I think I said that in both my first and my reply to a reply. TiO2 is not in a critical shortage yet, though I do wonder if we will be using it in such a low-value-added application as paint in a hundred years. Good ores are disappearing.
My minor beef with this article it is the same hype we often see here on slashdot (and in the scientific media in general). There was no breakthough here. Rather, this was typical scientific incrementalism - a minor improvement on a well-studied and well-known system, which may or may not be commercially viable.
Silicon, oxygen, and iron are common. Everything else is rare, though some things tend to accumulate and thereby make it realitively easy to extract them. Unfortunately, Ti is not one of them.
Did you know that a typical drop of sea water has 50,000,000,000 gold atoms? Good luck finding them.
In any case, Ti ore supply is not critical to this application - efficiency is.
First, Ti in any form is not particulary common, and good ores with an economically valuable Ti percentage are hard to come by (though NZ and AU are were most of it is found). Our current known reserves of good Ti ore are projected to run out by mid-century, but I always buy these projections with a bit of skepticism.
That being said, the amount of Ti used in such a panel is trivial, because the layer's thicknesses are measured in nanometers and microns. Your golf clubs have as much Ti as a football field of such panels. Refining of TiO2 to Ti metal is expensive and energy intensive, and I presume it is necessary in order to make these panels, even though the panels actually use TiO2. The process is probably Ti02 ore -> Ti -> TiCl4 -> TiO2 nanostructures. This is because the TiO2 in the panels needs to be extremely pure, and TiCl4, being a gas, can be distilled. It is then mixed with water under controlled conditions to release HCl and produce the nano-particles/structures necessary for the panels.
This article seems mostly hype to me. TiO2 nanostructures along with various dies are heavily researched around the world, with thousands of published articles. Since the article has no data, I presume all that happened was that these guys beat the previous efficiency record by a whee bit. The problem with these types of cells is that the efficiency still sucks...around 5% vs 20% for a standard silicon-based cell, and 40% for top of the line multi-junction cells (which are enormously expensive and are currently used for things like satellites or the Mars rovers). In a typical silicon cell, the silicon is about half the cost of the final package (not including the inverters, installation and all that jazz, however). Therefore, even if these TiO2 and dies cost ten times less, that won't even reduce the cost by 50%...and then you need several times the acreage to collect the energy you need.
For now, and for at least another decade in the future, silicon is king. Unfortunately, it is very expensive and there is a serious demand crunch right now, driving prices even higher (though many silicon manufacturers are heavily ramping production to solve this).
about 35000 dollars. The US's is around 42000, and I wouldn't even consider that a fair comparision, as Denmark is so small. How about we compare Denmark to Massachusetts, Delaware, or another small New England state of roughly the same size. Now you are up against a GDP of over 50,000 per year. While we are at it, we can compare some poor state like Alabama to a poor European nation...how does Romania sound? I won't bother to look but I am sure we win again.
Btw, I grew up in a trailer. Doing fine now. Also, I would rather live in a trailer on a half acre than be crammed into a tiny box (err, apartment) like your poor are. Crime rates between the US and Europe are converging. It is simply a non-factor in our lives for the most part, just like yours.
Take homeless people: The few we have are mostly (for lack of a better word) crazy.
It's no different here or anywhere else. If someone is out begging and sleeping on the street, they are usually either mentally deranged or an addict, and can get free food and shelter simply by asking. Some of them refuse the help, for whatever reasons.
I was not thinking about this type of person however, but rather the no-skills, getting-by-on-minimum wage or welfare group, which is much larger. THESE people are almost always in the posistion they are in because they chose to be there. They may whine and complain about the consquences of their choices, but choices they remain. Frankly, I don't have much sympathy for these people, nor should anyone. Strangely enough, most of them are far happier than one would think. I can honestly say the average person in my hometown (probably 40% of which are "poor" by the criteria above) are happier on the average than my college=educated set of friends I have made over the years.
I see one major difference in our thinking. We don't "give breaks" to the rich - we just screw them less than you do. I am not sure why you think screwing anyone is fair.
Morality is about what you do with YOUR money, not supporting (in public, at least) the government to raid one person for the benefit of yourself or a third party. Indeed, under a progressive tax system, the majority of those with "liberal" sentiments are not being charitable at all - they collect as much or more loot from the new taxes as they pay in tax. Probably the top 30% come out behind, the middle 40% breaks even and the bottom 30% comes out ahead. If you are not in the top 30%, you can't claim any "charitable" motivations for supporting socialism. Actually, for years I have been waiting to see a SINGLE instance of a non-mega-rich liberal claiming his or her own taxes should be raised. I have never, not once, seen this. Instead, I always seem them claiming that "the rich" should be taxed more, "the rich" implicitly being defined as "anyone who makes more money than I am likely to anytime soon". Of course, if such a person did exist, I would then ask them why, if they believe that they are morally obligated to pay a higher tax rate than the government requires, that they don't just overpay the government. The IRS surely would accept donations.
