Even assuming I wanted to explain these items, it would only be to point out the following:
i) Rossby waves are soliton waves at the first thermocline layer of the ocean.These are not modeled in the "Slab" model of the ocean used by most of the current climate models, including climateprediction.org. ii) Deep water is formed by the concentration of salinity in evaporation fields and the cooling of the water causing increased water density and the sustained downflow of water. Most famous example: the North Atlantic evaporative zone driving the Gulf Stream current. Also not modeled in the "slab" model of the ocean used in most climate models. Additionally, not modeled in the SEAM climate model (considered the most advanced model in use) used by the NEC Earth Simulator in Japan because their use of the Euler equations do not solve for density, only pressure. iii) Western Boundary currents are a localized variation of the Deep Water formation creating local fast-moving cyclic currents. The EAC made famous by Finding Nemo is a good example.Need I say it? Not modeled by the "slab" ocean model or SEAM. iv) Meddies are outbound eddies (think underwater vortexes) of highly saline (and often highly polluted) water that drains from the mediteranean and sinks into the Atlantic, meandering whole underwater until they disappate, often very distant from the Med.Once again, not modeled by the Slab model of the ocean, and it's doubtful that any model calculates precipative flow into the Med Basin to cause water drainage to the Atlantic. (Although I can't find any evidence either way on that one.) v) the pycnocline is a water exchange between two normally separate bodies of water, usually caused by opposing flows creating vortex boundaries between them, e.g. the North Atlantic Current and the North Atlantic Counter-current.Guess what? Not modeled in the "Slab" model of the ocean.
Finally, so what? These are all oceanic effects, the least understood part of the climate engine. If your intent was to point out that the models in use don't even model this rather big part of the climate accurately, well then, congratulations. And, if you'r going to argue back with me, then to prove your worth, I need you to define the following issues with the climate models in use.
i) orographic cooling vs. gravity waves
ii) topographical modeling vs. the "pool ball" model of the earth.
iii) Bathyscape vs. slab model of the ocean
iv) Euler equations solved for only pressure (SEAM) vs. solving for pressure and density.
v) Vegetative covering and seasons vs. fixed albedo calculations.
vi) Tidal motion vs. tide-free models.
vii) ground types, precipitative flow models and flow basins.
viii) Emissive sources vs. instant, even distribution of gas emissions.
I could keep going, but just that short list should show you just how poor current computer models are.
Somehow I don't think this is what I had in mind when I made the comparison... Realize that in your comparison the collapse of the motor's field converts it from a motor to a generator, thus you haven't actually "turned off the switch." A better argument would be that as I turned off the switch, resistance becomes infinite, and since we know that E=IR, as R goes infinite, so must E (voltage), thus running infinite voltage through the bulb and vaporizing it. (In reality of course, R just becomes very large while I [amperage] drops to zero and any big number times zero is still...zero. That's why lights rarely blow up with accompanying thunderbolt when the switch is turned off.)
Of course, now this whole discussion is just in the realm of "silly".
Intersting that for all your knowledge of the pressure of a PBMR, you assume (completely incorrectly) that the primary coolant loop is used to turn the generators. There is no reactor design that I know of where this is true. The primary loop carries radiation, and the idea of pumping radioactive material through a turbine from high to low pressure (because that's how turbines work after all) would mean all of the equipment in the generator house would quickly become radioactive. Not very conducive to generator maintenence.
On the other hand, in the real world, the heated primary loop runs to a heat exchanger where it heats the secondary loop, usually water from a river or lake, that is flashed to steam, run through the turbine and then used to pre-heat the incoming water in those big concrete cooling towers that everyone associates with nuclear reactors (even though most coal and gas fired plants have them as well.) The water is then either recycled (rare) or returned to the water source (river or lake) at slightly elevated temperatures. This means that the secondary loop is only "exposed" to a minor dose of radiation (through radiation leakage through the heat exchanger) before it is dumped. The overall radiation level is usually barely higher than background on release of the secondary coolant.
Thus, the primary coolant (in this case Helium) is locked in a closed cycle at a fixed pressure and exchanges heat to the secondary coolant loop. It never sees a turbine and is probably driven by high-speed impeller pumps in a closed loop. No turbines. The gas is kept at high pressure because helium is such a rotten carrier of heat. Liquid sodium is much better, but poses all kinds of other problems. The U.S. uses a lot of water steam, but high-temp steam is extremely corrosive.
Again, surprising that you would think that the primary loop is used for turning the turbines.
Then China has changed its plans since the last time this article was up here (last September) because I spent hours researching it then and was quite impressed with their reactor design. Several other people have commented on this topic that they are building a CANDU variant, with graphite coated pebbles of slightly enriched uranium bathed in a heavy water moderator.
If they have moved away from that design, then they are in danger of burning the graphite shells and a dozen other problems (Uranium can react spontaneously with air after all.)
Lo and behold, the second sidebar article says they are going for an HTGR design using the packed pebble design. So much for their "innovative new design" that they screamed all over back in September.
Of course it would still be hard to ignite the graphite in a helium atmosphere, but that also assumes a containment vessel is present, something that China, along with Russia, seems to think is a luxury.
Of course, the second sidebar also points out that they have already done "absolute failure" scenarios where they've turned off all the safety systems and watched the reactor shut down.
The "too cheap to meter" comment is addressed later in the comments, and was from one guy talking to a group of science-fiction writers in the 1950's. But yes, a real nuclear scientist said it, so I'll give you that.
On the other hand, in the U.S. Nuclear Reactors have killed how many civilians? So far as I know, the number of civilians killed in nuclear accidents at power plants is... zero. Yes, there have been deaths of workers, yes, you could argue that a few plants have leaked radiation here and there, but when you consider that the CDC is claiming 30,000 deaths a year from coal plants in the U.S., it makes for a hell of a weak argument.
Besides, the "safe" claim isn't even being made by the U.S. government, it's coming from China. As for me, I think nuclear is a great idea, and I'd rather be living 10 miles from Yucca Mountain than the 10 miles I currently live away from a coal plant that's rated one of the cleanest in America.
As for your "dirty bomb" statement, yeah, give it a try. Start by walking into a nuclear power plant, past the six layers of security. Then enter the core, ignoring the fatal dose of radiation you'll be bathed in. Grab hold of a few dozen pebbles, ignoring the heat that burns the flesh off your hands and arms. Take them home. Grind them up, again, ignore the fact that the fumes of the uranium or plutonium are among the most powerful and fastest acting poisons known to man. Use fluorine (a controlled substance also instantly fatal if breathed) to create UF6 to separate the Uranium from the graphite gas. Then use a million dollars of platinum to catylize the UF6 back to uranium metal. Stick it to 100 pounds of C4 and detonate it in downtown New York. Of course, the fact that you'll set off every airborne neutron detector that homeland security and the air force (and a half-dozen spy satellites) have before you leave your house might slow you down. Not to mention the continous man-hunt looking to find you.
You may not trust the government with this stuff, but consider the alternative. If there's one thing I'm not worried about in this country, it's how well our fissile material stockpile is guarded. When you realize that it takes three semis, twenty secret-service agents, the FBI and the army to move 20 grams of *spent* material to be used as the thermal warmers for the Pathfinder rover, you realize that the government is very serious about the security of this material.
Read the article, this reactor design (the CANDU) does not rely on pebble expansion for reaction moderation. The coolant itself (heavy water) provides the moderator that makes the reaction possible. Without the heavy water, there's no reaction. The generator also runs in the 900 degree F range, which is not hot enough to flash-ignite graphite. The Chernobyl reactor didn't ignite the graphite until the core reached 2200 degrees farenheit. The pebble-bed without coolant would probably back down to only a few degrees over ambient temperature without the moderating heavy water. The reactor efficiency is so low (195MW vs 2GW for a typical U.S. reactor) exactly because the pebble-bed never gets to insanely high temperatures.
So, the only time it's hot is when it's covered in water. Difficult for the graphite to ignite without an oxygen source. When it's exposed to air, the pebbles are already cooling to near ambient temperatures and can't get to the several thousands degrees it takes to ignite graphite.
Even a graphite fire is not dangerous if contained in a containment vessel. Chernobyl was only a disaster because the Russians used a single-wall design for their containment vessels, and the initial steam explosion blew that off the building. Then the core was exposed to open air. All U.S. reactors are double-walled and would have contained a Chernobyl type meltdown.
Read the article and research the design. Meltdown is prevented in this design by physical law, not by thermal expansion. (Okay, that's a physical law, but it's not the one we're depending on.)
