Why is that people always think that there are some police duties that are acceptable and some others that are a waste of time?. The police has many different duties, one of them (and arguably the most important) is to fight dangerous criminals and to help in life/death situations. If someone thinks that police should not be involved in these petty duties, then a law should be passed to create a new force to deal with these issues.
You must be kidding about dynamic compression not ruining classical music. There are a large number of examples of pieces which will loose quite a bit by compressing the dynamic range. Best symphonies, which for some people are the best music ever created, would be the most damaged.
I think it is a good idea that science teachers don't pay for their education. They will never be able to recover as an income the benefit that they give to society by educating people.
On the other hand, I wouldn't pay with taxes the education of an engineer that will likely make enough money in the industry. The incentives for this person to follow a career in engineering are already there, the incentives for someone to follow a career in science teaching are not.
You assume that the number of jobs is finite and therefore a foreign person will take the place of an American. At that level of education (and at any level really) many times jobs are created out of the work of this person (and the interaction with other highly skilled workers).So there is no evidence that your main assumption is even valid.
Yes, he/she will send money to their home country and will at the same time spend money in rent, services, not to mention that he/she will eventually start a family and pay for school for his/her American children. Finally most of the people in the most sophisticated fields of knowledge will choose to stay in the US, as his/her colleagues, conferences and job opportunities are all here. The money sent to the home country is most likely a small fraction of the wealth created by the worker.
Not sure what you mean by global temperatures are major contributing factors to the US temperatures. The direction of the change in global warming will not necessarily affect a particular region in the same direction. The US change in the temperature can not be interpreted as indication that the global trend of warming is at play. In fact you might well find that in a global warming scenario temperatures in the US (or in parts of it) could even decrease by changes in the circulation of oceans and atmosphere. I don't think models are good enough to pinpoint the direction of a regional change in temperature based in changes in anthropogenic forcing. But people are working to figure this out.
I thought you meant the "9 hottest years" in the US. I apologize.
About the uncertainty. Sure, you can always get uncertainty bars from any model simulation by changing the parameters according to reasonable values. However (and here I am only talking about the model "evidence") there is no agreement on whether global circulation models are right in the first place. So the issue of uncertainty goes on many levels. There is uncertainty about the uncertainty
The issue of educating the press about how to communicate science works both ways. I wonder if people complain that much about the press coverage when 1998 was presented as the hottest year on record in the US, I wonder if the argument of the small area of the continental US was used in that case to explain the little significance that the US record has for the global temperature. That means that the "9 hottest years"-record that you are referring to is negligibly important for global temperature when the temperatures considered are only the US ones!
I believe that a reasonable scientific stance is one of skepticism. No scientist is able to predict what the climate will be under climate change conditions. That would require for someone to know all inner workings of climate, and the magnitude and direction of all the feedbacks that models attempt to simulate. Of course the error in the data processing does not change the science of climate change. But that means that it leaves the state of the science of climate change exactly as it was before, that is one of uncertainty. And this is not what James Hansen is being teaching us for the last few years.
The analogy is flawed, since both climatologists and meteorologists work with the same set of equations (and therefore weather models and climate models are indeed very similar). If the meteorologist's job is to find the position of the rice, then the climatologist job is to find the average position of the rice in the tub.
On the other hand, the person that asks for correct 2 day forecasts on a consistent basis might already be having it.
The global warming effect of CO2 does not depend on the particular environmental regulations of a country, since CO2 is mixed globally in a scale of 1-2 years. There would be of course regional effects, such that not all the globe is equally affected by the changes brought about by the warming. Less long lived pollutants like aerosols, have more regional effects and they have been found to reduce solar radiation and heat the atmosphere (depending on the composition). If you are trying to document global warming, you should keep in mind that it has to be global. Regional changes (like trying to find the effect on US temperatures) are much more difficult to attribute or anticipate.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is that people always think that there are some police duties that are acceptable and some others that are a waste of time?. The police has many different duties, one of them (and arguably the most important) is to fight dangerous criminals and to help in life/death situations. If someone thinks that police should not be involved in these petty duties, then a law should be passed to create a new force to deal with these issues.
You must be kidding about dynamic compression not ruining classical music. There are a large number of examples of pieces which will loose quite a bit by compressing the dynamic range. Best symphonies, which for some people are the best music ever created, would be the most damaged.
I think it is a good idea that science teachers don't pay for their education. They will never be able to recover as an income the benefit that they give to society by educating people.
On the other hand, I wouldn't pay with taxes the education of an engineer that will likely make enough money in the industry. The incentives for this person to follow a career in engineering are already there, the incentives for someone to follow a career in science teaching are not.
You assume that the number of jobs is finite and therefore a foreign person will take the place of an American. At that level of education (and at any level really) many times jobs are created out of the work of this person (and the interaction with other highly skilled workers).So there is no evidence that your main assumption is even valid.
Yes, he/she will send money to their home country and will at the same time spend money in rent, services, not to mention that he/she will eventually start a family and pay for school for his/her American children. Finally most of the people in the most sophisticated fields of knowledge will choose to stay in the US, as his/her colleagues, conferences and job opportunities are all here. The money sent to the home country is most likely a small fraction of the wealth created by the worker.
Not sure what you mean by global temperatures are major contributing factors to the US temperatures. The direction of the change in global warming will not necessarily affect a particular region in the same direction. The US change in the temperature can not be interpreted as indication that the global trend of warming is at play. In fact you might well find that in a global warming scenario temperatures in the US (or in parts of it) could even decrease by changes in the circulation of oceans and atmosphere. I don't think models are good enough to pinpoint the direction of a regional change in temperature based in changes in anthropogenic forcing. But people are working to figure this out. I thought you meant the "9 hottest years" in the US. I apologize. About the uncertainty. Sure, you can always get uncertainty bars from any model simulation by changing the parameters according to reasonable values. However (and here I am only talking about the model "evidence") there is no agreement on whether global circulation models are right in the first place. So the issue of uncertainty goes on many levels. There is uncertainty about the uncertainty
The issue of educating the press about how to communicate science works both ways. I wonder if people complain that much about the press coverage when 1998 was presented as the hottest year on record in the US, I wonder if the argument of the small area of the continental US was used in that case to explain the little significance that the US record has for the global temperature. That means that the "9 hottest years"-record that you are referring to is negligibly important for global temperature when the temperatures considered are only the US ones! I believe that a reasonable scientific stance is one of skepticism. No scientist is able to predict what the climate will be under climate change conditions. That would require for someone to know all inner workings of climate, and the magnitude and direction of all the feedbacks that models attempt to simulate. Of course the error in the data processing does not change the science of climate change. But that means that it leaves the state of the science of climate change exactly as it was before, that is one of uncertainty. And this is not what James Hansen is being teaching us for the last few years.
The analogy is flawed, since both climatologists and meteorologists work with the same set of equations (and therefore weather models and climate models are indeed very similar). If the meteorologist's job is to find the position of the rice, then the climatologist job is to find the average position of the rice in the tub. On the other hand, the person that asks for correct 2 day forecasts on a consistent basis might already be having it.
The global warming effect of CO2 does not depend on the particular environmental regulations of a country, since CO2 is mixed globally in a scale of 1-2 years. There would be of course regional effects, such that not all the globe is equally affected by the changes brought about by the warming. Less long lived pollutants like aerosols, have more regional effects and they have been found to reduce solar radiation and heat the atmosphere (depending on the composition). If you are trying to document global warming, you should keep in mind that it has to be global. Regional changes (like trying to find the effect on US temperatures) are much more difficult to attribute or anticipate.