I think you meant to say "Inconceivable? You keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means".
Many fictional things are "conceivable", but in terms of real science, no one is going to take a casual "general relativity is totally broken" proposal seriously. General relativity has made more and better predictions (and more unexpected predictions) than just about anything. You can doubt any theory, but the more one has proven itself, the higher the bar to claim "but maybe it's totally wrong".
Every theory "might be wrong", but that's not a useful observation - it helps no one to point that out, much like complaining about the weather. "This might be true instead" is useful, but you have to explain everything the current theory is correct about too.
Yes, the trend was down. That's what I said. The explanation for "the Pause" was that Solar output fell, and that matched the amount the CO2-based warming rose. That's my point above: that Solar changes can be bigger than CO2-driven changes, to judge by the historical data of the past 800,000 years.
I value my privacy. Always have. Seemed like an obvious way to go. But even my professional name only appears on the internet in my linkedin, and in the minutes of a standards committee I worked with. I can't imagine using my name for any forum, or my hobby github work, or whatever.
I take your point for the few people working professionally with GitHub instead of the normal case for software devs.
In my case, my professional name isn't my legal name - the latter isn't anywhere on the internet. But to your point, my professional name does indicate my sex, and if I were trying to make a living with open source it would show up in GitHub.
Someone runs a light, hits a self-driving car. Because they tend to be small, they will spin around due to momentum in an intersection. It does so, and hits another car. When I witnessed a small car about the size of a Honda Fit or Mini get rammed due to a red light runner, then spin into another vehicle, the small car, even though it was not at fault with wreck #1 got sued by the driver of the car it hit.
Anyone can sue anyone for anything. That wont change.
Usually in multi-car accident, only the instigator (or his insurance) will end up paying.
Why would you think self-driving cars tend to be small? The Tesla's pretty heavy as modern cars go. Self-driving will probably come first to luxury cars, and those all tend to be heavy.
possible that those developers who don't feel it necessary to point out their favorite college sports team in situations where their favorite college sports team doesn't matter tend to also be those more likely to contribute worthwhile changes?
The double-negative makes it hard to parse, but I think I agree: "people who point out unimportant distractions about themselves have lower-quality submissions". Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Yes, and they aren't great. Friend of mine is an engineer at a car company - these are experiments to see if the reliability problems can be solved (and the Civic had a CVT ages ago, BTW, a friend drove one). At low enough power they work OK, but a belt is just no substitute for gears for durability and ability to scale up power-wise. Mercedes would love to offer a CVT for the S Class - even smoother power delivery - but it just can't be made to work, at least not yet.
Yes. Not just me, actual climate scientists have put forward the idea that the fact that all the models have been running hot for the past 19 year is due to solar variance (claiming it will soon return to normal and validate their models, of course, but they don't model the Sun).
We are as certain as we are of anything climate-wise that solar variation drives the 100k year glaciation cycle of the current ice age. And these changes happen fast, relative to the 100k year cycle. The relative stability of the climate for the past 10k years is an unexplained anomaly in the temperature record (check out the ice core data, if you like looking at real data).
The point is, no one knows why the glaciers have retreated for so long. Where I sit has been under kilometers of ice for most of the past 2.5 million years, with fairly brief ground exposure every 100k years. But the past 10k years were unique in the ice core data - temperatures didn't drop after spiking.
Are we overdue for a massive, rapid drop back to normal? Are we leaving the ice age? In either direction, solar activity is a bigger driver than the CO2 levels we're talking about, and changes seem to happen quite fast: just a few centuries. (It doesn't take much: a 6% drop in solar activity is hypothesized to have caused the "snowball Earth", where the entire Earth, excepting a few geothermal spots, was under ice - the biggest extinction event since the oxygen catastrophe).
Is "warmer" better or worse? By how much? Are we returning to glaciation in the current ice age, and CO2 emission is our only method to prevent glaciers covering Europe? Are we exiting the ice age we've been in for millions of years, and our CO2 emissions are a trivial part of the huge coming problem? The answers are about the Sun, not the atmosphere.
