I don't know if you know this, but pretty much all discoveries in the last hundred years have been made with math. Astronomy especially so.
It is pretty clear that you don't understand the fact that there are only so many scientists in the world, and these discoveries require people pouring over data for extended periods of time. Science is not a glorious profession, and it doesn't pay well. That means there aren't that many scientists doing all the works of science. It's not like there are millions of professional astronomers out there - at best there are a few thousand. Any time you can enlist the help the public to go through the tedious analysis tasks you are better off, especially if you happen to snag a guy who has two science degrees under his belt. Just because he doesn't do science for a living doesn't mean he wasn't trained as a scientist.
I'm honestly quite flabbergasted by your attitude. If Einstein were an astronomer instead of a theoretical physicist, how exactly would you expect him to discover new planets with just pencils, paper, and a waste basket?
Also, I believe you either misread or simply did not read this statement, I'll admit it could have been written better:
That said, I can't see our massive output of CO2 could possibly not be responsible for a large portion of the recent warming trend.
I pretty much agree with you completely. My beef is with mixing imprecise data with precise data and implying it is all precise data. In my mind it throws the whole study in doubt.
The recorded rise in the last 200 years, however, is extremely rapid and coincides with the highest levels of CO2 in the last 800,000 years by a good 30%. The correlation there is very, very strong.
There is a portion of the "hockey stick" that is definitely man made. I highly doubt, given the recorded natural variations in climate over the centuries, that the whole thing is man made. Yet when the media shows the "hockey stick" graph, they only show the last 200 years with no context of the previous cycles. That is extremely misleading. It's the kind of trick you pull when you are trying to swindle someone (which I think the politicians are, in fact, trying to do).
The facts as I see them are as follows: We are in a high swing of the natural cycle (this is apparent from the ups and downs of the cycle - we bottomed out of a cold cycle 200 years ago); on top of that we are contributing to the swing with GHG emissions, causing temperatures to rise faster than normal. The next stage of the cycle will probably be a flattening out (worst case) or a shallow decline (more likely) instead of the more severe dip that would ordinarily occur.
Given the graphs I've seen for the last 12,000 years of temperature data, it's hard to tell if the man-made GHG emissions will reverse the general cooling trend or not. I don't think anybody will be able to say so convincingly until we hit a weak cooling period followed up by another strong warming period.
That's going to take at least a couple hundred years to figure out for sure. If man-made influence is actually strong enough to plateau the cooling period we'll see it in 50 years or so. We'll also know the situation is probably very, very serious. I just don't get the impression, from what I've seen, that that is going to happen.
Where are the joint statements of national academies of science supporting other theories, like evolution, gravity, relativity, or optics? They aren't needed, because those theories all stand on their own.
Hammer? Meet nail.
That's my biggest beef with climate science. It really needs another 50-60 years to get its legs under it. That could probably be cut to 15 years or so if scientists were given sizable no-strings-attached grants from various institutions, and the media was cut off from reporting on it (at least until it develops).
Fat chance that will ever happen, though.
Right now the whole of AGW essentially hinges on one, single, correlative study (there are more which generally support it, but there is only one that anybody ever sees). That's a hell of a week foundation to rest our future on. The results of that study are scary, but we need to go forward rationally. Conduct many more studies, build micro-cosms of the atmosphere and study various changes, etc. Lets get some real, hard data from all over the world from various sources to verify the temperatures on record and the conditions under which they occurred, then lets decide what to do with it. That kind of research isn't moving very quickly
Right now it's far, far too political. There is a reason why over a thousand climate scientists have so far dissented against the IPCC's official position on the climate.
You fail to cite a source for this (as I mentioned, the post you linked conveniently ignores the last century). In fact it's now warmer than at any time in the past 12,000 years [wikipedia.org].
Someone can't read graphs.
The hockystick graph represents the same time period as the 2000 year portion at the end of the Holocene. For reference, the midieval warm period in the hockeystick graph is the little hump just before the little dip at the very end of the Holocene graph.
See the sharp swing up at the end of the Holocene graph? You know the one that says "2004 ---->"? That is telling you the graph stops at the year 2004. The Holocene graph represents all but the last six years of temperature variations. The detailed graphs stop at exactly the same point.
What do these graphs mean?
They mean that, over the course of the last 2000 years the temperature delta is about 0.4 degrees C. That is, on average the temperature has risen 0.4 degrees in the last 2000 years. Over the last 12,000 years, however, the delta is about -0.25, or 0.25 degrees colder than average for the last 12,000 years.
