Yes, Lovelock was being overly alarmist. He also has no expertise in climate change prediction, so his guess is as good as yours. The fact that he's wrong doesn't mean that actual experts who've made less extreme predictions are also wrong.
Lovelock is a black-and-white kind of guy(*), who tends toward hyperbole. His Gaia hypothesis is the same way: he takes a small truth about negative feedbacks in Earth systems and blows it up into some huge quasi-religious theory of everything.
Yeah, I know, sorry. But I'd feel irresponsible if I contributed to a gigantic flood of e-mails to respected meteorite experts, so I picked the most dismissive site I could find. That said, there *are* pieces of meteorite out there somewhere.
You're right that meteor fireballs occurred a lot during the cold war and raised alarms without leading to war, but the particular South Africa event you mention might actually have been a nuclear detonation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident
The story goes that when the US first launched satellite-based nuclear weapons detection systems, they started freaking out over huge explosions occurring all the time over remote ocean areas where nobody lived. Turns out they were just meteorites like this one, which are a lot more common than people realized.
(Sorry, I can't find a source for this, it's just something I heard at a lecture once.)
That's the right direction, but the elevation is too high and the time is wrong. This one came down after sunrise, and would be over the horizon from Phoenix. You probably saw a rather large Lyrid meteor: large ordinary meteors will throw off sparks as they fall.
A meteor this big probably didn't vaporize: if you live in the area you should be on the lookout for pieces on the ground.
I hesitate to say this, because it's a large area with a lot of ordinary rocks lying around, so there's going to be a huge number of not-actually-a-meteorite finds. This site http://meteorites.wustl.edu/what_to_do.htm gives the basics on figuring out if you've found a meteorite or not.
This meteor appears to be bigger than the one that came down over Chicago in 2003: quite a few large pieces were found then. But it's much easier to find meteorites in urban areas.
For my money, this video game works as well as conventional counseling because conventional counseling doesn't work. People get better, sure, but they get better on their own. Time, improving life circumstances, and new friends are what end depression, not lying on a couch talking about your feelings.
Your objection reinforces the original poster's point. He was using the fertile crescent as an analogy to global climate change. Your solution to the fertile crescent commons problem is privatization.
1) Do you consider all later Hansen models to now be falsified then?
Uh, what? The fact that a simple model agrees with a small amount of data does not falsify a more complex one. For example, Newton's laws work great to describe the gross motions of the planets in the solar system. That does not mean that Einstein's general theory of relativity is wrong.
The 1988 GISS model is roughly correct when calculating global average temperature change, but it is wrong in subtle ways when you look at regional changes, and it's also slightly more sensitive to greenhouse gases than it should be. Hansen got lucky in 1988: his model was a little off, but his middle-of-the-road estimate of CO2 emissions by humans was a little off to compensate.
But that's okay, it's not my goal to tell you that we understood climate change perfectly in 1988. We didn't, and we still don't. But our models are good enough, both then and now, to trustworthy numerical predictions of global warming. The biggest uncertainty for the future is not the models, but the trajectory of human activity.
2) Is choosing a single model out of many models cherry picking if done after the fact instead of stating which one should be verified with data?
There's no cherry picking. The NASA GISS model was one of several in existence in the late '80s and early '90s, and all of them predicted roughly the same thing. The GISS model was singled out in this discussion just because Hansen is the subject of this article.
I doubt there are really too many numbers. For instance you could pick just one weather station and show the annual averages over a 30 year period. That would give you only 30 numbers.
Perfect example. The trend will be much smaller than the random year-to-year variation at a single weather station over 30 years. If you do see a trend, it may be due to global warming, it might be random chance, or it might be because they built a parking lot next door a few years ago. To see a clear signal, you need to take the average of every weather station on Earth, and you need to account for the spatial distribution of stations, changes in the landscape near the stations, and a host of other factors.
The changes are too subtle to see at a single weather station, but that doesn't mean they're not real or important.
Also if the data is "publicly available" then how about a link?
