>>I have been looking at PV cells for my house lately. Outlay after the subsidy from our state Government is such that the system would pay for itself in about five years. But if you factor in the opportunity cost of investing the money the payoff period is a lot longer.
Yep, I'm getting solar put in at my house next month. It'll break even after 2-3 years (50c/kWH is PG&E's high tier rates), though as you say you can generally do better with investments.
>>Also note that Cu-59 will decay into Ni-59, which is radioactive and has a halflife of 76000 years. So even if this did work, you haven't solved the problem of radioactive waste.
What problem? It either has such a long halflife that it's barely radioactive, or it's active enough you can extract electricity from it.
If these guys were legit they could easily publish a paper that says, "We do this, this and this. The result is that. We don't know why." Inexplicable results are bread and butter in science. Irreproducible results... not so much.
Although even irreproducible results can find a place: the 17 keV neutrino was ultimately irreprodicible (it not existing and all) but that didn't stop Simpson and Hime from publishing multiple, meticulous papers on it documenting what they had done. Everyone else took them seriously because we couldn't see what they'd done wrong, even though most people found the idea of a neutrino that heavy with that weak a mixing angle implausible.
Exactly. Science doesn't deal very well with irrepreducible events. If your cosmic ray detector detects a proton moving with the kinetic energy of a softball (above the theoretical limit, and no explanation how it got there), as with the OMG Particle, you have to balance the fact that you could have gotten a sensor error against the possible detection. If you don't get another one, then you're sort of SOL on the issue. The Fly's Eye detected several dozen such particles, but the debate remains if the instruments were accurate, and/or if there are problems with calculating the theoretical limit.
As always, more empirical data is a good thing, and new instruments should help clear the issue up. But this only works because they'll (probably) be able to find more ultra high energy cosmic rays. If they never found any more than the original OMG Particle, then science doesn't tell us very much.
>>Again, you're factually wrong. As I pointed out, you cannot, contrary to your original assertion, own an IP address. Ditto with a domain name. You only lease/license them.
By that argument, you don't actually own your house, because if you stop paying property taxes, the government will take it away from you.
I work on several writing projects involving technology. A really fascinating study showed that when you ask most kids if they write for fun, most of them will say no. If you then ask them how many text / email / IM / blog / etc., nearly everyone will answer in the affirmative. Teens don't see these kinds of things as "writing". Once you sort of get through to them that it is, it's like a lightbulb turns on in their heads, and they suddenly start getting engaged in English.
In other words, while it's really easy to mock texting (tweets especially annoy me), I think that if modern teachers learn to take advantage of all the writing teens are actually doing, we could see a revolution in English skills.
>>Security is probably another advantage to add to those already mentioned. At a depth of 100 meters, it is not easily accessible and it is then probably easier to secure from any unauthorized access.
Efficiency is also a nice plus. As we all know from physics, the efficiency of an engine depends on the size of the difference in temperature between the hot and cold reservoirs. The colder the water you pump in, the more work you can extract from a cycle.
On a related note, France has had to shut down some of its reactors during the heat waves they've been getting in recent years, due to the plants' water supply becoming too warm. For a country that relies on nukes for its power, I can see why they'd find marine plants to be attractive.
It all comes down to cost, though. TFA had no information on pricing.
>>Yeah, that always struck me as the fallacy of the nukes vs. passive power collection debate. Pursuing both options and using them in different applications and climates, as their strengths and weaknesses dictate, seems to be the most logical approach by far.
The most logical approach is to simply use the most cost-efficient approach for each region. If that's solar or tidal, then use it. But nuclear is the clear winner - the only major source of power that doesn't generate CO2 with its production aside from Hydro.
NIMBYism is the only real downside to nuclear (and hydro) - waste isn't an issue, and if we finally start building burner reactors, then all our waste becomes free fuel. Well, NIMBYism takes place at the state level, too. California has banned all nuclear power plants, so the Fresno Nuclear Company is trying to do an end run around the law by setting it up as a desalination plant that just happens to sell power. We'll see how that plan works out for them. PG&E (the local power company) is also a company that has a track record of breaking promises (and the law) and refusing to interoperate with indy power generation companies. So there's that obstacle, too.
In the meantime, PG&E is charging up to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. Coincidence?
I've actually become quite pessimistic about the situation being fixable here in California. The PUC isn't doing its job, PG&E is full of criminals and hooligans, and environmentalists have been filing lawsuits against all the green power efforts in the state. I'm starting to think the only solution that will work is small-scale solar. In other words, people putting solar on the tops of their houses. It's actually more cost efficient than large-scale solar.
