According to the Stern report, the cost of reducing CO2 emissions is around 1% of global GDP (low hundreds of billions if I remember correctly). Have there been any estimates made regarding the cost of any geo-engineering solutions?
I must admit to some concerns with geo-engineering.
Firstly, why would geo-engineering be more likely to generate global agreement to act in a concerted fashion than any other way? (although, it may be looked upon more favourably by third world countries since the cost burden would presumably be primarily borne by first world countries)
Secondly, we don't exactly have a stellar record of successful interventions in previous attempts to facilitate large scale change in our environment (certainly here in Australia, the introduction of cane toads was a roaring success - NOT).
Thirdly, with so much money on offer for "big engineering" solutions, it would be FAR too likely to promote corrupt processes in the bidding processes around such projects (imagine KBR winning a no-bid 500 billion dollar project (which would inevitably overrun into the trillions) and then delivering 6 billion desk-fans to everyone on the planet - global warming? mitigated!)
While geo-engineering may be more politically palatable (we don't have to change our petro-chemically gluttonous ways), I am suspicious of solutions that basically hand the solution back to daddy. In my opinion, we need to take steps to decrease our environmental footprint anyway. There are over 6 billion of us on the planet and if everyone in the third world had the same lifestyle as those of us in the first world, there would not be enough food on the planet (given the current methods of production) to sustain us let alone our impact in terms of CO2 emissions. As a species, we cannot keep traveling on our current trajectory.
> It is the only way to continuously grow an economy indefinitely
And this belief is exactly why people continue to fall for these Ponzi schemes time after time, and why we inevitably have busts. Because you CANNOT grow an economy indefinitely.
> Fixed asset (gold-standard, etc...) systems will eventually become systems in which a select few will possess all the money in the world while the rest grovel at their feet, or revolt and take it back.
I can understand frustration. And yes, there are nutjobs that haved hitched their wagons to what they perceive to be "sides".
You say that the IPCC has lost credibility - with who? You say "the way they handle the research" - what way? And why are they useless?
At the end of the day, it boils down to the science on one hand and the extent to which we are convinced of the likelihood of the fitness of the theory to the observations, and on the other hand the exploitation of this issue by many decision makers, and the likelihood that they will make decisions based on the science rather than the lobby groups.
As I keep saying to people, arguments about the crack-pots, the politicians, the ra-ra brigades and the vested interests are essentially irrelevant. What research is happening, how good is it and are we listening and acting upon the conclusions, is the ONLY thing that matters here.
If the IPCC is as biased by vested interests as say the DoE, so what? What does the science say?
Any scientist that talks about sides, is no scientist. I do appreciate that there are divergent results, but for every paper on the list you link to that are at least a dozen (OK, I'm averaging) papers showing the opposite. I'm compelled to apply Occam's razor here.
OK Dr.Itoh, what is the "truth"? Where is YOUR peer-reviewed paper showing some actual research? Well, maybe you can be forgiven, since you are actually a bio-med engineer (Google it yourself you lazy sods).
By the way, Itoh was a "reviewer" not a "contributor". And just so that you know, the scientists on the IPCC were chosen by their respective governments, so of course, there's no change of bias there...
And if you could read you would notice that the parent I replied to mentioned "solar variability" and nothing else. Were did you get the "longer term" variations from?
Please be warned that the following may contain sarcasm.
You are essentially comparing the likelihood of two scenarios:
1. a global conspiracy of the majority of climate scientists involved in leeching (absolutely HUUUGE amounts of) grant money from unsuspecting taxpayers,
2. a global conspiracy by oil (and related industry) companies involved in sustaining their ever-so-slightly lucrative business models through the use of media manipulation underpinned by very little actual science.