We have similar educations. We are both lucky enough to afford the toys we want. I make ~10% more than you at our day jobs (after less than a year after my post-doc), while living in an area with a cost of living far below Copenhagen or any other major city, and paying a marginal tax rate in the thirties (including taxes for the retirement system). If I were to include my health care in that, it might crack 40% total. I do admit that I work more - 5.5 weeks of vacation and around 42 hours a week. My experiences in both Austria and Japan were in graduate schools (the first as a study abroad, the second as a post-doc). In both cases, I was spending most of my time with people who had similar educational backgrounds and aspirations as myself. In both cases, I either owned or was capable of owning far more things (ie, being materially rich) than my counterparts overseas. Whether we are "culturally richer" is another matter entirely, but it is clear from a broad swath of data that Americans are both the most productive and work the most (or close to it), giving us the most money to buy stuff with. I agree with some of your criticims of our purchase choices, however. I have always hated suburbia and hate it more now that I am stuck living in it.
I don't think you spend much time with poor people, as I have my whole life (I grew up in, and my family still resides in, a very poor rural area). I have met few people in my life who were poor because of a "temporary setback". Virtually all of them, in contrast, were poor because of the logical results of a series of poor choices stretching back most of their lives. Your near-hypothetical crack baby has a golden ticket to college here in the US, btw, financed without the use of force by private scholarship donations. Frankly, any American who cannot figure out how to pay for college is probably not smart enough to benefit from college in the first place. Btw, did you know that Americans donate FAR more money to charity (both religious and secular) than Europeans, or anyone else for that matter. Even stranger, donations (and volunteering) correlate strongly with being both religious and politically conservative. Most people expect the opposite. Probably something to do with the difference between talking and walking.
but I know that Americans with surely have more toys, bigger homes/apartments, and are more likely to own a car than Europeans (OK, I lived in Austria, from which I am drawing my experience) and Japan. It's because we have far larger paychecks, of course, and more room to spend them in. On the other hand, we don't get your "free" health care from the government, have to pay for part of our own college education, and don't have very good public transportation.
The problem with the European system is that it encourages free riders. What was that statistic about the fraction of Swedish adults who were on some form of disability? I can't remember it exactly, but I remember it was sickening the number of poor Swedes who were just do sick (errr, lazy) to work.
you pay for your "free" education every time you receive a much-reduced paycheck, I can't imagine that you are smart enough to make any real innovations.
Btw, American master's and PhD students in the sciences, engineering, etc almost universally receive stipends (better than those in Europe or Japan, btw. I have worked/studied in both locations and seen your paltry checks) and free tuition. So do large numbers of students in other disciplines, usually in exchange for teaching.
Why is it so difficult for you to even consider something besides humans could be at fault?
We have. Repeatedly. Why can't you understand this? The major "natural" changes that have affected global temperatures in the past are:
1: Changes in solar luminosity. The sun has gradually grown brighter over the last few billion years. It may have short-term cycles as well. However, many many many scientists have looked for this, and found little or no evidence of change over the last 150 years. Those who have found evidence of change have only found evidence of change far too small to trigger the observed warming.
2: Changes in the earth's core temperatures. The inside of our planet is gradually cooling. However, this is a billion-year-scale phenomena and has no impact on the last 150 years.
3: Changes in our orbit. Essentially, our orbit wobbles. This is what drives ice ages, and was what caused the global cooling scare of the '70s. If we did not interfere, the pattern predicts we would be heading towards another ice age in 1000-2000 years. Again, this phenomena is too long-term to be affecting a 150-year pattern, and should be trending the other way anyway.
4: Gross changes to the composition of the atmosphere. Our atmosphere has always been changing, as lighter gases escape into space, and life changes as well. However, these process are again on the long-term (millions of years). The only major, observed changes to atmospheric composition are caused by humans (short-term effects of volcanoes excepted).
The other hypothesis HAVE been addressed. Many times. They have all failed, leaving the obvious standing even stronger.
Lol,, Good you admited something. You admited that it might be possible that something else could be at fault.
Yes, I fully admit that it is possible that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is secretly causing global warming. In all seriousness, the recent IPCC report was right (or perhaps a bit conservative) in saying that there is a greater than 90% chance that the observed warming was primarily caused by human activity, and will continue into the future. There is essentially zero chance that we have not contributed at all.
Too many people claim it is impossible to be anything other then humans poluting co2.
You are confusing impossible with improbable. It is unlikely that anything other than our CO2 and other pollutants are the primary cause of the observed changes.
But more interestingly, we don't have to do much to fix this, just adapt.
