Sorry, completely forgot about replying to this thread.
What I meant with the pebble bed reactors was of course that the incidents (which were very minor and not the cause of the dismantling) were not with the technique in itself. After all, it's making it impossible for the reactors to go "boom" that's of interest.
The GP made the mistake of not clarifying "Liberal". It seems he meant what in the US would be called "Libertarian" (with a small or a big L dependent on whom you ask) - which in large parts of the world is the same thing as meant with "liberal".
In the US you've managed to make "liberal" mean "socialist" (or at least what you believe to be socialist, which would still be far far right wing in other countries).
... and then, when talking about libertarians, the GP is correct.
(libertarians can be both right and left-leaning, although some would claim that libertarians cannot support a non-free market and thus they're usually grouped at the right end of the scale. The Political Compass makes a better argument adding a freedom-dimension to politics)
Sure, put the waste in a container in the mojave desert. Mark it "dangerous".
Let me guess - you're still not "on my side" - even though the above is for all practicalities reasonable when we're talking hundreds of years. The reason people are worried about the current "waste" is because the number "hundreds of thousands of years" is being bandied around even though it's not true.
As to the rest of your post, you still need to brush up on your English (it's not even my first language and I seem to parse it better) and you need to look into the actual facts around the raw material and production methods needed for your "clean" energies and not only the myths* you keep believing around the oh-so-scary nuclear.
At the current rate of doubling of efficiency/cost we'll be able to supply most of our energy needs through solar alone. No regulation is needed to get there - only normal technological development. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use other options available to us - and oh-so-scary nuclear is simply one of the best ones.
That is, if you care about facts.
*) you really seem to believe nuclear waste and nuclear warheads have anything to do with each other
Because of people like you, who let their emotions and myths rule their lives instead of looking at actual facts.
predictions of safety and performance on experimental technology
Do you understand what passive safety means when it comes to a nuclear reactor? The info is available in the link I gave. I assume you don't doubt the laws of physics.. ?
Your own links show problems experienced with actual pebble bed reactors led to early shutdown
Only if you're unable to understand written English and listen to voices in your head instead.
it's just measured in hundreds instead of thousands of years
... and in the amount of waste produced which makes a huge difference as far as safe containment is concerned.
complete environmental devastation, nuclear proliferation and terrorism
"Myths and emotions" describe your views quite well.
... and as to your original question, feel free to read and research yourself sometime. You might learn something.
(France has run a breeder reactor for a long time as a means of reducing the amount of "waste" - and the reason India hasn't been able to build a nuclear industry until now was answered in the link I posted)
Tell me, for how long did you research your convictions before posting insults?
if you happen to crest a peak and it heads down the other side, it's not coming back--we're venus or mars in no time (say a few thousand years max)
True, but on the other hand there's absolutely no science backing up such a claim. Lots of hyperbole, yes, but even though hyperbole gets repeated a lot it doesn't become "true".
We're not, at all, like Mars and/or Venus - and cannot become like them in any possible foreseeable geologic timescale.
Highly radioactive = low half time = not radioactive for long Low radioactivity = long half time = radioactive for long (but not dangerous)
Oh, and "waste" is actually the same as fuel, if you build modern reactors. So this "waste" you're so concerned about is neither dangerous for long, and shouldn't be hidden away but used anyway.
Again, sorry. Your opinion is not, in any way, based on the scientific principles.
There are indeed major gaps in our understanding of climate (that's how the whole CO2 argument began, and that's the source of the "travesty" statement) and when you don't know you cannot say how the thing you don't know about will affect the things you know little about.
As far as I know, the MWP was global - as detailed in numerous papers investigating climate from all parts of the world. I know there's an agenda driven argument trying to claim it was local (and then, I would assume, the same argument will be made for the other warm periods we know about) but those arguments don't stand up to scrutination.
You might want to ask yourself why you apparently WANT catastrophic future scenarious to be true.
You do know that there are many mechanisms "climate science" readily admits to not being able to model?
There's no causative connection, whatsoever, between any one thing in "climate" (historic or current) that we're unable to model and the climate as a result of that being "unstable".
I completely fail to understand how you've come to believe there is:) It's not based in science anyway.
