Correlational models have long been dismissed as useless.
To get models to work climatatologists have had to use models based on physics.
This is because we have been having other effects on the earth besides pumping out CO2. We have also been emitting fine particles of polution, and sulphate aerosols and ozone effecting chemicals, and chemicals that cause photo chemical smog.
The bad news is that a lot of those other polutions are masking the CO2 -> temperature signal to a large degree. So pure correlational models do not work well.
This is also bad news because arm chair climatologists like yourself will be unable to observe significant changes in their local climate before the net forcing from greenhouse gasses is already a lot worse. The time constants of most of the masking effects are much shorter than the CO2 time constant. So unfortunately when the 'skeptics' react to some really adverse conditions and we stop burning fossil fuels, we will find we have to ride out even worse problems. This is on top of the decade or so lag between CO2 concentration and surface temperature changes.
As vagulely alluded to, pre historical climate change CO2 increases lagged temperature increases. This is not a cause for celebration. In those cases climate change was caused by increased temperature (changes in distance to sun etc). In our case it is caused by increases in CO2. The two are both forcings that cause each other to rise.
This means more CO2 begets more temperature which begets more CO2. This is not a good thing, and certainly not a reason for skeptics to use to say global warming is not dangerous.
There are lots of mechanisms by which temperature makes more CO2e, trees suffering, marshes melting, rotting, methane clathrates.
Just a reminder that Mozambique actually has an AK47 on their flag.
Looks like the award for the country which is the most gun crazy may come down to fine examination of the rules, or the ability of their citizens to afford a gun.
No.
Quoting an obscure quote on an irrelevant topic in that bastion of accurate reporting "The register" to argue your point doesn't qualify you as rational.
BTW the flame bait tag should clearly have been applied to the eco terrorist comment, which somehow managed to get 5 informative.
Removing solar and wind installations that cause distressing amounts of visual polution is a problem that I would love to have, it is easy to do and you are left with a legacy of just some concrete foundations.
Compare that with the legacies of irreversible effects of climate change, dangerous underground stored C02 or nuclear waste.
Let them discover a reason why renewables are unacceptable, we need leaders to point the way.
Alex
Fusion power has also been 20 years away for about 60 years now.
Greenpeace seem to understand technology better than most as they seem to recommend massive rollout of wind and solar thermal to fix climate change.
Thats not anti technology - thats appropriate proven technology urgently needed to fix problems caused by old school fossil technology now.
I think that you'd be surprised to find that you wouldn't actually know how to be green with out groups like Greenpeace bringing things to you and your societies attention just like they have with this issue.
Would anyone know the Japanese were harvesting whales if noone was watching / would you know about climate change ? I'm sure the oil / coal companies would have managed to tell us eventually.
Greenpeace use the media to bring attention to things that there is no commercial interest in publicizing, but which it is in all our interests to know about. That is extremely valuable in a world where most of our information about our ever closely interconnected world comes from international media which is mostly dominated by commercial interests.
Are you suggesting greenpeace is doing this to get an effective bribe out of apple ?
History would not support your accusation, as they obviously havent been succesfully bribedby the nuclear/coal/oil or any one of hundreds of large companies with much more money than apple, whose interests have been damaged by amounts much greater than this will damage apple.
Would you care to explain exactly the nature of the terror you feel from greenpeace ?
If you think they are terrorising Apple i think you are wrong
Implementing best practice that will be standard practice in a few years will only be good for Apple
They are being picked on because Greenpeace has recognised them as a technological leader. The recognition will only do them good. Being forced to become more of a leader will only do them good.
You are the terrorist. You are the one raving about ignorant masses, and trying to make people scared of the green movement, with no reasoning.
Greenpeace rationally pointing out better ways of not doing things, and promoting a ranking of companies based their supply of relavant consumer information, is not the act of a terrorist group.
I had a look at the reports on greenpeaces website about nuclear, and they all look quite well researched and informed.
I've never quite understood the reasons for defence of nuclear power, other than a vague nostalgia for what was a sort of golden age of physics and engineering,which I can relate to being an engineer.