In it they conclude that: "Proxies suggest solar forcing can induce strong regional climate change"
Since you can't be bothered to even Google for information however, let me make it nice and easy for you. (Please note, this is my nice simplistic, climate-change-in-a-paragraph explanation. Since I've compressed an entire body of science into a single paragraph, there may be some glossing over of details)
The earth is a ball hanging in space, irradiated by a big glowing ball. This forms our energy input. Some of this energy is radiated back out and some is kept in - trapped. Increasing the amount of CO2 traps more of the energy in. Energy is exactly that - it shakes things around. Heat is just one expression of energy. As a result of having more energy in the system, the climate gets more variable and more "extreme" as well as hotter (averaged globally). So, we either start radiating some of this back out into space (by reducing the "greenhouse" effect i.e. reducing the atmospheric CO2), or we learn to live with increasingly erratic and hotter (globally averaged) climate.
Half these quotes are nonsense themselves that merely display the non-science related biases of the person speaking (e.g. Delgado Domingos).
What I don't get is what skeptics hope to prove by making quotes like that. Where are the peer-reviewed papers by all these guys? Oh, you mean they are just blowing hot air instead of doing the science? Perhaps they're too lazy, or maybe they are so brilliant that they can see through it all. However this brilliant minority seems to produce very little in the way of concrete science related to THIS subject (climatology) as opposed to the overwhelming, prodigious amount of science produced by the vast majority of climatologists of which a very large proportion has similar conclusions.
And yet, "its coming" intelligence, seems to have been actively blocked from reaching people whose job it is to make key decisions. To me this is indicative of people desperate to keep their "eyes wide shut".
> I fail to see motive, nor how a government as incompetent as ours could pull of a huge conspiracy, and maintain full secrecy at all levels
The beauty is that you don't have to maintain secrecy. Our willingness to believe that all is right with the world and to have faith in our leaders leads people to selectively filter out truths which don't gibe with that world view. Don't believe me? How many people in your country still believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11? How many still believe that Iraq had WMD? The fact that events like (for example) the Gulf of Tonkin incident are well documented, does not mean that that truth is widely known let alone widely accepted. Politicians all over the world have figured out that it is all about managing the message. The few people that can see through the spin are ignored by the majority who choose to believe what they are told and look no further.
The other thing to note is that it doesn't have to be a "huge" consipiracy. If I order to you to run a war-game on that day, why would you question my motives? You don't have to be aware that 3 other similar war-games were called on the same day. Compartmentalisation and need-to-know practices ensure that large projects can proceed to conclusion with little or no knowledge amongst the lower ranks of the bigger picture.
> Also with an event so heinous, I really doubt that everyone involved would have absolutely no moral qualms with it, it doesn't gibe with human nature.
Are you kidding? We've just left a century which saw the Armenian massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's killing fields, the carpet bombing of Vietnam, the Rwandan genocide, Central American death squads and many more than I can remember. We are currently seeing Robert Mugabe slowly starve his people to death.
Don't kid yourself, human nature can self-justify the worst possible atrocities.
Absolutely. I guess what I was trying to convey is that greed exceeds in quantity the natural evolutionary impulse. I'm not sure if there's a qualitative difference though. How many times have people said about others (usually obscenely rich others) "Don't they have enough already?".
To put it another way, I guess I'm saying that maybe "greed" defines a behaviour not a motivation for that behaviour.
If anybody doubts the utility of greed as an agent of change (possibly progress?), you just have to look at the motivation behind the initial forays into the New World. The lure of booty and plunder has underpinned a great many of history's larger movements.
Greed is possibly the single greatest motivator. In a world of finite resources, competing with other organisms, I want to secure as much as possible for me and mine. However, as with a great many things, the speed with which we have evolved our technical ability to procure resources far beyond what we actually need for survival, has possibly outstripped the usefulness of this evolutionary impulse to greed. This is possibly why we see such ridiculous excesses.
Please note that I have personally experienced such compulsion myself. As a recovering compulsive gambler I presume to know pretty much what this lady was thinking.
Its not only sad, it seems to be a fundamental part of human nature. Witness the recent economic "meltdown". When the impulse to have that which you don't overpowers your common-sense - that's greed. People wanting to buy their own little mansion when common-sense tells you there is no way they can afford it? Greed. People wanting to push ridiculous loans on unsuspecting marks without thinking there would be repurcussions? Greed. Financiers buying "securitised" debt with one eye closed to the obvious flakiness of the underlying asset? Greed. Politicians and central bankers blithely greasing the wheels of this ridiculous machine by loosening regulation and increasing the money supply all the while trying to convince themselves and the public that its not all one big pyramid scheme? Greed.
