paleoclimate record is much lower resolution, and actually shows us that CO2 levels *lag* temperature changes, rather than lead them. This is contra to the hypothesis of AGW.
Climate scientists were not surprised when it was confirmed that CO2 lagged temperature - AFAIK it was predicted in advance based on the expectation that orbital forcing / milankovich cycles drove the 100,000-year past warming/cooling cycles. I believe the lag was first observed in this paper by Neftel et al. (1988). This video explains how orbital forcing alone is insufficient to explain the magnitude of the observed warming/cooling and thus a CO2 cycle, thought to be driven largely by CO2 solubility in oceans, was posited to explain the rest of the warming/cooling.
But no doubt someone has explained all this to you before. (aside: CO2 leading temperature change has been observed in the northern hemisphere - Shakun et al. 2012.)
The difficulty is when you assume that CO2's further interactions with say, water vapor, create a tripling effect of heat retention
Again, it's not an "assumption", it was predicted based on the laws of physics.
when you assume that all other sources and sinks of CO2 do not react to perturbations (say, like plant growth)
Wrong. We know for a fact that other sources and sinks of CO2 will react to perturbations, and scientists have been hard at work producing studies to quantify those effects. Plant growth is one effect, soil erosion is another, there's lower solubility of CO2 in the ocean as it warms up... the list goes on.
small differences in the input criteria may yield wildly varying results, making the predictive utility of even a perfectly written physical model essentially zero.
A perfect example of how climate science denial is built around grains of truth which themselves have always been openly acknowledged. Initial conditions can indeed change the outcome and there are significant differences between climate models, but it doesn't follow that their predictive power is zero. Best estimates of ECS from experts and models range from 1.5 to 4.5 Celcius - a wide range, yet we can predict with high confidence that observed ECS will be somewhere in that range.
The funny thing is that deniers imply that high levels of uncertainty mean there is nothing to fear, as if the climate system's instability somehow guarantees we won't experience a high ECS like 4.5. That just doesn't make sense.
The *lack* of any non-white swans observed (after looking really hard for them), clearly excludes competing hypotheses like "there are black swans" or "there are brown swans"
No. When people say things like "science is never proven" they are referring to the fact that inductive reasoning doesn't "prove" something unobserved can't happen or doesn't exist. (Granted, as a practical matter, assuming there are no black swans until one is observed is often the smartest thing to do. Similarly, assuming CO2 will probably have the effects predicted by laws of physics and observed in the paleoclimate record is the smart thing to do.)
an argument that the lack of these observations would exclude all other hypotheses, including the null.
The lack of certain observations excludes all hypotheses except one? How does a lack of observations exclude these hypotheses exactly?
there has never been presented any necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW
Says you.
mere existence of CO2 doesn't imply that AGW must be true
Of course not, but climate scientists agreed fairly consistently in the 1970s that human CO2 emissions would cause the gradual cooling trend of the previous 30 years to reverse, and it most certainly did! A few highly successful predictions from climate scientists don't prove AGW either, but neither can you show it's "not science" by claiming it isn't falsifiable, when it most obviously is.
Yes, 8-5 ka was a warm period (and the evidence is not definitive whether that period was warmer than today). The issue is the fast rate of change. See the Marcott wheelchair.
the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical
What Phil Jones said was, "Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below)."
The temperature record of the 19th century is not considered particularly precise among experts who study it, nor is a 20-year trend considered important by climate experts because ocean fluctuations lasting several years can affect the trend over such a short time.
But if we assume the early records are accurate, the temperature increase from 1910-1940 can be explained as a combination of (1) human greenhouse gas emissions, as we were indeed burning them before 1960, (2) volcanic activity much lower than average (stratospheric aerosols from volcanoes cause cooling, thus their absence causes warming), (3) increasing average solar irradiance in that time frame, and (4) internal variability, such as differences in ocean currents.
Correction: the peak insolation at the top of atmosphere (1361 W/m^2) has been known to trend by 0.6W/m^2 over periods of several decades, not the average insolation. See insolation graph.
Heat flow from the earth's core is 0.08W/m^2, compared with an average solar insolation of 340 W/m^2 (which has been known to trend by 0.5W/m^2 over periods of several decades) and an additional forcing of almost 2 W/m^2 from the CO2 humans have recently added.
So, no, heat from the earth's core is not really a top contender. And why should it be? Even if this number were much larger, there's no reason Earth's core should suddenly warm the earth much faster than it did in previous centuries and millenia... unless you're suggesting that the souls recently added to Hell from our burgeoning population have caused satan's furnaces to suddenly heat up?
When you only ask one side to provide proof of something, that's bullshit.
Human-caused global warming has been predicted by scientists since Svante Arrhenius in 1896 (See this list of early global warming papers).
Many of these papers were produced during the global cooling trend before 1975. Climate scientists predicted global warming before it happened and now over 90% of climate scientists are in agreement on the subject. Numerous studies show humans as the cause of recent global warming. Yet you think mainstream scientists haven't made their case?
Not only is CO2 a weak greenhouse gas
Until you add feedback mechanisms such as the increased absolute humidity that corresponds to increased temperatures (water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas). Then it has a much greater effect.
human production of it doesn't account for the majority of it.
Sort of. We started with 280 ppm in the atmosphere, now we're up to 410 ppm, so I guess humans are responsible for less than half!
However I assume you are referring to the myth that humans release less than 4% of all the CO2 that is "released" each year.
In a very twisted way, this is correct. A glass of water evaporating in a room with 90% humidity does not just "release" water molecules, it also absorbs them from the air. But if someone uses this fact to argue that water glasses will fill up in a humid room, there is something wrong with that, isn't there?
