every 4 years for a trek on the moon seems a bit farfetched
The Lunar X-Prize was announced in 2007. Four years ago. They've already finalised the list of competitors, and one team reportedly has already booked a launch.
And I think it's reasonable to assume that the gap between challenge and first win will be greater than the gap between the first and second. After all, if you can do is once, you can do it again. And a team who misses the first prize (due to some minor technical glitch) will be in a prime position to challenge for the second.
Judging by the replies, the general interpretation of my comment was "X-Prize needs smaller goals, smaller prizes". But that wasn't my intent. It's the repetition that's the key.
Take the current lunar prize. I don't suggest making the first prize easier (such as your suggestion), I suggest that the challenge be repeated after it is first won. The technology will quickly develop as teams try to out-distance each other (meaning greater reliability, range, terrain handling, control, etc.) That first challenge will seem small, retrospectively, but only in contrast to how good they get: "500m? That's pathetic! Last year they cracked the 100km mark!"
OTOH, when the actual prize is won, development will simply stop. As DerekLyons says below, there's no natural market yet.
I do understand that the donors don't want to be on the hook for decades. I was mourning for lost opportunities, not complaining that the foundation itself is "doing it wrong." The foundation doesn't have a choice. Now if I was a billionaire philanthrocapitalist, I'd put my money where my fat stupid mouth is. But I ain't, so I can't.
(Oh, another example like DARPA. Years ago, the original UK Robot Wars show did a special here in Australia, Aussie teams challenging the Best-of-British. We were slaughtered. Why? We don't have a local contest. Aussie teams had clever engineers, but they didn't have the contest necessary to hone their craft. The first one you build is always the worst.)
It's just that the hoax would be so mind-numbingly stupid. So awe-inspiringly pointless. If the soviet's caught them, it would be the greatest humiliation in the US's history. The US would be psychologically crippled, the soviet's would have effectively won the cold war. Why would they do it?
This would end all tinfoil hat theories on whether Nasa actually went there.
No it wouldn't. Most of the pro-hoax arguments can be refuted without any special knowledge. Hell, some just require you to turn on a couple of lights. Nothing will defeat the conspiracy theorists except ridicule and time.
It's a shame that the X-Prize donors only fund single prizes. It would vastly increase the rate of technological development if they were regular contests.
Compare DARPA's robot car challenge (now Urban Challenge) to X-Prize's original $10m sub-orbital prize. The first year, no team even qualified for the DARPA prize. Hell no team completed more than a fraction of the course. The following year, most teams completed a more difficult course, and half of them qualified (finished in under 10hrs). A few years later, the things are running traffic in urban obstacle courses.
Meanwhile, you have the suborbital X-Prize. After 9 years with no attempts, Burt Rutan's team met the minimum requirements for the X-Prize. And no one has ever done it since, including Rutan. Imagine how much suborbital rockets would have improved by now if it had been an annual highest-flight-wins event.
And imagine if the Lunar Prize was... well, let's say, a quadrennial event. A prize awarded every four years for the longest rover trek on the moon. A Paris Dakar Rally on the moon.
DARPA had the right idea, the X-Prize donors don't.
That alone gives Watson a huge timing advantage over the human competitors, who must (effectively) perform voice recognition and OCR to process the clues.
Don't forget that we are processing the clue for the answer (question! whatever!) even while we are processing it for comprehension. (*) Doing all that parallel analogue processing that the human brain is insanely good at. (Haven't you had that feeling that you know the answer to a question before you actually "remember" the answer? There's some freaky-assed recognition processing going on in there.)
Forcing Watson to wait until... however long you estimate it takes humans to read the clue... before Watson "sees" it, let's say two seconds, would give humans a nearly two second head start.
(* The spoken clue is a) for the audience b) to provide a timing sequence for the release of the buzzers. I doubt any but the most amateurish players rely on the spoken clue.)
