Under what mathematical law does the fact that two graphs don't look the same mean that they are not related? This is really sad: Experts spend years analyzing the data, come to an extremely complicated conclusion based on mountains of evidence, and then someone who has not the slightest fucking clue about science or mathematics walks in and says "But those graphs look different!" and decides those experts are all wrong. And worse, other people who share this guy's lack of clue believe his argument because it's the only one simple enough for them to understand.
The parent made a bunch of strong claims, without any data reference or argument to back them up. He contradicts the findings of EPOCA, BIOACID and the Royal Society in the UK, the NERC and various other organisations directly tasked with evaluating the situation. Moreover he claims these organisations essentially lie in order to get research money, without as much as a shred of evidence to back up his claims, and this is moderated insightful?
The car is not going slower, it's going 200 mph! Or in other words, you're an ass. Is this the kind of thing you bring up in ordinary conversation? You must be a hit at parties. I'd hit you twice.
I think you're over-egging your pudding, to coin a phrase. The fact of the matter is that you have no idea and nor do Scientists what the "ideal" PH of the Ocean is, how Ocean PH changes over time (years, decades, centuries, millennia), how creatures adapt to such change (as they surely must be able to) or whether or not any change is due to Human activity. Any one of these should cause you some pause for thought, but collectively they amount to what is essentially the speculations of a few activist Scientists desperate for their next research grant, doing Science by press release in order to get their particular study or proposition into the mainstream media. The mainstream media are very happy to publish any and all research no-matter how idiotic it is, provided it's bad news, because bad news sells (people like you enjoy the feeling of righteous indignation when you read it, don't you?).
That you dribble while spouting such nonsense reveals to me with some clarity that you have fallen passionately for this new Green Religion and are prepared to believe anything an Earth Scientist will tell you without question, regardless of the whether or not the actual evidence has been conjured out of nowhere by the use of unsuitable mathematical techniques and cherry-picked data, combined with unbelievably stupid press releases. When the power goes out, I'm betting you'll be the first to fire up his diesel generator in order to continue posting such drivel to these forums.
The Ocean is not becomming "more acidic". It's still very alkaline. You should say "over the very brief period of time we've been testing the PH of the ocean with any degree of accuracy, it's alkalinity has decreased by a very small amount. We have no way of knowing whether or not this is a natural cycle, or whether or not the measurements we take today, with different instruments from yester-year, account for the difference; in any case, we're pretty sure life in the Ocean will adapt to such a small change with relative ease, although this would mean our research grants to study it being severely curtailed, hence we need lots of alarming headlines in the mainstream media".
Imagine, if you like, that we just don't know enough about the system to say one way or the other whether cosmic rays influence low cloud cover? Now that isn't such a hard thing to do, is it? It's similar to imagining that we don't know how mountain ranges form, what causes earthquakes, or how volcanoes form. Obviously there are thousands of peer reviewed papers around in various areas of scientific endevour that are wrong. For example, all those geology papers published pre-plate tectonics, or all of those papers published in medical journals about the causes of stomach ulcers, pre-discovery of a certain type of bacterium. Well, I for one don't think the science is EVER settled. CERN certainly think there's an issue worth investigating (the CLOUD experiment isn't cheap).
On the point of the difference between the two papers, this is easy to see. From the conclusions:
Our results show global-scale evidence of conspicuous influences of solar variability on
cloudiness and aerosols. Irrespective of the detailed mechanism, the loss of ions from the
air during FDs reduces the cloud liquid water content over the oceans. So marked is
the response to relatively small variations in the total ionization, we suspect that a large
fraction of Earth's clouds could be controlled by ionization. Future work should estimate
how large a volume of the Earth's atmosphere is involved in the ion process that leads
to the changes seen in CCN and its importance for the Earth's radiation budget. From
solar activity to cosmic ray ionization to aerosols and liquid-water clouds, a causal chain
appears to operate on a global scale.
In fact, the effect is noticed around 7 days after the event. It is not yet understood why this is the case. Further research is needed and is planned but if they took your attitude, it wouldn't get funding or take place at all. As I keep saying in these types of discussion, the "team" warmists have all the funding, even though much of their research is bollocks. This is hardly surprising; they peer review each others papers, use each others data (without archiving it for replication) and cite each other all the time, as Wegman discoverd when he did a statistical network analysis of their inter-relationships. If you've read and understood the criticisms of Steig et al (for example), you'll see how far you can get in climate science with a Principle Component algorithm, some data cherry picking and a few friends either too stupid or too corrupt to challenge your assertions.
