Yeah. The real danger is what happens, when something *really* bad is going to happen and ever more people just laugh those people out of the room. If I had been in Japan on March 11th, I don't know if I had taken the tsunami warnings seriously - there had been so many useless tsunami warnings since the big one in 2004...
If something bad is going to happen in this one, it's seriously bad preparation... but then again, that was the reason why Katrina became as bad as it was...
You don't need that thick walls or any pillars for small houses - because you have very different forces acting on those than on high-rise buildings. Some reasonable walls made of reinforced concrete won't get blown away and flattened - no matter what tornado they are facing (they'll also survive when hit by a tree, if it's not absurdly large - but those should not be allowed in such areas anyway).
Sure, depending on the type of building the roof will be gone and you may have a lot of water coming in through the windows, but that's easy to repair. You wouldn't have hundreds of dead people, the damage would be much easier to repair and when you're not trying to survive a tornado the concrete walls help a lot with both insulation and temperature-buffering to keep rooms cool without air-conditioning at least for part of the day. All this can be pre-fabbed and the main cost of a house is in real-estate anyway - so it's not about cost, it's about refusing to prepare for the local weather (and, often enough, blaming the consequences on climate change).
Or a properly constructed building like St. Johns Hospital. That and several other large buildings have been struck by F5 tornadoes, without major structural damage and no wind-related fatalities. (5 patients on ventilators suffocated in St. Johns when the power cut out and emergency generators failed as well.) All that despite the fact that such large structures are much more vulnerable and exposed to wind than smaller structures.
Americans are pretending that tornadoes are an act of a vengeful god or something, and there is no use to do anything about them anyway. But in fact, the reason why you see endless rows of houses reduced to slaps of concrete by tornadoes - as most recently in Joplin - is lousy and inappropriate building standards first and foremost.
If you are building a house in an area that is very well known to be tornado-prone, which cannot structurally survive a tornado, you've only got yourself to blame when a slap of concrete is all that is left after one of them strikes.
I sincerely apologize should that comment hit too close to home.
If someone is 95% sure something important is going to happen, and you choose to ignore them because they can't achieve the answer you want, than a lot of the time you're probably going to regret it.
First of all, the 95% does not mean something happened the way you described it. It only means that the implied null-hypothesis has a chance of 5% to be true. That's it. It says nothing about the truth value of your hypothesis, nor does it say anything about the truth value of any other possible hypothesis that could give apparently similar results. (I recommend read Nicolas Nassim Taleb on those matters. Unfortunately, he closed down his ridiculously ugly, but also ridiculously informative, website fooledbyrandomness.com last month.)
If you can't get your confidence way up, there is very little way of ascertaining that a particular approach is correct. You're still open to ridiculous coincidences that you can't tease out with statistics alone anymore, because you lack a sufficient data base.
And secondly, as already stated above, you're putting up a straw-man by implying that the alternative is doing nothing. That's neither the case nor is it what I said. The reason being, that there are a huge lot of very good reasons to switch to non-fossil fuels, that you will have much less trouble justifying on a scientific and highly reliable basis. (In short: we're running out of and kill each other trying to gain access to this stuff.)
I read it and found it interesting. But I don't have enough information on my hands to reply to this in a meaningful way, so right now I can't say much more than I (truly!) appreciate your comment, however bland that may read.
But if you only have one real big experiment, and collecting another data point means waiting another year, than 95% suddenly means a lot more and might be the best you can do.
Sorry, no. This would amount to special pleading. 95% statistical certainty has the exact same meaning independent of whether you can get another data point within the next second or within the next year. And if that's the best you can do... well, I'm terribly sorry, but then the best you can do, is just not very good.
The difficulty of obtaining data doesn't change the likelihood of mistaking an effect for an artifact in statistical analysis (because math is blissfully ignorant of such difficulties), except insofar as you have a lot of time to think about it. But in this case your reasoning has to be very conclusive and obviously cannot rely on statistics to demonstrate its validity. But the latter is exactly what is being done.
I described examples at length in the linked posting. Sorry, but I'm afraid I can't cover your health insurance, if you should stretch a tendon in the act of using your mouse to click on it. But I can assure you, that this particular mouse click is worth the extra risk to your health.
