That's not just a boss, that was an *owner*, and that was in the 1980s. There were still relics of the J Jonah Jameson era around then.
The only CAD guys I worked with were in Tool and Die, and that was a shop work ethic. The office workers held the same work ethic as the shop floor. When you hear your buzzer, you're working. When you hear the buzzer, you're on break. You're late? You get reprimanded. It happens a few times? You're fired. It's a simple system, rigid, respectable, but nothing like a normal office environment. You're not a knowledge worker, you're a skilled labourer. Replaceable.
If you're walking *out* of the lunch room when everyone else is walking *in*, that's enough to get reprimanded. You obviously left your desk before the buzzer. You talk back to the boss when he reprimands you about it? He talks to the owner. You talk back to the owner? You're fired.
You can't make a personal call, smoke a cigarette, get a pepsi or go to the toilet unless you're on break.
Create multiple websites about you. In one, you were a beer-drinking guy who moved to the Barbados. Not you.
In another, you authored multiple books and magazine columns. Might be you.
A few more randomly generated ones and some near-look-alikes and you're done. They won't know what to believe. Oh and set a tracker on the websites, so you can see which ones your prospective employer visited (ID them by their IP)
The Feynman Lectures on Physics put it very well on the subject of Newtonian mechanics vs. special relativity:
"... A true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in practice one might think that the new law makes no significant difference. well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly forget it and use the simple constant mass law as a good approximation. But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more wrong we are."
Then we need to get in contact with Tehran. Hmmm... How to do that?
You know, what we should do is ask Tehran to send people over who speak our language and understand our culture. It'd be such a nice gesture that we should probably give them a place to stay. Maybe they can be put up in the former Iranian embassy. They have lots of tea and a mosque there. Heaps of Persian literature and discount phones to Tehran too.
We can negotiate with the people in this embassy for the release of the dipolmats. They can call Tehran and set up meetings and stuff.
"...people are acting like dogs in heat, trying to mate with anything that moves"
If you're under 18, somebody might have just lured you into talking graphically about sex. This whole thread is a luring incident.
The way I understand this is the law extends "luring" into areas where you're doing stuff like encouraging kids to engage in cybersex, send photos of themselves, stuff like that. It doesn't matter if there is absolutely no intent to ever meet them.
"1) Impose some centralized authority to control our growth and resource consumption."
You just paraphrased the OPEC mission statement:
"OPEC's mission is to coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital to those investing in the petroleum industry." http://www.opec.org/home/
Without getting into tit-for-tat, it's all personal experience. I'll add though that this is what a climate-zone is: http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/environment/forest/forestcanada/planthardi Individually, I could say "yeah, that's probably just a local effect." Together, all these anecdotes put together, I have to say "hmm, something's odd." Maybe other people have some anecdotes here too.
There seems to be a large number of people here who think there's a bias towards a global warming conspiracy. That somehow there's political and financial wealth to be made by spreading lies about this stuff. I don't understand how that could be the case. Just to be clear, I don't think there's any conspiracy at all. None.
Big money stands behind the business-as-usual angle. Why? They're making big money. Is that a conspiracy? No. Car companies want less regulation about cars, oil companies want less regulation over oil, this is not conspiracy, these are the personal interests of individual market leaders.
So who's standing behind the let's-change-business-as-usual angle? Critics seem to be torn. It's either politicians and scientists with a messiah complex, or a leftie government tax grab. Maybe it's both.
They're pretty wicked accusations, and up until the CRU information was released, there really wasn't much merit to the idea. I don't think a lot of people have gone 180 over the results though. Critics are congratulating themselves, and climate change scientists and activists are saying "WTF?"
As for the actual deception of the CRU, I can't find a lot of good info about what was said. The "hack" was filtered, insteaad of putting the whole of the emails up on bittorrent, it seems information was cherry-picked. Go check the Pirate Bay http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5172267/Leaked_Hadley_CRU_Emails._PST_(Outlook)_Format.. This is 4MB... that's not a lot of data. It's hard for me to understand what was omitted.
