IIRC they need a massive cache where the "sampling algorithm" throws a heap of data away. A quick google gives the following precise measure - "The LHC will generate data at a rate equivalent to every person on Earth making twenty phone calls at the same time." - but as you say it only stores a fraction of that.
Now asuming the phone calls are made over POTS, the bitrate from the sensors should be...20 * 6*10^9 * 1220bps...
"The reason that objective proof is elusive is that human beings are not at all objective."
It's true that most of what is written about economics is mearly opinion. Subjectivity is what the scientific method (SM) is supposed to weed out but the SM itself refuses to acknowledge the existence of "objective proof". With this in mind an economist should at the very least make use of error bars.
BTW: I strongly agree with the OP, skilled immigration is not a "tech issue" it's an economic/social one.
Sorry to answer twice and don't take this the wrong way. I dismissed your post when I saw the name Singer but it struck me later that you may not be aware of what "the work" actually is.
The IPCC reports are here (the the attribution section of the 2007 SPM is a good place to start), also this site is run by some world class climatologists who contributed to the reports. A couple of names you might want to check out on wikipedia are James Hansen (Head of NOAA and IMHO a model of what a "public servant" should be) and James Lovelock ("The eccentric father of Earth Sciences"). Of course you could always watch the movie, politics to one side, Al Gore's movie is actually just a "slide show" of what the IPCC reports say. Hansen has a cameo in that too.
I'm an old fart and feel it's my duty to tell you a story....
I was born 2yrs after the first sputnik, even though I'm still waiting for my jet pack to arrive, the changes in technology and society since I was a kid are nothing short of startling....now get off my lawn!
To sum up your unoriginal and widely debunked argument: "It's not happening and even if it was it'a a GoodThing(TM)".
As for the "recent analysis of peer-reviewed climate research" that is the source for your entire post - here is what I found with a couple of clicks: The source for your source (at the bottom of your link) is this book. IANAClimatologist but I know enough about "psuedoscience for hire" to recognise the name Singer as it's unrivaled master.
"it makes me think that you haven't actually read the work."
Even though the answer is obvious I just gotta ask: have you?
"...we are far more capable of cleaning up after ourselves than anyone else. Whether we clean it up on someone else's soil is a different political matter."
That's why we need strong international treaties so that "western companies" using "western technology" for "western consumption" doesn't mean abandoning our so called "values" just because the country is politically weak and/or corrupt does not mean we have the right to disreard the health, lives and livelyhoods of an "ignorant peasant" population "over there somewhere".
Capitialisim is a GoodThing(TM) but some corporates and their political hand-puppets are simply running a sophisticated and ruthless protection racket. "Informed democracy" may be the best answer but since 9/11 I haven't seen much of that anywhere, and I have no idea what the stone age tribes in west papua would view "freedom via democracy" but they are in for a rude awakening over the next 10-20yrs as their massive and largely unexplored jungle vanishes before their eyes.
"I know this will sound overly American."
The US is the largest economy in the west so to some extent is used as a scapegoat, google for "shell nigeria" and you will find similar "crimes against humanity". IMHO: Bush & congress have taken an overly cosy relationship between bussiness and politics and turned it into an incestous one, not as bad as Putin perhaps but still people in glass houses and all that...
If I have a "cause" I guess it would be this: The news is that a quarter of the North Pole's summer ice went "missing" this year, yet all the reports in the media are "about" a shipping channel.
"I personally look at facts and reality, and then I come to a conclusion. You appear to conclude that America is responsible for everything, and then twist any reality or new fact to fit."
Did you miss the "/ducks" tag or are you just a parinoid patriot?
I'm an Aussie and by all acounts we are just as wastefull and just as arrogant as the US, the only difference is we have less people and therefore get less column inches in any media disscussion.
The whole point of my post was to point out that the current state of affairs is a GLOBAL problem, that the US and Australian GOVERNMENTS go out of their way to shirk their responsiblity is a side issue.
It works like the "war on terror", the US makes a mess overseas so it doesn't have to clean up at home./ducks
Seriously though, it IS about consumption and the methods used to sustain and grow it. The US consumes ~50% of the worlds resources with only ~5% of the population, China and India are busy posioning themselves to stock the shelves of the western world just as Detroit did in the 50's only on a much larger scale.
