I don't know why anyone would expect America to be hardest hit. The US "National Climate Assessment" naturally focuses on.. the US.
The degree to which a country feels the "hardness of the hit" depends on that country's economic and political vulnerability. In 2017 we had our second straight year of record flooding, but despite its immense cost that amounted to less than 1% of our GDP. Since that cost was mostly borne by private entities, and it was non-discretionary, as a whole the country took it in stride. The same damage to a poorer, smaller, less stable country would have been catastrophic.
The wealth, size, economic diversification of the US, and our relative political stability mean that climate effects would have to be catastrophic on an unprecedented scale to force us to act out of short term considerations. We can easily shrug off a hundred billion dollars of flood damage every few years, even for a couple years in a row.
The notion that "global warming" means that it has to warm everywhere equally all the time is a ridiculously weak straw man. But even if that were true, a +2C increase would not be enough to make snow disappear in places where it is common. In fact in most such places the limiting factor in snow isn't temperature, but atmospheric moisture.
The simplest disproof of the "uniformly warmer everywhere all the time" straw man is winter. AGW is caused by solar forcing, which is locally weakest in winter. In fact, at the North Pole, there is no wintertime forcing at all.
I'm just curious what you think your anecdote proves. Are you claiming that the existence of flooding pre-warming implies that AGW can't increase flooding?
The US doesn't care either. US carbon emissions have been dropping for the last ten years, but the initial drop corresponded to the Great Recession, not any kind of public policy.
Later on those reduction continued because of the (then unpopular) fracking friendly policies of the previous administration. This was arguably more from concern over US energy independence than climate change. They also were keen for the US to become a gas exporter to blunt potential Russian influence in Europe.
The slight reduction in US CO2 output in 2017 was almost entirely due to the ongoing shift of electricity generation away from coal to natural gas. This represents a one-time shift from one carbon emitting fuel to another, significantly less carbon-emitting fuel. Once coal becomes economically extinct, US greenhouse emissions will resume growth as US economic output grows, absent any new public policies to promote conservation and/or renewable energy.
Note that EU carbon emissions per unit of GDP have actually fallen. However they don't have any vast untapped reserves of natural gas to produce the kind of easy short term reductions the US has; Germany in particular is dependent on coal. A switch to Russian natural gas would pull them inextricably into Russia's sphere of influence. Note that the other place Europe could turn for natural gas is Iran, however the US is insisting Europe reimpose sanctions on Iran.
The problem isn't science. The problem is the public's understanding of science, even the reporters who are supposed to be covering science don't know how to understand scientific results.
The world is complex, and evidence always at least appears contradictory when you start looking at a question. This means a study that says standing desks are good for you is useless when deciding whether to get a standing desk. A follow up study that finds standing desks to be useless is also completely unreliable.
So basically news should never, ever report a study as proving anything.
What you need to go on is either (a) your extensive and deep familiarity with all the literature on a question or (b) someone else who has that familiarity. Fortunately, some else's expert judgment is regularly available in something called a "systematic review paper", which summarizes all the recent evidence on every side of a question.
You very seldom see systematic reviews reported on in the press, although you see individual studies reported almost every day. It should be the other way around.
Or political dissidents. China could do this with it's "social credit score". Take someone whose life is literally considered worthless to society and give them a chance to get out of the red. As it stands it's kind of a Catch-22: you are so socially disabled by a low social credit score you can't rehabilitate yourself.
You could even say this was realistic -- more realistic than anyone signed on for.
If you read first hand accounts of voyages from the Age of Sail, one of the things that's striking is how much long distance travel depended on human life being cheap. In Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, he recounts a journey in which he departed Boston on August 14 and dropped anchor in Santa Barbara on January 19, five months later. Because it's a sailing ship, the sailors have to climb the ice-covered rigging in a storm to tie and untie knots. Sailors are swept of the deck walking from the fo'c'sle to the galley for a meal, and in a gale at night there's nothing that can be done about it. Injury and death at rates that would unacceptable to modern sensibilities were literally just the price of doing business.
