad hoc heuristics can often be very useful.
I would judge someone on the overall shape of their approach and the overarching themes that they are driving for, not on their ideological purity, particularly when absolute pruity isn't really that practical. By all means look for people who see carbon taxes or cap and trade as the primary solution, but don't be so silly as to begrudge the odd minor deviations to deal with the practical situation on the ground.
(Note that I am not defending Al Gore here; I don't think he actually meets the requirement of having a strong underlying foundation in carbon tax as the primary solution; rather I am trying to point out that absolute ideological purity is rarely a good way to judge things.)
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. - Genesis 8:22
None of the prophecies in Scripture describe anything like global warming or climate change as a sign of the "end times."
Please, don't assume they're complete idiots.
Please, don't assume they're not complete idiots.
Just look at the ridiculous beyond absurd size of the energy effect they are claiming from the actions of humans equivalent to a variable weighted super powered Michael Phelps swimming out into space toward an incoming mass extinction sized asteroid to avert disaster by altering its course by doing a flip turn off of that asteroid.
Climatology is indeed full of idiots. And it's time the physicists, chemists, economists, geologists, mathematicians, epistemologists, and statisticians published some critical review of climatology research. You will find none of those climatologists are worthy of their PhDs and that they should be stripped of their PhDs in whatever the strict process is in academia for charging colleagues with fraudulent research. Because the reputations of those physicists, chemists, economists, geologists, mathematicians, epistemologists, and statisticians are going to end up being sorely tarnished too by their negligence to vet the models of climatology.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
So, is it because of Global Warming or is it all Dubya's fault?
We have seen many spotless months in the last year. See http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ http://www.solarcycle24.com/ and various parts of the propagation reports and predictions at http://www.arrl.org./
Typical Slashdot- publishing crap without verifying a shred of it.
Ah, just when I thought there wasn't enough grandstanding in slashdot posts, the famous Chris Burke comes along to liven things up!
Yeah, that sounds fantastic, except for the whole "internalizing externalities" thing. How exactly are you going to determine what the environmental impact of everything is, convert that into a "cost", and force everyone to pay it every time they do something with such a cost such that economics automatically gives incentives to lower environmental impact?
Easy:
-Figure the cost to sink CO2 to acceptable levels and/or repair resulting excess damage, then divide by total CO2 emission.
-Assess the cost at the same point you would for any fuel tax.
-Tariff non-compliant contries to caputre the revenue they didn't.
You are correct that there is a lot of room to debate about what the total damage is, and it will change over time as new costs are found, new methods discovered, etc. But that's my whole point! If people were seriously interested in global warming for the sake of preventing catastrophe, that number would be the center of the entire debate. We would be debating how to set this value, not debating a hundred haphazard, inefficient gropes at solving the problem, like incandescent bulb bans.
In any case, it's not necessary to show that this approach is flawless; it just has to be best. Any other proposal will simply be a (poor) approximation of the result of correctly pricing the environmental externality.
Wal-Mart and Tide are becoming more efficient because of the rising price of fuel, and the price of fuel has very little if anything to do with the environmental impact of fossil fuels.
I'm sorry you didn't understand the reason I brought that up. (Next time, maybe divert some of your mind's powers away from thinking up dramatic flourishes and toward understanding someone's argument?) My point there was that as fuel prices go up -- whether because of tax or higher demand -- everyone all the way up the production chain searches for the next-easiest way to cut back, meaning they happen before the end user ("consumer") has to make any conscious decision to cut back.
By centering so many proposals around dictating consumer decisions and hopelessly trying to inform consumers and giving incandescent bulb buyers mean stares, alarmists are missing out on a huge realm of easy, untapped opportunities to cut back. Whether through stupidity or malice, that signals to me they are more interested in micromanaging people's lives than in actually finding the best way to cut back or cancel emissions.
While you're figuring that out, over the last 20+ years efficiency and emissions mandates have made a real impact -- ask anyone who lived in LA in the 80s. And subsidies for 'green' energy have caused the amount of energy produced in the U.S. through clean methods to increase much faster than it would have otherwise.
Fasters than doing nothing, sure. Faster than simply internalizing the costs of fossil fuels? Pure assertion on your part. Like with the examples I gave above, internalizing the costs leads to a search through the entire space of possible reductions, while subsidizing specific measures only searches a narrow part of that space. (And no, even I accept that only government can provide enough funds for more efficiency, that still doesn't help. See below.)
So in theory I agree with you 110%. The ultimate solution is to internalize environmental costs. But until you can turn the buzzword into a practical plan, don't go around saying that anyone who is proposing some other specific method of helping the environment doesn't really care about the environment and is only after power.
