1. 9-11 would still have happened (remember: because Gore contested the election in the courts, not all of Bush's team was in-place before 9-11 particularly at CIA where the Clinton/Gore people were still running things)
Oh good God! Bush v. Gore was decided on December 12, 2000, more than a month before Bush was inaugurated. If a delay of about one month was a problem then the Bush administration was just plain incompetent.
Well, in Oregon, since the post mark doesn't count you get lineups of cars on election night at the drop off points. I've seen lines over 1/4 mile long to do that before.
BTW, are you related to the guy who had a restaurant in Portland called Hung Far Lo?
You're assuming the Iranians are suicidal. They have to know that if they dropped the bomb on Israel they'd draw massive retaliation from the US and they wouldn't have a chance. They'd probably put up a good fight but in the end they'd be overwhelmed. I can't imagine Israel's Arab neighbors would be happy about having a nuclear weapon detonated next door either.. I just think they're a lot smarter than that.
Obama isn't running away from ObamaCare either. I think the reason it hasn't become more of an issue in the general election is that it's nearly the same thing as RomneyCare in Massachusetts. If Romney brings it up it just brings attention to the fact that he did the same thing.
Well Bend, Oregon is situated pretty much at the base of the Newberry shield volcano less than 30 miles north of the crater. The population of the metro area is ~170,000. Eugene, Oregon is only 90-100 miles west, metro area population ~ 350,000.
I used to live in Bend and have been all over Newberry. I've explored most of the lave tube caves around the base. Up in the crater there's a large obsidian flow that just dazzles you on a sunny day. If you're into the outdoors the whole area is pretty spectacular.
That makes sense. Storing more water at a higher elevation would move mass away from the Earth's center slowing the rotation a bit, just like a figure skater in a spin slows it down by spreading their arms or a leg. By the same token the melting of mountain glaciers would speed the Earth's rotation up a bit since the mass would be moving closer to the center. But the effect has got to be pretty miniscule considering the mass involved compared to the Earth's total mass.
Not really. The oceans are all linked, and a rise in one part would imply a rise in another part.
Sure, that's what common sense would tell you. But when it comes to a single station you have to account for the rise or fall of the land it's on. The gravitational attraction of things like mountain ranges and ice sheets affect local sea level. Changes in the prevailing winds or ocean currents also affect sea level. I found this article on the subject that talks about it. It's really a pretty fascinating subject, to me at least.
There is a fundamental difference between the Arctic sea ice that is floating on the ocean and the Greenland ice sheet that is sitting on land. When sea ice, typically 1-2 meters thick, melts out it exposes the underlying ocean water to the atmosphere. When a little ice melts off the top of a mile thick sheet of ice it's still ice, just slightly lower in elevation. If you're not perceptive enough to understand the difference that's not my problem.
If you want to see what it is in the longer term it's all there in the data products. It's got to be a pretty simple calculation with at best maybe 100 data points.
Oh, you're giving up on volcanoes and now it's forest fires that put out far more CO2 than humans.
I did a little Googling and found this story from 2007. It says forest fires release about 0.29 gigatonnes a year in the US and Alaska, equivalent to 4-6% of the nations output from burning fossil fuels. A significant amount but still far below the emissions from fossil fuels.
The fire suppression we've practiced for the last 100+ years leads to fuel buildup which can produce bigger fires when they happen.
Don't fall for the media hype. But as far as Sandy goes it sounds like it was about as bad as advertized from what I saw. Some areas like Washington DC got warnings that didn't pan out completely but predicting the path of a hurricane is difficult. If Sandy had turned a little further south they would have got it too.
I think in climatology 30 years is the basis for defining a lot of climate parameters. That's long enough that natural variability averages out and you can get a true climate reading. The 30% above average hurricane season this year was in comparison to 1981 to 2010. That's 30 years and basically the most recent 30 year to boot. It's 30% above average so far but I wonder what the standard deviation is. That would give you a better idea of how unusual it is.
No, it was not the melting of ice in Greenland, it was the record low Arctic sea ice around nearly the whole basin that exposed a lot of extra sea water to the atmosphere that probably helped exacerbate the blocking high by changing the jet stream.
As far as the Greenland summit melting, the 150 year average is over the last 10,000 years but if you look at this chart you'll notice that most of the events were concentrated from 4,000 to 8,000 years ago and before the 1889 event it had been 700 years since the previous one. In fact in the last 2,000 years there have only been 6 of the events, an average of one every 333 years.
I think you're only counting the hurricanes that hit the Contiguous US. The statistics in the story count all Atlantic tropical storms/hurricanes. Plenty of those hit other places like Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Bermuda, etc.
The "this is going to be the worst hurricane season on record with record landfalls." thing is just media hype if anything. You piqued my interest with that so I went and looked it up. I don't see any indication of CYA in them. They over predicted some years but under predicted others Here, you can see for yourself. Scroll down 2 pages for the prediction charts.