Right, because Deep Blue spanking Kasparov totally ruined chess for everyone else.
Deep Blue didn't ruin chess for people who'd already spent their lives learning how to play it. The question is whether it has reduced the number of kids taking up the game?
"In thirty years it will all fit in your pocket and cost $19.99."
Only if Moore's Law continues unabated. <Sigh> We finally see progress in useful AI, natural language, self-navigating cars, robots in the home, etc, and now we're running into Moore's Wall.
This is gonna be like the whole space thing again, isn't it? You build up my geek SF hopes and then stagnate for 40 years.
As everyone said, they're all walled gardens. So what we need is an open gaming platform.
I've previously suggested that open-source friendly-ish AMD and Google team up to develop a hardware spec and game-flavoured O/S (respectively) that any random hardware maker can develop, and any random game/App developer can write for, licence free.
they'll claim it's bankrupt, and legally separate from the lawyers themselves),
How amenable are US courts to the counter-claim that the firm was set up solely for that purpose? I was under the impression that judges could sometimes set aside "legal fiction".
I like many of these ideas, but they are impossible because they require a competitive experimental market. Because of copyright licensing, as it currently stands, no one (except Apple) can try (and fail) new methods because they'd need to negotiate with each and every rights-holder. And the rights-holders won't try these because it interferes with their existing (even if declining) markets.
There's no reason it has to be like this. Since copyright is a centralised government monopoly grant, there's no moral reason why there isn't a centralised government licensing system, to simplify the ability of new players to experiment in new markets.
I know the system's still in early trials, but I can't see anything about safety testing in their own site (or any article about them). They've tested in snow, so I assume they've seen a bit of ice, but there's nothing about them deliberately trying to find the system's fail points.
And that seems a little too common in these automated systems. Remember Volvo's infamous lolfail video? An anti-collision system that happily drove into a truck. Or Top Gear's experience with a production auto-park system, which happily backed into a fence. These systems work brilliantly until you throw something at them that wasn't in their test.
How will they cope with faulty data? What happens when I buy one that's 20 years old? I have enough trouble with faulty sensors on my decidedly non-automated car.
I can imagine people reporting their cars suddenly swerving off the road for no apparent reason. Manufacturer stonewalls, claims driver error, publishes data from in-car data recorder showing that a manual "release" was triggered. Except it is recorded from the same sensor that triggers the release, so can't differentiate between a driver action and a faulty sensor. Then someone dies. And the manufacturer issues a world-wide "fix", a slightly higher surround around the Release button.
The total global stockpile of He3 (most of which is used in nuclear weapons) is a few hundred kilograms. The commercial market is... small.
You'd be dropping an amount equivalent to several decades supply, all in one hit. Either you drop the price hard, or the market does not expand enough to absorb your supply and you have it sitting in a cylinder not earning money. (So you're not paying your debt/investors. So they would never lend/invest in the first place, because your business plan fails.)
But even at a full $4M/kg, you must spend less than $400M (per 100kg) in order to break even. But a small lunar lander would cost $200M for the launch alone. Leaving you $200M for the entire hardware platform (which includes equipment necessary to extract and concentrate a very very low level resource.)
To profit enough to make the venture worthwhile in its own right, you probably have to halve the costs to $200M. Which you can't. So until launch costs are much less, and hardware costs are much less, the whole idea is just pointless.
Re: Fusion.
As others have said, D/T fusion is easier than He3. The advantage of He3 fusion isn't that it's easy, it's that it's "Clean".
So if we crack self-sustaining He3 fusion, we'll already have D/T fusion. And He3 is the "ash" produced by D/T fusion. So by the time He3 fusion is practical, we'll already have an abundant Earth-based source.
There are reasons for going to the moon, He3 is not one of them. Anyone who talks about He3 is either ignorant, or lying to you to get funding.
There is no Helium-3 fusion. Therefore you are limited to existing markets.
