The fact that Morgenthau was writing what he did 7 years into the New Deal is evidence enough for me... but it is hardly the only evidence that exists.
Do you really expect me to supply an analysis of Depression-era economics here on Slashdot?
But since you asked, here are a couple of sources:
"But after the Gold Clause Ban and the devaluation, everything else FDR did just screwed up the market and kept the recovery from accelerating."
Not to mention the chaos that has ensued since, with American essentially running on fiat money. And especially after Nixon got rid of the last vestiges of it in 1971.
"What actually happened was a dramatic decrease in government spending accompanied by a huge expansion of the private sector."
The "mainstream" economists of the day, whom we would call "Keynesians" today, predicted disaster after the war. According to their beloved "scientific" Philips Curve, there was no way in hell the economy could absorb all the unemployed troops returning home. They predicted a big crash.
As history clearly shows, however, exactly the opposite is true. The years immediately after WWII were some of the most productive years in the history of the United States.
When people say "economists said", they are usually referring to mainstream economists or followers of Keynes. However, there were (and still are) other economic schools, among them the Austrians, who correctly predicted an economic boom.
Quoting FDR in regard to national recovery has to be some kind of joke. FDR helped to prolong the Great Depression. There is literally no evidence that anything he did helped to bring us out of it, and a great deal of evidence to the contrary.
FDR's own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, believed FDR's fiscal policy to be completely insane, and FDR himself to be a complete loon. (And the economic numbers tend to back him up.)
From Morgenthau's diary, in the seventh year of FDR's "New Deal" program (May 1939):
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and now if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosper. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And enormous debt to boot."
Note this is by the Treasury Secretary himself, not (no surprise) some socialist journalist or armchair economist of the day.
Government spending does not solve economic recessions or depressions. It never has, and it never will.
"but most license restrictions have regularly been upheld in court."
I wonder why, because as I stated above (and which is true), such restrictions are disallowed for every other kind of product in existence... as long as it is purchased retail.
"If it says somewhere "sale requires that you accept the license terms" then it isn't sold until you accept the license terms, which means on the other hand that you can ask for your money back if you don't agree (not agreeing means there was no sale yet, so you have no right to copy the software)."
No, the courts have held (for every other kind of product, INCLUDING BOOKS, though perhaps not software) that any such "agreement" is invalid. You purchased the product and the supplier has no further say over the matter. The item is yours and you can do what you want with it... except copying and selling, of course, which is a violation of a different law.
"And yes, I know that publishers claim that they license a right to use software instead of selling that right."
There was a recent court ruling that the First Sale Doctrine applies to software as well.
And the courts in general have long held that if you walk into a retail outlet and plunk down your money, you have BOUGHT the product, not licensed it, regardless of any written restrictions that are on or in the product.
A lot of people are not aware of this, but restrictions on the after-purchase use of products has been tried for just about everything under the sun, including hammers and shovels. Courts have consistently held that the manufacturer or supplier has no right to restrict the use of a product after it is purchased. Zero. Even if it is on the front of the package in bold print.
"And then they cripple it by making it depend on iTunes, a program that has arguably one of the worst interfaces in the history of GUIs, with several past versions appearing in bad UI galleries of the time."
Haha. Yep.
Although you have to admit that Apple painted themselves into a corner on that one: iTunes was the only available interface between Apple products and Windows. So everything that happened had to go through iTunes.
Don't misunderstand: I'm not saying it was justified or even very smart to do that. And although I use Apples, iTunes is one of my least favorite applications of all time. It tries to do far too much and only does a little of it well.
I also have a big beef with their App Store (the Mac app store, not iOS). If I were Apple, I would be utterly embarrassed by that application. It is excruciatingly slow, and the interface sucks. You can't even sort the applications, for Grid's sake! You can sort by category, "bestsellers" and date only. And that's really, really lame for something that contains tens of thousands of applications.
How is that relevant to the subject? Those were "locked" black boxes and Toyota wasn't giving that data to police or governments or anybody else.
You do have a point, sort of. It is certainly possible for manufacturers to put unreadable devices in the cars. But that isn't a matter of "proprietary format". That's a matter of outright encryption and secrecy. Two different things.
"We weren't eager to take in all those Jews, gays, mentally ill people, and political trouble makers."
Ah... you mean like Freemasons and others who were none of the above, but who were also sent to concentration camps? There were quite a few different groups that were on the Nazi Shit List, and your membership in a casual social club could put you there.
