With respect, I think that this will prove almost untrue. In a war like this there would be no particular hurry. Consider:
* As always, the war will be fought initially not at sea, but in the air. Since World War II, naval warfare has been air warfare first and foremost. That is even more true today. We could take out Iran's entire navy without using any actual ships, if we are patient, and with stealth aircraft, radar-sniffing missiles, and ECM protecting our planes, we will.
* We will know exactly where all of their naval surface assets are as the war begins. We have satellites, they don't. Boats can't hide. Their submarines, not their corvettes and frigates, are the "problem", but they don't have that many of them.
* I personally doubt that they can hide their submarines. I would guess that at this point the entire gulf and strait is one big acoustic array. We also have a moderate list of exotic new technologies for submarine detection, featuring blue/green lasers and massive computing, that can detect e.g. a submarine's underwater wake. Once detected, killing them is routine. They have exactly three submarines that could be a "problem" (Russian built Kilo submarines, quiet and fairly modern). I would bet that they are being actively tracked by the navy as I type this and that they will all three be gone within hours if not minutes of the initiation of any hostilities. That might be time for them to get an attack off, if they are in a position to do so, hence my bet-hedging.
* The question then is: how successful is such an attack likely to be? Iran does have "modern" missiles in their arsenal. OTOH, I rather suspect that all of our military assets at risk in the area have considerable defenses against modern missiles, in particular e.g. cruise missiles of all flavors. I could see one, or even two attacks succeeding, and possibly even sinking the targeted ship. Our own smaller attack (e.g. patrol) vessels will be at the greatest risk -- if anything gets up close and personal with Iran's navy, it will be these guys as they go after the "leftovers" of Iran's submarine fleet (their various minisubs, which will be the most difficult things to discover, track, and eliminate).
* Again, this is a war of technologies -- we have price-is-no-object ultramodern stuff; most of Iran's navy is 50+ years old (post-WWII vintage) and cannot possibly be as well protected or as well armed as ours is, assuming that it can actually get within range of our navy before our air power takes it out. Most of that navy will be eliminated before it can get off a shot, especially if we do the smart thing and actively retreat, pulling most of our naval assets back to where they can hit Iran but Iran cannot hit back and waiting for our air force to strategically eliminate Iran's air force (no longer than it took to eliminate Saddam's, a matter of a few days tops), most of its tactically deployed SAM sites (if it turns its radar on, it's dead; if it doesn't, it's useless and eventually dead anyway as satellites and surveillance aircraft and ground forces flag them for missions).
So, if we are patient, the rate limiting feature of the war will be the speed with which we can deliver advanced munitions to the battlefield as we use them, highly efficiently, to eliminate Iran's assets one by one and defeat them in detail with minimal risk. There is little chance that we will win completely untouched, but if Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Iraq are any measure -- and I think that they are -- it will be yet another case of our absolutely overwhelming military technology systematically and ruthlessly destroying a large but ill-equipped armed force. In the air we will be -- briefly -- challenged by our own F14 tomcat, plus a mish-mosh of soviet jets left over from the cold war.
The "left over" bit will be the main point of interest. The technology represented in their air force is somewhat aged. They have around 108 air superiority jets, all d
Well said, Sir! Or Madam, as the case may be! Obama has made a single mistake since he took office, and it's a mistake that has been made before. He tackled health care before midterm elections, instead of devoting all of his considerable energies towards fixing the economy. True, it looked like the economy was "fixed" rather rapidly -- if you look at the Dow (for example) since it bottomed, it has been a steady, predictable ascent back to roughly where it should be, given the fact that Bush looted and lost 1.5 trillion dollars over the course of the Iraq war. We've amortized the debt and worked through it to a "predictable" market again. However, the cost of pushing health care first was the loss of congress, and now he cannot control the needed tax increases equitably or otherwise to restore balance to the Federal budget. This puts the Republicans in position to sabotage the economy and push it into a second soft dip of recession, aided by the near-collapse of the Euro, which is the only thing that could conceivably cost him re-election.
It won't, I don't think. Europe appears to have stabilized its own debt problem, and this Christmas appears to have produced a huge surge in consumer spending, indicating a lot of confidence that things are more or less back to predictable/normal. I expect unemployment numbers will continue to drop and the spending spree will extend much further into January than usual, which may actually lead to a small increase in Federal revenues in 2011 (as well as a drop in e.g. unemployment liabilities) just from the continued improvement in the economy. 2012 will continue to be tight, but barring a serious and unexpected hit, the economy should improve slowly all year, leaving Obama in a nearly unassailable position come November.
The only hope for Romney (or whoever) is a serious second recession, and I'm not seeing that.
No, they don't. Note well that the slingshot did not significantly alter the energy of the orbit, only its inclination.
As I said, and as the wikipedia article on "Gravity Assist" makes quite clear, a gravity slingshot is an elastic collision. As such, the collision in the CM frame is a planar motion from one asymptote to another, more or less conserving the speed of the satellite in the CM frame but changing its direction. To transform this new CM velocity back into the lab/sun frame, (and to get the initial CM velocity in the first place) one add or subtracts v_cm as a VECTOR, which is basically the velocity of the planet. You can add up to 2 v_cm in the direction of the planet to the satellite on top of mere direction change of the satellite's existing speed, but v_cm has no component perpendicular to the ecliptic almost by definition.
So sure, you can change the direction of a satellite with a flyby of a planet, or you can add to its in-plane speed with a flyby, but you cannot exceed its incoming speed in the out-of-plane final component of the velocity. You can actually see this in the embedded figure of the final orbit of Ulysses -- it changed from Earth to Jupiter in plane to Earth to Jupiter (partly) out of plane. If the energy that had gone into getting it to Jupiter in the first place had gone directly into making its motion out of plane in the first place, I believe that you would end up with more or less the same maximum out of plane extent.
Oh, I'm not a "kid". I'm old too. Although if I were going to start, I would start by building a whatistron, if only I could figure out what a whatsitron was. I mean, cyclotron check, bevatron check, synchrotron check, but whatsitron? Hard to even figure out what he has in mind, there... and Blackie Duquesne isn't around to give me the blueprints...
Ah, so it divides out by the missing time dimension, does it? Or are you suggesting that I spread LSD onto a copper bar and... hmm, that might just work, might it not. At least if I was listening to Pink Floyd -- Set your Controls for the Heart of the Sun -- at the time.
