I got it when they were selling the 3 games (2.5 really - the last is just a "we promised a trilogy, so here's some extra since we cleaned up the story in game 2) for $10. I'd toss down $30-$40 for the three games, no problem. I'm stingy on games, but the Penumbra series was awesome. First-person horror-puzzlers.
It wasn't the most awesome engine, the graphics weren't fantastic, but it was a solid, god damn creepy game.
Waking up after a horrific nightmare of an experience, somewhere you'd been before, and having to figure out what had been moved in the room, and put it back into its place, while knowing that you were in some twisted nightmare, and realizing that you had to, even though you didn't know what would happen after....Writing on the walls that only shows up when the light is off, twisted scrawls from a soul tormented by demons, but you HAVE to read it, in order to survive...if you can call it surviving...The eyes in the dark, the....things....that chase you..
Penumbra was a fantastic series. It was a mix of a horror-version of Deus Ex, where instead of playing a beefed up cyber-soldier, you were playing a 20-something, out-of-shape guy who was losing his mind with some Indiana Jones-esque archeology, and ancient ruins, with a quick dusting of 'I played the Marine in AVP' style terror.
Buy it, if you don't have it already. Worth 2-5x the $5-$10 they charge for it.
I don't remember the last time I ran into the Look Around You series. It's been awhile. If you don't know about it, or haven't seen any of it in some time, you should get an inoculation. Try this.
In an attempt to add something useful to this discussion, I don't know what's more awesome - this theory, or ball lightning. I'm a fan of both!
When the wind is blowing the papers off your desk, the first thing you do is close the window.
That would be fine and good if a) You could close the window, and didn't need everyone else in the world to close it with you. And b) If closing the window instantly stopped the wind.
From a climate standpoint, closing the window will take 3/4 of the world to agree on. At the moment, EVERYONE is opening it wider. Worse, even if everyone agreed to close it, it would take 40 years.
Geo-engineering is dumping a bunch of paperweights on the table while you wait out those 40 years and try to get everyone to agree on closing the window. The alternative is to sit there while the papers of civilization blow away, waiting for everyone to agree on closing the window, then waiting for 40 years AFTER that agreement for it to finally happen.
Spraying water into the air will won't do shit. Even if it was proper geo-engineering, it'd only be a slight mitigation.
We're sure that CO2 produces warming for a couple of reasons:
1)All laboratory experiments show this. 2) All paleoclimate records show this. (To be fair, there are a ton of feedbacks in the system, but historical warm periods are very closely correlated with very high levels of CO2.) 3) All current observations show a very close correlation between CO2 and global temperature. In fact, there is nothing else that comes anywhere close to that correlation. 4) With reasonable parameters in models, previous CO2 data very closely predicts current temperatures and temperature distributions.
From a climate science standpoint, there is absolutely no doubt that increased CO2 leads to increased temperatures. Hell, even from a physics standpoint there's no question about it. In fact, the basic physics and chemistry aren't overly hard. Where the questions lie is in how the earth system as a whole responds to increased temperatures.
Clouds are perhaps the #1 area of uncertainty at the moment. Venus is scorching hot because of cloud cover and a strong greenhouse effect. Hotter on average than Mercury, which is a lot closer to the sun. Yet Mars is a frozen wasteland with no appreciable greenhouse effect or clouds. From ground and satellite observations we can see that, on average, low, thick clouds reflect more sun than they trap heat, and cause a net cooling. High, thin clouds trap more heat than they reflect, causing net warming.
But we lack data on "paleoclouds" - nobody really knows if a warmer planet leads to more low clouds or more high clouds. Most of the physics seems to indicate more clouds, (ala Venus) and paleoclimate records show wet periods corresponded with warm periods, and dry periods with cool periods.
I take a fair bit of issue with your last statement. You don't seem to know much about computational climate models. The entire point is to parametrize physical processes that are too computationally demanding to actually model. We can't model every raindrop, so we model net amounts based on parametrizations which agree with what we see. For instance, many model parametrizations are based on NCEP reanalysis data. It's freely available data, collected from a vast array of measurement devices. Pressure, temperature, humidity, winds, evaporation, precipitation, incoming solar, albedo, etc. The parametrizations we make are an aggreate of real data and pretty well known physical properties.
The big issues are the things we have no data for. "Paleoclouds", eg. Nobody knows what clouds were like 1 million years ago. We can estimate, based on what we know, but it's just a guess. Even something as simple as albedo is tricky. When we lose permafrost, the albedo of the poles changes. But what does it change to? Obviously it lowers, but the actual value depends on the types and distribution of plants that grow there. We've just got to guess at that. Do these uncertainties mean that global warming isn't happening? Not at all. It just means that the spread of predictions is that much larger.
One key thing we do know: The deep ocean has about a 1000 year circulation. We can trace the age of the ocean by testing for things like man-made nuclear particles and CFCs, among other things. When we examine 50 year old and newer water vs hundreds of years old water, the CO2 content of the new water is enormously higher. In fact, it looks like the ocean has taken up almost 50% of the CO2 we produced so far. As any chemist, physicist, or anyone who's opened a warm soda can tell you, warm liquids hold less gas. This potential slowdown of our major carbon sink, combined with our increasing emissions will likely have profound effects on future climate, above and beyond what's currently being modeled.
