So, the fact that both Tornadic activity in the United States and Cyclonic Activity globally are at 50 year lows all point to this "increased activity". Somewhere you have failed to notice that your claims must be backed up with data. Also, you have failed to explain why the actual global temperatures over the last 30 years have come in below the lowest predicted warming of all the models used by the IPCC, yet they continue to increase the predicted response. The last IPCC report posited a 3.0 degreeC/century rise in temperature, while actual data points at 1.2 degrees C/century or lower.
I work in computer science, and there's a name for a model which cannot predict, it's called "broken" or "incomplete". The fact that you now wish to make multi-trillion dollar, economy-wrecking, and real-life endangering decisions based on computer models that still can't agree with each other, much less the facts, is frightening beyond belief.
The amazing thing to me is that the same crowd that doesn't trust a banana with an extra gene inserted through a science evolved through 60 years of study, or grown with a fertilizer used for 80 years without a downside, are completely willing to take steps that will result in starvation, civil wars, and economic catastrophe over an increase of 0.012% of a particularly harmless gas in the atmosphere, which is required for life on Earth. A gas which, during the most life-bearing phase of the earth's history, was almost 20 times as abundant. All of which is based on computer programs developed by non-computer programmer programmers, over the course of a few months, which are less than accurate in the short term, and whose predictions are wildly inaccurate over the long term.
Not to mention, if tree-rings are such great thermometers, why has the dendrochronological record not been updated since the 1980's? Surely in the billions being funneled to climate research, someone can pay some grad students $10 an hour to go get some tree cores with a hand-drill every weekend?
Most of these climate scientists wouldn't know the climate it if rained on them.
The survey is full of self-confirming bias, and selection bias. And the 97% number ignores the 65% of the papers that said *NOTHING* either way about AGW. In fact, if you take only those papers that explicitly endorse AGW, versus those that deny it, the ratio is actually flipped, with the "deniers" winning out.
In fact, by percentages of publications, the number that support AGW have been steadily declining year after year since 1995 according to the very numbers in this paper. Make of that what you will.
That was a brief synopsis for those of you too lazy to RTFA.
Would you like me to work the Navier-Stokes equations for you to show convective heat transfer in a fluid body? I'm quite aware of what heating does, and I'm also quite aware that you have no concept of the numbers being talked about here. You talk about adding thousands of watts per square meter to a liquid forcing a transition to a gaseous (and often turbulent) state. The difference the math talked about here is 1.3 watts per square meter, out fo 1365 watts per square meter. And spread that over a 30 kilometer high column of gas. The overall increase is down in the third to fourth decimal place. Climate scientists know that, and they posit that there are dozens of "positive feedback" methods that will drive temperatures higher and higher. They believe the climate is in a unstable dynamic equilibrium, rather than a stable dynamic equilibrium -- think the difference between being on a roller-coaster poised at the top of the hill, or one at the bottom of a valley.
We have heard words like "tipping point" or "past the point of no return" which are all associated with an unstable equilibrium. Yet the climate of the Earth is no such thing. Yes, we may be able to push the roller coaster a little way up the hill, but when we release it, it will roll back down to the bottom again. The climate is the same way. It must be, or over the 4.6 billion year long life of this planet, some event (the Siberian Traps for instance -- look it up) would have long since sent the planet spiraling into catastrophe.
Anything -- ANYTHING -- we humans can do is temporary. To believe otherwise is the most blatant of arrogance on our part. The fact is, the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be having some effect on temperatures. But so what? We live in every biosphere. No one is going to die from it. It could be good. Things will change. So what -- they've changed before. We'll adapt. Some things won't. They'll die. There's this thing out there called evolution. It's been doing that for nearly 4 billion years.
So, your boiling pot of water, while a wonderful visual, is totally wrong. To get a more accurate model, turn your burner up to full, and when you've got a nice rolling boil, light a match and add it. See if you can spot the difference. That's the real model.
Please cite the testable predictions that the Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Science conglomerate has made. Please include any time when they stated a falsifiable claim. In other words, a prediction, which if found not to occur, would falsify their model.
The only one I found was made back in the 1990's which claimed that the Tropical troposphere would show faster and larger warming than all other areas of the planet.
This did not happen, and is not happening. In fact, the tropical troposphere has cooled over the entire satellite record. In response to this, the climate scientists have modified their models so they can "reverse forecast" this occurrence. Their model was proven wrong, their theory proven wrong, so they simply changed the rules.
Every time there's a heat wave or a drought, we hear, "GLOBAL WARMING!" shouted from the rooftops, yet when we have the coldest spring on record in the U.S., we're told that's also caused by global warming. We're told after Hurricane Katrina, that such "extreme weather" was going to be continuously increasing as the warming drove the weather. However, total Accumulated Cyclonic Energy hasn't increased. In fact it's been the lowest levels in history. We have gone over 2500 days without a major hurricane (Cat 3 or above) hitting the United States. Again, that's the longest stretch in the history of records. And yet, we're told this must be caused by global warming as well.
So, if it gets hotter, it's global warming, if it gets colder, it's global warming. In the end, there's no way to prove it wrong. By your own definition, that's not science.
No climate science prediction showed the current 15 year period of global cooling, and yet we see them talking about 97% agreement. This doesn't point to settled science, this points to a monopoly on the publishing of papers.
97% of people in a room can call a rabbit a cat, but that doesn't make it a cat.
Gotta call Bullshit. Sequestration cut every program by 1.4%. And there was a mandatory 1.7% increase on most budgets. If we really cut all programs 10% then it wouldn't be $44B in savings this year, it would be $370B in savings. We'd still be spending over $1T we don't have, but that would be a vast improvement over the $44B we're actually cutting.
- No one is willing to fix code that already exists because it works "good enough"
- No one is willing to expend the resources (read time and money) to go back and rewrite bad piece of code.
- Fear of new code exposing how bad the other code is.