Fortunately I just read about the term "unsinkable" as it was applied to the Titanic. The boat-maker never used the term. The dock-workers never used the term. The buyers never used the term. The only one who used it was a marketer for a travel agency booking berths aboard the Titanic. No one, the captain included, thought the ship was unsinkable. The very idea is ridiculous. Pour enough water into the ship, and it will sink.
On the other hand, pebble-bed reactors do not rely on making it difficult to meltdown, they rely on the fact that the natural state of the reactor bed is a "safe" condition. (No, that doesn't mean you can stick your head in it, just that it will not maintain a chain reaction.) So, in the case of a pebble-bed reactor, if you take away all the coolant, the reactor shuts itself down. The coolant (or more accurately the heat-transfer media, since it's used to move heat from the reactor core to the heat exchangers to make steam to turn generators) is integral to the design of the reactor.
To have a sustained reaction, there must be coolant present. If the coolant is present, then the reactor cannot melt down, because it's covered in coolant. If the coolant were to be allowed to boil off, then the reaction cannot be sustained and the reactor shuts off. So, Coolant=no meltdown, no coolant=no meltdown. Please find the way to make the reactor meltdown in the above scenario...
Give up? That's the difference between engineering and physical law. I can engineer a damn tough ship, but physical law says that if I add enough weight, it'll displace more weight than an equal volume of water, and it will sink. On the other hand, if I have a pebble and it releases X number of neutrons, nothing I can do will increase that number of neutrons or moderate them in such a way as to cause a chain-reaction, except adding a moderator, which, in-turn controls the chain-reaction. It's like claiming that I can make a light bulb that's hot get hotter and melt-down by turning off the switch.
Pebble-beds have been built and tested in the harshest ways, and no reaction can be sustained when the pebbles were "exposed" without the sustaining material. The only way to make a pebble-bed melt down is to take the pebbles, grind them down, extract the fissile material and make a regular nuclear reactor out of them.
Stage 1) A lizard is born with a small flap of skin connecting front arm to body. This lizard is from a group of climbing lizards. These lizards (like any 5 year old child and a tree) fall often. The one with skin flaps displaces more air as it falls and thus lands more softly, surviving more falls.
Stage 2) These skin flaps become larger as the better surviving lizards breed with each other. Eventually the flaps become so large that the lizards can learn to glide from branch to branch.
Stage 3) Lizards with large flaps of skin lose heat rapidly, those with a downy covering are better suited to retaining that heat. Basic feathers are born.
Stage 4) Lizards with long tails begin to flatten those tails out to form an aerodynamic surface. This allows them to steer their glides in the air. Those that can glide more accurately can better pounce on and capture food.
Stage 5) The feather covering becomes smoother as those lizards with smooth feathers have an aerodynamic advantage. Some learn that rapidly moving their forelimbs provides extra lift and allows them to flap/glide further or even briefly climb. This gives them access to a larger area and less need to climb slowly up a vertical surface, something which is becoming more difficult with their forelimbs/wings.
Stage 6) With enhanced distance comes a need for enhanced vision. Their lizard eyes become sharper as those with sharper vision can out-compete those without.
Stage 7) Since landing exposes the lizards to other predators, those that can swoop in and grasp with powerful hind legs and carry away their prey become more effective. Taloned, strong hind legs become the rule. Front limbs are used almost exclusively for flying.
Stage 8) Since front leg walking is now damaging to feathers, those that can stand entirely on their back legs and grip perches have the advantage. Those that can maintain flight and climb in the air even more so. This stage would be considered the first true "bird" rather than a lizard.
Funny that I don't see any "spontaneous mutations" in there. Just a population that grows to fill a niche in the environment and responds to survival pressures for food and away from predation.
And as for your argument about mutations -- of course 99+% of them are harmful. In fact, let's say one in one million mutations are helpful. That means there are 6,000 humans walking around right now with a helpful mutation. Repeat for 4 billion years and see what happens... Somewhere there's an amoeba pointing at you saying, "That mutation wrote my entire PhD dissertation!"
The sahara was once a luxurious Forest teeming with a wide array of Wildlife.. "the original forests that once stretched from Morocco to Afghanistan even as late as 2000 BC..."; "The deserts, the bad fields of the maghreb countries of Northern Africa are still, 2,000 years later, to a large extent the sad outcome of anti-ecological practices, of the way the corn was ground in order to be shipped to Rome, to be the panem part of the panem et circenses formula. And there it was eaten, and it went down the sewers into the Mediterranean, and that was where the fertilizer went instead of being recycled back into the ground from which it was taken."
From the Xenophile: African history site:
5. The reason why the land between the Mediterranean and the Atlas Mts. is near-desert today is because it has been so misused over the past 2,000 years. Forests were cleared, because of the need for both farmland and wood, and bad farming practices ruined the fertility of the soil, while much of the wildlife was slaughtered, hunted for sport or taken to arenas like the Colosseum in Rome for entertainment. Fields lost their protective ground cover to overgrazing, especially from sheep and goats, which do a more thorough job on the roots of plants than cattle. In the fourth century B.C., Plato described the ecological damage done to Greece with these words: "What now remains, compared with what existed, is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth wasted away and only the bare framework of the land being left." By the time the Romans were finished, the same could be said for the whole Mediterranean basin.
But gosh, you are right, the French didn't plunder the Saharan hardwoods, nope. They plundered the Sahelan hardwoods. And now the Sahel is one of the largest regions of ongoing desertification on the planet. So, gosh, I was wrong. Curse me for confusing the Sahara and the Sahel. They do bump up against each other, and their names sound really similar. And the last time I listened to my grandfather talk about the French ships loaded with tropical hardwoods was before he died, nearly twenty years ago. Unfortunately, first-hand evidence is no good to you and the people who think their climate models are right, screw the world outside the window...
But my point remains the same. Climate change has happened throughout history. In fact you're ignoring the Sahara itself, which was the victim of climate change from 6000BC (Lush, tropical rainforest) to 2000BC (Dry, sandy desert.) That occurred completely without human intervention. What was left was plundered by the Europeans (Yes, Rome is in Europe.)
You stated that no one should be better off than a Chinese sustinance farmer. You stated that living at any level beyond that is "unsustainable". I ask you then, are you part of the solution or part of the problem. Have you gone to live in a mud hut and eked out a living on the soil? Have you beaten your car's door panels into a plow to grow living things? Have you shut off your water and your electricity? Have you stopped eating anything you didn't harvest or kill yourself?
My point has been fixed like a stone through this whole argument. The current warming trend is due to increased solar activity. History shows (Site 1, Site 2) that solar input has far more to do with global temperatures than human produced greenhouse gasses ( Site 3).
You have failed to get this point all along. Collapsing economies, relegating 90% of the world population to starvation and medieval lifestyles is not the answer. The answer is to apply our *BRAINS* to find the solution. Not simply go off on knee-jerk reactions to today's "Prophet of Doom".
But I'm sure I'll get your knee-jerk reaction, backed with no facts, no research, not five minutes of reading or attempting to comprehend, presently.
Obviously you stopped reading after about two sentences. My whole point was that the scientists noted a trend, the public over-reacted. Now we see the same thing, and you claim I didn't read the whole page. I read it. If the scientists "didn't believe in global cooling" why were there over 900 published papers on it during the 1970's? By that argument, scientists don't believe in global warming today...
Amazing. You claim much better climate models today. This is on the same topic where (on a separate thread) a global warming advocate is telling me I can't understand climate models, because no one understands them. If we understand the climate model so much better, explain how temperatures dropped in the 1950-1970 period while CO2 emissions were continuing linearly upward.
You claim "universal consensus" among scientists. Proof please? The article you will undoubtedly site hand-picked 900 articles out of 4800 climate articles published over three years. Among those, there was still disagreement. Amnong the full 4800 there is outright "fisticuff-style" debate.
Several climatologists who disagree with global warming have also been ostracised from the group. They have banded together to write articles that tell how the "Peer Review" system has become "Friend Review", and anyone that upsets the gravy train of funding is suddenly found out in the cold.
Go to John Daly's web site to see a good example of what happens when someone says, "Wait a minute, that's bad science." Learn how he was refused the right to even *be* reviewed. This from a guy who spent years proving that "The Rising Oceans", the doomsday of the late 1980's, was a fraud. How? Well, he did something that all these modern scientists seem to lack the ability to do. Field Research.
If you're worried about something, why not look into the frightening overuse of dihydrogen-monoxide and work towards banning that? dhmo.org It seems like that'd be right up your alley.
You missed the point. You (at least I think it was you) sited the "majority opinion" as proof of global warming. I point at the 1970s when everyone there, including scientists were pointing at a cooling trend and the public picked it up and started screaming "DOOM! Argh! Run Away!"
Today, we have a group of scientists who have noted a warming trend. Several of them have put forth *theories*, backed only by computer models, that say it *might* be because of so-called "greenhouse gasses."
