One more thing: It is possible for human labor to contribute to economic growth but only if the worker was not adequately compensated. So in the extreme case, if you take a grown man and stop feeding him while demanding work then anything he will do until he dies is indeed pure growth of the economy. However, assuming efficient labor market and fair compensation, commodity labor does not create wealth. And the only reason non-commodity labor like research generates wealth is that it is never fairly compensated for (you just cannot fairly compensate the inventor of the wheel with all the resources of stone age economy).
Piano tuners create no wealth. They are much like a stable cell in your body: they do something and consume some resources but they do not contribute to the growth of your body. When you grow from baby to adult, that growth fundamentally comes from the nutrients you ingest (new natural resources) - nothing in your body generates growth without new resources. And conversely, take away new resources and the body wastes away (go see some concentration camp pictures circa WW2). Likewise, society only grows when new resources become available or new ways to use resources are found (kind of like human survival improved after a mutation which allowed people to process lactose and hence drink milk).
You might understand this from a different perspective. How many piano tuners does a society have? Well, there is some market size for that niche. What determines the niche size? Global economy. What determines the size of the global economy? Certainly not the size of the niches otherwise we'd be back to circular reasoning. So what is it? Well, we know many economies that collapsed due to internal contradictions so that can set the size of the economy. But the maximum achievable size is set by resource availability.
Now as far as planned vs market economies - I did not pass judgement on either. Market economies are susceptible to bubbles while centralized economies are susceptible to corruption, poor decision making due to power struggles in the bureaucracy, and hubris of top managers. So no, centralized economies do not look good by comparison. Quit putting words in my mouth. My point was simply that trade is not an inherently good thing.
First, about trade. Your example is of a good trade which stimulates usage of resources available and seeking out new ones. Notice that the trade was highly uncorrelated - different parties sold different goods and everything was demand driven. My point was that much of trade is correlated - where people buy inherently worthless or not quite so worthy trinkets because it is a fad (yes, including real estate a few years ago). This does not stimulate anything - yes, stuff is being produced to fulfill demand but demand is artificial and so the entire trade is unsustainable. The things it stimulates are not really needed and dissolve at first market crash. In that respect, trading shirts when the only demand is food is a good metaphor. this is what we were doing a few years back essentially. We need new sources of energy (new food so to speak) but we trade trinkets like houses which do not address the problem and do not stimulate dealing with the problem.
As far as where wealth comes from... Uh, do you know what went into making every single plant that makes stuff? Discoveries of how to make stuff and the natural resources. Nothing else. That is where wealth comes from. If no new discoveries are made, what will happen is that first every product will turn into a commodity with near zero margins, then when resources run out, the product will cease to be made. The plants are just a physical realization of research so you are making my point here. And for sure, plants have little to do with trade. Trade just connects supply and demand, it does not enable supply side and does not guarantee that demand is organic/sustainable. So healthy trade provides positive feedback for wealth creation, it even helps establish what wealth is in many cases but it is not responsible for wealth creation.
OK, I will bite. If a big company goes under, it surely does not mean that the market contracts. So far we agree. But it does mean that redundancy is reduced. Why is that bad? Well, first of all it means the system is not robust to events like Fukushima. Less players means more concentrated business chain means more vulnerability to disruption. Second, elimination of redundancy means less competition. Which implies higher prices, less quality, and less service. So what we get is not necessarily that resources were mis-allocated. It could just be that temporary sentiment shift places less value on robust supply and overall competition. Markets have often been quite short-sited and this could be a manifestation of that. Finally, one less big company means one less lobbyist. The surviving players can now make sure their voice is not balanced out by another player pulling in their own direction.
Also, I am not sure I buy that trade creates wealth. If I have two people on an otherwise empty island and they are starving to death for lack of food, whether or not they trade their shirts makes no difference to their wealth and might even detract from it if you factor in the calories they expend in trading. Wealth comes from two places and two places only: new natural resource discoveries and improvements in efficiency (i.e. scientific, technological and business process discoveries). Trade can stimulate these two and that is the only way it can help create wealth. Trade can also be detrimental. The most detrimental is trade that leads to bubbles, that is when strong correlation patterns show in the trade.