1 - Always treat a gun as if it is loaded, unless you, personally, have ensured that it is not.
2 - If you do not intimately know how the gun is loaded or unloaded, or how to check for a chambered round -- consider the gun is loaded.
3 - If another person tells you the gun is not loaded, treat it as loaded.
My dad taught me those when I was 8. I've always followed those rules to the letter, and I have never had a single accident with a gun. I have taught my kids the same rules, and they have never had a single accident with a gun.
This is not rocket science.
However, one of my "gun control nut" friends continues to tell me that there is no safe way to have a gun in your home without your kids blowing their heads off. This, despite me demonstrating that, with proper training, a gun is completely safe.
Horrible example. The term "Cancer Stick" for cigarettes was coined in 1873. "Coffin Nails" was a favorite term since the 1890's. We didn't need the tobacco companies to tell us anything, we all knew it. Personal responsibility is the fact that, knowing this, people smoked them anyway. And I say this as a person who watched his two pack a day uncle die of lung cancer at age 59. He knew damn well that they were killing him, but he refused to stop smoking. He never thought they were anything but bad for him.
Guess what, alcohol can kill you too, so can cheeseburgers. So can not exercising. I suppose you want Big Brother government to tell you what you can eat, drink, and do with your free time too. Funny, our current "health-conscious" president is a notorious chain-smoker.
About three years ago in Colorado Springs, three drunk teenagers broke into the home of a 93 year old man and his wife. The teenagers were all swinging baseball bats and tire irons. The 93 year old male pulled out a Colt.45 ACP fired one warning shot and then drilled the first kid in the chest, one-shot. Great. The other two advanced, and hit his arm with the bat. At that point, his aim was no longer ideal. He took four more shots to get one in the arm of the attacker, then a second round that disabled him. At this point the third attacker fled, and he fired one more shot that grazed the buttocks of the third attacker. Police, called by the wife at the start of the attack, took 4 minutes to arrive. They followed the blood drops to the third attacker who was arrested.
Total rounds fired: 8
Rounds remaining: 2 or 3 (not sure if he had a chamber + 10, or just the 10 in the mag)
Had the third attacker continued to press, he would have had a chance to drop them. The three attackers were later linked to another home invasion where they had beaten an 80+ year old couple to death after repeatedly raping the wife. Your three round limit would have ensured two more dead victims, and only one dead attacker.
If you limit weapons to three rounds, all you ensure is that home-invasion teams will start having at least four members.
I've already demonstrated elsewhere in this thread that it's not "two cents a month". That's a number you've pulled firmly out your backside. The real number is somewhere between $0.60 and nearly $5 a month, depending on whose numbers you take as gospel. It's also been three days since this happened. I can guarantee you haven't gotten your next bill yet to see whether or not DirecTV *has* cut your billing.
It amazes me how you blame everything here on DirecTV, who is a distributor of goods, and not on the manufacturer of those goods that is demanding an increase in prices. Do you expect the grocery store to eat the cost when the price of milk goes up from the distributor?
You point out that DirecTV wants to make a profit as if that were some horrible thing. Ask yourself how much profit they have to make to pay to launch a $2B satellite so you can watch Sponge Bob? And then you want them to have redundancy, so it's not just one satellite but two or three. And then everyone wants their local channels available, so it's not 200 channels, it's 2000 or more. Each satellite only has so much capacity. And when you reach that limit, it's another $2B to add the next channel. These aren't minor costs, and they can't pass those costs on to the customer. That's *their* cost of doing business. The only cost they can control at all is how much they pay to the suppliers for content to rebroadcast. And you criticize them for doing that.
You expect a company to "absorb the costs". Hey, great idea, let's do that to all companies out there. You know, it costs more to make a car now than in 1903, when cars cost $800. You should go in to your local dealership and tell them they should "absorb the cost" of the increases from their suppliers. It's only fair, right? Heck, when I was a kid in the 70's cars were under $3000, and that's like a promise to me, so they should sell me a car at the cost it was when I was born, right?
Get real, it's not a rental contract. They wrote into the contract that they will pass on substantial cost increases to the consumer. Go get your contract, read it. It's in there. You signed it. Tough luck.
And, yes, if they can't resolve the issue with Viacom, then they should offer a rate reduction of between $1.20 and $10 per month (see calculations in another message) which is the cost of the Viacom channels. I expect if they truly reach an impasse, that's what they'll do.
Fine, let's take the lowball of $144M. DirecTV has a well-known number of customers, namely 20,000,000. Viacom's channels are part of core programming, so everyone gets them. We divide $144M by 20M and we get $7.20 per subscriber per year. Okay, easy enough, that's a $0.60 per month increase, matching Viacom's claim of "pennies" per month. (60 pennies is still less than a dollar.)
DirecTV is putting a dollar figure on all their scrolls, a number I haven't seen Viacom deny. That number is $1,000,000,000 per year. Dividing by number of customers, that's $50 per customer, per year, or about $4.25 per month increase in the bill. Guess what, 425 pennies is still "pennies" per month.
If we go with your estimate of splitting the difference, it's $20 per year, and $1.75 per month. Again, if you want to stretch the term, it's still "pennies per month."
Now, if DirecTV is lying about the $1B number, why is Viacom not shouting "Liar Liar!" from the rooftops and giving out the real number instead? All they give us is "pennies per month" which describes absolutely *nothing* in terms of actual cost, other than greater than $0.01, since it's plural.
Both sides are using semantics. One is using them to defend my wallet, the other to pick my pocket. I know which side I'm naturally going to come down on.
So, you would prefer that DirecTV simply accept any rate increase of the content provider and pass them on to you? So, the $1B increase ($50/year/subscriber) should just be passed on to you? Like Viacom says, "it's only pennies a day."
And once that precedent is set, when Disney want's another $5 a month, and HBO does, and every other network, and your bill goes to $400 a month, will you vent your anger at the content providers or will you scream at DirecTV for not attempting to argue with the content providers to maintain a fair rate?
