That would be true if it was one person. But the *vast* majority of people break the password system by either picking easy-to-guess ones, writing them down, or repeating/reusing them.
To borrow your analogy, this is sort of like the car manufacturers producing cars that 99% of the population can't drive properly (but are easy to manufacture), then every time there's a crash, which happen often because the cars are basically un-roadworthy, the car manufacturer tells the driver they're a moron and they need to learn to drive, and the crash was all their fault.
Well, you could use them as slingshot accelerators, much as current interplanetary missions use the solar system's planets.
Which gives the slightly ridiculous possibility of interstellar travel being something like a vast game of snooker, slinging your craft around a few hundred nomad planets to build up speed then using a few hundred more to decelerate as you get close to your destination.
So your point, basically, is that programming is all about knowing what could go wrong with your code?
Not a bad definition actually...it would certainly explain why coding productivity increases in step with experience; you've made those mistakes already and now know to avoid them.
Well I hear a lot of SA accents here in Perth, which usually means there's problems abroad (witness the huge numbers of Irish accents around too).
If there's one thing that Western Australia has got, it's vast enormous areas of completely uninhabited wilderness, you'd think perfectly suitable for this sort of thing. Clearly the SA bid was either technically superior or there was politics involved. Either way, we have arsewit politicians...
Agree. Hopefully some pointy questions will get asked as to why Africa is seen as a better place to do science than Australia.
But then again we have arsewit politicians who will probably ignore the whole thing as geeks-only and therefore irrelevant and carry on backstabbing each other and doing an excellent impression of the monkey exhibit in a zoo... including the public masturbation and flinging of poo./sigh
Yeah, I knew I was getting it wrong with the pointers example even as I pushed the submit button. Late night posting is bad.
I'll have another go hehe.
A program to add numbers or do Fibonacci is simple, and unless you're fascinated by the process, pretty boring. If the student is fascinated by the process then all they'll need is a machine and Google, their fascination will do the rest. For most kids computers *are* GUI's, and while we know that's just an illusion (and Neal Stephenson prefers his simpler illusion) it's still what programs look like, and a "real-world" program has a GUI. The key and most important thing that has to be communicated to kids (and, well, everyone) is that *they* can write real programs, that there's no magic voodoo about coding and anyone can do it, it's not done by corporate geeks in offices. Getting them to perform simple number tricks with Assembler is cool, but it emphasises the huge amount of abstraction cliff they'll have to climb to get from there to a 'real' GUI program. I think it's easier and more motivating to go down the cliff. Start at the GUI with a 'real' program that they really wrote themselves, and guide them down the abstraction layers until they get to Assembler.
given that said beginner is probably on an x86 box, with a GUI of some description as their primary interface, then spending days or weeks learning how to allocate memory, increment pointers, and output text with no real-world application is just going to turn them off (and if it doesn't then they probably don't need lessons, just a machine and Google, and they'll teach themselves).
I'm all for getting coders to understand that code doesn't run on magic pixies, that there's real hardware under it all, but I think that comes later, not as lesson 1.
Assembly might actually teach them something useful, while BASIC and COBOL serve to do as much damage to their understanding or real programming as possible.
Please don't get into this purist crap. You really expect a ten-year-old to dive right into Smalltalk or LISP so they will have as pure an understanding of coding as possible?
BASIC and COBOL both had their place and their time, and they did their jobs well. If BASIC hadn't been around I doubt the GenX coders would have got into it so young or so keenly, since most of our generation learned how to code on home computers in BASIC (and then migrated to Assembler when BASIC wasn't quick enough). There's a reason that there's still millions of lines of mission-critical COBOL code quietly running our infrastructure too.
If I had to pick a language to teach someone new in now, it'd be a hard call. I'd love to say C++ and get them into game coding but the amount of work to get from a standing start to something that runs and you can go 'I made that' at is pretty huge, and C++ doesn't cope with newbie errors very well. Java and C# would be OK, but massive...there's a *lot* of ground to cover in each of them, and while you could start small it'd be hard to stop them zooming off into irrelevant tangents and exploring half-dead libraries.
Python's good, and pretty well-structured and easy to follow, I'd probably go with that as a modern-day BASIC. So (and I know I'm feeding the troll here) would Python do any 'damage to their understanding of real programming'?
