No one disagrees that the earth's climate has warmed and cooled repeatedly over the last 100,000 years and beyond. Many disagree, however, about the extent of man's involvement in climate change. This sort of study is as if police were to report 'Yes a crime has occurred' when what people really want to know is 'who dunnit?'
Seriously, cash is being used less and less every year. What really is it needed for anymore that couldn't be done with debit cards and prepaid cards and the like? There would be some huge advantages to getting rid of all cash. For example, there would be millions of man hours fewer required for people to 'make change' all day. The federal reserve would no longer have a monopoly on circulating money and the national mints could close down at enormous savings for printing money, stamping out coins (what is more useless than a penny or a nickel?). The illegal drug business which relies exclusively on cash would be put out of business along with criminal transactions of all types. Sanitation would be improved by removing the need for people to exchange filthy little bits of paper and metal. And so on... While it seems 'radical' at first thought, (just as Apple did when they got rid of the floppy disk drive) isn't this the direction we should at least be attempting to go in?
You are correct that I have a math error. The 15,000,000,000 tons of carbon (5.5 x 10^10 tons co2 equivalent) would be approximately 102 billion barrels of oil or about 5 years of current world production which is still insignificant wrt the global atmospheric co2 concentration. The earth's atmosphere has a mass of 5.7 x 10^15 tons so the carbon released from the hypothetical deforestation caused by the 50 million pre-columbian inhabitants would contribute to a hypothetical increase in the atmospheric co2 concentration of 10 ppm if we assume that all of the carbon is released as co2 and there is zero uptake in the deforested areas. This is approximately the same increase in co2 that we have seen between 2005 and the present. This amount of decrease or increase has an insignificant effect on the climate and certainly did not cause the Maunder minimum. To get to even this amount, we've made ridiculous assumptions about 50 million inhabitants armed with stone axes all carrying out slash and burn agriculture leaving 250 million acres continuously defoliated. The entire premise of TFA is...ridiculous...and is an excellent example of the fuzzy thinking inherent in AGW 'science.'
Reforestation requires that there first be deforestation by someone. I thought that was obvious but, judging by the comments, apparently it isn't. Who did this deforestation? The pre-columbian population (which experts put at about 50 million throughout North and South America) was simply not large enough to have accomplished significant deforestation through 'slash and burn' methods to affect the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Slash and burn requires that someone actually cut the trees down to dry out (i.e. the slash) and then burn them during a period of dry weather. Cutting down even one tree with a stone axe is a very large amount of work. The only reason for doing this would have been...agriculture...i.e. planting on the burned-over area after the burning. Again, planting and harvesting by hand is also a very large amount of work. A total population of 50 million people in North and South America, even if they were ALL engaged in agriculture (which they were obviously not), would have been able, at most, to have sustained agriculture on perhaps 500 million acres out of a total land area of 10,500 million acres or 4 percent. (This is a 'slashdot hypothetical'...europeans arriving in the 16th century did not find that.) If there are 30 tons of primeval carbon per acre (EPA number), that would correspond to a release of 15,000,000,000 tons of carbon or approximately 50 million barrels of oil which is the approximate amount of oil that is produced worldwide in ONE DAY. TFA is an excellent example of the fuzzy thinking inherent in AGW 'science.'
Sorry, but the idea that the native populations of central america were deforesting the north and south american continents to any significant degree with their relatively-small populations and stone axes and no horses is even more ridiculous, if that were possible. Also, the europeans arriving in North and South American in the 16th century did not find deforestation but rather large primeval forests in most areas.
The idea that the global climate could be changed by a relative handful of europeans clearing a tiny portion of the forested landscape with handsaws and horses is ridiculous. The Oort minimum began approximately 1,000 years ago, followed by the Wolf minimum (740 years ago), the Sporer minimum (600 years ago), and then the Maunder minimum approximately 400 years ago. Columbus set sail in 1492 so those europeans would have had to have been working like beavers (pardon the expression) to have cut down enough trees by ca 1600 to drive the climate to yet another minimum. We may be at the beginning of yet another climate minimum right now, likely driven by reduced solar output. AGW proponents are turning into spin doctors with these kinds of 'theories' (such as TFA) to explain the utter failure of their climatic theories to account for the real global climate change that is in the fossil record over the last 100,000 years.
All show and no go. It doesn't actually test your browser or system, it just attempts to identify the browser and then matches it up with a "score." My firefox 6 got a score of 2 out of 4 based on a list of features that it allegedly had or did not have and, among other things, gave me a check box under 'yes' for "Does the browser benefit from Windows Operating System features that protect against arbitrary data execution?" even though I was running a non-Windows OS. Then I hit it with Netscape 2, Netscape 4, HotJava 3, and Opera 3 and it was unable to identify any of those and just said it couldn't give a score. The best part, though, was where it said 'The flash plugin was needed to display the page' advising me on security.
