Actually, centrifugal force plays an important role as well.
Other than the fact that centrifugal forces don't actually exist, you are right. Tidal forces are due to the difference in gravitational attraction at different distances from the attracting object. Centrifugal forces are a fiction invented to allow you to do physics in a non-inertial frame.
Tidal forces are due not just to gravity pulling on an object, but gravity from two different bodies pulling on an object. See, one body can not cause tidal forces.
That is so wrong, that there is no point in reading anything else in your post.
"Not significant at p = 0.05" means "not significant at p = 0.05". Or, given that p = 0.05 is the usual bound on statistical significance in even the fuzziest subjects, it means "not statistically significant."
If you went to your doctor and he said your symptoms indicate might have a fatal disease, but there was a less than a 95% chance you actually had it, would you want it to be treated?
You exclude the possibility that the model for AGW is flawed and that the climate is changing for other reasons. As folks here are fond of pointing out, correlation is not causation.
You don't need a model to deduce AGW, and it is not a correlation argument. The temperature of the earth is set is by the balance of incoming absorbed solar radiation and outgoing infrared radiation. The presence of imperfect absorption (i.e. reflection of light from clouds/snow/ground or absorption by particles in the stratosphere) and imperfect emission of infrared radiation due to absorption in the atmosphere below the stratosphere. CO2 has high infrared absorption. If you increase the absorption in the atmosphere without decreasing the amount of visible light absorbed near the ground the surface temperature necessarily rises.
It is there is some dependence of visible albedo and IR absorption with temperature. Increased temperature increases the H2O concentration of the atmosphere which increases the IR absorption by H2O and the albedo of the earth. It's very easy to show from first principles (assuming you have an undergrad degree in a physical science) that the combined H2O effects cannot offset the CO2 effect without leading to a temperature instability that would rapidly result in a planet covered with highly reflective ice or a run away greenhouse effect that would turn us into another Venus. That hasn't happened in the last billion years or so, so the effects of increased water vapor probably only slightly alter the CO2 effects unless temperature gets to such an extreme hot or cold point that the feedback mechanisms that stabilize temperature fail to work.
No models are necessary to show this... Just some basic math and a little understanding of geologic processes. The reason climate scientists use models is to try to predict how fast these effects will occur and what the effects on different parts of the globe will be in the short term.
Now you can choose not to believe this, just as you can choose not to believe in mathematics or in gravity. The equations don't care what you believe, nor does the planet.
I'm pretty sure climate will keep on changing regardless of our level of emissions, or presence on this planet. It was changing before we came along too.
I may not be qualified to perform heart surgery, but I am qualified to tell you that using a chain saw is the wrong approach.
We're not talking about whether using a chain saw for heart surgery is a proper technique. We are talking about where to make the initial incision. Just because you are qualified to say that a chain saw is the wrong approach doesn't mean I'd trust you to know where to make the first cut.
"copenhagenclimatechallenge.org" has a, lets call it "unique," definition of "well qualified to comment on climate science". An MS in civil engineering... A retired civil engineering professor... An organic chemist... A botanist/author with lots of honorary degrees and an OBE... Quite a few Ph.D.s that don't give their field...
But even if they were all climatologists, 140 is a small fraction of the total. Their opinion doesn't have zero weight, but I don't give it more weight than actual climate simulations.
Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right. -- Robert Parks
The science of AGW is far more simple than you might think. It doesn't require climate models to prove the basics. It's just simple conservation of energy. The models are just there to investigate the details.
Apparently 31,000+ scientists are holding the same doubts as you: http://www.petitionproject.org/ but you know how it goes...
This is often cited, but very, very, very few of the 31,000+ signers are actually scientists. Even fewer have a degree in a field even remotely related to study of climate. Being a MD, a DVM, or a DDS doesn't preclude you from being a scientist, but very few of them actually are. Having a Ph.D. in Religious Studies doesn't make you a scientist. Not to mention that they don't verify the credentials of the signers at all. If you want to call them scientists, you need higher standards than "willing to lie about their degree on an online petition."