Bigger questions aside, you simply can't asses the cost/benefit of any proposed policy without solid modeling of this complex system (ocean mixing is a big part of it - most of the CO2 not in rocks is in the ocean, and feedback loops there could go wild in either direction with CO2 levels when some threshold is crossed).
Also, you add nothing to the quality of discussion by being an asshole, though you do come across exactly like the religious whackos of my youth did - same tone, same certainty, same unwillingness to actually discuss anything with heretics.
Some do, some don't. The big problem with autos is when you need to shift by more than one gear: my transmission will spend about 2 seconds dropping through the gears before it gives me power.
pretty soon, we can expect CVTs to mostly replace traditional automatics.
Nope - they have fundamental problems with reliability. A transmission that needs a belt is fundamentally a bad plan. Electric cars will come first.
Notice from your graph that temperatures are about the same as they were 19 years ago? That's what people call "the Pause". All of the climate models run hot - the Pause wasn't predicted by any of them (but it's within the error bars, just as it's within the error bars of the null hypothesis). Data from before the models were created means nothing when it comes to verifying the models.
Horseshit. CO2 is rising. By simple laws of radiative physics this must result in warming. What alternate possibility do you imagine exists?
No one is debating how CO2 works. What's the cost-benefit analysis on human action going forward? What are the feedback loops, in both directions, and how much does this matter? What's the dominant factor in determining future temperatures on Earth? (Hint: it's yellow)
Those 150 years of direct climate measurements didn't show much warming until they were "adjusted", but that's really beside the point.
The point of the debate is: what human action will make the life of humans better. Do we know enough to do a cost-benefit analysis on various plans? No. Do we know enough to know whether the climate will become warmer or cooler (not the bias introduced by humans, which is clear, but the total system behavior)? No, we don't.
Yes, yes, everyone understands what CO2 does, that's really not the issue. The complex system of feedback loops, many positive and many negative, that is our climate isn't well understood, and isn't yet successfully modeled. The atmosphere itself is a chaotic system, but no one would model just the atmosphere - the oceans are a far more powerful driver for climate, even for CO2 levels.
But, really, the single largest factor in determining "warmer or cooler" isn't human activity, or the atmosphere, or the oceans. It has driven quite dramatic climate shifts throughout the Earth's history, likely including extinction events, and including a 100k year cycle that we're at the peak of, and it's not well modeled and only modestly understood.
So, no, no one's debating how CO2 works. But that's a small part of the story, and not enough to inform policy.
Yes, or that. There's more than one party of politicians you see, and more than one strategy of getting money. It's fairly rare for research results to get caught up in this whole mess, but do you really think there's something a politician wouldn't do for money?
No conspiracy here, just politicians latching on to research that can be turned into an excuse for taxation - and there's always a party willing to latch onto anything that can be used as an excuse for new taxes. Doesn't mean the researchers aren't sincere, but you can't for a moment believe the politicians are sincere. Can you?
No, just pointing out that researchers work at the pleasure of the politicians. Usually, the politicians don't care one way or another about the results, but look at economics to see the fun when they do care. Once research results become a political football, funding gets hitched to one crowd* of politicians or another being in power.
*Is there a group noun for politicians? I propose "a taxation of politicians".
Yep, that's what I said. Most research scientists of any stripe are effectively government jobs (try keeping any such job without bringing in NSF or equivalent funding). Certainly anyone working for an oil company can't really be a "climate scientist", right?
So the hand-off from the politicians to the serfs laboring in the data fields is small - grants to fund the work - but it's real. The field wouldn't exists without government grants for the research. TFA is a counter-example: call me cynical, but I'm just assuming politics is at the bottom of the staff reduction, because the researchers weren't friends of the new politicians.
* Politician wants an excuse to tax something new, to have new money to give to his friends * Hey, climate science, we can use that! * Grants approved, except any grant questioning the premise denied (as has been true for 20 years) * Politician: Alarm! Disaster! Catastrophe! Sacrifice for the common good! Ka-ching.