Admittedly even if I found the temperature data to be convincing. Even if the warming trend seemed conclusive. I would hesitate to jump to the conclusion that combustion was the cause of it. That really is a very difficult thing to demonstrate. Because the 'experiment' lacks a control. If climate scientist can figure out a way around that problem it would certainly help to sell the idea of AGW to rational skeptics.
We have figured out several ways. The important ones are: * The spatial pattern of warming (in particular, stratospheric cooling) matches predicted greenhouse gas changes, but does not match other natural processes. * Computer climate models of 20th century climate reproduce what actually happened in the 20th century only if human greenhouse gas emissions are included, and not otherwise. * 20th century climate change appears to exceed all natural changes in the past 1000 years, implying that a human process is at work. (This data is too uncertain to prove the point on its own, but it does corroborate.)
Combine these arguments that natural changes cannot explain the current warming with a demonstration that what humans have done is *sufficient* to cause the observed changes (confirming that we do emit enough CO2, and it is powerful enough to cause the right amount of warming), and you've got a pretty solid argument.
I appreciate your description of yourself as a "rational skeptic", because rational skeptics are willing to listen. It sounds like you believe what you do because you've mostly seen the press releases, and not the actual arguments the scientists behind them are making. I'd encourage you to read the "Attribution" section of the IPCC Working Group 1's "Summary for Policymakers" and Technical Summary. The Wikipedia article on attribution of climate change is also (currently) very good. Many of the objections you make have been made within the scientific community over the years, and eventually addressed with new data.
The vast majority of people arguing that AGW is real don't even make scientific arguments. Their arguments are generally limited to Argument by Authority and work their way to Ad Hominem attacks.
That's the other thing I tell my students on the first day. I tell them about a conversation I had with a student when I was doing my job interview. She said "I'm so excited you might be teaching at Wheaton: I'm a big believer in global warming, but I really don't know anything about it." What? If you believe something without knowing anything about it, isn't that just a religious belief?
I wish just once we would see references to actual temperature data and I don't mean just graphs. Graphs can be deceptive. I mean the raw data that is used to make the graphs.
You can lie with raw numbers just as easily as you can lie with graphs, and there are just too many numbers to include in an article for laypeople. What's important is to understand the analysis that goes into generating the data. If you really care, the data is publicly available, and can be downloaded and analyzed however you like.
Unlike many climate change "believers", I don't think skeptics are stupid. They are, however, wrong. And a few of the powerful ones are malicious.
However, what we should do about climate change is not a scientific question.
Hi, climate change looneytune here. I'm a college physics / environmental science professor, and this is exactly what I tell students on the first day of my climate change class. I tell them that it's my job to describe the state of the science, but it's *their* job to decide what to do about it.
I'm not very frustrated that nobody's taking action. If, as a society, we make a rational decision that the costs of fixing the problem are greater than the costs of dealing with it, that's fine by me. What's frustrating is that people are making a blind decision to do nothing *without* considering the scientific evidence, and once they make that decision, they roll that back up the chain to deny the science itself.
Keep in mind, part of the thrust of the article is not just that people are increasingly deciding not to take action on human-caused climate change: they're increasingly denying that it's happening at all.
While the general public focuses on CO2, climate scientists do keep track of methane emissions through biological and industrial sources, and its global warming effect. Our best estimates (IPCC 4th assessment) put its warming effect at 1/4 of what CO2 is doing.
Your specific figure (methane increasing at 10x CO2) is absolutely wrong, probably because you've mixed up parts per million with parts per billion.
Your deforestation quote says nothing about climate change. Deforestation and other land-use changes have also been considered by the IPCC: they represent a *cooling* influence very roughly 1/8th as great as CO2's warming.
And this isn't something you need to trust an expert on. Look up Hansen's 1988 paper for yourself, compare it to your favorite observations, and draw your own conclusions. I have: Hansen's 1980s models are dead on. His model was oversensitive to CO2 changes by a little bit, and his middle-of-the-road scenario underestimated human CO2 output by little bit. 1980s climate science predicts 2011 temperatures accurately to within a tenth of a degree.