P.S. The IPCC models are a decade old. They only are using very well established, well reviewed models that have stood the test of time. The newer, more complete, less parametrized, and significantly more complicated models show a spread around the IPCC models. However, the bulk are above IPCC predictions for temperature. It doesn't help that we're following the worst-case IPCC emission scenario.
Well, to start, clouds form around aerosols. By definition, an aerosol is a particle small enough that the pull of gravity on its tiny mass is offset by air resistance, so it can remain suspended in the air. Such a high air resistance/mass ratio means shooting them any distance is really hard. It's like trying to throw open tissues 3000' into the air, except harder. Now, this is to make *clouds* - what they're trying to do.
If you want to seed clouds to make it rain (pretty much the opposite of making a cloud, really.) the best thing is tiny ice particles, followed by silver iodide. Silver iodide is usually used, as it's hard to keep ice solid and the right size. This convinces the moisture to form a crystal structure, similar to the substrate you sprinkled into the cloud.
Interestingly enough, the vast majority of water that falls from the sky starts as ice! Ice can rapidly grow in a saturated environment. Condensation is a much, much slower process, and is generally balanced by evaporation, even in clouds. Thus, liquid water is about the most useless thing to inject into clouds. Your idea of pumping water into the air wouldn't work, unless it was a really fine vapor, AND there were the aerosols for it to form around. AND it didn't just rain back out. And if you could put water in the air in a really massive quantity. The easiest way to do that would be to use a lake or ocean.
3000' is, atmospherically speaking, really, really low. Atmospheric scientists rarely use distance measurements, as everything is dependent on pressure. They break the atmosphere up into 100mb/100hPa (they're equal units, mb is older and hPa is metric) sections. Ground level is roughly 1000 hPa on average. The jet stream is in the 200-300 hPa range. (Pressure goes down as you go up, so lower pressure is higher vertically.) The bulk of weather happens between 1000 hPa and 500 hPa. 500 hPa corresponds, roughly, to 18,000'! In fact, when real meteorologists (a large percentage of the ones on TV don't have any sort of atmospheric degree - they have communications degrees!) discuss the weather, it's common for them to look at the 200-300 hPa levels to see what the jets are doing, the 500 hPa level to look at upper atmospheric dynamics, then 800-1000 hPa levels to see what the ground effects are.
If you put water 3,000' into the air, it won't stay there. It will either fall out, or keep going up. If it keeps going up, it most likely freezes, then comes back down. Inserting a large quantity of ANYTHING into the air with the correct buoyancy for any specific level, but with just enough inertia to get there, and not overshoot, is a ridiculously hard problem.
If you consider the surface of a pool the ground, and the bottom high enough in the atmosphere that water freezes and comes back down, you can get a good analogy to what they're trying to do. It's akin to jumping into a pool with enough air in your lungs that you end up neutrally buoyant, floating half-way down, without ever touching the bottom. And they're trying to do this in a kiddie pool rather than at the deep end in an olympic pool.
I haven't tried installing it in 3 years because of this. Is this current knowledge, or a residue from that time? I ask, because if you asked me, I'd say the same. But I *know* my experience is 3 years out-of-date. Has it gotten better?
I always ran into database issues, and a laggy, unintuitive UI. When your UI doesn't make clear sense, and it lags, a wrong button push spells frustration. My setup wasn't too awful either - an old dell with a huppauge card and remote, and a radeon video card. Between those things, however, I only once or twice briefly got them all working at once. The components now sit in a box in the other room waiting for me to get around to trying again.
If Dr. Evil had a bomb large enough to do that, you'd better be worrying about the bomb....
The methane hydrates/clathrates in the ocean are deep, buried in sediments, and well spread out. A single event like a bomb won't release much at all. You'd be better off blowing up an oil rig with the explosives.
However, a small change in temperature of part of an ocean could theoretically change the path of some currents, and those, in turn, could disrupt the methane. That's the real worry - you need something enormous to disrupt enough of them. It either has to be a change in currents/temperature, or cthulu.
Like you said at first, they ALSO require pressure. And they're shock-sensitive. Shock, minimal temperature changes, or minimal pressure changes can make them go back into gaseous form.
There is a ton of energy available in this form, throughout the oceans. It's a concern that the instability of these methane structures could actually cause some rapid climate change, if they're disturbed by warming oceans, current changes, etc.
That same instability makes them damn hard to mine for energy. A number of companies and research organizations have tried, but so far, everyone that's disturbed them has watched as the methane bubbled up to the surface, and escaped into the air.
Heh, the best part is that we might be trapping more heat than we're reflecting...
I'm doing a PhD in a climate area now, and the science is DEFINITELY not out on whether increased clouds hurt or help us. It depends on the height, location, water content, droplet size.....
But I agree with Idiomatick below - it's clear that we're into at least 40 years of warming, even if we turned off every last CO2 source today! As I posted above, we're on the ride, while we're still building the track ahead of us. The first 40+ years of the ride has been completed. What the next 80, 120, 160 years looks like is still a bit up in the air. However, it's hotter, with climate like we humans have never seen since we invented writing.
Our last chance to keep our climate like the last 10-15k yrs is to geo-engineer. Our only chance to get off this ride in the next 40 years is to put all our chips on 00 and spin the wheel. They aren't good odds, for sure....