>>Simple answer. Have it spinning on disk (or flash, or SSD, or...) and live accessable, plus an off-site backup.
As far as off-site backups goes, there's a number of good, automated solutions. I use Mozy, which is $50/year for unlimited backups. It integrates with windows, so you can access your off-site backup in real time like an external drive. It backs up my data daily.
I also keep an external drive which mirrors all my data nightly.
>>In other words, a manufacturer is selling a product that does exactly what the vast majority of it's customers want.
Everyone I know with a Droid X or Droid 2 (N = 4, myself included) hates the preinstalled software. In other words, they don't care about the fact that it's locked down so much as the fact that Motorola can put apps on it that the user cannot disable or delete. This pisses everyone off, especially when it's essentially advertising (Blockbuster) constantly running (Skype) or takes up a fair bit of memory (Need for Speed).
They also spam your applications list with these uninstallable apps, which is quite annoying.
I downloaded root software for my Droid X solely to be able to uninstall these applications. I have no other compelling reason to root my phone, as it otherwise does what I want.
The short version is: Wikipedia as it exists today is an insular, closed circle-jerk operation. Even good contributions and spelling corrections are apt to be "reverted" by a legion of people who are using semi-automated tools to up their "edit count", because the prime metric for becoming an "admin" is a stupid-high edit count that an actual writer could never reach in 10 years, and they don't give a crap how you got there.
Yep. "Cesspool" would be my one-word description of choice for Wikipedia, but insular circle-jerk has a nice ring to it, too.
I've added ISBN numbers to bibliographies (a minor, completely uncontroversial edit) and had a jackass admin (JayJG) autorevert the changes within 30 seconds. They own the page in question, against wikipedia policy. Putting a warning on their page that they're violating wikipedia policy results in one of their admin friends coming in, removing the warning, and then warning me to not fuck with them. This isn't an isolated incident either - I've basically given up on contributing to Wikipedia.
You want to know why I didn't click on your face to give you money, Jimmy Wales? That's why.
>>There exists none, zero, zip, nada excuse to tailgate
If you want the guy ahead of you to move over, you can indicate that you're going to tailgate him by moving slightly faster than the car ahead of you, while leaving enough space to be safe.
Reasonable drivers like myself will move over if it looks like you want to go faster than me. However, if you match my speed, then I'm going to stay in my lane. So you do need to move faster than the guy ahead of you.
>>if you think that's to slow then that's your problem. However there's never really any reason to go faster
For the record, I hate drivers like you. If you're doing 65 in the fast lane on an 8-lane freeway, you're a much bigger risk to the safety of people on the road than anyone else. Every time someone has to suddenly brake or you force a merge, you're creating a chance for an accident. Much better to merge right until you find a lane going your speed. If the slow lane is going faster than 65 (it averages 75MPH near my house off the I-15 at night, even in the slow lane), then sure, you can say "if you think that's too slow, it's your problem". Nobody is going to get pissed at someone driving the speed limit in the slow lane.
But it's your responsibility to drive safely, and on most interstates, the safe speed is higher than the speed limit. On all roads but interstates here in CA, safe speed limits are set by survey. On interstates, they set them instead by legislation. So it's usually set artificially low, to what some nanny state bastard in Sacramento thinks is a good idea.
>>For instance, suppose someone claimed that "p=hf". It's not necessary to open a textbook to debunk that claim because the left hand side has units of momentum, and the right hand side has units of "h" divided by time
Yeah, yeah. It's E=hf, momentum is merely proportional to hf (p = hf/c). In physics, relations are the most important things to remember. In this case, momentum is proportional to frequency (times some constant - you're just quibbling over the constant).
>>I never understood why some scientists say that philosophers of science don't understand science
If you're going to reference a post by mine, you should probably pick out what you're disagreeing with.
As I said in the post you're responding to here, if the temperature results moving forward can't falsify science, then climatology isn't science. This is not a flippant or trivial statement. At a certain level, science requires testable predictions to be made. If predictions have too large a range of results, they're less useful. I was pointing out the oddity that nearly no warming would be considered verification of the models (because it was included in the range of predictions), but a too hot prediction would falsify it (for being outside the range of predictions).
There's an important difference between directly testing individual parameters (such as the change in longwave radiation reflected, based on change of CO2 levels), which are often lab testable, and the predictions of a complex model which much necessarily abstract details away, and may or may not be accurate at making predictions. (This includes both your empirical and dynamic models above.) Forward testing of the models is the only valid form of testing, and this includes dynamic models.
