As for your last paragraph, I'd love to see a citation, because of the climate papers I've seen in the last five years, and I've seen a lot, I'd have to say that 99% of them involve the results of computer models, or extrapolations of old data sets. Find a decent research paper on RealClimate that involves something simple, like the influence of aerosol particles on cloud formation written in the last ten years, and I'd be impressed. Find me five, and I'll be shocked. In the meantime, I can show you fifty papers that cite computer models that take the computer prediction over the real world data and proclaim that the real-world is flawed. (Not in so many words, but last year's acredidation as the "hottest in history" required the use of computer simulations of polar temperatures, throwing out the actual satellite measurements that would have moved it down to #10, and that's just off the top of my head, despite it being widely reported with headlines like "Hottest year in four centuries!")
First off, I am not against change. I am against regulating change. In all of human history, no innovation has been mandated ahead of time. This is what I'm against. The insane reactionist movement that believes that if I only regulate that things should be so, they will somehow become so.
On the other hand, history teaches us time and time again, that if we remove the shackles from human ingenuity, then we will discover the solutions we need. If we simply were to allow the market economy to work, then as oil and coal become more expensive (current situation) then innovation (refining oil shale, revolutionary nuclear power plant design, super-efficient LED and compact fluorescent lighting) will take place.
For example, one need only look at the Kyoto signatories. Of all the countries that signed the treaty, only two are in compliance with it. England only squeaked down to a moderate level by switching power plants from coal to natural gas, and Germany by closing some 100 year old Soviet-Era coal plants. France is over 85% nuclear, but still their emissions increased by 8%. Only France, Italy, and the Netherlands had less than the global 16.4% increase in CO2 emissions from 1990 to 2002. Portugal rang the bell with a 59% increase in CO2 emissions. Ultra-Green partied Canada's emissions? Up by 29%.
In fact, one of the countries most compliant with the terms of the Kyoto treaty is -- The United States. Why? Because we never signed on to it. We didn't face onerous regulation that would lead to finding any way to cheat the system. We responded to market pressure to improve our CO2 emissions. All without one government regulation calling for it. http://ronhebron.com/blog/2006/06/europe-kyoto-hyp ocrites.htmlhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8403490/site/newsweek/
I'm all for change, as long as it's not towards a police state. It always amazes me that the party that decries the Patriot Act the loudest for taking away rights, is the same party that wants to regulate all industry in the country. Are you for freedom or against it?
I fail to see what this possibly has to do with your argument. Going from what you're saying, you seem to be implying that any release of CO2 is unacceptable. A more reasonable comparison, using your framework, would be:
This morning I walked out to the ocean and peed in it? Are you pissed?
I could make all the common arguments:
Maybe the ocean tasted like piss before I peed in it. (salt water vs. salt water, check.)
Maybe the pea in the ocean isn't doing any harm. (not in any real sense.)
It would have taken me more energy and to find an appropriate place to piss so it was easiest to piss in your ocean. (if you have to build a new house and sewer system before you can pee, then yes.)
Are you sure I even pissed in your ocean? (It would be very hard to tell.)
Maybe the piss was already there. (Considering that fish also urinate, quite likely.)
You should adapt and learn to enjoy the taste of piss in your ocean. (It has no real effect, and, even if it did, it would be negligible at best, and might actually be helpful, since the minerals in your urine would tend to provide nutrients to the nutrient poor ocean, just as added CO2 in the atmosphere has improved crop yield and tree growth over the last century -- look up CO2 fertilization effect on Google if you're bored.)
Technology will find a way to deal with the piss in your ocean. (Look, we've built sewage treatment plants, because people got sick of pissing in their own drinking water.)
No, the correct response to someone pissing in your ocean is to go swimming, because frankly, you're pissing isn't going to make one bit of difference.
The founder of Greenpeace agrees with me. He wants to go Nuclear. Deal with it. Kyoto called for a 15% reduction in CO2 emissions in 10 years. It takes 30 years just to get through regulatory meetings for a new power plant. And don't build wind farms where they might block Uber-Environmentalist Robert Kennedey's view of the ocean.
I'd be more than happy to unleash technology on the problem of CO2 emissions, but that's not the path that's being taken. Regulation, enforced, unreasonable standards is the rule of the day, and that will have the unintended consequences that I mentioned. Yes, my point is to take the regulation to its extreme, almost laughable, hysterical consequence. I want you to consider what will happen if you give a political group the right to regulate industry for the "good of the planet." Because I can guarantee you they'll use that power for the good of their campaign contributions.
I see lots of economic opportunity, if the industry is unleashed from insane regulation.
CO2 is a horrible greenhouse gas. http://www.icbe.com/emissions/calculate.asp Methane is 21 times more powerful. Some of the other chemicals are thousands of times better greenhouse gases. Secondly, despite the hype, overall, CO2 makes up only 0.5% of the greenhouse effect in the Earth's atmosphere, with assumed human contribution (the total increase from 280ppm to 360ppm) equaling 0.28% of the total "greenhouse effect" of the atmosphere. In fact, most of the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere comes from a far more abundant greenhouse gas, namely, water. http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data. html
Now, your argument has become: a change of 0.28% is responsible for all heat increase over the last century, despite the fact that solar cycles far better follow the actual temperature profile of the same period of time.
So, as I've stated in other responses, you must ignore the fact that (in the article you're commenting on) 800,000 years of data show vast (50%) swings in CO2 concentration without human intervention, but human produced CO2 must be causing the current warming trend of the last three decades/12 decades/future 10 decades (based on your current belief).
And it causes more hurricanes, except for this year, when it causes fewer.
As for your "only a couple of sources of CO2", you need to realize that IPCC themselves recognize over 20 separate CO2 sources and sinks in the climate model, few of which are of a "known" quantity. The carbon cycle is one of the largest and least understood cycles of the atmosphere, simply because it is so complex. http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/439.html
And as for doing this without links, I refuse to do that, since the very next response would be "WHERE'S YOUR CITATIONS, LOSER!"