In response, the public has picked it up and started screaming, "DOOM! Argh! Run Away!" The difference is that now there is a concerted effort, unlike in the late 1970's, to make governments take action on this data.
On the other hand, we have strong evidence of a 1-1 correlation of solar activity and global temperatures for the last 50 years, and a fragmentary 1000+ year record that shows the same thing. My *theory* backed by better evidence, says that the global warming is due to solar activity.
My theory says, gee weather is based on the sun. Their theory says, mankind is affecting the weather. Okay. I'll tell you what. Go out and make it rain. Try. I'll wait. Build an industry. Spend a trillion dollars on it. I'll wait. Still can't make it rain? Okay.
Tell me, what would we have to do if we *wanted* to raise the temperature of the planet? No, no answer? If we had to do it to save our lives, how would we do it?
On the other hand, the sun has driven weather patterns for 4.6 billion years. That's a pretty long record of success.
Your theory calls for mankind to basically shoot itself in the foot for the next hundred years based on a *theory* that may turn out to be wrong, just like the *theories* of impending ice ages in the 1970's were wrong.
My theory says. Gee, let's explain the main driving force of global warming first (because without the sun, the globe wouldn't be warm) and then see if there's anything left over.
All I hear is "temperature has climbed [some number between.6 degrees C and 2.5 degrees C]" with no explanation of why they chose that particular baseline as the "good" temperature. All through history the climate has changed. In the early 1700s we had the "Little Ice Age". The river Thames froze solid, it snowed in June. If we took that as the baseline, then global temperatures have climbed nearly 7 degrees (C). Of course, if we take the eleventh century as a baseline, when Berlin was filled with orange groves, then temperatures have *fallen* by 5 degrees (C).
Guess what, the climate changes. It has for 4.6 billion years, and it's not going to stop anytime soon. The idea that mankind is going to destroy the Earth is the height of human arrogance. The Earth will survive. It will balance. It has done it a thousand times before, it will do it again.
This is all getting tiresome. Warming is happening, it just ain't us doing it.
Amzing. Let me take these words out of my mouth that you've shoved in there. Ones like "foregone conclusion." My whole point is that the global warming crowd are the ones making foregone conclusions. Is your best defense trying to say, "you don't agree with me, so I'll accuse you of the same thing I'm doing."
No, I'm not an exoclimatologist by trade, but every process I listed is a part of climatology. You state right here that no climatologist understands climate while trying to argue that those same climatologists can predict the climate 100 years into the future. Yes, I have a solid idea that those effects exist. Why? Because a hundred years of empirical study proove they exist. Adiabatic heating and cooling can be demonstrated by driving ten minutes from where I am now and climbing Pike's Peak. Guess what, it's colder at the top then at the bottom. An air-mass moving up 7000 feet *must* shed temperature to do so. As the temperature drops, dew point is reached and water condenses out of the air. Water caries a large percentage of the specific heat of the atmosphere. Thus precipitation removes a large amount of energy from an airmass. Find me *ONE* climatologist who disagrees with that. ONE, I dare you.
I could continue and back up every single one of those items. But never mind. Here, look what your climatologists believed a mere three decades ago and consider what "listening to those experts" would have caused then. Global Cooling
I find it interesting that the country that has supplied more science to identify climate change, and to address climate change, is the one everyone seems to think is the "bad guy" in the scenario. I'll tell you what. Demonstrate to me that a bucket with 330ppm of CO2 will stop heat from radiating out vs a bucket with 212ppm CO2, and you might convince me of something. In fact, those experiments produce results that fall within the error margins of the measurement devices. Venus is sighted as a "runaway greenhouse", yet there's good evidence it radiates more energy than Earth. On the other hand, it receives more than twice the energy input from the sun. But you've already established that a million mile wide, barely contained, continuous, violently active, nuclear explosion has no effect on global temperatures.
And I'm the one with hobgoblins.
I'll tell you what, here's another cause to take up. www.dhmo.org Later, you can tell me to choke on that too.
No, my initial point was, signing on to the Kyoto treaty which blames the U.S. for everything and makes us fix everything while allowing the real polluters like China and India a free hand to continue polluting like mad men, will bankrupt the U.S. economy.
As for links: The Cooling World. That should do it. Or just search on Google for "The Cooling World" and get the article a couple of hundred times
I'm flat earth. Nice. So much for logical arguments on Slashdot.
Gentlement, draw your epithets...
I state that global warming trends are more consistant with changes in solar output than with changes in global CO2, and I'm flat earth? Perhaps you'd explain the Medieval Maxima, where temperatures were 4-6 degrees centigrade higher than today. Do you believe that the vikings were burning fossil fuels in their long-ships? Or was that due to a sudden drop in global dimming. Or maybe (as records from Chinese astronomers indicate) the sun entered an extremely active period at the time and imparted more energy to the Earth.
Oh wait, according to you I think the Earth is carried around on the back of a giant turtle.
Someone has been reposting the article from the 1975 copy of Newsweek on every one of these threads. I didn't think it was necessary for me to read it to you. I thought that a requirement to post was the ability to read...
Peer review is only valid when the peers have no ulterior motive. Please note that every study that ruyns counter to global warming is almost immediately disregarded, whether it is peer reviewed or not. The only data that shows global warming is the ground-based measurements, yet there are at least a half dozen studies that demonstrate that the ground-based observations are flawed in many ways.On the other hand, we have two sets of data (satellite and weather baloon) that show no global warming and are in perfect agreement with each other. These data are ignored.
By your basis, teh defense budget should be "peer reviewed" by defense contractors. That's like saying "Henhouse secuirty should be reviewed by this comittee of foxes..."
Saying that "the rational thing to do is act on the best information available" is ridiculous. We don't have the best information. This is right up there we the report I heard the other day saying that we could save another 700 lives a year by making the seat belt laws mandatory in 28 states where it isn't. Well, great, I can save another 2-3000 lives a year by taking 5mpg off the fuel efficiency standards, because cars could be made more impact resistant. Which should we be more angry about? You could also save 50,000 lives a year by reducing the maximum speed limit to 25 miles per hour. Apparently you're willing to kill 50,000 people a year just to get to the local market a little faster.
Every thing we do comes with a cost. Destorying the Economy of the U.S. will drag down most of the world with it. DO you want another 20 year long
"Great Depression" because you want to cut CO2 emissions by 10%? How many people would die in that?
Please excuses spelling, as I'm typing through VNC on a slow connection.
LIke the typical liberal over here (and that's the opposite of the liberals down in Oz) your answer is never to improve the lives of those who are miserable, but to drag everyone else down into misery. Several of your other statements are just frightening. Guess what, the U.s. doesn't grow fish in the Midwest. We fish them on the East and West COast and off the Alaskan coast and around Hawaii and Puerto Rico and along the thousands of other miles of coast line that the U.S. controls. Do we ship it Australia? Probably not. However I do know that somethng like 80% of the foodstuffs that are produced in America go for export. In other words, we feed four people in the world for every one American citizen. Damn us to hell.
France alone dragged millions of board feet from the Sahara every year for nearly a century. The participated in clear-cutting and burned the earth behind them to create those goat grazing areas.
And without an economy, we can all just go back to feudalism perhaps? Maybe we should all go back to sustinence farming and wearing robes? The fact is that without the U.S. there would be no "Environmental movement" because we are the only nation on earth so advanced that we can spend time worrying about the environment rather than worrying about where the next meal is coming from. You don't see people in Africa who are starving worried about global warming. They're the ones who are begging for a filth-belching tractor to help them plant food.
On top of that, it's our technology, and our advances that will make environmental management a reality. Without NASA satellites and the science of the U.S. there would be no awareness of global temperatures. Without the Internet to share data, there would be no collaboration to create the global outcry about global warming. But you're right. Let's go back to the middle ages. Everything was so much better when the average life span was 35. Why don't you start by throwing that evil computer of yours into the trash. Go ahead, I'll wait...
Oh no, gasp, you've slain me with annectdotal evidence. Surely because it's warmer on the giant concrete heat island of New York City, the whole world is heating up like a fireball from the CO2 emissions and cow flatulance.
My argument wasn't that there's no warming going on. A thermometer tells us that. It's just that I find it more likely that it's caused by variations in solar output (which vary almost in perfect lockstep with the temperature variations on Earth) then by CO2 emissions.
Oh, and two years studying atmospheric attributes and meteorlogical effects on all the planets in the Solar System tend to make me think that all that "climactics that I prattled off aren't made-up BS. But, kid yourself if you wish. And unlike you, I'll refrain from wishing any harsh blockages of your breathing aparatus upon you.
