Don't be silly. Any climatologist will tell you that's the first thing you have to take into account for the climate. We've had good measurements of insolation since the 1950's and very good satellite measurements since satellites started measuring it in the 1970's (or early 1980's). The simple fact is that the Sun's output hasn't varied enough to account for all of the temperature change. At best it can account for less than 10% of it. On top of that if the warming was caused by the Sun the whole atmosphere would be warming. But in fact the stratosphere has been cooling, a signature of greenhouse gas caused warming.
This is what I meant, actually -- that the insolation variation alone is too small to account for the warming. But that's also very likely true over the last 300 years post LIA, and it warmed nevertheless. And yes, I look at the thermal proxy and otherwise temperature records and reconstructions.
And I agree that CO_2 almost certainly causes some warming. Where I disagree is that I do not think that one can determine how much, and I vehemently disagree that the climate sensitivity is as high as has been asserted. I also think that our probable degree of knowledge and confidence is being overstated, although in the working group reports a lot more doubt is expressed than ever makes it out to the public.
Finally, I absolutely agree that the right thing to do is stick to the science. The GHE is certainly real -- clearly visible in TOA vs BOA spectroscopy. However, the CO_2-linked component of this is just one factor in a very complicated nonlinear chaotic system that is never quite in a state of dynamical equilibrium, with a huge degree of natural variability visible in the past that we do understand and cannot (retroactively) predict or convincingly explain. The net CO_2 linked GHE-driven AGW could range from basically zero (nearly completely cancelled in the long run by negative feedbacks or other bad habits like air pollution aerosols) to substantial, but I think its effect is probably being overestimated and certainly being overstated, and is likely to be less than disastrous, or less disastrous than some of the measures being urged to ameliorate or prevent it. I'm not completely alone in this, even among physicists interested in the climate.
My specific personal interest in the science is more in the statistics of it. There is an amazing series of papers by a guy named Koutsoyiannis who has been studying hydrology "forever" out of Athens (Greece, not Georgia). He long ago observed that water levels and periods of drought and flood follow patterns of "punctuated equilibrium" that are describable by what he calls Hurst-Kolmogorov statistics. Those same patterns are clearly visible in the thermal record, and indeed the 33 years of the satellite era are precisely that -- stable temperatures for 15 years, a sudden jump over 2-3 years associated with a single event (an unusually strong El Nino), followed by stable temperatures for 15 years (where by "stable" I mean specficially that there is a great deal of noise and oscillation, but that the linear trend is not resolvable from zero).
Two intervals does not a theory make, but it is very suggestive, especially when those temperatures are very likely to be (in some sense) a projection of a complicated poincare cycle around an occult multidimensional attractor. The interesting question from this point of view is what moves the attractors (and what keeps them locally stable!)
This is a macrodynamics question, not a microdynamics question. I agree that we know a lot of the components of the microdynamics, but there are macrodynamical features that I don't think can be captured in a detailed model because they represent large scale self-organization of the underlying heat flow. Even only within the Holocene, phenomena like the Younger Dryas suggest that there is some serious variability that can be triggered strictly out of internal non-linearity completely independent of CO_2. CO_2 coul
By the thirty year standard, there has barely been enough time to resolve any climate variation in the modern post-CO_2 world, let alone ascribe the fractions to AGW and natural variation. Indeed, the entire satellite era comprises just one of these intervals, and IMO that is the only stretch where we have truly reliable global data mostly free from the possibility of a variety of biases that have to be estimated, often badly. In that stretch, nearly 100% of the warming can arguably be ascribed to a single El Nino event, as the UAH LTT data is basically flat from 1979 to 1997, goes steeply up in 1998 to overshoot a 0.3C total rise that more or less is flat thereafter up to the present. One could easily be tempted to conclude that "a strong ENSO causes global warming", based strictly on this data, were it not post hoc ergo propter hoc, like so much of the discussion on both sides (which also begs the question of "what causes ENSO and what modulates its strength", which is AFAIK rather unknown).
As to whether 16 years is too short, I'm sure that I don't have to quote the 2008 report to you, which excluded a 15 year stretch without statistically significant warming at the 95% or better confidence level. It is the stubborn perpetuation of this stretch that is requiring reconsideration of earlier, often egregious, estimates of climate sensitivity. They're coming down, and they'll come down more every year without warming. I know that it is physics-based dogma that solar variation cannot possibly affect climate, but historically there has been a fair bit of correlation between solar state and climate (and there are a few proposed plausible causal mechanisms, which I will not presume to judge) and we are very likely to be at the peak of the lowest solar cycle in 100 years, with the prospect of the next cycle being even lower or the sun entering a Maunder minimum. At the end of this we may know a lot more than we do today -- either warming will resume with a vengeance (as it has a lot of catching up to do at this point) or it will remain flat or even cool. Either of the latter two will force substantial revision of everything -- flat by gradually reducing sensitivity still more but perhaps leaving the GCMs alive, actual cooling might cause the GCMs to be thrown under the bus and rebuilt from scratch.
Remember that there are substantial, poorly understood nonlinearities in the climate system, and that even very small non-CO_2 influences can be amplified. There has been a substantial and (as far as I know) unexplained reduction in stratospheric water vapor content in the current solar cycle, for example. This in turn can actually lower the troposphere (permitting escape from greater depth) and reducing ALR warming. Is this a chance fluctuation (quite possible) or evidence of a process we hadn't anticipated? There is a lot more science undone than done in climate science, because we have so little high quality instrumental data over such a very short time frame -- basically a single "minimum interval" by the very 30 year standard you cite.
Climate models are tested by hindcasting, sure. Can they hindcast the MWP and LIA? Can they explain why there was a warming trend from the beginning of the thermometric era until the present in the absence of CO_2? In other words, can they explain the baseline climate variation over geological timescales? I don't think so. They are attempting to fit/predict local anomalies without anything like certain knowledge of local baseline behavior and where they are literally incapable AFAIK of reproducing it outside of a very narrow time window. As I said, I love models and modelling. It's one of the things I do. But it helps to have a model that first works in the big strokes arena, getting the gross behavior right and THEN worrying about the details. I rather think that current models have this backwards, and are thus confusing signal and noise.
It is easy to fit nonlinear functions with an overcomplete basis in a completely
Personally, as a medical researcher, I like to try it and see what happens, but the patients usually prefer we have some theoretical justification and do most of our experimenting in animals (imperfect models) first. In terms of altering global climate I can see how the experimental approach might also have a few issues.
Excellent point. So, for a disease that has never in human-recorded history occurred due to the causes ascribed to its future occurrence, for which there is no empirical evidence in recorded history or prehistory that it is occurring other than an unproven theoretical argument, you would, I'm sure, endorse the medical adage "do no harm" by not prescribing what may be quack remedies for a disease that might not actually exist, it only "theoretically" exists, when those remedies have many severe side effects.
I agree.
It's really rather like not prescribing daily antibiotics for the entire human population because we are pretty sure -- theoretically -- that some disease is likely to evolve that the antibiotics might -- or might not -- prevent. Or taking any other sort of extreme measure in response to Pascal's Wager, however it is formulated. By not placing the predictions of future damage far, far above any visible sign of damage now one justifies the human cost and side effects of any measure taken to combat it, and of course transfer a rather lot of political power into the hands of those we elect to take those measures without any possible mechanism for them being held accountable, either politically or economically.
a) Global temperatures have largely levelled off over the last 16 years. Yes, this is also looking at the end of a time series, but over that time global CO_2 levels have risen dramatically. The lower troposphere temperature, as one of the few truly global indicators, is simply not showing the sort of growth it did over the first 17 years, and most of that growth is associated with a single discrete event -- the 1998 El Nino. Sea surface temperatures follow this trend even more directly, being nearly flat on both sides of the El Nino. It is also very, very difficult to separate out the CO_2 derived "warming signal" from the natural rise in temperature the planet has experienced after the little ice age, almost all of which had nothing to do with CO_2. The evidence that CO_2 forced warming is associated with a high climate sensitivity is weak already and weakening further. I do not know what sort of confidence one should place in high sensitivity predictions -- there isn't even good agreement among climate scientists or climate models, and the uncertainty is well-represented in the AR working group reports, just not in their summary for policy makers.
b) The only way to test climate models is to wait for decades and compare them to actual data. This is a test they have not done particularly well with over the last 16 years. In the meantime, one has to assign a lot less confidence to their predictions than is commonly done, given that they are trying to solve what is literally the most difficult problem in computational physics in the world, out to truly absurd future times. Their ability to hindcast and e.g. explain the last 1000 years of climate data is essentially nil. I personally just think that we don't yet know the right physics, or perhaps we do know the basic physics itself but that the complexity of the model is not yet computable. Tiny errors in a highly multivariate nonlinear system can have profound effects the further away you go. I also don't have a lot of confidence in various input assumptions -- not when they are applied to the geological data over long time spans. I think it will take as long as the rest of the century just to get the physics right, and if we were LUCKY we might get it mostly right in 20-30 more years of satellite data (the only data I have a lot of confidence in -- too many thumbs on too many scales in the thermometric record, as evidenced by the increasing divergence between reported land surface temperatures and LT and SS temperatures.
c) We know ice is forming as well as melting. Total sea ice isn't even changing a whole lot, and again it went through a very similar cycle back in the 30's, without CO_2. We simply don't have enough observational data to tell whether what is happening is mostly normal. And nearly all of the observed SLR is from the normal thermal expansion of seawater, and is not happening at an alarming rate.