As near as I can find, the price of He3 is $4M/kg, and the size of the commercial market is at or below 100kg. So your maximum gross income is $400M for 100kg delivery. That means you need to do, not just a sample-return, but also the mining and separation, for the price of a small probe.
Worse, the moment you drop 100kg onto the commercial market, there will be a sharp price drop, so you won't get $400M anyway.
Worser still, the main use of He3 today is in nuclear weapons. So expect severe restrictions on who you can sell to.
As an exercise, just to prove to yourself that you are correct and not stupid, try to find a Western nation with health care that is less "Socialist/Fascist" than the US under ObamaCare.
Just one.
Hey, it's not a waste, you'll have an example of a superior system to point to in future posts. "Why can't we have a system like [insert country], look how much better it is than stupid ObamaCare!"
No seriously. The idea of a decentralised, secure net serves some government/corporate needs even as other parts of those same governments/corporations are trying to restrict any user-side freedom.
We just need to trick one side into giving us the basics, before the other side catches on.
Apple also needs to lend him some lawyers. (He's being sued remember.) That act alone would undo all the brand damage this "support" company is causing.
If that is what the people want, the people will download it and based on those numbers, money could be sent their way.
Since the downloader invests nothing bar his ISP, it would be easy for an artist ('n'friends) to artificially boost the download numbers.
(Not criticising the general idea, but an unspoofable "download tracking system" would be hard to pull off. An idea I suggested (pre-iTunes) was a licensing system to replace digital copyright. Teh governmentz sets up a central Music/Film/Book Library server containing all published digital works. Vendors subscribe to it, which gives them the right to resell any work. The vendors are the only ones who need to track downloads. Government distributes royalties. Vendors don't have to negotiate with individual publishing companies, teh government sets all rates. It's not free-for-users, but it's a step away from existing stupidity.)
Firstly, because the hypothesis is unprovable (we don't have multiple Earth's to experiment with)
Hell, if that's the standard you've just ruled out 90% of science.
The point here is that two scientists can argue about Dark Matter [...] and nobody is going to raise my taxes and tell me I can't drive a car to work any more.
Make that 95%.
We're now asked to believe that warming causes cooling.
Now? I've been following this issue since the '80s and I've always heard the researchers say that global warming doesn't rule out regional cooling. It's not like it's something they've come up with this year to explain a northern hemisphere cold snap.
James Hansen.
Oh, the NASA guy. Wasn't he arrested (along with a 90+yr old congressman) for protesting against mountaintop-removal mining. That's where they blast the top off frickin' mountains and dump the waste in the valley below. Not exactly radical environmentalism to object to that.
He's also the guy who started this whole scare with his evidence to the senate in the 1980's.
Crap. As I pointed out to Dishevel, in my original post, this stuff didn't start in the 1980's. You can track the basic idea back to the 19th century. Lots of research in the '50s and '60s. It was mainstream atmospheric science by the '70s. The '80s was just when it hit public and politcal awareness and the backlash really started.
I agree [science] will win out eventually. Who was it who said that science progresses one funeral at a time? That's how paradigms get overturned.
40+ years of research. 30 years of bitter attacks on climate scientists, 30 years of government and industry funded opposition. Don't you think, if AGW was crap, we'd be a little further along with disproving it by now?
(Deaths aren't how ideas get overturned, they are just bypassed. If you are wrong, whether through fraud or stubborn error, you don't get any new evidence. You, or even your entire field, stagnates. Meanwhile, your rivals keep discovering new things, pushing further into the science, which gains them PhD students, citations, papers, funding, etc. Eventually it's as if you didn't exist. It happened with the Piltdown Hoax. It happened with Fred Hoyle and steady-state theory. Once he couldn't accept he was wrong, he pretty much stopped doing science. (The same thing has happened with Richard Lindzen...)
