I think technically speaking the US Government can only mint coins, not print paper currency. Hence the proposal for minting trillion dollar coins. But in reading that Wikipedia entry they say:
The issuance of paper currency is subject to various accounting and quantity restrictions that platinum coinage is not.
So it's just a lot easier to mint coins. The entry goes into a bit of detail on the laws dealing with the minting of coins.
Sounds like a good adventure. I of course glossed over some of the difficulties in rafting the Grand Canyon. Getting an actual permit is difficult and the whitewater and logistics of a 2-3 week trip in the Grand Canyon are not for beginners and the cost isn't trivial either.
Or if you've got the gumption you can row a raft down the river itself like I did 2 years ago. Pictures are nice but they can't really give you the true scope of it all. There's absolutely nothing like being there.
From geologic research there were events similar to the 1811/12 earthquakes around 1450, 900 and 300 and evidence for them as far back as 4800 B.C. That gives you some idea of the history. Based on that I'd say chances are it will be over 100 years before the next really big quake but you never know for sure.
I think the 1700 Cascadia earthquake off the Oregon/Washington coast probably qualifies as the largest in recorded history in the continental US. It hit at about 9:00 pm, January 26, 1700 and was an estimated magnitude of 8.7-9.2. (The reason the time is known so accurately is that the tsunami it caused was recorded in Japanese records.)
This pollution hits the whole west coast of North America. Something like half of the mercury in our local environment (Oregon) comes from coal burning in SE Asia.
If nothing else you could chemically analyze the dust to find its origin but dust storm remnants crossing the Atlantic have been tracked by satellite so it's know to happen.
I guess the problem I have with your attitude is that you think so many climate scientists are willing have their reputations destroyed for the sake of political gain.
I don't know why you think that's a problem with my attitude rather than with the climate scientists in question.
In order for your premise to be correct the conspiracy to distort climate science has to include most of the governments of the world that are supporting those thousands of climate scientists and it's a conspiracy that has held together for several decades without falling apart. That's just not a reasonable premise in my view.
Nobody "measures" a global mean temperature.
Satellites do though not necessarily at the Earth's surface. Everything else is an estimate.
Satellites don't measure temperature directly. They measure the microwave emissions of O2 and estimate a temperature from that. They don't measure the whole Earth at once but only a relatively small band under the satellites so it requires several orbits to see the whole planet. Those measurements still have to be combined statistically to come up with a mean global temperature. Besides the satellite temperature records largely agree with the surface temperature records so that doesn't really help you.
Regarding your last point, the difference in global temperatures between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was about 1 degree C. Add another 1 or 2C on top of that and you would expect some pretty drastic changes.
Unless the difference between the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was more than 1 C.
Got any evidence for that or is it just speculation on your part? I can provide evidence but you probably won't believe it because it's from those conspiring climate scientists.
Social Security? Hah! Social Security is doing just fine and current projections say it will continue to be fine into the 2030's. Some minor tweaks like raising the top wages subject to FICA withholding to $250,000 would guarantee it is in good shape into the foreseeable future. The only current problem with Social Security is that the government has to start paying back all of the money they borrowed from the SS Trust Fund and spent but that's not SS's problem.
I guess the problem I have with your attitude is that you think so many climate scientists are willing have their reputations destroyed for the sake of political gain. One of the fundamental assumptions of science, especially physical sciences of which climate science is one, is that there is an underlying physical reality that will be the same for anyone researching it. So if you deliberately misrepresent that underlying reality in your science you will be found out and your career will be over. There is no shame in being wrong in science as long as you're honestly wrong but to deliberately misrepresent the science is one of the cardinal sins. The number of climate scientists has to be in the thousands and probably over 10,000 depending on how you count it. To believe that so many scientists from around the world in so many different countries and organizations are all in on a conspiracy to deliberately misrepresent climate science or even that a small cabal at the top is able to control all of the others is just not reasonable.
For example, you can't go back in time and measure global mean temperature for yourself.