But the main point is that I completely agree that we need to look carefully at cost vs benefit, based on the actual evidence and not unproven models. The actual evidence does not support drastic and expensive action, it supports research into alternative energy resources that might -- when mature in a decade or three -- be able to reduce the consumption of carbon based energy without causing a worldwide energy depression worse than the problem it seeks to "cure". There is a substantial human cost to most of the steps being taken now to "ameliorate" the problem. In fact, they form a real-time "catastrophe" of their own, one definitely affecting the world right now, not in 80 years, maybe. Every day of energy poverty in the third world is another day of misery, and like it or not, carbon-based energy is cheap and plentiful compared to the currently available alternatives.
Then there is the politics of it all. Nuclear power, for example, could substantially reduce our reliance on coal using well
One should indeed! One should also be very leary of fitting any kind of fit, linear or nonlinear, to data over only 10-15 years that has varied rather consistently over 140 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise. Personally, I think the figure says all one could possibly need to say. Note well that anthropogenic CO_2 was completely irrelevant over almost all of this time series even according to the IPCC. Note also the overall range of the entire chart, roughly 1/4 of which supposedly incorporates "substantial" anthropogenic global warming -- just under 9 inches in 140 years. Note also that there are several periods with rise rates comparable to the present, for even longer periods, e.g. 1938-1950, where CO_2 was again not a factor even according to the IPCC reports.
It may be absolutely true that global climate models predict large amounts of sea level rise, but there is no actual evidence in the form of large rises in sea level to support this!. Perhaps there will be in the future. Perhaps not. I'm a theoretical physicist, and I just love theories. I'm a computational physicist, and love large scale model computations. But at the end of the day, I'm just a physicist, and the theories and computations have to agree with observation. So far, these do not, not even over the last 140 years, and they don't even give us insight into the large climate fluctuations observed over the last (fill in the blank with any number greater than 1000) number of years.
In the meantime, I work every summer literally living at the edge of the ocean facing straight out through the Beaufort inlet in North Carolina. Although I know that tidal gauge data indicates that there has been a sea level rise there over the time I've been working there or otherwise visiting, I certainly can't see it in my own (literal) back yard, where if there were any substantial and consistent rise -- I'm talking a rise of a few inches -- my back yard would be underwater at high tide. My neighbors have lived in their houses for over 40 years, and (yes, I've asked) haven't observed any rise at all, let alone an alarming one, of the highwater marks on their docks or seawalls (where the tops of their docks would be underwater at high tide if there were any consistent rise). This is absolutely anecdotal evidence, although the ocean being isostatic it is difficult to imagine it going up one place and not everyplace else, but see the curve above for the best global tidal gauge and satellite data in summary.
If you looked at this data and didn't know it was "sea level rise" and destined to rise because of Evil Human Activity -- if you were told it was the sales price of widgets, or the mean length of romance novels, over time -- and were asked "is there a statistically meaningful acceleration in trend" visible anywhere in the record -- you wouldn't even bother to do an actual statistical analysis because the answer is fairly evidently "no". If you were asked to estimate how likely it is that any aspect of this trend would justify a final sales figure for widgets of 48 (9 plus 39 more) in only 88 more years -- that would be over four times the entire growth over 142 years in only 90 years -- you wouldn't hesitate to give odds of 99 to 1 against. Bayesian analysis might alter the 99 to 1, sure (depending on how sure you are about your priors) but not even Bayes is going to comfortably make this 99 to 1 for.
I'm just sayin'...
rgb
(I will now wait for the usual "refutation" of this, the assertion I'm being paid off by the oil industry or the like. I wish. Instead, take due note of my Russell quote, below.)
Go for it. Bear in mind that the actual data is that SLR is around 3 mm/year -- depending on how short a segment of the data you are willing to cherrypick to prove a point. Since the assertion is made above that SLR is supposed to be a meter more than previously claimed -- hence around 2 meters or even more -- and since here we are in 2012 with SLR having gone up a whole inch (to the nearest inch) in the last decade -- we have to take something like 78 inches and split it up among 88 years. Hmm, if SLR went up by an order of magnitude next year we might just make it.
Otherwise, bear in mind that people who currently have beachfront property could die of old age before SLR becomes an issue for them. You (dear reader) could die of old age before SLR gets high enough to realize a profit on land you bought inland anticipating that it would become oceanfront. Or not.
Why is this sad? Was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire sad? The breakup of the British Empire? Relax, pop yourself a bag of popcorn, and enjoy the show -- it's been a long time coming and worth every minute.
Wait, wait! AC is talking to itself again! It's so confusing. Maybe we need "first AC" and "second AC" but no, then I suppose it wouldn't be anonymous. In the meantime, it sounds like AC is very confused...
Oh, I'm not arguing -- a lot of our linux-centric sysadmin folks here like apple laptops, and as you say, they've long since gotten to where they've got a full or nearly full complement of unixoid tools and features and most of the important OSS offerings. Of course, the students I'm referring to are not in your (or my:-) geek class. They just like them because they are thin, cool as in socially acceptable, and work pretty well. I'd say the "work pretty well" is one of the most important things in the list, even.
My own gripes against apple are strictly premium price, the fact that I need cone-head amounts of compute power even on my laptops a lot of the time (e.g. i7 processors and a mountain of ram), the fact that all of my source is written under linux, and the fact that its "coolness" actually annoys me. Oh, and the fact that my wife's iPhone got a SINGLE DROP OF WATER on the charging port, popped the little red tab, and even though it was fully functional (until it ran out of charge) it refused to charge and had to be completely replaced for almost 1/3 of its cost in spite of us having a service plan on it. Otherwise known as "Rip-Off Hardware Design", brought to you by a company eager to take your money in exchange for coolness.
Personally, I like my Casio android phone with its waterproof covers on all ports. You can (reportedly) drop it into a meter of water, pull it out, wipe it off, and it not only works, it works literally untouched. Not that I care to tempt the gods, but all that AND it cost a fraction of the iphone and has all of the android apps available, most for free.
Apple does sell its own version of kool-ade. That's not to assert that sometimes they don't deliver value for money -- it is to assert that they display the same shocking arrogance that any market leader seems to gain when they get on top in the PC universe. All that engineering skill -- so much that they actually bother to engineer in the little red switch! -- but somehow they can't manage to build a charging interface or user interface that a drop of water can't kill.
Or worse, they could easily do so, but prefer to make all of that money when people have to buy second and third iphones etc.
I was in our local supermall yesterday. They had an interior kiosk set up to sell Surfaces, manned by an easy half dozen earnest young salespeople hired for the season. They didn't have a single customer in view -- not one in all the times I walked by it. Everybody standing around looking bored.
The Apple store about fifty meters away, on the other had was absolutely packed, as it always is, with customers waiting in line. It wasn't even a busy night at the mall -- parking was actually pretty easy for the season.
The really interesting question is -- can Microsoft compete ANYWHERE on a level playing field? If they didn't have the world's computer retailers in a ball-lock with their pricing formula, would they even exist? The answer is not so clear. I've watched student PC and laptop ownership transition from nearly all WinXX PCs to nearly all Apple products in only five years. iPhone, iPad, iPod, thinline apple laptop -- standard operating equipment for current college students. A smattering of Droid tabs and phones in there -- it is the nerd product and also pretty cool. Even linux-based systems -- the choice of the ubergeek -- are starting to compete with Windows systems for a whole generation of kids.
If Valve/Steam works out and games move over the Linux big time, Windows could actually experience the start of its long awaited death spiral.
Except that you can practice. State learning matters. If somebody DOES drive all the time high, they very likely learn to compensate, but it is those first few times... and too many people would have lots of state learning on "video games". It would need to be a test nobody is likely to be able to practice on ahead of time.
