Water vapour is more or less always at it's saturation point in the atmosphere and unlike CO2 the saturation point is entirely dependent on tempratue and pressure. This is why it rains and also why we find dew drops in the desert before sunrise.
It is not considered a forcing because we can pump as much water vapour into the air as we like and it will make no difference to the global average temprature, it will simply condense over the next few days as rain/dew.
However because of its dependence on temprature and the fact that it is also a GHG means it is most definitely a positive feedback, IIRC it has been observed to have risen by about 5% over the last 40yrs. This extra 5% is amplifying the increase in temprature caused by the rise in CO2 concentration.
The forcing due soley to a doubling of CO2 is ~1.5DegC, the math/physics is almost 200yrs old, it was first predicted by Fourier and then confirmed experimentally by Faraday. Fourier's theory on absorption spectra is the basis for modern spectography, the direct forcing results it gives for CO2 are as robust as any of Newton's physical laws.
Adding in feedbacks such as water vapour and melting ice/permafrost is where the uncertainties and confusion sets in but generally it is thought that feedbacks (both positive and negative) will bring the total rise in temp due to a doubling of CO2 to ~3DegC. This number is called climate sensitivity.
I do not agree that there has been virtually no warming since 1995, the trend is still 0.11 ~ 0.15DegC/decade. What Phil Jones actually said in his BBC interview (linked in the skeptical science article) was that the confidence level for the trend over that 15yr period does not quite reach the magical 95% level of certainty. The same is true for ANY 15yr period. It comes as no surprise to me that the Daily Fail is the source of the misquotes and confusion.
Arctic melt is mainly driven by the rise in ocean temps (see the graph in the skeptical science link above), ocean currents, and a phenomena called polar amplification that was first predicted by models in the 1980's and was later confirmed by regional analysis of observations.
Both the ocean and the ice have a thermal inertia many orders of magnitude larger than the atmosphere. This means that if the atmosphre were to somehow drop 10DegC off the global average (say a freak run of consecutive volcanic eruptions) the ice would still continue on a melting trend for quite a few years.
There is some weak evidence that the heat going into the recent "dramatic" melting of the Arctic ice may be responsible for the flattening of the curve over the last couple of years but this is far from certain. What is a lot more certain is that, like the long term atmosphereic trend, the long term melting trend is virtually unchanged by the recent dramatic melt.
The PDO (El-Nino/El-Nina) is an internal fluctuation of the Earth's climate system, it is not a root cause for anything. It randomly redistributes existing heat in the ocean/atmosphere. It has nothing to do with the heat budget because it is basically large scale turbulence, I would also be very impressed if anyone could predict turbulance with any degree of accuracy.
Solar flux was counted as a minor positive forcing in the IPCC reports. There is some evidence it has become weaker since the 1990's. But I agree that the forcing effect of the sun can be considered stable in a "spherical cow" analysis.
None of this changes the radiative forcing properties of CO2 that have been understood now for nearly 200yrs. Nor does it change the fact we have pumped half a trillion tons of the stuff into the atmosphere and are on track to double that tonnage in the next 40yrs.
The only thing humans have any control over is our emmissions of GHG's (long term warming) and areosols (short term cooling). According to Fourier (1824 - explained in my link above), a trillion tons of CO2 will result in a rise of ~1.5degC. This 1.5degC will be added to the heat budget regardless of all the other forcings and feedbacks we don't have control over. The same laws of physics will continue to operate after 2050. We could blanket ourselves in smog to balance the heat budget but that seems to me to be a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
Simple risk analysis says we need to drastically cut our emmission, technically and financially I don't believe it's a difficult 40yr goal, I also don't believe anyone has the political solution to the tradgedy of the commons.
"Right, and yet he had to meet with lawyers to tell him this."
Yes that's right, he did need to ask because he is not a lawyer, it's called due dilligence. If he decided to throw them out without seeking legal advise then he could possibly have found himself behind bars in the future, if he decided to keep them and it was not legally required then he is wasting taxpayers money.