I'm no fanboi of DirecTV (although I do have it) but I'd rather they fought against a price increase even if it means temporarily losing channels, rather than tagging another $5 a month onto my bill.
Imagine there were only 19,000 people on Earth, roughly evenly distributed. What's the chance you'd ever run into another person? Now, instead of just the land area, make sure that 3/4ths of those people are on the ocean. What are the odds of running into one of them now?
Now, imagine that, instead of just the surface of the Earth, you stack up about 500 layers, each one of them the surface of a sphere wrapping the entire Earth, each one a mile higher than the last and starting about 160 miles up. Now instead of just the surface of the Earth, spread those 19,000 people across those 500 spheres evenly and evenly spread them around the surface of the sphere they're on. And all of those spheres have more area than the surface of the Earth.
Now, would you consider that area "dangerously heavily populated?" On top of that, you need to shrink the people down for most of the debris.
Now, to be fair, the real test is that many of these "people" are moving really, really fast, although most of them are moving in roughly the same direction. But a few of them are going in different directions. And some of those are jumping between spheres. But it's still areas larger than the whole surface of the Earth. There have been only a tiny number of collisions between these objects. (I think the number is actually -- one.)
Like I said, space is big. Really big. Bigger than the biggest thing you can imagine. You may think it's a long way down to the pharmacy, but that's peanuts compared to space. (With apologies to Douglas Adams)
Sadly, you take the definition of a Progressive think tank (run by ultra-1%'er George Soros) as the source of your definition.
"Gee, Mr. Fox, what's your plan for Hen-House management?"
I doubt that Stalin, or Pol Pot, or Mao defined their socialist/progressivist regimes as, "A long-standing ideology to repress the people, destroy the economy, stifle innovation, and kill millions while insuring the continuation of a decadent, hedonistic lifestyle for a carefully chosen elite."
Funny how you criticize the US educational system, but have clearly never read or understood what the socialist movement (started in the latter half of the 18th century) and the newly re-named Progressive movement of the 20th century (renamed when the muckrakers and guys like Lenin made "communist" and "socialist" into bad words) have done or how they've been implemented. The fact, alone, that you don't see them as the exact same movement, with one version having a "candy-covered coating" is a truly sad commentary on your "critical thinking" skills.
Sadly, you have bought into the redefinition of the language that the Progressive movement thrives on. There is nothing "progressive" about progressivism. The end result of progressivism is a small cadre of "elites" who control the lives of the underclass "for their own good." This is no different then the Feudalism of the middle ages.
Explain to me how the socialist ideal of a society where all people are taxed using a "progressive" scale so that there is no one who is "unfairly" rich, leaving a large group of people who work endlessly to feed a government of cultural elites (bureaucrats) whose job is to dole out largese to the people -- just enough to keep them hooked on the system but not enough for them to escape it -- is any different from the Feudal lords and the idea of Noblese Oblige?
We had that system, we've tried that system for 2000 years or more. Oh, it "works" in it's own way, namely a short, brutish existence for 99% of the population. But for that 1% it's a wonderful system.
And that's the huge irony here. The progressives of the last century have managed to convince "the 99%" that they really want to have the socialist system installed.
The most ironic statement in history: "Workers of the World Unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains." Because when they rose up, all they really did was forge shackles for themselves.
The USSR killed at least 25,000,000 people.
Pol Pot killed 10,000,000
Mao and his Cultural Revolution? Probably in excess of 30,000,000.
And this is the system you want to champion? I bet you think you were taught "critical thinking" as well...
A typical launch carries a 3-5% excess fuel load for safety margin, so there was always some extra fuel aboard at separation. The big factor that changed the game was that the Merlin 1-D engine was suppposed to reach 120,000 lbs of thrust each, but instead is testing at 145,000 lbs of thrust with a higher ISP, which IIRC is about 310 seconds, which is phenomenal for a Kerosene/LOX engine.
With the extra thrust and the better performance, it meant that they could either expand the payload by a few thousand kilos, which would still be an option with a more expensive, expendable flight, or they could have 6-8% fuel reserves at the end of the stage separation.
Without the payload to push, that 6-8% is more than enough to slow down a very light "empty tin can" and get it out of it's sub-orbital trajectory. If you watch the video, they're only burning three engines to deorbit, and one engine to land the first stage. The claim is that the first stage actually has the thrust to return it to the launch site, which might be possible. First stage separation is only a few hundred miles downrange, and you could actually just slow down and let the Earth rotate under you to move back west. In any case, you'd want to bring the speed down to where you are basically in a straight line free-fall back to the launch site, using only maneuvering jets for stability until a few miles above the ground, when you light the center engine and tail land it.
Clearly this isn't something simple, either. They aren't going to be flying this by next week or anything, and the actual fact is that they are likely to be unable to recover some of these first and second stages to bad or uncontrolled landings -- which is exactly the same as what happens now, so this can only be a win scenario for them if they get it working. I'd love to see $10/lb to LEO pricing.
As for the use of parachutes, the first launch of Falcon 9 attempted to parachute the first stage back to the ocean, but from what I heard, the aerodynamic forces on the tumbling, uncontrolled reentry of the stage caused it to break up before the parachutes were deployed. The second stage reentry is under even higher stresses, and I don't think they even tried to recover it before the grasshopper program.
I don't know any native-born American who is anti-immigrant. In fact, I am a third generation American, and I never even found anyone who'd call me anything but an American, and that includes my wife's family, who came over on the Mayflower. About the only people I know in America who'd call me anything but an American are those with names like John Crazy Horse. Of course, they do have some basis for that...