Nobody "measures" a global mean temperature. It is calculated using statistical methods from the temperatures measured by weather stations around the world. The data to calculate a global mean temperature is as available to you as it is to anyone. NOAA has the database available on line. It's true that we can't go back and redo those measurements but it's also true that most of them are from long before global warming was on the radar so there's no reason to think they are deliberately biased. Of course a calculated global mean temperature is no doubt different than what you'd get if you could instantaneously measure the temperature at every point in the atmosphere but as long as the way it is derived is consistent then you can get information about how temperatures are changing over time which is what we really care about anyway.
(such as your example of conflating curve fitting with statistical models)
Huh? What is a statistical model other than trying to find a curve that fits the statistics?
Finally, we have to act now. A key part of any scam is to keep the mark from thinking. Any predicted changes in climate happen over decades to centuries yet we have to act now due to "baked in" changes or ridiculously low thresholds (can't let global temperature change more than 2 C ever).
Regarding your last point, the difference in global temperatures between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was about 1 degree C. Add another 1 or 2C on top of that and you would expect some pretty drastic changes. The "baked in" changes are due to the fact things like ocean temperature and glacial melting don't respond instantaneously to the climate forcing. So even if we stopped adding CO2 to the atmosphere today the oceans would continue to heat up until they reached equilibrium with the current forcings, the glacial ice (including Greenland and Antarctica) would continue to melt until they reached a new equilibrium. Reaching the new equilibrium will take decades to centuries. Meanwhile the oceans will continue to rise. The last time CO2 levels were at 400 ppm sea level was something like 60 feet higher than today. It wouldn't surprise me if that's still the case.
Ah, I see, your objections are not based on science but rather political ideology. I've seen no reason to think that climate scientists are distorting the science because of political considerations. I find it hard to believe that they would be so stupid as to set themselves up to be shot down by someone who pointed out the reality behind the science for political reasons.
Up until 1998 (which is still the warmest year on record),...
I'm sorry but that is simply wrong. It was true in the old HADCRUT3 record (which was less comprehensive in it's global coverage than the others) but it is not true for the HADCRUT4 record and was never true for the NOAA or NASA/GISS databases where 2005 and 2010 are tied for the warmest on record. Cherry picking the temperature record you use and the year 1998 (the year of a very strong El Nino) is not scientifically justifiable.
So what is your point? You seem to think climate models are useless, I think they're better than anything else we've got and their results have been reasonably good so far considering their limitations.
Climate models are not curve fitted to past climate trends. They are merely used to test the output against.
Rather than try to paraphrase it I'll just quote a couple of entries from the Real Climate FAQ on climate models that explain it better than I ever could. They explain how climate models are physical models as much as possible and the role climate observations don't play in developing them. (Also see: FAQ on climate models: Part II.):
* What is the difference between a physics-based model and a statistical model?
Models in statistics or in many colloquial uses of the term often imply a simple relationship that is fitted to some observations. A linear regression line through a change of temperature with time, or a sinusoidal fit to the seasonal cycle for instance. More complicated fits are also possible (neural nets for instance). These statistical models are very efficient at encapsulating existing information concisely and as long as things don’t change much, they can provide reasonable predictions of future behaviour. However, they aren’t much good for predictions if you know the underlying system is changing in ways that might possibly affect how your original variables will interact.
Physics-based models on the other hand, try to capture the real physical cause of any relationship, which hopefully are understood at a deeper level. Since those fundamentals are not likely to change in the future, the anticipation of a successful prediction is higher. A classic example is Newton’s Law of motion, F=ma, which can be used in multiple contexts to give highly accurate results completely independently of the data Newton himself had on hand.
Climate models are fundamentally physics-based, but some of the small scale physics is only known empirically (for instance, the increase of evaporation as the wind increases). Thus statistical fits to the observed data are included in the climate model formulation, but these are only used for process-level parameterisations, not for trends in time.