"To find out if the Slashdot crowd honestly cares about the enviroment, or are simply hypocritcal AlGore elitists, just watch how this thread gets moderated."
Well atm you have +4 interesting and the number of posts on any environmental issue shows a lot of slashdotteres "care" about the issue one way or another. Personally I think I have "cared" about the environment since my parents raised me that way nearly five decades ago. I have no idea if I am an "Al Gore elitist" but I can tell you how the climate, bird and animal species have changed in my small corner of Australia over the last 40yrs.
Gore's documentry is just that, a documentry, it's a "slide show" for laymen that spells out what the IPCC reports say, Al Gore is simply demonstrating his personal and political support for the findings in the reports (ie: they are not "his ideas"). Gore was initially skeptical of AGW but was persuaded by (amoung others) Hansen to change his mind. Regardless of what else Gore has done I would have thought an influential politician with the ability to be skeptical of his own ideas and interested enough to take the time and effort needed to understand the science behind a complex subject would be regarded as a GoodThing(TM), particularly on a "nerd" site.
None of this means that governments of the developing world can shirk their responsibilty or that Al Gore doesn't (ironically) create a shitload of CO2 with his "personal presentations" of the movie to the likes of Bush, Murdoch, Howard, Blair, Putin, et-al. Economic infrastrature has outgrown single nations (eg: oil/gas pipelines, telecomms, food production, ect), what is missing is a coherent science based plan "to preserve the commons" on a scale bigger than any single nation. However as soon as one mentions "global plan" it's "OMG Stalin" rather than "hmmm, the plan to remove lead from car emmisions seems to be working".
"If I was talking about ice volume, it is a big change. Too bad the thread was concerning the Northwest Passage."
The change in ice volume is what creates the Northwest Passage, I fail to see how it is irrelevant to the thread. As for the ad-hom that makes up the rest of your reply, I can accept I misinterpreted the intention of your post without it.
Yeah right, the Artic ice sheet pops in an out of existence but we don't see it becuse our resolution is too low.
However you are technically correct in that there have been 5 other "great extinctions" over the last 2 billion years, so the one we are experiencing now is nothing new.
It is measured in millions of sq km and shows a full order of magnitude change over one data point, but that doesn't rank as a "big sudden change"? - WTF?
Be honest, you didn't even read the fucking summary: "'We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme.'"".
1. Look at the 1997 IPCC predictions.
2. Look at the figures in TFA!
3. Look at the current IPCC predictions for the midwest USA.
Conclusion: This IS alarming!
Why do you continue to stress the importance of a the unlikely possibility that the N.W passage could have been "open" and we somehow missed it because we weren't constanly looking at it? Are the "deck chairs" really that important to you in everything you discuss or is it just a rationale for your wishfull thinking?
"It was a whole lot warmer in the last interglacial, 120kya...balh, blah, blah"
It's not the temprature itself that people are concerned about (go back 250MYA and CO2 concentrations were 4X what they are now and the planet was 10C warmer. It's the unprecedented rate of change that is "unatural" and a "clear and present danger".
The melting of the North pole was predicted and it is now undeniably occuring, one of the predicted "flow on effects" of an ice free Artic ocean is desertification of midwest US ( modern humanity's "breadbasket"). Perhaps you would be happy to return to foraging for grubs and shellfish or hearding goats in an arid wasteland (re: middle east), me - I'm kinda fond of the idea of growing our staple diet in a predictable and sustainable manner. If you think discussing the possiblity of a global famine is hyperbowl then take a good look at what is happening to SE Australia (where I happen to live), if you prefer history then take a look at the "dustbowl" years in the US or the many cases where ancient civilizations crumbled due to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Not to mention global fisheries have been collapsing like dominoes since the 1980's....opps - I just did.
Currently the Artic is predicted to be ice free in 40-50yrs so (according to predictions) the US still has a while before it "dries up", but this year's data (to quote TFA) was "extreme". I have no idea what a 25% reduction from last years record low does to the statistical trend or the predictions of when (no longer "if") the Artic will become ice free in the summer. However using the figures from TFA, if the next three years are as "extreme" as this one then the ice will have receded into oblivion before kyoto even comes up for renewal in 2012.
