The Earth has, in the past, been much warmer and much more conducive to plant life. The implicit assumption that the current (or pre-industrial, for that matter) global temperature is ideal is unproven.
Noted, however:
crops - those plants used in agriculture are but a small fraction of plant life on the planet.
while global temperatures have been higher millions of years ago plants would have had tens or hundreds of years to adapt. Rates of warming predicted would only give them hundreds of years to adapt.
Increased evaporation from the oceans, and the resultant rain, may also start to arrest desertification, adding to the effect modeled by these studies.
It is also easily forgotten that increased temperatures doesn't just mean more evaporation from oceans, but also from lands. Bigger floods and drier droughts is not exactly conducive to agriculture as both will kill crops.
There is no corporate-welfare in a carbon tax. In other words, the most effective way of dealing with climate change doesn't even include corporate-welfare - and yet there are business leaders in support of it.
The kinds of carbon tax proposed is a tax on the release of carbon that has been locked in the Earth for millions of years, not all carbon emissions. It is only emissions of old carbon that are of concern.
Furthermore a tax on carbon does not affect all things equally. The tax would for example make bottled water shipped from the other side of the world more many times more than tap water, which would hardly be affected at all. It means that food trucked from hundreds of kilometers away will no longer be competitive with food grown by local farmers or your backyard.
You might complain about ordering books on Amazon, but then doesn't it make more sense to get an electronic copy? And if you must have a hard copy, then would it not be better and cheaper to print it at a local printing service?
The tax does make some things expensive - things that involve long distances for example - but that is the point. As long as there are alternatives, then the tax encourages people to change their behaviour to use these cheaper alternatives.
Furthermore, these price changes are necessary. As we speak, local farmland is being built on by developers to make a buck at the expense of everyone living nearby who have to source their foods from further away. We have an economic system that encourages this wasteful behaviour.
Mind you, if the carbon tax replaces income tax. You will have on average more disposable income that cancels exactly the average prices rises from the carbon tax. And then if you change your behaviour you will save more money and save the environment at the same time.
Except copyright laws affect everyone whereas contracts can only affect those who have signed a contract. People who come across any kind of intellectual material without having signed a contract would have been able to anything with it regardless of whatever contract was signed by others previously. In fact contracts based on the monopoly rights granted by the government are prevalent so contracts have not been made unnecessary by copyright at all.
Copyright have not replaced contracts, but provided for the use of contracts in situtations where it would otherwise be ineffective. It is therefore *not* a simplification, replacement nor harmonisation of the practise of entering into contracts.
how many people can't tell the difference between individual liberty and corporate liberty. A corporation is not a person.
No one is preventing you as an individual from buying fast food nor preventing you from buying toys and if you really wanted your kid to have both you are still free to do so.
Abolish elections and select your legislatures by random sampling of the population.
That completely undermines parties as well as saving the huge costs of elections and the corruption of election financing by big corporations.
That's what you call a Jury, and it's not such a bad idea.
You may as well make it a Jury - consensus decision making, new juries selected to judge on each new bill, 12 jurists, etc. It can even make decision making faster because you can have multiple Juries deliberating on separate bills at the same time.
It doesn't mean we can't have elected representatives elected by generate elections. They just won't be passing any laws themselves. They can only sponsor bills and speak for or against bills sponsored by any representative. The Jury would be sole body responsible for passing it into law, and unanimous decision making
Really now. If what these guys are saying is true and any cells can be reprogrammed. What's the big benefit of harvesting embryo's?
The original argument against embryonic stem cell research was that is either is potential for life or is life and that killing an embryo is killing life.
If embryonic stem cells and skin cells are really interchangeable, then perhaps skin cells have the potential for life as well.
In that case what is the difference if we work on embryonic stem cells or skin cells?
an example of Darwinian Evolution, but just at a different level?
For example, if you think of the unit of evolution as a gene instead of an organism and a bacteria as a habitat instead of an organism, then the gene evolves vertically, by replication and duplication. The transfer between two bacteria are just the gene migrating from one habitat to another.
Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus
Thanks for that. I wasn't really prepared to do the integration to work it out.
However, remember that E = 1/2mv^2
So twice the velocity is four times the energy.
And unless your fuel is of negligible mass or your energy source is not carried out with the payload, you still need to supply even more energy to carry all that extra fuel.
In light of this, twice as fast does not equate to twice as hard.
As cmowire pointed out gravity on most of these planets is not so great, with the exception of Jupiter where it is IIRC 2.5 g or so. On saturn it is just over a g and on Uranus and Neptune it is below one g. While their mass is huge their density is low so gravity is modest.
It helps, but it's still a lot more costly energy-wise to launch from there.
If you were on the Earth's surface and then doubled your distance from the centre of the Earth, gravity will change from g to 0.25g (ie. the r squared term on the bottom of Newton's law of gravitation).
The Earth has a radius of 6,500 km, so to get that reduction of gravity, you need to supply enough energy to move about 6,500 km against gravity.
The radius of Uranus is about 25,559 km. Let's suppose the gravity on the surface there is also g for illustration. In this case to get the same reduction in gravity to 0.25g you need to supply enough energy to move about 25,559 km against gravity. In order to do that you would need to carry more fuel, which will compound your launch costs further.
To imagine it visually, think of the Earth's gravity as a gravity well with a gradient (ie. slope) of g at the Earth's surface. Imagine the same for Uranus. They both have the same slope at their surfaces, however, with Uranus, the gravity well is much larger, with gravity staying near g for a greater distance from it's surface. Clearly a larger gravity well is harder to escape even if the gravity is the same.
Try plugging in those values into Newton's law of universal gravitation yourself for confirmation.
the weather man can't predict the weather for the comming week. but for some reason you think they can predict the weather 100 years into the future accurately?
Don't be silly. They don't call it "weather change" for a reason. It's called "climate change" and involves changes in climate, which *can* be predicted.
Anyone who knows anything about statistics knows you can't predict any particular event - for example the weather on any particular day (at some distant time in the future), but you can predict the distribution of those events - for example, how many hot days vs cold days in that year.
Heck, you can make predictions on totally random events like the throw of a fair dice: that each number would appear close to 50 times if you throw the dice 300 times.
If you don't understand that, you have absolutely no clue what climate change is all about.
Maybe you are talking about drought? No, rainfall will increase if it gets significantly warmer.
Drought isn't just about precipitation. A warmer climate might mean more rainfall (eg. flash floods), but also that rainwaters evaporate faster, so that when it doesn't rain, lands become drier faster.
Both are problematic.
Also, precipitation that now comes down as snow and get released slowly in snow melts in the warmer months would in the future just come straight, exacerbating flooding in some areas, and again affecting the consistency of water supplies.
As a public servant, your responsibility is to the taxpayers.
Don't you meant to citizens, or to voters? If a public servant's responsibility is to tax payers, your voting power would have been proportional to the amount of tax you pay.
In reality, the situation isn't urgent. It's well known that as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the approximate energy absorption and temperature rise is logarithmic in nature. There's a good discussion at: The Cold Facts About Global Warming. By the best current estimates, a doubling of CO2 concentration from current levels would result in less than a one deg. C increase in temperature - and that's without considering likely negative cloud feedback.
First you say the atmosphere is too complex to model, then cite an article that uses an even simpler model with its own projections. A bit of a double standard if you ask me.
But fine, let's go with it. What do the calculations regarding double CO2 actually say?
The net effect of all these processes is that doubling carbon dioxide would not double the amount of global warming. In fact, the effect of carbon dioxide is roughly logarithmic. Each time carbon dioxide (or some other greenhouse gas) is doubled, the increase in temperature is the same as the previous increase. The reason for this is that, eventually, all the longwave radiation that can be absorbed has already been absorbed. It would be analogous to closing more and more shades over the windows of your house on a sunny day -- it soon reaches the point where doubling the number of shades can't make it any darker.