The optimal strategy is a mixture of adaption and mitigation. Not all possible methods of mitigation are cost effective. This is the criteria by which they should be judged (though this is difficult, because it rapidly becomes a debate about discount rates and theoretical economics).
The other causes require political solutions and allow rejected policies becomes forced onto people. Something that french president Jacques Chirac said in a speach on the Kyoto treaty "genuine instrument of global governance" comes to mind. Is the fix, really a fix to a problem and is the problem really global warming or the lack of a one world order?
AGW is a global issue that needs global solutions. I have no problem with this bringing us closer to a world government.
Hmm... the lack of something only means you didn't find it, not that they don't exist
You may search any peer-reviewed journal you wish for peer-reviewed work that disputes AGW. You will come up with essentially nothing - a few papers that quibble about details but none that substantially change the overall concept.
By the same logic, I could bar every pro global warming paper from entering my journal and use it as conclusive proof it doesn't exist
And you would be fired. You clearly have no idea how peer-review works. The editor's primary job is to select reviewers who have no conflict of interest or close personal relationship with the authors, and are competent to judge the work. The authors themselves can make suggestions.
Now how do you account for the extra water vapor? How do you account for the larger heat sink in the ocean?
Again, I defer to the experts at the websites in my orginal posts. Clearly, you cannot comprehend their articles (or even the summaries of such), because they darned well DO address all the questions you are complaining about. Indeed, accounting for water vapor/humidity and ocean temperature the crux of understanding the global warming phenomena. What do you think these people do?
It is these people who are being shot down, getting their careas ruined and lives threatened.
Examples, please. You are pulling crap out of your crapper now. And since when is being a professor at MIT considered a "ruined" career?
You are right. We cannot prove a negative. But we have examined every even half-way plausible competing source for the observed warming. None of them has panned out. Not even close. On the contrary, the data is highly consistent with our original hypothesis - AGW caused primarily by CO2.
The fact the competing science isn't published in a peer review jounel only means that specific thing.
Yes, it means one specific thing - they don't have the data to back up their claims. That's what gets your paper in, and nothing else. I doubt you have ever dealt with peer-review, have you?
Why is it that Co2 is the only one that counts?
Who said it was? We are also dumping tons of methane and NOx into the atmosphere, which contribute to AGW as well. On the other hand, our sulfates and particulates have a cooling effect, and all of them combined change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, which is the largest greenhouse gas. The models are consistent with the observations - we dump in a brew of chemicals, this changes the amount of water vapor, and the chemicals plus water vapor combined trap the infrared radiation that carries energy away from our planet.
All sorts of alternative possibilities doesn't equate to every possiblity.
A ridiculously impossible standard. I suppose we haven't tested the hypothesis that magical unicorns' farts are actually the culprit behind the observed warming. Therefore, we can't safely conclude that CO2 is to blame, right?
We have had to adjust the role the sun plays by around 30%.
30% of 1% is 1.3%. Nice rhetorical trick. Estimates of the role in changes of solar luminosity are statistically indifferent from zero, but probably in the range of a percent or two.
You will find several scientist posting to slashdot that are non belivers
And several dozens (myself included) saying just the opposite. Personally, I have never met anyone who could claim to be a "scientist" who currently does not believe that AGW is almost certainly real (and I work in a major R&D lab, and know many scientists). When you look at the narrow fields involved in climate change, it is even more overwhelming. Even the most denier-like scientists, such as Lidzen(sp?) from MIT, only are claiming that we aren't quite so certain and that it probably won't be THAT bad.
And this overwhelming conseneus is based off of 928 papers published in one of the above mentioned journals 25% of wich didn't say anything about man being the cause of global wamring.
Absence of a comment does not imply anything. I am willing to bet those papers are older, as well. They all say it now somewhere in the introduction. It is taken as a given nowadays, with little or no hedging.
CO2 is up nearly 50% from pre-industrial levels, and is expected to reach twice pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
Various layers of the atmophere have warmed (or even cooled) to varying degrees - and are very consistent with the physical models for AGW (and inconsistent with the models for other explanations).
The world's two most prestigous scientific publications. Peer-reviewed by the world's top scientists. Refutation of a a published article in either of these journals will surely get you your own publication in one of the two, and open all sorts of job opportunties for you.
The fact that the deniers' arguments can't stand the scrutiny of peer review means they are largely rhetoric, and not based upon sound fact.
It is simple. Earth sheds energy via infrared light. CO2 absorbs infrared light. The more CO2 we stuff in the atmosphere, the more heat we trap. This is brain-dead simple to understand. It would be a miracle if we could dump all this CO2 garbage and NOT see a temperature increase.