Technically, the climate scientists are the "friends" here, of the politicians who have latched onto this as the latest excuse to take your money and give it to their friends.
There's no reasonable climate prediction than can be made simply from first principles. It amazes me how often people dismiss "deniers" without ever understanding what the debate is about, yet still claim they're fans of science, not religion.
Except that "verifying models" step. None of the climate models are making better predictions than the null hypothesis, or for that matter than the "lgw blindly asserting it's getting colder" model. Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so, and while that's within the error bars for most of these models, it's better predicted by the null hypothesis, and within the error bars if you take any of these models and put a "-" in front on their predicted temperature change. So, yeah, the negative of the models predicts as well as the models right now.
Not an argument that they're all wrong, but an argument that there's no reason to think any particular one is right, either. The "science" part is ongoing, but hasn't verified any of the models.
The "90% tedious bits" aren't the hard part of the job. Most people can do them. Most people simply can't organize their thoughts in a logical manner and think through all the cases. Plus, lead with the fun bit.:)
I'd say so. Coding is design + typing + debugging. This removes the typing (and the need to learn syntax and wrestle with silly syntax errors) and much of the debugging.
If you like coding with most of the tedious annoying bits removed, you might like actual coding. Or at least for "top down" people, it's a good approach.
Serif is always going to be fatiguing for an e-reader. If you have a reasonable font for modest DPI (not just any random print font), we're long past the terribly-low DPI days.
What actual point are you making? Is there any device you can describe where a non-technical user can install software without using he default distro and without being more likely to get malware than what they were seeking? How would that even work?
Foreign governments have been hacking us pretty aggressively, including getting all the dirt on everyone who applied for secret clearance (where you list everything you could be blackmailed for). It seems quite likely they'd have read email on an unsecured server for anyone high profile, since that's so much easier (and let's not kid ourselves that Hillary is the only one doing this!).
The SAP documents include names of "NOC agents" - actual moles in foreign governments and whatnot. That's not the only kind of SAP documents, but it's a common reason for a doc to limit access so strictly. You die when you get outed.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you meant to say "Inconceivable? You keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means".
Many fictional things are "conceivable", but in terms of real science, no one is going to take a casual "general relativity is totally broken" proposal seriously. General relativity has made more and better predictions (and more unexpected predictions) than just about anything. You can doubt any theory, but the more one has proven itself, the higher the bar to claim "but maybe it's totally wrong".
Every theory "might be wrong", but that's not a useful observation - it helps no one to point that out, much like complaining about the weather. "This might be true instead" is useful, but you have to explain everything the current theory is correct about too.
Yes, the trend was down. That's what I said. The explanation for "the Pause" was that Solar output fell, and that matched the amount the CO2-based warming rose. That's my point above: that Solar changes can be bigger than CO2-driven changes, to judge by the historical data of the past 800,000 years.
I value my privacy. Always have. Seemed like an obvious way to go. But even my professional name only appears on the internet in my linkedin, and in the minutes of a standards committee I worked with. I can't imagine using my name for any forum, or my hobby github work, or whatever.
I take your point for the few people working professionally with GitHub instead of the normal case for software devs.
In my case, my professional name isn't my legal name - the latter isn't anywhere on the internet. But to your point, my professional name does indicate my sex, and if I were trying to make a living with open source it would show up in GitHub.
Never use your real name on the internet. No good can come of that.
Someone runs a light, hits a self-driving car. Because they tend to be small, they will spin around due to momentum in an intersection. It does so, and hits another car. When I witnessed a small car about the size of a Honda Fit or Mini get rammed due to a red light runner, then spin into another vehicle, the small car, even though it was not at fault with wreck #1 got sued by the driver of the car it hit.
Anyone can sue anyone for anything. That wont change.
Usually in multi-car accident, only the instigator (or his insurance) will end up paying.
Why would you think self-driving cars tend to be small? The Tesla's pretty heavy as modern cars go. Self-driving will probably come first to luxury cars, and those all tend to be heavy.
possible that those developers who don't feel it necessary to point out their favorite college sports team in situations where their favorite college sports team doesn't matter tend to also be those more likely to contribute worthwhile changes?
