/. ought to institute a policy that if racist crap like this gets enough negative mods (-10?) it gets erased and all the modders get their points back.
The last time the state of Milankovitch Cycles was similar to what they are now was during the interglacial about 430,000 years ago. That one lasted about 30,000 years. But if "On the Effect of a New Grand Minimum of Solar Activity on the Future Climate on Earth" (Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010) is right then the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases has postponed any new ice age indefinitely. It's unlikely a new glacial period will happen any time soon certainly not in the lifetime of anyone alive today*.
It that isn't a trolling comment I don't know what is. Trying to tie Mann to a scandal in the football program. On top of that Mann has never been shown to be a liar. If his studies lead him to be alarmed about the potential for global warming to devastate our civilization shouldn't he as a leading scientist in the field voice his concerns?
I think a vehicle built with carbon fiber could be light enough and crash worthy enough to be doable but you still have the problem of the competence of the pilot.
Most general aviation piston engined airplanes use pure gasoline. It does have a slightly higher energy density because it's not cut with ethanol as automobile gasoline is but it's not that much different.
Instances of engine failure during flight are not necessarily automatically fatal to the occupants even in single engine airplanes. It depends mostly on the skill of the pilot and the availability of a suitable place to set down. For example US Airways Flight 1549.
Statistically speaking commercial air travel is very safe. But in general as the airplane gets smaller the accident rate goes up. The only way I can see a flying car being safe enough for the general population is if the flight is controlled by automation.
Also you have a much higher interest in the successful completion of the flight when you're sitting in the vehicle. It tends to focus your concentration.
That is a consequence of the widening gap between the rich and the not so rich. If the wealth were more evenly spread the not so rich would pay more taxes and reduce that 94% of all taxes paid by the top 20%.
Not a chance. The heat receive from the Sun and retained by the Earth is several orders of magnitude greater than all volcanoes put together. Volcanoes are insignificant in that regard.
The first scientist to alert Americans to the prospect that human-caused climate change and global warming was already upon us was NASA climatologist James Hansen. In a sweltering Senate hall during the hot, dry summer of 1988, Hansen announced that “it is time to stop waffling. The evidence is pretty strong that the [human-amplified] greenhouse effect is here.”
At the time, many scientists felt his announcement to be premature. I was among them.
I was a young graduate student researching the importance of natural – rather than human-caused – variations in temperature, and I felt that the “signal” of human-caused climate change had not yet emerged from the “noise” of natural, long-term climate variation. As I discuss in my book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, scientists by their very nature tend to be conservative, even reticent, when it comes to discussing findings and observations that lie at the forefront of our understanding and that aren’t yet part of the “accepted” body of scientific knowledge.
Dire warning
Hansen, it turns out, was right, and the critics were wrong. Rather than being reckless, as some of his critics charged, his announcement to the world proved to be prescient – and his critics were proven overly cautious.
Given the prescience of Hansen’s science, we would be unwise to ignore his latest, more dire warning.
In a paper published today in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hansen and two colleagues argue convincingly that climate change is now not only upon us, but in fact we are fully immersed in it. Much of the extreme weather we have witnessed in recent years almost certainly contains a human-induced component.
Hansen, in his latest paper, shows that the increase in probability of hot summers due to global warming is such that what was once considered an unusually hot summer has now become typical, and what was once considered typical will soon become a thing of the past – a summer too improbably cool to anymore expect.
We need to view this summer’s extreme weather in this wider context.
Not random
It is not simply a set of random events occurring in isolation, but part of a broader emerging pattern. We are seeing, in much of the extreme weather we are experiencing, the “loading of the weather dice.” Over the past decade, records for daily maximum high temperatures in the U.S. have been broken at twice the rate we would expect from chance alone. Think of this as rolling double sixes twice as often as you’d expect – something you would readily notice in a high stakes game of dice. Thus far this year, that ratio is close to 10 to 1. That’s double sixes coming up ten times as often as you expect.
