Just about any end-user service currently under contract is likely to be pulled back to see if the agency can do it cheaper. So then you get management, unsure what hardware and personnel are required, but with a strong motivation to under budget.
It's not federal government agencies that redistribute wealth amongst the states. It's Congress, usually driven by the fact that one whiny Senator from a fly-over state can block any legislation until he gets a pay off.
No. The official Christian Right position is that gay people are actually straight people who give in to that uncontrollable desire to have gay sex that good Christians have. If you're straight and you don't feel compelled to have gay sex, you are abnormal. That's why you'll never be made the Pastor of a megachurch.
Surely they aren't climate scientists who's entire livelihood depends on global warming continuing to be accepted as real and dangerous.
That bogus argument again. Climate scientists are not employed because of global warming. Most are college professors with tenure. If they don't get grants they teach (and they don't get graduate students because they can't pay them). But if there's not global warming they'll still get grants to do climate modeling. So, what does your livelyhood depend on?
Show me the physical chemistry argument for how CO2 forces increases in heat retention in a wet atmosphere.
It's not a chemistry argument, it's a physics argument. If you increase the CO2 level the infrared opacity of the atmosphere is increased due to the absorption bands of the CO2 molecule. Visible light striking the ground is absorbed and re-radiated in the infrared. Some fraction of that infrared radiation is absorbed by the CO2 absorption bands, which traps heat in the atmosphere. The rest escapes to space. (I'm not going to teach you radiative transfer which would give a more rigerous mathematical description of the process).
The trapped heat increases the temperature also allows the air to hold more water vapor which means there more gas phase water in the atmosphere. Water also has IR bands, so the increased water vapor stimulated by the increased CO2 also increases the trapping of heat in the lower atmosphere.
Not one person has ever done that. All I have every heard are appeals to authority and ad hominem.
What the hell is wrong with being skeptical? It offends your world view?
What you're doing isn't being skeptical. It's ignoring the evidence because it doesn't match the conclusions you want. With the current state of the evidence, climate change skepticism is about as reasonable as being skeptical of the rhinovirus virus theory of the common cold.
Divesting from South Africa was required by state law. I believe that tobacco company divestiture was also required by state law. But Tea Party gots ta think anything dats da state govmint is da Pinko. Frankly I'd rather have CALPERS managing my money than Lehman Brothers. Just imagine who the Tea Party would turn that $236 billion over to, at a cool 2% a year management fee no less.
What they're doing here is not different from standard practice. Every year they make a "focus list" of companies that are in danger of becoming bad investments and they decide whether to seek management changes or divest. This year, News Corp would be on that list for obvious reasons: nepotism and violations of the law combined with an incomprehensible business model. Would you prefer the just sold their shares rather than trying to make management changes?
BTW, News Corp won't be the only company on that list.
Unfortunately, CALPers seems to get into this "politics is more important than fiduciary responsibility to our members" mode these days.
It's a good thing they don't put anonymous cowards in charge of large pension funds. You do realize that if Murdoch isn't managing News Corp properly and is encouraging nepotism and law breaking as corporate policy, then it is only right that they should push hard for a management change. This might not be as political as you think. Go to the CALPERS wikipedia page and read about the "focus list".
BTW, I seem to recall that divesting from South Africa was required by state law, and not volunteered by CALPERS. Wouldn't want reality to get in the way of a tea party legend.
If News Corp were to go bankrupt, CALPERS would not be badly affected. It's not like CALPERS has 90% of its $236 billion in assets in News Corp. It's also not like CALPERS goes around endangering its asset values just for the hell of it.
Let me put this is a way the real Wyatt Earp would understand. Your argument is "People used to die before there were guns, therefore the smoking gun in my hand and the bullet hole in his chest cannot be used as evidence. He obviously died of natural causes."
I too admit I'm ambivalent. Certainly, there may be man-made effects involved, but how involved? More than solar cycles, or any number of other phenomena? Is it AGM, or just another natural process or cycle we've not previously run across?
