Problem is that people believe things for reasons. These reasons include:
Stupid liberals believe in human-caused GW, I hate stupid liberals, therefore I don't believe in HCGW.
Stupid conservatives are always wrong, I know they're wrong about this, too (equal opportunity politics here).
You'll take my SUV from me when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Solar panels??!!!? The condo board/zoning laws/homeowners association Will Not Allow.
Give up (well, drastically reduce) beef and pork? Are you kidding?
Not drop my little darlings off at school? What, you want them to walk and get hit by a car?
Note that generally, though not always, it is the desire to avoid change that motivates a disbelief in human-caused global warming. I have plenty of sympathy with people who really don't trust the models, and who don't trust temperature readings from urban areas, but the number of people for whom that is the primary motivation is relatively small. Most people, just don't want to change. Heck, we could not even get the metric system adopted in this country. So, whether natural and we should try to control, or unnatural and we should quit causing it, either way you are asking people to change.
There are easy engineering solutions to CO2 production (engineers use the metric system, too). The difficulties are social and political.
The goofiest part of this is that the same poltical retort works both ways. "Give up beef/my truck? What are we, a nation of girly-men?" vs "Can't ride your bike to work/put on a sweater? What are we, a nation of girly-men?"
I learned to drive in a 1967 Saab 96
on
A Requiem For Saab
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· Score: 2, Interesting
2 stroke, 3 cylinders, 3 barrel carburetor. 4 speed on the column. Dual diagonal braking, unibody construction, aircraft seat/shoulder belts. The 2-strokes were sadly, badly, filthy.
Parts on the car were half-metric, half-English. Many of the electronics were by Lucas, Prince of Darkness.
Over time, rebuilt two transmissions, several clutches, several sets of brakes, replaced some body panels. Eventually worked on the engine some, also once swapped front brakes, drum for disk.
My brother totalled two of them, one with the able assistance of a speeding drunk from the rear, the other as a solo effort, rolling the car and denting every body panel. Both times, nobody was hurt.
Bought two Saab 95s (station wagons, one V-4, the other 3-cylinder), one for $100, the other for $50, combined them to make one car, drove it from one side of the country to the other.
The old Saabs were damn fun cars, even though they had itty-bitty engines (820-850cc) producing barely 50hp. In terms of "bang for the buck", they were a total win. The only car I've ever had all 4 wheels off the ground, was a Saab.
Given the Lancet's study (original link has gone dead, summarized here), we didn't do a very good job of protecting civilians in Iraq. Life with our "protection" had a higher yearly mortality rate than life under Saddam, so using that very crude (but important -- dead bodies is a big deal) metric, we made things worse. It doesn't mean that our bullets caused the deaths directly, but we caused the chaos that caused the deaths. Life with a Taliban government is "stable", it's just stability run by a bunch of shitheads. If the shitheads had not been so friendly with Al Qaeda, they'd probably still be running the country. If you're worried about the Afghanis, what we're doing by choosing to fight on is a bet (aka "hope") that we'll get a better stable government, but what we're betting is another year or so of war in their country.
(And yes, I know that the Lancet study was statistical, etc, but we're quite happy with those same methods in non-politicized studies. Historical comparisons that I read said that in war zones those methods yield numbers that are "somewhat high but more accurate than official government reports". So I use the lower bound on their estimate, 393k excess deaths over a 3 year period, which is plenty horrible.)
Not sure how the ski-doo does it, but oil injected at the crank is not new for two strokes; the "Monte Carlo" line of Saabs did this back in the mi9d 60s. "Normal" Saabs did 50:1 premix, but with a Monte Carlo there was a tank of oil that was fed to the crank directly (and then burned). Perhaps the Ski-doo is also doing something else.
I learned to drive in a 2-stroke car -- a 1968 Saab, AFAIK the last 2-stroke car that could legally be sold in the US (50CID was the limit for that year, it was at or a hair under). They are not better in absolute terms, old style 2-strokes are just plain filthy. Their rear mufflers would not rust, instead they would become plugged with a mixture of soot and partially-burned gunk. If you left one of those cars idling for too long next to another car, you would leave an sooty oily spot from the exhaust. You could rejuvenate a muffler, if you had access to a trash fire or bonfire, by cooking it to bake/burn off the gunk.
Using synthetic oil for lubrication helps a little bit, because it is formulated to burn better, but in general, there is no way that these cars were cleaner.
So -- I actually drove one for years, actually worked on their exhaust system, actually left one idling next to another car for too long, and have seen all this with my own eyes. Where did you get your information? I'm curious to know what would cause someone to spout such obvious nonsense with such self-assured authority.