It is simple. The earth is getting warmer. Even the deniers won't deny this anymore. All sorts of alternative possibilities as to what could have caused this phenomena have been investigated. They have all turned up blank. The sun is not getting hotter or brighter (or at least not significantly so). Cosmic rays have not changed. The earth's orbit has not changed. No "natural" phenomena has been observed that could cause the temperature increase. Yes, temperature has "naturally" changed in the past, by not via magic. Something CAUSED the change - changes in the sun, our orbit, or wholesale changes in the biological system or atmosphere. These things are not changing now at any significant rate.
It is simple. The physical models predict that CO2 will cause warming - and not just any warming. They predict some areas will warm more, some less, and some not at all. The observed warming matches the models very well. On the contrary, models of other "natural" methods of heating, such as increased solar brightness, do not match the observations.
Is it absolutely certain that AGW is real? No. But virtually all scientists put it at 90% chance or higher. That is far above the level required to justify precautionary action.
Another issue that makes it nearly impossible to take up teaching as a second career is that schools (unlike universities) refuse to take anything other than public school teaching as experience. Imagine twenty odd years from now, when I am thinking about retirement in my late fifties. I would definitely consider teaching. Yet my 25 years of experience as a research scientist would count as NOTHING when it comes to determining my pay (nor would my great academic record, record of graduate school teaching and volunteer teaching, etc), and my PhD would be worth no more than a couple thousand dollars a year over a 22-year-old with a C- average from Directional State University.
and I get a pension, benefits, etc. It's hard to compare with numbers from NYC where the cost of living is so high. Teachers there start in the low fifties, which is higher than the national average for all teachers, yet 50k means you are barely at the edge of the middle-class. There are probably not a lot of science jobs in NYC itself, but if there were, they would have six-figure starting salaries. Yes, teachers can make a pretty good living, but only if they survive the job for twenty years. Most teacher pay scales are heavily back-loaded.
It's pretty simple. Most people with technical skills can make far more in the private sector than they can teaching. If we don't pay them market wages, we shouldn't expect many to show up.
If anything, I am quite confident that I would have been a better teacher than a scientist. The skill sets do not overlap completely but they do overlap substantially.
Also, the typical starting salary for a scientist is around 80k. I made more working as an intern for my company during a summer as an undergraduate than I would have made as a starting teacher.
Instead, I went to grad school and am now a corporate staff scientist.
I really wanted to teach, but giving up nearly half my potential income was simply too much. The kids lost out. I met plenty of other students in grad school who felt the same way.
Are teacher overpaid or underpaid, or have we gotten it just right? Easy enough!
Just look at the supply of teachers - are there enough qualified applicants for an open position at the salary you are offering? If I were an administrator, I would want at least twenty serious applications for a position, of which I could interview five or six and then pick the one who fit best. Are schools getting this many serious applicants?
In most cases, yes. In some cases, they are getting far more applicants than is necessary, indicating that the salary offered is too high. A suburban school posting a job for an elementary position in any decent district will be flooded with applications, normally hundreds and sometimes exceeding a thousand. On the other hand, there are not enough qualified math, science, and special education teachers, as well as teachers willing to teach in troubled rural or urban schools. It is clear from this that any employer besides a public school would cut the pay of elementary teachers and boost the pay of math teachers until qualified people for both positions could be found.
The reason I am not a secondary science teacher today is the poor pay. I make twice as much working as a researcher at a major corporation, and have a job that shuts off at 5pm each day without all the headaches. On the other hand, few elementary or English teachers could make double their teachers' pay. Indeed, few of them could even match it in the private sector.
Colleges and universities do not pay all professors the same. They know how to do it, and prove it can be done. Public schools need to move beyond the silly "all teachers are equal" mindset they have been stuck in for decades. It is killing education.
the negative effect of taxes on the economy. While this example is extremely exaggerated, the same thing happens countless times on a much smaller scale every day - I don't buy that shirt, for example, because taxes make the price $22 instead of $20. An otherwise mutually-beneficial transaction is lost.
Studies indicate that about fifteen cents are lost this way for every dollar the government collects for the major taxes (income, sales, property). That implies that the we have to spend a $1.15 just to get the government a dollar - and hence we always overpay for government services.
So insurance companies should do research? Well, they don't have the expertise. Guess they will have to partner with our buy out the pharmaceutical companies, who do. All you are suggesting is a bunch of horizontal mergers.
on publically-funded medical R&D. Canada's public medical R&D spending is around two billion Canadian dollars per year. The US's NIH spends nearly twenty times that alone. Accounting for the fact that we have about eight times the population, we beat the Canucks two and a half times over. Also, NIH is not the only source of public medical R&D, and our private sector whips theirs as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I said that in both my first and my reply to a reply. TiO2 is not in a critical shortage yet, though I do wonder if we will be using it in such a low-value-added application as paint in a hundred years. Good ores are disappearing.
My minor beef with this article it is the same hype we often see here on slashdot (and in the scientific media in general). There was no breakthough here. Rather, this was typical scientific incrementalism - a minor improvement on a well-studied and well-known system, which may or may not be commercially viable.