No, it's entirely reasonable to expect people trying to fix a major problem to determine if ... er, what they're doing actually fixes the problem, and the utter failure to transform tha
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I would argue that the most 'obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem' is to stop breeding. Plenty of side benefits, too!
Try several planets in the neighborhood.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_jr.html
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1998/triton.html
What I want to know is when AGW is proven as false as eugenics will people involved be properly disgraced as they should be? Al Gore? Somehow I doubt it. It will all be forgotten as if it never happened. I am sure they feel justified fighting evil consumption with scare tactics if that's what it takes to finally stop the capitalist juggernaut.
You are quite right, and the reality is that since the global warming has been proven beyond reasonable doubt under current scientific knowledge the proof should be accepted and acted upon. One cannot assume that past theory is any better than current theory, or that future proven theory will be significantly different from current theory. Therefore it is important to acknowledge current facts, research more and find alternative explanations (if any) to the phenomenon.
It is matter of opinion whether current global warming theory is the "truth" that counters the common belief or is the current global warming theory the common belief that should be rethought. For me personally the common belief was/is that humans are not capable in changing the atmosphere dramatically and global warming theory actually shows that human activity has significant impact on our atmosphere.
because "if the entire east coast.." doesn't sound like a prophesy to me. It sounds like, oh, I dunno, an EXAMPLE.
But I suppose your sky fairy fantasy is being attacked in your mind.
I may have missed a few, but this is the first post that mentioned that sunspots are associated with higher solar output. I expected more like this.
Perhaps for now, but prom season is coming up.
The only thing that would matter to the health of our planet now..
Is forests. Plant cover. Soil. Fertile topsoil that is produced by plants only, and held in place by them only. Mires, functioning wetland ecosystems.
We need to reseed as much forests as we can, and stop using the remaining ones. Thats the quickest way to slow the changes in climate.
When we are doing that, we need to trash the system of perpetual "economic growth". Thats the Ponzi scheme thats been going on for quite some while - while there have always existed an elite class of rulers, who have played games of Conquer and Divide. Empires have risen and fallen.
A) There is no evidence to suggest that invisible space goats even exist, except for your written reference to them. There is sufficient evidence that humans exist.
B) There is no evidence that hypothetical invisible space goats have belly button lint. There are measurements of how much greenhouse pollution human activity generates.
C) There is no evidence that belly button lint from an invisible space goat should affect our climate. There is sufficient evidence that greenhouse pollution is indeed greenhouse pollution, and the amount added to our atmosphere is (more than*) enough to cause the global warming that we are measuring.
*It is widely believed but rarely reported that global warming over the past century had been dampened significantly by an opposing global dimming effect caused by particulate pollution.
There is no such thing as proof in the sense you probably mean, but in this case, there is far more evidence on the side of human activity causing global warming than there is for belly button lint of invisible space goats causing global warming.
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
global warming was about creating a carbon trading market so TPTB could offload the subprime bubble. Come on sapiens, you can do it, THINK! Something's coming fast
No, that is NOT true. We have gobs of evidence the water will rise. In fact it is rising.
There is on evidence a god exists.
Of course, if this women has evidence there is a god, then that would changed thing. Thousands of years with no evidence, some how I doubt she has something new.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
144,000 disappear.
"You non-christians are left to fend for yourselves. "
I wish.
Also it is mentioned happening at three different times. Each counterdicting the other.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It has been proven to be man made. repeatedly.
Wake the fuck up.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You are completely wrong.
There is ample evidence that global warming is being impacted by CO2 emissions.
The agreement on global warming is done through repeated testing and observation. If some EVIDENCE comes out finding another source, then that's just great. But there hasn't been.
I've read too many actually scientific papers and talked to far too many people who specialize in climatology.
Sorry, We are causing global warming.
When the talk about global temperatures there are talking about the difference between the high and the low. That difference changes much slower then the temperature of any given day.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And do you knwo why that is?
Because the Chinese wouldn't sigh off on it until they changed certain to very likely.
Now China will be hurt the most by making changes to stop global warming, and the best the could do is get it down graded to very likely speaks volumes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, the biggest things we can do is begin moving to Solar Thermal, and begin incentives for more electric cars.
Solar thermal can power the country easily and cheaply. The cost to build them and change the grid is nothing compared to the cost of burning coal and CO2 auto emissions.
I love gas cars, big muscle cars and the feeling the engine as I accelerate. Its time for that to end.