If you've ever seen the games that people have played with regression models to get them to fit their data, you'll understand why. There's literally an infinite number of ways of fitting an estimator to a dataset, and while performing validation of a model by running variations in the input and comparing them against historic outputs is important and indispensable step, I won't allow you to get away with bullshit on this. I could build a dynamic model that matched the historic record precisely, and have absolutely no predictive value. That's my point.
I am NOT saying that these models are bad. You tend to overreact to my statements, so I'm making this explicitly clear - I (generally) believe the same things you do. I've done work with Scripps before, and have seen the work that go into these things. But I've also done enough work debugging models to accept their accuracy on faith, and accuracy over historical datasets is not sufficient proof of accuracy into the future. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Oh, and I do consider transient effects to be valid experiments "going forward". I'm not convinced they show evidence the way you think they do, as the 9/11 airline shutdown (reducing contrails) was reported to have the opposite effect predicted by climate models. I could be wrong though, I think I read that in Super Freakonomics, which isn't very rigorous.
Likewise, there have been a number of very public predictions made in the past about how bad the environment will be in the future (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager), which have tended to be proven false. I wouldn't be surprised if Al Gore is proven just as wrong with his "draw a straight line" prediction for temperatures in the future, using the 1960-1990 line as basis for extrapolation.
Finally, I've thought a bit more about that question of if photons of light have inertia. While they do have momentum, I am more convinced now that they don't have inertia. One can define inertia as the resistance of mass to changes in velocity, right? The root cause of this classic Newtonian mechanic is the interaction of objects with the Higgs field, right? That's what grants particles inertia. But photons do not interact with the Higgs field, so they don't have inertia.
>>Yeah, right. Because no one in the climate sciences has heard about Cross validation. And btw, if a model predicts the 1930's accurately and these years were not part of the sample set, that is pretty good cross validation in my book. [Someone]
Cross validation is an important tool. You have to get your model to work with existing data, first. But the real test of a model is when compared against the real world. It's absurdly easy to match a sample set of data, either by faking it, or by setting one's parameters in a certain way, which is why all such claims of the forms "95% accurate on the sample data" are immediately discounted by anyone in the computer science community. I wrote one of the first statistical spam filters, more complex than the Bayesian filters that you'll see in almost every person's computer these days. We didn't announce our accuracy on our sample data set of spam (it was quite high), but rather how much accuracy it had going forward. All models (climate and otherwise) have to be analyzed in terms of their predictive value, not how much accuracy they get on a sample data set.
You'd think that intelligent people would realize this, but apparently they didn't have professors with the same standards of enforcing rigor as mine did.
>>Sadly, you kept digging: >>... People who say that scientists have to CREATE MULTIPLE EARTHS in order to convince them aren't really skeptics.... [Dumb Scientist]
Just so you know, RC.org agrees with the general statement that not having a second Earth to run experiments on is a difficulty with climatology.
>>Here's a good example of coby's point: despite the fact that cosmic inflation was a unique, singular event, your comments suggest that you aren't applying your definition of "science" consistently
Not at all. Science can't (and doesn't) deal with singular events very well. Testing of hypotheses is the gold standard of science. In fields like geology, where you don't have a spare Earth to test with, you encounter this problem all the time. Someone will say Yosemite valley is formed by sinking, another by erosion by rivers, another by glaciers. You can't get a satisfying answer when all the hypotheses are supported by the data in one form or another. In some cases, you get lucky and discover evidence for one theory or another (scrape marks on rocks, moraines, etc.), and sometimes you don't. So people will build models and try to argue about it using these secondary sources.
So if it will make you feel better, we could say these sorts of fields (cosmology, climatology, geology, etc.) follow the silver standard of science - empirical observation, theory formation, and trying to come up with secondary sources to confirm or falsify the theories. But don't pretend they are as rigorous as being able to lab test a theory as in chemistry or physics.
>>Their streaming selection is ok for TV shows, but for movies it's fairly poor. This is no doubt directly due to the MPAA restricting what they can stream.
Maybe if they offered them 50 cents per view instead of the... $0? 5 cents?... the content providers would allow them to expand their selection.
The worst part is that they take down stuff available for streaming all the time, so I'll queue something and come back later to find I can't watch Zoolander, or whatever.
That's a very good point. Though I suppose if there were lots of parallel dimensions connected by gravity, they could exhibit similar behavior, if the matter was distributed throughout the dimensions so that they couldn't collide, and only interact through gravity.
>>Already discussed, but note that nuclear plants do generate small amounts of CO2 due to current enrichment and mining methods, as well as the curing of concrete containment dome
Sure. And people driving to work and breathing at the plant generate CO2, too. It's still no excuse for AGW protestors to chain themselves to a nuclear power plant in protest, though, as the amounts are insignificant.
>>Dr. Knutti's emissions graph makes it clear that he's examining a scenario in which CO2 emissions only drop to half of 2010 values by ~2030
There's lots of greens calling for zero CO2 emissions. Since you work in the field, I'm sure you're aware of them.
As far as science vs. policy goes, I absolutely agree with you that science and policy are two different ballgames, but people confuse the two: denying science because they don't like the policy, or pretending that because they know science, they are suited to crafting policy. Hansen's latest statements are illustrative: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/17/china-style-dictatorship-of-climatologists/
That said, he discovered the facts pointed him toward nuclear as a green solution, so he's not all bad.
>>I've already mentioned that albedo geoengineering "solutions" like stratospheric aerosol injection wouldn't address ocean acidification, so I don't see why you think they'd be effective.
Those are two different issues. It seems like it would be quite cheap and effective at reducing global temperatures (if they're found to be a problem), while not addressing the ocean acidification problem, which is another problem. Since you have/. search on tap, you should be able to find a quote from me on here that says basically this.
>>In reality, none of the geophysicists I've met at conferences have advocated solutions that will kill people or destroy the economy
Not outright, no. But the suggestions to move to 100% renewable would triple our current energy prices, or more. I care not a whit for your estimates of cap-and-trade - I'm talking about looking at what the price is we pay for power now, vs. what we'd pay with 100% renewable, and the impact would be quite devastating.
I'm currently modifying my position on the issue, though. While the levelized cost of large-scale solar is around 4x the cost of natural gas production, Small-scale solar is only about 2x as expensive, and avoids a lot of the land use, transmission line and lawsuit issues that can make large-scale plants unattractive to investors.
>>CBO estimates that households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40
Be very, very careful with your estimates. Poor families get subsidized power. Here in California, the high tier pricing has been shooting through the roof (it's up to 50c/kWH now) while baseline usage has remained flat at around 8c for the last decade or so. The PUC has been allowing PG&E to blow rates through the roof as long as they keep them low for the poor. Likewise, your estimate of only a 10% increase in cost for the rich is either wrong, or is representative of very little change being made on the CO2 front. You can look at kilowatt hour prices for renewables vs. coal and NG, and derive these numbers yourself.
Kyoto is irreparably flawed, as anyone knows, and basically would constitute a money transfer to Eastern Europe (being paid to have the USSR collapse on their heads).
Final point - nuclear is such an attractive technology (both from an economics and CO2 perspective) that they were banned from earning carbon credits, since they would be too effective. Nothing more needs to be said about the stupidity of our CO2 overlords, or the viability of nukes.
Interesting, Khayman. Why do you say it's inconsistent with the Bullet Cluster data? It seems to me that if you had two clusters on top of each other, one in our 3-brane, and one in a neighboring one, and they collided with a cluster just in our 3-brane, that the result would be more or less consistent with the result of the purported dark matter separating from the normal matter.
The big three designs right now are the GE ABWR, the Westinghouse AP1000, and the Areva EPR. The AP1000 is a simplified version, but it is a bit of a misnomer to call it a scaled down TMI.
>>One thing you did not take into account is while China takes the plans for the AP1000 or next gen doohickey, GE is forging on with their next idea. China, using this technique, will catch up, but they will always be 1 step behind. No more, no less
Well, the AP1000 is made by CBS (owner of Westinghouse), not GE (owner of NBC).
No matter how you slice it, they're getting a tremendous leg up in technology, and will be able to either continue R&D from a really good starting point, or will be able to just continue making cheap knock-offs of the AP1000, which has a reasonably good design.
There was an interesting musing by the author of a recent Scientific American about how dark matter may interact with its own kind by forces other than the ones that cause normal matter to interact with its own kind. According to the musing (which the author rejects), dark matter operating under such forces could form complex systems, maybe even an unseen parallel universe where "people" live lives like ours, as unaware of us as we are of them. All undetectable, except by their gravitational attraction on us.
This is something I've been musing on recently. What if there were, say, 4 or 5 universes all operating in the same "space", but invisible to each other because they're in another parallel dimension or 3-brane or something like that? According to string theory, pretty much nothing can escape from a 3-brane except gravity - which might explain why gravity is so weak, as it could diffuse in more directions than EM radiation. Since EM radiation can't escape, these things would be effectively invisible, as it appears to be.