Lindzen
That you didn't even bother to give his whole name suggests you know how well-known, and how controversial, he is within the field. Given that, you would also know how much of his work has been debunked. Especially his whole IR-iris negative-feedback thing.
the basic idea; CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we are releasing fossil carbon, therefore atmospheric CO2 levels will rise, therefore temperatures will rise. Nothing has ever cast doubt on that. No rival theory has ever produced any supporting evidence (not homeostasis, not sun-driving nor any other "natural cycle" theory, nor any other.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but we aren't living in a greenhouse. The Earth radiates energy into space.
Errr, greenhouses radiate away energy too. If they didn't they would never reach thermal equilibrium.
CO2 is the reason Earth isn't frozen. You do accept that, right? It raised the Earth's thermal equilibrium. It's century old science, no one seriously questions it. And if X units raises equilibrium Y degrees, why is it hard to accept that 2X will raise the it further?
The catastrophists (political activists) think it's anything from 4K to 16K. None of them know enough about the climate system to make any predictions, but they publish press releases of their model outputs as if they do. Without AGW, most of them wouldn't have careers.
Jesus, you really think there's some giant conspiracy? My original question remains, why do you believe that? How could such a thing exist in science given the way it works?
Thread's dead, but just in case you are still watching...
it's because it isn't really science; it's more like Astrology.
Why? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious, I don't understand why people who generally accept science are so hostile to AGW. 40 years of research, thousands of scientists (many who began as critics, many who are still critical of some aspect or subtheory.) How do you convince yourself that this, and only this, field is so dramatically different from any other.
The second question is easier to answer: wherever there are leftist activists - i.e. `post-normal' scientists who simultaneously decide which temperature stations to delete from their analysis and also go and get themselves arrested blockading power stations,then one can withdraw trust fairly easily.
And I got yelled at for not referencing...
But seriously, every field in science has feuds, incompetents, even frauds. But the science itself wins out. You can't pick one guy you dislike and say, "Aha, they must all be the same!" Science doesn't work that way.
Physicists are a little different (and easier to trust) of course, because there's not really a political ideology that has as its central core theme the belief that a proton is made up of 3 quarks.
How many physicists have you met?:)
My comment about ambiguous vs arrow-straight science... An example of ambiguous science is dark-matter. There was evidence of something going on, but no one could say for sure which way the science would go. Personally, I preferred MOND for its elegance. But over time, it was clear that the evidence had swung against MOND (and similar alternatives) in favour of Dark Matter. Moreso, it now looks like the superstring variant of Dark Matter is going to "Win". Who knew.
Likewise in paleo-anthropology. Out-Of-Africa vs Multi-regionalism. OOA was the default explanation, but MR started to get some wins, so who knew which way it would go. But over time, evidence came down more and more on a hybrid theory, 90% OOA, but with interbreeding with other hominins as Homo Sapiens spread.
Big bang theory, OTOH, just got more and more solid. Oh, there is bickering at the very edges of the theory, but nothing will be discovered that debunks the core idea of an expanding universe. The new evidence would not just have to be inconsistent with BB, it would also have to explain all the other evidence that did support BB.
AGW is like the big bang. It was never ambiguous. Since the 1970's (hell, since the 1870's) no evidence has ever countered the basic idea; CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we are releasing fossil carbon, therefore atmospheric CO2 levels will rise, therefore temperatures will rise. Nothing has ever cast doubt on that. No rival theory has ever produced any supporting evidence (not homeostasis, not sun-driving nor any other "natural cycle" theory, nor any other.)
<Sigh> Another stupidly long message... I am genuinely curious and you don't seem to be an "oh oh we're all gonna die, ha ha ha!" wanker, so if you can accept that I'm not trying to troll you, can you explain why you see AGW theory as so wildly different from any other field of science? Put it another way, what do they have to do differently?
Slashdot Mirror
every 4 years for a trek on the moon seems a bit farfetched
The Lunar X-Prize was announced in 2007. Four years ago. They've already finalised the list of competitors, and one team reportedly has already booked a launch.
