And then your accomplice has to get your half to you. A bank transfer of seven million is a little incriminating, or if they give you a suitcase of cash, you can't just lodge it into your account. "Enjoying" your money isn't so easy when you have to avoid ever creating a record of having the money.
Well, as long as you can avoid the government spying program, I mean Anti-terrorist program that requires banks to notify the government of any large deposit, I would think you would be okay. It is not like the inter state lottery is going to keep track of where their winners spend their money, or even has the jurisdiction to do so. The only reason they could is if there was previous suspicion and they could get a judge to issue a warrant.
Even if you tripped the government's bells over a large deposit, I don't think they would necessarily do anything if you could come up with a good reason, like "my friend just won the lottery and decided to give me a large chunk of money".
If you had $14 million you could probably skip the country for someplace without extradition and live pretty comfortably.
Easy enough for a Trust fund to retrieve the payout, deposited into an account in the Cayman's.
Then all your stooge has to do is, when asked, agree that he was the original purchaser of the ticket. The trust fund manager is the one who will receive the money and manage any payouts from the trust. He's the one you have to rely on not to screw things up, so you should go with a good, experienced trust manager, most of whom would find $14M (payout probably only $6-8M) as small potatoes.
If you're really paranoid, use a double blind trust, where the manager of the first trust creates the second trust, so the trust manager retrieving the payout doesn't know who the original trust has behind it, and the trust manager of the original trust doesn't know where the money from the second trust came from.
I agree, but at the same time, have a think about how many people you know to whom you can say: "I found a way to defraud a company of 14 million and you can have half but I need you to put your name to it."
Rule out all your acquaintances who aren't smart enough to avoid fucking it up, plus those who you can't trust, and rule out friends with kids or a job who are afraid of jail time, and people who can't keep a secret from their own friends and family who might fuck it up. And remember, for each person who says "no" to your plan, you've just created someone who can testify against you or blackmail you.
And then your accomplice has to get your half to you. A bank transfer of seven million is a little incriminating, or if they give you a suitcase of cash, you can't just lodge it into your account. "Enjoying" your money isn't so easy when you have to avoid ever creating a record of having the money.
Finding an accomplice for a big illegal act isn't *that* easy.
The irony is that his father was the recently imprisoned minister of finance for Nigeria, and he sent emails out to everyone asking them to launder the funds.
Let me introduce to you, Martha Stewart. Took the advice of her broker or whoever to sell some stock; saved a few tens of thousands (which she could afford to lose) when it fell the next day; went to jail for insider trading.
Sure, but what of the top cardiac surgeon who loses half of his patients but the other half go on to a high quality of life lasting years longer? Sometimes aggressive treatment does offer a fair chance for meaningful recovery.
OTOH, an expensive cancer treatment that buys an extra month of agonized delirium and never results in remission is an example of excess aggression.
These dumbass ratings tend to rely on whether the patient left the hospital horizontally or vertically; even if he dropped dead in the parking lot; because that's all there in the record, no added effort required. A much better measure is, obviously, how many are still alive a year later, but that requires something more than just reading the hospital chart. That measure isn't appropriate for the kind of stuff that buys an obviously dying person another month or two but that's a different thing than more or less routine surgery, no matter how difficult, that attempts to actually fix the problem. If the patient is expected to go home and get back to normal within six months, and it turns out he's dead six months later, that's a sign of something suboptimal. I'd estimate that maybe half the cardiac patients released by hospitals as OK are dead within a year. Often, they die in a different hospital than did the surgery, so the feedback never gets to the place that could use it.
A little ignorance goes a long way, especially when the ignorant presume to think everybody else is even more ignorant.
The question of measuring medical provider performance/quality has been around probably as long as there have been doctors, witch or otherwise.
A lot of work has been done, a lot of different measures devised; the bad measures didn't get too far, the good ones survived; but rather than just look into the literature, people prefer to reinvent the wheel, then complain that it is useless because of the corners on it.
Obviously, you have to take into account "degree of difficulty" both of the patient, and the actual problem being repaired. Everybody should realize this going in; anybody publishing a quality measure that doesn't address this needs to be laughed out of the business.