I'm not the originator of this quote, but I'll use it: Ice isn't political. It's not liberal or conservative. It doesn't take a poll. It doesn't ask permission. When it gets to a certain temperature it melts. And it's melting. Sea levels are up 3.5 inches since 1970 and are climbing at more than an inch per decade. That's significantly higher than model predictions. If you want to see a glacier in Glacier National Park, go soon.
You couldn't come up with better examples than milk and cars?
do you understand, why you can go to the grocery store and buy a couple gallons of milk for only a few bucks?
I don't know where you're living, but milk costs significantly more than $1.50 a gallon here. And last time I checked, the government regulated what can and can't be in milk, requires nutrition information to be on the carton, requires an ingredient list to include any additives, requires pasteurization of milk products, requires that products be marked with a "sell by" date, and requires that the dairy be inspected regularly. And, last time I checked, it would be illegal for a dairy to sign a contract with the city government giving them the exclusive right to sell milk in this city (at any price they wanted).
Yet, despite all that interference from government, there is a competitive market for milk. I'm sure the dairies complained about how government interference was going to drive them out of business when any of those "anti-business" regulations was proposed.
do you understand why your car, even if it's a crappy car, will still be a decent enough car?
Yes, and if it weren't for government regulation it would be a mufflerless, seatbeltless, airbagless car with no emissions controls burning leaded gasoline and getting 11 miles-per-gallon. I'm old enough to remember how each of those requirements was going to "destroy the auto industry". But what destroyed the American auto industry was building unreliable, gas guzzling, over-sized vehicles that nobody wanted to buy. How's that free market working out for ya?
Look at what's happened in medical care? prices have gone up tremendously. 50 years ago, there was no involvement and prices were lower, and people got the care they needed.
Again, where the hell have you been living? Fifty years ago medical care had more regulation, not less. Hospitals and insurance companies were highly regulated and were in many instances required to be non-profit. It was the deregulation of hospitals and insurance companies that started in the 1980s that started the current wave of costs spiraling out of control.
Again you are letting good stories containing what you want to believe get in the way of reality.
To translate: net neutrality is about removing the incentive of profit for innovation.
Yep, that's why nobody has ever been able to make money on the internet without artificially blocking their competition.
Go back to foxnews.com where they actually believe your cries that "Socialism is killing America!" Those of us who actually know what the word means and are smarter than a rock aren't buying your crap. Or you could pull your head out of your ass and actually read what the GP said.
We're not experiencing cooling right now (unless you think a single cooler year means we're in a long term cooling trend). That you think we are shows that you're getting your data from biased sources.
Just because it's colder today than it was yesterday doesn't mean spring is canceled.
I'm sorry, are you trying to say that it's ok to do shoddy science (yes, if you rely on bad software the science also becomes bad) just because your grants aren't large enough?
You are operating under a wrong assumption. You are assuming that only a professional developer can write code that functions properly and that there is no way to test whether a program is functioning properly. Moreover you are assuming that a typical software engineer would know whether 2nd order Runge-Kutta is sufficient for a problem or whether 4th order Runge-Kutta is required. Does a typical software engineer know when it's appropriate to add an artificial viscosity to a fluid mechanics problem? After all, if you look at the Euler equations, that would seem like an error. In interpolating across points in a spectrum, would you know why I'm weighting points by a sin() function rather than using straight linear interpolation? Is that an error or not? When is it proper? When is it improper?
A programmer might be adept at detecting off by one errors, but pre-existing tools and a graduate student can do the same thing.
But then, you have to have an intelligent and engaged public. Whups, no, we have a stupid, disengaged public that's grown stupider through 50 years of educator's inability to control their students and a required focus on self-esteem over actual learning.
Don't put all of the blame on the education system. You can put a hefty share of the blame on news media that decided that providing the information that citizens need in order to make rational decisions about governing wasn't profitable enough. You can also blame Ronald Reagan for pushing through the changes that allow the media to spew lies and pablum to increase their own power and wealth. Keeping people stupid and controllable is to the media's advantage.
What the article was describing was a situation where the accuracy of the results dropped from 6 significant figures to just 1.
