Yeah, the last thing you want a doctor to know is what else is going on with your health, what drugs you take that might affect his diagnosis or prescription, what physical or genetic conditions you might have, what family history of disease you have, etc.....
" I also realize that the fucking Sun has much more effect on the climate than we ever will." Yes. When the Sun inevitably goes nova, my house will definitely catch on fire; therefore, the suggestion that it's dangerous for me to toss lit matches into piles of newspaper in the basement is ludicrous. The Sun has much more effect than a single match.
This is from the same government that brought us the VA hospital system. I work in HIT myself, and I see nothing good coming of these new technology mandates.
Well, apparently you don't work in medical care quality and outcomes analysis.
"RAND's study, led by Dr. Steven Asch, found that the VA system delivered higher-quality care than the national sample of private hospitals on all measures except acute care (on which the two samples performed comparably). In nearly every other respect, VA patients received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment, and access to follow-up... Other studies have generated similar findings.." http://www.rand.org/blog/2012/08/socialized-or-not-we-can-learn-from-the-va.html
This isn't a fringe or polarized opinion, it's pretty much accepted in the field; as is the theory that a lot of the credit goes to the VA's electronic records system, which IS interoperable and is heavily used in order to monitor quality, identify problems and intervene, and all the things that you can do to improve quality when you aren't flying blind.
To get off my high horse, though, I can understand why anyone working in Health IT would be sour on the field. Most of what's out there is awful, and there's no news more chilling to a clinician than "We're adopting a new, easy to use electronic record system". But healthcare has been stuck in the 1950s end of the information revolution way too long, long after every other major industry has gotten on top of the horse.
It's something like the auto industry in the 60s, reacting to the government decrees for safety. If you're old enough, you can remember the horrors perpetrated on the public by the manufacturers in their snit over being told what to do; the nonretracting shoulder belts which had to be stored in clips above the door, the passive restraint belts with the little mechanical mouse which whizzed around the doorframe every time it was opened or shut.... but after that phase, look how far we've progressed now. If the industry needs a kick in the ass to get it to move into the present, let alone the future, then so be it.
Very true. However, just because you have those rights, does not mean that Bad People will let you use them. The Constitution is in the nature of a contract/promise that the US will not violate those rights, or else the courts will find that unconstitutional. Maybe. At some point. If all goes well.
The government has the fix for everything. Just let them confiscate more of our wealth and give them more power to micro-manage every aspect of our lives. That's the solution to this problem and apparently every other problem.
Do all of you guys commenting have a subscription to get past the WSJ paywall, or are you reading the article from some other method?
Oh... wait. "Reading the article". LOL.
Oh, stuff like "AGW is fake" or "Obamacare will kill grandma" are always free for nonsubscribers. It's the factual articles, which generally run counter to the editorial content, that are behind the paywall.
Where would you have it start? At the end of the ice age? Why not at the end of Ediacaran period? No? How about Permian? What period would you start with and why?
It's ALL cherry picked to support the conclusion they want to reach.
Nonsense. If it has been warming from 1997 to date, it has been warming from 1996 to date, it has been warming from 1995 to date, etc.; it has been warming from 1999 to date, it has been warming from 2000 to date, it has been warming from 2001 to date, etc.; but it has NOT been warming from 1998 to date, and you conclude from that that the climate has now switched over to cooling, that is very definitely cherry picking, even if you fuzz it up as "Global Cooling that has been going on for the past 15 or so years", as though you could pick any year back then, rather than it's just your faulty memory which has some faded postit note saying "see, AGW is fake after all" without marking what particular specific year is the only one that works for your argument.
For the rest of us "gee. 1998 was a freakishly hot year, wasn't it?"
So, 2009 is now only the second hottest year in recorded history, not the first hottest.A lot of folks might think that having the two hottest years in the past few centuries all within 15 years might be an indicator that it's warmer now; particularly if you notice that the first half a decade of the 21st century was also right up there.
Of course, if you took seriously the denialist arguments that "there are lots of things that affect climate" and "climate is cyclic", you'd notice that the high points of the El Nino (hot) years starting 1998 till now are on the average suddenly about 0.2 degrees C hotter than they were 1980 through 1995, just as the high points of the La Nina (cool) years from 1996 to 2008 are on the average suddenly about 0.15 degrees C warmer than they were from 1979 through 1989.
