Maintainig the satellites is one thing. Maintaining calibration as the orbits vary, microwave radiometers age, and the satellite moves in and out of the sun is another.
See, for instance, Global Warming Trend of Mean Tropospheric Temperature Observed by Satellites, by K.Y. Vinnikov and N.C. Grody, Science 302, 269-72 (2003), which points to the difficulty of maintaining calibration of the microwave radiometers through the diurnal cycle and the problems of determining appropriate weighting functions to calibrate measurements taken with the radiometer pointing somewhere other nadir.
If you follow the link I supplied, you will find that the National Academy of Science panel finds this anomaly a significant puzzle, not something that's been thought of and resolved.
The balance of evidence suggests that the world is indeed warming up, but climatologists do consider the microwave sounding data to be a real anomaly that they can't easily explain away.
Global warming is certainly real, but it's an enormous exaggeration to say that it's killing people in record numbers---it's not. It's also an enormous exaggeration to say that it threatens our species with extinction. It does not.
Global warming does pose a great threat to human society, but most of the damage won't be felt for another 100 years or more and even in a worst-case scenario, it's not plausible that it would extinguish the human race.
The author is thinking of the discrepancy between surface measurements and satellite measurements of the troposphere. Satellites show only half the warming trend that surface measurements do. It's not true that satellites show no warming, but they show a warming of between 0.0 and 0.2 Kelvin between 1980 and 2000, where surface measurements showed a warming of 0.25 to 0.4 K during the same period. Details may be found here.
There have been attempts to reconcile the two sets of data, mostly having to do with the difficulty of maintaining calibration of the satellites. These tend to produce corrected satellite records that agree with the larger warming measured on the surface, but the jury is still out.
It appears the Nobel committee has completely given up on the idea that the research must confer benefit on mankind.
The Nobel committee has also completely given up on the idea that the prize should be awarded for work done in the last year. From Nobel's will:
The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.
It describes what could happen were CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to increase by 1% annually. I don't know whether this is actually the current trend.
CO2 concent rations in the atmosphere have increased by about 30 percent in the last 50 years, with most of the increase happening in the last few decades.
The actual growth of CO2 varies from year to year, but has averaged about 0.5% per year for the last 15 years, with about 0.9% per year rates in the last four years (but these are probably related to El Nino cycles).
China's rapid industrialization (fuelled mostly by coal---the fuel richest in carbon emissions) threatens to accelerate this growth rate for the next several decades, so 1% annual growth is quite a reasonable estimate.
I have one of those green laser pointers from Slashdot... It doesn't diverge THAT much...
Based on the specs published on ThinkGeek, a green laser pointer your diffraction-limited beam diameter at 1000 feet would be about 20 cm, which I admit is less than "several feet," but which would still require about one watt of laser power to achieve the damage threshold for the human eye (3 mW/cm^2)---much more than the "<5 mW" produced by the pointer.
To blind someone with a 5-foot diameter beam, you'd need a whacking big laser.
The threshold for damage to the eye from visible-wavelength laser exposure with a 0.1 second duration (about the time it takes you to blink) is a fluence of about 0.3 mJ/cm^2 (see D. Sliney and M. Wolbarsht, Safety with Lasers and Other Optical Sources, (Plenum, 1982), Fig. 8-2), which corresponds to an intensity of 3 mW/cm^2.
If you multiply 3 mW/cm^2 by 20 square feet you get about 90 watts. Not exactly a hand-held device!
Laser pointers would be almost impossible to use against aircraft because the beam diverges so quickly. At 10 feet you might damage someone's retina, but at 1000 feet, the beam will have spread significantly: typical laser pointers have beam divergences of several milliradians, so at 1000 feet the beam will be several feet in diameter and the intensity will be insufficient to damage someone's eye.
A multi-watt laser with a decently large aperture and a TEM 00 spatial mode would be a different story.