It has shown that the current explanations using sulfates and ammonia for nucleation can be boosted by a factor of ten pending on the presence of cosmic radiation. They also say that further research will be required to see what effect cosmic rays have on the nucleation properties of other compounds to get the full picture.
As you obviously didn't read the piece I wrote, let me quote the second to last paragraph:
There are enough reasons to reduce the use of carbon based fossil fuels. Be it the fundamental scarcity of fossil fuels; the unavoidable environmental damage associated with their use and extraction; or their price that will inexorably rise as the world is industrializing, which will hamper the economies of the industrialized countries unless they reduce their dependence upon them.
There is no reason to desperately hang on to the climate change story, if you are concerned about CO2. Emissions are increasing massively anyway, because people need more energy resources, which leads to scarcities, which in turn lead to stupid wars in Iraq or Libya or wherever. We are in dire need of alternatives anyway.
It's people like you who sacrifice scientific integrity on the altar of the climate church, without doing a thing to help to change those things you don't want to see anymore.
The problem with a lot of public climate science is a matter of language. Specifically, the utter abuse of language by the IPCC to imply absolute scientific certainty where there is in fact, little more than strong hints in need of further investigation. Which is not surprising, as an intergovernmental panel is not a scientific, but a political institution.
This is in contrast with the particle scientists CERN, who are much more careful with their language, because they have not thrown scientific integrity out of the window in order to overstate their findings. Which is all the more remarkable given the huge expenditure on some experiments like the LHC. I've written a rather longish piece on that topic a few days ago.
They've had two fatal accidents in the 1970ies. One because of moronic Soviet orders to have a premature flight. Soyuz 1 - the first manned flight - failed, after all previous unmanned test flights had failed to land intact. Soyuz 1 crashed after vaporized (and then re-solidified) glue prevented the parachute from opening. The only cosmonaut died.
Soyuz 11 was a classic case of "someone had to find out the hard way" - a pressure valve opened due to bad luck, three cosmonauts on board suffocated. For a long time after, Soyuz only flew with two people on board - as they had to wear pressure suits during flight. They still do wear them, but lighter suits and a slightly bigger capsule allowed three to get on board again.
After that, all incidents were without fatalities. Although there was one flight where the cosmonauts had to bail out right at the launch pad, when an engine failed, the rocket fell over and exploded on the pad.
You should not attribute to malice, what you can adequately explain through a mechanism of self-reinforcing ignorance.
As for example the easily observable process of politicians selecting their advisors on the basis of compliance with their ideology - instead of erm... you know... the real world?
Isn't it funny how the leaders of a fallen nation always claim they didn't see it coming? How they keep claiming to the very last day, that theirs is a strong nation that will never fall?
Are you emotionally invested in a pro-AGW point of view? The article didn't strike me as particularly objective.
I have never seen a volcanologist writing something like:
"That's critical knowledge for predicting future volcanic eruptions. It means that if we lose the lava dome of the volcano, we open the tap to massive amounts of magma in the interior."
Neither have I seen an astronomer writing something like:
"That's critical knowledge for predicting future super-novae. It means that if we lose the carbon-fusion in the core of the star, we open the tap to massive amounts of neutrinos, gamma rays and heavy nuclei."
> This would only be scaremongering if it weren't true.
No. If you keep repeating "truths" out of all proportion, it is still scaremongering. That's why there are so many more people who feel perfectly fine driving a car to the airport and getting scared as soon as they board the plane - than there are people who are a paranoid, nervous wreak behind the driving wheel and relax upon boarding the much safer airplane (as it is indeed the case).
All that because news about airplane crashes are presented way out of proportion. If any passenger airplane crashes down anywhere on this globe - be it in Washington State, Siberia or Lagos, Nigeria - you'll know it. And they are all real. Not one is counterfeit or a fabrication. It just so happens, that 100% are being reported.
If there were as many dead people in airplane crashes as in car accidents, you'd need to have one major plane crash each day with over 100 dead people on average in the USA alone! Yet, much less than 1% of the car accidents with dead people are reported.