It could also explain that Dark Flow thing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow)
Slashdot Mirror
>>I have been looking at PV cells for my house lately. Outlay after the subsidy from our state Government is such that the system would pay for itself in about five years. But if you factor in the opportunity cost of investing the money the payoff period is a lot longer.
Yep, I'm getting solar put in at my house next month. It'll break even after 2-3 years (50c/kWH is PG&E's high tier rates), though as you say you can generally do better with investments.
>>Also note that Cu-59 will decay into Ni-59, which is radioactive and has a halflife of 76000 years. So even if this did work, you haven't solved the problem of radioactive waste.
What problem? It either has such a long halflife that it's barely radioactive, or it's active enough you can extract electricity from it.
The waste problem is a political one.
Exactly. Science doesn't deal very well with irrepreducible events. If your cosmic ray detector detects a proton moving with the kinetic energy of a softball (above the theoretical limit, and no explanation how it got there), as with the OMG Particle, you have to balance the fact that you could have gotten a sensor error against the possible detection. If you don't get another one, then you're sort of SOL on the issue. The Fly's Eye detected several dozen such particles, but the debate remains if the instruments were accurate, and/or if there are problems with calculating the theoretical limit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GZK_cutoff
As always, more empirical data is a good thing, and new instruments should help clear the issue up. But this only works because they'll (probably) be able to find more ultra high energy cosmic rays. If they never found any more than the original OMG Particle, then science doesn't tell us very much.
>>Again, you're factually wrong. As I pointed out, you cannot, contrary to your original assertion, own an IP address. Ditto with a domain name. You only lease/license them.
By that argument, you don't actually own your house, because if you stop paying property taxes, the government will take it away from you.
I work on several writing projects involving technology. A really fascinating study showed that when you ask most kids if they write for fun, most of them will say no. If you then ask them how many text / email / IM / blog / etc., nearly everyone will answer in the affirmative. Teens don't see these kinds of things as "writing". Once you sort of get through to them that it is, it's like a lightbulb turns on in their heads, and they suddenly start getting engaged in English.
In other words, while it's really easy to mock texting (tweets especially annoy me), I think that if modern teachers learn to take advantage of all the writing teens are actually doing, we could see a revolution in English skills.
Well, since they were in Australia, they actually ended up going -88 km/h.
>>some pretty silly supernatural or pseudo-scientific themes
Yeah. I stopped watching when they levitated a gold necklace in a strong magnetic field.
>>Security is probably another advantage to add to those already mentioned. At a depth of 100 meters, it is not easily accessible and it is then probably easier to secure from any unauthorized access.
Efficiency is also a nice plus. As we all know from physics, the efficiency of an engine depends on the size of the difference in temperature between the hot and cold reservoirs. The colder the water you pump in, the more work you can extract from a cycle.
On a related note, France has had to shut down some of its reactors during the heat waves they've been getting in recent years, due to the plants' water supply becoming too warm. For a country that relies on nukes for its power, I can see why they'd find marine plants to be attractive.
It all comes down to cost, though. TFA had no information on pricing.
>>Yeah, that always struck me as the fallacy of the nukes vs. passive power collection debate. Pursuing both options and using them in different applications and climates, as their strengths and weaknesses dictate, seems to be the most logical approach by far.
The most logical approach is to simply use the most cost-efficient approach for each region. If that's solar or tidal, then use it. But nuclear is the clear winner - the only major source of power that doesn't generate CO2 with its production aside from Hydro.
NIMBYism is the only real downside to nuclear (and hydro) - waste isn't an issue, and if we finally start building burner reactors, then all our waste becomes free fuel. Well, NIMBYism takes place at the state level, too. California has banned all nuclear power plants, so the Fresno Nuclear Company is trying to do an end run around the law by setting it up as a desalination plant that just happens to sell power. We'll see how that plan works out for them. PG&E (the local power company) is also a company that has a track record of breaking promises (and the law) and refusing to interoperate with indy power generation companies. So there's that obstacle, too.
In the meantime, PG&E is charging up to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour. Coincidence?
I've actually become quite pessimistic about the situation being fixable here in California. The PUC isn't doing its job, PG&E is full of criminals and hooligans, and environmentalists have been filing lawsuits against all the green power efforts in the state. I'm starting to think the only solution that will work is small-scale solar. In other words, people putting solar on the tops of their houses. It's actually more cost efficient than large-scale solar.
