Don't you think it is possible that James Hansen's political activism is informed by his alarm at what the science tells him and what that means for his children and grandchildren? Does being a scientist mean you have to resign from being human?
To me it shows a profound lack of imagination to think that we can't reduce carbon emissions without reducing our economic output. Just because we've been doing it that way for the past 200+ years doesn't mean there aren't alternatives.
Without government relieving the liability there would be no private nuclear plants built period. Even if you removed all government regulation the potential private liability is so high that no private entity will choose to finance a nuclear project.
Often though scientists talk in terms of carbon instead of CO2. That's because the CO2 is part of the Carbon Cycle that includes not only the atmospheric CO2 but the carbonic acid (dissolved CO2) in the waters of the planet, the carbon in the biosphere and the carbon in geologic processes. There is a balance maintained between those different stores of carbon and sometimes it's easier to talk about if you only consider the C in CO2.
The shortages of the 1970s oil crisis weren't due to diminished production, they were due to price controls instituted by Nixon...
Hmm. Interesting analysis. Having lived through that era I always thought that it was due to the fact that the US reached the point where we could no longer supply all of our demand for petroleum internally and OPEC, realizing they had us by the short hairs, started yanking.
The average of rolling a die is 3.5. If what you are saying is true then we would have to say the average is 4 which is not as precise at 3.5. There's a difference between a statistically derived number from a large number of samples and the individual samples that go into it.
Delays and failures such as this are a serious blow to the idea that we are ready for space flight based on the for profit model.
So how many failures has NASA had over the years? I daresay it's averaged at least one a year despite all of their knowledge. As others have said you're often pushing the limits of material science in rocketry and a small anomaly can become a catastrophic failure in a matter of seconds or less.
Problem is, there aren't any satellite measurements prior to 1979 - most of the "data" used in climate change study are from proxies and are notoriously sketchy and variant.
Yes, that's why I said it's too bad he couldn't take the graph back before 1979. Most of the data used in climate science are from the last 150 years. There are actual temperature measurements going back several hundred years and enough of them since around the mid 1800's for reasonable global temperature figures. Before that is considered paleoclimate which is only corroborating evidence. Proxies of course aren't as accurate but are still sufficient to show temperature trends and can be calibrated against the temperature records of the last 150 years.
When an average is constructed from combining many measurements it's reasonable to use a higher precision than the original measurements. That allows you to detect subtle changes in the data. For example if you have a series 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56 the average is 52.67 but if the series is 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56 the average is 52.83. Both round to 53 but expressing them to 2 decimal places shows there is a difference between the two series. Statistically speaking that technique is validly used all of the time.
We'll see, won't we. Too bad Dr Spencer can't take his graph back before 1979. I suspect it would break down pretty fast if he could.
I'd pay more attention to those things if they actually posed a physical mechanism for them. Right now it just looks like statistical manipulation to me.
Did you read Wolfgang Wagner's resignation letter? There is no indication that he resigned other than as a matter of personal honor. It's pure speculation that he resigned because of pressure from anyone
Considering that 2005 and 2010 are tied for the warmest year on record (according to GISS) it's pretty hard to justify saying it hasn't warmed in the past decade.
In the case of Pluto which he used as an example the eccentricity of its orbit is large enough to make a significant difference. Enough so that the atmosphere thickens considerably at perihelion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Atmosphere It's a bad example if you're trying to hypothesis some general Solar System warming.
In science? Not really. It's perfectly valid for a scientist to feel that someone else's work is not worthy of consideration. It happens all the time in other sciences and is not particularly controversial. But in the politicized arena of climate science it is.
I said it sounded like a straw man because "trillions upon trillions" is a rather large exaggeration. People will still be buying cars and energy, etc. Perhaps they will be a bit more expensive to buy but it's cheaper to power a vehicle with electricity than gasoline at current prices. If we just do things to encourage the switch over it will happen without a lot of economic turmoil. The need for strong action on global warming is more urgent than people (including you apparently) realize. The longer we wait the more drastic and expensive will be the actions we take when we get around to it.