Which can warm us as much as cool us. See Venus, at 400+ degrees....
The science is very much not complete on which sorts of clouds where warm us, and which where cool us. To a first order, yeah, we sort-of know. But nothing near the certainty that would be needed for this.
Worse, cloud nuclei aren't well understood, and the mechanics of *how* you form clouds is a very hot research topic right now. I don't for a second believe that they have the science to back up what they're tying to do - I'm working with people researching that question right now.
But if there's money in it, *sure*....I can *definitely* make more clouds....I'm the CEO and draw a hefty paycheck from my LLC....
As someone doing a PhD in weather/climate type stuff, I can give you some feedback:
To start, you're correct in your critique of the plan. 3000' is not far enough. Nor will they be able to get proper cloud aerosols up there, to form cloud nuclei, without them falling back to earth. And should all that work out well, their budget is an order of magnitude or two too small. And even if they had that money, it's a crap shoot if the clouds will warm or cool the earth.
To try to do this more "simply", using 10 football pitches, would fail. That sort of surface area is way too small. If we could form clouds like that, after every rain you'd have clouds above every major city, and even large roadways! Check out some satellite water vapor imagery of the US and you'll see that's not the case.
To create weather like that, you need a couple of square kilometers of water to be evaporated. And that's called......a lake. While salt might be an issue, you could simply keep the water circulating, and a few cm deep. It won't give you the exact same evaporation rate, but it would be lower maintenance, and far simpler.
But again, some clouds reflect sun and cool us, some trap outgoing longwave emissions (heat) and warm us. Just making clouds could freeze the planet, or it could make us something like Venus. The science is definitely not settled on those mechanics yet - I'm working with people trying to figure that out!
You're not too far off to be skeptical. I took a cloud physics course last semester. Cloud droplets form around aerosols - particles with such a low mass/volume ratio that they can remain suspended in the air.
How do they remain suspended in te air? They're so small that the force of gravity is about equal to the air resistance they encounter. I have absolutely no idea how you can turn sea water into a super-fine mist, and then shoot it 3,000' into the air. For it to stay there, it has to have massive air resistance. That's antithetical to shooting it there in the first place.
Not to mention my previous post about the large uncertainty in modeling cloud formation, and the even larger one in climate simulations, where clouds can both warm AND cool the earth, depending on a hundred different things.
I think the absurd dollar figures quoted are the icing on the cake.
But you're looking at a geological timescale instead of a human timescale! (And oddly enough, one of the few people who do that.)
I'm studying in a climate related area at the moment, and it's given me a pretty good prospective on it all. We humans grew up in a climatological golden age. Since we invented writing, all we've known is eternal spring, from a climate standpoint. Not the hottest it's ever been, nor anywhere NEAR the coldest it's ever been.
It had to end sometime - the geologic record shows this warm period as unprecedented. But the sad fact is that the whole of our human existence is tied to this climate. Our cities, harbors and ports rely upon this sea level, we quench our thirst and water our crops with rivers fed from glaciers and winter snow melt, our crops only grow in this one climate, and our livestock eat plants that grow in the same.
It doesn't matter that the earth has never been in balance - what matters is that human civilization was born and evolved only at this climatological instance. Adapting to anything else is going to be a brutal reminder of how transient a species we are.
Back to the GP's point - we're happily tipping the climatological balance right now. Yes, the earth has never been in balance, and from the earth's point of view, what we're doing is inconsequential. Species will go extinct, and new ones will come about. Glaciers will come and go, and continents will move. But from a human standpoint, we're speeding up a disruption the likes of which human civilization can't even conceive of. The earth will be fine. We may well be fucked when it's all over.
But at the same time, the GP is living in a fantasy world. Even if we flip a switch today, and stop all carbon emissions, we're looking at about 40 years more warming before the earth comes back into equilibrium. That's the absolutely BEST CASE scenario. Research into not messing up the biosphere would have been awesome 100-150 years ago. At the moment, we've done that research. Now we're on the ride, while we're still building track ahead of us. The first 40+ years of the ride has been completed. What the next 80, 120, 160 years looks like is still a bit up in the air.
Suffice to say, the ride is generally a lot hotter, with weather patterns we humans haven't seen since we learned to write.
Since I'm currently studying this, I can give a couple of good ones:
Cloud feedback is not well known at the moment. At different latitudes, at different heights, clouds have a different effect on climate. In some cases, they reflect the sun and cool the earth. In others they trap outgoing radiation and warm the earth. What's underneath them matters as well.
Secondly, cloud formation isn't well understood yet either. There's a good chance all that water will just fall back out of the sky, or it might just evaporate on the way up. Understanding an airmass and how it will respond to moisture added in the middle, rather than the bottom where it usually comes from, is no small feat.
Not to mention that I don't see how they're going to get water up that high. Shoot ice chunks? Water isn't known for being aerodynamic. When rain falls, a lot of it looks like a red blood cell/parachute combo. The terminal velocity of water is in the centimeters to meters per second range.
Clouds need aerosols to form around. I'm really not sure how they plan to get a particle with such a low mass/volume ratio that it doesn't have any downward motion UP into the air. Ice the right size to melt to a spec when it gets up that high?