Preface: I don't own an H2, I do drive 15 miles (25km) to and from work each day. I do this in my 30mpg (12kpl) light truck.
It's so interesting to see people put everyone who disagrees with them into Category X, and then procede to berate all the members of Category X. On the other hand, I don't sit here and call people who do believe in global warming as impending doom a bunch of "tree-hugging, long haired, tofu-eating, Yugo-driving morons who care more about saving a spotted owl then protecting their own children in a car accident." It'd be easy to create such generalizations, but like most generalizations, they'd be wrong.
The parent post brought up "FIVE DECADES OF DATA" and implied that it was sufficient to predict the climate for 100 years. A lot of reasonable, well-educated, environmentally concious people disagree with that statement. Climate (and weather) is a massively complex, and [by definition] chaotic system. Tiny changes in initial conditions cause drastic differences in outcome.
For the sake of argument, consider another chaotic system, a roulette wheel. Every time the wheel is spun, the ball will end up in one slot or another. There are 38 slots on a standard wheel. Now, I will give you access to the largest computer in the world, and tell you what the result of the last 50 spins were. I will then let you parley a $1 bet for the next 100 spins. My only condition is that you must call all 100 spins before the first bet.
Do you really believe that I wouldn't have your money by the end of the 100 spins? Do you think you could actually do better than 5%?
The Canadian Weather Beureau decided to use its best computer model to predict 2 years of climate and then decided to compare their estimate based on the following criteria: colder than normal, normal, hotter than normal. In other words, every day they had a 1 in 3 (33.3%) chance of getting it right if they flipped a coin. After two years, their percentage correct was 37%. So, millions of dollars of CPU and time was spent to get a 3.7% accuracy. When you consider that most of their "accurate days" occurred in the first few months, their record becomes even more dismal.
What we "fat, self-centered, instant gratification, H2 driving pricks" are saying is get some more real data and fix your models before you try and predict the future. Fifty data points does not let you extrapolate another one-hundred points of data. At best you could produce 5-10, and I doubt those would be accurate.
Gee, I suppose it was Strom Thurmond who funded NASA to have those freak 20 cooling years from 1950 to 1970? Or the fact that the warmest year on record is 1938? Or that the 1998 "hot year" corresponds with the El Nino event? Or did he fund the fastest warming period in history during the 1800s, when CO2 rose by 3 parts per million? Or how about the sudden plunge back down prior to 1918, when the CO2 continued to rise by 12ppm? Perhaps the fact that there is zero statistical correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures and a 95% correlation between solar activity and global temperatures has something to do with it?
Nah, the sun can't have any effect on global temperature. Never mind that it's so active right now we don't even have categories big enough for the size flares it's throwing off. It's not like that implies it's throwing off more energy.
Yeah, except, oh yeah, it was 19 terrorists who started the war on terror. Maybe you should be pissed off with them.
Had the attack not staggered the economy, had we not gone to war to protect ourselves, had the tax base continued to grow at the predicted rate, we wouldn't have run up any deficits.
While you're looking through those rose-colored glasses, why not tell me how good Michael Jackson is with kids, too.
Oh, and your beloved Clinton hid a 500 billion dollar deficit in the last year of his term. But you won't bother to go and check that fact, or that he strong-armed the CBO into covering it up through the election. Unfortunately the article (published August 8, 2002 in the Chicago Sun Times) is no longer available on-line, but here's a quick excerpt.
Robert Novak reports that, during Bill Clinton's last two years as CEO of the nation, "the announced level of before-tax profits was at least 10% too high - a discrepancy rising close to 30% during the last presidential campaign. Most startling, the Commerce Department in 2000 showed the economy on an upswing through most of the election year, while in fact it was declining."
Of course, I'm sure you'd have rather had Al Gore, who would have made gas $5 a gallon and outlawed SUVs and raised the MPG rate to a minimum of 50. And he would have been "saddened and angered" at the events of 9/11. He might even have written a letter.
Thank god we had a Texas Cowboy in the White House.
So because the general public believes it, we should now do science by majority vote? Better close down that evolutionary lab, because the last poll showed 80% of Americans believe in the Bible/Torah story of creation.
In 1970, peer reviewed journals were calling for dumping millions of tons of soot on the polar ice caps because of the rampant global cooling. In fact the rise in CO2 since 1950 has been nearly linear, but the temperature in the 1990s barely is back to the temperature in the 1930s. The curve of the graph is a steep valley with zero correlation to the rise in CO2 levels.
In fact, the greatest rise in CO2 happened from 1918 to 1950, when there was a marked cooling of temperatures. All of which is moot since we were coming out of some of the coldest temperatures ever from 1700. [The little ice age.] Tree rings and written evidence show us that the period from 600 AD to 1000AD was up to 5 degrees (Centigrade) warmer than the warmest year on record. Were the vikings and crusaders burning that many villages?
Let's lay out some facts.
No current climate model can accurately predict even two years into the future. Period. Don't believe me, ask any of them to run the data up to 1996 and then predict forward and match it to the real data. They *ALL* fail.
No one understands the complete carbon cycle, i.e. where is carbon produced, where does it go, what reactions does it cause, how much effect does it have on temperature, etc. Carbon is one of at least a dozen greenhouse gasses.
Water vapor accounts for 90+% of the global warming and cooling cycle. Some estimates put it as high as 98%. No one is telling us to put a pool cover on the oceans.
Human production of CO2 may account for as little as 4% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. No one knows for sure. A single volcanic event can pour ten years worth of CO2 into the atmosphere in a matter of hours. Trees produce CO2 at night. Should we be cutting them down?
NASA data from satellites and weather balloons has disagreed with measurements on the ground. Graphing the disagreement produces the exact graph of the amount of "global warming" that has occured in the last 50 years.
Most climate models assume that the oceanic movement of heat takes decades. The El Nino of 1998 proved that it takes days. Not one model has been changed to reflect this.
The climate model being used by Climate Modeling.net [according to their own documentation] does not model adiabatic cooling (cooling or heating of air as it pushes up or down over mountains) Their parameter of "gravity waves" gets it absolutely backwards, saying that mountains *add* energy to the atmosphere in the form of friction instead of sucking energy *out* of the atmosphere in the form of precipitation. In their model, Death Valley gets 20-30 inches of rain a year.
I'm sorry, but this isn't science, it's a bunch of climatologists screaming "DOOOM" and picking up a paycheck. They're proving their theory with models that are woefully inadequate and, at best, in their infancy. Ask them how many hurricanes their models predicted for last year. These are guys who model something on a computer and don't want to look at any nasty real-world facts that disprove their theories.
Okay, so, what's your point. I gave you a reference to cigarettes as being commonly referred to as "Cancer sticks" in the nineteenth century. You site a study used by a tobacco company to try to not pay a multi-billion dollar settlement that the states have since squandered on things like executive parking lots and new traffic lights.
Don't try to hold up a legal pleading attempting to create a plausible doubt against 150 years of common knowledge.
My uncle died of lung cancer when I was 10. I watched him whither and die while still smoking cigarettes up until the day before he died. Guess what, I know cigarettes are bad for you. So does everyone else. That's my point. No one grabs a pack of smokes and says, "Boy, I'll feel healthier after one of these!"
But, the real crime is that the cigarette companies are making 20-25 cents a pack on them, while we, the American People, are taking about $1.40 a pack in blood money [read taxes] from each and every pack. You and people like you scream about the dangers of tobacco. Well fine, BAN IT! So long as you still take money from the sale and production of tobacco, I will continue to say, "screw you," to every anti-cigarette zealot that comes along.
FYI. I do not smoke. That would be stupid. Apparently, such personal responsibility is beyond you.
Nice try, unfortunately for you, there is now data (a 5 year satellite study by NASA) that shows that CO2 levels fall by 2-3% as the air passes over the United States. In short, we are a net consumer of CO2, and not vice versa. On the other hand, Europe produces 38% more CO2 then it absorbs and China produces more CO2 than most of the rest of the world. They just get to say "we have a low per capita production" because they get to divide by a billion people who live just above the stone age.
The 25% figure comes from the fact that we burn 25% of the fossil fuel consumed by the world. In return, we produce 50% of the world's food. You really want to make the trade?
As for saying I am "one of those people", I find it interesting that this comes from [an aparent] European who spent 2000 years destroying everything they came in contact with. In the late middle ages, it was called the Sahara Jungle. Then Europeans decided that jungle wood was just the thing to panel their study with. Give me a break.