"Seems like I summed up the whitehouse spokesman's thought process pretty well."
No, it seems that in your rush to find fault you summed 1 + 1 and got zero.
"Go read up on the history of Einstein's General Relativity."
A more relevant perspective can be gained by reading up on the history of Fourier's 1824 prediction concerning the IR absorbtion properties of CO2 which were confirmed experimentally by Faraday in the 1850's. From Forier's "law of physics" we get the following radiative forcing formula for CO2...
5.35*ln(C2/C1) = 3.71 W/M^2
The answer is what you get for a doubling of CO2 concentration which is expected to be achived by the mid 21st century. This formula does not include positive feedbacks which paleoclimatology (a branch of geology) indicates will amplify that figure to around 7 W/M^2.
"Once we actually have climate science, it wil be about the long haul"
The national academies first warned the US government it had observed a warming signal from our emmissions in the 1950's, the only change to that warning since it was issued has been a dramatic increase in it's confidence levels. So exactly how long is your long term?
As for politics certain powerfull economic sectors have a strong vested interest in convincing people that Al Gore invented global warming in 2005, your views on Phil Jones seem to indicated you have taken their bait and are now ideologically hooked into their prefered "wait and see" strategy.
"the time to exit would have been after the trial showed it to be ineffective"
I don't think either party will exit until the nutjobs exit the senate, there seems to be an endless supply of nutjobs so I think it will continue for the foreseeable future. If the legislation is knocked back a second time as I think it will be then whoever is in power after the next election has even less incentive to pander to the nutjobs and can ask for more in return for kicking off the next round of the game.
I agree it's damaging Conroy publicly, before the last election Conroy was seen as a contender for the leadership, I think Rudd gave him the job to "test his loyalty". One interesting quote I saw from Conroy when asked about the immorality of the legislation was "you can trust your parliment to do the right thing". I'm not that trusting but I think it was a telling remark.
OTOH if it does become law, I will grab my pitchfork and join the inevitable lynch mob.
Nah, I'm 50 and work in an inhouse shop of ~20, MOST of my co-workers are over 40 and almost half are OLDER than me. We don't hire people with less than 10yrs experience. The company is an Aussie subsiduary of a large Japanese multinational, the Japanese traditionally have a healthy respect for experience.
"Throw a shrimp on the barbie" was a joke, it's saying "everything is NOT bigger in Texas", eg: Anna Creek cattle station is more than 10X the size of the largest US ranch. Americans failed to get the joke and thought the phrase was part of our lingo.
BTW, Most Aussies including me enjoyed the first Crocodile Dundee but Hoag's lost his popularity with Aussies when he dumped his wife of 20yrs and ran off with the woman from the movie.
Another Aussie here, Victorian but at 50 I have seen most of the country several times over. Everyone I know calls it a barbie, including the polititians on TV who try to set the adgenda for "talking around the barbie".
Shrimp = short person, or the tiny prawns in a "shrimp cocktail".
"The things like the publics need to be available to the other build machines in the distributed system."
Ahhh, I missed the distributed part. I've worked on some very large systems that took hours to build but I've never actually come across a distributed build during my 20yrs in the industry. The system I'm looking after at the moment builds win32, x64 and ia64 all on the same box, it uses a single python script with a cvs tag as a paramter to do the lot. The *nix builds are also kicked off from a single makefile/tag but run on seperate boxes for the half a dozen flavours we produce.
"Honestly, there was a ton of retarded shit that went on in the code base, and I would have done it entirely different"
A wise man once told me that source code is like shit, everybody else's stinks.;)
"There are some rights and freedoms which cannot morally be subject to a vote. Freedom of speech is one of them."
Aussie here in total agreement, I don't want my adult porn censored and for reasons I've posted elsewhere in this story I'm almost certain the porn filter will never become law.