On the 12,000 year timescale, the last 200 years has a delta of about 0.25 degrees. That bit is what has people scared. If we continue on the same pace we are now, we will match the average in another 200 years. That's over 4,000 years worth of temperature changes in only 400 years.
I'm no AGW alarmist (honest, you can look at my past posts to see what side of the fence I'm on), but I still find that rather disconcerting. The real question we should be asking is what will happen if it keeps accelerating?
Ultimately, if the warming accelerates enough and the greenhouse effect is allowed to "run away", millions of years down the road the Earth will truly be Venus's twin planet. I hope nobody wants that.
He's also never actually seen a real greenhouse, considering the fact that if there is snow outside for an extended period of time, there ain't shit growing inside. If this were actually true, people in cold climates would literally live in glass houses. But it isn't, because the GP doesn't understand how greenhouses actually work.
We've got greenhouses in Alaska. They shut down in winter, because shit don't grow.
I don't think the GP is the one who failed physics, man.
the ideal gas law doesn't apply to an entire atmosphere as a whole.
Why not? The fact is the vast majority (99%) of Venus's atmosphere resides in a single layer.
Also, even a truckfull of gas is slightly more dense on the bottom than the top, thanks to gravity. Doesn't seem to break the ideal gas law.
if they had the same mass of atmosphere, venus's atmosphere would take up more space.
Only if their composition and conditions were the same. The fact is, Venus's atmosphere is 93 times as massive as Earth's. That's the very reason for the high pressure on the surface! How the hell are you supposed to get higher pressure on a planet with less gravity without having a more massive atmosphere?!
Furthermore, Venus has no magnetic field. That means lighter gasses are blown away from the planet by the Solar Wind. This does not happen on Earth because of our magnetic field. Thus, Earth's atmosphere can expand much further into space than Venus's atmosphere can. 99% of Venus's atmosphere is in the Troposphere. It is so dense and rotates so fast that a pseudo-magnetic field is generated, protecting this layer from the Solar Wind. Lighter materials that float above the troposphere are blown off the planet.
Venus even has about twice as much Nitrogen in the air as the Earth does (If you'll remember, Earth's atmosphere is mostly Nitrogen, with a large fraction of Oxygen and a small fraction of other gasses), but that is dwarfed by the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The pressure is so great, the CO2 at the surface of Venus is actually not technically a gas any more - it's a superfluid. That is some friggin dense air!
Some physics notes for you:
If one gas is denser than another, the same mass will occupy a smaller space. That is the definition of density (d=m/v). Less volume for the same mass equals higher density. Higher mass for the same volume equals more density.
CO2 is denser than Oxygen and Nitrogen and even water vapor. Thus, it stays relatively low to the ground.
Gas compresses easily. As the pressure rises, the volume decreases. As the atmospheric mass increases, the pressure increases. The end result is that doubling the atmospheric mass does not double the volume. The volume will increase, but it won't double.
When you combine the fact the primary constituent of Venus's atmosphere (CO2) is much denser than the primary constituents of Earth's atmosphere with the fact that all light gasses (O2, N, water vapor) are blown off the planet by the solar wind, the result is an atmosphere that is 93 times as dense as Earth's yet has 85% of the volume.
These are not guesses or postulations, these are facts based on scientist's observations of Venus.
Venus's atmosphere is dense, and it is almost pure CO2, and it keeps the surface a nice toasty 900 degrees Fahrenheit. It is the ultimate result of a runaway greenhouse effect.
Yeah, everything that IPCC has ever produced or referenced has been personally created by these half a dozen people.
Most of the problems with IPCC reports are the summaries. The science is done by real scientists, but the summaries are done by a few dozen people, some scientists some not, none of whom were involved in the studies they summarize. For example the climate summary was performed by about 50 scientists who were largely not involved in any of the studies. About 1000 scientists have dissented and the number is growing (it was 400 in 2007)*.
The result is a summary that often misrepresents the data.
The truth is, anytime anybody tells you there is a consensus on a scientific topic it should raise a big red flag. Even among scientists who generally agree with AGW there is no consensus on how bad it is or what we should do about or even if we should do anything about it. This is true for pretty much all fields of scientific research, and it's how science works. Nothing in science should be accepted without question. That's just how science works.
* Here is a link to the report. Given the title of the website, they are clearly biased, so take it with a grain of salt. That said, it's clear the IPCC's findings are not fully accepted by everyone who is involved in that type of research.
One type flickers for 2 seconds before turning-on at full brightness, which is not bad. I can wait two seconds. The second type appears to be the most common in stores right now. It starts as a dim orange glow, then gradually changes to a yellowish light, and finally achieves full "hot white" appearance. This process takes 3-4 minutes. They are made by the German company called Philips... not some fly-by-night manufacturer.