The practical implication for a Mars mission, which due both to costs and launch windows would have to survive for many months, is that the crew roster is going to have to be heavy on medical expertise to meet modern expectations of safety. If you're a youngster with ambitions of being on the first Mars mission, get an undergraduate degree in engineering or Earth science and then an MD.
I don't doubt you've correctly characterized what they're using blockchain for, but what's still missing is any argument for why blockchain is a good way of doing this.
Blockchain's advantage for cryptocurrency is that it creates a decentralized audit trail in a situation with no central authority and no mutual trust between users.
This doesn't describe a console game environment at all. In the console environment the software vendor controls everything -- unless they allow you somehow to play with your own custom-written clients. The vendor controls every aspect of your experience. If it says you own a widget in the game, it can enforce that because it controls everyone's software.
In fact, here's a thought experiment. Suppose the vendor told you that item ownership in the game was controlled by blockchain. How could you tell if they were lying or telling the truth? You don't have access to the software or the data underlying the transaction. Maybe they're just simulating blockchain with a computationally more efficient alternative. Why would they do this? I dunno, maybe to hijack your console for bitcoin mining?
Everyone involved with the SLS project have shown nothing but sheer incompetence.
I beg to differ. SLS contractors have shown if anything uncanny competence at getting paid despite cost overruns and delays, even picking up performance bonuses for their failures.
If you look at companies that are actually trying to reduce costs, a startling divide emerges between them and the defense contractors behind SLS. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Stratolaunch are billionaire vanity projects, and they don't fulfill their purpose unless they actually achieve something.
The defense contractors that produce legacy systems and are behind the SLS fulfill their purpose if they earn safe profits, regardless of whether SLS launches on time or indeed ever, or proves to be economically viable.
To that end, defense contractors started to merge in the early 70s, seeking to avoid competition; by the 90s they were too big to fail, and today as we can see with the F35 and SLS programs they're too big to be allowed to suffer financial pain. Letting a project slip equals a safe pay day in the future.
The well-known hippie, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned us about this in his farewell speech, in which he coined the phrase "military industrial complex".
This should make every American concerned. We spent 2.6x as much on defense as China last year, but how much of that is corporate welfare? Contractors like Boeing and Lockheed rake in tens of billions of dollars a year, almost entirely from a government they are legally allowed to influence.
Well, at present they're the only ones who can launch a rocket capable of putting substantially more than a ton of payload into low Earth orbit without using Russian engines.
I suspect we can conclude nothing about bitter flavor and coffee preference from this other than they're correlated.
Stuff like this gets correlated all the time. It could be like red hair's correlation with altered pain perception; both are diverse effects of a single underlying mutation. Genetic variations with bitter tasting are also associated with trans-cellular membrane transport of certain classes of proteins that have effects throughout the body.
Or it could be that people learn to like the bitter flavor of coffee in the way that dogs learn to enjoy the sound of the dog trainer's clicker device. This is how people tend to crave foods that they habitually eat, even if they don't initially like those foods. The same goes for listening to music, which is why record companies do their best to saturate your experience with a new song. As long as they aren't conscious of being forced to listen to the song, the more they've heard a song the more they'll seek to hear it again.
You could stop them by transferring a nickel from the gallery's account to the recipient's. Don't tell me the telcos don't have the capability to do retry much anything with billing.
Here's the thing about picking low-hanging fruit; eventually the tree bears more low-hanging fruit. The golden age of physics discoveries in the early-to-mid 20th century corresponds with the aftermath of the introduction of quantum mechanics and relativity, and we're still working out the consequences of that.
A single field like physics goes through periods of disruption followed by a long and productive (although less glamorous) aftermath, so you can't judge productivity in science as a whole by a brief run of physics Nobel awards.