This is just a reporter and not a thorough one at that. Yes, a good reporter ( one you can trust with your life or your 10000 people company's sanity) is needed. This is not it.
But the original poster also pointed out FF needs good UI for letting old addons run. Manually editing RDF files is insane. There should be a tool which takes an xpi file and tells you who wrote it and when, what compatibility it has, a flow chart of the code and what would not work with this release. Then it would ask you if you still want run as is, if you want to automatically change addon code for compatibility or cancel install.
Looks like it's got a ways to go to catch up even with my good old TI85. No graphs, no matrix math, no stored variables (?), and no scripts. Oh, and it needs a chemistry mode and a units conversion mode. Not saying it is useless but I am not buying it just yet.
Seconded. On my machine FF4 leaks badly. Granted, my tab usage oscillates between 30 and 60 tabs but after about a day the usage goes beyond 1.2 Gb and then I have to force restart FF4. It was a bit better with FF3 (went to 150 tabs for as long as a day). The most disturbing thing is that usage grow without me doing much to the browser, even leaving it overnight to just sit there seems to up usage by hundreds of megs. My extensions: Adblock plus All-in-One sidebar back/forward dropmaker Beef TACO BetterPrivacy ChromEdit Plus Download helper Duplicate this tab FireFTP Flashblock Ghostery IE View Image Zoom Long URL please Memory Fox New Tab Homepage Nuke Anything Enhanced oldbar print ReadItLater Reload Tab on Double-click Remove New Tab Button Session Manager Tab History Menu Transliterator Tree Style Tab URL Tooltip User Agent Switcher Webmail notifier
I am still waiting for a few extensions from FF3 to be updated so this list is about to expand. And before anyone tells me to pare down the list, consider that these UI customization are what keeps me with Firefox. It took me years to optimize the look and feel because I have very strong preferences.
I will probably upgrade in a month or so
on
Firefox 4 Released!
·
· Score: 1
Right now, many key extensions (NoUn buttons, verttabbar, Reload_on_DoubleClick and a few others) are not ported yet. I have one test machine set up and I am adding extensions as they become available. Once the UI gets usable again I will upgrade all machines.
No. If you are holding a device in one hand while pointing something out to the customer and you do it for 20-30 minutes straight then you want that device to be as lightweight as possible. Using an external battery while using the device is out the window. It can be a bit heavier when it hangs on your shoulder in a bag but it cannot be more than 1.5 lb or so in actual use. And really, 8-10 oz would be best but we are not there yet.
Imagine a salesperson who starts their day at 8 am and goes to sell a product at a big company. He has meetings all day and gets back to his hotel at 11 pm. Or imagine a scientist at a conference or interviewing for a job - similar schedule. Imagine a doctor in a busy hospital - same requirements (10 hours might do the trick but barely so the battery better not degrade at all over time). During all of this you do not have time to recharge your battery (you might have a minute to swap batteries but not an hour needed for a recharge). The bag you buy for your slate will already be the right shape so sliding an extra battery in is no problem. However sliding in a bulky external battery is a problem - such bags and sleeves are usually designed for flat objects. Apple made the right choice for some markets but there are tons of people for whom swappable battery is a must. I am personally waiting for Fujitsu Q550 and Lenovo Ideapad Slate since both of those should have a removable battery (we will see if this means swappable or replaceable with a screwdriver - the latter being as useless as non-removable as far as I am concerned).
No. I run 20+ extensions (about half for privacy and about half to have the user interface just the way I like it). Some (like verttabbar) are broken right now in FF4 even if you edit the rdf file. Small extensions do only need the MaxVersion adjusted but anything big is likely to have trouble.
As an aside, I am always very vocal about hating Opera because I have found it impossible to configure the interface just the way I like it (in some cases I want it adjusted with pixel precision and have just the right shade of gray and the right curvature on the tabs and so on). So Firefox and a sidebar full of extensions plus custom hacks to config files is the only game in town for me.
