Like this comment comparing automatic stature and respect of science to politics.
It would be far more rational it politicians were automatically distrusted until proven to be in the honest minority.
I heard a comment this morning on the news that the belief in global warming pretty much follows your political party. Democrats yes, Republicans no. Heck with science and being skeptical enough to do some research, I'll just believe what my party's self appointed experts say.
The whole AGW issue itself looks more like religion/politics than science. It really dosn't help their cause that the models used fail to agree with observations. Also, as shown from the leaked emails, there appears to be a tendency to ignore data which dosn't fit with the theory/model. The "elephant in the room" is that the most obvious climate anomoly is the "little ice age" around the mid 17th century. There have also been several times in the last few thousand years where the climate as been as warm (if not warmer than) now.
What I don't understand is the attitude that the climate data is kept secret and we should trust them. To date not once has anyone been able to plug in the existing data into a model that reproduces the result seen in real life. The understanding of the subject at hand is not as complete as all would like us to believe. If you think that makes the general population dumb, i think quite the opposite, the general population is realizing that no one understands the matter well, most are trying to get rich from bad science and f care about the results. Everyone knows that we need to do something about our polluting the planet but we don't care about making Al Gore rich. Trust no one. make the original data public so we can have a real discussion.
The way in which terms such as "denier" are thrown around tends to imply that the last thing wanted would be any kind of real discussion. Such behaviour tends to imply that not only is the evidence supporting the original claim weak but also the advocate is fully aware of this.
Hadn't thought about the storage problem for hydrogen, but regardless, I stand by my points
It really is a big issue, especially when it comes to storing the fuel on the vehicle. You can't pour hydrogen into a gas or diesel tank nor will it go into the wing of a jet airliner. Even though you can probably get all three types of internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen you'd have to redesign the fuel system from scratch. Liquid fuels are just easier to handle.
Hydrogen on the other hand has one emission - water. The problems with it at the moment is that we don't have the infrastructure for it and it is expensive to impliment. BR>With existing fuels a fairly simple tank is needed to store liquid fuel at ambient pressure and temperature. Any kind of hydrogen fuel tank is considerably more complex.
Comparatively speaking, the hydrogen economy is the unproven tech. Sure, we know fuel cells work well in spacecraft when maintained by an army of techs who don't care about the cost compared to gasoline,
With spacecraft reducing weight is of great importance, so much so that they stopped painting the shuttle external tank white after the first few flights. This makes it worthwhile dealing with a difficult to handle fuel.
We have no infrastructure whatsoever that can even be refit to deliver the massive amounts of hydrogen fuel that would be required.
Uh, biofuels are a proven technology; Rudolph Diesel demonstrated his diesel engine at the world's far on peanut oil. Biofuel from algae has been demonstrated already.
Frank Whittle ran his prototype on castor oil, IIRC.
and the transportation sector will require hydrocarbons as a storage mechanism until electrical batteries can contain the same concentration of stored energy in both weight and volume and charging speed.
You might also want a battery which dosn't create more pollution to manufacture and dispose of than a fuel tank.
Needless to say, the cyanobacterium itself is not necessarily more efficient at photosynthesis than entire plant cells. For starters, all plant cell structures except for the chloroplasts are basically transparent so all the sunlight absorbed by plant leaves is absorbed in the chlorophyll that is only present in the cytochrome complexes in the chloroplasts.
I suspect the issue here is that it can be easier to get at something from inside a cyanobacterium than it is to get something from inside a plant cell. However the idea of cyanobacteria genetically engineered for auto-lysis only appears useful if you have a method of triggering it. Adding the appropriate enzyme to the culture appears rather simpler.
Plants are the most efficient at collecting solar energy.
The organisms in question are cyanobacteria which are about as closely related to plants as your or I am:)
Plants are the most efficient at storing energy as some form of hydrocarbon. We already have a huge infrastructure to distribute hydrocarbons.
I'm not aware of any plant which uses hydrocarbons for energy storage (or anything else). Plants typically use polysaccharides for this purpose.
This hydrogen nonsense was a huge waste of money,
Not only does hydrogen require new distribution and storage systems these are likely to be more expensive because of its physical properties. Specially has a very low boiling point and small molecules.
Every country strikes its between the privacy of its citizens and the security of its citizens.
This argument is very much a false dichotomy. Things which erode privacy may have little or no effect on security, even decrease. Things which affect secuirty need have nothing to do with privacy.
My brother who works in a top research Lab had the experience of the associated bank to the lab talk about putting in a biometric cash machine. This lab specialises in biomedicine and so it was rather a shock to the bank in question when they had hundred of very qualified scientists signing a petition against the idea.
