Tis the truth my lord". I believe but cannot prove it's the origin of the expression "a right royal rogering". Isabella's bastard son was the subsequent king of england and Roger was his voice until the rest of the Lord's ganged up on him and killed him ala Braveheart (btw: the father was portrayed as William Wallace in the movie Braveheart, nobody really knows but it's most likely Roger was the farther). For her part Isabella was locked up and went insane.
The family were king-makers in the UK for 400yrs and are mentioned in Shakespear's Henry V long after the line pasted to the Plantangenets, they basically owned a large chunks of the UK particularly around wales. They initialy obtained this claim by contributing a small fleet of stocked and manned viking ships to William the conquerer's invasion (IIRC 22 ships).
Of course I do not claim to be a direct descendant, just that I carry one of the oldest family names in Europe, was born near their stomping ground in england, and find my name's history interesting even if others don't.
If your current mod of +5 funny doesn't tell you something then you're not paying attention.
However I'm glad you fessed up after our discussion the other day, problem is we regular skeptics don't know what you guys are saying because you keep changing the subject to political conspiracy theories, when that goes nowhere you go back to cherry-picking and red-herrings....I've tried the tinfoil but it simply does not work. Perhaps it's time for you to stop behaving like the shop keeper in Monty Pythons dead parrot sketch.
I have similar opinions. Cap and trade will only work if what you are trading can be measured accurately, in my mind currently this means the large emmitters coal, oil, gas, concrete. The other large contributor is land use and as much as I like trees I think the only accurately measurable way to use land as a sink is to plough biochar into it, permits and credits should be based on a physically auditable ton of carbon and currently most land use schemes do not offer that level of certainty. That may change in the future. Of course if a coal plant can work out how to scrub it's emmissions and point to the stored carbon then they can use it as an offset.
From your link: "Apparently a NASA team overestimated the average 1998 temps by 0.06 degree Fahrenheit, making 1934 the new hottest year title holder by a slim 0.04-degree margin."
I and NASA agree with the call for transparency, lets look at the "Heartland Instituite".
The fact NASA and science in general fucks up every now and then in no way implies you have anything more credible to offer.
Coincidently my ancestors were famous in the middle ages, one of them was screwing the queen while in a nearby dungeon his men were shoving a red hot poker up the king of england's arse.
Strawman: From your words "A popular example is Mann's flawed" I assumed the bit you were pointing out was a "known problem" from the testiomony and I still do. You did not actually state what argument of yours the link was supposed to be supporting?
But now your talking about gross incompetence on a decades long intensive reasearch effort that requires a massive conspiracy by the worlds scientific institutions to cover up? Or are you saying that these same institutions do not understand undergrad stats?
Either show me your contra-evidence that asserts Mann is incorrect, the ice caps are NOT melting, or the world is NOT getting warmer. If you can't do that then there are other sites such as freerepublic where you can be intellectualy dishonest.
Speaking of taking things out of context, note that psuedo-skeptics have reduced the entire enquiry down to "our committee does not believe that the climate is warming".
Dude, stop dragging those red-herrings around, they stink.
If by pointing to Mann's reconstruction methods you mean to imply Mann, et al's hockey stick was debunked you are simply wrong...
The statisticians at the National Academies do not agree with you, or should I say their written testimony to the senate doesn't agree with you. Anyway they are probably the best statistical experts you can find in one place and are certainly not alone in their approval of Mann's work. Furthermore the minor problems they did point out were adressed by Mann in a later publication in Science which you can look up yourself, this is how science works, no?
The reason I point to that testimony is because it's the half-truth that many psuedo-skeptical, armchair statistitians base their opinions on, whether you in particular realise that or not is irrelevant.
Quote TFL: "The basic conclusion of the 1999 paper by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years ....[snip]... We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues. However, our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann et al. should not be construed as evidence that our committee does not believe that the climate is warming, and will continue to warm, as a result of human activities."
Why anyone would waste money and scientists time by having a senate enquiry on one particular graph is beyond me but whatever the reason it has served to further strengthen Mann's arguments.
As for the expert you keep demanding, that's not how science does things. Perhaps the NASA links are weak evidence by your standards because most people just rely on their reputation, but if you think they are wrong the onus is on you to provide evidence to the contrary. No matter how many papers I throw at you supporting NASA, you can continue to troll by demanding an individual expert claim an institutional publication which has nothing to do with the credibility of the evidence.