You mean convertible laptops. That is what I thought until I bout one from HP. It is 4 lb so it is heavy as hell but the worst part is that the swiveling keyboard adds too much thickness. Try using a device like that to read in bed where you hold it with one hand. Or try doing a sales presentation where you cradle the laptop in one hand and show stuff on screen with another. Doable but awkward. So the main problems with such devices is that they are too thick to hold in one hand and too heavy. An average book is about 12 oz so that gives you an idea of what people do not mind carrying around. The ideal weight for a portable device is on the order of 0.5 lb. Even the current crop of 1.5 lb devices is too heavy but it is getting to the usable range.
I have dealt with Dell support twice (bought two systems and had power supplies fail on both - yeah, typical Dell craftsmanship). But both were under warranty. I contacted Dell via their web site, had good exchanges with the rep (yes they ran me through script but they knew to cut through the BS when I told them I knew what I was doing), then within two days (in each case - the failures happened on different dates) a tech drove up to my lab and replaced a power supply. Different tech each time. Same fast, polite and efficient service. So, would I recommend buying a Dell. Hell no. At least if you want to avoid 100% failure rate on your PS. But would I recommend Dell customer service. At least locally, yes I would. Gotta give credit where it is due.
Based on my reading of the benchmarks (esp. the POVray benchmark which is a decent measure of multitasking performance) I would equate X6 with core i7 940.
Society did not in fact disintegrate. We still have a constitution, a congress, a president, laws on the books and so on. Any effects were small scale (one city) and did not pose existential threat to our civilization. Likewise, economy did not implode. We still have interstate commerce, you can still buy and sell things using one currency, and so on. For an economy to truly implode you'd first need very low population density and extinction of most transportation means. Once people are stuck in villages without any means of getting to the next one and hence without any eans to trade (such that the concept of currency itself loses most of its meaning) then economy really does implode. This did not happen. Crime did go up but no large scale loss of life occured. There are many examples in history where a third to a half of the population was eliminated in a war or internal strife. Natural disasters have been known to wipe out entire cities. Even this is arguably negligible since the rest survived and humanity in that part of the world persisted. But not even such a scale was seen on NO or anywhere else in the US. In short, moving NO people was not without glitches but only an extreme lack of perspective would suggest that there was a big problem or that a big problem would arise if we were to gradually resettle the coasts.
You want to talk about climate? OK. Let's talk long time frames and entire Earth length scales. Where is global warming relative to normal climate changes we have seen as humanity? Tiny. What are you worried about again? Indeed, the temperature proxies say that what is going on now is not anomalous either in scale of speed (although you do need to look back a bit to see similar hockey pucks as now even if current hockey puck is real and not made up by fraudulent data adjustments).
This whole distinction between weather and climate is driving me nuts. Do _you_ know what you are talking about? You cannot talk about climate change meaningfully because we just do not have temperature records for long time scales and any predictions would have to be verified on ten thousand year time scales to be believable. So the alternative is to demonstrate extreme short time and length scale predictive power. The idea being that in a chaotic system errors propagate exponentially so if you have extreme local predictive power then your errors looking forward are likely to be limited at least for a few decades. And so it is natural to ask for precise weather prediction but not just that. I want to see weather prediction with decent accuracy over the entire Earth (large length scales) and decent but verifiable time scales (say a year). I have asked in a previous thread for weather predictions for the upcoming year with 0.1 degree accuracy for all existing weather station locations across the globe. You produce that, demonstrate perfect agreement between theory and measurement and I will start to look at your theories with some credibility. The alternative is to predict global climate for 10000 years ahead and then wait that long to test agreement. Then and only then could we meaningfully talk about making informed policy decisions on climate.
He touches on most of my objections to global warming screams: 1. Non-convincing evidence for global warming if you discount all earth based measurement as well as historical reconstructions and use satellite data only. Or put differently, there are observation series (ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_1.txt) which show no warming.