Of course the concept of adjusted rates is standard for epidemiology, or even statistics of any form on any subject. "Case mix adjustment" in the general sense is a standard technique that goes into things like Medicare reimbursement; doctors get paid more for taking on the more difficult patients. Been that way for years. The same technique can be used to level the playing field for outcomes, so that apples and oranges and so on. Of course, it's not always meaningful to just roll everything up into one quality score, by definition you are throwing away a lot of data. Much more informative to find out who is better at specific types of cases; somebody who is great at really tough cases might be "better" but if your case is just routine, you might even do better with somebody who handles only routine cases.
I used to make a living cranking out quality reports for various surgeries for hospitals; not only did the hospitals not argue with them, they actually paid large $$ for us to do them for them. Key to the project was getting the hospitals' buyin from the start, by having their doctors sit down with us in a big meeting right from the design phase, tell us what to take into account; age, gender, diabetic status, smoker status, etc., plus things like "If there's a transfusion on the record, give the doctor a black mark, that means he nicked an artery", etc. Then every year after the new ratings came out, the same panel would sit down with us again and discuss whether the report was reflecting reality, like "Take that transfusion thing out again, all the ones we're seeing are just alcoholics with bleeding ulcers, not the doctor's fault. Just look for actual nicked artery diagnoses"
the proof was that the rankings generally fell into two categories: Good, and, occasionally, not so good. We wouldn't see anybody as "way better" because of that patient choice thing above; the doctors and hospitals you might expect to be better restrict themselves to the more difficult cases, so there really isn't much overlap of similar degrees of difficulty to show where one is better than another. Each one was good in the category they chose to work in.
And, when once in a while somebody scored below par, it was always obvious what the problem was; in one case, inadequate preoperative testing by the hospital compared to what everybody else was doing; they happily changed their practice once we pointed out the cause and effect. In another case, it was obvious that every patient from one particular nursing home would get an infection once they had checked out of the hospital. Nothing the doctors could do but hint to patients not to move into that place. Eventually, the project collapsed when cheap and shoddy rankings like "percent of total patients who died, unadjusted" started to be demanded by big national organizations, and the hospitals couldn't afford the luxury option of paying for both sets of measures; and our management couldn't peddle the program to the folks who wanted the stupid measures.
Bottom line, you can rank medical quality as well as any other repeatable process, even with all the individual differences between cases; you just have to be smart about it. Why people are still approaching it like the world was just created this morning is a mystery.
I. also, was thinking of an airbreathing lower stage, but what I was thinking of was using this same design, only having compressed air as the takeoff engine. You don't get quite as much lift as you do with Hydrogen, but you also don't need to carry it with you, if you can design the engine so that the microwaves can also pump the air into the aerospike chamber. Save the Hydrogen for when the air gets thinner. Not sure if this would work, though. Or maybe it's just too complex for a first model.
Yeah, the old discussions of this in Analog or whatever usually featured just heating up a tank of water. I wonder if the improvement from using H2 is worth the hassle. Also, Hindenburg.
The same physics applies, that launching eastwards to take advantage of the earth's rotation is important. So stick with the coast of Florida or Wallops Island or wherever.
So, a peer-reviewed scientific paper about the effects of a Maunder Minimum is, in your opinion, less credible than an un-peer-reviewed popular article.
Interesting.
Humph. Typical liberal comment, you cherry pick facts to try to support your point. It's a peer reviewed paper WHICH SUPPORTS AGW vs a popular article WHICH SUPPORTS AGW DENIALISM. Of course the former is going to be less credible, as any objective person not blinded by liberal lies would understand instantly.
No change of plan: we cut CO2 emissions to zero, and if the next day a volcano triggers a mini ice age, we're gonna resurrect the oil industry and burn gasoline in the open to counter it. You can watch the flames from your electrical vehicle.
No worries. If we cut CO2 emissions to zero now, it will be centuries, maybe millennia before the CO2 level drops back to 280 again. So we are effectively ice age proof for the foreseeable future. See, the glass is half full after all.
So 0.2% change in insolation is insignificant, while 0.02% change in atmospheric composition is catastrophic. The former causes change in raw primary energy input, the latter in how that energy is distributed in a turbulent atmosphere.
There's thinking right and "thinking" left.
If 99.96% of the atmosphere does not absorb energy, then yeah, a change in the remaining fraction from.03% to.04% represents a 33% increase in energy absorbed. Is that difficult for you to follow?
The solar constant is 1360 W/m**2, so 0.2% reduction would be 2.7 W/m**2. Current anthropogenic climate contributions come out to about 1 W/m**2 (some decrease from aerosols, some increase from GHGs).