And if you follow science as a whole the notion that it has somehow become less productive seems pretty silly. There's been a lot recent groundbreaking stuff going on in biology, medicine, and materials. Astronomy continues to advance -- doesn't the discovery of exoplanets seem like a big deal? In the social sciences anthropology has rewritten the history of human ancestry; behavioral economics is rapidly expanding; and psychology, no longer yoked to Freud, is going through an evidence-driven renaissance.
What's happening is change has become so continual that it's no longer perceptible as a discrete phenomenon.
Right, so if a group happens to think differently from you, that's groupthink?
Stuff that upsets the applecart is what a scientist wants to publish, and a journal wants to be the one that publishes that paper. Everyone wants the apple car to get turned over, but nobody wants it to be turned over for no reason. Just like every baseball fan wants to see a no-hitter, but nobody wants to see a no-hitter because the umpire gives the pitcher a huge strike zone.
I'm assuming they probably tested it on their own equipment first, but that's not a very convincing test. As a civilian you can buy anti-GPS jamming equipment, although some of it requires a security clearance. Presumably the Russians aren't supposed to have the classified stuff, and even if they did it wouldn't necessarily be the same as what the US or NATO military has.
Russians were just being assholes trying to annoy us.
That's quite possibly a contributing motivation, but it doesn't preclude a more pragmatic motivation.
Oh, for pete's sake. Nature is a British journal; it's editor is a British biomedical researcher. The study's lead author is a French oceanographer working at an American university.
It's conspiracy theory thinking to believe this paper was somehow timed to coincide with the US election. How is that supposed to work exactly? Somebody who doesn't believe in global warming is going to have his mind changed because of a letter published in Nature?
Scientists do sometimes rush, but what they're worried about isn't undecided voters; they're worried about other scientists publishing first. The first scientist to publish a result gets the credit, the citations, the glory, and in rare cases awards. Publish the same results a month later, and you may get a somewhat smaller share of citations, and that's it, even if your path to the result is more solid.
Read historical accounts of Watson and Crick's discovery of the double helix; they were terrified that Linus Pauling would beat them to the punch, to the point that they did some ethically dubious things. My wife, who is a scientist, and I were binge watching a mystery series that isn't very good from a "fair play" standpoint. One of the cheap tricks it uses is giving the culprit a ridiculously non-credible motivation for killing. In one episode it turned the victim was murdered by her academic adviser so he could steal her discovery. "This one," my wife said, "is totally believable."
Peer review isn't about repeating the test or confirming the analysis, it's about checking whether the conclusion matches the groupthink. This did.
And your evidence for this view would be... what? That papers get published that disagree with what you've been told is the truth?
I'm not a scientist, but I've worked with scientists and have helped some of them respond to peer review comments. If you've ever actually seen peer review at work, it's the farthest thing from groupthink there is. You have to remember: scientists in a field are competitors.
Each reviewer has a distinctive persona or style. Some reviewers are obviously very nice people. They try really hard to be constructive and helpful, and bend over backwards being diplomatic. Most reviewers are blunt and too the point: they've obviously skimmed through the paper and picked what seems to the low-hanging fruit. And more than a few reviewers are gratuitously nasty, even sarcastic, like middle school mean girls riffing on the wardrobe choices of an unpopular classmate.
Now to me the really fascinating thing about the whole process was how useful the mean girl criticism was. Here's the thing: the mean ones don't phone it in, they really want you to know what a idiot you are compared to them. It turns out, they're the ones most worth listening to.
OK: propose a process that would infallibly prevent errors from ever being published? What would that even look like?
Errors routinely get published in peer reviewed papers, even in prominent journals. How do we know this? Because they get caught by other scientists, usually pretty quickly. Scientists are world champion contrarians, and they're continually finding flaws in each others' work. Peer review is just the preliminary round of the pile-on.
This is why you should not pay too much attention to studies. The gold standard for evidence-based decisions is the systematic review paper.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why anyone would expect America to be hardest hit. The US "National Climate Assessment" naturally focuses on.. the US.
