"If AGW is so obvious, why are scientists wasting millions of dollars in accumulating evidence, running computer models, ascertaining the details of the physics involved etc.?"
Why did NASA recently launch the twin GRACE sattelites to test Einstien's physics? Why do we continously test QM by smashing atoms together? Those two theories are the most robust models of physical reality we have, why "waste" millions continuously testing them over and over again for the last 50-100yrs?
If you don't know the answer to any of these questions then you simply don't understand what the word "science" means. If this is the case then I sincerely think anything I can tell you about the philosophy of science will probably just confuse you further, however I will recommend you look up and study epistomology as a first step toward answering your own question.
And yeah, my spelling sucks but nowhere near as bad as your comprehension of science and the applicability of logical fallacies. AGW is established science, the onus is on the deniers to, ( at a minimum ), falsify Fourier's 1824 work on spectral lines or come up with a better explaination. As the letter in TFA states, immortal fame awaits anyone who can achieve such a feat since it would also rewrite astronomy, cosmology, quantum mechanics, and all the other fields of science that rely on the veracity of spectral analysis.
The general answer to your question is that science is not a static grab-bag of factiods. For a more specific answer read my reply to the parent post. However since your ad-hom laden post seems to accept the character assination of Jones, the IPCC and anyone else who disagrees with your conspiracy theories I doubt you will read the paper let alone learn anything from it.
"On what evidence do you base the claim that the MWP was regional?"
Although there is no generally accepted definition of the MWP in the litrature the IPCC glossary defines the MWP as - "An interval between AD 1000 and 1300 in which some Northern Hemisphere regions were warmer than during the Little Ice Age that followed."
For a much more detailed answer to your question Section 4.2 of a Jones/Mann paper published in Geophysical review gives a well referenced rundown as to why the MWP and LIA are no longer considered global anomolies. The six graphs in fig 4 (unfortunately split in half by a block of text) gives a nice visual representation of the available proxy records for various regions. Section 4.2 also sheds a bit of light as to why Jones expressed his contempt for the Soon and Baliunas paper in the climategate emails.
I don't expect you to wade through the whole paper, nor do I claim the expertise to verify it all myself but IMHO it is an excellent litratrature review that highlights the various pros and cons of climate reconstructions for the past couple of millenia.
GISTemp and HADcrut both refer to cleaned data sets. They are "independently derived" in that they use diffent statistical methods and different error correction, for example HADcrut ignores anything inside the arctic circle where as GISSTemp extrapolates data inside the arctic circle. Of course there is a large overlap in the raw instrumental data since there is only one set of raw instrumental data prior to sattelites.
If you don't trust any of those methods then it's not hard to do your own "back of the envelope" analysis using the raw weather station data and/or raw sattelite data and come up with a trend that is not much different to the more accurate figures in either of the cleaned data sets. In fact you don't even have to use all the raw data, just pick a hundred stations at random from across the globe and use a least squares fit, you will still get a similar degrees per decade trend. The reason this is possible is that when a genuine trend exists in noisy data it is really not that difficult to find it.
The board of NASDAQ decided to do that, most likley after consultation with the SEC. If a transaction was rolled back then all subsequent transactions of those shares would also have to be rolled back since the original sale "never happened". Presumably this is why they had to coordinate the action with other exchanges.
"A great part of the problem is that head smacking obvious issues like what caused the medieval global warming"
Nobody knows what caused the anomally known as the MWP but the fact that it was regional rules out the sun and other global phenomena. Whatever it was, it does not imply that CO2 is not causing the current warming. I'm sorry I only skimmed the the rest of your rant but that initial logical fallacy was enough to inform me that you are ill equiped to constructively critisize climate scientists.
"Seriously, if you believe AGW (and let's be specific here and call it out as Catastrophic AGW, because frankly, nobody gives a rats ass if human CO2 causes an increase in temps of 0.1C/century), give me your falsifiable hypothesis."
The warming trend is 0.14deg/decade, define "catastophic".