If they have a machine that can do this, I'll be DAMN impressed. If it works, I'll be dumbstruck. What could possibly go wrong? I'm not sure what could possibly go right....
Same here. It started with my netbook, as I tried desperately to maximize vertical space so that I could actually read pdfs and long web pages. From there it trickled into my main machine.
One of the nice things I found to hack this together is Tree-Style Tabs for Firefox. Puts the tabs on the left and branches them from the tab that spawned them. That's the best way to organize tabs that I've ever seen.
I wouldn't have as much of an issue if I was allowed to control it like EVERY OTHER MEDIA PLAYER. If you're going to be doing video and audio, there needs to be a full suite of controls to go with it. Far too many places don't have the ability to stop of pause, or they lack volume controls. If an application is making noise, it damn well better have volume controls and a mute button.
I've sort-of done this. I have two keys to get into work - exterior door and office door. In my desk I have all the rest of the keys I need to open the rest of the stuff around here. Sure, I might, once, need to just go in, go somewhere, and go out. But 99% of the time, I need to get into my office.
I tried doing that at home, but mail is at the bottom of the stairs, on the way to my apt. No sense really in leaving my mailbox key in my apt, because I'll have to cover a flight of stairs twice to get mail that way.
I tried leaving my car keys in my Apt when I was out without it, but there were plenty of times when I rode a bus home and then wanted to hop directly into the car to go to eat, to the girlfriend's place, etc. No sense in covering a flight of stairs twice while unlocking two doors just to retrieve car keys.
The best I can do is 5 keys - 2 for work, 1 apt, 1 mailbox, and 1 car. I wish I could get rid of 3 of those, however....I have them on a carabiner on my hip. 2 keys (and no keyless entry car fob) would fit in a front pocket well.
As someone who has an occasional key to his girlfriend's place:
1) Coming in late, after bedtime. She doesn't have to get woken up by someone hammering on the door - just by someone slipping into bed. 2) I parked there last night, we both went to work this morning, but I'm going to get back an hour or two before her. 3) See Red Flayer's response....
Yep. I posted pretty much the same above. I was trying to replace a 3 year old netbook, but the best I can do for the same price is 50% larger and heavier, with Windows 7 starter, and a spinning drive. Those were 3 things I specifically chose NOT to have when I bought my previous netbook. (Well, it might have been Vista crippled edition then, but you get the drift.)
What I wanted, and got 3 years ago doesn't exist now. And worse, BETTER than that also doesn't exist. The netbook marketplace no longer exists, I guess.
That's what killed my second purchase of a netbook.
The first one was one of the early ones, I bought it, doubled the ram, added 8gb of storage with a mini-SD chip, and did all that for under $350 or so. Fast forward three years, and after dropping it, abusing it, throwing it in bags while hibernating, etc, some stuff has started to fail. Wireless doesn't work, and the track pad is having issues. I want to buy another netbook, but....
The cheapest I can find are MSI books in the $270-$280 range, with Windows 7 starter, no SSD, and 50% larger and heavier than what I have currently. SSD options? Starting at $400.....
Why would I blow that when full notebooks start at that price?
In addition, the way Gmail handles it, IMHO, is fantastic. I want to get that sort of formatting in all the rest of my mail clients. Sadly, about the only way is to funnel them all to a Gmail account...
the ribbon is only a bad thing to someone intimately familiar with the products already
That's my major issue with it...
I'm familiar with MS Office, but I only use versions with the ribbon infrequently. When I sit down, I know what I want to do, and I know where I *used* to be able to find it. Now, I have this major learning curve to do something I've always been able to do with a couple of mouse clicks.
It's also quite possible that they did a few spot checks with the intensive stats, found that the results matched the quick and easy stats, and went with those. I know someone who does this sort of research, who's a fantastic statistician, and that's a fairly common approach. Doing the in-depth stats is computationally difficult and time consuming. I didn't see anywhere that they looked into the "behind the scenes" decisions which lead to the less rigorous stats being used. It could be that they justified them, which is why they were used.
I'm doing fairly limited climate modeling, confined to the North Atlantic. The model I have access to spits out 30 GB of data to model just the temperature and salinity of the NA for one year. That's none of the biology or chemistry, no carbon cycle, etc. The full carbon model we ran for 10 years tops 1TB.
With our budget, there's no way we could provide the hardware and bandwidth to serve tens to hundreds of TBs of data to anyone who wanted it. If someone with a valid need asks for it, we'll happily provide the data. But we just can't make it available to everyone. We'd need someone on dedicated staff to just maintain that infrastructure, most likely.
However, our model is freely available. (The MIT GCM) The initialization data is as well - it's NCEP reanalysis data, freely downloadable. Our methods are published. Theoretically, someone combining the two should be able to get the same results as us.
The statistical methods used, though arriving at correct results
You call "arriving at correct results" "Shoddy and careless"? Watch out - your seething blind climate skepticism is hanging out where everyone can see it!
If I take a general average, and it gets the same results as you doing some sort of fancy running mean, with a weighted, binned average method to back up your results, it doesn't make a lick of difference.
Like everyone else in the world, climate scientists have budgets. Data storage, computer time, and the manpower to analyze and interpret results all cost money.
Why you would be screaming about results that were correct is beyond me....