But what they don't tell you is that the purpose of the program was to convert a floating point number between 0 (inclusive) and 10 (exclusive) into a truncated integer value.
I suggest letting the scientists do science - i.e the models - and let software engineers do the implementation.
Do you have any idea what an NSF review panel would do to my proposal if I suggested paying a programmer? It would not be pretty. An NSF budget in my field is less than 10% of a faculty member's salary, plus a grad student, and maybe a trip to a conference. There's no way we would get more than 10% of a programmers salary from an NSF grant. Unless we get 20 million people to suggest that congress raise their taxes to pay for scientific programmers.
What we're talking about here is programmers making sure the code is a perfect representation of the scientific formulas described by the research paper.
There's no such thing for any non trivial calculation. Do you, offhand know when it's best to use upstream derivatives versus standard derivatives versus downstream derivatives when solving a series of differential equations? There are is a very large number of techniques for calculating the gradient of a quantity in a time varying system. None is a perfect representation. To the untrained, both upstream and downstream derivatives look like an error, yet for many problems they are practically a requirement. Then there's the question of which method of integration to use.
In some cases the only way to figure out if your code is "correct" is to figure out if it approximates the solution to a problem that can be calculated analytically. Or in the case of climate modeling, whether it can come close to fitting past data.
There are benefits and drawbacks to releasing code. First, let me say I am a scientist, and I do release my code, primarily under the GPL unless I am contractually obligated by license agreements to do otherwise. The exception would be trivial single use code or limited use code. Despite that, I don't get a lot of eyes looking at my code.
Some people here have claimed that journal policies are a part of the problem. Not as far as code releases go. Journals don't publish code. I think there are real impediments to code release, even when most scientists would claim that the release is a good idea.
A large amount of code is written by students with limited programming experience. Therefore it is difficult to read, poorly commented, and poorly optimized. That's a strong argument that it should be released. But a lot of people would be embarrassed if that code was released. So there will be some push back. Especially by established, famous, and respected professors who really don't want their crappy code to be a source of ridicule.
A lot of large bodies of code are controlled by scientific consortia. A library for simulating particle accelerator collision products might have several hundred authors. In many of the files the authors will have placed a copyright statement naming themselves as the copyright holder, in others they may have named the institution they work for as the copyright holder. Since the code was donated to the consortium, the consortium can claim its members have the implied right to used the code. But the consortium probably can't release the code to the public, since it would need the permission of all authors (many of them deceased) and the institutions they were working for when they developed the code in question.
A lot of scientific programmers use code that they don't have a license to release. For example, we've all pulled a routine out of Numerical Recipes, because it was easy, did the job we wanted, and was fast enough. Oops, sorry, can't distribute that code. We've all used a GPL library in an application linked to closed source or limited distribution libraries. Oops, sorry, it's illegal to distribute that code. (Don't tell my University about this, because they'll make me consult with a lawyer before releasing any code.)
Scientists may, in general, be intelligent and well informed, but when it comes to the intricacies of licensing agreements and copyright law most don't have more than a very limited understanding.
A lot of scientists don't want to be scooped by competitors.
There are some people who think releasing code or making it available to colleagues works against the scientific method by discouraging reimplementation of an application for the purpose of replicating earlier results.
In the case of climate modeling code, I'm guessing that #2 is probably the biggest hurdle. In my code, #3 is probably the biggest hurdle, and it does take significant effort to work around it.
The FDA hasn't established limits on ethyl mercury and has several articles suggesting that the methyl mercury limits be used for chronic exposure. See my other post showing one daily exposure limit was being exceeded by 3x for a typical 6-month getting his vaccinations.
I know you're an idiot who likes to argue for no reason, but I will point out that a "daily exposure limit" is that amount you are allowed to be exposed to every day ad infinitum. To calculate an approximate single exposure limit you would take that daily limit and multiply it by the half life of the substance in the body.
The half life of methyl mercury in the body is about 80 days, so a single exposure limit would be about 80X the daily limit.
The half life of ethyl mercury in the body is about 8 days, so if the EPA actually determined a daily limit scientifically, you would expect it to be about 10X the daily limit for methyl mercury.
