My idealism still exists. It's just tempered by pragmatism and realism.
One other thought I had is that if you don't have a certain amount of waste in scientific research you run the risk of missing important knowledge. Plenty of discoveries are accidental or serendipitous and are not the intention of the original research.
I think in a lot of cases you have to look deeper than the duh results reported to the public. Maybe the work deepens our understanding of why and quantifies it so we can make reasonable predictions. Knowledge can be useful in ways that we don't know about until we attain the knowledge. Things that you might consider wasteful are often considered vital by someone else. Who's to judge? When I was younger I used to be idealistic like you but I came to realize that most people are just doing the best they can and that's all that can be expected of them.
You think there is little or no waste on MythBusters? What they air is highly edited to be entertaining and fit the time constraints. I just watched the "Aftershow" on their site and they were talking about the "dodging a bullet" episode (missed that one, I'll catch it in reruns). Jamie related how he built this elaborate bullet shield with multiple panes of plexiglass with water between them to test dodging a real bullet rather than just a paintball but they never used it because they decided they didn't want to air a real gun shooting at a real person. How much waste was that? I'll bet if you asked Jamie and Adam would say there's plenty of wasted effort on the show, they just don't put most of it on the air unless it's particularly interesting.
Waste is an inescapable piece of the human condition. Perfection is something to strive for but will seldom if ever be achieved.
I think given the amount of attention the subject has received over the last 50+ years that it's damn near impossible that climatologists are deluded to any great degree. They may be wrong, missing some big factor, but they're still doing science honestly to the best of their ability and are not some clerics in some religious cult.
That's an important point. The general result of a study may be a "Duh!" conclusion but quantifying the conclusions is often useful nevertheless and may point to new areas of inquiry.
The problem with that is in pure scientific research you often can't tell what is waste until after the research is done. For example, how much money has been "wasted" on fusion research? Maybe they'll never come up with a workable solution for fusion and you might consider all of it to have been wasted but we still have much better knowledge of the subject. If they ever do come up with something that works will it change to not wasted?
Sometimes you just have to make investments that don't have assured payouts. If you don't make those kind of investments then nothing advances.
What are you trying to prove? That water has a higher specific heat than air? Of course it does. That's the reason it takes the oceans 30+ years to warm up enough so the air temperature matches the forcing and feedbacks it is experiencing. Don't forget the second law of thermodynamics. Heat always transfers from the warmer body to the colder one. The average air temperature in the room won't reach 120F until the water in the pool does too (which takes a lot longer than 1 hour) because the water will be absorbing heat from the air. I suppose you could jamb the 120F air in fast enough that the average temperature is 119.999...F but until the two equalize it won't be 120F. The air temperature will depend on how fast you feed that 120F air in and how fast the water can absorb the heat. There's a dynamic balance between the two. That the buffering that keeps the air temperature below the input air temperature until the buffer is depleted.
It's not only rich people that are incented by money...
A scientist is more incented by doing good science because once it is shown that they are not doing so their sources of funding will dry up. I guess you think there is some huge conspiracy by all of the different organizations making those funding decisions to push global warming. I have my conspiracy theories too but not about this.
HARRY_README.TXT
I have read it. I've also done a fair amount of coding in my life and used comments like that myself. I've used known data and extreme data to test my code. Unless you can prove that the code and data in question was used to produce the reported results you have nothing.
If I say the temperature may increase 1C over the next hundred years, +/- 10C, certainly my conclusion will not be falsified by any stretch of the imagination, but is it a *useful* conclusion?
Why don't you use real numbers? The uncertainty on model output for the 95% range of confidence is on the order of +/- 0.5C for temperature changes of 1-4C by 2100. If you're going to talk about uncertainty you need to use real numbers, not some imagined value.
... 30,000 volcanoes erupting in the past 50 years is going to have an impact on the heat content of the ocean.
Why do you presume that there are orders of magnitude more volcanic activity in the ocean than on the land? The total number of eruptions on land during that time period is probably in the hundreds, not thousands, depending on how you define eruptions. Volcanoes simply can not put out enough heat to significantly affect surface temperatures globally. I've never heard a serious skeptic even try to use that argument before.
I'd agree that in a laboratory, CO2 may be easier to study, but in real world effect, it is incredibly difficult to tease out its effect among all the other variables.