The double-negative makes it hard to parse, but I think I agree: "people who point out unimportant distractions about themselves have lower-quality submissions". Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Yes, and they aren't great. Friend of mine is an engineer at a car company - these are experiments to see if the reliability problems can be solved (and the Civic had a CVT ages ago, BTW, a friend drove one). At low enough power they work OK, but a belt is just no substitute for gears for durability and ability to scale up power-wise. Mercedes would love to offer a CVT for the S Class - even smoother power delivery - but it just can't be made to work, at least not yet.
Yes. Not just me, actual climate scientists have put forward the idea that the fact that all the models have been running hot for the past 19 year is due to solar variance (claiming it will soon return to normal and validate their models, of course, but they don't model the Sun).
We are as certain as we are of anything climate-wise that solar variation drives the 100k year glaciation cycle of the current ice age. And these changes happen fast, relative to the 100k year cycle. The relative stability of the climate for the past 10k years is an unexplained anomaly in the temperature record (check out the ice core data, if you like looking at real data).
The point is, no one knows why the glaciers have retreated for so long. Where I sit has been under kilometers of ice for most of the past 2.5 million years, with fairly brief ground exposure every 100k years. But the past 10k years were unique in the ice core data - temperatures didn't drop after spiking.
Are we overdue for a massive, rapid drop back to normal? Are we leaving the ice age? In either direction, solar activity is a bigger driver than the CO2 levels we're talking about, and changes seem to happen quite fast: just a few centuries. (It doesn't take much: a 6% drop in solar activity is hypothesized to have caused the "snowball Earth", where the entire Earth, excepting a few geothermal spots, was under ice - the biggest extinction event since the oxygen catastrophe).
Is "warmer" better or worse? By how much? Are we returning to glaciation in the current ice age, and CO2 emission is our only method to prevent glaciers covering Europe? Are we exiting the ice age we've been in for millions of years, and our CO2 emissions are a trivial part of the huge coming problem? The answers are about the Sun, not the atmosphere.
Bigger questions aside, you simply can't asses the cost/benefit of any proposed policy without solid modeling of this complex system (ocean mixing is a big part of it - most of the CO2 not in rocks is in the ocean, and feedback loops there could go wild in either direction with CO2 levels when some threshold is crossed).
Also, you add nothing to the quality of discussion by being an asshole, though you do come across exactly like the religious whackos of my youth did - same tone, same certainty, same unwillingness to actually discuss anything with heretics.
: they can shift much faster than you can.
Some do, some don't. The big problem with autos is when you need to shift by more than one gear: my transmission will spend about 2 seconds dropping through the gears before it gives me power.
pretty soon, we can expect CVTs to mostly replace traditional automatics.
Nope - they have fundamental problems with reliability. A transmission that needs a belt is fundamentally a bad plan. Electric cars will come first.
Notice from your graph that temperatures are about the same as they were 19 years ago? That's what people call "the Pause". All of the climate models run hot - the Pause wasn't predicted by any of them (but it's within the error bars, just as it's within the error bars of the null hypothesis). Data from before the models were created means nothing when it comes to verifying the models.
Horseshit. CO2 is rising. By simple laws of radiative physics this must result in warming. What alternate possibility do you imagine exists?
No one is debating how CO2 works. What's the cost-benefit analysis on human action going forward? What are the feedback loops, in both directions, and how much does this matter? What's the dominant factor in determining future temperatures on Earth? (Hint: it's yellow)
Those 150 years of direct climate measurements didn't show much warming until they were "adjusted", but that's really beside the point.
The point of the debate is: what human action will make the life of humans better. Do we know enough to do a cost-benefit analysis on various plans? No. Do we know enough to know whether the climate will become warmer or cooler (not the bias introduced by humans, which is clear, but the total system behavior)? No, we don't.
Yes, yes, everyone understands what CO2 does, that's really not the issue. The complex system of feedback loops, many positive and many negative, that is our climate isn't well understood, and isn't yet successfully modeled. The atmosphere itself is a chaotic system, but no one would model just the atmosphere - the oceans are a far more powerful driver for climate, even for CO2 levels.