Social Security recipient are the wealthiest demographic because they've had a lifetime to accumulate their wealth. Most of the retired people I know aren't all that wealthy though and have to be careful with their money to make it last. I'm 59 and half of my wealth is in my home that I managed to pay off last year. When I start getting SS that will be the first money I spend and I will try to make my other savings last as long as possible.
I will agree there are issues with the amount Medicare pays to providers but I'd be surprised if the paperwork for that is any worse than it is for private insurance. I'm against means testing since it turns the programs from an insurance plan into a welfare plan. I think everyone needs to have skin in the game. Yes, I'd be happy to have a Canadian style system here in the US but there are a lot of powerful entities that have convinced people it's no good. The Federal Government needs to facilitate that for it to happen.
Um... cosmic rays do not come from the Sun, in fact when the Sun is at the top of its 11 year cycle cosmic rays are suppressed by the Sun's magnetosphere and vice versa.
No one is suppressing the story about this research unless you think pointing out that doesn't mean as much as WattsUpWithThat and others want it to mean with regards to global warming is suppressing it.
Can you specify what those "trillions upon trillions of dollars" will be spent on? That sounds like a straw man to me. I have no problem with the government incentivizing the industry as we have with many others in the past. Much of the progress we've seen has been because government subsidized the research and development so it happens faster than it otherwise might. Many of the discoveries that lead to this progress were found by government sponsored research.
Tax cuts do not get spent to the extent that things like SS and Medicare do. Since the tax cuts are usually proportional to the tax paid the people who get a large chunk of the cuts won't put it in to consumer spending. If consumers aren't spending as much and there is low demand why would they invest it in something productive that creates jobs?
Medicare is cheaper than any private policy would be. It only has 3% overhead compared to 10-30% for private insurance.
I would prefer well implemented government programs like they have in Germany and Japan.
That's quite a straw man that rally2xs sets up. There may be a few "envirowacko's" out there but practically no one is saying you have to live in a cave and read by candlelight. We just need to switch to a different energy source and change some habits.
And I don't get the "trillions wasted" argument either. Instead of spending money on fossil fuel energy we're spending on renewable energy. It still pays people wages and buys materials from suppliers and all the other things that businesses do. It's just different than the current economy. As a bonus you get rid of a lot of pollution and environmental disasters like the BP oil rig and mountain top removal coal mining and you get out ahead of the curve on peak oil and coal. Do you know that the price of solar cells has dropped something like 60% in the past two years and is likely to drop below coal within the next decade. Battery technology has some exciting things coming down the pike. The trillions of dollars will be spent over the four decades or so that it takes to eliminate fossil fuels. We'd be spending the money anyway on them anyway. Oh... reading further it looks like you think the government will be spending all of that money. Most of it will be private sector money but even government money gets spent on wages and supplies. It all goes into the economy.
You know, 70% of the US economy is consumer spending. Those people receiving Social Security are spending that money on food and living expenses and maybe some frills. More consumer spending. How much would it hurt the economy if you took that money out of it? The problem with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act is it didn't go far enough. It should have been Medicare for all. The US spends about 17% if its GDP on health care and the rest of the OCED countries spend around 10%. The most cost effective and highest user satisfaction medical system in the US is the VA health care system where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are on salary.
I imagine you're pretty outraged by my statements but that's how I see it.
Maybe the people who have died because of our use of fossil fuels should be haunting us.
Yes, it's only one study and more work needs to be done. At the same time your supposition that algae will take up the excess CO2 in the oceans has even less support at this time. That could change in the future but I've seen no evidence yet that it might.
It was published in the journal Nature. Not that hard to find. To bad you have to pay to see the full paper but Nature is available in many libraries if you're interested enough.
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Don't you think it is possible that James Hansen's political activism is informed by his alarm at what the science tells him and what that means for his children and grandchildren? Does being a scientist mean you have to resign from being human?