Agreed, Convector. You (agentgonzo) really should read the wikipedia article on "Gravity assist". The ideal unpowered gravity assist is a classic kiddy-physics homework problem -- a one dimensional elastic collision in the direction of motion of the planet, and it has the effect of adding 2v_planet to (where v_planet is the VECTOR velocity of the planet) to the original velocity of the planet while otherwise reversing the velocity of the satellite. That follows, in turn, from the 1D solution to the elastic collision problem, v_2f = -v_2i + 2v_cm where v_cm = v_planet. Angular momentum is actually nearly irrelevant to the momentum gain -- angular momentum of the satellite in the cm frame of the planet determines the hyperbolic orbit of the satellite and hence the cm asymptotes, but the only step that matters by increasing velocity relative to the SUN is subtracting v_cm to put the satellite's velocity into the CM frame, solving the collision, and adding v_cm back to put the result back into the frame of the sun again, as a vector. Those steps are the same for all collisions.
You can "collide" with a planet at any angle you like, and the collision can indeed redirect your existing momentum up out of the ecliptic, but you cannot gain speed in this direction because v_cm is (almost) zero in the direction perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. Angular momentum is all but irrelevant in understanding the actual collision except insofar as it contributes to the relative in-ecliptic velocity of the satellite relative to (say) Jupiter, where the satellite began with an angular momentum relative to the Sun determined by the Earth's angular speed plus any it gained or lost (relative to the Sun) during its original boost.
Think in terms of the center of mass frame. The collision in this frame is always the same (as a function of e.g. incoming relative speed and impact parameter and the relative masses). In the CM frame, satellite comes in along one (hyperbolic) asymptote, collides, departs at same speed along another asymptote. Asymptotes live in the collision plane. Allowing for/ignoring the orbits relative to the Sun right up to where the collision happens, we are done. Fill in your relative speed, pick an impact parameter and plane of collision, read your outgoing asymptote off. That's where the satellite goes in the CM frame. Now mentally transform this result back into the (lab, rest) frame of the Sun by adding v_cm. v_cm has no component perpendicular to the ecliptic. This is the only thing that changes the outgoing speed of the collision relative to the sun -- in the CM frame incoming speed equals outgoing speed of the satellite, but the outgoing asymptote velocity vector gains 2 v_cm in the direction of the planet, while the vector velocity component of the asymptote perpendicular to the ecliptic is not changed.
There are two ways to get a gravity assist out of the plane of the ecliptic. The first is a power-assisted boost. If you are going to burn fuel to gain kinetic energy, you get the most KE if you burn when travelling at a high speed (P = F \cdot v). So turning on the rockets when you are at the point of closest approach in a slingshot gains more energy than the same burn when the rocket is travelling relatively slowly. This isn't really an "assist", however -- you still have to ship the energy uphill in the form of fuel, you just use it under optimal circumstances not to gain delta-v but to gain delta-K, which in turn boosts your orbit relative to the sun.
The second is to use multiple collisions. Suppose you get an "ideal" standard gravity assist off of Jupiter, and gain 2 v_jupiter in the direction of Jupiter in the process. You've now actually increased the speed of the spaceship relative to the sun, for "free", by more or less elastically bouncing off of it (in the cm frame). Now you approach Saturn, and use IT to direct your new, higher velocity out of the plane. That works. You don't GAIN any momentum (perpendicular to the ecliptic) from the collision with Saturn, but you can redirect the momentum you gained IN the plane of the ecliptic from Jupiter so that now it is perpendicular.
You are old. Do you think any "X" could be hanging around down there? As a physicist I have long wanted to experience an acceleration of c (the speed of light) driven by the awesome power of a disintegrating copper bar. Only I can't figure out how.
Not to be picky, but I don't believe gravitational slingshots work that way. They are basically elastic collisions (mediated by gravity) with a planet, and therefore only give you an increase in velocity if you "recoil" in the direction of motion of the planet. In a nutshell, you borrow a tiny bit of a planet's or moon's forward momentum to come out travelling at twice its speed relative to the Sun. That is, one can slingshot in the ecliptic (in the direction of revolution) and pick up speed, but planets have no velocity/momentum perpendicular to the ecliptic and therefore one cannot borrow any. All one can do with a "collision" that has an outgoing momentum vector perpendicular to the ecliptic is trade around momentum you already have. So single "collisions" won't do.
That means that one requires at least two such collisions/stages to pick up momentum perpendicular to the ecliptic. The first has to do one or more classic slingshots in the plane of the ecliptic to pick up linear momentum. The second has to "collide" with a planet's gravitational well in such a way as to deflect the momentum up or down out of the ecliptic. Sadly, because gravitation is a radial force and conserves angular momentum (in the approximately inertial frame of the collision), one cannot combine the two in a single collision any way I can think of -- you can only pick up slingshot momentum in the plane in a single pass; one cannot also deflect it up.
Voyager (IIRC) did just this sort of things -- engaged in multiple slingshots as it went along both to pick up momentum and energy and to alter direction of that momentum "for free" by selecting specific impact parameters and collision planes with its targets.
But this doesn't make this a bad idea, only a more complicated one than "just" a slingshot off of e.g. the moon. The other nifty thing they could probably manage with such a craft is doing some serious parallax measurements, ones with a baseline much larger than 2 AU. Put a really precise observatory in an orbit out at (say) 20 AU and you extend our ability to measure distances to nearby stars out by a factor of 10 -- 1000 times as many stars, probably even more if getting out of the haze reveals e.g. nearby brown dwarfs and stellar objects that are too faint to see. This in turn could alter things like estimates of the total mass or mass distribution of the galaxy if the numbers turn out to be very different from what we think they are now. So it isn't only a matter of the distant Universe -- the near Universe could benefit from this sort of out-of-ecliptic study, although it is long term science, since the further out you make the orbit, the longer you have to wait for a full parallax baseline.
... it is virtually violating a virtual international law. That is to say simulated (imaginary) killing violates a simulated (imaginary) law.
It's very simple.
And the minute they attempt to apply virtual sanctions to this virtually not-really-illegal act, they will discover lots of real players, companies, and nations ignoring their real idiocy in droves.
Don't try to bring sanity into this! This is Big Science. Great Science Fiction novels portray it. They can't be f-ing out of their minds apeshit berserk, surely!