It's not the fear of making mistakes, it's the fear of making deadly mistakes. Fouling the prop of an innocent boat (admittedly, unlikely 200 miles off the coast of Somalia) is still a mistake, it's just much less likely to be a deadly mistake.
There's also issues with merchant ships being armed (I don't understand all the reasons, I just recall that it was the case), and the political/public relations issue with how we treat a failed/failing state like Somalia. Piracy's bad because it injects money, but bad press (because we "kill their innocent fishermen") is also bad.
Before you attempt to kill them, you have to be certain that they are a pirate. Legally certain, not just Slashdot certain.
Fouling their prop doesn't require quite such a high standard of proof, and gets the job done, at least till they get their hands on some jet boats.
It's also not too smart for a pirate to escalate from a small disabled boat -- if someone on that ship had some means of firing back, that could only be deployed against proven pirates, well, you just gave them proof.
There's simulations, vs observations. Observations (Mauna Loa CO2 records, melting icecaps, glaciers, and permafrost) suggest that we've got some non-trivial warming going on. CO2's a greenhouse gas, so is CH4 (this is not something you can dispute, and have me think you are anything but a nut -- it's an optically transparent gas that blocks re-radiated IR), there is nothing surprising in the observation that it is getting warmer, and no other large enough cause is popping out of any other data. Notice I'm not working with all this other massaged data -- we know that these gasses should tend to warm things, we know we are putting more of them in the air, and we know (using heat-island-insensitive measures) that it is warming.
My default assumption is that we've got the burden of proof backwards -- namely, that anyone in favor of the current increasing CO2 trajectory, needs to "prove" (with simulations?) that it's ok. We're seeing effects now, we have every reason to believe that the oceans are acting as an enormous thermal buffer, which means that the CO2 we've already put in the air will continue to increase heat for some years. I find it somewhat interesting that there are few-to-zero competing simulation results.
I have one friend who works in climate modeling, and what he told me, years ago, is that climate models are good enough to be worth a lot of money to some of the very some companies that question them in public.
I'm also not too well disposed to believe in the wonders of negative feedback, or that it will make things turn out nice. A little delay in your negative feedback, is what converts a regulator, into an oscillator, and if there's one thing we know this system has got, it's delays.
I don't think you understand "the left" much at all, and the favored solution from most of "the left" that I know -- a CO2 ("carbon") tax -- has the property that it only addresses the claimed problem, while saying nothing at all about the way that we ultimately deal with it. It's explicitly not telling us how to cut CO2 emissions, but merely seeks to assign them a price, so that "the market" will then set about reducing CO2 emissions in whatever way we find most economical and suitable.
I'm also a little unclear on how the left ended up with Mussolini. I thought he was a fascist.
The result in the Nature letter, which I recall appearing in some other form a few years earlier, is the first information that made me go "oh shit" -- it's based on a long record of observations designed to minimize local effects, and it shows both CO2 increase, and evidence of warming. (And the whole crowd that's blathering on about water vapor and solar cycles and failure to measure X-rays and Mars and Jupiter -- sorry, that's been looked at, you guys are nuts and seriously in denial. Most of this shit can be checked with a few mouse clicks nowadays.)
And China's counterargument is that they have one quarter the US per capita CO2 emissions, and they've had a draconian national policy of limiting family sizes to cut population growth. Is the US doing anything comparable? I think they can make a pretty good case for applying those tariffs to US.
The proposed solution, championed by the proven-flaky (see discussion of solar panel "darkness" contributing to GW, if you can avoid buying the book) authors of SuperFreakonomics, is to inject SO2 into the air. History suggests that this will lower temperatures, and cause nasty droughts in China and India (if I recall correctly), and would not avoid acidifying the ocean.
The discussion in this country is largely influenced by our fossil-fuel and auto industries; people in Japan, England, and Europe live perfectly acceptable lives with half the per capita emissions that we in the US and Canada produce. That's still double China's per capita emissions, and that's not a lifestyle a care to adopt if I can possibly avoid it. The trick is to figure out how to live well without so many emissions. The basic recipe is something along the lines of (1) solar heat wherever possible (relatively cheap, could be deployed with decades-old technology, no weird side-effects), (2) switching the electrical grid away from CO2 sources (using nukes AND solar AND windmill, unless you are really comfortable with all eggs in a single basket), (3) much smaller and more efficient cars, electric and/or hybrid, (4) much more use of bicycles, especially in the US (5) much less dead mammal in our diet, and somewhat less meat overall, (6) improved building construction -- more insulation, better control of air circulation, designed for LED lighting. You may have noticed a distinct lack of rocket science in these proposals. The only places where technical improvements would help boatloads, are in the nuke plant design (safer, breeder, maybe thorium-cycle), solar cell efficiency (it's still coming up), and improvements in LED price/performance.