The reasons this is cloud cuckoo land (excuse me putting it that way) are:
(1) Even if you yourself don't have a bomb, you have the expertise, technology and raw materials to build one. In the USA this may take days, even hours. Not having physical weapons is no guarantee you couldn't build one if you needed it. You cannot un-invent the atom bomb. For this reason the threat still exists, even if you dismantle and destroy every weapon on the planet.
(2) A country like Iran has an incentive to build a bomb because it fears US conventional forces. What you are arguing is complete equality across the board, a kind of full-spectrum equality, with no side having any advantage it can leverage to get what it wants over any other. This is clearly absurd because in conventional terms, your industrial base, population and technological capabilities are the key components.
(3) Nuclear weapons prevented a third world war through MAD. But MAD only works if those in possession of such weapons are rational. Nuclear proliferation increases the possibility that these weapons will get into the hands of the irrational (this is a danger in Pakistan and North Korea). The possibility that one might be used against you increases (as you yourself have pointed out!). Without nuclear the non-proliferation effort of the past 60 years, perhaps there would be 100 countries with weapons, not 8 or 9? You cannot argue it has failed without taking into account the cost of doing nothing.
(4) In the absence of credible counter-measures, your only strategy therefore is to act to prevent your enemies (or rather, those who perceive you as the enemy, which is more to the point, given US policy as laid out in Obama's speech in Cairo) from obtaining this capability.
Only a cretin would expect an unfair scheme whereby only certain nations -- including historically aggressive nations such as the US, USSR, UK, and Israel -- are allowed to have nukes, to stand for long. The NPT requires us to work for disarmament; we have failed to do so.
Forget your fantasy world; there is no "fairness scheme" in international politics. There is your National Interest, whoever you are, period. Your National Interest includes being able to defend yourself, deter aggressors and leverage the policies of other countries to your advantage. Your "group hug" theory fails as soon as a bunch of lunatics comes to power in whichever state has a bomb. That we already have one (North Korea) and possibly another on the way (Pakistan) does not make me sleep easier at night. Again, where we can act to prevent proliferation, we should.
Dude you seem very confused. China and Russia are friends of ours.
Now they are, yes (in a manner of speaking). That wasn't the case when they acquired their nuclear weapons, was it?
You say that it's ok for allies to have nukes but not ok for anyone to threaten our allies. But you gave India and Pakistan as examples? They acquired nukes to threaten each other so they're both allies and threatening our allies.
When and where we are able to act in our own interests, we do so. Where we are not, obviously we cannot. Libya and Syria are two examples where we were able to act to stop nuclear proliferation. North Korea, India and Pakistan are examples of countries where we could not stop it.
Since when does what we "allow" have much influence on whether or not a nation has nukes? Are you proposing another war with N. Korea to take away their nukes or do you just want to invade all the ornery countries capable of producing them?
Again, your argument seems to be, "we can't stop it everywhere, therefore we shouldn't try to stop it anywhere". There's no need for me to point out the obvious problem with this argument. I throw the confused jibe back in your general direction. I don't think I've said anything particularly controversial here.
I'm a bit confused about the concept of "fairness" in this context. Do we allow anyone who wants to have nuclear weapons the option to acquire them because there's some natural "fairness" law? Only a cretin would say so. The way it works is if you're a threat to us, or a region containing friends of ours, then we don't want you to have them (Iran, Syria). If you're an ally, we'd rather you didn't have them but there's not much we can do to stop you acquiring them (India, Pakistan). If you're already strong and powerful, we assure your destruction if you fire them at us (Russia, China).
Me too. I've had around 2 weeks of decent sleep in the last two years and those two weeks were gained by taking sleeping pills after I crawled into the Doctor's surgery barely alive!
Very well said. If he doesn't know already, he will by the time he completes the project. We all learned this way. Some theory, yes, but mostly by practice.
The only problem here is people are used to the current paradigm. I hated Office 2007, but Microsoft research has paid off here, because once you get the hang of it it's actually quicker and easier to do things than the usual menu/toolbar system. I actually felt the same when I moved from Word Perfect to a WYSIWYG. It was awful! WP was much better;).
By the way, the Ribbon implementation doesn't have to be Windows only. As long as you follow the Microsoft design guidelines, you can implement the ribbon on any platform.
and so are coral reefs, another victim of increased water acidity.