Perhaps a road simulator video game. That would actually make sense. If they can't drive a video simulator well enough to avoid simple road circumstances that might lead to a crash, then they shouldn't be driving no matter what the reason...
amendment prohibiting redistribution of money to the states
uneven redistribution of money, conditional use of money, surely, but the provision is already there, in the reservation of the powers to the states. The federal government should not be able to coerce any laws out of the states. If they wanted to pass a federal law raising the drinking age, they should have done so. It would have then been challenged, and would have lost the challenge. Using highway funds as an end run around the inability of the Federal Government to pass a law of this sort itself is de facto proof that it violates the constitution.
This isn't about taxation, BTW. One could argue about their right to differentially tax things to accomplish some end as a completely separate issue. It is strictly about bribery and economic coercion to extend federal powers to issues explicitly reserved to the states.
What in the world were they (the SCOTUS) thinking?
Sure but the public argument is that you are a dastardly fiend for not doing Argon filled glass and a Prius anyway, damn the cost, because the real cost of not doing so is the end of the world when the sky falls and the seas rise.
It's really a strange modern variant of Pascal's Wager -- by making the cost of the "catastrophe" associated with AGW sufficiently great, they create an unlimited bias in the expectation value of outcomes. Even if "catastrophic" global warming is a 1% chance, by making it a million times more expensive (if it happens) than doing nothing, they can make it a 10,000 to one bet that mitigation is the economical choice and justify any investment or political strategy to accomplish it, just as Pascal pointed out regarding the "bet" that God exists -- moderate costs if you bet that God exists and are wrong, but infinite punishments (costs) if you bet God doesn't exist but are wrong (forgetting entirely about the benefits in both cases as well, although they are equally skewed between "none" for the atheist or theist alike if there is no God, "infinitely good" if there is a God and you pick the right God and get into "heaven" for eternity).
Again, otherwise I mostly agree with your reply. Personally, I've got R30 in the attic, low-E double paned windows on the house, and three uber-efficient furnace/ACs doing the three floors of my house, plus a tankless water heater. My energy expenses are indeed about a third of what they were (or would have been, extrapolating usage and prices) and yes, the amortization schedule is long enough that each of the investments will not really pay for the cost of the money in less than 15 to 20 years. That's sort of "break even". A 10 year amortization would be much better. Of the changes, I personally love the windows the most. Good windows matter, and one can e.g. clean them from the inside and they lock securely and have little flip-thingies so that you can leave them open and not let humans raise them fully to get in and they are very, very quiet compare to the old crappy windows we had. And I don't even "believe" in CAGW, and suspect AGW is minimal against the background GW of completely natural origin associated with coming out of the LIA.
As you say, many of the things done won't "sacrifice our economy", and the reason I introduced the extreme version of the argument is to draw attention to the parallel to Pascal's Wager, where a sufficiently large negative payoff justifies any strategy that might avoid it. Similar things apply to the risk of kilometer scale asteroids falling, global pandemics occurring, nuclear war occurring, even terrorism -- make the negative payoff high enough even at low risk, amplify the public perception of risk, and people will cheerfully give up their civil liberties and endure enormous expense and inconvenience to mitigate what is really a tiny risk. We forever lock the barn door once a horse is flown but ignore the open window through which our chickens are about to fly.
I personally would like to see the extreme edges taken off the entire debate. Don't predict meter-high sea level rise (and hence unimaginable "disaster", with unbounded costs) while the actual measured rate of sea level rise has been 9 whole inches since 1870 and is currently around 3 mm a year, or less than 9 inches more by the end of the century (assuming one cherrypicks the least favorable interval to use to compute the rise -- a fairer estimate would be a constant extrapolation of the post 1870 rate). Don't predict the melting of the ice caps (again, disaster) with Antarctic ice on the rise and just about matching the decrease in Arctic ice -- say instead that we don't really understand what and how polar ice is modulated. Don't predict horrible storms and droughts (disaster, worth any amount of money to mitigate) when there is zero evidence of increased drought, zero evidence of increased frequency or severity of storms. All of these things are predicted, but they are not actually happening.
Well, this isn't quite true. If you eat (say) an ounce of high-grade, THC-rich bud mixed into a bowl or two of chili you will learn that a) THC really is a hallucinogen. Who knew?; b) that while you will not be dead (no known fatal dose), you will be pretty much incapable of moving or doing complex anything, inclined to doze off, and quite capable of getting lost walking a few blocks down the street to get home. Been there, done that. The same is true to a lesser extent doing bong hits or smoking joints -- marijuana has a dazzling array of psychoactive compounds with quite different effects and concentrations. The one thing about doing bong hits or smoking joints is that it tends to be self-limiting as one reaches the point of physical impairment because it is incremental, and the time of maximum impairment is relatively short.
So the safest thing to say is that somebody who isn't trying to get maximally stoned and who isn't smoking or eating weed at a rate or in a way that boosts THC up to the levels that seriously mess with your cognitive abilities is likely to self-regulate their high to levels that leave them quite functional and capable of driving with only a slightly elevated risk of accident, equivalent to drinking a beer or two no more. This is, in fact, the rule far more than the exception.
However, one certainly can get truly wasted on marijuana, hashish, pure bud, and even get differently wasted on different variants of weed that have been bred for different concentrations of different cannabinoids.
You, and others reading this thread, might want to take a quite detour through:
that works through some of the psychopharmacology of pot. Sound bit facts: The human brain has more receptors that respond to cannabinoids than to components of any other drug or substance. There are many, many such cannabinoids. The brain's reaction to different cannabinoids in different strains of pot is therefore quite different depending on the particular mix and the overall concentrations. For example (from the article) Cannabis Sativa strains are known for their "cerebral high" with relatively little body involvement and leave one reasonably functionally unimpaired, at the cost of introducing a certain amount of anxiety/paranoia. Cannabis Indica, OTOH, is quite sedative and not a good idea for people who have to function while high. These factors are used in the medical marijuana business to literally prescribe different strains of pot for daytime and nighttime use, and is also a major factor in genetic crossbreeding carried out by growers legal and illegal across the country.
A big dose of high-potency Indica strains is not the best thing to take onboard right before you plan to drive through rush hour.
Ah, silly beanie, video game tests won't work, not for somebody who has "practiced" playing video games high (which would very likely be everybody under the age of 30 and a lot of people older than that).
Back in the days when I used to get high daily I also used to play pinball and ping pong and other games involving nearly instantaneous reflexes in order to succeed. I was truly excellent at both, high. I played the best evening of ping pong in my life high one night, with a friend who was also high. We were literally smashing the ball back and forth at maximum for volleys of twenty or more exchanges at top speed before somebody would miss, looking for a moment like ping pong olympiads. Pinball ditto -- marijuana often increases your ability to concentrate, and does not interfere with your reflexes in anything like the way alcohol (a depressant that will eventually render you incapable of coordinated movement or thought) does.
As I remarked above, "doubling the risk of a fatal crash" is multiplying a number near zero by two, and roughly matches the increase in risk of drinking a single beer. Marijuana is enormously variable, and so the best thing to do is deal with visible impairment and not worry about chemical tests at all.
Bear in mind also that the normal risk of fatal crashes is low, so doubling it is doubling a number very near zero as it is.
Contrast that with alcohol (quote from a 1991 NIH article):
"Based on driver fatalities in single-vehicle crashes, it was estimated that each 0.02 percentage increase in the BAC of a driver with non-zero BAC nearly doubles the risk of being in a fatal crash."
That is probably not quite a beer's worth of alcohol for most body weights. So to put it another way, somebody who smokes pot while driving -- not "before", but during (a thing that in my youth I did with remarkable frequency) -- is roughly as impaired as if they had had just consumed a single beer. At those levels one does have to wonder about the error bars in the study -- statistically resolving one near-zero from another near-zero is actually remarkably difficult and requires ever so many samples and a totally unbiased sampling scheme with a complete lack of confounding variables -- so your assertion that the actual risk might even go down in those that aren't smoking pot and drinking a beer (where the latter is also difficult to detect and also doubles your risk all by itself) is not without possible merit.
"At BACs in the 0.05-0.09 percent range, the likelihood of a crash was at least nine times greater than at zero BAC for all age groups. Younger drivers with BACs in the 0.05-0.09 range had higher relative risks than older drivers, and females had higher relative risks than males. At very high BACs (at or above 0.15 percent), the risk of crashing was 300 to 600 times the risk at zero or near-zero BACs."