Why stop there? It has definitely cooled from noon today till midnight now, I therefore declare that we are in a cooling trend.
Call me crazy, but I've got this idea for long haul transport; rather than have individual vehicles traveling more or less in parallel (and interfering with each other) or powering them via conductors in the roadway, we can put all the loads on a huge moving device almost as big as a section of roadway itself; we could call it a twain, after Mark Twain, who used to work on riverboats, which are vaguely similar in concept.
The Peter Principle is the steady-state situation. The dynamic situation, wherein the organization has not yet achieved stability, is almost as well-known; the manager who comes in, demonstrates incredible productivity by destroying the department (working employees until they burn out, freezing the hardware budget, cancelling routine maintenance, etc.) and after a year or two they get moved to another department to "fix" it, while the incoming manager who is tasked with merely keeping this great performance going, finds that everything and everyone is worn out or broken.
The main thing regarding both these paradigms is that the perpetrators never get the message that they are incompetent and need to change their behavior. quite the opposite, the continual promotions and rewards reinforce their patterns.
It's driven by the creationist idiots that think God created a perfect unchanging world so any suggestion of change is a spit in God's eye.
I know it's wrong to try to respond to flamebait, but you have it backwards. It's the people who think that the way the world is right this very minute is the way it is always supposed to be and we must do everything we can to keep it static that are the problem, and they aren't the religious nuts, they're the eco-nuts. They admit that they know about ice ages and the lush, tropical periods that the dinosaurs flourished in, but somehow today is perfect and no change, man-made OR natural, can be allowed to happen. Yes, it was different before, but it can no longer be different because we like it the way it is.
They're the ones bemoaning the extinction of species that no longer fit the climate or environment, and trying to build seawalls to stop the ocean from eroding that spit that developed a mere fifty years ago, but they've built their home on it and it must be preserved because it's "natural" and that's how it has "always been". The very people who hurl insults at "those religious nuts" for not accepting Evolution as the origin of life are the ones who try to stop true evolution and survival of the fittest from happening.
It's a pity they think their God is so limited.
Backwards again. Religious people know God isn't limited. It's the atheists who cannot fathom a God with powers they cannot personally understand or account for.
You don't see the religious right out protesting for carbon cap and trade or against energy users or producers. They know better. Change happens. It is Hope and Change doesn't.
So... you're arguing that we should accept, if not our extinction as a species, at least the disruption of our civilization which relies so heavily on contingencies such as climate, and reconcile ourselves to the rebirth of the Cretaceous and a resurgence of dinosaurs and ammonites, or their more recent analogs? Geez, you are one philosophical guru.
If you don't invest the time and effort to do your homework, you're not a critic with worthy opinions, you're a crank denialist full of smug self-absorption. And, just like in high school, whether you've done your homework or not is evident in the questions you ask.
That's that good conservative sense for you; if you have a good argument, like "it hasn't warmed since 1998" which was useful for 10 years or so if you insisted on using single year average rather than multiple year averages; there is no reason to dump it just because more recently, even that isn't true.
Are you saying the oceans, which are all connected, are as much as a constant 4" different in level, say, between NYC and, oh, Denmark or Japan?
Yes. See, for example, this Straight Dope which mentions that there is a 8" difference between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at Panama.
Clearly, the building of locks in the Panama Canal was a liberal ruse, to give the illusion of differentials in sea level between oceans, so that they might use the excuse of AGW decades later to steal our freedoms.
Alternately, if you actually read those emails then you should be armed with precise quotes of the "deceptions and manipulations" which you found so powerfully convincing, or at least have some mental construct of their findings to provide us, rather than just a brief handwave in their direction preparatory to an ad hominem slur devoid of substantive content.
As, for instance, these quotes from 7 unrelated investigations which I find convincing:
"even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified." -"The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia" http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387/387i.pdf
"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal. " - "Report of the International Panel set up by the University of East Anglia to examine the research of the Climatic Research Unit." http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/SAP
"Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community." - "Final Investigation Report Involving Dr. Michael E. Mann" http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf
"On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.... In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments." - "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review" http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf
"Petitioners say that emails disclosed from CRU provide evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate data. The media coverage after the emails were released was based on email statements quoted out of context and on unsubstantiated theories of conspiracy. The CRU emails do not show either that the science is flawed or that the scientific process has been compromised. EPA carefully reviewed the CRU emails and found no indication of improper data manipulation or misrepresentation of results." - "Myths vs. Facts: Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act" http://epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment/myths-facts.html
"In our review of the CRU emails, we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data comprising the GHCN-M dataset or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures. In addition, we found no evidence to suggest that NOAA was non-compliant with the IQA or the Shelby Amendment. " - "Examination of issues related to internet posting of emails from Climatic Research Unit" http://www.oig.doc.g
Well, I was surprised when I first learned (in connection with El Nino stuff) that sea level on the western edge of the Pacific is about half a meter higher than the eastern edge.