Utter rubbish. The water is not increasing in acidity. Its PH is ~8.104. Even the warmist lunatics believe it will still be ~7.824 100 years from now (no doubt they know this from running a pile of random numbers through a hockey-stick generator). Do you see that in no way can you say that there is increased acidity? If the PH falls below zero, then, my friend, the word Acid may be appropriate.
telling me they're going to fight for the opportunity to pollute the air
It's interesting that you've been brainwashed enough to think that CO2 is `pollution'. It's an essential trace gas, at incredibly small concentrations in our atmosphere too. It's essential for life on Earth and has been slowly reducing in concentration over the last few billion years. In fact one could say the biosphere is somewhat starved of it.
Do you subscribe to any general or climate related scientific journals? Because the consensus seems quite clear to me. Where we're lacking a consensus is in marketing material directed at the general public, but that will remain the case so long as there is money to be made. Don't mistake one for the other.
A splendid appeal to authority: "Scientists who publish papers on man-made global warming in climate related scientific journals find it easier to secure funding for further research into man-made global warming - !!!EXCLUSIVE!!!!"
Come the fuck on. You cannot honestly believe that the US government, which depends on tax revenue from American businesses and their employees, would intentionally handicap said businesses? To what end? Stop trying to turn a legitimate difference of opinion into some sort of battle between good and evil.
The problem is many of the Scientists went to University to study "Earth Sciences" in one form or another and were already reading books by people like Konrad Lorenz before then. The Green movement is obviously anti-technocracy. The problem is the politicians have to listen to these people when they take advice before coming to a view, because they have now risen to the tops of their professions. Apart from the Indian and Chinese politicians, I think only the Czech President has the balls to face down the warmists and flat-out disagree with what they're saying. But you know, the truth will eventually come out (that warming/cooling is almost entirely natural). It's just that this generation of Politicians and Scientists have their reputations to consider, so I don't expect it to come out any time soon.
I did a course in formal specification using Z at University. It was pretty straightforward but the problem comes when the programmer has to interpret the Z into some language. This was 15 years ago; I guess there are proofing tools available now that will look at your code and decide whether or not it's consistent with the Z specification. As long as there are no bugs in the proofing tool that is. There's no way of proving that the entire tool chain is correct, so there's not a 100% certainty that the specification matches the executable as the example above seems to imply.
If Humanity is still around then (highly unlikely) it will long since have had the technology and resources required to push the Earth to a new, stable and habitable orbit.
It requires a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops -- a thousand trillion floating point operations per second
It requires far more than that. According to some, the microtubules on the cytoskeletons of the cells themselves can be processing units. Raise the bar a few orders of magnitude in that case.
Ah yes, the familiar "use wikipedia" refrain. Written and maintained by the Warmists, of course. Your quote:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation are responsible for most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century."
..has caused me much hilarity, given that there was little man made CO2 pre- 1940's and at least half of the warming of the 20th century occurred then, and that post 1998 there has been no warming (cooling indeed, according to the satellite record) at all, despite increasing CO2. But don't let the facts bother your opinions too much, continue preaching your hypocritical environmental piety to all who will listen.
(b.) Meetings must be limited to information that *everyone* *needs* to know.
It totally disagree with this. You don't know if you need to know it until you know it. Each coder should have a good overview of the project as a whole, which involves knowing what other people are doing, even if that isn't directly related to your own work.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the kind of experts who do extremely complicated things like this, or this, or maybe even this?
Sure, the appeal to authority is one route you can take; indeed people like you always do that when you want to close down any debate. I don't know if you're aware of Professor Wegman's criticism of the Peer Review process in Climate Science? If not, I think you should read it. Or perhaps you'd prefer an expert opinion on the predictive capabilities of Computer Models? I don't know about you, but I raised an eyebrow when I found out Briffa's "hockey stick" turned out to have been generated from a whole 12 tree cores, or that the recent UN report stating that 300,000 people have died already due to "Climate Change" was a complete load of bollocks? Perhaps the American Chemical Society recently in uproar over it's Chairman's uncritical endorsement of "Global Warming" doesn't make you think twice? Or what about the EPA in the US suppressing a report from one of its own scientists? Does that make you feel uneasy at all?
So, follow the money. Who's going to benefit from Cap and Trade? Who's already benefiting from Carbon Offsetting? Hmmmmmmm.
Call me a heretic, if you like. I'm in good company.
I wonder if there's a graph you can show us to demonstrate this, perhaps in the shape of, say, some kind of hockey stick?