... are a tiny minority. Always have been, always will be. The submitter seems to think the average 10-year-old should be interested in programming because he was at that age. Well, good for him, and I guarantee there are still 10-year-olds interested in it, but they're going to be awfully thin on the ground -- and this was just true back then as it is now.
Agree.
My nephew at 10 years old asked me if I could teach him programming. I knew him well enough even then to say 'sure, but you've got to love it and want to stick with it' so after a brief lesson in writing local HTML files and using a browser to read them (and how to use Google to find tutorials), told him to create a web page. Sure enough about half an hour later he quit saying it was too boring.
I started learning at about 10 years old on a Commodore Pet that had nothing but crap BASIC and no graphics at all. I bugged my folks to get an Acorn Atom that had rudimentary graphics. No online Tutorials, no interactive debuggers, no GUI, nothing but command line and endless 'error 23: syntax error at line 100' messages, and I managed to code up a reasonable version of Missile Command in BASIC and Assembler. If I'd have had HTML and Javascript back then, god knows what I'd have created, but I know I wouldn't have given up after half an hour saying it was boring.
Some people find this stuff fascinating, most people don't.
Thanks for the tip, and it's good to know we can pay the authors direct and remove the godawful publishing houses as middlemen:) Hope++
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
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It doesn't work like that. You use a library manager to manage your books and that stops anyone else being able to mess with them (cos they're just files on your PC once off the device). Your canon is safe:)
Re:Colour is coming this year
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I paid for my Kindle within 6 months, purely from the difference in retail prices for books (in Australia we have ridiculously high prices for books because we have retarded protectionist laws on book publishing). I'm paying $10ish for a download to the Kindle, $25 for a dead tree paperback...doesn't take many books to pay back the cost. There's third-party library management software (I use Calibre: http://calibre-ebook.com/ ) that will manage your library on the PC and allow you to format-shift which then allows you to email the books to friends (provided they've got an e-reader of course).
And then of course I discovered that most of the pirate sites have a few thousand ebook torrent links. Not being able to sell second-hand books becomes pretty irrelevant when you can just grab what you want from the tubes for free, send it to your friends for free (and still have your copy available too of course).
I understand why a published author dedicated to the appreciation of fine literature would be worried about ebooks. The business model for novels is pretty much screwed by ebook piracy. However, as usual, I think all we'll lose is the commercial shite and the people who really want to write will continue to write. It's just harder to see how they'll get paid to do it.
The Average Usage even on a lot of large cap plans for those with decent connections in Australia is around 30GB, 10mb connections to 100Mbps is not going to suddenly make 10 times more content available. Sure there are those fringe users that try to download the entire internets porn collection every month, but they really are the minority (even if I do happen to be one of them).
At the moment. But the entire point (which seems to be deliberately ignored by every raving Liberal partisan out there (not that I'm saying you're a raving Liberal partisan of course)) is that the 'good ol' copper network is being pushed to it's limits by ADSL, and if the internet is going to grow more, it needs more bandwidth to do that in.
We may not use our 100Gb plans now, but that's probably because content companies are being constrained by the average bandwidth available, rather than being able to use whatever bandwidth they like in order to get their content across in the most effective way.
Ten years ago you would have wondered what the hell you needed 4Gb of memory in your PC for. Now you're thinking maybe that's not enough. In ten years time we'll be pondering whether 1Tb of memory is enough to keep your tablet from bottlenecking the 10Gb/s fibre connection.
might as well have another one of these threads, it's been a few years since the last one I think...
Acorn Atom circa 1980 ish. 12KB of RAM with the expansion pack. No storage at all (you could link to a tape recorder to very slowly store and recall data). No display (it plugged via a PAL lead into a TV). BASIC language and operating system fitted into a 2K ROM module if I remember correctly. I still have it on my shelf but haven't been able to plug it into a power source or TV for years.
I added global mean temp in blue to illustrate the increasing disparity since the 80's. Skeptics don't need to wait for another impotent cycle to determine whether solar activity is the driving factor.