Slashdot Mirror
I got it when they were selling the 3 games (2.5 really - the last is just a "we promised a trilogy, so here's some extra since we cleaned up the story in game 2) for $10. I'd toss down $30-$40 for the three games, no problem. I'm stingy on games, but the Penumbra series was awesome. First-person horror-puzzlers.
It wasn't the most awesome engine, the graphics weren't fantastic, but it was a solid, god damn creepy game.
Waking up after a horrific nightmare of an experience, somewhere you'd been before, and having to figure out what had been moved in the room, and put it back into its place, while knowing that you were in some twisted nightmare, and realizing that you had to, even though you didn't know what would happen after....Writing on the walls that only shows up when the light is off, twisted scrawls from a soul tormented by demons, but you HAVE to read it, in order to survive...if you can call it surviving...The eyes in the dark, the....things....that chase you..
Penumbra was a fantastic series. It was a mix of a horror-version of Deus Ex, where instead of playing a beefed up cyber-soldier, you were playing a 20-something, out-of-shape guy who was losing his mind with some Indiana Jones-esque archeology, and ancient ruins, with a quick dusting of 'I played the Marine in AVP' style terror.
Buy it, if you don't have it already. Worth 2-5x the $5-$10 they charge for it.
Allow me to karma whore for a second....
I don't remember the last time I ran into the Look Around You series. It's been awhile. If you don't know about it, or haven't seen any of it in some time, you should get an inoculation. Try this.
In an attempt to add something useful to this discussion, I don't know what's more awesome - this theory, or ball lightning. I'm a fan of both!
When the wind is blowing the papers off your desk, the first thing you do is close the window.
That would be fine and good if a) You could close the window, and didn't need everyone else in the world to close it with you. And b) If closing the window instantly stopped the wind.
From a climate standpoint, closing the window will take 3/4 of the world to agree on. At the moment, EVERYONE is opening it wider. Worse, even if everyone agreed to close it, it would take 40 years.
Geo-engineering is dumping a bunch of paperweights on the table while you wait out those 40 years and try to get everyone to agree on closing the window. The alternative is to sit there while the papers of civilization blow away, waiting for everyone to agree on closing the window, then waiting for 40 years AFTER that agreement for it to finally happen.
Spraying water into the air will won't do shit. Even if it was proper geo-engineering, it'd only be a slight mitigation.
We're sure that CO2 produces warming for a couple of reasons:
1)All laboratory experiments show this.
2) All paleoclimate records show this. (To be fair, there are a ton of feedbacks in the system, but historical warm periods are very closely correlated with very high levels of CO2.)
3) All current observations show a very close correlation between CO2 and global temperature. In fact, there is nothing else that comes anywhere close to that correlation.
4) With reasonable parameters in models, previous CO2 data very closely predicts current temperatures and temperature distributions.
From a climate science standpoint, there is absolutely no doubt that increased CO2 leads to increased temperatures. Hell, even from a physics standpoint there's no question about it. In fact, the basic physics and chemistry aren't overly hard. Where the questions lie is in how the earth system as a whole responds to increased temperatures.
Clouds are perhaps the #1 area of uncertainty at the moment. Venus is scorching hot because of cloud cover and a strong greenhouse effect. Hotter on average than Mercury, which is a lot closer to the sun. Yet Mars is a frozen wasteland with no appreciable greenhouse effect or clouds. From ground and satellite observations we can see that, on average, low, thick clouds reflect more sun than they trap heat, and cause a net cooling. High, thin clouds trap more heat than they reflect, causing net warming.
But we lack data on "paleoclouds" - nobody really knows if a warmer planet leads to more low clouds or more high clouds. Most of the physics seems to indicate more clouds, (ala Venus) and paleoclimate records show wet periods corresponded with warm periods, and dry periods with cool periods.
I take a fair bit of issue with your last statement. You don't seem to know much about computational climate models. The entire point is to parametrize physical processes that are too computationally demanding to actually model. We can't model every raindrop, so we model net amounts based on parametrizations which agree with what we see. For instance, many model parametrizations are based on NCEP reanalysis data. It's freely available data, collected from a vast array of measurement devices. Pressure, temperature, humidity, winds, evaporation, precipitation, incoming solar, albedo, etc. The parametrizations we make are an aggreate of real data and pretty well known physical properties.
The big issues are the things we have no data for. "Paleoclouds", eg. Nobody knows what clouds were like 1 million years ago. We can estimate, based on what we know, but it's just a guess. Even something as simple as albedo is tricky. When we lose permafrost, the albedo of the poles changes. But what does it change to? Obviously it lowers, but the actual value depends on the types and distribution of plants that grow there. We've just got to guess at that. Do these uncertainties mean that global warming isn't happening? Not at all. It just means that the spread of predictions is that much larger.
One key thing we do know: The deep ocean has about a 1000 year circulation. We can trace the age of the ocean by testing for things like man-made nuclear particles and CFCs, among other things. When we examine 50 year old and newer water vs hundreds of years old water, the CO2 content of the new water is enormously higher. In fact, it looks like the ocean has taken up almost 50% of the CO2 we produced so far. As any chemist, physicist, or anyone who's opened a warm soda can tell you, warm liquids hold less gas. This potential slowdown of our major carbon sink, combined with our increasing emissions will likely have profound effects on future climate, above and beyond what's currently being modeled.