At this point being ambivalent is the equivalent of never having bothered to check it out. Or really being a denier and just pretending to be ambivalent just to make people think you're objective. Since you threw in Al Gore as the sample "shady characters" but didn't mention Lehman Brothers or Oil Companies or the Koch Brothers, I'm guessing your ambivalence is a sham.
If you wanted the scientific evidence, it's not easy to find, because of all the sham sites (wattsupwiththat, ourcivilization.com, globalwarminghysteria). But if you stick to actual scientists and government agencies it's there. Realclimate and skepticalscience have distilled the evidence down pretty well. This page is a good starting point.
And nobody is seriously proposing kicking dust into the upper atmosphere. Although in 150 years, when we've done nothing because rich assholes like to make money too much, it may get to the point where such drastic measures are the only survivable options.
Al Gore's carbon trading system isn't a very good solution. It was proposed because it was the only solution Republicans would go for, and their friends on Wall St. could suck money out of it the way they suck money out of all the other commodities markets. Of course they've changed their minds since then. They'd rather rely on Jesus to save us than see Al Gore make a buck. If the Koch Brothers had gotten in on the ground floor of the carbon trading market, it would have been implemented by now.
A revenue neutral carbon tax is a much better way (although the carbontax.org version of that isn't quite what I would choose).
While they may be doing things that normally would take place on the KC-135 (aka the "Vomit Comet") that NASA has operated in the past, it mainly is being used to replace the sounding rocket research.... which often went to the same altitudes which SS2 is expected to be reaching.
And its not much good for that, either. Basically it's only good for experiments that can operate in an oxygen nitrogen environment pressurized at a bit less than one atmosphere. Basically biology experiments. Unless you're going to send up a vacuum chamber complete with pumps, that is. With a person aboard and with significant aerodynamic forces throughout the ride, I wouldn't think its stable enough for most microgravity experiments.
I believe cost per mass is pretty good at $2500/kg for 590kg, but SS2 doesn't go very high.
But then again, I work on instruments where I need direct exposure to space and apogees near 400km. The idea that $4.5M of the suborbital budget is going to this has me worried that there will be less available for sounding rockets. I doubt this is coming out of the balloon budget.
Or I could head to the iTunes store where the music I want is available at the same price.
Or you could head to amazon.com where most of the songs that are $1.29 on iTunes are $0.99 and the songs that are $0.99 on iTunes are $0.79. Except the Beatles, who are iTunes exclusive.
But as for your last example - does anyone still use CDs? Really?
I think you missed the point. If you've got all the Beatles CDs (I do) you've already ripped them to MP3s and you don't need to buy them from iTunes or anywhere else. Same for anything else you've already got. So who cares which online store has the stuff you already have? Online music stores are for stuff you don't already have. Except, of course, for the idiots that have to rebuy their music because they can't figure out how else to get it on their iPod. I know people like that and surprisingly they aren't all in their 70s.
Don't forget, you need to get authorization to take each iPill through the iTunes store. The authorization will be downloaded into the pill using a cable which costs $200, and will be usable for nothing else. Apple was considering using USB, but the company was worried that might cause excessive convenience.
Now, if you used the iCloud APIs and wrote an app that did...
I guess the question is, why would you bother? There are already cloud storage providers that utilize file system APIs to allow existing apps that aren't even cloud aware to do the same thing.
I guess I've always had that problem with Apple:
Fanboi: "Check out this new thing."
Me: "I'm already doing that for 20% less cost, and I don't have to do my banking through iTunes."
Fanboi: "But I started using iTunes five years ago, and I've been waiting for it to finish cataloguing my music collection since then, so I might as well use it for banking. Besides integration is good."
Me: "Why don't you use decent music software?"
Fanboi: "I have to use iTunes in order buy music from the iTunes store."
Me: "There are other music stores, and they're usually 20% cheaper than iTunes."
Fanboi: "If you have an iPod you should buy from the iTunes store."
Me: "Why?"
Fanboi: "It's integrated with iTunes. Plus they have the Beatles."
Me: "But iTunes sucks. And doesn't everyone who wants to listen to the Beatles already have all of their music on CD?" and so on.
It looks to me like Google trying to make a more generally appealing, manageable follow-on to the Google social media offering that preceeded Facebook.