Besides, the whole article is about how, prior to human influence, the CO2 levels followed climate trends. So are you claiming that prior to the last ice age the neanderthals and cro-magnons were driving SUVs?
We don't know exactly what causes global warming nor what increased CO2 levels do thus we should do whatever is easiest?
To which my response is, "Yes, we don't know what is causing the current warming trend, and isn't it about time we actually spent some of the money we're throwing at 'Global Climate Change' into actually doing research on what drives the atmospheric temperature and determining whether any of over a dozen factors for which we have no data affects global temperatures?"
I am unwilling to shut down half a dozen industries, reduce lifestyles back to the 17th century and potentially kill millions through half a dozen causes that can be avoided by maintaining an oil based economy (think no fertilizers, no shipping, no refrigeration), based on, "Well this *might* be really bad."
Heck, you want to impress me, don't get another 150,000 years of ice core data, just get the last 25 years of tree proxy data and show they match temperature levels. Why is it that a field of science can go to the artic and drill four mile deep ice cores, but they can't go to trees in the back yard and drill a 12" tree core to bring our proxies up to date?
If you are going to claim that as CO2 went up, the climate changed, and vice versa, then you are stating, unequivocally, that CO2 drives climate. So, the question then becomes, if the CO2 varies from 200-300ppm over the last 800,000 years, then what drove those changes?
Once again, this article confuses correlation with causation. If you are going to state that CO2 changes cause climate change, then you must also demonstrate a mechanism for the changing CO2. If, on the other hand, climate change causes changes in CO2 levels, then you need only explain climate change, something which has been adequately explained by solar cycles. http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/vars un.html and http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html
In fact, it's more correctly stated that CO2 levels tend to lag behind climate changes by up to 900 years. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299 /5613/1728 Although the folks at RealClimate like to just sweep this little fact under the carpet as unimportant. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13 To them, apparently, man made CO2 causes instant warming, but natural CO2 takes up to 800 years to have an effect.
Again, be very careful about assigning cause and effect in a system as complex as the atmosphere.
In other words, this extra datum is nice to have, but it changes nothing in any ongoing debate.
You're still in school, a totally different community. In schools (high, college or otherwise) socialization is encouraged, and the ones getting reprimanded are the ones that are "left out", usually the geek squad. In IT it's exactly the opposite. This is a situation where the geeks now run the castle. Social skills are questionable at best, and downright frowned upon at worst. Sexual harrassment laws make certain communication a firing offense, the same kind of communication you probably see in the hallways of any high school between every class. Even everyday communication isn't exactly encouraged. I have been reprimanded by managers several times in my career for being too talkative because I've struck up conversations that run more than two or three minutes. By the same token, I can remember three days in the last month where I've literally sat in my cube all day without a single word of verbal communication for the entire day. That's IT.
And if you make it clear in the workplace that the only reason these baked goods keep showing up is because you have a hobby of baking, that might be a different story. What I was talking about was the people who stop at the store every morning and bring in cookies and park them in their cube. It says, "I just want to socialize with someone, and I'm willing to bribe you with baked goods to do so."
In my opinion, it's simple. The woman has to grow a thick skin. Make it clear that she's not going to go "running to mommy" every time she hears a slightly-blue comment. This is an IT department, these aren't Alan Alda wannabes or handsome studly little brothers of Orlando Bloom (Except for me of course.) Don't expect them to act like that. They are socially juvenile misfits who are more comfortable with inanimate objects than other people. They're going to say things that aren't PC and they've had it repeatedly hammered into their brains that doing that around women is a career burner. Make it clear that you aren't going to berate them if they say something "wrong". If they do say something that offends you, let them know it bugs you in a bad way. Talk to *them* first, not your manager. 99 times out of a hundred, that's all you need to do. Make sure they understand this and they're going to be a lot more welcoming to you in the group.
Now, I'm not a young geek, I'm an old geek, married for 14 years with two kids, so I'm a little more socially adjusted (at least I think so.) So I'll try to give a couple other pieces of advice.
Don't bring cookies. That just screams desperate. We have a divorce' here who always brings (high-end) candies and chocolates, and (at least to me) that screams, "I want attention and I'm willing to buy it with candy." True, it seems to work...
However, the geeks are smart. If you don't want "romantic entaglements" then say it outright, right at the beginning. "I'm not looking for romantic entanglements. I know you guys are all great, but don't ask me out. Not going to happen. That said, if you want to go out for lunch and talk about the latest WoW mod pack or garbage collection schemas in Java, then let's go."
Sorry, but according to the documents I've gotten from my HR department (and I work at a Fortune 100 company), all I have to do is insinuate something, or be felt by the harassee to be insinuating something and I can be called up on sexual harassment charges. And I don't even have to be saying it to the harassee directly. If they overhear a comment that I make, and feel that it "perpetuates a culture of hostility towards them" then I can be called up on harassment.
There's a rather famous case from Milwaukee and Miller Beer, where a worker simply repeated the punch-line to a Seinfeld episode (Her name rhymes with a female body part -- Delores!) and was fired for sexual harrassment.
Don't think for a second that a man is safe from this for any reason.
However, I did work at a place where two of the female workers constantly made comments about the men's "physical attributes" and was told that, "there's nothing we can do about it." When one of the male workers said, "So if she can go around to the men and say 'Nice ass', does that mean I can go to her and say, 'Nice tits?'" He was immediately reprimanded and was forced to go to sensitivity training.
There is a huge double-standard in the workplace today that shows no sign of going away. Until it's done away with, women will find themselves isolated in the workplace. In the end, if women want to be accepted as "one of the guys" then they can't go crying to management every time someone might notice they have bumps in different places.