And I think it's reasonable to assume that the gap between challenge and first win will be greater than the gap between the first and second. After all, if you can do is once, you can do it again. And a team who misses the first prize (due to some minor technical glitch) will be in a prime position to challenge for the second.
Judging by the replies, the general interpretation of my comment was "X-Prize needs smaller goals, smaller prizes". But that wasn't my intent. It's the repetition that's the key.
Take the current lunar prize. I don't suggest making the first prize easier (such as your suggestion), I suggest that the challenge be repeated after it is first won. The technology will quickly develop as teams try to out-distance each other (meaning greater reliability, range, terrain handling, control, etc.) That first challenge will seem small, retrospectively, but only in contrast to how good they get: "500m? That's pathetic! Last year they cracked the 100km mark!"
OTOH, when the actual prize is won, development will simply stop. As DerekLyons says below, there's no natural market yet.
I do understand that the donors don't want to be on the hook for decades. I was mourning for lost opportunities, not complaining that the foundation itself is "doing it wrong." The foundation doesn't have a choice. Now if I was a billionaire philanthrocapitalist, I'd put my money where my fat stupid mouth is. But I ain't, so I can't.
(Oh, another example like DARPA. Years ago, the original UK Robot Wars show did a special here in Australia, Aussie teams challenging the Best-of-British. We were slaughtered. Why? We don't have a local contest. Aussie teams had clever engineers, but they didn't have the contest necessary to hone their craft. The first one you build is always the worst.)
It's just that the hoax would be so mind-numbingly stupid. So awe-inspiringly pointless. If the soviet's caught them, it would be the greatest humiliation in the US's history. The US would be psychologically crippled, the soviet's would have effectively won the cold war. Why would they do it?
This would end all tinfoil hat theories on whether Nasa actually went there.
No it wouldn't. Most of the pro-hoax arguments can be refuted without any special knowledge. Hell, some just require you to turn on a couple of lights. Nothing will defeat the conspiracy theorists except ridicule and time.
The correct response would have been "but only in groups."
It's a shame that the X-Prize donors only fund single prizes. It would vastly increase the rate of technological development if they were regular contests.
Compare DARPA's robot car challenge (now Urban Challenge) to X-Prize's original $10m sub-orbital prize. The first year, no team even qualified for the DARPA prize. Hell no team completed more than a fraction of the course. The following year, most teams completed a more difficult course, and half of them qualified (finished in under 10hrs). A few years later, the things are running traffic in urban obstacle courses.
Meanwhile, you have the suborbital X-Prize. After 9 years with no attempts, Burt Rutan's team met the minimum requirements for the X-Prize. And no one has ever done it since, including Rutan. Imagine how much suborbital rockets would have improved by now if it had been an annual highest-flight-wins event.
And imagine if the Lunar Prize was... well, let's say, a quadrennial event. A prize awarded every four years for the longest rover trek on the moon. A Paris Dakar Rally on the moon.
DARPA had the right idea, the X-Prize donors don't.
And they are excellent debaters.
That alone gives Watson a huge timing advantage over the human competitors, who must (effectively) perform voice recognition and OCR to process the clues.
Don't forget that we are processing the clue for the answer (question! whatever!) even while we are processing it for comprehension. (*) Doing all that parallel analogue processing that the human brain is insanely good at. (Haven't you had that feeling that you know the answer to a question before you actually "remember" the answer? There's some freaky-assed recognition processing going on in there.)
Forcing Watson to wait until... however long you estimate it takes humans to read the clue... before Watson "sees" it, let's say two seconds, would give humans a nearly two second head start.
(* The spoken clue is a) for the audience b) to provide a timing sequence for the release of the buzzers. I doubt any but the most amateurish players rely on the spoken clue.)
Right, because Deep Blue spanking Kasparov totally ruined chess for everyone else.
Deep Blue didn't ruin chess for people who'd already spent their lives learning how to play it. The question is whether it has reduced the number of kids taking up the game?