But all that is still beside the point. They were supplying material aid to an enemy in a time of declared war. That's an important little tidbit that people have often glossed over.
"I assume the extent of your historical researches consist of a quick perusal of Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust..."
You assume incorrectly. I never read anything by Black.
"IBM also made M1 Carbines for the US forces during WWII."
They did lots of things. And I never claimed none of them were good. They made some damned nice computers too. My statement was that they are not a "particular friend of the United States." None of this contradicts what I wrote.
"I don't know what "back radiation" is. Never heard of it. I have only spoken about "blackbody radiation". Note the word 'black' used by me vs 'back' used by yourself."
I am aware of the difference, and I admitted to you that my response became confused between two threads. There is no misunderstanding on my part here.
That is why I mentioned a link where you could find the explanation.
"IRC, one of the big issues with the existing black boxes is that they are in a format only the OEM can read."
This is hardly a real-world problem. Consumer devices for reading the data and settings in a vehicle's computer(s) tend to come out less than a year after the new models hit the streets.
IBM has never been a particular friend of America, at least as far back as the time it provided the Nazis with computational equipment to keep track of their concentration camps.
(And no, before you start calling bullshit, that is not controversial at all. It *IS* a matter of historical record. There are even documents that prove Watson himself knew what was going on.)
Why should we expect a company that started out with a "profit above all else" attitude to have changed?
"I have no idea who Spensor is or what he said or why that is relevent to any statements I have made. I have no idea what cold object is getting a warm object warmer. It certainly has nothing to do with what I am asserting. It all sounds like crackpot drivel to me worthy of being ignored."
I do apologize. It was late, I have been very busy, and a couple of different threads got confused.
However, this comment is relevant to the issue:
"The atmosphere of our planet randomly reflects some of this energy bouncing off or (blackbody) emitted by the earth that would otherwise be lost directly to space. Atoms that make up the atmosphere dictate the characteristics of this reflection behavior. The aggregate result of the reflections is that more energy is stored in the earth than would otherwise be."
Reflections, fine. But "back radiation", no. In brief (I have no time to go into detail today), many of the AGW warming models rely on the concept that clouds etc. "back radiate" some of the absorbed heat, which is in turn absorbed again by the earth. However, this is a flawed model: physics tells us that a cloud that has absorbed radiation from the earth must be cooler than the earth (it has to be to absorb the radiation in the first place), and cannot "back radiate" this radiation and return it to the earth, which is warmer than itself.
Note that this is not the same thing as merely trapping warmth. Trapped, yes. Back-radiated? No. That is a distinction that you have to ask the climate scientists about, because it is their own hare-brained concept, not mine.
An article by Spencer linked to elsewhere in this discussion (look for "Yes, Virginia") describes this concept of back-radiation, which is central to many of the AGW models. The article that I linked to above is by a Ph.D. physicist, refuting the first article. Only incidental that it got mentioned to you, it appears, but it is there if you want to look at it.
"you're claiming that it'd be better for businesses to run physical servers in their office than run virtual servers in a cloud of ~450k machines spread across god-knows-how-many dedicated datacenters?"
Yep. The numbers work out that way.
Keep in mind that no matter how many datacenters and how many machines, Amazon was DOWN for quite a long time in 2011. (And, although this is only an single anecdote: all the vaunted redundancy of AWS did not save the site of one of my customers when an Amazon server suffered a hardware failure a few months ago. Yes, there were local backups, but Amazon was completely useless and unhelpful in the situation and newer data was lost from the database.)
For that matter, Microsoft's cloud services also went down in 2011, and so did Google. All of the major services except perhaps Akamai, I believe.
While your examples are internally distributed, in the broader view of the internet they still represent concentrated-point-of-failure bottlenecks.
On the other hand, our cheaper company and personal servers were down less often, and never for more than a few hours.
I am all for cloud computing, for certain uses. And I will start doing it... when the reliability numbers actually show that it is justified.
It was inevitable, but it happened yet again: a law supposedly intended to "protect the children" does very little of that, and instead punishes people for life, often for relatively trivial things like this.
Three of us at the company got 17" MBPs at the same time. Sequential serial numbers even. Every one of them had the graphics card suddenly fail. Mine lasted longest but I believe that is because I took more care to keep my laptop cool.
To my surprise, Apple covered the repair as a "known issue" even though the machine was long out of warranty and I did not have an AppleCare policy. Not only that, the part was overnighted to the shop and it was done in under 24 hrs.