I have absolutely no problem with, and I don't know a single person who does have a problem with, every person who fills out a legal visa application and shows up in the country to work and become part of the productive society. I do, however, know a lot of people who are anti *ILLEGAL* immigrant -- cutting through a fence, sneaking into the country, stealing someone's identity through their social security number and then using it to take a $7 an hour job from a worker because the employer knows he can pay the illegal $4 an hour to do the same job since they can't complain about minimum wage violations. Then jumping on the welfare system or other public programs that don't report illegals, to add to their income with taxpayer money. That kind of crap is what's destroying a lot of the entry-level jobs in this country. And largely, that's not the fault of the illegal immigrant, but the fact that there's estimates of as many as 20 million illegals in the country means the problem is wide-spread. We tried amnesty in the 1980's and it was a disaster of epic proportions, as all it did was cause a new rush for more illegals to get into the country. After all, if we did it once...
My 18 year old son can't get a job right now with teen unemployment in the city over 70%, but not one of the clerks at the local McDonalds speaks a word of English. You try to figure out why that is...
There's no "anti-immigrant rhetoric" in the news, except for the lefties *claiming* that the republicans hate anyone who isn't white. It's the tired old democrat playbook of race warfare they've been going to since the late 1960's. Every Republican I've met is in favor of Immigration, heck the republican from Texas (whose name escapes me) keeps doubling the H-1B visa rate every year, despite the fact that it keeps depressing salaries in the computer programming field.
Sorry, I know you are talking about how accepting most Americans are about immigration, but that one line about anti-immigrant feelings just steams me.
Just to be pedantic -- Elon Musk has said he could design the Falcon XX for $2.5B. Bigelow Aerospace can put up a "Mars Mission" space station using BA-300's for less than a Billion dollars more. Assuming six launches of the Falcon XX to put those six BA-300 segments into an interplanetary transfer orbit at $150M each (SpaceX's estimated cost per flight of the XX) and you have a total of right around $4.5B. Now, Apple has a warchest of $80B in cash, so Apple could launch not one, but about 30 missions to Mars and remain solvent.
Whether they'd get a return on their investment is a tough question, since I'm not sure whether FoxConn will set up slave labor camps on Mars to make iPads or not.
What I was pointing out was that his comment of "as far as we can tell they've NEVER been this high before" was a patently false and exaggerated. It marks the kind of ill-thought-out rhetoric that marks both sides of the AGW argument. Both sides have become shrill and irrational with facts ignored in favor of screaming alarmist claptrap to push an agenda.
Things like his comment - "as far as we can tell they've NEVER been this high before" - are patently false. Comments from the other side, like, "reducing CO2 will collapse all of society and leave us in caves" aren't helpful either. I think that's the entire point, if you RTFA, that this guy Lovelock is admitting that screaming alarmist claptrap like "billions of people will be dead by 2050 and the few breeding pairs of humans left will be hiding in the Arctic and Antarctic" doesn't advance the science, or change anyone's beliefs, it's just utter bullshit that causes a harsh push-back that's just as harsh in the opposite direction. Especially as evidence to the contrary builds. Any good science is lost in the back-and-forth screaming match.
I hate to enter this discussion, but you are desperately wrong about CO2 levels. The Carboniferous period (when life * flourished* on Earth) had CO2 levels nearly 20 times higher than current times. Please read your units carefully. 7000ppm is quite a bit more than our current ~390ppm.
The original AC bitched about the advocacy of the astronauts and engineers as being unqualified. I pointed out that the same can be said of the AGW advocates. He then stated that he didn't know who Pachurri was, so I explained it. On top of that, Pachurri isn't just an advocate. He is the ultimate gatekeeper and head of the IPCC. Every government in the world takes his word as gospel in the IPCC reports. Every page of which he approves.
Reporting what the head of the IPCC does on the side is not ad hominem. He actually does write soft porn on the side, which calls into question his credentials. The entire other AC's post was about "gee, these guys aren't climate scientists -- they're highly trained analytic engineers who spend all their time going over numbers that have life or death results -- so they're totally unqualified to say 'maybe the company I worked for for 20-30 years should be more worried about launching rockets than taking sides in something the NOAA should be doing.'" While my post is, "gee, the guy who *runs* the IPCC, the highest authority on AGW -- is a former railroad engineer who's largest responsibility was explaining away late trains, and who also writes pulp novels -- so he's totally qualified to be making trillion dollar decisions affecting the life and death of literally billions of people."
I am not the one making the argument from authority. The logical fallacies aren't on my side.
On the other hand, I note how you completely ignore the very real fact that Michael Mann (et al) misused data flagrantly and got it past a group of "peers" who are all in his daily email list, and who run Real Climate.
Pachurri, by the way, is the Head of the IPCC, and co-recipient with Gore, of the Nobel Prize. He also writes soft-core porn on the side.
As has been pointed out in other threads, the entire contribution of the Oil industry to do "climate science" is less money than the GSA spent on their Vegas partying in 2010. It's amazing how all these people are getting checks from the oil industry, since they all must be for about $20. I'm sure a lot of scientists would risk their careers for that picture of Andrew Jackson.
Try reading some of the dissenting views for once, instead of listening to the echo chamber on Real Climate.
Real science? Go look up the Tiljander series and look at how Mann (et. al. 2008) used them and then tell me I'm the one relying on lies.
[Here's a hint: increasing X-Ray absorption in the sample corresponded to lower temperatures, Mann simply correlated the tail of the data -- which the author stated in the peer-reviewed paper was invalid due to modern interference -- with recent thermometer records and claimed it proved the hockey stick. This ignored the fact that higher values indicated colder temperatures, and the invalidity of the modern data. It fit his preconceived notions, so he used it... Upside-down. But hey, just because he used a proxy showing the Little Ice Age was warmer than the Medieval Warm Period... I'm sure that's justified.]
Slashdot Mirror
So, the fact that both Tornadic activity in the United States and Cyclonic Activity globally are at 50 year lows all point to this "increased activity". Somewhere you have failed to notice that your claims must be backed up with data. Also, you have failed to explain why the actual global temperatures over the last 30 years have come in below the lowest predicted warming of all the models used by the IPCC, yet they continue to increase the predicted response. The last IPCC report posited a 3.0 degreeC/century rise in temperature, while actual data points at 1.2 degrees C/century or lower.
