Maybe you should take a look at this. I don't know how much influence this guy has in the halls of government. Wikipedia would seem to imply that there is a considerable faction of their civil and military leadership which is very much interested in destabilizing American politics by inflaming racial tensions and supporting any and all dissidents.
Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements â" extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
You're generally arguing that it would be absurd for Russia to do these things, and it is absurd if you implicitly reject the notion that they would do so. Otherwise we can spin a pretty convincing narrative. Putin certainly has no love for Clinton, and is interested in increasing his share of world power. Since a direct military confrontation is a foregone conclusion, they turn to information and cultural warfare, and the well-worn tools of the spy trade. Hacking the voting machines directly is out of the question, but the majority of the people in the country are dumb enough to think that the major parties represent their interests, so the goal becomes controlling the narrative. Bribing journalists would be costly and prone to exposure. It's best to give them a story that is big enough that they have to report it. Hacking is deniable, doesn't require subverting anyone in a foreign nation, and has a fairly low cost and risk-reward ratio. Given the goal of destabilization, hacking a major political party becomes an obvious move. We've actually seen this exact scenario before, where state-level intelligence agents were caught attempting to hack the Democratic National Committee. We can probably assume that the intelligence interests between the major powers reflect the perceived threat level of the other powers, so it's probably safe to say that Russian hackers would be employed against US and Chinese targets primarily. It's likely that hacking attempts are made against the two major parties continually, but especially when the stakes are raised during an election.
So you're Putin. You exercise a great deal of power, but you are still ambitious. You don't exactly wake up every day thinking on how to knock the US off its pedestal, but it's never really far from your mind, and any ideas along that line will always find a willing ear. For Putin, this is nearly a foolproof solution, the only real consideration is what the US will do in response. You've already invaded the Ukraine and not drawn a military response. So why not do this?
So we have an established motive, an inarguable opportunity, and all of our intelligence agencies saying that there was at least some degree of influence. If Putin did not specifically authorize the hacks and subsequent leaks, he is certainly intensely pleased by this situation. Alexander Dugin and his friends in the Russian General Staff got everything they wanted, and not only that, they demonstrated the viability of this form of attack. If the goal is destabilization, one is led rather ineluctably towards this exact point of weakness.
The answer to this situation is to destabilize American politics. The voting system we have fairly obviously limits the power of minor parties, and encourages two large parties which are relatively homogenous in aims simply due to the laws of large numbers. So how are we, the electorate, driven to the polls? Wedge issues: global warming, border security, racism. The dissatisfaction with the major parties is very real, as are the underlying worldview differences, so it's not that we would not expect to see a strong conserv
This is why we need to ditch First Past the Post. The voting system encourages two large parties, which tend to be more alike (and centrist) than not, just because of the large numbers involved. But then we still need voters, so our party politics focuses around wedge issues. Our politicians very deliberately set us against one another, because they must. They have no incentive to do otherwise, nor to de-escalate any of these issues. American politics has become more fiercely partisan over the last few decades, and I am quite concerned that if this trend continues, it will be politically expedient for some asshole to lead this country to another civil war. At the very least there can be no particularly good argument against getting more information from the voter about their preferences.
For the record, and not that I enjoy his brand of politics more, but I suspect that the real loser of this recent election was Gary Johnson. He had some gaffes, but I feel like he would have had much stronger support if anyone had any expectation that he would win -- which is exactly the problem with FPTP, it encourages people to vote tactically, against their actual preferences.
Want to cast a real anti-Establishment vote? Support ranked choice voting. It's time to kick the lizards out, and they can take their damned political machine with them.
Dr. Christy certainly paints an alarming picture. It's a shame that he and Dr. Spencer are alone in their opinions. But I am sure that is the result of a vast conspiracy and not the quality of their ideas. So to repeat for both of your sakes, whether or not the GCMs are accurate is not an argument for or against AGW, any more than a potentially-flawed epidemiological model would invalidate the germ theory of disease. As it happens, Dr Christy's results are potentially interesting, but his presentation is fairly biased. I don't begrudge him that, I think. And if he or Dr. Spencer can come up with a plausible negative feedback mechanism then I am sure they would be taken quite seriously. The scientific consensus has reversed itself on this issue before, remember. The situation is analogous to the debate about dark matter. Yes, if you only look at galactic rotation curves, there is room for an alternate theory (MOND), and there have been a number of published papers. No presentations to Congress about the issue though, because it's not been made into a political issue. Multiple other lines of evidence however point to a different explanation. It's not completely impossible for some new observation to reverse the balance of evidence, but it hasn't happened yet, and the observations that would be required are about as unlikely as it is possible to get. Dr. Christy has already been a lead author on sections of the IPCC's assessments, it's not like people are ignoring his ideas or not incorporating them into the body of scientific literature. The issue is that his argument is flawed. Now, if you have nothing better to offer than Spencer and Christy I do believe we are done here. However, I would still encourage you to review the early history of AGW, as being fruitful for counterarguments. I would certainly like to see it disproven, and there were specific observations that have taken the theory from discredit to the consensus position. If your worldview can handle new information, you could potentially find additional reasons to sustain those objections. The argument you're presenting is crap, and everyone knows it. Find a better one.
I hate to point out that you seem to have failed to create a hyperlink. And you know, as I said, it's not a burden for me to support my statements. That you seem to have an issue would indicate that your position is insupportable. There has to be one person on the Internet who agrees with you, surely?
No, you're confusing youself. The lux measurement is the perceptual one, you know, the one that ignores wavelengths that humans can't see, and weights the wavelengths that we can see with peaks at the idealized human visual response. The actual radiant intensity at any given moment is going to be much greater. Measuring light levels in lux is completely useless unless you're a lighting director. It is a statement about human eyeballs, and should not be used when talking about things that are not human eyeballs.
Not that it matters to the point, but in fact they are pretty darn close
As it turns out, human visual response looks nothing likethe response of solar panels. Do note that, consistent with our other conclusions, the absorbed spectrum and peak are wider and differently located respectively. As far as I am aware, there isn't really a reason why we would expect people to try to build a solar cell that is less efficient than the human eye, especially since, as you say, clouds happen.
This was an easy mistake to make. Easy to the point where it's a little suspect why you're repeating it. The appropriate units would be watts per square meter, which is standard across the solar energy industry. I hope you are not using one cherry-picked (wrong) factoid as the basis for your anti-solar-energy stance. For anyone interested in some actual numbers, this calculator given an equation and computes the effective solar insolation (in W/m^2) for a given lat/long/percent cloud cover. Here's a calculator from NASA with many more parameters.