For AGW you can falsify it by showing Fourier's spectral analysis techniques don't work and therfore throw out much of astronomy, cosmology and quantum mechanics as a side effect. I imagine if you can manage such a feat your name will be immortalised in the history books.
For CO2 RF = 5.35*ln(C2/C1), (Fourier 1824), where...
C2 & C1 are repectively the start and end concentrations of CO2.
RF is radiative flux in watts/m^2.
Here's a hint -> You don't need a supercomputer to calculate the forcing from CO2. A few hundred dollars worth of equipment is all you need to start your investigation.
No, I'm old fashioned, I don't own a mobile phone. You are simply repeating propoganda without bothering to understand the context. The data still shows the MWP and the RWP however it has been demonstrated time and again that they were regional anomolies thus they have less influence on the global data than previously thought. That kind of self-correction is how science progresses, if you think that it goes against the scientific method then you must be looking at a different method to the rest of us.
"Weren't past IPCC reports peer reviewed (back when peer review maybe meant something)?"
The more you speak the more you reveal your ignorance. The IPCC is a 4 yearly review of all peer-revived papers on the subject of climate, it has an annual budget of $5-6M sourced from over 200 politically diverse nations. Each review involves roughly 2500 unpaid scientists tirelessly pawing over the mind numbing details of tens of thousands of papers during those four years. Collectively those scientists represent virtually every reputable scientific body on the planet. Who do you suggest should peer-review what amounts to the most rigorous peer-review of peer-reviewed science ever conducted on any scientific question?
Of course for any genuine skeptic the answer to that question is to review the reports and data yourself but I doubt the political muck raking displayed in your post will allow that to happen.
Yep the creationists and the anti-AGW's have recently joined forces at the heartland institute. I notice that my post is modded 50% flamebait, 50% underrated, if past results are anything to go by I think it will improve by the time the story reaches the bottom of the page. With a few more underrated's I could get the coverted +5 flamebait.:)
Yes the Earth has been warmer in the past and the last time it was this warm New York was 140 feet below sea level. As for life flourishing, the last time the Eath's oceans became acidic due to excess CO2 was during one of the 5 great natural extinction events.
Comparing human induced changes over human time scales to natural changes over gelogic time scales is a pointless philosphical exercise that has zero relevance to the current predicament of our civilisation. Ignoring the difference would indicate we are no more intelligent or adaptable than fermenting yeast in a sealed container.
Just for the sake of argument let's say the CRU were totally corrupt and in the pocket of the evil geniuses of the NWO. How then do you explain that the independently derived GISTEMP dataset (nasa) closely matches the HADcrut dataset (CRU)?
Others have pointed to the raw data for HADcrut, a small portion of wich is hard (but not imposible) to obtain due to nationalist obstuctions. GISStemp does not suffer from that restriction, the raw data and source code is all publicly available here and has been indenpendently reconstructed here
As for chaos theory, it was discovered by Lorenze while working on a weather models. Climatoligists are aware that climate is the statistics of weather and that chaos theory does not apply to climate over human time scales.
"I'd love to know what this letter would've looked like before we knew about wave theory, or...We'd be hearing about how matter is made up of particles which have neatly orbiting electrons because this hadn't been refuted yet, as though you have to agree with every long-standing theory that hasn't been refuted to be a good little boy or girl."
You are trying to make all science into an "argument from authority" wich it is not. Popper's "republic of science" demands you accept the best testable explaination until you can falsify it or come up with a better one, this has nothing to do with authority and everything to do with logic and skepticisim. Your statement shows you simply do not comprehend the relativity of wrong and utill you do you will never really appreciate the utility of science that is staring you in the face while you type your refutation of it.
Schizoprenic media is nothing new. The opinion columns in the WSJ have always been in violent disagreement with the news section on the issue of AGW. The same schizophrenic behaviour was evident at the WSJ during the tabacoo/cancer debate.