"In thirty years it will all fit in your pocket and cost $19.99."
Only if Moore's Law continues unabated. <Sigh> We finally see progress in useful AI, natural language, self-navigating cars, robots in the home, etc, and now we're running into Moore's Wall.
This is gonna be like the whole space thing again, isn't it? You build up my geek SF hopes and then stagnate for 40 years.
Jerks.
As everyone said, they're all walled gardens. So what we need is an open gaming platform.
I've previously suggested that open-source friendly-ish AMD and Google team up to develop a hardware spec and game-flavoured O/S (respectively) that any random hardware maker can develop, and any random game/App developer can write for, licence free.
Man goes to a doctor and says, "Doctor, I hurts when I do this!"
Doctor says, "Well, don't do that."
they'll claim it's bankrupt, and legally separate from the lawyers themselves),
How amenable are US courts to the counter-claim that the firm was set up solely for that purpose? I was under the impression that judges could sometimes set aside "legal fiction".
I like many of these ideas, but they are impossible because they require a competitive experimental market. Because of copyright licensing, as it currently stands, no one (except Apple) can try (and fail) new methods because they'd need to negotiate with each and every rights-holder. And the rights-holders won't try these because it interferes with their existing (even if declining) markets.
There's no reason it has to be like this. Since copyright is a centralised government monopoly grant, there's no moral reason why there isn't a centralised government licensing system, to simplify the ability of new players to experiment in new markets.
But it won't ever happen.
I know the system's still in early trials, but I can't see anything about safety testing in their own site (or any article about them). They've tested in snow, so I assume they've seen a bit of ice, but there's nothing about them deliberately trying to find the system's fail points.
And that seems a little too common in these automated systems. Remember Volvo's infamous lolfail video? An anti-collision system that happily drove into a truck. Or Top Gear's experience with a production auto-park system, which happily backed into a fence. These systems work brilliantly until you throw something at them that wasn't in their test.
How will they cope with faulty data? What happens when I buy one that's 20 years old? I have enough trouble with faulty sensors on my decidedly non-automated car.
I can imagine people reporting their cars suddenly swerving off the road for no apparent reason. Manufacturer stonewalls, claims driver error, publishes data from in-car data recorder showing that a manual "release" was triggered. Except it is recorded from the same sensor that triggers the release, so can't differentiate between a driver action and a faulty sensor. Then someone dies. And the manufacturer issues a world-wide "fix", a slightly higher surround around the Release button.
I can't see a reason for a 'sharp' drop
The total global stockpile of He3 (most of which is used in nuclear weapons) is a few hundred kilograms. The commercial market is... small.
You'd be dropping an amount equivalent to several decades supply, all in one hit. Either you drop the price hard, or the market does not expand enough to absorb your supply and you have it sitting in a cylinder not earning money. (So you're not paying your debt/investors. So they would never lend/invest in the first place, because your business plan fails.)
But even at a full $4M/kg, you must spend less than $400M (per 100kg) in order to break even. But a small lunar lander would cost $200M for the launch alone. Leaving you $200M for the entire hardware platform (which includes equipment necessary to extract and concentrate a very very low level resource.)
To profit enough to make the venture worthwhile in its own right, you probably have to halve the costs to $200M. Which you can't. So until launch costs are much less, and hardware costs are much less, the whole idea is just pointless.
Re: Fusion.
As others have said, D/T fusion is easier than He3. The advantage of He3 fusion isn't that it's easy, it's that it's "Clean".
So if we crack self-sustaining He3 fusion, we'll already have D/T fusion. And He3 is the "ash" produced by D/T fusion. So by the time He3 fusion is practical, we'll already have an abundant Earth-based source.
There are reasons for going to the moon, He3 is not one of them. Anyone who talks about He3 is either ignorant, or lying to you to get funding.
There is no Helium-3 fusion. Therefore you are limited to existing markets.