Where have you been shopping and when did you last buy CFLs?
Most bulbs I see are instant-on. I've had them in my house for about a year. There is a slight difference between just-turned-on and full brightness, but it starts at probably 90% brightness as soon as you flip the switch. They don't flicker. These aren't the super expensive bulbs. Not bottom of the barrel, but not high end either.
I do have a set of the older, gradual bulbs. They have been the most reliable (which is why I still have them, damnit), but they are also the most annoying. Mine start out a dim purple and finish a very bright white. I put them in the bathroom, because morning or the middle of the night are the only times that slow-to-brighten problem is actually helpful. It's still annoying the rest of the time.
Look for the "Instant On" the next time you go bulb shopping, you'll see a huge difference.
But to perform the task at hand (lighting the room) only 30 watts is required if we use a CFL, compared to 100 watts if we use an incandescent.
As long as all you want to do is light the room, CFLs will consume one third the energy that incandescents will.
You guys are looking at the figures from the wrong end. We don't care about the wattage, we care about the light output. Per watt, CFLs put out three to six times the amount of light that incandescents do (the figures used above actually put the worst of CFLs against the best of incandescents - hardly fair). That means we need one sixth to one third the wattage to produce the same result.
Thus, CFL's are three to six times more efficient than incandescents, and can cut your lighting power consumption by a third or more, even though they still put out almost 90% of their energy as heat instead of light.
That means you need 1/3 the wattage to produce the same light, which means in practical usage a CFL suited to the same task as an incandescent will produce 1/3 the heat.
Why would you replace a 100 watt incandescent with a CFL that is three times brighter? That's what your efficiency figures really mean, and that's why you are confused.
The difference between 2% of energy converted to light and 6% of energy converted to light is massive.
I do agree that CFLs are ridiculously unreliable. I've got halogens that have outlasted most of my CFLs (granted, the halogens use a lot more power and make more heat for the same light as the CFLs, but the CFLs were supposed to last me thousands of hours!).
Also, your figures are wrong for the efficiency of the bulbs.
A 32 watt CFL is 11.5% efficient, while a 40 watt incandescent is only 1.8% efficient.
That makes a 32 watt CFL over six times more efficient than the equivalent incandescent. That is, you need one sixth the wattage to produce the same light. One sixth the wattage means one sixth the heat (as you stated, that 9% difference per watt isn't much) waste.
Sounds to me you save quite a lot of energy with CFLs. The only thing that sucks about the is they don't last as long as they aught to.
LED's are about the same efficiency as CFLs, btw, but the light is more directed instead of just thrown all over the place, so you get less waste light, which is why LEDs can get away with much lower wattages. It also means they don't work well in all applications, though.
100 watts has to go somewhere, but it does NOT have to become heat. In fact, you can't get brighter bulbs at the same wattage if the percentage of waste heat can't change. It would be physically impossible.
In the case of florescent and even more so LED's, more of the energy goes to light than to heat. If more energy becomes visible light, there is less energy available to become heat.
A 100 watt incandescent will always be hotter than a 100 watt fluorescent. You need no more proof than the fact that the fluorescent is brighter. If it is brighter, it means there is less energy left over to be converted into heat.
That doesn't mean a CFL won't get hot, but it does mean a CFL won't be nearly as hot as an incandescent of the same wattage. This is even more apparent with LEDs, which at 1 watt are blinding. Incandescents, sad to say, are barely visible at 1 watt.
This kind of science is so easy and obvious you don't even need a special tool to make any of your observations. The study goes like this "The CFL is brighter than the incandescent. Considering the law of conservation of energy, the incandescent should therefore be hotter than the CFL. Is the incandescent hotter? Sure is."
The problem I have with the modern "hocky-stick" graph is the fact that they used thermometers at all.
They've got 800 some-odd years of tree ring data capped off with 100 years of thermometer data. How can you compare data measured via thermometers to data measured via tree-rings? The thermometer data is going to be vastly more accurate than the tree ring data, making the thermometer data dubious for comparison with the tree rings (or vice versa, however you want to look at it).
It's like like using cubits to measure the changes in the first five items and a micrometer to measure the changes in the last. The cubits have a massive margin of error, dwarfing the results of the micrometer.
That said, I can't see our massive output of CO2 could possibly not be responsible for a large portion of the recent warming trend.