Remember them? They gave away a 'free' plugin that let you view streaming video. The server software was the moneymaker and the 'free' plugin was the hook. Hopefully, flash will be the same forgotten status in a year or so, lost in the sea of open-sourced options.
The NSIDC is desperately trying to throw the atlas publishers under the bus to preserve their credibility. "An update to the Sciencemag.com story pinpoints the probable source of the error: a 2001 map from the NSIDC illustrates Greenland's central ice sheet without showing any of the peripheral glaciers. The Atlas editors may have seen this map and misinterpreted it." The NSIDC wants people to believe that the Atlas publishers took a 2001 map sans glaciers and magicly turned it into a 2011 map showing a shrunken ice sheet. The Atlas publishers say however, that "the data came from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), adding that the 15% retreat since the 10th edition of the atlas was released in 1999 is a result of global warming and "much more accurate data."
From TFA: "The first step is to wash out your empty beer can, unless of course said beer is a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. If it is PBR, promptly go drink a better beer. You really should be ashamed of yourself.
Lost me with his sneer. A lot of people like PBR because it's inexpensive and good.
Capitalism rewards effort and initiative. Communism does not. Human nature is to desire to be rewarded for effort and that has been the downfall of communism. In a capitalist economy, if you have an idea that is useful for society you can get funds, implement it, and perhaps make money. No so in a communist economy where a rigid structure in a necessity to ensure that plans are implemented. If you want to spend your days browsing the internet and playing video games, you will go hungry in a capitalist economy, though, while you might be fine in a communist economy, as long as you do your quota.
Stories on the internet are mindless drivel repeated word-for-word on numerous sites. Amid that, Slashdot was a beacon of light piercing the fog of shallow repetition. Slashdot linked to only the important stories (stuff that matters!) and then provided real insight from its many sharp readers. Thanks for creating Slashdot. With your departure, no doubt it will slowly drift in the direction of other internet media and become what it wasn't but...that's to be expected and something new will come along eventually.
Corporations in the United States benefit from a stable political system, fair court system, strong protection for IP, lenient corporate taxation, excellent communications, etc. However, federal government policy allows these same corporations that enjoy these benefits to make all of their business decisions based solely on what is in the very short-term best interests of the corporation...and that means that those decisions generally are made by using the United States as the corporate ash tray. The only beneficiaries of this are short-term investors. European government policies generally require their corporate citizens to actually be patriotic good citizens of the countries they live in. TFA points out the long-term consequences of the US policies...not only the immediate loss of jobs but much more importantly, the loss of knowledge and expertise that, once lost, can not be easily regained. As a result, we have become a country that ships raw materials and commodities overseas (grain, meat, coal, ores, logs, etc.) and then imports finished products from those same countries that we pay for with money that we borrow from them. Obviously, this cannot be sustained and the eventual result of our own government policies is our impoverishment. Even worse, at the moment we are also borrowing money to pay for very expensive wars in distant locations while other countries laugh at our foolishness.
Then, as now, people said 'it's too expensive...other machines (take your pick) are better/faster/cheaper.' Well, they were right, of course, but, as we now know, the IBM PC and its clones went on to absolutely destroy all of the other competition. Why? Were buyers just idiots who wanted the 'IBM' name on the front? Of course not. The reason the IBM PC and its clones went on to success was because they allowed businesses who were using typewriters, 'word processors (larger businesses),' and 'mini-computers' (even larger businesses)' to replace all of that with something much more useful. The IBM PC came with a detached keyboard, an open bus design that third-party companies could support with products that extended the capabilities with specialized gear, a reliable design, a simple DOS operating system (simple compared with the alternatives), a fairly readable monochrome monitor, and sales and support from a major player. For small businesses, it was a no-brainer to buy it, and they bought it in droves. I wrote and sold some early software for the IBM PC and most of the buyers were small businesses: doctor and dentist offices, auto repair shops, retail outlets, professional businesses, etc.
Honestly, the 'best days are behind it' kinds of stories about any company should automatically set off the FUD alarms unless they are based on specific events which support the point like dropping market share, declining revenues, product recalls, mass layoffs, etc. Yesterday, there were newspaper columns about how people are allegedly turning away from Apple MacBooks because they allegedly don't render fonts as well as Windows 7. Shame on slashdot for providing a platform for such a story. Google may be dying or its prospects may never have been brighter but the truth of it will never be known to us from reading stories which germinate in fud-infested soil.