To me it shows a profound lack of imagination to think that we can't reduce carbon emissions without reducing our economic output. Just because we've been doing it that way for the past 200+ years doesn't mean there aren't alternatives.
Without government relieving the liability there would be no private nuclear plants built period. Even if you removed all government regulation the potential private liability is so high that no private entity will choose to finance a nuclear project.
Often though scientists talk in terms of carbon instead of CO2. That's because the CO2 is part of the Carbon Cycle that includes not only the atmospheric CO2 but the carbonic acid (dissolved CO2) in the waters of the planet, the carbon in the biosphere and the carbon in geologic processes. There is a balance maintained between those different stores of carbon and sometimes it's easier to talk about if you only consider the C in CO2.
What we really should do is use the least worse variant of governing (capitalism) and iron out the quirks.
Capitalism is an economic system, not a political system.
The shortages of the 1970s oil crisis weren't due to diminished production, they were due to price controls instituted by Nixon ...
Hmm. Interesting analysis. Having lived through that era I always thought that it was due to the fact that the US reached the point where we could no longer supply all of our demand for petroleum internally and OPEC, realizing they had us by the short hairs, started yanking.
The average of rolling a die is 3.5. If what you are saying is true then we would have to say the average is 4 which is not as precise at 3.5. There's a difference between a statistically derived number from a large number of samples and the individual samples that go into it.
Delays and failures such as this are a serious blow to the idea that we are ready for space flight based on the for profit model.
So how many failures has NASA had over the years? I daresay it's averaged at least one a year despite all of their knowledge. As others have said you're often pushing the limits of material science in rocketry and a small anomaly can become a catastrophic failure in a matter of seconds or less.
Problem is, there aren't any satellite measurements prior to 1979 - most of the "data" used in climate change study are from proxies and are notoriously sketchy and variant.
Yes, that's why I said it's too bad he couldn't take the graph back before 1979. Most of the data used in climate science are from the last 150 years. There are actual temperature measurements going back several hundred years and enough of them since around the mid 1800's for reasonable global temperature figures. Before that is considered paleoclimate which is only corroborating evidence. Proxies of course aren't as accurate but are still sufficient to show temperature trends and can be calibrated against the temperature records of the last 150 years.
When an average is constructed from combining many measurements it's reasonable to use a higher precision than the original measurements. That allows you to detect subtle changes in the data. For example if you have a series 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56 the average is 52.67 but if the series is 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56 the average is 52.83. Both round to 53 but expressing them to 2 decimal places shows there is a difference between the two series. Statistically speaking that technique is validly used all of the time.
We'll see, won't we. Too bad Dr Spencer can't take his graph back before 1979. I suspect it would break down pretty fast if he could.
I'd pay more attention to those things if they actually posed a physical mechanism for them. Right now it just looks like statistical manipulation to me.
Did you read Wolfgang Wagner's resignation letter? There is no indication that he resigned other than as a matter of personal honor. It's pure speculation that he resigned because of pressure from anyone
Considering that 2005 and 2010 are tied for the warmest year on record (according to GISS) it's pretty hard to justify saying it hasn't warmed in the past decade.
In the case of Pluto which he used as an example the eccentricity of its orbit is large enough to make a significant difference. Enough so that the atmosphere thickens considerably at perihelion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Atmosphere It's a bad example if you're trying to hypothesis some general Solar System warming.
But it's the thought that counts.
In science? Not really. It's perfectly valid for a scientist to feel that someone else's work is not worthy of consideration. It happens all the time in other sciences and is not particularly controversial. But in the politicized arena of climate science it is.
That would probably be the recent CERN CLOUD paper that was also trumpeted as refuting anthropogenic climate change.
LOL. The paper Phil Jones refers to did get included in the IPCC report so they're not as powerful as you might believe.
I don't disagree but the WSJ paywall isn't coming down anytime soon.
I said it sounded like a straw man because "trillions upon trillions" is a rather large exaggeration. People will still be buying cars and energy, etc. Perhaps they will be a bit more expensive to buy but it's cheaper to power a vehicle with electricity than gasoline at current prices. If we just do things to encourage the switch over it will happen without a lot of economic turmoil. The need for strong action on global warming is more urgent than people (including you apparently) realize. The longer we wait the more drastic and expensive will be the actions we take when we get around to it.