Greens say : fossil fuel is killing the planet.
Response : "Aha but you don't like nuclear
Greens : WTF ?
Nuclear can't solve climate crisis:
Skills shortage - nuclear technicians all in nursing homes
Fuel shortage - not enough to last 40 years at current consumption
Takes 3-4 years just to pay back carbon used in concrete to construct reactor
Can't be installed quickly enough.
Life cycle cost close to infinite.
Employ monitoring and security gaurd for 10,000 years to monitor/gaurd waste. Calculate net present value of wages. Forget it. The only way to get this economical is to get government to make tax payers of future pay cost.
Insurance. Policy must cover accidents in waste storage for 10,000 years. Prohibitively expensive in todays dollars. Forget it.
Terrorist target.
Renewables only answer.
Logical, cost effective, no government enforced borrowing from future generations.
Wind and Solar - No legacy once superceded - available now with storage (solar thermal) - can take advantage of mass production unlike CCS and nuclear
Yes they are unfairly targeting Apple because :
Apple is a company that will actually care about its greenness because of the demographics of it's customers
Apple is vertically integrated therefore in a better position to do something
Apple is upmarket - bigger margins - can afford to do something
Apple's products are not just commodities like other PC makers - again bigger margins
So Greenpeace are just trying to pull on the place with the most leverage to get the best result for their effort.
Greenpeace serves an essential service in todays world where governments are continually lobbied by powerfull anti envoronment interests, who have the money to employ full time lobyists.
For lazy citizens like me supporting greenpeace saves me having to spend as much of my time and effort writing to politicians going on protests etc.
Like it or not there are actually some people out there that want to live on a sustainable planet. Don't shoot greenpeace for delivering that message.
I really find it interesting that people can be so offended by greenpeace suggesting ways forward in the world that will benefit us all, when so many other more powerful lobby groups are trying to do things that only benefit their own interests.
Why don't nuclear / coal / oil / forest destruction supporters get out on the streets and protest against the envorinonment movement ? After all in the next few years - it will necesarily be taking over public policy
The answer is because they won't get off their arses unless someone will pay them to do it.
The environment movement is not trying to spoil your party. They are just trying to change it into a party where your kids can enjoy the same party, the neighbours won't throw a brick though the window because they are missing out. - If you think 911 was bad wait until the third world finds out that the first world has been knowingly flooding large areas of river deltas, and stopping essential glacial melt river flow, in poor countries so that they could save a few bucks by buying coal fired electricity instead of renewables, so that they could run a plasma television and a SUV, while the poor people in the river deltas had negligable carbon emissions.
Alex
I am not sure of the exact genetic markers to distinguish Neanderthal from Homo Sapien, but some members of my local Rugby team look like they have most of the documented features.
This has the effect of documenting exactly what you are using from the library. (Usually you will only be using a small subset of any library)
The rest of your code can be written in an abstracted way. Like instead of instantiate an acme brand persistance object and call storeInXML on it every where in your code, just have a more abstract persist method, so the rest of the code doesn't even need to know how the stuff is being persisted
You can substitute a simpler or instrumented version for unit testing.
When you want to stop using the library for what ever reason (platform change, found a better way to get this functionality, different library, library licencing has changed etc) it is easy to see what needs to be changed, and the changes will not extend beyond one module
I too have shared your experience.
You can be assured that the.doc file format was designed specifically to not be producable without errors by anything other that Microsoft Word.
This is exactly the reason for the OOXML vs ODF war.
The OOXML file format will be a standard as long as you use the standard OOXML software to edit it.
I say much respect to you. I read your other post "First world, not the fatties" and agree with your points.
I think you should take pride in being not representative of "fat guys" or are you arguing that all fat people are as conscienscious as you ?
Great more croplands in Canada and Russia.
As long as you can maintain political stability while the rest of the world suffers changing rainfall patterns, inundation of population centers by rising sea levels, and ecosystem breakdown by all the rest of the worlds animal and plats finding themselves in the wrong climatic zone, and you can keep out the refugees, then you can grow some crops.