Note that at BAC's that are still in the legal range in most states, single car fatalities are nearly an order of magnitude greater than the single "doubling" of risk for immediate use of marijuana. That strongly suggests that the best thing to do about "impairment" from marijuana is -- ignore it, or as suggested above, use a field sobriety test, not a blood or saliva test. It is more or less irrelevant to driving skill. I would say (again, based on extensive experience) that this is not entirely true -- one can eat or smoke enough, potent enough, marijuana that driving is ill-advised, but in those cases field sobriety tests would be nearly impossible to pass as well. But it is actually somewhat difficult to get that stoned, and most pot smokers that I knew didn't want to drive when they were -- too scary.
But the simplest proofs are this. Whether or not it is legal, smoking pot and driving has been nearly universal forever among those that smoke pot. Most states are utterly unable to test for it, yet estimates of prevalence of usage (almost certainly low) suggest that anywhere up to 1/3 or 1/2 of people in certain age ranges at least occasionally smoke. Yet there is no positive association with this same group being a high risk on the road, outside of its tendency to drink. Alcohol is indeed a dangerous substance when it comes to driving, for obvious reasons, even for relatively small amounts. Pot is not, not until consumption is at extreme levels.
The last thing that confounds this is age. The distribution of fatal and non-fatal accidents with age is quite scary. A stoned 40 year old -- I mean a seriously wasted 40 year old stoner -- with a risk of accident 3 times his age-linked norm -- is a safer driver than a stone cold sober 19 year old. "Silverbacks" -- drivers on the high side of 75, where one's eyesight, hearing, and brain are all breaking down -- are safer still. Why? Because they drive (sober or not) carefully, and in particular far more conservatively than younger risk taking overconfident drivers. I'm living through my own sons' driving experience -- one at age 17 has his first car, now multiply scarred from driving it a whole month. One now 22, who at 18 took his eyes off of the road
A mere 80 or so years too late, of course. But better late than never.
Now if any state had the testicular fortitude to challenge them over their utterly unconstitutional use of the threat of withholding federal highway funds from states that failed to raise the drinking age to 21, we might see a restoration of sanity in that direction as well. Otherwise we might as well just ditch the constitution and abolish state and local government and get it all over with.
But getting the US government out of the marijuana game as the first step to getting it largely out of the drug game altogether might be good first steps to dismantling the current police state, and in the process saving perhaps 100 billion dollars (in all costs) nationwide. Maybe more -- drugs are roughly a half-trillion dollar business globally, and laundering drug money is a major mainstay of our banking system and creates a veritable shadow government with a steady stream of untaxed, illegal income that produces compounded wealth and disproportionate power for those that are involved.
It also opens up the states that legalize it to entirely new (taxable, now legitimate) industries -- not just recreational pot but an entire spectrum of hemp-derived products that are difficult to impossible to produce at this time. The hemp plant was enormously useful before it was made illegal, and to some extent was made illegal because it was so useful. I wish NC would follow in CO and WA's footsteps, because hemp would make an ideal cash crop to replace tobacco (the real "killer drug" of the US).
Goodness, do you know, I put exactly the same curve on top of the UAH data and it looks remarkably different. Although again how well or poorly it does depends a lot on how you cherrypick the insertion point, no doubt. Bottom line is UAH 33 year anomaly is a whopping 0.33 C -- which works out remarkably accurately to 0.1 C/decade, 1 degree C per century, with a lot of that increase coming from a single discrete event -- the El Nino warming of 1997-1998. It was nearly flat before (within noise). It has been nearly flat afterwards (within noise).
Could UAH suddenly go straight on back up? Sure. Has it? No. Could it go down? Absolutely (it has gone down into negative territory several times in the last couple of years, and there are reasons to think that the world is in a weakly cooling phase now that the PDO has reversed). The point again isn't that AGW isn't a possibility, that CAGW isn't a possibility -- it is that it is by no means a certainty. The George Mason survey of members of the AGU and AMS found that it isn't even true that all climate scientists think that AGW, let along CAGW, is a certainty, and the majority believe in AGW but not the C.
So when a top article cites warming consistent with the C when temperatures have been basically flat for 15 years and rising at only 0.1C per decade over the last 30 -- during which the bulk of the supposedly "anthropogenic" part of the post LIA warming occurred -- well, believe it if you want to, but personally I want something like believable data to support the assertion. In the meantime, I remain politely open minded.
I agree with pretty much everything you say. Note well: I was being a bit sarcastic (in context) about things like the Ordovician-Silurian and last glaciation because I was replying to somebody who picked a particular interval that showed extreme warming "at the 95% confidence level" which is and remains bullshit. The 15 year interval isn't quite cherrypicked -- it was stated -- some time ago, and by proponents of CAGW -- that it is the outer limit of an interval where natural variation could prevent the inevitable progression of AGW on a catastrophic scale. The point being, that since we are at that limit, it is increasingly unlikely (the longer the planet stubbornly resists warming to suit the theory) that the theories that predict extreme warming (not some warming, but extreme warming) are correct.
Their response, of course, was to participate in ad hominem and doubt my honesty, which is typical of "accepters" (if one might introduce the moral opposite of "deniers") who don't want to consider any of the negative evidence for CAGW any more than the deniers want to accept or acknowledge positive evidence. Sadly, one could play logical fallacy bingo all night and all day on the "accepter" or "denier" blogs.
As for this:
So you think changes are a net cost? Making our energy usage more efficient is more often a net gain. Worth doing regardless of whether there is global warming. Of course you can spend hugely on things such as expensive materials that are lightweight, but there's no need, not when there is so much low hanging fruit we're ignoring. We blow a lot of money on peacock style displays. People buy large vehicles and houses for the sake of appearances. Surely we can find some other way to show off that doesn't risk the climate. There's even better stuff than that. How about smarter traffic lights? Or do you enjoy idling at a red light while no traffic is present on the cross street?
Well said, sir, and I absolutely agree. But then one also has to consider carbon trading -- something that has no effect but to transfer money selectively into pockets that do nothing to earn it at the expense of nearly everybody in a way that even the proponents acknowledge will have no noticeable effect on CO_2 levels by the end of the century. One also has to do honest appraisals of the "catastrophic" costs that avoiding carbon based fuel supplies that are relatively cheap, plentiful, and reliable incur in the poorest countries in the world, where one of the primary things limiting the rise in the standard of living is energy availability. Not that this is easy when people are generating bullshit numbers like "400,000 people dying each year" due to (presumably anthropogenic) "climate change" and throwing them out into the public discourse, or asserting that the sea level is rising at alarming and unheard of levels, when there is no actual data to support them and a great deal to contradict them.
Increasing the efficiency of our usage of energy is just peachy and as you say often makes economic sense as well, although a lot of times it does not because of things like marginal cost and amortization. Is it better to use your gas guzzler (already paid for) for another five or ten years or buy a Prius at a price so high that even with the savings in gas you spend 50% more actual money? Spend $10,000 on a high efficiency AC/furnace (something I did last year) or eke another few years out of a much lower efficiency unit I already owned, when the amortized savings from the $10,000 investment will not be recovered in my lifetime and MAY not be recovered in the expected lifetime of the improved hardware? Buy a $30 LED 60W equivalent light bulb (containing e.g. arsenic almost certain to make its way into the environment eventually), a $4 CF 60W equivalent light bulb (that contains mercury that is almost certain to make its way into the environment eventually), or a $1 incandescent light bulb that you could grind up and eat safely, if you could chew glass and tungsten. When those cos
Because starting in the middle of the Roman Warm Period, the Holocene Optimum, or the Medieval Warm Period would be too confusing. Might as well start in 16000 BCE -- that's a good time, d'you think? If we fit a straight line fit from there, it predicts what, 10 or 15C of warming over the next 10000 or so years. You tell me what the signal is, and what is the noise, using YOUR favorite cherrypicked interval, or we could look at the entire dataset back to the Ordovician-Silurian transition (Ice age that began when CO_2 was 7000 ppm, almost 1 percent CO_2) and stop worrying so much.
All of them. In particular WoW and Diablo X, but really all of them. Yes, I've run WoW under Cedega, yes I've run Diablo on VMs, yes one can run them under Wine, but I want true native code, not emulated, simulated, virtualized. I'm looking forward to maybe -- just maybe -- seeing this happen over the next 3 years. Games with actual accelerated high density graphics, compiled for and running on Linux. What a concept.
Slashdot Mirror
The truly enlightened pagen worships jove. Full emacs needs to go on a diet, and vi, well, let's just say that they spell it e-VI-l for a reason...