For future reference: Nothing comes out of nothing. Not energy and not money (defined here as actual, real purchasing power, not pieces of paper with funny symbols on it).
Out of interest, has anybody done any reading regarding the evolutionary basis of greed?
Dude, no offence but what you've described is extremely unlikely, and while that is no consolation to you when it happened, it is unlikely to happen again. I've been playing since about 1987 (ascended only once, as a wizard) and never encountered anything that unlucky. Just chillax and try again. I've not encountered a single game since that has repaid so much more after the initial investment in learning. And the great thing is that I am still learning little things (admittedly, these days I don't play that often. I may get a hankering for NetHack about once a year that leads to about a month or so of playing). In the old "desert island" scenario, NetHack is the one game I would pick to have with me.
As a result of whacking the mole on the head with a mallet when it tries to pop up out of four of the five holes, the DMCA is responsible for the mole's successful appearance out of the last hole.
Out on a limb here... I presume the tests ran single tasks. As other posters have guessed, I also think its VM related. This would seem to be a result of VM advances that favour multi-process throughput/responsiveness over single-tasking speed. Are most of the recent VM changes geared at server or desktop use?
I would be interested to know the results if the CK scheduler was used. Con always focused on typical "desktop user" workloads in tuning his scheduler.
> I do think it's good news for the people of the U.S. Army, as they won't be killed or subjected to PTSD.
One of the natural checks on large scale war, is the horror and trauma of the generation that has lived through it, especially the soldiers that fought. Removing that check brings us one step closer to recreating large-scale horrors the likes of which we haven't seen for a long time.
> Unchecked American military supremacy is a scary thing Unchecked military supremacy is a scary thing
>...duplicates a lot of functionality that belongs outside of a filesystem...
Belongs outside the FS? According to whom? There are certainly good historical reasons for why we have the block-driver/volume-manager/file-system split we currently do. However, great innovations sometimes require that convention be damned. Are the benefits worth the different architecture?
Having said that I'm currently using ZFS on Mac OS X to host my VMware images. I can clone Windows guests as easy as pie without taking another 8Gb hit per VM. It's still not perfect on the Mac but it is pretty cool. We are also using ZFS at work (on Solaris SPARC) with mixed results. High-volume batch oriented (or low-connection/large-trx OLTP) databases run well. Databases with hundreds of connections making thousands of very short trx per sec. - not so well. We're still playing with it. Great for dev/test environments though. You can clone as many copies of some big DB as you like - instantaneous and space-saving - then destroy as you like.
In the examples you give, the alternatives are actually different things that have overlapping uses. Therefore one cannot always be a substitute for the other. This device however has NO purpose other than to "emualate" a flower as accurately as possible, including "oxygen generation" and "aroma emission" (great for those allergic to pollen, not so good to those allergic to air-borne chemicals).
I drank a "health drink" that contained ginger, beetroot, carrot, celery and apple juice - it tasted so f**king horrible that I couldn't finish it. I can vouch with some confidence for its ability to kill just about anything.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the Stern report, the cost of reducing CO2 emissions is around 1% of global GDP (low hundreds of billions if I remember correctly). Have there been any estimates made regarding the cost of any geo-engineering solutions?
I must admit to some concerns with geo-engineering.
Firstly, why would geo-engineering be more likely to generate global agreement to act in a concerted fashion than any other way? (although, it may be looked upon more favourably by third world countries since the cost burden would presumably be primarily borne by first world countries)
Secondly, we don't exactly have a stellar record of successful interventions in previous attempts to facilitate large scale change in our environment (certainly here in Australia, the introduction of cane toads was a roaring success - NOT).