As far as to pay for it. give the energy companies a tax break. Hell, I'd pay a 50 cents a gallon gas tax is it was going to build solar thermal plants.
"Why don't you guys just admitt that you are using the "global climate change" as a tool to push socialism/communism. "
Because it's not.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's no malice on the part of one willing to wreck the world economy to fight global warming and starving millions of people to do it??
"-No efficiency mandates."
Yeah, the power company would like that. Using there local monopoly to produce dirty electricity and passing the costs(as well as the dirt) to the consumer who won't have a choice.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So was it the only 31-day (for the sake of argument) period that was spotless during all those years or was it the only such period that lined up with the idea of time that we call month?
Oh, and of course I didn't RTFA.
Wow. I'm glad I'm not a Christian anymore.
if ratpure wipes out all Christians, where is the disadvantage?
(sarcasm) A US govt without Christians might have been a good thing. Perhaps rapture will solve the rest of the world's problems. (/sarcasm)
Did you actually read the article, including clarification at the end?
""it is clear that the NSIDC graph is correct, and that 2008 Arctic ice is barely 10% above last year - just as NSIDC had stated.""
So the register did an article to refute the NSIDC, then at the end said they were correct.
And quoting the register? seriously? It's horrible with it's data 'interpretation'
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"How strange is it that they think that the largest source of heat"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation
before mentioning the 'largest source of heat' perhaps you should read up on solar variation, or perhaps on the fact that in the past 11 years there has been not even a single watt per sqft change in the energy level of sunlight reaching the outer atmosphere, despite a constant increase in temperature, and a constant increase in carbon dioxide.
yeah, the sun is the big bad boy in charge of producing all 89,000 terrawatts of energy that hit the surface of the earth each second (almost 4 times as much reaches the outer atmosphere, and no i'm not counting the stuff that passes by the earth, only the part of the outer atmosphere that is directly above and the same exact size of half the surface of the earth). According to the Inverse Square law the diffusion of radiation is geometrically related to distance traveled. For example, the intensity of radiation from the Sun is 9140 watts per square meter at the distance of Mercury (0.387AU); but only 1370 watts per square meter at the distance of Earth (1AU)--a threefold increase in distance results in a ninefold decrease in intensity of radiation. because of this, even if the energy from the sun varies by 0.2% the amount that actually reaches the earth is way less. because the earth only receives 1/2,000,000,000 th of the total energy radiated by the sun, or 0.00000005% of the solar radiation, so all increases in solar radiation are automatically divided by 2 billion. the sun would have to increase total output by 2 billion watts to increase the energy the earth receives by a single watt.
so no, the big fusion generator in the sky has almost nothing to do with warming, the biggest single variant in the whole global warming equation is floating between the earth and the sun, we call them 'clouds.' green house gases are very important, but clouds are the single biggest factor, the second factor is the elliptical orbit of the earth, the third is the tilt of the earth on a regional basis.
greenhouse gases ultimately could be countered with a high orbit, roll of very thin highly reflective foil, that would have to be replaced every 30 years or so. or a giant, anchored floating roll of aluminum foil could be put in the oceans, and replaced as often as needed.
a computer model would have to be made to decide where to put either, to favorably shift weather patterns, if only it was global warming that was the only problem. no, human actions are having huge problems besides global warming. el nino, la nina, whatever, the worlds weather patterns normally shift very slowly, affected by very few large scale variables. human intervention has cause a huge shift in where clouds form, how long they float, the size of water droplets, everything about modern clouds are vastly different from the way clouds were, where the only debris that got into the atmosphere was dust from natural fires, and the occasional spew from volcanoes.
massive massive seams of coal being burnt, massive emissions from combustion of petrochemicals, these are changing the type and amount of particulate available to take water vapor from evaporation and bind it into clouds.
the good news is if we switched to clean burning methane hydrates, there would be less particulate, and thus we'd only have global warming from CO2 to worry about. there are more methane hydrates in the worlds permafrost and underneath oceans than there ever were deposits of coal, oil and natural gas ever. by orders of magnitude...
although if methane hydrates become the 'cheap' energy of the future, then civilization still hasn't reached true sustainability. they've just shifted when and where society really faces a future of real renewable energy.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
There's some cheap land next to me, here in central Georgia (the one that wasn't attacked by Russia), that would make nice beachfront property...
Impetuous! Homeric!
What planet are you on? We currently have a vigorous debate on the national policy level --- coinciding with a Presidential election --- that focuses entirely on the sort of cap and trade plans you discuss. There may be some nutbags out there, but all of the serious debate is on exactly the issue you mention.