>>Simple answer. Have it spinning on disk (or flash, or SSD, or...) and live accessable, plus an off-site backup.
As far as off-site backups goes, there's a number of good, automated solutions. I use Mozy, which is $50/year for unlimited backups. It integrates with windows, so you can access your off-site backup in real time like an external drive. It backs up my data daily.
I also keep an external drive which mirrors all my data nightly.
So between the two, I feel pretty safe.
>>In other words, a manufacturer is selling a product that does exactly what the vast majority of it's customers want.
Everyone I know with a Droid X or Droid 2 (N = 4, myself included) hates the preinstalled software. In other words, they don't care about the fact that it's locked down so much as the fact that Motorola can put apps on it that the user cannot disable or delete. This pisses everyone off, especially when it's essentially advertising (Blockbuster) constantly running (Skype) or takes up a fair bit of memory (Need for Speed).
They also spam your applications list with these uninstallable apps, which is quite annoying.
I downloaded root software for my Droid X solely to be able to uninstall these applications. I have no other compelling reason to root my phone, as it otherwise does what I want.
Yep. "Cesspool" would be my one-word description of choice for Wikipedia, but insular circle-jerk has a nice ring to it, too.
I've added ISBN numbers to bibliographies (a minor, completely uncontroversial edit) and had a jackass admin (JayJG) autorevert the changes within 30 seconds. They own the page in question, against wikipedia policy. Putting a warning on their page that they're violating wikipedia policy results in one of their admin friends coming in, removing the warning, and then warning me to not fuck with them. This isn't an isolated incident either - I've basically given up on contributing to Wikipedia.
You want to know why I didn't click on your face to give you money, Jimmy Wales? That's why.
>>There exists none, zero, zip, nada excuse to tailgate
If you want the guy ahead of you to move over, you can indicate that you're going to tailgate him by moving slightly faster than the car ahead of you, while leaving enough space to be safe.
Reasonable drivers like myself will move over if it looks like you want to go faster than me. However, if you match my speed, then I'm going to stay in my lane. So you do need to move faster than the guy ahead of you.
>>if you think that's to slow then that's your problem. However there's never really any reason to go faster
For the record, I hate drivers like you. If you're doing 65 in the fast lane on an 8-lane freeway, you're a much bigger risk to the safety of people on the road than anyone else. Every time someone has to suddenly brake or you force a merge, you're creating a chance for an accident. Much better to merge right until you find a lane going your speed. If the slow lane is going faster than 65 (it averages 75MPH near my house off the I-15 at night, even in the slow lane), then sure, you can say "if you think that's too slow, it's your problem". Nobody is going to get pissed at someone driving the speed limit in the slow lane.
But it's your responsibility to drive safely, and on most interstates, the safe speed is higher than the speed limit. On all roads but interstates here in CA, safe speed limits are set by survey. On interstates, they set them instead by legislation. So it's usually set artificially low, to what some nanny state bastard in Sacramento thinks is a good idea.
>>For instance, suppose someone claimed that "p=hf". It's not necessary to open a textbook to debunk that claim because the left hand side has units of momentum, and the right hand side has units of "h" divided by time
Yeah, yeah. It's E=hf, momentum is merely proportional to hf (p = hf/c). In physics, relations are the most important things to remember. In this case, momentum is proportional to frequency (times some constant - you're just quibbling over the constant).
>>I never understood why some scientists say that philosophers of science don't understand science
If you're going to reference a post by mine, you should probably pick out what you're disagreeing with.
As I said in the post you're responding to here, if the temperature results moving forward can't falsify science, then climatology isn't science. This is not a flippant or trivial statement. At a certain level, science requires testable predictions to be made. If predictions have too large a range of results, they're less useful. I was pointing out the oddity that nearly no warming would be considered verification of the models (because it was included in the range of predictions), but a too hot prediction would falsify it (for being outside the range of predictions).
There's an important difference between directly testing individual parameters (such as the change in longwave radiation reflected, based on change of CO2 levels), which are often lab testable, and the predictions of a complex model which much necessarily abstract details away, and may or may not be accurate at making predictions. (This includes both your empirical and dynamic models above.) Forward testing of the models is the only valid form of testing, and this includes dynamic models.
If you've ever seen the games that people have played with regression models to get them to fit their data, you'll understand why. There's literally an infinite number of ways of fitting an estimator to a dataset, and while performing validation of a model by running variations in the input and comparing them against historic outputs is important and indispensable step, I won't allow you to get away with bullshit on this. I could build a dynamic model that matched the historic record precisely, and have absolutely no predictive value. That's my point.
