How many books have you read that happen to describe objects affected by gravity? (probably all of them.) Of those, how many actually state a position that gravity is real? I'm guessing almost none. Clearly there is no consensus among the authors about gravity.
If a climate paper deals only with a specific aspect of the science and does not try to cover whether AGW as a whole is happening or not, if it takes No Position, then that says nothing at all about its authors' views. It does not say that the authors are uncertain or undecided.
Why some people continue to insist that these papers should not have been excluded in any meaningful analysis is beyond me.
I agree nuclear should be on the table too, but it's far from the only option, and rarely the best when you consider full-lifecycle costs and risks.
It may have escaped your notice but a number of countries have been busy scaling up their renewable energy production dramatically, including China. And grid-scale energy storage technologies abound, from pumped hydro to reflow batteries to molten salt and even kinetic flywheels.
The only real factor for adoption is cost, not existence. But while direct costs for renewables & storage have been falling rapidly, it's our stubborn refusal to consider all the costs of our current choices, including the many indirect and externalised costs to society, that has left us in this position today.
Sadly, too many vested interests are threatened to permit a clear-headed picture, so the arguments continue.
Go have a look at what would happen to Bangladesh with a 1m sea rise, to take just one example. Look at how much of that land would be poisoned by salt water, and how many people would be displaced by that. Think about what those people would have to do, where they would go - and what the people already living in those places might think of that.
There is a reason that most Western militaries have been saying climate change is a huge threat to global security.
You seize upon the trickle of cash for climate research and emissions mitigation, yet ignore the vast river of trillions flowing to the oil and coal industries. Is this also coincidence?
You're clearly determined to conflate the "no position" results with the far fewer "uncertain" results, despite them being listed separately for a reason.
Every so-called debunking of this paper I have read tries the same thing. What is it about "no position" that you people don't understand?
And yet, it is the considered opinion of the NASA scientists, and the scientists who peer-reviewed all those papers - all of whom have much more experience in this field than you - that the methodology is sound.
Clearly it is not "obviously garbage" to real experts. And yet you remain absolutely certain thatthey are the ones who are missing something? What does this say about you?
The problem for me is that a lot of denialist articles include "facts" that were later proven wrong and some years ago they were TOLD it is fine to lie in their studies to get people to deny climate change. So much of the denialist FUD looks like a power grab by fossil energy companies to give to pet politicians and astroturfing organisations to funnel the money back to their coffers.
Only one of those quotes is from an actual climatologist - and his dissenting claims have so far completely failed to convince the other 97% of his colleagues. Hardly a challenge to the consensus.
You know what would convince them? Hard evidence - which is curiously lacking from the denialist camp.
The best the 3% have been able to do is to claim that the decades of evidence we've accumulated still isn't "good enough" to be sure. The other 97% are not only convinced that AGW is happening, but have long since moved on with the job of figuring out what's actually going to happen.
Actually, economists have been saying for decades that a price on carbon is the most effective way to reduce emissions with least impact on the economy. And increases in efficiency have saved hundreds of billions annually.
Further, we've already had tech breakthroughs in energy production, with solar and wind to name a few. These have allowed us to decouple emissions growth from economic growth for the first time in history. With renewable energy prices still dropping and storage technology improving fast, even fully-green baseline power is already achievable; no further breakthroughs required, and we don't need to slash our energy consumption either.
For the record, I believe nukes should still be on the table, as there are cases where they still make the most sense. But their advantages have to be balanced against their price (both full-lifecycle cost, and potential failure risks), so I don't expect them to be widespread.
"Some sort of impact" sounds like weasel words to me. The linked paper shows six independent studies that all agree; the consensus of 90-100% of scientists is that:
human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century
Which is a much stronger statement than you make out. Also, agreement with this position is correlated with expertise.
The exact climate sensitivity is still being debated, but your links are nearly five years out of date.
More precisely, you could ask "What do Gangnam Style moves have to do with a journalist's for-profit article about AI?", and you might have a clearer answer.
Flippancy aside, they're specifically researching emotional AI, and dancing has long been associated with emotional response in humans. Baby steps, but if machines and people are going to interact more smoothly in the future, it'd help if the software had some understanding of the causes and effects of human emotional reactions.
Because you didn't look any further. Two clicks would get you here, with plenty of information on datasets and monitoring methodologies, such as that in Q6 and Q7, or to here, with links to more detailed info in Q2, Q3 and Q8.
