Not only that but I think there's a program that helps hospitals when their emergency rooms have to treat too many people who are uninsured and can't to pay. That's your tax dollars paying for medical care as well.
No, I wouldn't rule out special interests being involved; how many engineers would turn down a nice $10 million dollar cheque from exxon or BP to just make a big huff over a minor problem?
The payoff could be enormous compared to the cost.
I wouldn't take their concerns at face value - we know too little about their motivations; there needs to be independent peer review to see if their concerns have merit or not.
I'd like to see you repeat that accusation in a cage with the engineers you're trying to put down. I think the results wouldn't be pretty for you.
Actually they're probably civilized enough to not beat you up but if looks of disdain could kill you'd be dead.
Social Security is not on a path to bankruptcy. With the current value of the SS Trust Fund it can pay full benefits into the 2030's and after that if nothing is done to fix it SS will still be able to pay 70-80% of full benefits after that. Fixing it is as simple as raising the maximum income subject to SS withholding by some amount.
A third is that it fundamentally corrupts the trust people have in scientists, or will if the climate continues to diverge from the hysterical predictions. And make no mistake about it. It is diverging from those predictions, and has been for somewhere between 17 and 25 years now. People who should know better have made absolutely absurd predictions about "no more snow in winter by 2010", "collapse of ice pack", "sea level rise of half a meter by 2012" -- seriously, it is easy to go back and find the "headlines" of these jokers -- none of which have come even close to true. SLR is a perfect case in point. Total SLR over the last 140 years has been on the order of ten, count them ten, whole inches. An average of less than a tenth of an inch per year. The current rate is not spectacular -- I own a house that is about a meter above high tide in the mid-atlantic and this does matter to me -- it is invisible. It is so slow that whole generations don't even notice it, lost in the daily tide. Yet if you listen to the media, you'd think Florida is about to disappear under the sea.
For a PhD Physicist I'm surprised you appear to pay more attention to the popular press rather than the scientific literature. I'm aware that all of those statements have been made but I'm not aware of them being in the scientific literature other than perhaps as part of a range of possibilities rather than a specific prediction.
Regarding sea level rise specifically the observations of sea level rise have outpaced the projections of sea level rise in the IPCC reports since the first report. The rate of SLR was around 1 mm/year in the first half of the 20th Century, 2 mm/year in the later part of that century and over 3 mm/year since 1993. There are some indications lately that the rate may have risen to 4-5 mm/year but there's not enough data yet to positively state that.
... IF Antarctica suddenly starts melting (for the last few years Antarctic ice coverage has been at an all time high), IF the high Greenland icepack actually rises above freezing for more than ten minutes every decade, IF the projected Maunder-level minimum in solar output doesn't occur. People -- and sadly, this includes you -- confuse the predictions of a model with reality, with science in progress (which is what climate science even more than almost any other scientific discipline really is) from "settled science". Not even gravitation is settled science, but it is a damn sight more settled than climate science. At some point a Bayesian analysis of all of the priors conditioning the predictions renders the conclusion as meaningful as a coin flip.
Again I am surprised that you as a scientist don't make a distinction between Antarctic sea ice and the Antarctic ice sheet. It's true that Antarctic sea ice extent has been setting records lately (although not in 2015) but from measurements of the GRACE satellites the ice sheet, particularly in West Antarctica continues to lose mass. The GRACE satellites also show that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass. It doesn't matter so much what is happening at the top of the Greenland ice sheet as what is happening around the periphery where ice shelves are retreating and some of the outlet glaciers are speeding up. (Note that all of what I stated above is based on observations, not modeling.)
A Maunder Minimum level of solar activity is not expected to have a significant effect on the pace of global warming, maybe a 5 or 10 year delay of warming at most. (Note, that is based on modeling. Time will tell in the case that such a minimum occurs.)
It's true that no science is truly settled in the sense that it is always subject to revision pending new information. But I'm willing to consider science provisionally settled if there's no apparent prospect of new information. In general what leads to that new information is something that doesn't appear quite right in the old information.
I obviously can't argue with you at your level of education. I ran out of steam at differential equations.
But the model output isn't that far off from observations and when you force models to use the actual natural variations as they occurred, particularly in regards to ENSO they match observations quite well. There's going to have to be a lot more divergence between the models and observations before I reassess my position on the subject.
Time will tell who is right. The problem is if the climate scientists are right then we just move that much further down the path before we do anything about it which makes the problem that much worse.
If you knew anything about Bernie Sanders you'd know there's no chance of him running 3rd party. He said in one of the early debates with Clinton (paraphrased) "Either one of us is 100 times better than any Republican candidate."