Thirdly, with so much money on offer for "big engineering" solutions, it would be FAR too likely to promote corrupt processes in the bidding processes around such projects (imagine KBR winning a no-bid 500 billion dollar project (which would inevitably overrun into the trillions) and then delivering 6 billion desk-fans to everyone on the planet - global warming? mitigated!)
While geo-engineering may be more politically palatable (we don't have to change our petro-chemically gluttonous ways), I am suspicious of solutions that basically hand the solution back to daddy.
In my opinion, we need to take steps to decrease our environmental footprint anyway. There are over 6 billion of us on the planet and if everyone in the third world had the same lifestyle as those of us in the first world, there would not be enough food on the planet (given the current methods of production) to sustain us let alone our impact in terms of CO2 emissions. As a species, we cannot keep traveling on our current trajectory.
> It is the only way to continuously grow an economy indefinitely
And this belief is exactly why people continue to fall for these Ponzi schemes time after time, and why we inevitably have busts. Because you CANNOT grow an economy indefinitely.
> Fixed asset (gold-standard, etc...) systems will eventually become systems in which a select few will possess all the money in the world while the rest grovel at their feet, or revolt and take it back.
As opposed to what we have now. Oh, wait...
I can understand frustration. And yes, there are nutjobs that haved hitched their wagons to what they perceive to be "sides".
You say that the IPCC has lost credibility - with who? You say "the way they handle the research" - what way? And why are they useless?
At the end of the day, it boils down to the science on one hand and the extent to which we are convinced of the likelihood of the fitness of the theory to the observations, and on the other hand the exploitation of this issue by many decision makers, and the likelihood that they will make decisions based on the science rather than the lobby groups.
As I keep saying to people, arguments about the crack-pots, the politicians, the ra-ra brigades and the vested interests are essentially irrelevant. What research is happening, how good is it and are we listening and acting upon the conclusions, is the ONLY thing that matters here.
If the IPCC is as biased by vested interests as say the DoE, so what? What does the science say?
Any scientist that talks about sides, is no scientist. I do appreciate that there are divergent results, but for every paper on the list you link to that are at least a dozen (OK, I'm averaging) papers showing the opposite. I'm compelled to apply Occam's razor here.
"...we grow it from the vapor phase..."
Literally, vaporware.
OK Dr.Itoh, what is the "truth"? Where is YOUR peer-reviewed paper showing some actual research?
Well, maybe you can be forgiven, since you are actually a bio-med engineer (Google it yourself you lazy sods).
By the way, Itoh was a "reviewer" not a "contributor". And just so that you know, the scientists on the IPCC were chosen by their respective governments, so of course, there's no change of bias there...
And if you could read you would notice that the parent I replied to mentioned "solar variability" and nothing else. Were did you get the "longer term" variations from?
Have you heard of Occam's Razor?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occams_razor
Please be warned that the following may contain sarcasm.
You are essentially comparing the likelihood of two scenarios:
1. a global conspiracy of the majority of climate scientists involved in leeching (absolutely HUUUGE amounts of) grant money from unsuspecting taxpayers,
2. a global conspiracy by oil (and related industry) companies involved in sustaining their ever-so-slightly lucrative business models through the use of media manipulation underpinned by very little actual science.
Hmmmmmm. I wonder which is more likely?
You are kidding right? Let me introduce you to two new words: regional variability
Check out the following paper where solar forcing is specifically looked at:
http://www.yale.edu/yibs/Solar%20Variability%20Program/2008_Yale_solar_Shindell.pdf
In it they conclude that:
"Proxies suggest solar forcing can induce strong
regional climate change"
Since you can't be bothered to even Google for information however, let me make it nice and easy for you. (Please note, this is my nice simplistic, climate-change-in-a-paragraph explanation. Since I've compressed an entire body of science into a single paragraph, there may be some glossing over of details)
The earth is a ball hanging in space, irradiated by a big glowing ball. This forms our energy input. Some of this energy is radiated back out and some is kept in - trapped. Increasing the amount of CO2 traps more of the energy in. Energy is exactly that - it shakes things around. Heat is just one expression of energy. As a result of having more energy in the system, the climate gets more variable and more "extreme" as well as hotter (averaged globally). So, we either start radiating some of this back out into space (by reducing the "greenhouse" effect i.e. reducing the atmospheric CO2), or we learn to live with increasingly erratic and hotter (globally averaged) climate.