And seriously, do not try to put any actual physics or arithmetic or above all, economics into it. They'll hunt you down like a dog if you do...
rgb (and yes, I'm an avid SF reader, from Brin to Cordwainer Smith to Niven -- but just because they write cool stories doesn't make the idea feasible or even physically correct, see e.g. Ringworld and the gravitational instability problem.)
Hmmm, sounds like time for a science fiction story, or a grade B movie...
However, I would point out that if they get the genes exactly correct, nature provides a fair bit of instinct to help out. I also wouldn't call anything a "monster" -- that's all sorts of value judgement -- unless or until it is proven to be one.
I actually think they could resurrect the entire species, over time. The Holocene might still be a bit warm for them -- there are reasons they became extinct -- but a Siberian mastodon herd would be very cool.
Hmmm, you really do need to read the climategate 2 letters, don't you.
From message 4241.txt, a communication from Rob Wilson to Ed Cook (and others):
I first generated 1000 random time-series in Excel – I did not try and approximate the
persistence structure in tree-ring data. The autocorrelation therefore of the time-series
was close to zero, although it did vary between each time-series. Playing around therefore
with the AR persistent structure of these time-series would make a difference. However, as
these series are generally random white noise processes, I thought this would be a
conservative test of any potential bias.
I then screened the time-series against NH mean annual temperatures and retained those
series that correlated at the 90% C.L.
48 series passed this screening process.
Using three different methods, I developed a NH temperature reconstruction from these data:
1. simple mean of all 48 series after they had been normalised to their common period
2. Stepwise multiple regression
3. Principle component regression using a stepwise selection process.
The results are attached.
Interestingly, the averaging method produced the best results, although for each method
there is a linear trend in the model residuals – perhaps an end-effect problem of
over-fitting.
The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is precisely the
phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.
Surely this vindicates Mann -- by proving that it does indeed turn white noise into hockey sticks! Not only is Mann wrong, but the hockey team knows it perfectly well! There are letters where people openly lament being involved with the hockey stick type reconstructions (and other places, e.g. where they "hid the decline" in tree ring data) because they are terrible science and because they are openly worried that sooner or later people will catch on. As indeed they have, although they have won the PR war (another great Mann quote) to such an extent that even though they themselves know that the hockey stick is bogus and that white noise fit according to Mann's cherrypicking methodology will produce nothing but hockey sticks, it just won't die, will it? Thanks to people like you!
We could review the specific Climategate 2 letters where Jones talks about deliberately trying not to give away data to the people who requested it (something I would call "stonewalling", except that the circumstance in question is a FOIA request that was only a missed deadline away from being "a crime" upon the release of the CG emails), or about the points where it turns out that he does a lousy job of keeping records (problems with Excel spreadsheets) and no longer can reproduce his own results because he doesn't know what data he used, if you like.
Or we could look at the many, many other places where internal communications show that the hockey team is well aware of many problems with their own results and consistently choose not to let the general public know about them lest we be led to doubt their conclusion. Then we could read Feynman's lovely article on "Cargo Cult Science": http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm. See how close you think the hockey team comes to Feynman's fairly modest standard for good, honest science, while reading Mann going on about the importance of winning the PR war, getting journal editors fired, and generally doing his very best to eliminate all challenge to his papers, or, if he can't manage that, eliminating the challengers themselves.
But really, read them yourself. Don't accept what people tell you about them, read them! Then tell me that this is honest science, well done.
And this is the way everybody should be doing it, including work funded by NIH, NOAA, DOE, EPA, DOD (well, not all of the DOD work, but some of it). It should be legally mandated for all granting agencies, especially agencies that fund research that is critical to public policy decisions, decisions on the spending of large amounts of tax money, human life and well being, or technological advances that belong in the public domain because (after all) the public paid for them.
All true, so perhaps we should add a line or two limiting the scope of the rule, then make it law. If your research data is being used as the basis for major political policy decisions and the spending of unlimited amounts of taxpayer money (e.g. climate research) the public's need outweighs your own inconvenience or embarrassment. Cost we can ignore. Note well that in most enterprises putting data/methods up on a website should be almost free -- who doesn't have websites? Who cannot use archive/comression tools like gzip, tar, zip? Preserving a snapshot of data and methods is already a part of responsible research; a law here would just be a matter of mandating that the publication archival snapshot be made public. If you don't have one, well, that's a problem that suggests that you aren't very professional, maybe not professional enough to deserve funding since you wouldn't necessarily be able to reproduce you own published results without it, could you?
The law should apply to medical research and certain other scientific venues where huge amounts of money or public trust or political decisioning are on the line. Not so much a legal mandate for people studying poison dart frogs in the rain forest canopy, although even for them it should be the expected standard of practice if you are non-privately funded. Anybody doing science should be archiving and/or maintaining a revision history of their work for themselves, and making an archival snap available that matches any actual accepted publication should be cheap, easy, and is the right thing to do.
No, the IPCC doesn't collect data, they collect published results from data that remains occult even now. Indeed, Phil Jones appears to have lost the raw data out of which e.g. HadCRUT3 was built. Not only is it impossible for anyone else to check his methods or reproduce his results from raw data, he can't reproduce his results from raw data.
Doesn't matter to the IPCC or anybody else that uses that data.
Look up the history of e.g. Steve Mcintyre's efforts to get actual data and methods out of any of the hockey team. Look up the comments in Climategate 2 emails where they conspire to deliberately hide it, even from FOIA requests. That's the true basis of the cooked (up) data used by the IPCC and hence by all the governments of the world to make decisions involving tens to hundreds of billions of dollars now, trillions of dollars over the next few decades.
Transparency of data and methods should be legally mandated for any publicly funded published result used in any sort of political process involving the expenditure of vast amounts of taxpayer money.
You mean, a way like "requiring the authors to put their data and numerical methods up on a website no later than the date of publication of the paper"?
Unless their competitors are good at time travel, that seems as though it might be enough...
Only if he can discuss it in properly controlled, double blind circumstances. For example, he can wait in a room until a man in a white lab coat enters to discuss it with him. Outside, the researcher can flip a coin to determine whether the individual in the lab coat is an actual psychologist or is a plumber or taxi cab driver. Afterwards he can be ordered to perform a really nasty task, such is cleaning up the urinals in a public restroom with a toothbrush, to determine whether or not he still has issues with authority,
Are you kidding? What's the cost of storage on a webserver, per byte? Would that be "zero" compared to the size of any reasonable dataset in the discipline? It would. You could put up a single e.g. 10 TB server in a single lab for a few thousand dollars and it would cost a few hundred dollars a year to run and would handle all the data associated with all the publications in psychology in a decade.