* Are climate models just a fit to the trend in the global temperature data?
No. Much of the confusion concerning this point comes from a misunderstanding stemming from the point above. Model development actually does not use the trend data in tuning (see below). Instead, modellers work to improve the climatology of the model (the fit to the average conditions), and it’s intrinsic variability (such as the frequency and amplitude of tropical variability). The resulting model is pretty much used ‘as is’ in hindcast experiments for the 20th Century.
And yet you kind of demolish your own credibility when you demonstrate your lack of understanding of some of the basic arguments made by climate science. You apparently are listening to someone other than climate scientists when you talk about doomsday predictions never coming true. Saying "the polar bears will go extinct in 2010, no, wait, in 2012, no, wait, in 2013, no, wait, in 2014... in the mean time, the climate scientists studying the phenomena got trapped in ice?" is just hyperbolic and wrong. No one has said they expected polar bears to go extinct in the near future, just that they will be stressed by the changes that are occurring in the Arctic which could potentially lead to their extinction sometime in the future. Then you add the bit about climate scientists studying the problem getting trapped in the ice. I presume you are talking about the ones that made the headlines recently. Problem is they were trapped in the sea ice in Antarctic. There are no polar bears in Antarctica. If you're so misinformed on such basic information as that why should we take anything you say at face value.
Also, if you think water vapor, clouds and incoming solar radiation are not addressed in climate theory you obviously have no clue what is in the theory. Climate models simply wouldn't work at all if they didn't include those factors. But water vapor by itself can never drive climate change because the level in the atmosphere is well regulated by temperature and observations of the Sun don't show its output changing enough to account for observed climate changes.
If you want us on the scientific side to respect what you say you need to demonstrate that you respect the science enough to make coherent arguments about it.
It's not clear whether that quote is talking about the General Circulation Models (aka Global Climate Models) that climate scientists use or some other type of model. But if you're interested pointers to source code for several of the GCM's and the information needed to run the models is available here.
* Is this (global warming) necessarily a bad thing?
When people ask this I like to point out that the temperature difference between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was only about 1 degree C. Now we're talking about 2 degrees or more (over the mid-20th Century) by 2100. The changes caused by 2C or more of warming are likely to be pretty drastic.
You probably didn't participate in them, mbone. Because I did, and I remember the beginning of the 1980s was about Global Cooling. People were freaked out about it, but without the megaphone of the internet. It was magazines and newspapers.
I'm calling BS on that because global cooling was never a dominant paradigm in climate science even though it got a lot of attention in the press at the time.
Science is not democracy. 99% of the scientists can and have been often wrong in human History.
That may be so but to assume they are wrong in the absence of evidence that they are wrong is silly. Until you find that magic bullet that shoots them down you'll be better off going with the scientific consensus. You'll be right more often than wrong that way.
So unless he explains where his "trend" comes from, and why it started only very recently, it's all total hogwash.
The trend comes mostly from the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, primarily CO2. The level of CO2 only seriously started rising around 200 years ago.
You obviously thing climate models are just an exercise in curve fitting rather than the actual physical models they are.
If the climate scientists have a model that accurately predicted the past 16 years then we can talk about the future.
Your expectation that models should accurately predict such short term variability just shows your lack of understanding of how climate models are expected to work. While individual model runs do show such periods of lowered temperature rise they are never expected to get the timing of such a period right because the timing of that natural variability is largely unpredictable. Since we're mostly talking about cyclical things like ENSO and the PDO it's sufficient to get the long term average right. When individual model runs from several models are combined together into an ensemble prediction that produces and averaged prediction that makes the variability of individual runs disappear.
So your expectation that climate models should be able to predict the past 16 years is essentially a straw man because that's not what climate scientists expect them to be able to do in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I think technically speaking the US Government can only mint coins, not print paper currency. Hence the proposal for minting trillion dollar coins. But in reading that Wikipedia entry they say:
The issuance of paper currency is subject to various accounting and quantity restrictions that platinum coinage is not.