And since you obviously think you are good at stats why haven't you answered my question? - Under your stated assumptions, what's the probability that Antarctica and/or Greenland is NOT losing ice?
In the case of Antarctica the majority of the area may be floating in the wintertime, in summer only the dwindling number of permanent ice shelves survive, the biggest of these being the Ross ice shelf. However regadless of season the majority of the volume is not floating.
The point at which the ice meets the seabed is where the ice is no longer part of the ice shelf but is still part of the ice sheet. The amount of floating ice supported at one end by land and held up by tension is insignificant but it does prevent the sheet from floating away into warmer waters.
A thick sheet of ice will resist waves and bend with the tide rather than cracking. However if the temprature is warm enough to reduce the thickness, cracks are likely to appear at tension points near where the ice meets the land. Once cracks start to form the constant battering of waves and tides will break up the ice shelf well before it all melts.
The sudden collapse of ice shelves has been observed in the recent past, this one is behaving in a similar manner and is five degrees further south than previous observations. The loss of these ice shelves is also expected to speed up the flow of glaciers that they've been holding back for millenia.
...the chebyshev limit says there is still a whopping 11% chance that the actual value is outside the range... I don't see any statistics experts mentioned in that link, so I gotta assume that we cannot expect a normally distributed error, that in fact they have no idea what the distribution might be.
There are some 50 published papers from the journals Nature and Science alone, when your finished teaching them stats maybe you can teach them risk management.
"Are there some countries that are exempt from the global regulations? Is CO2 actually a "pollutant", and how do we define pollution? Has relatively recent human activity actually been proven to be the cause of something we can't even measure properly? What percentage of the atmosphere does CO2 actually occupy and what is it's molecular weight?"
No, Yes, A resourse out of place, Two incorrect assumptions in the question render it meaningless, Very small, Irrelevant.
Not trolling you, but I'm genuinely interested to know whether you think a global cap and trade treaty is a valid market based solution to AGW in particular, and pollution in general?
I think the salt will just mean the fresh melt forms a layer on top, you can test it youself with a glass of salty water and some ice cubes. However we have known for a while now that overall Antarticia is losing mass and that sea levels are already rising.
Quote from TFL: "The estimated mass loss was enough to raise global sea level about 1.2 millimeters (0.05 inches) during the survey period; about 13 percent of the overall observed sea level rise for the same period. The researchers found Antarctica's ice sheet decreased by 152 (plus or minus 80) cubic kilometers of ice annually between April 2002 and August 2005."
"We know that energy must be leaving the system, because we're capturing it with a turbine."
Yes but humans and their civilizations are part of "the system", the kinetic energy we remove from the system is converted to electricity which when used goes back into the system (mainly as heat), some of it will escape into space as EM radiation but most of it will end up back in the system as kinetic energy.
I don't have numbers but there is a lot of energy in an average cold front, 2-3000km long, 5km high and moving at 20-120km/h. An unbroken line of massive turbines 300 feet high, streching the length of the front will have a very minor physical effect. Trees are already more effective at this since they block more air and absorb the energy by swaying about all over the place. Still our CO2 output is measured in ppm and the minor effect is tubulance that I suspect is significanly different to that of trees, so yes, these things are definitely worth modelling before we build them and I'm fairly confident that would happen in most western nations.
Harvesting wind and solar could have unknown side effects that will only become apparent as we scale up but it's hard to see how it could be as undesirable as the known side effects of burning coal, model revision says get rid of coal. Another good example of model revision at work is bio-fuels, allthough the powers to be were told about undesirable side effects prior to regulatory implementation those side effects are now obvious to all. Like it or not we have been observably screwing with the system for thousands of years but only over the last 50-100 has our technology and sheer numbers been sufficient to steadily push the system towards a state that will no longer support our civilization (even our species if we really cock-up).