I agree about the excercise and what they eat.
They don't need to stop eating as often but enjoy eating better quality food in sensible amounts. Quality tastes good without giving you health problems.
But this has everything to do with global warming.
We don't need to stop consuming energy - but we need to enjoy obtaining energy from quality sources - not fossil fuels. Quality lights the room without giving us climate problems.
Theoretically he has more control over his own population than he does over Saudi Arabia, and there are more effective policy instruments than going on TV and saying things.
But what to use depends on the goal. Are you trying to make people happy today - by reducing the price of petrol or eating another fatty food item ; or are you trying to make the people happy in the future - by avoiding catastrophic climate change or morbid obesity.
My point is that the two issues are very much the same. The short term gratification verses long term gratification.
People that have trouble solving a problem which only involves themselves and has a time constant of only a few months, are unlikely to be able to help solve a problem that involves the entire planet and has time constants of decades.
You make my point for me.
I made a comment about why I was too weak and certain of failure to make climate related comments to fat people. ( and that George Bush was too).
And sure enough I am seen as scary dude with a God Complex.
Apologies for pointing out what I see as very serious issue affecting the future of the whole planet.
Why don't I just shut up and wait for the problems to solve themselves.
If a person cannot use their intelligence to succeed in managing the most basic of biological systems with really simple well understood dynamics - the mass balance of the human body, cannot override the simple want for more food and less exercise, then there is no way they are going to be able to appreciate their place in the complex system that is the earth, and manage their effects on it.
I try to promote bike riding, and green house issues. But what can I say to an obese person, who can't face their own petty problems let alone the worlds and couldn't ride a bike if they wanted to.
In a normal society where people move large distances under their own power - not having their carcass dragged around by a fossil fuel burning internal combustion engine, these people would have to be put in to the same category as the disabled.
The idea that they are not sick/disabled is one that comes from this age but which I think will be discarded in the future.
These people that will automatically resist forces that they cannot adapt to with out changing their shape.
This is why George Bush is asking the king of Saudi to produce more oil - not because he will buy it but just to make the price go down. It would be far more sensible for him to be asking his overweight SUV driving fatties to slim down and drive smaller cars.
I agree.
The only reason we have cheap off peak (base load) power now is because coal fired / nuclear power stations cannot supply power on demand. They can't change their output so they almost have to give it away at night to be able to supply enough during the day - solar however almost matches demand if a few hours of storage are added for the early evening.
Thats why we can waste it by heating water at night and running lights in empty buildings etc.
When we have significant penetration of renewables and time of use metering, and electric cars that push and pull power from the grid http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/10/0317210,the problem will disapear because people / smart devices will use energy when it the price is suitable and the price will representative of supply - i.e. a market.
I don't think that point number 4 will be a real problem. In many countries peak is when everyone turns their air conditioning on. Time of use metering and distributed storage (cars) and distributed generation will all mean that transmission peaks are reduced.
When electricity prices are greater - which they will be when a carbon tax is introduced, we will all use energy in much more sensible ways like designing better houses, using solar powered heating and solar powered chilling, which will reduce the peak power demand.
In Summary - No need for nuclear because of base load power. Renewables are the future
The paradigm of having web pages that you serve, and that are actually files on the server only works for a short time. Mixing any of these inline scripting languages into the HTML document stinks IMO.
As soon as your website is a bit dynamic you are better off generating everything on the fly. You can describe content with databases and xml and CSS and then have your server generate actual pages from that.
I personally use c++ cgi scripts to generate all pages, as I need to do some computationally expensive crunching as well. Why learn a dodgy scripting language when you know how to do it properly anyway ? As soon as you need to do something different or slightly complex all these scripting languages start to become painfull and you need to start augmenting them anyway.
I realise that I am not a cool web developer, and there are potential security problems with using compiled languages, but this works well for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Correlational models have long been dismissed as useless.
To get models to work climatatologists have had to use models based on physics.
This is because we have been having other effects on the earth besides pumping out CO2. We have also been emitting fine particles of polution, and sulphate aerosols and ozone effecting chemicals, and chemicals that cause photo chemical smog.