If you're looking to make a difference here, get informed: both candidates are proposing a cap and trade system. The major difference is whether the permits will be auctioned or just given away. There also appears to be some doubt on the Republican side as to whether the cap will actually be "mandatory". I'll leave it to you to decide how the heck it would possibly work without being mandatory, but whatever...
Begs the question: How many of 'em were available in 1913?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I'm on the planet of the people-who-read-a-post-before-they-respond. Come join us!
Let's try this one more time, but slower:
I accept that the obvious, best solutions (cap-and-trade, carbon tax) have entered the national dialog (against protests from the very people I'm criticizing, but whatever).
I do not accept that the obvious, best solutions have entered the national dialog to the exclusion of the other, more wasteful ideas that seem to have more to do with controlling people than with seriously heading off a potential catastrophe.
See the difference?
See why citing the existence of people who want cap-and-trade on top of the mountains of stupid, intrusive policies ... doesn't refute anything I said?
See why you look like the ignorant one when you claim that all of the serious debate is on C&T, as opposed to ethanol subsidies and CAFE standards and government funding of renewables research and solar cell/hybrid tax credits...?
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Apparently he likes the NYTimes and CNN. Of course reading and listening to those guys can make ya a little loopy.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Ah, just when I thought there wasn't enough grandstanding in slashdot posts, the famous Chris Burke comes along to liven things up!
Wow, that's the most retarded self-righteous douche-bag thing I've heard on /. since "anyone who doesn't advocate my idea -- and only my idea -- doesn't really care about the environment." What this quote even mean, and what the fuck is wrong with you?
-Figure the cost to sink CO2 to acceptable levels and/or repair resulting excess damage, then divide by total CO2 emission.
Using what method? And is all you care about CO2? Because there's a lot more externalities that need to be accounted for that are harder to measure than simple stoichiometry for fuel burning. Focusing only on CO2 makes it much easier to shift the cost to other areas that you aren't considering.
I'm sorry you didn't understand the reason I brought that up. (Next time, maybe divert some of your mind's powers away from thinking up dramatic flourishes and toward understanding someone's argument?) My point there was that as fuel prices go up -- whether because of tax or higher demand -- everyone all the way up the production chain searches for the next-easiest way to cut back, meaning they happen before the end user ("consumer") has to make any conscious decision to cut back.
Wow, so you make the most trivial and banal observation in all of economics. Profit-minded businesses try to reduce costs and increase efficiency. And that solves everything, eh? I am so enlightened. Meanwhile, you completely ignore my point which was the question: How much should gas actually cost? How are you going to internalize the actual environmental cost of the gas? You realize that there's more to fuel oil than CO2, and that the other "externalities" depend on the type of car, ship, plane, power station which is using them, right? How are you going to define this such that it is accurate and fair and free of politics, and thus better than the options? Flourish my ass, you're the one with empty platitudes.
Fasters than doing nothing, sure. Faster than simply internalizing the costs of fossil fuels? Pure assertion on your part.
You mean pure strawman on your part, since I never said that. But your whole premise requires that you assume your "internalization" will produce faster results. How, when people are willing to pay more for status symbols, is image-is-all LA going to get better as fast with your purely economic solution than a California mandate for lower emission vehicles?
Even if I assume that it would be faster just to make you happy, my point was that emission standards worked. So say whatever you want about what is ideal, people advocating standards had a practical solution that resulted in a cleaner environment. And you have the chutzpah, the unrestrained balls to imply they weren't really concerned with the environment?
No, it's entirely reasonable to expect people trying to fix a major problem to determine if ... er, what they're doing actually fixes the problem, and the utter failure to transform that ideal solution (basically handed to them by economists) into a practical plan does say something about where their priorities lie.
Whatever. I haven't heard a single thing from you about how this eternal problem of economics is going to be magically solved such that every environmental costs. You aren't discussing at all the practical ramifications and difficulties of your suggestion. You know what real environmentalists care about? Real solutions. Yours is a pipe dream. You might be able to make it into something real, if you really really tried, but in the meantime, questioning the motives of those who propose and implement real solutions, however sub-optimal, is complete bullshit.
Like I said, your idea is great, the optimal solution. It is also difficult to implement, and you ignore both engineering and political obstacles
The enemies of Democracy are
The rapture is an idea that came up in the 1800s so it's not like Christians have been predicting it for centuries.