So the record-breaking heat this summer over so much of the United States, where records that have stood since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s are now dropping like flies, isn’t just a fluke of nature; it is the loading of the weather dice playing out in real time.
The record heat – and the dry soils associated with it – played a role in the unprecedented forest fires that wrought death and destruction in Colorado and New Mexico. It played a role in the hot and bone-dry conditions over the nation’s breadbasket that has decimated U.S. agricultural yields. It played a role in the unprecedented 50 percent of the U.S. finding itself in extreme drought.
Other threats
Climate change is also threatening us in other ways of course, subjecting our coastal cities to increased
Not that I expect it to sway your opinion but here are some comments on the paper by other scientists:
The science in Hansen’s study is excellent “and reframes the question,” said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
Another upcoming study by Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, links the 2010 Russian heat wave to global warming by looking at the underlying weather that caused the heat wave. He called Hansen’s paper an important one that helps communicate the problem.
White House science adviser John Holdren praised the paper’s findings in a statement: “This work, which finds that extremely hot summers are over 10 times more common than they used to be, reinforces many other lines of evidence showing that climate change is occurring and that it is harmful.”
Granger Morgan, head of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, called Hansen’s study “an important next step in what I expect will be a growing set of statistically-based arguments.”
I read all of that and didn't quite know what to make of it. I don't think your hypothesis is very realistic.
There are lots of things besides dust that can be cloud condensation nuclei and I doubt there is any level of the atmosphere that is totally without them. If the air becomes supersaturated to around 400% water will condense regardless of the availability of condensation nuclei and once that starts it will cascade back down to 100% or lower rather quickly. The total amount of water in the atmosphere is enough to cover the Earth's surface with about 1 inch of water. Assuming that's for a relative humidity of 50% then 100% would mean 2 inches and 400% would mean 8 inches. I seriously doubt you could get enough water vapor in the atmosphere under any scenario to change sea level by more than a foot or two. The times in the past when sea level has been very low is during glaciations (ice ages), not hot ages. The fact that water vapor is lighter than air and CO2 is heaver than air makes little difference to their distribution in the atmosphere. The CO2 concentration is not significantly reduced as the elevation increases, a fact that has been measured. Water vapor however is scarce above the troposphere because as you rise it get colder (lapse rate) and the water vapor condenses out. The polar regions may become much warmer but they'll still be subject to little or no sunlight during the winter months and the melting of the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica would raise sea levels over 200 feet.
The earliest use of the term "climate change" I'm aware of was a 1956 paper by Glibert Plass titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change" so it's been around for a long time.
I agree that GCM's may be able to tell you something about expected changes in average precipitation for broad regions. But with a horizontal grid size of around 100 x 100 km they're not very precise. There are smaller regional climate models that offer more precision
Hansen's latest paper is a statistical analysis of long term changes in global temperatures. That is exactly what climate science is about, the statistics of aggregated weather events. Individual weather events such as an extra cold winter storm or a heat wave are not climate but when you examine the patterns of many events over time it is climate. As I said you can denigrate Hansen all you want but his work has stood up well compared to actual observations.
When you consider how much is spent on alternative energy sources you have to subtract the amount that would have been spent on conventional energy sources to produce that power. It's the difference between the two that is the extra cost.
Slashdot Mirror
I say it's far more efficient to convert the coal to uranium, and then there would be zero carbon emissions!
You know the secret of the Philosopher's Stone!?
There's a lot of room between roman_mir's free market worship and Marxist economics.
/. ought to institute a policy that if racist crap like this gets enough negative mods (-10?) it gets erased and all the modders get their points back.
The last time the state of Milankovitch Cycles was similar to what they are now was during the interglacial about 430,000 years ago. That one lasted about 30,000 years. But if "On the Effect of a New Grand Minimum of Solar Activity on the Future Climate on Earth" (Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010) is right then the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases has postponed any new ice age indefinitely. It's unlikely a new glacial period will happen any time soon certainly not in the lifetime of anyone alive today*.
*Assuming no breakthroughs in immortality.