So another way of looking at it is by thinking of adding blankets to your bed on a cold night: if you have no blankets, adding one will have a big effect. If you have a thousand blankets, adding another thousand will have an unmeasurably small effect.
Sounds right - or does it?
Well, the amount of energy absorbed by the entire atmosphere doesn't change much - I can grant that much. This is because as you get higher into the atmosphere, because of all the CO2 below you, there isn't much heat coming out for you to block further anyway - hence the extra blankets analogy - the extra blankets don't do much more.
However, the analogy is wrong.
The problem is, it is calculating the total absorption of the entire atmosphere and then calibrating it against the surface temperature changes (which is totally unrelated). It doesn't matter to us how much the total temperature of the atmosphere increases. What matters is how much the surface temperature increases, because that's where we live.
It mentions earlier:
It is generally accepted that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already high enough to absorb almost all the infrared radiation in the main carbon dioxide absorption bands over a distance of only a few km
Let's say 5km of atmosphere is capable of absorbing 100% of the heat energy. If you double the CO2, then the same amount of energy is absorbed in the bottom 2.5km. If you double again, then the same amount of energy is absorbed in the bottom 1.25km.
If 1.25km of atmosphere absorbed 5km worth of heat, that's 4 times the amount of heat as before. As we double the CO2 concentration twice, the amount of CO2 is 4 times more.
In other words, the surface temperature increases mostly linearly. That the total atmospheric temperature increase is logarithmic because more and more of the upper atmosphere is getting colder is immaterial. We don't live there!
The article is intentionally confounding two unrelated concepts to fool you into believing it.
I say this because earlier in the article, it said
For radiation from the sun, this theory predicts that increased CO2 would cause cooling in the upper atmosphere and warming in the lower atmosphere
So they know this, yet still manage to overlook it in their model.
There are quite a few problems with your "logic" here. First of all, the trillions spent to save the economic system from collapse have already been spent - they're gone.
No, I wasn't proposing that trillions should be spent. I was using the fact to illustrate that the amount of political will or political commitment to solving the problem of climate change pales in comparison to that of solving the global financial crisis.
We don't have trillions to spend on nonexistent global warming - good thing it's not a problem.
A couple of problems:
The US and other nations didn't have trillions to spend on fixing the global financial crisis either. But the trillions were found nonetheless, whether from debt or relaxation of fiscal policy.
It would still be cheaper than finding accomodation for dislocated climate refugees and dealing with resulting social problems.
Spending money is not the best way to fight climate change in any case. It's much better to raise a carbon tax and use the revenue to cut other taxes. As there is no net tax revenue change, there is no net effect inflationary or deflationary effect on the economy, but it introduces the incentives for investment new technologies. In no way does fighting climate change require killing an economy.
Further, even if we here in the US were to sign up to such a disastrous policy, China and India have refused. China is the world's largest CO2 producer at this point, and as our economy died theirs would simply pick up the slack. The net effect of what was attempted at Copenhagen would have been close to zero.
The US doesn't have to sign up to Copenhagen to act. All I want is for the US to act seriously. How it does it is immaterial to the rest of the world - only that it does. A number of European nations have long ago enacted a carbon tax for instance without any agreement or damage to their economy.
Further, killing the US economy would also kill many of the innovative projects that will eventually reduce CO2 output, whether such reduction is needed or not.
The glass walls of a greenhouse don't permit convection,
Neither does the vaccuum of empty space.
whereas the atmosphere does.
Why you would compare the glass of a glass house to the atmosphere is beyond me. The air contained in a glass house convects. The air in the glass house is a more appropriate analog to the atmosphere is it not?
Some highly nonlinear things happen in the atmosphere when convection occurs
Hurricanes would likely fall under that category.
- mainly falling under the category of "clouds". Clouds reflect a lot of solar energy back into space. So, the comparison between a conventional greenhouse, and the Earth's atmosphere is not straightforward at all.
Not straightward isn't the same as not true.
You don't get convection without a temperature gradiant, so the existance of more convection presupposes that a temperature gradient has already become exaggerated, one manifestation being that the surface temperature has already increased.