The critics seem to be saying that it looks like some guys have some tree-ring-thickness to temperature data which correlates up until the 1960s. After over 100 years of correlation, the tree ring data diverges from the instrumental data. Trees aren't growing as fast. Not sure why.
In the last graph, you can see that the data stops around 1960. There's divergence there and the temperature may have dropped.
Think about that. What did the programmer do to make the tree-data fit the measurement data? Correct me if I'm wrong, but he changed the tree-ring information after 1960.
I think the question should be "why does the tree-ring data correlate with the measured temperature data between 1880 and 1960, and then suddenly diverge?" and not into accusations of lies, messiah complexes and funding grabs.
My personal experiences... they're anecdotes. They're in line with the instrumental data. The instrumental data is NOT in question, if you doubt it, I'm sure you can find microfilms of temperature reports in newspapers going back to the 1800s. Our temperature increases are looking pretty remarkable. What does it mean?
Even reading between the lines on the right-wing blogs, from what I can tell, some programmer force-fit tree ring data to modern instrumental data. The problem was not that the instrumental data was inaccurate, but that the tree ring data didn't correlate with the instrumental data.
I'm curious why the tree ring data wouldn't correlate. But I don't have an undergrad in climate science, so I can't really comment other than to say that it's damned odd. I did study some anthropology and I know from that it's probably best to read a full report and not just the conclusion when you're going to make assumptions based on tree rings or carbon dating. In this case, I haven't seen the full reports laying about.
But yeah, for scientists, I think this is all business as usual. The journalists and politicians need to read the fine print and not jump to conclusions based on information with error-bars in the stratosphere.
Did anyone actually say that the instrumental data was in dispute? I think if it was, that would be a smoking gun.
Outside of the science, all I know is that the climate zone in my local area has changed. Plants which you could not grow before, you can grow now. I hear from Innuit that there are plants and animals in the North which they have not seen before. I know that tornadoes dot the German Rhine where no tornadoes were seen before, I know hurricanes on the Eastern seaboard are behaving differently, I know that Crete was so dry when I saw it that I couldn't imagine olive trees growing there without irrigation, I know that our highways are a half kilometer wide and countless kilometers long, with thousands upon thousands of idling cars sitting on them, ten times a week for as long as I've been alive, and I know that sea captains don't want to traverse the Indian ocean because the almanacs are no longer reasonable guides to chart how long a given voyage from one port to the next might take.
Everything else is told to me by strangers. Maybe the arctic is intact, maybe the rainforests never actually existed. Maybe Mt. Kilamajaro doesn't exist, maybe it's all a mind control plot. All plausible answers I suppose from people telling me that climate change is a myth.
Has anyone here seen a rainforest? Have you seen the clearcutting? Maybe none of this is real. Right now, the temperature where I am is 6 Celcius. Is my thermometer tampered with by some global warming co-conspirators? If I wrote it down, would somebody question it 100 years from now? Maybe the celcius scale has been tampered with.
"It [climate change] is not something that is within our control "... can only be known for certain by continuing to perform environmental science. Ditto for determining if humans are the cause.
Your position seems to be that there is no reason to be alarmed and there are more important places to focus our efforts. You're not a whacko and I don't think you're wrong. Your conclusions are different is all.
I disagree that we've done worse in the past. Many of the effects on the environment have been cumulative. We don't yet know how to correct them and the practices are continuing. We've lost huge amounts of stored carbon in the rainforests, and huge amounts of stored carbon in a hundred years of heavily burning fossil fuels. Our behaviour has improved, but we're not fixing anything, we're just destroying things more slowly.
Maybe by caving to global warming pressures, you hesitated to take the the truck to work this morning. Instead, you took the car. In the drive through, you chose a large coffee instead of an extra large. It was the cupholder. This decision denied little Pablo in Columbia the money he needed to send his boy to school. His boy will become so disgruntled with life that he's going to take up a megalomaniacaical journey to raise Columbia to a superpower. They're going to overthrow the U.S. and make everyone eat soap. That's right. Soap. Every day. Just because he hates America.