Don't be silly. Any climatologist will tell you that's the first thing you have to take into account for the climate. We've had good measurements of insolation since the 1950's and very good satellite measurements since satellites started measuring it in the 1970's (or early 1980's). The simple fact is that the Sun's output hasn't varied enough to account for all of the temperature change. At best it can account for less than 10% of it. On top of that if the warming was caused by the Sun the whole atmosphere would be warming. But in fact the stratosphere has been cooling, a signature of greenhouse gas caused warming.
This is what I meant, actually -- that the insolation variation alone is too small to account for the warming. But that's also very likely true over the last 300 years post LIA, and it warmed nevertheless. And yes, I look at the thermal proxy and otherwise temperature records and reconstructions.
And I agree that CO_2 almost certainly causes some warming. Where I disagree is that I do not think that one can determine how much, and I vehemently disagree that the climate sensitivity is as high as has been asserted. I also think that our probable degree of knowledge and confidence is being overstated, although in the working group reports a lot more doubt is expressed than ever makes it out to the public.
Finally, I absolutely agree that the right thing to do is stick to the science. The GHE is certainly real -- clearly visible in TOA vs BOA spectroscopy. However, the CO_2-linked component of this is just one factor in a very complicated nonlinear chaotic system that is never quite in a state of dynamical equilibrium, with a huge degree of natural variability visible in the past that we do understand and cannot (retroactively) predict or convincingly explain. The net CO_2 linked GHE-driven AGW could range from basically zero (nearly completely cancelled in the long run by negative feedbacks or other bad habits like air pollution aerosols) to substantial, but I think its effect is probably being overestimated and certainly being overstated, and is likely to be less than disastrous, or less disastrous than some of the measures being urged to ameliorate or prevent it. I'm not completely alone in this, even among physicists interested in the climate.
My specific personal interest in the science is more in the statistics of it. There is an amazing series of papers by a guy named Koutsoyiannis who has been studying hydrology "forever" out of Athens (Greece, not Georgia). He long ago observed that water levels and periods of drought and flood follow patterns of "punctuated equilibrium" that are describable by what he calls Hurst-Kolmogorov statistics. Those same patterns are clearly visible in the thermal record, and indeed the 33 years of the satellite era are precisely that -- stable temperatures for 15 years, a sudden jump over 2-3 years associated with a single event (an unusually strong El Nino), followed by stable temperatures for 15 years (where by "stable" I mean specficially that there is a great deal of noise and oscillation, but that the linear trend is not resolvable from zero).
Two intervals does not a theory make, but it is very suggestive, especially when those temperatures are very likely to be (in some sense) a projection of a complicated poincare cycle around an occult multidimensional attractor. The interesting question from this point of view is what moves the attractors (and what keeps them locally stable!)
This is a macrodynamics question, not a microdynamics question. I agree that we know a lot of the components of the microdynamics, but there are macrodynamical features that I don't think can be captured in a detailed model because they represent large scale self-organization of the underlying heat flow. Even only within the Holocene, phenomena like the Younger Dryas suggest that there is some serious variability that can be triggered strictly out of internal non-linearity completely independent of CO_2. CO_2 coul
By the thirty year standard, there has barely been enough time to resolve any climate variation in the modern post-CO_2 world, let alone ascribe the fractions to AGW and natural variation. Indeed, the entire satellite era comprises just one of these intervals, and IMO that is the only stretch where we have truly reliable global data mostly free from the possibility of a variety of biases that have to be estimated, often badly. In that stretch, nearly 100% of the warming can arguably be ascribed to a single El Nino event, as the UAH LTT data is basically flat from 1979 to 1997, goes steeply up in 1998 to overshoot a 0.3C total rise that more or less is flat thereafter up to the present. One could easily be tempted to conclude that "a strong ENSO causes global warming", based strictly on this data, were it not post hoc ergo propter hoc, like so much of the discussion on both sides (which also begs the question of "what causes ENSO and what modulates its strength", which is AFAIK rather unknown).
As to whether 16 years is too short, I'm sure that I don't have to quote the 2008 report to you, which excluded a 15 year stretch without statistically significant warming at the 95% or better confidence level. It is the stubborn perpetuation of this stretch that is requiring reconsideration of earlier, often egregious, estimates of climate sensitivity. They're coming down, and they'll come down more every year without warming. I know that it is physics-based dogma that solar variation cannot possibly affect climate, but historically there has been a fair bit of correlation between solar state and climate (and there are a few proposed plausible causal mechanisms, which I will not presume to judge) and we are very likely to be at the peak of the lowest solar cycle in 100 years, with the prospect of the next cycle being even lower or the sun entering a Maunder minimum. At the end of this we may know a lot more than we do today -- either warming will resume with a vengeance (as it has a lot of catching up to do at this point) or it will remain flat or even cool. Either of the latter two will force substantial revision of everything -- flat by gradually reducing sensitivity still more but perhaps leaving the GCMs alive, actual cooling might cause the GCMs to be thrown under the bus and rebuilt from scratch.
Remember that there are substantial, poorly understood nonlinearities in the climate system, and that even very small non-CO_2 influences can be amplified. There has been a substantial and (as far as I know) unexplained reduction in stratospheric water vapor content in the current solar cycle, for example. This in turn can actually lower the troposphere (permitting escape from greater depth) and reducing ALR warming. Is this a chance fluctuation (quite possible) or evidence of a process we hadn't anticipated? There is a lot more science undone than done in climate science, because we have so little high quality instrumental data over such a very short time frame -- basically a single "minimum interval" by the very 30 year standard you cite.
Climate models are tested by hindcasting, sure. Can they hindcast the MWP and LIA? Can they explain why there was a warming trend from the beginning of the thermometric era until the present in the absence of CO_2? In other words, can they explain the baseline climate variation over geological timescales? I don't think so. They are attempting to fit/predict local anomalies without anything like certain knowledge of local baseline behavior and where they are literally incapable AFAIK of reproducing it outside of a very narrow time window. As I said, I love models and modelling. It's one of the things I do. But it helps to have a model that first works in the big strokes arena, getting the gross behavior right and THEN worrying about the details. I rather think that current models have this backwards, and are thus confusing signal and noise.
It is easy to fit nonlinear functions with an overcomplete basis in a completely
Personally, as a medical researcher, I like to try it and see what happens, but the patients usually prefer we have some theoretical justification and do most of our experimenting in animals (imperfect models) first. In terms of altering global climate I can see how the experimental approach might also have a few issues.
Excellent point. So, for a disease that has never in human-recorded history occurred due to the causes ascribed to its future occurrence, for which there is no empirical evidence in recorded history or prehistory that it is occurring other than an unproven theoretical argument, you would, I'm sure, endorse the medical adage "do no harm" by not prescribing what may be quack remedies for a disease that might not actually exist, it only "theoretically" exists, when those remedies have many severe side effects.
I agree.
It's really rather like not prescribing daily antibiotics for the entire human population because we are pretty sure -- theoretically -- that some disease is likely to evolve that the antibiotics might -- or might not -- prevent. Or taking any other sort of extreme measure in response to Pascal's Wager, however it is formulated. By not placing the predictions of future damage far, far above any visible sign of damage now one justifies the human cost and side effects of any measure taken to combat it, and of course transfer a rather lot of political power into the hands of those we elect to take those measures without any possible mechanism for them being held accountable, either politically or economically.
A recipe for disaster.
rgb
I don't argue with most of this. A few points:
a) Global temperatures have largely levelled off over the last 16 years. Yes, this is also looking at the end of a time series, but over that time global CO_2 levels have risen dramatically. The lower troposphere temperature, as one of the few truly global indicators, is simply not showing the sort of growth it did over the first 17 years, and most of that growth is associated with a single discrete event -- the 1998 El Nino. Sea surface temperatures follow this trend even more directly, being nearly flat on both sides of the El Nino. It is also very, very difficult to separate out the CO_2 derived "warming signal" from the natural rise in temperature the planet has experienced after the little ice age, almost all of which had nothing to do with CO_2. The evidence that CO_2 forced warming is associated with a high climate sensitivity is weak already and weakening further. I do not know what sort of confidence one should place in high sensitivity predictions -- there isn't even good agreement among climate scientists or climate models, and the uncertainty is well-represented in the AR working group reports, just not in their summary for policy makers.
b) The only way to test climate models is to wait for decades and compare them to actual data. This is a test they have not done particularly well with over the last 16 years. In the meantime, one has to assign a lot less confidence to their predictions than is commonly done, given that they are trying to solve what is literally the most difficult problem in computational physics in the world, out to truly absurd future times. Their ability to hindcast and e.g. explain the last 1000 years of climate data is essentially nil. I personally just think that we don't yet know the right physics, or perhaps we do know the basic physics itself but that the complexity of the model is not yet computable. Tiny errors in a highly multivariate nonlinear system can have profound effects the further away you go. I also don't have a lot of confidence in various input assumptions -- not when they are applied to the geological data over long time spans. I think it will take as long as the rest of the century just to get the physics right, and if we were LUCKY we might get it mostly right in 20-30 more years of satellite data (the only data I have a lot of confidence in -- too many thumbs on too many scales in the thermometric record, as evidenced by the increasing divergence between reported land surface temperatures and LT and SS temperatures.
c) We know ice is forming as well as melting. Total sea ice isn't even changing a whole lot, and again it went through a very similar cycle back in the 30's, without CO_2. We simply don't have enough observational data to tell whether what is happening is mostly normal. And nearly all of the observed SLR is from the normal thermal expansion of seawater, and is not happening at an alarming rate.