Friends of ours have a daughter who started descending into autism one week after the MMR vaccine.
As I point out here their daughter was already autistic. Most autistic children go through a period of regression around the time the MMR vaccine is usually given. This happens whether they get the vaccine or not and is not related to the vaccine.
110 million people got the swine flu vaccine. It is inevitable that some will die within a day of getting the vaccine. That doesn't mean the vaccine caused their deaths.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, centrifugal force plays an important role as well.
Other than the fact that centrifugal forces don't actually exist, you are right. Tidal forces are due to the difference in gravitational attraction at different distances from the attracting object. Centrifugal forces are a fiction invented to allow you to do physics in a non-inertial frame.
Tidal forces are due not just to gravity pulling on an object, but gravity from two different bodies pulling on an object. See, one body can not cause tidal forces.
That is so wrong, that there is no point in reading anything else in your post.
"Not significant at p = 0.05" means "not significant at p = 0.05". Or, given that p = 0.05 is the usual bound on statistical significance in even the fuzziest subjects, it means "not statistically significant."
If you went to your doctor and he said your symptoms indicate might have a fatal disease, but there was a less than a 95% chance you actually had it, would you want it to be treated?
You exclude the possibility that the model for AGW is flawed and that the climate is changing for other reasons. As folks here are fond of pointing out, correlation is not causation.
You don't need a model to deduce AGW, and it is not a correlation argument. The temperature of the earth is set is by the balance of incoming absorbed solar radiation and outgoing infrared radiation. The presence of imperfect absorption (i.e. reflection of light from clouds/snow/ground or absorption by particles in the stratosphere) and imperfect emission of infrared radiation due to absorption in the atmosphere below the stratosphere. CO2 has high infrared absorption. If you increase the absorption in the atmosphere without decreasing the amount of visible light absorbed near the ground the surface temperature necessarily rises.
It is there is some dependence of visible albedo and IR absorption with temperature. Increased temperature increases the H2O concentration of the atmosphere which increases the IR absorption by H2O and the albedo of the earth. It's very easy to show from first principles (assuming you have an undergrad degree in a physical science) that the combined H2O effects cannot offset the CO2 effect without leading to a temperature instability that would rapidly result in a planet covered with highly reflective ice or a run away greenhouse effect that would turn us into another Venus. That hasn't happened in the last billion years or so, so the effects of increased water vapor probably only slightly alter the CO2 effects unless temperature gets to such an extreme hot or cold point that the feedback mechanisms that stabilize temperature fail to work.
No models are necessary to show this... Just some basic math and a little understanding of geologic processes. The reason climate scientists use models is to try to predict how fast these effects will occur and what the effects on different parts of the globe will be in the short term.
Now you can choose not to believe this, just as you can choose not to believe in mathematics or in gravity. The equations don't care what you believe, nor does the planet.
I'm pretty sure climate will keep on changing regardless of our level of emissions, or presence on this planet. It was changing before we came along too.
Not even close to how fast it is changing now.
I may not be qualified to perform heart surgery, but I am qualified to tell you that using a chain saw is the wrong approach.
We're not talking about whether using a chain saw for heart surgery is a proper technique. We are talking about where to make the initial incision. Just because you are qualified to say that a chain saw is the wrong approach doesn't mean I'd trust you to know where to make the first cut.
"copenhagenclimatechallenge.org" has a, lets call it "unique," definition of "well qualified to comment on climate science". An MS in civil engineering... A retired civil engineering professor... An organic chemist... A botanist/author with lots of honorary degrees and an OBE... Quite a few Ph.D.s that don't give their field...
But even if they were all climatologists, 140 is a small fraction of the total. Their opinion doesn't have zero weight, but I don't give it more weight than actual climate simulations.
Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right. - Robert Parks
Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right. -- Robert Parks
The science of AGW is far more simple than you might think. It doesn't require climate models to prove the basics. It's just simple conservation of energy. The models are just there to investigate the details.
Apparently 31,000+ scientists are holding the same doubts as you: http://www.petitionproject.org/ but you know how it goes...