There, better now?
So what?
Half these quotes are nonsense themselves that merely display the non-science related biases of the person speaking (e.g. Delgado Domingos).
What I don't get is what skeptics hope to prove by making quotes like that. Where are the peer-reviewed papers by all these guys? Oh, you mean they are just blowing hot air instead of doing the science? Perhaps they're too lazy, or maybe they are so brilliant that they can see through it all. However this brilliant minority seems to produce very little in the way of concrete science related to THIS subject (climatology) as opposed to the overwhelming, prodigious amount of science produced by the vast majority of climatologists of which a very large proportion has similar conclusions.
Forget the soundbites, show me the science!
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelii/
To quote from the linked article:
"The model accounts for both the seasonal and diurnal solar cycles in its temperature calculations."
But hey, why let facts get in the way of a complete fabrication?
When you say "we saw it coming". Yes. We did. As Colleen Rowley, former FBI agent attests:
http://www.apfn.org/APFN/WTC_whistleblower1.htm
And yet, "its coming" intelligence, seems to have been actively blocked from reaching people whose job it is to make key decisions. To me this is indicative of people desperate to keep their "eyes wide shut".
Colleen Rowley was of course not the only investigator whose actions were blocked. You may have heard of Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI translator:
http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/050704SibelEdmonds.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/25/60minutes/main526954.shtml
Don't be too sure of yourself dude...
> I fail to see motive, nor how a government as incompetent as ours could pull of a huge conspiracy, and maintain full secrecy at all levels
The beauty is that you don't have to maintain secrecy. Our willingness to believe that all is right with the world and to have faith in our leaders leads people to selectively filter out truths which don't gibe with that world view. Don't believe me? How many people in your country still believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11? How many still believe that Iraq had WMD? The fact that events like (for example) the Gulf of Tonkin incident are well documented, does not mean that that truth is widely known let alone widely accepted. Politicians all over the world have figured out that it is all about managing the message. The few people that can see through the spin are ignored by the majority who choose to believe what they are told and look no further.
The other thing to note is that it doesn't have to be a "huge" consipiracy. If I order to you to run a war-game on that day, why would you question my motives? You don't have to be aware that 3 other similar war-games were called on the same day. Compartmentalisation and need-to-know practices ensure that large projects can proceed to conclusion with little or no knowledge amongst the lower ranks of the bigger picture.
> Also with an event so heinous, I really doubt that everyone involved would have absolutely no moral qualms with it, it doesn't gibe with human nature.
Are you kidding? We've just left a century which saw the Armenian massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's killing fields, the carpet bombing of Vietnam, the Rwandan genocide, Central American death squads and many more than I can remember. We are currently seeing Robert Mugabe slowly starve his people to death.
Don't kid yourself, human nature can self-justify the worst possible atrocities.
See http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Evil-Ordinary-Genocide-Killing/dp/0195148681/
Absolutely. I guess what I was trying to convey is that greed exceeds in quantity the natural evolutionary impulse. I'm not sure if there's a qualitative difference though. How many times have people said about others (usually obscenely rich others) "Don't they have enough already?".
To put it another way, I guess I'm saying that maybe "greed" defines a behaviour not a motivation for that behaviour.
Well put. Loved the last line :-)
If anybody doubts the utility of greed as an agent of change (possibly progress?), you just have to look at the motivation behind the initial forays into the New World. The lure of booty and plunder has underpinned a great many of history's larger movements.
I don't necessarily disagree.
Greed is possibly the single greatest motivator. In a world of finite resources, competing with other organisms, I want to secure as much as possible for me and mine. However, as with a great many things, the speed with which we have evolved our technical ability to procure resources far beyond what we actually need for survival, has possibly outstripped the usefulness of this evolutionary impulse to greed. This is possibly why we see such ridiculous excesses.