The bad news is that a lot of those other polutions are masking the CO2 -> temperature signal to a large degree. So pure correlational models do not work well.
This is also bad news because arm chair climatologists like yourself will be unable to observe significant changes in their local climate before the net forcing from greenhouse gasses is already a lot worse. The time constants of most of the masking effects are much shorter than the CO2 time constant. So unfortunately when the 'skeptics' react to some really adverse conditions and we stop burning fossil fuels, we will find we have to ride out even worse problems. This is on top of the decade or so lag between CO2 concentration and surface temperature changes.
As vagulely alluded to, pre historical climate change CO2 increases lagged temperature increases. This is not a cause for celebration. In those cases climate change was caused by increased temperature (changes in distance to sun etc). In our case it is caused by increases in CO2. The two are both forcings that cause each other to rise.
This means more CO2 begets more temperature which begets more CO2. This is not a good thing, and certainly not a reason for skeptics to use to say global warming is not dangerous.
There are lots of mechanisms by which temperature makes more CO2e, trees suffering, marshes melting, rotting, methane clathrates.
Just a reminder that Mozambique actually has an AK47 on their flag.
Looks like the award for the country which is the most gun crazy may come down to fine examination of the rules, or the ability of their citizens to afford a gun.
No.
Quoting an obscure quote on an irrelevant topic in that bastion of accurate reporting "The register" to argue your point doesn't qualify you as rational.
BTW the flame bait tag should clearly have been applied to the eco terrorist comment, which somehow managed to get 5 informative.
Maybe they will,
Removing solar and wind installations that cause distressing amounts of visual polution is a problem that I would love to have, it is easy to do and you are left with a legacy of just some concrete foundations.
Compare that with the legacies of irreversible effects of climate change, dangerous underground stored C02 or nuclear waste.
Let them discover a reason why renewables are unacceptable, we need leaders to point the way.
Alex
Fusion power has also been 20 years away for about 60 years now.
Greenpeace seem to understand technology better than most as they seem to recommend massive rollout of wind and solar thermal to fix climate change.
Thats not anti technology - thats appropriate proven technology urgently needed to fix problems caused by old school fossil technology now.
I think that you'd be surprised to find that you wouldn't actually know how to be green with out groups like Greenpeace bringing things to you and your societies attention just like they have with this issue.
Would anyone know the Japanese were harvesting whales if noone was watching / would you know about climate change ? I'm sure the oil / coal companies would have managed to tell us eventually.
Greenpeace use the media to bring attention to things that there is no commercial interest in publicizing, but which it is in all our interests to know about. That is extremely valuable in a world where most of our information about our ever closely interconnected world comes from international media which is mostly dominated by commercial interests.
Are you suggesting greenpeace is doing this to get an effective bribe out of apple ?
History would not support your accusation, as they obviously havent been succesfully bribedby the nuclear/coal/oil or any one of hundreds of large companies with much more money than apple, whose interests have been damaged by amounts much greater than this will damage apple.
Would you care to explain exactly the nature of the terror you feel from greenpeace ?
If you think they are terrorising Apple i think you are wrong
Implementing best practice that will be standard practice in a few years will only be good for Apple
They are being picked on because Greenpeace has recognised them as a technological leader. The recognition will only do them good. Being forced to become more of a leader will only do them good.
You are the terrorist. You are the one raving about ignorant masses, and trying to make people scared of the green movement, with no reasoning.
Greenpeace rationally pointing out better ways of not doing things, and promoting a ranking of companies based their supply of relavant consumer information, is not the act of a terrorist group.
I had a look at the reports on greenpeaces website about nuclear, and they all look quite well researched and informed.
,which I can relate to being an engineer.
I've never quite understood the reasons for defence of nuclear power, other than a vague nostalgia for what was a sort of golden age of physics and engineering
Greens say : fossil fuel is killing the planet.
Response : "Aha but you don't like nuclear
Greens : WTF ?