No different to software experts objecting to voting machines based on general purpose computers...
But I don't have much hope for that. The same industry that bankrupts individuals over a little file sharing also lobbies and donates funds to politicians. Why do I feel that they're just gonna get a (hard) slap on the wrist for this?
As long as it gets before a judge it's going to hurt. The Canadian Judiciary are no friends of the entertainments industry.
This is shocking and awe inspiring to me. They have paid thousands if not millions to have these laws put into place.
After the MPAA was caught pirating a movie, with both the MPAA & the RIAA having been caught pirating software it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
And here's the kicker -- it's not casual copying or sharing -- it's massive for-profit piracy.
With this going on for 20 odd years.
There should be criminal charges filed, prison time served
Does Canadian law allow for "corporate people" to be imprisoned?
and a massive reorganization of the companies charged.
Even paying a fraction of the proposed amount would probably leave the companies involved so insolvent that liquidation would be the only possibility.
Uh, no, the GPL isn't a copyright license, it's a procedural use of code that may or may not otherwise be bound by copyright.
Actually that's exactly what it is. Copyright law says "You need permission from the copyright holder to do X, Y & Z". The GPL (and anything similar) says "You have permission subject to conditions A, B & C".
It's a usage license that defines the procedure under which the code can subsequently be used,
The GPL says nothing about how the code can be used, it is only concerned with transfer of copies to other parties. The GPL is most definitly not an EULA, no matter how many people think it is!
fixed that for ya, in EU you can buy any phone (at a higher price) and 3 pay as you go sim cards from different carriers and use whichever card you want when you want.
You can also take your phone to another country, including those in Africa, Asia or Australasia and have it work. Though it's likely to work out cheaper to buy a local SIM if you intend making much use of your phone.
The US is the only country I am aware of with a phone-tied-to-carrier system.
The US does have some GSM, but it's on the 1.9GHz waveband, so you need a phone which can handle this.
The scientific research that has been presented to me, coupled with the research I have done on my own confirms that we, as a population, have no clue what exactly is going on; therefore, we are just along for the ride on a planet that we happen to inhabit. Does this mean that we should not do what we can to take care of our "house"? No, it does not. It simply means that we are trying to solve a problem that may not even exist.
At the same time we appear to be ignoring lots of other things we probably should doing something about.
Also, if Anthropogenic Global Warming were true, why hasn't recorded human history, vis-a-vis, the last 1,000 years or so, shown a consistent increase in global temperatures? It would be very easy to conclude that humans have been burning more wood over the prior year for the duration of their history (beginning prior to the last millennium)
Humans have been burning wood for rather longer than one thousand years. For the start of humans having major effects would be more likely the beginning of agriculture.
But, there was a mini-ice age in the last millennium. That doesn't compute.
You'd expect people would start burning rather more wood at the start of that period then stop burning so much at the end.
This was serious shit. Sovereignty of nations with cap and trade and trillions of dollars are in play at COP15. The banksters are drooling for an agreement to be signed. Yeah your old pals who just got the bailouts. JP Morgan, Goldman, Shiti etc... You think carbon credits, carbon tax, is going to help?
If anything it's more likely to hinder.
I personally believe the Earth will do bad things from time to time, and we should try to clean up our shit, beef up important things, and try to be prepared, but within our monetary means.
Those monetary means will be rather less if people follow something which is at best misguided at worst a scam.
So coral growth rings, ice core samples, and sediment records are right out? With the latter two you have the fairly simple issue that the older the deposit the more it is compressed by what is above. The problem with tree rings is that they actually correspond more to precipitation than temperature. So is it possible that something other than temperature could affect any of these examples?
Regardless of whether the effects we see today are of human origin, the fact is that continuing to burn fossil fuels at current rates is not environmentally sound policy. The pollution produced has a tangible and real impact on peoples' health, the energy infrastructure in place motivates a great deal of humanitarian damage around the world and the continued release of massive amounts of acidifying CO2 and other greenhouse gases will eventually cause massive problems with the global climate, problems which we may or may not be observing yet, although the vast majority of the data out there does support the conclusion that we are indeed seeing the results of human activity.
Whilst the the climate issue may or may not be significent along with pollution wasting a scarce resource (including fighting wars) just dosn't appear especially sensible.
