I really learned touch typing when as my CWE project I converted a typing program in TRS-80 Basic to run on a CPM system (with 32 CPU's hooked up to dumb terminals) so the school could teach the first term of typing on the computers. Testing each of the 60 different typing lessons multiple times tends to hone your skills. I hit 120 wpm once while testing but normally am in the 40-60 wpm range. The worst thing about it is if you get your fingers off by one key on the keyboard you end up typing honnrtodj (that's gibberish typed with my hands shifted 1 key right).
It's a lot cheaper to have them practice digging fox holes on a US Base than to station them in Iraq. They don't get hazard pay and supplying them is cheaper.
I don't believe I ever said I thought there was a connection between global warming and the number of hurricanes/tropical storms. I did say global warming may cause some increase in the average strength of them but even that's not a sure thing. I never thought that Katrina was caused by global warming but I think it's possible it wouldn't have been as strong without global warming. That was my whole point. If you ignore the exceptional year of 2005 the number of hurricanes during the following 4 years was pretty ordinary.
Didn't I say "The end of the last glaciation of the current ice age was about 20,000 years ago." The current ice age is thought to have started with the Pleistocene age a little over 2.5 million years ago (about the same time the genus homo evolved). The last ice age previous to that is thought to have been the Karoo from 360-260 million years ago.
Wikipedia is not an authoritative source but often it's a good starting point, especially for science and factually based articles. Were any of those things I cited wrong
I've never seen anything that justifies your statement that we are coming out of the current ice age. I guess that's the basis of your "warming for 250,000 years" claim. I know you said you weren't going to reply but I'd be interested to learn more about why you think the current ice age is ending. Can you cite any scientific paper about that?
What does the CO2 we exhale have to do with anything? That is from carbon that is already in the carbon cycle, not fossil carbon that's been buried for (in most cases) millions of years. The carbon cycle is roughly in balance from year to year (until you start looking at longer time periods where since the start of the current ice age apparently it's been bouncing from 180 ppmv to 280 ppmv during glacials and interglacials respectively).
You know, you try to sound so reasonable but I'd be willing to bet that I understand science better than you do. I believe that climate scientists know their field and give honest assessments of their findings. If someone comes along and and completely overturns the current understanding in a scientific way then I'll listen to them as will real climate scientists but that hasn't happened.
The Earth has not been warming for 250,000 years. The end of the last glaciation of the current ice age was about 20,000 years ago. From the Holocene maximum around 8,000 years ago there has been a slight cooling trend. In general the Earth has been cooling for around 50 million years.
The 30% reduction target is just for getting started. One climate scientist when asked "What is the correct amount for human CO2 emissions?" replied "Zero." and I believe him.
If you "follow the money" you'll find far more of it in the fossil fuel industry than you do in climate research.
The last time CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are now (290 ppmv) was probably over 15 million years ago. Long before humans or even the genus homo evolved.
We know pretty accurately how much CO2 human activities release. For instance burning a ton of coal releases about 2.5 tons of CO2*. You can do the same calculation for other fossil fuels. We know that year to year CO2 level increases in the atmosphere amount to 40-50% of the total human release of CO2 each year. That's why I say it's silly to argue that humans aren't responsible for the increase in CO2 levels.
*Coal is about 70% carbon on average so a ton of coal contains about 1400 lbs of carbon. CO2 is one carbon (atomic weight 12) and two oxygen (atomic weight 16) for a total atomic weight of 44. So a CO2 molecule weighs 3.667 times the weight of the carbon alone. 1400 lbs * 3.667 = 5134 lbs / 2000 = 2.567 tons of CO2 per ton of coal.
Of course 2005 was the all time record and 2006-2009 may be a bit under the average but not that much. From 1990 to 2004 respectively the number of hurricanes each year was 8, 3, 4, 4, 3, 11, 10, 3, 10, 8, 8, 9, 4, 7, 9. Matched against that 5, 6, 8 & 3 doesn't look that far off.
The solar cell keeps working for 20 or 30 years whenever the Sun shines. With a combustion generator you're buying fuel all the time plus they require a much higher level of maintenance than a solar cell. The question is what is your total cost over the life of the project.