Silicon, oxygen, and iron are common. Everything else is rare, though some things tend to accumulate and thereby make it realitively easy to extract them. Unfortunately, Ti is not one of them.
Did you know that a typical drop of sea water has 50,000,000,000 gold atoms? Good luck finding them.
In any case, Ti ore supply is not critical to this application - efficiency is.
If someone in India, China, or Timbuktu can do your job for less, one of three things will happen.
1: You will be canned, and your company will bring him here to do your work
2: You will be canned, and your company will hire him and open shop in his country
3: Some other company (foreign or domestic) will hire him, beat your company in the marketplace, and put you out of business.
Any way you cut it, you are toast. Quit whining and learn to compete.
Btw, of the three best options, which is best for the USA?
Number one, by a longshot.
First, Ti in any form is not particulary common, and good ores with an economically valuable Ti percentage are hard to come by (though NZ and AU are were most of it is found). Our current known reserves of good Ti ore are projected to run out by mid-century, but I always buy these projections with a bit of skepticism.
That being said, the amount of Ti used in such a panel is trivial, because the layer's thicknesses are measured in nanometers and microns. Your golf clubs have as much Ti as a football field of such panels. Refining of TiO2 to Ti metal is expensive and energy intensive, and I presume it is necessary in order to make these panels, even though the panels actually use TiO2. The process is probably Ti02 ore -> Ti -> TiCl4 -> TiO2 nanostructures. This is because the TiO2 in the panels needs to be extremely pure, and TiCl4, being a gas, can be distilled. It is then mixed with water under controlled conditions to release HCl and produce the nano-particles/structures necessary for the panels.
This article seems mostly hype to me. TiO2 nanostructures along with various dies are heavily researched around the world, with thousands of published articles. Since the article has no data, I presume all that happened was that these guys beat the previous efficiency record by a whee bit. The problem with these types of cells is that the efficiency still sucks...around 5% vs 20% for a standard silicon-based cell, and 40% for top of the line multi-junction cells (which are enormously expensive and are currently used for things like satellites or the Mars rovers). In a typical silicon cell, the silicon is about half the cost of the final package (not including the inverters, installation and all that jazz, however). Therefore, even if these TiO2 and dies cost ten times less, that won't even reduce the cost by 50%...and then you need several times the acreage to collect the energy you need.
For now, and for at least another decade in the future, silicon is king. Unfortunately, it is very expensive and there is a serious demand crunch right now, driving prices even higher (though many silicon manufacturers are heavily ramping production to solve this).
about 35000 dollars. The US's is around 42000, and I wouldn't even consider that a fair comparision, as Denmark is so small. How about we compare Denmark to Massachusetts, Delaware, or another small New England state of roughly the same size. Now you are up against a GDP of over 50,000 per year. While we are at it, we can compare some poor state like Alabama to a poor European nation...how does Romania sound? I won't bother to look but I am sure we win again.
Btw, I grew up in a trailer. Doing fine now. Also, I would rather live in a trailer on a half acre than be crammed into a tiny box (err, apartment) like your poor are. Crime rates between the US and Europe are converging. It is simply a non-factor in our lives for the most part, just like yours.
Take homeless people: The few we have are mostly (for lack of a better word) crazy.
It's no different here or anywhere else. If someone is out begging and sleeping on the street, they are usually either mentally deranged or an addict, and can get free food and shelter simply by asking. Some of them refuse the help, for whatever reasons.
I was not thinking about this type of person however, but rather the no-skills, getting-by-on-minimum wage or welfare group, which is much larger. THESE people are almost always in the posistion they are in because they chose to be there. They may whine and complain about the consquences of their choices, but choices they remain. Frankly, I don't have much sympathy for these people, nor should anyone. Strangely enough, most of them are far happier than one would think. I can honestly say the average person in my hometown (probably 40% of which are "poor" by the criteria above) are happier on the average than my college=educated set of friends I have made over the years.
I see one major difference in our thinking. We don't "give breaks" to the rich - we just screw them less than you do. I am not sure why you think screwing anyone is fair.
Morality is about what you do with YOUR money, not supporting (in public, at least) the government to raid one person for the benefit of yourself or a third party. Indeed, under a progressive tax system, the majority of those with "liberal" sentiments are not being charitable at all - they collect as much or more loot from the new taxes as they pay in tax. Probably the top 30% come out behind, the middle 40% breaks even and the bottom 30% comes out ahead. If you are not in the top 30%, you can't claim any "charitable" motivations for supporting socialism. Actually, for years I have been waiting to see a SINGLE instance of a non-mega-rich liberal claiming his or her own taxes should be raised. I have never, not once, seen this. Instead, I always seem them claiming that "the rich" should be taxed more, "the rich" implicitly being defined as "anyone who makes more money than I am likely to anytime soon". Of course, if such a person did exist, I would then ask them why, if they believe that they are morally obligated to pay a higher tax rate than the government requires, that they don't just overpay the government. The IRS surely would accept donations.