Only about 1/3 of that 2.7 W/m**2 is relevant at the surface, but it's still very much in the range of anthropogenic contributions to the terrestrial heat balance.
Well, just for starters, the average incoming solar radiation is one-fourth the solar constant because you seem to have forgotten half the earth's surface is experiencing night at any given time, and everything north or south of the equator, and/or east or west of high noon is receiving radiation attenuated by the angle of incidence. (for the mathematically inclined: earth's total irradiance is the solar constant times pi r squared; the total surface area is 4 times pi r squared. You do the math) Then there's the reduction of absorbed energy due to the earth's albedo, which varies from almost 100% on the ice pack to almost 0 on the ocean and anywhere in between, including transient reductions due to clouds and aerosol particles, etc.; that reduces the total another 30%.
Whereas that 1 W/M^2 refers to every square foot of the earth's surface, every second of the day or night.
I was hoping the solar minimum would give us a little breathing room to get CO2 emissions under control before we cook the planet.
Sadly, it doesn't work that way. The CO2 in the atmosphere already isn't going away for another few hundred years at least, and it will sit around soaking up energy all that time, through solar cycle after solar cycle, until we hit equilibrium temp, even if we stopped cranking out CO2 yesterday.
This is where I have an issue. ANY piece of science than, in any way, might somehow make someone question the global warming dogma is immediately attacked and discredited.
Agreed: if this work was identical in every respect but said nothing about climate, no one would pay any attention to it. Instead, it "must be false" because it has been used by Denialists (somehow... it isn't clear to me how, but Denialists are insane so I guess it doesn't have to be).
My favorite response to this story from Warmists has been statements along the lines of, "The Little Ice Age was local to Europe and in any case caused by volcanic eruptions" (which result in global cooling.) It's a bit like the old Russian joke about "It was a long time ago and in any case it never happened."
It is possible but quite tricky to reconcile the claims that the Little Ice Age was both local and caused by volcanoes, but the people putting forward these arguments don't even try. They just spout whatever contradiction sustains their faith.
This is not to say AGW isn't real and doesn't deserve a significant policy response, including rapid building of modern nuclear plants to replace base-load coal, shifting of taxes from income to carbon emissions, and public money spent to support solar, storage and smarter grids. But many people who "believe in global warming" have decoupled themselves from the science, such that almost anything that happens will be spun in support of their beliefs.
Again, who says it "must be false"? Again, it's like the Fox news anchor who asked Bill Nye if the discovery of volcanoes on the moon did not disprove AGW; except that at least that guy did not respond to Nye's explanation with "So you're saying there are no volcanoes on the moon?"
This is where I have an issue. ANY piece of science than, in any way, might somehow make someone question the global warming dogma is immediately attacked and discredited. As a former scientist, this is really scary.
Every scientific point of view deserves scrutiny. To immediately try to discredit people of differing opinions to stop the global warming money train is really scary.
Same thing happened back in the 90s, when the theory of dinosaurs evolving into birds surfaced. For a few years there, any opposing theory was mocked and laughed at.
this is where you indeed have an issue, but I don't think you and I are thinking of the same issue.
who's attacking the "piece of science"? I don't see anybody doing so. the "piece of science" being the original paper, I assume you mean.
what happens is that any piece of science that, in any way, might be used as an excuse to shed some sort of doubt on AGW, no matter how unfounded, is immediately publicized ad nauseum and accepted uncritically in the mass media; and that groundless denialism is "attacked" by pointing out that the initial study said nothing of the kind. and that leads to "but the little ice age!" and "Scientists told us global cooling was coming!" and "CO2 is good for plants!" and "it's a criminally fraudulent plot by scientists!" and so on and so on.
see also "Mars is warming!"
"Pluto is warming!"
"There are volcanoes on the moon!" http://hypervocal.com/news/201...
I was active on Slashdot early on, and then recently came back. Can someone tell me what the hell happened to this site? Was there a specific event that made all of the smart people leave, or was it gradual? Or did some event cause thousands of idiots to start posting here?
Because this thread is amazing. It makes the comments at the bottom of a Fox News article seem rational and intelligent.