That's really not enough to make G+ a good social network that people will use. What attracted people to Facebook, back in the day, was that it was really two way social media with a symmetric network with lots of user specific customization. But then along came Twitter with its exceptionally asymmetric model. When it got to about 1% the size of Facebook, Zuckerberg said lets do that, and started getting rid of all the Facebook features that we liked: walls, notes, tabs, apps that would customize our walls and interact with our friends.
If G+ wants users, that's where it should head. The space Facebook discarded. Divide circles into incoming, outgoing, and bidirectional. Co-opt the old Facebook app model and allow us to make profile pages and tabs with customized apps/images/badges. Add automatic export of posts, notes and photos to other social networks. Automatic RSS blog import. Devise a G+ API that we can make interesting apps with that aren't games.
You never learn. I'm guessing that's primarily because you don't want to.
You've got a temperature envelope on real climate that could *cool* ever 10 years and still fit!
Look at it and see for yourself. IT HASN'T BEEN COOLING! And short duration (less than a decade or two) cooling is not necessarily inconsistent with global warming because we don't have absolute knowledge of heat content of the oceans. (Sometimes it is inconsistent with global warming, but not always). A warm day in winter doesn't falsify seasons.
And now that current sea level rise rates have been shown to mismatch the models, what is your next step?
a) assume the models are falsified, and start from new assumptions;
You really don't understand how science works. You look at the possibilities to explain the difference. Sea level has been rising much more rapidly than expected. The obvious reason is that the oceans are warmer than we predicted. The water has expanded more that models from 12 years ago anticipated because of that. The rising waters have turned some land ice into floating ice. The amount of sea ice has also decreased more rapidly than expected because of that.
So yes, the models are falsified, and we build new models using what have learned (more rapid heat transfer to the oceans, slightly less mixing of surface with subsurface waters) and try to match the observations. So why aren't you worried that our models significantly underpredicted the amount of warming? Oh yeah, that's because you think that we're cooling. Now that your assumption has been falsified, what do you do? Let me guess: make the same claims again tomorrow despite all evidence to the contrary.
In regards to warming trend over the past 15 years, and how well models predicted it:
Because you only read the works of liars, all you get is lies. A better reference is here. We are well within the forecast temperature envelope. But models do significantly underpredict current sea level rise rates.
You've made the assertion that you know, with absolute certainty, the ratio of non-natural forcing to natural forcings.
I have made no such assertion. As usual you are misrepresenting what I say. What I have essentially said is that we can measure the temperature change over time and we know how the human caused forcings have varied over time. The total natural forcings can be determined from those two items. It's a bit more complicated than simple subtraction, but it's a well understood procedure.
There's no way to know anything with absolute certainty, but with high probability (P>98%), the anthropogenic forcings are much larger in magnitude than the natural forcings. And it is likely (P>70%) that the natural forcings have decreased in the last 50 years.
Speculation. There are myriad natural forcings we don't have any reasonable quantification for (which is really part of the problem).
Not speculation. You don't need to quantify the myriad natural forcings. We can determine the sum of the natural forcings without knowing each individual one. If you have 85 cents, you don't need to know how many dimes you have to know if you can buy a candy bar.
[ many lies from wattsupwiththat.com ]
As I said before, Watts' site is deliberate misinformation. It distorts articles to make unsubstantiated points and ignores contradictory information. And you apparently cant tell the difference between a total and a rate of change.
Slashdot Mirror
Just about any end-user service currently under contract is likely to be pulled back to see if the agency can do it cheaper. So then you get management, unsure what hardware and personnel are required, but with a strong motivation to under budget.
Was the sugar in the form of an energy drink or something else caffeinated?
They've got a mumps epidemic in northern California, too.
It's not federal government agencies that redistribute wealth amongst the states. It's Congress, usually driven by the fact that one whiny Senator from a fly-over state can block any legislation until he gets a pay off.
gays are the products of Satan.
No. The official Christian Right position is that gay people are actually straight people who give in to that uncontrollable desire to have gay sex that good Christians have. If you're straight and you don't feel compelled to have gay sex, you are abnormal. That's why you'll never be made the Pastor of a megachurch.
