You're seriously claiming that you don't believe that models done on a few MHz processor are any different to those on a processor hundreds of thousands times faster? Try telling that to anyone who has tried to model drug or molecule interactions.
You don't have to wait a decade or two. Just do a comparison with models from five years ago. You would have years of temperature data to compare against instead of cherry picking a model that is almost three decades old.
"Brendan Nyhan at the University of Michigan undertook a study that found that when people were shown information that proved that their beliefs were wrong they actually became more entrenched in their original beliefs. This is known in the business as 'backfire'. And what's more, highly intelligent people tend to suffer backfire more than less intelligent people do, making us immune to any facts that are counter to our strongly held beliefs."
I guess it comes down to who you trust more: The Academy of Sciences, NASA, CSIRO, the Royal Academy, and all the major scientific institutions of the world, or the Daily Mail science section, which commonly has articles like the 100 foot killer snake stalking people in Borneo:
This isn't a reason to be worried about nuclear power. This shows that bad things can happen when political decisions override science engineering or when bad engineers don't do a good job.
This is the exact reason that we should worry about nuclear power. As an engineer, I know that politics and price are generally involved in making engineering decisions.
- All engineers make mistakes. I'm sure that there were many good engineers involved with Fukushima. - Software programmers make mistakes. - Natural disasters happen. - Corruption happens. - Builders make mistakes and swap parts for cheaper parts to save money. - Lack of oversight happens. - Maintenance gets cut to save money. - Safety measures get reduced to save money. - Security gets reduced to save money.
It would be nice to have an energy producing technology that doesn't fail so catastrophically, doesn't require such high levels of safety and security, and doesn't have all the issues around waste disposal.
Those egghead scientists in their ivory towers. What have they ever done for us?
I don't know about you, but if there's a difference of opinion between the scientific institutions of the world and some conservative talk-back radio hosts/bloggers, generally I'd side with the scientific institutions of the world - they have a very good track record when there's this much scientific consensus on a topic.
Can you even name a time when there was complete consensus between NASA, the Royal Academy, the National Academy of Sciences, CSIRO, and every other major scientific institution of the world and they were wrong?
And you even go on to suggest that we teach every whack-job's pet theories in schools and ask students to make up their own minds? Learning about perpetual motion machines and how water can cure cancer has no place in a science classroom. It is misleading and a complete waste of time and resources.
Smaller systems can record an event when the card was swiped, when the door was opened, when the door was closed and when the lock is engaged or disengaged. They'll also record an event if the door was opened without a successful card swipe.
Most decent electronic locks will return this kind of data.
Remember that the 8.9 magnitude quake struck 100km from the reactors, so the intensity of the quake would have been a lot less at the reactors than at the epicentre.
There were 34 earthquakes recorded of magnitudes ranging from 8.0 to 9.5 in the 20th century (three stronger than the recent one). Do you think that the reactor could have withstood a direct hit from any one of these 34 quakes?
Thankfully we have these plucky bloggers with hearts of gold, keeping an eye on all those eggheads in their ivory towers - Scientists are always trying to mislead us with their "theories" and "models".
I also read a blog the other day asserting that global warming was caused by Aliens with some relationship to Hitler.
Me - I'd rather listen to NASA, The National Academy of Sciences, and all the other major Scientific institutions of the world, than some blogger. Sure research organizations publish papers and documents containing mistakes; that's the nature of science.
"Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Within the business we recognise that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health. Doubt is also the limit of our “product”. Unfortunately, we cannot take a position directly opposing the anti-cigarette forces and say that cigarettes are a contributor to good health. No information that we have supports such a claim."
Plenty of other countries (Europe, Canada, Australia) have similar systems, and it hasn't ended with gulags and mass killings.
A basic lifestyle is just that:
Just enough to get you a room in a share house in a less desirable area, and just enough to get some food on the table.
Education and health are free (or almost free) in case you want to improve yourself or hit an emergency.
Long term unemployed still generally have to go to job interviews regularly and will get their money cut off if they refuse employment.
This kind of system works great when a recession hits too, since you don't have millions of people suddenly panicing about losing their jobs and halting all spending at the same time.
Event better, electric cars that are only going to see minimal use on certain days could be configured to draw electricity from the grid at off peak times, and feed it back into the grid during peak times, potentially earning the owner money.