You know, it's people like you who are obsessed with Al Gore. I've never paid him much attention because it's the scientists and their work that really matters. Gore is just like a spokesmodel for the subject.
If you can't trust them counting paper ballots how could you ever trust them to run an electronic voting machine? Heck, the people running the machines are barely competent and have to call in a tech if something goes sideways. If you really want an electronic interface I'd be okay with one that you record your votes on then it prints out your ballot so you can verify it's correct before you turn it in for counting. But the voting machine itself shouldn't keep an internal record of the vote.
Fortunately in my state we have vote by mail which requires a paper ballot. Any registered voter can observe the vote counting if they want to (limited by elections office space). It's my understanding that there are always observers, at least in my county. They do have an electronic machine or two in the county elections office for ADA reasons, so disabled people can use them if they desire. I'm okay with that.
I've been doing computer work, mostly systems and database admin with some programming thrown in, for over 30 years now. I know well the strengths and weaknesses of computers. It's too easy to blow them up either accidentally (guilty!) or on purpose with malicious intent. The vote is one of the fundamental rights in the US and I don't want it subject to those weaknesses. A hardcopy ballot that the voter can personally verify is the most trustworthy way we have of recording votes even though it's not perfect.
Yeah, I'm pretty cynical about what voting accomplishes right now especially at the national level but if enough people get exercised about something it can make a difference.
Just say no to all electronic voting. I don't care if it's open source or not, how can you ever be sure about the software loaded on a voting machine unless you do it personally. And then how can anyone else who uses the machine trust you. I don't have a problem with machine counting of paper ballots because you always have a hand count to fall back on if necessary but I'll never trust pure electronic voting.
Too bad you weren't around (I assume) when Neil Armstrong first stepped on to the Moon. We were glued to TV that day. That was even harder to believe at the time. Telstar 1, the first satellite to beam live television from Europe to the US was only launched 7 years before that.
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1. 9-11 would still have happened (remember: because Gore contested the election in the courts, not all of Bush's team was in-place before 9-11 particularly at CIA where the Clinton/Gore people were still running things)
Oh good God! Bush v. Gore was decided on December 12, 2000, more than a month before Bush was inaugurated. If a delay of about one month was a problem then the Bush administration was just plain incompetent.
Well, in Oregon, since the post mark doesn't count you get lineups of cars on election night at the drop off points. I've seen lines over 1/4 mile long to do that before.
BTW, are you related to the guy who had a restaurant in Portland called Hung Far Lo?
Romney has surrounded himself with many of the same neocons that Bush II did.
You're assuming the Iranians are suicidal. They have to know that if they dropped the bomb on Israel they'd draw massive retaliation from the US and they wouldn't have a chance. They'd probably put up a good fight but in the end they'd be overwhelmed. I can't imagine Israel's Arab neighbors would be happy about having a nuclear weapon detonated next door either.. I just think they're a lot smarter than that.
Nicely put.
Yeah, a lot of people fell for the "robbing of Medicare" meme. It's simply not true and Paul Ryan's budget had the same thing in it.
Obama isn't running away from ObamaCare either. I think the reason it hasn't become more of an issue in the general election is that it's nearly the same thing as RomneyCare in Massachusetts. If Romney brings it up it just brings attention to the fact that he did the same thing.
Well Bend, Oregon is situated pretty much at the base of the Newberry shield volcano less than 30 miles north of the crater. The population of the metro area is ~170,000. Eugene, Oregon is only 90-100 miles west, metro area population ~ 350,000.
I used to live in Bend and have been all over Newberry. I've explored most of the lave tube caves around the base. Up in the crater there's a large obsidian flow that just dazzles you on a sunny day. If you're into the outdoors the whole area is pretty spectacular.
I've read hydro also slows the earth rotation.
That makes sense. Storing more water at a higher elevation would move mass away from the Earth's center slowing the rotation a bit, just like a figure skater in a spin slows it down by spreading their arms or a leg. By the same token the melting of mountain glaciers would speed the Earth's rotation up a bit since the mass would be moving closer to the center. But the effect has got to be pretty miniscule considering the mass involved compared to the Earth's total mass.
Not really. The oceans are all linked, and a rise in one part would imply a rise in another part.
Sure, that's what common sense would tell you. But when it comes to a single station you have to account for the rise or fall of the land it's on. The gravitational attraction of things like mountain ranges and ice sheets affect local sea level. Changes in the prevailing winds or ocean currents also affect sea level. I found this article on the subject that talks about it. It's really a pretty fascinating subject, to me at least.
There is a fundamental difference between the Arctic sea ice that is floating on the ocean and the Greenland ice sheet that is sitting on land. When sea ice, typically 1-2 meters thick, melts out it exposes the underlying ocean water to the atmosphere. When a little ice melts off the top of a mile thick sheet of ice it's still ice, just slightly lower in elevation. If you're not perceptive enough to understand the difference that's not my problem.