I work in computer science, and there's a name for a model which cannot predict, it's called "broken" or "incomplete". The fact that you now wish to make multi-trillion dollar, economy-wrecking, and real-life endangering decisions based on computer models that still can't agree with each other, much less the facts, is frightening beyond belief.
The amazing thing to me is that the same crowd that doesn't trust a banana with an extra gene inserted through a science evolved through 60 years of study, or grown with a fertilizer used for 80 years without a downside, are completely willing to take steps that will result in starvation, civil wars, and economic catastrophe over an increase of 0.012% of a particularly harmless gas in the atmosphere, which is required for life on Earth. A gas which, during the most life-bearing phase of the earth's history, was almost 20 times as abundant. All of which is based on computer programs developed by non-computer programmer programmers, over the course of a few months, which are less than accurate in the short term, and whose predictions are wildly inaccurate over the long term.
Not to mention, if tree-rings are such great thermometers, why has the dendrochronological record not been updated since the 1980's? Surely in the billions being funneled to climate research, someone can pay some grad students $10 an hour to go get some tree cores with a hand-drill every weekend?
Most of these climate scientists wouldn't know the climate it if rained on them.
You want an analysis of the article itself? I could do that, but someone already has: Cook's Survey not only Meaningless, but Misleading
The survey is full of self-confirming bias, and selection bias. And the 97% number ignores the 65% of the papers that said *NOTHING* either way about AGW. In fact, if you take only those papers that explicitly endorse AGW, versus those that deny it, the ratio is actually flipped, with the "deniers" winning out.
In fact, by percentages of publications, the number that support AGW have been steadily declining year after year since 1995 according to the very numbers in this paper. Make of that what you will.
That was a brief synopsis for those of you too lazy to RTFA.
Would you like me to work the Navier-Stokes equations for you to show convective heat transfer in a fluid body? I'm quite aware of what heating does, and I'm also quite aware that you have no concept of the numbers being talked about here. You talk about adding thousands of watts per square meter to a liquid forcing a transition to a gaseous (and often turbulent) state. The difference the math talked about here is 1.3 watts per square meter, out fo 1365 watts per square meter. And spread that over a 30 kilometer high column of gas. The overall increase is down in the third to fourth decimal place. Climate scientists know that, and they posit that there are dozens of "positive feedback" methods that will drive temperatures higher and higher. They believe the climate is in a unstable dynamic equilibrium, rather than a stable dynamic equilibrium -- think the difference between being on a roller-coaster poised at the top of the hill, or one at the bottom of a valley.
We have heard words like "tipping point" or "past the point of no return" which are all associated with an unstable equilibrium. Yet the climate of the Earth is no such thing. Yes, we may be able to push the roller coaster a little way up the hill, but when we release it, it will roll back down to the bottom again. The climate is the same way. It must be, or over the 4.6 billion year long life of this planet, some event (the Siberian Traps for instance -- look it up) would have long since sent the planet spiraling into catastrophe.
Anything -- ANYTHING -- we humans can do is temporary. To believe otherwise is the most blatant of arrogance on our part. The fact is, the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be having some effect on temperatures. But so what? We live in every biosphere. No one is going to die from it. It could be good. Things will change. So what -- they've changed before. We'll adapt. Some things won't. They'll die. There's this thing out there called evolution. It's been doing that for nearly 4 billion years.
So, your boiling pot of water, while a wonderful visual, is totally wrong. To get a more accurate model, turn your burner up to full, and when you've got a nice rolling boil, light a match and add it. See if you can spot the difference. That's the real model.
The hypotheses must make testable predictions.
Please cite the testable predictions that the Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Science conglomerate has made. Please include any time when they stated a falsifiable claim. In other words, a prediction, which if found not to occur, would falsify their model.
The only one I found was made back in the 1990's which claimed that the Tropical troposphere would show faster and larger warming than all other areas of the planet.
This did not happen, and is not happening. In fact, the tropical troposphere has cooled over the entire satellite record. In response to this, the climate scientists have modified their models so they can "reverse forecast" this occurrence. Their model was proven wrong, their theory proven wrong, so they simply changed the rules.
Every time there's a heat wave or a drought, we hear, "GLOBAL WARMING!" shouted from the rooftops, yet when we have the coldest spring on record in the U.S., we're told that's also caused by global warming. We're told after Hurricane Katrina, that such "extreme weather" was going to be continuously increasing as the warming drove the weather. However, total Accumulated Cyclonic Energy hasn't increased. In fact it's been the lowest levels in history. We have gone over 2500 days without a major hurricane (Cat 3 or above) hitting the United States. Again, that's the longest stretch in the history of records. And yet, we're told this must be caused by global warming as well.
So, if it gets hotter, it's global warming, if it gets colder, it's global warming. In the end, there's no way to prove it wrong. By your own definition, that's not science.
No climate science prediction showed the current 15 year period of global cooling, and yet we see them talking about 97% agreement. This doesn't point to settled science, this points to a monopoly on the publishing of papers.
97% of people in a room can call a rabbit a cat, but that doesn't make it a cat.
Gotta call Bullshit. Sequestration cut every program by 1.4%. And there was a mandatory 1.7% increase on most budgets. If we really cut all programs 10% then it wouldn't be $44B in savings this year, it would be $370B in savings. We'd still be spending over $1T we don't have, but that would be a vast improvement over the $44B we're actually cutting.
You forgot:
- No one is willing to fix code that already exists because it works "good enough"
- No one is willing to expend the resources (read time and money) to go back and rewrite bad piece of code.
- Fear of new code exposing how bad the other code is.
(32 years of real world coding.)
The full and proper set of rules is:
1 - Always treat a gun as if it is loaded, unless you, personally, have ensured that it is not.