What happened? The rapidly spreading availability of internet access to everybody and anybody. All human endeavors go through this cycle, although not always to completion
first, a small group of exceptional individuals who share a commitment to a vision and easily coordinate their efforts to make it reality
then, an influx of individuals inspired by the vision, but who don't all share it exactly the same way, and often work at crosspurposes
then, the big popularity surge as people see something happening and want to identify with it in some way and it becomes faddish, although they aren't all that sure what the vision is
finally, maturity, when it becomes fertile ground for crazy people, criminals, psychopaths, and capitalists to feed their various needs.
Surface area of the world is around 510 million square kilometers. Half of that is exposed to sunlight at any given time. That sunlight averages around 250W per square meter. Do the math. A 0.2% change in output is a change of about 127 TW (yes, teraWatts) per day. I'd call that a pretty significant given it's about 7 times more than the entire energy consumption of humanity (in all forms). Doesn't take much solar output change to totally swamp all of humanity. Seems that would be quite a change to the climate, doesn't it?
and the recent increase in heat works out to about 0.73 W/M^2 more energy retained by the earth. Which is a 0.292% increase. http://www.skepticalscience.co...
What an interesting way to present the information.
What does seem to have contributed to the abandonment of the Western Settlements, archaeologists said, is climate change. The onset of a ''little ice age'' made living halfway up Greenland's coast untenable in the mid-1300's, argues Dr. Charles Schweger, an archaeology professor at the University of Alberta, who has studied soils around the Farm Beneath the Sand.
Read another piece yesterday that mentioned the find in question here was of a very, very close cousin to the good ol' Velociraptor. The conclusion there was that the Velociraptor was likely feathered as well, and not likely to look much like the leather/scaley beasts from the movies (and, um, they weren't that big, either, apparently).
Yeah, what they had in the movie looked like Deinonychus. But Velociraptor sounds like something more 12 year old boys would pay to see.
Slashdot Mirror
And then your accomplice has to get your half to you. A bank transfer of seven million is a little incriminating, or if they give you a suitcase of cash, you can't just lodge it into your account. "Enjoying" your money isn't so easy when you have to avoid ever creating a record of having the money.
Well, as long as you can avoid the government spying program, I mean Anti-terrorist program that requires banks to notify the government of any large deposit, I would think you would be okay. It is not like the inter state lottery is going to keep track of where their winners spend their money, or even has the jurisdiction to do so. The only reason they could is if there was previous suspicion and they could get a judge to issue a warrant. Even if you tripped the government's bells over a large deposit, I don't think they would necessarily do anything if you could come up with a good reason, like "my friend just won the lottery and decided to give me a large chunk of money".
If you had $14 million you could probably skip the country for someplace without extradition and live pretty comfortably.
Easy enough for a Trust fund to retrieve the payout, deposited into an account in the Cayman's.
Then all your stooge has to do is, when asked, agree that he was the original purchaser of the ticket. The trust fund manager is the one who will receive the money and manage any payouts from the trust. He's the one you have to rely on not to screw things up, so you should go with a good, experienced trust manager, most of whom would find $14M (payout probably only $6-8M) as small potatoes.
If you're really paranoid, use a double blind trust, where the manager of the first trust creates the second trust, so the trust manager retrieving the payout doesn't know who the original trust has behind it, and the trust manager of the original trust doesn't know where the money from the second trust came from.
Invest in car washes. I saw Breaking Bad.
> he was an idiot for buying the ticket himself.
I agree, but at the same time, have a think about how many people you know to whom you can say: "I found a way to defraud a company of 14 million and you can have half but I need you to put your name to it."
Rule out all your acquaintances who aren't smart enough to avoid fucking it up, plus those who you can't trust, and rule out friends with kids or a job who are afraid of jail time, and people who can't keep a secret from their own friends and family who might fuck it up. And remember, for each person who says "no" to your plan, you've just created someone who can testify against you or blackmail you.
And then your accomplice has to get your half to you. A bank transfer of seven million is a little incriminating, or if they give you a suitcase of cash, you can't just lodge it into your account. "Enjoying" your money isn't so easy when you have to avoid ever creating a record of having the money.
Finding an accomplice for a big illegal act isn't *that* easy.
The irony is that his father was the recently imprisoned minister of finance for Nigeria, and he sent emails out to everyone asking them to launder the funds.
Let me introduce to you, Martha Stewart. Took the advice of her broker or whoever to sell some stock; saved a few tens of thousands (which she could afford to lose) when it fell the next day; went to jail for insider trading.
