Translation of first: "Wanting our children to not grow up in some Max Max world, that's a special interest too!" Translation of second: "Look over there!"
Worst thing is that maybe you honestly think you are being fair and balanced.
And notice how old Al Gore and his fellow cap and traders have NOT ONCE demanded heavy tariffs or other protectionist measures to get China and India to comply with carbon caps, why? Because they make massive profits there, that's why!
Nearly. I don't know how much Al Gore personally makes from polluting in China, but no matter how much it was it would be a small share of all the money being made by polluting in China. That money is hard to fight against politically, tempting politicans to choose easier paths.
By the way, there is at least one prominent climate scientist in this debate, who is railing against politicians like Gore for taking the easy path, and stating that the political influence of money is the largest problem in fighting global warming.
The problem with asserting CO2 is a "lever" for H2O is that you've missed out on clouds entirely.
Is that a problem? I didn't claim to enumerate all the feedbacks there are. That clouds exist and can have an effect on temperature (apparently in either direction, depending on altitute? I don't know too much about it) doesn't change the fact that CO2 is a feedback. So why is there a problem asserting that?
The negative feedback loops that exist in our system (and they must, otherwise we'd have already had either run away cooling or run away warming)
This is kind of wrong. There aren't any large, unknown negative feedback loops that "have to exist" to explain our present climate, to the precision we are able to explain it. Maybe unknown negative feedbacks could make models more accurate, but they can't realistically change the general picture very much.
Also, regarding "runaway" cooling and warming. There's the fact that as things get warmer, they radiate more heat. This ultimately limits all feedbacks in either direction.
(So it's not linear feedback of the kind you get out of a microphone. No one ever said that, and people who think so worry too much, in a sense. Of course, if that bleak idea convinces them to deny global warming entirely, they worry too little!)
Things won't spin entirely out of control although it can get more than bad enough for humans.
is man actually capable of changing the properties of something as huge as planet Earth?
The answer is yes. Remember Archimedes? "Give me a fixed point to stand and I shall move the earth", he said. It's all about leverage.
Now for climate, we have some very potent "levers". They're not exactly like levers in physics, but the point is you can turn a small movement into a big one.
The main lever is the water vapor feedback. As anyone who's hung around denialist blogs knows, water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas. What they try to obfuscate is that it's a "lever", and how it's connected to the other stuff.
If the world warms a little, there becomes more water vapor in the atmosphere. This keeps heat from the sun in, warming the planet further, causing even more water vapor in the atmosphere. (But you can relax a little, it's not an out-of-control feedback. A warmer planet radiates more heat into space. Eventually it radiates so much that it balances the extra heat from our new water vapor insulation.)
The reverse happens if the world cools a little. Less water vapor, leading to lower temperatures, leading to even less vapor, until the new balance is reached.
There are many such levers. CO2 is another one - as the world warms, so do the oceans, and warm water can dissolve less gas than cold water. A great deal of CO2 is dissolved in seawater, so as the world warms, the oceans release CO2, leading to further warming, leading to further release etc. This is a slower lever, but very powerful. It is thought that the CO2 lever is responsible for ice ages - Milankovich cycles, the small orbital anomalies that cause cooling and warming with periods of some hundred thousand years, by themselves only cause a tiny temperature difference. It would hardly matter for life on earth if it hadn't been magnified so forcefully by the CO2 and water vapor feedbacks.
This is how man can change the properties of something as huge as planet earth. A trillion tons of CO2 that used to be buried deep beneath the surface is now in the atmosphere thanks to human activities. It may not sound like much, as big as the crust and atmosphere is, but the planet just isn't set up to be forgiving of such changes - at least not to us.
why is it when I point to localised evidence of cooling as proof AGW is bullshit, AGW supporters give me a line about global temps being the only valid data.
What? No, not at all. If you show me a glacier has gained as much mass since 1921 as this one has lost, I'm paying attention, I promise. If it's just local variation, there should be plenty of them.
(Oh, don't try to pull the classic denialist trick of going for area instead of volume.)
Why not? Music execs are notoriously bad at picking the music that will succeed. Publishers are bad at picking up the books that will succeed. Quite often Hollywood wastes money on a big flop.