Well, whether a change in weather is positive or negative is a rather subjective judgment. Any significant change is likely to be disruptive of human activities in some way. As you pointed out you can have subtle or dramatic differences and still come to the same average. Raising the overall temperature puts more total energy in the system which is bound to have its own effects. Reducing temperature differences would intuitively seem to produce milder weather but there are lots of examples in science where that sort of intuition has proved wrong because of other factors.
I didn't say anything about hurricanes in regard to global warming. I was merely pointing out your statement about a dearth of hurricanes since Katrina was not justified. The current thinking seems to be that global warming won't necessarily change the number of them but may result in some increase in the average intensity. But it's not an area of science that is well understood yet so who knows. Hurricane records from before the satellite era are somewhat iffy especially as you go back further in time. Sometimes they could occur without anybody observing them, especially before WWII.
Changing the temperature balance between two regions will definitely have an effect on weather. Simple thermodynamics tells you that.
2005, the year of Katrina, was the strongest Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history. There has been a dearth of major hurricanes hitting the US since then but they've hit elsewhere. In August 2007 Hurricane Dean, tied for the 7th strongest Atlantic hurricane ever, hit the Yucatan Peninsula as a category 5 storm and caused at least 44 deaths. In September Hurricane Felix hit Nicaragua and caused at least 133 deaths and over $50 million in damage (a lot for Nicaragua I imagine). 2007 was the only season where 2 Cat 5 storms made landfall in the same year. 2008 was an active year with 8 hurricanes, 5 of them major, and over $47.5 billion in damages, the third highest on record after 2004 & 2005.
This year already Hurricane Alex hit Northeast Mexico and caused major flooding along the Rio Grande and Southern Texas. If the predictions are right 2010 will be an above average hurricane season.
I was just commenting on you saying "Let them move or die?" Where are they going to move to if it's not possible to do within their own country?
My solution to illegal immigration is to make it too expensive for employers to hire them. Throw some company bigwigs in jail for it or something. If there are no jobs for them they'll quit coming.
Carbon offsets work by paying to maintain carbon sinks or avoidance of carbon emissions. When I go fill my gas tank that's a transfer of wealth as well. I don't think the Bushmen of Southern Africa offer any carbon offsets. The places they live are not really suitable for that.
You obviously don't understand how the models are built. They don't just try to mathematically match them to the curve of observed data. To the extent possible they build the actual physical relationships they have discovered through the science they do into them. Some things are not well enough understood to do that so they have to use some plausible scenario of what the input from them would be but as models are improved those are changed to the actual physical relationships when they finally figure them out.
Again, what does the age of the model have to do with it? The models are not tied the data in existence when they are created. You can use data from any time period you have to validate the model. In some hindcast runs they've gone back 400 years. You can start them in 1900 and see how well the predict the climate in 2000. When you do that you have the advantage of feeding actual observed data into them rather than some scenario of the future.
It was named Greenland, because it used to be "Green".
I laugh every time I read that line. Greenland has never been completely or even mostly free of ice in at least the last 500,000 years and probably a lot longer. There was a bit of ice retreat around the edges during the MWP but it's not likely it was ever a lot greener than it is today.
That the increase is atmospheric CO2 is caused by human burning of fossil fuels is about as close to a proven fact as you can get. It's silly to argue that the increase in CO2 over the last 200 years is not primarily from human sources.
Well, the prediction is more like 2 degrees C (3.6F) by 2100. But that's a global average. At the poles, particularly the North Pole and surrounding areas it will be more like 4 or 6 degrees. Maybe that doesn't sound like much to you but ask some biologist about it.
Climate computer models are tested against past climate. You know the data we've been recording for the last 150 years. They even test them against paleoclimate data at times.
Do you think there wasn't any rationing in the US before? I want some of what you've been smoking. There will always be rationing of a sort because resources are not unlimited.
Either global warming increases storm activity, or it doesn't. You can't have increased hurricanes and storms and increased desert.
Sure you can. The Earth is a big place. Some places will see more precipitation, some places less. Some places may see about the same amount of precipitation but the timing of it will change. All of that can be disruptive.
What does the age of a model have to do with anything? The models are just tools and can theoretically be used to model any time period. We have fairly detailed climate data going back well over 100 years to test them against.