Took me a moment to realize, this statistic is totally meaningless. The average new car buyer keeps their car for at least 5-6 years -- more if they like the car. The vast majority of hybrid sales occurred after 2004.
The reason only 35% of people who're selling their hybrid buy a new hybrid is because the people who *like* hybrids are STILL DRIVING the one they bought a few years ago!
This statistic is basically like saying, "The majority of kids who throw their dinner plate on the floor say it tastes 'yucky'. Therefore, the majority of dinners are yucky."
Ask this question again once the hybrid market has stabilized, and you may get a very different answer.
"Excluding Prius owners"... well there's your problem. Of the hybrids people would likely be trading in (2000-2008ish), only the Toyota Prius is worth a damn. All the others in that year range had tiny electric motors which barely gave any hybrid boost at all. If the "hybrid" you're trading in is basically an ordinary car with a cordless drill motor strapped to the fan belt, of course you're not going to be loyal to it.
The idea is to multiply the complexity of solving a captcha with the complexity of solving a password to give a problem that's far harder than either one alone.
With captchas alone, if you can defeat a captcha in 10 seconds, you win. With passwords alone, if you can try a single entry in a 10 million-word dictionary every microsecond, you win in 10 seconds. But if each dictionary attempt requires you to solve a captcha, you still win... in 3 years of computing time.
It all boils down to, "how long does it really take to solve a captcha?" And yeah, I'm not sure it's long enough, but we'd have to work the numbers to be sure.
Slashdot comments usually contain at least a few insightful comments, but so far people have been going for wisecracks and low-hanging fruit.
Yes, using a self-signed certificate in a security product is stupid. Yes, trusting physicists to come up with a good encryption scheme is like hiring a plumber to do heart bypass surgery (I am a physicist). But those are boring criticisms. A more interesting question: is the basic idea actually any good?
If you play with it, it looks like it boils down to using a short easy password to generate a chaotic bit pattern; this bit pattern is XORed against a Captcha image. The result is easy for humans to read. If you try to decrypt with the wrong password, you get a different chaotic bit pattern that can't be read. But a computer has to do a lot of work to figure out if each bit pattern contains readable text or not.
The goal here is not to increase the entropy of the password, or to use an asymmetric algorithm that's much easier to encode than decode. Instead, they're trying to make each decryption attempt require enough compute cycles that it's impractical to brute-force even a short password.
The obvious direct attack is to write a very good, very fast captcha detector. It doesn't actually have to be able to *read* the captcha at all: it just has to be able to filter out "obviously doesn't contain text" from "probably contains text", and present the likely candidates to a human for final analysis. Some sort of noisy edge detection algorithm might work well.
If you hate writing computer vision algorithms, a simple Mechanical Turk approach might also work. If you presented a full-screen grid of 100 candidate decryptions to a human, they could probably identify one that contains text in a couple of seconds. A single human should be able to complete an English dictionary attack in a day.
"many allege that EA was pressured by LGBT activists to include the content, which they say is forcing LGBT themes on children playing the games"
Clearly these people have never played Bioware's games, and know nothing about their politics. Nobody had to force them to include LGBT themes: Bioware has been pushing liberal political themes (gender, racial, and orientation equality; international engagement and anti-isolationism; community activism over corporate greed) on their own for a decade now -- and they started long before they joined up with EA.
That's not a criticism. The authors are entitled to present political opinions in their work. If you don't like it, make your own game. If it's good enough to sell 3 million copies, I'm sure EA will be happy to distribute it for you.
"You don't need this. Just write SQL that doesn't suck."
Not everyone is a billion-dollar corporation that can hire you to write their website. There are millions of websites in the world run by people who use prebuilt web service packages on LAMP servers. These are bakeries, car dealerships, WoW guilds, churches, with volunteers they don't have the time or money to rewrite WordPress from the ground up, and their prebuilt software gets hit by SQL injection attacks on the regular.
If you feel they should either hire a full-time SQL expert, stick to Facebook, or get the hell off the Internet, then you don't have a clue what the Internet is about.