Nuclear can't solve climate crisis:
Skills shortage - nuclear technicians all in nursing homes
Fuel shortage - not enough to last 40 years at current consumption
Takes 3-4 years just to pay back carbon used in concrete to construct reactor
Can't be installed quickly enough.
Life cycle cost close to infinite. Employ monitoring and security gaurd for 10,000 years to monitor/gaurd waste. Calculate net present value of wages. Forget it. The only way to get this economical is to get government to make tax payers of future pay cost.
Insurance. Policy must cover accidents in waste storage for 10,000 years. Prohibitively expensive in todays dollars. Forget it.
Terrorist target.
Renewables only answer. Logical, cost effective, no government enforced borrowing from future generations.
Wind and Solar - No legacy once superceded - available now with storage (solar thermal) - can take advantage of mass production unlike CCS and nuclear
Nuclear - WHY ?
Yes they are unfairly targeting Apple because :
Apple is a company that will actually care about its greenness because of the demographics of it's customers
Apple is vertically integrated therefore in a better position to do something
Apple is upmarket - bigger margins - can afford to do something
Apple's products are not just commodities like other PC makers - again bigger margins
So Greenpeace are just trying to pull on the place with the most leverage to get the best result for their effort.
Greenpeace serves an essential service in todays world where governments are continually lobbied by powerfull anti envoronment interests, who have the money to employ full time lobyists.
For lazy citizens like me supporting greenpeace saves me having to spend as much of my time and effort writing to politicians going on protests etc.
Like it or not there are actually some people out there that want to live on a sustainable planet. Don't shoot greenpeace for delivering that message.
I really find it interesting that people can be so offended by greenpeace suggesting ways forward in the world that will benefit us all, when so many other more powerful lobby groups are trying to do things that only benefit their own interests.
Why don't nuclear / coal / oil / forest destruction supporters get out on the streets and protest against the envorinonment movement ? After all in the next few years - it will necesarily be taking over public policy
The answer is because they won't get off their arses unless someone will pay them to do it.
The environment movement is not trying to spoil your party. They are just trying to change it into a party where your kids can enjoy the same party, the neighbours won't throw a brick though the window because they are missing out. - If you think 911 was bad wait until the third world finds out that the first world has been knowingly flooding large areas of river deltas, and stopping essential glacial melt river flow, in poor countries so that they could save a few bucks by buying coal fired electricity instead of renewables, so that they could run a plasma television and a SUV, while the poor people in the river deltas had negligable carbon emissions.
Alex
I am not sure of the exact genetic markers to distinguish Neanderthal from Homo Sapien, but some members of my local Rugby team look like they have most of the documented features.
Yep. Write your own wrappers / interfaces.
This has the effect of documenting exactly what you are using from the library. (Usually you will only be using a small subset of any library)
The rest of your code can be written in an abstracted way. Like instead of instantiate an acme brand persistance object and call storeInXML on it every where in your code, just have a more abstract persist method, so the rest of the code doesn't even need to know how the stuff is being persisted
You can substitute a simpler or instrumented version for unit testing.
When you want to stop using the library for what ever reason (platform change, found a better way to get this functionality, different library, library licencing has changed etc) it is easy to see what needs to be changed, and the changes will not extend beyond one module
I too have shared your experience. .doc file format was designed specifically to not be producable without errors by anything other that Microsoft Word.
You can be assured that the
This is exactly the reason for the OOXML vs ODF war. The OOXML file format will be a standard as long as you use the standard OOXML software to edit it.
Bonus Uranium I thought we were just there for the oil ...
I say much respect to you. I read your other post "First world, not the fatties" and agree with your points.
I think you should take pride in being not representative of "fat guys" or are you arguing that all fat people are as conscienscious as you ?
Great more croplands in Canada and Russia.
As long as you can maintain political stability while the rest of the world suffers changing rainfall patterns, inundation of population centers by rising sea levels, and ecosystem breakdown by all the rest of the worlds animal and plats finding themselves in the wrong climatic zone, and you can keep out the refugees, then you can grow some crops.
I agree about the excercise and what they eat.