Rather than speculate you could actually go read the report on Mann and see who the investigating officials were:
Composition of the Investigatory Committee:
Sarah M. Assmann, Waller Professor
Department of Biology
Welford Castleman, Evan Pugh Professor and Eberly Distinguished Chair in Science
Department of Chemistry and Department of Physics
Mary Jane Irwin, Evan Pugh Professor
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Nina G. Jablonski, Department Head and Professor
Department of Anthropology
Fred W. Vondracek, Professor
Department of Human Development and Family Studies
Research Integrity Officer:
Candice Yekel, Director of the Office for Research Protections
Penn State never did a formal investigation of Sandusky until the past year so it's unlikely that any of those people knew anything about it.
It that isn't a trolling comment I don't know what is. Trying to tie Mann to a scandal in the football program. On top of that Mann has never been shown to be a liar. If his studies lead him to be alarmed about the potential for global warming to devastate our civilization shouldn't he as a leading scientist in the field voice his concerns?
If the rate of solar flaring has not changed significantly over the last 60,000 years* or so then it doesn't have much effect.
*60,000 years being the approximate oldest useful dating from carbon 14.
I think a vehicle built with carbon fiber could be light enough and crash worthy enough to be doable but you still have the problem of the competence of the pilot.
Most general aviation piston engined airplanes use pure gasoline. It does have a slightly higher energy density because it's not cut with ethanol as automobile gasoline is but it's not that much different.
Take off and climbing to cruise altitude is where most of the fuel burn occurs.
Probably hot air would be the best way to levitate personal blimps.
Instances of engine failure during flight are not necessarily automatically fatal to the occupants even in single engine airplanes. It depends mostly on the skill of the pilot and the availability of a suitable place to set down. For example US Airways Flight 1549.
Statistically speaking commercial air travel is very safe. But in general as the airplane gets smaller the accident rate goes up. The only way I can see a flying car being safe enough for the general population is if the flight is controlled by automation.
Also you have a much higher interest in the successful completion of the flight when you're sitting in the vehicle. It tends to focus your concentration.
That is a consequence of the widening gap between the rich and the not so rich. If the wealth were more evenly spread the not so rich would pay more taxes and reduce that 94% of all taxes paid by the top 20%.
Not a chance. The heat receive from the Sun and retained by the Earth is several orders of magnitude greater than all volcanoes put together. Volcanoes are insignificant in that regard.
And here is one you'll probably laugh at because of the source:
James Hansen’s latest findings linking extreme weather to climate change is science society cannot afford to ignore.
by Michael Mann, via The Daily Climate
The first scientist to alert Americans to the prospect that human-caused climate change and global warming was already upon us was NASA climatologist James Hansen. In a sweltering Senate hall during the hot, dry summer of 1988, Hansen announced that “it is time to stop waffling. The evidence is pretty strong that the [human-amplified] greenhouse effect is here.”
At the time, many scientists felt his announcement to be premature. I was among them.
I was a young graduate student researching the importance of natural – rather than human-caused – variations in temperature, and I felt that the “signal” of human-caused climate change had not yet emerged from the “noise” of natural, long-term climate variation. As I discuss in my book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, scientists by their very nature tend to be conservative, even reticent, when it comes to discussing findings and observations that lie at the forefront of our understanding and that aren’t yet part of the “accepted” body of scientific knowledge.
Dire warning
Hansen, it turns out, was right, and the critics were wrong. Rather than being reckless, as some of his critics charged, his announcement to the world proved to be prescient – and his critics were proven overly cautious.
Given the prescience of Hansen’s science, we would be unwise to ignore his latest, more dire warning.
In a paper published today in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hansen and two colleagues argue convincingly that climate change is now not only upon us, but in fact we are fully immersed in it. Much of the extreme weather we have witnessed in recent years almost certainly contains a human-induced component.
Hansen, in his latest paper, shows that the increase in probability of hot summers due to global warming is such that what was once considered an unusually hot summer has now become typical, and what was once considered typical will soon become a thing of the past – a summer too improbably cool to anymore expect.
We need to view this summer’s extreme weather in this wider context.