One of the funnier things, actually, is the resolute attempt by the CRU and IPCC to discount the Sun as a source of climate variability. None of the IPCC models take into account the sunspot cycles, nor are there "what if" runs based on possible variability. That's not entirely surprising given that the mechanism for sunspot minima causing lower temperatures isn't understood. However, we do know historically that minima such as the Maunder Minimum produced sharply lower temperatures.
As I understand, solar activity correlated for most of the time we have direct temperature records, but the correlation diverged markedly in the last two decades. Solar activity having reduced in that time is unable to explain the continued rise in temperature.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
Solar activity is therefore not something I can use to explain currently warming trends.
True, although the "greenhouse effect" applies to closed systems (bounded in the case of a greenhouse, with glass). It's not at all clear the IPCC is modeling the open "greenhouse effect" here on Earth properly.
The "greenhouse effect" in any sense of the word not a closed system. Even a glass greenhouse has external energy input via sunlight and output via the gradual dissipation of heat into its environment via the contact of glass with air. The distinction is false.
To equate climate change to phlogiston or egg cholesterol is a long stretch indeed.
Not really so much, but the other thing to keep in mind is that phlogiston was never used as a justification for spending trillions of dollars, permanently changing the world economy, and affecting the standard of living of billions of people. So, the standard for the science used to "prove" anthropogenic global warming should be high indeed.
As if changing the world economy is a bad thing. The standard of living of billions of people is already poor and developed nations grapple with traffic congestion, pollution, rising grocery prices due to poor planning and energy security. Trillions of dollars were spent on saving the economic system from collapse and bailing out banks to preserve a world economy that didn't work particularly well. Commitments to save the planet pale in comparison by orders of magnitude.
IMO, the current state of the art is not even close. Fortunately, given the state of the Sun's sunspot cycles we may be in a multi-decade timeout on warming, anthropogenic or no. We should know quite a bit more twenty or thirty years down the road.
By which time projections say we will be too late.
In other words, in Scala, type inference wasn't just allowed on local variables. It was allowed on methods and fields too. This makes it possible for me to store the value, {x = 1, y = 2} of an anonymous type in a field for reuse.
This is impossible to do in C# and it means I can't store results of Linq queries somewhere in a typesafe manner for later use as well.
Plus Scala has an interpreter and can be a scripting language. A scripting language that has access to the Java class library is really cool.
I'm surprised JScript.net isn't a scripting language given its name. I can't just put JScript.net code into a *.js text file just run it without compilation.
I was initially excited by.net when it was first released and have preferred it over Java, which as a language seemed to have stagnate. Now, I am finding C# quite a disappointment with Microsoft not investing the time and energy to ensure the features they add to the language are polished:
* Adding extension methods without also adding extension properties * Refusing to implementing covariant return types * Adding type inference, but disallowing it for class method return types
As so forth. Microsoft simply doesn't have the discipline to finish any feature addition to the language before moving to the next.
That doesn't mean I prefer Java either. I only use Java and C# at work out of necessity.
Funny how you so easily dismiss the tree ring data, but desperately latch onto the sunspot data as if it was proof of the causation between solar activity and temperature.
Recent data totally disproves your thesis that solar activity is the prime driver of climate change in recent history. Yet the meme persists in climate skeptic circles and highlights the bankruptcy of the movement.
Tree ring data however is not settled yet. The divergence happens in some trees - especially in those found in the northern hemisphere where the majority of the world's population lives, but not in the southern hemisphere. It is certaintly plausible that human activity is causing the divergence, and if so, the tree ring data would be likely fine in a pre-industrial era.
We don't know for sure, but a person genuinely interested in the science would want to know why - perhaps even favoring more funding to investigate the discrepancy.
Yet instead of teasing out the real cause of the divergence, you'd rather have all tree ring data tossed out so that we can never know the truth.
That there exist people who think that way is truly sad.