Settle the fuck down. The fuel is removed, and everything that remains on site would not be classified as high level waste..
Except for the part about "Tons of highly radioactive fuel now stored in pools will have to cool before the rods can be moved to concrete pads outdoors.... An estimated 3 million pounds of spent fuel at San Onofre is so radioactive that no repository exists that can handle it, meaning it will have to remain in concrete casks on the coast for decades, if not indefinitely." as explained in the link in the post.
as long as there are methheads out there looking to rip stuff off (often literally) and sell it for chump change, the days of twisted pair copper are numbered with a low number
Slashdot Mirror
"But what if the patient doesn't want that? "
Yeah, the last thing you want a doctor to know is what else is going on with your health, what drugs you take that might affect his diagnosis or prescription, what physical or genetic conditions you might have, what family history of disease you have, etc.....
" I also realize that the fucking Sun has much more effect on the climate than we ever will."
Yes. When the Sun inevitably goes nova, my house will definitely catch on fire; therefore, the suggestion that it's dangerous for me to toss lit matches into piles of newspaper in the basement is ludicrous. The Sun has much more effect than a single match.
This is from the same government that brought us the VA hospital system. I work in HIT myself, and I see nothing good coming of these new technology mandates.
Well, apparently you don't work in medical care quality and outcomes analysis.
"RAND's study, led by Dr. Steven Asch, found that the VA system delivered higher-quality care than the national sample of private hospitals on all measures except acute care (on which the two samples performed comparably). In nearly every other respect, VA patients received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment, and access to follow-up ... Other studies have generated similar findings.." http://www.rand.org/blog/2012/08/socialized-or-not-we-can-learn-from-the-va.html
This isn't a fringe or polarized opinion, it's pretty much accepted in the field; as is the theory that a lot of the credit goes to the VA's electronic records system, which IS interoperable and is heavily used in order to monitor quality, identify problems and intervene, and all the things that you can do to improve quality when you aren't flying blind.
To get off my high horse, though, I can understand why anyone working in Health IT would be sour on the field. Most of what's out there is awful, and there's no news more chilling to a clinician than "We're adopting a new, easy to use electronic record system". But healthcare has been stuck in the 1950s end of the information revolution way too long, long after every other major industry has gotten on top of the horse.
It's something like the auto industry in the 60s, reacting to the government decrees for safety. If you're old enough, you can remember the horrors perpetrated on the public by the manufacturers in their snit over being told what to do; the nonretracting shoulder belts which had to be stored in clips above the door, the passive restraint belts with the little mechanical mouse which whizzed around the doorframe every time it was opened or shut.... but after that phase, look how far we've progressed now. If the industry needs a kick in the ass to get it to move into the present, let alone the future, then so be it.
ok, so what is plan B then?
The measures taken so far pretty much confirms that everything Snowden has said is true.
[guy at NSA in charge of minimizing leaks hitting forehead] "D'oh!"
the me park
I thought this was how all tech companies handled customer support; most of the answers I have received sounded like this guy's.
More valuable to know if real life violence behavior can help us sell video games. $$$$$!
Call me when they develop something that detects sarcomas. That would be useful.
Very true. However, just because you have those rights, does not mean that Bad People will let you use them. The Constitution is in the nature of a contract/promise that the US will not violate those rights, or else the courts will find that unconstitutional. Maybe. At some point. If all goes well.
Yes, you are endowed with inalienable rights. That and a few bucks, or a weapon, will get you a cup of coffee.
The government has the fix for everything. Just let them confiscate more of our wealth and give them more power to micro-manage every aspect of our lives. That's the solution to this problem and apparently every other problem.