However pre-pubecent child porn is not a freedom of speech issue, it's a denial of the victim's basic human rights and freedoms and is quite rightly viewed as a serious crime. I'm in favour of law enforcement agencies monitoring these sites through warrants and sharing that data with foriegn law enforcement for the sole purpose of hunting down the rock spiders who produce and habitually consume this material. I am not in favour of mobs taking the law into their own hands and that includes both peodphile lynch mobs and the operation titstorm mob.
The operative word there is "seems". On just about every slashdot story concerning this issue I have asked for someone to point to a quote from Conroy where he says he is in favor of implementing a mandatory filter on private computers. There are tons of quotes about how comminted he is to the inquiry and the trial but none that I have seen that says he's committed to implementation.
The fact is most people in Australia who follow politics are smart enough to see this "yes minister" episode for what it is, ie: a snow job on two independent senators who (under certain circumstances) hold the balance of power in the senate but this is NOT one of those circumstances.
Now before anyone accuses me of being Conroy's #1 fan, the previous Howard government did exactly the same thing but Labor blocked their mandatory filter legislation in the senate, in other words the two major parties are taking turns at being the good cop (senate) or the bad cop (house of reps).
Anyone with half a brain and a bit of knowlege on Aussie politics (eg: Conroy) knows this bill will NEVER pass the senate, this is why Conroy has stated that he plans to reintroduce the legislation just before the next election, neither major party wants it to become a double dissolution trigger and would prefer it to be quitely voted down when it can be drowned out by the noise of a federal election.
Anyone who has bothered to read what the policies of both major parties actually say will find that neither are in favour of mandatory filters on private computers but both are in favour of the current mandatory filters on GOVERNMENT computers (ie: schools) and both are in favour of the current law that says ISP's must offer the mandatory government filter as an opt-in choice for those who want it. That translates to ~5% of users who have opted-in and with those sort of numbers it's obviously not seen as a vote winner by either major party.
None of this is new, it's a political game. The puritan minority will not go away so the major parties will continue this game because it has effectively kept the puritans busy chasing their own tails for at least a decade.
As for the independent senators, one of them backed down quite early on, making the football of this game Mr 2%, who has become strangely silent about censorship since his own anti-abortion sponsers "somehow" made it onto the proposed blacklist. It's also worth noting how Mr 2% got his nickname, both major parties have a score to settle with him and he will be gone at the next election, probably to be replaced by some other nutjob senator in a marginal seat who will keep the game alive during their fleeting term in office.
The game is an unfortunate waste of taxpayers money but OTOH a democracy must provide an avenue for minorites to voice their political opinion even if that opinon is ironically advocating censorship of the opinons of porn lovers they disagree with. Since opertaion titstorm is in effect illegally censoring the government with their DDOS they also fail the same irony test.
"Perhaps he was told "Put this enormous program together in one month or the company is screwed." In cases like that..." - you put the hard word on them for more money.
"It is the best guess based on the recently collected evidence. However guessing on recently collected evidence can have its own flaws based on assumptions."
Ain't it grand! Science unlike religion is never certain, it's also the only philosophy we have that gets things close enough to right to be usefull.
I'm not defending creationists but the ability to hold two contradicting ideas is actually a hallmark of intelligence. Where ideas come from is a mystery but knowledge comes from applying self-skepticisim to resolve the conflicting ideas, science is formalised self-skepticisim.
"You are primarily correct, but I'd be careful about using the word "proof" or "proven" in a scientific context."
I think he gets it - "Evolution has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. More than 99 of biologist believes in it. Anything that gets that level of acceptance is considered a FACT by scientists"
Slashdot Mirror
"That's why they should face the consequences of voting for people who, by proxy, break the law on their behalf."
Does this imply the current state of the US economy is natural justice?
To expand a bit on your informative post...
Water vapour is more or less always at it's saturation point in the atmosphere and unlike CO2 the saturation point is entirely dependent on tempratue and pressure. This is why it rains and also why we find dew drops in the desert before sunrise.
It is not considered a forcing because we can pump as much water vapour into the air as we like and it will make no difference to the global average temprature, it will simply condense over the next few days as rain/dew.
