The point is that the number of heat sources produced by humanity, or the animal kingdom in general, is finite, and pretty small over the area of the planet (as far as I know, nobody's paved the oceans (70% of the earth's surface) and covered them with "Planes. Trucks. Cars. Factories. Power plants". On the other hand, CO2-mediated IR absorbency occurs in the entire atmosphere, over every square inch of the earth's surface, capturing radiated heat. That's an enormous amount, in total. It's been calculated and rechecked numerous times, that merely the increase in CO2, not the entire AGW effect, amounts to the energy equivalent of 278 Hiroshima size nuclear devices every minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Over time, that tends to add up, I'd guess.
"A few hundred sample points to model the entire Earth?" Dopne a lot of research into this, have you? Must have missed this hard to find entry: "This results in approximately 500,000 "basic" variables, since each grid point has four variables " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_climate_model#Model_grids Or did you get "a few hundred" when calculating the number of points from that statement? " I really doubt anything useful can be taken from such a model about next week," Well, I expect you'll change your mind then. Hey, remember when the denier argument was that climate models were just too complicated? Ah, memories....
Indeed. Have you ever seen a victim of the kind of school which considers itself "applied" and therefore attempts to teach students engineering and/or technology without the "hurdle" of learning calculus on even the level of the basic concepts of derivative/slope and integral/area. Actual experience convinced me that it's easier to teach these guys enough calculus to understand their subject, than it is to teach them the subject without any reference to the principles of calculus. And as people have pointed out here and again, the "hard sciences" are the easy ones. The reason so little progress is made in the soft sciences is because they're way way more difficult, more complex, harder to measure, harder to define.
"According to the Congressional Research Service 170 members of the House and 60 Senators are lawyers. Out of a total of 435 U.S. Representatives and 100 Senators (535 total in Congress), lawyers comprise the biggest voting block of one type, making up 43% of Congress. Sixty percent of the U.S. Senate is lawyers. Enough said. 37.2% of the House of Representatives are lawyers. Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_percentage_of_US_congress_members_are_lawyers#ixzz22Y8oD7Ym"
This is bothersome to me, because lawyers' training tends to be: 'Given a desired point of view, generate an argument to prove it is true". Much the opposite of the "scientific method" (which is not universally applied by scientists to all decisions, I do realize) And more in line with actors, whose job training is to make fiction appear "truthy". And that brings us to Ronald Reagan, considered the greatest president ever by the half of the American voters who, by some coincidence, also happen to be the half who are easily convinced of things by lawyers, actors, etc.
"The reality is that, places like China will continue to pollute a lot for as long as they possibly can"
I have less faith in your ability to read the minds of foreign countries than I have in our ability to read thermometers and CO2 levels. And not much faith in your belief that 300 million Americans represent such a larger market than one and a half billion Chinese that Chinese industry cannot cannot survive without access to them, while at the same time it's the Chinese who are producing more CO2 and/or pollution than we.
And "Chances are that these countries would only be able to meet our envrionmental standards if they bougth technology from us." is strictly Pooya.
Hah! You're one of those sky-is-falling chicken liberals who probably believes the tiny amount of heat in a match could cause a whole house to catch fire. It's completely impossible! In fact, just the amount of heat a house receives in a day from the sun dwarfs the tiny amount of heat in a match. Liberals just want to restrict your freedom to set your own draperies on fire, and to tear down our economy by attacking the match-making industry, without which we'd still be in the caves unable to create fire.
Presumably the reason the earth and Mars are both warming is supposed to be that " The sun is a mildly variable star." (Unless that's just something the OP interjects randomly into conversations). In which case, you'd kind of see it in more than 2 planets in this booming community of objects we call a solar system, wouldn't you? (This is where they name Pluto and/or maybe some random moon of Jupiter or Saturn or something) You need more than 50% of the objects in the solar system to be warming to be a statistically significant indicator of some common factor, such as the sun. In particular, the complete absence of any warming on the moon, the cosmic equivalent of the doghouse in our back yard, bathed in the same dosage of sun and very easy to see and measure, would be a screaming indicator that the sun isn't doing any heating on objects in our vicinity without an atmosphere.