Please note that I have personally experienced such compulsion myself. As a recovering compulsive gambler I presume to know pretty much what this lady was thinking.
Not only did you put a smile on my face, but you have totally captured the thought process of the rubes that fall for these scams.
You hit the nail exactly on the head.
Its not only sad, it seems to be a fundamental part of human nature. Witness the recent economic "meltdown". When the impulse to have that which you don't overpowers your common-sense - that's greed. People wanting to buy their own little mansion when common-sense tells you there is no way they can afford it? Greed. People wanting to push ridiculous loans on unsuspecting marks without thinking there would be repurcussions? Greed. Financiers buying "securitised" debt with one eye closed to the obvious flakiness of the underlying asset? Greed. Politicians and central bankers blithely greasing the wheels of this ridiculous machine by loosening regulation and increasing the money supply all the while trying to convince themselves and the public that its not all one big pyramid scheme? Greed.
For future reference:
Nothing comes out of nothing. Not energy and not money (defined here as actual, real purchasing power, not pieces of paper with funny symbols on it).
Out of interest, has anybody done any reading regarding the evolutionary basis of greed?
Great Linux trick. Pretty useless on Unix though...
Dude, no offence but what you've described is extremely unlikely, and while that is no consolation to you when it happened, it is unlikely to happen again.
I've been playing since about 1987 (ascended only once, as a wizard) and never encountered anything that unlucky.
Just chillax and try again. I've not encountered a single game since that has repaid so much more after the initial investment in learning. And the great thing is that I am still learning little things (admittedly, these days I don't play that often. I may get a hankering for NetHack about once a year that leads to about a month or so of playing).
In the old "desert island" scenario, NetHack is the one game I would pick to have with me.
How a 'bout a whac-a-mole(TM) analogy?
As a result of whacking the mole on the head with a mallet when it tries to pop up out of four of the five holes, the DMCA is responsible for the mole's successful appearance out of the last hole.
Out on a limb here...
I presume the tests ran single tasks. As other posters have guessed, I also think its VM related. This would seem to be a result of VM advances that favour multi-process throughput/responsiveness over single-tasking speed. Are most of the recent VM changes geared at server or desktop use?
I would be interested to know the results if the CK scheduler was used. Con always focused on typical "desktop user" workloads in tuning his scheduler.
Just a thought...
> I do think it's good news for the people of the U.S. Army, as they won't be killed or subjected to PTSD.
One of the natural checks on large scale war, is the horror and trauma of the generation that has lived through it, especially the soldiers that fought. Removing that check brings us one step closer to recreating large-scale horrors the likes of which we haven't seen for a long time.
> Unchecked American military supremacy is a scary thing
Unchecked military supremacy is a scary thing
> ...duplicates a lot of functionality that belongs outside of a filesystem...
Belongs outside the FS? According to whom? There are certainly good historical reasons for why we have the block-driver/volume-manager/file-system split we currently do. However, great innovations sometimes require that convention be damned. Are the benefits worth the different architecture?
Having said that I'm currently using ZFS on Mac OS X to host my VMware images. I can clone Windows guests as easy as pie without taking another 8Gb hit per VM. It's still not perfect on the Mac but it is pretty cool. We are also using ZFS at work (on Solaris SPARC) with mixed results. High-volume batch oriented (or low-connection/large-trx OLTP) databases run well. Databases with hundreds of connections making thousands of very short trx per sec. - not so well. We're still playing with it. Great for dev/test environments though. You can clone as many copies of some big DB as you like - instantaneous and space-saving - then destroy as you like.
I am not actually making that argument.
In the examples you give, the alternatives are actually different things that have overlapping uses. Therefore one cannot always be a substitute for the other. This device however has NO purpose other than to "emualate" a flower as accurately as possible, including "oxygen generation" and "aroma emission" (great for those allergic to pollen, not so good to those allergic to air-borne chemicals).
Hey, don't knock the power of beetroot!
I drank a "health drink" that contained ginger, beetroot, carrot, celery and apple juice - it tasted so f**king horrible that I couldn't finish it. I can vouch with some confidence for its ability to kill just about anything.