Yes, and according to maps and text from the middle ages, the North Pole was also a green paradise since this was the place where the Garden of Eden was located.
Apparently there was also an island of virgins located somewhere near Greenland !
Can you access your local mayor's email account? Can you download the full schematics for the space shuttle? Why isn't your local police department's incident reporting system completely open source?
I'm all for increased transparency, but there is no reason that all information from publicly funded work should be publicly available.
Because: - Overheads. The costs of doing this would be huge. - A lot of publicly funded work is done by private companies, who might not want to release their work to their competitors. - Most people don't want every piece of work, every correspondance that they've ever done accessible by everyone for the rest of time.
It is fair to see the final reports/papers/etc... produced by most government departments, and some information on how those results were obtained, which is pretty much what happens for most government funded scientific agencies.
Both of the reports from the investigations by the "House of Commons Science and Technology Committee" and "Scientific Assessment Panel" exonerated Professor Jones and the CRU.
He acted within the UK FOI laws. All UK Government agencies act this way. If you make a FOI request at any level of UK government it will generally be rejected because under the FOI laws they can reject requests which cost too much to process. This means a government deparment can effectively refuse any FOI requests they choose.
This is a problem with the UK's transparency laws, and has no bearings on the credibility of any of the CRU research findings (In any case, this would be a problem with the University's protocol for the handling of FOI requests, not Professor Jones personally).
If you are accusing the CRU of scientific fraud, this is a very serious accusation, and you'd better have decent evidence to back up your claim; Not "They didn't respond to FOI requests."
Did you read the article that you linked to (and for that matter the original article that was linked in this slashdot article) ? You are instigating the kind of political motivated persecution that both articles criticise.
From your article: "By equating controversial results with legal fraud, Mr. Cuccinelli demonstrates a dangerous disregard for scientific method and academic freedom. The remedy for unsatisfactory data or analysis is public criticism from peers and more data, not a politically tinged witch hunt or, worse, a civil penalty. Scientists and other academics inevitably will get things wrong, and they will use public funds in the process, because failure is as important to producing good scholarship as success."
Mann is being persecuted because he is pushing a view point that is politcally damaging to the republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who incidentally also seems to believe another consipracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya and has faked his birth certificate.
Jones has already been cleared of wrongdoing in investigations, but still gets death threats made against him made by people who do not like his results.
>> 1. Giant Batteries/ Flywheels/ Water storage hills
If you have a few million hybrid and electric cars on the road, there are your batteries.
Only about 25% would be driven at any point in time. The rest can sit there storing energy when the wind is blowing, and returning energy to the grid at peak times, earning money for their owners.
>> You do realize, they've been in decline for about the last 18k years, right? Since the last glacial period.
Quite the pedant. The GP poster wasn't talking about a very tiny decline. No-one is trying to claim that the climate doesn't change. The problem is how quickly it is currently changing.
If the temperature had been increasing for the last 18k years as fast as it has risen for the last few decades, we'd currently be experiencing temperatures nearing the 300 degrees Celcius mark, and the glaciers would have long since melted.
Look, the Ancient Romans wrote that England's weather was too cold and too wet to grow grapes for making wine.
I didn't post to argue about the Roman civilization's taste in wine, just to disprove the myth that England was some kind of dry, warm wine growing paradise during Roman times. There are plenty of other sources of temperature data in England to support this assertion.
Slashdot Mirror
You're seriously claiming that you don't believe that models done on a few MHz processor are any different to those on a processor hundreds of thousands times faster? Try telling that to anyone who has tried to model drug or molecule interactions.
You don't have to wait a decade or two. Just do a comparison with models from five years ago. You would have years of temperature data to compare against instead of cherry picking a model that is almost three decades old.
Well, you wouldn't expect temperatures from current models to disagree with the temperature today, would you?
In 1988 the 386 processor (33MHz) had just been released.
I would definitely expect climate models from 1988 to be very basic compared with any predictions from recent years.
You're using predictions from 1988, with temperature data from back in 2006.
Surely there's newer predictions and temperature data than that? We're almost up to 2012 now (25 years later).
You are dodgy and purposely trying to mislead.
"Brendan Nyhan at the University of Michigan undertook a study that found that when people were shown information that proved that their beliefs were wrong they actually became more entrenched in their original beliefs. This is known in the business as 'backfire'. And what's more, highly intelligent people tend to suffer backfire more than less intelligent people do, making us immune to any facts that are counter to our strongly held beliefs."
I guess it comes down to who you trust more: The Academy of Sciences, NASA, CSIRO, the Royal Academy, and all the major scientific institutions of the world, or the Daily Mail science section, which commonly has articles like the 100 foot killer snake stalking people in Borneo:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1149743/Picture-100ft-long-snake-sparks-fears-mythical-monster-Borneo.html
If you have a lot of your power getting generated by solar then you'll have a drop off of power generation in the evening/night.
Your car would be able to return some of that power to the grid at evening peak times after you've driven home from work.
Only if you regularly have unplanned trips of 200 kms or so (Not the average driver). Short unplanned trips won't be a problem.
The worst that happens anyway is that you have to stop off and recharge on the way; same as can happen with a petrol vehicle.
This isn't a reason to be worried about nuclear power. This shows that bad things can happen when political decisions override science engineering or when bad engineers don't do a good job.
This is the exact reason that we should worry about nuclear power. As an engineer, I know that politics and price are generally involved in making engineering decisions.
- All engineers make mistakes. I'm sure that there were many good engineers involved with Fukushima.
- Software programmers make mistakes.
- Natural disasters happen.
- Corruption happens.
- Builders make mistakes and swap parts for cheaper parts to save money.
- Lack of oversight happens.
- Maintenance gets cut to save money.
- Safety measures get reduced to save money.
- Security gets reduced to save money.
It would be nice to have an energy producing technology that doesn't fail so catastrophically, doesn't require such high levels of safety and security, and doesn't have all the issues around waste disposal.
Those egghead scientists in their ivory towers. What have they ever done for us?
I don't know about you, but if there's a difference of opinion between the scientific institutions of the world and some conservative talk-back radio hosts/bloggers, generally I'd side with the scientific institutions of the world - they have a very good track record when there's this much scientific consensus on a topic.
Can you even name a time when there was complete consensus between NASA, the Royal Academy, the National Academy of Sciences, CSIRO, and every other major scientific institution of the world and they were wrong?
And you even go on to suggest that we teach every whack-job's pet theories in schools and ask students to make up their own minds?
Learning about perpetual motion machines and how water can cure cancer has no place in a science classroom. It is misleading and a complete waste of time and resources.
Configurable.
I write software for card access systems.
Smaller systems can record an event when the card was swiped, when the door was opened, when the door was closed and when the lock is engaged or disengaged.
They'll also record an event if the door was opened without a successful card swipe.
Most decent electronic locks will return this kind of data.
Remember that the 8.9 magnitude quake struck 100km from the reactors, so the intensity of the quake would have been a lot less at the reactors than at the epicentre.
There were 34 earthquakes recorded of magnitudes ranging from 8.0 to 9.5 in the 20th century (three stronger than the recent one).
Do you think that the reactor could have withstood a direct hit from any one of these 34 quakes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_20th-century_earthquakes
And also
1) Create a mobile phone app that can detect winners from a photograph and send the results along with a log in ID to your web-server.
2) Give this app to many people who work behind the counters of these stores in return for half the profits.
Thankfully we have these plucky bloggers with hearts of gold, keeping an eye on all those eggheads in their ivory towers - Scientists are always trying to mislead us with their "theories" and "models".
I also read a blog the other day asserting that global warming was caused by Aliens with some relationship to Hitler.
Me - I'd rather listen to NASA, The National Academy of Sciences, and all the other major Scientific institutions of the world, than some blogger. Sure research organizations publish papers and documents containing mistakes; that's the nature of science.
"Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Within the business we recognise that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health. Doubt is also the limit of our “product”. Unfortunately, we cannot take a position directly opposing the anti-cigarette forces and say that cigarettes are a contributor to good health. No information that we have supports such a claim."
Plenty of other countries (Europe, Canada, Australia) have similar systems, and it hasn't ended with gulags and mass killings.
A basic lifestyle is just that:
Just enough to get you a room in a share house in a less desirable area, and just enough to get some food on the table.
Education and health are free (or almost free) in case you want to improve yourself or hit an emergency.
Long term unemployed still generally have to go to job interviews regularly and will get their money cut off if they refuse employment.
This kind of system works great when a recession hits too, since you don't have millions of people suddenly panicing about losing their jobs and halting all spending at the same time.
Event better, electric cars that are only going to see minimal use on certain days could be configured to draw electricity from the grid at off peak times, and feed it back into the grid during peak times, potentially earning the owner money.
In Australia we have four major banks that all charge these fees, and almost always match each other on all their fees.
Whenever a viable competitor pops up, one of the big four banks just buys the new bank up.
I pay $2.00 each time I use an ATM that belongs to my bank, and up to double that for an ATM that doesn't belong to my bank.
Yes, and according to maps and text from the middle ages, the North Pole was also a green paradise since this was the place where the Garden of Eden was located.
Apparently there was also an island of virgins located somewhere near Greenland !
Why?
Can you access your local mayor's email account?
Can you download the full schematics for the space shuttle?
Why isn't your local police department's incident reporting system completely open source?
I'm all for increased transparency, but there is no reason that all information from publicly funded work should be publicly available.
Because:
- Overheads. The costs of doing this would be huge.
- A lot of publicly funded work is done by private companies, who might not want to release their work to their competitors.
- Most people don't want every piece of work, every correspondance that they've ever done accessible by everyone for the rest of time.
It is fair to see the final reports/papers/etc... produced by most government departments, and some information on how those results were obtained, which is pretty much what happens for most government funded scientific agencies.
Both of the reports from the investigations by the "House of Commons Science and Technology Committee" and "Scientific Assessment Panel" exonerated Professor Jones and the CRU.
He acted within the UK FOI laws. All UK Government agencies act this way. If you make a FOI request at any level of UK government it will generally be rejected because under the FOI laws they can reject requests which cost too much to process. This means a government deparment can effectively refuse any FOI requests they choose.
This is a problem with the UK's transparency laws, and has no bearings on the credibility of any of the CRU research findings (In any case, this would be a problem with the University's protocol for the handling of FOI requests, not Professor Jones personally).
If you are accusing the CRU of scientific fraud, this is a very serious accusation, and you'd better have decent evidence to back up your claim; Not "They didn't respond to FOI requests."
Did you read the article that you linked to (and for that matter the original article that was linked in this slashdot article) ?
You are instigating the kind of political motivated persecution that both articles criticise.
From your article: "By equating controversial results with legal fraud, Mr. Cuccinelli demonstrates a dangerous disregard for scientific method and academic freedom. The remedy for unsatisfactory data or analysis is public criticism from peers and more data, not a politically tinged witch hunt or, worse, a civil penalty. Scientists and other academics inevitably will get things wrong, and they will use public funds in the process, because failure is as important to producing good scholarship as success."
Mann is being persecuted because he is pushing a view point that is politcally damaging to the republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who incidentally also seems to believe another consipracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya and has faked his birth certificate.
Jones has already been cleared of wrongdoing in investigations, but still gets death threats made against him made by people who do not like his results.
>> 1. Giant Batteries/ Flywheels/ Water storage hills
If you have a few million hybrid and electric cars on the road, there are your batteries.
Only about 25% would be driven at any point in time. The rest can sit there storing energy when the wind is blowing, and returning energy to the grid at peak times, earning money for their owners.
>> You do realize, they've been in decline for about the last 18k years, right? Since the last glacial period.
Quite the pedant. The GP poster wasn't talking about a very tiny decline.
No-one is trying to claim that the climate doesn't change. The problem is how quickly it is currently changing.
If the temperature had been increasing for the last 18k years as fast as it has risen for the last few decades, we'd currently be experiencing temperatures nearing the 300 degrees Celcius mark, and the glaciers would have long since melted.
It's just another version of the Playstation 2 EyeToy, which was released in 2003.
Look, the Ancient Romans wrote that England's weather was too cold and too wet to grow grapes for making wine.
I didn't post to argue about the Roman civilization's taste in wine, just to disprove the myth that England was some kind of dry, warm wine growing paradise during Roman times. There are plenty of other sources of temperature data in England to support this assertion.