Of course the efficiency of an electric drive train compared to an ICE engine means you probably need less than half the energy for an electric car than you do for an ICE car.
I have my doubts whether your example of different models for the multielectron atom is comparable to the situation with climate models. It seems more likely to me that it's more like multiple models for just one of your multielectron atom examples.
As I said I have confidence that climate scientists including those working on climate models are honestly presenting their results to the best of their abilities. If you want to shake my confidence in them present something that does a better job of predicting/projecting climate than the current theory. No one's come close to doing that yet.
nonsense, not when the idiots at the IPCC are making absurd claims like their "Himalaya glaciers will be gone by 2034" debacle. chicken little alarmists are not a credible source
Or idiots like you who pay no attention to the correction made for what was essentially a typographical error and continue to try and use it.
Yes, vindicated. For those of you who didn't click on link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close. If they practised science at this point you would trash your hypothesis and come up with a new one. Since they are anti-science and reality doesn't matter, only their agenda, they ignore this reality and tell you the models are what matters and reality is only an inconvenient truth to them.
Of course climate models model the surface temperature while you're comparing them to satellite temperatures that convert proxy readings for somewhere up in the troposphere to temperatures. Also, the satellite temperature graph stops in 2013. It would be interesting to see what an up to January 2016 graph would show.
I went to Wood For Trees and the current UAH plot up to January 2016 looks like this. Just eyeballing it I'd say the January 2016 temperature is above the "Climate Models Best Estimate" line in your graph. I expect February 2016 to be even a bit warmer.
How about this: Suppose we apply a hypothesis test to each model, one at a time (which is at least semi-justifiable) and reject all of the models altogether whose envelope of predictions deviates from reality by some reasonable threshold. Then we can look at the predictions of the survivors. That would, of course, eliminate maybe 2/3 of the models from the "ensemble" right there, and the remaining models would have a much lower ECS. Where ECS itself has been in "free fall" for the last few years because the planet simply hasn't warmed as fast as the model ensemble average was predicting and it was becoming an embarrassment.
Different models have different strengths and weaknesses. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project provides data for the modelers to explore those strengths and weaknesses and improve their models. You understand that even for a single model the the final output is a result of a number of model runs combined together, don't you? Another interesting test of models is to segregate out the individual model runs that by coincidence happened to match the real world natural variations (such as ENSO) or to rerun the model forcing the real world natural variations on them. When you do that you find they match the real world observations quite well. It feels to me that when you're looking at ECS in relation to climate models you're using too short a period to make your judgement on. There's a reason that 30 years is the classical period for climate (as defined by the World Meteorological Organization).
How much of health care spending is wasted on insurance company overhead? I suspect most doctor offices and other health care facilities could cut the number of people they employ to handle paperwork in half with a single payer system.
Better yet rather than paying doctors for piecework, having to track every single different little thing they do for a patient pay primary care physicians a lump sum per patient per year to cover all their needs and have the PC physician pay the specialists rather than the patient. That would encourage the PC physician to do what they can to keep a patient as healthy as they can to maximize their profit and give them freedom to spend the necessary time with patients rather than the current micromanagement of their time. You'd have to make some provisions for a PC physician that was unlucky in having sicker than average patients but that wouldn't be too hard.
However when it comes to higher education, there is no disputing the fact that making it more accessible to people across the board (which requires investment) reaps dramatic rewards. People make more money, they are less likely to be involved in crime, they help their communities, the list goes on and on. A lot of people also errantly assume that this means everyone goes to the local state university and gets a 4 year degree in any topic of their choosing, this is not the case nor has Sanders ever called for it. Many people will go to community colleges, many will go to vocational / technical colleges. Yet others might go to truck driving schools or police academies. These are all avenues that would not have been open to these people with only a high school degree. These are all ways to improve peoples' quality of life without giving them money directly, and to see those rewards truly propagate through the community as well.
Not to mention eliminating the obscene amounts of debt many college students are now accumulating for their schooling that forces them to spend their money on paying it off rather than buying houses and cars and otherwise spending their earnings into the economy.
I wasn't arguing against FT agreements in general, just some of the provisions of them. I don't think a country should have to give up laws like the example if gave for the sake of corporate profits.
If you want to cut down on illegal immigration what you need to do is come down hard on employers who hire them. If there's no work there won't be nearly as many illegal immigrants. As far as the ones who are already here they are for the most part already integrated into our economic system. If you could somehow deport all of them tomorrow it would mean an instant recession due to the drop in economic activity from 11 million people disappearing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that but I think there's a program that helps hospitals when their emergency rooms have to treat too many people who are uninsured and can't to pay. That's your tax dollars paying for medical care as well.
If Obama wanted to shut down the nukes how come there are 4 new reactors being built and a 5th completed right now?