That's not to say anybody would be lying about the number of car accidents - but the biased reporting is very obviously having the effect of making airplanes appear much more dangerous than they actually are. The worst is, however, that it makes people talk and fight like idiots about airplane safety whenever there is a crash - but they all forget about the dreadful danger that car traffic is. There are far over a million dead people in car accidents each year worldwide. But nobody cares.
There was a time, way back, when geologists would have presented this kind of finding and said:
"We finally have a map of how the ice in Antarctica moves. We don't quite know exactly why it moves the way it does, but at least now we know some of the questions we should ask ourselves."
Instead we get scaremongering drivel along the lines of: "That's critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise. It means that if we lose ice at the coasts from the warming ocean, we open the tap to massive amounts of ice in the interior."
It's too easy to say that China is simply undercutting prices. In fact, both Europe and the USA could simply refuse to import rare earth minerals that are not mined according to appropriate environmental standards. But they don't - because they fear that their cronies will blame them for a their latest 1% fall in revenue, should they do and the radical environmentalists will stage another outbreak of moral panic anyway.
The result of environmental standards in the USA and Europe is for the most part simply that those things are done cheaper and dirtier elsewhere (China, India, Africa, whatever). In short, it's NIMBY whatever color the veil.
The weight savings result from doing away with a mess of redundant equipment/chargers etc. that were designed by moronic, egoistic engineers whose idea of standardization is that they are happy to follow any standard, so long as it's theirs.
They were instead replaced by one small and much more lightweight unit that weighs 9lbs instead of 50lbs and is still able to plug into all their gadgets and charge their batteries. (Maybe one day we can do that with laptops and cellphones too...) This unit can accept power from a lot of different kinds of sources (conventional grid AC, but also DC etc.), they plan to also distribute a set solar cells and buffer batteries, that can (naturally) also plug into this unit - but will almost double the weight of the equipment to about 17lbs. (Still a lot less than 50 lbs, but the usual caveats of solar power apply, so they are quite likely to end up using other sources a lot as well.)
I have little hope for NASA. Right now, they are scrapping exploration missions left and right and the missions they do have pay no attention to being cost-effective. They are building exactly one mars rover for $2.5bn and that's it. Are you kidding?
(Ok, in this case, they have a good excuse for building just one of them - NASA is running out of Plutonium-238, because Bill Clinton decided that nuclear research is a thing of the past and ordered all research reactors that could produce radioisotopes to be shut down. That includes vital isotopes for cancer diagnostics (Tc-99m) with 18hr half life that must now be imported from Canada...)
And despite all that, the manned missions are underfunded - NASA's budget as a whole is being cut, at a time when they are supposed to do stuff that is much more ambitious than anything they did in the last 30 years. Sure, that's how you do that sort of stuff. Not.
We only have data of 32 years. The paper is trying to derive from that basis the natural variability of ice-cover over decades and assigns all the residual variability to non-natural - that is, anthropogenic - factors. They do that by integrating this data into huge simulation runs of up to 4000 years:
Over 4000 years of CCSM4 integrations were used to calculate trends for this study.
Natural trends were derived from a 1300-year long control run with constant 1850 forcing
(1850CNT) and from an 850-year long last millennium run with transient forcings applied from
1000 to 1850 (LM) (Landrum et al., submitted).
This isn't science. This isn't even just preposterous. This is ludicrous. It's cargo cult science if anything.
There is not enough data to tell what is natural and what is not - and you very very certainly cannot just go ahead and assign what you don't understand to human action. The problem is not that we don't know - it's that we cannot know.
There can be no doubt about the science, when so many experts agree. What's the point anyway in their childish insistence that predictions must be accurate. After all, this is a complex system those scientists are dealing with. I mean, hell, we don't even really understand how the ice ages came about or what exactly happened to the Sahara in the last couple of thousand years. We don't even know what the weather will be like next Sunday.
You can't really expect those scientists to get everything exactly right the first time, they are scientists, they can't do miracles. And besides, science is changing all the time - it's nothing unusual.
Actually, he would have said something like: Looting is the extension of consumerism by other means (yet more radical and if in any way possible to be avoided).
He also defined war rather nicely as "a means to force ones will upon the enemy". To stick with the parallel, looting would be a means to acquire consumer goods against the will of the shop owner... see, Clausewitz was a bore.