P.S. The IPCC models are a decade old. They only are using very well established, well reviewed models that have stood the test of time. The newer, more complete, less parametrized, and significantly more complicated models show a spread around the IPCC models. However, the bulk are above IPCC predictions for temperature. It doesn't help that we're following the worst-case IPCC emission scenario.
Well, to start, clouds form around aerosols. By definition, an aerosol is a particle small enough that the pull of gravity on its tiny mass is offset by air resistance, so it can remain suspended in the air. Such a high air resistance/mass ratio means shooting them any distance is really hard. It's like trying to throw open tissues 3000' into the air, except harder. Now, this is to make *clouds* - what they're trying to do.
If you want to seed clouds to make it rain (pretty much the opposite of making a cloud, really.) the best thing is tiny ice particles, followed by silver iodide. Silver iodide is usually used, as it's hard to keep ice solid and the right size. This convinces the moisture to form a crystal structure, similar to the substrate you sprinkled into the cloud.
Interestingly enough, the vast majority of water that falls from the sky starts as ice! Ice can rapidly grow in a saturated environment. Condensation is a much, much slower process, and is generally balanced by evaporation, even in clouds. Thus, liquid water is about the most useless thing to inject into clouds. Your idea of pumping water into the air wouldn't work, unless it was a really fine vapor, AND there were the aerosols for it to form around. AND it didn't just rain back out. And if you could put water in the air in a really massive quantity. The easiest way to do that would be to use a lake or ocean.
3000' is, atmospherically speaking, really, really low. Atmospheric scientists rarely use distance measurements, as everything is dependent on pressure. They break the atmosphere up into 100mb/100hPa (they're equal units, mb is older and hPa is metric) sections. Ground level is roughly 1000 hPa on average. The jet stream is in the 200-300 hPa range. (Pressure goes down as you go up, so lower pressure is higher vertically.) The bulk of weather happens between 1000 hPa and 500 hPa. 500 hPa corresponds, roughly, to 18,000'! In fact, when real meteorologists (a large percentage of the ones on TV don't have any sort of atmospheric degree - they have communications degrees!) discuss the weather, it's common for them to look at the 200-300 hPa levels to see what the jets are doing, the 500 hPa level to look at upper atmospheric dynamics, then 800-1000 hPa levels to see what the ground effects are.
If you put water 3,000' into the air, it won't stay there. It will either fall out, or keep going up. If it keeps going up, it most likely freezes, then comes back down. Inserting a large quantity of ANYTHING into the air with the correct buoyancy for any specific level, but with just enough inertia to get there, and not overshoot, is a ridiculously hard problem.
If you consider the surface of a pool the ground, and the bottom high enough in the atmosphere that water freezes and comes back down, you can get a good analogy to what they're trying to do. It's akin to jumping into a pool with enough air in your lungs that you end up neutrally buoyant, floating half-way down, without ever touching the bottom. And they're trying to do this in a kiddie pool rather than at the deep end in an olympic pool.
I haven't tried installing it in 3 years because of this. Is this current knowledge, or a residue from that time? I ask, because if you asked me, I'd say the same. But I *know* my experience is 3 years out-of-date. Has it gotten better?
I always ran into database issues, and a laggy, unintuitive UI. When your UI doesn't make clear sense, and it lags, a wrong button push spells frustration. My setup wasn't too awful either - an old dell with a huppauge card and remote, and a radeon video card. Between those things, however, I only once or twice briefly got them all working at once. The components now sit in a box in the other room waiting for me to get around to trying again.
If Dr. Evil had a bomb large enough to do that, you'd better be worrying about the bomb....
The methane hydrates/clathrates in the ocean are deep, buried in sediments, and well spread out. A single event like a bomb won't release much at all. You'd be better off blowing up an oil rig with the explosives.
However, a small change in temperature of part of an ocean could theoretically change the path of some currents, and those, in turn, could disrupt the methane. That's the real worry - you need something enormous to disrupt enough of them. It either has to be a change in currents/temperature, or cthulu.
Like you said at first, they ALSO require pressure. And they're shock-sensitive. Shock, minimal temperature changes, or minimal pressure changes can make them go back into gaseous form.
There is a ton of energy available in this form, throughout the oceans. It's a concern that the instability of these methane structures could actually cause some rapid climate change, if they're disturbed by warming oceans, current changes, etc.
That same instability makes them damn hard to mine for energy. A number of companies and research organizations have tried, but so far, everyone that's disturbed them has watched as the methane bubbled up to the surface, and escaped into the air.
Heh, the best part is that we might be trapping more heat than we're reflecting...
I'm doing a PhD in a climate area now, and the science is DEFINITELY not out on whether increased clouds hurt or help us. It depends on the height, location, water content, droplet size.....
But I agree with Idiomatick below - it's clear that we're into at least 40 years of warming, even if we turned off every last CO2 source today! As I posted above, we're on the ride, while we're still building the track ahead of us. The first 40+ years of the ride has been completed. What the next 80, 120, 160 years looks like is still a bit up in the air. However, it's hotter, with climate like we humans have never seen since we invented writing.
Our last chance to keep our climate like the last 10-15k yrs is to geo-engineer. Our only chance to get off this ride in the next 40 years is to put all our chips on 00 and spin the wheel. They aren't good odds, for sure....