Similarly the ocean "releases" more CO2 every year than humans, but it absorbs more than it releases. Drawing attention to CO2 coming out of the ocean while completely ignoring the CO2 going into the ocean is highly misleading. The ocean's pH is dropping, why do you think that is?
If you want to get into secondary factors, then plain ol' water vapor beats out CO2 by a country mile.
Humidity depends on environmental conditions. When temperatures increase, the water vapor concentration (absolute humidity aka vapor pressure) also increases.
The primary cause of warming and cooling is the fucking sun, by far.
In fact, the Cook 2013 study found about 4,000 papers that gave or implied an opinion about whether global warming is caused by humans, with 97% supporting that view, at least implicitly, and 78 papers (under 2%) that "minimized" or rejected human causation, at least implicitly. Since the research results are completely public, if I was Pruitt, I'd just ask my secretary to download those 78 papers and select the ones I like best.
Alternately they could find references via the 2016 paper "Learning from mistakes in climate research" whose goal was to find patterns of errors in 38 contrarian papers.
We've had as much success with our climate models as we have of finally eradicating cancer.
In 1972, J.S. Sawyer calculated there would be about 0.6 C of global warming by the end of the century (the actual amount of warming was 0.5 C as the CO2 concentration was a bit lower than predicted). In 1967, Manabe & Wetherald predicted that doubling the CO2 concentration would increase global temperatures 2 C. (see here for more early papers.)
Neither of these papers were based on a sophisticated computer model, they were based on energy balance calculations - greenhouse gases slow down the exit of energy to space, therefore the surface warms - plus feedbacks such as the relation between temperature and absolute humidity.
The early predictions of global warming came during a period of global cooling. The scientists stuck their necks out and got the right answer then - so if you don't trust computer models, feel free to trust that early pre-computer-model research. It got roughly the same answer the computer models are getting today.
It's true that some models disagree: some say the ECS is closer to 2.0 C, others closer to 4.5 C. Meanwhile the average temperature over land has increased over 1 C since 1975. None of these numbers justifies inaction to fund clean energy.
I have the same problem as you with my ideas for "Loyc" projects at http://loyc.net/ - they gather very little interest. As a consequence, I've lost enthusiasm for my projects and subsequently they've had little progress. I suspect the problem is that people don't want to really look at or help with a project until it is already fairly mature. It could also be that everybody's too busy trying to make a living. But perhaps I haven't marketed my ideas well enough or done a good enough job explaining what I want to accomplish.
People have good reasons - other than learning curve - not to learn your new programming language:
- There are already lots of good languages out there. I've seen lots of language designs that failed to even attempt to answer a basic question, "what advantages does my language provide that NONE of the existing languages do?" I think that's because most new language designs actually DON'T provide anything that hasn't already been done pretty well by existing (but often unpopular) languages. Make sure you've looked at other less-popular languages like Nim, Ceylon, D, Rust, etc. to see if they can't already do what you want.
- New languages have lousy tools. Lots of developers expect IDE autocompletion features, a package manager, a debugger, a way to target Android/iOS, a way to target web browsers, and of course syntax highlighting.
- If they write code in your new language, it won't interoperate with other languages. You could make it a.NET language or JVM language so it can interoperate with other.NET languages and JVM languages (and you get multiplatform support for free), but both of these options (especially JVM) substantially constrain the design of your language - your language won't be capable of various low-level features that.NET and JVM cannot do. You could (and should) support interop with C, but C libraries tend to be very clunky to use (e.g. memory management is always a pain in the ass.) I'd say the.NET runtime has stagnated for quite a few years but it looks like they're finally adding valuable new features, e.g. a feature traditionally known as slices, which in.NET is called Span.
Without interoperability, your language will be extremely limited since it won't be able to take advantage of existing code libraries, and therefore very few people will want to use it even if the language design is fantastic. In Loyc I want interoperability to be a core focus (though again, due to lack of outside interest I've made little progress).
More specifically, Fukushima and Chernobyl were "generation II" reactors, newer reactors are "generation III" (which achieve greater safety via expensive safety systems - hence the death of the dream of electricity "too cheap to meter").
Soon we will have "generation IV" reactors, and in this category the grassroots favorite is Molten Salt Reactors or MSRs. It's odd to call these things "generation IV" actually - it's like referring to the jet engine as a "generation IV propeller". MSRs, which are liquid-fueled and salt-cooled, are on a totally separate technology path from traditional reactors that are solid-fueled and water-cooled. They achieve higher safety and lower cost simultaneously through a philosophy of "don't manage risks - eliminate them."
The LFTR (liquid fuel thorium reactor) is the most well-known proposed MSR, and this has led to some confusion, because people sometimes think that the use of thorium is the main innovation, when in fact the molten salt is the main innovation. The main advantage of thorium is that the world supply is unlimited - we can never run out of it, making LFTR a fully sustainable technology. The advantages of molten salt reactors include high safety, lower cost, higher efficiency, high temperature (so they can use the same inexpensive turbines as fossil fuel plants), production of waste heat (which can be combined with desalination or negative carbon emission technology), ability to burn existing nuclear waste as fuel, and better load-following ability.
Okay, but if you're going to make a new system that meets your requirements better, would it kill you to include at least some semblance of the advantages of previous systems in the new one?
For example, what3words codes are easy to remember - they are simply 3 words. A typical Open Location Code is 7FG49QCJ+2V. So... yeah.
There is so much advice one could give. Here's mine.
Organization is key - both within a file and across the whole program - to letting anyone else understand your code. At the project level, try to make it obvious how the project is structured by choosing appropriate names and, if it's a large-ish project, break it up into folders in a logical way and provide a readme.txt that tells readers about the main parts of the project, where they are located (files and names of types/classes) and how they fit together.
Use good names. Method names should be verb phrases if they perform an action, and the name can be very long if it is only rarely called (e.g. DeleteRecordIfOlderThan(...), GetListOfRecentRecordsAndDetectCorruption(...)). In many projects, a function name can be a noun phrase if it is a property (e.g. students() or studentList()) while others always require a verb phrase (getStudents() or getStudentList()). Personally I use a noun phrase for properties (O(1) time) but a verb phrase for queries that return a list (O(N) time) or access a file. Variable names are less important but should usually be more than one letter (except: i and j for index, x and y for coordinates).
Use stream processing for shorter, more readable code (LINQ in C#, Streams in Java, map/filter/reduce in other languages). More broadly, take advantage of functional programming techniques where applicable.
You know the Single Responsibility Principle? Well, if you find it hard to give each class or type a single responsibility, at least minimize the number of responsibilities until you eventually figure out how to break things up into smaller pieces. Try to keep individual functions small enough to fit in your head: if it looks taller than the height of your head, it's probably too big.
Understand big-O notation and computational complexity. Avoid O(n^2) and especially O(n^3) algorithms.
Modularization, isolation and generalization are important. I think of it as "knowledge compartmentalization of programs": to the extent possible, components of a program should not "know" about other components. Low-level components should be reasonably general, too, so that you could copy the algorithm into a different program unchanged (or with some added functionality, such that compatibility with the first program is not broken). As the joke says: "No well-trained ethically conscious engineer would ever write a 'destroy Baghdad' procedure. He would write a 'destroy city' procedure, and pass Baghdad as a parameter." Or generalize to 'destroy area' and support cities as one overload of the method. Where it makes sense, use type parameters (or not - a lot of these decisions still depend on good judgement gained over years of practice and experimentation). Higher-level code that uses lower-level code should also generally be unaware of how the lower-level code works. Two unrelated modules should be especially unaware of each other.
Learn about and use dependency injection in nontrivial programs, preferably constructor injection. See also the Ambient Service Pattern.
Use unit tests and integration tests and understand what they are for (I briefly taught a junior class in software engineering and found that they had no idea what kind of tests to write. If nothing else, your tests should check if the basic functionality of your program work. If your unit tests all pass but your program's basic features don't work, you're on the wrong track.) Eventually, learn about mocking.
Use different quantities of comments in different situations. Few, short comments are needed to explain what code is supposed to DO. Longer comments are needed to explain WHY the code works the way it does, like architectural decisions. If the same explanation applies in several places, make a design document or long description on a relevant class and
they picked 91 sites that they deemed "junk", through 5 criteria (3 of which had to be met). The problem is that they picks do not normalize for traffic and breadth, and they didn't study the actual content being shared.
Look, their criteria was:
For a source to be labeled as junk news it must fall in at least three of the following five domains:
- Professionalism: These outlets do not employ
the standards and best practices of professional
journalism. They refrain from providing clear
information about real authors, editors,
publishers and owners. They lack transparency,
accountability, and do not publish corrections on
debunked information.
- Style: These outlets use emotionally driven
language with emotive expressions, hyperbole,
ad hominem attacks, misleading headlines,
excessive capitalization, unsafe generalizations
and fallacies, moving images, graphic pictures
and mobilizing memes.
- Credibility: These outlets rely on false
information and conspiracy theories, which they
often employ strategically. They report without
consulting multiple sources and do not employ
fact-checking methods. Their sources are often
untrustworthy and their standards of news
production lack credibility.
- Bias: Reporting in these outlets is highly biased
and ideologically skewed, which is otherwise
described as hyper-partisan reporting. These
outlets frequently present opinion and
commentary essays as news.
- Counterfeit: These outlets mimic professional
news media. They counterfeit fonts, branding
and stylistic content strategies. Commentary and
junk content is stylistically disguised as news, with references to news agencies, and credible
sources, and headlines written in a news tone,
with bylines, date, time and location stamps.
Granted, the criteria seem a bit subjective. For instance, if a web site uses a lot of "hyperbole,
misleading headlines, unsafe generalizations
and fallacies, emotionally driven language" but very little "ad hominem attacks, excessive capitalization, moving images, graphic pictures and mobilizing memes", does it count as "bad style" or not?
But it's interesting that none of the top-voted comments here responded by saying "I'm conservative but I prefer conservative sources that don't meet these criteria, and I'm concerned about the prevalence of conservative sources that do." Instead I'm seeing responses like "they should have counted CNN as junk news!" (really, CNN should be on the list when Fox News is not?) or "these criteria are unfair because they single out conservative hyperpartisan media! so the criteria should have been changed!"
Perhaps "they didn't study the actual content being shared" as RedK suggests, but in order to evaluate the 5 criteria they must of course have evaluated samples of each site's content.
How do we raise the cost of CO2 naturally? Well, for one it is going to rise as we keep using it up. The price goes down naturally with increased technology and economy of scale.
In other words, you propose doing nothing, except for the one thing (fixing nuclear regulations) that might annoy those anti-nuclear liberals. The problem with this of course is that most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground, which won't happen naturally.
It's actually worse than that because most articles that explain how "most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground" haven't even considered clathrates / methane hydrates, a new CO2-emitting fuel source that is now being explored.
I agree, nuclear regulations need improvement in the USA, particularly to facilitate GenIVs and Molten Salt Reactors - offering higher safety at lower cost, but hindered by the current regulatory regime.
But solar energy with no subsidies has already become cheaper than coal near the equator. Look up Swanson's law - the Moore's law of solar. It's hard to imagine solar panels ever being useful during cloudy Canadian winters, but solar in the south plus nuclear in the north makes a lot of sense.
Yes, I've seen that post by Roy Spencer before. His graph relies largely on choosing a very short baseline (1979-1983) to exaggerate the difference between models and measurements (because the difference between models and observations was unusually large in 1979-1983). In contrast, it is normal to use a 30-year period for baselining to eliminate short-term artifacts.
Spencer's graph also shows that measurements of the troposphere are not as high as models predicted; climate scientists generally agree about this but have explored many possible reasons (technical discussion here), whereas Spencer/Christy emphasize just that one interpretation of the data that minimizes global warming. A paper published soon afterward confirmed the hot spot, but I've seen how people who don't want to believe it can dismiss that paper based on its title alone (the title contains the word "homogenised", which deniers take as an indication of fraud.)
It's interesting that Lynnwood highlights that Spencer is 'funded solely by Government grants (not "Big Oil")' - at the same time as other 'skeptics' argue that climate scientists cannot be trusted because you supposedly "have to" believe in man-made global warming in order to get government funding. One thing I've learned well from talking to skeptics is that they are very good at burning the climate science candle at both ends. Another example: mainstream models are claimed to be useless because they are not perfectly accurate, but apparently if a model is produced by Spencer/Christy it can be trusted.
Lynnwood is also confused about the topic of discussion when he says "Puts a bit of a damper on the whole 'models assume we have negative carbon output!' kind of thing". The supercomputer models of the atmosphere, oceans, land and vegetation which Spencer is criticizing are completely different and separate from "models" of future economic activity, some of which optimistically include negative-carbon technology.
The two sets of models are even made by totally different people (economists et al vs physicists, oceanographers, ecologists, et al) Folks like Lynnwood simplistically reduce the work of thousands of scientists around the world into a single concept called "models" which can then be dismissed in its entirety, with little thought.
Any time you see someone cite claims by Roy Spencer (or his research partner John Christy), be skeptical. This guy is one of the 1.6% found to minimize or reject AGW in the Cook 2013 study.
He seems to be invited to any congressional hearing about climate change, has a very popular contrarian blog, and claims to be part of the oft-mentioned "97% consensus". You'll sometimes see his followers pretend that the consensus is only that humans could cause "some" of the warming, when in fact there's a consensus that humans cause at least "most" of it. He wrote a book on free market economics and once said "I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government".
How could YouTube afford what you're suggesting? 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. How many people would it take to police that? YouTube, like Google, is only able to provide the volume of free services that it does by not manually scanning content.
YouTube has automatic content scanners, and the pirates know this. My stepson has been watching the Simpsons on YouTube (we have 8 seasons on DVD, but YouTube is more convenient) and I notice the videos use three separate measures to evade detection:
1. Cropping: the picture is highly cropped, with about 20% of the picture cut off on all sides.
2. Audio distortion: the voices sound wrong.
3. Watermarking: special pirate watermarks are added.
Not really, you can tell the post was written by a woman because it constantly begs the question while simultaneously offering nothing of value. Even going so far as to reference Gamergate as though it's evidence of sexism when at best it's evidence that women are spoiled and self-entitled.
The reason why the "sexism" isn't going to go away any time soon is that it's inconvenient to women for it to go away [...]
Wow. I couldn't ask for a more perfect specimen of unconscious bias.
Looks like the authors of the study didn't look at the Debunking handbook, which basically says: always show the fact before (and after) the myth, explain where the myth went wrong, make the fact somehow more memorable or "sticky" than the myth, and don't overdo your rebuttal. If you play your card just right, you might get small decreases in rates of belief in the myth. Any mistake and you risk a backfire effect. To make this more difficult, many myths are driven by conspiratorial thinking, which has a self-sealing quality in which people think: "perhaps the debunker is one of them!"
If you'd written your comment ten years ago, it would be very timely. Two years ago, many would agree. But recently there has been a breakthrough in solar energy prices, one that people might have seen coming if they had been familiar with the solar equivalent of Moore's law.
It does amaze me how people can cheer whenever a nuclear plant closes while also saying climate change is an urgent problem. But just as deniers use myths to ignore science, some environmentalists believe myths that greatly exaggerate the danger of nuclear energy - perhaps thinking The Simpsons' nuclear plant is an accurate model of real life? The irony is that opposition to new plants has kept the oldest, least safe reactors running longer.
But most of the objections to "nuclear power" are actually objections to solid-fuel reactors. There is a new kind of nuclear plant, the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), which solves almost all the problems with traditional reactors. Some call it "generation IV" but this is a misnomer - it's Gen I on a completely different technology track based on liquid fuel.
MSRs, and an ideal version of the MSR called LFTR (Liquid-fueled thorium reactor), has a slew of advantages, most notably:
"Walk-away safe": relies mainly on passive safety, assured by physics, not pumps, not control systems, not human operators. Some designs don't even need coolant water.
Absurdly high fuel density: a lifetime supply of thorium fits in the palm of your hand.
Very low toxic waste: can produce 200+ times as much energy per kilogram of fuel compared to conventional LWRs, and the miniscule amount of remaining waste is a radiation hazard for 300 years instead of 3000. Not only that but some MSRs can actually burn existing waste stockpiles as a fuel.
Economy of scale - reactor units are small, and can be built in a factory or shipyard and shipped to where they are needed. High-temperature operation means smaller, cheaper turbines.
Traditional large reactors are slow at load-following, but it doesn't seem as though this has been a serious problem in the past. New SMR/LFTR reactors are smaller and can adjust their output more quickly.
The reason that your federal taxes won't go down is that Trump's cuts are balanced out by his increases in spending on the military, even though that spending is already larger than military spending by China, Russia, UK, Japan, France, Saudia Arabia, India and Germany combined.
So state governments cannot pick up the slack without raising taxes. Thanks Trump!
Of course, when it comes to climate change, local action isn't really good enough. The US emits more CO2 than any other country except China, and these cities pledging their support for Paris represent not much more than 10% of the U.S. population.
disproving bullshit is a waste of time because nobody is meant to believe it.
Okay, but why does it continue to work so well? I think lots of people do believe it, or believe it "might" be true. I run into the believers and semi-believers often when I'm otherwise happily commenting around the internet. As a typical example consider this comment ranked 5 from Anonymous Coward:
Newsflash - the intelligence agencies of the United States have a documented history of breaking the law.
Any claims based on the assertion that they behave lawfully is flawed and not to be considered credible.
This style of thinking - and there's a lot of it - allows any layman to use a chain of reasoning like this: "so what if Trump's a bullshit artist? So is everyone else, therefore we can't tell who's right, therefore Trump may be right and I'm going to continue to stand by him."
Such arguments help establish the Russian model of propaganda in the U.S. Now, while the tactic of sewing doubt about what's true and false is well known as a Russian strategy ("therefore Putin may be right and I'm going to continue to stand by him"), I think in the U.S. the dominant cause is that the conservative media waged a war on the credibility of the mainstream media and won - as described by this conservative publication.
You don't seriously think there have only been two misguided, racially motivated killings in the last 10 years? Anyway, two incidents is perfectly adequate to illustrate that "Racism doesn't always attract the brightest bulbs."
Slashdot Mirror
Climate scientists were not surprised when it was confirmed that CO2 lagged temperature - AFAIK it was predicted in advance based on the expectation that orbital forcing / milankovich cycles drove the 100,000-year past warming/cooling cycles. I believe the lag was first observed in this paper by Neftel et al. (1988). This video explains how orbital forcing alone is insufficient to explain the magnitude of the observed warming/cooling and thus a CO2 cycle, thought to be driven largely by CO2 solubility in oceans, was posited to explain the rest of the warming/cooling.
But no doubt someone has explained all this to you before. (aside: CO2 leading temperature change has been observed in the northern hemisphere - Shakun et al. 2012.)
Again, it's not an "assumption", it was predicted based on the laws of physics.
Wrong. We know for a fact that other sources and sinks of CO2 will react to perturbations, and scientists have been hard at work producing studies to quantify those effects. Plant growth is one effect, soil erosion is another, there's lower solubility of CO2 in the ocean as it warms up... the list goes on.
A perfect example of how climate science denial is built around grains of truth which themselves have always been openly acknowledged. Initial conditions can indeed change the outcome and there are significant differences between climate models, but it doesn't follow that their predictive power is zero. Best estimates of ECS from experts and models range from 1.5 to 4.5 Celcius - a wide range, yet we can predict with high confidence that observed ECS will be somewhere in that range.
The funny thing is that deniers imply that high levels of uncertainty mean there is nothing to fear, as if the climate system's instability somehow guarantees we won't experience a high ECS like 4.5. That just doesn't make sense.
No. When people say things like "science is never proven" they are referring to the fact that inductive reasoning doesn't "prove" something unobserved can't happen or doesn't exist. (Granted, as a practical matter, assuming there are no black swans until one is observed is often the smartest thing to do. Similarly, assuming CO2 will probably have the effects predicted by laws of physics and observed in the paleoclimate record is the smart thing to do.)
The lack of certain observations excludes all hypotheses except one? How does a lack of observations exclude these hypotheses exactly?
Says you.
Of course not, but climate scientists agreed fairly consistently in the 1970s that human CO2 emissions would cause the gradual cooling trend of the previous 30 years to reverse, and it most certainly did! A few highly successful predictions from climate scientists don't prove AGW either, but neither can you show it's "not science" by claiming it isn't falsifiable, when it most obviously is.
What Phil Jones said was, "Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below)."
The temperature record of the 19th century is not considered particularly precise among experts who study it, nor is a 20-year trend considered important by climate experts because ocean fluctuations lasting several years can affect the trend over such a short time.
But if we assume the early records are accurate, the temperature increase from 1910-1940 can be explained as a combination of (1) human greenhouse gas emissions, as we were indeed burning them before 1960, (2) volcanic activity much lower than average (stratospheric aerosols from volcanoes cause cooling, thus their absence causes warming), (3) increasing average solar irradiance in that time frame, and (4) internal variability, such as differences in ocean currents.
Correction: the peak insolation at the top of atmosphere (1361 W/m^2) has been known to trend by 0.6W/m^2 over periods of several decades, not the average insolation. See insolation graph.
Heat flow from the earth's core is 0.08W/m^2, compared with an average solar insolation of 340 W/m^2 (which has been known to trend by 0.5W/m^2 over periods of several decades) and an additional forcing of almost 2 W/m^2 from the CO2 humans have recently added.
... unless you're suggesting that the souls recently added to Hell from our burgeoning population have caused satan's furnaces to suddenly heat up?
So, no, heat from the earth's core is not really a top contender. And why should it be? Even if this number were much larger, there's no reason Earth's core should suddenly warm the earth much faster than it did in previous centuries and millenia
Human-caused global warming has been predicted by scientists since Svante Arrhenius in 1896 (See this list of early global warming papers).
Many of these papers were produced during the global cooling trend before 1975. Climate scientists predicted global warming before it happened and now over 90% of climate scientists are in agreement on the subject. Numerous studies show humans as the cause of recent global warming. Yet you think mainstream scientists haven't made their case?
Until you add feedback mechanisms such as the increased absolute humidity that corresponds to increased temperatures (water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas). Then it has a much greater effect.
Sort of. We started with 280 ppm in the atmosphere, now we're up to 410 ppm, so I guess humans are responsible for less than half!
However I assume you are referring to the myth that humans release less than 4% of all the CO2 that is "released" each year.
In a very twisted way, this is correct. A glass of water evaporating in a room with 90% humidity does not just "release" water molecules, it also absorbs them from the air. But if someone uses this fact to argue that water glasses will fill up in a humid room, there is something wrong with that, isn't there?
Similarly the ocean "releases" more CO2 every year than humans, but it absorbs more than it releases. Drawing attention to CO2 coming out of the ocean while completely ignoring the CO2 going into the ocean is highly misleading. The ocean's pH is dropping, why do you think that is?
Humidity depends on environmental conditions. When temperatures increase, the water vapor concentration (absolute humidity aka vapor pressure) also increases.
The 11-year average of solar irradiance has varied by only about 0.1% over the last century and solar output has decreased in recent decades.
In fact, the Cook 2013 study found about 4,000 papers that gave or implied an opinion about whether global warming is caused by humans, with 97% supporting that view, at least implicitly, and 78 papers (under 2%) that "minimized" or rejected human causation, at least implicitly. Since the research results are completely public, if I was Pruitt, I'd just ask my secretary to download those 78 papers and select the ones I like best.
Alternately they could find references via the 2016 paper "Learning from mistakes in climate research" whose goal was to find patterns of errors in 38 contrarian papers.
In 1972, J.S. Sawyer calculated there would be about 0.6 C of global warming by the end of the century (the actual amount of warming was 0.5 C as the CO2 concentration was a bit lower than predicted). In 1967, Manabe & Wetherald predicted that doubling the CO2 concentration would increase global temperatures 2 C. (see here for more early papers.)
Neither of these papers were based on a sophisticated computer model, they were based on energy balance calculations - greenhouse gases slow down the exit of energy to space, therefore the surface warms - plus feedbacks such as the relation between temperature and absolute humidity.
The early predictions of global warming came during a period of global cooling. The scientists stuck their necks out and got the right answer then - so if you don't trust computer models, feel free to trust that early pre-computer-model research. It got roughly the same answer the computer models are getting today.
It's true that some models disagree: some say the ECS is closer to 2.0 C, others closer to 4.5 C. Meanwhile the average temperature over land has increased over 1 C since 1975. None of these numbers justifies inaction to fund clean energy.
I have the same problem as you with my ideas for "Loyc" projects at http://loyc.net/ - they gather very little interest. As a consequence, I've lost enthusiasm for my projects and subsequently they've had little progress. I suspect the problem is that people don't want to really look at or help with a project until it is already fairly mature. It could also be that everybody's too busy trying to make a living. But perhaps I haven't marketed my ideas well enough or done a good enough job explaining what I want to accomplish.
People have good reasons - other than learning curve - not to learn your new programming language:
- There are already lots of good languages out there. I've seen lots of language designs that failed to even attempt to answer a basic question, "what advantages does my language provide that NONE of the existing languages do?" I think that's because most new language designs actually DON'T provide anything that hasn't already been done pretty well by existing (but often unpopular) languages. Make sure you've looked at other less-popular languages like Nim, Ceylon, D, Rust, etc. to see if they can't already do what you want.
- New languages have lousy tools. Lots of developers expect IDE autocompletion features, a package manager, a debugger, a way to target Android/iOS, a way to target web browsers, and of course syntax highlighting.
- If they write code in your new language, it won't interoperate with other languages. You could make it a .NET language or JVM language so it can interoperate with other .NET languages and JVM languages (and you get multiplatform support for free), but both of these options (especially JVM) substantially constrain the design of your language - your language won't be capable of various low-level features that .NET and JVM cannot do. You could (and should) support interop with C, but C libraries tend to be very clunky to use (e.g. memory management is always a pain in the ass.) I'd say the .NET runtime has stagnated for quite a few years but it looks like they're finally adding valuable new features, e.g. a feature traditionally known as slices, which in .NET is called Span.
Without interoperability, your language will be extremely limited since it won't be able to take advantage of existing code libraries, and therefore very few people will want to use it even if the language design is fantastic. In Loyc I want interoperability to be a core focus (though again, due to lack of outside interest I've made little progress).
More specifically, Fukushima and Chernobyl were "generation II" reactors, newer reactors are "generation III" (which achieve greater safety via expensive safety systems - hence the death of the dream of electricity "too cheap to meter").
Soon we will have "generation IV" reactors, and in this category the grassroots favorite is Molten Salt Reactors or MSRs. It's odd to call these things "generation IV" actually - it's like referring to the jet engine as a "generation IV propeller". MSRs, which are liquid-fueled and salt-cooled, are on a totally separate technology path from traditional reactors that are solid-fueled and water-cooled. They achieve higher safety and lower cost simultaneously through a philosophy of "don't manage risks - eliminate them."
The LFTR (liquid fuel thorium reactor) is the most well-known proposed MSR, and this has led to some confusion, because people sometimes think that the use of thorium is the main innovation, when in fact the molten salt is the main innovation. The main advantage of thorium is that the world supply is unlimited - we can never run out of it, making LFTR a fully sustainable technology. The advantages of molten salt reactors include high safety, lower cost, higher efficiency, high temperature (so they can use the same inexpensive turbines as fossil fuel plants), production of waste heat (which can be combined with desalination or negative carbon emission technology), ability to burn existing nuclear waste as fuel, and better load-following ability.
Okay, but if you're going to make a new system that meets your requirements better, would it kill you to include at least some semblance of the advantages of previous systems in the new one?
For example, what3words codes are easy to remember - they are simply 3 words. A typical Open Location Code is 7FG49QCJ+2V. So... yeah.
There is so much advice one could give. Here's mine.
Organization is key - both within a file and across the whole program - to letting anyone else understand your code. At the project level, try to make it obvious how the project is structured by choosing appropriate names and, if it's a large-ish project, break it up into folders in a logical way and provide a readme.txt that tells readers about the main parts of the project, where they are located (files and names of types/classes) and how they fit together.
Use good names. Method names should be verb phrases if they perform an action, and the name can be very long if it is only rarely called (e.g. DeleteRecordIfOlderThan(...), GetListOfRecentRecordsAndDetectCorruption(...)). In many projects, a function name can be a noun phrase if it is a property (e.g. students() or studentList()) while others always require a verb phrase (getStudents() or getStudentList()). Personally I use a noun phrase for properties (O(1) time) but a verb phrase for queries that return a list (O(N) time) or access a file. Variable names are less important but should usually be more than one letter (except: i and j for index, x and y for coordinates).
Use stream processing for shorter, more readable code (LINQ in C#, Streams in Java, map/filter/reduce in other languages). More broadly, take advantage of functional programming techniques where applicable.
You know the Single Responsibility Principle? Well, if you find it hard to give each class or type a single responsibility, at least minimize the number of responsibilities until you eventually figure out how to break things up into smaller pieces. Try to keep individual functions small enough to fit in your head: if it looks taller than the height of your head, it's probably too big.
Understand big-O notation and computational complexity. Avoid O(n^2) and especially O(n^3) algorithms.
Modularization, isolation and generalization are important. I think of it as "knowledge compartmentalization of programs": to the extent possible, components of a program should not "know" about other components. Low-level components should be reasonably general, too, so that you could copy the algorithm into a different program unchanged (or with some added functionality, such that compatibility with the first program is not broken). As the joke says: "No well-trained ethically conscious engineer would ever write a 'destroy Baghdad' procedure. He would write a 'destroy city' procedure, and pass Baghdad as a parameter." Or generalize to 'destroy area' and support cities as one overload of the method. Where it makes sense, use type parameters (or not - a lot of these decisions still depend on good judgement gained over years of practice and experimentation). Higher-level code that uses lower-level code should also generally be unaware of how the lower-level code works. Two unrelated modules should be especially unaware of each other.
Learn about and use dependency injection in nontrivial programs, preferably constructor injection. See also the Ambient Service Pattern.
Use unit tests and integration tests and understand what they are for (I briefly taught a junior class in software engineering and found that they had no idea what kind of tests to write. If nothing else, your tests should check if the basic functionality of your program work. If your unit tests all pass but your program's basic features don't work, you're on the wrong track.) Eventually, learn about mocking.
Use different quantities of comments in different situations. Few, short comments are needed to explain what code is supposed to DO. Longer comments are needed to explain WHY the code works the way it does, like architectural decisions. If the same explanation applies in several places, make a design document or long description on a relevant class and
Look, their criteria was:
Granted, the criteria seem a bit subjective. For instance, if a web site uses a lot of "hyperbole, misleading headlines, unsafe generalizations and fallacies, emotionally driven language" but very little "ad hominem attacks, excessive capitalization, moving images, graphic pictures and mobilizing memes", does it count as "bad style" or not?
But it's interesting that none of the top-voted comments here responded by saying "I'm conservative but I prefer conservative sources that don't meet these criteria, and I'm concerned about the prevalence of conservative sources that do." Instead I'm seeing responses like "they should have counted CNN as junk news!" (really, CNN should be on the list when Fox News is not?) or "these criteria are unfair because they single out conservative hyperpartisan media! so the criteria should have been changed!"
Perhaps "they didn't study the actual content being shared" as RedK suggests, but in order to evaluate the 5 criteria they must of course have evaluated samples of each site's content.
In other words, you propose doing nothing, except for the one thing (fixing nuclear regulations) that might annoy those anti-nuclear liberals. The problem with this of course is that most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground, which won't happen naturally.
It's actually worse than that because most articles that explain how "most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground" haven't even considered clathrates / methane hydrates, a new CO2-emitting fuel source that is now being explored.
So why not the Republican climate change solution?
I agree, nuclear regulations need improvement in the USA, particularly to facilitate GenIVs and Molten Salt Reactors - offering higher safety at lower cost, but hindered by the current regulatory regime.
But solar energy with no subsidies has already become cheaper than coal near the equator. Look up Swanson's law - the Moore's law of solar. It's hard to imagine solar panels ever being useful during cloudy Canadian winters, but solar in the south plus nuclear in the north makes a lot of sense.
This is the magnified minority effect - Roy Spencer and his co-worker John Christy are the most frequently-quoted of the 3% of climate scientists that minimize or reject human-caused global warming (in their case, minimize). As if simply repeating their opinions ad nauseum makes them correct.
Yes, I've seen that post by Roy Spencer before. His graph relies largely on choosing a very short baseline (1979-1983) to exaggerate the difference between models and measurements (because the difference between models and observations was unusually large in 1979-1983). In contrast, it is normal to use a 30-year period for baselining to eliminate short-term artifacts.
Spencer's graph also shows that measurements of the troposphere are not as high as models predicted; climate scientists generally agree about this but have explored many possible reasons (technical discussion here), whereas Spencer/Christy emphasize just that one interpretation of the data that minimizes global warming. A paper published soon afterward confirmed the hot spot, but I've seen how people who don't want to believe it can dismiss that paper based on its title alone (the title contains the word "homogenised", which deniers take as an indication of fraud.)
It's interesting that Lynnwood highlights that Spencer is 'funded solely by Government grants (not "Big Oil")' - at the same time as other 'skeptics' argue that climate scientists cannot be trusted because you supposedly "have to" believe in man-made global warming in order to get government funding. One thing I've learned well from talking to skeptics is that they are very good at burning the climate science candle at both ends. Another example: mainstream models are claimed to be useless because they are not perfectly accurate, but apparently if a model is produced by Spencer/Christy it can be trusted.
Lynnwood is also confused about the topic of discussion when he says "Puts a bit of a damper on the whole 'models assume we have negative carbon output!' kind of thing". The supercomputer models of the atmosphere, oceans, land and vegetation which Spencer is criticizing are completely different and separate from "models" of future economic activity, some of which optimistically include negative-carbon technology.
The two sets of models are even made by totally different people (economists et al vs physicists, oceanographers, ecologists, et al) Folks like Lynnwood simplistically reduce the work of thousands of scientists around the world into a single concept called "models" which can then be dismissed in its entirety, with little thought.
Any time you see someone cite claims by Roy Spencer (or his research partner John Christy), be skeptical. This guy is one of the 1.6% found to minimize or reject AGW in the Cook 2013 study.
He seems to be invited to any congressional hearing about climate change, has a very popular contrarian blog, and claims to be part of the oft-mentioned "97% consensus". You'll sometimes see his followers pretend that the consensus is only that humans could cause "some" of the warming, when in fact there's a consensus that humans cause at least "most" of it. He wrote a book on free market economics and once said "I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government".
How could YouTube afford what you're suggesting? 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. How many people would it take to police that? YouTube, like Google, is only able to provide the volume of free services that it does by not manually scanning content.
YouTube has automatic content scanners, and the pirates know this. My stepson has been watching the Simpsons on YouTube (we have 8 seasons on DVD, but YouTube is more convenient) and I notice the videos use three separate measures to evade detection:
1. Cropping: the picture is highly cropped, with about 20% of the picture cut off on all sides.
2. Audio distortion: the voices sound wrong.
3. Watermarking: special pirate watermarks are added.
Wow. I couldn't ask for a more perfect specimen of unconscious bias.
Speaking of which, did anybody actually watch any of Google's diversity training before criticizing it?
Looks like the authors of the study didn't look at the Debunking handbook, which basically says: always show the fact before (and after) the myth, explain where the myth went wrong, make the fact somehow more memorable or "sticky" than the myth, and don't overdo your rebuttal. If you play your card just right, you might get small decreases in rates of belief in the myth. Any mistake and you risk a backfire effect. To make this more difficult, many myths are driven by conspiratorial thinking, which has a self-sealing quality in which people think: "perhaps the debunker is one of them!"
It does amaze me how people can cheer whenever a nuclear plant closes while also saying climate change is an urgent problem. But just as deniers use myths to ignore science, some environmentalists believe myths that greatly exaggerate the danger of nuclear energy - perhaps thinking The Simpsons' nuclear plant is an accurate model of real life? The irony is that opposition to new plants has kept the oldest, least safe reactors running longer.
But most of the objections to "nuclear power" are actually objections to solid-fuel reactors. There is a new kind of nuclear plant, the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR), which solves almost all the problems with traditional reactors. Some call it "generation IV" but this is a misnomer - it's Gen I on a completely different technology track based on liquid fuel. MSRs, and an ideal version of the MSR called LFTR (Liquid-fueled thorium reactor), has a slew of advantages, most notably:
Traditional large reactors are slow at load-following, but it doesn't seem as though this has been a serious problem in the past. New SMR/LFTR reactors are smaller and can adjust their output more quickly.
The reason that your federal taxes won't go down is that Trump's cuts are balanced out by his increases in spending on the military, even though that spending is already larger than military spending by China, Russia, UK, Japan, France, Saudia Arabia, India and Germany combined.
So state governments cannot pick up the slack without raising taxes. Thanks Trump!
Of course, when it comes to climate change, local action isn't really good enough. The US emits more CO2 than any other country except China, and these cities pledging their support for Paris represent not much more than 10% of the U.S. population.
Okay, but why does it continue to work so well? I think lots of people do believe it, or believe it "might" be true. I run into the believers and semi-believers often when I'm otherwise happily commenting around the internet. As a typical example consider this comment ranked 5 from Anonymous Coward:
This style of thinking - and there's a lot of it - allows any layman to use a chain of reasoning like this: "so what if Trump's a bullshit artist? So is everyone else, therefore we can't tell who's right, therefore Trump may be right and I'm going to continue to stand by him."
Such arguments help establish the Russian model of propaganda in the U.S. Now, while the tactic of sewing doubt about what's true and false is well known as a Russian strategy ("therefore Putin may be right and I'm going to continue to stand by him"), I think in the U.S. the dominant cause is that the conservative media waged a war on the credibility of the mainstream media and won - as described by this conservative publication.
You don't seriously think there have only been two misguided, racially motivated killings in the last 10 years? Anyway, two incidents is perfectly adequate to illustrate that "Racism doesn't always attract the brightest bulbs."