"The fact is at the end of the day Assange has got the job done"
Exactly. As the front man his job is to honour the promise that WL makes to it's informants; ie: maximum exposure for their information. Since google news currently lists well over 14,000 WL related articles, (the highest hit count I can personally recall for any issue), I'd say he's doing a spectacular job.
Rudd is worthy of a hat tip for his public support of Assange even though some of the documets were embarrasing to him personally, Rudd blames the US for the leaks and claims Assange has done nothing wrong by publishing them. He is one of the few politicians in the world to publicly speak up for WL, another notable exeption being Putin who is reveling in the irony of lecturing the US in the basic principles of a free press. But the most suprising to me personally is ex-prime minister John Howard who has also said "Assange has done nothing wrong" by publishing the leaks.
Bill always claimed he was going to give away most of his fortune at age 55, I didn't believe it until I saw him do it. Kudo's to him for his generosity, for keeping his word, and for showing others that mega-philanthropy brings it's own rewards.
BP stands for "Beyond Petroleum" it ceased to be British Petrolem in 2001 shortly after it meged with Amaco and ate a smorgasboard of other smaller companies. It's global headquarters are in London but it is listed on both the LSE and the NYSE.
Besides the GP was comparing the regulatory regimes of the two countries. If the US chooses to implement a regulatory regime comprable to Nigeria then they can expect similar enviromental results.
"Fact is that these climate models have a *lot* more uncertainty over decades and centuries that is presented in the media."
I'm not interested in what the media reports as fact (particularly the US media), the scientists themselves use error bars to accurately describe the uncertainty in climate models.
"Negative feedback loops are just not mentioned"
The reason negative feed back loops are rearely mentioned is because they are rare in a warming climate and generally overwhelemd by the positive feedbacks. Feed back loops wrt climate change are generally in the smae direction as the forcing, ie they amplify the direction of temprature changes so that a small -ve forcing creates more cooling than expected and a small +ve forcing creates more warming than expected. By far the largest negative forcing in our current cliamte is sulphate pollution but it's benificial cooling effects are far outweighed by the acid rain it causes.
"Yes the models we have are as good as it gets, but the confidence is way over sold, and any correction ends up being so politically charged that it *does* discredit the science in the public eye."
You need look no further than the summary for a great example of how the results of a single study are vastly oversold by the politically minded. It is well known in the climate science community that the models weakest points are ice sheet dynamics, cloud physics and biological feed backs, the reason for this is we know virtually nothing about them. However we can determine their combined influence by subtracting the influence of things we have have a better understanding of from the observations. One such well known influence is the effect of GHG's, unlike feedbacks this effect does have a simple anylitical solution and does not require anything bigger than a scientific calculator to work out. The uncertanties above are the main reason that climate sensitivity estimates have hardly changed from the 3degC +/- 1.5degC estimate from the 1970's. This paper is a very small step in the the very large job of improving that estimate.
"These models don't even make clear prediction about whats going to happen really, yet we are all going to get flooded and turned into desert at the same time."
No climate scientist I know of is claiming that global models make accurate regional predictions, however over the last 4+ decades they have made many predictions for various zones based on lattitude and/or altitude that have since been confirmed by observation (we don't have the luxury of a full scale model Earth to test with, so we have to wait for nature to confirm the prediction). (Examples of such predictions include: ploar amplification, statospheric cooling, troposheric warming, high altitude precipitation, stronger convection in the Hadley cell, nightime vs daytime temprature trends)
Seems to me it's a complaint that requires extrodinary evidence since it's trivial to point to the IPCC forcing graph showing the widely accepted values for the main forcings used in climate models. (Solar activity is the short bar second from the right).
You and the GP both made what is in my opinion is a bullshit claim that has been parroted from psueo-scientific propoganda sites who's only purpose in life is to spread anti-science FUD. If (as it appears) you can't back up the claim with anything other than bluster and bald assertions then the best scientifically motivated course of action would be to STFU until you have at least attempted to apply some self-skepticisim to your extrodinary claims.
"The risk assessment has to change because of this paper."
What is required before this one model can be said to have changed the risk assesment is for all the thousands of other models to incorporate the effect and come up with a combined result that lowers the expected value. This is not impossible but IMHO is highly unlikely.
Also I quoted something the scientists themselves thought was important enough to put in the abstract, not some jounalist putting their own political spin on the result to make the story more "interesting".
As for the risk of economic harm, numerous reputable economic studies (such as the stern report) have concluded that delaying any action will significantly increase the risk of economic harm. But I'm sure you can find just as many economic studies authoured by lobbyists at right-wing think tanks that say the opposite.