You do realise the papers talked about in the climategate emails were published and did make it into the IPCC reports, right? And that with 20/20 hinsight Jones opinion of those papers was correct because they have definitely not withstood the test of time.
What I find amazing about climategate is that in 10yrs worth of emails the propogandists could only find a handfull of quotes to take out of context and twist to suit their agenda. Similarly in 20yrs worth of IPCC reports the only genuine error found so far is the himalayan date which despite the scrutiny of an army of psuedo-skeptics was actually found by IPCC scientists. If the psuedo-skeptics could claim similar standards of self-skeptcisim half as good as that then the "psuedo" part could be dropped and I could call them scientists.
It's not the first time Mann has been attacted, among other unsuccesfull attacks by polticians was a senate inquisition into his hockey stick paper. The inqustitors lost when their star witness testified in Mann's favour. Science won when in 2005 the star witness published Mann's updated paper that both adressed their minor critisisims and extended the results to 2000yrs ago.
However, if we're going to have inquisitions then we should also look at the witches at the heartland institute, CEI, and other like minded think tanks who sell their powerfull propoganda spells to vested intrests.
Give it a rest, your the one who is stonewalling and name calling. Any genuine skeptic who claims to be an "adamant supporter of the Scientific method" should have figured out by now that climategate was a well orchestrated propoganda excersise that utterly failed to dent the science.
Fortunately that is not true over the long run, having argued the case for AGW on slashdot for the last decade I can say that the slashdot consensus on AGW has done a complete 180 degree turn around in that time. Ten years ago I was definitely in the minority and was constantly modded down for debunking basic stuff such as the "volcanos release more CO2 than mankind" myth. Sure there's still a minority who for political or religious reasons will never accept that mankind can warm the globe but the rest of us (including me) are now much better informed for having had the amature scientific debate.
The public argument about the science of AGW is very similar to the public argument over smoking causing cancer. The strength of the FF lobby and their pet politicians is orders of magnitude greater than the strength of the tabacoo lobby in it's hayday. Scientists have not failed to communicate the science of AGW but they have not yet been successfull in battling the anti-science forces who know full well they are engaging in propoganda and witch hunts in an effort to keep the public in confused darkness. However you are right, it does not reflect well on society that there is still a vast army of usefull idiots who accept and parrot the anti-science position without question.
But all is not lost, unlike propoganda and politics, science is objective and always wins in the long run. Evolution, plate techtonics, and AGW, are "scientific facts" where people can see the evidence for themselves. Gun laws, abortion rights, and what to do about AGW, are subjective and those are the wedge arguments that, fueled by the blind faith of politics and religion, will rage forever.
"...it's a shift because the machines themselves no longer matter....The shift was in how applications bounce from one physical machine to another"
Yes, that's called hardware abstraction. The data center can be considered as a single machine that can allocate storage and processing resources as required, wich is exactly what time sharing on mainframes was designed to do.
"It's a completely different set of problems and solutions, due to being a different environment"
No it's the same problem (resource allocation) with the same solution (hardware abstraction) but I agree the implementation has evolved along with the hardware.
"Prior to 50 years ago, computers were only for personal use? Listen, I know it's fun to be contrary, but you didn't respond to what I actually wrote at all....and no matter how much you want to pretend that everyone had personal computers in the 50s and then BOOM, mainframes came after PCs, you're just bloody wrong."
I said nothing about personal use. I said single user purpose built; ie: the machine was built to solve a specific problem for it's owner, such as computing artiliery tables for the military. How you can build that into claiming I said PC came before mainframes I'm not sure, but it looks like you had fun jumping to the wrong conclusion.
"In short, "cloud computing" is a very different paradigm than anything the industry has ever seen before"
No it's the natural incremental evolution of mainframe/supercomputer time sharing with a catchy new name. The paradigm shift occured at least half a century ago when computers moved from single user purpose built machines to general purpose time share machines where resources were rented to users.