- Peace
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
Save your brain cells, don't respond to Burke.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Thanks. I thought that the term AIDS came about after the discovery of HIV.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
And what statistical foundation is there for these percentages? What is the null hypothesis? How do these numbers work? Say in 100 years its on average 2 degress (F or C) warmer, does that mean there is a 95% chance it was our fault. Or is it more like the 95% chance of rain in a given area we see in forecasts. That is, no rain does not mean there wasn't a chance that it could have rained, therefore the forecast was still correct.
/. when the report came out. Also the IPCC report put to much emphasis on natural warming according to ./
These terms just look less vague that ones I used and have about as much statistical backing. I have read the report (well not all of it), these are more or less political estimates, that ironically got hammered here on
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Everybody knows it's full of spots on the back side.
Claiming to be pedantic on Slashdot is asking for trouble
What good does it do to talk about this? The sheeple can not infer the truth, so nothing will change for the better as a result of explaining why things ain't so swell. I think the better answer is to try to find one simple issue that even the sheep can get behind - the ones I have considered are ending the participation of lawyers in the legislature, breaking up the United State into 7 smaller countries, and ending the use of voting machines. Anybody else have any big simple ideas?
Social Credit would solve everything...
You say "greenhouse pollution" - I say "plant food".
it's in my head
So if the Sun is female, maybe she's pregnant?
> uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
No it doesn't. It states definitely and unambiguously (at least in the summary): "...have increased markedly...".
So the summary is at best misleading, if the rest of the report uses phrases like that.
It's a very interesting report. I'm not saying that from having read it in full, but I looked at the Summary For Policy Makers, specifically "Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750" (because that's all that any policy maker who trusts the IPCC will do), and the References; disregarding all IPCC references as this paper is presented as new information not a rehash of old, of which the only fact-based source (as opposed to other IPCC docs and administrative stuff like glossaries and unit definitions) is Heim, R.R., 2002: A Review of Twentieth-Century Drought Indices Used in the United States.
So there's no data covering 60% of the Summary time period mentioned (i.e. no data for 1750-1900), and the only data is about US-only droughts from 1900 to 2000. Actually on second thoughts that's not necessarily data, just a review of the drought indices (whatever they are), which might mean it doesn't talk about drought data at all.
Even taking into account the IPCC references I couldn't find any actual facts.
So from potentially no facts at all, they conclude that carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750? How does that work then? If there are actual facts, why aren't they listed in the References, and why didn't any of about 594 reviewers (18 names in the first column, 3 columns, 11 pages) spot this? It's true that I'm not a trained scientist (mine was an engineering degree) so maybe there's something lacking in my reviewing technique, maybe scientific docs don't list references in the References section or something.
Perhaps I should have read the whole thing. But if someone asks you if their C code is standards compliant, and presents you with 100,000,000 lines of code that start with "void main", then you already know after only 9 bytes that the answer is "no".
There's a very interesting documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle. If you're interested, grab the torrent and have a look. The most memorable comment in this for me was "1. the simplicity of the [anthropogenic warming] argument and 2. the complete disregard of all climate science up to that point".
"Several hundred scientific contributors and co-authors". Hmm. Annex 2, 13 names in the first column, 3 columns, 13 pages plus 1 column. The next chapter lists the reviewers. So that's about 520 contributors, NOT counting reviewers. It would be interesting to know what individual contributions were, perhaps if we take half a dozen each, we could collectively email them all and ask them politely how they contributed and what their backgrounds are?
The global absolute mean is difficult to calculate, since it requires all equipment and readings to be calibrated globally. That's why climate scientists tend to calculate the relative changes at whatever geographical point they're sampling. The sequences of relative changes can then be combined to produce statistically accurate portraits of the global change (relative change, not absolute values). The absolute value of the global mean doesn't really tell us anything, as we are concerned with regional variations.
Irrefutable proofs are for mathematics. In the real world, we know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and the model of how we expect increased levels of it to behave with respect to temperature matches observations from the real world. If you have a model that better matches the data, then go ahead and get it published.
Climate scientists are well aware that the sun contributes to Earth's climate. However, it is only one factor, and greenhouse gases provide a more accurate model of recent and historical temperature trends.
"The Sun's energy output has not increased since direct measurements began in 1978."
"According to solar physicists, the sun emitted a third less energy about 4 billion years ago and has been steadily brightening ever since. Yet for most of this time, Earth has been even warmer than today, a phenomenon sometimes called the faint sun paradox. The reason: higher levels of greenhouse gases trapping more of the sun's heat."
If you have a model that better matches the data, then go ahead and get it published.
Thats the problem. With all the guesstimates in the current models its easy to get what you want out of them and still fit the *historic* data. There is little sensitivity analysis being done and I have some strong criticism of the ones that are.