No, I wouldn't rule out special interests being involved; how many engineers would turn down a nice $10 million dollar cheque from exxon or BP to just make a big huff over a minor problem?
The payoff could be enormous compared to the cost.
I wouldn't take their concerns at face value - we know too little about their motivations; there needs to be independent peer review to see if their concerns have merit or not.
I'd like to see you repeat that accusation in a cage with the engineers you're trying to put down. I think the results wouldn't be pretty for you.
Actually they're probably civilized enough to not beat you up but if looks of disdain could kill you'd be dead.
Anchorage is about 800 miles closer to North Korea than Honolulu is.
Social Security is not on a path to bankruptcy. With the current value of the SS Trust Fund it can pay full benefits into the 2030's and after that if nothing is done to fix it SS will still be able to pay 70-80% of full benefits after that. Fixing it is as simple as raising the maximum income subject to SS withholding by some amount.
I would call Pell Grants and Head Start investments in the future of our country.
A third is that it fundamentally corrupts the trust people have in scientists, or will if the climate continues to diverge from the hysterical predictions. And make no mistake about it. It is diverging from those predictions, and has been for somewhere between 17 and 25 years now. People who should know better have made absolutely absurd predictions about "no more snow in winter by 2010", "collapse of ice pack", "sea level rise of half a meter by 2012" -- seriously, it is easy to go back and find the "headlines" of these jokers -- none of which have come even close to true. SLR is a perfect case in point. Total SLR over the last 140 years has been on the order of ten, count them ten, whole inches. An average of less than a tenth of an inch per year. The current rate is not spectacular -- I own a house that is about a meter above high tide in the mid-atlantic and this does matter to me -- it is invisible. It is so slow that whole generations don't even notice it, lost in the daily tide. Yet if you listen to the media, you'd think Florida is about to disappear under the sea.
For a PhD Physicist I'm surprised you appear to pay more attention to the popular press rather than the scientific literature. I'm aware that all of those statements have been made but I'm not aware of them being in the scientific literature other than perhaps as part of a range of possibilities rather than a specific prediction.
Regarding sea level rise specifically the observations of sea level rise have outpaced the projections of sea level rise in the IPCC reports since the first report. The rate of SLR was around 1 mm/year in the first half of the 20th Century, 2 mm/year in the later part of that century and over 3 mm/year since 1993. There are some indications lately that the rate may have risen to 4-5 mm/year but there's not enough data yet to positively state that.
Again I am surprised that you as a scientist don't make a distinction between Antarctic sea ice and the Antarctic ice sheet. It's true that Antarctic sea ice extent has been setting records lately (although not in 2015) but from measurements of the GRACE satellites the ice sheet, particularly in West Antarctica continues to lose mass. The GRACE satellites also show that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass. It doesn't matter so much what is happening at the top of the Greenland ice sheet as what is happening around the periphery where ice shelves are retreating and some of the outlet glaciers are speeding up. (Note that all of what I stated above is based on observations, not modeling.)
A Maunder Minimum level of solar activity is not expected to have a significant effect on the pace of global warming, maybe a 5 or 10 year delay of warming at most. (Note, that is based on modeling. Time will tell in the case that such a minimum occurs.)
It's true that no science is truly settled in the sense that it is always subject to revision pending new information. But I'm willing to consider science provisionally settled if there's no apparent prospect of new information. In general what leads to that new information is something that doesn't appear quite right in the old information.
Projections are predictions base
I obviously can't argue with you at your level of education. I ran out of steam at differential equations.
But the model output isn't that far off from observations and when you force models to use the actual natural variations as they occurred, particularly in regards to ENSO they match observations quite well. There's going to have to be a lot more divergence between the models and observations before I reassess my position on the subject.
Time will tell who is right. The problem is if the climate scientists are right then we just move that much further down the path before we do anything about it which makes the problem that much worse.
In 2012 I happily voted for Rocky Anderson. But if I lived in a swing state I probably would have voted for Obama.
If you knew anything about Bernie Sanders you'd know there's no chance of him running 3rd party. He said in one of the early debates with Clinton (paraphrased) "Either one of us is 100 times better than any Republican candidate."
I believe Tesla has plans for a car in the $30K range in 2017 or 2018. The timing may be tied into getting the battery plant in Nevada up and running.
Of course the efficiency of an electric drive train compared to an ICE engine means you probably need less than half the energy for an electric car than you do for an ICE car.
It seems like the problem with fracking is mostly not the fracking itself but the disposal of excess fracking fluids by injecting them in dry wells.
I have my doubts whether your example of different models for the multielectron atom is comparable to the situation with climate models. It seems more likely to me that it's more like multiple models for just one of your multielectron atom examples.