They don't need to stop eating as often but enjoy eating better quality food in sensible amounts. Quality tastes good without giving you health problems.
But this has everything to do with global warming.
We don't need to stop consuming energy - but we need to enjoy obtaining energy from quality sources - not fossil fuels. Quality lights the room without giving us climate problems.
Theoretically he has more control over his own population than he does over Saudi Arabia, and there are more effective policy instruments than going on TV and saying things.
But what to use depends on the goal. Are you trying to make people happy today - by reducing the price of petrol or eating another fatty food item ; or are you trying to make the people happy in the future - by avoiding catastrophic climate change or morbid obesity.
My point is that the two issues are very much the same. The short term gratification verses long term gratification.
People that have trouble solving a problem which only involves themselves and has a time constant of only a few months, are unlikely to be able to help solve a problem that involves the entire planet and has time constants of decades.
You make my point for me.
I made a comment about why I was too weak and certain of failure to make climate related comments to fat people. ( and that George Bush was too).
And sure enough I am seen as scary dude with a God Complex.
Apologies for pointing out what I see as very serious issue affecting the future of the whole planet. Why don't I just shut up and wait for the problems to solve themselves.
If a person cannot use their intelligence to succeed in managing the most basic of biological systems with really simple well understood dynamics - the mass balance of the human body, cannot override the simple want for more food and less exercise, then there is no way they are going to be able to appreciate their place in the complex system that is the earth, and manage their effects on it.
I try to promote bike riding, and green house issues. But what can I say to an obese person, who can't face their own petty problems let alone the worlds and couldn't ride a bike if they wanted to.
In a normal society where people move large distances under their own power - not having their carcass dragged around by a fossil fuel burning internal combustion engine, these people would have to be put in to the same category as the disabled.
The idea that they are not sick/disabled is one that comes from this age but which I think will be discarded in the future.
These people that will automatically resist forces that they cannot adapt to with out changing their shape.
This is why George Bush is asking the king of Saudi to produce more oil - not because he will buy it but just to make the price go down. It would be far more sensible for him to be asking his overweight SUV driving fatties to slim down and drive smaller cars.
I agree. The only reason we have cheap off peak (base load) power now is because coal fired / nuclear power stations cannot supply power on demand. They can't change their output so they almost have to give it away at night to be able to supply enough during the day - solar however almost matches demand if a few hours of storage are added for the early evening. ,the problem will disapear because people / smart devices will use energy when it the price is suitable and the price will representative of supply - i.e. a market.
Thats why we can waste it by heating water at night and running lights in empty buildings etc.
When we have significant penetration of renewables and time of use metering, and electric cars that push and pull power from the grid http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/10/0317210
I don't think that point number 4 will be a real problem. In many countries peak is when everyone turns their air conditioning on. Time of use metering and distributed storage (cars) and distributed generation will all mean that transmission peaks are reduced.
When electricity prices are greater - which they will be when a carbon tax is introduced, we will all use energy in much more sensible ways like designing better houses, using solar powered heating and solar powered chilling, which will reduce the peak power demand.
In Summary - No need for nuclear because of base load power.
Renewables are the future
Don't worry - you aren't the only one :)
The paradigm of having web pages that you serve, and that are actually files on the server only works for a short time. Mixing any of these inline scripting languages into the HTML document stinks IMO.
As soon as your website is a bit dynamic you are better off generating everything on the fly.
You can describe content with databases and xml and CSS and then have your server generate actual pages from that.
I personally use c++ cgi scripts to generate all pages, as I need to do some computationally expensive crunching as well. Why learn a dodgy scripting language when you know how to do it properly anyway ? As soon as you need to do something different or slightly complex all these scripting languages start to become painfull and you need to start augmenting them anyway.
I realise that I am not a cool web developer, and there are potential security problems with using compiled languages, but this works well for me.
Alex
Now all he has to do is programme it with some standard responses, and have voice recognition and he could replace a lot of peoples jobs.
Anyone who leanrs to play the piano and sing, like Elton, doesn't exactly look like they are going out of their way to do stuff with other people.