We have similar educations. We are both lucky enough to afford the toys we want. I make ~10% more than you at our day jobs (after less than a year after my post-doc), while living in an area with a cost of living far below Copenhagen or any other major city, and paying a marginal tax rate in the thirties (including taxes for the retirement system). If I were to include my health care in that, it might crack 40% total. I do admit that I work more - 5.5 weeks of vacation and around 42 hours a week. My experiences in both Austria and Japan were in graduate schools (the first as a study abroad, the second as a post-doc). In both cases, I was spending most of my time with people who had similar educational backgrounds and aspirations as myself. In both cases, I either owned or was capable of owning far more things (ie, being materially rich) than my counterparts overseas. Whether we are "culturally richer" is another matter entirely, but it is clear from a broad swath of data that Americans are both the most productive and work the most (or close to it), giving us the most money to buy stuff with. I agree with some of your criticims of our purchase choices, however. I have always hated suburbia and hate it more now that I am stuck living in it.
I don't think you spend much time with poor people, as I have my whole life (I grew up in, and my family still resides in, a very poor rural area). I have met few people in my life who were poor because of a "temporary setback". Virtually all of them, in contrast, were poor because of the logical results of a series of poor choices stretching back most of their lives. Your near-hypothetical crack baby has a golden ticket to college here in the US, btw, financed without the use of force by private scholarship donations. Frankly, any American who cannot figure out how to pay for college is probably not smart enough to benefit from college in the first place. Btw, did you know that Americans donate FAR more money to charity (both religious and secular) than Europeans, or anyone else for that matter. Even stranger, donations (and volunteering) correlate strongly with being both religious and politically conservative. Most people expect the opposite. Probably something to do with the difference between talking and walking.
but I know that Americans with surely have more toys, bigger homes/apartments, and are more likely to own a car than Europeans (OK, I lived in Austria, from which I am drawing my experience) and Japan. It's because we have far larger paychecks, of course, and more room to spend them in. On the other hand, we don't get your "free" health care from the government, have to pay for part of our own college education, and don't have very good public transportation.
The problem with the European system is that it encourages free riders. What was that statistic about the fraction of Swedish adults who were on some form of disability? I can't remember it exactly, but I remember it was sickening the number of poor Swedes who were just do sick (errr, lazy) to work.
you pay for your "free" education every time you receive a much-reduced paycheck, I can't imagine that you are smart enough to make any real innovations.
Btw, American master's and PhD students in the sciences, engineering, etc almost universally receive stipends (better than those in Europe or Japan, btw. I have worked/studied in both locations and seen your paltry checks) and free tuition. So do large numbers of students in other disciplines, usually in exchange for teaching.
Why is it so difficult for you to even consider something besides humans could be at fault?
We have. Repeatedly. Why can't you understand this? The major "natural" changes that have affected global temperatures in the past are:
1: Changes in solar luminosity. The sun has gradually grown brighter over the last few billion years. It may have short-term cycles as well. However, many many many scientists have looked for this, and found little or no evidence of change over the last 150 years. Those who have found evidence of change have only found evidence of change far too small to trigger the observed warming.
2: Changes in the earth's core temperatures. The inside of our planet is gradually cooling. However, this is a billion-year-scale phenomena and has no impact on the last 150 years.
3: Changes in our orbit. Essentially, our orbit wobbles. This is what drives ice ages, and was what caused the global cooling scare of the '70s. If we did not interfere, the pattern predicts we would be heading towards another ice age in 1000-2000 years. Again, this phenomena is too long-term to be affecting a 150-year pattern, and should be trending the other way anyway.
4: Gross changes to the composition of the atmosphere. Our atmosphere has always been changing, as lighter gases escape into space, and life changes as well. However, these process are again on the long-term (millions of years). The only major, observed changes to atmospheric composition are caused by humans (short-term effects of volcanoes excepted).
The other hypothesis HAVE been addressed. Many times. They have all failed, leaving the obvious standing even stronger.
Lol,, Good you admited something. You admited that it might be possible that something else could be at fault.
Yes, I fully admit that it is possible that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is secretly causing global warming. In all seriousness, the recent IPCC report was right (or perhaps a bit conservative) in saying that there is a greater than 90% chance that the observed warming was primarily caused by human activity, and will continue into the future. There is essentially zero chance that we have not contributed at all.
Too many people claim it is impossible to be anything other then humans poluting co2.
You are confusing impossible with improbable. It is unlikely that anything other than our CO2 and other pollutants are the primary cause of the observed changes.
But more interestingly, we don't have to do much to fix this, just adapt.