2 - If you do not intimately know how the gun is loaded or unloaded, or how to check for a chambered round -- consider the gun is loaded.
3 - If another person tells you the gun is not loaded, treat it as loaded.
My dad taught me those when I was 8. I've always followed those rules to the letter, and I have never had a single accident with a gun. I have taught my kids the same rules, and they have never had a single accident with a gun.
This is not rocket science.
However, one of my "gun control nut" friends continues to tell me that there is no safe way to have a gun in your home without your kids blowing their heads off. This, despite me demonstrating that, with proper training, a gun is completely safe.
Horrible example. The term "Cancer Stick" for cigarettes was coined in 1873. "Coffin Nails" was a favorite term since the 1890's. We didn't need the tobacco companies to tell us anything, we all knew it. Personal responsibility is the fact that, knowing this, people smoked them anyway. And I say this as a person who watched his two pack a day uncle die of lung cancer at age 59. He knew damn well that they were killing him, but he refused to stop smoking. He never thought they were anything but bad for him.
Guess what, alcohol can kill you too, so can cheeseburgers. So can not exercising. I suppose you want Big Brother government to tell you what you can eat, drink, and do with your free time too. Funny, our current "health-conscious" president is a notorious chain-smoker.
About three years ago in Colorado Springs, three drunk teenagers broke into the home of a 93 year old man and his wife. The teenagers were all swinging baseball bats and tire irons. The 93 year old male pulled out a Colt .45 ACP fired one warning shot and then drilled the first kid in the chest, one-shot. Great. The other two advanced, and hit his arm with the bat. At that point, his aim was no longer ideal. He took four more shots to get one in the arm of the attacker, then a second round that disabled him. At this point the third attacker fled, and he fired one more shot that grazed the buttocks of the third attacker. Police, called by the wife at the start of the attack, took 4 minutes to arrive. They followed the blood drops to the third attacker who was arrested.
Total rounds fired: 8
Rounds remaining: 2 or 3 (not sure if he had a chamber + 10, or just the 10 in the mag)
Had the third attacker continued to press, he would have had a chance to drop them. The three attackers were later linked to another home invasion where they had beaten an 80+ year old couple to death after repeatedly raping the wife. Your three round limit would have ensured two more dead victims, and only one dead attacker.
If you limit weapons to three rounds, all you ensure is that home-invasion teams will start having at least four members.
I've already demonstrated elsewhere in this thread that it's not "two cents a month". That's a number you've pulled firmly out your backside. The real number is somewhere between $0.60 and nearly $5 a month, depending on whose numbers you take as gospel. It's also been three days since this happened. I can guarantee you haven't gotten your next bill yet to see whether or not DirecTV *has* cut your billing.
It amazes me how you blame everything here on DirecTV, who is a distributor of goods, and not on the manufacturer of those goods that is demanding an increase in prices. Do you expect the grocery store to eat the cost when the price of milk goes up from the distributor?
You point out that DirecTV wants to make a profit as if that were some horrible thing. Ask yourself how much profit they have to make to pay to launch a $2B satellite so you can watch Sponge Bob? And then you want them to have redundancy, so it's not just one satellite but two or three. And then everyone wants their local channels available, so it's not 200 channels, it's 2000 or more. Each satellite only has so much capacity. And when you reach that limit, it's another $2B to add the next channel. These aren't minor costs, and they can't pass those costs on to the customer. That's *their* cost of doing business. The only cost they can control at all is how much they pay to the suppliers for content to rebroadcast. And you criticize them for doing that.
You expect a company to "absorb the costs". Hey, great idea, let's do that to all companies out there. You know, it costs more to make a car now than in 1903, when cars cost $800. You should go in to your local dealership and tell them they should "absorb the cost" of the increases from their suppliers. It's only fair, right? Heck, when I was a kid in the 70's cars were under $3000, and that's like a promise to me, so they should sell me a car at the cost it was when I was born, right?
Get real, it's not a rental contract. They wrote into the contract that they will pass on substantial cost increases to the consumer. Go get your contract, read it. It's in there. You signed it. Tough luck.
And, yes, if they can't resolve the issue with Viacom, then they should offer a rate reduction of between $1.20 and $10 per month (see calculations in another message) which is the cost of the Viacom channels. I expect if they truly reach an impasse, that's what they'll do.
Fine, let's take the lowball of $144M. DirecTV has a well-known number of customers, namely 20,000,000. Viacom's channels are part of core programming, so everyone gets them. We divide $144M by 20M and we get $7.20 per subscriber per year. Okay, easy enough, that's a $0.60 per month increase, matching Viacom's claim of "pennies" per month. (60 pennies is still less than a dollar.)
DirecTV is putting a dollar figure on all their scrolls, a number I haven't seen Viacom deny. That number is $1,000,000,000 per year. Dividing by number of customers, that's $50 per customer, per year, or about $4.25 per month increase in the bill. Guess what, 425 pennies is still "pennies" per month.
If we go with your estimate of splitting the difference, it's $20 per year, and $1.75 per month. Again, if you want to stretch the term, it's still "pennies per month."
Now, if DirecTV is lying about the $1B number, why is Viacom not shouting "Liar Liar!" from the rooftops and giving out the real number instead? All they give us is "pennies per month" which describes absolutely *nothing* in terms of actual cost, other than greater than $0.01, since it's plural.
Both sides are using semantics. One is using them to defend my wallet, the other to pick my pocket. I know which side I'm naturally going to come down on.
So, you would prefer that DirecTV simply accept any rate increase of the content provider and pass them on to you? So, the $1B increase ($50/year/subscriber) should just be passed on to you? Like Viacom says, "it's only pennies a day."
And once that precedent is set, when Disney want's another $5 a month, and HBO does, and every other network, and your bill goes to $400 a month, will you vent your anger at the content providers or will you scream at DirecTV for not attempting to argue with the content providers to maintain a fair rate?
