And sea level rise amplifies the effect of coastal erosion, so your point is...?
My point is that sea level rise does *not* necessarily amplify effects of costal erosion. You're making an unsupported assertion there.
If I point out a costal area where the coastal erosion has been steady for the past 100 years, even though sea level has increased, will you accept that as a refutation of your assertion?
And if you are going to make an amplification assertion, will you quantify it? If sea level rise amplifies coastal erosion by a factor of 1.000000000001, should we care?
Frankly, rates of change in this system will *always* be changing. As it stands, they're not following the steady uptick in atmospheric CO2, which tends to cast doubt on any causal relationship from CO2.
So you don't even know what it is you're being skeptical about.
I'm skeptical that there exists any necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. I challenge you to cite the one you believe in.
No, I asked you a question.
Without specifying who "the scientists" are. I might know less than Richard Lindzen, for example, but I certainly know more than Michael Mann:)
I was asking what your credentials are.
The nice thing about science is that it can be played without credentials - we don't have to rely on appeals to authority. We start with our falsifiable hypothesis statement, try desperately to find falsifications, and fail - we get closer and closer to truth that way.
So want to play science, or do you want to argue authority?:)
Costal erosion is orders of magnitude more impactful than a 5cm average sea level rise. In fact, an average 5cm sea level rise tells you *nothing* about how local costal conditions are going to respond -> there are plenty of places where the high tide level *falls* even as "average sea level' is on the rise.
Not to mention, a 5cm average sea level rise, even if completely evenly applied to every coastal area, is dwarfed by natural variation in tidal range.
Oh, and nice trick turning centimeters of *height* into meters of *length*:) A cute sophistry, but not very effective.
Quote a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement from any scientist on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and then we can talk about who knows better than who. As it stands, you've simply made an appeal to unnamed authorities.
So your assertion is that from 1992-2012, ice caps melted and caused 11mm of sea level rise, but from 1972-1992, there were only 2mm of sea level rise due to ice caps?
Pics or it didn't happen.
Oh, and just for fun, any observations you can cite of weather, CO2, ice cover, and global average temperature that would falsify your assumption that humans control the weather and the sea levels of the earth now?
Everything is AGW related - hot spells, cold spells, droughts, floods, riots, earthquakes, locusts, hurricanes, doldrums - that's a cop out.
The fact of the matter here is that 11mm in 20 years, or 55mm in 20 years, is ridiculously small. Seriously, 6 *centimeters* in 20 years. Even with a thirty year horizon, that's not more than 10 *centimeters*.
Quick quiz: how much did ocean levels rise from 1900-2000, and how many acres of real estate were devalued because of it?
As for acceleration, sea level rise is actually *slowing* - there's simply no possible plausible scenario that is going to turn *millimeters* of change into *meters* of change in in 20 years, or even 100 for that matter.
Now it's quite possible that some of the natural petroleum sources on our planet were in fact from dead fish, but this seems to give a significant boost to those who have asserted that Abiogenic petroleum is not only *possible* but perhaps even more common that biogenic petroleum.
I'd believe the assertion that CFCs in our atmosphere are unequivocally anthropogenic if we had a longer term record for CFC history in the air (specifically the upper stratosphere), but we don't have anything of the sort. In fact, my understanding is that these concentrations are measured indirectly (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/oceans/new_atmCFC.html) - perhaps you know of a direct CFC-o-mometer that can give column CFC concentrations on a global scale, but thus far, I haven't seen such data or mechanisms.
I'd also assert that while volcanoes are a known source of CFCs, I wouldn't assume that they are the only non-anthropogenic source of CFCs. Again, part of this is a dearth of long term CFC atmospheric information (if we had seen CFCs in significant quantities in say, 100,000BC, during a period of low volcanic activity, we'd have to start searching for other possible sources), but I think we're assuming way too much here.
So to play the science game, the first thing I'd do is improve the measurement network, the second thing I'd do is look for other non-anthropogenic sources of CFCs on earth, and then I'd look for non-anthropogenic sources of CFCs on other planets. After thoroughly convincing myself that we've established a galactic principle of "CFCs come from intelligent life", then I might be more likely to accept the remote detection of CFCs as indicative of ETI.
Here's the rub though - if we can establish that *someplace* on earth these compounds can occur naturally, even if their rate on *earth* is very low, that doesn't preclude their rate on some other planet being very high.