But the main point is that I completely agree that we need to look carefully at cost vs benefit, based on the actual evidence and not unproven models. The actual evidence does not support drastic and expensive action, it supports research into alternative energy resources that might -- when mature in a decade or three -- be able to reduce the consumption of carbon based energy without causing a worldwide energy depression worse than the problem it seeks to "cure". There is a substantial human cost to most of the steps being taken now to "ameliorate" the problem. In fact, they form a real-time "catastrophe" of their own, one definitely affecting the world right now, not in 80 years, maybe. Every day of energy poverty in the third world is another day of misery, and like it or not, carbon-based energy is cheap and plentiful compared to the currently available alternatives.
Then there is the politics of it all. Nuclear power, for example, could substantially reduce our reliance on coal using well
One should indeed! One should also be very leary of fitting any kind of fit, linear or nonlinear, to data over only 10-15 years that has varied rather consistently over 140 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise. Personally, I think the figure says all one could possibly need to say. Note well that anthropogenic CO_2 was completely irrelevant over almost all of this time series even according to the IPCC. Note also the overall range of the entire chart, roughly 1/4 of which supposedly incorporates "substantial" anthropogenic global warming -- just under 9 inches in 140 years. Note also that there are several periods with rise rates comparable to the present, for even longer periods, e.g. 1938-1950, where CO_2 was again not a factor even according to the IPCC reports.
It may be absolutely true that global climate models predict large amounts of sea level rise, but there is no actual evidence in the form of large rises in sea level to support this! . Perhaps there will be in the future. Perhaps not. I'm a theoretical physicist, and I just love theories. I'm a computational physicist, and love large scale model computations. But at the end of the day, I'm just a physicist, and the theories and computations have to agree with observation. So far, these do not, not even over the last 140 years, and they don't even give us insight into the large climate fluctuations observed over the last (fill in the blank with any number greater than 1000) number of years.
In the meantime, I work every summer literally living at the edge of the ocean facing straight out through the Beaufort inlet in North Carolina. Although I know that tidal gauge data indicates that there has been a sea level rise there over the time I've been working there or otherwise visiting, I certainly can't see it in my own (literal) back yard, where if there were any substantial and consistent rise -- I'm talking a rise of a few inches -- my back yard would be underwater at high tide. My neighbors have lived in their houses for over 40 years, and (yes, I've asked) haven't observed any rise at all, let alone an alarming one, of the highwater marks on their docks or seawalls (where the tops of their docks would be underwater at high tide if there were any consistent rise). This is absolutely anecdotal evidence, although the ocean being isostatic it is difficult to imagine it going up one place and not everyplace else, but see the curve above for the best global tidal gauge and satellite data in summary.
If you looked at this data and didn't know it was "sea level rise" and destined to rise because of Evil Human Activity -- if you were told it was the sales price of widgets, or the mean length of romance novels, over time -- and were asked "is there a statistically meaningful acceleration in trend" visible anywhere in the record -- you wouldn't even bother to do an actual statistical analysis because the answer is fairly evidently "no". If you were asked to estimate how likely it is that any aspect of this trend would justify a final sales figure for widgets of 48 (9 plus 39 more) in only 88 more years -- that would be over four times the entire growth over 142 years in only 90 years -- you wouldn't hesitate to give odds of 99 to 1 against. Bayesian analysis might alter the 99 to 1, sure (depending on how sure you are about your priors) but not even Bayes is going to comfortably make this 99 to 1 for.
I'm just sayin'...
rgb
(I will now wait for the usual "refutation" of this, the assertion I'm being paid off by the oil industry or the like. I wish. Instead, take due note of my Russell quote, below.)
Go for it. Bear in mind that the actual data is that SLR is around 3 mm/year -- depending on how short a segment of the data you are willing to cherrypick to prove a point. Since the assertion is made above that SLR is supposed to be a meter more than previously claimed -- hence around 2 meters or even more -- and since here we are in 2012 with SLR having gone up a whole inch (to the nearest inch) in the last decade -- we have to take something like 78 inches and split it up among 88 years. Hmm, if SLR went up by an order of magnitude next year we might just make it.
Otherwise, bear in mind that people who currently have beachfront property could die of old age before SLR becomes an issue for them. You (dear reader) could die of old age before SLR gets high enough to realize a profit on land you bought inland anticipating that it would become oceanfront. Or not.
rgb
Does AC have parents? How could we tell? They too would have to be AC. AC is indeed his own Grandpaw. Or hers. Its.
Why is this sad? Was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire sad? The breakup of the British Empire? Relax, pop yourself a bag of popcorn, and enjoy the show -- it's been a long time coming and worth every minute.
Wait, wait! AC is talking to itself again! It's so confusing. Maybe we need "first AC" and "second AC" but no, then I suppose it wouldn't be anonymous. In the meantime, it sounds like AC is very confused...
Oh, I'm not arguing -- a lot of our linux-centric sysadmin folks here like apple laptops, and as you say, they've long since gotten to where they've got a full or nearly full complement of unixoid tools and features and most of the important OSS offerings. Of course, the students I'm referring to are not in your (or my:-) geek class. They just like them because they are thin, cool as in socially acceptable, and work pretty well. I'd say the "work pretty well" is one of the most important things in the list, even.
My own gripes against apple are strictly premium price, the fact that I need cone-head amounts of compute power even on my laptops a lot of the time (e.g. i7 processors and a mountain of ram), the fact that all of my source is written under linux, and the fact that its "coolness" actually annoys me. Oh, and the fact that my wife's iPhone got a SINGLE DROP OF WATER on the charging port, popped the little red tab, and even though it was fully functional (until it ran out of charge) it refused to charge and had to be completely replaced for almost 1/3 of its cost in spite of us having a service plan on it. Otherwise known as "Rip-Off Hardware Design", brought to you by a company eager to take your money in exchange for coolness.
Personally, I like my Casio android phone with its waterproof covers on all ports. You can (reportedly) drop it into a meter of water, pull it out, wipe it off, and it not only works, it works literally untouched. Not that I care to tempt the gods, but all that AND it cost a fraction of the iphone and has all of the android apps available, most for free.
Apple does sell its own version of kool-ade. That's not to assert that sometimes they don't deliver value for money -- it is to assert that they display the same shocking arrogance that any market leader seems to gain when they get on top in the PC universe. All that engineering skill -- so much that they actually bother to engineer in the little red switch! -- but somehow they can't manage to build a charging interface or user interface that a drop of water can't kill.
Or worse, they could easily do so, but prefer to make all of that money when people have to buy second and third iphones etc.
rgb
I was in our local supermall yesterday. They had an interior kiosk set up to sell Surfaces, manned by an easy half dozen earnest young salespeople hired for the season. They didn't have a single customer in view -- not one in all the times I walked by it. Everybody standing around looking bored.
The Apple store about fifty meters away, on the other had was absolutely packed, as it always is, with customers waiting in line. It wasn't even a busy night at the mall -- parking was actually pretty easy for the season.
The really interesting question is -- can Microsoft compete ANYWHERE on a level playing field? If they didn't have the world's computer retailers in a ball-lock with their pricing formula, would they even exist? The answer is not so clear. I've watched student PC and laptop ownership transition from nearly all WinXX PCs to nearly all Apple products in only five years. iPhone, iPad, iPod, thinline apple laptop -- standard operating equipment for current college students. A smattering of Droid tabs and phones in there -- it is the nerd product and also pretty cool. Even linux-based systems -- the choice of the ubergeek -- are starting to compete with Windows systems for a whole generation of kids.
If Valve/Steam works out and games move over the Linux big time, Windows could actually experience the start of its long awaited death spiral.
rgb
Except that you can practice. State learning matters. If somebody DOES drive all the time high, they very likely learn to compensate, but it is those first few times... and too many people would have lots of state learning on "video games". It would need to be a test nobody is likely to be able to practice on ahead of time.