What is expensive and wastes taxes is bozos who do crap research, publish the crap results, hide the crap data and crap methods, and are cited repeatedly in other people's work, a circle of error and corruption that often lasts for years before it is finally discovered and weeded out. We pay for that work already; we need to make people accountable for it by requiring data/methods transparency (if you are e.g. not privately funded). That way the bozos would have research careers that are either over instantly or they'd get so sharply corrected by their peers that they'd wake up and do things right.
Not biological psychology/neurophysiology. Not even all social psychology. The work on cognitive dissonance, for example, is pretty amazing and reproducible and explains so very much...
And continues. Phil Jones, for example, has stonewalled requests for the raw data used to e.g. create HadCRUT3 etc, although recently it seems that one reason he hasn't shared it is that he lost it and literally can't share it. So we have a rather important temperature series, openly available on the web and used by many, many climate researchers and nobody can reconstruct it, including the original author. The problem continues -- it is like pulling teeth, getting members of the hockey team to share data and/or methods so anyone can check them.
Since the few times somebody has bulled through until they've succeeded, e.g. Steve Mcintyre vs Michael Mann, what has been discovered is that the published result (the infamous MBH "hockey stick") is nothing but amplified, distorted white noise that has absolutely no correlation with the data used to produce it, let alone skill at reconstructing actual past temperatures, it doesn't bode well for the discipline.
I've recently written a guest article on WUWT calling for data/methods transparency in climate research. By transparent, I mean that you should not be allowed to publish a paper that could potentially influence lawmakers and public policy to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars unless you simultaneously publish all contributory raw data (including any data you for any reason left out) and the actual computer code used to process it into figures and conclusions. Something this important needs full open source open data transparency even more than medical research (another discipline where reproducibility of results is abysmal, where there are vested interests galore, and where we spend/waste a phenomenal amount of both money and human morbidity and mortality on crap results.
Gee, why not -- read them yourself? Instead of relying on the "authority" of others?
Too difficult? Read them yourself and then you tell me that they portray the unbiased presentation of well-supported research, when they openly conspire to suppress contradictory research (among many, many other sins).
Also note that this is Climategate 2 -- there is a lot of new stuff that wasn't in the first round, and no, it hasn't been examined by everybody yet. And finally, for whatever it is worth, there is a difference between "fraud" and the abuse of the scientific process, cherrypicking data, allowing confirmation bias to corrupt your own research BELIEVING that your results are nevertheless correct.
"Fraud" is a narrow and specific legal question. Dishonest is something that is without question. Read the damn letters!
Damn skippy, and good reply. Neither fusion nor solar will take a trillion dollars -- a trillion dollars spend on solar today would buy roughly a terawatt in generating capacity, and that's not including the enormous leverage of a trillion dollars funding the construction of massive large scale solar foundries. Before we managed to spend a trillion dollars -- and I do mean spend, not including leverage and money pulled out of the ensuing gold-rush of private capital to ride along -- we would end up with at least 10 terawatts of generating capacity. This, in turn, would has so very much positive synergistic impact on every aspect of the economy that it would almost certainly turn out that we make a huge profit on the trillion dollars long before we manage to spend it, so much additional money that for all practical purposes the conversion is free.
Solar isn't perfect, but given that kind of investment solutions for a lot of its imperfections would be found (nighttime storage, using "free" (post capital investment) daytime solar to turn atmospheric CO_2 and H2O directly back into gasoline or methane or something with a high energy density in a solar-derived "recycling" program, high density automotive batteries).
Whether or not we do anything of the sort (with the money we'd save pulling out of Kyoto and working to eliminate the IPCC altogether) within a decade declining solar costs and improved engineering and physics "in the pipe" already will conspire to make most of this happen anyway, long before we need to "panic" on behalf of baby polar bears.
But I agree, in the long run only fusion will allow us to achieve a credible steady state type I civilization, and we might as well get started on it. Dropping $10-30 billion on it a year with a liberal hand would probably do the trick in fairly short order.
Having just worked my way through many of the Climategate 2 emails (and yes, read a rather lot of the literature) it isn't all that surprising that Kyoto is about to be a major fail. The science is far from settled, the primary researchers are perfectly aware that it is far from settled and openly admit it in their internal discussions, but they are far more concerned with things like having a person's Ph.D. revoked (for the sin of disagreeing with their conclusions), having journal editors fired (for the sin of publishing a paper that weakened their "cause"), winning the "PR war" (what about figuring out the science?), verifying on their own that the infamous MBH hockey stick graph is crap (yes, in the internal climategate letters you discover that the primary hockey team members know perfectly well that trend-fit white noise put into Mann's algorithm produces nothing but hockey sticks at this point, but do they openly admit the mistake and remove the graph from all of the public policy presentations on the subject? Hell no! Both MBH and MJ are still there on the wikipedia pages for global warming, because admitting error and removing crap results that are known to be completely wrong weakens the message and undermines the PR war).
Throw in that the UAH temperature anomaly since 1981 -- evaluated with openly accessible methods from openly available datasets and not susceptible to e.g. UHI "corrections" liberally applied, unlike e.g. HadCRUT3 -- is a whopping 0.11C. That would be 30 years, call it a third of a century, and 0.11C net warming as of October. Over that time, CO_2 has gone from 335 ppm (Mauna Loa) to around 390 ppm. That is a 55/335 = 16% increase. Since the 1998 El Nino peak (and the end of the series of Grand Solar Maxima of the 20th century) global temperatures have gone down (or held nearly steady). The most pessimistic trending of post 1997 data is 0.2 C. During that interval CO_2 concentration went up around 8%. Even the IPCC is backing off from predictions of much warming "for a while" and of course everybody but Al Gore is sober enough to be able to see that there is no correlation between e.g. the frequency or energy in tropical storms and either the UAH (fairly reliable satellite derived) data or the God-knows-how derived HadCRUT data and especially not with raw CO_2 concentrations.