I hate those graphs... I'm colourblind and showing me three lines of almost-identical colour and then saying 'look, they don't match' is pretty irritating;) However, with only two lines I can see the point hehe. I played around with the graphing options there and yeah, there's no correlation between sunspot activity and global temperature I can see...which is interesting but a little irrelevant as obviously solar activity is a forcing, is agreed on by everyone to be a forcing (again, the extent is debated by the various camps) and as you yourself pointed out above, is expected to play a role in setting global temperatures. So obviously just using the raw sunspot activity to match against global temps doesn't mean much. I persist in being interested to see what happens during the low cycle;)
Also, it is a chaotic system. You can't expect it to produce nice clean correlation graphs showing how the variance in one parameter influences the result in another graph. Chaotic systems don't work like that. Unfortunately political systems do, so there's a lot of effort and political capital that's gone into producing graphs that show increasing CO2 to correlate cleanly with increasing global temperature.
A couple there that I haven't read, thanks for the references:) I've avoided the creationist nutters before, as they're clearly just anti-science rather than trying to get at the truth.
Yeah, mostly they seem to be saying the warming has stopped or paused, not that we're going to freeze. Watts generally reports on other's predictions rather than making his own.
But if you take some of the nuts predictions from the political AGW movement they're no saner than some of the nuts predictions in the sceptic movement. And to be honest, some of the predictions in the IPCC publications are verging on nuts, but then a lot of that body is increasingly political rather than scientific.
And I thought solar was declining? There's all sorts of excitement on the sceptic sites about the solar minimum we're heading into which will finally prove that solar forcings > emissions forcings. Which will be interesting to see.
My prediction? The political disaster campaign will fail over the next five years. The scientists will increasingly distance themselves from the political green campaigners, there'll be a modest backlash against green politics and towards libertarian politics, until the next crunch hits and the demand for government welfare funds increases again. The climate will continue to get warmer and colder, probably warmer than it has been at any time since the MWP, maybe even significantly warmer than that, but certainly never warm enough to threaten human civilisation. The seas will continue to rise at a very modest rate, threatening a few low-lying pacific islands. Some parts of Siberia will warm enough to enable prairie farming, which will contribute to the global food supply. The increase in CO2 and water vapour will reduce desertification and in some place push back the deserts marginally (we may even get the North African coast back as it was in Roman times).
My understanding of the IPCC position is that water vapour (and other feedbacks) will be doing the heavy lifting of any warming. CO2 by itself is 'only' capable of around 1-2 degrees C warming, for example (methane is capable of more but is in less abundance, and there are other emissions that have different signatures, the net result is around 1-3 degrees C). However these forcings are enough to trigger the natural feedbacks which will take over and drive the temperature up much further. So human emissions are directly responsible for at least some of the warming, which as far as I'm aware is agreed by everyone.
However, you cite human influence, which is different (human emissions could be responsible for only part of the warming, but because they trigger the feedbacks, all of the warming is influenced by humans) I'd agree that your characterisation of the debate is correct, with the caveat that the sceptics haven't actually predicted anything except 'the scientists are wrong, it's not going to get that warm'. The current flavour of the month is that the coming solar minimum will give us 30 years of cooling, but there's too many competing theories to actually get a consistent prediction of anything from the movement. To be fair, the anti-AGW movement doesn't see its job as providing an alternative explanation, just trying to poke holes in the political AGW movement and keep the science honest.
I have never seen a case where they ask questions, their minds are made up already and no ammount of evidence/answers will change it. After all they might have to drive their SUV overcompensationveichles a bit less or something, and we cant have that!
This. This is the problem I have.
There are a lot of reasons to not drive an SUV in cities, so don't get me wrong I'm all for things that make people behave less stupidly.
But you're using a cudgel to attempt to beat sense into their heads instead of educating them as to why their behaviour is harming everyone around them. So it's not surprising they're taking it as an attack and stubbornly resisting every step.
Let's just follow the chain of logic you're using: - Global Warming is caused by human CO2 emissions - Cars emit CO2, and bigger cars emit more CO2 - Therefore people should stop driving cars, or drive smaller cars if they must drive cars
It's perfectly logical, but completely wrong. If we assume the first step as true, then cars are not the only thing that emit CO2, and in fact they're not even in the top 10. There are lots of other things that will make more difference to the climate if we cut them than cars. But if we assume that the second step is true, then we just need to switch fuels to something that doesn't emit CO2, or clean the CO2 from the exhaust fumes, and we're still good to drive massive overcompensating cars again.