Why do you keep making these nonsense claims about climate science when you clearly have the capacity for critical thought in other subjects?
I've thought about this for the better part of the day today. I consider your question to be sincere, and I've contemplated spending quite some time writing an equally sincere and in-depth answer.
It would be quite the blog post if I did. I've realized I'll just have to make it somewhat shorter:
A few years ago I was "all in" when it came to AGW. Not just in talk but in action as well. I caused a close friend of mine to spend a considerable sum of extra money on investment-protecting the new house he built close to the sea shore since I was confident we would see several decimeters of sea rise in the next century (he raised the foundation 40cm because of my advice).
Some time after that, my critical mind (and you're correct - I do practice what I consider to be healthy scientific scepticism in all areas I track. Working as a futurist, I track quite a few) began sending off warning signals when it came to AGW due to a lot of hyperbole being spread around. I think you know what I mean - I've personally listened live to Al Gore claiming we'd see an ice free arctic in five years, that ice bears were going to go extinct and that everything from this to that were "evidence" of catastrophic global warming.
So, I decided to track the science. Read the papers. Do personal back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to verify (or falsify) the hyperbole. And, as you could expect, things didn't add up. Sure there was a lot of valid science, but it was being distored beyond recognition by people who apparently were less interested in science and more interested in pushing agendas.
Long story short - I'm now spending more than a little time making sure the actual science isn't getting lost in the reporting, and I'm doing so everywhere I see unfounded hyperbole and suppression of sound scepticism. Cases in point:
1) I tried getting more science and less politics into some AGW-related Wikipedia pages a few months ago. No go. There's an incredible agenda driven bias amongst Wikipedia admins making sure only one line, the "true" AGW line, is reflected in the articles.
2) On Slashdot, a few days after an article related to AGW has been available, some users with mod points will go through the comments and moderate anything not fully compliant with catastrophic AGW (which includes my fully sourced and paper-referencing please-do-proper-science posts) Troll and/or Overrated.
3) Name-calling. Anyone using the word "denier" (which IS a reference to holocaust denialism) or comparing AGW-sceptics with creationists (in my country, Sweden, creationism is basically unheard of) just proves the point that most of the debate around AGW is driven by non-scientific agendas.
I'd rather just do science. I fully expect most of the catastrophy-reporting around climate change to have subsided within two years and I'd be happy to return and revisit all of these discussions then:)
Anyway;
As to your comment on proxies above. The MWP and LIA are fully visible in most proxies* except tree rings. That's a problem with tree rings as a proxy, and dendrologists admit as much, not with the amplitudes of the LIA and MWP themselves. I don't really see where you get "1960s" from - I'm talking about recent findings here. I see no reason based in proper science why tree ring proxies should have their status elevated as they have in the later IPCC reports.
Better;) Although using the word "raw" is somewhat in error still, both HADCrut and GISTemp use data from GHCN which has already been "adjusted". That both datasets show the same signals is thus expected.
Using them as validation of eachother - "independent" - is thus statistically dubious at best.
I'm of the opinion that the UHI adjustments done in GHCN are in error, and that station dropsouts are biasing any derived results. That does not mean that there isn't a positive trend, there is, it just looks somewhat different over the 20th century and it would track the satellite data (UAH) much closer over the same time periods if corrected.
Sorry, you seem to think Slashdot posts are journal papers:) That might explain why you use an unnecessary amount of words for the points you want to get across.
This, in fact the sum total of Baillie is quoted as saying in the sources CRN used
I've quoted this before in this thread, and you yourself mentioned that CRN's source was The Times in your post above:
“It’s been dressed up as though we are suppressing climate data, but we have never produced climate records from our tree rings,” Professor Bailee said.
“In my view it would be dangerous to try and make interpretations about the temperature from this data.”
Do notice the direct quotes. Baillie is the source. If you want to claim he's misrepresented, please bring that up with The Times.
Agree. So why is it that the researches, including the publications (Nature) and compilations (IPCC) keep doing so?
A real scientist is open about what he's doing.
(The same thing applies when taking direct CO2 measurements from non-pole areas and compare them to polar proxies. Point out what you're comparing instead of showing it as one single graph)
Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times
There's no scientific support for the statement above. Some models predict that to be the result, but the feedback processes speculated to behave that way are currently not well understood. The time period "in modern times" is equally badly qualified, we do not have information more than a few decades back to support such a statement.
Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic
There's dubious support for the statement above. It relies on interesting measurements of ocean pH levels (where? No such thing as a global pH level) from centuries ago - and it's trivial to show that the equipment of that time did not have the accuracy needed for the claim to be well supported. It's also a politized statement since "more acidic" is meant to convey a picture of impending doom, where "going from basic 8.179 in 1751 to 8.104 in 1994" will likely just result in a sigh.
Here comes the interesting part: You, me, and all scientists in the audicence know what I've written above is true. Fanaticism around the area of AGW will however result in "interesting" replies to this post, as well as (likely) moderations both ways. Why? When did proper caveats with regards to how well a scientific hypothesis is supported become something negative to point out?
Agree. It's almost like cherry picking the 19th century as the base temperature point for a linear extrapolation into the future, or the end of the 70s as a base point for arctic ice coverage.
Both starting points above were colder than the average appropriate time spans around them.
CO2 absorption decreases logarithmically, and we're already at a level where increased levels of CO2 makes no real difference. Catastrophic AGW is not due to CO2-warming, it's due to (unknown and still falsifyable) positive feedbacks.
Slashdot Mirror
1) All mobiles do AAC ... done.
"much more ... interesting" ;)
I wonder what will be the effects of millions of people carrying wifi hotspots.
It will make location services relying on nearby hotspots instead of GPS and/or cell towers to become much more interesting at least.
If you factor in that a lot of the pollution in China is due to making goods for the US, then what's "their" fair share?
I.e, if China were to stop polluting you'd ever have no goods or you'd have to make them yourself inside the US - raising your emissions.
Sorry, completely forgot about replying to this thread.
What I meant with the pebble bed reactors was of course that the incidents (which were very minor and not the cause of the dismantling) were not with the technique in itself. After all, it's making it impossible for the reactors to go "boom" that's of interest.
A lot of people get lactose intolerant in their 30s, without ever understanding that that's what it is.
"My stomach cannot tolerate the coffee anymore" is not uncommon to hear - and it's seldom the coffee.
The GP made the mistake of not clarifying "Liberal". It seems he meant what in the US would be called "Libertarian" (with a small or a big L dependent on whom you ask) - which in large parts of the world is the same thing as meant with "liberal".
In the US you've managed to make "liberal" mean "socialist" (or at least what you believe to be socialist, which would still be far far right wing in other countries).
(libertarians can be both right and left-leaning, although some would claim that libertarians cannot support a non-free market and thus they're usually grouped at the right end of the scale. The Political Compass makes a better argument adding a freedom-dimension to politics)
just do that, and I'll be on your side
Sure, put the waste in a container in the mojave desert. Mark it "dangerous".
Let me guess - you're still not "on my side" - even though the above is for all practicalities reasonable when we're talking hundreds of years. The reason people are worried about the current "waste" is because the number "hundreds of thousands of years" is being bandied around even though it's not true.
As to the rest of your post, you still need to brush up on your English (it's not even my first language and I seem to parse it better) and you need to look into the actual facts around the raw material and production methods needed for your "clean" energies and not only the myths* you keep believing around the oh-so-scary nuclear.
At the current rate of doubling of efficiency/cost we'll be able to supply most of our energy needs through solar alone. No regulation is needed to get there - only normal technological development. That doesn't mean we shouldn't use other options available to us - and oh-so-scary nuclear is simply one of the best ones.
That is, if you care about facts.
*) you really seem to believe nuclear waste and nuclear warheads have anything to do with each other
tell me, why are none built yet?
Because of people like you, who let their emotions and myths rule their lives instead of looking at actual facts.
predictions of safety and performance on experimental technology
Do you understand what passive safety means when it comes to a nuclear reactor? The info is available in the link I gave. I assume you don't doubt the laws of physics .. ?
Your own links show problems experienced with actual pebble bed reactors led to early shutdown
Only if you're unable to understand written English and listen to voices in your head instead.
it's just measured in hundreds instead of thousands of years
complete environmental devastation, nuclear proliferation and terrorism
"Myths and emotions" describe your views quite well.