On the other hand, we can't burn fossil fuels forever - barely a hundred years after we began burning them in earnest we have reached the crisis point for declining fuel reserves. I doubt if there will be any major consumption of fossil fuels in another hundred years.
Objectively speaking, how much damage can this very temporary CO2 addition actually do? Trending from 10,000 year old ice core data the global temperature has been gradually declining, with an uptick only in the last 400 years or so. Even at our accelerated warming rate I don't think we can get close to the temperatures 10,000 years ago before we run out of fossil fuels. We may be inconvenienced (rising sea level, expanded deserts, etc) for a few hundred years, but there may be some real upsides to it too (like expanded tropical regions and more livable land at higher latitudes and altitudes).
Alarmism is the wrong position to take regardless. We need to look closely and determine what the real costs are. It may be something that is ultimately no big deal. Or, it may be something that will run out of control and never be correctable. Considering that the second option is at least remotely possible, I think we should err on the side of caution. That doesn't mean we need to go crazy with conservation though.
Just some helpful comparison info, based on an average annual mileage of 12,000 miles (based on US DOT figures):
15mpg = 800 gallons per year
28mpg = 428.5 gallons per year
50mpg = 240 gallons per year
80mpg = 150 gallons per year
The differences between them are large, but the diminishing returns are clear as you go to higher mpg. Twice the mpg gets you half the savings of the previous doubling of mpg. Going from 15mpg to 28mpg saves you almost 372 gallons per year. Going from 28 to 80, however, only saves another 279 gallons per year. Still a lot, but not nearly as worthwhile as the jump from 15 to 30.
If all you care about is your carbon footprint, 80mpg is the obvious choice. However, if money factors in at all 80mpg quickly becomes the worst option. I'll illustrate with my own vehicle:
I own an '02 Dodge Ram 1500, it gets, on a good day, about 13mpg. I don't drive a whole lot - about 7k miles a year. That's 546 gallons a year, at $3.50 a gallon for about $1900 a year in gas costs. An 80 mpg car would use 7 gallons to go the same distance, and cost about $25. The savings, then, is $1875 a year.
The only car I know of that would get 80+ mpg and is anything close to resembling a real car is the Chevy Volt, which costs $40,000. It only gets this kind of mpg when you can plug in - so short range only. That's fine, since most of my driving is city driving.
Since my truck was paid off long ago, if I bought a Volt it would take 20 years to break even (completely ignoring the much higher maintenance costs - I can maintain my own truck, I can't a Volt). I also loose the pickup bed and 4wd.
You should have noticed that the web browser doesn't work without background data either.
You need a constant connection to browse the web, any idiot should know that. The market is just a fancy front-end for a website (you can actually access it on a PC, but you can only download from a phone).
As for Backup Assistant and Skype, that blows. You should go see your Verizon rep. You know you're paying $2 a month for BA right?
Any app that is ad supported requires internet access. Most of the free apps are ad supported. Most of them work just fine if you have mobile data turned off (I'm sure a few are assholes about it - I haven't come across any), but the app is still going to try to use the internet to download advertisements if the internet is accessible - ergo the "this app requires network services" type messages. Any app that auto-updates will require this as well, ads or no.
Some apps require access to the cell services in order to allow the app to handle incoming phone calls, for example. The app itself may have nothing to do with making phone calls, or intercepting phone calls, but the interruption from the phone call might cause the program to hang if handled incorrectly. So, it needs to access the cell API in order to handle the app correctly when you receive a call. Ergo "this app requires access to cell services".
The warning allows you to do a little research if it concerns you and find out if this app is ok or if it is doing some funny business.
Statistically, you are almost certainly right, but it doesn't make for a good argument.
Instead you simply point out the fact that there is no evidence to suggest TSA has prevented a single terrorist attack (all threat failures have been due to either incompetence or passengers), so that 4 hours (in addition to the already humiliating treatment you get in the security screening, and now new improved* humiliating equipment) has bought us nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
If you read the article, it tells you what they are looking for.
Hey, I think I just found over 500 more... *holds up list of exoplanets*
I don't know if you know this, but pretty much all discoveries in the last hundred years have been made with math. Astronomy especially so.
It is pretty clear that you don't understand the fact that there are only so many scientists in the world, and these discoveries require people pouring over data for extended periods of time. Science is not a glorious profession, and it doesn't pay well. That means there aren't that many scientists doing all the works of science. It's not like there are millions of professional astronomers out there - at best there are a few thousand. Any time you can enlist the help the public to go through the tedious analysis tasks you are better off, especially if you happen to snag a guy who has two science degrees under his belt. Just because he doesn't do science for a living doesn't mean he wasn't trained as a scientist.