Disproving AGW would at this point require new physics, so there's not a lot of research towards it.There's a similarly distressing lack of research into over-unity devices and anti-gravity boots. It seems that after 150+ years the physics of CO2 are pretty well established. Did you know that AGW was completely discredited up until the mid 50s? Somehow the entire field completely changed over to thinking a different way, and scientists weren't fired en masse because there wasn't any sort of political controversy tied up in what the science said.
That chart shows that CO2 levels have not been elevated for some fifty million years. Very few species currently on Earth evolved under high-CO2 conditions, and that can especially be considered true for modern farming varietals, which tend to be genetically distinct from wild plants. Modern experiments with high-CO2 farming show decreases in growth above 1200ppm for most species,
And to the sibling poster, do any amount of research into the results of melting permafrost. It would be easier to farm the Sahara than the tundra under any climactic conditions.
The most correct distinction to make about climate change vs global warming is to distinguish between the overturning of the theory that the climate was cyclical and self-moderating, and the subsequent understanding that not only could it be changed, that it is being changed, and that human activity is the primary cause. The idea that the climate was (somehow) static persisted through the 1950s. I found a textbook the other day printed in that year which explicitly dismissed CO2 as a source of warming, and Callendar 1949 ("CAN CARBON DIOXIDE INFLUENCE CLIMATE?") paints an equally explicit picture of the theory's "chequered history". Evidence for ice ages of course had been known since the early 19th century, and were widely accepted by the latter half of that century, so there were many theories of climate change which did not discuss warming, and indeed Arrhenius' foundational 1896 paper presents the warming scenario merely for comparison.
There is absolutely a difference between "climate change" and "global warming", and both concepts did have to establish themselves separately. One imagines that it is still possible to research paleoclimate without necessarily taking explicit note of ongoing climatic changes. However, the study of the current climate is synonymous with the study of global warming.
Our eyes sense brightness according to a power law. What looks "about half as bright" to our eyes is actually about 15% as bright, in terms of luminous power. A sunny day is about 120,000lux, a cloudy day about 1,000lux. Meaning when it's cloudy, the sun's power is reduced by over 99%
So whether or not you meant to do so, this does illustrate what a catastrophically bad unit of measure the candela is. A fundamental unit that is weighted by a model of human vision is, well, not terribly fundamental, wouldn't you say? But I am sure you're not meaning to say that solar panels have the exact absorption characteristics as human eyes do. Maybe you would like to rethink your conclusions there slightly.
The process is inherently political because the IPCC's agenda is not scientific, it is political and globalist
That's all well and good, but the establishing science for AGW was done (necessarily) before the IPCC was founded, and whether they are or not political is really irrelevant to the correctness of the science. The person who is secure in their belief that their views represent objective reality does not need to ascribe political motivations to contrary evidence.
You did not give any links to the UAH data. I linked the wikipedia page, which said that the controversy had been resolved, and asked if you had any more recent studies-- or any sort of rational reason for believing -- that this was not true. To which you have yet to make a reply.
Of you could request the data sets from the source projects. If you are competent you will have no problem doing this
Of course I am not competent to be able to analyze the raw data. I have zero idea about how that instrumentation operates. Which is why I rely on expert opinion. But if you don't have a paper to show, I'm willing to grasp at straws. If you are clever enough to do such things, walk me through it, or maybe you have a blog post that describes how someone else was able to analyze it.
Then we will have established one out the dozens of claims that you have presented. You know, I'm happy to provide citations for things that I am sure about. The worst case is that I learn something new. I'd be happy to go through the entire basis for your belief, point by point, observation by observation. I'd be happy because I don't have to worry about whether or not my position is correct. Of all the things to be wrong about, I would be delighted to wrong about AGW. It's very clear that at this point we would need new physics for that, since the H2O-CO2 feedback is easily demonstrable in the lab, and no one has yet found a sufficiently strong negative feedback, but I certainly have many personal reasons for wishing otherwise. The observations of the radiative behavior of CO2 in the upper atmosphere and in the lab are inarguable. Either there is something wrong with our understanding of CO2, something wrong with our understanding of how radiation and heat behave in various atmospheres, or wrong about the composition of the atmosphere, or there exists some strong negative feedback that we're unaware of. You're not arguing any of that, you're arguing about some models and short-term temperature predictions. Why? Because your reasoning does not take into account any of the actual evidence for the theory. Plus, if you do have a physics background, you'll know that all of that stuff has some pretty solid evidence behind it. And the Arctic is very much melting like butter on a hot pan, so I'm not sure what your explanation is for that. Nothing to worry about? Oh hey, look at that. I guess now my hometown is on the wikipedia page for glacial ice loss.
Now, you were saying something about divergent predictions? Oh, right, you were going to provide some sort of evidence for your claims. I'm all ears.
You repeating the same horseshit over and over again is also not showing the data. You have presented nothing. I'll give you a hint, data is usually tabulated and often is summarized in a document with the name of a scientific journal at the beginning. Surely someone, somewhere has written an analysis that supports your ideas. You're not just basing your worldview on pictures from some guy's blog, right? Okay, well, let's loosen the terms a little bit. Cite anything that lets me reproduce whatever numbers you're talking about. Hell, even random blog posts would make a change from the same unsourced factoids.
And what is it with you people and insisting on politicizing the debate? You're making it quite clear that your only interest is the science that supports your political principles.
I did skip a sentence there, as you say the point was not entirely coherent, but it wasn't worth the trouble to post a correction. The first police forces in the US were created during the mid-19th Century. Prior to that, there were such things as beadles and tipstaves, night watchmen, and other private security forces, but they did not have guns, because muskets and long rifles are not particularly effective at that task. The first "bobbies" were armed with clubs and wooden noisemakers, which they later traded for whistles. Police forces in the UK still do not typically carry guns. The problem with police is that they are armed agents of the State, who as agents of the State are protected from the consequences of using those arms. I do see this issue as being consequential of the failure to revise the 2nd Amendment. It was said then that, "God made man, but Samuel Colt made him equal," and I am sure that it made sense with the widespread availability of the new repeating arms and handguns for the police to adopt similar means. My reading of history seems to support the idea that this was more or less an unintended consequence, and I believe it is not too bold to suggest that the rest of the history of police forces are an argument against police immunity, and potentially against their having lethal force at all. I feel very few people in this country would agree that the State should be able to kill citizens arbitrarily without trial, and that the Founders would be appalled, but that by giving these police a fairly literal license to kill, we are accepting that that can and will happen.
We should NOT be maintaining a standing army in peacetime
This is the ideologically correct answer, but it fails to address legitimate military needs. Large engines of war cannot be improvised easily, nor can experienced staff or intelligence officers, nor logistic/supply chains. WWI was among other things was an education in how difficult it can be to scale up an army from its pre-war size of around 100,000 (and about the same number of National Guardsmen) to the eventual ~2 million man American Expeditionary Force. Adhering to the general rule of "no peacetime military spending without a fairly immediately looming crisis" (which seems to be the general idea contained in the Federalist papers) also would prohibit maintaining sea- or airbases, and essentially all strategic weapons.