"Climate change is happening, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. We may accelerate it in either direction, but we can't stop it. If we drastically cut our energy usage, we will be unequipped to deal with the change, and will die off in the billions. However if we continue to use plenty of energy towards industrial development and scientific research, we will be able to adapt to the climate change and survive."
Feel free to add more scenarios, but what you describe is scenario 2. Except I have no idea how you can come to a conclusion that cutting energy usage will cause us to die off in the billions.
There *IS* a happy medium between throwing us back to hippie days of rowboats and lawn-gardens and ramping up production of cars and exploration of fossil fuels. Focusing on nuclear, battery technology, commuter rail, telecommunication technology, "real cost" shifts towards a less disposable economy, all have real advantages and who knows? maybe spending more money on energy research and efficiency will have more of an impact on our ability to survive this scenario of "inevitable global warming" than the heaters in our 5 ton SUVs.
But yeah, it's possible. I'm not proposing a stop to all science, nor even a slowing of it. Just a focus away from an unbridled race to the bottom and into additional regulations which control the commons... just as we have laws which prevent people from stealing your home, stealing your electricity or stealing your gasoline, we need laws to protect your air, your water and your way of life.
Stalin isn't in power anymore. We're not talking about plans to starve the breadbasket of the world in order to fund a global climate change war effort.
We're talking about doing something, as opposed to doing nothing.
Just admit that you don't care. No scenario affects you terribly in your lifetime and you don't see why you should be inconvenienced by the whole thing.
Collapsing antarctic ice shelves, melting Greenland glaciers, a soon-to-be snow-free Kilamajaro, the opening of the Arctic passage, frost-heave in permafrost.
Ice age?
Current CO2 levels are off your chart. They're around 390ppm.
I don't know what you can't understand. It's not about being right. It's about scenario planning.
Scenario 1. Climate change is not happening.
skeptic: wait for more data.
result: life goes on.
activist: execute global emissions changes
result: millions are inconvenienced as governments struggle to achieve futile targets. The air and water is cleaner though.
Scenario 2. Climate change is not primarily man-made
skeptic: wait for more data.
result: humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions.
activist: execute global emissions changes
result: humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions. Depth and speed of problem is slowed by human change.
Scenario 3. Climate change is primarily man made
skeptic: wait for more data.
result: humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions, possible irreversible climmate trends.
activist: execute global emissions changes
result: nothing happens.
If you can show me enough data that I will believe that the skeptic's response and resultant outcome of scenario #3 or #2 is sooo much more heinous than the activist's response and outcomes of #1 and #2, then you might have a point. Otherwise, you're just arguing about something which doesn't matter. Who cares if we might be wrong? The terrible part is we might be right.
Don't worry. It'll all be throttled soon. I predict that anyone who wants to produce content will need a special business line.
To use VoIP, that'll be throttled, as will non-branded chat apps. Anything that will allow a telco-style grab for features. The most expensive will be the one which permits encryption for working from home... unless you're a big company who can afford a mutual kickback relationship with the telco.
The days of the free Internet are coming to an end. It'll be as dead as devoid of creative talent as radio and television soon. Because, well, we have to protect the artist.
In my home reality, we had machines to jump into parallel dimensions, but baguettes were outlawed when Palin took the U.S. presidency and invaded France.
I hadn't heard of the croaking bird dimension though. I'll have to visit.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not just a boss, that was an *owner*, and that was in the 1980s. There were still relics of the J Jonah Jameson era around then.
The only CAD guys I worked with were in Tool and Die, and that was a shop work ethic. The office workers held the same work ethic as the shop floor. When you hear your buzzer, you're working. When you hear the buzzer, you're on break. You're late? You get reprimanded. It happens a few times? You're fired. It's a simple system, rigid, respectable, but nothing like a normal office environment. You're not a knowledge worker, you're a skilled labourer. Replaceable.