2. Certainly if one takes a long term view of climate then anything below 5 degree swing is not out of line with the climate over the past million years and so is not a cause for alarm.
3. Global warming observed from land stations may be due to urban heat island effect where the stations are positioned too close to sources of heat. Moreover, if one looks at http://www.surfacestations.org/, the number of CRN-1 stations is minuscule and even those do not necessarily produce believable data because they are not calibrated often and are not monitored 24/7 for random events which could affect data (e.g. bird flock landing on a redundant array of temperature sensors). Why should I believe the data produced by earth-based stations?
4. The correlation between CO2 levels and temperature is not surprising but CO2 level changes lag temperature changes. What is the cause and what is the effect again? The plot you link to shows this clearly as well btw.
5. Predictive power of climate models is non-existent. Indeed, a simple calculation shows that greenhouse effect, if real, should saturate at some point so that Earth temperature would not increase indefinitely even in this scenario.
My additional objection is that even if climate change is real, and even if it is driven by CO2 levels (rather than vice versa) then it may be preferable to address the issue via carbon sequestration and other technological measures rather than reducing our carbon footprint. Imposing things like Kyoto protocol rather than giving financial incentives for technology development is very dubious to me.
Could be. Such jobs should definitely not be the driver for dam building. But if this is indeed the cheapest way to address sea level rise then having such jobs is a silver lining to a bad situation.
Society did not disintegrate, economy did not implode, people did not even die (except those subjected to immediate impact and flooding, so there were no deathly riots due to migrants from NO area for instance). In other words, it was an event with economic impact but one that did not pose an existential threat to the USA. Likewise, I would argue with sea level change.
Slashdot Mirror
This does not seem like a healthy trend.
One more thing: It is possible for human labor to contribute to economic growth but only if the worker was not adequately compensated. So in the extreme case, if you take a grown man and stop feeding him while demanding work then anything he will do until he dies is indeed pure growth of the economy. However, assuming efficient labor market and fair compensation, commodity labor does not create wealth. And the only reason non-commodity labor like research generates wealth is that it is never fairly compensated for (you just cannot fairly compensate the inventor of the wheel with all the resources of stone age economy).
Piano tuners create no wealth. They are much like a stable cell in your body: they do something and consume some resources but they do not contribute to the growth of your body. When you grow from baby to adult, that growth fundamentally comes from the nutrients you ingest (new natural resources) - nothing in your body generates growth without new resources. And conversely, take away new resources and the body wastes away (go see some concentration camp pictures circa WW2). Likewise, society only grows when new resources become available or new ways to use resources are found (kind of like human survival improved after a mutation which allowed people to process lactose and hence drink milk).
You might understand this from a different perspective. How many piano tuners does a society have? Well, there is some market size for that niche. What determines the niche size? Global economy. What determines the size of the global economy? Certainly not the size of the niches otherwise we'd be back to circular reasoning. So what is it? Well, we know many economies that collapsed due to internal contradictions so that can set the size of the economy. But the maximum achievable size is set by resource availability.
Now as far as planned vs market economies - I did not pass judgement on either. Market economies are susceptible to bubbles while centralized economies are susceptible to corruption, poor decision making due to power struggles in the bureaucracy, and hubris of top managers. So no, centralized economies do not look good by comparison. Quit putting words in my mouth. My point was simply that trade is not an inherently good thing.
First, about trade. Your example is of a good trade which stimulates usage of resources available and seeking out new ones. Notice that the trade was highly uncorrelated - different parties sold different goods and everything was demand driven. My point was that much of trade is correlated - where people buy inherently worthless or not quite so worthy trinkets because it is a fad (yes, including real estate a few years ago). This does not stimulate anything - yes, stuff is being produced to fulfill demand but demand is artificial and so the entire trade is unsustainable. The things it stimulates are not really needed and dissolve at first market crash. In that respect, trading shirts when the only demand is food is a good metaphor. this is what we were doing a few years back essentially. We need new sources of energy (new food so to speak) but we trade trinkets like houses which do not address the problem and do not stimulate dealing with the problem.
