I agree with your points to a degree -- and, no, I am not one of the skeptics with my head in the sand completely.
I do believe CO2 driven climate change is PART of the bigger picture and is in part driven by man -- or at least being accelerated -- and I agree completely that accelerated global warming is a bad thing.
That said, *part* of the cycle is natural and would probably have happened regardless -- but the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by Hydrocarbon burning is miniscule in comparison to the amount stored in the permafrost layer and dissolved in seawater.
The other problem I have is that most of the climate models I have seen tend to ignore historical data before our own era and often take great liberties (or completely ignore) such things as increases in cloud cover and increases in solar reflection due to snow cover.
Basically, yes, I feel global warming is occurring and we are partly to blame (though I think we are merely accelerating the inevitable rather than being the primary cause -- i.e. it probably would have happened anyway, we are just speeding it up by several hundred years, to our own detriment).
What I disagree on is the final outcome -- there is just as much evidence, and possibly more, that the final result of global warming will be to plunge the Earth back into another ice age. Earth is basically a self-regulating/self-correcting system and when it gets too far out of balance, it tends to over-correct with a vengeance.
Earth will survive. Some plants and animals will survive. The Ice Age will end and species will spread and evolve to fill the empty niches. Life will go on.
Whether or not WE will go on...well, that's a different question...
The thing many people overlook (the global warming people especially) is that if you go back and look at ice core samples and prehistoric patterns of glaciation, the current weather patterns look eerily similar to what has happened before.
Specifically: initial warming leads to the melting of the permafrost, which leads to a massive release of CO2 into the atmosphere. This promotes runaway global warming -- which unfortunately means greater ocean temperatures and much more evaporation. This means more rain and more SNOW.
Additionally, it also tends to disrupt ocean currents and the rotation of heat from the equator to the poles (i.e. the vast majority of Europe is at Latitudes higher than Canada is -- and if it weren't for the warm ocean currents they would have equally frigid weather).
The basic problem is that if you get enough extended period of heavy snow, you may eventually get enough snowpack to resist melting well into the summer months. This is exacerbated by the fact that snow, being white, reflects a HUGE amount of light/heat back into space. In essence, due to snow fall, cold weather is somewhat self-perpetuating.
Eventually you reach a situation where the amount of extra snow that falls in the winter is too great in certain latitudes to EVER completely melt in the winter -- and then things start going down hill from there. Thanks to the fact that evaporation / refreezing and then remelting acts as a wonderful method for desalinization of seawater, you also end up playing merry havoc with the ocean currents as well (and end up with much more coastal ice formation as the freezing point of the fresh water run off is much higher than that of pure seawater). Eventually the currents supplying heat to the North Atlantic basically shut down altogether and things go to hell in a hand basket (i.e. hell freezes over!).
The point that most of the "global warming" alarmists miss is that data shows that in the past both average global temperatures *and* CO2 levels peaked at levels significantly HIGHER than they are right now -- immediately before the planet plunged into the next ice age.
People need to realize that ALL of recorded human history has occurred in the current warm interglacial period -- which is only the most recent one. Furthermore, they need to realize that these warm interglacials of 20K-25K years are the EXCEPTION not the rule -- with ice ages of 100K years or more being the norm (with the interglacial periods between them).
While the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was largely pure BS, there were some grains of actual science behind it (albeit they sped up the time table of events by several orders of magnitude to make it exciting).
One of the things this article ignores completely is the area of embedded programming -- and there is still a LOT of it going on. There are still a ton of NEW projects being done based on 8051 and 6800 series derivatives -- and those are just two of the major architectures.
Even if you are not specifically doing embedded programming per se, the more you know about the basic architecture of your system the more you can help the compiler take advantage of it.
For instance, on the vast majority of processors comparing a register to zero is typically a VERY low cost operation. Furthermore, many processors have hard coded instructions that both decrement a register, compare it to zero, and branch if it is not. If you enable the most aggressive optimizations on some compilers they will attempt to do loop re-ordering (often with disastrous results) and do sometimes succeed. HOWEVER, more often than not there are chunks of code inside the loops that prevent effective re-ordering from occurring. If you are aware of your processors underlying architecture and try to intentionally write most of your loops as count down to zero in the first place, you make life much easier for the compiler and allow it to make more efficient code as a result. This is just one small case.