Investing in sane nuclear power (India, France and Russia build power plants at less than a third of the price-per-kW of new proposals in the US and severely mitigate the waste problem by reprocessing in fast breeders)
But look at the fuss when Iran wants to do the same. Never mind that India, France and Russia actually have nuclear weapons and the ability to use them against just about anywhere on the planet.
biofuels from non-food crops in regions where the land use will not interfere with agriculture
Instead we have biofuels competing with regular agriculture for political reasons. Growing any crop is agriculture by definition. The sensible thing would be to create agriculture where it does not exist currently. It's also sensible to create fuels (and possibly lubricating oils) which work with with the machines and distribution systems we have now. Reducing the use of oil for fuel also means longer to find alternatives for using oil as a source of useful chemicals. It's also sensible to use waste to produce useful things. Be it methane from rotting garbage as a fuel or waste heat (even carbon dioxide) from an industrial plant to help grow plants. There's also interesting technology for converting organic waste products into an oil subsitute.
all of these combined with investments in energy efficiency (many investments of this sort are being made privately without a government mandate because, again, its cheaper to save energy than buy energy!)
Efficiency can also mean better use of the energy you do have. e.g. Air Conditioning system which instead of using a fan assisted radiator to put the heat into the outside air does something like put it into an insulated tank of water so you either need less energy for hot water or to take heat out of when you need heating. You might want to keep the outside radiator to take heat from the outside air too. Thing is that all the fuss about the climate together with the "carbon trading" nonsense isn't really helping here.
Anyone with a reasonable background in science should be able to take their models apart, thoroughly understand what they are doing and why and be able to replicate their work, from the friggen hunk of wood to the final graph.
Instead people are looking at their models and trying not to laugh.
This has nothing to do with the data being 'properly calibrated' and everything to do with the faulty assumption that ring width strong correlates with temperature, which is the assumption they use for pre-1960 data. They sold you another lie to explain the first, my friend.
Tree ring width correlates strongly with precipitation, not temperature.
Whilst temperature may be a factor in precipitation it certainly isn't the only factor involved.
Plenty of REAL peer reviewed studies to back this up, along with validated experimental evidence
Given that wood and tree fruits are important cash crops there are plenty of good reasons to understand the growth of these plants.
Slashdot Mirror
Like this comment comparing automatic stature and respect of science to politics.
It would be far more rational it politicians were automatically distrusted until proven to be in the honest minority.
I heard a comment this morning on the news that the belief in global warming pretty much follows your political party. Democrats yes, Republicans no. Heck with science and being skeptical enough to do some research, I'll just believe what my party's self appointed experts say.
The whole AGW issue itself looks more like religion/politics than science. It really dosn't help their cause that the models used fail to agree with observations. Also, as shown from the leaked emails, there appears to be a tendency to ignore data which dosn't fit with the theory/model. The "elephant in the room" is that the most obvious climate anomoly is the "little ice age" around the mid 17th century. There have also been several times in the last few thousand years where the climate as been as warm (if not warmer than) now.
What I don't understand is the attitude that the climate data is kept secret and we should trust them. To date not once has anyone been able to plug in the existing data into a model that reproduces the result seen in real life. The understanding of the subject at hand is not as complete as all would like us to believe. If you think that makes the general population dumb, i think quite the opposite, the general population is realizing that no one understands the matter well, most are trying to get rich from bad science and f care about the results. Everyone knows that we need to do something about our polluting the planet but we don't care about making Al Gore rich. Trust no one. make the original data public so we can have a real discussion.
The way in which terms such as "denier" are thrown around tends to imply that the last thing wanted would be any kind of real discussion. Such behaviour tends to imply that not only is the evidence supporting the original claim weak but also the advocate is fully aware of this.
Hadn't thought about the storage problem for hydrogen, but regardless, I stand by my points
It really is a big issue, especially when it comes to storing the fuel on the vehicle. You can't pour hydrogen into a gas or diesel tank nor will it go into the wing of a jet airliner. Even though you can probably get all three types of internal combustion engine to run on hydrogen you'd have to redesign the fuel system from scratch. Liquid fuels are just easier to handle.
Hydrogen on the other hand has one emission - water. The problems with it at the moment is that we don't have the infrastructure for it and it is expensive to impliment.
BR>With existing fuels a fairly simple tank is needed to store liquid fuel at ambient pressure and temperature. Any kind of hydrogen fuel tank is considerably more complex.
Comparatively speaking, the hydrogen economy is the unproven tech. Sure, we know fuel cells work well in spacecraft when maintained by an army of techs who don't care about the cost compared to gasoline,
With spacecraft reducing weight is of great importance, so much so that they stopped painting the shuttle external tank white after the first few flights. This makes it worthwhile dealing with a difficult to handle fuel.