Replacing coal with wind and/or solar on a global scale over the next 50yrs is not technically difficult and our current understanding is it would have a very desirable effect on the system. However our global civilization is based on another system called "the market" which is in a bugrudgingly symbiotic relationship with the biosphere (ie:the trdgedy of the commons). For the market to loose it's grudge against the biosphere it must recognise CO2 emmissions are a limited resourse and price the use of that resource accordingly, as it stands all of humanity is subsidising the coal industry by allowing them to dangerously overload the biosphere's CO2 absorbtion resource for free. It's really not hard to understand, we currently emit ~10Gt/yr, the biosphere can absorb ~3Gt/yr. The basic economic solutions available to close that gap are simple but will create industrial sized winners and losers over the next few decades, naturally politicians are loathe to upset the status-quo that brought them into power.
I agree wholeheartedly with your notion of revising models based on observations and outcomes, science must inform policy. However science based policy descisions are still based on what is "desirable". A politicians desire to stay in power overrides all others, so unless the environment becomes an international bipartisan issue it will continue to be overwhelmed by short term desires.
Yep, I've seen it. It's a masterpiece, example quote...
"A Rudd Labor Government will require ISPs to offer a 'clean feed' internet service to all homes, schools and public internet points accessible by children, such as public libraries".
The government already provides several "mandatory clean feed" broadcast channels and media sites similar to the BBC, it's like our telcos having mandatory universal service obligations to provide phones. Nowhere does it say ISP's can't continue to offer a "dirty feed" to adults.
I call bullshit, if they had a credit for that (and I doubt it) then it would just be debited when it passes out of the companies hands (pretty much like GST). OTOH it's an excellent auditing question to ask if you are serious about building a capped carbon market. The way it looks to me is...
The industry facing virtual extinction over the next 50yrs is coal.
Oil, gas and concrete will be more expensive the faster we use it.
Landuse is currently problematic to mesure and thus open to auditing abuse.
The sooner we get down to and stay at ~3Gt/yr the sooner our influence will stop destabalising the climate and acidifying the oceans. We are currently at ~10Gt/yr, 40-50yrs seems "doable" considering the infrastructure I've seen built and rebuilt over the last 50yrs.
Slashdot Mirror
OT and sarcastic maybe, but Troll?
Tis the truth my lord". I believe but cannot prove it's the origin of the expression "a right royal rogering". Isabella's bastard son was the subsequent king of england and Roger was his voice until the rest of the Lord's ganged up on him and killed him ala Braveheart (btw: the father was portrayed as William Wallace in the movie Braveheart, nobody really knows but it's most likely Roger was the farther). For her part Isabella was locked up and went insane.
The family were king-makers in the UK for 400yrs and are mentioned in Shakespear's Henry V long after the line pasted to the Plantangenets, they basically owned a large chunks of the UK particularly around wales. They initialy obtained this claim by contributing a small fleet of stocked and manned viking ships to William the conquerer's invasion (IIRC 22 ships).
Of course I do not claim to be a direct descendant, just that I carry one of the oldest family names in Europe, was born near their stomping ground in england, and find my name's history interesting even if others don't.
If your current mod of +5 funny doesn't tell you something then you're not paying attention.
However I'm glad you fessed up after our discussion the other day, problem is we regular skeptics don't know what you guys are saying because you keep changing the subject to political conspiracy theories, when that goes nowhere you go back to cherry-picking and red-herrings....I've tried the tinfoil but it simply does not work. Perhaps it's time for you to stop behaving like the shop keeper in Monty Pythons dead parrot sketch.
Looks like I upset a freerepublic fan with mod points...
I have similar opinions. Cap and trade will only work if what you are trading can be measured accurately, in my mind currently this means the large emmitters coal, oil, gas, concrete. The other large contributor is land use and as much as I like trees I think the only accurately measurable way to use land as a sink is to plough biochar into it, permits and credits should be based on a physically auditable ton of carbon and currently most land use schemes do not offer that level of certainty. That may change in the future. Of course if a coal plant can work out how to scrub it's emmissions and point to the stored carbon then they can use it as an offset.
From your link: "Apparently a NASA team overestimated the average 1998 temps by 0.06 degree Fahrenheit, making 1934 the new hottest year title holder by a slim 0.04-degree margin."
I and NASA agree with the call for transparency, lets look at the "Heartland Instituite".
The fact NASA and science in general fucks up every now and then in no way implies you have anything more credible to offer.
Coincidently my ancestors were famous in the middle ages, one of them was screwing the queen while in a nearby dungeon his men were shoving a red hot poker up the king of england's arse.