I think you're over-egging your pudding, to coin a phrase. The fact of the matter is that you have no idea and nor do Scientists what the "ideal" PH of the Ocean is, how Ocean PH changes over time (years, decades, centuries, millennia), how creatures adapt to such change (as they surely must be able to) or whether or not any change is due to Human activity. Any one of these should cause you some pause for thought, but collectively they amount to what is essentially the speculations of a few activist Scientists desperate for their next research grant, doing Science by press release in order to get their particular study or proposition into the mainstream media. The mainstream media are very happy to publish any and all research no-matter how idiotic it is, provided it's bad news, because bad news sells (people like you enjoy the feeling of righteous indignation when you read it, don't you?).
That you dribble while spouting such nonsense reveals to me with some clarity that you have fallen passionately for this new Green Religion and are prepared to believe anything an Earth Scientist will tell you without question, regardless of the whether or not the actual evidence has been conjured out of nowhere by the use of unsuitable mathematical techniques and cherry-picked data, combined with unbelievably stupid press releases. When the power goes out, I'm betting you'll be the first to fire up his diesel generator in order to continue posting such drivel to these forums.
The Ocean is not becomming "more acidic". It's still very alkaline. You should say "over the very brief period of time we've been testing the PH of the ocean with any degree of accuracy, it's alkalinity has decreased by a very small amount. We have no way of knowing whether or not this is a natural cycle, or whether or not the measurements we take today, with different instruments from yester-year, account for the difference; in any case, we're pretty sure life in the Ocean will adapt to such a small change with relative ease, although this would mean our research grants to study it being severely curtailed, hence we need lots of alarming headlines in the mainstream media".
Call me old fashioned, but who the hell takes their laptop with them to the movies anyway?
Imagine, if you like, that we just don't know enough about the system to say one way or the other whether cosmic rays influence low cloud cover? Now that isn't such a hard thing to do, is it? It's similar to imagining that we don't know how mountain ranges form, what causes earthquakes, or how volcanoes form. Obviously there are thousands of peer reviewed papers around in various areas of scientific endevour that are wrong. For example, all those geology papers published pre-plate tectonics, or all of those papers published in medical journals about the causes of stomach ulcers, pre-discovery of a certain type of bacterium. Well, I for one don't think the science is EVER settled. CERN certainly think there's an issue worth investigating (the CLOUD experiment isn't cheap).
On the point of the difference between the two papers, this is easy to see. From the conclusions:
In fact, the effect is noticed around 7 days after the event. It is not yet understood why this is the case. Further research is needed and is planned but if they took your attitude, it wouldn't get funding or take place at all. As I keep saying in these types of discussion, the "team" warmists have all the funding, even though much of their research is bollocks. This is hardly surprising; they peer review each others papers, use each others data (without archiving it for replication) and cite each other all the time, as Wegman discoverd when he did a statistical network analysis of their inter-relationships. If you've read and understood the criticisms of Steig et al (for example), you'll see how far you can get in climate science with a Principle Component algorithm, some data cherry picking and a few friends either too stupid or too corrupt to challenge your assertions.
Your research is a little old. try finding some newer research to back up your arguments. Of course not many people are working on this hypothesis. Scientists are very busy cherry picking dendro-proxies to make it look like recent warming is unprecidented. They don't have much time for solar variance.
The reasons this is cloud cuckoo land (excuse me putting it that way) are:
(1) Even if you yourself don't have a bomb, you have the expertise, technology and raw materials to build one. In the USA this may take days, even hours. Not having physical weapons is no guarantee you couldn't build one if you needed it. You cannot un-invent the atom bomb. For this reason the threat still exists, even if you dismantle and destroy every weapon on the planet.
(2) A country like Iran has an incentive to build a bomb because it fears US conventional forces. What you are arguing is complete equality across the board, a kind of full-spectrum equality, with no side having any advantage it can leverage to get what it wants over any other. This is clearly absurd because in conventional terms, your industrial base, population and technological capabilities are the key components.
(3) Nuclear weapons prevented a third world war through MAD. But MAD only works if those in possession of such weapons are rational. Nuclear proliferation increases the possibility that these weapons will get into the hands of the irrational (this is a danger in Pakistan and North Korea). The possibility that one might be used against you increases (as you yourself have pointed out!). Without nuclear the non-proliferation effort of the past 60 years, perhaps there would be 100 countries with weapons, not 8 or 9? You cannot argue it has failed without taking into account the cost of doing nothing.
(4) In the absence of credible counter-measures, your only strategy therefore is to act to prevent your enemies (or rather, those who perceive you as the enemy, which is more to the point, given US policy as laid out in Obama's speech in Cairo) from obtaining this capability.