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I really learned touch typing when as my CWE project I converted a typing program in TRS-80 Basic to run on a CPM system (with 32 CPU's hooked up to dumb terminals) so the school could teach the first term of typing on the computers. Testing each of the 60 different typing lessons multiple times tends to hone your skills. I hit 120 wpm once while testing but normally am in the 40-60 wpm range. The worst thing about it is if you get your fingers off by one key on the keyboard you end up typing honnrtodj (that's gibberish typed with my hands shifted 1 key right).
It's a lot cheaper to have them practice digging fox holes on a US Base than to station them in Iraq. They don't get hazard pay and supplying them is cheaper.
I don't believe I ever said I thought there was a connection between global warming and the number of hurricanes/tropical storms. I did say global warming may cause some increase in the average strength of them but even that's not a sure thing. I never thought that Katrina was caused by global warming but I think it's possible it wouldn't have been as strong without global warming. That was my whole point. If you ignore the exceptional year of 2005 the number of hurricanes during the following 4 years was pretty ordinary.
Didn't I say "The end of the last glaciation of the current ice age was about 20,000 years ago." The current ice age is thought to have started with the Pleistocene age a little over 2.5 million years ago (about the same time the genus homo evolved). The last ice age previous to that is thought to have been the Karoo from 360-260 million years ago.
Wikipedia is not an authoritative source but often it's a good starting point, especially for science and factually based articles. Were any of those things I cited wrong
I've never seen anything that justifies your statement that we are coming out of the current ice age. I guess that's the basis of your "warming for 250,000 years" claim. I know you said you weren't going to reply but I'd be interested to learn more about why you think the current ice age is ending. Can you cite any scientific paper about that?
What does the CO2 we exhale have to do with anything? That is from carbon that is already in the carbon cycle, not fossil carbon that's been buried for (in most cases) millions of years. The carbon cycle is roughly in balance from year to year (until you start looking at longer time periods where since the start of the current ice age apparently it's been bouncing from 180 ppmv to 280 ppmv during glacials and interglacials respectively).
You know, you try to sound so reasonable but I'd be willing to bet that I understand science better than you do. I believe that climate scientists know their field and give honest assessments of their findings. If someone comes along and and completely overturns the current understanding in a scientific way then I'll listen to them as will real climate scientists but that hasn't happened.
The Earth has not been warming for 250,000 years. The end of the last glaciation of the current ice age was about 20,000 years ago. From the Holocene maximum around 8,000 years ago there has been a slight cooling trend. In general the Earth has been cooling for around 50 million years.
The 30% reduction target is just for getting started. One climate scientist when asked "What is the correct amount for human CO2 emissions?" replied "Zero." and I believe him.
If you "follow the money" you'll find far more of it in the fossil fuel industry than you do in climate research.
The last time CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as they are now (290 ppmv) was probably over 15 million years ago. Long before humans or even the genus homo evolved.
We know pretty accurately how much CO2 human activities release. For instance burning a ton of coal releases about 2.5 tons of CO2*. You can do the same calculation for other fossil fuels. We know that year to year CO2 level increases in the atmosphere amount to 40-50% of the total human release of CO2 each year. That's why I say it's silly to argue that humans aren't responsible for the increase in CO2 levels.
*Coal is about 70% carbon on average so a ton of coal contains about 1400 lbs of carbon. CO2 is one carbon (atomic weight 12) and two oxygen (atomic weight 16) for a total atomic weight of 44. So a CO2 molecule weighs 3.667 times the weight of the carbon alone. 1400 lbs * 3.667 = 5134 lbs / 2000 = 2.567 tons of CO2 per ton of coal.
Of course 2005 was the all time record and 2006-2009 may be a bit under the average but not that much. From 1990 to 2004 respectively the number of hurricanes each year was 8, 3, 4, 4, 3, 11, 10, 3, 10, 8, 8, 9, 4, 7, 9. Matched against that 5, 6, 8 & 3 doesn't look that far off.
The solar cell keeps working for 20 or 30 years whenever the Sun shines. With a combustion generator you're buying fuel all the time plus they require a much higher level of maintenance than a solar cell. The question is what is your total cost over the life of the project.
Well, whether a change in weather is positive or negative is a rather subjective judgment. Any significant change is likely to be disruptive of human activities in some way. As you pointed out you can have subtle or dramatic differences and still come to the same average. Raising the overall temperature puts more total energy in the system which is bound to have its own effects. Reducing temperature differences would intuitively seem to produce milder weather but there are lots of examples in science where that sort of intuition has proved wrong because of other factors.