As I said I have confidence that climate scientists including those working on climate models are honestly presenting their results to the best of their abilities. If you want to shake my confidence in them present something that does a better job of predicting/projecting climate than the current theory. No one's come close to doing that yet.
Without massive government subsidies nuclear power has little chance against other means of producing power that are less costly.
nonsense, not when the idiots at the IPCC are making absurd claims like their "Himalaya glaciers will be gone by 2034" debacle. chicken little alarmists are not a credible source
Or idiots like you who pay no attention to the correction made for what was essentially a typographical error and continue to try and use it.
graph
Yes, vindicated. For those of you who didn't click on link it shows the "enviro-left" IPCC predictions vs actual temperature measurements. Not even close. If they practised science at this point you would trash your hypothesis and come up with a new one. Since they are anti-science and reality doesn't matter, only their agenda, they ignore this reality and tell you the models are what matters and reality is only an inconvenient truth to them.
Of course climate models model the surface temperature while you're comparing them to satellite temperatures that convert proxy readings for somewhere up in the troposphere to temperatures. Also, the satellite temperature graph stops in 2013. It would be interesting to see what an up to January 2016 graph would show.
I went to Wood For Trees and the current UAH plot up to January 2016 looks like this. Just eyeballing it I'd say the January 2016 temperature is above the "Climate Models Best Estimate" line in your graph. I expect February 2016 to be even a bit warmer.
It takes a special AC level of stupidity to confuse European governments with soviet style governments.
How about this: Suppose we apply a hypothesis test to each model, one at a time (which is at least semi-justifiable) and reject all of the models altogether whose envelope of predictions deviates from reality by some reasonable threshold. Then we can look at the predictions of the survivors. That would, of course, eliminate maybe 2/3 of the models from the "ensemble" right there, and the remaining models would have a much lower ECS. Where ECS itself has been in "free fall" for the last few years because the planet simply hasn't warmed as fast as the model ensemble average was predicting and it was becoming an embarrassment.
Different models have different strengths and weaknesses. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project provides data for the modelers to explore those strengths and weaknesses and improve their models. You understand that even for a single model the the final output is a result of a number of model runs combined together, don't you? Another interesting test of models is to segregate out the individual model runs that by coincidence happened to match the real world natural variations (such as ENSO) or to rerun the model forcing the real world natural variations on them. When you do that you find they match the real world observations quite well. It feels to me that when you're looking at ECS in relation to climate models you're using too short a period to make your judgement on. There's a reason that 30 years is the classical period for climate (as defined by the World Meteorological Organization).
I don't think any pure "ism" is going to ever work in the real world.
How much of health care spending is wasted on insurance company overhead? I suspect most doctor offices and other health care facilities could cut the number of people they employ to handle paperwork in half with a single payer system.
Better yet rather than paying doctors for piecework, having to track every single different little thing they do for a patient pay primary care physicians a lump sum per patient per year to cover all their needs and have the PC physician pay the specialists rather than the patient. That would encourage the PC physician to do what they can to keep a patient as healthy as they can to maximize their profit and give them freedom to spend the necessary time with patients rather than the current micromanagement of their time. You'd have to make some provisions for a PC physician that was unlucky in having sicker than average patients but that wouldn't be too hard.
However when it comes to higher education, there is no disputing the fact that making it more accessible to people across the board (which requires investment) reaps dramatic rewards. People make more money, they are less likely to be involved in crime, they help their communities, the list goes on and on. A lot of people also errantly assume that this means everyone goes to the local state university and gets a 4 year degree in any topic of their choosing, this is not the case nor has Sanders ever called for it. Many people will go to community colleges, many will go to vocational / technical colleges. Yet others might go to truck driving schools or police academies. These are all avenues that would not have been open to these people with only a high school degree. These are all ways to improve peoples' quality of life without giving them money directly, and to see those rewards truly propagate through the community as well.
Not to mention eliminating the obscene amounts of debt many college students are now accumulating for their schooling that forces them to spend their money on paying it off rather than buying houses and cars and otherwise spending their earnings into the economy.
I wasn't arguing against FT agreements in general, just some of the provisions of them. I don't think a country should have to give up laws like the example if gave for the sake of corporate profits.
If you want to cut down on illegal immigration what you need to do is come down hard on employers who hire them. If there's no work there won't be nearly as many illegal immigrants. As far as the ones who are already here they are for the most part already integrated into our economic system. If you could somehow deport all of them tomorrow it would mean an instant recession due to the drop in economic activity from 11 million people disappearing.
Here's my proposal: create a new Conservativr party with a fiscally conservative and socially liberal platform.
Sounds like you're talking about Libertarians.