While we *may* decide that there are no significant natural sources of CFCs on earth (an open question, given the indirectness of our measurements, and the lack of any long term record), we cannot presume that such a thing is true on all worlds, or even all earth-like worlds.
The question is, "can volcanoes (and hey what the hell, oceans) increase CFC concentration in the atmosphere"? The assumption of the "detection of CFCs means detection of intelligent life" depends on a lack of CFC generation by any natural means. We've already shown this is simply not the case, and unfortunately, our measurement network and duration for CFC concentrations in our own atmosphere is terribly limited.
If you see a flux of CFCs in the atmosphere, why would you assume that this is due to anthropogenic activity?
More importantly, how would you exclude natural activity as a cause of observed CFC fluxes? One might start off with the assertion that CFCs never occur naturally, but as we've seen, that is demonstrably false. We could do some study of natural CFC sources, and try to extrapolate that to the entire universe of natural CFC sources, but that would be informative, not definitive.
As for natural halocarbons not including CFCs, I'm not sure I see where you're getting that - CFCs are a subset of halocarbons...are you asserting that there is a specific CFC that has not be observed in volcanic plumes?
"This statement is one that I keep seeing on websites and blogs, and ties in with the assertions repeated by Warrick & Farmer (1990), Grimston (1992), Hendeles et al. (2007), Colice (2007), Colice (2008), and Green & Stewart (2008, p. 18) to the effect that CFCs are not natural in the environment. If one chooses to measure the gases emerging from volcanic vents instead of taking a politician's word for it, one discovers that volcanoes produce a variety of halocarbons, including CFCs. This fact, along with other natural sources of CFCs including sponges, other marine animals, bacteria (both marine & terrestrial), fungi (both marine & terrestrial), plants (both marine & terrestrial), lichen, insects, is so well documented that it is the subject of ongoing textbook publication (Gribble, 2003; Jordan, 2003). Stoiber et al. (1971) first measured and documented CFCs venting from Santiaguito in Guatamala. Since, there have been many studies corroborating the volcanic emission of CFCs (Isidorov et al, 1990; Isidorov et al., 1993; Jordon et al., 2000; Schwandner et al., 2000; Schwandner et al., 2002; Schwandner et al., 2004; Frische et al., 2006). Although some authors attempt to correlate volcanogenic CFCs to atmospheric variations, the confirmation of soil diffusion decay with distance from the vent (Schwandner et al., 2004) still stands in stark contradiction of Frische's hypothesis."
The thought that any government, or collection of governments, with all the military might of the planet unified, could *stop* climate from changing, is ludicrous beyond belief.
And given that banks operate on a fractional reserve basis and have done forever, I'm not sure that there's much benefit to the economy in you lending another 30k to a bank.
Well, you can chop off, say, 10% of the 30k as a fractional reserve requirement, and still end up ahead of the game if the remaining 27k is being used to invest in profitable enterprises that create jobs. And of course, if you live somewhere like Kalifornia, you can chop off, say, 10% of each 3k given to ten people for sales tax on any goods and services spending:)
I still think that we've got an open question as to whether money invested in a company has a greater effect on economic growth than money spent by consumers. Yes, fractional reserve requirements will tinge the equation, as will sales taxes. Yes, money in Bermuda is more distant from our economy, but the same can be said for remittances sent back to home countries by recent immigrants. There are doubtless dozens of other minor factors that can come into play on either the "I spent my 30k investing in a gas station" or "I spent my 30k buying 5 used import cars", but I haven't seen it demonstrated that investment is quantitatively worse than direct spending.
The idea that everyone will be able to live their lives only doing things they like is a ridiculous offshoot of our silly self-esteem dogma. The central complaint here seems to be "my son just doesn't like certain stuff, so let him skip that".
Now, I'm all for ditching government schools, and leaving it up to the marketplace to pander to people who don't want to do hard things...we could have Easy(TM) Charter School, based on the idea that kids can skip whatever they want. But my bet is that the problem here isn't the school, and it isn't even the kid - it's the parent who mistakenly believes that their offspring is some special little snowflake, and needs to be acknowledged as such by the rest of the world.
Broken Window Fallacy again - asserting that because we have infrastructure to build (our broken window), that we should look upon this as an unvarnished good ignores the opportunity cost. If you take money from the populace (or the future generations of the populace) to build expensive bullet trains, or unreliable wind farms, or uncompetitive solar farms, you've stolen the opportunity for them to decide to do something different with it - maybe what they really wanted was more clothes, or more food, or new musical instruments.