I wasn't saying that everyone on the Cape & Islands was rich or liberal. I was saying that rich and liberal people who summer on the Cape and Islands (the Kennedys, Walter Cronite, etc.) oppose Cape Wind while saying that wind farms should be built in the Berkshires (whose rich, liberal summer residents oppose wind power there as well). Listen to Cronkite:
Walter Cronkite squirmed a bit at this characterization. "The problem really is Nimbyism," he admitted when I reached him by phone not long ago, ''and it bothers me a great deal that I find myself in this position.
I'm all for these factories, but there must be areas that are far less valuable than this place is." With prodding, he suggested the deserts of California. Then, perhaps realizing that might be a tad remote to serve New England's energy needs, he added, "Inland New England would substitute just as well.... it will be most unsightly for what is now open bay. Everybody will see it, anyone who wanders on the water, who has a home that faces the water." [Emphasis added]
I am sorry if my comments made it seem that I was tarring everyone on the Cape & Islands as rich. I know plenty of people working hard year round to make ends meet and am well aware that more than just vacationers live there.
What you don't address is that if the Cape and Islands continue to produce their electric power by burning fossil fuels, they are contributing to sea level rise that will, over the next century, threaten fresh water supplies, accelerate beach erosion, and threaten fish populations. It's nice to go fishing in the sound, but it's also nice to be a good steward of the area for future generations.
Fossil fuel power plants on the Cape also produce pollution that hurts the area in the short run. In April 2003, 98,000 gallons of oil bound for a power plant in Sandwich spilled into Buzzards Bay from a leaky barge. This oil killed fish and birds, contaminated shellfish beds, and mucked up beaches along 93 miles of coastline.
I find it terribly amusing that all the wealthy liberals who live on MV/CC/Nantucket think it's someone else's problem to stop global warming and the consequent rise in sea level from washing their vacation homes out to sea!
Because hydrogen is such a small atom, when stored as a gas, hydrogen leaks out of almost any container at a significant rate (I seem to remember ~10% per day).
I regularly keep commercial compressed gas cylinders filled with about 2500 PSI of pure hydrogen in my lab. I have stored such tanks for two years without significant loss of pressure.
The only exception are laptops, which radiate quite a bit of heat through the case.
Actually, laptops conduct heat through the case. The case itself cools by convection. Radiative transport is not significant at the temperatures at which computers operate.
The article states that the employees were paid for a 40 hour week, and used time cards, which management pressured them to falsify in order to understate actual hours worked. If the employees held exempt salaried positions, then time cards would not have been necessary.
The problem here seems to be that management wanted it both ways---they wanted to hire the employees as hourly, not salaried workers, but not to pay them for all the hours worked. There would be no grounds for a lawsuit if management had been upfront about this being a salaried, unlimited hours position.
This is exactly why cars with anti-lock brakes are more dangerous than cars without them---drivers overcompensate for the added safety of the ABS system. This phenomenon has been well-documented and is known in the field as "risk homeostasis."
Peer review is in the funny situation that it fails basic tests of reproducibility that we would require of the experimental methods in scientific papers.
We don't have a better alternative to peer review, but it's well known that you can send the same paper or grant proposal to several different groups of qualified peer reviewers and get completely different reviews.
This is gnarly enough for publication, but if public policy depends on it (e.g., peer review of the scientific basis of environmental regulations at EPA and FDA) peer review can go completely to hell.
We have good records of past CO2 levels only for the past 420,000 years. Over this time CO2 changed cyclically until about 200 years ago. Starting then, it began to grow exponentially at a rate never seen before (about a thousand times faster than the cycles seen in the previous half-million years).
CO2 levels, which had never gone above about 300 parts per million during any past cycles suddenly rose from about 290 parts per million in 1900 to over 370 parts per million today at almost exactly the rate you would expect if human deforestation (19th century) and use of fossil fuels (20th century) had been responsible for all the growth. Isotopic analysis of atmospheric carbon is also consistent with the hypothesis that the additional carbon dioxide came from fossil sources.