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The funny thing is, what you call "real houses" is what most Europeans would call a reinforced cardboard box ...
Yeah. The real danger is what happens, when something *really* bad is going to happen and ever more people just laugh those people out of the room. If I had been in Japan on March 11th, I don't know if I had taken the tsunami warnings seriously - there had been so many useless tsunami warnings since the big one in 2004 ...
... but then again, that was the reason why Katrina became as bad as it was ...
If something bad is going to happen in this one, it's seriously bad preparation
You don't need that thick walls or any pillars for small houses - because you have very different forces acting on those than on high-rise buildings. Some reasonable walls made of reinforced concrete won't get blown away and flattened - no matter what tornado they are facing (they'll also survive when hit by a tree, if it's not absurdly large - but those should not be allowed in such areas anyway).
Sure, depending on the type of building the roof will be gone and you may have a lot of water coming in through the windows, but that's easy to repair. You wouldn't have hundreds of dead people, the damage would be much easier to repair and when you're not trying to survive a tornado the concrete walls help a lot with both insulation and temperature-buffering to keep rooms cool without air-conditioning at least for part of the day. All this can be pre-fabbed and the main cost of a house is in real-estate anyway - so it's not about cost, it's about refusing to prepare for the local weather (and, often enough, blaming the consequences on climate change).
Or a properly constructed building like St. Johns Hospital. That and several other large buildings have been struck by F5 tornadoes, without major structural damage and no wind-related fatalities. (5 patients on ventilators suffocated in St. Johns when the power cut out and emergency generators failed as well.) All that despite the fact that such large structures are much more vulnerable and exposed to wind than smaller structures.
Americans are pretending that tornadoes are an act of a vengeful god or something, and there is no use to do anything about them anyway. But in fact, the reason why you see endless rows of houses reduced to slaps of concrete by tornadoes - as most recently in Joplin - is lousy and inappropriate building standards first and foremost.
If you are building a house in an area that is very well known to be tornado-prone, which cannot structurally survive a tornado, you've only got yourself to blame when a slap of concrete is all that is left after one of them strikes.
I sincerely apologize should that comment hit too close to home.
Somewhere I read, that an F3 tornado can blow even a well-anchored house from its foundations.
I guess, when your house needs an anchor, you're doing it wrong.
If someone is 95% sure something important is going to happen, and you choose to ignore them because they can't achieve the answer you want, than a lot of the time you're probably going to regret it.
First of all, the 95% does not mean something happened the way you described it. It only means that the implied null-hypothesis has a chance of 5% to be true. That's it. It says nothing about the truth value of your hypothesis, nor does it say anything about the truth value of any other possible hypothesis that could give apparently similar results. (I recommend read Nicolas Nassim Taleb on those matters. Unfortunately, he closed down his ridiculously ugly, but also ridiculously informative, website fooledbyrandomness.com last month.)
If you can't get your confidence way up, there is very little way of ascertaining that a particular approach is correct. You're still open to ridiculous coincidences that you can't tease out with statistics alone anymore, because you lack a sufficient data base.
And secondly, as already stated above, you're putting up a straw-man by implying that the alternative is doing nothing. That's neither the case nor is it what I said. The reason being, that there are a huge lot of very good reasons to switch to non-fossil fuels, that you will have much less trouble justifying on a scientific and highly reliable basis. (In short: we're running out of and kill each other trying to gain access to this stuff.)
I read it and found it interesting. But I don't have enough information on my hands to reply to this in a meaningful way, so right now I can't say much more than I (truly!) appreciate your comment, however bland that may read.
But if you only have one real big experiment, and collecting another data point means waiting another year, than 95% suddenly means a lot more and might be the best you can do.
Sorry, no. This would amount to special pleading. 95% statistical certainty has the exact same meaning independent of whether you can get another data point within the next second or within the next year. And if that's the best you can do ... well, I'm terribly sorry, but then the best you can do, is just not very good.