Well, at least he won't get no hassles from them Barksdale boys up there. Don't need no space ship neither: just give him a couple testers, he'll be higher than the moon in no time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, Lovelock was being overly alarmist. He also has no expertise in climate change prediction, so his guess is as good as yours. The fact that he's wrong doesn't mean that actual experts who've made less extreme predictions are also wrong.
Lovelock is a black-and-white kind of guy(*), who tends toward hyperbole. His Gaia hypothesis is the same way: he takes a small truth about negative feedbacks in Earth systems and blows it up into some huge quasi-religious theory of everything.
* Yes, that was a Daisyworld joke.
Yeah, I know, sorry. But I'd feel irresponsible if I contributed to a gigantic flood of e-mails to respected meteorite experts, so I picked the most dismissive site I could find. That said, there *are* pieces of meteorite out there somewhere.
The average meteor you might see on a clear night is the size of a grain of sand. So by that measure, a minivan is big.
You're right that meteor fireballs occurred a lot during the cold war and raised alarms without leading to war, but the particular South Africa event you mention might actually have been a nuclear detonation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident
The story goes that when the US first launched satellite-based nuclear weapons detection systems, they started freaking out over huge explosions occurring all the time over remote ocean areas where nobody lived. Turns out they were just meteorites like this one, which are a lot more common than people realized.
(Sorry, I can't find a source for this, it's just something I heard at a lecture once.)
That's the right direction, but the elevation is too high and the time is wrong. This one came down after sunrise, and would be over the horizon from Phoenix. You probably saw a rather large Lyrid meteor: large ordinary meteors will throw off sparks as they fall.
A meteor this big probably didn't vaporize: if you live in the area you should be on the lookout for pieces on the ground.
I hesitate to say this, because it's a large area with a lot of ordinary rocks lying around, so there's going to be a huge number of not-actually-a-meteorite finds. This site http://meteorites.wustl.edu/what_to_do.htm gives the basics on figuring out if you've found a meteorite or not.
This meteor appears to be bigger than the one that came down over Chicago in 2003: quite a few large pieces were found then. But it's much easier to find meteorites in urban areas.
For my money, this video game works as well as conventional counseling because conventional counseling doesn't work. People get better, sure, but they get better on their own. Time, improving life circumstances, and new friends are what end depression, not lying on a couch talking about your feelings.
Your objection reinforces the original poster's point. He was using the fertile crescent as an analogy to global climate change. Your solution to the fertile crescent commons problem is privatization.
But you can't privatize the atmosphere.
Uh, what? The fact that a simple model agrees with a small amount of data does not falsify a more complex one. For example, Newton's laws work great to describe the gross motions of the planets in the solar system. That does not mean that Einstein's general theory of relativity is wrong.
The 1988 GISS model is roughly correct when calculating global average temperature change, but it is wrong in subtle ways when you look at regional changes, and it's also slightly more sensitive to greenhouse gases than it should be. Hansen got lucky in 1988: his model was a little off, but his middle-of-the-road estimate of CO2 emissions by humans was a little off to compensate.
But that's okay, it's not my goal to tell you that we understood climate change perfectly in 1988. We didn't, and we still don't. But our models are good enough, both then and now, to trustworthy numerical predictions of global warming. The biggest uncertainty for the future is not the models, but the trajectory of human activity.
There's no cherry picking. The NASA GISS model was one of several in existence in the late '80s and early '90s, and all of them predicted roughly the same thing. The GISS model was singled out in this discussion just because Hansen is the subject of this article.
Perfect example. The trend will be much smaller than the random year-to-year variation at a single weather station over 30 years. If you do see a trend, it may be due to global warming, it might be random chance, or it might be because they built a parking lot next door a few years ago. To see a clear signal, you need to take the average of every weather station on Earth, and you need to account for the spatial distribution of stations, changes in the landscape near the stations, and a host of other factors.
The changes are too subtle to see at a single weather station, but that doesn't mean they're not real or important.
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/
That ought to satisfy your curiosity for a few centuries.