I'm no fanboi of DirecTV (although I do have it) but I'd rather they fought against a price increase even if it means temporarily losing channels, rather than tagging another $5 a month onto my bill.
Because space is big...
Imagine there were only 19,000 people on Earth, roughly evenly distributed. What's the chance you'd ever run into another person? Now, instead of just the land area, make sure that 3/4ths of those people are on the ocean. What are the odds of running into one of them now?
Now, imagine that, instead of just the surface of the Earth, you stack up about 500 layers, each one of them the surface of a sphere wrapping the entire Earth, each one a mile higher than the last and starting about 160 miles up. Now instead of just the surface of the Earth, spread those 19,000 people across those 500 spheres evenly and evenly spread them around the surface of the sphere they're on. And all of those spheres have more area than the surface of the Earth.
Now, would you consider that area "dangerously heavily populated?" On top of that, you need to shrink the people down for most of the debris.
Now, to be fair, the real test is that many of these "people" are moving really, really fast, although most of them are moving in roughly the same direction. But a few of them are going in different directions. And some of those are jumping between spheres. But it's still areas larger than the whole surface of the Earth. There have been only a tiny number of collisions between these objects. (I think the number is actually -- one.)
Like I said, space is big. Really big. Bigger than the biggest thing you can imagine. You may think it's a long way down to the pharmacy, but that's peanuts compared to space. (With apologies to Douglas Adams)
Sadly, you take the definition of a Progressive think tank (run by ultra-1%'er George Soros) as the source of your definition.
"Gee, Mr. Fox, what's your plan for Hen-House management?"
I doubt that Stalin, or Pol Pot, or Mao defined their socialist/progressivist regimes as, "A long-standing ideology to repress the people, destroy the economy, stifle innovation, and kill millions while insuring the continuation of a decadent, hedonistic lifestyle for a carefully chosen elite."
Funny how you criticize the US educational system, but have clearly never read or understood what the socialist movement (started in the latter half of the 18th century) and the newly re-named Progressive movement of the 20th century (renamed when the muckrakers and guys like Lenin made "communist" and "socialist" into bad words) have done or how they've been implemented. The fact, alone, that you don't see them as the exact same movement, with one version having a "candy-covered coating" is a truly sad commentary on your "critical thinking" skills.
Sadly, you have bought into the redefinition of the language that the Progressive movement thrives on. There is nothing "progressive" about progressivism. The end result of progressivism is a small cadre of "elites" who control the lives of the underclass "for their own good." This is no different then the Feudalism of the middle ages.
Explain to me how the socialist ideal of a society where all people are taxed using a "progressive" scale so that there is no one who is "unfairly" rich, leaving a large group of people who work endlessly to feed a government of cultural elites (bureaucrats) whose job is to dole out largese to the people -- just enough to keep them hooked on the system but not enough for them to escape it -- is any different from the Feudal lords and the idea of Noblese Oblige?
We had that system, we've tried that system for 2000 years or more. Oh, it "works" in it's own way, namely a short, brutish existence for 99% of the population. But for that 1% it's a wonderful system.
And that's the huge irony here. The progressives of the last century have managed to convince "the 99%" that they really want to have the socialist system installed.
The most ironic statement in history: "Workers of the World Unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains." Because when they rose up, all they really did was forge shackles for themselves.
The USSR killed at least 25,000,000 people.
Pol Pot killed 10,000,000
Mao and his Cultural Revolution? Probably in excess of 30,000,000.
And this is the system you want to champion? I bet you think you were taught "critical thinking" as well...
A typical launch carries a 3-5% excess fuel load for safety margin, so there was always some extra fuel aboard at separation. The big factor that changed the game was that the Merlin 1-D engine was suppposed to reach 120,000 lbs of thrust each, but instead is testing at 145,000 lbs of thrust with a higher ISP, which IIRC is about 310 seconds, which is phenomenal for a Kerosene/LOX engine.
With the extra thrust and the better performance, it meant that they could either expand the payload by a few thousand kilos, which would still be an option with a more expensive, expendable flight, or they could have 6-8% fuel reserves at the end of the stage separation.
Without the payload to push, that 6-8% is more than enough to slow down a very light "empty tin can" and get it out of it's sub-orbital trajectory. If you watch the video, they're only burning three engines to deorbit, and one engine to land the first stage. The claim is that the first stage actually has the thrust to return it to the launch site, which might be possible. First stage separation is only a few hundred miles downrange, and you could actually just slow down and let the Earth rotate under you to move back west. In any case, you'd want to bring the speed down to where you are basically in a straight line free-fall back to the launch site, using only maneuvering jets for stability until a few miles above the ground, when you light the center engine and tail land it.
Clearly this isn't something simple, either. They aren't going to be flying this by next week or anything, and the actual fact is that they are likely to be unable to recover some of these first and second stages to bad or uncontrolled landings -- which is exactly the same as what happens now, so this can only be a win scenario for them if they get it working. I'd love to see $10/lb to LEO pricing.
As for the use of parachutes, the first launch of Falcon 9 attempted to parachute the first stage back to the ocean, but from what I heard, the aerodynamic forces on the tumbling, uncontrolled reentry of the stage caused it to break up before the parachutes were deployed. The second stage reentry is under even higher stresses, and I don't think they even tried to recover it before the grasshopper program.
I don't know any native-born American who is anti-immigrant. In fact, I am a third generation American, and I never even found anyone who'd call me anything but an American, and that includes my wife's family, who came over on the Mayflower. About the only people I know in America who'd call me anything but an American are those with names like John Crazy Horse. Of course, they do have some basis for that...