Difficult is not the same thing as impossible. It's something that has been studied for over 100 years and especially since the 1950's. I think we know a thing or two about it. We can measure the radiative energy coming off the Earth's surface across a range of frequencies. We can measure how that changes as you get higher in the atmosphere. We can measure the composition of the atmosphere so we know what absorption characteristics we should expect. Sure it's c
No, you did not hear any climate scientist say that most coastal cities would be underwater by 2010 in the 1980's. If you think you did please cite the quote that backs up your statement. And Al Gore did not say that either. Earlier IPCC reports were saying that there would be 1-2 feet of sea level rise by 2100. In the past few years that's changed to 3-6 feet of SLR by 2100 but it will be the next IPCC report before that is incorporated.
You're metaphor is an extreme exaggeration that has no basis in reality. You really need to pay attention to the time frames that scientists are talking about when they make their statements about what they expect to happen. Most of the effects of global warming are happening a bit faster than scientists have postulated.
The wind is always blowing somewhere. It's just a matter of distribution.
Modern wind turbines are not nearly as deadly for birds as older ones. The old turbines were much smaller and turned much faster and no consideration was given to where birds typically fly. Newer turbines are much larger and slower turning and they are not placed in migratory flyways. I'm not sure they're any harder on birds now-a-days than other human causes such as large picture windows or motor vehicles. But the newer turbines are apparently pretty hard on bats who get a fatal case of the bends by the change in air pressure as they skirt around the turbine blades.
What evidence do you have that Phil Jones or Michael Mann live as if they don't believe in AGW? It's easy to throw names out there but if you want to be credible you have to back it up.
Yes, you are right. It says 10 gal/hr right there on their website. I doubt you'd want to fly it until the fuel exhausted though. Repacking the parachute is a pain.
I'm not really disagreeing with you but Prineville really is kind of off the beaten path. The closest town of any size to the east of it is John Day, Oregon with a population of around 1,800. It's 116 miles away over a winding mountain road that can be tough in the winter. There's not much but mountains and desert to the north and south of it. There's not that much distribution opportunity from Prineville that isn't better from Bend, Redmond or Madras along US 97 to the west. Of course distributing electronic bits doesn't suffer from the transportation issues that physical goods do so Facebook can take advantage of the cheap land and electricity.
I respect your viewpoint but I believe burning the flag in protest is a political statement that is protected by the First Amendment (Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech...). I think it dangerous to make a symbol, even such a powerful symbol as The Flag of the United States of America into something holy that needs to be protected. That smacks of idolatry to me (and I'm not even religious).
Sounds exactly like the Prineville I know. Back in the late 1960's a long haired hippie type came to town and was given a haircut (against his will) by the locals. My cousin was one of them.
Until Les Schwab died Prineville was the headquarters of Les Schwab tires. They still have a distribution warehouse there. That's the big employer in Prineville.
I laughed at your comment. Oregon already has pretty strict zoning regulations but Prineville is far enough off the beaten path that they have difficulty attracting business. Facebook was attracted by the cheap land and electricity rates. Before they developed that industrial park up on the rimrock it was just sage brush and juniper scrub.
Well I wouldn't call it a caldera but AC is right. The datacenter is on top of the rimrock maybe 700 feet above the town and digging a pipeline through the basalt for the heat would be quite expensive and require dynamite.
The total population in Crook County is under 20,000. The adjacent Deschutes County is around 115,000. Prineville is kind of off the beaten path for transportation and I certainly wouldn't think about starting an import business there.
Gas isn't any more expensive in Portland than it is across the Columbia River in Vancouver. I can't see that it costs us any more than pump your own, at least the difference isn't enough for me to worry about.
The issue was on a ballot measure a while back and the voters of the state soundly rejected allowing pump-your-own gas. (1982 - Measure 4 - the yes votes were only 42.5% of the ballots cast.)
Slashdot Mirror
Bo Derek. Maybe I'm a bit older than you.
My idealism still exists. It's just tempered by pragmatism and realism.
One other thought I had is that if you don't have a certain amount of waste in scientific research you run the risk of missing important knowledge. Plenty of discoveries are accidental or serendipitous and are not the intention of the original research.
Born in 1952.
Time for bed.