Trying to drive people to more ethical sensible behaviour by screaming at them 'the world will burn unless you do this' is just going to backfire sooo badly.
Maybe because we do value science so highly and we utterly detest the politicisation of science that is such a huge feature of the climate debate.
If you actually listen to both sides, then the scientists are debating one very small thing: how sensitive the climate is to the small forcing from human gaseous emissions.
Both sides agree there is some warming. The extent of the current warming and whether it has paused/stopped for the last ten years is disputed (for a variety of reasons, but there are credible peer-reviewed climate scientists discussing the pause). The political AGW movement denies there has been any pause ("9 of the hottest 10 years on record have been since 2000", for example, which is shrill cry to keep believing the warming, but is also completely consistent with a pause in warming). The anti-AGW movement says that we have had some warming, but it's not a pause and we're due for another cooling period.
Both sides agree that at least some of the warming is due to human emissions. Again, the dispute is over how much. The political AGW movement says all the warming is human-induced. The climatologists say some of it is. The anti-AGW movement say very little of it is, and there are a variety of other more important causes.
Both sides agree that the majority influence on the climate are the various feedbacks involved in this chaotic system. The climate papers and models are very firmly saying that the current warming will increase water vapour in the atmosphere which will cause further warming. The political AGW movement says there is a 'tipping point' imminent beyond which all feedbacks become runaway positive feedbacks and the planet burns (I exaggerate only very slightly). The anti-AGW movement says that the feedbacks are unknown, there's no evidence that the models are right on this, and the water vapour feedbacks could be as strongly negative as positive.
Both sides agree that the outcome of continued warming is unknown. The climatologists get quiet on this point, but there are a number of other disciplines, notably the biosciences, that have published papers showing that any climate change is bad (which makes sense from a worldview where any changes to an ecosystem are seen as 'damage' and the current state of the ecosystem is the ideal state of that ecosystem, which is the prevailing view). The political AGW movement insist that the outcome will be catastrophic. The anti-AGW movement tend towards the view that a little warming would actually be quite nice, but accept that some places would have a negative outcome.
There are ancillary debates about, for instance, ocean level rises, ocean acidification, the causes and consequences of sea-ice and glacier retreats and other stuff, but basically it for the most part seems to be pretty good, open, honest debate. The anti-AGW movement has a core of competent scientists, mathematicians and amateur/retired climatologists who do know their stuff and can talk reasonably about it. For example, the original scepticism was sparked by McIntyre who is a statistician and had some legitimate questions about the statistics used in the climate science papers, those questions were subsequently borne out by the UK enquiries (no-one did anything 'wrong' but the enquiry did conclude that there were valid questions about the statistics methodologies used).
However, this is all surrounded by a haze of politics, so that professional climatologists have to be careful about what they publish in case it can be seen as supporting the 'other side', there are calls to censor publications on the subject to maintain a united front on the subject, the image of a 97% 'consensus' must be maintained at all times. The only place there can be a sensible debate about it is on the blogs, because they're not censored (though there are some people who would love to). And all the time there's a constant drumbeat of 'DENIALIST' whenever someone questions the political "truths".
This is bad. The use of the word Denialist is bad. Attempting to censo
His media empire has peddled enough fear and confusion that we'd actually accept strangers seeing us naked because it might in some way fool us into believing that we're not immediately going to get raped/blown up/mugged/shot/knifed/run over/whatever in our homes by the rampaging teenagers/immigrants/aboriginals/bikies that infest our cities.
Of course when I say 'us' I mean the general population of Australia, and not "us" the geeks/nerds/intellectuals/speccy gits who are capable of analysing statistics and realise that this is one of the safest countries in the world to live in .
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That would be true if it was one person.
But the *vast* majority of people break the password system by either picking easy-to-guess ones, writing them down, or repeating/reusing them.
To borrow your analogy, this is sort of like the car manufacturers producing cars that 99% of the population can't drive properly (but are easy to manufacture), then every time there's a crash, which happen often because the cars are basically un-roadworthy, the car manufacturer tells the driver they're a moron and they need to learn to drive, and the crash was all their fault.
The system is broken if people can't use it. People aren't broken because they can't use the system right.
If your method of controlling access is nice and easy for computers but hard for people, it's broken and you need to find a new method.