However because of its dependence on temprature and the fact that it is also a GHG means it is most definitely a positive feedback, IIRC it has been observed to have risen by about 5% over the last 40yrs. This extra 5% is amplifying the increase in temprature caused by the rise in CO2 concentration.
The forcing due soley to a doubling of CO2 is ~1.5DegC, the math/physics is almost 200yrs old, it was first predicted by Fourier and then confirmed experimentally by Faraday. Fourier's theory on absorption spectra is the basis for modern spectography, the direct forcing results it gives for CO2 are as robust as any of Newton's physical laws.
Adding in feedbacks such as water vapour and melting ice/permafrost is where the uncertainties and confusion sets in but generally it is thought that feedbacks (both positive and negative) will bring the total rise in temp due to a doubling of CO2 to ~3DegC. This number is called climate sensitivity.
"I'm not saying this to be faceious..."
Ditto, a few points...
I do not agree that there has been virtually no warming since 1995, the trend is still 0.11 ~ 0.15DegC/decade. What Phil Jones actually said in his BBC interview (linked in the skeptical science article) was that the confidence level for the trend over that 15yr period does not quite reach the magical 95% level of certainty. The same is true for ANY 15yr period. It comes as no surprise to me that the Daily Fail is the source of the misquotes and confusion.
Arctic melt is mainly driven by the rise in ocean temps (see the graph in the skeptical science link above), ocean currents, and a phenomena called polar amplification that was first predicted by models in the 1980's and was later confirmed by regional analysis of observations.
Both the ocean and the ice have a thermal inertia many orders of magnitude larger than the atmosphere. This means that if the atmosphre were to somehow drop 10DegC off the global average (say a freak run of consecutive volcanic eruptions) the ice would still continue on a melting trend for quite a few years.
There is some weak evidence that the heat going into the recent "dramatic" melting of the Arctic ice may be responsible for the flattening of the curve over the last couple of years but this is far from certain. What is a lot more certain is that, like the long term atmosphereic trend, the long term melting trend is virtually unchanged by the recent dramatic melt.
The PDO (El-Nino/El-Nina) is an internal fluctuation of the Earth's climate system, it is not a root cause for anything. It randomly redistributes existing heat in the ocean/atmosphere. It has nothing to do with the heat budget because it is basically large scale turbulence, I would also be very impressed if anyone could predict turbulance with any degree of accuracy.
Solar flux was counted as a minor positive forcing in the IPCC reports. There is some evidence it has become weaker since the 1990's. But I agree that the forcing effect of the sun can be considered stable in a "spherical cow" analysis.
None of this changes the radiative forcing properties of CO2 that have been understood now for nearly 200yrs. Nor does it change the fact we have pumped half a trillion tons of the stuff into the atmosphere and are on track to double that tonnage in the next 40yrs.
The only thing humans have any control over is our emmissions of GHG's (long term warming) and areosols (short term cooling). According to Fourier (1824 - explained in my link above), a trillion tons of CO2 will result in a rise of ~1.5degC. This 1.5degC will be added to the heat budget regardless of all the other forcings and feedbacks we don't have control over. The same laws of physics will continue to operate after 2050. We could blanket ourselves in smog to balance the heat budget but that seems to me to be a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
Simple risk analysis says we need to drastically cut our emmission, technically and financially I don't believe it's a difficult 40yr goal, I also don't believe anyone has the political solution to the tradgedy of the commons.
"Right, and yet he had to meet with lawyers to tell him this."
Yes that's right, he did need to ask because he is not a lawyer, it's called due dilligence. If he decided to throw them out without seeking legal advise then he could possibly have found himself behind bars in the future, if he decided to keep them and it was not legally required then he is wasting taxpayers money.
"Seems like I summed up the whitehouse spokesman's thought process pretty well."
No, it seems that in your rush to find fault you summed 1 + 1 and got zero.
Yes, damage caused by a deliberate attack is an insurance matter, not an engineering matter. Nothing can be made 100% failsafe.
"Go read up on the history of Einstein's General Relativity."