And in fact, if you believe that infrastructure projects are a good thing, then our death and destruction elsewhere should actually be a *double* bonus -> it stimulates the economy with government spending on the military, and then further stimulates the economy of the places we destroyed because we need to rebuild infrastructure! In fact, we could just skip the whole traveling overseas part, and have the military re-enact Sherman's march, destroy cities en-masse, and then we could justify even more the required infrastructure projects to rebuild!:)
Money in the bank isn't removed from the economy - it's what banking institutions use to lend to borrowers and stimulate economic activity.
If you get an additional $30k, but don't need it to make a material difference to your life, that $30k sits in a bank, which can then lend to a small business who needs that $30k to invest in their store to create another say, 10 jobs. Or maybe that $30k sits in a mutual fund, which becomes an investment in a wide range of companies that now can create jobs. Unless you actually take that $30k and bury it in your backyard, it's working *somewhere*.
Now you can argue that $30k of spending on goods and services (10 people with $3k all making a material difference to their lives) is better than $30k of investment in companies and jobs, but I think that's an open question rather than a given.
1) the draw down of the military post-WWII would've driven the country into recession
2) "saving" money from ending wars, and using that money to say, pay off debt, would drive the country into recession
Keynes got it right about one thing - the inability to lower prices/wages causes a great deal of our economic problems: instead of adjusting quickly to new economic realities, we adjust poorly. Some of this is just human nature (a business who adjusts to economic conditions by lowering wages will end up losing productivity from employees as they feel disgruntled, and of course people have a hard time selling things for less than they bought them for, simply on an emotional level), but regardless of the cause, these are the "rough spots" of economic cycles we need to deal with.
The assertion that government expenditure is the proper way to respond to sticky prices is a dangerous misperception of reality, based in the Broken Window Fallacy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3AKoL0vEs
In the end, we have two competing classes of people - borrowers and savers. Savers want to lend their money to borrowers to grow it reliably. Borrowers want to borrow money from savers because they bet they can grow it more than they'll have to repay. But monetary policy cannot be neutral in this matter -> inflation screws savers, making them less willing to lend, and deflation screws borrowers, driving them to bankruptcy which screws savers too.
As it stands, the U.S. federal government is a massive debtor, and so it's no surprise that it's incentive is to inflate the currency, destroy the power of the dollar, and pay off its debt with cheaper greenbacks. Unfortunately, what is in the self-interest of the U.S. government is something that retards economic activity, and makes savers less willing to invest.
Honestly, if liberals truly believed in Keynesian economics, they'd militarize the entire nation, and hire everyone as a military contractor. Increased defense spending would be seen as economic stimulus, rather than some sort of black hole for money. I think what the liberals don't quite realize is the same way they see galavanting around the world with M-16s and F-22s as wasteful, fiscal conservatives think the same thing about various welfare and entitlement programs.
In the "Guns, Butter, Jobs" equation, the Keynesian model would suggest that guns means more jobs means more people can afford their own butter.
Okay, so say we stop looking at hours, and instead look at results...if we want to setup incentives for that, shouldn't we be paying by result? So let's say this week you get one good result, and next week you get five...should we pay you five times more the second week? Four times less the first week?
Now I'm not saying that there aren't problems with using hours as a proxy for worth, it's just that on the whole, there's a lot of variability on how much even the most efficient person can accomplish, and a lot of down time in between successes. We get a certain amount of stability when we're working by the hour, because our down time becomes a risk taken on by our employer.
That all being said, one of the most frustrating things is the tiny range of compensation versus the wide range of skill set in the knowledge business -> people who are ten times as efficient don't get paid ten times as much. But then again, if they essentially get to slack off 10 times as much as their inferior peers, but still get paid for those hours, I guess that's something...:)
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that sea level rise does *not* necessarily amplify effects of costal erosion. You're making an unsupported assertion there.
If I point out a costal area where the coastal erosion has been steady for the past 100 years, even though sea level has increased, will you accept that as a refutation of your assertion?
And if you are going to make an amplification assertion, will you quantify it? If sea level rise amplifies coastal erosion by a factor of 1.000000000001, should we care?