I have absolutely no problem with, and I don't know a single person who does have a problem with, every person who fills out a legal visa application and shows up in the country to work and become part of the productive society. I do, however, know a lot of people who are anti *ILLEGAL* immigrant -- cutting through a fence, sneaking into the country, stealing someone's identity through their social security number and then using it to take a $7 an hour job from a worker because the employer knows he can pay the illegal $4 an hour to do the same job since they can't complain about minimum wage violations. Then jumping on the welfare system or other public programs that don't report illegals, to add to their income with taxpayer money. That kind of crap is what's destroying a lot of the entry-level jobs in this country. And largely, that's not the fault of the illegal immigrant, but the fact that there's estimates of as many as 20 million illegals in the country means the problem is wide-spread. We tried amnesty in the 1980's and it was a disaster of epic proportions, as all it did was cause a new rush for more illegals to get into the country. After all, if we did it once...
My 18 year old son can't get a job right now with teen unemployment in the city over 70%, but not one of the clerks at the local McDonalds speaks a word of English. You try to figure out why that is...
There's no "anti-immigrant rhetoric" in the news, except for the lefties *claiming* that the republicans hate anyone who isn't white. It's the tired old democrat playbook of race warfare they've been going to since the late 1960's. Every Republican I've met is in favor of Immigration, heck the republican from Texas (whose name escapes me) keeps doubling the H-1B visa rate every year, despite the fact that it keeps depressing salaries in the computer programming field.
Sorry, I know you are talking about how accepting most Americans are about immigration, but that one line about anti-immigrant feelings just steams me.
Just to be pedantic -- Elon Musk has said he could design the Falcon XX for $2.5B. Bigelow Aerospace can put up a "Mars Mission" space station using BA-300's for less than a Billion dollars more. Assuming six launches of the Falcon XX to put those six BA-300 segments into an interplanetary transfer orbit at $150M each (SpaceX's estimated cost per flight of the XX) and you have a total of right around $4.5B. Now, Apple has a warchest of $80B in cash, so Apple could launch not one, but about 30 missions to Mars and remain solvent.
Whether they'd get a return on their investment is a tough question, since I'm not sure whether FoxConn will set up slave labor camps on Mars to make iPads or not.
What I was pointing out was that his comment of "as far as we can tell they've NEVER been this high before" was a patently false and exaggerated. It marks the kind of ill-thought-out rhetoric that marks both sides of the AGW argument. Both sides have become shrill and irrational with facts ignored in favor of screaming alarmist claptrap to push an agenda.
Things like his comment - "as far as we can tell they've NEVER been this high before" - are patently false. Comments from the other side, like, "reducing CO2 will collapse all of society and leave us in caves" aren't helpful either. I think that's the entire point, if you RTFA, that this guy Lovelock is admitting that screaming alarmist claptrap like "billions of people will be dead by 2050 and the few breeding pairs of humans left will be hiding in the Arctic and Antarctic" doesn't advance the science, or change anyone's beliefs, it's just utter bullshit that causes a harsh push-back that's just as harsh in the opposite direction. Especially as evidence to the contrary builds. Any good science is lost in the back-and-forth screaming match.
I hate to enter this discussion, but you are desperately wrong about CO2 levels. The Carboniferous period (when life * flourished* on Earth) had CO2 levels nearly 20 times higher than current times. Please read your units carefully. 7000ppm is quite a bit more than our current ~390ppm.
The original AC bitched about the advocacy of the astronauts and engineers as being unqualified. I pointed out that the same can be said of the AGW advocates. He then stated that he didn't know who Pachurri was, so I explained it. On top of that, Pachurri isn't just an advocate. He is the ultimate gatekeeper and head of the IPCC. Every government in the world takes his word as gospel in the IPCC reports. Every page of which he approves.
Reporting what the head of the IPCC does on the side is not ad hominem. He actually does write soft porn on the side, which calls into question his credentials. The entire other AC's post was about "gee, these guys aren't climate scientists -- they're highly trained analytic engineers who spend all their time going over numbers that have life or death results -- so they're totally unqualified to say 'maybe the company I worked for for 20-30 years should be more worried about launching rockets than taking sides in something the NOAA should be doing.'" While my post is, "gee, the guy who *runs* the IPCC, the highest authority on AGW -- is a former railroad engineer who's largest responsibility was explaining away late trains, and who also writes pulp novels -- so he's totally qualified to be making trillion dollar decisions affecting the life and death of literally billions of people."
I am not the one making the argument from authority. The logical fallacies aren't on my side.
On the other hand, I note how you completely ignore the very real fact that Michael Mann (et al) misused data flagrantly and got it past a group of "peers" who are all in his daily email list, and who run Real Climate.
Sorry, mis-remembered. It was Mike Tyson, not Chuckles. Still, I'm sure he's being dropped by all his sponsors and ad agencies...
Right?
Right?
(crickets)
Hey, Charles Barkeley asked why no one has shot George Zimmerman dead yet this morning...
I'm sure that he'll be dropped by the networks for his hate speech...
In 3..... 2....
Pachurri, by the way, is the Head of the IPCC, and co-recipient with Gore, of the Nobel Prize. He also writes soft-core porn on the side.
As has been pointed out in other threads, the entire contribution of the Oil industry to do "climate science" is less money than the GSA spent on their Vegas partying in 2010. It's amazing how all these people are getting checks from the oil industry, since they all must be for about $20. I'm sure a lot of scientists would risk their careers for that picture of Andrew Jackson.
Try reading some of the dissenting views for once, instead of listening to the echo chamber on Real Climate.
Real science? Go look up the Tiljander series and look at how Mann (et. al. 2008) used them and then tell me I'm the one relying on lies.
[Here's a hint: increasing X-Ray absorption in the sample corresponded to lower temperatures, Mann simply correlated the tail of the data -- which the author stated in the peer-reviewed paper was invalid due to modern interference -- with recent thermometer records and claimed it proved the hockey stick. This ignored the fact that higher values indicated colder temperatures, and the invalidity of the modern data. It fit his preconceived notions, so he used it... Upside-down. But hey, just because he used a proxy showing the Little Ice Age was warmer than the Medieval Warm Period... I'm sure that's justified.]