The degree to which a country feels the "hardness of the hit" depends on that country's economic and political vulnerability. In 2017 we had our second straight year of record flooding, but despite its immense cost that amounted to less than 1% of our GDP. Since that cost was mostly borne by private entities, and it was non-discretionary, as a whole the country took it in stride. The same damage to a poorer, smaller, less stable country would have been catastrophic.
The wealth, size, economic diversification of the US, and our relative political stability mean that climate effects would have to be catastrophic on an unprecedented scale to force us to act out of short term considerations. We can easily shrug off a hundred billion dollars of flood damage every few years, even for a couple years in a row.
The notion that "global warming" means that it has to warm everywhere equally all the time is a ridiculously weak straw man. But even if that were true, a +2C increase would not be enough to make snow disappear in places where it is common. In fact in most such places the limiting factor in snow isn't temperature, but atmospheric moisture.
The simplest disproof of the "uniformly warmer everywhere all the time" straw man is winter. AGW is caused by solar forcing, which is locally weakest in winter. In fact, at the North Pole, there is no wintertime forcing at all.
I'm just curious what you think your anecdote proves. Are you claiming that the existence of flooding pre-warming implies that AGW can't increase flooding?
The US doesn't care either. US carbon emissions have been dropping for the last ten years, but the initial drop corresponded to the Great Recession, not any kind of public policy.
Later on those reduction continued because of the (then unpopular) fracking friendly policies of the previous administration. This was arguably more from concern over US energy independence than climate change. They also were keen for the US to become a gas exporter to blunt potential Russian influence in Europe.
The slight reduction in US CO2 output in 2017 was almost entirely due to the ongoing shift of electricity generation away from coal to natural gas. This represents a one-time shift from one carbon emitting fuel to another, significantly less carbon-emitting fuel. Once coal becomes economically extinct, US greenhouse emissions will resume growth as US economic output grows, absent any new public policies to promote conservation and/or renewable energy.
Note that EU carbon emissions per unit of GDP have actually fallen. However they don't have any vast untapped reserves of natural gas to produce the kind of easy short term reductions the US has; Germany in particular is dependent on coal. A switch to Russian natural gas would pull them inextricably into Russia's sphere of influence. Note that the other place Europe could turn for natural gas is Iran, however the US is insisting Europe reimpose sanctions on Iran.
The problem isn't science. The problem is the public's understanding of science, even the reporters who are supposed to be covering science don't know how to understand scientific results.
The world is complex, and evidence always at least appears contradictory when you start looking at a question. This means a study that says standing desks are good for you is useless when deciding whether to get a standing desk. A follow up study that finds standing desks to be useless is also completely unreliable.
So basically news should never, ever report a study as proving anything.
What you need to go on is either (a) your extensive and deep familiarity with all the literature on a question or (b) someone else who has that familiarity. Fortunately, some else's expert judgment is regularly available in something called a "systematic review paper", which summarizes all the recent evidence on every side of a question.
You very seldom see systematic reviews reported on in the press, although you see individual studies reported almost every day. It should be the other way around.
Or political dissidents. China could do this with it's "social credit score". Take someone whose life is literally considered worthless to society and give them a chance to get out of the red. As it stands it's kind of a Catch-22: you are so socially disabled by a low social credit score you can't rehabilitate yourself.
You could even say this was realistic -- more realistic than anyone signed on for.
If you read first hand accounts of voyages from the Age of Sail, one of the things that's striking is how much long distance travel depended on human life being cheap. In Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, he recounts a journey in which he departed Boston on August 14 and dropped anchor in Santa Barbara on January 19, five months later. Because it's a sailing ship, the sailors have to climb the ice-covered rigging in a storm to tie and untie knots. Sailors are swept of the deck walking from the fo'c'sle to the galley for a meal, and in a gale at night there's nothing that can be done about it. Injury and death at rates that would unacceptable to modern sensibilities were literally just the price of doing business.
The practical implication for a Mars mission, which due both to costs and launch windows would have to survive for many months, is that the crew roster is going to have to be heavy on medical expertise to meet modern expectations of safety. If you're a youngster with ambitions of being on the first Mars mission, get an undergraduate degree in engineering or Earth science and then an MD.