Oh by the way I am well aware of the current literature on this, but i find the question of "how do you calculate the global temperature" is a good starting point for people to dig deeper. Historic climate prediction is the next question that I think far to many people ignore. My problem with the global warming debate is not that someone disagrees with me but that hardly a soul will look past popular media to get "facts".
Incidentally I don't dispute that we *could* be causing even a strong effect on the climate. But I do dispute that the current models hold even a iota of accuracy for long term predications with the "claimed" confidence. I worked with some of these people and I have worked on similar models. I just wish they would be more honest on what we don't know.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Just one remark:
The several hundred scientists who contributed have not all signed on to the overall conclusions of the report.
If you ask the IPCC who actually signed on to the conclusions and who didn't, you'll find out that this data is not given out to the public.
In mainstream media, journalists always seem to assume that all scientists who contributed to the report also supported the overall conclusions of the report. This is not the case.
Aw, don't be mad at me just because I pointed out that your useless fantasy isn't an appropriate reason to question the motives of others. It's not my fault that some people live in reality. *hug*
The enemies of Democracy are
Ok, I know this is a day old, but I can't let this pass:
"The agreement on global warming is done through repeated testing and observation."
What.The.Fuck are you talking about? "Testing" involves setting up an experiment, with controls, running the experiment, and seeing if the results agree with the theory. So...
1) What experiment was conducted where a massive amount of carbon dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere in a precise manner?
2) What other atmosphere was used as the control?
3) Did the experiment run for the 300 odd years required to verify the hypothesis?
Oh, and finally, you mentioned "repeated" HOW MANY times has a lot of CO2 been introduced into the atmosphere, the effects observed, the gas WITHDRAWN from the atmosphere, and then repeated?
The main problem with Global Warming theories is that they CAN'T be tested in any meaningful way. So data is gathered, mostly from proxies, and models are developed from that, and if they get EVERYTHING right, it will describe the current and future climactic conditions. That is NOT an experiment; it's more like accident reconstruction.
You are ascribing a level of certainty that even the most diehard REAL climatologist would not claim.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
> uses phrases like "very high confidence" and "very likely".
No it doesn't. It states definitely and unambiguously (at least in the summary): "...have increased markedly...".
I guess you are quoting from page 5. On that same page you will also find, for example, "There is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming." (Italics in the original) So yes, the Summary for Policymakers contains that sort of language.
Regarding the availability of supporting facts and data, remember that when you are reading the Summary for Policymakers, you're just reading a summary. It's like reading the abstract of a journal article: you don't read an abstract and think, these guys have no data, you go on to read the paper if you want the details. Or to follow up on the code analogy, if all you look at are the use cases, you shouldn't be surprised if what you read doesn't compile. The SPM is a summary for politicians who don't want all of the data. If you want all of the data and the reasoning, you can go beyond the Summary to read the working group reports. The working group reports do include complete references in exactly the form that you are expecting; the references include refereed journals and other reputable sources.
The appendices of the synthesis report and the working group reports list the authors, contributors, and reviewers, with their nationalities and organizational affiliations. Authors, contributors, and reviewers are also named at the beginnings of the chapters of the working group reports. So it's easy to at least see who contributed to what parts of the reports.
In my aforementioned Philosophy of Science course my final paper was a study of the parallels between the development of the disease model of syphilis and that of AIDS. And the parallels were striking.
People often forget that, for many years, scientists had no freakin' clue what was causing it, so for a while the viral theory and the "breakdown from systematic abuse" theory were equally valid. And the funny thing is, from a public health point of view, the second model would have probably worked better. But the viral model won out, mainly because it fit the data better.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"When resounding current evidence supports a theory that something in particular is causing a disease (or problem)- we naturally tend to act preemptively."
Sure about that? Lets take AIDS in Africa. The main cause of the massive spread of HIV in some countries is the habit of truck drivers to frequent prostitutes - a lot of them - while on the road. They catch the virus, and then give it to their wives.
Now, the simplest way to stop this would be to convince African men to stop sticking their dicks into everything with 2 legs while on the road. Instead, the action has been AFTER the fact - what do we do now that everyone is infected?
As for your statement of the precautionary Principle, it took me a while to realize you were advocating action on global warming. You are applying that statement to a LACK of action or policy, which doesn't fit the way you want it to.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
"You are quite right, and the reality is that since the global warming has been proven beyond reasonable doubt under current scientific knowledge the proof should be accepted and acted upon."
Assuming arguendo your premise is correct, lets turn to the resultant - "and acted upon." Really? "Acted upon" how? The basic argument seems to be of the form:
"You are doing X, and X is causing Y. Y is bad, so stop doing X."