Actually, no, we don't.
http://notrickszone.com/2012/11/29/stefan-rahmstorfs-sea-level-amnesia-using-his-own-numbers-sea-level-rise-actually-dropped-3/
Frankly, rates of change in this system will *always* be changing. As it stands, they're not following the steady uptick in atmospheric CO2, which tends to cast doubt on any causal relationship from CO2.
I'm skeptical that there exists any necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. I challenge you to cite the one you believe in.
Without specifying who "the scientists" are. I might know less than Richard Lindzen, for example, but I certainly know more than Michael Mann :)
The nice thing about science is that it can be played without credentials - we don't have to rely on appeals to authority. We start with our falsifiable hypothesis statement, try desperately to find falsifications, and fail - we get closer and closer to truth that way.
So want to play science, or do you want to argue authority? :)
Costal erosion is orders of magnitude more impactful than a 5cm average sea level rise. In fact, an average 5cm sea level rise tells you *nothing* about how local costal conditions are going to respond -> there are plenty of places where the high tide level *falls* even as "average sea level' is on the rise.
Not to mention, a 5cm average sea level rise, even if completely evenly applied to every coastal area, is dwarfed by natural variation in tidal range.
Oh, and nice trick turning centimeters of *height* into meters of *length* :) A cute sophistry, but not very effective.
Quote a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement from any scientist on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and then we can talk about who knows better than who. As it stands, you've simply made an appeal to unnamed authorities.
Seriously, you think people wouldn't have been hurt by supermegaultrastorm sandy if their houses had been 2cm higher?
Really?
So your assertion is that from 1992-2012, ice caps melted and caused 11mm of sea level rise, but from 1972-1992, there were only 2mm of sea level rise due to ice caps?
Pics or it didn't happen.
Oh, and just for fun, any observations you can cite of weather, CO2, ice cover, and global average temperature that would falsify your assumption that humans control the weather and the sea levels of the earth now?
Everything is AGW related - hot spells, cold spells, droughts, floods, riots, earthquakes, locusts, hurricanes, doldrums - that's a cop out.
The fact of the matter here is that 11mm in 20 years, or 55mm in 20 years, is ridiculously small. Seriously, 6 *centimeters* in 20 years. Even with a thirty year horizon, that's not more than 10 *centimeters*.
Quick quiz: how much did ocean levels rise from 1900-2000, and how many acres of real estate were devalued because of it?
As for acceleration, sea level rise is actually *slowing* - there's simply no possible plausible scenario that is going to turn *millimeters* of change into *meters* of change in in 20 years, or even 100 for that matter.
Everybody raise their houses by 2cm, quick!
Now it's quite possible that some of the natural petroleum sources on our planet were in fact from dead fish, but this seems to give a significant boost to those who have asserted that Abiogenic petroleum is not only *possible* but perhaps even more common that biogenic petroleum.
Fascinating stuff.
I'd believe the assertion that CFCs in our atmosphere are unequivocally anthropogenic if we had a longer term record for CFC history in the air (specifically the upper stratosphere), but we don't have anything of the sort. In fact, my understanding is that these concentrations are measured indirectly (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/oceans/new_atmCFC.html) - perhaps you know of a direct CFC-o-mometer that can give column CFC concentrations on a global scale, but thus far, I haven't seen such data or mechanisms.
I'd also assert that while volcanoes are a known source of CFCs, I wouldn't assume that they are the only non-anthropogenic source of CFCs. Again, part of this is a dearth of long term CFC atmospheric information (if we had seen CFCs in significant quantities in say, 100,000BC, during a period of low volcanic activity, we'd have to start searching for other possible sources), but I think we're assuming way too much here.
So to play the science game, the first thing I'd do is improve the measurement network, the second thing I'd do is look for other non-anthropogenic sources of CFCs on earth, and then I'd look for non-anthropogenic sources of CFCs on other planets. After thoroughly convincing myself that we've established a galactic principle of "CFCs come from intelligent life", then I might be more likely to accept the remote detection of CFCs as indicative of ETI.
Here's the rub though - if we can establish that *someplace* on earth these compounds can occur naturally, even if their rate on *earth* is very low, that doesn't preclude their rate on some other planet being very high.
While we *may* decide that there are no significant natural sources of CFCs on earth (an open question, given the indirectness of our measurements, and the lack of any long term record), we cannot presume that such a thing is true on all worlds, or even all earth-like worlds.