If you're walking *out* of the lunch room when everyone else is walking *in*, that's enough to get reprimanded. You obviously left your desk before the buzzer. You talk back to the boss when he reprimands you about it? He talks to the owner. You talk back to the owner? You're fired.
You can't make a personal call, smoke a cigarette, get a pepsi or go to the toilet unless you're on break.
Think of it this way http://www.xkcd.com/632/
Create multiple websites about you. In one, you were a beer-drinking guy who moved to the Barbados. Not you.
In another, you authored multiple books and magazine columns. Might be you.
A few more randomly generated ones and some near-look-alikes and you're done. They won't know what to believe. Oh and set a tracker on the websites, so you can see which ones your prospective employer visited (ID them by their IP)
The Feynman Lectures on Physics put it very well on the subject of Newtonian mechanics vs. special relativity:
"... A true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in practice one might think that the new law makes no significant difference. well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly forget it and use the simple constant mass law as a good approximation. But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more wrong we are."
Yeah, jail the diplomats.
Then we need to get in contact with Tehran. Hmmm... How to do that?
You know, what we should do is ask Tehran to send people over who speak our language and understand our culture. It'd be such a nice gesture that we should probably give them a place to stay. Maybe they can be put up in the former Iranian embassy. They have lots of tea and a mosque there. Heaps of Persian literature and discount phones to Tehran too.
We can negotiate with the people in this embassy for the release of the dipolmats. They can call Tehran and set up meetings and stuff.
Perfect solution.
"...people are acting like dogs in heat, trying to mate with anything that moves"
If you're under 18, somebody might have just lured you into talking graphically about sex. This whole thread is a luring incident.
The way I understand this is the law extends "luring" into areas where you're doing stuff like encouraging kids to engage in cybersex, send photos of themselves, stuff like that. It doesn't matter if there is absolutely no intent to ever meet them.
I think we all can't know how we'd behave unless we were in such a situation.
Help! I was led to an info page.
"...why are we presuming this person is a he?"
Occam's razor?
"1) Impose some centralized authority to control our growth and resource consumption."
You just paraphrased the OPEC mission statement:
"OPEC's mission is to coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital to those investing in the petroleum industry." http://www.opec.org/home/
Without getting into tit-for-tat, it's all personal experience. I'll add though that this is what a climate-zone is: http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/environment/forest/forestcanada/planthardi Individually, I could say "yeah, that's probably just a local effect." Together, all these anecdotes put together, I have to say "hmm, something's odd." Maybe other people have some anecdotes here too.
There seems to be a large number of people here who think there's a bias towards a global warming conspiracy. That somehow there's political and financial wealth to be made by spreading lies about this stuff. I don't understand how that could be the case. Just to be clear, I don't think there's any conspiracy at all. None.
Big money stands behind the business-as-usual angle. Why? They're making big money. Is that a conspiracy? No. Car companies want less regulation about cars, oil companies want less regulation over oil, this is not conspiracy, these are the personal interests of individual market leaders.
So who's standing behind the let's-change-business-as-usual angle? Critics seem to be torn. It's either politicians and scientists with a messiah complex, or a leftie government tax grab. Maybe it's both.
They're pretty wicked accusations, and up until the CRU information was released, there really wasn't much merit to the idea. I don't think a lot of people have gone 180 over the results though. Critics are congratulating themselves, and climate change scientists and activists are saying "WTF?"
As for the actual deception of the CRU, I can't find a lot of good info about what was said. The "hack" was filtered, insteaad of putting the whole of the emails up on bittorrent, it seems information was cherry-picked. Go check the Pirate Bay http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5172267/Leaked_Hadley_CRU_Emails._PST_(Outlook)_Format.. This is 4MB... that's not a lot of data. It's hard for me to understand what was omitted.
The critics seem to be saying that it looks like some guys have some tree-ring-thickness to temperature data which correlates up until the 1960s. After over 100 years of correlation, the tree ring data diverges from the instrumental data. Trees aren't growing as fast. Not sure why.
This is the instrumental temperature record: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
This is the tree ring data laid over top: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
In the last graph, you can see that the data stops around 1960. There's divergence there and the temperature may have dropped.