Slashdot Mirror
Noted, however:
It is also easily forgotten that increased temperatures doesn't just mean more evaporation from oceans, but also from lands. Bigger floods and drier droughts is not exactly conducive to agriculture as both will kill crops.
There is no corporate-welfare in a carbon tax. In other words, the most effective way of dealing with climate change doesn't even include corporate-welfare - and yet there are business leaders in support of it.
A tax on carbon is a tax on everything.
Why the exaggeration?
The kinds of carbon tax proposed is a tax on the release of carbon that has been locked in the Earth for millions of years, not all carbon emissions. It is only emissions of old carbon that are of concern.
Furthermore a tax on carbon does not affect all things equally. The tax would for example make bottled water shipped from the other side of the world more many times more than tap water, which would hardly be affected at all. It means that food trucked from hundreds of kilometers away will no longer be competitive with food grown by local farmers or your backyard.
You might complain about ordering books on Amazon, but then doesn't it make more sense to get an electronic copy? And if you must have a hard copy, then would it not be better and cheaper to print it at a local printing service?
The tax does make some things expensive - things that involve long distances for example - but that is the point. As long as there are alternatives, then the tax encourages people to change their behaviour to use these cheaper alternatives.
Furthermore, these price changes are necessary. As we speak, local farmland is being built on by developers to make a buck at the expense of everyone living nearby who have to source their foods from further away. We have an economic system that encourages this wasteful behaviour.
Mind you, if the carbon tax replaces income tax. You will have on average more disposable income that cancels exactly the average prices rises from the carbon tax. And then if you change your behaviour you will save more money and save the environment at the same time.
Now wouldn't that be great?
Except copyright laws affect everyone whereas contracts can only affect those who have signed a contract. People who come across any kind of intellectual material without having signed a contract would have been able to anything with it regardless of whatever contract was signed by others previously. In fact contracts based on the monopoly rights granted by the government are prevalent so contracts have not been made unnecessary by copyright at all.
Copyright have not replaced contracts, but provided for the use of contracts in situtations where it would otherwise be ineffective. It is therefore *not* a simplification, replacement nor harmonisation of the practise of entering into contracts.
Just because it is fraught with technical issues, doesn't mean it won't be tried at the expense of users who have very little by the way of choice.
how many people can't tell the difference between individual liberty and corporate liberty. A corporation is not a person.
No one is preventing you as an individual from buying fast food nor preventing you from buying toys and if you really wanted your kid to have both you are still free to do so.
Abolish elections and select your legislatures by random sampling of the population.
That completely undermines parties as well as saving the huge costs of elections and the corruption of election financing by big corporations.
That's what you call a Jury, and it's not such a bad idea.
You may as well make it a Jury - consensus decision making, new juries selected to judge on each new bill, 12 jurists, etc. It can even make decision making faster because you can have multiple Juries deliberating on separate bills at the same time.
It doesn't mean we can't have elected representatives elected by generate elections. They just won't be passing any laws themselves. They can only sponsor bills and speak for or against bills sponsored by any representative. The Jury would be sole body responsible for passing it into law, and unanimous decision making
Really now. If what these guys are saying is true and any cells can be reprogrammed. What's the big benefit of harvesting embryo's?
The original argument against embryonic stem cell research was that is either is potential for life or is life and that killing an embryo is killing life.
If embryonic stem cells and skin cells are really interchangeable, then perhaps skin cells have the potential for life as well.
In that case what is the difference if we work on embryonic stem cells or skin cells?
an example of Darwinian Evolution, but just at a different level?
For example, if you think of the unit of evolution as a gene instead of an organism and a bacteria as a habitat instead of an organism, then the gene evolves vertically, by replication and duplication. The transfer between two bacteria are just the gene migrating from one habitat to another.
Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus
Thanks for that. I wasn't really prepared to do the integration to work it out.
However, remember that E = 1/2mv^2
So twice the velocity is four times the energy.
And unless your fuel is of negligible mass or your energy source is not carried out with the payload, you still need to supply even more energy to carry all that extra fuel.
In light of this, twice as fast does not equate to twice as hard.