Which can warm us as much as cool us. See Venus, at 400+ degrees....
The science is very much not complete on which sorts of clouds where warm us, and which where cool us. To a first order, yeah, we sort-of know. But nothing near the certainty that would be needed for this.
Worse, cloud nuclei aren't well understood, and the mechanics of *how* you form clouds is a very hot research topic right now. I don't for a second believe that they have the science to back up what they're tying to do - I'm working with people researching that question right now.
But if there's money in it, *sure*....I can *definitely* make more clouds....I'm the CEO and draw a hefty paycheck from my LLC....
As someone doing a PhD in weather/climate type stuff, I can give you some feedback:
To start, you're correct in your critique of the plan. 3000' is not far enough. Nor will they be able to get proper cloud aerosols up there, to form cloud nuclei, without them falling back to earth. And should all that work out well, their budget is an order of magnitude or two too small. And even if they had that money, it's a crap shoot if the clouds will warm or cool the earth.
To try to do this more "simply", using 10 football pitches, would fail. That sort of surface area is way too small. If we could form clouds like that, after every rain you'd have clouds above every major city, and even large roadways! Check out some satellite water vapor imagery of the US and you'll see that's not the case.
To create weather like that, you need a couple of square kilometers of water to be evaporated. And that's called......a lake. While salt might be an issue, you could simply keep the water circulating, and a few cm deep. It won't give you the exact same evaporation rate, but it would be lower maintenance, and far simpler.
But again, some clouds reflect sun and cool us, some trap outgoing longwave emissions (heat) and warm us. Just making clouds could freeze the planet, or it could make us something like Venus. The science is definitely not settled on those mechanics yet - I'm working with people trying to figure that out!
You're not too far off to be skeptical. I took a cloud physics course last semester. Cloud droplets form around aerosols - particles with such a low mass/volume ratio that they can remain suspended in the air.
How do they remain suspended in te air? They're so small that the force of gravity is about equal to the air resistance they encounter. I have absolutely no idea how you can turn sea water into a super-fine mist, and then shoot it 3,000' into the air. For it to stay there, it has to have massive air resistance. That's antithetical to shooting it there in the first place.
Not to mention my previous post about the large uncertainty in modeling cloud formation, and the even larger one in climate simulations, where clouds can both warm AND cool the earth, depending on a hundred different things.
I think the absurd dollar figures quoted are the icing on the cake.
But you're looking at a geological timescale instead of a human timescale! (And oddly enough, one of the few people who do that.)
I'm studying in a climate related area at the moment, and it's given me a pretty good prospective on it all. We humans grew up in a climatological golden age. Since we invented writing, all we've known is eternal spring, from a climate standpoint. Not the hottest it's ever been, nor anywhere NEAR the coldest it's ever been.
It had to end sometime - the geologic record shows this warm period as unprecedented. But the sad fact is that the whole of our human existence is tied to this climate. Our cities, harbors and ports rely upon this sea level, we quench our thirst and water our crops with rivers fed from glaciers and winter snow melt, our crops only grow in this one climate, and our livestock eat plants that grow in the same.
It doesn't matter that the earth has never been in balance - what matters is that human civilization was born and evolved only at this climatological instance. Adapting to anything else is going to be a brutal reminder of how transient a species we are.
Back to the GP's point - we're happily tipping the climatological balance right now. Yes, the earth has never been in balance, and from the earth's point of view, what we're doing is inconsequential. Species will go extinct, and new ones will come about. Glaciers will come and go, and continents will move. But from a human standpoint, we're speeding up a disruption the likes of which human civilization can't even conceive of. The earth will be fine. We may well be fucked when it's all over.
But at the same time, the GP is living in a fantasy world. Even if we flip a switch today, and stop all carbon emissions, we're looking at about 40 years more warming before the earth comes back into equilibrium. That's the absolutely BEST CASE scenario. Research into not messing up the biosphere would have been awesome 100-150 years ago. At the moment, we've done that research. Now we're on the ride, while we're still building track ahead of us. The first 40+ years of the ride has been completed. What the next 80, 120, 160 years looks like is still a bit up in the air.
Suffice to say, the ride is generally a lot hotter, with weather patterns we humans haven't seen since we learned to write.
Since I'm currently studying this, I can give a couple of good ones:
Cloud feedback is not well known at the moment. At different latitudes, at different heights, clouds have a different effect on climate. In some cases, they reflect the sun and cool the earth. In others they trap outgoing radiation and warm the earth. What's underneath them matters as well.
Secondly, cloud formation isn't well understood yet either. There's a good chance all that water will just fall back out of the sky, or it might just evaporate on the way up. Understanding an airmass and how it will respond to moisture added in the middle, rather than the bottom where it usually comes from, is no small feat.
Not to mention that I don't see how they're going to get water up that high. Shoot ice chunks? Water isn't known for being aerodynamic. When rain falls, a lot of it looks like a red blood cell/parachute combo. The terminal velocity of water is in the centimeters to meters per second range.
Clouds need aerosols to form around. I'm really not sure how they plan to get a particle with such a low mass/volume ratio that it doesn't have any downward motion UP into the air. Ice the right size to melt to a spec when it gets up that high?