As near as I can find, the price of He3 is $4M/kg, and the size of the commercial market is at or below 100kg. So your maximum gross income is $400M for 100kg delivery. That means you need to do, not just a sample-return, but also the mining and separation, for the price of a small probe.
Worse, the moment you drop 100kg onto the commercial market, there will be a sharp price drop, so you won't get $400M anyway.
Worser still, the main use of He3 today is in nuclear weapons. So expect severe restrictions on who you can sell to.
attempting to take over health care...check...
As an exercise, just to prove to yourself that you are correct and not stupid, try to find a Western nation with health care that is less "Socialist/Fascist" than the US under ObamaCare.
Just one.
Hey, it's not a waste, you'll have an example of a superior system to point to in future posts. "Why can't we have a system like [insert country], look how much better it is than stupid ObamaCare!"
Just one. I'll wait.
Did they give you the source? Allow you to modify the code running on the TV itself?
(I'm not a freetard, hell I'm running Windows, but "Uses Linux" is not open source, unless it's open.)
DARPA?
No seriously. The idea of a decentralised, secure net serves some government/corporate needs even as other parts of those same governments/corporations are trying to restrict any user-side freedom.
We just need to trick one side into giving us the basics, before the other side catches on.
Apple also needs to lend him some lawyers. (He's being sued remember.) That act alone would undo all the brand damage this "support" company is causing.
If that is what the people want, the people will download it and based on those numbers, money could be sent their way.
Since the downloader invests nothing bar his ISP, it would be easy for an artist ('n'friends) to artificially boost the download numbers.
(Not criticising the general idea, but an unspoofable "download tracking system" would be hard to pull off. An idea I suggested (pre-iTunes) was a licensing system to replace digital copyright. Teh governmentz sets up a central Music/Film/Book Library server containing all published digital works. Vendors subscribe to it, which gives them the right to resell any work. The vendors are the only ones who need to track downloads. Government distributes royalties. Vendors don't have to negotiate with individual publishing companies, teh government sets all rates. It's not free-for-users, but it's a step away from existing stupidity.)
Firstly, because the hypothesis is unprovable (we don't have multiple Earth's to experiment with)
Hell, if that's the standard you've just ruled out 90% of science.
The point here is that two scientists can argue about Dark Matter [...] and nobody is going to raise my taxes and tell me I can't drive a car to work any more.
Make that 95%.
We're now asked to believe that warming causes cooling.
Now? I've been following this issue since the '80s and I've always heard the researchers say that global warming doesn't rule out regional cooling. It's not like it's something they've come up with this year to explain a northern hemisphere cold snap.
James Hansen.
Oh, the NASA guy. Wasn't he arrested (along with a 90+yr old congressman) for protesting against mountaintop-removal mining. That's where they blast the top off frickin' mountains and dump the waste in the valley below. Not exactly radical environmentalism to object to that.
He's also the guy who started this whole scare with his evidence to the senate in the 1980's.
Crap. As I pointed out to Dishevel, in my original post, this stuff didn't start in the 1980's. You can track the basic idea back to the 19th century. Lots of research in the '50s and '60s. It was mainstream atmospheric science by the '70s. The '80s was just when it hit public and politcal awareness and the backlash really started.
I agree [science] will win out eventually. Who was it who said that science progresses one funeral at a time? That's how paradigms get overturned.
40+ years of research. 30 years of bitter attacks on climate scientists, 30 years of government and industry funded opposition. Don't you think, if AGW was crap, we'd be a little further along with disproving it by now?
(Deaths aren't how ideas get overturned, they are just bypassed. If you are wrong, whether through fraud or stubborn error, you don't get any new evidence. You, or even your entire field, stagnates. Meanwhile, your rivals keep discovering new things, pushing further into the science, which gains them PhD students, citations, papers, funding, etc. Eventually it's as if you didn't exist. It happened with the Piltdown Hoax. It happened with Fred Hoyle and steady-state theory. Once he couldn't accept he was wrong, he pretty much stopped doing science. (The same thing has happened with Richard Lindzen...)