Sure, but what of the top cardiac surgeon who loses half of his patients but the other half go on to a high quality of life lasting years longer? Sometimes aggressive treatment does offer a fair chance for meaningful recovery.
OTOH, an expensive cancer treatment that buys an extra month of agonized delirium and never results in remission is an example of excess aggression.
These dumbass ratings tend to rely on whether the patient left the hospital horizontally or vertically; even if he dropped dead in the parking lot; because that's all there in the record, no added effort required. A much better measure is, obviously, how many are still alive a year later, but that requires something more than just reading the hospital chart. That measure isn't appropriate for the kind of stuff that buys an obviously dying person another month or two but that's a different thing than more or less routine surgery, no matter how difficult, that attempts to actually fix the problem. If the patient is expected to go home and get back to normal within six months, and it turns out he's dead six months later, that's a sign of something suboptimal. I'd estimate that maybe half the cardiac patients released by hospitals as OK are dead within a year. Often, they die in a different hospital than did the surgery, so the feedback never gets to the place that could use it.
A little ignorance goes a long way, especially when the ignorant presume to think everybody else is even more ignorant.
The question of measuring medical provider performance/quality has been around probably as long as there have been doctors, witch or otherwise. A lot of work has been done, a lot of different measures devised; the bad measures didn't get too far, the good ones survived; but rather than just look into the literature, people prefer to reinvent the wheel, then complain that it is useless because of the corners on it.
Obviously, you have to take into account "degree of difficulty" both of the patient, and the actual problem being repaired. Everybody should realize this going in; anybody publishing a quality measure that doesn't address this needs to be laughed out of the business.
Of course the concept of adjusted rates is standard for epidemiology, or even statistics of any form on any subject. "Case mix adjustment" in the general sense is a standard technique that goes into things like Medicare reimbursement; doctors get paid more for taking on the more difficult patients. Been that way for years. The same technique can be used to level the playing field for outcomes, so that apples and oranges and so on. Of course, it's not always meaningful to just roll everything up into one quality score, by definition you are throwing away a lot of data. Much more informative to find out who is better at specific types of cases; somebody who is great at really tough cases might be "better" but if your case is just routine, you might even do better with somebody who handles only routine cases.
I used to make a living cranking out quality reports for various surgeries for hospitals; not only did the hospitals not argue with them, they actually paid large $$ for us to do them for them. Key to the project was getting the hospitals' buyin from the start, by having their doctors sit down with us in a big meeting right from the design phase, tell us what to take into account; age, gender, diabetic status, smoker status, etc., plus things like "If there's a transfusion on the record, give the doctor a black mark, that means he nicked an artery", etc. Then every year after the new ratings came out, the same panel would sit down with us again and discuss whether the report was reflecting reality, like "Take that transfusion thing out again, all the ones we're seeing are just alcoholics with bleeding ulcers, not the doctor's fault. Just look for actual nicked artery diagnoses"
the proof was that the rankings generally fell into two categories: Good, and, occasionally, not so good. We wouldn't see anybody as "way better" because of that patient choice thing above; the doctors and hospitals you might expect to be better restrict themselves to the more difficult cases, so there really isn't much overlap of similar degrees of difficulty to show where one is better than another. Each one was good in the category they chose to work in.
And, when once in a while somebody scored below par, it was always obvious what the problem was; in one case, inadequate preoperative testing by the hospital compared to what everybody else was doing; they happily changed their practice once we pointed out the cause and effect. In another case, it was obvious that every patient from one particular nursing home would get an infection once they had checked out of the hospital. Nothing the doctors could do but hint to patients not to move into that place.
Eventually, the project collapsed when cheap and shoddy rankings like "percent of total patients who died, unadjusted" started to be demanded by big national organizations, and the hospitals couldn't afford the luxury option of paying for both sets of measures; and our management couldn't peddle the program to the folks who wanted the stupid measures.
Bottom line, you can rank medical quality as well as any other repeatable process, even with all the individual differences between cases; you just have to be smart about it. Why people are still approaching it like the world was just created this morning is a mystery.
Cain y'all jus' slow it dayown a piece? Sounz lahk y'all one o' them Hindoos, words comin' out ya pie-hole sa fas'.
Ah 'members when NASCAR was runnin' them Chevy Luminums.
I don't know, could be romantic. "It's a nice night, honey. Want to go watch the flaming bat shower?"