Well, they're begging the question - human CFCs didn't cause ozone depletion either :)
http://reason.com/blog/2007/09/27/ozone-hole-science-revisited
The question is, "can volcanoes (and hey what the hell, oceans) increase CFC concentration in the atmosphere"? The assumption of the "detection of CFCs means detection of intelligent life" depends on a lack of CFC generation by any natural means. We've already shown this is simply not the case, and unfortunately, our measurement network and duration for CFC concentrations in our own atmosphere is terribly limited.
If you see a flux of CFCs in the atmosphere, why would you assume that this is due to anthropogenic activity?
More importantly, how would you exclude natural activity as a cause of observed CFC fluxes? One might start off with the assertion that CFCs never occur naturally, but as we've seen, that is demonstrably false. We could do some study of natural CFC sources, and try to extrapolate that to the entire universe of natural CFC sources, but that would be informative, not definitive.
As for natural halocarbons not including CFCs, I'm not sure I see where you're getting that - CFCs are a subset of halocarbons...are you asserting that there is a specific CFC that has not be observed in volcanic plumes?
Hrm...funny how you can measure them out of volcanoes:
http://cfc.geologist-1011.net/
"CFCs are not Volcanic" - Oh Really?
"This statement is one that I keep seeing on websites and blogs, and ties in with the assertions repeated by Warrick & Farmer (1990), Grimston (1992), Hendeles et al. (2007), Colice (2007), Colice (2008), and Green & Stewart (2008, p. 18) to the effect that CFCs are not natural in the environment. If one chooses to measure the gases emerging from volcanic vents instead of taking a politician's word for it, one discovers that volcanoes produce a variety of halocarbons, including CFCs. This fact, along with other natural sources of CFCs including sponges, other marine animals, bacteria (both marine & terrestrial), fungi (both marine & terrestrial), plants (both marine & terrestrial), lichen, insects, is so well documented that it is the subject of ongoing textbook publication (Gribble, 2003; Jordan, 2003). Stoiber et al. (1971) first measured and documented CFCs venting from Santiaguito in Guatamala. Since, there have been many studies corroborating the volcanic emission of CFCs (Isidorov et al, 1990; Isidorov et al., 1993; Jordon et al., 2000; Schwandner et al., 2000; Schwandner et al., 2002; Schwandner et al., 2004; Frische et al., 2006). Although some authors attempt to correlate volcanogenic CFCs to atmospheric variations, the confirmation of soil diffusion decay with distance from the vent (Schwandner et al., 2004) still stands in stark contradiction of Frische's hypothesis."
Less alkali is "more neutral" if you're starting off alkali.
Less alkali is "more acidic" if you're starting off acidic.
Ah, the precautionary principle :)
Islamic terrorists *always* attack innocent civilians, the idea of governments trying to prevent this by eliminating all Muslims is patently absurd. :)
You can use the precautionary principle to justify *anything*.
...climate *always* changes.
The thought that any government, or collection of governments, with all the military might of the planet unified, could *stop* climate from changing, is ludicrous beyond belief.
Well, you can chop off, say, 10% of the 30k as a fractional reserve requirement, and still end up ahead of the game if the remaining 27k is being used to invest in profitable enterprises that create jobs. And of course, if you live somewhere like Kalifornia, you can chop off, say, 10% of each 3k given to ten people for sales tax on any goods and services spending :)
I still think that we've got an open question as to whether money invested in a company has a greater effect on economic growth than money spent by consumers. Yes, fractional reserve requirements will tinge the equation, as will sales taxes. Yes, money in Bermuda is more distant from our economy, but the same can be said for remittances sent back to home countries by recent immigrants. There are doubtless dozens of other minor factors that can come into play on either the "I spent my 30k investing in a gas station" or "I spent my 30k buying 5 used import cars", but I haven't seen it demonstrated that investment is quantitatively worse than direct spending.
The idea that everyone will be able to live their lives only doing things they like is a ridiculous offshoot of our silly self-esteem dogma. The central complaint here seems to be "my son just doesn't like certain stuff, so let him skip that".
Now, I'm all for ditching government schools, and leaving it up to the marketplace to pander to people who don't want to do hard things...we could have Easy(TM) Charter School, based on the idea that kids can skip whatever they want. But my bet is that the problem here isn't the school, and it isn't even the kid - it's the parent who mistakenly believes that their offspring is some special little snowflake, and needs to be acknowledged as such by the rest of the world.