Now let's see. The earth's mean temperature is roughly 280 C give or take a bit. Let's assume that the thirty year anomaly is 0.28C, in rough agreement with UAH -- it won't matter for this argument. CO_2 up by 16%, T up by -- what would that be? Yes, that's right, by 0.1%! I won't even bother discussing climate sensitivity -- that's dead in the water right there! There are two things anybody can see from simple back of the envelope calculations, the sort one should do just to see if complex models (in the end) make sense. One is that 0.1% -- hell, 1% -- is surely within the bounds of natural variability for a tipped planet with warm, complex oceans, and the most cursory glance at temperatures over the entire Holocene stand is clear evidence that it is a lot larger than that, with or without human civilization. The other is that if 100% of that gain was pure response to CO_2 forcing without any confounding factors or fudge factors contributing, the noise from non-CO_2 fluctuations greatly exceeds this signal and we cannot explain the noise!. For the last decade, temperature trends haven't even had the same sign as a nearly 10% increase in atmospheric CO_2.
This leaves a CAGW enthusiast doubly damned. If solar state is irrelevant, decadal oscillations are irrelevant, oceanic heat reservoir forcing (with up to 1000 year timescales, so some fraction of the energy contributing to the current SST comes from sunlight that warmed the ocean when Columbus was sailing the ocean blue!) is irrelevant (and unpredictable besides), and volcanic aerosols over that decade irrelevant, then that leaves only CO_2 and the sign of the tempera
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So, if we are patient, the rate limiting feature of the war will be the speed with which we can deliver advanced munitions to the battlefield as we use them, highly efficiently, to eliminate Iran's assets one by one and defeat them in detail with minimal risk. There is little chance that we will win completely untouched, but if Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Iraq are any measure -- and I think that they are -- it will be yet another case of our absolutely overwhelming military technology systematically and ruthlessly destroying a large but ill-equipped armed force. In the air we will be -- briefly -- challenged by our own F14 tomcat, plus a mish-mosh of soviet jets left over from the cold war.
The "left over" bit will be the main point of interest. The technology represented in their air force is somewhat aged. They have around 108 air superiority jets, all d
Well said, Sir! Or Madam, as the case may be! Obama has made a single mistake since he took office, and it's a mistake that has been made before. He tackled health care before midterm elections, instead of devoting all of his considerable energies towards fixing the economy. True, it looked like the economy was "fixed" rather rapidly -- if you look at the Dow (for example) since it bottomed, it has been a steady, predictable ascent back to roughly where it should be, given the fact that Bush looted and lost 1.5 trillion dollars over the course of the Iraq war. We've amortized the debt and worked through it to a "predictable" market again. However, the cost of pushing health care first was the loss of congress, and now he cannot control the needed tax increases equitably or otherwise to restore balance to the Federal budget. This puts the Republicans in position to sabotage the economy and push it into a second soft dip of recession, aided by the near-collapse of the Euro, which is the only thing that could conceivably cost him re-election.
It won't, I don't think. Europe appears to have stabilized its own debt problem, and this Christmas appears to have produced a huge surge in consumer spending, indicating a lot of confidence that things are more or less back to predictable/normal. I expect unemployment numbers will continue to drop and the spending spree will extend much further into January than usual, which may actually lead to a small increase in Federal revenues in 2011 (as well as a drop in e.g. unemployment liabilities) just from the continued improvement in the economy. 2012 will continue to be tight, but barring a serious and unexpected hit, the economy should improve slowly all year, leaving Obama in a nearly unassailable position come November.
The only hope for Romney (or whoever) is a serious second recession, and I'm not seeing that.
rgb
No, they don't. Note well that the slingshot did not significantly alter the energy of the orbit, only its inclination.
As I said, and as the wikipedia article on "Gravity Assist" makes quite clear, a gravity slingshot is an elastic collision. As such, the collision in the CM frame is a planar motion from one asymptote to another, more or less conserving the speed of the satellite in the CM frame but changing its direction. To transform this new CM velocity back into the lab/sun frame, (and to get the initial CM velocity in the first place) one add or subtracts v_cm as a VECTOR, which is basically the velocity of the planet. You can add up to 2 v_cm in the direction of the planet to the satellite on top of mere direction change of the satellite's existing speed, but v_cm has no component perpendicular to the ecliptic almost by definition.
So sure, you can change the direction of a satellite with a flyby of a planet, or you can add to its in-plane speed with a flyby, but you cannot exceed its incoming speed in the out-of-plane final component of the velocity. You can actually see this in the embedded figure of the final orbit of Ulysses -- it changed from Earth to Jupiter in plane to Earth to Jupiter (partly) out of plane. If the energy that had gone into getting it to Jupiter in the first place had gone directly into making its motion out of plane in the first place, I believe that you would end up with more or less the same maximum out of plane extent.
rgb
Oh, I'm not a "kid". I'm old too. Although if I were going to start, I would start by building a whatistron, if only I could figure out what a whatsitron was. I mean, cyclotron check, bevatron check, synchrotron check, but whatsitron? Hard to even figure out what he has in mind, there... and Blackie Duquesne isn't around to give me the blueprints...
rgb
Ah, so it divides out by the missing time dimension, does it? Or are you suggesting that I spread LSD onto a copper bar and... hmm, that might just work, might it not. At least if I was listening to Pink Floyd -- Set your Controls for the Heart of the Sun -- at the time.
Agreed, Convector. You (agentgonzo) really should read the wikipedia article on "Gravity assist". The ideal unpowered gravity assist is a classic kiddy-physics homework problem -- a one dimensional elastic collision in the direction of motion of the planet, and it has the effect of adding 2v_planet to (where v_planet is the VECTOR velocity of the planet) to the original velocity of the planet while otherwise reversing the velocity of the satellite. That follows, in turn, from the 1D solution to the elastic collision problem, v_2f = -v_2i + 2v_cm where v_cm = v_planet. Angular momentum is actually nearly irrelevant to the momentum gain -- angular momentum of the satellite in the cm frame of the planet determines the hyperbolic orbit of the satellite and hence the cm asymptotes, but the only step that matters by increasing velocity relative to the SUN is subtracting v_cm to put the satellite's velocity into the CM frame, solving the collision, and adding v_cm back to put the result back into the frame of the sun again, as a vector. Those steps are the same for all collisions.
You can "collide" with a planet at any angle you like, and the collision can indeed redirect your existing momentum up out of the ecliptic, but you cannot gain speed in this direction because v_cm is (almost) zero in the direction perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. Angular momentum is all but irrelevant in understanding the actual collision except insofar as it contributes to the relative in-ecliptic velocity of the satellite relative to (say) Jupiter, where the satellite began with an angular momentum relative to the Sun determined by the Earth's angular speed plus any it gained or lost (relative to the Sun) during its original boost.