Well, you could use them as slingshot accelerators, much as current interplanetary missions use the solar system's planets.
Which gives the slightly ridiculous possibility of interstellar travel being something like a vast game of snooker, slinging your craft around a few hundred nomad planets to build up speed then using a few hundred more to decelerate as you get close to your destination.
So your point, basically, is that programming is all about knowing what could go wrong with your code?
Not a bad definition actually...it would certainly explain why coding productivity increases in step with experience; you've made those mistakes already and now know to avoid them.
Well I hear a lot of SA accents here in Perth, which usually means there's problems abroad (witness the huge numbers of Irish accents around too).
If there's one thing that Western Australia has got, it's vast enormous areas of completely uninhabited wilderness, you'd think perfectly suitable for this sort of thing. Clearly the SA bid was either technically superior or there was politics involved. Either way, we have arsewit politicians...
Well start talking to an experienced C# coder about hashtables and they'll reply by talking about dictionaries.
Maybe the confusion was on the other side of the desk?
Sure, 'cos you can use C# to do a client-side in-browser game, that's gonna work really well...oh hang on...
Use the tool to fit the problem and learn how to use your tools. Just because most JS code is nasty doesn't mean you have to write nasty JS.
Agree. Hopefully some pointy questions will get asked as to why Africa is seen as a better place to do science than Australia.
But then again we have arsewit politicians who will probably ignore the whole thing as geeks-only and therefore irrelevant and carry on backstabbing each other and doing an excellent impression of the monkey exhibit in a zoo... including the public masturbation and flinging of poo. /sigh
Yeah, I knew I was getting it wrong with the pointers example even as I pushed the submit button. Late night posting is bad.
I'll have another go hehe.
A program to add numbers or do Fibonacci is simple, and unless you're fascinated by the process, pretty boring. If the student is fascinated by the process then all they'll need is a machine and Google, their fascination will do the rest.
For most kids computers *are* GUI's, and while we know that's just an illusion (and Neal Stephenson prefers his simpler illusion) it's still what programs look like, and a "real-world" program has a GUI.
The key and most important thing that has to be communicated to kids (and, well, everyone) is that *they* can write real programs, that there's no magic voodoo about coding and anyone can do it, it's not done by corporate geeks in offices. Getting them to perform simple number tricks with Assembler is cool, but it emphasises the huge amount of abstraction cliff they'll have to climb to get from there to a 'real' GUI program. I think it's easier and more motivating to go down the cliff. Start at the GUI with a 'real' program that they really wrote themselves, and guide them down the abstraction layers until they get to Assembler.
I wrote out a whole reply to this, before I stopped myself from feeding the troll.
You nearly had me ;)
yeah you're joking ;)
given that said beginner is probably on an x86 box, with a GUI of some description as their primary interface, then spending days or weeks learning how to allocate memory, increment pointers, and output text with no real-world application is just going to turn them off (and if it doesn't then they probably don't need lessons, just a machine and Google, and they'll teach themselves).
I'm all for getting coders to understand that code doesn't run on magic pixies, that there's real hardware under it all, but I think that comes later, not as lesson 1.
Assembly might actually teach them something useful, while BASIC and COBOL serve to do as much damage to their understanding or real programming as possible.
Please don't get into this purist crap.
You really expect a ten-year-old to dive right into Smalltalk or LISP so they will have as pure an understanding of coding as possible?
BASIC and COBOL both had their place and their time, and they did their jobs well. If BASIC hadn't been around I doubt the GenX coders would have got into it so young or so keenly, since most of our generation learned how to code on home computers in BASIC (and then migrated to Assembler when BASIC wasn't quick enough). There's a reason that there's still millions of lines of mission-critical COBOL code quietly running our infrastructure too.
If I had to pick a language to teach someone new in now, it'd be a hard call. I'd love to say C++ and get them into game coding but the amount of work to get from a standing start to something that runs and you can go 'I made that' at is pretty huge, and C++ doesn't cope with newbie errors very well.
Java and C# would be OK, but massive...there's a *lot* of ground to cover in each of them, and while you could start small it'd be hard to stop them zooming off into irrelevant tangents and exploring half-dead libraries.