Yeah. Clinton had one of those moments too when he blew up an aspirin factory where he thought bin Laden was making chemical weapons. Or the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
But superscripts have been supported in HTML for over a decade. Longer than slashdot has been around. So why should slashdot, which is presented in HTML, not support a perfectly valid HTML tag and force ugly typography instead?
The old notation was 10 with a superscript 23. That goes back over 100 years. Notations such as 10**23 are relatively new, having been invented to deal with representing exponentiation on computer I/O devices in the 1950s.
Beside this, double asterisks and circumflexes are completely unnecessary kludges for web sites because HTML is completely capable of handling superscripts! A web site that describes itself as "news for nerds" and does not support superscripts and subscripts is pretty sad!
It's interesting to note that trace quantities of uranium are present naturally in coal. If you work the numbers, you will find that the amount of uranium and thorium in a ton of coal is much greater than the amount of uranium needed to produce the same amount of energy in a fission reactor.
And fusion would be a hell of a lot cleaner than fission. The only problem is that we don't know how to do it.
People have been predicting fusion power "in the near future" for the past 50 years. Good evidence that fusion is the power of the future and always will be.
The real problem is not that we will run out of oil too soon. The real problem is that we will not run out of coal soon enough. There is enough coal in known reserves to increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by about a factor of ten. Regardless what anyone thinks about how bad global warming will be when we double the amount of CO2 in the air, it's hard to imagine that increasing it from around 700 billion tons to 7000 billion tons would not seriously mess with the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
See, for instance, Global Warming Trend of Mean Tropospheric Temperature Observed by Satellites, by K.Y. Vinnikov and N.C. Grody, Science 302, 269-72 (2003), which points to the difficulty of maintaining calibration of the microwave radiometers through the diurnal cycle and the problems of determining appropriate weighting functions to calibrate measurements taken with the radiometer pointing somewhere other nadir.
The balance of evidence suggests that the world is indeed warming up, but climatologists do consider the microwave sounding data to be a real anomaly that they can't easily explain away.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also says, in their report Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis that "It is very likely that these significant differences in trends between the surface and lower troposphere are real and not solely an artifact of measurement bias," (p. 102)and that "uncertainties due to limited temporal sampling prevent confident extrapolation of these trends to other or longer time periods. ... [A] full explanation of the lower-troposphere lapse rate changes since 1958 requires further research." (p. 123)
Global warming does pose a great threat to human society, but most of the damage won't be felt for another 100 years or more and even in a worst-case scenario, it's not plausible that it would extinguish the human race.
There have been attempts to reconcile the two sets of data, mostly having to do with the difficulty of maintaining calibration of the satellites. These tend to produce corrected satellite records that agree with the larger warming measured on the surface, but the jury is still out.
Nonetheless, we do not expect that creationists should get equal time with Darwinians.
The Nobel committee has also completely given up on the idea that the prize should be awarded for work done in the last year. From Nobel's will:
CO2 concent rations in the atmosphere have increased by about 30 percent in the last 50 years, with most of the increase happening in the last few decades.
The actual growth of CO2 varies from year to year, but has averaged about 0.5% per year for the last 15 years, with about 0.9% per year rates in the last four years (but these are probably related to El Nino cycles).
China's rapid industrialization (fuelled mostly by coal---the fuel richest in carbon emissions) threatens to accelerate this growth rate for the next several decades, so 1% annual growth is quite a reasonable estimate.
Based on the specs published on ThinkGeek, a green laser pointer your diffraction-limited beam diameter at 1000 feet would be about 20 cm, which I admit is less than "several feet," but which would still require about one watt of laser power to achieve the damage threshold for the human eye (3 mW/cm^2)---much more than the "<5 mW" produced by the pointer.
The threshold for damage to the eye from visible-wavelength laser exposure with a 0.1 second duration (about the time it takes you to blink) is a fluence of about 0.3 mJ/cm^2 (see D. Sliney and M. Wolbarsht, Safety with Lasers and Other Optical Sources, (Plenum, 1982), Fig. 8-2), which corresponds to an intensity of 3 mW/cm^2.
If you multiply 3 mW/cm^2 by 20 square feet you get about 90 watts. Not exactly a hand-held device!
A multi-watt laser with a decently large aperture and a TEM 00 spatial mode would be a different story.
I am sorry if my comments made it seem that I was tarring everyone on the Cape & Islands as rich. I know plenty of people working hard year round to make ends meet and am well aware that more than just vacationers live there.
What you don't address is that if the Cape and Islands continue to produce their electric power by burning fossil fuels, they are contributing to sea level rise that will, over the next century, threaten fresh water supplies, accelerate beach erosion, and threaten fish populations. It's nice to go fishing in the sound, but it's also nice to be a good steward of the area for future generations.
Fossil fuel power plants on the Cape also produce pollution that hurts the area in the short run. In April 2003, 98,000 gallons of oil bound for a power plant in Sandwich spilled into Buzzards Bay from a leaky barge. This oil killed fish and birds, contaminated shellfish beds, and mucked up beaches along 93 miles of coastline.
I find it terribly amusing that all the wealthy liberals who live on MV/CC/Nantucket think it's someone else's problem to stop global warming and the consequent rise in sea level from washing their vacation homes out to sea!
I regularly keep commercial compressed gas cylinders filled with about 2500 PSI of pure hydrogen in my lab. I have stored such tanks for two years without significant loss of pressure.
Actually, laptops conduct heat through the case. The case itself cools by convection. Radiative transport is not significant at the temperatures at which computers operate.
The problem here seems to be that management wanted it both ways---they wanted to hire the employees as hourly, not salaried workers, but not to pay them for all the hours worked. There would be no grounds for a lawsuit if management had been upfront about this being a salaried, unlimited hours position.
This is exactly why cars with anti-lock brakes are more dangerous than cars without them---drivers overcompensate for the added safety of the ABS system. This phenomenon has been well-documented and is known in the field as "risk homeostasis."
We don't have a better alternative to peer review, but it's well known that you can send the same paper or grant proposal to several different groups of qualified peer reviewers and get completely different reviews.
This is gnarly enough for publication, but if public policy depends on it (e.g., peer review of the scientific basis of environmental regulations at EPA and FDA) peer review can go completely to hell.
We have good records of past CO2 levels only for the past 420,000 years. Over this time CO2 changed cyclically until about 200 years ago. Starting then, it began to grow exponentially at a rate never seen before (about a thousand times faster than the cycles seen in the previous half-million years). CO2 levels, which had never gone above about 300 parts per million during any past cycles suddenly rose from about 290 parts per million in 1900 to over 370 parts per million today at almost exactly the rate you would expect if human deforestation (19th century) and use of fossil fuels (20th century) had been responsible for all the growth. Isotopic analysis of atmospheric carbon is also consistent with the hypothesis that the additional carbon dioxide came from fossil sources.
Yeah. Clinton had one of those moments too when he blew up an aspirin factory where he thought bin Laden was making chemical weapons. Or the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
But superscripts have been supported in HTML for over a decade. Longer than slashdot has been around. So why should slashdot, which is presented in HTML, not support a perfectly valid HTML tag and force ugly typography instead?
Beside this, double asterisks and circumflexes are completely unnecessary kludges for web sites because HTML is completely capable of handling superscripts! A web site that describes itself as "news for nerds" and does not support superscripts and subscripts is pretty sad!
Of course it would be easier to post "ten to the power of twenty three" if slashdot supported <sup> tags.
And fusion would be a hell of a lot cleaner than fission. The only problem is that we don't know how to do it.
People have been predicting fusion power "in the near future" for the past 50 years. Good evidence that fusion is the power of the future and always will be.
The real problem is not that we will run out of oil too soon. The real problem is that we will not run out of coal soon enough. There is enough coal in known reserves to increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by about a factor of ten. Regardless what anyone thinks about how bad global warming will be when we double the amount of CO2 in the air, it's hard to imagine that increasing it from around 700 billion tons to 7000 billion tons would not seriously mess with the environment.