As far as where wealth comes from... Uh, do you know what went into making every single plant that makes stuff? Discoveries of how to make stuff and the natural resources. Nothing else. That is where wealth comes from. If no new discoveries are made, what will happen is that first every product will turn into a commodity with near zero margins, then when resources run out, the product will cease to be made. The plants are just a physical realization of research so you are making my point here. And for sure, plants have little to do with trade. Trade just connects supply and demand, it does not enable supply side and does not guarantee that demand is organic/sustainable. So healthy trade provides positive feedback for wealth creation, it even helps establish what wealth is in many cases but it is not responsible for wealth creation.
OK, I will bite. If a big company goes under, it surely does not mean that the market contracts. So far we agree. But it does mean that redundancy is reduced. Why is that bad? Well, first of all it means the system is not robust to events like Fukushima. Less players means more concentrated business chain means more vulnerability to disruption. Second, elimination of redundancy means less competition. Which implies higher prices, less quality, and less service. So what we get is not necessarily that resources were mis-allocated. It could just be that temporary sentiment shift places less value on robust supply and overall competition. Markets have often been quite short-sited and this could be a manifestation of that. Finally, one less big company means one less lobbyist. The surviving players can now make sure their voice is not balanced out by another player pulling in their own direction.
Also, I am not sure I buy that trade creates wealth. If I have two people on an otherwise empty island and they are starving to death for lack of food, whether or not they trade their shirts makes no difference to their wealth and might even detract from it if you factor in the calories they expend in trading. Wealth comes from two places and two places only: new natural resource discoveries and improvements in efficiency (i.e. scientific, technological and business process discoveries). Trade can stimulate these two and that is the only way it can help create wealth. Trade can also be detrimental. The most detrimental is trade that leads to bubbles, that is when strong correlation patterns show in the trade.
I just hope when HP goes bust, Agilent buy their name. To me, they are HP but I refuse to get worked up over branding.
This is just a reporter and not a thorough one at that. Yes, a good reporter ( one you can trust with your life or your 10000 people company's sanity) is needed. This is not it.
But the original poster also pointed out FF needs good UI for letting old addons run. Manually editing RDF files is insane. There should be a tool which takes an xpi file and tells you who wrote it and when, what compatibility it has, a flow chart of the code and what would not work with this release. Then it would ask you if you still want run as is, if you want to automatically change addon code for compatibility or cancel install.
Looks like it's got a ways to go to catch up even with my good old TI85. No graphs, no matrix math, no stored variables (?), and no scripts. Oh, and it needs a chemistry mode and a units conversion mode. Not saying it is useless but I am not buying it just yet.
Seconded. On my machine FF4 leaks badly. Granted, my tab usage oscillates between 30 and 60 tabs but after about a day the usage goes beyond 1.2 Gb and then I have to force restart FF4. It was a bit better with FF3 (went to 150 tabs for as long as a day). The most disturbing thing is that usage grow without me doing much to the browser, even leaving it overnight to just sit there seems to up usage by hundreds of megs.
My extensions:
Adblock plus
All-in-One sidebar
back/forward dropmaker
Beef TACO
BetterPrivacy
ChromEdit Plus
Download helper
Duplicate this tab
FireFTP
Flashblock
Ghostery
IE View
Image Zoom
Long URL please
Memory Fox
New Tab Homepage
Nuke Anything Enhanced
oldbar
print
ReadItLater
Reload Tab on Double-click
Remove New Tab Button
Session Manager
Tab History Menu
Transliterator
Tree Style Tab
URL Tooltip
User Agent Switcher
Webmail notifier
I am still waiting for a few extensions from FF3 to be updated so this list is about to expand.
And before anyone tells me to pare down the list, consider that these UI customization are
what keeps me with Firefox. It took me years to optimize the look and feel because I have very
strong preferences.
Right now, many key extensions (NoUn buttons, verttabbar, Reload_on_DoubleClick and a few others) are not ported yet. I have one test machine set up and I am adding extensions as they become available. Once the UI gets usable again I will upgrade all machines.