Since that time pretty much all of computing has been about how to efficiently abstract and share the hardware resources between applications and/or users and to this end there have been several rounds of centralization and decentralization. The evolution of the current centralized cloud has taken us from a propritary box the size of a room (and the power of a pocket calculator), to a whole bunch of modern comodity boxes the size of a warehouse.
In other words, the basic pardigm of shared abstract resources hasn't changed but the implementation of it has progressed in amazing leaps and bounds.
You guys are having the wrong argument. The solar panels came off the WH roof as a signal to the coal industry. If the DOE's budget was put towards cajoling the market to replace coal then it might acomplish similar results to the Manhattan project and as a side effect maybe acomplish a reduction in oil use due to an increased viability of electric cars. But some things would still have to use oil, planes are a prime example.
Of course this cannot be done tommorow. However, every oil refinery, off shore platform and coal fired plant on the planet was built during my life time and most of it could easily be replaced with cleaner alternatives over the next few decades. As long as the juice keeps coming out the wall most people probably wouldn't notice it. The only reason such an infrastructure shift cannot be started tommorow is the lack of political will to stand up to economically powerfull vested interests that are supporting modern civilization while at the same time racing toward the proverbial brick wall.
Not directly, but without it you have anarchy which ensures NOBODY produces anything. Try looking outside your navel, can you find ANY country with a weak goverment that is not a poverty stricken shit hole?
The problem in the US is not over-regulation, it's corruption. The cape project basically had to wait for a powerfull NIMBY politician to die, and when he did, hey presto the SAME regulations are no longer a barrier. That one person should have the power to distort the regulatory process for their personal gain is frankly a tad third-worldish, perhaps you need stronger regulations on your politicians to curb that sort of nonesense?
Slashdot Mirror
"If AGW is so obvious, why are scientists wasting millions of dollars in accumulating evidence, running computer models, ascertaining the details of the physics involved etc.?"
Why did NASA recently launch the twin GRACE sattelites to test Einstien's physics? Why do we continously test QM by smashing atoms together? Those two theories are the most robust models of physical reality we have, why "waste" millions continuously testing them over and over again for the last 50-100yrs?
If you don't know the answer to any of these questions then you simply don't understand what the word "science" means. If this is the case then I sincerely think anything I can tell you about the philosophy of science will probably just confuse you further, however I will recommend you look up and study epistomology as a first step toward answering your own question.
And yeah, my spelling sucks but nowhere near as bad as your comprehension of science and the applicability of logical fallacies. AGW is established science, the onus is on the deniers to, ( at a minimum ), falsify Fourier's 1824 work on spectral lines or come up with a better explaination. As the letter in TFA states, immortal fame awaits anyone who can achieve such a feat since it would also rewrite astronomy, cosmology, quantum mechanics, and all the other fields of science that rely on the veracity of spectral analysis.
The general answer to your question is that science is not a static grab-bag of factiods. For a more specific answer read my reply to the parent post. However since your ad-hom laden post seems to accept the character assination of Jones, the IPCC and anyone else who disagrees with your conspiracy theories I doubt you will read the paper let alone learn anything from it.
BTW: It's Mann's hockey stick.
"On what evidence do you base the claim that the MWP was regional?"
Although there is no generally accepted definition of the MWP in the litrature the IPCC glossary defines the MWP as - "An interval between AD 1000 and 1300 in which some Northern Hemisphere regions were warmer than during the Little Ice Age that followed."
For a much more detailed answer to your question Section 4.2 of a Jones/Mann paper published in Geophysical review gives a well referenced rundown as to why the MWP and LIA are no longer considered global anomolies. The six graphs in fig 4 (unfortunately split in half by a block of text) gives a nice visual representation of the available proxy records for various regions. Section 4.2 also sheds a bit of light as to why Jones expressed his contempt for the Soon and Baliunas paper in the climategate emails.
I don't expect you to wade through the whole paper, nor do I claim the expertise to verify it all myself but IMHO it is an excellent litratrature review that highlights the various pros and cons of climate reconstructions for the past couple of millenia.