Lindzen
That you didn't even bother to give his whole name suggests you know how well-known, and how controversial, he is within the field. Given that, you would also know how much of his work has been debunked. Especially his whole IR-iris negative-feedback thing.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but we aren't living in a greenhouse. The Earth radiates energy into space.
Errr, greenhouses radiate away energy too. If they didn't they would never reach thermal equilibrium.
CO2 is the reason Earth isn't frozen. You do accept that, right? It raised the Earth's thermal equilibrium. It's century old science, no one seriously questions it. And if X units raises equilibrium Y degrees, why is it hard to accept that 2X will raise the it further?
The catastrophists (political activists) think it's anything from 4K to 16K. None of them know enough about the climate system to make any predictions, but they publish press releases of their model outputs as if they do. Without AGW, most of them wouldn't have careers.
Jesus, you really think there's some giant conspiracy? My original question remains, why do you believe that? How could such a thing exist in science given the way it works?
it's because it isn't really science; it's more like Astrology.
Why? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious, I don't understand why people who generally accept science are so hostile to AGW. 40 years of research, thousands of scientists (many who began as critics, many who are still critical of some aspect or subtheory.) How do you convince yourself that this, and only this, field is so dramatically different from any other.
The second question is easier to answer: wherever there are leftist activists - i.e. `post-normal' scientists who simultaneously decide which temperature stations to delete from their analysis and also go and get themselves arrested blockading power stations,then one can withdraw trust fairly easily.
And I got yelled at for not referencing...
But seriously, every field in science has feuds, incompetents, even frauds. But the science itself wins out. You can't pick one guy you dislike and say, "Aha, they must all be the same!" Science doesn't work that way.
Physicists are a little different (and easier to trust) of course, because there's not really a political ideology that has as its central core theme the belief that a proton is made up of 3 quarks.
How many physicists have you met? :)
My comment about ambiguous vs arrow-straight science... An example of ambiguous science is dark-matter. There was evidence of something going on, but no one could say for sure which way the science would go. Personally, I preferred MOND for its elegance. But over time, it was clear that the evidence had swung against MOND (and similar alternatives) in favour of Dark Matter. Moreso, it now looks like the superstring variant of Dark Matter is going to "Win". Who knew.
Likewise in paleo-anthropology. Out-Of-Africa vs Multi-regionalism. OOA was the default explanation, but MR started to get some wins, so who knew which way it would go. But over time, evidence came down more and more on a hybrid theory, 90% OOA, but with interbreeding with other hominins as Homo Sapiens spread.
Big bang theory, OTOH, just got more and more solid. Oh, there is bickering at the very edges of the theory, but nothing will be discovered that debunks the core idea of an expanding universe. The new evidence would not just have to be inconsistent with BB, it would also have to explain all the other evidence that did support BB.
AGW is like the big bang. It was never ambiguous. Since the 1970's (hell, since the 1870's) no evidence has ever countered the basic idea; CO2 is a greenhouse gas, we are releasing fossil carbon, therefore atmospheric CO2 levels will rise, therefore temperatures will rise. Nothing has ever cast doubt on that. No rival theory has ever produced any supporting evidence (not homeostasis, not sun-driving nor any other "natural cycle" theory, nor any other.)
<Sigh> Another stupidly long message... I am genuinely curious and you don't seem to be an "oh oh we're all gonna die, ha ha ha!" wanker, so if you can accept that I'm not trying to troll you, can you explain why you see AGW theory as so wildly different from any other field of science? Put it another way, what do they have to do differently?
Just went looking. I was wrong. He didn't "create" the term, and it was a Bush Jr advisor, not Reagan/BushSr. I got my eras wrong too.
The name you want, though, is Frank Luntz.