I have no reason to be anything but impressed by Apple's handing of the situation. Saved my bacon... at the time I had no backup machine to do my work on.
So I am left with the impression that the matter at hand was a situation that somehow fell through the cracks.
"... Apple is like an avatar of marketing; the essence of style over substance given form."
I disagree entirely. That is to say, I do dislike some of the things Apple does, but it's not "style over substance" at all.
Contrary to popular belief, most consumers aren't stupid. There is a reason it became the #1 mp3 player on the market: superior design and execution. Among other things, iPods had the most usable and intuitive interfaces. They have been copied but still not equalled.
"We can easily calculate what the measured CO2 increase by itself does to the global energy balance of a static system"
All very well if you are talking about the "global" balance of a generic system. But the particular context -- and your use of "global" in that context -- perhaps confused the issue. Given that context, I won't apologize for interpreting your comment as I did.
"If this is what I think it is you are glossing over the important parts about CLOSED systems and equilibrium. Neither is true statement when applied to sun earth energy balance. The earth is part of an OPEN system."
For this particular physics concept it doesn't matter whether you are in a closed or open system. "Back radiating" to something warmer is impossible in either one. It has nothing to do with whether there is a net overall increase or decrease in the immediate environment, which in fact might change depending on whether you are in an open or closed system. It has merely to do with the direction of absorption. A cooler object cannot increase the temperature of a warmer object via thermal radiation. It just doesn't happen. Ask any physicist. And that is precisely where Spencer is wrong. He uses a thought experiment to illustrate his point, but his "proof" is based on invalid assumptions. Garbage in, garbage out.
What you are referring to, I believe, is an increase or decrease of entropy. It is indeed possible in an open system for a local region to decrease in entropy. That much is true. But that requires input from other areas of higher energy, not lower. The "back radiation" concept proposes that energy somehow flows from a lower-energy-density region to a higher-energy-density region.
Doesn't happen. If it did, you could cook your food by setting it outside in the snow.
"You said "So you admit that people should stop watching / listening to news about AGW?""
You wrote, more-or-less, that people should stop listening to bullshit. I was agreeing with you. My point was that there has been a good deal of bullshit on BOTH sides of the AGW argument.
"I made a statement of fact about the composition of the atmosphere and you go off on your merry little tangent thinking you know me. Well guess what you are WRONG."
As I mentioned at the top of this post, I wasn't assuming at all. I interpreted your words in a particular way, true, but that was from deduction based on the words and their context, not assumption.
"You just randomly spewed...and don't tell me... when I never said anything about any storms or anything remotly similiar to it"
There was nothing random about it. You had mentioned danger to coastal areas. There are 2 conceivable sources of that danger that could be due to AGW: rising sea levels themselves (which pose far less danger than we have often been told), and catastrophic weather events such as cyclones. My mention of catastrophic weather events was therefore entirely relevant to the discussion.
"You just made it up..."
Not even close.
"You are driven by your own ideas and views of reality always seeking to reinforce them with evidence or thought matching your presuppositions rather than investing sufficient time and energy to question and check them."
I have been studying the science of this subject for years. I believe I detect a bit of psychological "projection" here.
"I would rather people not make unwarranted assumptions about anyones positions that have not been stated."
A final time: it was not an assumption, it was a reasonable conclusion based on your actual words. What you stated was (I repeat):
"We can easily calculate what the measured CO2 increase by itself does to the global energy balance of a static syst
I quoted the assertion to which I was referring. Reading problems, maybe?
"As to your reference I have one of my own:"
My reference was hardly a "straw man". Your own statement was that "We can easily calculate what the measured CO2 increase by itself does to the global energy balance of a static system."
My point (which should have been clear to someone with knowledge of the field) was that most models that make exactly the kind of calculations you stated are based on the idea of radiative forcings due to "back radiation", which supposedly account for a large part of the increased temperature.
However, the back radiation concept does not pass scientific muster: it violates the second law of thermodynamics.
There is nothing "straw man" about that argument. It directly addresses the assertion you made. And it points out a fatal flaw in the majority of CO2-caused-warming models used to make exactly the kind of calculations you referred to.
No shit... if only I had explicitly said as much...oh wait I did.
What you wrote was : "We can easily calculate what the measured CO2 increase by itself does to the global energy balance of a static system.... Predicting offsetting secondary dynamic responses to the change on our living earth is extremely difficult to model and an area of active research."