So your objection to the claim "hottest year on record" is purely because your definition of how it should be calculated is different to NOAA's? And different to NASA, the Met Office Hadley Centre, the WMO, and the ECMWF, based on separate analyses of all three major dataset - they all agree that 2015 was the hottest year on record. Good luck convincing them that they're all wrong while your simplistic method is the only meaningful approach. Maybe start with trying to get a paper about that through peer review.
And the NOAA page I linked above has links to FAQs describing collection and processing, full datasets, and the papers describing their methodologies - all there for anyone who is interested enough to click through.
Angered? No, what you've said is all mostly correct. Just largely irrelevant to what's happening today. Perhaps you have a more relevant point to make?
First, the "hottest years" we've been having are global averages for the whole year, not just snow outside someone's window one day.
Second, "hottest year on record" means "this year's global average temperature was higher than anything we've ever seen before", which could just be a fluke - if it wasn't merely the latest in a whole string of "hottest years on record" over the last decade. When the global temperature record gets broken in 1998, then 2010, again in 2014, and yet again in 2015, that's ridiculously unlikely to be anything except a rising temperature trend - not just random weather.
While that's certainly true, the downstream reservoir need not be nearly as large as the upstream one, depending on the situation. And even without any pumping, hydro's relatively quick response allows it to reduce its output to when the wind picks up, providing some of the same reserve-capacity benefits.
According to Wikipedia, Scotland has 1.54 GW of installed hydro, and 5.59 GW of wind generators. Even accounting for capacity factors, hydro is clearly not the source of "most" of Scotland's renewable power.
It's also worth noting that a good pumped hydro setup makes an excellent way to balance and store the excess from their wind & wave generation.
Not to mention, 4) pumped hydro storage is the perfect complement for all that excess wind power they've got so much of - and they're increasingly taking advantage of that fortuitous combination.
How many of those prior cases demanded that the vendor create a customised "FBiOS" to bypass all protections, and how many involved a much more limited order to provide the password to unlock one specific phone?
I think you'll find the change in tune is more about what they're now being ordered to do. Consider also that Apple and Google created these encryption features in part to avoid the burden of the increasing number of unlock requests.
Slashdot Mirror
How many books have you read that happen to describe objects affected by gravity? (probably all of them.) Of those, how many actually state a position that gravity is real? I'm guessing almost none. Clearly there is no consensus among the authors about gravity.
If a climate paper deals only with a specific aspect of the science and does not try to cover whether AGW as a whole is happening or not, if it takes No Position, then that says nothing at all about its authors' views. It does not say that the authors are uncertain or undecided.
Why some people continue to insist that these papers should not have been excluded in any meaningful analysis is beyond me.
How many UFO "experts" have decades of hard evidence to back their conclusions?
Hence the remaining 3%, yes.
A much more accurate statement: Over 90% of oil & coal executives think the fossil fuel gravy supertankers should continue.
I agree nuclear should be on the table too, but it's far from the only option, and rarely the best when you consider full-lifecycle costs and risks.
It may have escaped your notice but a number of countries have been busy scaling up their renewable energy production dramatically, including China. And grid-scale energy storage technologies abound, from pumped hydro to reflow batteries to molten salt and even kinetic flywheels.
The only real factor for adoption is cost, not existence. But while direct costs for renewables & storage have been falling rapidly, it's our stubborn refusal to consider all the costs of our current choices, including the many indirect and externalised costs to society, that has left us in this position today.
Sadly, too many vested interests are threatened to permit a clear-headed picture, so the arguments continue.
Go have a look at what would happen to Bangladesh with a 1m sea rise, to take just one example. Look at how much of that land would be poisoned by salt water, and how many people would be displaced by that. Think about what those people would have to do, where they would go - and what the people already living in those places might think of that.
There is a reason that most Western militaries have been saying climate change is a huge threat to global security.
You seize upon the trickle of cash for climate research and emissions mitigation, yet ignore the vast river of trillions flowing to the oil and coal industries. Is this also coincidence?
You're clearly determined to conflate the "no position" results with the far fewer "uncertain" results, despite them being listed separately for a reason.
Every so-called debunking of this paper I have read tries the same thing. What is it about "no position" that you people don't understand?
And yet, it is the considered opinion of the NASA scientists, and the scientists who peer-reviewed all those papers - all of whom have much more experience in this field than you - that the methodology is sound.
Clearly it is not "obviously garbage" to real experts. And yet you remain absolutely certain thatthey are the ones who are missing something? What does this say about you?
You don't need "qualifications" to accuse somebody of lying.
They certainly help if you want to be convincing in your accusations though.