The optimal strategy is a mixture of adaption and mitigation. Not all possible methods of mitigation are cost effective. This is the criteria by which they should be judged (though this is difficult, because it rapidly becomes a debate about discount rates and theoretical economics).
The other causes require political solutions and allow rejected policies becomes forced onto people. Something that french president Jacques Chirac said in a speach on the Kyoto treaty "genuine instrument of global governance" comes to mind. Is the fix, really a fix to a problem and is the problem really global warming or the lack of a one world order?
AGW is a global issue that needs global solutions. I have no problem with this bringing us closer to a world government.
Hmm... the lack of something only means you didn't find it, not that they don't exist
You may search any peer-reviewed journal you wish for peer-reviewed work that disputes AGW. You will come up with essentially nothing - a few papers that quibble about details but none that substantially change the overall concept.
By the same logic, I could bar every pro global warming paper from entering my journal and use it as conclusive proof it doesn't exist
And you would be fired. You clearly have no idea how peer-review works. The editor's primary job is to select reviewers who have no conflict of interest or close personal relationship with the authors, and are competent to judge the work. The authors themselves can make suggestions.
Now how do you account for the extra water vapor? How do you account for the larger heat sink in the ocean?
Again, I defer to the experts at the websites in my orginal posts. Clearly, you cannot comprehend their articles (or even the summaries of such), because they darned well DO address all the questions you are complaining about. Indeed, accounting for water vapor/humidity and ocean temperature the crux of understanding the global warming phenomena. What do you think these people do?
It is these people who are being shot down, getting their careas ruined and lives threatened.
Examples, please. You are pulling crap out of your crapper now. And since when is being a professor at MIT considered a "ruined" career?
You are right. We cannot prove a negative. But we have examined every even half-way plausible competing source for the observed warming. None of them has panned out. Not even close. On the contrary, the data is highly consistent with our original hypothesis - AGW caused primarily by CO2.
The fact the competing science isn't published in a peer review jounel only means that specific thing.
Yes, it means one specific thing - they don't have the data to back up their claims. That's what gets your paper in, and nothing else. I doubt you have ever dealt with peer-review, have you?
Why is it that Co2 is the only one that counts?
Who said it was? We are also dumping tons of methane and NOx into the atmosphere, which contribute to AGW as well. On the other hand, our sulfates and particulates have a cooling effect, and all of them combined change the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, which is the largest greenhouse gas. The models are consistent with the observations - we dump in a brew of chemicals, this changes the amount of water vapor, and the chemicals plus water vapor combined trap the infrared radiation that carries energy away from our planet.
All sorts of alternative possibilities doesn't equate to every possiblity.
A ridiculously impossible standard. I suppose we haven't tested the hypothesis that magical unicorns' farts are actually the culprit behind the observed warming. Therefore, we can't safely conclude that CO2 is to blame, right?
We have had to adjust the role the sun plays by around 30%.
30% of 1% is 1.3%. Nice rhetorical trick. Estimates of the role in changes of solar luminosity are statistically indifferent from zero, but probably in the range of a percent or two.
You will find several scientist posting to slashdot that are non belivers
And several dozens (myself included) saying just the opposite. Personally, I have never met anyone who could claim to be a "scientist" who currently does not believe that AGW is almost certainly real (and I work in a major R&D lab, and know many scientists). When you look at the narrow fields involved in climate change, it is even more overwhelming. Even the most denier-like scientists, such as Lidzen(sp?) from MIT, only are claiming that we aren't quite so certain and that it probably won't be THAT bad.
And this overwhelming conseneus is based off of 928 papers published in one of the above mentioned journals 25% of wich didn't say anything about man being the cause of global wamring.
Absence of a comment does not imply anything. I am willing to bet those papers are older, as well. They all say it now somewhere in the introduction. It is taken as a given nowadays, with little or no hedging.
CO2 is up nearly 50% from pre-industrial levels, and is expected to reach twice pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
Various layers of the atmophere have warmed (or even cooled) to varying degrees - and are very consistent with the physical models for AGW (and inconsistent with the models for other explanations).
www.sciencemag.org
The world's two most prestigous scientific publications. Peer-reviewed by the world's top scientists. Refutation of a a published article in either of these journals will surely get you your own publication in one of the two, and open all sorts of job opportunties for you.
The fact that the deniers' arguments can't stand the scrutiny of peer review means they are largely rhetoric, and not based upon sound fact.
It is simple. Earth sheds energy via infrared light. CO2 absorbs infrared light. The more CO2 we stuff in the atmosphere, the more heat we trap. This is brain-dead simple to understand. It would be a miracle if we could dump all this CO2 garbage and NOT see a temperature increase.