Strawman: From your words "A popular example is Mann's flawed" I assumed the bit you were pointing out was a "known problem" from the testiomony and I still do. You did not actually state what argument of yours the link was supposed to be supporting?
But now your talking about gross incompetence on a decades long intensive reasearch effort that requires a massive conspiracy by the worlds scientific institutions to cover up? Or are you saying that these same institutions do not understand undergrad stats?
Either show me your contra-evidence that asserts Mann is incorrect, the ice caps are NOT melting, or the world is NOT getting warmer. If you can't do that then there are other sites such as freerepublic where you can be intellectualy dishonest.
You can beg all you like but I won't answer your troll except to warn you that looking at my other posts will make your head explode.
Speaking of taking things out of context, note that psuedo-skeptics have reduced the entire enquiry down to "our committee does not believe that the climate is warming".
Dude, stop dragging those red-herrings around, they stink.
If by pointing to Mann's reconstruction methods you mean to imply Mann, et al's hockey stick was debunked you are simply wrong...
The statisticians at the National Academies do not agree with you, or should I say their written testimony to the senate doesn't agree with you. Anyway they are probably the best statistical experts you can find in one place and are certainly not alone in their approval of Mann's work. Furthermore the minor problems they did point out were adressed by Mann in a later publication in Science which you can look up yourself, this is how science works, no?
The reason I point to that testimony is because it's the half-truth that many psuedo-skeptical, armchair statistitians base their opinions on, whether you in particular realise that or not is irrelevant.
Quote TFL: "The basic conclusion of the 1999 paper by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years
....[snip]...
We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues. However, our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann et al. should not be construed as evidence that our committee does not believe that the climate is warming, and will continue to warm, as a result of human activities."
Why anyone would waste money and scientists time by having a senate enquiry on one particular graph is beyond me but whatever the reason it has served to further strengthen Mann's arguments.
As for the expert you keep demanding, that's not how science does things. Perhaps the NASA links are weak evidence by your standards because most people just rely on their reputation, but if you think they are wrong the onus is on you to provide evidence to the contrary. No matter how many papers I throw at you supporting NASA, you can continue to troll by demanding an individual expert claim an institutional publication which has nothing to do with the credibility of the evidence.
And since you obviously think you are good at stats why haven't you answered my question? - Under your stated assumptions, what's the probability that Antarctica and/or Greenland is NOT losing ice?
In the case of Antarctica the majority of the area may be floating in the wintertime, in summer only the dwindling number of permanent ice shelves survive, the biggest of these being the Ross ice shelf. However regadless of season the majority of the volume is not floating.
The point at which the ice meets the seabed is where the ice is no longer part of the ice shelf but is still part of the ice sheet. The amount of floating ice supported at one end by land and held up by tension is insignificant but it does prevent the sheet from floating away into warmer waters.
A thick sheet of ice will resist waves and bend with the tide rather than cracking. However if the temprature is warm enough to reduce the thickness, cracks are likely to appear at tension points near where the ice meets the land. Once cracks start to form the constant battering of waves and tides will break up the ice shelf well before it all melts.
The sudden collapse of ice shelves has been observed in the recent past, this one is behaving in a similar manner and is five degrees further south than previous observations. The loss of these ice shelves is also expected to speed up the flow of glaciers that they've been holding back for millenia.
...the chebyshev limit says there is still a whopping 11% chance that the actual value is outside the range... I don't see any statistics experts mentioned in that link, so I gotta assume that we cannot expect a normally distributed error, that in fact they have no idea what the distribution might be.
There are some 50 published papers from the journals Nature and Science alone, when your finished teaching them stats maybe you can teach them risk management.
"Are there some countries that are exempt from the global regulations? Is CO2 actually a "pollutant", and how do we define pollution? Has relatively recent human activity actually been proven to be the cause of something we can't even measure properly? What percentage of the atmosphere does CO2 actually occupy and what is it's molecular weight?"
No, Yes, A resourse out of place, Two incorrect assumptions in the question render it meaningless, Very small, Irrelevant.
Look at it another way. If I mix bricks with water it becomes more dense but the volume of water won't change.
Not trolling you, but I'm genuinely interested to know whether you think a global cap and trade treaty is a valid market based solution to AGW in particular, and pollution in general?
Yep, no difference there.