Perhaps a road simulator video game. That would actually make sense. If they can't drive a video simulator well enough to avoid simple road circumstances that might lead to a crash, then they shouldn't be driving no matter what the reason...
rgb
amendment prohibiting redistribution of money to the states
uneven redistribution of money, conditional use of money, surely, but the provision is already there, in the reservation of the powers to the states. The federal government should not be able to coerce any laws out of the states. If they wanted to pass a federal law raising the drinking age, they should have done so. It would have then been challenged, and would have lost the challenge. Using highway funds as an end run around the inability of the Federal Government to pass a law of this sort itself is de facto proof that it violates the constitution.
This isn't about taxation, BTW. One could argue about their right to differentially tax things to accomplish some end as a completely separate issue. It is strictly about bribery and economic coercion to extend federal powers to issues explicitly reserved to the states.
What in the world were they (the SCOTUS) thinking?
I did not know that. Wow, what were they thinking. That is just so wrong.
rgb
Great minds think alike;-)
See my reply to a different reply on the same thread. CAGW is at heart a partly "religious" argument.
rgb
Sure but the public argument is that you are a dastardly fiend for not doing Argon filled glass and a Prius anyway, damn the cost, because the real cost of not doing so is the end of the world when the sky falls and the seas rise.
It's really a strange modern variant of Pascal's Wager -- by making the cost of the "catastrophe" associated with AGW sufficiently great, they create an unlimited bias in the expectation value of outcomes. Even if "catastrophic" global warming is a 1% chance, by making it a million times more expensive (if it happens) than doing nothing, they can make it a 10,000 to one bet that mitigation is the economical choice and justify any investment or political strategy to accomplish it, just as Pascal pointed out regarding the "bet" that God exists -- moderate costs if you bet that God exists and are wrong, but infinite punishments (costs) if you bet God doesn't exist but are wrong (forgetting entirely about the benefits in both cases as well, although they are equally skewed between "none" for the atheist or theist alike if there is no God, "infinitely good" if there is a God and you pick the right God and get into "heaven" for eternity).
Again, otherwise I mostly agree with your reply. Personally, I've got R30 in the attic, low-E double paned windows on the house, and three uber-efficient furnace/ACs doing the three floors of my house, plus a tankless water heater. My energy expenses are indeed about a third of what they were (or would have been, extrapolating usage and prices) and yes, the amortization schedule is long enough that each of the investments will not really pay for the cost of the money in less than 15 to 20 years. That's sort of "break even". A 10 year amortization would be much better. Of the changes, I personally love the windows the most. Good windows matter, and one can e.g. clean them from the inside and they lock securely and have little flip-thingies so that you can leave them open and not let humans raise them fully to get in and they are very, very quiet compare to the old crappy windows we had. And I don't even "believe" in CAGW, and suspect AGW is minimal against the background GW of completely natural origin associated with coming out of the LIA.
As you say, many of the things done won't "sacrifice our economy", and the reason I introduced the extreme version of the argument is to draw attention to the parallel to Pascal's Wager, where a sufficiently large negative payoff justifies any strategy that might avoid it. Similar things apply to the risk of kilometer scale asteroids falling, global pandemics occurring, nuclear war occurring, even terrorism -- make the negative payoff high enough even at low risk, amplify the public perception of risk, and people will cheerfully give up their civil liberties and endure enormous expense and inconvenience to mitigate what is really a tiny risk. We forever lock the barn door once a horse is flown but ignore the open window through which our chickens are about to fly.
I personally would like to see the extreme edges taken off the entire debate. Don't predict meter-high sea level rise (and hence unimaginable "disaster", with unbounded costs) while the actual measured rate of sea level rise has been 9 whole inches since 1870 and is currently around 3 mm a year, or less than 9 inches more by the end of the century (assuming one cherrypicks the least favorable interval to use to compute the rise -- a fairer estimate would be a constant extrapolation of the post 1870 rate). Don't predict the melting of the ice caps (again, disaster) with Antarctic ice on the rise and just about matching the decrease in Arctic ice -- say instead that we don't really understand what and how polar ice is modulated. Don't predict horrible storms and droughts (disaster, worth any amount of money to mitigate) when there is zero evidence of increased drought, zero evidence of increased frequency or severity of storms. All of these things are predicted, but they are not actually happening.
Well, this isn't quite true. If you eat (say) an ounce of high-grade, THC-rich bud mixed into a bowl or two of chili you will learn that a) THC really is a hallucinogen. Who knew?; b) that while you will not be dead (no known fatal dose), you will be pretty much incapable of moving or doing complex anything, inclined to doze off, and quite capable of getting lost walking a few blocks down the street to get home. Been there, done that. The same is true to a lesser extent doing bong hits or smoking joints -- marijuana has a dazzling array of psychoactive compounds with quite different effects and concentrations. The one thing about doing bong hits or smoking joints is that it tends to be self-limiting as one reaches the point of physical impairment because it is incremental, and the time of maximum impairment is relatively short.
So the safest thing to say is that somebody who isn't trying to get maximally stoned and who isn't smoking or eating weed at a rate or in a way that boosts THC up to the levels that seriously mess with your cognitive abilities is likely to self-regulate their high to levels that leave them quite functional and capable of driving with only a slightly elevated risk of accident, equivalent to drinking a beer or two no more. This is, in fact, the rule far more than the exception.
However, one certainly can get truly wasted on marijuana, hashish, pure bud, and even get differently wasted on different variants of weed that have been bred for different concentrations of different cannabinoids.
You, and others reading this thread, might want to take a quite detour through:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid
that works through some of the psychopharmacology of pot. Sound bit facts: The human brain has more receptors that respond to cannabinoids than to components of any other drug or substance. There are many, many such cannabinoids. The brain's reaction to different cannabinoids in different strains of pot is therefore quite different depending on the particular mix and the overall concentrations. For example (from the article) Cannabis Sativa strains are known for their "cerebral high" with relatively little body involvement and leave one reasonably functionally unimpaired, at the cost of introducing a certain amount of anxiety/paranoia. Cannabis Indica, OTOH, is quite sedative and not a good idea for people who have to function while high. These factors are used in the medical marijuana business to literally prescribe different strains of pot for daytime and nighttime use, and is also a major factor in genetic crossbreeding carried out by growers legal and illegal across the country.
A big dose of high-potency Indica strains is not the best thing to take onboard right before you plan to drive through rush hour.
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Ah, silly beanie, video game tests won't work, not for somebody who has "practiced" playing video games high (which would very likely be everybody under the age of 30 and a lot of people older than that).
Back in the days when I used to get high daily I also used to play pinball and ping pong and other games involving nearly instantaneous reflexes in order to succeed. I was truly excellent at both, high. I played the best evening of ping pong in my life high one night, with a friend who was also high. We were literally smashing the ball back and forth at maximum for volleys of twenty or more exchanges at top speed before somebody would miss, looking for a moment like ping pong olympiads. Pinball ditto -- marijuana often increases your ability to concentrate, and does not interfere with your reflexes in anything like the way alcohol (a depressant that will eventually render you incapable of coordinated movement or thought) does.
As I remarked above, "doubling the risk of a fatal crash" is multiplying a number near zero by two, and roughly matches the increase in risk of drinking a single beer. Marijuana is enormously variable, and so the best thing to do is deal with visible impairment and not worry about chemical tests at all.
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Bear in mind also that the normal risk of fatal crashes is low, so doubling it is doubling a number very near zero as it is.
Contrast that with alcohol (quote from a 1991 NIH article):
"Based on driver fatalities in single-vehicle crashes, it was estimated that each 0.02 percentage increase in the BAC of a driver with non-zero BAC nearly doubles the risk of being in a fatal crash."
That is probably not quite a beer's worth of alcohol for most body weights. So to put it another way, somebody who smokes pot while driving -- not "before", but during (a thing that in my youth I did with remarkable frequency) -- is roughly as impaired as if they had had just consumed a single beer. At those levels one does have to wonder about the error bars in the study -- statistically resolving one near-zero from another near-zero is actually remarkably difficult and requires ever so many samples and a totally unbiased sampling scheme with a complete lack of confounding variables -- so your assertion that the actual risk might even go down in those that aren't smoking pot and drinking a beer (where the latter is also difficult to detect and also doubles your risk all by itself) is not without possible merit.
Again from the article here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1875701:
"At BACs in the 0.05-0.09 percent range, the likelihood of a crash was at least nine times greater than at zero BAC for all age groups. Younger drivers with BACs in the 0.05-0.09 range had higher relative risks than older drivers, and females had higher relative risks than males. At very high BACs (at or above 0.15 percent), the risk of crashing was 300 to 600 times the risk at zero or near-zero BACs."