Thinking outside the box: we cover the vehicle with an envelope of CO2 that absorbs IR radiated from the earth! Ok, going back into the box now.
I. also, was thinking of an airbreathing lower stage, but what I was thinking of was using this same design, only having compressed air as the takeoff engine. You don't get quite as much lift as you do with Hydrogen, but you also don't need to carry it with you, if you can design the engine so that the microwaves can also pump the air into the aerospike chamber. Save the Hydrogen for when the air gets thinner. Not sure if this would work, though. Or maybe it's just too complex for a first model.
Like a ground powered beam heated pulse jet.
The old handwaving articles used to just picture a big tank of water with the back end painted black and an IR laser aimed at it.
Yeah, the old discussions of this in Analog or whatever usually featured just heating up a tank of water. I wonder if the improvement from using H2 is worth the hassle. Also, Hindenburg.
Gimme mah luminous foal hayut.
The same physics applies, that launching eastwards to take advantage of the earth's rotation is important. So stick with the coast of Florida or Wallops Island or wherever.
So, a peer-reviewed scientific paper about the effects of a Maunder Minimum is, in your opinion, less credible than an un-peer-reviewed popular article. Interesting.
Humph. Typical liberal comment, you cherry pick facts to try to support your point. It's a peer reviewed paper WHICH SUPPORTS AGW vs a popular article WHICH SUPPORTS AGW DENIALISM. Of course the former is going to be less credible, as any objective person not blinded by liberal lies would understand instantly.
No change of plan: we cut CO2 emissions to zero, and if the next day a volcano triggers a mini ice age, we're gonna resurrect the oil industry and burn gasoline in the open to counter it. You can watch the flames from your electrical vehicle.
No worries. If we cut CO2 emissions to zero now, it will be centuries, maybe millennia before the CO2 level drops back to 280 again. So we are effectively ice age proof for the foreseeable future.
See, the glass is half full after all.
So 0.2% change in insolation is insignificant, while 0.02% change in atmospheric composition is catastrophic. The former causes change in raw primary energy input, the latter in how that energy is distributed in a turbulent atmosphere.
There's thinking right and "thinking" left.
If 99.96% of the atmosphere does not absorb energy, then yeah, a change in the remaining fraction from .03% to .04% represents a 33% increase in energy absorbed. Is that difficult for you to follow?
The solar constant is 1360 W/m**2, so 0.2% reduction would be 2.7 W/m**2. Current anthropogenic climate contributions come out to about 1 W/m**2 (some decrease from aerosols, some increase from GHGs).
Only about 1/3 of that 2.7 W/m**2 is relevant at the surface, but it's still very much in the range of anthropogenic contributions to the terrestrial heat balance.
Well, just for starters, the average incoming solar radiation is one-fourth the solar constant because you seem to have forgotten half the earth's surface is experiencing night at any given time, and everything north or south of the equator, and/or east or west of high noon is receiving radiation attenuated by the angle of incidence. (for the mathematically inclined: earth's total irradiance is the solar constant times pi r squared; the total surface area is 4 times pi r squared. You do the math) Then there's the reduction of absorbed energy due to the earth's albedo, which varies from almost 100% on the ice pack to almost 0 on the ocean and anywhere in between, including transient reductions due to clouds and aerosol particles, etc.; that reduces the total another 30%.
Whereas that 1 W/M^2 refers to every square foot of the earth's surface, every second of the day or night.
I was hoping the solar minimum would give us a little breathing room to get CO2 emissions under control before we cook the planet.
Sadly, it doesn't work that way. The CO2 in the atmosphere already isn't going away for another few hundred years at least, and it will sit around soaking up energy all that time, through solar cycle after solar cycle, until we hit equilibrium temp, even if we stopped cranking out CO2 yesterday.
This is where I have an issue. ANY piece of science than, in any way, might somehow make someone question the global warming dogma is immediately attacked and discredited.
Agreed: if this work was identical in every respect but said nothing about climate, no one would pay any attention to it. Instead, it "must be false" because it has been used by Denialists (somehow... it isn't clear to me how, but Denialists are insane so I guess it doesn't have to be).
My favorite response to this story from Warmists has been statements along the lines of, "The Little Ice Age was local to Europe and in any case caused by volcanic eruptions" (which result in global cooling.) It's a bit like the old Russian joke about "It was a long time ago and in any case it never happened."