Surely they aren't climate scientists who's entire livelihood depends on global warming continuing to be accepted as real and dangerous.
That bogus argument again. Climate scientists are not employed because of global warming. Most are college professors with tenure. If they don't get grants they teach (and they don't get graduate students because they can't pay them). But if there's not global warming they'll still get grants to do climate modeling. So, what does your livelyhood depend on?
Show me the physical chemistry argument for how CO2 forces increases in heat retention in a wet atmosphere.
It's not a chemistry argument, it's a physics argument. If you increase the CO2 level the infrared opacity of the atmosphere is increased due to the absorption bands of the CO2 molecule. Visible light striking the ground is absorbed and re-radiated in the infrared. Some fraction of that infrared radiation is absorbed by the CO2 absorption bands, which traps heat in the atmosphere. The rest escapes to space. (I'm not going to teach you radiative transfer which would give a more rigerous mathematical description of the process).
The trapped heat increases the temperature also allows the air to hold more water vapor which means there more gas phase water in the atmosphere. Water also has IR bands, so the increased water vapor stimulated by the increased CO2 also increases the trapping of heat in the lower atmosphere.
Not one person has ever done that. All I have every heard are appeals to authority and ad hominem.
I just did.
Yes, using the truth to fight lies can be considered propaganda. If you prefer the lies that is.
What the hell is wrong with being skeptical? It offends your world view?
What you're doing isn't being skeptical. It's ignoring the evidence because it doesn't match the conclusions you want. With the current state of the evidence, climate change skepticism is about as reasonable as being skeptical of the rhinovirus virus theory of the common cold.
Divesting from South Africa was required by state law. I believe that tobacco company divestiture was also required by state law. But Tea Party gots ta think anything dats da state govmint is da Pinko. Frankly I'd rather have CALPERS managing my money than Lehman Brothers. Just imagine who the Tea Party would turn that $236 billion over to, at a cool 2% a year management fee no less.
What they're doing here is not different from standard practice. Every year they make a "focus list" of companies that are in danger of becoming bad investments and they decide whether to seek management changes or divest. This year, News Corp would be on that list for obvious reasons: nepotism and violations of the law combined with an incomprehensible business model. Would you prefer the just sold their shares rather than trying to make management changes?
BTW, News Corp won't be the only company on that list.
Unfortunately, CALPers seems to get into this "politics is more important than fiduciary responsibility to our members" mode these days.
It's a good thing they don't put anonymous cowards in charge of large pension funds. You do realize that if Murdoch isn't managing News Corp properly and is encouraging nepotism and law breaking as corporate policy, then it is only right that they should push hard for a management change. This might not be as political as you think. Go to the CALPERS wikipedia page and read about the "focus list".
BTW, I seem to recall that divesting from South Africa was required by state law, and not volunteered by CALPERS. Wouldn't want reality to get in the way of a tea party legend.
If News Corp were to go bankrupt, CALPERS would not be badly affected. It's not like CALPERS has 90% of its $236 billion in assets in News Corp. It's also not like CALPERS goes around endangering its asset values just for the hell of it.
Let me put this is a way the real Wyatt Earp would understand. Your argument is "People used to die before there were guns, therefore the smoking gun in my hand and the bullet hole in his chest cannot be used as evidence. He obviously died of natural causes."
Reality refuses to be that silly. Human CO2 emissions are driving current climate change. That doesn't mean there aren't natural processes that change climate, too. They are even operating now. They are smaller than those caused by humans. Natural climate change in the past proves that climate is sensitive to an energy imbalance. If the planet accumulates heat, global temperatures will go up. Currently, CO2 released by human activity is imposing an energy imbalance due to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Past climate change actually provides evidence for our climate's sensitivity to CO2.
I too admit I'm ambivalent. Certainly, there may be man-made effects involved, but how involved? More than solar cycles, or any number of other phenomena? Is it AGM, or just another natural process or cycle we've not previously run across?
At this point being ambivalent is the equivalent of never having bothered to check it out. Or really being a denier and just pretending to be ambivalent just to make people think you're objective. Since you threw in Al Gore as the sample "shady characters" but didn't mention Lehman Brothers or Oil Companies or the Koch Brothers, I'm guessing your ambivalence is a sham.