Think in terms of the center of mass frame. The collision in this frame is always the same (as a function of e.g. incoming relative speed and impact parameter and the relative masses). In the CM frame, satellite comes in along one (hyperbolic) asymptote, collides, departs at same speed along another asymptote. Asymptotes live in the collision plane. Allowing for/ignoring the orbits relative to the Sun right up to where the collision happens, we are done. Fill in your relative speed, pick an impact parameter and plane of collision, read your outgoing asymptote off. That's where the satellite goes in the CM frame. Now mentally transform this result back into the (lab, rest) frame of the Sun by adding v_cm. v_cm has no component perpendicular to the ecliptic. This is the only thing that changes the outgoing speed of the collision relative to the sun -- in the CM frame incoming speed equals outgoing speed of the satellite, but the outgoing asymptote velocity vector gains 2 v_cm in the direction of the planet, while the vector velocity component of the asymptote perpendicular to the ecliptic is not changed.
There are two ways to get a gravity assist out of the plane of the ecliptic. The first is a power-assisted boost. If you are going to burn fuel to gain kinetic energy, you get the most KE if you burn when travelling at a high speed (P = F \cdot v). So turning on the rockets when you are at the point of closest approach in a slingshot gains more energy than the same burn when the rocket is travelling relatively slowly. This isn't really an "assist", however -- you still have to ship the energy uphill in the form of fuel, you just use it under optimal circumstances not to gain delta-v but to gain delta-K, which in turn boosts your orbit relative to the sun.
The second is to use multiple collisions. Suppose you get an "ideal" standard gravity assist off of Jupiter, and gain 2 v_jupiter in the direction of Jupiter in the process. You've now actually increased the speed of the spaceship relative to the sun, for "free", by more or less elastically bouncing off of it (in the cm frame). Now you approach Saturn, and use IT to direct your new, higher velocity out of the plane. That works. You don't GAIN any momentum (perpendicular to the ecliptic) from the collision with Saturn, but you can redirect the momentum you gained IN the plane of the ecliptic from Jupiter so that now it is perpendicular.
rgb
You are old. Do you think any "X" could be hanging around down there? As a physicist I have long wanted to experience an acceleration of c (the speed of light) driven by the awesome power of a disintegrating copper bar. Only I can't figure out how.
rgb
Not to be picky, but I don't believe gravitational slingshots work that way. They are basically elastic collisions (mediated by gravity) with a planet, and therefore only give you an increase in velocity if you "recoil" in the direction of motion of the planet. In a nutshell, you borrow a tiny bit of a planet's or moon's forward momentum to come out travelling at twice its speed relative to the Sun. That is, one can slingshot in the ecliptic (in the direction of revolution) and pick up speed, but planets have no velocity/momentum perpendicular to the ecliptic and therefore one cannot borrow any. All one can do with a "collision" that has an outgoing momentum vector perpendicular to the ecliptic is trade around momentum you already have. So single "collisions" won't do.
That means that one requires at least two such collisions/stages to pick up momentum perpendicular to the ecliptic. The first has to do one or more classic slingshots in the plane of the ecliptic to pick up linear momentum. The second has to "collide" with a planet's gravitational well in such a way as to deflect the momentum up or down out of the ecliptic. Sadly, because gravitation is a radial force and conserves angular momentum (in the approximately inertial frame of the collision), one cannot combine the two in a single collision any way I can think of -- you can only pick up slingshot momentum in the plane in a single pass; one cannot also deflect it up.
Voyager (IIRC) did just this sort of things -- engaged in multiple slingshots as it went along both to pick up momentum and energy and to alter direction of that momentum "for free" by selecting specific impact parameters and collision planes with its targets.
But this doesn't make this a bad idea, only a more complicated one than "just" a slingshot off of e.g. the moon. The other nifty thing they could probably manage with such a craft is doing some serious parallax measurements, ones with a baseline much larger than 2 AU. Put a really precise observatory in an orbit out at (say) 20 AU and you extend our ability to measure distances to nearby stars out by a factor of 10 -- 1000 times as many stars, probably even more if getting out of the haze reveals e.g. nearby brown dwarfs and stellar objects that are too faint to see. This in turn could alter things like estimates of the total mass or mass distribution of the galaxy if the numbers turn out to be very different from what we think they are now. So it isn't only a matter of the distant Universe -- the near Universe could benefit from this sort of out-of-ecliptic study, although it is long term science, since the further out you make the orbit, the longer you have to wait for a full parallax baseline.
rgb
... it is virtually violating a virtual international law. That is to say simulated (imaginary) killing violates a simulated (imaginary) law.
It's very simple.
And the minute they attempt to apply virtual sanctions to this virtually not-really-illegal act, they will discover lots of real players, companies, and nations ignoring their real idiocy in droves.
Sometimes you really do just have to say no...
rgb
Don't try to bring sanity into this! This is Big Science. Great Science Fiction novels portray it. They can't be f-ing out of their minds apeshit berserk, surely!
And seriously, do not try to put any actual physics or arithmetic or above all, economics into it. They'll hunt you down like a dog if you do...
rgb (and yes, I'm an avid SF reader, from Brin to Cordwainer Smith to Niven -- but just because they write cool stories doesn't make the idea feasible or even physically correct, see e.g. Ringworld and the gravitational instability problem.)
Hmmm, sounds like time for a science fiction story, or a grade B movie...
However, I would point out that if they get the genes exactly correct, nature provides a fair bit of instinct to help out. I also wouldn't call anything a "monster" -- that's all sorts of value judgement -- unless or until it is proven to be one.
I actually think they could resurrect the entire species, over time. The Holocene might still be a bit warm for them -- there are reasons they became extinct -- but a Siberian mastodon herd would be very cool.
rgb
...the passenger pigeon? Surely there must be some decent DNA in a museum somewhere, or the very back of a very old freezer...
Good, good, science in progress! We'll add that to the authoritative command!
Hmmm, you really do need to read the climategate 2 letters, don't you.
From message 4241.txt, a communication from Rob Wilson to Ed Cook (and others):
I first generated 1000 random time-series in Excel – I did not try and approximate the persistence structure in tree-ring data. The autocorrelation therefore of the time-series was close to zero, although it did vary between each time-series. Playing around therefore with the AR persistent structure of these time-series would make a difference. However, as these series are generally random white noise processes, I thought this would be a conservative test of any potential bias.