Where does the article say that CO2 has nowhere near the ability to block heat that the AGW proponents would give it. ?
The original article is presenting a fairly sophisticated argument wherein the authors attempt to correlate actual satellite measurements of radiative heat loss over time with the predictions of IPCC climate models. There arguments are not easily reduced to a couple of sentences for a slashdot comment but...from the original article: "One of the most obvious conclusions from Figure 3 is that the satellite observations and climate models display markedly different time-dependent behaviors in their temperature versus radiation variations, especially over the oceans (Figure 3(b))."
And..."Finally, a mixture of 70% radiative and 30% non-radiative forcing (solid line in Figure 3) produces lag regression coefficients that vary in a manner similar to the satellite data in Figure 3. This suggests that, while the temperature variations during 2000–2010 had a strong radiative forcing component, they were also influenced by more non-radiative forcing than is exhibited by the coupled climate models."
And finally..."Yet, as seen in Figure 2, we are still faced with a rather large discrepancy in the time-lagged regression coefficients between the radiative signatures displayed by the real climate system in satellite data versus the climate models. While this discrepancy is nominally in the direction of lower climate sensitivity of the real climate system, there are a variety of parameters other than feedback affecting the lag regression statistics which make accurate feedback diagnosis difficult. These include the amount of non-radiative versus radiative forcing, how periodic the temperature and radiative balance variations are, the depth of the mixed layer,etc., all of which preclude any quantitative estimate of how large the feedback difference is."
The bottom line is that actual satellite measurements of heat radiation for the 2000-2010 time period are far larger than what is predicted from the current IPCC models which shows that either 1) CO2 has no where near the ability to block heat that the AGW proponents would give it since the IPCC models feature atmospheric CO2 concentration as a forcing function, or 2) the NASA satellite measurements are wrong. Take your pick. The first takeaway here is that the current climate models are simply not good enough yet to be used to predict future climate doom or to drive the creation of government policies that will impact billions of people by driving up food, transportation, and heating costs. The second takeaway is that, while the climate may have warmed in recent decades, the IPCC models cannot account for the warming as a consequence of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
The CO2-is-blocking-heat mantra has been repeated so often that almost no one even questions the underlying physics...which don't support CO2 gas as 'greenhouse glass' but more like 'greenhouse fine-weave window screen.' Now finally comes some actual data which, not surprisingly, supports the basic physics and shows that CO2 has nowhere near the ability to block heat that the AGW proponents would give it.
"Problem isn't the sexual activity. Problem is the mindset that people have about it, teached by religions for hundreds of years. When people can finally put that past them and accept that, just like for them, sexual activity is a normal human function there is no need to worry about stuff like this.
You could say the same about murder, child labor, infanticide, and denial of comfort to the suffering. The problem is not 'mindset' but that those things are wrong. Sexual activity showing up on FitBit violates privacy and offends dignity but is not otherwise necessarily immoral. However, the alleged sexual activity seems questionable. From TFA: "the Fitbit Tracker is an compact wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket..." How exactly is this device functioning as an accelerometer when the user is partially or completely naked (a common state for much sexual activity)?
Seriously, corporate data is always compromised and is the worst sort of misleading propaganda. It doesn't matter if it's a drug company, a software company,. a hardware company, an oil company, an airline, whatever. The corporate citizen has no character, integrity, principles, or purpose other than advancing the goals of the corporation...and whatever data it puts out reflects that. The only corporate data that is ever even remotely honest is the financial data and that's only because it is audited by somewhat-independent outside accounting professionals, although Enron showed us that even that data can be doctored.
There's not much we can do about it except live with it. The AGW people will say the Earth really would have warmed up if only the sun had not done its cooldown thing. The anti-AGW people will say that the Earth never would have warmed up anyway and that the sun is the real driver of the global climate, not the atmospheric co2 concentration.
I lived in Los Angeles for 3 years and frequently rode a motorcycle around which meant that you could split the lanes and reach the intersection front line. When they see the yellow light, many LA drivers accelerate on the theory that even if the light turns red before they reach it, there'll be a delay before the other cars get moving. There were many drivers in LA who would enter the intersection 10 seconds after it turned red. They are in a hurry after all and on a very important trip so they knew it was okay. This meant that when the light turned green and you were waiting to enter on a motorcycle, you looked both ways before moving and then slowly and cautiously entered to avoid sudden violent death...and that near avoidance happened frequently. Those red light cameras catch all of the people who are running the red light and they are the ones complaining. The fact that there are so many of them tells you how common running red lights is in LA.