GISTemp and HADcrut both refer to cleaned data sets. They are "independently derived" in that they use diffent statistical methods and different error correction, for example HADcrut ignores anything inside the arctic circle where as GISSTemp extrapolates data inside the arctic circle. Of course there is a large overlap in the raw instrumental data since there is only one set of raw instrumental data prior to sattelites.
If you don't trust any of those methods then it's not hard to do your own "back of the envelope" analysis using the raw weather station data and/or raw sattelite data and come up with a trend that is not much different to the more accurate figures in either of the cleaned data sets. In fact you don't even have to use all the raw data, just pick a hundred stations at random from across the globe and use a least squares fit, you will still get a similar degrees per decade trend. The reason this is possible is that when a genuine trend exists in noisy data it is really not that difficult to find it.
The board of NASDAQ decided to do that, most likley after consultation with the SEC. If a transaction was rolled back then all subsequent transactions of those shares would also have to be rolled back since the original sale "never happened". Presumably this is why they had to coordinate the action with other exchanges.
"A great part of the problem is that head smacking obvious issues like what caused the medieval global warming"
Nobody knows what caused the anomally known as the MWP but the fact that it was regional rules out the sun and other global phenomena. Whatever it was, it does not imply that CO2 is not causing the current warming. I'm sorry I only skimmed the the rest of your rant but that initial logical fallacy was enough to inform me that you are ill equiped to constructively critisize climate scientists.
"Seriously, if you believe AGW (and let's be specific here and call it out as Catastrophic AGW, because frankly, nobody gives a rats ass if human CO2 causes an increase in temps of 0.1C/century), give me your falsifiable hypothesis."
The warming trend is 0.14deg/decade, define "catastophic".
For AGW you can falsify it by showing Fourier's spectral analysis techniques don't work and therfore throw out much of astronomy, cosmology and quantum mechanics as a side effect. I imagine if you can manage such a feat your name will be immortalised in the history books.
For CO2 RF = 5.35*ln(C2/C1), (Fourier 1824), where...
C2 & C1 are repectively the start and end concentrations of CO2.
RF is radiative flux in watts/m^2.
Here's a hint -> You don't need a supercomputer to calculate the forcing from CO2. A few hundred dollars worth of equipment is all you need to start your investigation.
"Call me old fashioned"
No, I'm old fashioned, I don't own a mobile phone. You are simply repeating propoganda without bothering to understand the context. The data still shows the MWP and the RWP however it has been demonstrated time and again that they were regional anomolies thus they have less influence on the global data than previously thought. That kind of self-correction is how science progresses, if you think that it goes against the scientific method then you must be looking at a different method to the rest of us.
"Weren't past IPCC reports peer reviewed (back when peer review maybe meant something)?"
The more you speak the more you reveal your ignorance. The IPCC is a 4 yearly review of all peer-revived papers on the subject of climate, it has an annual budget of $5-6M sourced from over 200 politically diverse nations. Each review involves roughly 2500 unpaid scientists tirelessly pawing over the mind numbing details of tens of thousands of papers during those four years. Collectively those scientists represent virtually every reputable scientific body on the planet. Who do you suggest should peer-review what amounts to the most rigorous peer-review of peer-reviewed science ever conducted on any scientific question?
Of course for any genuine skeptic the answer to that question is to review the reports and data yourself but I doubt the political muck raking displayed in your post will allow that to happen.
Yep the creationists and the anti-AGW's have recently joined forces at the heartland institute. I notice that my post is modded 50% flamebait, 50% underrated, if past results are anything to go by I think it will improve by the time the story reaches the bottom of the page. With a few more underrated's I could get the coverted +5 flamebait. :)
Yes the Earth has been warmer in the past and the last time it was this warm New York was 140 feet below sea level. As for life flourishing, the last time the Eath's oceans became acidic due to excess CO2 was during one of the 5 great natural extinction events.