"It's no mystery."
It is a huge mystery but it's not a total mystery thanks to thousands of scientists who have been very actively working on the broarder question of the "dynamic stablity" of the biosphere in general and climate in particular. Thanks to this large but much maligned group of boffins there have been huge strides in our knowledge over the last three decades (including the sources for your "facts"). Yet when the consensus predictions of these "grant seeking leaches" start occuring in front of our very eyes at a much more alarming rate there are still those who will brush it all aside with some self-serving babble about our distant ancestors who had not even developed language let alone a global econmy and infrastructure that is TOTALLY dependent on the predictability of annual weather patterns (ie:climate). Arguing about the exact definition of an "open" as it pertains to the N.W. passage is the preverbial arranging of deck chairs.
Disclaimer: Sorry to pick on you personally, please take it as a general comment about the level of anthropogenic arrogance on slashdot regarding AGW.
From TFA: "Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre said: "We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme."
Last year was a record low for ice coverage, a quarter of what was left of the ice cap last year dissapeared this year, how extreme do you want it?
BTW: I entirely agree with the GP, the IPCC reports by their very nature are conservative in their estimates, but they are also by their very nature are the best representation of the current state of scientific knowledge. I think in time the IPCC will move toward the (depressing) picture drawn by people such as Hansen, Lovelock, Attenborough and many others.
Slashdot Mirror
I read it as - the KKK (clowns, nun's, etc) do not have the right to "demonstrate" on my front lawn.
IIRC they need a massive cache where the "sampling algorithm" throws a heap of data away. A quick google gives the following precise measure - "The LHC will generate data at a rate equivalent to every person on Earth making twenty phone calls at the same time." - but as you say it only stores a fraction of that.
Now asuming the phone calls are made over POTS, the bitrate from the sensors should be...20 * 6*10^9 * 1220bps...
"....if Google got in bed with the Dept. of Homeland Security."
The resulting offspring would spend all their time searching themselves for terrorists.
A bit - how much of that $6.5M can be cashed now?
"The reason that objective proof is elusive is that human beings are not at all objective."
It's true that most of what is written about economics is mearly opinion. Subjectivity is what the scientific method (SM) is supposed to weed out but the SM itself refuses to acknowledge the existence of "objective proof". With this in mind an economist should at the very least make use of error bars.
BTW: I strongly agree with the OP, skilled immigration is not a "tech issue" it's an economic/social one.
It seems subtlety is lost on some moderators.
Bah! Formatting was up the creek. Climatology site
Sorry to answer twice and don't take this the wrong way. I dismissed your post when I saw the name Singer but it struck me later that you may not be aware of what "the work" actually is.
The IPCC reports are here (the the attribution section of the 2007 SPM is a good place to start), also this site is run by some world class climatologists who contributed to the reports. A couple of names you might want to check out on wikipedia are James Hansen (Head of NOAA and IMHO a model of what a "public servant" should be) and James Lovelock ("The eccentric father of Earth Sciences"). Of course you could always watch the movie, politics to one side, Al Gore's movie is actually just a "slide show" of what the IPCC reports say. Hansen has a cameo in that too.
I'm an old fart and feel it's my duty to tell you a story....
I have followed this subject since I saw the imfamous "ice age" article in National Geographic back in the 70's, I thought it was BS and the story died a natural death, OTOH: I was about 16-17 and was firmly convinved that Uri Gellr could bend spoons if he frowned in the right way. In the early 80's a thin book about skepticisim written by a magicain taught me more about science than all my high school teachers put together (bless them, they tried). Sadly I don't remeber the title of Randi's book but Carl Sagan is a good read.
All true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.
"hopefully like 50 or so years from now"
I was born 2yrs after the first sputnik, even though I'm still waiting for my jet pack to arrive, the changes in technology and society since I was a kid are nothing short of startling....now get off my lawn!
To sum up your unoriginal and widely debunked argument: "It's not happening and even if it was it'a a GoodThing(TM)".