"Cost savings" is an extremely poor reason to switch to digital controls for an operating nuclear power plant. I worked with digital and analog controls over the years and digital controls allow you to amazing things that are not possible with analog controls. However, digital controls also ALWAYS have bugs in the operational logic. The only way to remove the bugs is with extensive testing and even them some survive to be discovered when a wrong thing happens during operation. The problem with a nuclear power plant is that it is so unforgiving. If the wrong thing happens at an oil refinery, there are overpressure valves, thousands of manual valves, etc. that can be used to keep things from getting out of hand until the unit can be shutdown, the program corrected, the control element repaired, or whatever. In a nuclear power plant, after a wrong thing happens, a portion of the plant may be irrevocably damaged or contaminated. The potential cost savings seem trivially small compared with the risk of losing a portion of the plant and/or releasing radioactive materials and contaminating the surroundings.
Osama Bin Laden's organization needed a LOT of money to keep going. Money to pay for food and housing for all of the thousands of followers who are not actually working or doing anything useful. Money for travel, equipment, supplies, bribes, etc. Those hard drives will probably show exactly WHO was supporting these terrorists. Which banks were laundering money money donations to make it available to Osama Bin Laden? Maybe JPMorgan Chase was Osama's banker like they were Bernie Madoff's banker. Who was issuing them credit cards? Which foreign governments were enabling them to travel by issuing passports, visas, and other documents? The Osama Bin Laden people were very sophisticated in how they approached their terrorist activities...that was OBL's 'innovation'...and now it may all come unraveled. There are plenty of young men with rifles running around the Afghanistan hills who hate the West...or what little they know of it...but that does not make them into terrorists capable of carrying out a sophisticated act of terror in another country. That OBL data may help ID a few new faces but mostly it will be the leads to the money trail that will bring the global terror activities to an end.
The comments here are all either 1) Nuclear power is bad, 2) Nuclear power is not bad, or 3) the Japanese people are great. No one wants to talk about Fukushima. There are 3 reactor cores in which nuclear fission was happening when the earthquake hit. When the quake hit, the control rods were allegedly inserted and shutdown was initiated. Then the tsunami hit an hour later and took out all of the cooling. After that, the cores melted, hydrogen gas was produced, several hydrogen explosions occurred, four of the plants were heavily damaged by the explosions, some of the melted fuel reformed localized critical masses in Unit 2, the fuel storage ponds went dry and the stored fuel began oxidizing in fires, and portions of highly dangerous fuel were found up to a mile away. At present, we really don't know what is happening at Fukushima other than that large quantities of radioactive materials continue to be released every day and that as of today, through some unknown process, someone has calculated that 'only' 10 percent of what was released at Chernobyl (whatever that was) has been released at Fukushima. Perhaps tomorrow that number will be 11 percent. This will be an ongoing severe world crisis until all fission is stopped, all fuel is once again in proper storage and containment, and releases of radioactive material have been contained and stopped. That will take at least several months and more likely several years. The passage of time will help a little but mostly ending the Fukushima catastrophe will require new technology that has not yet been implemented on this scale...robotic workers, mobile robotic video inspection, containment, treatment and storage of radioactive debris and water, etc. Until that happens, the long half-life fission isotopes such as Cesion-137 and Strontium-90 will continue to be released and continue to spread in the environment worldwide through, air, water, food, shipping, etc. These are unprecedented quantities and the impact cannot be predicted. There is really nothing that can be done by receptors other than to try and screen for their presence and limit exposures to the extent possible. That and reassure the consumers of those materials that the levels are low and there's nothing to worry about.
...nobody's been allowed close enough to suffer any significant exposure. If they were exposed, then they voluntarily traveled inside the 20-km evacuation radius and it's their own damn fault
Au contraire...The Fukushima facility is releasing ginormous quantities of fission byproducts, particularly Iodine-131 and Cesium-137. If fission were no longer occurring, the release of the short-lived fission isotopes would be tapering off but that does not seem to be happening. Instead, there appear to be ongoing criticality incidents occuring, especially in Unit 2, but potentially in other units, caused by meltdown of the fuel whereupon it flows to the bottom of the containment, peridically puddles into a critical mass(s) away from any surviving control rods, and releases fission byproducts and neutons. Once released into the environment, there are numerous pathways for contaminationand exposure of people outside of the relatively-small exclusion zone. For example, consumption of fish exposed to isotopes in the seawater, consumption of drinking water contaminated by airborne isotopes, ships picking up contaminated seawater for ballast, contamination of horizontal surfaces downwind by airborne fallout, exposure to aircraft contaminated by flying through airborne contamination, etc. are all potential pathways to exposure. Perhaps the Chinese government is fearmongering...but there is plenty of fear to be mongered.