If you want to see what it is in the longer term it's all there in the data products. It's got to be a pretty simple calculation with at best maybe 100 data points.
30 years is kind of the standard in climate science, long enough that the noise of natural variability gets filtered out.
Oh, you're giving up on volcanoes and now it's forest fires that put out far more CO2 than humans.
I did a little Googling and found this story from 2007. It says forest fires release about 0.29 gigatonnes a year in the US and Alaska, equivalent to 4-6% of the nations output from burning fossil fuels. A significant amount but still far below the emissions from fossil fuels.
The fire suppression we've practiced for the last 100+ years leads to fuel buildup which can produce bigger fires when they happen.
Don't fall for the media hype. But as far as Sandy goes it sounds like it was about as bad as advertized from what I saw. Some areas like Washington DC got warnings that didn't pan out completely but predicting the path of a hurricane is difficult. If Sandy had turned a little further south they would have got it too.
I think in climatology 30 years is the basis for defining a lot of climate parameters. That's long enough that natural variability averages out and you can get a true climate reading. The 30% above average hurricane season this year was in comparison to 1981 to 2010. That's 30 years and basically the most recent 30 year to boot. It's 30% above average so far but I wonder what the standard deviation is. That would give you a better idea of how unusual it is.
Oddly enough sea level is far more complex than a single station can measure.
No, it was not the melting of ice in Greenland, it was the record low Arctic sea ice around nearly the whole basin that exposed a lot of extra sea water to the atmosphere that probably helped exacerbate the blocking high by changing the jet stream.
As far as the Greenland summit melting, the 150 year average is over the last 10,000 years but if you look at this chart you'll notice that most of the events were concentrated from 4,000 to 8,000 years ago and before the 1889 event it had been 700 years since the previous one. In fact in the last 2,000 years there have only been 6 of the events, an average of one every 333 years.
I think you're only counting the hurricanes that hit the Contiguous US. The statistics in the story count all Atlantic tropical storms/hurricanes. Plenty of those hit other places like Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Bermuda, etc.
The "this is going to be the worst hurricane season on record with record landfalls." thing is just media hype if anything. You piqued my interest with that so I went and looked it up. I don't see any indication of CYA in them. They over predicted some years but under predicted others Here, you can see for yourself. Scroll down 2 pages for the prediction charts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Atlantic_hurricane_season
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Atlantic_hurricane_season
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Atlantic_hurricane_season
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Atlantic_hurricane_season
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Atlantic_hurricane_season
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Atlantic_hurricane_season
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Atlantic_hurricane_season
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Atlantic_hurricane_season
I tried that one, smoked a whole fat Thai stick by myself in less than a half hour.
You know, it's people like you who are obsessed with Al Gore. I've never paid him much attention because it's the scientists and their work that really matters. Gore is just like a spokesmodel for the subject.
If you can't trust them counting paper ballots how could you ever trust them to run an electronic voting machine? Heck, the people running the machines are barely competent and have to call in a tech if something goes sideways. If you really want an electronic interface I'd be okay with one that you record your votes on then it prints out your ballot so you can verify it's correct before you turn it in for counting. But the voting machine itself shouldn't keep an internal record of the vote.
Fortunately in my state we have vote by mail which requires a paper ballot. Any registered voter can observe the vote counting if they want to (limited by elections office space). It's my understanding that there are always observers, at least in my county. They do have an electronic machine or two in the county elections office for ADA reasons, so disabled people can use them if they desire. I'm okay with that.
I've been doing computer work, mostly systems and database admin with some programming thrown in, for over 30 years now. I know well the strengths and weaknesses of computers. It's too easy to blow them up either accidentally (guilty!) or on purpose with malicious intent. The vote is one of the fundamental rights in the US and I don't want it subject to those weaknesses. A hardcopy ballot that the voter can personally verify is the most trustworthy way we have of recording votes even though it's not perfect.
Yeah, I'm pretty cynical about what voting accomplishes right now especially at the national level but if enough people get exercised about something it can make a difference.
Just say no to all electronic voting. I don't care if it's open source or not, how can you ever be sure about the software loaded on a voting machine unless you do it personally. And then how can anyone else who uses the machine trust you. I don't have a problem with machine counting of paper ballots because you always have a hand count to fall back on if necessary but I'll never trust pure electronic voting.
Too bad you weren't around (I assume) when Neil Armstrong first stepped on to the Moon. We were glued to TV that day. That was even harder to believe at the time. Telstar 1, the first satellite to beam live television from Europe to the US was only launched 7 years before that.
Plants also need oxygen to survive too.
In plants oxygen is produced in photosynthesis but most oxygen used in plant respiration enters passively by diffusion or through structural openings such as lenticels.