A more relevant perspective can be gained by reading up on the history of Fourier's 1824 prediction concerning the IR absorbtion properties of CO2 which were confirmed experimentally by Faraday in the 1850's. From Forier's "law of physics" we get the following radiative forcing formula for CO2...
5.35*ln(C2/C1) = 3.71 W/M^2
The answer is what you get for a doubling of CO2 concentration which is expected to be achived by the mid 21st century. This formula does not include positive feedbacks which paleoclimatology (a branch of geology) indicates will amplify that figure to around 7 W/M^2.
"Once we actually have climate science, it wil be about the long haul"
The national academies first warned the US government it had observed a warming signal from our emmissions in the 1950's, the only change to that warning since it was issued has been a dramatic increase in it's confidence levels. So exactly how long is your long term?
As for politics certain powerfull economic sectors have a strong vested interest in convincing people that Al Gore invented global warming in 2005, your views on Phil Jones seem to indicated you have taken their bait and are now ideologically hooked into their prefered "wait and see" strategy.
"the time to exit would have been after the trial showed it to be ineffective"
I don't think either party will exit until the nutjobs exit the senate, there seems to be an endless supply of nutjobs so I think it will continue for the foreseeable future. If the legislation is knocked back a second time as I think it will be then whoever is in power after the next election has even less incentive to pander to the nutjobs and can ask for more in return for kicking off the next round of the game.
I agree it's damaging Conroy publicly, before the last election Conroy was seen as a contender for the leadership, I think Rudd gave him the job to "test his loyalty". One interesting quote I saw from Conroy when asked about the immorality of the legislation was "you can trust your parliment to do the right thing". I'm not that trusting but I think it was a telling remark.
OTOH if it does become law, I will grab my pitchfork and join the inevitable lynch mob.
Nah, I'm 50 and work in an inhouse shop of ~20, MOST of my co-workers are over 40 and almost half are OLDER than me. We don't hire people with less than 10yrs experience. The company is an Aussie subsiduary of a large Japanese multinational, the Japanese traditionally have a healthy respect for experience.
"Is it so balmy down there in Australia that you can have open space under your doors?"
Yes.
"Throw a shrimp on the barbie" was a joke, it's saying "everything is NOT bigger in Texas", eg: Anna Creek cattle station is more than 10X the size of the largest US ranch. Americans failed to get the joke and thought the phrase was part of our lingo.
BTW, Most Aussies including me enjoyed the first Crocodile Dundee but Hoag's lost his popularity with Aussies when he dumped his wife of 20yrs and ran off with the woman from the movie.
Another Aussie here, Victorian but at 50 I have seen most of the country several times over. Everyone I know calls it a barbie, including the polititians on TV who try to set the adgenda for "talking around the barbie".
Shrimp = short person, or the tiny prawns in a "shrimp cocktail".
flamebait? - only if windows source code has achieved self awareness and is now capable of flaming.
It would never work, just before the proffesor sends the SOS message Gilligan will trip over the delicate instrument and ruin everything
"The things like the publics need to be available to the other build machines in the distributed system."
;)
Ahhh, I missed the distributed part. I've worked on some very large systems that took hours to build but I've never actually come across a distributed build during my 20yrs in the industry. The system I'm looking after at the moment builds win32, x64 and ia64 all on the same box, it uses a single python script with a cvs tag as a paramter to do the lot. The *nix builds are also kicked off from a single makefile/tag but run on seperate boxes for the half a dozen flavours we produce.
"Honestly, there was a ton of retarded shit that went on in the code base, and I would have done it entirely different"
A wise man once told me that source code is like shit, everybody else's stinks.
"There are some rights and freedoms which cannot morally be subject to a vote. Freedom of speech is one of them."
Aussie here in total agreement, I don't want my adult porn censored and for reasons I've posted elsewhere in this story I'm almost certain the porn filter will never become law.