Think about that. What did the programmer do to make the tree-data fit the measurement data? Correct me if I'm wrong, but he changed the tree-ring information after 1960.
I think the question should be "why does the tree-ring data correlate with the measured temperature data between 1880 and 1960, and then suddenly diverge?" and not into accusations of lies, messiah complexes and funding grabs.
My personal experiences... they're anecdotes. They're in line with the instrumental data. The instrumental data is NOT in question, if you doubt it, I'm sure you can find microfilms of temperature reports in newspapers going back to the 1800s. Our temperature increases are looking pretty remarkable. What does it mean?
Even reading between the lines on the right-wing blogs, from what I can tell, some programmer force-fit tree ring data to modern instrumental data. The problem was not that the instrumental data was inaccurate, but that the tree ring data didn't correlate with the instrumental data.
I'm curious why the tree ring data wouldn't correlate. But I don't have an undergrad in climate science, so I can't really comment other than to say that it's damned odd. I did study some anthropology and I know from that it's probably best to read a full report and not just the conclusion when you're going to make assumptions based on tree rings or carbon dating. In this case, I haven't seen the full reports laying about.
Some more info from Wikipedia is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
But yeah, for scientists, I think this is all business as usual. The journalists and politicians need to read the fine print and not jump to conclusions based on information with error-bars in the stratosphere.
Did anyone actually say that the instrumental data was in dispute? I think if it was, that would be a smoking gun.
"Anthropogenic Global Warming"
"Anthropromorphic Global Warming" would be what hippies do. E.g., singing to the earth until it felt warmth in the cockles of its heart.
Outside of the science, all I know is that the climate zone in my local area has changed. Plants which you could not grow before, you can grow now. I hear from Innuit that there are plants and animals in the North which they have not seen before. I know that tornadoes dot the German Rhine where no tornadoes were seen before, I know hurricanes on the Eastern seaboard are behaving differently, I know that Crete was so dry when I saw it that I couldn't imagine olive trees growing there without irrigation, I know that our highways are a half kilometer wide and countless kilometers long, with thousands upon thousands of idling cars sitting on them, ten times a week for as long as I've been alive, and I know that sea captains don't want to traverse the Indian ocean because the almanacs are no longer reasonable guides to chart how long a given voyage from one port to the next might take.
Everything else is told to me by strangers. Maybe the arctic is intact, maybe the rainforests never actually existed. Maybe Mt. Kilamajaro doesn't exist, maybe it's all a mind control plot. All plausible answers I suppose from people telling me that climate change is a myth.
Has anyone here seen a rainforest? Have you seen the clearcutting? Maybe none of this is real. Right now, the temperature where I am is 6 Celcius. Is my thermometer tampered with by some global warming co-conspirators? If I wrote it down, would somebody question it 100 years from now? Maybe the celcius scale has been tampered with.
"It [climate change] is not something that is within our control "... can only be known for certain by continuing to perform environmental science. Ditto for determining if humans are the cause.
Your position seems to be that there is no reason to be alarmed and there are more important places to focus our efforts. You're not a whacko and I don't think you're wrong. Your conclusions are different is all.
I disagree that we've done worse in the past. Many of the effects on the environment have been cumulative. We don't yet know how to correct them and the practices are continuing. We've lost huge amounts of stored carbon in the rainforests, and huge amounts of stored carbon in a hundred years of heavily burning fossil fuels. Our behaviour has improved, but we're not fixing anything, we're just destroying things more slowly.
Maybe by caving to global warming pressures, you hesitated to take the the truck to work this morning. Instead, you took the car. In the drive through, you chose a large coffee instead of an extra large. It was the cupholder. This decision denied little Pablo in Columbia the money he needed to send his boy to school. His boy will become so disgruntled with life that he's going to take up a megalomaniacaical journey to raise Columbia to a superpower. They're going to overthrow the U.S. and make everyone eat soap. That's right. Soap. Every day. Just because he hates America.