It is possible but quite tricky to reconcile the claims that the Little Ice Age was both local and caused by volcanoes, but the people putting forward these arguments don't even try. They just spout whatever contradiction sustains their faith.
This is not to say AGW isn't real and doesn't deserve a significant policy response, including rapid building of modern nuclear plants to replace base-load coal, shifting of taxes from income to carbon emissions, and public money spent to support solar, storage and smarter grids. But many people who "believe in global warming" have decoupled themselves from the science, such that almost anything that happens will be spun in support of their beliefs.
Again, who says it "must be false"? Again, it's like the Fox news anchor who asked Bill Nye if the discovery of volcanoes on the moon did not disprove AGW; except that at least that guy did not respond to Nye's explanation with "So you're saying there are no volcanoes on the moon?"
This is where I have an issue. ANY piece of science than, in any way, might somehow make someone question the global warming dogma is immediately attacked and discredited. As a former scientist, this is really scary.
Every scientific point of view deserves scrutiny. To immediately try to discredit people of differing opinions to stop the global warming money train is really scary.
Same thing happened back in the 90s, when the theory of dinosaurs evolving into birds surfaced. For a few years there, any opposing theory was mocked and laughed at.
this is where you indeed have an issue, but I don't think you and I are thinking of the same issue. who's attacking the "piece of science"? I don't see anybody doing so. the "piece of science" being the original paper, I assume you mean.
what happens is that any piece of science that, in any way, might be used as an excuse to shed some sort of doubt on AGW, no matter how unfounded, is immediately publicized ad nauseum and accepted uncritically in the mass media; and that groundless denialism is "attacked" by pointing out that the initial study said nothing of the kind. and that leads to "but the little ice age!" and "Scientists told us global cooling was coming!" and "CO2 is good for plants!" and "it's a criminally fraudulent plot by scientists!" and so on and so on.
see also
"Mars is warming!"
"Pluto is warming!"
"There are volcanoes on the moon!" http://hypervocal.com/news/201...
I was active on Slashdot early on, and then recently came back. Can someone tell me what the hell happened to this site? Was there a specific event that made all of the smart people leave, or was it gradual? Or did some event cause thousands of idiots to start posting here?
Because this thread is amazing. It makes the comments at the bottom of a Fox News article seem rational and intelligent.
What happened? The rapidly spreading availability of internet access to everybody and anybody.
All human endeavors go through this cycle, although not always to completion
first, a small group of exceptional individuals who share a commitment to a vision and easily coordinate their efforts to make it reality
then, an influx of individuals inspired by the vision, but who don't all share it exactly the same way, and often work at crosspurposes
then, the big popularity surge as people see something happening and want to identify with it in some way and it becomes faddish, although they aren't all that sure what the vision is
finally, maturity, when it becomes fertile ground for crazy people, criminals, psychopaths, and capitalists to feed their various needs.
Surface area of the world is around 510 million square kilometers. Half of that is exposed to sunlight at any given time. That sunlight averages around 250W per square meter. Do the math. A 0.2% change in output is a change of about 127 TW (yes, teraWatts) per day. I'd call that a pretty significant given it's about 7 times more than the entire energy consumption of humanity (in all forms). Doesn't take much solar output change to totally swamp all of humanity. Seems that would be quite a change to the climate, doesn't it?
and the recent increase in heat works out to about 0.73 W/M^2 more energy retained by the earth. Which is a 0.292% increase. http://www.skepticalscience.co...
What an interesting way to present the information.
What does seem to have contributed to the abandonment of the Western Settlements, archaeologists said, is climate change. The onset of a ''little ice age'' made living halfway up Greenland's coast untenable in the mid-1300's, argues Dr. Charles Schweger, an archaeology professor at the University of Alberta, who has studied soils around the Farm Beneath the Sand.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05...
It's almost as if you didn't care about what happened, but wanted to score political points.
Now you're going to tell us that Iceland was named because it used to be cold, but the geothermal effects started up later on?
Read another piece yesterday that mentioned the find in question here was of a very, very close cousin to the good ol' Velociraptor. The conclusion there was that the Velociraptor was likely feathered as well, and not likely to look much like the leather/scaley beasts from the movies (and, um, they weren't that big, either, apparently).
Yeah, what they had in the movie looked like Deinonychus. But Velociraptor sounds like something more 12 year old boys would pay to see.