So it's just a lot easier to mint coins. The entry goes into a bit of detail on the laws dealing with the minting of coins.
Sounds like a good adventure. I of course glossed over some of the difficulties in rafting the Grand Canyon. Getting an actual permit is difficult and the whitewater and logistics of a 2-3 week trip in the Grand Canyon are not for beginners and the cost isn't trivial either.
Or if you've got the gumption you can row a raft down the river itself like I did 2 years ago. Pictures are nice but they can't really give you the true scope of it all. There's absolutely nothing like being there.
One random bit of code without any context doesn't prove shit.
From geologic research there were events similar to the 1811/12 earthquakes around 1450, 900 and 300 and evidence for them as far back as 4800 B.C. That gives you some idea of the history. Based on that I'd say chances are it will be over 100 years before the next really big quake but you never know for sure.
I think the 1700 Cascadia earthquake off the Oregon/Washington coast probably qualifies as the largest in recorded history in the continental US. It hit at about 9:00 pm, January 26, 1700 and was an estimated magnitude of 8.7-9.2. (The reason the time is known so accurately is that the tsunami it caused was recorded in Japanese records.)
Too bad most of that energy in the ground is just another form of stored solar energy.
As long as you can still afford the gasoline.
This pollution hits the whole west coast of North America. Something like half of the mercury in our local environment (Oregon) comes from coal burning in SE Asia.
If nothing else you could chemically analyze the dust to find its origin but dust storm remnants crossing the Atlantic have been tracked by satellite so it's know to happen.
I guess the problem I have with your attitude is that you think so many climate scientists are willing have their reputations destroyed for the sake of political gain.
I don't know why you think that's a problem with my attitude rather than with the climate scientists in question.
In order for your premise to be correct the conspiracy to distort climate science has to include most of the governments of the world that are supporting those thousands of climate scientists and it's a conspiracy that has held together for several decades without falling apart. That's just not a reasonable premise in my view.
Nobody "measures" a global mean temperature.
Satellites do though not necessarily at the Earth's surface. Everything else is an estimate.
Satellites don't measure temperature directly. They measure the microwave emissions of O2 and estimate a temperature from that. They don't measure the whole Earth at once but only a relatively small band under the satellites so it requires several orbits to see the whole planet. Those measurements still have to be combined statistically to come up with a mean global temperature. Besides the satellite temperature records largely agree with the surface temperature records so that doesn't really help you.
Regarding your last point, the difference in global temperatures between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was about 1 degree C. Add another 1 or 2C on top of that and you would expect some pretty drastic changes.
Unless the difference between the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was more than 1 C.
Got any evidence for that or is it just speculation on your part? I can provide evidence but you probably won't believe it because it's from those conspiring climate scientists.
Social Security? Hah! Social Security is doing just fine and current projections say it will continue to be fine into the 2030's. Some minor tweaks like raising the top wages subject to FICA withholding to $250,000 would guarantee it is in good shape into the foreseeable future. The only current problem with Social Security is that the government has to start paying back all of the money they borrowed from the SS Trust Fund and spent but that's not SS's problem.
I guess the problem I have with your attitude is that you think so many climate scientists are willing have their reputations destroyed for the sake of political gain. One of the fundamental assumptions of science, especially physical sciences of which climate science is one, is that there is an underlying physical reality that will be the same for anyone researching it. So if you deliberately misrepresent that underlying reality in your science you will be found out and your career will be over. There is no shame in being wrong in science as long as you're honestly wrong but to deliberately misrepresent the science is one of the cardinal sins. The number of climate scientists has to be in the thousands and probably over 10,000 depending on how you count it. To believe that so many scientists from around the world in so many different countries and organizations are all in on a conspiracy to deliberately misrepresent climate science or even that a small cabal at the top is able to control all of the others is just not reasonable.
For example, you can't go back in time and measure global mean temperature for yourself.