No, we've got to get better leaders, and not just the official leaders -- we need an opposition that is at least anchored in reality, even if their biases are different.
Individual action fails, because it's a global problem. Without international agreements, treaties, and laws (setting emissions targets, taxing carbon, changing existing subsidies away from fossil-fuel-friendly), individual actors are chumps. Individual action doesn't shift electrical generation away from fossil fuels, and individual action doesn't build electrical grids on a scale that would allow us to put nuke plants where they didn't make people nervous, or that would allows us rely on locally unreliable sources like wind and solar.
That said, I'm a chump, and I'm still not doing enough. 1992 Honda Civic when I drive, but bicycle commute not less than 2x/week. The default meat is now poultry. Switching our home's heat from fuel oil to almost anything else would be an improvement (coal and resistive electrical heat would be worse), but that sort of change is generally much more expensive than changing diet or transportation.
It is true of cycling, at least in certain cases, I read it in the most recent edition of (the book) Bicycling Science. It's not nearly as large as the benefit from following.
Nope, as has been noted above, the GPS data proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was speeding. There's two witnesses, radar AND GPS. If the car accelerated 0-60, instantly, his average speed between the two GPS readings is still over the limit -- not by much, but speeding is speeding, and if you're going to get pedantic enough to take it to court like that, the court can be pedantic back at you. The longer it takes him to accelerate, the longer he had to brake after seeing the cop, the higher his maximum speed must have been.
I think this was an excellent result, and it could only have been better if the family had gotten dinged for the extra costs they incurred for the prosecution by gaming court dates.
How much farmland are we talking about? My numbers are dated (Cadillac Desert), but what I recall is that 85% of California's water goes to agriculture, 15% goes to the cities. So as insane as it is to maintain lush lawns in a semi-desert, cutting off the cities would only increase the water supply for agriculture by about 1/6.
On the other hand (at least when Cadillac Desert was written) agriculture had bizarre water use incentives, and could have used the available water much more efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly we're doing this wrong. Maybe if we frame them for pirating MP3s, the ISPs will move a little quicker.
But what is the data? The pictures didn't tell me what the points represent.
Okay, but WTF do those spray-painted images mean?
Note that generally, though not always, it is the desire to avoid change that motivates a disbelief in human-caused global warming. I have plenty of sympathy with people who really don't trust the models, and who don't trust temperature readings from urban areas, but the number of people for whom that is the primary motivation is relatively small. Most people, just don't want to change. Heck, we could not even get the metric system adopted in this country. So, whether natural and we should try to control, or unnatural and we should quit causing it, either way you are asking people to change.
There are easy engineering solutions to CO2 production (engineers use the metric system, too). The difficulties are social and political. The goofiest part of this is that the same poltical retort works both ways. "Give up beef/my truck? What are we, a nation of girly-men?" vs "Can't ride your bike to work/put on a sweater? What are we, a nation of girly-men?"
2 stroke, 3 cylinders, 3 barrel carburetor. 4 speed on the column. Dual diagonal braking, unibody construction, aircraft seat/shoulder belts. The 2-strokes were sadly, badly, filthy.
Parts on the car were half-metric, half-English. Many of the electronics were by Lucas, Prince of Darkness.
Over time, rebuilt two transmissions, several clutches, several sets of brakes, replaced some body panels. Eventually worked on the engine some, also once swapped front brakes, drum for disk.
My brother totalled two of them, one with the able assistance of a speeding drunk from the rear, the other as a solo effort, rolling the car and denting every body panel. Both times, nobody was hurt.
Bought two Saab 95s (station wagons, one V-4, the other 3-cylinder), one for $100, the other for $50, combined them to make one car, drove it from one side of the country to the other.
The old Saabs were damn fun cars, even though they had itty-bitty engines (820-850cc) producing barely 50hp. In terms of "bang for the buck", they were a total win. The only car I've ever had all 4 wheels off the ground, was a Saab.