As to games, remember Age of Conan?
Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far, but it's hard to say if it's luck, talent for seeing what will work, or just hordes of loyal fans.
Sure, you'll always miss out on some flexibility and fidelity compared to the real thing but with today's technology, not too much.
This appears to be the attitude of most synth designers, unfortunately. The best digital pianos I've heard emulated sympathetic resonance for a couple of strings, but not nearly enough to give a credible sostenuto effect.
The midi files in question are performed by good pianists, they are midi conversions of recorded piano rolls. I'm concerned with good instrument sound.
No, we had not. When you say something like that I wonder if you're living in Europe at all - or maybe you're counting on your readers to not be in Europe?
Winter in Europe, December to February, were below the average for the period 1951-1980 (the standard reference period). But already in spring, March to May, it was back above it.
Another issue: the amount of snowfall depends primarily on water vapor in the atmosphere. As long as there's freezing temperatures, more moisture means more snow. More cold below zero degrees celsius does not cause more snow. A very basic prediction of climate modeling is that water vapor in the atmosphere will increase as temperature increases. So record cold might be unexpected from a climate science perspective; record snowfall would not.
Remember that the Economist is a British magazine. Belief in WMDs and support for the war was not as pervasive there. AFAIK, most of the active global warming deniers in the UK are also in UKIP and beyond.
They have backtracked on both those issues though, I will give them that. And they have some positions which are unpopular in the UK right wing, such as EU support. So it could be that I judge them somewhat harshly.
Generating realistic sounds of rigid objects is fairly straight forward. You know the material properties. You know the size and shape from your physics engine. You run it through some relatively simple set of equations to get the resonance frequency of the shard. Add in amplitude from the impact, natural damping over time, and you're done. [...] Producing realistic sound like that isn't very impressive.
I beg to differ. Where is the software that can do this accurately, instead of trying to do it realtime? (realtime any half-decent synth tries to, and fails...)
I've searched many times for sound rendering software. Something that could take, say, a midi file, work on it for 8 hours, and give me a piano sound that doesn't sound like crap. I haven't found anything yet. If you could show me some, I'd be genuinely grateful (it's even something I would pay money for. The software I mean, not you telling me:p )
I love this stuff too. I've wanted rendered sound for years. It always irked me that programmers would use so much effort to render graphics, and so little to render realistic sound. People will gladly run a raytracer for 8 hours to get a nice picture of a car, but I've never found anyone who run a physics simulation for 8 hours to get the sound of a piano right - even though I've never heard a decent synthesized piano sound in my life. What happened, why did sound get so little attention compared to graphics?
Anyway, these videos are evidence that maybe things are changing.
They get technology reasonably well. They occasionally call out the occasional walking piece of corruption that other are resigned to (read: Silvio Berlusconi). But editorial-wise, they are very far right. They supported the iraq war, they believed in WMD, and they denied global warming for a very long time (until 2007?).
You could equally well say that the heart and soul of physics was statistics. Or medicine. Or astronomy. Or any kind of social science.
Statistics is damn important for a lot of things, including climate science, but it's far from everything. It's also not correct that statistics experts aren't represented in climate science - and it's a cruel lie that it's any better represented among the "critics".
Well, the American Meteorological Society gave him their seal of approval (for informative, well communicated, and scientifically sound weather information), so he can't be all bad.
Over 1600 people have that "Seal of approval". It does not require the holder to have a meteorology degree, and they actually paid an annual fee to keep it. It's really not very prestigious, which is maybe why they discontinued it.
And the "qualified statistician" Steve McIntyre has only a regular bachelor's degree in mathematics - nice enough to have, I'm sure, but hardly enough to make him a specialist. James Hansen, for instance, has a bachelor in mathematics too, in addition to the master's degree in astronomy and PhD in physics (and about 40 years of publication history).
Not to say that academic qualifications are everything. But neither are they a reason to pay special attention to McIntyre.
No, you're right, calling McIntyre an industry shill is a bit unfair. Calling him a shill for the mining industry is a bit like calling Dick Cheney a shill for the oil industry.
McIntyre is a former mining company executive, no mere grunt.