I am NOT saying that these models are bad. You tend to overreact to my statements, so I'm making this explicitly clear - I (generally) believe the same things you do. I've done work with Scripps before, and have seen the work that go into these things. But I've also done enough work debugging models to accept their accuracy on faith, and accuracy over historical datasets is not sufficient proof of accuracy into the future. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Oh, and I do consider transient effects to be valid experiments "going forward". I'm not convinced they show evidence the way you think they do, as the 9/11 airline shutdown (reducing contrails) was reported to have the opposite effect predicted by climate models. I could be wrong though, I think I read that in Super Freakonomics, which isn't very rigorous.
Likewise, there have been a number of very public predictions made in the past about how bad the environment will be in the future (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager), which have tended to be proven false. I wouldn't be surprised if Al Gore is proven just as wrong with his "draw a straight line" prediction for temperatures in the future, using the 1960-1990 line as basis for extrapolation.
Finally, I've thought a bit more about that question of if photons of light have inertia. While they do have momentum, I am more convinced now that they don't have inertia. One can define inertia as the resistance of mass to changes in velocity, right? The root cause of this classic Newtonian mechanic is the interaction of objects with the Higgs field, right? That's what grants particles inertia. But photons do not interact with the Higgs field, so they don't have inertia.
>>Yeah, right. Because no one in the climate sciences has heard about Cross validation. And btw, if a model predicts the 1930's accurately and these years were not part of the sample set, that is pretty good cross validation in my book. [Someone]
Cross validation is an important tool. You have to get your model to work with existing data, first. But the real test of a model is when compared against the real world. It's absurdly easy to match a sample set of data, either by faking it, or by setting one's parameters in a certain way, which is why all such claims of the forms "95% accurate on the sample data" are immediately discounted by anyone in the computer science community. I wrote one of the first statistical spam filters, more complex than the Bayesian filters that you'll see in almost every person's computer these days. We didn't announce our accuracy on our sample data set of spam (it was quite high), but rather how much accuracy it had going forward. All models (climate and otherwise) have to be analyzed in terms of their predictive value, not how much accuracy they get on a sample data set.
You'd think that intelligent people would realize this, but apparently they didn't have professors with the same standards of enforcing rigor as mine did.
>>Sadly, you kept digging: ... [Dumb Scientist]
>>... People who say that scientists have to CREATE MULTIPLE EARTHS in order to convince them aren't really skeptics.
Just so you know, RC.org agrees with the general statement that not having a second Earth to run experiments on is a difficulty with climatology.
>>Here's a good example of coby's point: despite the fact that cosmic inflation was a unique, singular event, your comments suggest that you aren't applying your definition of "science" consistently
Not at all. Science can't (and doesn't) deal with singular events very well. Testing of hypotheses is the gold standard of science. In fields like geology, where you don't have a spare Earth to test with, you encounter this problem all the time. Someone will say Yosemite valley is formed by sinking, another by erosion by rivers, another by glaciers. You can't get a satisfying answer when all the hypotheses are supported by the data in one form or another. In some cases, you get lucky and discover evidence for one theory or another (scrape marks on rocks, moraines, etc.), and sometimes you don't. So people will build models and try to argue about it using these secondary sources.
So if it will make you feel better, we could say these sorts of fields (cosmology, climatology, geology, etc.) follow the silver standard of science - empirical observation, theory formation, and trying to come up with secondary sources to confirm or falsify the theories. But don't pretend they are as rigorous as being able to lab test a theory as in chemistry or physics.
>>(witness HBO's stance that Netflix users have to pay $30/month before Netflix will get HBO shows).
To be fair, HBO already allows streaming its shows... you just have to subscribe to HBO.
It wouldn't make sense for them to allow another company to sell the same thing for less.
>>Their streaming selection is ok for TV shows, but for movies it's fairly poor. This is no doubt directly due to the MPAA restricting what they can stream.
Maybe if they offered them 50 cents per view instead of the... $0? 5 cents?... the content providers would allow them to expand their selection.
The worst part is that they take down stuff available for streaming all the time, so I'll queue something and come back later to find I can't watch Zoolander, or whatever.
That's a very good point. Though I suppose if there were lots of parallel dimensions connected by gravity, they could exhibit similar behavior, if the matter was distributed throughout the dimensions so that they couldn't collide, and only interact through gravity.