Python's good, and pretty well-structured and easy to follow, I'd probably go with that as a modern-day BASIC. So (and I know I'm feeding the troll here) would Python do any 'damage to their understanding of real programming'?
... are a tiny minority. Always have been, always will be. The submitter seems to think the average 10-year-old should be interested in programming because he was at that age. Well, good for him, and I guarantee there are still 10-year-olds interested in it, but they're going to be awfully thin on the ground -- and this was just true back then as it is now.
Agree.
My nephew at 10 years old asked me if I could teach him programming. I knew him well enough even then to say 'sure, but you've got to love it and want to stick with it' so after a brief lesson in writing local HTML files and using a browser to read them (and how to use Google to find tutorials), told him to create a web page. Sure enough about half an hour later he quit saying it was too boring.
I started learning at about 10 years old on a Commodore Pet that had nothing but crap BASIC and no graphics at all. I bugged my folks to get an Acorn Atom that had rudimentary graphics. No online Tutorials, no interactive debuggers, no GUI, nothing but command line and endless 'error 23: syntax error at line 100' messages, and I managed to code up a reasonable version of Missile Command in BASIC and Assembler. If I'd have had HTML and Javascript back then, god knows what I'd have created, but I know I wouldn't have given up after half an hour saying it was boring.
Some people find this stuff fascinating, most people don't.
Thanks for the tip, and it's good to know we can pay the authors direct and remove the godawful publishing houses as middlemen :) Hope++
It doesn't work like that. You use a library manager to manage your books and that stops anyone else being able to mess with them (cos they're just files on your PC once off the device). :)
Your canon is safe
I paid for my Kindle within 6 months, purely from the difference in retail prices for books (in Australia we have ridiculously high prices for books because we have retarded protectionist laws on book publishing). I'm paying $10ish for a download to the Kindle, $25 for a dead tree paperback...doesn't take many books to pay back the cost.
There's third-party library management software (I use Calibre: http://calibre-ebook.com/ ) that will manage your library on the PC and allow you to format-shift which then allows you to email the books to friends (provided they've got an e-reader of course).
And then of course I discovered that most of the pirate sites have a few thousand ebook torrent links. Not being able to sell second-hand books becomes pretty irrelevant when you can just grab what you want from the tubes for free, send it to your friends for free (and still have your copy available too of course).
I understand why a published author dedicated to the appreciation of fine literature would be worried about ebooks. The business model for novels is pretty much screwed by ebook piracy. However, as usual, I think all we'll lose is the commercial shite and the people who really want to write will continue to write. It's just harder to see how they'll get paid to do it.
The Average Usage even on a lot of large cap plans for those with decent connections in Australia is around 30GB, 10mb connections to 100Mbps is not going to suddenly make 10 times more content available. Sure there are those fringe users that try to download the entire internets porn collection every month, but they really are the minority (even if I do happen to be one of them).
At the moment. But the entire point (which seems to be deliberately ignored by every raving Liberal partisan out there (not that I'm saying you're a raving Liberal partisan of course)) is that the 'good ol' copper network is being pushed to it's limits by ADSL, and if the internet is going to grow more, it needs more bandwidth to do that in.
We may not use our 100Gb plans now, but that's probably because content companies are being constrained by the average bandwidth available, rather than being able to use whatever bandwidth they like in order to get their content across in the most effective way.
Ten years ago you would have wondered what the hell you needed 4Gb of memory in your PC for. Now you're thinking maybe that's not enough. In ten years time we'll be pondering whether 1Tb of memory is enough to keep your tablet from bottlenecking the 10Gb/s fibre connection.
might as well have another one of these threads, it's been a few years since the last one I think...
Acorn Atom circa 1980 ish. 12KB of RAM with the expansion pack. No storage at all (you could link to a tape recorder to very slowly store and recall data). No display (it plugged via a PAL lead into a TV). BASIC language and operating system fitted into a 2K ROM module if I remember correctly. I still have it on my shelf but haven't been able to plug it into a power source or TV for years.
Yes and no. It's an 11.5 year cycle. Each cycle has been lower than the previous for the last few decades, and this coming cycle looks to be lower still, but we are headed into another maximum. This graph illustrates: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:12/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:138/plot/gistemp/mean:12/scale:100/offset:70
I added global mean temp in blue to illustrate the increasing disparity since the 80's. Skeptics don't need to wait for another impotent cycle to determine whether solar activity is the driving factor.