I don't see any particularly good options for resolving these issues. I'll probably be satisfied if we can just collectively sit down and discuss *all* of the issues, not just the right to one's personal arms. However, if you think that disbanding the military is going to be a good solution, I'd certainly be interested in hearing you support that view.
No, that is not what it means. It is a layman term with runs down to an abbreviation of "it does not eject reaction mass"
Those words are synonymous.You are simply wrong, and ignoring every word written on the subject because you can't otherwise reconcile your space fantasies with your knowledge of basic physics. Reactionless drives violate CoM by definition. But hey, maybe you'd rather hear it from Lubos Motl. Maybe that's a bit harsh. Sean Carroll? Ethan Siegel is also on record saying similar things, but you can't trust him, not when he has that kind of beard.
Anyway: if you can write down a few formulas why an EM drive violates CoE;D you probably get a Nobel Prize:D
Every equation with a term for momentum would be violated. Relativity though is easiest. You remember Einstein's thought experiment with the elevator, that you cannot determine whether you are at rest or in uniform motion from within it? So one consequence of this is that you can't do anything within that elevator to affect its motion, and of course these are pretty much restatements of Newton's first and third laws. For an exactly analogous scenario, imagine you are in a space in free fall in the center of a 10m cubic room. Einstein, Newton, and Galileo say that you will never be able to reach the sides of that room without throwing a ball or otherwise changing your mass. Now, you are correct in believing that any device which did lose mass in order to accelerate would be compliant with CoM/CoE, but that is not what is being claimed. This is not being described as a super-high-efficiency ion thruster, it is a basic electromagnetic device which claims to affect motion without reaction mass, as you yourself said. That means that you can use it to escape the 10m cube, or test whether your elevator is in uniform motion. If it is expelling some massive particles, then it will have to take those as fuel, and the Rocket Equation applies, and this is just a normal rocket drive with particularly bad efficiency.
That it is not violating CoM is self evident, or it would not produce thrust
The essence of your logical failure in a nutshell. If Q, Therefore P. P, Therefore Q. Logically, you cannot exclude the possibility that it produces thrust in violation of CoM. And in point of fact, the device does not produce thrust -- no one has been able to measure thrust in excess of their error bars, except those that failed to adequately quantify their systemic errors. And no, there are no "reputated institutions" working on this, even if that were an argument for the correctness of any position. And to forestall a couple other objections, no, dark matter won't save you as it is not charged, and there does not exist anywhere enough mass density for something this size to work as a bussard ramscoop.
The EmDrive is a fantasy fueled by those with more exposure to Star Trek than Einstein.
You have presented no evidence. You linked to one blog post with one image, which did not give any information about how that image was generated. There is no standard of evidence which can possibly encompass unsourced blog posts. If there is some sort of empirical evidence which disproves it, you should be able to post a link to it, or give a relevant journal citation. APK argues better than this.
There is no prohibition of a standing army in the second amendment, and the Federalist papers do note that explicitly. However, there is no positive mention of the concept of standing armies either in the Federalist papers nor any other writings of the Founders, they were universally opposed to them as an inherent threat to liberty. The authors of the Federalist papers considered that they had adequately prepared against such things without needing to put in an explicit proscription. And the various abuses committed by our police forces bear that out fairly well.
I am not arguing for disarmament. That is to say, I think it could be an acceptable option, but I am not suggesting any particular solution. Having a standing army and not a militia is unarguably against the wishes of our founders. What should be done about that is probably an issue for you NRA types to consider. If you feel like I have incorrectly read the Federalist papers or that I am incorrectly characterizing their writings please cite any contemporary source you like in support.
Once again, a post completely devoid of citations, and showing no indication that you have read any of the material presented. And as it happens, you have entirely misunderstood my comments on empiricism, but at this point correcting your misunderstanding seems to be an exercise in futility. Next time you wish to have a conversation about science, bring some citations.
Fascinating. What did the study say about the utter uselessness of the militia (as demonstrated by the burning of the Capitol in 1814), the intentions of the Founders not to have a military in peacetime, and the current lack of any organized militia, that being necessary to the security of a free state? Do you imagine that any part of warfare has changed since 1789? Do you feel that muskets and automatic machine guns should be treated identically by legislation? How are we doing on the citizen-farmer thing that the Founders were also in favor of? Is it possible that the conditions under which the 2nd Amendment were drafted have little or nothing to do with the society that has resulted?
I believe that it is only consistent, that if one wishes to argue the Founders' perspective on the second amendment, that if they argue in favor of an individual right to bear arms, they must also argue against the United States maintaining a standing army in peacetime. Furthermore, the Founders would probably not have considered our police forces as anything other than a standing army targeted against the People; certainly no such thing existed during their lifetimes. I am sure your mental gyrations will be fascinating to watch.
I love how frothy you're getting. I'm still repeating a few basic points, though, and you keep posting things that are trivially contradicted, which is a real shame. As I keep saying, there are and have been much better arguments against AGW in the past, and you do need some specific evidence to refute the theory. Such evidence has not been observed and there is no particularly compelling reason to believe it ever will be, of course, but you can't just hold up some tangentially-related failed prediction and claim it invalidates the whole thing.
The CAGW skeptics understand and practice science, because they accept the empirical evidence being presented by independent satellite and balloon measurements and comparing them with the IPCC's predictions, and the predictions have failed quite badly.
No, the deniers are cherry-picking datasets and presenting no evidence which affects the underlying theory, which is based on easily-verified physical properties of atmospheric gases. Empiricism means looking at all the data, not just that which supports your theory.
This is a complete failure of logic, sorry to say.
The theory is called anthropogenic global warming. It predicts global warming. There are number of specific ways that we expect that to happen, but we put the big prediction right in the title there.
But what the satellites saw is consistent with CO2 only warming with negligible effect from water vapor (and water vapor is the CORE of IPCC's claim for requiring political action).
That's not what the wikipedia article on the UAH records says, and it seems to be well cited.