Nobody "measures" a global mean temperature. It is calculated using statistical methods from the temperatures measured by weather stations around the world. The data to calculate a global mean temperature is as available to you as it is to anyone. NOAA has the database available on line. It's true that we can't go back and redo those measurements but it's also true that most of them are from long before global warming was on the radar so there's no reason to think they are deliberately biased. Of course a calculated global mean temperature is no doubt different than what you'd get if you could instantaneously measure the temperature at every point in the atmosphere but as long as the way it is derived is consistent then you can get information about how temperatures are changing over time which is what we really care about anyway.
(such as your example of conflating curve fitting with statistical models)
Huh? What is a statistical model other than trying to find a curve that fits the statistics?
Finally, we have to act now. A key part of any scam is to keep the mark from thinking. Any predicted changes in climate happen over decades to centuries yet we have to act now due to "baked in" changes or ridiculously low thresholds (can't let global temperature change more than 2 C ever).
Regarding your last point, the difference in global temperatures between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was about 1 degree C. Add another 1 or 2C on top of that and you would expect some pretty drastic changes. The "baked in" changes are due to the fact things like ocean temperature and glacial melting don't respond instantaneously to the climate forcing. So even if we stopped adding CO2 to the atmosphere today the oceans would continue to heat up until they reached equilibrium with the current forcings, the glacial ice (including Greenland and Antarctica) would continue to melt until they reached a new equilibrium. Reaching the new equilibrium will take decades to centuries. Meanwhile the oceans will continue to rise. The last time CO2 levels were at 400 ppm sea level was something like 60 feet higher than today. It wouldn't surprise me if that's still the case.
Ah, I see, your objections are not based on science but rather political ideology. I've seen no reason to think that climate scientists are distorting the science because of political considerations. I find it hard to believe that they would be so stupid as to set themselves up to be shot down by someone who pointed out the reality behind the science for political reasons.
There is no question that they are better than no model at all. Here is a comparison of models to real world data up to 2012. The 2013 version should be out in a month or so.
Up until 1998 (which is still the warmest year on record), ...
I'm sorry but that is simply wrong. It was true in the old HADCRUT3 record (which was less comprehensive in it's global coverage than the others) but it is not true for the HADCRUT4 record and was never true for the NOAA or NASA/GISS databases where 2005 and 2010 are tied for the warmest on record. Cherry picking the temperature record you use and the year 1998 (the year of a very strong El Nino) is not scientifically justifiable.
So what is your point? You seem to think climate models are useless, I think they're better than anything else we've got and their results have been reasonably good so far considering their limitations.
Climate models are not curve fitted to past climate trends. They are merely used to test the output against.
Rather than try to paraphrase it I'll just quote a couple of entries from the Real Climate FAQ on climate models that explain it better than I ever could. They explain how climate models are physical models as much as possible and the role climate observations don't play in developing them. (Also see: FAQ on climate models: Part II.):
* What is the difference between a physics-based model and a statistical model?
Models in statistics or in many colloquial uses of the term often imply a simple relationship that is fitted to some observations. A linear regression line through a change of temperature with time, or a sinusoidal fit to the seasonal cycle for instance. More complicated fits are also possible (neural nets for instance). These statistical models are very efficient at encapsulating existing information concisely and as long as things don’t change much, they can provide reasonable predictions of future behaviour. However, they aren’t much good for predictions if you know the underlying system is changing in ways that might possibly affect how your original variables will interact.
Physics-based models on the other hand, try to capture the real physical cause of any relationship, which hopefully are understood at a deeper level. Since those fundamentals are not likely to change in the future, the anticipation of a successful prediction is higher. A classic example is Newton’s Law of motion, F=ma, which can be used in multiple contexts to give highly accurate results completely independently of the data Newton himself had on hand.
Climate models are fundamentally physics-based, but some of the small scale physics is only known empirically (for instance, the increase of evaporation as the wind increases). Thus statistical fits to the observed data are included in the climate model formulation, but these are only used for process-level parameterisations, not for trends in time.