Slashdot Mirror
Even assuming I wanted to explain these items, it would only be to point out the following:
i) Rossby waves are soliton waves at the first thermocline layer of the ocean. These are not modeled in the "Slab" model of the ocean used by most of the current climate models, including climateprediction.org.
ii) Deep water is formed by the concentration of salinity in evaporation fields and the cooling of the water causing increased water density and the sustained downflow of water. Most famous example: the North Atlantic evaporative zone driving the Gulf Stream current. Also not modeled in the "slab" model of the ocean used in most climate models. Additionally, not modeled in the SEAM climate model (considered the most advanced model in use) used by the NEC Earth Simulator in Japan because their use of the Euler equations do not solve for density, only pressure.
iii) Western Boundary currents are a localized variation of the Deep Water formation creating local fast-moving cyclic currents. The EAC made famous by Finding Nemo is a good example. Need I say it? Not modeled by the "slab" ocean model or SEAM.
iv) Meddies are outbound eddies (think underwater vortexes) of highly saline (and often highly polluted) water that drains from the mediteranean and sinks into the Atlantic, meandering whole underwater until they disappate, often very distant from the Med. Once again, not modeled by the Slab model of the ocean, and it's doubtful that any model calculates precipative flow into the Med Basin to cause water drainage to the Atlantic. (Although I can't find any evidence either way on that one.)
v) the pycnocline is a water exchange between two normally separate bodies of water, usually caused by opposing flows creating vortex boundaries between them, e.g. the North Atlantic Current and the North Atlantic Counter-current. Guess what? Not modeled in the "Slab" model of the ocean.
Finally, so what? These are all oceanic effects, the least understood part of the climate engine. If your intent was to point out that the models in use don't even model this rather big part of the climate accurately, well then, congratulations. And, if you'r going to argue back with me, then to prove your worth, I need you to define the following issues with the climate models in use.
i) orographic cooling vs. gravity waves
ii) topographical modeling vs. the "pool ball" model of the earth.
iii) Bathyscape vs. slab model of the ocean
iv) Euler equations solved for only pressure (SEAM) vs. solving for pressure and density.
v) Vegetative covering and seasons vs. fixed albedo calculations.
vi) Tidal motion vs. tide-free models.
vii) ground types, precipitative flow models and flow basins.
viii) Emissive sources vs. instant, even distribution of gas emissions.
I could keep going, but just that short list should show you just how poor current computer models are.
Somehow I don't think this is what I had in mind when I made the comparison... Realize that in your comparison the collapse of the motor's field converts it from a motor to a generator, thus you haven't actually "turned off the switch." A better argument would be that as I turned off the switch, resistance becomes infinite, and since we know that E=IR, as R goes infinite, so must E (voltage), thus running infinite voltage through the bulb and vaporizing it. (In reality of course, R just becomes very large while I [amperage] drops to zero and any big number times zero is still...zero. That's why lights rarely blow up with accompanying thunderbolt when the switch is turned off.)
Of course, now this whole discussion is just in the realm of "silly".
Quick! Mod me off-topic!
Intersting that for all your knowledge of the pressure of a PBMR, you assume (completely incorrectly) that the primary coolant loop is used to turn the generators. There is no reactor design that I know of where this is true. The primary loop carries radiation, and the idea of pumping radioactive material through a turbine from high to low pressure (because that's how turbines work after all) would mean all of the equipment in the generator house would quickly become radioactive. Not very conducive to generator maintenence.
On the other hand, in the real world, the heated primary loop runs to a heat exchanger where it heats the secondary loop, usually water from a river or lake, that is flashed to steam, run through the turbine and then used to pre-heat the incoming water in those big concrete cooling towers that everyone associates with nuclear reactors (even though most coal and gas fired plants have them as well.) The water is then either recycled (rare) or returned to the water source (river or lake) at slightly elevated temperatures. This means that the secondary loop is only "exposed" to a minor dose of radiation (through radiation leakage through the heat exchanger) before it is dumped. The overall radiation level is usually barely higher than background on release of the secondary coolant.
Thus, the primary coolant (in this case Helium) is locked in a closed cycle at a fixed pressure and exchanges heat to the secondary coolant loop. It never sees a turbine and is probably driven by high-speed impeller pumps in a closed loop. No turbines. The gas is kept at high pressure because helium is such a rotten carrier of heat. Liquid sodium is much better, but poses all kinds of other problems. The U.S. uses a lot of water steam, but high-temp steam is extremely corrosive.
Again, surprising that you would think that the primary loop is used for turning the turbines.
Then China has changed its plans since the last time this article was up here (last September) because I spent hours researching it then and was quite impressed with their reactor design. Several other people have commented on this topic that they are building a CANDU variant, with graphite coated pebbles of slightly enriched uranium bathed in a heavy water moderator.
If they have moved away from that design, then they are in danger of burning the graphite shells and a dozen other problems (Uranium can react spontaneously with air after all.)
Lo and behold, the second sidebar article says they are going for an HTGR design using the packed pebble design. So much for their "innovative new design" that they screamed all over back in September.
Of course it would still be hard to ignite the graphite in a helium atmosphere, but that also assumes a containment vessel is present, something that China, along with Russia, seems to think is a luxury.
Of course, the second sidebar also points out that they have already done "absolute failure" scenarios where they've turned off all the safety systems and watched the reactor shut down.
The "too cheap to meter" comment is addressed later in the comments, and was from one guy talking to a group of science-fiction writers in the 1950's. But yes, a real nuclear scientist said it, so I'll give you that.
On the other hand, in the U.S. Nuclear Reactors have killed how many civilians? So far as I know, the number of civilians killed in nuclear accidents at power plants is... zero. Yes, there have been deaths of workers, yes, you could argue that a few plants have leaked radiation here and there, but when you consider that the CDC is claiming 30,000 deaths a year from coal plants in the U.S., it makes for a hell of a weak argument.
Besides, the "safe" claim isn't even being made by the U.S. government, it's coming from China. As for me, I think nuclear is a great idea, and I'd rather be living 10 miles from Yucca Mountain than the 10 miles I currently live away from a coal plant that's rated one of the cleanest in America.
As for your "dirty bomb" statement, yeah, give it a try. Start by walking into a nuclear power plant, past the six layers of security. Then enter the core, ignoring the fatal dose of radiation you'll be bathed in. Grab hold of a few dozen pebbles, ignoring the heat that burns the flesh off your hands and arms. Take them home. Grind them up, again, ignore the fact that the fumes of the uranium or plutonium are among the most powerful and fastest acting poisons known to man. Use fluorine (a controlled substance also instantly fatal if breathed) to create UF6 to separate the Uranium from the graphite gas. Then use a million dollars of platinum to catylize the UF6 back to uranium metal. Stick it to 100 pounds of C4 and detonate it in downtown New York. Of course, the fact that you'll set off every airborne neutron detector that homeland security and the air force (and a half-dozen spy satellites) have before you leave your house might slow you down. Not to mention the continous man-hunt looking to find you.
You may not trust the government with this stuff, but consider the alternative. If there's one thing I'm not worried about in this country, it's how well our fissile material stockpile is guarded. When you realize that it takes three semis, twenty secret-service agents, the FBI and the army to move 20 grams of *spent* material to be used as the thermal warmers for the Pathfinder rover, you realize that the government is very serious about the security of this material.
story from "Managing Martians" by Donna Shirley
Read the article, this reactor design (the CANDU) does not rely on pebble expansion for reaction moderation. The coolant itself (heavy water) provides the moderator that makes the reaction possible. Without the heavy water, there's no reaction. The generator also runs in the 900 degree F range, which is not hot enough to flash-ignite graphite. The Chernobyl reactor didn't ignite the graphite until the core reached 2200 degrees farenheit. The pebble-bed without coolant would probably back down to only a few degrees over ambient temperature without the moderating heavy water. The reactor efficiency is so low (195MW vs 2GW for a typical U.S. reactor) exactly because the pebble-bed never gets to insanely high temperatures.
So, the only time it's hot is when it's covered in water. Difficult for the graphite to ignite without an oxygen source. When it's exposed to air, the pebbles are already cooling to near ambient temperatures and can't get to the several thousands degrees it takes to ignite graphite.
Even a graphite fire is not dangerous if contained in a containment vessel. Chernobyl was only a disaster because the Russians used a single-wall design for their containment vessels, and the initial steam explosion blew that off the building. Then the core was exposed to open air. All U.S. reactors are double-walled and would have contained a Chernobyl type meltdown.
Read the article and research the design. Meltdown is prevented in this design by physical law, not by thermal expansion. (Okay, that's a physical law, but it's not the one we're depending on.)
Fortunately I just read about the term "unsinkable" as it was applied to the Titanic. The boat-maker never used the term. The dock-workers never used the term. The buyers never used the term. The only one who used it was a marketer for a travel agency booking berths aboard the Titanic. No one, the captain included, thought the ship was unsinkable. The very idea is ridiculous. Pour enough water into the ship, and it will sink.