I'm honestly quite flabbergasted by your attitude. If Einstein were an astronomer instead of a theoretical physicist, how exactly would you expect him to discover new planets with just pencils, paper, and a waste basket?
Yes, precise is what I meant to say, thanks.
Also, I believe you either misread or simply did not read this statement, I'll admit it could have been written better:
That said, I can't see our massive output of CO2 could possibly not be responsible for a large portion of the recent warming trend.
I pretty much agree with you completely. My beef is with mixing imprecise data with precise data and implying it is all precise data. In my mind it throws the whole study in doubt.
The recorded rise in the last 200 years, however, is extremely rapid and coincides with the highest levels of CO2 in the last 800,000 years by a good 30%. The correlation there is very, very strong.
There is a portion of the "hockey stick" that is definitely man made. I highly doubt, given the recorded natural variations in climate over the centuries, that the whole thing is man made. Yet when the media shows the "hockey stick" graph, they only show the last 200 years with no context of the previous cycles. That is extremely misleading. It's the kind of trick you pull when you are trying to swindle someone (which I think the politicians are, in fact, trying to do).
The facts as I see them are as follows: We are in a high swing of the natural cycle (this is apparent from the ups and downs of the cycle - we bottomed out of a cold cycle 200 years ago); on top of that we are contributing to the swing with GHG emissions, causing temperatures to rise faster than normal. The next stage of the cycle will probably be a flattening out (worst case) or a shallow decline (more likely) instead of the more severe dip that would ordinarily occur.
Given the graphs I've seen for the last 12,000 years of temperature data, it's hard to tell if the man-made GHG emissions will reverse the general cooling trend or not. I don't think anybody will be able to say so convincingly until we hit a weak cooling period followed up by another strong warming period.
That's going to take at least a couple hundred years to figure out for sure. If man-made influence is actually strong enough to plateau the cooling period we'll see it in 50 years or so. We'll also know the situation is probably very, very serious. I just don't get the impression, from what I've seen, that that is going to happen.
In what way is this post informative? All he did was give his opinion, he gave no facts.
It should be interesting, not informative.
Where are the joint statements of national academies of science supporting other theories, like evolution, gravity, relativity, or optics? They aren't needed, because those theories all stand on their own.
Hammer? Meet nail.
That's my biggest beef with climate science. It really needs another 50-60 years to get its legs under it. That could probably be cut to 15 years or so if scientists were given sizable no-strings-attached grants from various institutions, and the media was cut off from reporting on it (at least until it develops).
Fat chance that will ever happen, though.
Right now the whole of AGW essentially hinges on one, single, correlative study (there are more which generally support it, but there is only one that anybody ever sees). That's a hell of a week foundation to rest our future on. The results of that study are scary, but we need to go forward rationally. Conduct many more studies, build micro-cosms of the atmosphere and study various changes, etc. Lets get some real, hard data from all over the world from various sources to verify the temperatures on record and the conditions under which they occurred, then lets decide what to do with it. That kind of research isn't moving very quickly
Right now it's far, far too political. There is a reason why over a thousand climate scientists have so far dissented against the IPCC's official position on the climate.
You fail to cite a source for this (as I mentioned, the post you linked conveniently ignores the last century). In fact it's now warmer than at any time in the past 12,000 years [wikipedia.org].
Someone can't read graphs.
The hockystick graph represents the same time period as the 2000 year portion at the end of the Holocene. For reference, the midieval warm period in the hockeystick graph is the little hump just before the little dip at the very end of the Holocene graph.
See the sharp swing up at the end of the Holocene graph? You know the one that says "2004 ---->"? That is telling you the graph stops at the year 2004. The Holocene graph represents all but the last six years of temperature variations. The detailed graphs stop at exactly the same point.
What do these graphs mean?
They mean that, over the course of the last 2000 years the temperature delta is about 0.4 degrees C. That is, on average the temperature has risen 0.4 degrees in the last 2000 years. Over the last 12,000 years, however, the delta is about -0.25, or 0.25 degrees colder than average for the last 12,000 years.
On the 12,000 year timescale, the last 200 years has a delta of about 0.25 degrees. That bit is what has people scared. If we continue on the same pace we are now, we will match the average in another 200 years. That's over 4,000 years worth of temperature changes in only 400 years.
I'm no AGW alarmist (honest, you can look at my past posts to see what side of the fence I'm on), but I still find that rather disconcerting. The real question we should be asking is what will happen if it keeps accelerating?
Ultimately, if the warming accelerates enough and the greenhouse effect is allowed to "run away", millions of years down the road the Earth will truly be Venus's twin planet. I hope nobody wants that.