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Seriously, I thought about posting this anonymously and re-read it three times to make sure I wouldn't endanger my job before sending it.
Maybe this is a bit too low-tech for slashdot, but when cleaning up stacks of empty cd cases, I found that the small white "document storage boxes" that you can get at any office supply store perfectly fit six stacks of CDs in their cases. Just stack the disks into the box, mark them with a "keep until" date and when that rolls around, just toss the whole thing (the boxes only cost about $0.50 each.) Keeps it clean, reduces the time to pull them out of the case, and if you need to recover one, just pull the box that falls into the date range and search that box. Each box holds about 500 discs, so you'd be talking about 60 boxes, which means a decent size file room will store them all.
It's cheap and easy. But probably way too low tech for the slashdot crowd.
Sorry, you can't blame this court for that ruling. The decision that growing a crop in one state for consumption in that state is Interstate commerce can be laid squarely at the feet of FDR and his court in 1942.
Wickard v. Filburn got to the Supreme Court, and in 1942, the justices unanimously ruled against the farmer. The government claimed that if Mr. Filburn grew wheat for his own use, he would not be buying it -- and that affected interstate commerce. It also argued that if the price of wheat rose, which is what the government wanted, Mr. Filburn might be tempted to sell his surplus wheat in the interstate market, thwarting the government's objective. The Supreme Court bought it.http://www.fff.org/freedom/0895g.asp
Sorry, I heard someone address this on the radio at one point (A local commentator actually - Joseph Michelli if I remember right), who went through the Congress and determined that there are 25 congressmen (House and Senate) with children in the millitary, or just shy of 5% of the population of the Congress (25/535).
On the other side, the average volunteerism rate for the U.S. population is about 3%.
So, in fact, the U.S. Congress has a higher rate of military volunteerism than the general public, so your argument falls apart.
Nice try, Mr. AC, but the 2003 Advanced Server was part of my Visual Studio 2003 (.NET) Enterprise Architect bundle. I do consulting work, and I have to have their top of the line compiler. Part of that package is the "Back Office Developer" which includes one complimentary copy of (da-dah) Advanced Server 2003. So thank you and good night, my copy was purchased *directly* from Microsoft as part of my upgrade from Visual Studio 7. My Windows XP Pro is store bought, from Best Buy, no less.
And thank you again, I have called them *three times*. Every time the new WGA comes out, my copies show up as non-genuine. And no, I've never handed them out or given out the keys. The Server has been installed on one machine, one time.
I got it for free as part of my Visual Studio Enterprise Architect package (that I needed for my consulting work.)
I also use it to domain serve for my home network with my wife's machine (used for her teaching job, requires Winders) and my kid's machines (games, enough said) and the windows machine for consulting work.
What about my two perfectly legitimately licensed machines at home that fail the "Windows Genuine Advantage" test every time they update WGA? Considering that one of them is my copy of Advanced Server 2003, I won't be exactly happy when it gets killed this fall. (Hey, I just use it for the mail server program because I can't stand sendmail.)
And I'm just a little bitty guy with one server running. What happens when this hits some company's server farm and they all shut down? How much liability is MicroSoft going to have when that happens?
And every time they "fix" my copy after the new WGA comes out, I have to make manual registry changes. Can you imagine having to do that on a 500 machine server farm?
Great idea MicroSoft, if your product actually worked.
Here's my problem with your statement, you ask me to provide cold hard facts that global warming isn't all it's cracked up to be. Well, I can do that with a dozen studies and web sites http://www.junkscience.com/, http://www.john-daly.com/, http://www.climateaudit.com/ are all quick and easy to pull off the top of my head.
In addition, it's recently been pointed out that there's no Nobel Prize waiting for the person who proves anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a crock, in fact it's like a death knell to your carreer to pursue global warming skepticism, even if you are totally right.
McIntyre and McKittrick, the two people who have (respectively) a PhD in Statistics and PhDs in Math and Geology were told that they had no qualifications to argue the quality of Mann's "Hockey Stick". This work was done by climate change scientists who had degrees in, hmmm, one has a PhD in Math and Geology (Mann) and the other has a degree in Statistics (the et. al. of the report.) McIntyre and McKittrick have received dozens of death threats from the AGW crowd, especially after they proved that Mann's equation would produce a hockey stick, even with totally random data.
The reason gravity, and relativity, and evolution haven't been "shot down" is very simple. They are falsifiable theories. It takes a single fact that lies outside their purview to devastate the theory. Gravity - at least Newton's version - was ruined by the fact that the planet Mercury was in the wrong place. Look up the Planet Vulcan sometime and see why Relativity knocked Newton out of the ballpark.
The current AGW debate is based on two facts. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased by approximately 80PPM over the last 160 years, and during the last 140 years, there's been an increase in temperature of about 0.6 degrees C. However, there's a big caveat in these two pieces of data. It's called "Correlation does not imply causality." It's one of the first things any good statistician should be taught. However, it's plain that the climate scientists decided to jump on the bandwagon and scream "CO2 is wrecking the Earth!".
To "prove" this, they've turned to computer models of the atmosphere. These, they say, prove that global warming is real, yet even they admit that most of their models "go runaway" and have to be thrown out. I'm sorry, but if your model is so fragile that given the same inputs it can "go runaway", then the model isn't accurate. It's equivalent to tossing a coin. It's meaningless. Who decides what is a "runaway result". Climate Prediction even admits that they threw out any run of their model that showed cooling with an increase in CO2.