My father taught computer science for 40 years, but technically he was a physicist, not a computer scientist - computer science didn't exist when he went to university.
Statistics is important, but it's far from the only important thing in climate science.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation of first: "Wanting our children to not grow up in some Max Max world, that's a special interest too!"
Translation of second: "Look over there!"
Worst thing is that maybe you honestly think you are being fair and balanced.
Nearly. I don't know how much Al Gore personally makes from polluting in China, but no matter how much it was it would be a small share of all the money being made by polluting in China. That money is hard to fight against politically, tempting politicans to choose easier paths.
By the way, there is at least one prominent climate scientist in this debate, who is railing against politicians like Gore for taking the easy path, and stating that the political influence of money is the largest problem in fighting global warming.
Is that a problem? I didn't claim to enumerate all the feedbacks there are. That clouds exist and can have an effect on temperature (apparently in either direction, depending on altitute? I don't know too much about it) doesn't change the fact that CO2 is a feedback. So why is there a problem asserting that?
This is kind of wrong. There aren't any large, unknown negative feedback loops that "have to exist" to explain our present climate, to the precision we are able to explain it. Maybe unknown negative feedbacks could make models more accurate, but they can't realistically change the general picture very much.
Also, regarding "runaway" cooling and warming. There's the fact that as things get warmer, they radiate more heat. This ultimately limits all feedbacks in either direction.
(So it's not linear feedback of the kind you get out of a microphone. No one ever said that, and people who think so worry too much, in a sense. Of course, if that bleak idea convinces them to deny global warming entirely, they worry too little!)
Things won't spin entirely out of control although it can get more than bad enough for humans.
The answer is yes. Remember Archimedes? "Give me a fixed point to stand and I shall move the earth", he said. It's all about leverage.
Now for climate, we have some very potent "levers". They're not exactly like levers in physics, but the point is you can turn a small movement into a big one.
The main lever is the water vapor feedback. As anyone who's hung around denialist blogs knows, water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas. What they try to obfuscate is that it's a "lever", and how it's connected to the other stuff.
If the world warms a little, there becomes more water vapor in the atmosphere. This keeps heat from the sun in, warming the planet further, causing even more water vapor in the atmosphere. (But you can relax a little, it's not an out-of-control feedback. A warmer planet radiates more heat into space. Eventually it radiates so much that it balances the extra heat from our new water vapor insulation.)
The reverse happens if the world cools a little. Less water vapor, leading to lower temperatures, leading to even less vapor, until the new balance is reached.
There are many such levers. CO2 is another one - as the world warms, so do the oceans, and warm water can dissolve less gas than cold water. A great deal of CO2 is dissolved in seawater, so as the world warms, the oceans release CO2, leading to further warming, leading to further release etc. This is a slower lever, but very powerful. It is thought that the CO2 lever is responsible for ice ages - Milankovich cycles, the small orbital anomalies that cause cooling and warming with periods of some hundred thousand years, by themselves only cause a tiny temperature difference. It would hardly matter for life on earth if it hadn't been magnified so forcefully by the CO2 and water vapor feedbacks.
This is how man can change the properties of something as huge as planet earth. A trillion tons of CO2 that used to be buried deep beneath the surface is now in the atmosphere thanks to human activities. It may not sound like much, as big as the crust and atmosphere is, but the planet just isn't set up to be forgiving of such changes - at least not to us.
What? No, not at all. If you show me a glacier has gained as much mass since 1921 as this one has lost, I'm paying attention, I promise. If it's just local variation, there should be plenty of them.
(Oh, don't try to pull the classic denialist trick of going for area instead of volume.)
Why not? Music execs are notoriously bad at picking the music that will succeed. Publishers are bad at picking up the books that will succeed. Quite often Hollywood wastes money on a big flop.
As to games, remember Age of Conan?
Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far, but it's hard to say if it's luck, talent for seeing what will work, or just hordes of loyal fans.
I did another search after writing this, and came over Pianoteq3.
!!!
OK, now I've heard a better digital piano! And I think I may actually be tempted to buy a trialware app for Linux for the first time in my life :-)
This appears to be the attitude of most synth designers, unfortunately. The best digital pianos I've heard emulated sympathetic resonance for a couple of strings, but not nearly enough to give a credible sostenuto effect.