If they have a machine that can do this, I'll be DAMN impressed. If it works, I'll be dumbstruck. What could possibly go wrong? I'm not sure what could possibly go right....
Same here. It started with my netbook, as I tried desperately to maximize vertical space so that I could actually read pdfs and long web pages. From there it trickled into my main machine.
One of the nice things I found to hack this together is Tree-Style Tabs for Firefox. Puts the tabs on the left and branches them from the tab that spawned them. That's the best way to organize tabs that I've ever seen.
I wouldn't have as much of an issue if I was allowed to control it like EVERY OTHER MEDIA PLAYER. If you're going to be doing video and audio, there needs to be a full suite of controls to go with it. Far too many places don't have the ability to stop of pause, or they lack volume controls. If an application is making noise, it damn well better have volume controls and a mute button.
I've sort-of done this. I have two keys to get into work - exterior door and office door. In my desk I have all the rest of the keys I need to open the rest of the stuff around here. Sure, I might, once, need to just go in, go somewhere, and go out. But 99% of the time, I need to get into my office.
I tried doing that at home, but mail is at the bottom of the stairs, on the way to my apt. No sense really in leaving my mailbox key in my apt, because I'll have to cover a flight of stairs twice to get mail that way.
I tried leaving my car keys in my Apt when I was out without it, but there were plenty of times when I rode a bus home and then wanted to hop directly into the car to go to eat, to the girlfriend's place, etc. No sense in covering a flight of stairs twice while unlocking two doors just to retrieve car keys.
The best I can do is 5 keys - 2 for work, 1 apt, 1 mailbox, and 1 car. I wish I could get rid of 3 of those, however....I have them on a carabiner on my hip. 2 keys (and no keyless entry car fob) would fit in a front pocket well.
As someone who has an occasional key to his girlfriend's place:
1) Coming in late, after bedtime. She doesn't have to get woken up by someone hammering on the door - just by someone slipping into bed.
2) I parked there last night, we both went to work this morning, but I'm going to get back an hour or two before her.
3) See Red Flayer's response....
Yep. I posted pretty much the same above. I was trying to replace a 3 year old netbook, but the best I can do for the same price is 50% larger and heavier, with Windows 7 starter, and a spinning drive. Those were 3 things I specifically chose NOT to have when I bought my previous netbook. (Well, it might have been Vista crippled edition then, but you get the drift.)
What I wanted, and got 3 years ago doesn't exist now. And worse, BETTER than that also doesn't exist. The netbook marketplace no longer exists, I guess.
That's what killed my second purchase of a netbook.
The first one was one of the early ones, I bought it, doubled the ram, added 8gb of storage with a mini-SD chip, and did all that for under $350 or so. Fast forward three years, and after dropping it, abusing it, throwing it in bags while hibernating, etc, some stuff has started to fail. Wireless doesn't work, and the track pad is having issues. I want to buy another netbook, but....
The cheapest I can find are MSI books in the $270-$280 range, with Windows 7 starter, no SSD, and 50% larger and heavier than what I have currently. SSD options? Starting at $400.....
Why would I blow that when full notebooks start at that price?
In addition, the way Gmail handles it, IMHO, is fantastic. I want to get that sort of formatting in all the rest of my mail clients. Sadly, about the only way is to funnel them all to a Gmail account...
the ribbon is only a bad thing to someone intimately familiar with the products already
That's my major issue with it...
I'm familiar with MS Office, but I only use versions with the ribbon infrequently. When I sit down, I know what I want to do, and I know where I *used* to be able to find it. Now, I have this major learning curve to do something I've always been able to do with a couple of mouse clicks.
That's damn frustrating.
It's also quite possible that they did a few spot checks with the intensive stats, found that the results matched the quick and easy stats, and went with those. I know someone who does this sort of research, who's a fantastic statistician, and that's a fairly common approach. Doing the in-depth stats is computationally difficult and time consuming. I didn't see anywhere that they looked into the "behind the scenes" decisions which lead to the less rigorous stats being used. It could be that they justified them, which is why they were used.
I'm doing fairly limited climate modeling, confined to the North Atlantic. The model I have access to spits out 30 GB of data to model just the temperature and salinity of the NA for one year. That's none of the biology or chemistry, no carbon cycle, etc. The full carbon model we ran for 10 years tops 1TB.
With our budget, there's no way we could provide the hardware and bandwidth to serve tens to hundreds of TBs of data to anyone who wanted it. If someone with a valid need asks for it, we'll happily provide the data. But we just can't make it available to everyone. We'd need someone on dedicated staff to just maintain that infrastructure, most likely.
However, our model is freely available. (The MIT GCM) The initialization data is as well - it's NCEP reanalysis data, freely downloadable. Our methods are published. Theoretically, someone combining the two should be able to get the same results as us.
The statistical methods used, though arriving at correct results
You call "arriving at correct results" "Shoddy and careless"? Watch out - your seething blind climate skepticism is hanging out where everyone can see it!
If I take a general average, and it gets the same results as you doing some sort of fancy running mean, with a weighted, binned average method to back up your results, it doesn't make a lick of difference.
Like everyone else in the world, climate scientists have budgets. Data storage, computer time, and the manpower to analyze and interpret results all cost money.
Why you would be screaming about results that were correct is beyond me....