If you wanted the scientific evidence, it's not easy to find, because of all the sham sites (wattsupwiththat, ourcivilization.com, globalwarminghysteria). But if you stick to actual scientists and government agencies it's there. Realclimate and skepticalscience have distilled the evidence down pretty well. This page is a good starting point.
It's not the sun or volcanos. Temperatures have not been declining. Climate models have done a good job of predicting temperature, and they can only do a good job of matching past temperatures and predicting future temperatures if human greenhouse gas emissions are included. The negative effects of global warming outweigh the positive.
And nobody is seriously proposing kicking dust into the upper atmosphere. Although in 150 years, when we've done nothing because rich assholes like to make money too much, it may get to the point where such drastic measures are the only survivable options.
Al Gore's carbon trading system isn't a very good solution. It was proposed because it was the only solution Republicans would go for, and their friends on Wall St. could suck money out of it the way they suck money out of all the other commodities markets. Of course they've changed their minds since then. They'd rather rely on Jesus to save us than see Al Gore make a buck. If the Koch Brothers had gotten in on the ground floor of the carbon trading market, it would have been implemented by now.
A revenue neutral carbon tax is a much better way (although the carbontax.org version of that isn't quite what I would choose).
Seriously, we should have started doing this in the 1950's.
We have been. Thanks for noticing.
While they may be doing things that normally would take place on the KC-135 (aka the "Vomit Comet") that NASA has operated in the past, it mainly is being used to replace the sounding rocket research.... which often went to the same altitudes which SS2 is expected to be reaching.
And its not much good for that, either. Basically it's only good for experiments that can operate in an oxygen nitrogen environment pressurized at a bit less than one atmosphere. Basically biology experiments. Unless you're going to send up a vacuum chamber complete with pumps, that is. With a person aboard and with significant aerodynamic forces throughout the ride, I wouldn't think its stable enough for most microgravity experiments.
I believe cost per mass is pretty good at $2500/kg for 590kg, but SS2 doesn't go very high.
But then again, I work on instruments where I need direct exposure to space and apogees near 400km. The idea that $4.5M of the suborbital budget is going to this has me worried that there will be less available for sounding rockets. I doubt this is coming out of the balloon budget.
NASA chartered flights to low earth orbit.
No. Spaceship two is not orbital. It's suborbital.
Or I could head to the iTunes store where the music I want is available at the same price.
Or you could head to amazon.com where most of the songs that are $1.29 on iTunes are $0.99 and the songs that are $0.99 on iTunes are $0.79. Except the Beatles, who are iTunes exclusive.
But as for your last example - does anyone still use CDs? Really?
I think you missed the point. If you've got all the Beatles CDs (I do) you've already ripped them to MP3s and you don't need to buy them from iTunes or anywhere else. Same for anything else you've already got. So who cares which online store has the stuff you already have? Online music stores are for stuff you don't already have. Except, of course, for the idiots that have to rebuy their music because they can't figure out how else to get it on their iPod. I know people like that and surprisingly they aren't all in their 70s.
Yeah, cause its never happened to anyone else before...
Don't forget, you need to get authorization to take each iPill through the iTunes store. The authorization will be downloaded into the pill using a cable which costs $200, and will be usable for nothing else. Apple was considering using USB, but the company was worried that might cause excessive convenience.
And bets on how long it is before Apple de-lists the DropBox iPhone app because it duplicates functionality?
Now, if you used the iCloud APIs and wrote an app that did...
I guess the question is, why would you bother? There are already cloud storage providers that utilize file system APIs to allow existing apps that aren't even cloud aware to do the same thing.
I guess I've always had that problem with Apple:
Fanboi: "Check out this new thing."
Me: "I'm already doing that for 20% less cost, and I don't have to do my banking through iTunes."
Fanboi: "But I started using iTunes five years ago, and I've been waiting for it to finish cataloguing my music collection since then, so I might as well use it for banking. Besides integration is good."
Me: "Why don't you use decent music software?"