The midi files in question are performed by good pianists, they are midi conversions of recorded piano rolls. I'm concerned with good instrument sound.
No, we had not. When you say something like that I wonder if you're living in Europe at all - or maybe you're counting on your readers to not be in Europe?
Winter in Europe, December to February, were below the average for the period 1951-1980 (the standard reference period). But already in spring, March to May, it was back above it.
Another issue: the amount of snowfall depends primarily on water vapor in the atmosphere. As long as there's freezing temperatures, more moisture means more snow. More cold below zero degrees celsius does not cause more snow. A very basic prediction of climate modeling is that water vapor in the atmosphere will increase as temperature increases. So record cold might be unexpected from a climate science perspective; record snowfall would not.
Remember that the Economist is a British magazine. Belief in WMDs and support for the war was not as pervasive there. AFAIK, most of the active global warming deniers in the UK are also in UKIP and beyond.
They have backtracked on both those issues though, I will give them that. And they have some positions which are unpopular in the UK right wing, such as EU support. So it could be that I judge them somewhat harshly.
You do realize roughly half the clips in that video were of actual things breaking?
Squeak!!
I've heard rumors that the common punching sound is actually a wrench smashing a cabbage.
I beg to differ. Where is the software that can do this accurately, instead of trying to do it realtime? (realtime any half-decent synth tries to, and fails...)
I've searched many times for sound rendering software. Something that could take, say, a midi file, work on it for 8 hours, and give me a piano sound that doesn't sound like crap. I haven't found anything yet. If you could show me some, I'd be genuinely grateful (it's even something I would pay money for. The software I mean, not you telling me :p )
Thanks for that link!
I love this stuff too. I've wanted rendered sound for years. It always irked me that programmers would use so much effort to render graphics, and so little to render realistic sound. People will gladly run a raytracer for 8 hours to get a nice picture of a car, but I've never found anyone who run a physics simulation for 8 hours to get the sound of a piano right - even though I've never heard a decent synthesized piano sound in my life. What happened, why did sound get so little attention compared to graphics?
Anyway, these videos are evidence that maybe things are changing.
Bah, by British brother in law soldered shut the antenna plug on his TV a while back, to save some license money when he wasn't using it.
They get technology reasonably well. They occasionally call out the occasional walking piece of corruption that other are resigned to (read: Silvio Berlusconi). But editorial-wise, they are very far right. They supported the iraq war, they believed in WMD, and they denied global warming for a very long time (until 2007?).
They also made some great boardgames back in the day.
I suspect they were the real-world inspiration for ACME corporation in Looney Tunes.
Viruses that infect harmful bacteria. If bacteria can co-evolve to help us, why shouldn't viruses?
You could equally well say that the heart and soul of physics was statistics. Or medicine. Or astronomy. Or any kind of social science.
Statistics is damn important for a lot of things, including climate science, but it's far from everything. It's also not correct that statistics experts aren't represented in climate science - and it's a cruel lie that it's any better represented among the "critics".
Over 1600 people have that "Seal of approval". It does not require the holder to have a meteorology degree, and they actually paid an annual fee to keep it. It's really not very prestigious, which is maybe why they discontinued it.
And the "qualified statistician" Steve McIntyre has only a regular bachelor's degree in mathematics - nice enough to have, I'm sure, but hardly enough to make him a specialist. James Hansen, for instance, has a bachelor in mathematics too, in addition to the master's degree in astronomy and PhD in physics (and about 40 years of publication history).
Not to say that academic qualifications are everything. But neither are they a reason to pay special attention to McIntyre.
No, you're right, calling McIntyre an industry shill is a bit unfair. Calling him a shill for the mining industry is a bit like calling Dick Cheney a shill for the oil industry.
McIntyre is a former mining company executive, no mere grunt.
"Scrutiny" is not what they want to do with the data. It's more like a judicial accuser going for a fishing trip.
My father taught computer science for 40 years, but technically he was a physicist, not a computer scientist - computer science didn't exist when he went to university.
Statistics is important, but it's far from the only important thing in climate science.