As cmowire pointed out gravity on most of these planets is not so great, with the exception of Jupiter where it is IIRC 2.5 g or so. On saturn it is just over a g and on Uranus and Neptune it is below one g. While their mass is huge their density is low so gravity is modest.
It helps, but it's still a lot more costly energy-wise to launch from there.
If you were on the Earth's surface and then doubled your distance from the centre of the Earth, gravity will change from g to 0.25g (ie. the r squared term on the bottom of Newton's law of gravitation).
The Earth has a radius of 6,500 km, so to get that reduction of gravity, you need to supply enough energy to move about 6,500 km against gravity.
The radius of Uranus is about 25,559 km. Let's suppose the gravity on the surface there is also g for illustration. In this case to get the same reduction in gravity to 0.25g you need to supply enough energy to move about 25,559 km against gravity. In order to do that you would need to carry more fuel, which will compound your launch costs further.
To imagine it visually, think of the Earth's gravity as a gravity well with a gradient (ie. slope) of g at the Earth's surface. Imagine the same for Uranus. They both have the same slope at their surfaces, however, with Uranus, the gravity well is much larger, with gravity staying near g for a greater distance from it's surface. Clearly a larger gravity well is harder to escape even if the gravity is the same.
Try plugging in those values into Newton's law of universal gravitation yourself for confirmation.
the weather man can't predict the weather for the comming week. but for some reason you think they can predict the weather 100 years into the future accurately?
Don't be silly. They don't call it "weather change" for a reason. It's called "climate change" and involves changes in climate, which *can* be predicted.
Anyone who knows anything about statistics knows you can't predict any particular event - for example the weather on any particular day (at some distant time in the future), but you can predict the distribution of those events - for example, how many hot days vs cold days in that year.
Heck, you can make predictions on totally random events like the throw of a fair dice: that each number would appear close to 50 times if you throw the dice 300 times.
If you don't understand that, you have absolutely no clue what climate change is all about.
A wheel and axle may be beyond Mother Nature's reach, barring some amazing fluke.
Does an ancient cellular proton transport mechanism that has a component that rotates on an axle count?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-ATPase
Maybe you are talking about drought? No, rainfall will increase if it gets significantly warmer.
Drought isn't just about precipitation. A warmer climate might mean more rainfall (eg. flash floods), but also that rainwaters evaporate faster, so that when it doesn't rain, lands become drier faster.
Both are problematic.
Also, precipitation that now comes down as snow and get released slowly in snow melts in the warmer months would in the future just come straight, exacerbating flooding in some areas, and again affecting the consistency of water supplies.
As a public servant, your responsibility is to the taxpayers.
Don't you meant to citizens, or to voters? If a public servant's responsibility is to tax payers, your voting power would have been proportional to the amount of tax you pay.
In reality, the situation isn't urgent. It's well known that as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere, the approximate energy absorption and temperature rise is logarithmic in nature. There's a good discussion at: The Cold Facts About Global Warming. By the best current estimates, a doubling of CO2 concentration from current levels would result in less than a one deg. C increase in temperature - and that's without considering likely negative cloud feedback.
First you say the atmosphere is too complex to model, then cite an article that uses an even simpler model with its own projections. A bit of a double standard if you ask me.
But fine, let's go with it. What do the calculations regarding double CO2 actually say?
The net effect of all these processes is that doubling carbon dioxide would not double the amount of global warming. In fact, the effect of carbon dioxide is roughly logarithmic. Each time carbon dioxide (or some other greenhouse gas) is doubled, the increase in temperature is the same as the previous increase. The reason for this is that, eventually, all the longwave radiation that can be absorbed has already been absorbed. It would be analogous to closing more and more shades over the windows of your house on a sunny day -- it soon reaches the point where doubling the number of shades can't make it any darker.
So another way of looking at it is by thinking of adding blankets to your bed on a cold night: if you have no blankets, adding one will have a big effect. If you have a thousand blankets, adding another thousand will have an unmeasurably small effect.
Sounds right - or does it?