Note that at BAC's that are still in the legal range in most states, single car fatalities are nearly an order of magnitude greater than the single "doubling" of risk for immediate use of marijuana. That strongly suggests that the best thing to do about "impairment" from marijuana is -- ignore it, or as suggested above, use a field sobriety test, not a blood or saliva test. It is more or less irrelevant to driving skill. I would say (again, based on extensive experience) that this is not entirely true -- one can eat or smoke enough, potent enough, marijuana that driving is ill-advised, but in those cases field sobriety tests would be nearly impossible to pass as well. But it is actually somewhat difficult to get that stoned, and most pot smokers that I knew didn't want to drive when they were -- too scary.
But the simplest proofs are this. Whether or not it is legal, smoking pot and driving has been nearly universal forever among those that smoke pot. Most states are utterly unable to test for it, yet estimates of prevalence of usage (almost certainly low) suggest that anywhere up to 1/3 or 1/2 of people in certain age ranges at least occasionally smoke. Yet there is no positive association with this same group being a high risk on the road, outside of its tendency to drink. Alcohol is indeed a dangerous substance when it comes to driving, for obvious reasons, even for relatively small amounts. Pot is not, not until consumption is at extreme levels.
The last thing that confounds this is age. The distribution of fatal and non-fatal accidents with age is quite scary. A stoned 40 year old -- I mean a seriously wasted 40 year old stoner -- with a risk of accident 3 times his age-linked norm -- is a safer driver than a stone cold sober 19 year old. "Silverbacks" -- drivers on the high side of 75, where one's eyesight, hearing, and brain are all breaking down -- are safer still. Why? Because they drive (sober or not) carefully, and in particular far more conservatively than younger risk taking overconfident drivers. I'm living through my own sons' driving experience -- one at age 17 has his first car, now multiply scarred from driving it a whole month. One now 22, who at 18 took his eyes off of the road
A mere 80 or so years too late, of course. But better late than never.
Now if any state had the testicular fortitude to challenge them over their utterly unconstitutional use of the threat of withholding federal highway funds from states that failed to raise the drinking age to 21, we might see a restoration of sanity in that direction as well. Otherwise we might as well just ditch the constitution and abolish state and local government and get it all over with.
But getting the US government out of the marijuana game as the first step to getting it largely out of the drug game altogether might be good first steps to dismantling the current police state, and in the process saving perhaps 100 billion dollars (in all costs) nationwide. Maybe more -- drugs are roughly a half-trillion dollar business globally, and laundering drug money is a major mainstay of our banking system and creates a veritable shadow government with a steady stream of untaxed, illegal income that produces compounded wealth and disproportionate power for those that are involved.
It also opens up the states that legalize it to entirely new (taxable, now legitimate) industries -- not just recreational pot but an entire spectrum of hemp-derived products that are difficult to impossible to produce at this time. The hemp plant was enormously useful before it was made illegal, and to some extent was made illegal because it was so useful. I wish NC would follow in CO and WA's footsteps, because hemp would make an ideal cash crop to replace tobacco (the real "killer drug" of the US).
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Goodness, do you know, I put exactly the same curve on top of the UAH data and it looks remarkably different. Although again how well or poorly it does depends a lot on how you cherrypick the insertion point, no doubt. Bottom line is UAH 33 year anomaly is a whopping 0.33 C -- which works out remarkably accurately to 0.1 C/decade, 1 degree C per century, with a lot of that increase coming from a single discrete event -- the El Nino warming of 1997-1998. It was nearly flat before (within noise). It has been nearly flat afterwards (within noise).
Could UAH suddenly go straight on back up? Sure. Has it? No. Could it go down? Absolutely (it has gone down into negative territory several times in the last couple of years, and there are reasons to think that the world is in a weakly cooling phase now that the PDO has reversed). The point again isn't that AGW isn't a possibility, that CAGW isn't a possibility -- it is that it is by no means a certainty. The George Mason survey of members of the AGU and AMS found that it isn't even true that all climate scientists think that AGW, let along CAGW, is a certainty, and the majority believe in AGW but not the C.
So when a top article cites warming consistent with the C when temperatures have been basically flat for 15 years and rising at only 0.1C per decade over the last 30 -- during which the bulk of the supposedly "anthropogenic" part of the post LIA warming occurred -- well, believe it if you want to, but personally I want something like believable data to support the assertion. In the meantime, I remain politely open minded.
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I agree with pretty much everything you say. Note well: I was being a bit sarcastic (in context) about things like the Ordovician-Silurian and last glaciation because I was replying to somebody who picked a particular interval that showed extreme warming "at the 95% confidence level" which is and remains bullshit. The 15 year interval isn't quite cherrypicked -- it was stated -- some time ago, and by proponents of CAGW -- that it is the outer limit of an interval where natural variation could prevent the inevitable progression of AGW on a catastrophic scale. The point being, that since we are at that limit, it is increasingly unlikely (the longer the planet stubbornly resists warming to suit the theory) that the theories that predict extreme warming (not some warming, but extreme warming) are correct.
Their response, of course, was to participate in ad hominem and doubt my honesty, which is typical of "accepters" (if one might introduce the moral opposite of "deniers") who don't want to consider any of the negative evidence for CAGW any more than the deniers want to accept or acknowledge positive evidence. Sadly, one could play logical fallacy bingo all night and all day on the "accepter" or "denier" blogs.
As for this:
So you think changes are a net cost? Making our energy usage more efficient is more often a net gain. Worth doing regardless of whether there is global warming. Of course you can spend hugely on things such as expensive materials that are lightweight, but there's no need, not when there is so much low hanging fruit we're ignoring. We blow a lot of money on peacock style displays. People buy large vehicles and houses for the sake of appearances. Surely we can find some other way to show off that doesn't risk the climate. There's even better stuff than that. How about smarter traffic lights? Or do you enjoy idling at a red light while no traffic is present on the cross street?
Well said, sir, and I absolutely agree. But then one also has to consider carbon trading -- something that has no effect but to transfer money selectively into pockets that do nothing to earn it at the expense of nearly everybody in a way that even the proponents acknowledge will have no noticeable effect on CO_2 levels by the end of the century. One also has to do honest appraisals of the "catastrophic" costs that avoiding carbon based fuel supplies that are relatively cheap, plentiful, and reliable incur in the poorest countries in the world, where one of the primary things limiting the rise in the standard of living is energy availability. Not that this is easy when people are generating bullshit numbers like "400,000 people dying each year" due to (presumably anthropogenic) "climate change" and throwing them out into the public discourse, or asserting that the sea level is rising at alarming and unheard of levels, when there is no actual data to support them and a great deal to contradict them.
Increasing the efficiency of our usage of energy is just peachy and as you say often makes economic sense as well, although a lot of times it does not because of things like marginal cost and amortization. Is it better to use your gas guzzler (already paid for) for another five or ten years or buy a Prius at a price so high that even with the savings in gas you spend 50% more actual money? Spend $10,000 on a high efficiency AC/furnace (something I did last year) or eke another few years out of a much lower efficiency unit I already owned, when the amortized savings from the $10,000 investment will not be recovered in my lifetime and MAY not be recovered in the expected lifetime of the improved hardware? Buy a $30 LED 60W equivalent light bulb (containing e.g. arsenic almost certain to make its way into the environment eventually), a $4 CF 60W equivalent light bulb (that contains mercury that is almost certain to make its way into the environment eventually), or a $1 incandescent light bulb that you could grind up and eat safely, if you could chew glass and tungsten. When those cos
Because starting in the middle of the Roman Warm Period, the Holocene Optimum, or the Medieval Warm Period would be too confusing. Might as well start in 16000 BCE -- that's a good time, d'you think? If we fit a straight line fit from there, it predicts what, 10 or 15C of warming over the next 10000 or so years. You tell me what the signal is, and what is the noise, using YOUR favorite cherrypicked interval, or we could look at the entire dataset back to the Ordovician-Silurian transition (Ice age that began when CO_2 was 7000 ppm, almost 1 percent CO_2) and stop worrying so much.
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All of them. In particular WoW and Diablo X, but really all of them. Yes, I've run WoW under Cedega, yes I've run Diablo on VMs, yes one can run them under Wine, but I want true native code, not emulated, simulated, virtualized. I'm looking forward to maybe -- just maybe -- seeing this happen over the next 3 years. Games with actual accelerated high density graphics, compiled for and running on Linux. What a concept.
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