Social Security recipient are the wealthiest demographic because they've had a lifetime to accumulate their wealth. Most of the retired people I know aren't all that wealthy though and have to be careful with their money to make it last. I'm 59 and half of my wealth is in my home that I managed to pay off last year. When I start getting SS that will be the first money I spend and I will try to make my other savings last as long as possible.
I will agree there are issues with the amount Medicare pays to providers but I'd be surprised if the paperwork for that is any worse than it is for private insurance. I'm against means testing since it turns the programs from an insurance plan into a welfare plan. I think everyone needs to have skin in the game. Yes, I'd be happy to have a Canadian style system here in the US but there are a lot of powerful entities that have convinced people it's no good. The Federal Government needs to facilitate that for it to happen.
About 10^-20?
Um... cosmic rays do not come from the Sun, in fact when the Sun is at the top of its 11 year cycle cosmic rays are suppressed by the Sun's magnetosphere and vice versa.
No one is suppressing the story about this research unless you think pointing out that doesn't mean as much as WattsUpWithThat and others want it to mean with regards to global warming is suppressing it.
I debated putting that link in there but decided to include it for the /.er's that do subscribe.
Can you specify what those "trillions upon trillions of dollars" will be spent on? That sounds like a straw man to me. I have no problem with the government incentivizing the industry as we have with many others in the past. Much of the progress we've seen has been because government subsidized the research and development so it happens faster than it otherwise might. Many of the discoveries that lead to this progress were found by government sponsored research.
Tax cuts do not get spent to the extent that things like SS and Medicare do. Since the tax cuts are usually proportional to the tax paid the people who get a large chunk of the cuts won't put it in to consumer spending. If consumers aren't spending as much and there is low demand why would they invest it in something productive that creates jobs?
Medicare is cheaper than any private policy would be. It only has 3% overhead compared to 10-30% for private insurance.
I would prefer well implemented government programs like they have in Germany and Japan.
That's quite a straw man that rally2xs sets up. There may be a few "envirowacko's" out there but practically no one is saying you have to live in a cave and read by candlelight. We just need to switch to a different energy source and change some habits.
And I don't get the "trillions wasted" argument either. Instead of spending money on fossil fuel energy we're spending on renewable energy. It still pays people wages and buys materials from suppliers and all the other things that businesses do. It's just different than the current economy. As a bonus you get rid of a lot of pollution and environmental disasters like the BP oil rig and mountain top removal coal mining and you get out ahead of the curve on peak oil and coal. Do you know that the price of solar cells has dropped something like 60% in the past two years and is likely to drop below coal within the next decade. Battery technology has some exciting things coming down the pike. The trillions of dollars will be spent over the four decades or so that it takes to eliminate fossil fuels. We'd be spending the money anyway on them anyway. Oh ... reading further it looks like you think the government will be spending all of that money. Most of it will be private sector money but even government money gets spent on wages and supplies. It all goes into the economy.
You know, 70% of the US economy is consumer spending. Those people receiving Social Security are spending that money on food and living expenses and maybe some frills. More consumer spending. How much would it hurt the economy if you took that money out of it? The problem with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act is it didn't go far enough. It should have been Medicare for all. The US spends about 17% if its GDP on health care and the rest of the OCED countries spend around 10%. The most cost effective and highest user satisfaction medical system in the US is the VA health care system where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are on salary.
I imagine you're pretty outraged by my statements but that's how I see it.
Maybe the people who have died because of our use of fossil fuels should be haunting us.
Yes, it's only one study and more work needs to be done. At the same time your supposition that algae will take up the excess CO2 in the oceans has even less support at this time. That could change in the future but I've seen no evidence yet that it might.
It was published in the journal Nature. Not that hard to find. To bad you have to pay to see the full paper but Nature is available in many libraries if you're interested enough.