This is often cited, but very, very, very few of the 31,000+ signers are actually scientists. Even fewer have a degree in a field even remotely related to study of climate. Being a MD, a DVM, or a DDS doesn't preclude you from being a scientist, but very few of them actually are. Having a Ph.D. in Religious Studies doesn't make you a scientist. Not to mention that they don't verify the credentials of the signers at all. If you want to call them scientists, you need higher standards than "willing to lie about their degree on an online petition."
I'm not the originator of this quote, but I'll use it: Ice isn't political. It's not liberal or conservative. It doesn't take a poll. It doesn't ask permission. When it gets to a certain temperature it melts. And it's melting. Sea levels are up 3.5 inches since 1970 and are climbing at more than an inch per decade. That's significantly higher than model predictions. If you want to see a glacier in Glacier National Park, go soon.
do you understand, why you can go to the grocery store and buy a couple gallons of milk for only a few bucks?
I don't know where you're living, but milk costs significantly more than $1.50 a gallon here. And last time I checked, the government regulated what can and can't be in milk, requires nutrition information to be on the carton, requires an ingredient list to include any additives, requires pasteurization of milk products, requires that products be marked with a "sell by" date, and requires that the dairy be inspected regularly. And, last time I checked, it would be illegal for a dairy to sign a contract with the city government giving them the exclusive right to sell milk in this city (at any price they wanted).
Yet, despite all that interference from government, there is a competitive market for milk. I'm sure the dairies complained about how government interference was going to drive them out of business when any of those "anti-business" regulations was proposed.
do you understand why your car, even if it's a crappy car, will still be a decent enough car?
Yes, and if it weren't for government regulation it would be a mufflerless, seatbeltless, airbagless car with no emissions controls burning leaded gasoline and getting 11 miles-per-gallon. I'm old enough to remember how each of those requirements was going to "destroy the auto industry". But what destroyed the American auto industry was building unreliable, gas guzzling, over-sized vehicles that nobody wanted to buy. How's that free market working out for ya?
Look at what's happened in medical care? prices have gone up tremendously. 50 years ago, there was no involvement and prices were lower, and people got the care they needed.
Again, where the hell have you been living? Fifty years ago medical care had more regulation, not less. Hospitals and insurance companies were highly regulated and were in many instances required to be non-profit. It was the deregulation of hospitals and insurance companies that started in the 1980s that started the current wave of costs spiraling out of control.
Again you are letting good stories containing what you want to believe get in the way of reality.
Never attribute to laziness what might better be attributable to avarice, greed, and malice.
Spoken like a true believer. Never let reality get in the way of a good story.
To translate: net neutrality is about removing the incentive of profit for innovation.
Yep, that's why nobody has ever been able to make money on the internet without artificially blocking their competition.
Go back to foxnews.com where they actually believe your cries that "Socialism is killing America!" Those of us who actually know what the word means and are smarter than a rock aren't buying your crap. Or you could pull your head out of your ass and actually read what the GP said.
First, if they all do this at the same time that suggests collusion, which is a violation of existing anti-trust laws.
And when is the last time you saw those laws enforced?
We're not experiencing cooling right now (unless you think a single cooler year means we're in a long term cooling trend). That you think we are shows that you're getting your data from biased sources.
Just because it's colder today than it was yesterday doesn't mean spring is canceled.
I'm sorry, are you trying to say that it's ok to do shoddy science (yes, if you rely on bad software the science also becomes bad) just because your grants aren't large enough?
You are operating under a wrong assumption. You are assuming that only a professional developer can write code that functions properly and that there is no way to test whether a program is functioning properly. Moreover you are assuming that a typical software engineer would know whether 2nd order Runge-Kutta is sufficient for a problem or whether 4th order Runge-Kutta is required. Does a typical software engineer know when it's appropriate to add an artificial viscosity to a fluid mechanics problem? After all, if you look at the Euler equations, that would seem like an error. In interpolating across points in a spectrum, would you know why I'm weighting points by a sin() function rather than using straight linear interpolation? Is that an error or not? When is it proper? When is it improper?