If we stop doing X, will Y really be reversed?
Is Y even really bad?
Stopping X will also cause Z - shouldn't that be taken into account?
Proponents of action on Global Warming are taking a scientific position, which is *descriptive*, and translating it directly into policy, which is *prescriptive*. But if people argue with the policy, the proponents fall back on the scientific conclusions, and then say "Isn't it OBVIOUS what the policy should be? The science is clear!" But there are so many other interests wrapped up in policymaking that no one believes that the proponents of policies on global warming are only thinking of "the good of the planet".
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You conspiracy nuts are a real sweet bunch.
We had 3.3% (annual rate) growth last quarter. After 9/11, two wars, Katrina, subprime meltdown, housing slump, and rising petroleum prices that's better than Jimmy Carter could have done!
The obvious, least economically damaging, least intrusive way to handle the problem is to simply internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off, either by tradeable caps or a tax ... But the most vocal alarms don't want this. Instead, they propose a laundry list of intrusive interventions.
Now, we basically agree that even if these "vocal alarm[ists]" (whoever they may be) don't want this, they clearly aren't vocal enough to stop both major political parties from proposing a C&T plan. And yet, clearly these dastardly miscreants hate C&T, so who are they?
Well, they're probably not the Ethanol lobby, who would benefit (at least marginally) from Cap & Trade, insomuch as they can claim something approaching carbon neutrality. They're not the CAFE people (whoever they are), because internalizing carbon costs would certainly make it politically easier to pass higher mileage standards. And they're not the solar cell people, who would also receive an implicit subsidy from C&T. I can't believe that any of these people would find opposition to C&T to be in their interest.
In fact, about the only group I can see really opposing C&T would be fossil fuels, industry, and the (clean) coal folks, since they don't currently have much in the way of carbon capture. And, not surprisingly, that seems to be the way it's going. Sadly these people seem to have gotten hold of John McCain's ear and he's now going around giving speeches about how the mandatory cap won't really be enforced.
So, having raised the specter of these people. Tell me, who are they? How are they opposing C&T? How does your original post --- where you clearly state that they don't want it --- make sense with reference to these people? Perhaps you've changed your argument since the first post, and I respect that. But you should be clear about how your argument has changed before you yell at people for not reading your posts.
Oh geez.
Here's what you missed:
The obvious ... way to handle the problem is to SIMPLY internalize the costs that CO2 emissions throw off ... But the most vocal alarm[ist]s don't want this.
See the difference?
Virtually every alarmist that I'm aware of does not want to "simply" internalize the costs that fossil fuels throw off, that is, do *only* that. (And yes, lots of other context should have made that clear.) Sure, they might want to slap it on, just as icing on the cake, a way to satisfy their sense of justice, but they do not make it anywhere close to their _only_ proposal, the *focus* of their approach.
So, basically, you've been attacking a strawman this whole time while not being aware of even the existence of my real criticism. Almost to the last one, the alarmists *do not want* an economically efficient proposal, *especially* the most economically efficient one, or they would propose this (internalization of costs, period). If they ever do bother to actually figure out a hard, quantifiable value for the fossil fuel externality, it's kind of a footnote that never makes it into the national debate, and never gets seriously vetted, so they tag on all kinds of dubious assumptions that make it unrealistically high.
Because, you know, the purpose of alarmism was *never* to solve an oncoming catastrophe, but to have power over others or something similar to that.
BUT BEFORE YOU ROLL YOUR EYES AT ME, let me try to dispel your contempt. As an intellecutally honest, reasonable individual who has a clue, I absolutely, 100%, do not consider this "psychoanalysis" of alarmists as reason for inaction. I feel obligated to treat all positions as if they were presented as competently as possible (for purposes of determining policy). If the science is right, it's right. The evil intent of the folks who swiped up AGW as their latest, hippest rationalization for policies they'd want anyway does not take away from the validity of the science.
And I have been fighting "on your side" (though I dislike framing the situation that way) in libertarian circles. As a longtime libertarian, I have been absolutely apalled at the refusal of hardcore libertarians to recognize the need for and legitmacy of well-defined rights in the atmosphere, a resource becoming scarce, so that the market can incorporate the price of the CO2's damage and thereby include it in its (very powerful) mechanism for maximizing efficiency given constraints. (Guess who I am on this thread. Hint: I said I was appalled.)
So I do agree with the need for action, but just as strongly, I believe it needs to meet these constraints:
1) It must work: meaning everybody must be on board, or we slurp enough money from non-compliers to make up for their mess.