I think in a lot of cases you have to look deeper than the duh results reported to the public. Maybe the work deepens our understanding of why and quantifies it so we can make reasonable predictions. Knowledge can be useful in ways that we don't know about until we attain the knowledge. Things that you might consider wasteful are often considered vital by someone else. Who's to judge? When I was younger I used to be idealistic like you but I came to realize that most people are just doing the best they can and that's all that can be expected of them.
You think there is little or no waste on MythBusters? What they air is highly edited to be entertaining and fit the time constraints. I just watched the "Aftershow" on their site and they were talking about the "dodging a bullet" episode (missed that one, I'll catch it in reruns). Jamie related how he built this elaborate bullet shield with multiple panes of plexiglass with water between them to test dodging a real bullet rather than just a paintball but they never used it because they decided they didn't want to air a real gun shooting at a real person. How much waste was that? I'll bet if you asked Jamie and Adam would say there's plenty of wasted effort on the show, they just don't put most of it on the air unless it's particularly interesting.
Waste is an inescapable piece of the human condition. Perfection is something to strive for but will seldom if ever be achieved.
Can you always tell if it's wasted before the research is done?
I think given the amount of attention the subject has received over the last 50+ years that it's damn near impossible that climatologists are deluded to any great degree. They may be wrong, missing some big factor, but they're still doing science honestly to the best of their ability and are not some clerics in some religious cult.
That's an important point. The general result of a study may be a "Duh!" conclusion but quantifying the conclusions is often useful nevertheless and may point to new areas of inquiry.
The problem with that is in pure scientific research you often can't tell what is waste until after the research is done. For example, how much money has been "wasted" on fusion research? Maybe they'll never come up with a workable solution for fusion and you might consider all of it to have been wasted but we still have much better knowledge of the subject. If they ever do come up with something that works will it change to not wasted?
Sometimes you just have to make investments that don't have assured payouts. If you don't make those kind of investments then nothing advances.
Abortion has been around since before ancient Greece existed. We just use more sophisticated methods now.
I'll suggest this experiment ...
What are you trying to prove? That water has a higher specific heat than air? Of course it does. That's the reason it takes the oceans 30+ years to warm up enough so the air temperature matches the forcing and feedbacks it is experiencing. Don't forget the second law of thermodynamics. Heat always transfers from the warmer body to the colder one. The average air temperature in the room won't reach 120F until the water in the pool does too (which takes a lot longer than 1 hour) because the water will be absorbing heat from the air. I suppose you could jamb the 120F air in fast enough that the average temperature is 119.999...F but until the two equalize it won't be 120F. The air temperature will depend on how fast you feed that 120F air in and how fast the water can absorb the heat. There's a dynamic balance between the two. That the buffering that keeps the air temperature below the input air temperature until the buffer is depleted.
It's not only rich people that are incented by money ...
A scientist is more incented by doing good science because once it is shown that they are not doing so their sources of funding will dry up. I guess you think there is some huge conspiracy by all of the different organizations making those funding decisions to push global warming. I have my conspiracy theories too but not about this.
HARRY_README.TXT
I have read it. I've also done a fair amount of coding in my life and used comments like that myself. I've used known data and extreme data to test my code. Unless you can prove that the code and data in question was used to produce the reported results you have nothing.
If I say the temperature may increase 1C over the next hundred years, +/- 10C, certainly my conclusion will not be falsified by any stretch of the imagination, but is it a *useful* conclusion?
Why don't you use real numbers? The uncertainty on model output for the 95% range of confidence is on the order of +/- 0.5C for temperature changes of 1-4C by 2100. If you're going to talk about uncertainty you need to use real numbers, not some imagined value.
... 30,000 volcanoes erupting in the past 50 years is going to have an impact on the heat content of the ocean.
Why do you presume that there are orders of magnitude more volcanic activity in the ocean than on the land? The total number of eruptions on land during that time period is probably in the hundreds, not thousands, depending on how you define eruptions. Volcanoes simply can not put out enough heat to significantly affect surface temperatures globally. I've never heard a serious skeptic even try to use that argument before.
Predicts both cycle 24 and 25. ...
Thanks for the link. I wasn't aware of that research. But the forcing of CO2 and other GHG's is high enough that even if the Sun went into another Maunder Minimum the climate would continue to warm. On the Effect of a New Grand Minimum of Solar Activity on the Future Climate on Earth (Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010).