A programmer might be adept at detecting off by one errors, but pre-existing tools and a graduate student can do the same thing.
But then, you have to have an intelligent and engaged public. Whups, no, we have a stupid, disengaged public that's grown stupider through 50 years of educator's inability to control their students and a required focus on self-esteem over actual learning.
Don't put all of the blame on the education system. You can put a hefty share of the blame on news media that decided that providing the information that citizens need in order to make rational decisions about governing wasn't profitable enough. You can also blame Ronald Reagan for pushing through the changes that allow the media to spew lies and pablum to increase their own power and wealth. Keeping people stupid and controllable is to the media's advantage.
If only there was an institution where the states could have a voice on Federal legislation.....
I don't think you've been watching the senate lately if you think states have a voice there.
What the article was describing was a situation where the accuracy of the results dropped from 6 significant figures to just 1.
But what they don't tell you is that the purpose of the program was to convert a floating point number between 0 (inclusive) and 10 (exclusive) into a truncated integer value.
And the predictions made to date have been, in fact, wrong.
What universe are you living in? The globe is warming rapidly in the universe the rest of us inhabit.
I suggest letting the scientists do science - i.e the models - and let software engineers do the implementation.
Do you have any idea what an NSF review panel would do to my proposal if I suggested paying a programmer? It would not be pretty. An NSF budget in my field is less than 10% of a faculty member's salary, plus a grad student, and maybe a trip to a conference. There's no way we would get more than 10% of a programmers salary from an NSF grant. Unless we get 20 million people to suggest that congress raise their taxes to pay for scientific programmers.
What we're talking about here is programmers making sure the code is a perfect representation of the scientific formulas described by the research paper.
There's no such thing for any non trivial calculation. Do you, offhand know when it's best to use upstream derivatives versus standard derivatives versus downstream derivatives when solving a series of differential equations? There are is a very large number of techniques for calculating the gradient of a quantity in a time varying system. None is a perfect representation. To the untrained, both upstream and downstream derivatives look like an error, yet for many problems they are practically a requirement. Then there's the question of which method of integration to use.
In some cases the only way to figure out if your code is "correct" is to figure out if it approximates the solution to a problem that can be calculated analytically. Or in the case of climate modeling, whether it can come close to fitting past data.
Damn slashdot and its awful posting interface.
There are benefits and drawbacks to releasing code. First, let me say I am a scientist, and I do release my code, primarily under the GPL unless I am contractually obligated by license agreements to do otherwise. The exception would be trivial single use code or limited use code. Despite that, I don't get a lot of eyes looking at my code.
Some people here have claimed that journal policies are a part of the problem. Not as far as code releases go. Journals don't publish code. I think there are real impediments to code release, even when most scientists would claim that the release is a good idea.
In the case of climate modeling code, I'm guessing that #2 is probably the biggest hurdle. In my code, #3 is probably the biggest hurdle, and it does take significant effort to work around it.
The FDA hasn't established limits on ethyl mercury and has several articles suggesting that the methyl mercury limits be used for chronic exposure. See my other post showing one daily exposure limit was being exceeded by 3x for a typical 6-month getting his vaccinations.
I know you're an idiot who likes to argue for no reason, but I will point out that a "daily exposure limit" is that amount you are allowed to be exposed to every day ad infinitum. To calculate an approximate single exposure limit you would take that daily limit and multiply it by the half life of the substance in the body.
The half life of methyl mercury in the body is about 80 days, so a single exposure limit would be about 80X the daily limit.
The half life of ethyl mercury in the body is about 8 days, so if the EPA actually determined a daily limit scientifically, you would expect it to be about 10X the daily limit for methyl mercury.
Friends of ours have a daughter who started descending into autism one week after the MMR vaccine.
As I point out here their daughter was already autistic. Most autistic children go through a period of regression around the time the MMR vaccine is usually given. This happens whether they get the vaccine or not and is not related to the vaccine.
110 million people got the swine flu vaccine. It is inevitable that some will die within a day of getting the vaccine. That doesn't mean the vaccine caused their deaths.