We have figured out several ways. The important ones are:
* The spatial pattern of warming (in particular, stratospheric cooling) matches predicted greenhouse gas changes, but does not match other natural processes.
* Computer climate models of 20th century climate reproduce what actually happened in the 20th century only if human greenhouse gas emissions are included, and not otherwise.
* 20th century climate change appears to exceed all natural changes in the past 1000 years, implying that a human process is at work. (This data is too uncertain to prove the point on its own, but it does corroborate.)
Combine these arguments that natural changes cannot explain the current warming with a demonstration that what humans have done is *sufficient* to cause the observed changes (confirming that we do emit enough CO2, and it is powerful enough to cause the right amount of warming), and you've got a pretty solid argument.
I appreciate your description of yourself as a "rational skeptic", because rational skeptics are willing to listen. It sounds like you believe what you do because you've mostly seen the press releases, and not the actual arguments the scientists behind them are making. I'd encourage you to read the "Attribution" section of the IPCC Working Group 1's "Summary for Policymakers" and Technical Summary. The Wikipedia article on attribution of climate change is also (currently) very good. Many of the objections you make have been made within the scientific community over the years, and eventually addressed with new data.
That's the other thing I tell my students on the first day. I tell them about a conversation I had with a student when I was doing my job interview. She said "I'm so excited you might be teaching at Wheaton: I'm a big believer in global warming, but I really don't know anything about it." What? If you believe something without knowing anything about it, isn't that just a religious belief?
You can lie with raw numbers just as easily as you can lie with graphs, and there are just too many numbers to include in an article for laypeople. What's important is to understand the analysis that goes into generating the data. If you really care, the data is publicly available, and can be downloaded and analyzed however you like.
Unlike many climate change "believers", I don't think skeptics are stupid. They are, however, wrong. And a few of the powerful ones are malicious.
Your entire second paragraph is absolutely false, and totally unsupported. The rest is just paranoid raving.
Hi, climate change looneytune here. I'm a college physics / environmental science professor, and this is exactly what I tell students on the first day of my climate change class. I tell them that it's my job to describe the state of the science, but it's *their* job to decide what to do about it.
I'm not very frustrated that nobody's taking action. If, as a society, we make a rational decision that the costs of fixing the problem are greater than the costs of dealing with it, that's fine by me. What's frustrating is that people are making a blind decision to do nothing *without* considering the scientific evidence, and once they make that decision, they roll that back up the chain to deny the science itself.
Keep in mind, part of the thrust of the article is not just that people are increasingly deciding not to take action on human-caused climate change: they're increasingly denying that it's happening at all.
While the general public focuses on CO2, climate scientists do keep track of methane emissions through biological and industrial sources, and its global warming effect. Our best estimates (IPCC 4th assessment) put its warming effect at 1/4 of what CO2 is doing.
Your specific figure (methane increasing at 10x CO2) is absolutely wrong, probably because you've mixed up parts per million with parts per billion.
Your deforestation quote says nothing about climate change. Deforestation and other land-use changes have also been considered by the IPCC: they represent a *cooling* influence very roughly 1/8th as great as CO2's warming.
I'm a physics guy too. You're making an unjustified appeal to your own authority, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
"Dr. Peiser doesn't have the scientific background to judge whether Hansen's predictions are correct, incorrect, or somwhere in between"
Okay, how about Gavin Schmidt, who does this for a living? Granted, he works at NASA GISS with Hansen, but you can't deny he's an expert.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/
And this isn't something you need to trust an expert on. Look up Hansen's 1988 paper for yourself, compare it to your favorite observations, and draw your own conclusions. I have: Hansen's 1980s models are dead on. His model was oversensitive to CO2 changes by a little bit, and his middle-of-the-road scenario underestimated human CO2 output by little bit. 1980s climate science predicts 2011 temperatures accurately to within a tenth of a degree.
Took me a moment to realize, this statistic is totally meaningless. The average new car buyer keeps their car for at least 5-6 years -- more if they like the car. The vast majority of hybrid sales occurred after 2004.