How is he supposed to know weather to laud or revile the guy if he doesn't even know his politics?!
Sheesh!
I suppose this would be a great time to bring up http://nolabels.org/ a movement which I wholeheartedly support.
He's also never actually seen a real greenhouse, considering the fact that if there is snow outside for an extended period of time, there ain't shit growing inside. If this were actually true, people in cold climates would literally live in glass houses. But it isn't, because the GP doesn't understand how greenhouses actually work.
We've got greenhouses in Alaska. They shut down in winter, because shit don't grow.
I don't think the GP is the one who failed physics, man.
the ideal gas law doesn't apply to an entire atmosphere as a whole.
Why not? The fact is the vast majority (99%) of Venus's atmosphere resides in a single layer.
Also, even a truckfull of gas is slightly more dense on the bottom than the top, thanks to gravity. Doesn't seem to break the ideal gas law.
if they had the same mass of atmosphere, venus's atmosphere would take up more space.
Only if their composition and conditions were the same. The fact is, Venus's atmosphere is 93 times as massive as Earth's. That's the very reason for the high pressure on the surface! How the hell are you supposed to get higher pressure on a planet with less gravity without having a more massive atmosphere?!
Furthermore, Venus has no magnetic field. That means lighter gasses are blown away from the planet by the Solar Wind. This does not happen on Earth because of our magnetic field. Thus, Earth's atmosphere can expand much further into space than Venus's atmosphere can. 99% of Venus's atmosphere is in the Troposphere. It is so dense and rotates so fast that a pseudo-magnetic field is generated, protecting this layer from the Solar Wind. Lighter materials that float above the troposphere are blown off the planet.
Venus even has about twice as much Nitrogen in the air as the Earth does (If you'll remember, Earth's atmosphere is mostly Nitrogen, with a large fraction of Oxygen and a small fraction of other gasses), but that is dwarfed by the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The pressure is so great, the CO2 at the surface of Venus is actually not technically a gas any more - it's a superfluid. That is some friggin dense air!
Some physics notes for you:
If one gas is denser than another, the same mass will occupy a smaller space. That is the definition of density (d=m/v). Less volume for the same mass equals higher density. Higher mass for the same volume equals more density.
CO2 is denser than Oxygen and Nitrogen and even water vapor. Thus, it stays relatively low to the ground.
Gas compresses easily. As the pressure rises, the volume decreases. As the atmospheric mass increases, the pressure increases. The end result is that doubling the atmospheric mass does not double the volume. The volume will increase, but it won't double.
When you combine the fact the primary constituent of Venus's atmosphere (CO2) is much denser than the primary constituents of Earth's atmosphere with the fact that all light gasses (O2, N, water vapor) are blown off the planet by the solar wind, the result is an atmosphere that is 93 times as dense as Earth's yet has 85% of the volume.
These are not guesses or postulations, these are facts based on scientist's observations of Venus.
Venus's atmosphere is dense, and it is almost pure CO2, and it keeps the surface a nice toasty 900 degrees Fahrenheit. It is the ultimate result of a runaway greenhouse effect.
Yeah, everything that IPCC has ever produced or referenced has been personally created by these half a dozen people.
Most of the problems with IPCC reports are the summaries. The science is done by real scientists, but the summaries are done by a few dozen people, some scientists some not, none of whom were involved in the studies they summarize. For example the climate summary was performed by about 50 scientists who were largely not involved in any of the studies. About 1000 scientists have dissented and the number is growing (it was 400 in 2007)*.
The result is a summary that often misrepresents the data.
The truth is, anytime anybody tells you there is a consensus on a scientific topic it should raise a big red flag. Even among scientists who generally agree with AGW there is no consensus on how bad it is or what we should do about or even if we should do anything about it. This is true for pretty much all fields of scientific research, and it's how science works. Nothing in science should be accepted without question. That's just how science works.
* Here is a link to the report. Given the title of the website, they are clearly biased, so take it with a grain of salt. That said, it's clear the IPCC's findings are not fully accepted by everyone who is involved in that type of research.
One type flickers for 2 seconds before turning-on at full brightness, which is not bad. I can wait two seconds. The second type appears to be the most common in stores right now. It starts as a dim orange glow, then gradually changes to a yellowish light, and finally achieves full "hot white" appearance. This process takes 3-4 minutes. They are made by the German company called Philips... not some fly-by-night manufacturer.
Where have you been shopping and when did you last buy CFLs?
Most bulbs I see are instant-on. I've had them in my house for about a year. There is a slight difference between just-turned-on and full brightness, but it starts at probably 90% brightness as soon as you flip the switch. They don't flicker. These aren't the super expensive bulbs. Not bottom of the barrel, but not high end either.
I do have a set of the older, gradual bulbs. They have been the most reliable (which is why I still have them, damnit), but they are also the most annoying. Mine start out a dim purple and finish a very bright white. I put them in the bathroom, because morning or the middle of the night are the only times that slow-to-brighten problem is actually helpful. It's still annoying the rest of the time.
Look for the "Instant On" the next time you go bulb shopping, you'll see a huge difference.
But to perform the task at hand (lighting the room) only 30 watts is required if we use a CFL, compared to 100 watts if we use an incandescent.
As long as all you want to do is light the room, CFLs will consume one third the energy that incandescents will.
You guys are looking at the figures from the wrong end. We don't care about the wattage, we care about the light output. Per watt, CFLs put out three to six times the amount of light that incandescents do (the figures used above actually put the worst of CFLs against the best of incandescents - hardly fair). That means we need one sixth to one third the wattage to produce the same result.
Thus, CFL's are three to six times more efficient than incandescents, and can cut your lighting power consumption by a third or more, even though they still put out almost 90% of their energy as heat instead of light.
But it's a 300% increase in efficiency.
That means you need 1/3 the wattage to produce the same light, which means in practical usage a CFL suited to the same task as an incandescent will produce 1/3 the heat.
Why would you replace a 100 watt incandescent with a CFL that is three times brighter? That's what your efficiency figures really mean, and that's why you are confused.
The difference between 2% of energy converted to light and 6% of energy converted to light is massive.
I do agree that CFLs are ridiculously unreliable. I've got halogens that have outlasted most of my CFLs (granted, the halogens use a lot more power and make more heat for the same light as the CFLs, but the CFLs were supposed to last me thousands of hours!).
Also, your figures are wrong for the efficiency of the bulbs.
A 32 watt CFL is 11.5% efficient, while a 40 watt incandescent is only 1.8% efficient.
That makes a 32 watt CFL over six times more efficient than the equivalent incandescent. That is, you need one sixth the wattage to produce the same light. One sixth the wattage means one sixth the heat (as you stated, that 9% difference per watt isn't much) waste.
Sounds to me you save quite a lot of energy with CFLs. The only thing that sucks about the is they don't last as long as they aught to.
LED's are about the same efficiency as CFLs, btw, but the light is more directed instead of just thrown all over the place, so you get less waste light, which is why LEDs can get away with much lower wattages. It also means they don't work well in all applications, though.
Wow, someone doesn't understand physics.
100 watts has to go somewhere, but it does NOT have to become heat. In fact, you can't get brighter bulbs at the same wattage if the percentage of waste heat can't change. It would be physically impossible.
In the case of florescent and even more so LED's, more of the energy goes to light than to heat. If more energy becomes visible light, there is less energy available to become heat.
A 100 watt incandescent will always be hotter than a 100 watt fluorescent. You need no more proof than the fact that the fluorescent is brighter. If it is brighter, it means there is less energy left over to be converted into heat.
That doesn't mean a CFL won't get hot, but it does mean a CFL won't be nearly as hot as an incandescent of the same wattage. This is even more apparent with LEDs, which at 1 watt are blinding. Incandescents, sad to say, are barely visible at 1 watt.
This kind of science is so easy and obvious you don't even need a special tool to make any of your observations. The study goes like this "The CFL is brighter than the incandescent. Considering the law of conservation of energy, the incandescent should therefore be hotter than the CFL. Is the incandescent hotter? Sure is."
I dunno, I'm right off the arctic ocean and it was right around -50(F) for the last two or three weeks.
Just warmed up to a balmy -30 yesterday.
Statistically speaking, they still do a better job.
The education (or lack thereof) of the educator doesn't seem to be the major limiting factor.
Can what you smoke be traced in a drug test? Cause I want to try some!
BTW, I have literally no idea what you are trying to say.
Are you saying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's website is misinformation mixed with a little bit of truth?
Or are you saying sunysuffolk.edu is misinformation mixed with a bit of truth?
I can't buy the first statement, and for the second, why would you bother posting it?
The problem I have with the modern "hocky-stick" graph is the fact that they used thermometers at all.
They've got 800 some-odd years of tree ring data capped off with 100 years of thermometer data. How can you compare data measured via thermometers to data measured via tree-rings? The thermometer data is going to be vastly more accurate than the tree ring data, making the thermometer data dubious for comparison with the tree rings (or vice versa, however you want to look at it).