Checking the blockchain yourself presumes you have access to the data and documentation on the format.
I don't doubt you've correctly characterized what they're using blockchain for, but what's still missing is any argument for why blockchain is a good way of doing this.
Blockchain's advantage for cryptocurrency is that it creates a decentralized audit trail in a situation with no central authority and no mutual trust between users.
This doesn't describe a console game environment at all. In the console environment the software vendor controls everything -- unless they allow you somehow to play with your own custom-written clients. The vendor controls every aspect of your experience. If it says you own a widget in the game, it can enforce that because it controls everyone's software.
In fact, here's a thought experiment. Suppose the vendor told you that item ownership in the game was controlled by blockchain. How could you tell if they were lying or telling the truth? You don't have access to the software or the data underlying the transaction. Maybe they're just simulating blockchain with a computationally more efficient alternative. Why would they do this? I dunno, maybe to hijack your console for bitcoin mining?
Everyone involved with the SLS project have shown nothing but sheer incompetence.
I beg to differ. SLS contractors have shown if anything uncanny competence at getting paid despite cost overruns and delays, even picking up performance bonuses for their failures.
If you look at companies that are actually trying to reduce costs, a startling divide emerges between them and the defense contractors behind SLS. Companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Stratolaunch are billionaire vanity projects, and they don't fulfill their purpose unless they actually achieve something.
The defense contractors that produce legacy systems and are behind the SLS fulfill their purpose if they earn safe profits, regardless of whether SLS launches on time or indeed ever, or proves to be economically viable.
To that end, defense contractors started to merge in the early 70s, seeking to avoid competition; by the 90s they were too big to fail, and today as we can see with the F35 and SLS programs they're too big to be allowed to suffer financial pain. Letting a project slip equals a safe pay day in the future.
The well-known hippie, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned us about this in his farewell speech, in which he coined the phrase "military industrial complex".
This should make every American concerned. We spent 2.6x as much on defense as China last year, but how much of that is corporate welfare? Contractors like Boeing and Lockheed rake in tens of billions of dollars a year, almost entirely from a government they are legally allowed to influence.
Well, at present they're the only ones who can launch a rocket capable of putting substantially more than a ton of payload into low Earth orbit without using Russian engines.
This shows something I've observed many times over the years: stupid people can be cunning; or alternatively clever people can be idiots.
Depends on how old you were. S100 was a big deal back in the 70s.
I suspect we can conclude nothing about bitter flavor and coffee preference from this other than they're correlated.
Stuff like this gets correlated all the time. It could be like red hair's correlation with altered pain perception; both are diverse effects of a single underlying mutation. Genetic variations with bitter tasting are also associated with trans-cellular membrane transport of certain classes of proteins that have effects throughout the body.
Or it could be that people learn to like the bitter flavor of coffee in the way that dogs learn to enjoy the sound of the dog trainer's clicker device. This is how people tend to crave foods that they habitually eat, even if they don't initially like those foods. The same goes for listening to music, which is why record companies do their best to saturate your experience with a new song. As long as they aren't conscious of being forced to listen to the song, the more they've heard a song the more they'll seek to hear it again.
You could stop them by transferring a nickel from the gallery's account to the recipient's. Don't tell me the telcos don't have the capability to do retry much anything with billing.
Here's the thing about picking low-hanging fruit; eventually the tree bears more low-hanging fruit. The golden age of physics discoveries in the early-to-mid 20th century corresponds with the aftermath of the introduction of quantum mechanics and relativity, and we're still working out the consequences of that.
A single field like physics goes through periods of disruption followed by a long and productive (although less glamorous) aftermath, so you can't judge productivity in science as a whole by a brief run of physics Nobel awards.