2) It must be minimally intrusive: meaning send the market the right signal for the cost of CO2 emission, and otherwise not tell people what to do.
3) It must be minimally corrupt: meaning include rotating auditors, rewards for whistleblowing, refunding of all excess revenues to citizens, etc so that such a program is not bent to favor one group of people.
If you can't meet those, I guarantee the cure will be worse than the disease.
But back to the original topic: do you know of any alarmist who doesn't meet my characterization? I doubt it.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
...where too much is still not enough.
--
Nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to in hope.
The Soviets and the Chinese managed to starve millions of people just with central planning alone. They weren't even worried about pollution. Imagine the combination of the two.
I don't have a newsletter, but I do have a ranch in the boonies. If you turn over all of your worldly possessions to the common good of my commune, you can live with us in peace and harmony. I know that seems like a high price to you right now, but remember, the massive inflation that we're likely to experience will surely render everything you own near worthless in the near future. However, my divine status will ensure your safety in the soon-to-come apocalypse. Oh, but on your way here, could you pick up about 10,000 packets of cool-aid and some rat poison. Thx.
1) I'm not a climate scientist.
2) This isn't a scientific forum.
3) The parent's comment was completely missing the point (no one was 'asking' anyone to prove anything). After all, the anonymous coward he was replying to put 'prove' in quotation marks, suggesting the irony of using this one piece of data to discredit global warming.
4) My point was, which side is following the scientific process? From what I've seen, global warming skeptics are mostly engaged in a media campaign for lay people. They are rarely publishing in scientific journals. Why not? Because of some imagined liberal conspiracy?
Neither the 'believers' nor the 'skeptics' seem particularly credible. I don't care what you, personally, believe. I think policy should have a foundation in science. Instead, we have leaders listening to people like Michael Crichton.
Oh, and you're obviously not a hick - you use such fancy words:
Nice variables, weightings, and models (whether linearly "crude" or non linearly complex), showing the respective effect on the output average Earth temperature in your post.
I guess it's not possible to argue with a person who thinks world is black and white, is there someone asking to stop CO2 emissions? Current evidence just shows we are pushing the limits on CO2 tolerance of the earth, reducing those emissions to more manageable levels will buy years of time to study the consequences of X, Y, Z factors. Not reducing CO2 emissions according to current theory is just not viable option and will cause serious problems. In case the reduction of CO2 emissions starts to tip the scales to some unexpected direction it is much easier to resume the CO2 pollution than take pollution out from the atmosphere.
Don't get me wrong, reduction of CO2 is not all that needs to be done, but that is a good start. Overall small particle pollution needs to be cut down as well. Conservation of water needs to happen and so forth. Following your example I could create this:
We are consuming WATER, and consuming WATER is causing FAMINE. FAMINE is bad, so stop consuming WATER. If we stop consuming WATER, will FAMINE really be reversed? Is FAMINE even really bad? Stopping consuming WATER will also cause LOWER LIVING STANDARD - shouldn't that be taken into account?
Anything out there can be put into this form, naturally FAMINE is not bad in terms of population control, loss of LIVING STANDARD may be worse personally in case you are not the one impacted with FAMINE. For me these scenarios are just not acceptable, I believe in moderation early on, especially since we can foresee the future so clearly.
Neither the 'believers' nor the 'skeptics' seem particularly credible. I don't care what you, personally, believe. I think policy should have a foundation in science.
As once again evidenced by your nice variables, weightings, and models (whether linearly "crude" or non linearly complex), showing the respective effect on the output average Earth temperature in your post.
They are rarely publishing in scientific journals. Why not? Because of some imagined liberal conspiracy?
Maybe just because you suck.
What's funny is there are thousands of threads and millions of posts with no such "science", most especially from the "believers". But keep barking loudly about your hick opponents.
Oh, and you're obviously not a hick - you use such fancy words:
Like, STFU Dumbass.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
Neither the 'believers' nor the 'skeptics' seem particularly credible. I don't care what you, personally, believe. I think policy should have a foundation in science.
As once again evidenced by your nice variables, weightings, and models (whether linearly "crude" or non linearly complex), showing the respective effect on the output average Earth temperature in your post.
They are rarely publishing in scientific journals. Why not? Because of some imagined liberal conspiracy?
Maybe just because you suck.
What's funny is there are thousands of threads and millions of posts with no such "science", most especially from the "believers". But keep barking loudly about your hick opponents.
Oh, and you're obviously not a hick - you use such fancy words:
Like, STFU Dumbass.
I win!