Even the most powerful simulator in the world, the NEC Earth Simulator, only works on 50 kilometer wide grids. They had never even seen a hurricane on their "simulated Earth" until two years ago, and even then, they didn't call it a hurricane, they called it a "hurricane precursor" known as a "curl" because the simulation wouldn't support the actual hurricane formation and flow. Now, hurricanes are responsible, annually, for 30-40% of the rainfall in portions of the Southern United States. Their model admittedly doesn't handle this, those areas never receive that rainfall, and precipitation is responsible for a large amount of ground-cooling in models, as well as hundreds of other effects that simply aren't modeled. And that's just one of a dozen things I could list that are wrong with computer models. I've had this argument before. (And it's dropped off my lis
You're missing the point. The list on Wikipedia is not definitive. What it is showing is that there are 12 vocal opponents or skeptics that people feel it is worthwhile to mention. My point is that your original post seems to claim that these twelve are the only human beings on the planet with a scientific background who are skeptical of "Global Warming". That was the "Alien Paradox" or "Fermi Paradox" that I was talking about. It's a logical falacy and makes the rest of your point and your argument meaningless. To argue, you have to accept your premise that there is not a single, scientifically minded human being who disagrees with anthropogenic global warming.
That's just not true.
The head of the National Weather Service here in Boulder, Colorado has huge issues with the Global Warming crowd on the simple basis that all warming models show heating at the poles. If that's the case, then the temperature differential between the poles and the equator gets smaller, and weather gets milder, as all weather on Earth is driven by the movement to equalize hot and cold air masses. In fact, satellite data shows the poles are getting colder, and this agrees with the more violent weather we've seen lately.
He's not the only one. In fact, back in 2001, some 18,000 scientists signed a petition against global warming, including some 2,000+ climate scientists. On the other side, less than 50 climate scientists sided with the IPCC 2000 report.
But that doesn't matter. You see, science is not about consensus. It's about facts. When Albert Einstein was aked what he thought about the book "100 Scientists Prove Einstein Wrong" he just looked at the reporter and said, "One. It takes One."
Your argument suffers from the "Alien Paradox". Namely you claim there are only 12 climate skeptics because of something you read on Wikipedia. This is like stating that there are no aliens, because none have ever joined you for dinner.
I can make the same claim by saying that no climate scientist who agrees with global warming has ever joined me for dinner, therefore, no global warming climate scientists exist.
You then ask for reliable sources after citing Wikipedia. Now I can jump over there right now and change it to read that there are 12,000,000 skeptics. By your accounting, my argument has just become strong. However, you do not cite a reliable source, and therefore your whole argument is moot.
I believe it was Einstein, when confronted by a reporter asking, "Have you seen the new book 100 Scientists Prove Einstein Wrong?", who looked at the reporter and answered.
"One, it takes One."
"Scientific Consensus" is the most dangerous phrase in the world. Science doesn't work by consensus, or the Earth would be flat, the Sun would go around us, and the planets would be suspended in crystal spheres.
Congratulations, you've found the first (of many) issues with this article. The "group of climate scientists" apparently (from the article) didn't do any new research, they simply agreed with the "Hockey Stick" from Mann's group.
The problem is that any and all temperatures taken before 1860 (with a few isolated exceptions) come from things called "temperature proxies". The most common of these, and the ones that the "Hockey Stick" are based on, are tree-rings.
The theory of using tree rings goes like this: If the weather is warmer during a certain year, then the ring is wider. If it's colder, then the ring is more narrow. From a naive point of view, this seems valid. But there's quite a few problems with this.
First, at the very best, a tree ring is a measure of growth from spring through summer. Trees stop growing in the fall and don't grow during the winter, so the tree ring proxy is, at best, a measure of half the year.
Second, tree rings are not a 1:1 correlation with temperature. They are also affected by dozens of other factors, such as precipitation, nutrient availability, insect infestation, and, yes, CO2 levels in the air (since trees require CO2 for transpiration, the lower the CO2, the poorer the growth. Do you already see a dishonesty factor built in here?)
Third, there aren't a lot of trees that grow past a couple of hundred years, so you become extremely limited in your data sets, the further back you go.
Fourth, the trees that tend to live the longest, tend to grow in micro-climates. The Redwoods, the sequoias, the bristlecone pines, all live in very specific micro-climates that don't necessarily reflect the larger climate environment. Because these trees represent the only proxies for date ranges, the data can be skewed.
Fifth, there is no simple linear scale for tree ring growth. It's more of a curve, with the ideal temperature at the widest, and then hotter or colder being thinner, with no way to tell the difference. In most of the proxy studies, the numbers have "erred" towards the higher temperature, *if* they even take this non-linear scale into account.
Finally, there's downright dishonesty on the part of the researcher when picking data. Mann fought for over 8 years to keep from revealing the data he used to produce the hockey stick even though his research was funded with a government grant. Why? It turns out that for the entire 1500's (1501-1598) he used a single North-American Bristlecone Pine located at over 10,000 feet of altitude as the sole source of data for that century, a century which all other proxies pointed to as being much, much warmer then this single Bristlecone Pine points at. His "cherry picking" of the data represents a major flaw in his research, yet this group of "scientists" have backed up his results.
The congressman who commissioned this study (and he's a RINO if there ever was one) responded to the "attack" on Mann by Joe Barton (R-TX) who wanted Mann to publish his data and methods for deriving the "Hockey Stick". What an attack. Mann was only violating the terms under which he received his research grants by not publishing his data and methods. So, we have one congressman complaining that this "scientist" didn't follow the rules of government research grants, and another attacking the first congressman for daring to question this scientist.
This is just another recycling of the "Hockey Stick". Blah.
Nah, the graphics card is a 160 GPU SLI Nvidia 7900 processor with 320GB of memory layered into the CPU. Only the DVI interface exits the chip. Does 10,000 x 10,000 graphics with HDRI and 8x antialising at 150 fps.