However pre-pubecent child porn is not a freedom of speech issue, it's a denial of the victim's basic human rights and freedoms and is quite rightly viewed as a serious crime. I'm in favour of law enforcement agencies monitoring these sites through warrants and sharing that data with foriegn law enforcement for the sole purpose of hunting down the rock spiders who produce and habitually consume this material. I am not in favour of mobs taking the law into their own hands and that includes both peodphile lynch mobs and the operation titstorm mob.
"Conroy seems ideologically committed to this"
The operative word there is "seems". On just about every slashdot story concerning this issue I have asked for someone to point to a quote from Conroy where he says he is in favor of implementing a mandatory filter on private computers. There are tons of quotes about how comminted he is to the inquiry and the trial but none that I have seen that says he's committed to implementation.
The fact is most people in Australia who follow politics are smart enough to see this "yes minister" episode for what it is, ie: a snow job on two independent senators who (under certain circumstances) hold the balance of power in the senate but this is NOT one of those circumstances.
Now before anyone accuses me of being Conroy's #1 fan, the previous Howard government did exactly the same thing but Labor blocked their mandatory filter legislation in the senate, in other words the two major parties are taking turns at being the good cop (senate) or the bad cop (house of reps).
Anyone with half a brain and a bit of knowlege on Aussie politics (eg: Conroy) knows this bill will NEVER pass the senate, this is why Conroy has stated that he plans to reintroduce the legislation just before the next election, neither major party wants it to become a double dissolution trigger and would prefer it to be quitely voted down when it can be drowned out by the noise of a federal election.
Anyone who has bothered to read what the policies of both major parties actually say will find that neither are in favour of mandatory filters on private computers but both are in favour of the current mandatory filters on GOVERNMENT computers (ie: schools) and both are in favour of the current law that says ISP's must offer the mandatory government filter as an opt-in choice for those who want it. That translates to ~5% of users who have opted-in and with those sort of numbers it's obviously not seen as a vote winner by either major party.
None of this is new, it's a political game. The puritan minority will not go away so the major parties will continue this game because it has effectively kept the puritans busy chasing their own tails for at least a decade.
As for the independent senators, one of them backed down quite early on, making the football of this game Mr 2%, who has become strangely silent about censorship since his own anti-abortion sponsers "somehow" made it onto the proposed blacklist. It's also worth noting how Mr 2% got his nickname, both major parties have a score to settle with him and he will be gone at the next election, probably to be replaced by some other nutjob senator in a marginal seat who will keep the game alive during their fleeting term in office.
The game is an unfortunate waste of taxpayers money but OTOH a democracy must provide an avenue for minorites to voice their political opinion even if that opinon is ironically advocating censorship of the opinons of porn lovers they disagree with. Since opertaion titstorm is in effect illegally censoring the government with their DDOS they also fail the same irony test.
Why would you want to archive stuff that can be reproduced by a build?
PS: Developers also use change tags but I was talking about the build tag.
Heh, I'm a developer, the cvs "gatekeeper", and the primary builder in a shop of 20 odd programers.
"Perhaps he was told "Put this enormous program together in one month or the company is screwed." In cases like that..." - you put the hard word on them for more money.
"Whaaaaat? Why does the person doing the builds need write access to ANY of the code base? That makes no sense!"
Not sure how you do it, but I tag the source before building it.
"It is the best guess based on the recently collected evidence. However guessing on recently collected evidence can have its own flaws based on assumptions."
Ain't it grand! Science unlike religion is never certain, it's also the only philosophy we have that gets things close enough to right to be usefull.
I'm not defending creationists but the ability to hold two contradicting ideas is actually a hallmark of intelligence. Where ideas come from is a mystery but knowledge comes from applying self-skepticisim to resolve the conflicting ideas, science is formalised self-skepticisim.
Posting to bring some much deserved attention to your eloquent and informative post. :)
"You are primarily correct, but I'd be careful about using the word "proof" or "proven" in a scientific context."
I think he gets it - "Evolution has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. More than 99 of biologist believes in it. Anything that gets that level of acceptance is considered a FACT by scientists"