I think the salt will just mean the fresh melt forms a layer on top, you can test it youself with a glass of salty water and some ice cubes. However we have known for a while now that overall Antarticia is losing mass and that sea levels are already rising.
Quote from TFL: "The estimated mass loss was enough to raise global sea level about 1.2 millimeters (0.05 inches) during the survey period; about 13 percent of the overall observed sea level rise for the same period. The researchers found Antarctica's ice sheet decreased by 152 (plus or minus 80) cubic kilometers of ice annually between April 2002 and August 2005."
Greenland is also losing mass.
Yep the taxpayers payed someone to do the damage so they pay the costs, the rest is just red tape.
I'm not from the US but I'd say invading a data center is better (and cheaper) than invading the middle east.
"We know that energy must be leaving the system, because we're capturing it with a turbine."
Yes but humans and their civilizations are part of "the system", the kinetic energy we remove from the system is converted to electricity which when used goes back into the system (mainly as heat), some of it will escape into space as EM radiation but most of it will end up back in the system as kinetic energy.
I don't have numbers but there is a lot of energy in an average cold front, 2-3000km long, 5km high and moving at 20-120km/h. An unbroken line of massive turbines 300 feet high, streching the length of the front will have a very minor physical effect. Trees are already more effective at this since they block more air and absorb the energy by swaying about all over the place. Still our CO2 output is measured in ppm and the minor effect is tubulance that I suspect is significanly different to that of trees, so yes, these things are definitely worth modelling before we build them and I'm fairly confident that would happen in most western nations.
Harvesting wind and solar could have unknown side effects that will only become apparent as we scale up but it's hard to see how it could be as undesirable as the known side effects of burning coal, model revision says get rid of coal. Another good example of model revision at work is bio-fuels, allthough the powers to be were told about undesirable side effects prior to regulatory implementation those side effects are now obvious to all. Like it or not we have been observably screwing with the system for thousands of years but only over the last 50-100 has our technology and sheer numbers been sufficient to steadily push the system towards a state that will no longer support our civilization (even our species if we really cock-up).
Replacing coal with wind and/or solar on a global scale over the next 50yrs is not technically difficult and our current understanding is it would have a very desirable effect on the system. However our global civilization is based on another system called "the market" which is in a bugrudgingly symbiotic relationship with the biosphere (ie:the trdgedy of the commons). For the market to loose it's grudge against the biosphere it must recognise CO2 emmissions are a limited resourse and price the use of that resource accordingly, as it stands all of humanity is subsidising the coal industry by allowing them to dangerously overload the biosphere's CO2 absorbtion resource for free. It's really not hard to understand, we currently emit ~10Gt/yr, the biosphere can absorb ~3Gt/yr. The basic economic solutions available to close that gap are simple but will create industrial sized winners and losers over the next few decades, naturally politicians are loathe to upset the status-quo that brought them into power.
I agree wholeheartedly with your notion of revising models based on observations and outcomes, science must inform policy. However science based policy descisions are still based on what is "desirable". A politicians desire to stay in power overrides all others, so unless the environment becomes an international bipartisan issue it will continue to be overwhelmed by short term desires.
....and I think it's interesting how you keep dodging the subject, wanker!
...but yeah you bent my cyclical idea outta shape...
Yep, I've seen it. It's a masterpiece, example quote...
"A Rudd Labor Government will require ISPs to offer a 'clean feed' internet service to all homes, schools and public internet points accessible by children, such as public libraries".
The government already provides several "mandatory clean feed" broadcast channels and media sites similar to the BBC, it's like our telcos having mandatory universal service obligations to provide phones. Nowhere does it say ISP's can't continue to offer a "dirty feed" to adults.
I call bullshit, if they had a credit for that (and I doubt it) then it would just be debited when it passes out of the companies hands (pretty much like GST). OTOH it's an excellent auditing question to ask if you are serious about building a capped carbon market. The way it looks to me is...
The industry facing virtual extinction over the next 50yrs is coal.
Oil, gas and concrete will be more expensive the faster we use it.
Landuse is currently problematic to mesure and thus open to auditing abuse.
The sooner we get down to and stay at ~3Gt/yr the sooner our influence will stop destabalising the climate and acidifying the oceans. We are currently at ~10Gt/yr, 40-50yrs seems "doable" considering the infrastructure I've seen built and rebuilt over the last 50yrs.