On the other hand, pebble-bed reactors do not rely on making it difficult to meltdown, they rely on the fact that the natural state of the reactor bed is a "safe" condition. (No, that doesn't mean you can stick your head in it, just that it will not maintain a chain reaction.) So, in the case of a pebble-bed reactor, if you take away all the coolant, the reactor shuts itself down. The coolant (or more accurately the heat-transfer media, since it's used to move heat from the reactor core to the heat exchangers to make steam to turn generators) is integral to the design of the reactor.
To have a sustained reaction, there must be coolant present. If the coolant is present, then the reactor cannot melt down, because it's covered in coolant. If the coolant were to be allowed to boil off, then the reaction cannot be sustained and the reactor shuts off. So, Coolant=no meltdown, no coolant=no meltdown. Please find the way to make the reactor meltdown in the above scenario...
Give up? That's the difference between engineering and physical law. I can engineer a damn tough ship, but physical law says that if I add enough weight, it'll displace more weight than an equal volume of water, and it will sink. On the other hand, if I have a pebble and it releases X number of neutrons, nothing I can do will increase that number of neutrons or moderate them in such a way as to cause a chain-reaction, except adding a moderator, which, in-turn controls the chain-reaction. It's like claiming that I can make a light bulb that's hot get hotter and melt-down by turning off the switch.
Pebble-beds have been built and tested in the harshest ways, and no reaction can be sustained when the pebbles were "exposed" without the sustaining material. The only way to make a pebble-bed melt down is to take the pebbles, grind them down, extract the fissile material and make a regular nuclear reactor out of them.
And that's the whole point.
Are you actually basing your knowledge of the safety features of a nuclear reactor on an animated cartoon?
You do realize that Homer Simpson is a fictional character, right?
Stage 1) A lizard is born with a small flap of skin connecting front arm to body. This lizard is from a group of climbing lizards. These lizards (like any 5 year old child and a tree) fall often. The one with skin flaps displaces more air as it falls and thus lands more softly, surviving more falls.
Stage 2) These skin flaps become larger as the better surviving lizards breed with each other. Eventually the flaps become so large that the lizards can learn to glide from branch to branch.
Stage 3) Lizards with large flaps of skin lose heat rapidly, those with a downy covering are better suited to retaining that heat. Basic feathers are born.
Stage 4) Lizards with long tails begin to flatten those tails out to form an aerodynamic surface. This allows them to steer their glides in the air. Those that can glide more accurately can better pounce on and capture food.
Stage 5) The feather covering becomes smoother as those lizards with smooth feathers have an aerodynamic advantage. Some learn that rapidly moving their forelimbs provides extra lift and allows them to flap/glide further or even briefly climb. This gives them access to a larger area and less need to climb slowly up a vertical surface, something which is becoming more difficult with their forelimbs/wings.
Stage 6) With enhanced distance comes a need for enhanced vision. Their lizard eyes become sharper as those with sharper vision can out-compete those without.
Stage 7) Since landing exposes the lizards to other predators, those that can swoop in and grasp with powerful hind legs and carry away their prey become more effective. Taloned, strong hind legs become the rule. Front limbs are used almost exclusively for flying.
Stage 8) Since front leg walking is now damaging to feathers, those that can stand entirely on their back legs and grip perches have the advantage. Those that can maintain flight and climb in the air even more so. This stage would be considered the first true "bird" rather than a lizard.
Funny that I don't see any "spontaneous mutations" in there. Just a population that grows to fill a niche in the environment and responds to survival pressures for food and away from predation.
And as for your argument about mutations -- of course 99+% of them are harmful. In fact, let's say one in one million mutations are helpful. That means there are 6,000 humans walking around right now with a helpful mutation. Repeat for 4 billion years and see what happens... Somewhere there's an amoeba pointing at you saying, "That mutation wrote my entire PhD dissertation!"
From a green web site:
.. "the original forests that once stretched from Morocco to Afghanistan even as late as 2000 BC ..."; "The deserts, the bad fields of the maghreb countries of Northern Africa are still, 2,000 years later, to a large extent the sad outcome of anti-ecological practices, of the way the corn was ground in order to be shipped to Rome, to be the panem part of the panem et circenses formula. And there it was eaten, and it went down the sewers into the Mediterranean, and that was where the fertilizer went instead of being recycled back into the ground from which it was taken."
The sahara was once a luxurious Forest teeming with a wide array of Wildlife
From the Xenophile: African history site:
5. The reason why the land between the Mediterranean and the Atlas Mts. is near-desert today is because it has been so misused over the past 2,000 years. Forests were cleared, because of the need for both farmland and wood, and bad farming practices ruined the fertility of the soil, while much of the wildlife was slaughtered, hunted for sport or taken to arenas like the Colosseum in Rome for entertainment. Fields lost their protective ground cover to overgrazing, especially from sheep and goats, which do a more thorough job on the roots of plants than cattle. In the fourth century B.C., Plato described the ecological damage done to Greece with these words: "What now remains, compared with what existed, is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth wasted away and only the bare framework of the land being left." By the time the Romans were finished, the same could be said for the whole Mediterranean basin.
But gosh, you are right, the French didn't plunder the Saharan hardwoods, nope. They plundered the Sahelan hardwoods. And now the Sahel is one of the largest regions of ongoing desertification on the planet. So, gosh, I was wrong. Curse me for confusing the Sahara and the Sahel. They do bump up against each other, and their names sound really similar. And the last time I listened to my grandfather talk about the French ships loaded with tropical hardwoods was before he died, nearly twenty years ago. Unfortunately, first-hand evidence is no good to you and the people who think their climate models are right, screw the world outside the window...
But my point remains the same. Climate change has happened throughout history. In fact you're ignoring the Sahara itself, which was the victim of climate change from 6000BC (Lush, tropical rainforest) to 2000BC (Dry, sandy desert.) That occurred completely without human intervention. What was left was plundered by the Europeans (Yes, Rome is in Europe.)
You stated that no one should be better off than a Chinese sustinance farmer. You stated that living at any level beyond that is "unsustainable". I ask you then, are you part of the solution or part of the problem. Have you gone to live in a mud hut and eked out a living on the soil? Have you beaten your car's door panels into a plow to grow living things? Have you shut off your water and your electricity? Have you stopped eating anything you didn't harvest or kill yourself?
My point has been fixed like a stone through this whole argument. The current warming trend is due to increased solar activity. History shows (Site 1, Site 2) that solar input has far more to do with global temperatures than human produced greenhouse gasses ( Site 3).
You have failed to get this point all along. Collapsing economies, relegating 90% of the world population to starvation and medieval lifestyles is not the answer. The answer is to apply our *BRAINS* to find the solution. Not simply go off on knee-jerk reactions to today's "Prophet of Doom".
But I'm sure I'll get your knee-jerk reaction, backed with no facts, no research, not five minutes of reading or attempting to comprehend, presently.
Obviously you stopped reading after about two sentences. My whole point was that the scientists noted a trend, the public over-reacted. Now we see the same thing, and you claim I didn't read the whole page. I read it. If the scientists "didn't believe in global cooling" why were there over 900 published papers on it during the 1970's? By that argument, scientists don't believe in global warming today...
Amazing. You claim much better climate models today. This is on the same topic where (on a separate thread) a global warming advocate is telling me I can't understand climate models, because no one understands them. If we understand the climate model so much better, explain how temperatures dropped in the 1950-1970 period while CO2 emissions were continuing linearly upward.
You claim "universal consensus" among scientists. Proof please? The article you will undoubtedly site hand-picked 900 articles out of 4800 climate articles published over three years. Among those, there was still disagreement. Amnong the full 4800 there is outright "fisticuff-style" debate.
Several climatologists who disagree with global warming have also been ostracised from the group. They have banded together to write articles that tell how the "Peer Review" system has become "Friend Review", and anyone that upsets the gravy train of funding is suddenly found out in the cold.
Go to John Daly's web site to see a good example of what happens when someone says, "Wait a minute, that's bad science." Learn how he was refused the right to even *be* reviewed. This from a guy who spent years proving that "The Rising Oceans", the doomsday of the late 1980's, was a fraud. How? Well, he did something that all these modern scientists seem to lack the ability to do. Field Research.
If you're worried about something, why not look into the frightening overuse of dihydrogen-monoxide and work towards banning that? dhmo.org It seems like that'd be right up your alley.
You missed the point. You (at least I think it was you) sited the "majority opinion" as proof of global warming. I point at the 1970s when everyone there, including scientists were pointing at a cooling trend and the public picked it up and started screaming "DOOM! Argh! Run Away!"