IPCC's 'Global Warming' meme they have now very sneakily moved to the meaningless meme 'Climate Change
No, the name 'climate change' is older than 'global warming'. You would know this if you had bothered to read any of that history site I linked. As I said, the prevailing idea before the 1950s was that the climate did not change, or if it did, it was a cyclical change, and that things would go back to normal afterwards. Despite knowing that Ice Ages had occurred in the past, there was a pervasive belief that the climate could not change, or if it could then that would take place over millions of years. Multiple lines of evidence overturned this belief, and you can read all about it on that history site, or if you like you can get on Google Scholar and read the papers that were published yourself. Various incorrect theories of climate change accompanied the gradually-mounting evidence for Ice Ages in the 19th century, and it was on Ice Ages that climate change research initially focused. Carbon dioxide was not even known to be increasing until Keeling's measurements began in 1958, although there was some evidence to that effect previously. We can also reference Plass, 1956 "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change.", which you'll note refers to climate change in the title. The understanding that humans were emitting CO2 in excess of what the natural sinks could absorb also took several decades to overcome apparently contradictory measurements. After it was established that the climate could change, there was still necessary work to determine that CO2 could affect it. Global warming is a hyponym of climate change, and although currently they are more-or-less interchangably used today, we did have evidence for climatic changes and theories about it before anyone was concerned about warming, and the shift to using the term 'global warming' happened only after that became the obvious climatic change. Again, this is easily verified in the literature.
The wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on the UAH dataset doesn't seem to support the idea of a large divergence.
Once again, your arguments are equivalent to "nuh uh!". Once again, you are completely wrong and arguing merely from an ideological bias. The entire fucking point of a "reactionless drive" is that it violates CoM. That's what "reactionless" means. But hey, it's not like every reputable physicist has same the same damn thing. It's not like multiple independent lines of evidence and every physical theory we have say this is impossible. No, that stuff is all wrong because you would rather it not be true.
I've read the wikipedia articles. I've read Shawyer and White's papers, and McCulloch. All of which were lacking in basic physical knowledge at best, and word salad at worst. The EmDrive does not work, but if it did work, it would violate CoM/CoE. Source: literally everything that has ever been reported, plus all known physics. Your warp drive fantasies are not real and will never be real.
Yes, that was rather the point. But empiricism is not the only path to truth, and there is no particularly good basis with which to say it is the best path to truth. Rationalism is a completely acceptable alternative. And it is my contention that a large portion of the US population, especially those engaged in AGW denial, are not empirical, have no interest in being empirical, and have no notion that this could be a bad thing.
The IPCC made a specific prediction that the TLT would warm faster than the surface, this is the 'smoking gun' of AGW
There are a number of key predictions of AGW, but I don't recall that having been one offhand. Firstly it predicts global warming, and the observed warming must be considered the "smoking gun". Secondly it predicted the the warming effects would be more extreme at the poles, and for nighttime temperatures. It also predicted stratospheric cooling. All of these things have been observed. But again, the core evidence is the properties of CO2 and water vapor. Small inaccuracies in the year-to-year temperature changes of specific parts of the atmosphere can not be considered evidence for or against global warming. The wikipedia article on the UAH dataset doesn't seem to support the idea of a large divergence.
Much of the difference, at least in the Lower troposphere global average decadal trend between UAH and RSS, has been removed with the release of RSS version 3.3 in January 2011. RSS and UAH TLT are now within 0.003 K/decade of one another. Significant differences remain, however, in the Mid Troposphere (TMT) decadal trends.
I would imagine.003 K/decade is pretty close to the error bars there.
I have to assume that by "TCS" you are referring to some measure of climate sensitivity, but I have no idea from the context whether you're talking about the transient (TCR) or equilibrium (ECS) temperatures. Frankly I'm not sure what you think is a particularly massive difference. It looks like they're pretty close. Also, from wikipedia:
As estimated by the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) "there is high confidence that ECS is extremely unlikely less than 1C and medium confidence that the ECS is likely between 1.5C and 4.5C and very unlikely greater than 6C."[4] This is a change from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which said it was likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5 C with a best estimate of about 3 C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5 C. Values substantially higher than 4.5 C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values.[5] The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) said it was "likely to be in the range of 1.5 to 4.5 C".[6]
This again does not seem to fit with your description. It would also not be sufficient to invalidate AGW if it were true, although it could lead to some interesting new science. We need a strong negative feedback, a change in the properties of CO2/H2O, or a new way to radiate energy to space. None of these things are especially likely, but that's science for you.
Actually it does relate to thermodynamics. If EmDrive works it violates the conservation of momentum, which is also equivalent to violating conservation of energy, and also implies a "preferred frame" for the universe, and also that the laws of physics are different in different places, and potentially implies that the speed of light does actually vary. It would invalidate every physical theory that we have, and potentially end our ability to know what the "real" physical laws are. Not bad for a few guys and a hunk of copper. But, in actuality, they had a poor experimental design and worse error analysis.
That said, they're pretty far over their heads already, they may as well improve their experiment and learn something from the inevitable null result.
This would be a skeptical perspective, there are various other wrong arguments. As it happens it's one of the better wrong arguments available, but still insufficient. Links are likely to be first resource available rather than an authoritative source; the nice thing about empiricism is that it's consistent.
Doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases global surface temperatures by 1.16 K.
Yes, that's a reasonable figure.
we are not far off the conditions of CO2 starvation for plants where all plant life dies, since they evolved in an atmosphere of 2000 ppmV CO2
If plants were starved for CO2, we would not be seeing the global concentration rising. This also misses a much better argument. In the first decades of the 20th Century, AGW was discredited for a number of reasons, the relevant one being that it was thought that the oceans would be able to absorb and buffer any increase of CO2. There is 50 times the amount of dissolved carbon in the oceans than there is in the atmosphere, and it seemed obvious that anything happening to the atmosphere would necessarily be minor. That turned out not to be the case.
the lifetime is certainly under 10 years and possibly as short as 10 months
This is an extraordinary claim. I would ask you to provide a citation from a reputable journal, but I cannot imagine that a claim so blatantly unphysical would ever be accepted into a reputable journal. However, it's clear that the excess carbon is not being sequestered; however long it stays in the atmosphere is irrelevant to whether it is increasing.
The debate is entirely about what the effect of water vapor (clouds have) on these sensitivities.
Clouds are not water vapor, actually, they're condensed water. Water vapor is the stuff that's not visible. The Earth is actually opaque to IR. Water vapor and CO2 in the laboratory have a very strong feedback effect. Clouds do not cover 100% of the Earth's surface, but water vapor does, so we should intuitively expect that clouds should not have a greater effect than water vapor. Also, since it is undisputed that clouds also contribute to warming, the required negative feedback would need to be that much greater. Given that the positive feedbacks are as you say of alarming magnitude, this negative feedback should be fairly obvious. And yet no skeptic has been able to propose a mechanism. Sufficient evidence has not been presented to overturn the IPCC results.
Meanwhile the skeptics believe the IPCC computer models are wrong
Of course they are, "all models are wrong, some are useful". Modeling that atmosphere in two dimensions or as a column of gases is a very easy way to demonstrate the warming effect. But having an accurate or inaccurate model is irrelevant to whether the observations that it's built on are correct. You need the observat
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you should take a look at this. I don't know how much influence this guy has in the halls of government. Wikipedia would seem to imply that there is a considerable faction of their civil and military leadership which is very much interested in destabilizing American politics by inflaming racial tensions and supporting any and all dissidents.