Slashdot Mirror
As for your last paragraph, I'd love to see a citation, because of the climate papers I've seen in the last five years, and I've seen a lot, I'd have to say that 99% of them involve the results of computer models, or extrapolations of old data sets. Find a decent research paper on RealClimate that involves something simple, like the influence of aerosol particles on cloud formation written in the last ten years, and I'd be impressed. Find me five, and I'll be shocked. In the meantime, I can show you fifty papers that cite computer models that take the computer prediction over the real world data and proclaim that the real-world is flawed. (Not in so many words, but last year's acredidation as the "hottest in history" required the use of computer simulations of polar temperatures, throwing out the actual satellite measurements that would have moved it down to #10, and that's just off the top of my head, despite it being widely reported with headlines like "Hottest year in four centuries!")
First off, I am not against change. I am against regulating change. In all of human history, no innovation has been mandated ahead of time. This is what I'm against. The insane reactionist movement that believes that if I only regulate that things should be so, they will somehow become so.
p ocrites.html http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8403490/site/newsweek/
On the other hand, history teaches us time and time again, that if we remove the shackles from human ingenuity, then we will discover the solutions we need. If we simply were to allow the market economy to work, then as oil and coal become more expensive (current situation) then innovation (refining oil shale, revolutionary nuclear power plant design, super-efficient LED and compact fluorescent lighting) will take place.
For example, one need only look at the Kyoto signatories. Of all the countries that signed the treaty, only two are in compliance with it. England only squeaked down to a moderate level by switching power plants from coal to natural gas, and Germany by closing some 100 year old Soviet-Era coal plants. France is over 85% nuclear, but still their emissions increased by 8%. Only France, Italy, and the Netherlands had less than the global 16.4% increase in CO2 emissions from 1990 to 2002. Portugal rang the bell with a 59% increase in CO2 emissions. Ultra-Green partied Canada's emissions? Up by 29%.
In fact, one of the countries most compliant with the terms of the Kyoto treaty is -- The United States. Why? Because we never signed on to it. We didn't face onerous regulation that would lead to finding any way to cheat the system. We responded to market pressure to improve our CO2 emissions. All without one government regulation calling for it. http://ronhebron.com/blog/2006/06/europe-kyoto-hy
I'm all for change, as long as it's not towards a police state. It always amazes me that the party that decries the Patriot Act the loudest for taking away rights, is the same party that wants to regulate all industry in the country. Are you for freedom or against it?
I fail to see what this possibly has to do with your argument. Going from what you're saying, you seem to be implying that any release of CO2 is unacceptable. A more reasonable comparison, using your framework, would be:
This morning I walked out to the ocean and peed in it? Are you pissed?
I could make all the common arguments:
Maybe the ocean tasted like piss before I peed in it. (salt water vs. salt water, check.)
Maybe the pea in the ocean isn't doing any harm. (not in any real sense.)
It would have taken me more energy and to find an appropriate place to piss so it was easiest to piss in your ocean. (if you have to build a new house and sewer system before you can pee, then yes.)
Are you sure I even pissed in your ocean? (It would be very hard to tell.)
Maybe the piss was already there. (Considering that fish also urinate, quite likely.)
You should adapt and learn to enjoy the taste of piss in your ocean. (It has no real effect, and, even if it did, it would be negligible at best, and might actually be helpful, since the minerals in your urine would tend to provide nutrients to the nutrient poor ocean, just as added CO2 in the atmosphere has improved crop yield and tree growth over the last century -- look up CO2 fertilization effect on Google if you're bored.)
Technology will find a way to deal with the piss in your ocean. (Look, we've built sewage treatment plants, because people got sick of pissing in their own drinking water.)
No, the correct response to someone pissing in your ocean is to go swimming, because frankly, you're pissing isn't going to make one bit of difference.
Only when you don't know that the mass of the atmospehre is measured in *QUINTILLIONS* of tons.
The founder of Greenpeace agrees with me. He wants to go Nuclear. Deal with it. Kyoto called for a 15% reduction in CO2 emissions in 10 years. It takes 30 years just to get through regulatory meetings for a new power plant. And don't build wind farms where they might block Uber-Environmentalist Robert Kennedey's view of the ocean.
I'd be more than happy to unleash technology on the problem of CO2 emissions, but that's not the path that's being taken. Regulation, enforced, unreasonable standards is the rule of the day, and that will have the unintended consequences that I mentioned. Yes, my point is to take the regulation to its extreme, almost laughable, hysterical consequence. I want you to consider what will happen if you give a political group the right to regulate industry for the "good of the planet." Because I can guarantee you they'll use that power for the good of their campaign contributions.
I see lots of economic opportunity, if the industry is unleashed from insane regulation.
CO2 is a horrible greenhouse gas. http://www.icbe.com/emissions/calculate.asp Methane is 21 times more powerful. Some of the other chemicals are thousands of times better greenhouse gases. Secondly, despite the hype, overall, CO2 makes up only 0.5% of the greenhouse effect in the Earth's atmosphere, with assumed human contribution (the total increase from 280ppm to 360ppm) equaling 0.28% of the total "greenhouse effect" of the atmosphere. In fact, most of the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere comes from a far more abundant greenhouse gas, namely, water. http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data. html
Now, your argument has become: a change of 0.28% is responsible for all heat increase over the last century, despite the fact that solar cycles far better follow the actual temperature profile of the same period of time.
So, as I've stated in other responses, you must ignore the fact that (in the article you're commenting on) 800,000 years of data show vast (50%) swings in CO2 concentration without human intervention, but human produced CO2 must be causing the current warming trend of the last three decades/12 decades/future 10 decades (based on your current belief).
And it causes more hurricanes, except for this year, when it causes fewer.
Permafrost layers have been shown to release tremendous amounts of captive CO2 when melted. http://www.spacedaily.com/news/greenhouse-04d.html
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As for your "only a couple of sources of CO2", you need to realize that IPCC themselves recognize over 20 separate CO2 sources and sinks in the climate model, few of which are of a "known" quantity. The carbon cycle is one of the largest and least understood cycles of the atmosphere, simply because it is so complex. http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/439.htm
And as for doing this without links, I refuse to do that, since the very next response would be "WHERE'S YOUR CITATIONS, LOSER!"