It is simple. The earth is getting warmer. Even the deniers won't deny this anymore. All sorts of alternative possibilities as to what could have caused this phenomena have been investigated. They have all turned up blank. The sun is not getting hotter or brighter (or at least not significantly so). Cosmic rays have not changed. The earth's orbit has not changed. No "natural" phenomena has been observed that could cause the temperature increase. Yes, temperature has "naturally" changed in the past, by not via magic. Something CAUSED the change - changes in the sun, our orbit, or wholesale changes in the biological system or atmosphere. These things are not changing now at any significant rate.
It is simple. The physical models predict that CO2 will cause warming - and not just any warming. They predict some areas will warm more, some less, and some not at all. The observed warming matches the models very well. On the contrary, models of other "natural" methods of heating, such as increased solar brightness, do not match the observations.
Is it absolutely certain that AGW is real? No. But virtually all scientists put it at 90% chance or higher. That is far above the level required to justify precautionary action.
Another issue that makes it nearly impossible to take up teaching as a second career is that schools (unlike universities) refuse to take anything other than public school teaching as experience. Imagine twenty odd years from now, when I am thinking about retirement in my late fifties. I would definitely consider teaching. Yet my 25 years of experience as a research scientist would count as NOTHING when it comes to determining my pay (nor would my great academic record, record of graduate school teaching and volunteer teaching, etc), and my PhD would be worth no more than a couple thousand dollars a year over a 22-year-old with a C- average from Directional State University.
and I get a pension, benefits, etc. It's hard to compare with numbers from NYC where the cost of living is so high. Teachers there start in the low fifties, which is higher than the national average for all teachers, yet 50k means you are barely at the edge of the middle-class. There are probably not a lot of science jobs in NYC itself, but if there were, they would have six-figure starting salaries. Yes, teachers can make a pretty good living, but only if they survive the job for twenty years. Most teacher pay scales are heavily back-loaded.
It's pretty simple. Most people with technical skills can make far more in the private sector than they can teaching. If we don't pay them market wages, we shouldn't expect many to show up.
If anything, I am quite confident that I would have been a better teacher than a scientist. The skill sets do not overlap completely but they do overlap substantially.
Also, the typical starting salary for a scientist is around 80k. I made more working as an intern for my company during a summer as an undergraduate than I would have made as a starting teacher.
Instead, I went to grad school and am now a corporate staff scientist.
I really wanted to teach, but giving up nearly half my potential income was simply too much. The kids lost out. I met plenty of other students in grad school who felt the same way.
differntial pay. So does every corporation on earth, despite plenty of jobs where it is difficult to quantify performance.
It is not a real issue to determine teacher performance. Everyone knows who the good teachers are.
Are teacher overpaid or underpaid, or have we gotten it just right? Easy enough!
Just look at the supply of teachers - are there enough qualified applicants for an open position at the salary you are offering? If I were an administrator, I would want at least twenty serious applications for a position, of which I could interview five or six and then pick the one who fit best. Are schools getting this many serious applicants?
In most cases, yes. In some cases, they are getting far more applicants than is necessary, indicating that the salary offered is too high. A suburban school posting a job for an elementary position in any decent district will be flooded with applications, normally hundreds and sometimes exceeding a thousand. On the other hand, there are not enough qualified math, science, and special education teachers, as well as teachers willing to teach in troubled rural or urban schools. It is clear from this that any employer besides a public school would cut the pay of elementary teachers and boost the pay of math teachers until qualified people for both positions could be found.
The reason I am not a secondary science teacher today is the poor pay. I make twice as much working as a researcher at a major corporation, and have a job that shuts off at 5pm each day without all the headaches. On the other hand, few elementary or English teachers could make double their teachers' pay. Indeed, few of them could even match it in the private sector.
Colleges and universities do not pay all professors the same. They know how to do it, and prove it can be done. Public schools need to move beyond the silly "all teachers are equal" mindset they have been stuck in for decades. It is killing education.
the negative effect of taxes on the economy. While this example is extremely exaggerated, the same thing happens countless times on a much smaller scale every day - I don't buy that shirt, for example, because taxes make the price $22 instead of $20. An otherwise mutually-beneficial transaction is lost.
Studies indicate that about fifteen cents are lost this way for every dollar the government collects for the major taxes (income, sales, property). That implies that the we have to spend a $1.15 just to get the government a dollar - and hence we always overpay for government services.
So insurance companies should do research? Well, they don't have the expertise. Guess they will have to partner with our buy out the pharmaceutical companies, who do. All you are suggesting is a bunch of horizontal mergers.
Chump change compared to Social Security! Think of all the good things we could have spent THAT money on!
on publically-funded medical R&D. Canada's public medical R&D spending is around two billion Canadian dollars per year. The US's NIH spends nearly twenty times that alone. Accounting for the fact that we have about eight times the population, we beat the Canucks two and a half times over. Also, NIH is not the only source of public medical R&D, and our private sector whips theirs as well.