As for the "recent analysis of peer-reviewed climate research" that is the source for your entire post - here is what I found with a couple of clicks: The source for your source (at the bottom of your link) is this book. IANAClimatologist but I know enough about "psuedoscience for hire" to recognise the name Singer as it's unrivaled master.
"it makes me think that you haven't actually read the work."
Even though the answer is obvious I just gotta ask: have you?
"...we are far more capable of cleaning up after ourselves than anyone else. Whether we clean it up on someone else's soil is a different political matter."
That's why we need strong international treaties so that "western companies" using "western technology" for "western consumption" doesn't mean abandoning our so called "values" just because the country is politically weak and/or corrupt does not mean we have the right to disreard the health, lives and livelyhoods of an "ignorant peasant" population "over there somewhere".
Capitialisim is a GoodThing(TM) but some corporates and their political hand-puppets are simply running a sophisticated and ruthless protection racket. "Informed democracy" may be the best answer but since 9/11 I haven't seen much of that anywhere, and I have no idea what the stone age tribes in west papua would view "freedom via democracy" but they are in for a rude awakening over the next 10-20yrs as their massive and largely unexplored jungle vanishes before their eyes.
"I know this will sound overly American."
The US is the largest economy in the west so to some extent is used as a scapegoat, google for "shell nigeria" and you will find similar "crimes against humanity". IMHO: Bush & congress have taken an overly cosy relationship between bussiness and politics and turned it into an incestous one, not as bad as Putin perhaps but still people in glass houses and all that...
If I have a "cause" I guess it would be this: The news is that a quarter of the North Pole's summer ice went "missing" this year, yet all the reports in the media are "about" a shipping channel.
woosh!
Are you proposing?
"I personally look at facts and reality, and then I come to a conclusion. You appear to conclude that America is responsible for everything, and then twist any reality or new fact to fit."
Did you miss the "/ducks" tag or are you just a parinoid patriot?
I'm an Aussie and by all acounts we are just as wastefull and just as arrogant as the US, the only difference is we have less people and therefore get less column inches in any media disscussion.
The whole point of my post was to point out that the current state of affairs is a GLOBAL problem, that the US and Australian GOVERNMENTS go out of their way to shirk their responsiblity is a side issue.
It works like the "war on terror", the US makes a mess overseas so it doesn't have to clean up at home. /ducks
Seriously though, it IS about consumption and the methods used to sustain and grow it. The US consumes ~50% of the worlds resources with only ~5% of the population, China and India are busy posioning themselves to stock the shelves of the western world just as Detroit did in the 50's only on a much larger scale.
"To find out if the Slashdot crowd honestly cares about the enviroment, or are simply hypocritcal AlGore elitists, just watch how this thread gets moderated."
Well atm you have +4 interesting and the number of posts on any environmental issue shows a lot of slashdotteres "care" about the issue one way or another. Personally I think I have "cared" about the environment since my parents raised me that way nearly five decades ago. I have no idea if I am an "Al Gore elitist" but I can tell you how the climate, bird and animal species have changed in my small corner of Australia over the last 40yrs.
Gore's documentry is just that, a documentry, it's a "slide show" for laymen that spells out what the IPCC reports say, Al Gore is simply demonstrating his personal and political support for the findings in the reports (ie: they are not "his ideas"). Gore was initially skeptical of AGW but was persuaded by (amoung others) Hansen to change his mind. Regardless of what else Gore has done I would have thought an influential politician with the ability to be skeptical of his own ideas and interested enough to take the time and effort needed to understand the science behind a complex subject would be regarded as a GoodThing(TM), particularly on a "nerd" site.
None of this means that governments of the developing world can shirk their responsibilty or that Al Gore doesn't (ironically) create a shitload of CO2 with his "personal presentations" of the movie to the likes of Bush, Murdoch, Howard, Blair, Putin, et-al. Economic infrastrature has outgrown single nations (eg: oil/gas pipelines, telecomms, food production, ect), what is missing is a coherent science based plan "to preserve the commons" on a scale bigger than any single nation. However as soon as one mentions "global plan" it's "OMG Stalin" rather than "hmmm, the plan to remove lead from car emmisions seems to be working".
"If I was talking about ice volume, it is a big change. Too bad the thread was concerning the Northwest Passage."