It's like like using cubits to measure the changes in the first five items and a micrometer to measure the changes in the last. The cubits have a massive margin of error, dwarfing the results of the micrometer.
That said, I can't see our massive output of CO2 could possibly not be responsible for a large portion of the recent warming trend.
On the other hand, we can't burn fossil fuels forever - barely a hundred years after we began burning them in earnest we have reached the crisis point for declining fuel reserves. I doubt if there will be any major consumption of fossil fuels in another hundred years.
Objectively speaking, how much damage can this very temporary CO2 addition actually do? Trending from 10,000 year old ice core data the global temperature has been gradually declining, with an uptick only in the last 400 years or so. Even at our accelerated warming rate I don't think we can get close to the temperatures 10,000 years ago before we run out of fossil fuels. We may be inconvenienced (rising sea level, expanded deserts, etc) for a few hundred years, but there may be some real upsides to it too (like expanded tropical regions and more livable land at higher latitudes and altitudes).
Alarmism is the wrong position to take regardless. We need to look closely and determine what the real costs are. It may be something that is ultimately no big deal. Or, it may be something that will run out of control and never be correctable. Considering that the second option is at least remotely possible, I think we should err on the side of caution. That doesn't mean we need to go crazy with conservation though.
Just some helpful comparison info, based on an average annual mileage of 12,000 miles (based on US DOT figures):
15mpg = 800 gallons per year
28mpg = 428.5 gallons per year
50mpg = 240 gallons per year
80mpg = 150 gallons per year
The differences between them are large, but the diminishing returns are clear as you go to higher mpg. Twice the mpg gets you half the savings of the previous doubling of mpg. Going from 15mpg to 28mpg saves you almost 372 gallons per year. Going from 28 to 80, however, only saves another 279 gallons per year. Still a lot, but not nearly as worthwhile as the jump from 15 to 30.
If all you care about is your carbon footprint, 80mpg is the obvious choice. However, if money factors in at all 80mpg quickly becomes the worst option. I'll illustrate with my own vehicle:
I own an '02 Dodge Ram 1500, it gets, on a good day, about 13mpg. I don't drive a whole lot - about 7k miles a year. That's 546 gallons a year, at $3.50 a gallon for about $1900 a year in gas costs. An 80 mpg car would use 7 gallons to go the same distance, and cost about $25. The savings, then, is $1875 a year.
The only car I know of that would get 80+ mpg and is anything close to resembling a real car is the Chevy Volt, which costs $40,000. It only gets this kind of mpg when you can plug in - so short range only. That's fine, since most of my driving is city driving.
Since my truck was paid off long ago, if I bought a Volt it would take 20 years to break even (completely ignoring the much higher maintenance costs - I can maintain my own truck, I can't a Volt). I also loose the pickup bed and 4wd.
It's not worth it for me.
You should have noticed that the web browser doesn't work without background data either.
You need a constant connection to browse the web, any idiot should know that. The market is just a fancy front-end for a website (you can actually access it on a PC, but you can only download from a phone).
As for Backup Assistant and Skype, that blows. You should go see your Verizon rep. You know you're paying $2 a month for BA right?
Any app that is ad supported requires internet access. Most of the free apps are ad supported. Most of them work just fine if you have mobile data turned off (I'm sure a few are assholes about it - I haven't come across any), but the app is still going to try to use the internet to download advertisements if the internet is accessible - ergo the "this app requires network services" type messages. Any app that auto-updates will require this as well, ads or no.
Some apps require access to the cell services in order to allow the app to handle incoming phone calls, for example. The app itself may have nothing to do with making phone calls, or intercepting phone calls, but the interruption from the phone call might cause the program to hang if handled incorrectly. So, it needs to access the cell API in order to handle the app correctly when you receive a call. Ergo "this app requires access to cell services".
The warning allows you to do a little research if it concerns you and find out if this app is ok or if it is doing some funny business.
Most people don't care.
Someone suggested submitting the 18,000 lobbyists in congress to the list.
If you are willing to cough up $250 you can get names and contact info here.
If you are willing to do the legwork, this is the official lobbyist registration list for the Senate.
Don't jump to conclusions.
Statistically, you are almost certainly right, but it doesn't make for a good argument.
Instead you simply point out the fact that there is no evidence to suggest TSA has prevented a single terrorist attack (all threat failures have been due to either incompetence or passengers), so that 4 hours (in addition to the already humiliating treatment you get in the security screening, and now new improved* humiliating equipment) has bought us nothing.
* Now with nudity!