(France has run a breeder reactor for a long time as a means of reducing the amount of "waste" - and the reason India hasn't been able to build a nuclear industry until now was answered in the link I posted)
Tell me, for how long did you research your convictions before posting insults?
I wouldn't want to deal with ridiculous one-off articles like malamanteau
Then don't read them.
if you happen to crest a peak and it heads down the other side, it's not coming back--we're venus or mars in no time (say a few thousand years max)
True, but on the other hand there's absolutely no science backing up such a claim. Lots of hyperbole, yes, but even though hyperbole gets repeated a lot it doesn't become "true".
We're not, at all, like Mars and/or Venus - and cannot become like them in any possible foreseeable geologic timescale.
where are the magical no waste plants?
Less (a lot less) "waste":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Safety:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
India is building them (and will go Thorium instead of Uranium):
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
Tell me, for how long did you research your convictions before posting insults?
On nuclear "waste":
Highly radioactive = low half time = not radioactive for long
Low radioactivity = long half time = radioactive for long (but not dangerous)
Oh, and "waste" is actually the same as fuel, if you build modern reactors. So this "waste" you're so concerned about is neither dangerous for long, and shouldn't be hidden away but used anyway.
Again, sorry. Your opinion is not, in any way, based on the scientific principles.
There are indeed major gaps in our understanding of climate (that's how the whole CO2 argument began, and that's the source of the "travesty" statement) and when you don't know you cannot say how the thing you don't know about will affect the things you know little about.
As far as I know, the MWP was global - as detailed in numerous papers investigating climate from all parts of the world. I know there's an agenda driven argument trying to claim it was local (and then, I would assume, the same argument will be made for the other warm periods we know about) but those arguments don't stand up to scrutination.
You might want to ask yourself why you apparently WANT catastrophic future scenarious to be true.
You do know that there are many mechanisms "climate science" readily admits to not being able to model?
There's no causative connection, whatsoever, between any one thing in "climate" (historic or current) that we're unable to model and the climate as a result of that being "unstable".
I completely fail to understand how you've come to believe there is :) It's not based in science anyway.
Why do you keep making these nonsense claims about climate science when you clearly have the capacity for critical thought in other subjects?
I've thought about this for the better part of the day today. I consider your question to be sincere, and I've contemplated spending quite some time writing an equally sincere and in-depth answer.
It would be quite the blog post if I did. I've realized I'll just have to make it somewhat shorter:
A few years ago I was "all in" when it came to AGW. Not just in talk but in action as well. I caused a close friend of mine to spend a considerable sum of extra money on investment-protecting the new house he built close to the sea shore since I was confident we would see several decimeters of sea rise in the next century (he raised the foundation 40cm because of my advice).
Some time after that, my critical mind (and you're correct - I do practice what I consider to be healthy scientific scepticism in all areas I track. Working as a futurist, I track quite a few) began sending off warning signals when it came to AGW due to a lot of hyperbole being spread around. I think you know what I mean - I've personally listened live to Al Gore claiming we'd see an ice free arctic in five years, that ice bears were going to go extinct and that everything from this to that were "evidence" of catastrophic global warming.
So, I decided to track the science. Read the papers. Do personal back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to verify (or falsify) the hyperbole. And, as you could expect, things didn't add up. Sure there was a lot of valid science, but it was being distored beyond recognition by people who apparently were less interested in science and more interested in pushing agendas.
Long story short - I'm now spending more than a little time making sure the actual science isn't getting lost in the reporting, and I'm doing so everywhere I see unfounded hyperbole and suppression of sound scepticism. Cases in point:
1) I tried getting more science and less politics into some AGW-related Wikipedia pages a few months ago. No go. There's an incredible agenda driven bias amongst Wikipedia admins making sure only one line, the "true" AGW line, is reflected in the articles.
2) On Slashdot, a few days after an article related to AGW has been available, some users with mod points will go through the comments and moderate anything not fully compliant with catastrophic AGW (which includes my fully sourced and paper-referencing please-do-proper-science posts) Troll and/or Overrated.
3) Name-calling. Anyone using the word "denier" (which IS a reference to holocaust denialism) or comparing AGW-sceptics with creationists (in my country, Sweden, creationism is basically unheard of) just proves the point that most of the debate around AGW is driven by non-scientific agendas.