The change in ice volume is what creates the Northwest Passage, I fail to see how it is irrelevant to the thread. As for the ad-hom that makes up the rest of your reply, I can accept I misinterpreted the intention of your post without it.
Yeah right, the Artic ice sheet pops in an out of existence but we don't see it becuse our resolution is too low.
However you are technically correct in that there have been 5 other "great extinctions" over the last 2 billion years, so the one we are experiencing now is nothing new.
Fraudian "food bowl" I suppose, but you get the point.
"it isn't like this is some big sudden change"
It is measured in millions of sq km and shows a full order of magnitude change over one data point, but that doesn't rank as a "big sudden change"? - WTF?
Be honest, you didn't even read the fucking summary: "'We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme.'"".
1. Look at the 1997 IPCC predictions.
2. Look at the figures in TFA!
3. Look at the current IPCC predictions for the midwest USA.
Conclusion: This IS alarming!
Why do you continue to stress the importance of a the unlikely possibility that the N.W passage could have been "open" and we somehow missed it because we weren't constanly looking at it? Are the "deck chairs" really that important to you in everything you discuss or is it just a rationale for your wishfull thinking?
"It was a whole lot warmer in the last interglacial, 120kya...balh, blah, blah"
It's not the temprature itself that people are concerned about (go back 250MYA and CO2 concentrations were 4X what they are now and the planet was 10C warmer. It's the unprecedented rate of change that is "unatural" and a "clear and present danger".
The melting of the North pole was predicted and it is now undeniably occuring, one of the predicted "flow on effects" of an ice free Artic ocean is desertification of midwest US ( modern humanity's "breadbasket"). Perhaps you would be happy to return to foraging for grubs and shellfish or hearding goats in an arid wasteland (re: middle east), me - I'm kinda fond of the idea of growing our staple diet in a predictable and sustainable manner. If you think discussing the possiblity of a global famine is hyperbowl then take a good look at what is happening to SE Australia (where I happen to live), if you prefer history then take a look at the "dustbowl" years in the US or the many cases where ancient civilizations crumbled due to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Not to mention global fisheries have been collapsing like dominoes since the 1980's....opps - I just did.
Currently the Artic is predicted to be ice free in 40-50yrs so (according to predictions) the US still has a while before it "dries up", but this year's data (to quote TFA) was "extreme". I have no idea what a 25% reduction from last years record low does to the statistical trend or the predictions of when (no longer "if") the Artic will become ice free in the summer. However using the figures from TFA, if the next three years are as "extreme" as this one then the ice will have receded into oblivion before kyoto even comes up for renewal in 2012.
"It's no mystery."
It is a huge mystery but it's not a total mystery thanks to thousands of scientists who have been very actively working on the broarder question of the "dynamic stablity" of the biosphere in general and climate in particular. Thanks to this large but much maligned group of boffins there have been huge strides in our knowledge over the last three decades (including the sources for your "facts"). Yet when the consensus predictions of these "grant seeking leaches" start occuring in front of our very eyes at a much more alarming rate there are still those who will brush it all aside with some self-serving babble about our distant ancestors who had not even developed language let alone a global econmy and infrastructure that is TOTALLY dependent on the predictability of annual weather patterns (ie:climate). Arguing about the exact definition of an "open" as it pertains to the N.W. passage is the preverbial arranging of deck chairs.
Disclaimer: Sorry to pick on you personally, please take it as a general comment about the level of anthropogenic arrogance on slashdot regarding AGW.
From TFA: "Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre said: "We have seen the ice-covered area drop to just around 3 million sq km which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minima of 2005 and 2006. There has been a reduction of the ice cover over the last 10 years of about 100 000 sq km per year on average, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is extreme."
Last year was a record low for ice coverage, a quarter of what was left of the ice cap last year dissapeared this year, how extreme do you want it?
BTW: I entirely agree with the GP, the IPCC reports by their very nature are conservative in their estimates, but they are also by their very nature are the best representation of the current state of scientific knowledge. I think in time the IPCC will move toward the (depressing) picture drawn by people such as Hansen, Lovelock, Attenborough and many others.
"sounds fun... how much longer do we have to wait?"
Let's hope it happens before we run out of food.