I then screened the time-series against NH mean annual temperatures and retained those series that correlated at the 90% C.L.
48 series passed this screening process.
Using three different methods, I developed a NH temperature reconstruction from these data:
1. simple mean of all 48 series after they had been normalised to their common period
2. Stepwise multiple regression
3. Principle component regression using a stepwise selection process.
The results are attached.
Interestingly, the averaging method produced the best results, although for each method there is a linear trend in the model residuals – perhaps an end-effect problem of over-fitting.
The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about.
Surely this vindicates Mann -- by proving that it does indeed turn white noise into hockey sticks! Not only is Mann wrong, but the hockey team knows it perfectly well! There are letters where people openly lament being involved with the hockey stick type reconstructions (and other places, e.g. where they "hid the decline" in tree ring data) because they are terrible science and because they are openly worried that sooner or later people will catch on. As indeed they have, although they have won the PR war (another great Mann quote) to such an extent that even though they themselves know that the hockey stick is bogus and that white noise fit according to Mann's cherrypicking methodology will produce nothing but hockey sticks, it just won't die, will it? Thanks to people like you!
We could review the specific Climategate 2 letters where Jones talks about deliberately trying not to give away data to the people who requested it (something I would call "stonewalling", except that the circumstance in question is a FOIA request that was only a missed deadline away from being "a crime" upon the release of the CG emails), or about the points where it turns out that he does a lousy job of keeping records (problems with Excel spreadsheets) and no longer can reproduce his own results because he doesn't know what data he used, if you like.
Or we could look at the many, many other places where internal communications show that the hockey team is well aware of many problems with their own results and consistently choose not to let the general public know about them lest we be led to doubt their conclusion. Then we could read Feynman's lovely article on "Cargo Cult Science": http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm. See how close you think the hockey team comes to Feynman's fairly modest standard for good, honest science, while reading Mann going on about the importance of winning the PR war, getting journal editors fired, and generally doing his very best to eliminate all challenge to his papers, or, if he can't manage that, eliminating the challengers themselves.
But really, read them yourself. Don't accept what people tell you about them, read them! Then tell me that this is honest science, well done.
rgb
And this is the way everybody should be doing it, including work funded by NIH, NOAA, DOE, EPA, DOD (well, not all of the DOD work, but some of it). It should be legally mandated for all granting agencies, especially agencies that fund research that is critical to public policy decisions, decisions on the spending of large amounts of tax money, human life and well being, or technological advances that belong in the public domain because (after all) the public paid for them.
rgb
All true, so perhaps we should add a line or two limiting the scope of the rule, then make it law. If your research data is being used as the basis for major political policy decisions and the spending of unlimited amounts of taxpayer money (e.g. climate research) the public's need outweighs your own inconvenience or embarrassment. Cost we can ignore. Note well that in most enterprises putting data/methods up on a website should be almost free -- who doesn't have websites? Who cannot use archive/comression tools like gzip, tar, zip? Preserving a snapshot of data and methods is already a part of responsible research; a law here would just be a matter of mandating that the publication archival snapshot be made public. If you don't have one, well, that's a problem that suggests that you aren't very professional, maybe not professional enough to deserve funding since you wouldn't necessarily be able to reproduce you own published results without it, could you?
The law should apply to medical research and certain other scientific venues where huge amounts of money or public trust or political decisioning are on the line. Not so much a legal mandate for people studying poison dart frogs in the rain forest canopy, although even for them it should be the expected standard of practice if you are non-privately funded. Anybody doing science should be archiving and/or maintaining a revision history of their work for themselves, and making an archival snap available that matches any actual accepted publication should be cheap, easy, and is the right thing to do.
rgb
No, the IPCC doesn't collect data, they collect published results from data that remains occult even now. Indeed, Phil Jones appears to have lost the raw data out of which e.g. HadCRUT3 was built. Not only is it impossible for anyone else to check his methods or reproduce his results from raw data, he can't reproduce his results from raw data.
Doesn't matter to the IPCC or anybody else that uses that data.
Look up the history of e.g. Steve Mcintyre's efforts to get actual data and methods out of any of the hockey team. Look up the comments in Climategate 2 emails where they conspire to deliberately hide it, even from FOIA requests. That's the true basis of the cooked (up) data used by the IPCC and hence by all the governments of the world to make decisions involving tens to hundreds of billions of dollars now, trillions of dollars over the next few decades.
Transparency of data and methods should be legally mandated for any publicly funded published result used in any sort of political process involving the expenditure of vast amounts of taxpayer money.
rgb
You mean, a way like "requiring the authors to put their data and numerical methods up on a website no later than the date of publication of the paper"?
Unless their competitors are good at time travel, that seems as though it might be enough...
rgb
Only if he can discuss it in properly controlled, double blind circumstances. For example, he can wait in a room until a man in a white lab coat enters to discuss it with him. Outside, the researcher can flip a coin to determine whether the individual in the lab coat is an actual psychologist or is a plumber or taxi cab driver. Afterwards he can be ordered to perform a really nasty task, such is cleaning up the urinals in a public restroom with a toothbrush, to determine whether or not he still has issues with authority,
rgb
Are you kidding? What's the cost of storage on a webserver, per byte? Would that be "zero" compared to the size of any reasonable dataset in the discipline? It would. You could put up a single e.g. 10 TB server in a single lab for a few thousand dollars and it would cost a few hundred dollars a year to run and would handle all the data associated with all the publications in psychology in a decade.
What is expensive and wastes taxes is bozos who do crap research, publish the crap results, hide the crap data and crap methods, and are cited repeatedly in other people's work, a circle of error and corruption that often lasts for years before it is finally discovered and weeded out. We pay for that work already; we need to make people accountable for it by requiring data/methods transparency (if you are e.g. not privately funded). That way the bozos would have research careers that are either over instantly or they'd get so sharply corrected by their peers that they'd wake up and do things right.
rgb
Not biological psychology/neurophysiology. Not even all social psychology. The work on cognitive dissonance, for example, is pretty amazing and reproducible and explains so very much...
rgb
And continues. Phil Jones, for example, has stonewalled requests for the raw data used to e.g. create HadCRUT3 etc, although recently it seems that one reason he hasn't shared it is that he lost it and literally can't share it. So we have a rather important temperature series, openly available on the web and used by many, many climate researchers and nobody can reconstruct it, including the original author. The problem continues -- it is like pulling teeth, getting members of the hockey team to share data and/or methods so anyone can check them.