A copy of the 2006 Lancet study of excess deaths in Iraq during the war. http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf
Given the Lancet's study (original link has gone dead, summarized here), we didn't do a very good job of protecting civilians in Iraq. Life with our "protection" had a higher yearly mortality rate than life under Saddam, so using that very crude (but important -- dead bodies is a big deal) metric, we made things worse. It doesn't mean that our bullets caused the deaths directly, but we caused the chaos that caused the deaths. Life with a Taliban government is "stable", it's just stability run by a bunch of shitheads. If the shitheads had not been so friendly with Al Qaeda, they'd probably still be running the country. If you're worried about the Afghanis, what we're doing by choosing to fight on is a bet (aka "hope") that we'll get a better stable government, but what we're betting is another year or so of war in their country.
(And yes, I know that the Lancet study was statistical, etc, but we're quite happy with those same methods in non-politicized studies. Historical comparisons that I read said that in war zones those methods yield numbers that are "somewhat high but more accurate than official government reports". So I use the lower bound on their estimate, 393k excess deaths over a 3 year period, which is plenty horrible.)
Not sure how the ski-doo does it, but oil injected at the crank is not new for two strokes; the "Monte Carlo" line of Saabs did this back in the mi9d 60s. "Normal" Saabs did 50:1 premix, but with a Monte Carlo there was a tank of oil that was fed to the crank directly (and then burned). Perhaps the Ski-doo is also doing something else.
I learned to drive in a 2-stroke car -- a 1968 Saab, AFAIK the last 2-stroke car that could legally be sold in the US (50CID was the limit for that year, it was at or a hair under). They are not better in absolute terms, old style 2-strokes are just plain filthy. Their rear mufflers would not rust, instead they would become plugged with a mixture of soot and partially-burned gunk. If you left one of those cars idling for too long next to another car, you would leave an sooty oily spot from the exhaust. You could rejuvenate a muffler, if you had access to a trash fire or bonfire, by cooking it to bake/burn off the gunk.
Using synthetic oil for lubrication helps a little bit, because it is formulated to burn better, but in general, there is no way that these cars were cleaner.
So -- I actually drove one for years, actually worked on their exhaust system, actually left one idling next to another car for too long, and have seen all this with my own eyes. Where did you get your information? I'm curious to know what would cause someone to spout such obvious nonsense with such self-assured authority.
It's not the fear of making mistakes, it's the fear of making deadly mistakes. Fouling the prop of an innocent boat (admittedly, unlikely 200 miles off the coast of Somalia) is still a mistake, it's just much less likely to be a deadly mistake.
There's also issues with merchant ships being armed (I don't understand all the reasons, I just recall that it was the case), and the political/public relations issue with how we treat a failed/failing state like Somalia. Piracy's bad because it injects money, but bad press (because we "kill their innocent fishermen") is also bad.
Before you attempt to kill them, you have to be certain that they are a pirate. Legally certain, not just Slashdot certain.
Fouling their prop doesn't require quite such a high standard of proof, and gets the job done, at least till they get their hands on some jet boats.
It's also not too smart for a pirate to escalate from a small disabled boat -- if someone on that ship had some means of firing back, that could only be deployed against proven pirates, well, you just gave them proof.
There's simulations, vs observations. Observations (Mauna Loa CO2 records, melting icecaps, glaciers, and permafrost) suggest that we've got some non-trivial warming going on. CO2's a greenhouse gas, so is CH4 (this is not something you can dispute, and have me think you are anything but a nut -- it's an optically transparent gas that blocks re-radiated IR), there is nothing surprising in the observation that it is getting warmer, and no other large enough cause is popping out of any other data. Notice I'm not working with all this other massaged data -- we know that these gasses should tend to warm things, we know we are putting more of them in the air, and we know (using heat-island-insensitive measures) that it is warming.
My default assumption is that we've got the burden of proof backwards -- namely, that anyone in favor of the current increasing CO2 trajectory, needs to "prove" (with simulations?) that it's ok. We're seeing effects now, we have every reason to believe that the oceans are acting as an enormous thermal buffer, which means that the CO2 we've already put in the air will continue to increase heat for some years. I find it somewhat interesting that there are few-to-zero competing simulation results.
I have one friend who works in climate modeling, and what he told me, years ago, is that climate models are good enough to be worth a lot of money to some of the very some companies that question them in public.
I'm also not too well disposed to believe in the wonders of negative feedback, or that it will make things turn out nice. A little delay in your negative feedback, is what converts a regulator, into an oscillator, and if there's one thing we know this system has got, it's delays.
I'm pretty happy with this result: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v382/n6587/abs/382146a0.html
CO2 concentrations measured at the middle of the ocean, and changes in the yearly duration of photosynthesis, works for me.