* Are climate models just a fit to the trend in the global temperature data?
No. Much of the confusion concerning this point comes from a misunderstanding stemming from the point above. Model development actually does not use the trend data in tuning (see below). Instead, modellers work to improve the climatology of the model (the fit to the average conditions), and it’s intrinsic variability (such as the frequency and amplitude of tropical variability). The resulting model is pretty much used ‘as is’ in hindcast experiments for the 20th Century.
And yet you kind of demolish your own credibility when you demonstrate your lack of understanding of some of the basic arguments made by climate science. You apparently are listening to someone other than climate scientists when you talk about doomsday predictions never coming true. Saying "the polar bears will go extinct in 2010, no, wait, in 2012, no, wait, in 2013, no, wait, in 2014... in the mean time, the climate scientists studying the phenomena got trapped in ice?" is just hyperbolic and wrong. No one has said they expected polar bears to go extinct in the near future, just that they will be stressed by the changes that are occurring in the Arctic which could potentially lead to their extinction sometime in the future. Then you add the bit about climate scientists studying the problem getting trapped in the ice. I presume you are talking about the ones that made the headlines recently. Problem is they were trapped in the sea ice in Antarctic. There are no polar bears in Antarctica. If you're so misinformed on such basic information as that why should we take anything you say at face value.
Also, if you think water vapor, clouds and incoming solar radiation are not addressed in climate theory you obviously have no clue what is in the theory. Climate models simply wouldn't work at all if they didn't include those factors. But water vapor by itself can never drive climate change because the level in the atmosphere is well regulated by temperature and observations of the Sun don't show its output changing enough to account for observed climate changes.
If you want us on the scientific side to respect what you say you need to demonstrate that you respect the science enough to make coherent arguments about it.
It's not clear whether that quote is talking about the General Circulation Models (aka Global Climate Models) that climate scientists use or some other type of model. But if you're interested pointers to source code for several of the GCM's and the information needed to run the models is available here.
* Is this (global warming) necessarily a bad thing?
When people ask this I like to point out that the temperature difference between the depths of the Little Ice Age and the mid-20th Century was only about 1 degree C. Now we're talking about 2 degrees or more (over the mid-20th Century) by 2100. The changes caused by 2C or more of warming are likely to be pretty drastic.
You probably didn't participate in them, mbone. Because I did, and I remember the beginning of the 1980s was about Global Cooling. People were freaked out about it, but without the megaphone of the internet. It was magazines and newspapers.
I'm calling BS on that because global cooling was never a dominant paradigm in climate science even though it got a lot of attention in the press at the time.
There probably aren't any comprehensive records of California rainfall before around 1890. Before then you are forced to use proxy measurements.
Science is not democracy. 99% of the scientists can and have been often wrong in human History.
That may be so but to assume they are wrong in the absence of evidence that they are wrong is silly. Until you find that magic bullet that shoots them down you'll be better off going with the scientific consensus. You'll be right more often than wrong that way.
So unless he explains where his "trend" comes from, and why it started only very recently, it's all total hogwash.
The trend comes mostly from the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, primarily CO2. The level of CO2 only seriously started rising around 200 years ago.
You obviously thing climate models are just an exercise in curve fitting rather than the actual physical models they are.
If the climate scientists have a model that accurately predicted the past 16 years then we can talk about the future.
Your expectation that models should accurately predict such short term variability just shows your lack of understanding of how climate models are expected to work. While individual model runs do show such periods of lowered temperature rise they are never expected to get the timing of such a period right because the timing of that natural variability is largely unpredictable. Since we're mostly talking about cyclical things like ENSO and the PDO it's sufficient to get the long term average right. When individual model runs from several models are combined together into an ensemble prediction that produces and averaged prediction that makes the variability of individual runs disappear.
So your expectation that climate models should be able to predict the past 16 years is essentially a straw man because that's not what climate scientists expect them to be able to do in the first place.