The existing cap and trade system for sulpur emmissions implemented (and personally spearheaded) by Ronald Regan in the early 1990's has been an outstanding sucess at reducing acid rain. The scheme is international, based on sound science and free market ideals, I don't see what's to dislike other than paying more for your electricity if you choose a provider that insists on using antiquated technology.
The four questions you raise have been discussed ad-nausem for the last 20yrs, your "finally" comment only serves to demonstrates you haven't been paying attention to the science or the politics.
The first real demonstration of climate model skill was in the 1960's when models predicted the counter intuitive phenomena of stratosphereic cooling. The next significant demonstration was when models in the 80's predicted the phenomena of polar-amplification. Both these phenomena were predicted by models before they were confirmed with observations. As for predicting the global average temprature trend the observations have been well within the error bars of model predictions since the 1970's.
"You wouldnt get in an airplane designed by model results as crappy as these"
Hate to break this to you but you already do, climate models work on the same finite element algorithims as any other engineering model does when there is no anylitical solution to the equations. Computers have been doing this type of numerical analysis since they were first invented and took over the job of producing artilery tables. Such methods have revolutionised both science and engineering over the pats 50yrs to the point that no major engineering project would dare contemplate not using them.
Are they perfect? - Of course not but imperfect certainly does not mean useless, if it did all of science would be useless.
Can you point to a published model that does NOT account for solar activity? Can you tell me why we have been launching space probes explicitly designed to constantly monitor solar acticvity if nobody is using the data?
1.64DegC is still within the error bars for climate sensitivity that have not significantly changed since the 1970's; ie: 3.0DegC +/- 1.5 degC for a doubling of CO2.
The abstract itself claims: "By accelerating the water cycle, this feedback slows but does not alleviate the projected warming, reducing the land surface warming by 0.6C. Compared to previous studies, these results imply that long term negative feedback from CO2 induced increases in vegetation density could reduce temperature following a stabilization of CO2 concentration." [My emphasis] - In other words nature will suck up our excess if we stop pumping into the atmosphere faster than she can cope with it, which has been the assumption for many years.
Disclaimer: I'm not rubbishing the study I think it's a valuable in the effort to reduce the above mentioned error bars. However despite the inference of the summary it does not change the risk assesment one iota.
"I guess we should just get used to this sort of reaction whenever something game changing is claimed."
The critisims by themselves appear valid and worthy of a reply, the accusations of fraud are contemptuos and make the whole blog unworthy of a reply. If we ever get used to scientists claiming fraud without a shread of evidence then politics will have defeated our one genuinely useful philosophy.
"they cannot do this bypassing without also finding the check-summing code and fixing it also."
You give the average pirate way too much technical cred, hint: you don't even need to know how the serial check works to jump over it. The checksum code doesn't need to be in the serial check routines, it can be scattered thru the code in multiple places simply by using using an inline function.
One very old scheme is to embed a checksum of the code segment inside the binary itself and then check it at runtime. It's not foolproof but it will identify most pirated copies with zero chance of false positives.
"Some snake venoms can be weaponized. Archers had dipped their arrows in venom in past centuries. Today one might dip the shrapnel of a bomb in it."
Do you have any idea how many fucking snakes there are here in Oz? What's to stop Dr. Evil's henchmen from catching and milking their own, the protected species act? This is aside from the fact it would make fuck all difference to the outcome if the shrapnel passing thu your skull was dipped in poision or not.
"Identifying the specific sites that produce the vaccines serves no good purpose.
Nor does it do any harm. Your comic book senarios have nothing in common with the real world. Terrorist terrorise by blowing up people in soft targets such as tousits spots, not by temporarily hampering the production of next years flu shot.
This is often the problem with the way maths and science are taught, they give you a grab bag of factiods and procedures but ommit the basic concepts. The result is that many people remeber bits and pieces but cannot start to put the jigsaw together.
As Sagan put it..."Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grand children's time... when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstitions and darkness."
Excllent rebuttal! One minor nit pick, unlike the people who built the hoover dam the people who built the pyramids were treated with respect and hansomly rewarded. The idea that they were ill treated slaves came from 19th century historians that couldn't imagine any other way of getting people to work their arse off.
Game and movie producers aren't against the concept of R18+ they just want their particular game/movie to have an M rating rather than R18+ becuase an M rating gives you a much larger potential market. GTA is currently rated M, don't know about the other two.
Anyone who ignores well established science without the required extrodinary evidence is either a fool or out for money.
Anyone that tells you that there's no consensus in science has never cracked open a text book.
Slashdot Mirror
"The fact is at the end of the day Assange has got the job done"
Exactly. As the front man his job is to honour the promise that WL makes to it's informants; ie: maximum exposure for their information. Since google news currently lists well over 14,000 WL related articles, (the highest hit count I can personally recall for any issue), I'd say he's doing a spectacular job.