Slashdot Mirror
No one disagrees that the earth's climate has warmed and cooled repeatedly over the last 100,000 years and beyond. Many disagree, however, about the extent of man's involvement in climate change. This sort of study is as if police were to report 'Yes a crime has occurred' when what people really want to know is 'who dunnit?'
Seriously, cash is being used less and less every year. What really is it needed for anymore that couldn't be done with debit cards and prepaid cards and the like? There would be some huge advantages to getting rid of all cash. For example, there would be millions of man hours fewer required for people to 'make change' all day. The federal reserve would no longer have a monopoly on circulating money and the national mints could close down at enormous savings for printing money, stamping out coins (what is more useless than a penny or a nickel?). The illegal drug business which relies exclusively on cash would be put out of business along with criminal transactions of all types. Sanitation would be improved by removing the need for people to exchange filthy little bits of paper and metal. And so on... While it seems 'radical' at first thought, (just as Apple did when they got rid of the floppy disk drive) isn't this the direction we should at least be attempting to go in?
You are correct that I have a math error. The 15,000,000,000 tons of carbon (5.5 x 10^10 tons co2 equivalent) would be approximately 102 billion barrels of oil or about 5 years of current world production which is still insignificant wrt the global atmospheric co2 concentration. The earth's atmosphere has a mass of 5.7 x 10^15 tons so the carbon released from the hypothetical deforestation caused by the 50 million pre-columbian inhabitants would contribute to a hypothetical increase in the atmospheric co2 concentration of 10 ppm if we assume that all of the carbon is released as co2 and there is zero uptake in the deforested areas. This is approximately the same increase in co2 that we have seen between 2005 and the present. This amount of decrease or increase has an insignificant effect on the climate and certainly did not cause the Maunder minimum. To get to even this amount, we've made ridiculous assumptions about 50 million inhabitants armed with stone axes all carrying out slash and burn agriculture leaving 250 million acres continuously defoliated. The entire premise of TFA is...ridiculous...and is an excellent example of the fuzzy thinking inherent in AGW 'science.'
Reforestation requires that there first be deforestation by someone. I thought that was obvious but, judging by the comments, apparently it isn't. Who did this deforestation? The pre-columbian population (which experts put at about 50 million throughout North and South America) was simply not large enough to have accomplished significant deforestation through 'slash and burn' methods to affect the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Slash and burn requires that someone actually cut the trees down to dry out (i.e. the slash) and then burn them during a period of dry weather. Cutting down even one tree with a stone axe is a very large amount of work. The only reason for doing this would have been...agriculture...i.e. planting on the burned-over area after the burning. Again, planting and harvesting by hand is also a very large amount of work. A total population of 50 million people in North and South America, even if they were ALL engaged in agriculture (which they were obviously not), would have been able, at most, to have sustained agriculture on perhaps 500 million acres out of a total land area of 10,500 million acres or 4 percent. (This is a 'slashdot hypothetical'...europeans arriving in the 16th century did not find that.) If there are 30 tons of primeval carbon per acre (EPA number), that would correspond to a release of 15,000,000,000 tons of carbon or approximately 50 million barrels of oil which is the approximate amount of oil that is produced worldwide in ONE DAY. TFA is an excellent example of the fuzzy thinking inherent in AGW 'science.'
Sorry, but the idea that the native populations of central america were deforesting the north and south american continents to any significant degree with their relatively-small populations and stone axes and no horses is even more ridiculous, if that were possible. Also, the europeans arriving in North and South American in the 16th century did not find deforestation but rather large primeval forests in most areas.
The idea that the global climate could be changed by a relative handful of europeans clearing a tiny portion of the forested landscape with handsaws and horses is ridiculous. The Oort minimum began approximately 1,000 years ago, followed by the Wolf minimum (740 years ago), the Sporer minimum (600 years ago), and then the Maunder minimum approximately 400 years ago. Columbus set sail in 1492 so those europeans would have had to have been working like beavers (pardon the expression) to have cut down enough trees by ca 1600 to drive the climate to yet another minimum. We may be at the beginning of yet another climate minimum right now, likely driven by reduced solar output. AGW proponents are turning into spin doctors with these kinds of 'theories' (such as TFA) to explain the utter failure of their climatic theories to account for the real global climate change that is in the fossil record over the last 100,000 years.
All show and no go. It doesn't actually test your browser or system, it just attempts to identify the browser and then matches it up with a "score." My firefox 6 got a score of 2 out of 4 based on a list of features that it allegedly had or did not have and, among other things, gave me a check box under 'yes' for "Does the browser benefit from Windows Operating System features that protect against arbitrary data execution?" even though I was running a non-Windows OS. Then I hit it with Netscape 2, Netscape 4, HotJava 3, and Opera 3 and it was unable to identify any of those and just said it couldn't give a score. The best part, though, was where it said 'The flash plugin was needed to display the page' advising me on security.