>>Already discussed, but note that nuclear plants do generate small amounts of CO2 due to current enrichment and mining methods, as well as the curing of concrete containment dome
Sure. And people driving to work and breathing at the plant generate CO2, too. It's still no excuse for AGW protestors to chain themselves to a nuclear power plant in protest, though, as the amounts are insignificant.
>>Dr. Knutti's emissions graph makes it clear that he's examining a scenario in which CO2 emissions only drop to half of 2010 values by ~2030
There's lots of greens calling for zero CO2 emissions. Since you work in the field, I'm sure you're aware of them.
As far as science vs. policy goes, I absolutely agree with you that science and policy are two different ballgames, but people confuse the two: denying science because they don't like the policy, or pretending that because they know science, they are suited to crafting policy. Hansen's latest statements are illustrative: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/17/china-style-dictatorship-of-climatologists/
That said, he discovered the facts pointed him toward nuclear as a green solution, so he's not all bad.
>>I've already mentioned that albedo geoengineering "solutions" like stratospheric aerosol injection wouldn't address ocean acidification, so I don't see why you think they'd be effective.
Those are two different issues. It seems like it would be quite cheap and effective at reducing global temperatures (if they're found to be a problem), while not addressing the ocean acidification problem, which is another problem. Since you have /. search on tap, you should be able to find a quote from me on here that says basically this.
>>In reality, none of the geophysicists I've met at conferences have advocated solutions that will kill people or destroy the economy
Not outright, no. But the suggestions to move to 100% renewable would triple our current energy prices, or more. I care not a whit for your estimates of cap-and-trade - I'm talking about looking at what the price is we pay for power now, vs. what we'd pay with 100% renewable, and the impact would be quite devastating.
I'm currently modifying my position on the issue, though. While the levelized cost of large-scale solar is around 4x the cost of natural gas production, Small-scale solar is only about 2x as expensive, and avoids a lot of the land use, transmission line and lawsuit issues that can make large-scale plants unattractive to investors.
>>CBO estimates that households in the lowest income quintile would see an average net benefit of about $40
Be very, very careful with your estimates. Poor families get subsidized power. Here in California, the high tier pricing has been shooting through the roof (it's up to 50c/kWH now) while baseline usage has remained flat at around 8c for the last decade or so. The PUC has been allowing PG&E to blow rates through the roof as long as they keep them low for the poor. Likewise, your estimate of only a 10% increase in cost for the rich is either wrong, or is representative of very little change being made on the CO2 front. You can look at kilowatt hour prices for renewables vs. coal and NG, and derive these numbers yourself.
Kyoto is irreparably flawed, as anyone knows, and basically would constitute a money transfer to Eastern Europe (being paid to have the USSR collapse on their heads).
Final point - nuclear is such an attractive technology (both from an economics and CO2 perspective) that they were banned from earning carbon credits, since they would be too effective. Nothing more needs to be said about the stupidity of our CO2 overlords, or the viability of nukes.
Interesting, Khayman. Why do you say it's inconsistent with the Bullet Cluster data? It seems to me that if you had two clusters on top of each other, one in our 3-brane, and one in a neighboring one, and they collided with a cluster just in our 3-brane, that the result would be more or less consistent with the result of the purported dark matter separating from the normal matter.
The big three designs right now are the GE ABWR, the Westinghouse AP1000, and the Areva EPR. The AP1000 is a simplified version, but it is a bit of a misnomer to call it a scaled down TMI.
>>One thing you did not take into account is while China takes the plans for the AP1000 or next gen doohickey, GE is forging on with their next idea. China, using this technique, will catch up, but they will always be 1 step behind. No more, no less
Well, the AP1000 is made by CBS (owner of Westinghouse), not GE (owner of NBC).
No matter how you slice it, they're getting a tremendous leg up in technology, and will be able to either continue R&D from a really good starting point, or will be able to just continue making cheap knock-offs of the AP1000, which has a reasonably good design.
This is something I've been musing on recently. What if there were, say, 4 or 5 universes all operating in the same "space", but invisible to each other because they're in another parallel dimension or 3-brane or something like that? According to string theory, pretty much nothing can escape from a 3-brane except gravity - which might explain why gravity is so weak, as it could diffuse in more directions than EM radiation. Since EM radiation can't escape, these things would be effectively invisible, as it appears to be.
It could also explain that Dark Flow thing. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_flow)
>>Jeez, WTF is with all you guys and the "Why don't they pay back their loans" bit? GS paid back their loans plus interest a while ago already.
It's easy when you get the government to print money for you.