Which, taken together, are contradictory in the context that you, yourself, set up. In one breath you say "we can calculate static effects", in the next you say "but the system is dynamic". Which, strictly speaking, is true. But both sentences are disingenuous, because of your prior statements which set the context:
"The hell you do. You can't 'prove' the next trigger pull in Russian Roulette is harmful either... Surely this does not mean our actions are devoid of consequences simply because an outcome can't be 'proven'.... 1/3 of the carbon in the atmosphere was put there by humans. The isotopic ratios of carbon from fossil fuels vs burning trees, respiration..etc are awefully hard to miss or misinterpret."
You were clearly implying a position on the subject there... but now you are trying to hide behind a claim of "wait... I said that we don't really know, it's continuing research".
You are "weaseling". Trying to have it both ways. You can't. If you want me to accept that we really don't know because the system is dynamic, then your first statements are out-of-context bullshit. But if your first statements were NOT bullshit, then you can't expect me to believe that you think we really don't know because the system is dynamic.
"The "reality" of public opinion only."
No, the important part is the reality of what people do, and the policies they set based on that opinion. And while I did not explicitly say so, I meant "public" in the sense of "non-scientists", which includes most politicians and policy makers. If you assume those are trivial issues, you do so at your own peril.
"Your awefully good at making shit I never said up and then attempting to use that against me. You have no clue what my position is. I have not stated it."
I made up nothing. I was (and am) replying directly to things you clearly stated in writing. And yes, you DID state it. Once again: the very first sentence of the post to which I was replying (I quoted that sentence above) shows pretty clearly to anybody with half a brain what your position is. You can deny it now all you like, but others, like me, will probably just think you are full of BS.
"And please don't go on about how all the magic unicorns will drown as their lands are flooded by an extra inch of seawater."
Talk about straw-man! Hahaha! What does this have to do with an increasing
Slashdot Mirror
If you believe some reasoning is specious, why don't you do us all a favor and point out exactly which reasoning it is?
"Do not give specious reasoning a free pass because you agree with its conclusion."
And I presume that we should apply this rule equally to your own comments?
The fact that Morgenthau was writing what he did 7 years into the New Deal is evidence enough for me... but it is hardly the only evidence that exists.
Do you really expect me to supply an analysis of Depression-era economics here on Slashdot?
But since you asked, here are a couple of sources:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123353276749137485.html
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=258
"But after the Gold Clause Ban and the devaluation, everything else FDR did just screwed up the market and kept the recovery from accelerating."
Not to mention the chaos that has ensued since, with American essentially running on fiat money. And especially after Nixon got rid of the last vestiges of it in 1971.
"What actually happened was a dramatic decrease in government spending accompanied by a huge expansion of the private sector."
The "mainstream" economists of the day, whom we would call "Keynesians" today, predicted disaster after the war. According to their beloved "scientific" Philips Curve, there was no way in hell the economy could absorb all the unemployed troops returning home. They predicted a big crash.
As history clearly shows, however, exactly the opposite is true. The years immediately after WWII were some of the most productive years in the history of the United States.
When people say "economists said", they are usually referring to mainstream economists or followers of Keynes. However, there were (and still are) other economic schools, among them the Austrians, who correctly predicted an economic boom.
"There was no recovery in the private sector during WWII."
A lot of economists attribute the Great Depression and the eventual recovery to a lot of things. But the actual numbers do not back most of them up.
FDR's own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, believed FDR's fiscal policy to be completely insane, and FDR himself to be a complete loon. (And the economic numbers tend to back him up.)
From Morgenthau's diary, in the seventh year of FDR's "New Deal" program (May 1939):
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and now if I am wrong somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosper. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started. And enormous debt to boot."
Note this is by the Treasury Secretary himself, not (no surprise) some socialist journalist or armchair economist of the day.
Government spending does not solve economic recessions or depressions. It never has, and it never will.
... the Judean People's Front?
"but most license restrictions have regularly been upheld in court."
I wonder why, because as I stated above (and which is true), such restrictions are disallowed for every other kind of product in existence... as long as it is purchased retail.
"If it says somewhere "sale requires that you accept the license terms" then it isn't sold until you accept the license terms, which means on the other hand that you can ask for your money back if you don't agree (not agreeing means there was no sale yet, so you have no right to copy the software)."