Fanboi: "I have to use iTunes in order buy music from the iTunes store."
Me: "There are other music stores, and they're usually 20% cheaper than iTunes."
Fanboi: "If you have an iPod you should buy from the iTunes store."
Me: "Why?"
Fanboi: "It's integrated with iTunes. Plus they have the Beatles."
Me: "But iTunes sucks. And doesn't everyone who wants to listen to the Beatles already have all of their music on CD?" and so on.
Of course! Apple never fails at anything. They just didn't want to succeed in the first place.
goes back to measuring the time constant for the decay of the reality distortion field.
It looks to me like Google trying to make a more generally appealing, manageable follow-on to the Google social media offering that preceeded Facebook.
That's really not enough to make G+ a good social network that people will use. What attracted people to Facebook, back in the day, was that it was really two way social media with a symmetric network with lots of user specific customization. But then along came Twitter with its exceptionally asymmetric model. When it got to about 1% the size of Facebook, Zuckerberg said lets do that, and started getting rid of all the Facebook features that we liked: walls, notes, tabs, apps that would customize our walls and interact with our friends.
If G+ wants users, that's where it should head. The space Facebook discarded. Divide circles into incoming, outgoing, and bidirectional. Co-opt the old Facebook app model and allow us to make profile pages and tabs with customized apps/images/badges. Add automatic export of posts, notes and photos to other social networks. Automatic RSS blog import. Devise a G+ API that we can make interesting apps with that aren't games.
You've got a temperature envelope on real climate that could *cool* ever 10 years and still fit!
Look at it and see for yourself. IT HASN'T BEEN COOLING! And short duration (less than a decade or two) cooling is not necessarily inconsistent with global warming because we don't have absolute knowledge of heat content of the oceans. (Sometimes it is inconsistent with global warming, but not always). A warm day in winter doesn't falsify seasons.
And now that current sea level rise rates have been shown to mismatch the models, what is your next step? a) assume the models are falsified, and start from new assumptions;
You really don't understand how science works. You look at the possibilities to explain the difference. Sea level has been rising much more rapidly than expected. The obvious reason is that the oceans are warmer than we predicted. The water has expanded more that models from 12 years ago anticipated because of that. The rising waters have turned some land ice into floating ice. The amount of sea ice has also decreased more rapidly than expected because of that.
So yes, the models are falsified, and we build new models using what have learned (more rapid heat transfer to the oceans, slightly less mixing of surface with subsurface waters) and try to match the observations. So why aren't you worried that our models significantly underpredicted the amount of warming? Oh yeah, that's because you think that we're cooling. Now that your assumption has been falsified, what do you do? Let me guess: make the same claims again tomorrow despite all evidence to the contrary.
In regards to warming trend over the past 15 years, and how well models predicted it:
Because you only read the works of liars, all you get is lies. A better reference is here. We are well within the forecast temperature envelope. But models do significantly underpredict current sea level rise rates.
You've made the assertion that you know, with absolute certainty, the ratio of non-natural forcing to natural forcings.
I have made no such assertion. As usual you are misrepresenting what I say. What I have essentially said is that we can measure the temperature change over time and we know how the human caused forcings have varied over time. The total natural forcings can be determined from those two items. It's a bit more complicated than simple subtraction, but it's a well understood procedure.
There's no way to know anything with absolute certainty, but with high probability (P>98%), the anthropogenic forcings are much larger in magnitude than the natural forcings. And it is likely (P>70%) that the natural forcings have decreased in the last 50 years.
The expected warming trend for the past 15 years hasn't been there, period.
Why do you keep repeating this lie? The warming has continued.
Speculation. There are myriad natural forcings we don't have any reasonable quantification for (which is really part of the problem).
Not speculation. You don't need to quantify the myriad natural forcings. We can determine the sum of the natural forcings without knowing each individual one. If you have 85 cents, you don't need to know how many dimes you have to know if you can buy a candy bar.
[ many lies from wattsupwiththat.com ]
As I said before, Watts' site is deliberate misinformation. It distorts articles to make unsubstantiated points and ignores contradictory information. And you apparently cant tell the difference between a total and a rate of change.