The difficulty of obtaining data doesn't change the likelihood of mistaking an effect for an artifact in statistical analysis (because math is blissfully ignorant of such difficulties), except insofar as you have a lot of time to think about it. But in this case your reasoning has to be very conclusive and obviously cannot rely on statistics to demonstrate its validity. But the latter is exactly what is being done.
I described examples at length in the linked posting. Sorry, but I'm afraid I can't cover your health insurance, if you should stretch a tendon in the act of using your mouse to click on it. But I can assure you, that this particular mouse click is worth the extra risk to your health.
If only people would remember how quickly earth ran out of energy reserves in that movie, once the sun was blocked ....
It has shown that the current explanations using sulfates and ammonia for nucleation can be boosted by a factor of ten pending on the presence of cosmic radiation. They also say that further research will be required to see what effect cosmic rays have on the nucleation properties of other compounds to get the full picture.
There are enough reasons to reduce the use of carbon based fossil fuels. Be it the fundamental scarcity of fossil fuels; the unavoidable environmental damage associated with their use and extraction; or their price that will inexorably rise as the world is industrializing, which will hamper the economies of the industrialized countries unless they reduce their dependence upon them.
There is no reason to desperately hang on to the climate change story, if you are concerned about CO2. Emissions are increasing massively anyway, because people need more energy resources, which leads to scarcities, which in turn lead to stupid wars in Iraq or Libya or wherever. We are in dire need of alternatives anyway.
It's people like you who sacrifice scientific integrity on the altar of the climate church, without doing a thing to help to change those things you don't want to see anymore.
The problem with a lot of public climate science is a matter of language. Specifically, the utter abuse of language by the IPCC to imply absolute scientific certainty where there is in fact, little more than strong hints in need of further investigation. Which is not surprising, as an intergovernmental panel is not a scientific, but a political institution.
This is in contrast with the particle scientists CERN, who are much more careful with their language, because they have not thrown scientific integrity out of the window in order to overstate their findings. Which is all the more remarkable given the huge expenditure on some experiments like the LHC. I've written a rather longish piece on that topic a few days ago.
They've had two fatal accidents in the 1970ies. One because of moronic Soviet orders to have a premature flight. Soyuz 1 - the first manned flight - failed, after all previous unmanned test flights had failed to land intact. Soyuz 1 crashed after vaporized (and then re-solidified) glue prevented the parachute from opening. The only cosmonaut died.
Soyuz 11 was a classic case of "someone had to find out the hard way" - a pressure valve opened due to bad luck, three cosmonauts on board suffocated. For a long time after, Soyuz only flew with two people on board - as they had to wear pressure suits during flight. They still do wear them, but lighter suits and a slightly bigger capsule allowed three to get on board again.
After that, all incidents were without fatalities. Although there was one flight where the cosmonauts had to bail out right at the launch pad, when an engine failed, the rocket fell over and exploded on the pad.
You should not attribute to malice, what you can adequately explain through a mechanism of self-reinforcing ignorance.
... you know ... the real world?
As for example the easily observable process of politicians selecting their advisors on the basis of compliance with their ideology - instead of erm
Isn't it funny how the leaders of a fallen nation always claim they didn't see it coming? How they keep claiming to the very last day, that theirs is a strong nation that will never fall?
You know what? They don't even lie.
Are you emotionally invested in a pro-AGW point of view? The article didn't strike me as particularly objective.
I have never seen a volcanologist writing something like:
"That's critical knowledge for predicting future volcanic eruptions. It means that if we lose the lava dome of the volcano, we open the tap to massive amounts of magma in the interior."
Neither have I seen an astronomer writing something like:
"That's critical knowledge for predicting future super-novae. It means that if we lose the carbon-fusion in the core of the star, we open the tap to massive amounts of neutrinos, gamma rays and heavy nuclei."
> This would only be scaremongering if it weren't true.
No. If you keep repeating "truths" out of all proportion, it is still scaremongering. That's why there are so many more people who feel perfectly fine driving a car to the airport and getting scared as soon as they board the plane - than there are people who are a paranoid, nervous wreak behind the driving wheel and relax upon boarding the much safer airplane (as it is indeed the case).
All that because news about airplane crashes are presented way out of proportion. If any passenger airplane crashes down anywhere on this globe - be it in Washington State, Siberia or Lagos, Nigeria - you'll know it. And they are all real. Not one is counterfeit or a fabrication. It just so happens, that 100% are being reported.