No, the courts have held (for every other kind of product, INCLUDING BOOKS, though perhaps not software) that any such "agreement" is invalid. You purchased the product and the supplier has no further say over the matter. The item is yours and you can do what you want with it... except copying and selling, of course, which is a violation of a different law.
"And yes, I know that publishers claim that they license a right to use software instead of selling that right."
There was a recent court ruling that the First Sale Doctrine applies to software as well.
And the courts in general have long held that if you walk into a retail outlet and plunk down your money, you have BOUGHT the product, not licensed it, regardless of any written restrictions that are on or in the product.
A lot of people are not aware of this, but restrictions on the after-purchase use of products has been tried for just about everything under the sun, including hammers and shovels. Courts have consistently held that the manufacturer or supplier has no right to restrict the use of a product after it is purchased. Zero. Even if it is on the front of the package in bold print.
"And then they cripple it by making it depend on iTunes, a program that has arguably one of the worst interfaces in the history of GUIs, with several past versions appearing in bad UI galleries of the time."
Haha. Yep.
Although you have to admit that Apple painted themselves into a corner on that one: iTunes was the only available interface between Apple products and Windows. So everything that happened had to go through iTunes.
Don't misunderstand: I'm not saying it was justified or even very smart to do that. And although I use Apples, iTunes is one of my least favorite applications of all time. It tries to do far too much and only does a little of it well.
I also have a big beef with their App Store (the Mac app store, not iOS). If I were Apple, I would be utterly embarrassed by that application. It is excruciatingly slow, and the interface sucks. You can't even sort the applications, for Grid's sake! You can sort by category, "bestsellers" and date only. And that's really, really lame for something that contains tens of thousands of applications.
How is that relevant to the subject? Those were "locked" black boxes and Toyota wasn't giving that data to police or governments or anybody else.
You do have a point, sort of. It is certainly possible for manufacturers to put unreadable devices in the cars. But that isn't a matter of "proprietary format". That's a matter of outright encryption and secrecy. Two different things.
"We weren't eager to take in all those Jews, gays, mentally ill people, and political trouble makers."
Ah... you mean like Freemasons and others who were none of the above, but who were also sent to concentration camps? There were quite a few different groups that were on the Nazi Shit List, and your membership in a casual social club could put you there.
But all that is still beside the point. They were supplying material aid to an enemy in a time of declared war. That's an important little tidbit that people have often glossed over.
"I assume the extent of your historical researches consist of a quick perusal of Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust..."
You assume incorrectly. I never read anything by Black.
"IBM also made M1 Carbines for the US forces during WWII."
They did lots of things. And I never claimed none of them were good. They made some damned nice computers too. My statement was that they are not a "particular friend of the United States." None of this contradicts what I wrote.
"I don't know what "back radiation" is. Never heard of it. I have only spoken about "blackbody radiation". Note the word 'black' used by me vs 'back' used by yourself."
I am aware of the difference, and I admitted to you that my response became confused between two threads. There is no misunderstanding on my part here.
That is why I mentioned a link where you could find the explanation.
"IRC, one of the big issues with the existing black boxes is that they are in a format only the OEM can read."
This is hardly a real-world problem. Consumer devices for reading the data and settings in a vehicle's computer(s) tend to come out less than a year after the new models hit the streets.
IBM has never been a particular friend of America, at least as far back as the time it provided the Nazis with computational equipment to keep track of their concentration camps.
(And no, before you start calling bullshit, that is not controversial at all. It *IS* a matter of historical record. There are even documents that prove Watson himself knew what was going on.)
Why should we expect a company that started out with a "profit above all else" attitude to have changed?
"I have no idea who Spensor is or what he said or why that is relevent to any statements I have made. I have no idea what cold object is getting a warm object warmer. It certainly has nothing to do with what I am asserting. It all sounds like crackpot drivel to me worthy of being ignored."
I do apologize. It was late, I have been very busy, and a couple of different threads got confused.
However, this comment is relevant to the issue:
"The atmosphere of our planet randomly reflects some of this energy bouncing off or (blackbody) emitted by the earth that would otherwise be lost directly to space. Atoms that make up the atmosphere dictate the characteristics of this reflection behavior. The aggregate result of the reflections is that more energy is stored in the earth than would otherwise be."