But, really, the single largest factor in determining "warmer or cooler" isn't human activity, or the atmosphere, or the oceans. It has driven quite dramatic climate shifts throughout the Earth's history, likely including extinction events, and including a 100k year cycle that we're at the peak of, and it's not well modeled and only modestly understood.
So, no, no one's debating how CO2 works. But that's a small part of the story, and not enough to inform policy.
Yes, or that. There's more than one party of politicians you see, and more than one strategy of getting money. It's fairly rare for research results to get caught up in this whole mess, but do you really think there's something a politician wouldn't do for money?
No conspiracy here, just politicians latching on to research that can be turned into an excuse for taxation - and there's always a party willing to latch onto anything that can be used as an excuse for new taxes. Doesn't mean the researchers aren't sincere, but you can't for a moment believe the politicians are sincere. Can you?
No, just pointing out that researchers work at the pleasure of the politicians. Usually, the politicians don't care one way or another about the results, but look at economics to see the fun when they do care. Once research results become a political football, funding gets hitched to one crowd* of politicians or another being in power.
*Is there a group noun for politicians? I propose "a taxation of politicians".
Yep, that's what I said. Most research scientists of any stripe are effectively government jobs (try keeping any such job without bringing in NSF or equivalent funding). Certainly anyone working for an oil company can't really be a "climate scientist", right?
So the hand-off from the politicians to the serfs laboring in the data fields is small - grants to fund the work - but it's real. The field wouldn't exists without government grants for the research. TFA is a counter-example: call me cynical, but I'm just assuming politics is at the bottom of the staff reduction, because the researchers weren't friends of the new politicians.
* Politician wants an excuse to tax something new, to have new money to give to his friends
* Hey, climate science, we can use that!
* Grants approved, except any grant questioning the premise denied (as has been true for 20 years)
* Politician: Alarm! Disaster! Catastrophe! Sacrifice for the common good! Ka-ching.
Technically, the climate scientists are the "friends" here, of the politicians who have latched onto this as the latest excuse to take your money and give it to their friends.
There's no reasonable climate prediction than can be made simply from first principles. It amazes me how often people dismiss "deniers" without ever understanding what the debate is about, yet still claim they're fans of science, not religion.
Except that "verifying models" step. None of the climate models are making better predictions than the null hypothesis, or for that matter than the "lgw blindly asserting it's getting colder" model. Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so, and while that's within the error bars for most of these models, it's better predicted by the null hypothesis, and within the error bars if you take any of these models and put a "-" in front on their predicted temperature change. So, yeah, the negative of the models predicts as well as the models right now.
Not an argument that they're all wrong, but an argument that there's no reason to think any particular one is right, either. The "science" part is ongoing, but hasn't verified any of the models.
The "90% tedious bits" aren't the hard part of the job. Most people can do them. Most people simply can't organize their thoughts in a logical manner and think through all the cases. Plus, lead with the fun bit. :)
I'd say so. Coding is design + typing + debugging. This removes the typing (and the need to learn syntax and wrestle with silly syntax errors) and much of the debugging.
If you like coding with most of the tedious annoying bits removed, you might like actual coding. Or at least for "top down" people, it's a good approach.
Serif is always going to be fatiguing for an e-reader. If you have a reasonable font for modest DPI (not just any random print font), we're long past the terribly-low DPI days.
What actual point are you making? Is there any device you can describe where a non-technical user can install software without using he default distro and without being more likely to get malware than what they were seeking? How would that even work?
Foreign governments have been hacking us pretty aggressively, including getting all the dirt on everyone who applied for secret clearance (where you list everything you could be blackmailed for). It seems quite likely they'd have read email on an unsecured server for anyone high profile, since that's so much easier (and let's not kid ourselves that Hillary is the only one doing this!).
The SAP documents include names of "NOC agents" - actual moles in foreign governments and whatnot. That's not the only kind of SAP documents, but it's a common reason for a doc to limit access so strictly. You die when you get outed.