Doesn't take a PhD in climatology to figure that out, BTW.
So your argument would be, CO2 causes the earth to be warmer than it would otherwise, but more CO2 doesn't. Would that be because the atmosphere is already at 100% CO2, or because all IR is currently absorbed by the atmosphere and none escapes? Because there can't be any other reasons why it wouldn't.
For some it will be good. For some bad. The diversity of life has historically increased with warming. Coastal cities won't like a sea level rise though.
Yeah, anything that can evolve on the time scale of decades will be just fine.
One might also inquire whether the OP has actually read Marx at any point in his/her life and has any intelligent response to Marx' thoughts, other than using it as an insult, as he/she was brought up to do? "I don't know what they have to say, It makes no difference anyway, Whatever it is, I'm against it."
What bothers people about this, I suspect, is that they were brought up to believe that "you get what you pay for" and similar capitalist/free market rhetoric, basically that the price of something is somehow inherent in the item itself; and if the exact same item constructed in Manhattan costs ten times what it costs when it is made in Malaysia something's wrong, and somebody somewhere on one side of the other is getting screwed.
"We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions." The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
RICHARD A. MULLER
July 28, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?pagewanted=all
Problem there is that one side controls the "peers."
Because scientists in a given field are so NOT in competition for grant money, publication space, positions, talented students, etc., and just NEVER pick on each other's publications when reviewing. Thanks, I had forgotten that "fact" (in the rightwing sense).
They already have pill bottle caps which keep tabs of how many times they are opened; and of course, the doctors can always just check whether you're buying your prescriptions on schedule. Which they already do. Because if you're motivated enough to evade your prescriptions by buying the drugs, opening the bottle, and putting the pills down the toilet, you're not going to be stopped by the need to stick the patch on a glass of carbonated or other acidic beverage and drop the pill in there so it generates the appropriate signal.
On piano, the secret is just play the black keys, and you will do a decent job of keeping on the melodic side of F# major. Get yourself a transposing piano and presto, you're Irving Berlin.http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2664/if-irving-berlin-could-not-read-or-write-music-how-did-he-compose
are you kidding? algebra is hugely useful for every day life. trig, maybe people could live without. heck, if you don't know arithmetic you might be able to survive with a calculator. but most of "teaching algebra" consists of getting kids to recognize that they kind of know how to do the stuff from their daily lives and to formalize it so they can do it when it's not intuitively obvious. I'd also make the argument that you need to understand at least the fundamental ideas behind calculus to be educated, but that doesn't cover the entire population.
I hope this is clear. And I'm for nuclear energy, big time. But stop with this thorium "magic fuel" BS.
No offense, but this is kind of typical of why I'm sort of automatically skeptical of the arguments of those who are typically "for nuclear energy, big time"
Yeah, but we abandoned commercial development on the LFTR 50 or so years ago. The time required to get the first one up and running would be certainly considerably longer than the time required to build a new nuke of current design, which is like 10 years, so the fact that we should have been building LFTRs all along and/or some of the numerous other passively cooled designs such as pebble bed reactors, is now kind of moot. All of which doesn't speak well to the ability to trust the power industry in general and its governmental/regulatory apparatus to make optimal decisions.
given that it takes a good ten years to build a nuke plant, and the amount of CO2 produced in doing so, not just by the fossil fuels involved but also by the concrete used, it would seem like a losing proposition, compared to putting ten years into setting up the brand new from scratch power system using wind and solar and whatever, largely local to place of use. They don't have to be tied to our model of power generation and distribution which was optimal in Edison's day, any more than developing nations have to be limited to setting up a landline phone system rather than adopting cellular technology from the start.
Same goes for the already developed nations; building new nukes isn't going to help AGW any; the most that could be considered within the realm of usefulness would be stretching the sundown dates of existing nuclear plants.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that the number of heat sources produced by humanity, or the animal kingdom in general, is finite, and pretty small over the area of the planet (as far as I know, nobody's paved the oceans (70% of the earth's surface) and covered them with "Planes. Trucks. Cars. Factories. Power plants". On the other hand, CO2-mediated IR absorbency occurs in the entire atmosphere, over every square inch of the earth's surface, capturing radiated heat. That's an enormous amount, in total. It's been calculated and rechecked numerous times, that merely the increase in CO2, not the entire AGW effect, amounts to the energy equivalent of 278 Hiroshima size nuclear devices every minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Over time, that tends to add up, I'd guess.