Reflections, fine. But "back radiation", no. In brief (I have no time to go into detail today), many of the AGW warming models rely on the concept that clouds etc. "back radiate" some of the absorbed heat, which is in turn absorbed again by the earth. However, this is a flawed model: physics tells us that a cloud that has absorbed radiation from the earth must be cooler than the earth (it has to be to absorb the radiation in the first place), and cannot "back radiate" this radiation and return it to the earth, which is warmer than itself.
Note that this is not the same thing as merely trapping warmth. Trapped, yes. Back-radiated? No. That is a distinction that you have to ask the climate scientists about, because it is their own hare-brained concept, not mine.
An article by Spencer linked to elsewhere in this discussion (look for "Yes, Virginia") describes this concept of back-radiation, which is central to many of the AGW models. The article that I linked to above is by a Ph.D. physicist, refuting the first article. Only incidental that it got mentioned to you, it appears, but it is there if you want to look at it.
"you're claiming that it'd be better for businesses to run physical servers in their office than run virtual servers in a cloud of ~450k machines spread across god-knows-how-many dedicated datacenters?"
Yep. The numbers work out that way.
Keep in mind that no matter how many datacenters and how many machines, Amazon was DOWN for quite a long time in 2011. (And, although this is only an single anecdote: all the vaunted redundancy of AWS did not save the site of one of my customers when an Amazon server suffered a hardware failure a few months ago. Yes, there were local backups, but Amazon was completely useless and unhelpful in the situation and newer data was lost from the database.)
For that matter, Microsoft's cloud services also went down in 2011, and so did Google. All of the major services except perhaps Akamai, I believe.
While your examples are internally distributed, in the broader view of the internet they still represent concentrated-point-of-failure bottlenecks.
On the other hand, our cheaper company and personal servers were down less often, and never for more than a few hours.
I am all for cloud computing, for certain uses. And I will start doing it... when the reliability numbers actually show that it is justified.
Well, then. If 2011 is any indication, then Amazon's greater share of Net traffic should INCREASE the average amount of downtime for webservers.
All centralization of the internet equals a decrease in quality and reliability.
It was inevitable, but it happened yet again: a law supposedly intended to "protect the children" does very little of that, and instead punishes people for life, often for relatively trivial things like this.
Three of us at the company got 17" MBPs at the same time. Sequential serial numbers even. Every one of them had the graphics card suddenly fail. Mine lasted longest but I believe that is because I took more care to keep my laptop cool.
To my surprise, Apple covered the repair as a "known issue" even though the machine was long out of warranty and I did not have an AppleCare policy. Not only that, the part was overnighted to the shop and it was done in under 24 hrs.
I have no reason to be anything but impressed by Apple's handing of the situation. Saved my bacon... at the time I had no backup machine to do my work on.
So I am left with the impression that the matter at hand was a situation that somehow fell through the cracks.
"... Apple is like an avatar of marketing; the essence of style over substance given form."
I disagree entirely. That is to say, I do dislike some of the things Apple does, but it's not "style over substance" at all.
Contrary to popular belief, most consumers aren't stupid. There is a reason it became the #1 mp3 player on the market: superior design and execution. Among other things, iPods had the most usable and intuitive interfaces. They have been copied but still not equalled.
There is plenty of substance.
"We can easily calculate what the measured CO2 increase by itself does to the global energy balance of a static system"
All very well if you are talking about the "global" balance of a generic system. But the particular context -- and your use of "global" in that context -- perhaps confused the issue. Given that context, I won't apologize for interpreting your comment as I did.
"If this is what I think it is you are glossing over the important parts about CLOSED systems and equilibrium. Neither is true statement when applied to sun earth energy balance. The earth is part of an OPEN system."
For this particular physics concept it doesn't matter whether you are in a closed or open system. "Back radiating" to something warmer is impossible in either one. It has nothing to do with whether there is a net overall increase or decrease in the immediate environment, which in fact might change depending on whether you are in an open or closed system. It has merely to do with the direction of absorption. A cooler object cannot increase the temperature of a warmer object via thermal radiation. It just doesn't happen. Ask any physicist. And that is precisely where Spencer is wrong. He uses a thought experiment to illustrate his point, but his "proof" is based on invalid assumptions. Garbage in, garbage out.
What you are referring to, I believe, is an increase or decrease of entropy. It is indeed possible in an open system for a local region to decrease in entropy. That much is true. But that requires input from other areas of higher energy, not lower. The "back radiation" concept proposes that energy somehow flows from a lower-energy-density region to a higher-energy-density region.