Forget your fantasy world; there is no "fairness scheme" in international politics. There is your National Interest, whoever you are, period. Your National Interest includes being able to defend yourself, deter aggressors and leverage the policies of other countries to your advantage. Your "group hug" theory fails as soon as a bunch of lunatics comes to power in whichever state has a bomb. That we already have one (North Korea) and possibly another on the way (Pakistan) does not make me sleep easier at night. Again, where we can act to prevent proliferation, we should.
Now they are, yes (in a manner of speaking). That wasn't the case when they acquired their nuclear weapons, was it?
When and where we are able to act in our own interests, we do so. Where we are not, obviously we cannot. Libya and Syria are two examples where we were able to act to stop nuclear proliferation. North Korea, India and Pakistan are examples of countries where we could not stop it.
Again, your argument seems to be, "we can't stop it everywhere, therefore we shouldn't try to stop it anywhere". There's no need for me to point out the obvious problem with this argument. I throw the confused jibe back in your general direction. I don't think I've said anything particularly controversial here.
I'm a bit confused about the concept of "fairness" in this context. Do we allow anyone who wants to have nuclear weapons the option to acquire them because there's some natural "fairness" law? Only a cretin would say so. The way it works is if you're a threat to us, or a region containing friends of ours, then we don't want you to have them (Iran, Syria). If you're an ally, we'd rather you didn't have them but there's not much we can do to stop you acquiring them (India, Pakistan). If you're already strong and powerful, we assure your destruction if you fire them at us (Russia, China).
Me too. I've had around 2 weeks of decent sleep in the last two years and those two weeks were gained by taking sleeping pills after I crawled into the Doctor's surgery barely alive!
Very well said. If he doesn't know already, he will by the time he completes the project. We all learned this way. Some theory, yes, but mostly by practice.
The only problem here is people are used to the current paradigm. I hated Office 2007, but Microsoft research has paid off here, because once you get the hang of it it's actually quicker and easier to do things than the usual menu/toolbar system. I actually felt the same when I moved from Word Perfect to a WYSIWYG. It was awful! WP was much better ;).
By the way, the Ribbon implementation doesn't have to be Windows only. As long as you follow the Microsoft design guidelines, you can implement the ribbon on any platform.
Indeed, as a University assignment I replaced the memory manager in Minix from First Fit to Best Fit ;).
Utter rubbish. The water is not increasing in acidity. Its PH is ~8.104. Even the warmist lunatics believe it will still be ~7.824 100 years from now (no doubt they know this from running a pile of random numbers through a hockey-stick generator). Do you see that in no way can you say that there is increased acidity? If the PH falls below zero, then, my friend, the word Acid may be appropriate.
It's interesting that you've been brainwashed enough to think that CO2 is `pollution'. It's an essential trace gas, at incredibly small concentrations in our atmosphere too. It's essential for life on Earth and has been slowly reducing in concentration over the last few billion years. In fact one could say the biosphere is somewhat starved of it.
A splendid appeal to authority: "Scientists who publish papers on man-made global warming in climate related scientific journals find it easier to secure funding for further research into man-made global warming - !!!EXCLUSIVE!!!!"
The problem is many of the Scientists went to University to study "Earth Sciences" in one form or another and were already reading books by people like Konrad Lorenz before then. The Green movement is obviously anti-technocracy. The problem is the politicians have to listen to these people when they take advice before coming to a view, because they have now risen to the tops of their professions. Apart from the Indian and Chinese politicians, I think only the Czech President has the balls to face down the warmists and flat-out disagree with what they're saying. But you know, the truth will eventually come out (that warming/cooling is almost entirely natural). It's just that this generation of Politicians and Scientists have their reputations to consider, so I don't expect it to come out any time soon.
I did a course in formal specification using Z at University. It was pretty straightforward but the problem comes when the programmer has to interpret the Z into some language. This was 15 years ago; I guess there are proofing tools available now that will look at your code and decide whether or not it's consistent with the Z specification. As long as there are no bugs in the proofing tool that is. There's no way of proving that the entire tool chain is correct, so there's not a 100% certainty that the specification matches the executable as the example above seems to imply.
If Humanity is still around then (highly unlikely) it will long since have had the technology and resources required to push the Earth to a new, stable and habitable orbit.
It requires far more than that. According to some, the microtubules on the cytoskeletons of the cells themselves can be processing units. Raise the bar a few orders of magnitude in that case.
It totally disagree with this. You don't know if you need to know it until you know it. Each coder should have a good overview of the project as a whole, which involves knowing what other people are doing, even if that isn't directly related to your own work.