Well, the amount of energy absorbed by the entire atmosphere doesn't change much - I can grant that much. This is because as you get higher into the atmosphere, because of all the CO2 below you, there isn't much heat coming out for you to block further anyway - hence the extra blankets analogy - the extra blankets don't do much more.
However, the analogy is wrong.
The problem is, it is calculating the total absorption of the entire atmosphere and then calibrating it against the surface temperature changes (which is totally unrelated). It doesn't matter to us how much the total temperature of the atmosphere increases. What matters is how much the surface temperature increases, because that's where we live.
It mentions earlier:
It is generally accepted that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already high enough to absorb almost all the infrared radiation in the main carbon dioxide absorption bands over a distance of only a few km
Let's say 5km of atmosphere is capable of absorbing 100% of the heat energy. If you double the CO2, then the same amount of energy is absorbed in the bottom 2.5km. If you double again, then the same amount of energy is absorbed in the bottom 1.25km.
If 1.25km of atmosphere absorbed 5km worth of heat, that's 4 times the amount of heat as before. As we double the CO2 concentration twice, the amount of CO2 is 4 times more.
In other words, the surface temperature increases mostly linearly. That the total atmospheric temperature increase is logarithmic because more and more of the upper atmosphere is getting colder is immaterial. We don't live there!
The article is intentionally confounding two unrelated concepts to fool you into believing it.
I say this because earlier in the article, it said
For radiation from the sun, this theory predicts that increased CO2 would cause cooling in the upper atmosphere and warming in the lower atmosphere
So they know this, yet still manage to overlook it in their model.
There are quite a few problems with your "logic" here. First of all, the trillions spent to save the economic system from collapse have already been spent - they're gone.
No, I wasn't proposing that trillions should be spent. I was using the fact to illustrate that the amount of political will or political commitment to solving the problem of climate change pales in comparison to that of solving the global financial crisis.
We don't have trillions to spend on nonexistent global warming - good thing it's not a problem.
A couple of problems:
Further, even if we here in the US were to sign up to such a disastrous policy, China and India have refused. China is the world's largest CO2 producer at this point, and as our economy died theirs would simply pick up the slack. The net effect of what was attempted at Copenhagen would have been close to zero.
The US doesn't have to sign up to Copenhagen to act. All I want is for the US to act seriously. How it does it is immaterial to the rest of the world - only that it does. A number of European nations have long ago enacted a carbon tax for instance without any agreement or damage to their economy.
Further, killing the US economy would also kill many of the innovative projects that will eventually reduce CO2 output, whether such reduction is needed or not.
That was never what I proposed.
The glass walls of a greenhouse don't permit convection,
Neither does the vaccuum of empty space.
whereas the atmosphere does.
Why you would compare the glass of a glass house to the atmosphere is beyond me. The air contained in a glass house convects. The air in the glass house is a more appropriate analog to the atmosphere is it not?
Some highly nonlinear things happen in the atmosphere when convection occurs
Hurricanes would likely fall under that category.
- mainly falling under the category of "clouds". Clouds reflect a lot of solar energy back into space. So, the comparison between a conventional greenhouse, and the Earth's atmosphere is not straightforward at all.
Not straightward isn't the same as not true.
You don't get convection without a temperature gradiant, so the existance of more convection presupposes that a temperature gradient has already become exaggerated, one manifestation being that the surface temperature has already increased.
It's well known that 1998 was the warmest year on record, while the chart shows 2005 as quite a bit warmer, eh?
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/2005_warmest.html
One of the funnier things, actually, is the resolute attempt by the CRU and IPCC to discount the Sun as a source of climate variability. None of the IPCC models take into account the sunspot cycles, nor are there "what if" runs based on possible variability. That's not entirely surprising given that the mechanism for sunspot minima causing lower temperatures isn't understood. However, we do know historically that minima such as the Maunder Minimum produced sharply lower temperatures.
As I understand, solar activity correlated for most of the time we have direct temperature records, but the correlation diverged markedly in the last two decades. Solar activity having reduced in that time is unable to explain the continued rise in temperature. http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm Solar activity is therefore not something I can use to explain currently warming trends.