Also, as far as hand optimizations go, I still do it quite often -- even at the raw assembly level. With visual inspection and manual adjustment I have proved time and time again that I can do a MUCH better optimizing job than the Keil compiler can. I can also typically get some gains on ColdFire/Freescale stuff as well, just not quite as drastic.
I have worked on many projects over the years and seen more bad programmers than I care to admit -- and the most recent/youngest batch has both some of the best and worst I've ever seen (with far more of the later than the former). This is not their fault, it is the fault of what the university's are teaching them. At one company I used to work for (and this was a BIG company with over a hundred thousand of employees worldwide) our local HR department had a standing policy to NOT hire Computer Science graduates for permanent programming positions unless they had interned with us first. Basically, all the CS grads had far to many theoretical and inefficient/unreliable programming ideas to unlearn to be useful.
Also, there are many cases where even hand manipulation at the raw binary code level is still needed and useful. Although most projects I deal with now, thankfully, use flash for code space, a few still do use OTP (one time programmable) parts. It has not been that many years ago that I had to spend the better part of 2 months figuring out a way to "overburn" a set of parts by finding a safe location where I could turn existing instructions into NOP's followed by a branch to a new chunk of code at the end of our programmed space (when re-programming/overburning an OTP you can still turn a 1 to a 0 but not the other way around -- thankfully, the architecture we were using considered 00 as a NOP and we had left all the unprogrammed space as FF's). And yes, this is a very extreme example, but it allowed me to find a fix that allowed us to use over 35 THOUSAND mis-programmed parts that otherwise would have had to be tossed (and these parts cost in the $12 range EACH).
Similarly, on some large volume consumer products, manual code optimizations, low level coding, and hand tweaking is still the norm -- for a very simple reason: it saves money. In almost every case, it is still almost always cheaper to use the micros with less onboard flash and hand optimizing the code often allows us to keep code just below the threshold of the next size part. Similarly, on one project I was on we had 3 engineers spend 6 months hand writing a custom DSP algorithm that allowed us to remove a filter circuit whose component cost was on the order of $0.15 USD (yes, 15 cents). The management team was utterly thrilled over this as the volume for the circuit in question was way over 1 million units (you do t
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Yes & No.
I agree with your points to a degree -- and, no, I am not one of the skeptics with my head in the sand completely.
I do believe CO2 driven climate change is PART of the bigger picture and is in part driven by man -- or at least being accelerated -- and I agree completely that accelerated global warming is a bad thing.
That said, *part* of the cycle is natural and would probably have happened regardless -- but the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by Hydrocarbon burning is miniscule in comparison to the amount stored in the permafrost layer and dissolved in seawater.
The other problem I have is that most of the climate models I have seen tend to ignore historical data before our own era and often take great liberties (or completely ignore) such things as increases in cloud cover and increases in solar reflection due to snow cover.
Basically, yes, I feel global warming is occurring and we are partly to blame (though I think we are merely accelerating the inevitable rather than being the primary cause -- i.e. it probably would have happened anyway, we are just speeding it up by several hundred years, to our own detriment).
What I disagree on is the final outcome -- there is just as much evidence, and possibly more, that the final result of global warming will be to plunge the Earth back into another ice age. Earth is basically a self-regulating/self-correcting system and when it gets too far out of balance, it tends to over-correct with a vengeance.
Earth will survive. Some plants and animals will survive. The Ice Age will end and species will spread and evolve to fill the empty niches. Life will go on.
Whether or not WE will go on...well, that's a different question...
The thing many people overlook (the global warming people especially) is that if you go back and look at ice core samples and prehistoric patterns of glaciation, the current weather patterns look eerily similar to what has happened before.
Specifically: initial warming leads to the melting of the permafrost, which leads to a massive release of CO2 into the atmosphere. This promotes runaway global warming -- which unfortunately means greater ocean temperatures and much more evaporation. This means more rain and more SNOW.
Additionally, it also tends to disrupt ocean currents and the rotation of heat from the equator to the poles (i.e. the vast majority of Europe is at Latitudes higher than Canada is -- and if it weren't for the warm ocean currents they would have equally frigid weather).
The basic problem is that if you get enough extended period of heavy snow, you may eventually get enough snowpack to resist melting well into the summer months. This is exacerbated by the fact that snow, being white, reflects a HUGE amount of light/heat back into space. In essence, due to snow fall, cold weather is somewhat self-perpetuating.