I'd agree that in a laboratory, CO2 may be easier to study, but in real world effect, it is incredibly difficult to tease out its effect among all the other variables.
Difficult is not the same thing as impossible. It's something that has been studied for over 100 years and especially since the 1950's. I think we know a thing or two about it. We can measure the radiative energy coming off the Earth's surface across a range of frequencies. We can measure how that changes as you get higher in the atmosphere. We can measure the composition of the atmosphere so we know what absorption characteristics we should expect. Sure it's c
No, you did not hear any climate scientist say that most coastal cities would be underwater by 2010 in the 1980's. If you think you did please cite the quote that backs up your statement. And Al Gore did not say that either. Earlier IPCC reports were saying that there would be 1-2 feet of sea level rise by 2100. In the past few years that's changed to 3-6 feet of SLR by 2100 but it will be the next IPCC report before that is incorporated.
You're metaphor is an extreme exaggeration that has no basis in reality. You really need to pay attention to the time frames that scientists are talking about when they make their statements about what they expect to happen. Most of the effects of global warming are happening a bit faster than scientists have postulated.
The wind is always blowing somewhere. It's just a matter of distribution.
Modern wind turbines are not nearly as deadly for birds as older ones. The old turbines were much smaller and turned much faster and no consideration was given to where birds typically fly. Newer turbines are much larger and slower turning and they are not placed in migratory flyways. I'm not sure they're any harder on birds now-a-days than other human causes such as large picture windows or motor vehicles. But the newer turbines are apparently pretty hard on bats who get a fatal case of the bends by the change in air pressure as they skirt around the turbine blades.
Who told you your land will be uninhabitable next year? Certainly not any climate scientist.
What evidence do you have that Phil Jones or Michael Mann live as if they don't believe in AGW? It's easy to throw names out there but if you want to be credible you have to back it up.
Go get the raw data for yourself and if you plot it out and compare it to the adjusted data you will find that the difference is minuscule.
Yes, you are right. It says 10 gal/hr right there on their website. I doubt you'd want to fly it until the fuel exhausted though. Repacking the parachute is a pain.
Same AC here. I got that bass ackwards didn't I. If 5 gallons gives you 45 minutes of engine time then the engine is burning 6.67 gallons per hour.
I'm not really disagreeing with you but Prineville really is kind of off the beaten path. The closest town of any size to the east of it is John Day, Oregon with a population of around 1,800. It's 116 miles away over a winding mountain road that can be tough in the winter. There's not much but mountains and desert to the north and south of it. There's not that much distribution opportunity from Prineville that isn't better from Bend, Redmond or Madras along US 97 to the west. Of course distributing electronic bits doesn't suffer from the transportation issues that physical goods do so Facebook can take advantage of the cheap land and electricity.
I respect your viewpoint but I believe burning the flag in protest is a political statement that is protected by the First Amendment (Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech ...). I think it dangerous to make a symbol, even such a powerful symbol as The Flag of the United States of America into something holy that needs to be protected. That smacks of idolatry to me (and I'm not even religious).
Sounds exactly like the Prineville I know. Back in the late 1960's a long haired hippie type came to town and was given a haircut (against his will) by the locals. My cousin was one of them.
Until Les Schwab died Prineville was the headquarters of Les Schwab tires. They still have a distribution warehouse there. That's the big employer in Prineville.
I laughed at your comment. Oregon already has pretty strict zoning regulations but Prineville is far enough off the beaten path that they have difficulty attracting business. Facebook was attracted by the cheap land and electricity rates. Before they developed that industrial park up on the rimrock it was just sage brush and juniper scrub.
Well I wouldn't call it a caldera but AC is right. The datacenter is on top of the rimrock maybe 700 feet above the town and digging a pipeline through the basalt for the heat would be quite expensive and require dynamite.
The total population in Crook County is under 20,000. The adjacent Deschutes County is around 115,000. Prineville is kind of off the beaten path for transportation and I certainly wouldn't think about starting an import business there.
Gas isn't any more expensive in Portland than it is across the Columbia River in Vancouver. I can't see that it costs us any more than pump your own, at least the difference isn't enough for me to worry about.
The issue was on a ballot measure a while back and the voters of the state soundly rejected allowing pump-your-own gas. (1982 - Measure 4 - the yes votes were only 42.5% of the ballots cast.)