Let me guess; you live in one of those red states, like the top ten ranked by Romney's infamous 47% who pay no taxes http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/the_reckoning/2012/10/non-payers-by-state.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg
and where the federal government "confiscates your wealth" by giving you back more of it, compared to the blue states where the federal government "confiscates our wealth" to give it to you guys so that your ignorant asses won't starve and turn to cannibalism, for which assistance you bite the hand which feeds you as an expression of your Christian morality.
2007 - http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/fedspend_per_taxesbystate-20071009.pdf
2004 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpinto/2987025203/
Do all of you guys commenting have a subscription to get past the WSJ paywall, or are you reading the article from some other method?
Oh... wait. "Reading the article". LOL.
Oh, stuff like "AGW is fake" or "Obamacare will kill grandma" are always free for nonsubscribers. It's the factual articles, which generally run counter to the editorial content, that are behind the paywall.
How is any reconstruction not "cherry picked"?
Where would you have it start? At the end of the ice age? Why not at the end of Ediacaran period? No? How about Permian? What period would you start with and why?
It's ALL cherry picked to support the conclusion they want to reach.
Nonsense. If it has been warming from 1997 to date, it has been warming from 1996 to date, it has been warming from 1995 to date, etc.; it has been warming from 1999 to date, it has been warming from 2000 to date, it has been warming from 2001 to date, etc.; but it has NOT been warming from 1998 to date, and you conclude from that that the climate has now switched over to cooling, that is very definitely cherry picking, even if you fuzz it up as "Global Cooling that has been going on for the past 15 or so years", as though you could pick any year back then, rather than it's just your faulty memory which has some faded postit note saying "see, AGW is fake after all" without marking what particular specific year is the only one that works for your argument.
Here's a nice piece of cherry picking by Roy Spencer, utilizing not just 1998, but also March 2011.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/uah_march2011.png
which is conveniently forgotten 18 months later, back to the default just 1998 cherry picking
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Dec_2012_v5.51.png
see also
http://www.data360.org/temp/dsg1655_990_600.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/Satellite_Temperatures.png/800px-Satellite_Temperatures.png
For the rest of us "gee. 1998 was a freakishly hot year, wasn't it?"
So, 2009 is now only the second hottest year in recorded history, not the first hottest.A lot of folks might think that having the two hottest years in the past few centuries all within 15 years might be an indicator that it's warmer now; particularly if you notice that the first half a decade of the 21st century was also right up there.
Of course, if you took seriously the denialist arguments that "there are lots of things that affect climate" and "climate is cyclic", you'd notice that the high points of the El Nino (hot) years starting 1998 till now are on the average suddenly about 0.2 degrees C hotter than they were 1980 through 1995, just as the high points of the La Nina (cool) years from 1996 to 2008 are on the average suddenly about 0.15 degrees C warmer than they were from 1979 through 1989.
Why stop there? It has definitely cooled from noon today till midnight now, I therefore declare that we are in a cooling trend.
"Obama's actions are often quite different than his rhetoric"... like any politician. ..
Or most human beings.
Call me crazy, but I've got this idea for long haul transport; rather than have individual vehicles traveling more or less in parallel (and interfering with each other) or powering them via conductors in the roadway, we can put all the loads on a huge moving device almost as big as a section of roadway itself; we could call it a twain, after Mark Twain, who used to work on riverboats, which are vaguely similar in concept.
The Peter Principle is the steady-state situation. The dynamic situation, wherein the organization has not yet achieved stability, is almost as well-known; the manager who comes in, demonstrates incredible productivity by destroying the department (working employees until they burn out, freezing the hardware budget, cancelling routine maintenance, etc.) and after a year or two they get moved to another department to "fix" it, while the incoming manager who is tasked with merely keeping this great performance going, finds that everything and everyone is worn out or broken.
The main thing regarding both these paradigms is that the perpetrators never get the message that they are incompetent and need to change their behavior. quite the opposite, the continual promotions and rewards reinforce their patterns.
It's driven by the creationist idiots that think God created a perfect unchanging world so any suggestion of change is a spit in God's eye.
I know it's wrong to try to respond to flamebait, but you have it backwards. It's the people who think that the way the world is right this very minute is the way it is always supposed to be and we must do everything we can to keep it static that are the problem, and they aren't the religious nuts, they're the eco-nuts. They admit that they know about ice ages and the lush, tropical periods that the dinosaurs flourished in, but somehow today is perfect and no change, man-made OR natural, can be allowed to happen. Yes, it was different before, but it can no longer be different because we like it the way it is.