Remember them? They gave away a 'free' plugin that let you view streaming video. The server software was the moneymaker and the 'free' plugin was the hook. Hopefully, flash will be the same forgotten status in a year or so, lost in the sea of open-sourced options.
The NSIDC is desperately trying to throw the atlas publishers under the bus to preserve their credibility. "An update to the Sciencemag.com story pinpoints the probable source of the error: a 2001 map from the NSIDC illustrates Greenland's central ice sheet without showing any of the peripheral glaciers. The Atlas editors may have seen this map and misinterpreted it." The NSIDC wants people to believe that the Atlas publishers took a 2001 map sans glaciers and magicly turned it into a 2011 map showing a shrunken ice sheet. The Atlas publishers say however, that "the data came from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), adding that the 15% retreat since the 10th edition of the atlas was released in 1999 is a result of global warming and "much more accurate data."
From TFA: "The first step is to wash out your empty beer can, unless of course said beer is a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. If it is PBR, promptly go drink a better beer. You really should be ashamed of yourself.
Lost me with his sneer. A lot of people like PBR because it's inexpensive and good.
Capitalism rewards effort and initiative. Communism does not. Human nature is to desire to be rewarded for effort and that has been the downfall of communism. In a capitalist economy, if you have an idea that is useful for society you can get funds, implement it, and perhaps make money. No so in a communist economy where a rigid structure in a necessity to ensure that plans are implemented. If you want to spend your days browsing the internet and playing video games, you will go hungry in a capitalist economy, though, while you might be fine in a communist economy, as long as you do your quota.
Stories on the internet are mindless drivel repeated word-for-word on numerous sites. Amid that, Slashdot was a beacon of light piercing the fog of shallow repetition. Slashdot linked to only the important stories (stuff that matters!) and then provided real insight from its many sharp readers. Thanks for creating Slashdot. With your departure, no doubt it will slowly drift in the direction of other internet media and become what it wasn't but...that's to be expected and something new will come along eventually.
Corporations in the United States benefit from a stable political system, fair court system, strong protection for IP, lenient corporate taxation, excellent communications, etc. However, federal government policy allows these same corporations that enjoy these benefits to make all of their business decisions based solely on what is in the very short-term best interests of the corporation...and that means that those decisions generally are made by using the United States as the corporate ash tray. The only beneficiaries of this are short-term investors. European government policies generally require their corporate citizens to actually be patriotic good citizens of the countries they live in. TFA points out the long-term consequences of the US policies...not only the immediate loss of jobs but much more importantly, the loss of knowledge and expertise that, once lost, can not be easily regained. As a result, we have become a country that ships raw materials and commodities overseas (grain, meat, coal, ores, logs, etc.) and then imports finished products from those same countries that we pay for with money that we borrow from them. Obviously, this cannot be sustained and the eventual result of our own government policies is our impoverishment. Even worse, at the moment we are also borrowing money to pay for very expensive wars in distant locations while other countries laugh at our foolishness.
Then, as now, people said 'it's too expensive...other machines (take your pick) are better/faster/cheaper.' Well, they were right, of course, but, as we now know, the IBM PC and its clones went on to absolutely destroy all of the other competition. Why? Were buyers just idiots who wanted the 'IBM' name on the front? Of course not. The reason the IBM PC and its clones went on to success was because they allowed businesses who were using typewriters, 'word processors (larger businesses),' and 'mini-computers' (even larger businesses)' to replace all of that with something much more useful. The IBM PC came with a detached keyboard, an open bus design that third-party companies could support with products that extended the capabilities with specialized gear, a reliable design, a simple DOS operating system (simple compared with the alternatives), a fairly readable monochrome monitor, and sales and support from a major player. For small businesses, it was a no-brainer to buy it, and they bought it in droves. I wrote and sold some early software for the IBM PC and most of the buyers were small businesses: doctor and dentist offices, auto repair shops, retail outlets, professional businesses, etc.
Honestly, the 'best days are behind it' kinds of stories about any company should automatically set off the FUD alarms unless they are based on specific events which support the point like dropping market share, declining revenues, product recalls, mass layoffs, etc. Yesterday, there were newspaper columns about how people are allegedly turning away from Apple MacBooks because they allegedly don't render fonts as well as Windows 7. Shame on slashdot for providing a platform for such a story. Google may be dying or its prospects may never have been brighter but the truth of it will never be known to us from reading stories which germinate in fud-infested soil.