Besides, the whole article is about how, prior to human influence, the CO2 levels followed climate trends. So are you claiming that prior to the last ice age the neanderthals and cro-magnons were driving SUVs?
We don't know exactly what causes global warming nor what increased CO2 levels do thus we should do whatever is easiest?
To which my response is, "Yes, we don't know what is causing the current warming trend, and isn't it about time we actually spent some of the money we're throwing at 'Global Climate Change' into actually doing research on what drives the atmospheric temperature and determining whether any of over a dozen factors for which we have no data affects global temperatures?"
I am unwilling to shut down half a dozen industries, reduce lifestyles back to the 17th century and potentially kill millions through half a dozen causes that can be avoided by maintaining an oil based economy (think no fertilizers, no shipping, no refrigeration), based on, "Well this *might* be really bad."
Heck, you want to impress me, don't get another 150,000 years of ice core data, just get the last 25 years of tree proxy data and show they match temperature levels. Why is it that a field of science can go to the artic and drill four mile deep ice cores, but they can't go to trees in the back yard and drill a 12" tree core to bring our proxies up to date?
If you are going to claim that as CO2 went up, the climate changed, and vice versa, then you are stating, unequivocally, that CO2 drives climate. So, the question then becomes, if the CO2 varies from 200-300ppm over the last 800,000 years, then what drove those changes?
s un.html and http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html
9 /5613/1728 Although the folks at RealClimate like to just sweep this little fact under the carpet as unimportant. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13 To them, apparently, man made CO2 causes instant warming, but natural CO2 takes up to 800 years to have an effect.
Once again, this article confuses correlation with causation. If you are going to state that CO2 changes cause climate change, then you must also demonstrate a mechanism for the changing CO2. If, on the other hand, climate change causes changes in CO2 levels, then you need only explain climate change, something which has been adequately explained by solar cycles. http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/var
In fact, it's more correctly stated that CO2 levels tend to lag behind climate changes by up to 900 years. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/29
Again, be very careful about assigning cause and effect in a system as complex as the atmosphere.
In other words, this extra datum is nice to have, but it changes nothing in any ongoing debate.
You're still in school, a totally different community. In schools (high, college or otherwise) socialization is encouraged, and the ones getting reprimanded are the ones that are "left out", usually the geek squad. In IT it's exactly the opposite. This is a situation where the geeks now run the castle. Social skills are questionable at best, and downright frowned upon at worst. Sexual harrassment laws make certain communication a firing offense, the same kind of communication you probably see in the hallways of any high school between every class. Even everyday communication isn't exactly encouraged. I have been reprimanded by managers several times in my career for being too talkative because I've struck up conversations that run more than two or three minutes. By the same token, I can remember three days in the last month where I've literally sat in my cube all day without a single word of verbal communication for the entire day. That's IT.
And if you make it clear in the workplace that the only reason these baked goods keep showing up is because you have a hobby of baking, that might be a different story. What I was talking about was the people who stop at the store every morning and bring in cookies and park them in their cube. It says, "I just want to socialize with someone, and I'm willing to bribe you with baked goods to do so."
In my opinion, it's simple. The woman has to grow a thick skin. Make it clear that she's not going to go "running to mommy" every time she hears a slightly-blue comment. This is an IT department, these aren't Alan Alda wannabes or handsome studly little brothers of Orlando Bloom (Except for me of course.) Don't expect them to act like that. They are socially juvenile misfits who are more comfortable with inanimate objects than other people. They're going to say things that aren't PC and they've had it repeatedly hammered into their brains that doing that around women is a career burner. Make it clear that you aren't going to berate them if they say something "wrong". If they do say something that offends you, let them know it bugs you in a bad way. Talk to *them* first, not your manager. 99 times out of a hundred, that's all you need to do. Make sure they understand this and they're going to be a lot more welcoming to you in the group.
Now, I'm not a young geek, I'm an old geek, married for 14 years with two kids, so I'm a little more socially adjusted (at least I think so.) So I'll try to give a couple other pieces of advice.
Don't bring cookies. That just screams desperate. We have a divorce' here who always brings (high-end) candies and chocolates, and (at least to me) that screams, "I want attention and I'm willing to buy it with candy." True, it seems to work...
However, the geeks are smart. If you don't want "romantic entaglements" then say it outright, right at the beginning. "I'm not looking for romantic entanglements. I know you guys are all great, but don't ask me out. Not going to happen. That said, if you want to go out for lunch and talk about the latest WoW mod pack or garbage collection schemas in Java, then let's go."
Sorry, but according to the documents I've gotten from my HR department (and I work at a Fortune 100 company), all I have to do is insinuate something, or be felt by the harassee to be insinuating something and I can be called up on sexual harassment charges. And I don't even have to be saying it to the harassee directly. If they overhear a comment that I make, and feel that it "perpetuates a culture of hostility towards them" then I can be called up on harassment.
There's a rather famous case from Milwaukee and Miller Beer, where a worker simply repeated the punch-line to a Seinfeld episode (Her name rhymes with a female body part -- Delores!) and was fired for sexual harrassment.
Don't think for a second that a man is safe from this for any reason.
However, I did work at a place where two of the female workers constantly made comments about the men's "physical attributes" and was told that, "there's nothing we can do about it." When one of the male workers said, "So if she can go around to the men and say 'Nice ass', does that mean I can go to her and say, 'Nice tits?'" He was immediately reprimanded and was forced to go to sensitivity training.