Doesn't happen. If it did, you could cook your food by setting it outside in the snow.
"You said "So you admit that people should stop watching / listening to news about AGW?""
You wrote, more-or-less, that people should stop listening to bullshit. I was agreeing with you. My point was that there has been a good deal of bullshit on BOTH sides of the AGW argument.
"I made a statement of fact about the composition of the atmosphere and you go off on your merry little tangent thinking you know me. Well guess what you are WRONG."
As I mentioned at the top of this post, I wasn't assuming at all. I interpreted your words in a particular way, true, but that was from deduction based on the words and their context, not assumption.
"You just randomly spewed ...and don't tell me... when I never said anything about any storms or anything remotly similiar to it"
There was nothing random about it. You had mentioned danger to coastal areas. There are 2 conceivable sources of that danger that could be due to AGW: rising sea levels themselves (which pose far less danger than we have often been told), and catastrophic weather events such as cyclones. My mention of catastrophic weather events was therefore entirely relevant to the discussion.
"You just made it up..."
Not even close.
"You are driven by your own ideas and views of reality always seeking to reinforce them with evidence or thought matching your presuppositions rather than investing sufficient time and energy to question and check them."
I have been studying the science of this subject for years. I believe I detect a bit of psychological "projection" here.
"I would rather people not make unwarranted assumptions about anyones positions that have not been stated."
A final time: it was not an assumption, it was a reasonable conclusion based on your actual words. What you stated was (I repeat):
"We can easily calculate what the measured CO2 increase by itself does to the global energy balance of a static syst
"What assertion have I made that is wrong?"
I quoted the assertion to which I was referring. Reading problems, maybe?
"As to your reference I have one of my own:"
My reference was hardly a "straw man". Your own statement was that "We can easily calculate what the measured CO2 increase by itself does to the global energy balance of a static system."
My point (which should have been clear to someone with knowledge of the field) was that most models that make exactly the kind of calculations you stated are based on the idea of radiative forcings due to "back radiation", which supposedly account for a large part of the increased temperature.
However, the back radiation concept does not pass scientific muster: it violates the second law of thermodynamics.
There is nothing "straw man" about that argument. It directly addresses the assertion you made. And it points out a fatal flaw in the majority of CO2-caused-warming models used to make exactly the kind of calculations you referred to.
No shit... if only I had explicitly said as much...oh wait I did.
What you wrote was : "We can easily calculate what the measured CO2 increase by itself does to the global energy balance of a static system.... Predicting offsetting secondary dynamic responses to the change on our living earth is extremely difficult to model and an area of active research."
Which, taken together, are contradictory in the context that you, yourself, set up. In one breath you say "we can calculate static effects", in the next you say "but the system is dynamic". Which, strictly speaking, is true. But both sentences are disingenuous, because of your prior statements which set the context:
"The hell you do. You can't 'prove' the next trigger pull in Russian Roulette is harmful either... Surely this does not mean our actions are devoid of consequences simply because an outcome can't be 'proven'. ... 1/3 of the carbon in the atmosphere was put there by humans. The isotopic ratios of carbon from fossil fuels vs burning trees, respiration..etc are awefully hard to miss or misinterpret."
You were clearly implying a position on the subject there... but now you are trying to hide behind a claim of "wait... I said that we don't really know, it's continuing research".
You are "weaseling". Trying to have it both ways. You can't. If you want me to accept that we really don't know because the system is dynamic, then your first statements are out-of-context bullshit. But if your first statements were NOT bullshit, then you can't expect me to believe that you think we really don't know because the system is dynamic.
"The "reality" of public opinion only."
No, the important part is the reality of what people do, and the policies they set based on that opinion. And while I did not explicitly say so, I meant "public" in the sense of "non-scientists", which includes most politicians and policy makers. If you assume those are trivial issues, you do so at your own peril.
"Your awefully good at making shit I never said up and then attempting to use that against me. You have no clue what my position is. I have not stated it."
I made up nothing. I was (and am) replying directly to things you clearly stated in writing. And yes, you DID state it. Once again: the very first sentence of the post to which I was replying (I quoted that sentence above) shows pretty clearly to anybody with half a brain what your position is. You can deny it now all you like, but others, like me, will probably just think you are full of BS.
"And please don't go on about how all the magic unicorns will drown as their lands are flooded by an extra inch of seawater."
Talk about straw-man! Hahaha! What does this have to do with an increasing