I didn't say anything about hurricanes in regard to global warming. I was merely pointing out your statement about a dearth of hurricanes since Katrina was not justified. The current thinking seems to be that global warming won't necessarily change the number of them but may result in some increase in the average intensity. But it's not an area of science that is well understood yet so who knows. Hurricane records from before the satellite era are somewhat iffy especially as you go back further in time. Sometimes they could occur without anybody observing them, especially before WWII.
Changing the temperature balance between two regions will definitely have an effect on weather. Simple thermodynamics tells you that.
2005, the year of Katrina, was the strongest Atlantic hurricane season in recorded history. There has been a dearth of major hurricanes hitting the US since then but they've hit elsewhere. In August 2007 Hurricane Dean, tied for the 7th strongest Atlantic hurricane ever, hit the Yucatan Peninsula as a category 5 storm and caused at least 44 deaths. In September Hurricane Felix hit Nicaragua and caused at least 133 deaths and over $50 million in damage (a lot for Nicaragua I imagine). 2007 was the only season where 2 Cat 5 storms made landfall in the same year. 2008 was an active year with 8 hurricanes, 5 of them major, and over $47.5 billion in damages, the third highest on record after 2004 & 2005.
This year already Hurricane Alex hit Northeast Mexico and caused major flooding along the Rio Grande and Southern Texas. If the predictions are right 2010 will be an above average hurricane season.
List of Atlantic hurricane seasons
I was just commenting on you saying "Let them move or die?" Where are they going to move to if it's not possible to do within their own country?
My solution to illegal immigration is to make it too expensive for employers to hire them. Throw some company bigwigs in jail for it or something. If there are no jobs for them they'll quit coming.
Carbon offsets work by paying to maintain carbon sinks or avoidance of carbon emissions. When I go fill my gas tank that's a transfer of wealth as well. I don't think the Bushmen of Southern Africa offer any carbon offsets. The places they live are not really suitable for that.
Well, having Congress write the law may be problematic but that doesn't invalidate the principle.
You obviously don't understand how the models are built. They don't just try to mathematically match them to the curve of observed data. To the extent possible they build the actual physical relationships they have discovered through the science they do into them. Some things are not well enough understood to do that so they have to use some plausible scenario of what the input from them would be but as models are improved those are changed to the actual physical relationships when they finally figure them out.
Again, what does the age of the model have to do with it? The models are not tied the data in existence when they are created. You can use data from any time period you have to validate the model. In some hindcast runs they've gone back 400 years. You can start them in 1900 and see how well the predict the climate in 2000. When you do that you have the advantage of feeding actual observed data into them rather than some scenario of the future.
Just wait until your gas costs you $10/gallon.
It was named Greenland, because it used to be "Green".
I laugh every time I read that line. Greenland has never been completely or even mostly free of ice in at least the last 500,000 years and probably a lot longer. There was a bit of ice retreat around the edges during the MWP but it's not likely it was ever a lot greener than it is today.
That the increase is atmospheric CO2 is caused by human burning of fossil fuels is about as close to a proven fact as you can get. It's silly to argue that the increase in CO2 over the last 200 years is not primarily from human sources.
Well, the prediction is more like 2 degrees C (3.6F) by 2100. But that's a global average. At the poles, particularly the North Pole and surrounding areas it will be more like 4 or 6 degrees. Maybe that doesn't sound like much to you but ask some biologist about it.
Climate computer models are tested against past climate. You know the data we've been recording for the last 150 years. They even test them against paleoclimate data at times.
Species extinction is irreversible. Desertification and sea level rise is irreversible on any meaningful time scale.
Do you think there wasn't any rationing in the US before? I want some of what you've been smoking. There will always be rationing of a sort because resources are not unlimited.
Either global warming increases storm activity, or it doesn't. You can't have increased hurricanes and storms and increased desert.
Sure you can. The Earth is a big place. Some places will see more precipitation, some places less. Some places may see about the same amount of precipitation but the timing of it will change. All of that can be disruptive.
From the Wikipedia article on Bangladesh:
What does the age of a model have to do with anything? The models are just tools and can theoretically be used to model any time period. We have fairly detailed climate data going back well over 100 years to test them against.