There is a huge double-standard in the workplace today that shows no sign of going away. Until it's done away with, women will find themselves isolated in the workplace. In the end, if women want to be accepted as "one of the guys" then they can't go crying to management every time someone might notice they have bumps in different places.
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Seriously, I thought about posting this anonymously and re-read it three times to make sure I wouldn't endanger my job before sending it.
Maybe this is a bit too low-tech for slashdot, but when cleaning up stacks of empty cd cases, I found that the small white "document storage boxes" that you can get at any office supply store perfectly fit six stacks of CDs in their cases. Just stack the disks into the box, mark them with a "keep until" date and when that rolls around, just toss the whole thing (the boxes only cost about $0.50 each.) Keeps it clean, reduces the time to pull them out of the case, and if you need to recover one, just pull the box that falls into the date range and search that box. Each box holds about 500 discs, so you'd be talking about 60 boxes, which means a decent size file room will store them all.
It's cheap and easy. But probably way too low tech for the slashdot crowd.
Sorry, you can't blame this court for that ruling. The decision that growing a crop in one state for consumption in that state is Interstate commerce can be laid squarely at the feet of FDR and his court in 1942.
Wickard v. Filburn got to the Supreme Court, and in 1942, the justices unanimously ruled against the farmer. The government claimed that if Mr. Filburn grew wheat for his own use, he would not be buying it -- and that affected interstate commerce. It also argued that if the price of wheat rose, which is what the government wanted, Mr. Filburn might be tempted to sell his surplus wheat in the interstate market, thwarting the government's objective. The Supreme Court bought it. http://www.fff.org/freedom/0895g.asp
Sorry, I heard someone address this on the radio at one point (A local commentator actually - Joseph Michelli if I remember right), who went through the Congress and determined that there are 25 congressmen (House and Senate) with children in the millitary, or just shy of 5% of the population of the Congress (25/535).
On the other side, the average volunteerism rate for the U.S. population is about 3%.
So, in fact, the U.S. Congress has a higher rate of military volunteerism than the general public, so your argument falls apart.
Nice try, Mr. AC, but the 2003 Advanced Server was part of my Visual Studio 2003 (.NET) Enterprise Architect bundle. I do consulting work, and I have to have their top of the line compiler. Part of that package is the "Back Office Developer" which includes one complimentary copy of (da-dah) Advanced Server 2003. So thank you and good night, my copy was purchased *directly* from Microsoft as part of my upgrade from Visual Studio 7. My Windows XP Pro is store bought, from Best Buy, no less.
And thank you again, I have called them *three times*. Every time the new WGA comes out, my copies show up as non-genuine. And no, I've never handed them out or given out the keys. The Server has been installed on one machine, one time.
I got it for free as part of my Visual Studio Enterprise Architect package (that I needed for my consulting work.)
I also use it to domain serve for my home network with my wife's machine (used for her teaching job, requires Winders) and my kid's machines (games, enough said) and the windows machine for consulting work.
What about my two perfectly legitimately licensed machines at home that fail the "Windows Genuine Advantage" test every time they update WGA? Considering that one of them is my copy of Advanced Server 2003, I won't be exactly happy when it gets killed this fall. (Hey, I just use it for the mail server program because I can't stand sendmail.)
And I'm just a little bitty guy with one server running. What happens when this hits some company's server farm and they all shut down? How much liability is MicroSoft going to have when that happens?
And every time they "fix" my copy after the new WGA comes out, I have to make manual registry changes. Can you imagine having to do that on a 500 machine server farm?
Great idea MicroSoft, if your product actually worked.
"This giant mirror will block out 30% of the sun's rays, thus cooling the Earth."
"Wormstrom!"
Here's my problem with your statement, you ask me to provide cold hard facts that global warming isn't all it's cracked up to be. Well, I can do that with a dozen studies and web sites http://www.junkscience.com/, http://www.john-daly.com/, http://www.climateaudit.com/ are all quick and easy to pull off the top of my head.
In addition, it's recently been pointed out that there's no Nobel Prize waiting for the person who proves anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a crock, in fact it's like a death knell to your carreer to pursue global warming skepticism, even if you are totally right.
McIntyre and McKittrick, the two people who have (respectively) a PhD in Statistics and PhDs in Math and Geology were told that they had no qualifications to argue the quality of Mann's "Hockey Stick". This work was done by climate change scientists who had degrees in, hmmm, one has a PhD in Math and Geology (Mann) and the other has a degree in Statistics (the et. al. of the report.) McIntyre and McKittrick have received dozens of death threats from the AGW crowd, especially after they proved that Mann's equation would produce a hockey stick, even with totally random data.
The reason gravity, and relativity, and evolution haven't been "shot down" is very simple. They are falsifiable theories. It takes a single fact that lies outside their purview to devastate the theory. Gravity - at least Newton's version - was ruined by the fact that the planet Mercury was in the wrong place. Look up the Planet Vulcan sometime and see why Relativity knocked Newton out of the ballpark.
The current AGW debate is based on two facts. CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased by approximately 80PPM over the last 160 years, and during the last 140 years, there's been an increase in temperature of about 0.6 degrees C. However, there's a big caveat in these two pieces of data. It's called "Correlation does not imply causality." It's one of the first things any good statistician should be taught. However, it's plain that the climate scientists decided to jump on the bandwagon and scream "CO2 is wrecking the Earth!".
To "prove" this, they've turned to computer models of the atmosphere. These, they say, prove that global warming is real, yet even they admit that most of their models "go runaway" and have to be thrown out. I'm sorry, but if your model is so fragile that given the same inputs it can "go runaway", then the model isn't accurate. It's equivalent to tossing a coin. It's meaningless. Who decides what is a "runaway result". Climate Prediction even admits that they threw out any run of their model that showed cooling with an increase in CO2.