.6 degrees C and 2.5 degrees C]" with no explanation of why they chose that particular baseline as the "good" temperature. All through history the climate has changed. In the early 1700s we had the "Little Ice Age". The river Thames froze solid, it snowed in June. If we took that as the baseline, then global temperatures have climbed nearly 7 degrees (C). Of course, if we take the eleventh century as a baseline, when Berlin was filled with orange groves, then temperatures have *fallen* by 5 degrees (C).
Today, we have a group of scientists who have noted a warming trend. Several of them have put forth *theories*, backed only by computer models, that say it *might* be because of so-called "greenhouse gasses."
In response, the public has picked it up and started screaming, "DOOM! Argh! Run Away!" The difference is that now there is a concerted effort, unlike in the late 1970's, to make governments take action on this data.
On the other hand, we have strong evidence of a 1-1 correlation of solar activity and global temperatures for the last 50 years, and a fragmentary 1000+ year record that shows the same thing. My *theory* backed by better evidence, says that the global warming is due to solar activity.
My theory says, gee weather is based on the sun. Their theory says, mankind is affecting the weather. Okay. I'll tell you what. Go out and make it rain. Try. I'll wait. Build an industry. Spend a trillion dollars on it. I'll wait. Still can't make it rain? Okay.
Tell me, what would we have to do if we *wanted* to raise the temperature of the planet? No, no answer? If we had to do it to save our lives, how would we do it?
On the other hand, the sun has driven weather patterns for 4.6 billion years. That's a pretty long record of success.
Your theory calls for mankind to basically shoot itself in the foot for the next hundred years based on a *theory* that may turn out to be wrong, just like the *theories* of impending ice ages in the 1970's were wrong.
My theory says. Gee, let's explain the main driving force of global warming first (because without the sun, the globe wouldn't be warm) and then see if there's anything left over.
All I hear is "temperature has climbed [some number between
Guess what, the climate changes. It has for 4.6 billion years, and it's not going to stop anytime soon. The idea that mankind is going to destroy the Earth is the height of human arrogance. The Earth will survive. It will balance. It has done it a thousand times before, it will do it again.
This is all getting tiresome. Warming is happening, it just ain't us doing it.
By the way, here's another one: Global Cooling. With several peer-reviewed consensus documents to back the hysteria of the 1970s.
Amzing. Let me take these words out of my mouth that you've shoved in there. Ones like "foregone conclusion." My whole point is that the global warming crowd are the ones making foregone conclusions. Is your best defense trying to say, "you don't agree with me, so I'll accuse you of the same thing I'm doing."
No, I'm not an exoclimatologist by trade, but every process I listed is a part of climatology. You state right here that no climatologist understands climate while trying to argue that those same climatologists can predict the climate 100 years into the future. Yes, I have a solid idea that those effects exist. Why? Because a hundred years of empirical study proove they exist. Adiabatic heating and cooling can be demonstrated by driving ten minutes from where I am now and climbing Pike's Peak. Guess what, it's colder at the top then at the bottom. An air-mass moving up 7000 feet *must* shed temperature to do so. As the temperature drops, dew point is reached and water condenses out of the air. Water caries a large percentage of the specific heat of the atmosphere. Thus precipitation removes a large amount of energy from an airmass. Find me *ONE* climatologist who disagrees with that. ONE, I dare you.
I could continue and back up every single one of those items. But never mind. Here, look what your climatologists believed a mere three decades ago and consider what "listening to those experts" would have caused then. Global Cooling
I find it interesting that the country that has supplied more science to identify climate change, and to address climate change, is the one everyone seems to think is the "bad guy" in the scenario. I'll tell you what. Demonstrate to me that a bucket with 330ppm of CO2 will stop heat from radiating out vs a bucket with 212ppm CO2, and you might convince me of something. In fact, those experiments produce results that fall within the error margins of the measurement devices. Venus is sighted as a "runaway greenhouse", yet there's good evidence it radiates more energy than Earth. On the other hand, it receives more than twice the energy input from the sun. But you've already established that a million mile wide, barely contained, continuous, violently active, nuclear explosion has no effect on global temperatures.
And I'm the one with hobgoblins.
I'll tell you what, here's another cause to take up. www.dhmo.org Later, you can tell me to choke on that too.
No, my initial point was, signing on to the Kyoto treaty which blames the U.S. for everything and makes us fix everything while allowing the real polluters like China and India a free hand to continue polluting like mad men, will bankrupt the U.S. economy.
As for links: The Cooling World. That should do it. Or just search on Google for "The Cooling World" and get the article a couple of hundred times
I'm flat earth. Nice. So much for logical arguments on Slashdot.
Gentlement, draw your epithets...
I state that global warming trends are more consistant with changes in solar output than with changes in global CO2, and I'm flat earth? Perhaps you'd explain the Medieval Maxima, where temperatures were 4-6 degrees centigrade higher than today. Do you believe that the vikings were burning fossil fuels in their long-ships? Or was that due to a sudden drop in global dimming. Or maybe (as records from Chinese astronomers indicate) the sun entered an extremely active period at the time and imparted more energy to the Earth.
Oh wait, according to you I think the Earth is carried around on the back of a giant turtle.
Someone has been reposting the article from the 1975 copy of Newsweek on every one of these threads. I didn't think it was necessary for me to read it to you. I thought that a requirement to post was the ability to read...
Peer review is only valid when the peers have no ulterior motive. Please note that every study that ruyns counter to global warming is almost immediately disregarded, whether it is peer reviewed or not. The only data that shows global warming is the ground-based measurements, yet there are at least a half dozen studies that demonstrate that the ground-based observations are flawed in many ways.On the other hand, we have two sets of data (satellite and weather baloon) that show no global warming and are in perfect agreement with each other. These data are ignored.
By your basis, teh defense budget should be "peer reviewed" by defense contractors. That's like saying "Henhouse secuirty should be reviewed by this comittee of foxes..."
Saying that "the rational thing to do is act on the best information available" is ridiculous. We don't have the best information. This is right up there we the report I heard the other day saying that we could save another 700 lives a year by making the seat belt laws mandatory in 28 states where it isn't. Well, great, I can save another 2-3000 lives a year by taking 5mpg off the fuel efficiency standards, because cars could be made more impact resistant. Which should we be more angry about? You could also save 50,000 lives a year by reducing the maximum speed limit to 25 miles per hour. Apparently you're willing to kill 50,000 people a year just to get to the local market a little faster.
Every thing we do comes with a cost. Destorying the Economy of the U.S. will drag down most of the world with it. DO you want another 20 year long "Great Depression" because you want to cut CO2 emissions by 10%? How many people would die in that?
Please excuses spelling, as I'm typing through VNC on a slow connection.
LIke the typical liberal over here (and that's the opposite of the liberals down in Oz) your answer is never to improve the lives of those who are miserable, but to drag everyone else down into misery. Several of your other statements are just frightening. Guess what, the U.s. doesn't grow fish in the Midwest. We fish them on the East and West COast and off the Alaskan coast and around Hawaii and Puerto Rico and along the thousands of other miles of coast line that the U.S. controls. Do we ship it Australia? Probably not. However I do know that somethng like 80% of the foodstuffs that are produced in America go for export. In other words, we feed four people in the world for every one American citizen. Damn us to hell.
France alone dragged millions of board feet from the Sahara every year for nearly a century. The participated in clear-cutting and burned the earth behind them to create those goat grazing areas.
And without an economy, we can all just go back to feudalism perhaps? Maybe we should all go back to sustinence farming and wearing robes? The fact is that without the U.S. there would be no "Environmental movement" because we are the only nation on earth so advanced that we can spend time worrying about the environment rather than worrying about where the next meal is coming from. You don't see people in Africa who are starving worried about global warming. They're the ones who are begging for a filth-belching tractor to help them plant food.
On top of that, it's our technology, and our advances that will make environmental management a reality. Without NASA satellites and the science of the U.S. there would be no awareness of global temperatures. Without the Internet to share data, there would be no collaboration to create the global outcry about global warming. But you're right. Let's go back to the middle ages. Everything was so much better when the average life span was 35. Why don't you start by throwing that evil computer of yours into the trash. Go ahead, I'll wait...
Oh no, gasp, you've slain me with annectdotal evidence. Surely because it's warmer on the giant concrete heat island of New York City, the whole world is heating up like a fireball from the CO2 emissions and cow flatulance.
My argument wasn't that there's no warming going on. A thermometer tells us that. It's just that I find it more likely that it's caused by variations in solar output (which vary almost in perfect lockstep with the temperature variations on Earth) then by CO2 emissions.