Comparing human induced changes over human time scales to natural changes over gelogic time scales is a pointless philosphical exercise that has zero relevance to the current predicament of our civilisation. Ignoring the difference would indicate we are no more intelligent or adaptable than fermenting yeast in a sealed container.
Just for the sake of argument let's say the CRU were totally corrupt and in the pocket of the evil geniuses of the NWO. How then do you explain that the independently derived GISTEMP dataset (nasa) closely matches the HADcrut dataset (CRU)?
Others have pointed to the raw data for HADcrut, a small portion of wich is hard (but not imposible) to obtain due to nationalist obstuctions. GISStemp does not suffer from that restriction, the raw data and source code is all publicly available here and has been indenpendently reconstructed here
As for chaos theory, it was discovered by Lorenze while working on a weather models. Climatoligists are aware that climate is the statistics of weather and that chaos theory does not apply to climate over human time scales.
"I'd love to know what this letter would've looked like before we knew about wave theory, or...We'd be hearing about how matter is made up of particles which have neatly orbiting electrons because this hadn't been refuted yet, as though you have to agree with every long-standing theory that hasn't been refuted to be a good little boy or girl."
You are trying to make all science into an "argument from authority" wich it is not. Popper's "republic of science" demands you accept the best testable explaination until you can falsify it or come up with a better one, this has nothing to do with authority and everything to do with logic and skepticisim. Your statement shows you simply do not comprehend the relativity of wrong and utill you do you will never really appreciate the utility of science that is staring you in the face while you type your refutation of it.
Schizoprenic media is nothing new. The opinion columns in the WSJ have always been in violent disagreement with the news section on the issue of AGW. The same schizophrenic behaviour was evident at the WSJ during the tabacoo/cancer debate.
You do realise the papers talked about in the climategate emails were published and did make it into the IPCC reports, right? And that with 20/20 hinsight Jones opinion of those papers was correct because they have definitely not withstood the test of time.
What I find amazing about climategate is that in 10yrs worth of emails the propogandists could only find a handfull of quotes to take out of context and twist to suit their agenda. Similarly in 20yrs worth of IPCC reports the only genuine error found so far is the himalayan date which despite the scrutiny of an army of psuedo-skeptics was actually found by IPCC scientists. If the psuedo-skeptics could claim similar standards of self-skeptcisim half as good as that then the "psuedo" part could be dropped and I could call them scientists.
"And, of course, they say nothing about the subversion of the peer review process discussed in the emails."
Why would they mention something that only exists in the fervent imagination of political hacks and conspiracy theorists?
It's not the first time Mann has been attacted, among other unsuccesfull attacks by polticians was a senate inquisition into his hockey stick paper. The inqustitors lost when their star witness testified in Mann's favour. Science won when in 2005 the star witness published Mann's updated paper that both adressed their minor critisisims and extended the results to 2000yrs ago.
However, if we're going to have inquisitions then we should also look at the witches at the heartland institute, CEI, and other like minded think tanks who sell their powerfull propoganda spells to vested intrests.
Sorry but anyone who insists on parroting the climgate propoganda as fact is simply not paying attention.
Give it a rest, your the one who is stonewalling and name calling. Any genuine skeptic who claims to be an "adamant supporter of the Scientific method" should have figured out by now that climategate was a well orchestrated propoganda excersise that utterly failed to dent the science.
"and thus nobody's mind is ever changed."
Fortunately that is not true over the long run, having argued the case for AGW on slashdot for the last decade I can say that the slashdot consensus on AGW has done a complete 180 degree turn around in that time. Ten years ago I was definitely in the minority and was constantly modded down for debunking basic stuff such as the "volcanos release more CO2 than mankind" myth. Sure there's still a minority who for political or religious reasons will never accept that mankind can warm the globe but the rest of us (including me) are now much better informed for having had the amature scientific debate.