I hate those graphs... I'm colourblind and showing me three lines of almost-identical colour and then saying 'look, they don't match' is pretty irritating ;) ;)
However, with only two lines I can see the point hehe. I played around with the graphing options there and yeah, there's no correlation between sunspot activity and global temperature I can see...which is interesting but a little irrelevant as obviously solar activity is a forcing, is agreed on by everyone to be a forcing (again, the extent is debated by the various camps) and as you yourself pointed out above, is expected to play a role in setting global temperatures. So obviously just using the raw sunspot activity to match against global temps doesn't mean much. I persist in being interested to see what happens during the low cycle
Also, it is a chaotic system. You can't expect it to produce nice clean correlation graphs showing how the variance in one parameter influences the result in another graph. Chaotic systems don't work like that. Unfortunately political systems do, so there's a lot of effort and political capital that's gone into producing graphs that show increasing CO2 to correlate cleanly with increasing global temperature.
A couple there that I haven't read, thanks for the references :) I've avoided the creationist nutters before, as they're clearly just anti-science rather than trying to get at the truth.
Yeah, mostly they seem to be saying the warming has stopped or paused, not that we're going to freeze. Watts generally reports on other's predictions rather than making his own.
But if you take some of the nuts predictions from the political AGW movement they're no saner than some of the nuts predictions in the sceptic movement. And to be honest, some of the predictions in the IPCC publications are verging on nuts, but then a lot of that body is increasingly political rather than scientific.
And I thought solar was declining? There's all sorts of excitement on the sceptic sites about the solar minimum we're heading into which will finally prove that solar forcings > emissions forcings. Which will be interesting to see.
My prediction? The political disaster campaign will fail over the next five years. The scientists will increasingly distance themselves from the political green campaigners, there'll be a modest backlash against green politics and towards libertarian politics, until the next crunch hits and the demand for government welfare funds increases again. The climate will continue to get warmer and colder, probably warmer than it has been at any time since the MWP, maybe even significantly warmer than that, but certainly never warm enough to threaten human civilisation.
The seas will continue to rise at a very modest rate, threatening a few low-lying pacific islands. Some parts of Siberia will warm enough to enable prairie farming, which will contribute to the global food supply. The increase in CO2 and water vapour will reduce desertification and in some place push back the deserts marginally (we may even get the North African coast back as it was in Roman times).
But then, I'm an optimist ;)
My understanding of the IPCC position is that water vapour (and other feedbacks) will be doing the heavy lifting of any warming. CO2 by itself is 'only' capable of around 1-2 degrees C warming, for example (methane is capable of more but is in less abundance, and there are other emissions that have different signatures, the net result is around 1-3 degrees C). However these forcings are enough to trigger the natural feedbacks which will take over and drive the temperature up much further. So human emissions are directly responsible for at least some of the warming, which as far as I'm aware is agreed by everyone.
However, you cite human influence, which is different (human emissions could be responsible for only part of the warming, but because they trigger the feedbacks, all of the warming is influenced by humans)
I'd agree that your characterisation of the debate is correct, with the caveat that the sceptics haven't actually predicted anything except 'the scientists are wrong, it's not going to get that warm'. The current flavour of the month is that the coming solar minimum will give us 30 years of cooling, but there's too many competing theories to actually get a consistent prediction of anything from the movement. To be fair, the anti-AGW movement doesn't see its job as providing an alternative explanation, just trying to poke holes in the political AGW movement and keep the science honest.
I have never seen a case where they ask questions, their minds are made up already and no ammount of evidence/answers will change it. After all they might have to drive their SUV overcompensationveichles a bit less or something, and we cant have that!
This. This is the problem I have.
There are a lot of reasons to not drive an SUV in cities, so don't get me wrong I'm all for things that make people behave less stupidly.
But you're using a cudgel to attempt to beat sense into their heads instead of educating them as to why their behaviour is harming everyone around them. So it's not surprising they're taking it as an attack and stubbornly resisting every step.
Let's just follow the chain of logic you're using:
- Global Warming is caused by human CO2 emissions
- Cars emit CO2, and bigger cars emit more CO2
- Therefore people should stop driving cars, or drive smaller cars if they must drive cars
It's perfectly logical, but completely wrong.