Rudd is worthy of a hat tip for his public support of Assange even though some of the documets were embarrasing to him personally, Rudd blames the US for the leaks and claims Assange has done nothing wrong by publishing them. He is one of the few politicians in the world to publicly speak up for WL, another notable exeption being Putin who is reveling in the irony of lecturing the US in the basic principles of a free press. But the most suprising to me personally is ex-prime minister John Howard who has also said "Assange has done nothing wrong" by publishing the leaks.
Bill always claimed he was going to give away most of his fortune at age 55, I didn't believe it until I saw him do it. Kudo's to him for his generosity, for keeping his word, and for showing others that mega-philanthropy brings it's own rewards.
BP stands for "Beyond Petroleum" it ceased to be British Petrolem in 2001 shortly after it meged with Amaco and ate a smorgasboard of other smaller companies. It's global headquarters are in London but it is listed on both the LSE and the NYSE.
Besides the GP was comparing the regulatory regimes of the two countries. If the US chooses to implement a regulatory regime comprable to Nigeria then they can expect similar enviromental results.
"Fact is that these climate models have a *lot* more uncertainty over decades and centuries that is presented in the media."
I'm not interested in what the media reports as fact (particularly the US media), the scientists themselves use error bars to accurately describe the uncertainty in climate models.
"Negative feedback loops are just not mentioned"
The reason negative feed back loops are rearely mentioned is because they are rare in a warming climate and generally overwhelemd by the positive feedbacks. Feed back loops wrt climate change are generally in the smae direction as the forcing, ie they amplify the direction of temprature changes so that a small -ve forcing creates more cooling than expected and a small +ve forcing creates more warming than expected. By far the largest negative forcing in our current cliamte is sulphate pollution but it's benificial cooling effects are far outweighed by the acid rain it causes.
"Yes the models we have are as good as it gets, but the confidence is way over sold, and any correction ends up being so politically charged that it *does* discredit the science in the public eye."
You need look no further than the summary for a great example of how the results of a single study are vastly oversold by the politically minded. It is well known in the climate science community that the models weakest points are ice sheet dynamics, cloud physics and biological feed backs, the reason for this is we know virtually nothing about them. However we can determine their combined influence by subtracting the influence of things we have have a better understanding of from the observations. One such well known influence is the effect of GHG's, unlike feedbacks this effect does have a simple anylitical solution and does not require anything bigger than a scientific calculator to work out. The uncertanties above are the main reason that climate sensitivity estimates have hardly changed from the 3degC +/- 1.5degC estimate from the 1970's. This paper is a very small step in the the very large job of improving that estimate.
"These models don't even make clear prediction about whats going to happen really, yet we are all going to get flooded and turned into desert at the same time."
No climate scientist I know of is claiming that global models make accurate regional predictions, however over the last 4+ decades they have made many predictions for various zones based on lattitude and/or altitude that have since been confirmed by observation (we don't have the luxury of a full scale model Earth to test with, so we have to wait for nature to confirm the prediction). (Examples of such predictions include: ploar amplification, statospheric cooling, troposheric warming, high altitude precipitation, stronger convection in the Hadley cell, nightime vs daytime temprature trends)
I love irrelevant perls of wisdom, do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?
Seems to me it's a complaint that requires extrodinary evidence since it's trivial to point to the IPCC forcing graph showing the widely accepted values for the main forcings used in climate models. (Solar activity is the short bar second from the right).
You and the GP both made what is in my opinion is a bullshit claim that has been parroted from psueo-scientific propoganda sites who's only purpose in life is to spread anti-science FUD. If (as it appears) you can't back up the claim with anything other than bluster and bald assertions then the best scientifically motivated course of action would be to STFU until you have at least attempted to apply some self-skepticisim to your extrodinary claims.
"The risk assessment has to change because of this paper."
What is required before this one model can be said to have changed the risk assesment is for all the thousands of other models to incorporate the effect and come up with a combined result that lowers the expected value. This is not impossible but IMHO is highly unlikely.
Also I quoted something the scientists themselves thought was important enough to put in the abstract, not some jounalist putting their own political spin on the result to make the story more "interesting".
As for the risk of economic harm, numerous reputable economic studies (such as the stern report) have concluded that delaying any action will significantly increase the risk of economic harm. But I'm sure you can find just as many economic studies authoured by lobbyists at right-wing think tanks that say the opposite.
The existing cap and trade system for sulpur emmissions implemented (and personally spearheaded) by Ronald Regan in the early 1990's has been an outstanding sucess at reducing acid rain. The scheme is international, based on sound science and free market ideals, I don't see what's to dislike other than paying more for your electricity if you choose a provider that insists on using antiquated technology.