You're generally arguing that it would be absurd for Russia to do these things, and it is absurd if you implicitly reject the notion that they would do so. Otherwise we can spin a pretty convincing narrative. Putin certainly has no love for Clinton, and is interested in increasing his share of world power. Since a direct military confrontation is a foregone conclusion, they turn to information and cultural warfare, and the well-worn tools of the spy trade. Hacking the voting machines directly is out of the question, but the majority of the people in the country are dumb enough to think that the major parties represent their interests, so the goal becomes controlling the narrative. Bribing journalists would be costly and prone to exposure. It's best to give them a story that is big enough that they have to report it. Hacking is deniable, doesn't require subverting anyone in a foreign nation, and has a fairly low cost and risk-reward ratio. Given the goal of destabilization, hacking a major political party becomes an obvious move. We've actually seen this exact scenario before, where state-level intelligence agents were caught attempting to hack the Democratic National Committee. We can probably assume that the intelligence interests between the major powers reflect the perceived threat level of the other powers, so it's probably safe to say that Russian hackers would be employed against US and Chinese targets primarily. It's likely that hacking attempts are made against the two major parties continually, but especially when the stakes are raised during an election.
So you're Putin. You exercise a great deal of power, but you are still ambitious. You don't exactly wake up every day thinking on how to knock the US off its pedestal, but it's never really far from your mind, and any ideas along that line will always find a willing ear. For Putin, this is nearly a foolproof solution, the only real consideration is what the US will do in response. You've already invaded the Ukraine and not drawn a military response. So why not do this?
So we have an established motive, an inarguable opportunity, and all of our intelligence agencies saying that there was at least some degree of influence. If Putin did not specifically authorize the hacks and subsequent leaks, he is certainly intensely pleased by this situation. Alexander Dugin and his friends in the Russian General Staff got everything they wanted, and not only that, they demonstrated the viability of this form of attack. If the goal is destabilization, one is led rather ineluctably towards this exact point of weakness.
The answer to this situation is to destabilize American politics. The voting system we have fairly obviously limits the power of minor parties, and encourages two large parties which are relatively homogenous in aims simply due to the laws of large numbers. So how are we, the electorate, driven to the polls? Wedge issues: global warming, border security, racism. The dissatisfaction with the major parties is very real, as are the underlying worldview differences, so it's not that we would not expect to see a strong conserv
This is why we need to ditch First Past the Post. The voting system encourages two large parties, which tend to be more alike (and centrist) than not, just because of the large numbers involved. But then we still need voters, so our party politics focuses around wedge issues. Our politicians very deliberately set us against one another, because they must. They have no incentive to do otherwise, nor to de-escalate any of these issues. American politics has become more fiercely partisan over the last few decades, and I am quite concerned that if this trend continues, it will be politically expedient for some asshole to lead this country to another civil war. At the very least there can be no particularly good argument against getting more information from the voter about their preferences.
For the record, and not that I enjoy his brand of politics more, but I suspect that the real loser of this recent election was Gary Johnson. He had some gaffes, but I feel like he would have had much stronger support if anyone had any expectation that he would win -- which is exactly the problem with FPTP, it encourages people to vote tactically, against their actual preferences.
Want to cast a real anti-Establishment vote? Support ranked choice voting. It's time to kick the lizards out, and they can take their damned political machine with them.
Dr. Christy certainly paints an alarming picture. It's a shame that he and Dr. Spencer are alone in their opinions. But I am sure that is the result of a vast conspiracy and not the quality of their ideas. So to repeat for both of your sakes, whether or not the GCMs are accurate is not an argument for or against AGW, any more than a potentially-flawed epidemiological model would invalidate the germ theory of disease. As it happens, Dr Christy's results are potentially interesting, but his presentation is fairly biased. I don't begrudge him that, I think. And if he or Dr. Spencer can come up with a plausible negative feedback mechanism then I am sure they would be taken quite seriously. The scientific consensus has reversed itself on this issue before, remember. The situation is analogous to the debate about dark matter. Yes, if you only look at galactic rotation curves, there is room for an alternate theory (MOND), and there have been a number of published papers. No presentations to Congress about the issue though, because it's not been made into a political issue. Multiple other lines of evidence however point to a different explanation. It's not completely impossible for some new observation to reverse the balance of evidence, but it hasn't happened yet, and the observations that would be required are about as unlikely as it is possible to get. Dr. Christy has already been a lead author on sections of the IPCC's assessments, it's not like people are ignoring his ideas or not incorporating them into the body of scientific literature. The issue is that his argument is flawed. Now, if you have nothing better to offer than Spencer and Christy I do believe we are done here. However, I would still encourage you to review the early history of AGW, as being fruitful for counterarguments. I would certainly like to see it disproven, and there were specific observations that have taken the theory from discredit to the consensus position. If your worldview can handle new information, you could potentially find additional reasons to sustain those objections. The argument you're presenting is crap, and everyone knows it. Find a better one.
I hate to point out that you seem to have failed to create a hyperlink. And you know, as I said, it's not a burden for me to support my statements. That you seem to have an issue would indicate that your position is insupportable. There has to be one person on the Internet who agrees with you, surely?
I believe that it's safe to say that consensus is how we evaluate all competing models of reality.
No, you're confusing youself. The lux measurement is the perceptual one, you know, the one that ignores wavelengths that humans can't see, and weights the wavelengths that we can see with peaks at the idealized human visual response. The actual radiant intensity at any given moment is going to be much greater. Measuring light levels in lux is completely useless unless you're a lighting director. It is a statement about human eyeballs, and should not be used when talking about things that are not human eyeballs.
Not that it matters to the point, but in fact they are pretty darn close
As it turns out, human visual response looks nothing likethe response of solar panels. Do note that, consistent with our other conclusions, the absorbed spectrum and peak are wider and differently located respectively. As far as I am aware, there isn't really a reason why we would expect people to try to build a solar cell that is less efficient than the human eye, especially since, as you say, clouds happen.
This was an easy mistake to make. Easy to the point where it's a little suspect why you're repeating it. The appropriate units would be watts per square meter, which is standard across the solar energy industry. I hope you are not using one cherry-picked (wrong) factoid as the basis for your anti-solar-energy stance. For anyone interested in some actual numbers, this calculator given an equation and computes the effective solar insolation (in W/m^2) for a given lat/long/percent cloud cover. Here's a calculator from NASA with many more parameters.