They're the ones bemoaning the extinction of species that no longer fit the climate or environment, and trying to build seawalls to stop the ocean from eroding that spit that developed a mere fifty years ago, but they've built their home on it and it must be preserved because it's "natural" and that's how it has "always been". The very people who hurl insults at "those religious nuts" for not accepting Evolution as the origin of life are the ones who try to stop true evolution and survival of the fittest from happening.
It's a pity they think their God is so limited.
Backwards again. Religious people know God isn't limited. It's the atheists who cannot fathom a God with powers they cannot personally understand or account for.
You don't see the religious right out protesting for carbon cap and trade or against energy users or producers. They know better. Change happens. It is Hope and Change doesn't.
So... you're arguing that we should accept, if not our extinction as a species, at least the disruption of our civilization which relies so heavily on contingencies such as climate, and reconcile ourselves to the rebirth of the Cretaceous and a resurgence of dinosaurs and ammonites, or their more recent analogs? Geez, you are one philosophical guru.
If you don't invest the time and effort to do your homework, you're not a critic with worthy opinions, you're a crank denialist full of smug self-absorption. And, just like in high school, whether you've done your homework or not is evident in the questions you ask.
That's that good conservative sense for you; if you have a good argument, like "it hasn't warmed since 1998" which was useful for 10 years or so if you insisted on using single year average rather than multiple year averages; there is no reason to dump it just because more recently, even that isn't true.
http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2011/11/SkepticsvRealistsSmall.gif.492x0_q85_crop-smart.jpg
Are you saying the oceans, which are all connected, are as much as a constant 4" different in level, say, between NYC and, oh, Denmark or Japan?
Yes. See, for example, this Straight Dope which mentions that there is a 8" difference between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at Panama.
Clearly, the building of locks in the Panama Canal was a liberal ruse, to give the illusion of differentials in sea level between oceans, so that they might use the excuse of AGW decades later to steal our freedoms.
Alternately, if you actually read those emails then you should be armed with precise quotes of the "deceptions and manipulations" which you found so powerfully convincing, or at least have some mental construct of their findings to provide us, rather than just a brief handwave in their direction preparatory to an ad hominem slur devoid of substantive content.
As, for instance, these quotes from 7 unrelated investigations which I find convincing:
"even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified."
-"The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia" http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387/387i.pdf
"We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention. As with many small research groups their internal procedures were rather informal. "
- "Report of the International Panel set up by the University of East Anglia to examine the research of the Climatic Research Unit." http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/CRUstatements/SAP
"Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community."
- "Final Investigation Report Involving Dr. Michael E. Mann" http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf
"On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt. ... In addition, we do not find that their behaviour has prejudiced the balance of advice given to policy makers. In particular, we did not find any evidence of behaviour that might undermine the conclusions of the IPCC assessments."
- "The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review" http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf
"Petitioners say that emails disclosed from CRU provide evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate data. The media coverage after the emails were released was based on email statements quoted out of context and on unsubstantiated theories of conspiracy. The CRU emails do not show either that the science is flawed or that the scientific process has been compromised. EPA carefully reviewed the CRU emails and found no indication of improper data manipulation or misrepresentation of results."
- "Myths vs. Facts: Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act" http://epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment/myths-facts.html
"In our review of the CRU emails, we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data comprising the GHCN-M dataset or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures. In addition, we found no evidence to suggest that NOAA was non-compliant with the IQA or the Shelby Amendment. "
- "Examination of issues related to internet posting of emails from Climatic Research Unit" http://www.oig.doc.g
Well, I was surprised when I first learned (in connection with El Nino stuff) that sea level on the western edge of the Pacific is about half a meter higher than the eastern edge.
Settle the fuck down. The fuel is removed, and everything that remains on site would not be classified as high level waste..
Except for the part about "Tons of highly radioactive fuel now stored in pools will have to cool before the rods can be moved to concrete pads outdoors. ... An estimated 3 million pounds of spent fuel at San Onofre is so radioactive that no repository exists that can handle it, meaning it will have to remain in concrete casks on the coast for decades, if not indefinitely." as explained in the link in the post.
as long as there are methheads out there looking to rip stuff off (often literally) and sell it for chump change, the days of twisted pair copper are numbered with a low number