No I am not just looking for ways to put it down. It is not for me but I already said that it is a great device for a huge market.
No. If you are holding a device in one hand while pointing something out to the customer and you do it for 20-30 minutes straight then you want that device to be as lightweight as possible. Using an external battery while using the device is out the window. It can be a bit heavier when it hangs on your shoulder in a bag but it cannot be more than 1.5 lb or so in actual use. And really, 8-10 oz would be best but we are not there yet.
Imagine a salesperson who starts their day at 8 am and goes to sell a product at a big company. He has meetings all day and
gets back to his hotel at 11 pm. Or imagine a scientist at a conference or interviewing for a job - similar schedule. Imagine a doctor in a busy hospital - same requirements (10 hours might do the trick but barely so the battery better not degrade at all over time).
During all of this you do not have time to recharge your battery (you might have a minute to swap batteries but not an hour needed for a recharge). The bag you buy for your slate will already be the right shape so sliding an extra battery in is no problem. However sliding in a bulky external battery is a problem - such bags and sleeves are usually designed for flat objects.
Apple made the right choice for some markets but there are tons of people for whom swappable battery is a must. I am personally waiting for Fujitsu Q550 and Lenovo Ideapad Slate since both of those should have a removable battery (we will see if this means swappable or replaceable with a screwdriver - the latter being as useless as non-removable as far as I am concerned).
No. I run 20+ extensions (about half for privacy and about half to have the user interface just the way I like it). Some (like verttabbar) are broken right now in FF4 even if you edit the rdf file. Small extensions do only need the MaxVersion adjusted but anything big is likely to have trouble.
As an aside, I am always very vocal about hating Opera because I have found it impossible to configure the interface just the way I like it (in some cases I want it adjusted with pixel precision and have just the right shade of gray and the right curvature on the tabs and so on). So Firefox and a sidebar full of extensions plus custom hacks to config files is the only game in town for me.
To quote wikipedia: "An object smaller than its Schwarzschild radius is called a black hole. "
He is calling "yo mama" a black hole.
HP, lenovo, fujitsu, Dell, Sony, etc. all offer convertible tablets. I am sure patents are an issue but not sure where you get the "1 company" from.
You mean convertible laptops. That is what I thought until I bout one from HP. It is 4 lb so it is heavy
as hell but the worst part is that the swiveling keyboard adds too much thickness. Try using a device
like that to read in bed where you hold it with one hand. Or try doing a sales presentation where you
cradle the laptop in one hand and show stuff on screen with another. Doable but awkward.
So the main problems with such devices is that they are too thick to hold in one hand and too heavy.
An average book is about 12 oz so that gives you an idea of what people do not mind carrying around.
The ideal weight for a portable device is on the order of 0.5 lb. Even the current crop of 1.5 lb devices
is too heavy but it is getting to the usable range.
I have dealt with Dell support twice (bought two systems and had power supplies fail on both - yeah, typical Dell craftsmanship). But both were under warranty. I contacted Dell via their web site, had good exchanges with the rep (yes they ran me through script but they knew to cut through the BS when I told them I knew what I was doing), then within two days (in each case - the failures happened on different dates) a tech drove up to my lab and replaced a power supply. Different tech each time. Same fast, polite and efficient service. So, would I recommend buying a Dell. Hell no. At least if you want to avoid 100% failure rate on your PS. But would I recommend Dell customer service. At least locally, yes I would. Gotta give credit where it is due.
Based on my reading of the benchmarks (esp. the POVray benchmark which is a decent measure of multitasking performance) I would equate X6 with core i7 940.
From my brief testing, it appears that the technique is trivial to defeat by just running a median filter on the image before saving or rescaling.
Society did not in fact disintegrate. We still have a constitution, a congress, a president, laws on the books and so on. Any effects were small scale (one city) and did not pose existential threat to our civilization.