I don't think you understand "the left" much at all, and the favored solution from most of "the left" that I know -- a CO2 ("carbon") tax -- has the property that it only addresses the claimed problem, while saying nothing at all about the way that we ultimately deal with it. It's explicitly not telling us how to cut CO2 emissions, but merely seeks to assign them a price, so that "the market" will then set about reducing CO2 emissions in whatever way we find most economical and suitable.
I'm also a little unclear on how the left ended up with Mussolini. I thought he was a fascist.
Consider this result, and the data it references. A few rogue emails are just noise, not signal.
The result in the Nature letter, which I recall appearing in some other form a few years earlier, is the first information that made me go "oh shit" -- it's based on a long record of observations designed to minimize local effects, and it shows both CO2 increase, and evidence of warming. (And the whole crowd that's blathering on about water vapor and solar cycles and failure to measure X-rays and Mars and Jupiter -- sorry, that's been looked at, you guys are nuts and seriously in denial. Most of this shit can be checked with a few mouse clicks nowadays.)
And China's counterargument is that they have one quarter the US per capita CO2 emissions, and they've had a draconian national policy of limiting family sizes to cut population growth. Is the US doing anything comparable? I think they can make a pretty good case for applying those tariffs to US.
The discussion in this country is largely influenced by our fossil-fuel and auto industries; people in Japan, England, and Europe live perfectly acceptable lives with half the per capita emissions that we in the US and Canada produce. That's still double China's per capita emissions, and that's not a lifestyle a care to adopt if I can possibly avoid it. The trick is to figure out how to live well without so many emissions. The basic recipe is something along the lines of (1) solar heat wherever possible (relatively cheap, could be deployed with decades-old technology, no weird side-effects), (2) switching the electrical grid away from CO2 sources (using nukes AND solar AND windmill, unless you are really comfortable with all eggs in a single basket), (3) much smaller and more efficient cars, electric and/or hybrid, (4) much more use of bicycles, especially in the US (5) much less dead mammal in our diet, and somewhat less meat overall, (6) improved building construction -- more insulation, better control of air circulation, designed for LED lighting. You may have noticed a distinct lack of rocket science in these proposals. The only places where technical improvements would help boatloads, are in the nuke plant design (safer, breeder, maybe thorium-cycle), solar cell efficiency (it's still coming up), and improvements in LED price/performance.
And no greedy people in the fossil fuel industry? There's boatloads more money there, so that's where any thinking greedy person would go.
No, we've got to get better leaders, and not just the official leaders -- we need an opposition that is at least anchored in reality, even if their biases are different.
Individual action fails, because it's a global problem. Without international agreements, treaties, and laws (setting emissions targets, taxing carbon, changing existing subsidies away from fossil-fuel-friendly), individual actors are chumps. Individual action doesn't shift electrical generation away from fossil fuels, and individual action doesn't build electrical grids on a scale that would allow us to put nuke plants where they didn't make people nervous, or that would allows us rely on locally unreliable sources like wind and solar.
That said, I'm a chump, and I'm still not doing enough. 1992 Honda Civic when I drive, but bicycle commute not less than 2x/week. The default meat is now poultry. Switching our home's heat from fuel oil to almost anything else would be an improvement (coal and resistive electrical heat would be worse), but that sort of change is generally much more expensive than changing diet or transportation.
That is, these are the lamest excuse anyone has yet concocted for not riding a bicycle.
So you figure dissimilar in the immune system, but similar on the sweet-ride preference?
It is true of cycling, at least in certain cases, I read it in the most recent edition of (the book) Bicycling Science. It's not nearly as large as the benefit from following.
Nope, as has been noted above, the GPS data proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was speeding. There's two witnesses, radar AND GPS. If the car accelerated 0-60, instantly, his average speed between the two GPS readings is still over the limit -- not by much, but speeding is speeding, and if you're going to get pedantic enough to take it to court like that, the court can be pedantic back at you. The longer it takes him to accelerate, the longer he had to brake after seeing the cop, the higher his maximum speed must have been.
I think this was an excellent result, and it could only have been better if the family had gotten dinged for the extra costs they incurred for the prosecution by gaming court dates.
What county was that? I'll try to stay away, also. I see no reason not to name names, given your relative anonymity and the passage of time.
How much farmland are we talking about? My numbers are dated (Cadillac Desert), but what I recall is that 85% of California's water goes to agriculture, 15% goes to the cities. So as insane as it is to maintain lush lawns in a semi-desert, cutting off the cities would only increase the water supply for agriculture by about 1/6.
On the other hand (at least when Cadillac Desert was written) agriculture had bizarre water use incentives, and could have used the available water much more efficiently.