We have no infrastructure whatsoever that can even be refit to deliver the massive amounts of hydrogen fuel that would be required.
As well as all the issues surrounding fueling...
Uh, biofuels are a proven technology; Rudolph Diesel demonstrated his diesel engine at the world's far on peanut oil. Biofuel from algae has been demonstrated already.
Frank Whittle ran his prototype on castor oil, IIRC.
and the transportation sector will require hydrocarbons as a storage mechanism until electrical batteries can contain the same concentration of stored energy in both weight and volume and charging speed.
You might also want a battery which dosn't create more pollution to manufacture and dispose of than a fuel tank.
Needless to say, the cyanobacterium itself is not necessarily more efficient at photosynthesis than entire plant cells. For starters, all plant cell structures except for the chloroplasts are basically transparent so all the sunlight absorbed by plant leaves is absorbed in the chlorophyll that is only present in the cytochrome complexes in the chloroplasts.
I suspect the issue here is that it can be easier to get at something from inside a cyanobacterium than it is to get something from inside a plant cell. However the idea of cyanobacteria genetically engineered for auto-lysis only appears useful if you have a method of triggering it. Adding the appropriate enzyme to the culture appears rather simpler.
Plants are the most efficient at collecting solar energy.
:)
The organisms in question are cyanobacteria which are about as closely related to plants as your or I am
Plants are the most efficient at storing energy as some form of hydrocarbon. We already have a huge infrastructure to distribute hydrocarbons.
I'm not aware of any plant which uses hydrocarbons for energy storage (or anything else). Plants typically use polysaccharides for this purpose.
This hydrogen nonsense was a huge waste of money,
Not only does hydrogen require new distribution and storage systems these are likely to be more expensive because of its physical properties. Specially has a very low boiling point and small molecules.
The US government is especially good at sending bogus signals. There's no reason to believe other governments aren't as good.
Not just governments. The same can apply to organised crime, corporations, etc, etc.
Every country strikes its between the privacy of its citizens and the security of its citizens.
This argument is very much a false dichotomy. Things which erode privacy may have little or no effect on security, even decrease. Things which affect secuirty need have nothing to do with privacy.
This is what decades of living in fear will do to a population.
But most people don't deliberatly choose to go and live in a warzone.
My brother who works in a top research Lab had the experience of the associated bank to the lab talk about putting in a biometric cash machine. This lab specialises in biomedicine and so it was rather a shock to the bank in question when they had hundred of very qualified scientists signing a petition against the idea.
No different to software experts objecting to voting machines based on general purpose computers...
But I don't have much hope for that. The same industry that bankrupts individuals over a little file sharing also lobbies and donates funds to politicians. Why do I feel that they're just gonna get a (hard) slap on the wrist for this?
As long as it gets before a judge it's going to hurt. The Canadian Judiciary are no friends of the entertainments industry.
Its a bitch when the rules and damage ammount you get set for things comes back to royally bite you in the ass as it has for CRIA
:)
It's known as "hoist with one's own petard"
This is shocking and awe inspiring to me. They have paid thousands if not millions to have these laws put into place.
After the MPAA was caught pirating a movie, with both the MPAA & the RIAA having been caught pirating software it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
And here's the kicker -- it's not casual copying or sharing -- it's massive for-profit piracy.
With this going on for 20 odd years.
There should be criminal charges filed, prison time served
Does Canadian law allow for "corporate people" to be imprisoned?
and a massive reorganization of the companies charged.
Even paying a fraction of the proposed amount would probably leave the companies involved so insolvent that liquidation would be the only possibility.
Uh, no, the GPL isn't a copyright license, it's a procedural use of code that may or may not otherwise be bound by copyright.
Actually that's exactly what it is. Copyright law says "You need permission from the copyright holder to do X, Y & Z". The GPL (and anything similar) says "You have permission subject to conditions A, B & C".
It's a usage license that defines the procedure under which the code can subsequently be used,
The GPL says nothing about how the code can be used, it is only concerned with transfer of copies to other parties. The GPL is most definitly not an EULA, no matter how many people think it is!
fixed that for ya, in EU you can buy any phone (at a higher price) and 3 pay as you go sim cards from different carriers and use whichever card you want when you want.
You can also take your phone to another country, including those in Africa, Asia or Australasia and have it work. Though it's likely to work out cheaper to buy a local SIM if you intend making much use of your phone.
The US is the only country I am aware of with a phone-tied-to-carrier system.
The US does have some GSM, but it's on the 1.9GHz waveband, so you need a phone which can handle this.