The public argument about the science of AGW is very similar to the public argument over smoking causing cancer. The strength of the FF lobby and their pet politicians is orders of magnitude greater than the strength of the tabacoo lobby in it's hayday. Scientists have not failed to communicate the science of AGW but they have not yet been successfull in battling the anti-science forces who know full well they are engaging in propoganda and witch hunts in an effort to keep the public in confused darkness. However you are right, it does not reflect well on society that there is still a vast army of usefull idiots who accept and parrot the anti-science position without question.
But all is not lost, unlike propoganda and politics, science is objective and always wins in the long run. Evolution, plate techtonics, and AGW, are "scientific facts" where people can see the evidence for themselves. Gun laws, abortion rights, and what to do about AGW, are subjective and those are the wedge arguments that, fueled by the blind faith of politics and religion, will rage forever.
"...it's a shift because the machines themselves no longer matter....The shift was in how applications bounce from one physical machine to another"
Yes, that's called hardware abstraction. The data center can be considered as a single machine that can allocate storage and processing resources as required, wich is exactly what time sharing on mainframes was designed to do.
"It's a completely different set of problems and solutions, due to being a different environment"
No it's the same problem (resource allocation) with the same solution (hardware abstraction) but I agree the implementation has evolved along with the hardware.
"Prior to 50 years ago, computers were only for personal use? Listen, I know it's fun to be contrary, but you didn't respond to what I actually wrote at all....and no matter how much you want to pretend that everyone had personal computers in the 50s and then BOOM, mainframes came after PCs, you're just bloody wrong."
I said nothing about personal use. I said single user purpose built; ie: the machine was built to solve a specific problem for it's owner, such as computing artiliery tables for the military. How you can build that into claiming I said PC came before mainframes I'm not sure, but it looks like you had fun jumping to the wrong conclusion.
"In short, "cloud computing" is a very different paradigm than anything the industry has ever seen before"
No it's the natural incremental evolution of mainframe/supercomputer time sharing with a catchy new name. The paradigm shift occured at least half a century ago when computers moved from single user purpose built machines to general purpose time share machines where resources were rented to users.
Since that time pretty much all of computing has been about how to efficiently abstract and share the hardware resources between applications and/or users and to this end there have been several rounds of centralization and decentralization. The evolution of the current centralized cloud has taken us from a propritary box the size of a room (and the power of a pocket calculator), to a whole bunch of modern comodity boxes the size of a warehouse.
In other words, the basic pardigm of shared abstract resources hasn't changed but the implementation of it has progressed in amazing leaps and bounds.
In the 60's and 70's the term "tea party" was a euphemisim for a swingers party.
You guys are having the wrong argument. The solar panels came off the WH roof as a signal to the coal industry. If the DOE's budget was put towards cajoling the market to replace coal then it might acomplish similar results to the Manhattan project and as a side effect maybe acomplish a reduction in oil use due to an increased viability of electric cars. But some things would still have to use oil, planes are a prime example.
Of course this cannot be done tommorow. However, every oil refinery, off shore platform and coal fired plant on the planet was built during my life time and most of it could easily be replaced with cleaner alternatives over the next few decades. As long as the juice keeps coming out the wall most people probably wouldn't notice it. The only reason such an infrastructure shift cannot be started tommorow is the lack of political will to stand up to economically powerfull vested interests that are supporting modern civilization while at the same time racing toward the proverbial brick wall.
Yes I did mean 5 meters, and I was thinking of the Hale.
"Regulation doesn't produce things".
Not directly, but without it you have anarchy which ensures NOBODY produces anything. Try looking outside your navel, can you find ANY country with a weak goverment that is not a poverty stricken shit hole?
The problem in the US is not over-regulation, it's corruption. The cape project basically had to wait for a powerfull NIMBY politician to die, and when he did, hey presto the SAME regulations are no longer a barrier. That one person should have the power to distort the regulatory process for their personal gain is frankly a tad third-worldish, perhaps you need stronger regulations on your politicians to curb that sort of nonesense?
it's likely the same thing will happen this time.
Actually it's unlikely since your pessimisim is ignoring the fact that the vast majority of space observatories have operated flawlessly.