Where does the article say that CO2 has nowhere near the ability to block heat that the AGW proponents would give it. ?
The original article is presenting a fairly sophisticated argument wherein the authors attempt to correlate actual satellite measurements of radiative heat loss over time with the predictions of IPCC climate models. There arguments are not easily reduced to a couple of sentences for a slashdot comment but...from the original article: "One of the most obvious conclusions from Figure 3 is that the satellite observations and climate models display markedly different time-dependent behaviors in their temperature versus radiation variations, especially over the oceans (Figure 3(b))."
And..."Finally, a mixture of 70% radiative and 30% non-radiative forcing (solid line in Figure 3) produces lag regression coefficients that vary in a manner similar to the satellite data in Figure 3. This suggests that, while the temperature variations during 2000–2010 had a strong radiative forcing component, they were also influenced by more non-radiative forcing than is exhibited by the coupled climate models."
And finally..."Yet, as seen in Figure 2, we are still faced with a rather large discrepancy in the time-lagged regression coefficients between the radiative signatures displayed by the real climate system in satellite data versus the climate models. While this discrepancy is nominally in the direction of lower climate sensitivity of the real climate system, there are a variety of parameters other than feedback affecting the lag regression statistics which make accurate feedback diagnosis difficult. These include the amount of non-radiative versus radiative forcing, how periodic the temperature and radiative balance variations are, the depth of the mixed layer,etc., all of which preclude any quantitative estimate of how large the feedback difference is."
The bottom line is that actual satellite measurements of heat radiation for the 2000-2010 time period are far larger than what is predicted from the current IPCC models which shows that either 1) CO2 has no where near the ability to block heat that the AGW proponents would give it since the IPCC models feature atmospheric CO2 concentration as a forcing function, or 2) the NASA satellite measurements are wrong. Take your pick. The first takeaway here is that the current climate models are simply not good enough yet to be used to predict future climate doom or to drive the creation of government policies that will impact billions of people by driving up food, transportation, and heating costs. The second takeaway is that, while the climate may have warmed in recent decades, the IPCC models cannot account for the warming as a consequence of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
The CO2-is-blocking-heat mantra has been repeated so often that almost no one even questions the underlying physics...which don't support CO2 gas as 'greenhouse glass' but more like 'greenhouse fine-weave window screen.' Now finally comes some actual data which, not surprisingly, supports the basic physics and shows that CO2 has nowhere near the ability to block heat that the AGW proponents would give it.
"Problem isn't the sexual activity. Problem is the mindset that people have about it, teached by religions for hundreds of years. When people can finally put that past them and accept that, just like for them, sexual activity is a normal human function there is no need to worry about stuff like this.
You could say the same about murder, child labor, infanticide, and denial of comfort to the suffering. The problem is not 'mindset' but that those things are wrong. Sexual activity showing up on FitBit violates privacy and offends dignity but is not otherwise necessarily immoral. However, the alleged sexual activity seems questionable. From TFA: "the Fitbit Tracker is an compact wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket..." How exactly is this device functioning as an accelerometer when the user is partially or completely naked (a common state for much sexual activity)?
Seriously, corporate data is always compromised and is the worst sort of misleading propaganda. It doesn't matter if it's a drug company, a software company,. a hardware company, an oil company, an airline, whatever. The corporate citizen has no character, integrity, principles, or purpose other than advancing the goals of the corporation...and whatever data it puts out reflects that. The only corporate data that is ever even remotely honest is the financial data and that's only because it is audited by somewhat-independent outside accounting professionals, although Enron showed us that even that data can be doctored.
There's not much we can do about it except live with it. The AGW people will say the Earth really would have warmed up if only the sun had not done its cooldown thing. The anti-AGW people will say that the Earth never would have warmed up anyway and that the sun is the real driver of the global climate, not the atmospheric co2 concentration.
I lived in Los Angeles for 3 years and frequently rode a motorcycle around which meant that you could split the lanes and reach the intersection front line. When they see the yellow light, many LA drivers accelerate on the theory that even if the light turns red before they reach it, there'll be a delay before the other cars get moving. There were many drivers in LA who would enter the intersection 10 seconds after it turned red. They are in a hurry after all and on a very important trip so they knew it was okay. This meant that when the light turned green and you were waiting to enter on a motorcycle, you looked both ways before moving and then slowly and cautiously entered to avoid sudden violent death...and that near avoidance happened frequently. Those red light cameras catch all of the people who are running the red light and they are the ones complaining. The fact that there are so many of them tells you how common running red lights is in LA.