If there were as many dead people in airplane crashes as in car accidents, you'd need to have one major plane crash each day with over 100 dead people on average in the USA alone! Yet, much less than 1% of the car accidents with dead people are reported.
That's not to say anybody would be lying about the number of car accidents - but the biased reporting is very obviously having the effect of making airplanes appear much more dangerous than they actually are. The worst is, however, that it makes people talk and fight like idiots about airplane safety whenever there is a crash - but they all forget about the dreadful danger that car traffic is. There are far over a million dead people in car accidents each year worldwide. But nobody cares.
There was a time, way back, when geologists would have presented this kind of finding and said:
"We finally have a map of how the ice in Antarctica moves. We don't quite know exactly why it moves the way it does, but at least now we know some of the questions we should ask ourselves."
Instead we get scaremongering drivel along the lines of: "That's critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise. It means that if we lose ice at the coasts from the warming ocean, we open the tap to massive amounts of ice in the interior."
It's too easy to say that China is simply undercutting prices. In fact, both Europe and the USA could simply refuse to import rare earth minerals that are not mined according to appropriate environmental standards. But they don't - because they fear that their cronies will blame them for a their latest 1% fall in revenue, should they do and the radical environmentalists will stage another outbreak of moral panic anyway.
The result of environmental standards in the USA and Europe is for the most part simply that those things are done cheaper and dirtier elsewhere (China, India, Africa, whatever). In short, it's NIMBY whatever color the veil.
Guys, you're missing the point.
...) This unit can accept power from a lot of different kinds of sources (conventional grid AC, but also DC etc.), they plan to also distribute a set solar cells and buffer batteries, that can (naturally) also plug into this unit - but will almost double the weight of the equipment to about 17lbs. (Still a lot less than 50 lbs, but the usual caveats of solar power apply, so they are quite likely to end up using other sources a lot as well.)
The weight savings result from doing away with a mess of redundant equipment/chargers etc. that were designed by moronic, egoistic engineers whose idea of standardization is that they are happy to follow any standard, so long as it's theirs.
They were instead replaced by one small and much more lightweight unit that weighs 9lbs instead of 50lbs and is still able to plug into all their gadgets and charge their batteries. (Maybe one day we can do that with laptops and cellphones too
I have little hope for NASA. Right now, they are scrapping exploration missions left and right and the missions they do have pay no attention to being cost-effective. They are building exactly one mars rover for $2.5bn and that's it. Are you kidding?
...)
(Ok, in this case, they have a good excuse for building just one of them - NASA is running out of Plutonium-238, because Bill Clinton decided that nuclear research is a thing of the past and ordered all research reactors that could produce radioisotopes to be shut down. That includes vital isotopes for cancer diagnostics (Tc-99m) with 18hr half life that must now be imported from Canada
And despite all that, the manned missions are underfunded - NASA's budget as a whole is being cut, at a time when they are supposed to do stuff that is much more ambitious than anything they did in the last 30 years. Sure, that's how you do that sort of stuff. Not.
This isn't science. This isn't even just preposterous. This is ludicrous. It's cargo cult science if anything.
There is not enough data to tell what is natural and what is not - and you very very certainly cannot just go ahead and assign what you don't understand to human action. The problem is not that we don't know - it's that we cannot know.
There can be no doubt about the science, when so many experts agree. What's the point anyway in their childish insistence that predictions must be accurate. After all, this is a complex system those scientists are dealing with. I mean, hell, we don't even really understand how the ice ages came about or what exactly happened to the Sahara in the last couple of thousand years. We don't even know what the weather will be like next Sunday.
You can't really expect those scientists to get everything exactly right the first time, they are scientists, they can't do miracles. And besides, science is changing all the time - it's nothing unusual.
Actually, he would have said something like: Looting is the extension of consumerism by other means (yet more radical and if in any way possible to be avoided).
... see, Clausewitz was a bore.
He also defined war rather nicely as "a means to force ones will upon the enemy". To stick with the parallel, looting would be a means to acquire consumer goods against the will of the shop owner