The reason only 35% of people who're selling their hybrid buy a new hybrid is because the people who *like* hybrids are STILL DRIVING the one they bought a few years ago!
This statistic is basically like saying, "The majority of kids who throw their dinner plate on the floor say it tastes 'yucky'. Therefore, the majority of dinners are yucky."
Ask this question again once the hybrid market has stabilized, and you may get a very different answer.
"Excluding Prius owners"... well there's your problem. Of the hybrids people would likely be trading in (2000-2008ish), only the Toyota Prius is worth a damn. All the others in that year range had tiny electric motors which barely gave any hybrid boost at all. If the "hybrid" you're trading in is basically an ordinary car with a cordless drill motor strapped to the fan belt, of course you're not going to be loyal to it.
The idea is to multiply the complexity of solving a captcha with the complexity of solving a password to give a problem that's far harder than either one alone.
With captchas alone, if you can defeat a captcha in 10 seconds, you win. With passwords alone, if you can try a single entry in a 10 million-word dictionary every microsecond, you win in 10 seconds. But if each dictionary attempt requires you to solve a captcha, you still win ... in 3 years of computing time.
It all boils down to, "how long does it really take to solve a captcha?" And yeah, I'm not sure it's long enough, but we'd have to work the numbers to be sure.
Slashdot comments usually contain at least a few insightful comments, but so far people have been going for wisecracks and low-hanging fruit.
Yes, using a self-signed certificate in a security product is stupid. Yes, trusting physicists to come up with a good encryption scheme is like hiring a plumber to do heart bypass surgery (I am a physicist). But those are boring criticisms. A more interesting question: is the basic idea actually any good?
If you play with it, it looks like it boils down to using a short easy password to generate a chaotic bit pattern; this bit pattern is XORed against a Captcha image. The result is easy for humans to read. If you try to decrypt with the wrong password, you get a different chaotic bit pattern that can't be read. But a computer has to do a lot of work to figure out if each bit pattern contains readable text or not.
The goal here is not to increase the entropy of the password, or to use an asymmetric algorithm that's much easier to encode than decode. Instead, they're trying to make each decryption attempt require enough compute cycles that it's impractical to brute-force even a short password.
The obvious direct attack is to write a very good, very fast captcha detector. It doesn't actually have to be able to *read* the captcha at all: it just has to be able to filter out "obviously doesn't contain text" from "probably contains text", and present the likely candidates to a human for final analysis. Some sort of noisy edge detection algorithm might work well.
If you hate writing computer vision algorithms, a simple Mechanical Turk approach might also work. If you presented a full-screen grid of 100 candidate decryptions to a human, they could probably identify one that contains text in a couple of seconds. A single human should be able to complete an English dictionary attack in a day.
"many allege that EA was pressured by LGBT activists to include the content, which they say is forcing LGBT themes on children playing the games"
Clearly these people have never played Bioware's games, and know nothing about their politics. Nobody had to force them to include LGBT themes: Bioware has been pushing liberal political themes (gender, racial, and orientation equality; international engagement and anti-isolationism; community activism over corporate greed) on their own for a decade now -- and they started long before they joined up with EA.
That's not a criticism. The authors are entitled to present political opinions in their work. If you don't like it, make your own game. If it's good enough to sell 3 million copies, I'm sure EA will be happy to distribute it for you.
"You don't need this. Just write SQL that doesn't suck."
Not everyone is a billion-dollar corporation that can hire you to write their website. There are millions of websites in the world run by people who use prebuilt web service packages on LAMP servers. These are bakeries, car dealerships, WoW guilds, churches, with volunteers they don't have the time or money to rewrite WordPress from the ground up, and their prebuilt software gets hit by SQL injection attacks on the regular.
If you feel they should either hire a full-time SQL expert, stick to Facebook, or get the hell off the Internet, then you don't have a clue what the Internet is about.
Well, at least he won't get no hassles from them Barksdale boys up there. Don't need no space ship neither: just give him a couple testers, he'll be higher than the moon in no time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman