I was referring to upper ranks of business as well as lower. You find plenty of people on the leftward side of things there. For example, my cousing is a venture capitalist... and on the left. A good friend is an entrepreneur and quite wealthy - and on the left. Many of silicon valley's moguls are on the left. It is a belief, on the left, that because capitalism is associated with the ideology of the right, that capitalists are rightists. It is a belief without substantiation. My observation is that most capitalists could care less about politics - the successful ones are too busy doing business, which consumes them.
So I would suggest you provide some sort of evidence. Do you know these people (over the years, I have spent time with quite a few)? I believe you are applying ideological reasoning and asserting it as fact. Again, my observation is that the people focused on high level business are simply not very interested in politics. Of course, there George Soros, one of the richest men in the world, who is very hard left. But he is an exception too.
I already gave you an example of negative effects of having a homogenous left faculty: conservatives being discouraged to seek PhD's. I have never heard of people on the left being so discouraged, and that isn't surprising when even in the science and engineering departments of modern academia, the ratio of Democrat voter registration (a proxy for somewhere on the left) to Republican registration is typically 4 or 5 to 1! This is something you could check - get the names of the profs, and then go to the voter rolls.
So let me ask you a question. Do you believe diversity of ideas and backgrounds is a good idea in universities? Do you support affirmative action on the Sandra Day O'Connor grounds - that diversity in the student bodies brings added perspective?
Quite frankly, I find it shocking that anyone would find acceptable an overwhelming political stance of the faculty of Universities - places which are supposed to have discussions, arguments, and in general all different sorts of opinions.
As to what the teachers are teaching... a friend recently just completed a course in "Community Psychology." Nice name, but the subject is really how to use the guise of psychology as a way to achieve "social justice" in communities - in other words it is radically to the left. When I took freshman economics (a long time ago, btw), my professor was a member of CPUSA and told us that he intended to teach us that Communism was the only scientific (and desirable) economic system. And that was at that bastion of Bible-belt conservatism (hah!), the University of Kansas. My poli-sci professor taught that Socialism was the best political system (in honors freshman poli sci). My calculus of complex variables prof refused to allow any ROTC members to attend his class. There was NO analogous actions by right wing professors (what few there were) - believe me, the whole world would have heard the screeching about it from the left - demonstrations and media coverage.
"As are liberals, I'm sure. It is not bias to say, for example, that a communist should not pursue a business degree nor should a creationist pursue a life sciences degree as they are philisophically opposed to the disciples. That's not the fault of biology or free market economics."
You're sure that liberals are advised to not pursue advanced degrees in certain subjects. You have got to be kidding! The liberal/left screech machine operates very, very effectively. If you don't believe me, look at what happened to Summers at Harvard for posing one carefully phrased, valid quesiton that happened to be politically incorrect. If liberarls wered getting this treatment - again (just as in the past) you and I would know all about it, because we would be hearing about it constantly (if nothing else, the New York Times would run above-the-fold stories for weeks about just one case).
Thus, given the lack of any reports of discrimination against leftis
As a businessman, I can tell you that the stereotype you picked up is nonsense. Business has conservatives, and it has liberals, and I haven't seen that many who are even political.
The problem in academia (and there are a lot more studies than just one) is that it is very strongly biased to the left. And that bias means there is little diversity (a favorite word of you guys on the left, eh?) in education.
There are those who claim that professors keep their biases to themselves. Indeed, many professors do. But far too many do not.
Conservatives are often advised, in a number of fields, to not go for PhD's because they will never get tenure. This is highly surprising when 90-100% of many liberal arts departments are liberals.
If you think that academics should be strongly dominated by one political view - that this is okay - then you must like having institutes of "higher learning" and "academic freedom" being transformed into Orwellian PC environments, as indeed many have. It does make a mockery, however, of the current academic argument for "affirmative action" (quotas) - that a diverse student body is best.
The radicalization of universities has been in progress for a long time. The Vietnam War increased this trend, and universities today have a high percentage of senior professors who started as draft-avoiding (which I have nothing against) graduate students, with a predictable left-wing radicalization. Anyone who was on campus during those years (as I was) saw this trend very easily.
That this is more than conjecture is attested to by this report.
The article includes the results of a number of studies. In addition, consider this statement:
Today, the notion of truth and objectivity is regarded by many professors as antiquated and an obstacle to social change. In this postmodern view, all ideas are political, the classroom is an appropriate place for advocacy, and students should be molded into "change agents" to promote a political agenda. The University of California recently abandoned the provision on academic freedom that cautioned against using the classroom as a "platform for propaganda." The president of the university argued in a letter to the academic senate that the regulation was outdated.
And finally, some here will find it irresistable to attack the messenger (which is a rightist organization dedicated to attacking political correctness on campus). I would suggest that responses should address the issues and data raised. Ad hominem attacks, while having a long history on Slashdot and before that on Usenet, are mere failed arguments.
The reason I choose not to debate it is because it has been debated here before in much more detail. Check the archives.
I'm sorry that you chose to take the example as some sort of silly partisan argument rather than recognizing it as merely one (personal, in this case) example of Wikipedia bias.
Pretend that my information was false (which you *assume* it was given the scare quotes you put around the word.
It still doesn't justify the deletioon of my changes on the grounds that "the book probalby doesn't even exist" when it is available from Amazon.
It would appear the you thoroughly missed that.
The point (as Wikipedia themselves say) is that the parts that are controversial may be wrong because of the controversy.
I do not lead my readers to believe that it is implicitly anti-Bush. I simply give them an experiment. Learn to read, eh?
I do believe that the on-line world is much more strongly anti-Bush/anti-Conservative than the population in general. I could go into reasons but your closed little mind and inability to read makes it irrelevant.
All of this depends on the intended and actual usage.
There are extremely valuable computer programs out there which are at least 40 years old (TPF/ACP anyone)?
As of 10 years ago (and probably still today), the majority of credit card processing was done in IBM/360-370 assembly language on a system at least 30 years old.
These are very big business systems (or in the case of ACP, an unusual special-purpose OS that supports a set of very big very high performance business systems). The value of replacing them is far less than the cost of doing so. While the cost of maintaining them is high, enhancements are often done in more modern programs which "wrap" the old, old central applications.
Wikipedia, which is a noble experiment and a great resource, has long acknowledged that in controversial areas, its accuracy is suspect. And indeed it is. During the 2004 election campaign, I put some information that was unfavorable to John Kerry into it. I gave a reference, which was an easily obtained book. My change was rejected because "the book probably doesn't exist" even though the simplest Amazon search showed that it does and was available.
Even today, if you read the Bush and Kerry sections, you will find the phrasing of the Kerry section to be much more favorable than that of Bush (if you have ever studies actual propaganda, you will recognize the technique). The concentration of various facts to be similarly more favorable - selective editing - I'm sure the many Bush haters on here are itching to tell me that both are accurate. They are not - in either case.
Hence citing the Wikipedia as authorithy on *controversial* subjects is ridiculous, as has been discussed here before.
I praise the Wikipedia effort, but one unfortunately side effect is that those who control the keys to the kingdom, or the faction which works the hardest to change an entry, determine the content, regardless of truth and damgingly against balance. Wikipedia is trying to change this, although I cannot think of any methodology that are consistent with its character that will work.
And no, I'm not going to debate this. If you don't believe me, go find some other controversial area and eventually you will discover this sort of shading to be common.
Look, I am going to stop disputing the climate science for the purposes of argument. But not before I challenge a couple of statements. First, I am well aware of the greenhouse gas characteristics of CO2 - it is simple physics (NOT chemistry). Second, "the results of the math" are poppycock. Simple math does NOT tell us about the causes of warming, or predict the future of it, or we wouldn't need models! Math (really, the attempt to describe the various factors involved in forming climate) can help us build models, but it is merely a reduction of the results of complex experiments (with comples results) into formulas simple enough to be used in a model (i.e. a very rough approximation).
But lets just assume that you are 100% corret. That the models have the amazing ability to forecast climate.
Assume that.
Now, once again, please try to understand my point of view: it makes not one damn bit of difference if the models are right or not.
PLEASE let me know that you understand at least that statement, and why I am saying it, even if your don't agree - because once again your responses utterly ignore the by far most important part of the entire system: human behavior. You simply advocate a change in that behavior. But you don't analyze or forecast or model or even take into account the consequences of such advocacy, which include strong negative feedback, which I think makes the entire enterprise a joke. Why don't you go tell that nutcase president of Iran, you know - the one who has a green aura which struck dumb the United Nations - that he should stop pumping out CO2. Do you think you will be successful? Tell the dicators that run China. Tell the VOTERS in the democratic regimes, after they have felt the terribly painful effects of a true remediation effort (cuts of 40-50% from 1990 baseline).
Now, do you have a model that predicts that behavior? Because, if you do, you will certainly be eligible for at least one Nobel prize.
And that is the point that way too many CO2 reduction advocates miss!
You write as if we can just "stop pumping out CO2."
You have ignored every single one of my challenges about how we are to achieve that. And... don't give me a technical answer, because the "greenhouse gas" of this issue is human behavior.
So tell me, Mr. physical scientist, how are you going to "stop pumping out green house gas?"
I have simplified the argument here, because my argument does not rely upon the accuracy or the inaccuracy of your vaunted models (I could continue to show why those models are unreliable, but you wouldn't listen). Again, screw the models - assume they are correct.
Now tell me what you advocate and how you are actually going to make it work.
Perhaps if you give that an honest analysis, you will then realize that perhaps your efforts are best spent advocating what is possible and less damaging:
1) more research into climate factors (I don't care how confident you are, we really don't know enough about a lot of issues there)
2) research about how to reduce the negative impacts of global warming, and how to take advantage of the positive impacts.
This is totally irrelevant, as are your points about other countries reducing hydrocarbon use. Hydrocarbon resources are going to run out (or rather, it is going to become economically un-viable to continue using them at current rates). There will need to be a major reduction in their use anyway. We have a choice - do it now in a controlled fashion, or let our economies collapse later.
I think you are making a horrible error. Mankind is very resourceful. The increased price of hydrocarbons will produce innovation that government programs never will. These might indeed reduce the usage. In any case, they are going to keep the resources from becoming economically un-viable for a very long timer, DURING WHICH all sorts of things will be tried, new approaches will be discovered, and better science will be applied to the climate prediction problem.
Why should we do it now in a "controlled fashion" (more on that later - you are dreaming if you think we can control it) when almost all important discoveries and trends were a result of UN-controlled activity? Do you really believe that there is some august body that is smarter and more innovative than the thousands of scientists and engineers and investors who are driven to solve the problems? I realize this is common European thinking, and I think it is pathetic and flies in the face of history.
By the way, at the current price of oil, it is becoming *profitable* to develop and use more *green* energy. That doesn't require a decision and treaties and some (never, ever discussed) mechanism of forcing people to actually cut their carbon use (it seems that some of the loud proponents of Kyoto are already missing their goals... just as anyone who didn't believe in the omniscience and more importantly, the omnipotence of European elites could have easily predicted).
Your bias is shown by your obsession with controlling CO2 emissions, when a far more rational approach might be to develop techniques for *adjusting to* the results of global warming - which has the advantage of working even if the CO2 is not the main cause. You also haven't mentioned ameliorating the CO2 issue - a problem for which many solutions have been proposed, and certainly one which merits additional research and engineering.
And in doing so you neglect that the computer models are, of course, tested against real world conditions by attempts to model past climate.
You are utterly ignoring the terrible quality of the paleoclimatic data which makes such runs extremely suspect. If we had good data, and the models could do a good job of predicting climate for a few thousand years (as opposed to 150 years), that would me more interesting (although it would help if they could model climate in PAST periods of rapid CO2 buildup), but we do not. Furthermore, even models which can predict some of the past may be nothing more than flukes - in other words, our selection of those models and those parameters is simply the result of trying a gazillion combinations and taking the one which (perhaps accidently) has some correlation with vaguely known past reality - a variation on the idea of sampling bias.
But tinkering with your parameters until the model fits an arbitrary set of invalid data is hardly confidence building. And that is exactly what has been going on.
Depends on what you mean by correct. Global warming is an established fact, not matter what one can argue is causing it.
Nobody is disputing that. The issues are: (1) How much are we causing it, (2) Can we change the trend, and (3) what can we do about it if we can't change it.
It is arrogant and foolish to note that the seas are rising (they are) and we need to think about how to prevent widespread damage? On the contrary, to do nothing in the face of established facts is foolish.
I am certainly willing to consider issues of dealing with rising seas. However, you have not demonstrated that the warming is caused by the CO2. Beyond that, you consistently assume in t
...me:The difficulty of the social engineering required to take "precautionary" action dwarfs any effort mankind has ever undertaken. The probability of success is almost nil....reply:Why? The social engineering is equivalent to the amount of effort involved in a war. We have managed that sort of effort throughout the history of mankind.
It is not the "amount of effort" - it is the character of the effort and the character of the response. Kyoto is a fine example: it requires sacrifice from first world countries, but leaves out the fastest growing polluters, who are also the largest countries. Why does it leave them out? Presumably becaues they won't agree to it. Or perhaps it was because the Kyoto planners failed to anticipate the rapid growth in India and China.
Either case illustrates one of my critiques - in the first, it is the difficulty of getting agreement (not to mention compliance). In the second, it is the failure of very important predictions.
In other words, the power does not exist in the world to force those who choose not to make the dramatic sacrifices necessary to divert a major proportion of the world's economies into rebuilding our enercy systems. If it did exist, it would require dramatic amounts of coercion (as exists in your example: war). In other words, it would require either a world government with drastic police powers, or war and threat of war by major powers to coerce other governments into coercing their citizens into following these policies.
Now if the power exists anywhere, the US has it. We have the power to coerce most world powers into doing out bidding - at least in the short term. Of course, we would have to use the threat and practice of thermonuclear warfare to do so, but we do have that power. Of course, China and Russia cannot be easily coerced that way (especially Russia), because they can retaliste.
Anyway, I hope this gives some idea of why serious rearchitecture of the world's energy production and consumtion systems is a utopian ideal, not even close to a practical situation....me: But history and economics tells us that the effects of taking those actions will be non-compliance, wars, dramatic economic dislocations and large numbers of human deaths as a trickle-down consequence of the dramatic depression of first world economies....reply:We have no evidence at all of the results of what we need to do, as we have not done it before. There is a considerable opinion that reducing usage on hydrocarbons for fuel, for example, will hugely boost first world economies.
First, let me comment that there is considerable opinion that the process of reducing usage of hydrocarbons for fuel, to the level needed for significant global warming attenuation (assuming, as always, that the models commonly used have some semblance of prediction of reality), will be good for first world economies. This sounds like wishful thinking to me. Sure, you can find some people who will say so (does this reasoning seem familiar?), but not many, and there are plenty of well respected economists who vehemently disagree.
There are many reasons to believe that, without major breakthroughs in engineering, this is just nonsense. The problems are that oil, in particular, is a very good fuel - it is widely available (for a while), easy to transport, has an enormously expnsive acquisition, transportation and delivery infrastructure already in place (how many tens of trillions of dollars is that worth?), has a high energy density (for something that can be used to power an automobile - nothing compared to fission fuel), has widely developed technology, and more tens of trillions of dollars worth of existing user systems. In a badly simplified sense, one could say something like "look at all the jobs it would create to build a new infrastructure and new user systems." That is, in fact, the sort of reasoning I have seen. And certainly in the long run, oil will become more scarce (although enormous r
You link does a good job of doing this - they use different timesteps and scales to deal with climate forecasting than to do with weather forecasting.
Which in fact means that they are doing essentially the same as weather forecasting, but just with different parameters. And in fact the techniques discussed in my link *are* what they use in weather forecasting.
Oh really? And why would that be? Since the climate is the time integral of these short term events, and the models are using the same physical laws, the predictions are either going to be parameterized out the kazoo, which certainly affects their credibility, or they should be sensitive to weather issues. Weather makes climate and climate makes weather.
As they say in their experimental strategy, what they are doing is similar to weather forecasting. However, it is not the same. They use longer timesteps for climate forecast, ignoring chaotic features of daily weather. So, the chaos of day-scale weather forecasts is irrelevant, which is what I said.
The chaos is in the system, not the time steps. If one can prove that the longer range mechanisms do not have their own chaos - in the earth system, not the simulation, and also that the models are correct, that would be reasonable. Even if day-to-day chaos is irrelevant (essentially by averaging out), that does not rule out longer scale chaos from longer scale dynamical terms in the overall feedback system.
I did not say this. I did not say that all minority opinions are wrong. I said that minority opinions are generally wrong. Of course, some minority opinions are right, and become the foundation of future theory. But to assume that any minority opinion is worth listening to is just silly.
Although you did not say that, I will agree with what you are now saying about minority opinions. I choose to listen to the minority opinions of the people I mentioned because not only do I know them as human beings, I have had a chance to observe their methods and their level of care and self critique.
I said:There are many other systems involved that are not well understood. If we don't understand these major processes, we cannot model them.
No - we can simply do our best, as in any area of science.
Exactly, and as long as science is what we are doing, that's just fine. But when we are making policy, or popularizing the results of the science, it's a different matter, because "best" may simply not be good enough.
Put another way: science as a process is far different than science as a policy input. The former is normally full of uncertainties, disputes and even refutations of former consensus opinion. The latter is a political and human process which does not well adapt to the uncertainties of some sciences such as climate prediction. And that is my point.
We may have a higher than average probability that anthropogenic effects in global warming are significant (see my own guess to that effect above). But to go the direction Lovelock has gone is to take an uncertainty, perfectly normal in science, and to extrapolate it way beyond reasonableness.
Look - I am not saying you are wildly wrong, or what you are posting is rubbish. What I am saying is that the majority of researchers in the field disagree with you, so I am afraid it makes sense to listen to them and not you. Call it the precautionary principle.
And I am saying that when it comes to policy, listening to "the majority of researchers" on a subject that is very far from settled is, in this case, simply insufficient. And if we had the real researchers on this forum, they could duke it out. But we don't, so we have proxies such as you and me.
As for the precautionary principle... that is one of the most dangerous principles I have ever encountered. The reason is that it is very unbalanced. From a policy making perspective, it tends to be used to take (or certainly to strongly advocate) re
"theoretically" the bandwidth of any signal with a square wave in it is infinite, because the "square" wave has an infinite slope. Whether there is any *useful* energy at the higher frequencies is another matter. If you generate -300 dBm at some frequency, nobody is going to be interested, since it will be way, way, way below thermal noise.
What counts is the real effective bandwith of the system, where it *is* impossible to generate infinite slope signals, and where antennae (or, in a more technical sense, transducers or impedance matchers) are inherently signal selective.
As for iron penetration (why you are hung up on iron, I don't know) is mostly dependent on conduction. Metal attenuation is extremely well understood, and is very, very high until you get to frequencies where you are better off talking about wavelength (i.e. infrared) at which point the attenuation of pulses of the signal is still extremely high, but you can get low attenuation by a very different process: heat conduction. Good luck imaging with that.
You can throw around all the fancy theory you want. As an engineer, I understand real world limitations (and yes, I understand theory two - an engineer is an applied scientist), and UWB, unless you really want to pervert the term, is not going to penetrate metal unless there are holes or bad joints in it (and I am not talking about the space between atoms). If you *are* going to penetrate it for the purposes of doing damage, you won't screw around with some sort of complex analysis of the target via probing pulses, you will simply hit it with very large amounts of metal.
You can forget imaging through metal. It ain't gonna work unless the metal is very thing where the attenuation is reasonable, or the wavelength is down below molecular distances - i.e. extreme-UV (?), X or gamma rays.
To say that Lovelock is 'without post-doc work' is the most supreme nonsense. He has been publishing 'post doctoral' work for decades. He is is a fellow of the Royal Society - one of the most prestigious scientific positions in the world; awarded for contribution science - it is hard to think of any better qualification or evidence of actual scientific work.
In exactly what fields? To say that Chrichton has no experience in science (which I was responding to) is also balderdash.
The resulting quality of science in his books shows he is not well qualified for this.
For his novels, true. For his non-fiction, nonsense.
I'm sure I could find a qualified friend (even a professor) who could back up any point of view I want.
What a coincidence it is then, that of the few climate scientists I know, every one of them is a global warming skeptic! I didn't choose them for their views. I didn't choose them at all.
Single voices in this field don't matter (not even Lovelock's) - what matters is the scientific consensus.
You are absolutely right - FOR GETTING GRANT MONEY AND PUBLICITY.
As has been pointed out on here many, many times, consensus science is not what counts in the long run. What matters in science is theories tested by evidence. Usually the consensus is right, but there are plenty of dramatic counterexamples... in fact, many major paradigm shifts *start* with a minority. Look at ulcer pathogenesis. How about continental drift? Furthermore, on a highly politicized subject, the validity of scientific consensus (in an area where it is very hard to get solid data) is even more questionable. When skeptics had trouble getting money under the Clinton regime, it is not surprising that supporters get the limelight. When supporters get good press because scare stories sell papers and TV, again, people would rather be a supporter than a skeptic. Since the proponents of global warming often claim that skeptics are driven by "corporate" money, they are themselves projecting their own susceptibility to non-scientific influence!
Would you care to point out the evidence that strongly supports anthropogenic global warming. I would be quite amazed if you can use the very short period of time that we have been adding significant amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere to "prove" any sort of trend in a climatic system, much less isolate its cause. The "ice age is coming" scare was only 25 years ago, and scientists then knew with precision the first order albedo effect of CO2 and the fact that the CO2 content of the atmosphere had risen nearly 50%, but they came to a very different conclusion.
As for IPCC quotes on previous high temperatures, again, we are dependent on hard-to-sustain secondary hypotheses about which markers mean what on a global temperature scale. Even today, when we have lots of instrumentation in space and on the ground, there are valid disputes about the accuracy of the temperature data, although we can be pretty sure it is a lot better than data derived by proxy. Remember the fuss about NASA sounding data, and the subtle instrumentation issues that were involved? Does that give you great confidence in our ability to accurate measure temperatures even now?
BTW, are you quoting from the executive summaries or the depths of the IPCC reports?
He may have that opinion. Most don't. What matters in science is majority opinion.
Sounds like science suddenly got democratic. I don't recall that being part of the scientific method. It reminds me of Soviet science, where political pressure caused the rise of Lysenkoism. More specifically, the human dynamics involved in creating majorities in highly political subjects are not the dynamics you want for scientifically determining reality.
We have already warmed way beyond the temperature at the start of the little ice age, and even beyond that of the medieval warm period before that. At current rates the Arctic ice will be gone in a few decades. There has ne
Nope, there is totally inadequate evidence that it is man caused. There is LOTS of phony evidence provided by the media (this Hurricane year was made worse by global warming, for example. It ignores years less than 100 years ago).
If you care, see my other posting tied to the LoveLock subthread for why you shouldn't listen to people who claim to KNOW that man is causing global warming.
As for those who support Kyoto, there are two deadly counter-arguments:
1) By the models used by the Kyoto proponents themselves, Kyoto will not make a *measurable* change in 100 years.
2) There is every reason to believe that no treaty can last 100 years, and that changes in population (such as the demographic disaster facing Europe, Japan and to a lesser extent the US), changes in technology, and the likelihood of major wars is just a start in the issues unconsidered by those so confidently promoting it.
If you don't believe this, just imagine that it is 1905. The west (Europe and the US mostly) control the world. Major warfare is believed to no longer be possible (they believed this up to 2 weeks *after* Archduke Ferdinand was killed). Horse poop is an environmental problem and the use of 25% or so of farmland for horse energy supplies is forecast to grow rapidly. So you set up an international horse poop treaty - to use fewer horses.
Of course, little do you know that during the next 100 years there will be:
1) World War I (destroying all treaty structures in Europe) 2) The Spanish Flu 3) The great depression 4) The great increase in the use of internal combustino driven automobiles and trucks, rendering the problem moot 5) The development of electrical and electronics engineering with dramatic changes in society and lifestyles 6) The defeat of almost all infectious killing diseases except in the thirld world. 7) The rise of international Communism with its complete indifference to environmental issues 8) The rise of Fascism, Naziism, and World War II 9) The end of colonialism 10) The invention of the computer 11) The invention of nuclear power and nuclear weapons 12) The cold war, which over-rode environmental considerations in at least the proxy-war countries 13) well... you get the picture
It is arrogant and hubristic to really expect an international treaty effort like Kyoto to either last long enough to do any good, or to expect that the political and technological future can be well enough predicted to even make the question interesting or tractible.
Lovelock has spent his career inventing instruments (instrumentation, not science - he is a world class inventor in this area) and writing books. His comments referenced above indicate that he is far from science (or using metaphors without identifying them as such) win some of his important statements.
Chrichton has spent his career writing books, some of which have involved a huge amount of in depth research (of the results of other scientists), for which he is well qualified.
So I checked, last week, with a friend who is, in fact, a well regarded climate expert (PhD: Climatology. Current profession: Distinguished Professor, Climatology). I have known him long enough to have watched his views on this subject change from very cautious proponent of the anthropogenic hypothese to a cautious skeptic to a fervent skeptic.
His comments (and those from two other experts I know who are also PhD's with lots of research time in Climatology) - paraphrased:
The science of man-caused (anthropogenic) global warming is junk. The paleoclimatic data is of inadequate quality. Modeling is not reliable (he has done climate modeling and now is doing paleo work).
Everyone agrees that planet is warming - it is recovering from a little ice age a few centuries ago.
The hysteria over anthropogenic global warming is disappointing. So is the scare mongering by some scientists in the field.
Now you probably need to be a climatologist (or have a very, very active interest, lots of time to read lots of papers, and deep knowledge of statistics and some of the methods in the papers) to understand the details of the criticism of paleoclimatology (hint: a couple of significant problems are tiny sample sizes which may show only local conditions, and the necessity of using indirect (proxy) measurements such as tree rings or isotope ratios, which may show an effect other than temperature change).
To understand the problems with modeling is easier, since many of us have experience with computer modeling. I am not an expert on this, but I know a little bit about it. Global Circulation Model users make a large number of assumptions, because the models don't have enough spatial and temporal resolution, and reliable starting data is also too sparse. Thus the modelers have to "parameterize" them, and use sensitivity analyses to get some idea of how good the parameterizations are. Parameterization involves replacing the detailed modeling of things like mountain ranges with a number, or a set of numbers, to account for that range in whatever resolution cells it turns up in. Furthermore, we know that weather is chaotic - hence the GCM's for weather are simply not trustworthy beyond 5 days when one is lucky, and less than a day when one is not. Now extend to 100 years and you get a better idea of the problem. The only hope for GCM's is if climate is not chaotic (the integral of a chaotic function may not be chaotic... I believe) and that the models happen not to be sensitive to the known underlying chaos. Couple to this the lack of an adequate number of years of calibration data (i.e. paleoclimatic data) and you have a model that is:
1) uncalibratable due to the lack of a long enough time series of reliable data (both for climate forcers and actual climate results) 2) of low temporal and spatial resolution compared to some of the processes being modeled (hurricane formation, for example) 3) inadequately initialized (low resolution, data quality, and the need for interpolation) 4) full of guesses in the form of parameterization 5) fighting chaos 6) doing the equivalent of numerical integration, for a very l
I'm not going to waste time trying to debate too much of this, but when you say:
I did not "self-declare" these "enemies", GWB did that on behalf of the entire planet with bothering to ask them
I have to laugh. That statement is very absurd. I didn't self declare the enemies either. THEY did that. They declared war on the west. And the repeat that declaration every once in a while.
As to Guy Faulkes, do you really want to compare the destructive power of that bomb to a small nuke? It's absurd.
Regarding the lack of newness of the threat. You are right in a way - every since nukes were invented, there was the potential that terrorists could use them. But that potential was very low because:L
1) Those who had them wanted and kept extremely tight control over them. Now we are about to have nukes in the hands of a regime whose president "had a green aura" which struck dumb those who listened to him. Dear Leader in North Korea probably had them. These people are crazy enough (unlike the Russians and later the Chinese) that they may very well give (or sell, in the case of the Norks) a bomb or two to terrorists.
2) Those who had them were deterrable - if a nuke went off in DC, it would have triggered nuclear war against the USSR, since they obviously did it. One cannot deter Al Qaeda, and the possible sources for them to get weapons today is much greater. Furthermore, they are willing to use other WMDs even easier to get or make, including bological agents and chemical weapons. They are *not* deterrable.
As for the effectiveness of international law: Is it stopping the Iranians from getting nukes? Did it stop North Korea? Did it prevent *any* terrorist attacks? Did it prevent the AQ Kahn nuclear weapons production and sales network? Did it stop the genocide being committed by Sudan, or the slavery? Did it slow down Al Qaeda in the slightest? Did it keep Saddam Hussein from attacking first Iran, then Kuwait? Did it keep the Palestinians from killing innocent civilians in Israel, or the IRA from doing the same in Britain? Is it worth a popcorn fart?
Your appeal to international law to stop the kind of threat that we have is laughable. My biggest annoyance is that too many people attach magical powers to international law (and the UN for that matter) in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary.
Parinoia and power is a far more dangerous mix than OBL and a suitcase nuke.
Yeah, right. Tell me, is it paranoid to believe that AQ wants to kill you and me, or is it an unpleasant fact? Is it paranoid to believe that if AQ gets a nuke, they will use it in a western city?
Just what "paranoia" are you talking about? The attempt to defend ourselves from a very large movement of people who believe that should either be killed or forced to live in a 9th century barbarism? The fear that perhaps if our skyscrapers were attacked once by those people, with 3000 deaths and a cost of $1 trillian, that it might happen again, and again, or in a much worse form? The declarations of our well funded and widespread enemy that they wish to use WMDs against us? The attempts they have made to do so in Britain and Jordan? Our discovery of the AQ Khan nuclear weapons supermarket?
Many people live in a world that think will just keep on going in the same pleasant way it has been. They natually feel that history is linear, that big changes aren't going to happen in their lifetime. They don't see threats because they don't have the vision to understand that history is replete with sudden changes and huge amounts of violent deaths. Perhaps they are paranoid about lesser dangers (such as US power), causing them to ignore the danger of true malevolence.
I think paranoia is dangerous, all right. I think that those who are paranoid of the US but believe that Al Qaeda is just a few malcontents that can be rounded up and put on trial are dangerous. These people (YOU) fail to understand that the current trend by the Islamofascists resembles more the Mahdi rebell
Regardless of how you describe the generation process, UWB simply means spreading electromagnetic energy over a frequency range greater or much greater than normally used by other forms of modulation.
It is normally done with pulses (not square waves, but very widely separated very narrow pulses), because, as the Fourier transform demonstrates, this produces a very wide spectrum (if you could generate Dirac delta functions, it would be infinetly wide). It is not a matter of "resulting harmonics" - it is a matter of wide bandwith - the narrower the pulse, the greater the bandwidth. This is the classic issue with time domain vs. frequency domain. Certainly the pulse will also have harmonics, and they will also have the bandwidth spreading.
Of course, the spectral density at any particular spot is going to be dependent on all sorts of things - primarily the antenna and the original waveform.
On to shielding. The issue with metallic shielding (and iron is not particularly more interesting than a non-ferrous metal) is that it has extremely high attenuation at all frequencies up to x-rays. There are no magic holes below that frequency. A solid metal box, with metal of a certain conductivity and thickness, will effectively stop almost all EMF that it encounters. At frequencies where UWB or HPM's are going to be used, the metal is *not* modelled as mostly space, because the atom separation is much smaller than the wavelength. Hence the metal is modelled as a conductor (with no finer structure) with a given conductivity and thickness.
But what is your point? You seem to wander off into the stratosphere with your vast computing and your nodes ever meter or so.
If you want to generate high field strengths for weapons purposes, you simply use high power, and a frequency/energy/wavelength which will have enough penetration (small enough attenuation) to do what you want. Furthermore, you may want to choose a frequency (or frequency range if you are playing with UWB) which can slip by shielding but which is not overly attenuated by whatever my be covering the target - such as soil.
In other words, it's a lot simpler than you make out. What counts is not the small scale physics of metal, but the macro behavior, unless you are at x-ray frequencies or above. The best thing to generate is a high powered pulse at microwave frequencies (i.e. it may very well be a number of cycles), not so much due to its frequency spreading effect as its peak power.
The VC were *always* commanded by the North Vietnamese. The separation was primarily for political reasons, so the North could maintain the fiction that the war in the south was an indigenous rebellion, which it certainly was not. Giap's biographies verify this. After 1968, with the destruction of the VC in the three offensives (the first and most famous of which was the "Tet Offensive"), the war was almost totally against NVA.
The war in South Vietnam was always against the North. That's why the linch pin was the Ho Chi Minh trail. Asked how the US could have won the war in the South, Giap stated that an invasion of Laos blocking the trail would have been sufficient. Giap also stated that the government of the North was ready to end the war (in the SOUTH) after the Tet defeat, until it saw how that defeat was spun by media in the US as a great victory for the VC. The North then decided to win by psychological warfare using the left in the US, and in fact succeeded in that tactic.
Many of the VC were south Vietnamese. After the Geneva accords, there was a period when people in Vietnam could choose which country they wanted to live in - the Communist dictatorship of the north or the capitalist dictatorship of the south. A large number of people moved. But the remnants of the Viet Minh in the South were ordered to stay in the south to become what was later called the VC.
You may also be interested to know that the PRG (the political arm of the VC) was also commanded, from its formation, by the north. It was created to form an additional communist organization, supposedly representing interests in the south, in the "peace talks."
Both of these organizations were classic "fronts" - they pretended to represent or fight for interests in the nouth, while actually being controlled by the north.
What about Vietnam and Somalia? In Vietnam, we won the war in-country by doing something a little better than what you said: providing safety for civilians, by pacifying large amounts of territory. Civilians rarely want to do anything other than get back to normal life. This was completed by 1972, to the extent that the US ambassador could drive around the country with no escort.
Vietnam was ultimately lost by a failure of will in the United States, and was lost to a massive armored invasion from another country - not to indigenous guerillas. We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Details (once again) available on request.
Somalia was a case of mission creep (and an Al Qaeda ambush) and loss of will. US forces were introduced by GHWB for one purpose: protecting the distribution of humanitarian aid. Clinton extended the mission to include actively participating in the anarchy by snatching one of the malefaactors. At the same time, the administration refused the on-scene commander's request for adequate technology - M1 tanks as an urban reaction force - one which would have saved most of those lost in "Black Hawk Down." Our subsequent retreat (cited by Al Qaeda as one reason they are ultimately going to win) was simply, again, a loss of will.
The biggest military problem for the US since World War II has been the difficulty of maintaining the will to fight extended wars. Given support from the homeland, the military will eventually win whatever we get into (although they may stumble around a bit through tactics space until they hit the right ones).
We are showing every sign of losing our will again - this time in Iraq. Whether Iraq was the right or wrong war to fight, losing it will have deadly ramifications for our ability to fight Al Qaeda.
I'm going to try to not debate the morality of the current Iraq war... But the contention that we now expect magical technology to win our wars is utter crap. However, we do have technology that we know how to employ very well. When you have good technology, you use it. But we aren't dumb enough to think it is a "magical" solution. America has long been considered one of the best countries at fighting guerilla warfare. Britain and Australia also fit that characterization.
As to technological fixes... you use your strengths, and that is one of ours. The enemy uses theirs - IED technology, terror, and masquerading as civilians in defiance of the laws of war.
Our soldiers have the best body armor in the world. Our precision weapons allowed us to inflict maximum damage Saddam's regime with minimum (historically) collateral damage. They allowed us to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with ground forces consisting of a few hundred special forces members and CIA paramilitary folks, armed with laser designators, GPS's and radios, and importantly, a large force of - you guessed it - friendly (or well paid) guerillas. We have lots of other dramtically superior technology, some of it well suited for guerilla war.
But America is not stupid enough to believe that technology is everything. Ask any marine about how he was trained. As any army grunt. Ask a SEAL or "green beret." We train our professional military very well, and have an tradition of field improvisation (including, during Iraq II, the quick adoption of practice 2000lb bombs - 2000lb of concrete - for destruction of tanks and other vehicles parked too close to civilians).
Iraq is a tough but small war, which we know how to win. The enemy, can only win by defeating our will through propaganda and psy-war tactics that our feckless press and too many political leaders are suckers for.
We have hardly forgotten the lessons for winning guerilla wars. We have fought in and won many guerilla wars over the centuries. I am not aware of any war in which we were defeated by guerillas Since someone will mention it, this includes Vietnam. The "guerillas" (Viet Cong) were utterly defeated and destroyed by the end of 1968 (according to our military and their commander. Giap).
Hey, the PDP-10 was a nice machine. But no way would it fit into a ladies "hambag." A PDP-10 only fit in a room.
Now when I was in the military, our on-board computers were *analog* - servos, gears, integrators, etc. Even so, they managed to keep track of our position within a few miles on a 14 hour flight, and provide a very useful display on the TACCO's console.
Nonsense. "Nothing absorbs at every frequency" is just not true - or certainly not true for the frequency range you are talking about (the attenuation of metal to gamma rays - a very, very, very high frequency - is substantially less than it is to, say, terrahertz).
UWB is just a different form of spread spectrum. In other words, it is EMF generation using electromagnetic radiation across a wide range of wavelengths/frequencies. Furthermjore, it isn't a blast of radiation across "an entire spectrum" (whatever that is - do you mean the entire electromagnetic spectrum - through high energy gamma?). It is a generation of EM radiation across a specific spectrum, normally quite a bit wider than other spread spectrum techniques use. But it might only be, say, across 10 GHz, which looks narrowband at THz frequencies.
Looking through a concrete wall as mentioned in the article works because concrete has far less attenuation than metal. Even if it has rebar in it, most ordinary microwave frequencies will get through with little attenuation. If it had chickenwire (say, for stucco), the wavelength would have to be shorter to image through it. If it was solid metal, dramatically higher transmit power would be required for imaging, since metal has extremely high attenuation (so does salt water, which is why extremely *low* frequencies (100kHz) are used to communicate with submerged submarines.
But trying to look through a metal wall with THz UWB wouldn't work worth a damn even if radiation leaked through some weaknesses. You can't image that way. Likewise, metal in the imaging field could result in dynamic range problems (overload) that might prevent imaging.
Now switch from UWB to terraherz radiation. The two are not the same idea.
Terraherz electromagnetic radiation can get through shielding that would cause much greater attenuation of lower frequencies, just like ordinary microwave can get through a lot of lower grade shielding that's just fine for, say, HF radio. Hence microwave pulse weapons (if they exist) use very high frequencies compared to just about anything else - perhaps even THz range.
The idea of shotgunning in a HPM weapon to find a particular frequency or set of frequencies is not likely to be useful. Just using a very short wavelength is what you want to do (perhaps with some spectrum spreading). While there might be a few odd resonances that shotgunning would find, it really isn't significant.
Oh, so it is the "church wsa increasingly conservative..." that was the problem.
THAT IS COMPLETE NONSENSE>
In the United States, the Catholic Church was becoming more liberal, as the 60's generation rose to positions of power. Today, the Catholic bishops are still far more liberal than the Vatican. If fact, conservative Catholics blame the *liberalization* of the Church for the sexual abuse scandal. One reason was a liberal decision to admist homosexuals to the seminaries. Now, you may find non-politically correct facts hard to digest, or have some psychological need to simply deny them, but the main problem was homosexual priests. Period. It isn't an accident that the vast majority of the cases were male on male, where the victim was adolescent (and btw, often above the age of consent desired by the gay lobby).
That the church also had true pedophiles is also true, and not surprising. Pedophiles (and some homosexuals) seek out and infiltrate organizations that work with children. If you have ever been part of such an organization and had to undergo screenin and the related anti-sexual abuse training, you learn that. It wasn't until the absurd child care pedophile witch hunts that the issue suddenly flipped and went from being a part of the therapy culture to being one of the lawsuit culture (and at least got some of the critical evaluation and press it needed).
That the church fell for the *liberal* doctrine that pedophiles (and people with any other issue) can be cured with *therapy* is also a fact.
Those who remember the past (and are old enough to do so) remember the times when pedophiles were considered to be curable (especially since they were very good at faking a cure), and in fact every problem (except perhaps conservatism) could be cured with a bit of time with some sort of modern therapist. So when you lay this on a "conservative" Catholic church, you are simply demonstrating your ignorance of the issue.
The evidence you cite comes from an apparently left-wing newspaper, consists of a few anecdotes (and btw, the LA diocese is one of the most liberal) and then goes off quoting a lawyer (who has big bucks to make).
Fact: Homosexuals were the abusers in the vast majority of Catholic Church cases (and also the Boy Scouts, which is why the Boy Scouts don't allow homosexuals). All homosexual priests who did this were violating their vows of chastity.
Fact: Too often, but far from always, members of the middle level Church hierarchy either failed to appreciate the depth of the problem, or chose to cover it up. This is certainly wrong.
Fact: The Catholic Church, and in fact all organized Christian religions, are favorite targets of attacks from the modern social left.
Fact: The "pedophilia" scandal, while at times definitely the fault of members of the Cathlic Church, is a gold mine for lawyers.
Fact: Many cases of remembered early childhood sex abuse (i.e. recovered memories) are not real, as has been solidly established in psychological circles.
I'm afraid that a complete relativism, and a retreat to history, fails to convince, and although popular these days, is a complete cop-out and disgustingly cynical. Anyway...
I will lay out the fundamentals of the argument here in its most simple form.
The new and UNIQUE threat is;
1) A very large group of people who are willing to die to kill large numbers of us. We last encountered that in World War II with the Japanese - remember them? But the Japanese never were able to kill as many Americans in America as Al Qaeda did in one attack, and yet we had to use nuclear weapons to end the threat.
COMBINED WITH (for the first time)
2) weapons of *mass* destruction which can be used by one or a small number of individuals to kill thousands to hundreds of thousands of people.
The latter means two things:
A) The threat is much greater because detecting and preventing a massive attack is not always possible
B) When used by non-state groups such as Al Qaeda, Deterrence does not work because they don't care about retaliation, and doing so requires us to kill a very large number of innocent people. Your relativism or labeling of "good" and "bad" is irrelevant simply because: I don't want *my* family or friends to fall victim to this or its consequences. Unless you are a fool you would agree with that for *your* familiy. And since you and I happen to have the same self-declared enemy, we both face the same threat.
To address the idea that this is police action, not war:
1) A group with strong support from as many people as a decent sized nation has declared a war on us (which means darn near anyone not "them"). They have taken actions consistent with war. Until we invaded Afghanistan, they controlled an entire country and used its assets against us (does *that* sound like war to you)?
2) Their attacks on the West far exceed the damage that "criminal" actions involve, requiring a more extensive defense than police capabiloities can provide. Their potential for vastly more damaging attacks is clear, and their intent is also clear and frequently stated.
3) The brits did not treat the IRA as a war and start bombing the fuck out of N. Ireland, both IRA and Republican terrorist actions were treated as major crimes - The IRA never represented one percent of the threat that Al Qaeda does. They did not have WMDs and would not have used them if they did - because the backlash would have defeated them immediately. The same is true of the Palestinians. But the British did take military action against the IRA, and took "police state" actions within their own country in order to fight the terrorism. That is why Britain already has a huge number of police monitored cameras, which they now plan to greatly increase due to the larger threat of the Islamofascists. Britain also has long had much stronger internal security powers (due to its lack of constitutional rights) than America (can you say MI5? can you say secrecy orders?). Al Qaeda members have been caught (probably using war powers) in Britain working on a potent chemical WMD - ricin.
You are falling into (and loving) the old fashioned view of terrorism: a gang of criminals who can do minimal damage compared to a government. But Al Qaeda, contrary to your assertions, is likely to obtain one important characteristic of superpowerdom: WMDs. They have claimed to desire them, and have taken many steps, by many of their subgroups and their headquarters group, to obtain them. They have tried to use them. It is only a matter of time. If you consider fighting the use of WMDs by a foreign conspiracy and huge cult to be a police matter, you either have vast more faith in the powers of policing than I do, or you live in a country where citizens have far fewer protections, under ordinary criminal law, than in my country.
Al Qaeda and other Islamofascists also have another important characteristic: their goals are much more ambitions than the IRA's - they don't want to control just a few counti
Sorry, dude, but Republicanism has nothing to do with it and being concerned about the future of my country has a heck of a lot to do with it. If 9-11 had happened in the Hillary administration, I would still be in favor of the government trying to stop the terrorists, even though I trust Bush far more than the Clintons to not abuse the system (based on the history of both administrations).
As to your "how to fix it" - did it ever occur to you that they might, just might not use airplanes next time? That perhaps they will instead take some of that Sarin gas that is in Iraq (remember the IED that turned out to contain Sarin?) and stuff it into the air handling system for *your* office building. Then at least we won't hear you rant about what is, for those who bother to think about thinks, simply friendly fire?
But you will NEVER understand that.
It is clear from your language that you are not a person who pays attention to anything. Have you ever heard of Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS)? It's clear, sadly, that you have a bad case of it.
I won't even bother to refute your points. Your rudeness indicates a closed mind that wouldn't even listen. I see this all too often in Bush haters.
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Let's clear up a few things...
I was referring to upper ranks of business as well as lower. You find plenty of people on the leftward side of things there. For example, my cousing is a venture capitalist... and on the left. A good friend is an entrepreneur and quite wealthy - and on the left. Many of silicon valley's moguls are on the left. It is a belief, on the left, that because capitalism is associated with the ideology of the right, that capitalists are rightists. It is a belief without substantiation. My observation is that most capitalists could care less about politics - the successful ones are too busy doing business, which consumes them.
So I would suggest you provide some sort of evidence. Do you know these people (over the years, I have spent time with quite a few)? I believe you are applying ideological reasoning and asserting it as fact. Again, my observation is that the people focused on high level business are simply not very interested in politics. Of course, there George Soros, one of the richest men in the world, who is very hard left. But he is an exception too.
I already gave you an example of negative effects of having a homogenous left faculty: conservatives being discouraged to seek PhD's. I have never heard of people on the left being so discouraged, and that isn't surprising when even in the science and engineering departments of modern academia, the ratio of Democrat voter registration (a proxy for somewhere on the left) to Republican registration is typically 4 or 5 to 1! This is something you could check - get the names of the profs, and then go to the voter rolls.
So let me ask you a question. Do you believe diversity of ideas and backgrounds is a good idea in universities? Do you support affirmative action on the Sandra Day O'Connor grounds - that diversity in the student bodies brings added perspective?
Quite frankly, I find it shocking that anyone would find acceptable an overwhelming political stance of the faculty of Universities - places which are supposed to have discussions, arguments, and in general all different sorts of opinions.
As to what the teachers are teaching... a friend recently just completed a course in "Community Psychology." Nice name, but the subject is really how to use the guise of psychology as a way to achieve "social justice" in communities - in other words it is radically to the left. When I took freshman economics (a long time ago, btw), my professor was a member of CPUSA and told us that he intended to teach us that Communism was the only scientific (and desirable) economic system. And that was at that bastion of Bible-belt conservatism (hah!), the University of Kansas. My poli-sci professor taught that Socialism was the best political system (in honors freshman poli sci). My calculus of complex variables prof refused to allow any ROTC members to attend his class. There was NO analogous actions by right wing professors (what few there were) - believe me, the whole world would have heard the screeching about it from the left - demonstrations and media coverage.
"As are liberals, I'm sure. It is not bias to say, for example, that a communist should not pursue a business degree nor should a creationist pursue a life sciences degree as they are philisophically opposed to the disciples. That's not the fault of biology or free market economics."
You're sure that liberals are advised to not pursue advanced degrees in certain subjects. You have got to be kidding! The liberal/left screech machine operates very, very effectively. If you don't believe me, look at what happened to Summers at Harvard for posing one carefully phrased, valid quesiton that happened to be politically incorrect. If liberarls wered getting this treatment - again (just as in the past) you and I would know all about it, because we would be hearing about it constantly (if nothing else, the New York Times would run above-the-fold stories for weeks about just one case).
Thus, given the lack of any reports of discrimination against leftis
As a businessman, I can tell you that the stereotype you picked up is nonsense. Business has conservatives, and it has liberals, and I haven't seen that many who are even political.
The problem in academia (and there are a lot more studies than just one) is that it is very strongly biased to the left. And that bias means there is little diversity (a favorite word of you guys on the left, eh?) in education.
There are those who claim that professors keep their biases to themselves. Indeed, many professors do. But far too many do not.
Conservatives are often advised, in a number of fields, to not go for PhD's because they will never get tenure. This is highly surprising when 90-100% of many liberal arts departments are liberals.
If you think that academics should be strongly dominated by one political view - that this is okay - then you must like having institutes of "higher learning" and "academic freedom" being transformed into Orwellian PC environments, as indeed many have. It does make a mockery, however, of the current academic argument for "affirmative action" (quotas) - that a diverse student body is best.
A diverse student body but a homogenous faculty?
Hardly a reasonable pair of ideas.
That this is more than conjecture is attested to by this report.
The article includes the results of a number of studies. In addition, consider this statement:
And finally, some here will find it irresistable to attack the messenger (which is a rightist organization dedicated to attacking political correctness on campus). I would suggest that responses should address the issues and data raised. Ad hominem attacks, while having a long history on Slashdot and before that on Usenet, are mere failed arguments.
Propaganda does work.
But what percentage of the electorate makes its political judgements based on information on Wikipedia? I would hope very little.
Wiki is great, but not for that.
The reason I choose not to debate it is because it has been debated here before in much more detail. Check the archives.
I'm sorry that you chose to take the example as some sort of silly partisan argument rather than recognizing it as merely one (personal, in this case) example of Wikipedia bias.
Pretend that my information was false (which you *assume* it was given the scare quotes you put around the word.
It still doesn't justify the deletioon of my changes on the grounds that "the book probalby doesn't even exist" when it is available from Amazon.
It would appear the you thoroughly missed that.
The point (as Wikipedia themselves say) is that the parts that are controversial may be wrong because of the controversy.
I do not lead my readers to believe that it is implicitly anti-Bush. I simply give them an experiment. Learn to read, eh?
I do believe that the on-line world is much more strongly anti-Bush/anti-Conservative than the population in general. I could go into reasons but your closed little mind and inability to read makes it irrelevant.
All of this depends on the intended and actual usage.
There are extremely valuable computer programs out there which are at least 40 years old (TPF/ACP anyone)?
As of 10 years ago (and probably still today), the majority of credit card processing was done in IBM/360-370 assembly language on a system at least 30 years old.
These are very big business systems (or in the case of ACP, an unusual special-purpose OS that supports a set of very big very high performance business systems). The value of replacing them is far less than the cost of doing so. While the cost of maintaining them is high, enhancements are often done in more modern programs which "wrap" the old, old central applications.
Wikipedia, which is a noble experiment and a great resource, has long acknowledged that in controversial areas, its accuracy is suspect. And indeed it is. During the 2004 election campaign, I put some information that was unfavorable to John Kerry into it. I gave a reference, which was an easily obtained book. My change was rejected because "the book probably doesn't exist" even though the simplest Amazon search showed that it does and was available.
Even today, if you read the Bush and Kerry sections, you will find the phrasing of the Kerry section to be much more favorable than that of Bush (if you have ever studies actual propaganda, you will recognize the technique). The concentration of various facts to be similarly more favorable - selective editing - I'm sure the many Bush haters on here are itching to tell me that both are accurate. They are not - in either case.
Hence citing the Wikipedia as authorithy on *controversial* subjects is ridiculous, as has been discussed here before.
I praise the Wikipedia effort, but one unfortunately side effect is that those who control the keys to the kingdom, or the faction which works the hardest to change an entry, determine the content, regardless of truth and damgingly against balance. Wikipedia is trying to change this, although I cannot think of any methodology that are consistent with its character that will work.
And no, I'm not going to debate this. If you don't believe me, go find some other controversial area and eventually you will discover this sort of shading to be common.
Look, I am going to stop disputing the climate science for the purposes of argument. But not before I challenge a couple of statements. First, I am well aware of the greenhouse gas characteristics of CO2 - it is simple physics (NOT chemistry). Second, "the results of the math" are poppycock. Simple math does NOT tell us about the causes of warming, or predict the future of it, or we wouldn't need models! Math (really, the attempt to describe the various factors involved in forming climate) can help us build models, but it is merely a reduction of the results of complex experiments (with comples results) into formulas simple enough to be used in a model (i.e. a very rough approximation).
But lets just assume that you are 100% corret. That the models have the amazing ability to forecast climate.
Assume that.
Now, once again, please try to understand my point of view: it makes not one damn bit of difference if the models are right or not.
PLEASE let me know that you understand at least that statement, and why I am saying it, even if your don't agree - because once again your responses utterly ignore the by far most important part of the entire system: human behavior. You simply advocate a change in that behavior. But you don't analyze or forecast or model or even take into account the consequences of such advocacy, which include strong negative feedback, which I think makes the entire enterprise a joke. Why don't you go tell that nutcase president of Iran, you know - the one who has a green aura which struck dumb the United Nations - that he should stop pumping out CO2. Do you think you will be successful? Tell the dicators that run China. Tell the VOTERS in the democratic regimes, after they have felt the terribly painful effects of a true remediation effort (cuts of 40-50% from 1990 baseline).
Now, do you have a model that predicts that behavior? Because, if you do, you will certainly be eligible for at least one Nobel prize.
And that is the point that way too many CO2 reduction advocates miss!
You write as if we can just "stop pumping out CO2."
You have ignored every single one of my challenges about how we are to achieve that. And... don't give me a technical answer, because the "greenhouse gas" of this issue is human behavior.
So tell me, Mr. physical scientist, how are you going to "stop pumping out green house gas?"
I have simplified the argument here, because my argument does not rely upon the accuracy or the inaccuracy of your vaunted models (I could continue to show why those models are unreliable, but you wouldn't listen). Again, screw the models - assume they are correct.
Now tell me what you advocate and how you are actually going to make it work.
Perhaps if you give that an honest analysis, you will then realize that perhaps your efforts are best spent advocating what is possible and less damaging:
1) more research into climate factors (I don't care how confident you are, we really don't know enough about a lot of issues there)
2) research about how to reduce the negative impacts of global warming, and how to take advantage of the positive impacts.
This is totally irrelevant, as are your points about other countries reducing hydrocarbon use. Hydrocarbon resources are going to run out (or rather, it is going to become economically un-viable to continue using them at current rates). There will need to be a major reduction in their use anyway. We have a choice - do it now in a controlled fashion, or let our economies collapse later.
I think you are making a horrible error. Mankind is very resourceful. The increased price of hydrocarbons will produce innovation that government programs never will. These might indeed reduce the usage. In any case, they are going to keep the resources from becoming economically un-viable for a very long timer, DURING WHICH all sorts of things will be tried, new approaches will be discovered, and better science will be applied to the climate prediction problem.
Why should we do it now in a "controlled fashion" (more on that later - you are dreaming if you think we can control it) when almost all important discoveries and trends were a result of UN-controlled activity? Do you really believe that there is some august body that is smarter and more innovative than the thousands of scientists and engineers and investors who are driven to solve the problems? I realize this is common European thinking, and I think it is pathetic and flies in the face of history.
By the way, at the current price of oil, it is becoming *profitable* to develop and use more *green* energy. That doesn't require a decision and treaties and some (never, ever discussed) mechanism of forcing people to actually cut their carbon use (it seems that some of the loud proponents of Kyoto are already missing their goals... just as anyone who didn't believe in the omniscience and more importantly, the omnipotence of European elites could have easily predicted).
Your bias is shown by your obsession with controlling CO2 emissions, when a far more rational approach might be to develop techniques for *adjusting to* the results of global warming - which has the advantage of working even if the CO2 is not the main cause. You also haven't mentioned ameliorating the CO2 issue - a problem for which many solutions have been proposed, and certainly one which merits additional research and engineering.
And in doing so you neglect that the computer models are, of course, tested against real world conditions by attempts to model past climate.
You are utterly ignoring the terrible quality of the paleoclimatic data which makes such runs extremely suspect. If we had good data, and the models could do a good job of predicting climate for a few thousand years (as opposed to 150 years), that would me more interesting (although it would help if they could model climate in PAST periods of rapid CO2 buildup), but we do not. Furthermore, even models which can predict some of the past may be nothing more than flukes - in other words, our selection of those models and those parameters is simply the result of trying a gazillion combinations and taking the one which (perhaps accidently) has some correlation with vaguely known past reality - a variation on the idea of sampling bias.
But tinkering with your parameters until the model fits an arbitrary set of invalid data is hardly confidence building. And that is exactly what has been going on.
Depends on what you mean by correct. Global warming is an established fact, not matter what one can argue is causing it.
Nobody is disputing that. The issues are: (1) How much are we causing it, (2) Can we change the trend, and (3) what can we do about it if we can't change it.
It is arrogant and foolish to note that the seas are rising (they are) and we need to think about how to prevent widespread damage? On the contrary, to do nothing in the face of established facts is foolish.
I am certainly willing to consider issues of dealing with rising seas. However, you have not demonstrated that the warming is caused by the CO2. Beyond that, you consistently assume in t
...me:The difficulty of the social engineering required to take "precautionary" action dwarfs any effort mankind has ever undertaken. The probability of success is almost nil. ...reply:Why? The social engineering is equivalent to the amount of effort involved in a war. We have managed that sort of effort throughout the history of mankind.
...me: But history and economics tells us that the effects of taking those actions will be non-compliance, wars, dramatic economic dislocations and large numbers of human deaths as a trickle-down consequence of the dramatic depression of first world economies. ...reply:We have no evidence at all of the results of what we need to do, as we have not done it before. There is a considerable opinion that reducing usage on hydrocarbons for fuel, for example, will hugely boost first world economies.
It is not the "amount of effort" - it is the character of the effort and the character of the response. Kyoto is a fine example: it requires sacrifice from first world countries, but leaves out the fastest growing polluters, who are also the largest countries. Why does it leave them out? Presumably becaues they won't agree to it. Or perhaps it was because the Kyoto planners failed to anticipate the rapid growth in India and China.
Either case illustrates one of my critiques - in the first, it is the difficulty of getting agreement (not to mention compliance). In the second, it is the failure of very important predictions.
In other words, the power does not exist in the world to force those who choose not to make the dramatic sacrifices necessary to divert a major proportion of the world's economies into rebuilding our enercy systems. If it did exist, it would require dramatic amounts of coercion (as exists in your example: war). In other words, it would require either a world government with drastic police powers, or war and threat of war by major powers to coerce other governments into coercing their citizens into following these policies.
Now if the power exists anywhere, the US has it. We have the power to coerce most world powers into doing out bidding - at least in the short term. Of course, we would have to use the threat and practice of thermonuclear warfare to do so, but we do have that power. Of course, China and Russia cannot be easily coerced that way (especially Russia), because they can retaliste.
Anyway, I hope this gives some idea of why serious rearchitecture of the world's energy production and consumtion systems is a utopian ideal, not even close to a practical situation.
First, let me comment that there is considerable opinion that the process of reducing usage of hydrocarbons for fuel, to the level needed for significant global warming attenuation (assuming, as always, that the models commonly used have some semblance of prediction of reality), will be good for first world economies. This sounds like wishful thinking to me. Sure, you can find some people who will say so (does this reasoning seem familiar?), but not many, and there are plenty of well respected economists who vehemently disagree.
There are many reasons to believe that, without major breakthroughs in engineering, this is just nonsense. The problems are that oil, in particular, is a very good fuel - it is widely available (for a while), easy to transport, has an enormously expnsive acquisition, transportation and delivery infrastructure already in place (how many tens of trillions of dollars is that worth?), has a high energy density (for something that can be used to power an automobile - nothing compared to fission fuel), has widely developed technology, and more tens of trillions of dollars worth of existing user systems. In a badly simplified sense, one could say something like "look at all the jobs it would create to build a new infrastructure and new user systems." That is, in fact, the sort of reasoning I have seen. And certainly in the long run, oil will become more scarce (although enormous r
(re: weather modeling vs climate modeling)
You link does a good job of doing this - they use different timesteps and scales to deal with climate forecasting than to do with weather forecasting.
Which in fact means that they are doing essentially the same as weather forecasting, but just with different parameters. And in fact the techniques discussed in my link *are* what they use in weather forecasting.
Oh really? And why would that be? Since the climate is the time integral of these short term events, and the models are using the same physical laws, the predictions are either going to be parameterized out the kazoo, which certainly affects their credibility, or they should be sensitive to weather issues. Weather makes climate and climate makes weather.
As they say in their experimental strategy, what they are doing is similar to weather forecasting. However, it is not the same. They use longer timesteps for climate forecast, ignoring chaotic features of daily weather. So, the chaos of day-scale weather forecasts is irrelevant, which is what I said.
The chaos is in the system, not the time steps. If one can prove that the longer range mechanisms do not have their own chaos - in the earth system, not the simulation, and also that the models are correct, that would be reasonable. Even if day-to-day chaos is irrelevant (essentially by averaging out), that does not rule out longer scale chaos from longer scale dynamical terms in the overall feedback system.
I did not say this. I did not say that all minority opinions are wrong. I said that minority opinions are generally wrong. Of course, some minority opinions are right, and become the foundation of future theory. But to assume that any minority opinion is worth listening to is just silly.
Although you did not say that, I will agree with what you are now saying about minority opinions. I choose to listen to the minority opinions of the people I mentioned because not only do I know them as human beings, I have had a chance to observe their methods and their level of care and self critique.
I said:There are many other systems involved that are not well understood. If we don't understand these major processes, we cannot model them.
No - we can simply do our best, as in any area of science.
Exactly, and as long as science is what we are doing, that's just fine. But when we are making policy, or popularizing the results of the science, it's a different matter, because "best" may simply not be good enough.
Put another way: science as a process is far different than science as a policy input. The former is normally full of uncertainties, disputes and even refutations of former consensus opinion. The latter is a political and human process which does not well adapt to the uncertainties of some sciences such as climate prediction. And that is my point.
We may have a higher than average probability that anthropogenic effects in global warming are significant (see my own guess to that effect above). But to go the direction Lovelock has gone is to take an uncertainty, perfectly normal in science, and to extrapolate it way beyond reasonableness.
Look - I am not saying you are wildly wrong, or what you are posting is rubbish. What I am saying is that the majority of researchers in the field disagree with you, so I am afraid it makes sense to listen to them and not you. Call it the precautionary principle.
And I am saying that when it comes to policy, listening to "the majority of researchers" on a subject that is very far from settled is, in this case, simply insufficient. And if we had the real researchers on this forum, they could duke it out. But we don't, so we have proxies such as you and me.
As for the precautionary principle... that is one of the most dangerous principles I have ever encountered. The reason is that it is very unbalanced. From a policy making perspective, it tends to be used to take (or certainly to strongly advocate) re
"theoretically" the bandwidth of any signal with a square wave in it is infinite, because the "square" wave has an infinite slope. Whether there is any *useful* energy at the higher frequencies is another matter. If you generate -300 dBm at some frequency, nobody is going to be interested, since it will be way, way, way below thermal noise.
What counts is the real effective bandwith of the system, where it *is* impossible to generate infinite slope signals, and where antennae (or, in a more technical sense, transducers or impedance matchers) are inherently signal selective.
As for iron penetration (why you are hung up on iron, I don't know) is mostly dependent on conduction. Metal attenuation is extremely well understood, and is very, very high until you get to frequencies where you are better off talking about wavelength (i.e. infrared) at which point the attenuation of pulses of the signal is still extremely high, but you can get low attenuation by a very different process: heat conduction. Good luck imaging with that.
You can throw around all the fancy theory you want. As an engineer, I understand real world limitations (and yes, I understand theory two - an engineer is an applied scientist), and UWB, unless you really want to pervert the term, is not going to penetrate metal unless there are holes or bad joints in it (and I am not talking about the space between atoms). If you *are* going to penetrate it for the purposes of doing damage, you won't screw around with some sort of complex analysis of the target via probing pulses, you will simply hit it with very large amounts of metal.
You can forget imaging through metal. It ain't gonna work unless the metal is very thing where the attenuation is reasonable, or the wavelength is down below molecular distances - i.e. extreme-UV (?), X or gamma rays.
To say that Lovelock is 'without post-doc work' is the most supreme nonsense. He has been publishing 'post doctoral' work for decades. He is is a fellow of the Royal Society - one of the most prestigious scientific positions in the world; awarded for contribution science - it is hard to think of any better qualification or evidence of actual scientific work.
In exactly what fields? To say that Chrichton has no experience in science (which I was responding to) is also balderdash.
The resulting quality of science in his books shows he is not well qualified for this.
For his novels, true. For his non-fiction, nonsense.
I'm sure I could find a qualified friend (even a professor) who could back up any point of view I want.
What a coincidence it is then, that of the few climate scientists I know, every one of them is a global warming skeptic! I didn't choose them for their views. I didn't choose them at all.
Single voices in this field don't matter (not even Lovelock's) - what matters is the scientific consensus.
You are absolutely right - FOR GETTING GRANT MONEY AND PUBLICITY.
As has been pointed out on here many, many times, consensus science is not what counts in the long run. What matters in science is theories tested by evidence. Usually the consensus is right, but there are plenty of dramatic counterexamples... in fact, many major paradigm shifts *start* with a minority. Look at ulcer pathogenesis. How about continental drift? Furthermore, on a highly politicized subject, the validity of scientific consensus (in an area where it is very hard to get solid data) is even more questionable. When skeptics had trouble getting money under the Clinton regime, it is not surprising that supporters get the limelight. When supporters get good press because scare stories sell papers and TV, again, people would rather be a supporter than a skeptic. Since the proponents of global warming often claim that skeptics are driven by "corporate" money, they are themselves projecting their own susceptibility to non-scientific influence!
Would you care to point out the evidence that strongly supports anthropogenic global warming. I would be quite amazed if you can use the very short period of time that we have been adding significant amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere to "prove" any sort of trend in a climatic system, much less isolate its cause. The "ice age is coming" scare was only 25 years ago, and scientists then knew with precision the first order albedo effect of CO2 and the fact that the CO2 content of the atmosphere had risen nearly 50%, but they came to a very different conclusion.
As for IPCC quotes on previous high temperatures, again, we are dependent on hard-to-sustain secondary hypotheses about which markers mean what on a global temperature scale. Even today, when we have lots of instrumentation in space and on the ground, there are valid disputes about the accuracy of the temperature data, although we can be pretty sure it is a lot better than data derived by proxy. Remember the fuss about NASA sounding data, and the subtle instrumentation issues that were involved? Does that give you great confidence in our ability to accurate measure temperatures even now?
BTW, are you quoting from the executive summaries or the depths of the IPCC reports?
He may have that opinion. Most don't. What matters in science is majority opinion.
Sounds like science suddenly got democratic. I don't recall that being part of the scientific method. It reminds me of Soviet science, where political pressure caused the rise of Lysenkoism. More specifically, the human dynamics involved in creating majorities in highly political subjects are not the dynamics you want for scientifically determining reality.
We have already warmed way beyond the temperature at the start of the little ice age, and even beyond that of the medieval warm period before that. At current rates the Arctic ice will be gone in a few decades. There has ne
Yep, the earth is warming.
Nope, there is totally inadequate evidence that it is man caused. There is LOTS of phony evidence provided by the media (this Hurricane year was made worse by global warming, for example. It ignores years less than 100 years ago).
If you care, see my other posting tied to the LoveLock subthread for why you shouldn't listen to people who claim to KNOW that man is causing global warming.
As for those who support Kyoto, there are two deadly counter-arguments:
1) By the models used by the Kyoto proponents themselves, Kyoto will not make a *measurable* change in 100 years.
2) There is every reason to believe that no treaty can last 100 years, and that changes in population (such as the demographic disaster facing Europe, Japan and to a lesser extent the US), changes in technology, and the likelihood of major wars is just a start in the issues unconsidered by those so confidently promoting it.
If you don't believe this, just imagine that it is 1905. The west (Europe and the US mostly) control the world. Major warfare is believed to no longer be possible (they believed this up to 2 weeks *after* Archduke Ferdinand was killed). Horse poop is an environmental problem and the use of 25% or so of farmland for horse energy supplies is forecast to grow rapidly. So you set up an international horse poop treaty - to use fewer horses.
Of course, little do you know that during the next 100 years there will be:
1) World War I (destroying all treaty structures in Europe)
2) The Spanish Flu
3) The great depression
4) The great increase in the use of internal combustino driven automobiles and trucks, rendering the problem moot
5) The development of electrical and electronics engineering with dramatic changes in society and lifestyles
6) The defeat of almost all infectious killing diseases except in the thirld world.
7) The rise of international Communism with its complete indifference to environmental issues
8) The rise of Fascism, Naziism, and World War II
9) The end of colonialism
10) The invention of the computer
11) The invention of nuclear power and nuclear weapons
12) The cold war, which over-rode environmental considerations in at least the proxy-war countries
13) well... you get the picture
It is arrogant and hubristic to really expect an international treaty effort like Kyoto to either last long enough to do any good, or to expect that the political and technological future can be well enough predicted to even make the question interesting or tractible.
Check the real credentials here, and the picture isn't as simple.
Lovelock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock#Profes sional_career is also an MD (like Chrichton) but without the post-doc work. MD post-doc work is the actual practice of science.
Lovelock has spent his career inventing instruments (instrumentation, not science - he is a world class inventor in this area) and writing books. His comments referenced above indicate that he is far from science (or using metaphors without identifying them as such) win some of his important statements.
Chrichton has spent his career writing books, some of which have involved a huge amount of in depth research (of the results of other scientists), for which he is well qualified.
So I checked, last week, with a friend who is, in fact, a well regarded climate expert (PhD: Climatology. Current profession: Distinguished Professor, Climatology). I have known him long enough to have watched his views on this subject change from very cautious proponent of the anthropogenic hypothese to a cautious skeptic to a fervent skeptic.
His comments (and those from two other experts I know who are also PhD's with lots of research time in Climatology) - paraphrased:
The science of man-caused (anthropogenic) global warming is junk. The paleoclimatic data is of inadequate quality. Modeling is not reliable (he has done climate modeling and now is doing paleo work).
Everyone agrees that planet is warming - it is recovering from a little ice age a few centuries ago.
The hysteria over anthropogenic global warming is disappointing. So is the scare mongering by some scientists in the field.
Now you probably need to be a climatologist (or have a very, very active interest, lots of time to read lots of papers, and deep knowledge of statistics and some of the methods in the papers) to understand the details of the criticism of paleoclimatology (hint: a couple of significant problems are tiny sample sizes which may show only local conditions, and the necessity of using indirect (proxy) measurements such as tree rings or isotope ratios, which may show an effect other than temperature change).
To understand the problems with modeling is easier, since many of us have experience with computer modeling. I am not an expert on this, but I know a little bit about it. Global Circulation Model users make a large number of assumptions, because the models don't have enough spatial and temporal resolution, and reliable starting data is also too sparse. Thus the modelers have to "parameterize" them, and use sensitivity analyses to get some idea of how good the parameterizations are. Parameterization involves replacing the detailed modeling of things like mountain ranges with a number, or a set of numbers, to account for that range in whatever resolution cells it turns up in. Furthermore, we know that weather is chaotic - hence the GCM's for weather are simply not trustworthy beyond 5 days when one is lucky, and less than a day when one is not. Now extend to 100 years and you get a better idea of the problem. The only hope for GCM's is if climate is not chaotic (the integral of a chaotic function may not be chaotic... I believe) and that the models happen not to be sensitive to the known underlying chaos. Couple to this the lack of an adequate number of years of calibration data (i.e. paleoclimatic data) and you have a model that is:
1) uncalibratable due to the lack of a long enough time series of reliable data (both for climate forcers and actual climate results)
2) of low temporal and spatial resolution compared to some of the processes being modeled (hurricane formation, for example)
3) inadequately initialized (low resolution, data quality, and the need for interpolation)
4) full of guesses in the form of parameterization
5) fighting chaos
6) doing the equivalent of numerical integration, for a very l
I'm not going to waste time trying to debate too much of this, but when you say:
I did not "self-declare" these "enemies", GWB did that on behalf of the entire planet with bothering to ask them
I have to laugh. That statement is very absurd. I didn't self declare the enemies either. THEY did that. They declared war on the west. And the repeat that declaration every once in a while.
As to Guy Faulkes, do you really want to compare the destructive power of that bomb to a small nuke? It's absurd.
Regarding the lack of newness of the threat. You are right in a way - every since nukes were invented, there was the potential that terrorists could use them. But that potential was very low because:L
1) Those who had them wanted and kept extremely tight control over them. Now we are about to have nukes in the hands of a regime whose president "had a green aura" which struck dumb those who listened to him. Dear Leader in North Korea probably had them. These people are crazy enough (unlike the Russians and later the Chinese) that they may very well give (or sell, in the case of the Norks) a bomb or two to terrorists.
2) Those who had them were deterrable - if a nuke went off in DC, it would have triggered nuclear war against the USSR, since they obviously did it. One cannot deter Al Qaeda, and the possible sources for them to get weapons today is much greater. Furthermore, they are willing to use other WMDs even easier to get or make, including bological agents and chemical weapons. They are *not* deterrable.
As for the effectiveness of international law: Is it stopping the Iranians from getting nukes? Did it stop North Korea? Did it prevent *any* terrorist attacks? Did it prevent the AQ Kahn nuclear weapons production and sales network? Did it stop the genocide being committed by Sudan, or the slavery? Did it slow down Al Qaeda in the slightest? Did it keep Saddam Hussein from attacking first Iran, then Kuwait? Did it keep the Palestinians from killing innocent civilians in Israel, or the IRA from doing the same in Britain? Is it worth a popcorn fart?
Your appeal to international law to stop the kind of threat that we have is laughable. My biggest annoyance is that too many people attach magical powers to international law (and the UN for that matter) in spite of compelling evidence to the contrary.
Parinoia and power is a far more dangerous mix than OBL and a suitcase nuke.
Yeah, right. Tell me, is it paranoid to believe that AQ wants to kill you and me, or is it an unpleasant fact? Is it paranoid to believe that if AQ gets a nuke, they will use it in a western city?
Just what "paranoia" are you talking about? The attempt to defend ourselves from a very large movement of people who believe that should either be killed or forced to live in a 9th century barbarism? The fear that perhaps if our skyscrapers were attacked once by those people, with 3000 deaths and a cost of $1 trillian, that it might happen again, and again, or in a much worse form? The declarations of our well funded and widespread enemy that they wish to use WMDs against us? The attempts they have made to do so in Britain and Jordan? Our discovery of the AQ Khan nuclear weapons supermarket?
Many people live in a world that think will just keep on going in the same pleasant way it has been. They natually feel that history is linear, that big changes aren't going to happen in their lifetime. They don't see threats because they don't have the vision to understand that history is replete with sudden changes and huge amounts of violent deaths. Perhaps they are paranoid about lesser dangers (such as US power), causing them to ignore the danger of true malevolence.
I think paranoia is dangerous, all right. I think that those who are paranoid of the US but believe that Al Qaeda is just a few malcontents that can be rounded up and put on trial are dangerous. These people (YOU) fail to understand that the current trend by the Islamofascists resembles more the Mahdi rebell
Regardless of how you describe the generation process, UWB simply means spreading electromagnetic energy over a frequency range greater or much greater than normally used by other forms of modulation.
It is normally done with pulses (not square waves, but very widely separated very narrow pulses), because, as the Fourier transform demonstrates, this produces a very wide spectrum (if you could generate Dirac delta functions, it would be infinetly wide). It is not a matter of "resulting harmonics" - it is a matter of wide bandwith - the narrower the pulse, the greater the bandwidth. This is the classic issue with time domain vs. frequency domain. Certainly the pulse will also have harmonics, and they will also have the bandwidth spreading.
Of course, the spectral density at any particular spot is going to be dependent on all sorts of things - primarily the antenna and the original waveform.
On to shielding. The issue with metallic shielding (and iron is not particularly more interesting than a non-ferrous metal) is that it has extremely high attenuation at all frequencies up to x-rays. There are no magic holes below that frequency. A solid metal box, with metal of a certain conductivity and thickness, will effectively stop almost all EMF that it encounters. At frequencies where UWB or HPM's are going to be used, the metal is *not* modelled as mostly space, because the atom separation is much smaller than the wavelength. Hence the metal is modelled as a conductor (with no finer structure) with a given conductivity and thickness.
But what is your point? You seem to wander off into the stratosphere with your vast computing and your nodes ever meter or so.
If you want to generate high field strengths for weapons purposes, you simply use high power, and a frequency/energy/wavelength which will have enough penetration (small enough attenuation) to do what you want. Furthermore, you may want to choose a frequency (or frequency range if you are playing with UWB) which can slip by shielding but which is not overly attenuated by whatever my be covering the target - such as soil.
In other words, it's a lot simpler than you make out. What counts is not the small scale physics of metal, but the macro behavior, unless you are at x-ray frequencies or above. The best thing to generate is a high powered pulse at microwave frequencies (i.e. it may very well be a number of cycles), not so much due to its frequency spreading effect as its peak power.
Dude, YOU don't know who the VC were!
The VC were *always* commanded by the North Vietnamese. The separation was primarily for political reasons, so the North could maintain the fiction that the war in the south was an indigenous rebellion, which it certainly was not. Giap's biographies verify this. After 1968, with the destruction of the VC in the three offensives (the first and most famous of which was the "Tet Offensive"), the war was almost totally against NVA.
The war in South Vietnam was always against the North. That's why the linch pin was the Ho Chi Minh trail. Asked how the US could have won the war in the South, Giap stated that an invasion of Laos blocking the trail would have been sufficient. Giap also stated that the government of the North was ready to end the war (in the SOUTH) after the Tet defeat, until it saw how that defeat was spun by media in the US as a great victory for the VC. The North then decided to win by psychological warfare using the left in the US, and in fact succeeded in that tactic.
Many of the VC were south Vietnamese. After the Geneva accords, there was a period when people in Vietnam could choose which country they wanted to live in - the Communist dictatorship of the north or the capitalist dictatorship of the south. A large number of people moved. But the remnants of the Viet Minh in the South were ordered to stay in the south to become what was later called the VC.
You may also be interested to know that the PRG (the political arm of the VC) was also commanded, from its formation, by the north. It was created to form an additional communist organization, supposedly representing interests in the south, in the "peace talks."
Both of these organizations were classic "fronts" - they pretended to represent or fight for interests in the nouth, while actually being controlled by the north.
What about Vietnam and Somalia? In Vietnam, we won the war in-country by doing something a little better than what you said: providing safety for civilians, by pacifying large amounts of territory. Civilians rarely want to do anything other than get back to normal life. This was completed by 1972, to the extent that the US ambassador could drive around the country with no escort.
Vietnam was ultimately lost by a failure of will in the United States, and was lost to a massive armored invasion from another country - not to indigenous guerillas. We snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Details (once again) available on request.
Somalia was a case of mission creep (and an Al Qaeda ambush) and loss of will. US forces were introduced by GHWB for one purpose: protecting the distribution of humanitarian aid. Clinton extended the mission to include actively participating in the anarchy by snatching one of the malefaactors. At the same time, the administration refused the on-scene commander's request for adequate technology - M1 tanks as an urban reaction force - one which would have saved most of those lost in "Black Hawk Down." Our subsequent retreat (cited by Al Qaeda as one reason they are ultimately going to win) was simply, again, a loss of will.
The biggest military problem for the US since World War II has been the difficulty of maintaining the will to fight extended wars. Given support from the homeland, the military will eventually win whatever we get into (although they may stumble around a bit through tactics space until they hit the right ones).
We are showing every sign of losing our will again - this time in Iraq. Whether Iraq was the right or wrong war to fight, losing it will have deadly ramifications for our ability to fight Al Qaeda.
I'm going to try to not debate the morality of the current Iraq war... But the contention that we now expect magical technology to win our wars is utter crap. However, we do have technology that we know how to employ very well. When you have good technology, you use it. But we aren't dumb enough to think it is a "magical" solution. America has long been considered one of the best countries at fighting guerilla warfare. Britain and Australia also fit that characterization.
As to technological fixes... you use your strengths, and that is one of ours. The enemy uses theirs - IED technology, terror, and masquerading as civilians in defiance of the laws of war.
Our soldiers have the best body armor in the world. Our precision weapons allowed us to inflict maximum damage Saddam's regime with minimum (historically) collateral damage. They allowed us to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with ground forces consisting of a few hundred special forces members and CIA paramilitary folks, armed with laser designators, GPS's and radios, and importantly, a large force of - you guessed it - friendly (or well paid) guerillas. We have lots of other dramtically superior technology, some of it well suited for guerilla war.
But America is not stupid enough to believe that technology is everything. Ask any marine about how he was trained. As any army grunt. Ask a SEAL or "green beret." We train our professional military very well, and have an tradition of field improvisation (including, during Iraq II, the quick adoption of practice 2000lb bombs - 2000lb of concrete - for destruction of tanks and other vehicles parked too close to civilians).
Iraq is a tough but small war, which we know how to win. The enemy, can only win by defeating our will through propaganda and psy-war tactics that our feckless press and too many political leaders are suckers for.
We have hardly forgotten the lessons for winning guerilla wars. We have fought in and won many guerilla wars over the centuries. I am not aware of any war in which we were defeated by guerillas Since someone will mention it, this includes Vietnam. The "guerillas" (Viet Cong) were utterly defeated and destroyed by the end of 1968 (according to our military and their commander. Giap).
Hey, the PDP-10 was a nice machine. But no way would it fit into a ladies "hambag." A PDP-10 only fit in a room.
Now when I was in the military, our on-board computers were *analog* - servos, gears, integrators, etc. Even so, they managed to keep track of our position within a few miles on a 14 hour flight, and provide a very useful display on the TACCO's console.
Nonsense. "Nothing absorbs at every frequency" is just not true - or certainly not true for the frequency range you are talking about (the attenuation of metal to gamma rays - a very, very, very high frequency - is substantially less than it is to, say, terrahertz).
UWB is just a different form of spread spectrum. In other words, it is EMF generation using electromagnetic radiation across a wide range of wavelengths/frequencies. Furthermjore, it isn't a blast of radiation across "an entire spectrum" (whatever that is - do you mean the entire electromagnetic spectrum - through high energy gamma?). It is a generation of EM radiation across a specific spectrum, normally quite a bit wider than other spread spectrum techniques use. But it might only be, say, across 10 GHz, which looks narrowband at THz frequencies.
Looking through a concrete wall as mentioned in the article works because concrete has far less attenuation than metal. Even if it has rebar in it, most ordinary microwave frequencies will get through with little attenuation. If it had chickenwire (say, for stucco), the wavelength would have to be shorter to image through it. If it was solid metal, dramatically higher transmit power would be required for imaging, since metal has extremely high attenuation (so does salt water, which is why extremely *low* frequencies (100kHz) are used to communicate with submerged submarines.
But trying to look through a metal wall with THz UWB wouldn't work worth a damn even if radiation leaked through some weaknesses. You can't image that way. Likewise, metal in the imaging field could result in dynamic range problems (overload) that might prevent imaging.
Now switch from UWB to terraherz radiation. The two are not the same idea.
Terraherz electromagnetic radiation can get through shielding that would cause much greater attenuation of lower frequencies, just like ordinary microwave can get through a lot of lower grade shielding that's just fine for, say, HF radio. Hence microwave pulse weapons (if they exist) use very high frequencies compared to just about anything else - perhaps even THz range.
The idea of shotgunning in a HPM weapon to find a particular frequency or set of frequencies is not likely to be useful. Just using a very short wavelength is what you want to do (perhaps with some spectrum spreading). While there might be a few odd resonances that shotgunning would find, it really isn't significant.
Oh, so it is the "church wsa increasingly conservative..." that was the problem.
THAT IS COMPLETE NONSENSE>
In the United States, the Catholic Church was becoming more liberal, as the 60's generation rose to positions of power. Today, the Catholic bishops are still far more liberal than the Vatican. If fact, conservative Catholics blame the *liberalization* of the Church for the sexual abuse scandal. One reason was a liberal decision to admist homosexuals to the seminaries. Now, you may find non-politically correct facts hard to digest, or have some psychological need to simply deny them, but the main problem was homosexual priests. Period. It isn't an accident that the vast majority of the cases were male on male, where the victim was adolescent (and btw, often above the age of consent desired by the gay lobby).
That the church also had true pedophiles is also true, and not surprising. Pedophiles (and some homosexuals) seek out and infiltrate organizations that work with children. If you have ever been part of such an organization and had to undergo screenin and the related anti-sexual abuse training, you learn that. It wasn't until the absurd child care pedophile witch hunts that the issue suddenly flipped and went from being a part of the therapy culture to being one of the lawsuit culture (and at least got some of the critical evaluation and press it needed).
That the church fell for the *liberal* doctrine that pedophiles (and people with any other issue) can be cured with *therapy* is also a fact.
Those who remember the past (and are old enough to do so) remember the times when pedophiles were considered to be curable (especially since they were very good at faking a cure), and in fact every problem (except perhaps conservatism) could be cured with a bit of time with some sort of modern therapist. So when you lay this on a "conservative" Catholic church, you are simply demonstrating your ignorance of the issue.
The evidence you cite comes from an apparently left-wing newspaper, consists of a few anecdotes (and btw, the LA diocese is one of the most liberal) and then goes off quoting a lawyer (who has big bucks to make).
Fact: Homosexuals were the abusers in the vast majority of Catholic Church cases (and also the Boy Scouts, which is why the Boy Scouts don't allow homosexuals). All homosexual priests who did this were violating their vows of chastity.
Fact: Too often, but far from always, members of the middle level Church hierarchy either failed to appreciate the depth of the problem, or chose to cover it up. This is certainly wrong.
Fact: The Catholic Church, and in fact all organized Christian religions, are favorite targets of attacks from the modern social left.
Fact: The "pedophilia" scandal, while at times definitely the fault of members of the Cathlic Church, is a gold mine for lawyers.
Fact: Many cases of remembered early childhood sex abuse (i.e. recovered memories) are not real, as has been solidly established in psychological circles.
I'm afraid that a complete relativism, and a retreat to history, fails to convince, and although popular these days, is a complete cop-out and disgustingly cynical. Anyway...
I will lay out the fundamentals of the argument here in its most simple form.
The new and UNIQUE threat is;
1) A very large group of people who are willing to die to kill large numbers of us. We last encountered that in World War II with the Japanese - remember them? But the Japanese never were able to kill as many Americans in America as Al Qaeda did in one attack, and yet we had to use nuclear weapons to end the threat.
COMBINED WITH (for the first time)
2) weapons of *mass* destruction which can be used by one or a small number of individuals to kill thousands to hundreds of thousands of people.
The latter means two things:
A) The threat is much greater because detecting and preventing a massive attack is not always possible
B) When used by non-state groups such as Al Qaeda, Deterrence does not work because they don't care about retaliation, and doing so requires us to kill a very large number of innocent people.
Your relativism or labeling of "good" and "bad" is irrelevant simply because: I don't want *my* family or friends to fall victim to this or its consequences. Unless you are a fool you would agree with that for *your* familiy. And since you and I happen to have the same self-declared enemy, we both face the same threat.
To address the idea that this is police action, not war:
1) A group with strong support from as many people as a decent sized nation has declared a war on us (which means darn near anyone not "them"). They have taken actions consistent with war. Until we invaded Afghanistan, they controlled an entire country and used its assets against us (does *that* sound like war to you)?
2) Their attacks on the West far exceed the damage that "criminal" actions involve, requiring a more extensive defense than police capabiloities can provide. Their potential for vastly more damaging attacks is clear, and their intent is also clear and frequently stated.
3) The brits did not treat the IRA as a war and start bombing the fuck out of N. Ireland, both IRA and Republican terrorist actions were treated as major crimes - The IRA never represented one percent of the threat that Al Qaeda does. They did not have WMDs and would not have used them if they did - because the backlash would have defeated them immediately. The same is true of the Palestinians. But the British did take military action against the IRA, and took "police state" actions within their own country in order to fight the terrorism. That is why Britain already has a huge number of police monitored cameras, which they now plan to greatly increase due to the larger threat of the Islamofascists. Britain also has long had much stronger internal security powers (due to its lack of constitutional rights) than America (can you say MI5? can you say secrecy orders?). Al Qaeda members have been caught (probably using war powers) in Britain working on a potent chemical WMD - ricin.
You are falling into (and loving) the old fashioned view of terrorism: a gang of criminals who can do minimal damage compared to a government. But Al Qaeda, contrary to your assertions, is likely to obtain one important characteristic of superpowerdom: WMDs. They have claimed to desire them, and have taken many steps, by many of their subgroups and their headquarters group, to obtain them. They have tried to use them. It is only a matter of time. If you consider fighting the use of WMDs by a foreign conspiracy and huge cult to be a police matter, you either have vast more faith in the powers of policing than I do, or you live in a country where citizens have far fewer protections, under ordinary criminal law, than in my country.
Al Qaeda and other Islamofascists also have another important characteristic: their goals are much more ambitions than the IRA's - they don't want to control just a few counti
Uh huh.
Sorry, dude, but Republicanism has nothing to do with it and being concerned about the future of my country has a heck of a lot to do with it. If 9-11 had happened in the Hillary administration, I would still be in favor of the government trying to stop the terrorists, even though I trust Bush far more than the Clintons to not abuse the system (based on the history of both administrations).
As to your "how to fix it" - did it ever occur to you that they might, just might not use airplanes next time? That perhaps they will instead take some of that Sarin gas that is in Iraq (remember the IED that turned out to contain Sarin?) and stuff it into the air handling system for *your* office building. Then at least we won't hear you rant about what is, for those who bother to think about thinks, simply friendly fire?
But you will NEVER understand that.
It is clear from your language that you are not a person who pays attention to anything. Have you ever heard of Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS)? It's clear, sadly, that you have a bad case of it.
I won't even bother to refute your points. Your rudeness indicates a closed mind that wouldn't even listen. I see this all too often in Bush haters.