All thanks to the "warmers". Bastards.
Yeah, and poor Exxon is still scrubbing rocks in Alaska. The world is so cruel. Damn these climate loving bastards!
You're talking about ethanol right?
I don't dismiss criticisms of environmental policy out of hand, and I don't dismiss concerns about global warming out of hand.
Ethanol was a bad idea and rife with corruption. That doesn't mean that the environmental concerns are invalid.
"Climate change is happening, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. We may accelerate it in either direction, but we can't stop it. If we drastically cut our energy usage, we will be unequipped to deal with the change, and will die off in the billions. However if we continue to use plenty of energy towards industrial development and scientific research, we will be able to adapt to the climate change and survive."
Feel free to add more scenarios, but what you describe is scenario 2. Except I have no idea how you can come to a conclusion that cutting energy usage will cause us to die off in the billions.
There *IS* a happy medium between throwing us back to hippie days of rowboats and lawn-gardens and ramping up production of cars and exploration of fossil fuels. Focusing on nuclear, battery technology, commuter rail, telecommunication technology, "real cost" shifts towards a less disposable economy, all have real advantages and who knows? maybe spending more money on energy research and efficiency will have more of an impact on our ability to survive this scenario of "inevitable global warming" than the heaters in our 5 ton SUVs.
But yeah, it's possible. I'm not proposing a stop to all science, nor even a slowing of it. Just a focus away from an unbridled race to the bottom and into additional regulations which control the commons... just as we have laws which prevent people from stealing your home, stealing your electricity or stealing your gasoline, we need laws to protect your air, your water and your way of life.
I have no idea what you're afraid of.
Stalin isn't in power anymore. We're not talking about plans to starve the breadbasket of the world in order to fund a global climate change war effort.
We're talking about doing something, as opposed to doing nothing.
Just admit that you don't care. No scenario affects you terribly in your lifetime and you don't see why you should be inconvenienced by the whole thing.
Collapsing antarctic ice shelves, melting Greenland glaciers, a soon-to-be snow-free Kilamajaro, the opening of the Arctic passage, frost-heave in permafrost.
Ice age?
Current CO2 levels are off your chart. They're around 390ppm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
I don't know what you can't understand. It's not about being right. It's about scenario planning.
Scenario 1. Climate change is not happening.
skeptic: wait for more data.
result: life goes on.
activist: execute global emissions changes
result: millions are inconvenienced as governments struggle to achieve futile targets. The air and water is cleaner though.
Scenario 2. Climate change is not primarily man-made
skeptic: wait for more data.
result: humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions.
activist: execute global emissions changes
result: humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions. Depth and speed of problem is slowed by human change.
Scenario 3. Climate change is primarily man made
skeptic: wait for more data.
result: humans deeply impacted. millions die of starvation, cities are relocated, numerous mass extinctions, possible irreversible climmate trends.
activist: execute global emissions changes
result: nothing happens.
If you can show me enough data that I will believe that the skeptic's response and resultant outcome of scenario #3 or #2 is sooo much more heinous than the activist's response and outcomes of #1 and #2, then you might have a point. Otherwise, you're just arguing about something which doesn't matter. Who cares if we might be wrong? The terrible part is we might be right.
Don't worry. It'll all be throttled soon. I predict that anyone who wants to produce content will need a special business line.
To use VoIP, that'll be throttled, as will non-branded chat apps. Anything that will allow a telco-style grab for features. The most expensive will be the one which permits encryption for working from home... unless you're a big company who can afford a mutual kickback relationship with the telco.
The days of the free Internet are coming to an end. It'll be as dead as devoid of creative talent as radio and television soon. Because, well, we have to protect the artist.
In my home reality, we had machines to jump into parallel dimensions, but baguettes were outlawed when Palin took the U.S. presidency and invaded France.
I hadn't heard of the croaking bird dimension though. I'll have to visit.
It's a huge advertising edge for Microsoft.
"Stay informed, Fox News, exclusively indexed by Bing..."
Stupid people everywhere will flock.