Not random
It is not simply a set of random events occurring in isolation, but part of a broader emerging pattern. We are seeing, in much of the extreme weather we are experiencing, the “loading of the weather dice.” Over the past decade, records for daily maximum high temperatures in the U.S. have been broken at twice the rate we would expect from chance alone. Think of this as rolling double sixes twice as often as you’d expect – something you would readily notice in a high stakes game of dice. Thus far this year, that ratio is close to 10 to 1. That’s double sixes coming up ten times as often as you expect.
So the record-breaking heat this summer over so much of the United States, where records that have stood since the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s are now dropping like flies, isn’t just a fluke of nature; it is the loading of the weather dice playing out in real time.
The record heat – and the dry soils associated with it – played a role in the unprecedented forest fires that wrought death and destruction in Colorado and New Mexico. It played a role in the hot and bone-dry conditions over the nation’s breadbasket that has decimated U.S. agricultural yields. It played a role in the unprecedented 50 percent of the U.S. finding itself in extreme drought.
Other threats
Climate change is also threatening us in other ways of course, subjecting our coastal cities to increased
Not that I expect it to sway your opinion but here are some comments on the paper by other scientists:
The science in Hansen’s study is excellent “and reframes the question,” said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
Another upcoming study by Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, links the 2010 Russian heat wave to global warming by looking at the underlying weather that caused the heat wave. He called Hansen’s paper an important one that helps communicate the problem.
White House science adviser John Holdren praised the paper’s findings in a statement: “This work, which finds that extremely hot summers are over 10 times more common than they used to be, reinforces many other lines of evidence showing that climate change is occurring and that it is harmful.”
Granger Morgan, head of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, called Hansen’s study “an important next step in what I expect will be a growing set of statistically-based arguments.”
I read all of that and didn't quite know what to make of it. I don't think your hypothesis is very realistic.
There are lots of things besides dust that can be cloud condensation nuclei and I doubt there is any level of the atmosphere that is totally without them. If the air becomes supersaturated to around 400% water will condense regardless of the availability of condensation nuclei and once that starts it will cascade back down to 100% or lower rather quickly. The total amount of water in the atmosphere is enough to cover the Earth's surface with about 1 inch of water. Assuming that's for a relative humidity of 50% then 100% would mean 2 inches and 400% would mean 8 inches. I seriously doubt you could get enough water vapor in the atmosphere under any scenario to change sea level by more than a foot or two. The times in the past when sea level has been very low is during glaciations (ice ages), not hot ages. The fact that water vapor is lighter than air and CO2 is heaver than air makes little difference to their distribution in the atmosphere. The CO2 concentration is not significantly reduced as the elevation increases, a fact that has been measured. Water vapor however is scarce above the troposphere because as you rise it get colder (lapse rate) and the water vapor condenses out. The polar regions may become much warmer but they'll still be subject to little or no sunlight during the winter months and the melting of the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica would raise sea levels over 200 feet.
The earliest use of the term "climate change" I'm aware of was a 1956 paper by Glibert Plass titled "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change" so it's been around for a long time.
I agree that GCM's may be able to tell you something about expected changes in average precipitation for broad regions. But with a horizontal grid size of around 100 x 100 km they're not very precise. There are smaller regional climate models that offer more precision
Whatever. Water is just as essential as air is to life and our society is critically shaped by the availability or lack of water.
Hansen's latest paper is a statistical analysis of long term changes in global temperatures. That is exactly what climate science is about, the statistics of aggregated weather events. Individual weather events such as an extra cold winter storm or a heat wave are not climate but when you examine the patterns of many events over time it is climate. As I said you can denigrate Hansen all you want but his work has stood up well compared to actual observations.
I've heard that the peak of the Perseids will occur around 2:00 AM Pacific Time on Sunday (August 12) morning.
I think you could argue that an aquifer and water in general is a public good.
When you consider how much is spent on alternative energy sources you have to subtract the amount that would have been spent on conventional energy sources to produce that power. It's the difference between the two that is the extra cost.