Eventually you reach a situation where the amount of extra snow that falls in the winter is too great in certain latitudes to EVER completely melt in the winter -- and then things start going down hill from there. Thanks to the fact that evaporation / refreezing and then remelting acts as a wonderful method for desalinization of seawater, you also end up playing merry havoc with the ocean currents as well (and end up with much more coastal ice formation as the freezing point of the fresh water run off is much higher than that of pure seawater). Eventually the currents supplying heat to the North Atlantic basically shut down altogether and things go to hell in a hand basket (i.e. hell freezes over!).
The point that most of the "global warming" alarmists miss is that data shows that in the past both average global temperatures *and* CO2 levels peaked at levels significantly HIGHER than they are right now -- immediately before the planet plunged into the next ice age.
People need to realize that ALL of recorded human history has occurred in the current warm interglacial period -- which is only the most recent one. Furthermore, they need to realize that these warm interglacials of 20K-25K years are the EXCEPTION not the rule -- with ice ages of 100K years or more being the norm (with the interglacial periods between them).
While the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was largely pure BS, there were some grains of actual science behind it (albeit they sped up the time table of events by several orders of magnitude to make it exciting).
One of the things this article ignores completely is the area of embedded programming -- and there is still a LOT of it going on. There are still a ton of NEW projects being done based on 8051 and 6800 series derivatives -- and those are just two of the major architectures.
Even if you are not specifically doing embedded programming per se, the more you know about the basic architecture of your system the more you can help the compiler take advantage of it.
For instance, on the vast majority of processors comparing a register to zero is typically a VERY low cost operation. Furthermore, many processors have hard coded instructions that both decrement a register, compare it to zero, and branch if it is not. If you enable the most aggressive optimizations on some compilers they will attempt to do loop re-ordering (often with disastrous results) and do sometimes succeed. HOWEVER, more often than not there are chunks of code inside the loops that prevent effective re-ordering from occurring. If you are aware of your processors underlying architecture and try to intentionally write most of your loops as count down to zero in the first place, you make life much easier for the compiler and allow it to make more efficient code as a result. This is just one small case.
Also, as far as hand optimizations go, I still do it quite often -- even at the raw assembly level. With visual inspection and manual adjustment I have proved time and time again that I can do a MUCH better optimizing job than the Keil compiler can. I can also typically get some gains on ColdFire/Freescale stuff as well, just not quite as drastic.
I have worked on many projects over the years and seen more bad programmers than I care to admit -- and the most recent/youngest batch has both some of the best and worst I've ever seen (with far more of the later than the former). This is not their fault, it is the fault of what the university's are teaching them. At one company I used to work for (and this was a BIG company with over a hundred thousand of employees worldwide) our local HR department had a standing policy to NOT hire Computer Science graduates for permanent programming positions unless they had interned with us first. Basically, all the CS grads had far to many theoretical and inefficient/unreliable programming ideas to unlearn to be useful.
Also, there are many cases where even hand manipulation at the raw binary code level is still needed and useful. Although most projects I deal with now, thankfully, use flash for code space, a few still do use OTP (one time programmable) parts. It has not been that many years ago that I had to spend the better part of 2 months figuring out a way to "overburn" a set of parts by finding a safe location where I could turn existing instructions into NOP's followed by a branch to a new chunk of code at the end of our programmed space (when re-programming/overburning an OTP you can still turn a 1 to a 0 but not the other way around -- thankfully, the architecture we were using considered 00 as a NOP and we had left all the unprogrammed space as FF's). And yes, this is a very extreme example, but it allowed me to find a fix that allowed us to use over 35 THOUSAND mis-programmed parts that otherwise would have had to be tossed (and these parts cost in the $12 range EACH).
Similarly, on some large volume consumer products, manual code optimizations, low level coding, and hand tweaking is still the norm -- for a very simple reason: it saves money. In almost every case, it is still almost always cheaper to use the micros with less onboard flash and hand optimizing the code often allows us to keep code just below the threshold of the next size part. Similarly, on one project I was on we had 3 engineers spend 6 months hand writing a custom DSP algorithm that allowed us to remove a filter circuit whose component cost was on the order of $0.15 USD (yes, 15 cents). The management team was utterly thrilled over this as the volume for the circuit in question was way over 1 million units (you do t