"A few hundred sample points to model the entire Earth?"
Dopne a lot of research into this, have you? Must have missed this hard to find entry:
"This results in approximately 500,000 "basic" variables, since each grid point has four variables "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_climate_model#Model_grids
Or did you get "a few hundred" when calculating the number of points from that statement?
" I really doubt anything useful can be taken from such a model about next week,"
Well, I expect you'll change your mind then.
Hey, remember when the denier argument was that climate models were just too complicated? Ah, memories....
Indeed. Have you ever seen a victim of the kind of school which considers itself "applied" and therefore attempts to teach students engineering and/or technology without the "hurdle" of learning calculus on even the level of the basic concepts of derivative/slope and integral/area. Actual experience convinced me that it's easier to teach these guys enough calculus to understand their subject, than it is to teach them the subject without any reference to the principles of calculus. And as people have pointed out here and again, the "hard sciences" are the easy ones. The reason so little progress is made in the soft sciences is because they're way way more difficult, more complex, harder to measure, harder to define.
"According to the Congressional Research Service 170 members of the House and 60 Senators are lawyers.
Out of a total of 435 U.S. Representatives and 100 Senators (535 total in Congress), lawyers comprise the biggest voting block of one type, making up 43% of Congress. Sixty percent of the U.S. Senate is lawyers. Enough said. 37.2% of the House of Representatives are lawyers.
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_percentage_of_US_congress_members_are_lawyers#ixzz22Y8oD7Ym"
This is bothersome to me, because lawyers' training tends to be: 'Given a desired point of view, generate an argument to prove it is true". Much the opposite of the "scientific method" (which is not universally applied by scientists to all decisions, I do realize) And more in line with actors, whose job training is to make fiction appear "truthy". And that brings us to Ronald Reagan, considered the greatest president ever by the half of the American voters who, by some coincidence, also happen to be the half who are easily convinced of things by lawyers, actors, etc.
"The reality is that, places like China will continue to pollute a lot for as long as they possibly can"
I have less faith in your ability to read the minds of foreign countries than I have in our ability to read thermometers and CO2 levels. And not much faith in your belief that 300 million Americans represent such a larger market than one and a half billion Chinese that Chinese industry cannot cannot survive without access to them, while at the same time it's the Chinese who are producing more CO2 and/or pollution than we.
And "Chances are that these countries would only be able to meet our envrionmental standards if they bougth technology from us." is strictly Pooya.
Hah! You're one of those sky-is-falling chicken liberals who probably believes the tiny amount of heat in a match could cause a whole house to catch fire. It's completely impossible! In fact, just the amount of heat a house receives in a day from the sun dwarfs the tiny amount of heat in a match. Liberals just want to restrict your freedom to set your own draperies on fire, and to tear down our economy by attacking the match-making industry, without which we'd still be in the caves unable to create fire.
Presumably the reason the earth and Mars are both warming is supposed to be that " The sun is a mildly variable star." (Unless that's just something the OP interjects randomly into conversations). In which case, you'd kind of see it in more than 2 planets in this booming community of objects we call a solar system, wouldn't you? (This is where they name Pluto and/or maybe some random moon of Jupiter or Saturn or something) You need more than 50% of the objects in the solar system to be warming to be a statistically significant indicator of some common factor, such as the sun. In particular, the complete absence of any warming on the moon, the cosmic equivalent of the doghouse in our back yard, bathed in the same dosage of sun and very easy to see and measure, would be a screaming indicator that the sun isn't doing any heating on objects in our vicinity without an atmosphere.
Doesn't take a PhD in climatology to figure that out, BTW.
So your argument would be, CO2 causes the earth to be warmer than it would otherwise, but more CO2 doesn't. Would that be because the atmosphere is already at 100% CO2, or because all IR is currently absorbed by the atmosphere and none escapes? Because there can't be any other reasons why it wouldn't.