The scientific research that has been presented to me, coupled with the research I have done on my own confirms that we, as a population, have no clue what exactly is going on; therefore, we are just along for the ride on a planet that we happen to inhabit. Does this mean that we should not do what we can to take care of our "house"? No, it does not. It simply means that we are trying to solve a problem that may not even exist.
At the same time we appear to be ignoring lots of other things we probably should doing something about.
Also, if Anthropogenic Global Warming were true, why hasn't recorded human history, vis-a-vis, the last 1,000 years or so, shown a consistent increase in global temperatures? It would be very easy to conclude that humans have been burning more wood over the prior year for the duration of their history (beginning prior to the last millennium)
Humans have been burning wood for rather longer than one thousand years. For the start of humans having major effects would be more likely the beginning of agriculture.
But, there was a mini-ice age in the last millennium. That doesn't compute.
You'd expect people would start burning rather more wood at the start of that period then stop burning so much at the end.
This was serious shit. Sovereignty of nations with cap and trade and trillions of dollars are in play at COP15. The banksters are drooling for an agreement to be signed. Yeah your old pals who just got the bailouts. JP Morgan, Goldman, Shiti etc... You think carbon credits, carbon tax, is going to help?
If anything it's more likely to hinder.
I personally believe the Earth will do bad things from time to time, and we should try to clean up our shit, beef up important things, and try to be prepared, but within our monetary means.
Those monetary means will be rather less if people follow something which is at best misguided at worst a scam.
So coral growth rings, ice core samples, and sediment records are right out?
With the latter two you have the fairly simple issue that the older the deposit the more it is compressed by what is above. The problem with tree rings is that they actually correspond more to precipitation than temperature. So is it possible that something other than temperature could affect any of these examples?
Regardless of whether the effects we see today are of human origin, the fact is that continuing to burn fossil fuels at current rates is not environmentally sound policy. The pollution produced has a tangible and real impact on peoples' health, the energy infrastructure in place motivates a great deal of humanitarian damage around the world and the continued release of massive amounts of acidifying CO2 and other greenhouse gases will eventually cause massive problems with the global climate, problems which we may or may not be observing yet, although the vast majority of the data out there does support the conclusion that we are indeed seeing the results of human activity.
Whilst the the climate issue may or may not be significent along with pollution wasting a scarce resource (including fighting wars) just dosn't appear especially sensible.
Investing in sane nuclear power (India, France and Russia build power plants at less than a third of the price-per-kW of new proposals in the US and severely mitigate the waste problem by reprocessing in fast breeders)
But look at the fuss when Iran wants to do the same. Never mind that India, France and Russia actually have nuclear weapons and the ability to use them against just about anywhere on the planet.
biofuels from non-food crops in regions where the land use will not interfere with agriculture
Instead we have biofuels competing with regular agriculture for political reasons. Growing any crop is agriculture by definition. The sensible thing would be to create agriculture where it does not exist currently. It's also sensible to create fuels (and possibly lubricating oils) which work with with the machines and distribution systems we have now. Reducing the use of oil for fuel also means longer to find alternatives for using oil as a source of useful chemicals.
It's also sensible to use waste to produce useful things. Be it methane from rotting garbage as a fuel or waste heat (even carbon dioxide) from an industrial plant to help grow plants. There's also interesting technology for converting organic waste products into an oil subsitute.
all of these combined with investments in energy efficiency (many investments of this sort are being made privately without a government mandate because, again, its cheaper to save energy than buy energy!)
Efficiency can also mean better use of the energy you do have. e.g. Air Conditioning system which instead of using a fan assisted radiator to put the heat into the outside air does something like put it into an insulated tank of water so you either need less energy for hot water or to take heat out of when you need heating. You might want to keep the outside radiator to take heat from the outside air too.
Thing is that all the fuss about the climate together with the "carbon trading" nonsense isn't really helping here.
Anyone with a reasonable background in science should be able to take their models apart, thoroughly understand what they are doing and why and be able to replicate their work, from the friggen hunk of wood to the final graph.
Instead people are looking at their models and trying not to laugh.
This has nothing to do with the data being 'properly calibrated' and everything to do with the faulty assumption that ring width strong correlates with temperature, which is the assumption they use for pre-1960 data. They sold you another lie to explain the first, my friend. Tree ring width correlates strongly with precipitation, not temperature.
Whilst temperature may be a factor in precipitation it certainly isn't the only factor involved.
Plenty of REAL peer reviewed studies to back this up, along with validated experimental evidence
Given that wood and tree fruits are important cash crops there are plenty of good reasons to understand the growth of these plants.