If we assume the first step as true, then cars are not the only thing that emit CO2, and in fact they're not even in the top 10. There are lots of other things that will make more difference to the climate if we cut them than cars.
But if we assume that the second step is true, then we just need to switch fuels to something that doesn't emit CO2, or clean the CO2 from the exhaust fumes, and we're still good to drive massive overcompensating cars again.
Trying to drive people to more ethical sensible behaviour by screaming at them 'the world will burn unless you do this' is just going to backfire sooo badly.
Maybe because we do value science so highly and we utterly detest the politicisation of science that is such a huge feature of the climate debate.
If you actually listen to both sides, then the scientists are debating one very small thing: how sensitive the climate is to the small forcing from human gaseous emissions.
Both sides agree there is some warming. The extent of the current warming and whether it has paused/stopped for the last ten years is disputed (for a variety of reasons, but there are credible peer-reviewed climate scientists discussing the pause). The political AGW movement denies there has been any pause ("9 of the hottest 10 years on record have been since 2000", for example, which is shrill cry to keep believing the warming, but is also completely consistent with a pause in warming). The anti-AGW movement says that we have had some warming, but it's not a pause and we're due for another cooling period.
Both sides agree that at least some of the warming is due to human emissions. Again, the dispute is over how much. The political AGW movement says all the warming is human-induced. The climatologists say some of it is. The anti-AGW movement say very little of it is, and there are a variety of other more important causes.
Both sides agree that the majority influence on the climate are the various feedbacks involved in this chaotic system. The climate papers and models are very firmly saying that the current warming will increase water vapour in the atmosphere which will cause further warming. The political AGW movement says there is a 'tipping point' imminent beyond which all feedbacks become runaway positive feedbacks and the planet burns (I exaggerate only very slightly). The anti-AGW movement says that the feedbacks are unknown, there's no evidence that the models are right on this, and the water vapour feedbacks could be as strongly negative as positive.
Both sides agree that the outcome of continued warming is unknown. The climatologists get quiet on this point, but there are a number of other disciplines, notably the biosciences, that have published papers showing that any climate change is bad (which makes sense from a worldview where any changes to an ecosystem are seen as 'damage' and the current state of the ecosystem is the ideal state of that ecosystem, which is the prevailing view). The political AGW movement insist that the outcome will be catastrophic. The anti-AGW movement tend towards the view that a little warming would actually be quite nice, but accept that some places would have a negative outcome.
There are ancillary debates about, for instance, ocean level rises, ocean acidification, the causes and consequences of sea-ice and glacier retreats and other stuff, but basically it for the most part seems to be pretty good, open, honest debate. The anti-AGW movement has a core of competent scientists, mathematicians and amateur/retired climatologists who do know their stuff and can talk reasonably about it. For example, the original scepticism was sparked by McIntyre who is a statistician and had some legitimate questions about the statistics used in the climate science papers, those questions were subsequently borne out by the UK enquiries (no-one did anything 'wrong' but the enquiry did conclude that there were valid questions about the statistics methodologies used).
However, this is all surrounded by a haze of politics, so that professional climatologists have to be careful about what they publish in case it can be seen as supporting the 'other side', there are calls to censor publications on the subject to maintain a united front on the subject, the image of a 97% 'consensus' must be maintained at all times. The only place there can be a sensible debate about it is on the blogs, because they're not censored (though there are some people who would love to). And all the time there's a constant drumbeat of 'DENIALIST' whenever someone questions the political "truths".
This is bad. The use of the word Denialist is bad. Attempting to censo
His media empire has peddled enough fear and confusion that we'd actually accept strangers seeing us naked because it might in some way fool us into believing that we're not immediately going to get raped/blown up/mugged/shot/knifed/run over/whatever in our homes by the rampaging teenagers/immigrants/aboriginals/bikies that infest our cities.
Of course when I say 'us' I mean the general population of Australia, and not "us" the geeks/nerds/intellectuals/speccy gits who are capable of analysing statistics and realise that this is one of the safest countries in the world to live in .
Australia certainly would lose tourists as it would eliminate US tourists...
The exchange rate has already seen to most of that. Australia is ridiculously expensive in US Dollars.