Since the few times somebody has bulled through until they've succeeded, e.g. Steve Mcintyre vs Michael Mann, what has been discovered is that the published result (the infamous MBH "hockey stick") is nothing but amplified, distorted white noise that has absolutely no correlation with the data used to produce it, let alone skill at reconstructing actual past temperatures, it doesn't bode well for the discipline.
I've recently written a guest article on WUWT calling for data/methods transparency in climate research. By transparent, I mean that you should not be allowed to publish a paper that could potentially influence lawmakers and public policy to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars unless you simultaneously publish all contributory raw data (including any data you for any reason left out) and the actual computer code used to process it into figures and conclusions. Something this important needs full open source open data transparency even more than medical research (another discipline where reproducibility of results is abysmal, where there are vested interests galore, and where we spend/waste a phenomenal amount of both money and human morbidity and mortality on crap results.
rgb
Gee, why not -- read them yourself? Instead of relying on the "authority" of others?
Too difficult? Read them yourself and then you tell me that they portray the unbiased presentation of well-supported research, when they openly conspire to suppress contradictory research (among many, many other sins).
Also note that this is Climategate 2 -- there is a lot of new stuff that wasn't in the first round, and no, it hasn't been examined by everybody yet. And finally, for whatever it is worth, there is a difference between "fraud" and the abuse of the scientific process, cherrypicking data, allowing confirmation bias to corrupt your own research BELIEVING that your results are nevertheless correct.
"Fraud" is a narrow and specific legal question. Dishonest is something that is without question. Read the damn letters!
rgb
Damn skippy, and good reply. Neither fusion nor solar will take a trillion dollars -- a trillion dollars spend on solar today would buy roughly a terawatt in generating capacity, and that's not including the enormous leverage of a trillion dollars funding the construction of massive large scale solar foundries. Before we managed to spend a trillion dollars -- and I do mean spend, not including leverage and money pulled out of the ensuing gold-rush of private capital to ride along -- we would end up with at least 10 terawatts of generating capacity. This, in turn, would has so very much positive synergistic impact on every aspect of the economy that it would almost certainly turn out that we make a huge profit on the trillion dollars long before we manage to spend it, so much additional money that for all practical purposes the conversion is free.
Solar isn't perfect, but given that kind of investment solutions for a lot of its imperfections would be found (nighttime storage, using "free" (post capital investment) daytime solar to turn atmospheric CO_2 and H2O directly back into gasoline or methane or something with a high energy density in a solar-derived "recycling" program, high density automotive batteries).
Whether or not we do anything of the sort (with the money we'd save pulling out of Kyoto and working to eliminate the IPCC altogether) within a decade declining solar costs and improved engineering and physics "in the pipe" already will conspire to make most of this happen anyway, long before we need to "panic" on behalf of baby polar bears.
But I agree, in the long run only fusion will allow us to achieve a credible steady state type I civilization, and we might as well get started on it. Dropping $10-30 billion on it a year with a liberal hand would probably do the trick in fairly short order.
rgb
Having just worked my way through many of the Climategate 2 emails (and yes, read a rather lot of the literature) it isn't all that surprising that Kyoto is about to be a major fail. The science is far from settled, the primary researchers are perfectly aware that it is far from settled and openly admit it in their internal discussions, but they are far more concerned with things like having a person's Ph.D. revoked (for the sin of disagreeing with their conclusions), having journal editors fired (for the sin of publishing a paper that weakened their "cause"), winning the "PR war" (what about figuring out the science?), verifying on their own that the infamous MBH hockey stick graph is crap (yes, in the internal climategate letters you discover that the primary hockey team members know perfectly well that trend-fit white noise put into Mann's algorithm produces nothing but hockey sticks at this point, but do they openly admit the mistake and remove the graph from all of the public policy presentations on the subject? Hell no! Both MBH and MJ are still there on the wikipedia pages for global warming, because admitting error and removing crap results that are known to be completely wrong weakens the message and undermines the PR war).
Throw in that the UAH temperature anomaly since 1981 -- evaluated with openly accessible methods from openly available datasets and not susceptible to e.g. UHI "corrections" liberally applied, unlike e.g. HadCRUT3 -- is a whopping 0.11C. That would be 30 years, call it a third of a century, and 0.11C net warming as of October. Over that time, CO_2 has gone from 335 ppm (Mauna Loa) to around 390 ppm. That is a 55/335 = 16% increase. Since the 1998 El Nino peak (and the end of the series of Grand Solar Maxima of the 20th century) global temperatures have gone down (or held nearly steady). The most pessimistic trending of post 1997 data is 0.2 C. During that interval CO_2 concentration went up around 8%. Even the IPCC is backing off from predictions of much warming "for a while" and of course everybody but Al Gore is sober enough to be able to see that there is no correlation between e.g. the frequency or energy in tropical storms and either the UAH (fairly reliable satellite derived) data or the God-knows-how derived HadCRUT data and especially not with raw CO_2 concentrations.
Now let's see. The earth's mean temperature is roughly 280 C give or take a bit. Let's assume that the thirty year anomaly is 0.28C, in rough agreement with UAH -- it won't matter for this argument. CO_2 up by 16%, T up by -- what would that be? Yes, that's right, by 0.1%! I won't even bother discussing climate sensitivity -- that's dead in the water right there! There are two things anybody can see from simple back of the envelope calculations, the sort one should do just to see if complex models (in the end) make sense. One is that 0.1% -- hell, 1% -- is surely within the bounds of natural variability for a tipped planet with warm, complex oceans, and the most cursory glance at temperatures over the entire Holocene stand is clear evidence that it is a lot larger than that, with or without human civilization. The other is that if 100% of that gain was pure response to CO_2 forcing without any confounding factors or fudge factors contributing, the noise from non-CO_2 fluctuations greatly exceeds this signal and we cannot explain the noise!. For the last decade, temperature trends haven't even had the same sign as a nearly 10% increase in atmospheric CO_2.
This leaves a CAGW enthusiast doubly damned. If solar state is irrelevant, decadal oscillations are irrelevant, oceanic heat reservoir forcing (with up to 1000 year timescales, so some fraction of the energy contributing to the current SST comes from sunlight that warmed the ocean when Columbus was sailing the ocean blue!) is irrelevant (and unpredictable besides), and volcanic aerosols over that decade irrelevant, then that leaves only CO_2 and the sign of the tempera