Disproving AGW would at this point require new physics, so there's not a lot of research towards it.There's a similarly distressing lack of research into over-unity devices and anti-gravity boots. It seems that after 150+ years the physics of CO2 are pretty well established. Did you know that AGW was completely discredited up until the mid 50s? Somehow the entire field completely changed over to thinking a different way, and scientists weren't fired en masse because there wasn't any sort of political controversy tied up in what the science said.
That chart shows that CO2 levels have not been elevated for some fifty million years. Very few species currently on Earth evolved under high-CO2 conditions, and that can especially be considered true for modern farming varietals, which tend to be genetically distinct from wild plants. Modern experiments with high-CO2 farming show decreases in growth above 1200ppm for most species,
And to the sibling poster, do any amount of research into the results of melting permafrost. It would be easier to farm the Sahara than the tundra under any climactic conditions.
The most correct distinction to make about climate change vs global warming is to distinguish between the overturning of the theory that the climate was cyclical and self-moderating, and the subsequent understanding that not only could it be changed, that it is being changed, and that human activity is the primary cause. The idea that the climate was (somehow) static persisted through the 1950s. I found a textbook the other day printed in that year which explicitly dismissed CO2 as a source of warming, and Callendar 1949 ("CAN CARBON DIOXIDE INFLUENCE CLIMATE?") paints an equally explicit picture of the theory's "chequered history". Evidence for ice ages of course had been known since the early 19th century, and were widely accepted by the latter half of that century, so there were many theories of climate change which did not discuss warming, and indeed Arrhenius' foundational 1896 paper presents the warming scenario merely for comparison.
There is absolutely a difference between "climate change" and "global warming", and both concepts did have to establish themselves separately. One imagines that it is still possible to research paleoclimate without necessarily taking explicit note of ongoing climatic changes. However, the study of the current climate is synonymous with the study of global warming.
Our eyes sense brightness according to a power law. What looks "about half as bright" to our eyes is actually about 15% as bright, in terms of luminous power. A sunny day is about 120,000lux, a cloudy day about 1,000lux. Meaning when it's cloudy, the sun's power is reduced by over 99%
So whether or not you meant to do so, this does illustrate what a catastrophically bad unit of measure the candela is. A fundamental unit that is weighted by a model of human vision is, well, not terribly fundamental, wouldn't you say? But I am sure you're not meaning to say that solar panels have the exact absorption characteristics as human eyes do. Maybe you would like to rethink your conclusions there slightly.
The process is inherently political because the IPCC's agenda is not scientific, it is political and globalist
That's all well and good, but the establishing science for AGW was done (necessarily) before the IPCC was founded, and whether they are or not political is really irrelevant to the correctness of the science. The person who is secure in their belief that their views represent objective reality does not need to ascribe political motivations to contrary evidence.
You did not give any links to the UAH data. I linked the wikipedia page, which said that the controversy had been resolved, and asked if you had any more recent studies-- or any sort of rational reason for believing -- that this was not true. To which you have yet to make a reply.
Of you could request the data sets from the source projects. If you are competent you will have no problem doing this
Of course I am not competent to be able to analyze the raw data. I have zero idea about how that instrumentation operates. Which is why I rely on expert opinion. But if you don't have a paper to show, I'm willing to grasp at straws. If you are clever enough to do such things, walk me through it, or maybe you have a blog post that describes how someone else was able to analyze it.
Then we will have established one out the dozens of claims that you have presented. You know, I'm happy to provide citations for things that I am sure about. The worst case is that I learn something new. I'd be happy to go through the entire basis for your belief, point by point, observation by observation. I'd be happy because I don't have to worry about whether or not my position is correct. Of all the things to be wrong about, I would be delighted to wrong about AGW. It's very clear that at this point we would need new physics for that, since the H2O-CO2 feedback is easily demonstrable in the lab, and no one has yet found a sufficiently strong negative feedback, but I certainly have many personal reasons for wishing otherwise. The observations of the radiative behavior of CO2 in the upper atmosphere and in the lab are inarguable. Either there is something wrong with our understanding of CO2, something wrong with our understanding of how radiation and heat behave in various atmospheres, or wrong about the composition of the atmosphere, or there exists some strong negative feedback that we're unaware of. You're not arguing any of that, you're arguing about some models and short-term temperature predictions. Why? Because your reasoning does not take into account any of the actual evidence for the theory. Plus, if you do have a physics background, you'll know that all of that stuff has some pretty solid evidence behind it. And the Arctic is very much melting like butter on a hot pan, so I'm not sure what your explanation is for that. Nothing to worry about? Oh hey, look at that. I guess now my hometown is on the wikipedia page for glacial ice loss.
Now, you were saying something about divergent predictions? Oh, right, you were going to provide some sort of evidence for your claims. I'm all ears.
You repeating the same horseshit over and over again is also not showing the data. You have presented nothing. I'll give you a hint, data is usually tabulated and often is summarized in a document with the name of a scientific journal at the beginning. Surely someone, somewhere has written an analysis that supports your ideas. You're not just basing your worldview on pictures from some guy's blog, right? Okay, well, let's loosen the terms a little bit. Cite anything that lets me reproduce whatever numbers you're talking about. Hell, even random blog posts would make a change from the same unsourced factoids.
And what is it with you people and insisting on politicizing the debate? You're making it quite clear that your only interest is the science that supports your political principles.
Where's the data? I know you know how to hyperlink.
I did skip a sentence there, as you say the point was not entirely coherent, but it wasn't worth the trouble to post a correction. The first police forces in the US were created during the mid-19th Century. Prior to that, there were such things as beadles and tipstaves, night watchmen, and other private security forces, but they did not have guns, because muskets and long rifles are not particularly effective at that task. The first "bobbies" were armed with clubs and wooden noisemakers, which they later traded for whistles. Police forces in the UK still do not typically carry guns. The problem with police is that they are armed agents of the State, who as agents of the State are protected from the consequences of using those arms. I do see this issue as being consequential of the failure to revise the 2nd Amendment. It was said then that, "God made man, but Samuel Colt made him equal," and I am sure that it made sense with the widespread availability of the new repeating arms and handguns for the police to adopt similar means. My reading of history seems to support the idea that this was more or less an unintended consequence, and I believe it is not too bold to suggest that the rest of the history of police forces are an argument against police immunity, and potentially against their having lethal force at all. I feel very few people in this country would agree that the State should be able to kill citizens arbitrarily without trial, and that the Founders would be appalled, but that by giving these police a fairly literal license to kill, we are accepting that that can and will happen.
We should NOT be maintaining a standing army in peacetime
This is the ideologically correct answer, but it fails to address legitimate military needs. Large engines of war cannot be improvised easily, nor can experienced staff or intelligence officers, nor logistic/supply chains. WWI was among other things was an education in how difficult it can be to scale up an army from its pre-war size of around 100,000 (and about the same number of National Guardsmen) to the eventual ~2 million man American Expeditionary Force. Adhering to the general rule of "no peacetime military spending without a fairly immediately looming crisis" (which seems to be the general idea contained in the Federalist papers) also would prohibit maintaining sea- or airbases, and essentially all strategic weapons.