True, although the "greenhouse effect" applies to closed systems (bounded in the case of a greenhouse, with glass). It's not at all clear the IPCC is modeling the open "greenhouse effect" here on Earth properly.
The "greenhouse effect" in any sense of the word not a closed system. Even a glass greenhouse has external energy input via sunlight and output via the gradual dissipation of heat into its environment via the contact of glass with air. The distinction is false.
To equate climate change to phlogiston or egg cholesterol is a long stretch indeed.
Not really so much, but the other thing to keep in mind is that phlogiston was never used as a justification for spending trillions of dollars, permanently changing the world economy, and affecting the standard of living of billions of people. So, the standard for the science used to "prove" anthropogenic global warming should be high indeed.
As if changing the world economy is a bad thing. The standard of living of billions of people is already poor and developed nations grapple with traffic congestion, pollution, rising grocery prices due to poor planning and energy security. Trillions of dollars were spent on saving the economic system from collapse and bailing out banks to preserve a world economy that didn't work particularly well. Commitments to save the planet pale in comparison by orders of magnitude.
IMO, the current state of the art is not even close. Fortunately, given the state of the Sun's sunspot cycles we may be in a multi-decade timeout on warming, anthropogenic or no. We should know quite a bit more twenty or thirty years down the road.
By which time projections say we will be too late.
Type inference makes anonymous types more useful.
For instance in Scala I could do this (this is the Scala interpreter by the way):
scala> class A {
| val value = new {
| val x = 1
| val y = 2
| }
| }
defined class A
scala> new A().value.x
res10: Int = 1
scala> new A().value
res11: java.lang.Object{def x: Int; def y: Int} = A$$anon$1@bc9f8fb
In other words, in Scala, type inference wasn't just allowed on local variables. It was allowed on methods and fields too. This makes it possible for me to store the value, {x = 1, y = 2} of an anonymous type in a field for reuse.
This is impossible to do in C# and it means I can't store results of Linq queries somewhere in a typesafe manner for later use as well.
Plus Scala has an interpreter and can be a scripting language. A scripting language that has access to the Java class library is really cool.
I'm surprised JScript.net isn't a scripting language given its name. I can't just put JScript.net code into a *.js text file just run it without compilation.
This is a poor effort on Microsoft's part.
I'm not sure what you mean by "class method return types" in regards to type inference.
Something this:
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/127
C# let's me use anonymous types, but I can't return them from my method. How sucky is that?
I was initially excited by .net when it was first released and have preferred it over Java, which as a language seemed to have stagnate. Now, I am finding C# quite a disappointment with Microsoft not investing the time and energy to ensure the features they add to the language are polished:
* Adding extension methods without also adding extension properties
* Refusing to implementing covariant return types
* Adding type inference, but disallowing it for class method return types
As so forth. Microsoft simply doesn't have the discipline to finish any feature addition to the language before moving to the next.
That doesn't mean I prefer Java either. I only use Java and C# at work out of necessity.
My language of choice is now Scala.
Funny how you so easily dismiss the tree ring data, but desperately latch onto the sunspot data as if it was proof of the causation between solar activity and temperature.
Guess what? It diverges too:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm
Recent data totally disproves your thesis that solar activity is the prime driver of climate change in recent history. Yet the meme persists in climate skeptic circles and highlights the bankruptcy of the movement.
Tree ring data however is not settled yet. The divergence happens in some trees - especially in those found in the northern hemisphere where the majority of the world's population lives, but not in the southern hemisphere. It is certaintly plausible that human activity is causing the divergence, and if so, the tree ring data would be likely fine in a pre-industrial era.
We don't know for sure, but a person genuinely interested in the science would want to know why - perhaps even favoring more funding to investigate the discrepancy.
Yet instead of teasing out the real cause of the divergence, you'd rather have all tree ring data tossed out so that we can never know the truth.
That there exist people who think that way is truly sad.