The four questions you raise have been discussed ad-nausem for the last 20yrs, your "finally" comment only serves to demonstrates you haven't been paying attention to the science or the politics.
The first real demonstration of climate model skill was in the 1960's when models predicted the counter intuitive phenomena of stratosphereic cooling. The next significant demonstration was when models in the 80's predicted the phenomena of polar-amplification. Both these phenomena were predicted by models before they were confirmed with observations. As for predicting the global average temprature trend the observations have been well within the error bars of model predictions since the 1970's.
"You wouldnt get in an airplane designed by model results as crappy as these"
Hate to break this to you but you already do, climate models work on the same finite element algorithims as any other engineering model does when there is no anylitical solution to the equations. Computers have been doing this type of numerical analysis since they were first invented and took over the job of producing artilery tables. Such methods have revolutionised both science and engineering over the pats 50yrs to the point that no major engineering project would dare contemplate not using them.
Are they perfect? - Of course not but imperfect certainly does not mean useless, if it did all of science would be useless.
Can you point to a published model that does NOT account for solar activity? Can you tell me why we have been launching space probes explicitly designed to constantly monitor solar acticvity if nobody is using the data?
1.64DegC is still within the error bars for climate sensitivity that have not significantly changed since the 1970's; ie: 3.0DegC +/- 1.5 degC for a doubling of CO2.
The abstract itself claims: "By accelerating the water cycle, this feedback slows but does not alleviate the projected warming, reducing the land surface warming by 0.6C. Compared to previous studies, these results imply that long term negative feedback from CO2 induced increases in vegetation density could reduce temperature following a stabilization of CO2 concentration." [My emphasis] - In other words nature will suck up our excess if we stop pumping into the atmosphere faster than she can cope with it, which has been the assumption for many years.
Disclaimer: I'm not rubbishing the study I think it's a valuable in the effort to reduce the above mentioned error bars. However despite the inference of the summary it does not change the risk assesment one iota.
"I guess we should just get used to this sort of reaction whenever something game changing is claimed."
The critisims by themselves appear valid and worthy of a reply, the accusations of fraud are contemptuos and make the whole blog unworthy of a reply. If we ever get used to scientists claiming fraud without a shread of evidence then politics will have defeated our one genuinely useful philosophy.
From what I recall you checksum the code segment then store the result in the data segment but there may be better ways of doing this nowadays.
"they cannot do this bypassing without also finding the check-summing code and fixing it also."
You give the average pirate way too much technical cred, hint: you don't even need to know how the serial check works to jump over it. The checksum code doesn't need to be in the serial check routines, it can be scattered thru the code in multiple places simply by using using an inline function.
"Anyone know how they detect pirated copies?"
One very old scheme is to embed a checksum of the code segment inside the binary itself and then check it at runtime. It's not foolproof but it will identify most pirated copies with zero chance of false positives.
"Conspiracy theories would fly out of control"
You must be new to the internet.
"Some snake venoms can be weaponized. Archers had dipped their arrows in venom in past centuries. Today one might dip the shrapnel of a bomb in it."
Do you have any idea how many fucking snakes there are here in Oz? What's to stop Dr. Evil's henchmen from catching and milking their own, the protected species act? This is aside from the fact it would make fuck all difference to the outcome if the shrapnel passing thu your skull was dipped in poision or not.
"Identifying the specific sites that produce the vaccines serves no good purpose.
Nor does it do any harm. Your comic book senarios have nothing in common with the real world. Terrorist terrorise by blowing up people in soft targets such as tousits spots, not by temporarily hampering the production of next years flu shot.
"Was that really necessary?"
That's the wrong question since it implies supression should be the default action.
I originally got the info from a documentry many moons ago but the first random google hit I skimmed tells a similar tale.
This is often the problem with the way maths and science are taught, they give you a grab bag of factiods and procedures but ommit the basic concepts. The result is that many people remeber bits and pieces but cannot start to put the jigsaw together.
... when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstitions and darkness."
As Sagan put it..."Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grand children's time
Excllent rebuttal! One minor nit pick, unlike the people who built the hoover dam the people who built the pyramids were treated with respect and hansomly rewarded. The idea that they were ill treated slaves came from 19th century historians that couldn't imagine any other way of getting people to work their arse off.
Game and movie producers aren't against the concept of R18+ they just want their particular game/movie to have an M rating rather than R18+ becuase an M rating gives you a much larger potential market. GTA is currently rated M, don't know about the other two.
Anyone who ignores well established science without the required extrodinary evidence is either a fool or out for money.
Anyone that tells you that there's no consensus in science has never cracked open a text book.
So your saying that the two most respected scientific journals in the world Nature and Science do not know anything about QA?