I don't see any particularly good options for resolving these issues. I'll probably be satisfied if we can just collectively sit down and discuss *all* of the issues, not just the right to one's personal arms. However, if you think that disbanding the military is going to be a good solution, I'd certainly be interested in hearing you support that view.
Still no citations. I don't know why you think repeating yourself demonstrates anything.
It's always the dumbest arguments with you.
No, that is not what it means. It is a layman term with runs down to an abbreviation of "it does not eject reaction mass"
Those words are synonymous.You are simply wrong, and ignoring every word written on the subject because you can't otherwise reconcile your space fantasies with your knowledge of basic physics. Reactionless drives violate CoM by definition. But hey, maybe you'd rather hear it from Lubos Motl. Maybe that's a bit harsh. Sean Carroll? Ethan Siegel is also on record saying similar things, but you can't trust him, not when he has that kind of beard.
Anyway: if you can write down a few formulas why an EM drive violates CoE ;D you probably get a Nobel Prize :D
Every equation with a term for momentum would be violated. Relativity though is easiest. You remember Einstein's thought experiment with the elevator, that you cannot determine whether you are at rest or in uniform motion from within it? So one consequence of this is that you can't do anything within that elevator to affect its motion, and of course these are pretty much restatements of Newton's first and third laws. For an exactly analogous scenario, imagine you are in a space in free fall in the center of a 10m cubic room. Einstein, Newton, and Galileo say that you will never be able to reach the sides of that room without throwing a ball or otherwise changing your mass. Now, you are correct in believing that any device which did lose mass in order to accelerate would be compliant with CoM/CoE, but that is not what is being claimed. This is not being described as a super-high-efficiency ion thruster, it is a basic electromagnetic device which claims to affect motion without reaction mass, as you yourself said. That means that you can use it to escape the 10m cube, or test whether your elevator is in uniform motion. If it is expelling some massive particles, then it will have to take those as fuel, and the Rocket Equation applies, and this is just a normal rocket drive with particularly bad efficiency.
That it is not violating CoM is self evident, or it would not produce thrust
The essence of your logical failure in a nutshell. If Q, Therefore P. P, Therefore Q. Logically, you cannot exclude the possibility that it produces thrust in violation of CoM. And in point of fact, the device does not produce thrust -- no one has been able to measure thrust in excess of their error bars, except those that failed to adequately quantify their systemic errors. And no, there are no "reputated institutions" working on this, even if that were an argument for the correctness of any position. And to forestall a couple other objections, no, dark matter won't save you as it is not charged, and there does not exist anywhere enough mass density for something this size to work as a bussard ramscoop.
The EmDrive is a fantasy fueled by those with more exposure to Star Trek than Einstein.
You have presented no evidence. You linked to one blog post with one image, which did not give any information about how that image was generated. There is no standard of evidence which can possibly encompass unsourced blog posts. If there is some sort of empirical evidence which disproves it, you should be able to post a link to it, or give a relevant journal citation. APK argues better than this.
There is no prohibition of a standing army in the second amendment, and the Federalist papers do note that explicitly. However, there is no positive mention of the concept of standing armies either in the Federalist papers nor any other writings of the Founders, they were universally opposed to them as an inherent threat to liberty. The authors of the Federalist papers considered that they had adequately prepared against such things without needing to put in an explicit proscription. And the various abuses committed by our police forces bear that out fairly well.
I am not arguing for disarmament. That is to say, I think it could be an acceptable option, but I am not suggesting any particular solution. Having a standing army and not a militia is unarguably against the wishes of our founders. What should be done about that is probably an issue for you NRA types to consider. If you feel like I have incorrectly read the Federalist papers or that I am incorrectly characterizing their writings please cite any contemporary source you like in support.
Once again, a post completely devoid of citations, and showing no indication that you have read any of the material presented. And as it happens, you have entirely misunderstood my comments on empiricism, but at this point correcting your misunderstanding seems to be an exercise in futility. Next time you wish to have a conversation about science, bring some citations.
Fascinating. What did the study say about the utter uselessness of the militia (as demonstrated by the burning of the Capitol in 1814), the intentions of the Founders not to have a military in peacetime, and the current lack of any organized militia, that being necessary to the security of a free state? Do you imagine that any part of warfare has changed since 1789? Do you feel that muskets and automatic machine guns should be treated identically by legislation? How are we doing on the citizen-farmer thing that the Founders were also in favor of? Is it possible that the conditions under which the 2nd Amendment were drafted have little or nothing to do with the society that has resulted?
I believe that it is only consistent, that if one wishes to argue the Founders' perspective on the second amendment, that if they argue in favor of an individual right to bear arms, they must also argue against the United States maintaining a standing army in peacetime. Furthermore, the Founders would probably not have considered our police forces as anything other than a standing army targeted against the People; certainly no such thing existed during their lifetimes. I am sure your mental gyrations will be fascinating to watch.
I love how frothy you're getting. I'm still repeating a few basic points, though, and you keep posting things that are trivially contradicted, which is a real shame. As I keep saying, there are and have been much better arguments against AGW in the past, and you do need some specific evidence to refute the theory. Such evidence has not been observed and there is no particularly compelling reason to believe it ever will be, of course, but you can't just hold up some tangentially-related failed prediction and claim it invalidates the whole thing.
The CAGW skeptics understand and practice science, because they accept the empirical evidence being presented by independent satellite and balloon measurements and comparing them with the IPCC's predictions, and the predictions have failed quite badly.
No, the deniers are cherry-picking datasets and presenting no evidence which affects the underlying theory, which is based on easily-verified physical properties of atmospheric gases. Empiricism means looking at all the data, not just that which supports your theory.
This is a complete failure of logic, sorry to say.
The theory is called anthropogenic global warming. It predicts global warming. There are number of specific ways that we expect that to happen, but we put the big prediction right in the title there.
But what the satellites saw is consistent with CO2 only warming with negligible effect from water vapor (and water vapor is the CORE of IPCC's claim for requiring political action).
That's not what the wikipedia article on the UAH records says, and it seems to be well cited.