I'd rather just do science. I fully expect most of the catastrophy-reporting around climate change to have subsided within two years and I'd be happy to return and revisit all of these discussions then :)
Anyway;
As to your comment on proxies above. The MWP and LIA are fully visible in most proxies* except tree rings. That's a problem with tree rings as a proxy, and dendrologists admit as much, not with the amplitudes of the LIA and MWP themselves. I don't really see where you get "1960s" from - I'm talking about recent findings here. I see no reason based in proper science why tree ring proxies should have their status elevated as they have in the later IPCC reports.
I believe there's an agenda showing.
*) I really like this project: http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
Better ;) Although using the word "raw" is somewhat in error still, both HADCrut and GISTemp use data from GHCN which has already been "adjusted". That both datasets show the same signals is thus expected.
Using them as validation of eachother - "independent" - is thus statistically dubious at best.
I'm of the opinion that the UHI adjustments done in GHCN are in error, and that station dropsouts are biasing any derived results. That does not mean that there isn't a positive trend, there is, it just looks somewhat different over the 20th century and it would track the satellite data (UAH) much closer over the same time periods if corrected.
if climate is really as unstable as a global MWP would indicate
I'm sorry, but there's no scientific basis for your statements on MWP meaning "being unstable". Why do you claim there is?
Sorry, you seem to think Slashdot posts are journal papers :) That might explain why you use an unnecessary amount of words for the points you want to get across.
This, in fact the sum total of Baillie is quoted as saying in the sources CRN used
I've quoted this before in this thread, and you yourself mentioned that CRN's source was The Times in your post above:
“It’s been dressed up as though we are suppressing climate data, but we have never produced climate records from our tree rings,” Professor Bailee said.
“In my view it would be dangerous to try and make interpretations about the temperature from this data.”
Do notice the direct quotes. Baillie is the source. If you want to claim he's misrepresented, please bring that up with The Times.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7102743.ece
Do you see the danger now in claiming Baillie as the source?
No, not really - but feel free to continue ranting anyway.
Agree. So why is it that the researches, including the publications (Nature) and compilations (IPCC) keep doing so?
A real scientist is open about what he's doing.
(The same thing applies when taking direct CO2 measurements from non-pole areas and compare them to polar proxies. Point out what you're comparing instead of showing it as one single graph)
How then do you explain that the independently derived GISTEMP dataset (nasa) closely matches the HADcrut dataset (CRU)?
Because they're not independent, of course. You know better than this. Or did you mean their modifications and not just the actual data?
Sure, I'll select two:
Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times
There's no scientific support for the statement above. Some models predict that to be the result, but the feedback processes speculated to behave that way are currently not well understood. The time period "in modern times" is equally badly qualified, we do not have information more than a few decades back to support such a statement.
Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic
There's dubious support for the statement above. It relies on interesting measurements of ocean pH levels (where? No such thing as a global pH level) from centuries ago - and it's trivial to show that the equipment of that time did not have the accuracy needed for the claim to be well supported. It's also a politized statement since "more acidic" is meant to convey a picture of impending doom, where "going from basic 8.179 in 1751 to 8.104 in 1994" will likely just result in a sigh.
Here comes the interesting part: You, me, and all scientists in the audicence know what I've written above is true. Fanaticism around the area of AGW will however result in "interesting" replies to this post, as well as (likely) moderations both ways. Why? When did proper caveats with regards to how well a scientific hypothesis is supported become something negative to point out?
Agree. It's almost like cherry picking the 19th century as the base temperature point for a linear extrapolation into the future, or the end of the 70s as a base point for arctic ice coverage.
Both starting points above were colder than the average appropriate time spans around them.
Why do you claim that climate models accurately can emulate historic climate when they cannot?
(That's what the whole debate on whether the MWP was global or not centers around - thus my comment)
increased CO2 absolutely increases temperature
CO2 absorption decreases logarithmically, and we're already at a level where increased levels of CO2 makes no real difference. Catastrophic AGW is not due to CO2-warming, it's due to (unknown and still falsifyable) positive feedbacks.
http://brneurosci.org/temperatures6.png
(from http://brneurosci.org/co2.html - first hit I got on google. Don't know what the rest of that page contains)