Even the most powerful simulator in the world, the NEC Earth Simulator, only works on 50 kilometer wide grids. They had never even seen a hurricane on their "simulated Earth" until two years ago, and even then, they didn't call it a hurricane, they called it a "hurricane precursor" known as a "curl" because the simulation wouldn't support the actual hurricane formation and flow. Now, hurricanes are responsible, annually, for 30-40% of the rainfall in portions of the Southern United States. Their model admittedly doesn't handle this, those areas never receive that rainfall, and precipitation is responsible for a large amount of ground-cooling in models, as well as hundreds of other effects that simply aren't modeled. And that's just one of a dozen things I could list that are wrong with computer models. I've had this argument before. (And it's dropped off my lis
You're missing the point. The list on Wikipedia is not definitive. What it is showing is that there are 12 vocal opponents or skeptics that people feel it is worthwhile to mention. My point is that your original post seems to claim that these twelve are the only human beings on the planet with a scientific background who are skeptical of "Global Warming". That was the "Alien Paradox" or "Fermi Paradox" that I was talking about. It's a logical falacy and makes the rest of your point and your argument meaningless. To argue, you have to accept your premise that there is not a single, scientifically minded human being who disagrees with anthropogenic global warming.
That's just not true.
The head of the National Weather Service here in Boulder, Colorado has huge issues with the Global Warming crowd on the simple basis that all warming models show heating at the poles. If that's the case, then the temperature differential between the poles and the equator gets smaller, and weather gets milder, as all weather on Earth is driven by the movement to equalize hot and cold air masses. In fact, satellite data shows the poles are getting colder, and this agrees with the more violent weather we've seen lately.
He's not the only one. In fact, back in 2001, some 18,000 scientists signed a petition against global warming, including some 2,000+ climate scientists. On the other side, less than 50 climate scientists sided with the IPCC 2000 report.
But that doesn't matter. You see, science is not about consensus. It's about facts. When Albert Einstein was aked what he thought about the book "100 Scientists Prove Einstein Wrong" he just looked at the reporter and said, "One. It takes One."
Your argument suffers from the "Alien Paradox". Namely you claim there are only 12 climate skeptics because of something you read on Wikipedia. This is like stating that there are no aliens, because none have ever joined you for dinner.
I can make the same claim by saying that no climate scientist who agrees with global warming has ever joined me for dinner, therefore, no global warming climate scientists exist.
You then ask for reliable sources after citing Wikipedia. Now I can jump over there right now and change it to read that there are 12,000,000 skeptics. By your accounting, my argument has just become strong. However, you do not cite a reliable source, and therefore your whole argument is moot.
I believe it was Einstein, when confronted by a reporter asking, "Have you seen the new book 100 Scientists Prove Einstein Wrong ?", who looked at the reporter and answered.
"One, it takes One."
"Scientific Consensus" is the most dangerous phrase in the world. Science doesn't work by consensus, or the Earth would be flat, the Sun would go around us, and the planets would be suspended in crystal spheres.
Congratulations, you've found the first (of many) issues with this article. The "group of climate scientists" apparently (from the article) didn't do any new research, they simply agreed with the "Hockey Stick" from Mann's group.
The problem is that any and all temperatures taken before 1860 (with a few isolated exceptions) come from things called "temperature proxies". The most common of these, and the ones that the "Hockey Stick" are based on, are tree-rings.
The theory of using tree rings goes like this: If the weather is warmer during a certain year, then the ring is wider. If it's colder, then the ring is more narrow. From a naive point of view, this seems valid. But there's quite a few problems with this.
First, at the very best, a tree ring is a measure of growth from spring through summer. Trees stop growing in the fall and don't grow during the winter, so the tree ring proxy is, at best, a measure of half the year.
Second, tree rings are not a 1:1 correlation with temperature. They are also affected by dozens of other factors, such as precipitation, nutrient availability, insect infestation, and, yes, CO2 levels in the air (since trees require CO2 for transpiration, the lower the CO2, the poorer the growth. Do you already see a dishonesty factor built in here?)
Third, there aren't a lot of trees that grow past a couple of hundred years, so you become extremely limited in your data sets, the further back you go.
Fourth, the trees that tend to live the longest, tend to grow in micro-climates. The Redwoods, the sequoias, the bristlecone pines, all live in very specific micro-climates that don't necessarily reflect the larger climate environment. Because these trees represent the only proxies for date ranges, the data can be skewed.
Fifth, there is no simple linear scale for tree ring growth. It's more of a curve, with the ideal temperature at the widest, and then hotter or colder being thinner, with no way to tell the difference. In most of the proxy studies, the numbers have "erred" towards the higher temperature, *if* they even take this non-linear scale into account.
Finally, there's downright dishonesty on the part of the researcher when picking data. Mann fought for over 8 years to keep from revealing the data he used to produce the hockey stick even though his research was funded with a government grant. Why? It turns out that for the entire 1500's (1501-1598) he used a single North-American Bristlecone Pine located at over 10,000 feet of altitude as the sole source of data for that century, a century which all other proxies pointed to as being much, much warmer then this single Bristlecone Pine points at. His "cherry picking" of the data represents a major flaw in his research, yet this group of "scientists" have backed up his results.
The congressman who commissioned this study (and he's a RINO if there ever was one) responded to the "attack" on Mann by Joe Barton (R-TX) who wanted Mann to publish his data and methods for deriving the "Hockey Stick". What an attack. Mann was only violating the terms under which he received his research grants by not publishing his data and methods. So, we have one congressman complaining that this "scientist" didn't follow the rules of government research grants, and another attacking the first congressman for daring to question this scientist.
This is just another recycling of the "Hockey Stick". Blah.
Nah, the graphics card is a 160 GPU SLI Nvidia 7900 processor with 320GB of memory layered into the CPU. Only the DVI interface exits the chip. Does 10,000 x 10,000 graphics with HDRI and 8x antialising at 150 fps.