The problem for me is that a lot of denialist articles include "facts" that were later proven wrong and some years ago they were TOLD it is fine to lie in their studies to get people to deny climate change. So much of the denialist FUD looks like a power grab by fossil energy companies to give to pet politicians and astroturfing organisations to funnel the money back to their coffers.
FTFY
Only one of those quotes is from an actual climatologist - and his dissenting claims have so far completely failed to convince the other 97% of his colleagues. Hardly a challenge to the consensus.
You know what would convince them? Hard evidence - which is curiously lacking from the denialist camp.
The best the 3% have been able to do is to claim that the decades of evidence we've accumulated still isn't "good enough" to be sure. The other 97% are not only convinced that AGW is happening, but have long since moved on with the job of figuring out what's actually going to happen.
Actually, economists have been saying for decades that a price on carbon is the most effective way to reduce emissions with least impact on the economy. And increases in efficiency have saved hundreds of billions annually.
Further, we've already had tech breakthroughs in energy production, with solar and wind to name a few. These have allowed us to decouple emissions growth from economic growth for the first time in history. With renewable energy prices still dropping and storage technology improving fast, even fully-green baseline power is already achievable; no further breakthroughs required, and we don't need to slash our energy consumption either.
For the record, I believe nukes should still be on the table, as there are cases where they still make the most sense. But their advantages have to be balanced against their price (both full-lifecycle cost, and potential failure risks), so I don't expect them to be widespread.
"Some sort of impact" sounds like weasel words to me. The linked paper shows six independent studies that all agree; the consensus of 90-100% of scientists is that:
human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century
Which is a much stronger statement than you make out. Also, agreement with this position is correlated with expertise.
The exact climate sensitivity is still being debated, but your links are nearly five years out of date.
More precisely, you could ask "What do Gangnam Style moves have to do with a journalist's for-profit article about AI?", and you might have a clearer answer.
Flippancy aside, they're specifically researching emotional AI, and dancing has long been associated with emotional response in humans. Baby steps, but if machines and people are going to interact more smoothly in the future, it'd help if the software had some understanding of the causes and effects of human emotional reactions.
Because you didn't look any further. Two clicks would get you here, with plenty of information on datasets and monitoring methodologies, such as that in Q6 and Q7, or to here, with links to more detailed info in Q2, Q3 and Q8.
You're welcome.
So your objection to the claim "hottest year on record" is purely because your definition of how it should be calculated is different to NOAA's? And different to NASA, the Met Office Hadley Centre, the WMO, and the ECMWF, based on separate analyses of all three major dataset - they all agree that 2015 was the hottest year on record. Good luck convincing them that they're all wrong while your simplistic method is the only meaningful approach. Maybe start with trying to get a paper about that through peer review.
And the NOAA page I linked above has links to FAQs describing collection and processing, full datasets, and the papers describing their methodologies - all there for anyone who is interested enough to click through.
Angered? No, what you've said is all mostly correct. Just largely irrelevant to what's happening today. Perhaps you have a more relevant point to make?
Nope.
If you've got a point to make, try citing some genuine data.
First, the "hottest years" we've been having are global averages for the whole year, not just snow outside someone's window one day.
Second, "hottest year on record" means "this year's global average temperature was higher than anything we've ever seen before", which could just be a fluke - if it wasn't merely the latest in a whole string of "hottest years on record" over the last decade. When the global temperature record gets broken in 1998, then 2010, again in 2014, and yet again in 2015, that's ridiculously unlikely to be anything except a rising temperature trend - not just random weather.
While that's certainly true, the downstream reservoir need not be nearly as large as the upstream one, depending on the situation. And even without any pumping, hydro's relatively quick response allows it to reduce its output to when the wind picks up, providing some of the same reserve-capacity benefits.
As it turns out, Scotland already has about 740MW of pumped-storage hydro capacity, with another 1200MW proposed.
According to Wikipedia, Scotland has 1.54 GW of installed hydro, and 5.59 GW of wind generators. Even accounting for capacity factors, hydro is clearly not the source of "most" of Scotland's renewable power.
It's also worth noting that a good pumped hydro setup makes an excellent way to balance and store the excess from their wind & wave generation.
Not to mention, 4) pumped hydro storage is the perfect complement for all that excess wind power they've got so much of - and they're increasingly taking advantage of that fortuitous combination.
You all remember the next two.
How many of those prior cases demanded that the vendor create a customised "FBiOS" to bypass all protections, and how many involved a much more limited order to provide the password to unlock one specific phone?
I think you'll find the change in tune is more about what they're now being ordered to do. Consider also that Apple and Google created these encryption features in part to avoid the burden of the increasing number of unlock requests.