Oh, and two years studying atmospheric attributes and meteorlogical effects on all the planets in the Solar System tend to make me think that all that "climactics that I prattled off aren't made-up BS. But, kid yourself if you wish. And unlike you, I'll refrain from wishing any harsh blockages of your breathing aparatus upon you.
Preface: I don't own an H2, I do drive 15 miles (25km) to and from work each day. I do this in my 30mpg (12kpl) light truck.
It's so interesting to see people put everyone who disagrees with them into Category X, and then procede to berate all the members of Category X. On the other hand, I don't sit here and call people who do believe in global warming as impending doom a bunch of "tree-hugging, long haired, tofu-eating, Yugo-driving morons who care more about saving a spotted owl then protecting their own children in a car accident." It'd be easy to create such generalizations, but like most generalizations, they'd be wrong.
The parent post brought up "FIVE DECADES OF DATA" and implied that it was sufficient to predict the climate for 100 years. A lot of reasonable, well-educated, environmentally concious people disagree with that statement. Climate (and weather) is a massively complex, and [by definition] chaotic system. Tiny changes in initial conditions cause drastic differences in outcome.
For the sake of argument, consider another chaotic system, a roulette wheel. Every time the wheel is spun, the ball will end up in one slot or another. There are 38 slots on a standard wheel. Now, I will give you access to the largest computer in the world, and tell you what the result of the last 50 spins were. I will then let you parley a $1 bet for the next 100 spins. My only condition is that you must call all 100 spins before the first bet.
Do you really believe that I wouldn't have your money by the end of the 100 spins? Do you think you could actually do better than 5%?
The Canadian Weather Beureau decided to use its best computer model to predict 2 years of climate and then decided to compare their estimate based on the following criteria: colder than normal, normal, hotter than normal. In other words, every day they had a 1 in 3 (33.3%) chance of getting it right if they flipped a coin. After two years, their percentage correct was 37%. So, millions of dollars of CPU and time was spent to get a 3.7% accuracy. When you consider that most of their "accurate days" occurred in the first few months, their record becomes even more dismal.
What we "fat, self-centered, instant gratification, H2 driving pricks" are saying is get some more real data and fix your models before you try and predict the future. Fifty data points does not let you extrapolate another one-hundred points of data. At best you could produce 5-10, and I doubt those would be accurate.
Gee, I suppose it was Strom Thurmond who funded NASA to have those freak 20 cooling years from 1950 to 1970? Or the fact that the warmest year on record is 1938? Or that the 1998 "hot year" corresponds with the El Nino event? Or did he fund the fastest warming period in history during the 1800s, when CO2 rose by 3 parts per million? Or how about the sudden plunge back down prior to 1918, when the CO2 continued to rise by 12ppm? Perhaps the fact that there is zero statistical correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures and a 95% correlation between solar activity and global temperatures has something to do with it?
Nah, the sun can't have any effect on global temperature. Never mind that it's so active right now we don't even have categories big enough for the size flares it's throwing off. It's not like that implies it's throwing off more energy.
Leave the sarcasm to a professional.
Yeah, except, oh yeah, it was 19 terrorists who started the war on terror. Maybe you should be pissed off with them.
Had the attack not staggered the economy, had we not gone to war to protect ourselves, had the tax base continued to grow at the predicted rate, we wouldn't have run up any deficits.
While you're looking through those rose-colored glasses, why not tell me how good Michael Jackson is with kids, too.
Oh, and your beloved Clinton hid a 500 billion dollar deficit in the last year of his term. But you won't bother to go and check that fact, or that he strong-armed the CBO into covering it up through the election. Unfortunately the article (published August 8, 2002 in the Chicago Sun Times) is no longer available on-line, but here's a quick excerpt.
Robert Novak reports that, during Bill Clinton's last two years as CEO of the nation, "the announced level of before-tax profits was at least 10% too high - a discrepancy rising close to 30% during the last presidential campaign. Most startling, the Commerce Department in 2000 showed the economy on an upswing through most of the election year, while in fact it was declining."
Of course, I'm sure you'd have rather had Al Gore, who would have made gas $5 a gallon and outlawed SUVs and raised the MPG rate to a minimum of 50. And he would have been "saddened and angered" at the events of 9/11. He might even have written a letter.
Thank god we had a Texas Cowboy in the White House.
So because the general public believes it, we should now do science by majority vote? Better close down that evolutionary lab, because the last poll showed 80% of Americans believe in the Bible/Torah story of creation.
In 1970, peer reviewed journals were calling for dumping millions of tons of soot on the polar ice caps because of the rampant global cooling. In fact the rise in CO2 since 1950 has been nearly linear, but the temperature in the 1990s barely is back to the temperature in the 1930s. The curve of the graph is a steep valley with zero correlation to the rise in CO2 levels.
In fact, the greatest rise in CO2 happened from 1918 to 1950, when there was a marked cooling of temperatures. All of which is moot since we were coming out of some of the coldest temperatures ever from 1700. [The little ice age.] Tree rings and written evidence show us that the period from 600 AD to 1000AD was up to 5 degrees (Centigrade) warmer than the warmest year on record. Were the vikings and crusaders burning that many villages?
Let's lay out some facts.
No current climate model can accurately predict even two years into the future. Period. Don't believe me, ask any of them to run the data up to 1996 and then predict forward and match it to the real data. They *ALL* fail.
No one understands the complete carbon cycle, i.e. where is carbon produced, where does it go, what reactions does it cause, how much effect does it have on temperature, etc. Carbon is one of at least a dozen greenhouse gasses.
Water vapor accounts for 90+% of the global warming and cooling cycle. Some estimates put it as high as 98%. No one is telling us to put a pool cover on the oceans.
Human production of CO2 may account for as little as 4% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. No one knows for sure. A single volcanic event can pour ten years worth of CO2 into the atmosphere in a matter of hours. Trees produce CO2 at night. Should we be cutting them down?
NASA data from satellites and weather balloons has disagreed with measurements on the ground. Graphing the disagreement produces the exact graph of the amount of "global warming" that has occured in the last 50 years.
Most climate models assume that the oceanic movement of heat takes decades. The El Nino of 1998 proved that it takes days. Not one model has been changed to reflect this.
The climate model being used by Climate Modeling.net [according to their own documentation] does not model adiabatic cooling (cooling or heating of air as it pushes up or down over mountains) Their parameter of "gravity waves" gets it absolutely backwards, saying that mountains *add* energy to the atmosphere in the form of friction instead of sucking energy *out* of the atmosphere in the form of precipitation. In their model, Death Valley gets 20-30 inches of rain a year.
I'm sorry, but this isn't science, it's a bunch of climatologists screaming "DOOOM" and picking up a paycheck. They're proving their theory with models that are woefully inadequate and, at best, in their infancy. Ask them how many hurricanes their models predicted for last year. These are guys who model something on a computer and don't want to look at any nasty real-world facts that disprove their theories.
Okay, so, what's your point. I gave you a reference to cigarettes as being commonly referred to as "Cancer sticks" in the nineteenth century. You site a study used by a tobacco company to try to not pay a multi-billion dollar settlement that the states have since squandered on things like executive parking lots and new traffic lights.
Don't try to hold up a legal pleading attempting to create a plausible doubt against 150 years of common knowledge.
My uncle died of lung cancer when I was 10. I watched him whither and die while still smoking cigarettes up until the day before he died. Guess what, I know cigarettes are bad for you. So does everyone else. That's my point. No one grabs a pack of smokes and says, "Boy, I'll feel healthier after one of these!"
But, the real crime is that the cigarette companies are making 20-25 cents a pack on them, while we, the American People, are taking about $1.40 a pack in blood money [read taxes] from each and every pack. You and people like you scream about the dangers of tobacco. Well fine, BAN IT! So long as you still take money from the sale and production of tobacco, I will continue to say, "screw you," to every anti-cigarette zealot that comes along.
FYI. I do not smoke. That would be stupid. Apparently, such personal responsibility is beyond you.
Nice try, unfortunately for you, there is now data (a 5 year satellite study by NASA) that shows that CO2 levels fall by 2-3% as the air passes over the United States. In short, we are a net consumer of CO2, and not vice versa. On the other hand, Europe produces 38% more CO2 then it absorbs and China produces more CO2 than most of the rest of the world. They just get to say "we have a low per capita production" because they get to divide by a billion people who live just above the stone age.
The 25% figure comes from the fact that we burn 25% of the fossil fuel consumed by the world. In return, we produce 50% of the world's food. You really want to make the trade?
As for saying I am "one of those people", I find it interesting that this comes from [an aparent] European who spent 2000 years destroying everything they came in contact with. In the late middle ages, it was called the Sahara Jungle. Then Europeans decided that jungle wood was just the thing to panel their study with. Give me a break.