And if you follow science as a whole the notion that it has somehow become less productive seems pretty silly. There's been a lot recent groundbreaking stuff going on in biology, medicine, and materials. Astronomy continues to advance -- doesn't the discovery of exoplanets seem like a big deal? In the social sciences anthropology has rewritten the history of human ancestry; behavioral economics is rapidly expanding; and psychology, no longer yoked to Freud, is going through an evidence-driven renaissance.
What's happening is change has become so continual that it's no longer perceptible as a discrete phenomenon.
Your source that the child Soros robbed people going to death camps? Infowars?
Oh, so you're one of those people who think he was a 9 year-old SS officer?
Emacs Lisp?
Alright, examples? And I mean real scientific journals like Nature publishing obvious trolls, not predatory journals.
Right, so if a group happens to think differently from you, that's groupthink?
Stuff that upsets the applecart is what a scientist wants to publish, and a journal wants to be the one that publishes that paper. Everyone wants the apple car to get turned over, but nobody wants it to be turned over for no reason. Just like every baseball fan wants to see a no-hitter, but nobody wants to see a no-hitter because the umpire gives the pitcher a huge strike zone.
I'm assuming they probably tested it on their own equipment first, but that's not a very convincing test. As a civilian you can buy anti-GPS jamming equipment, although some of it requires a security clearance. Presumably the Russians aren't supposed to have the classified stuff, and even if they did it wouldn't necessarily be the same as what the US or NATO military has.
Russians were just being assholes trying to annoy us.
That's quite possibly a contributing motivation, but it doesn't preclude a more pragmatic motivation.
Oh, for pete's sake. Nature is a British journal; it's editor is a British biomedical researcher. The study's lead author is a French oceanographer working at an American university.
It's conspiracy theory thinking to believe this paper was somehow timed to coincide with the US election. How is that supposed to work exactly? Somebody who doesn't believe in global warming is going to have his mind changed because of a letter published in Nature?
Scientists do sometimes rush, but what they're worried about isn't undecided voters; they're worried about other scientists publishing first. The first scientist to publish a result gets the credit, the citations, the glory, and in rare cases awards. Publish the same results a month later, and you may get a somewhat smaller share of citations, and that's it, even if your path to the result is more solid.
Read historical accounts of Watson and Crick's discovery of the double helix; they were terrified that Linus Pauling would beat them to the punch, to the point that they did some ethically dubious things. My wife, who is a scientist, and I were binge watching a mystery series that isn't very good from a "fair play" standpoint. One of the cheap tricks it uses is giving the culprit a ridiculously non-credible motivation for killing. In one episode it turned the victim was murdered by her academic adviser so he could steal her discovery. "This one," my wife said, "is totally believable."
Peer review isn't about repeating the test or confirming the analysis, it's about checking whether the conclusion matches the groupthink. This did.
And your evidence for this view would be... what? That papers get published that disagree with what you've been told is the truth?
I'm not a scientist, but I've worked with scientists and have helped some of them respond to peer review comments. If you've ever actually seen peer review at work, it's the farthest thing from groupthink there is. You have to remember: scientists in a field are competitors.
Each reviewer has a distinctive persona or style. Some reviewers are obviously very nice people. They try really hard to be constructive and helpful, and bend over backwards being diplomatic. Most reviewers are blunt and too the point: they've obviously skimmed through the paper and picked what seems to the low-hanging fruit. And more than a few reviewers are gratuitously nasty, even sarcastic, like middle school mean girls riffing on the wardrobe choices of an unpopular classmate.
Now to me the really fascinating thing about the whole process was how useful the mean girl criticism was. Here's the thing: the mean ones don't phone it in, they really want you to know what a idiot you are compared to them. It turns out, they're the ones most worth listening to.
OK: propose a process that would infallibly prevent errors from ever being published? What would that even look like?
Errors routinely get published in peer reviewed papers, even in prominent journals. How do we know this? Because they get caught by other scientists, usually pretty quickly. Scientists are world champion contrarians, and they're continually finding flaws in each others' work. Peer review is just the preliminary round of the pile-on.
This is why you should not pay too much attention to studies. The gold standard for evidence-based decisions is the systematic review paper.