"Cost savings" is an extremely poor reason to switch to digital controls for an operating nuclear power plant. I worked with digital and analog controls over the years and digital controls allow you to amazing things that are not possible with analog controls. However, digital controls also ALWAYS have bugs in the operational logic. The only way to remove the bugs is with extensive testing and even them some survive to be discovered when a wrong thing happens during operation. The problem with a nuclear power plant is that it is so unforgiving. If the wrong thing happens at an oil refinery, there are overpressure valves, thousands of manual valves, etc. that can be used to keep things from getting out of hand until the unit can be shutdown, the program corrected, the control element repaired, or whatever. In a nuclear power plant, after a wrong thing happens, a portion of the plant may be irrevocably damaged or contaminated. The potential cost savings seem trivially small compared with the risk of losing a portion of the plant and/or releasing radioactive materials and contaminating the surroundings.
Osama Bin Laden's organization needed a LOT of money to keep going. Money to pay for food and housing for all of the thousands of followers who are not actually working or doing anything useful. Money for travel, equipment, supplies, bribes, etc. Those hard drives will probably show exactly WHO was supporting these terrorists. Which banks were laundering money money donations to make it available to Osama Bin Laden? Maybe JPMorgan Chase was Osama's banker like they were Bernie Madoff's banker. Who was issuing them credit cards? Which foreign governments were enabling them to travel by issuing passports, visas, and other documents? The Osama Bin Laden people were very sophisticated in how they approached their terrorist activities...that was OBL's 'innovation'...and now it may all come unraveled. There are plenty of young men with rifles running around the Afghanistan hills who hate the West...or what little they know of it...but that does not make them into terrorists capable of carrying out a sophisticated act of terror in another country. That OBL data may help ID a few new faces but mostly it will be the leads to the money trail that will bring the global terror activities to an end.
The comments here are all either 1) Nuclear power is bad, 2) Nuclear power is not bad, or 3) the Japanese people are great. No one wants to talk about Fukushima. There are 3 reactor cores in which nuclear fission was happening when the earthquake hit. When the quake hit, the control rods were allegedly inserted and shutdown was initiated. Then the tsunami hit an hour later and took out all of the cooling. After that, the cores melted, hydrogen gas was produced, several hydrogen explosions occurred, four of the plants were heavily damaged by the explosions, some of the melted fuel reformed localized critical masses in Unit 2, the fuel storage ponds went dry and the stored fuel began oxidizing in fires, and portions of highly dangerous fuel were found up to a mile away. At present, we really don't know what is happening at Fukushima other than that large quantities of radioactive materials continue to be released every day and that as of today, through some unknown process, someone has calculated that 'only' 10 percent of what was released at Chernobyl (whatever that was) has been released at Fukushima. Perhaps tomorrow that number will be 11 percent. This will be an ongoing severe world crisis until all fission is stopped, all fuel is once again in proper storage and containment, and releases of radioactive material have been contained and stopped. That will take at least several months and more likely several years. The passage of time will help a little but mostly ending the Fukushima catastrophe will require new technology that has not yet been implemented on this scale...robotic workers, mobile robotic video inspection, containment, treatment and storage of radioactive debris and water, etc. Until that happens, the long half-life fission isotopes such as Cesion-137 and Strontium-90 will continue to be released and continue to spread in the environment worldwide through, air, water, food, shipping, etc. These are unprecedented quantities and the impact cannot be predicted. There is really nothing that can be done by receptors other than to try and screen for their presence and limit exposures to the extent possible. That and reassure the consumers of those materials that the levels are low and there's nothing to worry about.
...nobody's been allowed close enough to suffer any significant exposure. If they were exposed, then they voluntarily traveled inside the 20-km evacuation radius and it's their own damn fault
Au contraire...The Fukushima facility is releasing ginormous quantities of fission byproducts, particularly Iodine-131 and Cesium-137. If fission were no longer occurring, the release of the short-lived fission isotopes would be tapering off but that does not seem to be happening. Instead, there appear to be ongoing criticality incidents occuring, especially in Unit 2, but potentially in other units, caused by meltdown of the fuel whereupon it flows to the bottom of the containment, peridically puddles into a critical mass(s) away from any surviving control rods, and releases fission byproducts and neutons. Once released into the environment, there are numerous pathways for contaminationand exposure of people outside of the relatively-small exclusion zone. For example, consumption of fish exposed to isotopes in the seawater, consumption of drinking water contaminated by airborne isotopes, ships picking up contaminated seawater for ballast, contamination of horizontal surfaces downwind by airborne fallout, exposure to aircraft contaminated by flying through airborne contamination, etc. are all potential pathways to exposure. Perhaps the Chinese government is fearmongering...but there is plenty of fear to be mongered.