Broken Window Fallacy again - asserting that because we have infrastructure to build (our broken window), that we should look upon this as an unvarnished good ignores the opportunity cost. If you take money from the populace (or the future generations of the populace) to build expensive bullet trains, or unreliable wind farms, or uncompetitive solar farms, you've stolen the opportunity for them to decide to do something different with it - maybe what they really wanted was more clothes, or more food, or new musical instruments.
And in fact, if you believe that infrastructure projects are a good thing, then our death and destruction elsewhere should actually be a *double* bonus -> it stimulates the economy with government spending on the military, and then further stimulates the economy of the places we destroyed because we need to rebuild infrastructure! In fact, we could just skip the whole traveling overseas part, and have the military re-enact Sherman's march, destroy cities en-masse, and then we could justify even more the required infrastructure projects to rebuild! :)
Money in the bank isn't removed from the economy - it's what banking institutions use to lend to borrowers and stimulate economic activity.
If you get an additional $30k, but don't need it to make a material difference to your life, that $30k sits in a bank, which can then lend to a small business who needs that $30k to invest in their store to create another say, 10 jobs. Or maybe that $30k sits in a mutual fund, which becomes an investment in a wide range of companies that now can create jobs. Unless you actually take that $30k and bury it in your backyard, it's working *somewhere*.
Now you can argue that $30k of spending on goods and services (10 people with $3k all making a material difference to their lives) is better than $30k of investment in companies and jobs, but I think that's an open question rather than a given.
If the Keynseian approach worked:
1) the draw down of the military post-WWII would've driven the country into recession
2) "saving" money from ending wars, and using that money to say, pay off debt, would drive the country into recession
Keynes got it right about one thing - the inability to lower prices/wages causes a great deal of our economic problems: instead of adjusting quickly to new economic realities, we adjust poorly. Some of this is just human nature (a business who adjusts to economic conditions by lowering wages will end up losing productivity from employees as they feel disgruntled, and of course people have a hard time selling things for less than they bought them for, simply on an emotional level), but regardless of the cause, these are the "rough spots" of economic cycles we need to deal with.
The assertion that government expenditure is the proper way to respond to sticky prices is a dangerous misperception of reality, based in the Broken Window Fallacy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3AKoL0vEs
In the end, we have two competing classes of people - borrowers and savers. Savers want to lend their money to borrowers to grow it reliably. Borrowers want to borrow money from savers because they bet they can grow it more than they'll have to repay. But monetary policy cannot be neutral in this matter -> inflation screws savers, making them less willing to lend, and deflation screws borrowers, driving them to bankruptcy which screws savers too.
As it stands, the U.S. federal government is a massive debtor, and so it's no surprise that it's incentive is to inflate the currency, destroy the power of the dollar, and pay off its debt with cheaper greenbacks. Unfortunately, what is in the self-interest of the U.S. government is something that retards economic activity, and makes savers less willing to invest.
Honestly, if liberals truly believed in Keynesian economics, they'd militarize the entire nation, and hire everyone as a military contractor. Increased defense spending would be seen as economic stimulus, rather than some sort of black hole for money. I think what the liberals don't quite realize is the same way they see galavanting around the world with M-16s and F-22s as wasteful, fiscal conservatives think the same thing about various welfare and entitlement programs.
In the "Guns, Butter, Jobs" equation, the Keynesian model would suggest that guns means more jobs means more people can afford their own butter.
Okay, so say we stop looking at hours, and instead look at results...if we want to setup incentives for that, shouldn't we be paying by result? So let's say this week you get one good result, and next week you get five...should we pay you five times more the second week? Four times less the first week?
Now I'm not saying that there aren't problems with using hours as a proxy for worth, it's just that on the whole, there's a lot of variability on how much even the most efficient person can accomplish, and a lot of down time in between successes. We get a certain amount of stability when we're working by the hour, because our down time becomes a risk taken on by our employer.
That all being said, one of the most frustrating things is the tiny range of compensation versus the wide range of skill set in the knowledge business -> people who are ten times as efficient don't get paid ten times as much. But then again, if they essentially get to slack off 10 times as much as their inferior peers, but still get paid for those hours, I guess that's something... :)
Plausible deniability. This sounds like something you can deploy without much trace at all.
Heck, you could even just assert you had a "coolant leak" on your satellite :)