Likewise, economy did not implode. We still have interstate commerce, you can still buy and sell things using one currency, and so on. For an economy to truly implode you'd first need very low population density and extinction of most transportation means. Once people are stuck in villages without any means of getting to the next one and hence without any eans to trade (such that the concept of currency itself loses most of its meaning) then economy really does implode. This did not happen.
Crime did go up but no large scale loss of life occured. There are many examples in history where a third to a half of the population was eliminated in a war or internal strife. Natural disasters have been known to wipe out entire cities. Even this is arguably negligible since the rest survived and humanity in that part of the world persisted. But not even such a scale was seen on NO or anywhere else in the US.
In short, moving NO people was not without glitches but only an extreme lack of perspective would suggest that there was a big problem or that a big problem would arise if we were to gradually resettle the coasts.
First, a bit about ice cores:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
You want to talk about climate? OK. Let's talk long time frames and entire Earth length scales. Where is global warming relative to normal climate changes we have seen as humanity? Tiny. What are you worried about again? Indeed, the temperature proxies say that what is going on now is not anomalous either in scale of speed (although you do need to look back a bit to see similar hockey pucks as now even if current hockey puck is real and not made up by fraudulent data adjustments).
This whole distinction between weather and climate is driving me nuts. Do _you_ know what you are talking about? You cannot talk about climate change meaningfully because we just do not have temperature records for long time scales and any predictions would have to be verified on ten thousand year time scales to be believable. So the alternative is to demonstrate extreme short time and length scale predictive power. The idea being that in a chaotic system errors propagate exponentially so if you have extreme local predictive power then your errors looking forward are likely to be limited at least for a few decades. And so it is natural to ask for precise weather prediction but not just that. I want to see weather prediction with decent accuracy over the entire Earth (large length scales) and decent but verifiable time scales (say a year). I have asked in a previous thread for weather predictions for the upcoming year with 0.1 degree accuracy for all existing weather station locations across the globe. You produce that, demonstrate perfect agreement between theory and measurement and I will start to look at your theories with some credibility. The alternative is to predict global climate for 10000 years ahead and then wait that long to test agreement. Then and only then could we meaningfully talk about making informed policy decisions on climate.
I would recommend you look at
http://www.ianschumacher.com/global_warming.html
and
http://www.ianschumacher.com/greenhouse_effect_maximum.html
He touches on most of my objections to global warming screams:
1. Non-convincing evidence for global warming if you discount all earth based measurement as well as historical reconstructions and use satellite data only. Or put differently, there are observation series (ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_1.txt) which show no warming.
2. Certainly if one takes a long term view of climate then anything below 5 degree swing is not out of line with the climate over the past million years and so is not a cause for alarm.
3. Global warming observed from land stations may be due to urban heat island effect where the stations are positioned too close to sources of heat. Moreover, if one looks at http://www.surfacestations.org/, the number of CRN-1 stations is minuscule and even those do not necessarily produce believable data because they are not calibrated often and are not monitored 24/7 for random events which could affect data (e.g. bird flock landing on a redundant array of temperature sensors). Why should I believe the data produced by earth-based stations?
4. The correlation between CO2 levels and temperature is not surprising but CO2 level changes lag temperature changes. What is the cause and what is the effect again? The plot you link to shows this clearly as well btw.
5. Predictive power of climate models is non-existent. Indeed, a simple calculation shows that greenhouse effect, if real, should saturate at some point so that Earth temperature would not increase indefinitely even in this scenario.
My additional objection is that even if climate change is real, and even if it is driven by CO2 levels (rather than vice versa) then it may be preferable to address the issue via carbon sequestration and other technological measures rather than reducing our carbon footprint. Imposing things like Kyoto protocol rather than giving financial incentives for technology development is very dubious to me.
Could be. Such jobs should definitely not be the driver for dam building. But if this is indeed the cheapest way to address sea level rise then having such jobs is a silver lining to a bad situation.
Society did not disintegrate, economy did not implode, people did not even die (except those subjected to immediate impact and flooding, so there were no deathly riots due to migrants from NO area for instance). In other words, it was an event with economic impact but one that did not pose an existential threat to the USA. Likewise, I would argue with sea level change.