IPCC's 'Global Warming' meme they have now very sneakily moved to the meaningless meme 'Climate Change
No, the name 'climate change' is older than 'global warming'. You would know this if you had bothered to read any of that history site I linked. As I said, the prevailing idea before the 1950s was that the climate did not change, or if it did, it was a cyclical change, and that things would go back to normal afterwards. Despite knowing that Ice Ages had occurred in the past, there was a pervasive belief that the climate could not change, or if it could then that would take place over millions of years. Multiple lines of evidence overturned this belief, and you can read all about it on that history site, or if you like you can get on Google Scholar and read the papers that were published yourself. Various incorrect theories of climate change accompanied the gradually-mounting evidence for Ice Ages in the 19th century, and it was on Ice Ages that climate change research initially focused. Carbon dioxide was not even known to be increasing until Keeling's measurements began in 1958, although there was some evidence to that effect previously. We can also reference Plass, 1956 "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change.", which you'll note refers to climate change in the title. The understanding that humans were emitting CO2 in excess of what the natural sinks could absorb also took several decades to overcome apparently contradictory measurements. After it was established that the climate could change, there was still necessary work to determine that CO2 could affect it. Global warming is a hyponym of climate change, and although currently they are more-or-less interchangably used today, we did have evidence for climatic changes and theories about it before anyone was concerned about warming, and the shift to using the term 'global warming' happened only after that became the obvious climatic change. Again, this is easily verified in the literature.
The wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on the UAH dataset doesn't seem to support the idea of a large divergence.
This is the observed da
Once again, your arguments are equivalent to "nuh uh!". Once again, you are completely wrong and arguing merely from an ideological bias. The entire fucking point of a "reactionless drive" is that it violates CoM. That's what "reactionless" means. But hey, it's not like every reputable physicist has same the same damn thing. It's not like multiple independent lines of evidence and every physical theory we have say this is impossible. No, that stuff is all wrong because you would rather it not be true.
I've read the wikipedia articles. I've read Shawyer and White's papers, and McCulloch. All of which were lacking in basic physical knowledge at best, and word salad at worst. The EmDrive does not work, but if it did work, it would violate CoM/CoE. Source: literally everything that has ever been reported, plus all known physics. Your warp drive fantasies are not real and will never be real.
This is a completely anti-scientific statement.
Yes, that was rather the point. But empiricism is not the only path to truth, and there is no particularly good basis with which to say it is the best path to truth. Rationalism is a completely acceptable alternative. And it is my contention that a large portion of the US population, especially those engaged in AGW denial, are not empirical, have no interest in being empirical, and have no notion that this could be a bad thing.
The IPCC made a specific prediction that the TLT would warm faster than the surface, this is the 'smoking gun' of AGW
There are a number of key predictions of AGW, but I don't recall that having been one offhand. Firstly it predicts global warming, and the observed warming must be considered the "smoking gun". Secondly it predicted the the warming effects would be more extreme at the poles, and for nighttime temperatures. It also predicted stratospheric cooling. All of these things have been observed. But again, the core evidence is the properties of CO2 and water vapor. Small inaccuracies in the year-to-year temperature changes of specific parts of the atmosphere can not be considered evidence for or against global warming. The wikipedia article on the UAH dataset doesn't seem to support the idea of a large divergence.
I would imagine .003 K/decade is pretty close to the error bars there.
I have to assume that by "TCS" you are referring to some measure of climate sensitivity, but I have no idea from the context whether you're talking about the transient (TCR) or equilibrium (ECS) temperatures. Frankly I'm not sure what you think is a particularly massive difference. It looks like they're pretty close. Also, from wikipedia:
This again does not seem to fit with your description. It would also not be sufficient to invalidate AGW if it were true, although it could lead to some interesting new science. We need a strong negative feedback, a change in the properties of CO2/H2O, or a new way to radiate energy to space. None of these things are especially likely, but that's science for you.
Actually it does relate to thermodynamics. If EmDrive works it violates the conservation of momentum, which is also equivalent to violating conservation of energy, and also implies a "preferred frame" for the universe, and also that the laws of physics are different in different places, and potentially implies that the speed of light does actually vary. It would invalidate every physical theory that we have, and potentially end our ability to know what the "real" physical laws are. Not bad for a few guys and a hunk of copper. But, in actuality, they had a poor experimental design and worse error analysis.
That said, they're pretty far over their heads already, they may as well improve their experiment and learn something from the inevitable null result.
This would be a skeptical perspective, there are various other wrong arguments. As it happens it's one of the better wrong arguments available, but still insufficient. Links are likely to be first resource available rather than an authoritative source; the nice thing about empiricism is that it's consistent.
Doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases global surface temperatures by 1.16 K.
Yes, that's a reasonable figure.
we are not far off the conditions of CO2 starvation for plants where all plant life dies, since they evolved in an atmosphere of 2000 ppmV CO2
Carbon dioxide levels have not been at that level for since, what, the mid-Cretaceous? Tens of millions of years at any rate. For most crops the saturation point will be reached at about 1,000—1,300 ppm under ideal circumstances., higher levels inhibit growth. There are any number of studies which bear these figures out, but as it happens I have also personally experimented with gardening with supplemental CO2, and with my hydroponic setup anything higher than 1500 ppm produced noticeably less healthy plants.
...[plants] rapidly absorb human-emitted CO2..."
If plants were starved for CO2, we would not be seeing the global concentration rising. This also misses a much better argument. In the first decades of the 20th Century, AGW was discredited for a number of reasons, the relevant one being that it was thought that the oceans would be able to absorb and buffer any increase of CO2. There is 50 times the amount of dissolved carbon in the oceans than there is in the atmosphere, and it seemed obvious that anything happening to the atmosphere would necessarily be minor. That turned out not to be the case.
the lifetime is certainly under 10 years and possibly as short as 10 months
This is an extraordinary claim. I would ask you to provide a citation from a reputable journal, but I cannot imagine that a claim so blatantly unphysical would ever be accepted into a reputable journal. However, it's clear that the excess carbon is not being sequestered; however long it stays in the atmosphere is irrelevant to whether it is increasing.
The debate is entirely about what the effect of water vapor (clouds have) on these sensitivities.
Clouds are not water vapor, actually, they're condensed water. Water vapor is the stuff that's not visible. The Earth is actually opaque to IR. Water vapor and CO2 in the laboratory have a very strong feedback effect. Clouds do not cover 100% of the Earth's surface, but water vapor does, so we should intuitively expect that clouds should not have a greater effect than water vapor. Also, since it is undisputed that clouds also contribute to warming, the required negative feedback would need to be that much greater. Given that the positive feedbacks are as you say of alarming magnitude, this negative feedback should be fairly obvious. And yet no skeptic has been able to propose a mechanism. Sufficient evidence has not been presented to overturn the IPCC results.
Meanwhile the skeptics believe the IPCC computer models are wrong
Of course they are, "all models are wrong, some are useful". Modeling that atmosphere in two dimensions or as a column of gases is a very easy way to demonstrate the warming effect. But having an accurate or inaccurate model is irrelevant to whether the observations that it's built on are correct. You need the observat