...is global warming good or bad.
For some it will be good. For some bad. The diversity of life has historically increased with warming. Coastal cities won't like a sea level rise though.
Yeah, anything that can evolve on the time scale of decades will be just fine.
I'd rather have a politician who understands the behavior of positive and negative feedback loops than one who understands fundraising.
One might also inquire whether the OP has actually read Marx at any point in his/her life and has any intelligent response to Marx' thoughts, other than using it as an insult, as he/she was brought up to do?
"I don't know what they have to say,
It makes no difference anyway,
Whatever it is, I'm against it."
Leonard Cohen knew it.... The war is over, the good guys have lost, and everybody knows.
There never was a war. T'was ever thus.
What bothers people about this, I suspect, is that they were brought up to believe that "you get what you pay for" and similar capitalist/free market rhetoric, basically that the price of something is somehow inherent in the item itself; and if the exact same item constructed in Manhattan costs ten times what it costs when it is made in Malaysia something's wrong, and somebody somewhere on one side of the other is getting screwed.
"We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions."
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
RICHARD A. MULLER
July 28, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?pagewanted=all
if you've never seen an apple wireless keyboard and mouse
http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/iMac-right-angled-Wireless-Keyboard-Magic-Mouse.png
Problem there is that one side controls the "peers."
Because scientists in a given field are so NOT in competition for grant money, publication space, positions, talented students, etc., and just NEVER pick on each other's publications when reviewing.
Thanks, I had forgotten that "fact" (in the rightwing sense).
They already have pill bottle caps which keep tabs of how many times they are opened; and of course, the doctors can always just check whether you're buying your prescriptions on schedule. Which they already do. Because if you're motivated enough to evade your prescriptions by buying the drugs, opening the bottle, and putting the pills down the toilet, you're not going to be stopped by the need to stick the patch on a glass of carbonated or other acidic beverage and drop the pill in there so it generates the appropriate signal.
On piano, the secret is just play the black keys, and you will do a decent job of keeping on the melodic side of F# major. Get yourself a transposing piano and presto, you're Irving Berlin.http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2664/if-irving-berlin-could-not-read-or-write-music-how-did-he-compose
because they know that if they shut it down to just the 1, you'd leave.
are you kidding? algebra is hugely useful for every day life. trig, maybe people could live without. heck, if you don't know arithmetic you might be able to survive with a calculator. but most of "teaching algebra" consists of getting kids to recognize that they kind of know how to do the stuff from their daily lives and to formalize it so they can do it when it's not intuitively obvious.
I'd also make the argument that you need to understand at least the fundamental ideas behind calculus to be educated, but that doesn't cover the entire population.
I know what you mean, I get the same thing from trucks on I-95.
I hope this is clear. And I'm for nuclear energy, big time. But stop with this thorium "magic fuel" BS.
No offense, but this is kind of typical of why I'm sort of automatically skeptical of the arguments of those who are typically "for nuclear energy, big time"
Yeah, but we abandoned commercial development on the LFTR 50 or so years ago. The time required to get the first one up and running would be certainly considerably longer than the time required to build a new nuke of current design, which is like 10 years, so the fact that we should have been building LFTRs all along and/or some of the numerous other passively cooled designs such as pebble bed reactors, is now kind of moot. All of which doesn't speak well to the ability to trust the power industry in general and its governmental/regulatory apparatus to make optimal decisions.
given that it takes a good ten years to build a nuke plant, and the amount of CO2 produced in doing so, not just by the fossil fuels involved but also by the concrete used, it would seem like a losing proposition, compared to putting ten years into setting up the brand new from scratch power system using wind and solar and whatever, largely local to place of use. They don't have to be tied to our model of power generation and distribution which was optimal in Edison's day, any more than developing nations have to be limited to setting up a landline phone system rather than adopting cellular technology from the start.
Same goes for the already developed nations; building new nukes isn't going to help AGW any; the most that could be considered within the realm of usefulness would be stretching the sundown dates of existing nuclear plants.
The wheel was invented in the stone age. Look at the BC comic strip. Everybody rode unicycles.