It's always hard for me to resist a Slashdot Global Warming story, since it seems like someone has to answer all the clueless rants that always follow. No, I've got to stop. Can't spend all my time dealing with opinionated ignorance. Too many stories this week.
Look, artificial global climate change is a real problem, and look, we don't know everything about it and look, we do know a great deal more than nothing about it. Look.
Here's my best recent posting on the subject, typos and all. I gotta go.
I agree that the hydrogen story is really about nuclear power vs. fossil fuels vs. renewables, and that politicians don't say this, but you might want to notice that applies to hydrogen advocates as well as opponents. When it comes down to it, hydrogen is not an energy source, after all. I agree with you that politicians say what's convenient and leave important things out.
It's an interesting point, but it has nothing to do with what upsets me.
I stand accused of saying that climate change is a serious problem, in my capacity as a scientist, because I'm corrupt. This is hugely exasperating, because the corrupting influence goes exactly in the other direction, at least in this country at this time.
Your numbers are wrong. Order 100 K tons/day (fromt the volcano paper) = 36.5 Mtons/yr = 3650 M tons / century. Volcanic eruptions are much smaller than human emissions.
In the long run, all the carbon did emerge from volcanoes, but they've had billions of years to do the trick.
The total emissions for 245 years list is a most peculiar way of looking at this by the way.
There's a very nice picture of the global carbon cycle here:
here, but it doesn't include vulcanism as a first order effect. The numbers (it doesn't say, but I happen to know) are in petagrams/year (a.k.a. megatons/yr).
The IPCC report explicitly shows volcanic input as less than 0.1 petagrams/year, or less than 2 % of human input.
(See the figure on p. 188.
Another way of looking at it is that over long time scales limestone formation must essentially balance vulcanism. So the net of those two phenomena must have been near zero before the anthropogenic input.
Hope this helps you in your consideration of the matter.
Global Cooling. We will freeze to death shortly.
Pop journalism from 1975.
Global Warming. We will warm up the earth and either melt or be drowned. US government, consistent with the IPCC.
Climate Change. The earth will have rapidly chaging temperatures resulting in the destruction of humankind. The IPCC consensus document, very badly misrepresented.
"Run out of oxygen" theory. We'll ruin the atmosphere to the point we can't breathe it. Totally irrelevant, surface ozone site, very badly misrepresented.
Nothing. All of the above are bunk. A technical paper about middle atmosphere temperatures. Important enough within the field, but not broad enough to merit that summary.
"Various scientists publicizing all possible viewpoints" is a consequence of the importance of the issue. People who don't much care for the scientific mainstream's conclusions will dig up some iconoclasts. Research is about stuff that is uncertain, after all. The stuff that makes it into undergrad textbooks is pretty much settled, but that isn't what scientists think about.
What gets publicized isn;t the same as what people in the discipline think about. The IPCC position is the best representation of the scientific mainstream in this matter. That doesn't guarantee it's right, of course. Science is not infallible. On the other hand, it's a better bet than the various fringe positions you will see here and there. I could find you a better sampling of those than you found, but I'd rather not.
Yes, this is well known. It is a real factor in temperature records in urban areas, "the heat island effect", and complicates the thermometric record as different stations become more, or occasinally less urban.
Globally, direct heat forcing is more than two orders of magnitude smaller than anthropogenic greenhouse forcing. You can easily work this out yourself. The greenhouse forcing is already more than 1 watt per square meter, averaged everywhere and 24 hours a day, and is expected to go up to between 4 and 12 W/m^2 over the next century.
Since almost all energy use is eventually dissipated as heat, ignore the rest (radiated to space) and calculate the per capita energy usage that would deliver direct heating comparable to that obtained from greenhouse forcing.
The scientists have to stoke fear in order to get funding from governments. If we had scientists more concerned with creating viable solutions to the "problems" of global warming they would be more interested in practical solutions that people would want instead of screaming about doom & gloom to get another grant.
Aargh. Scientists are funded by government. In the US, both houses of congress and the executive branch are run by people, hmm, how to put this mildly, disinclined to regulating energy.
If climate researchers were purely concerned with funding, then American science would be contrary to the science of other countries with goernments more inclined to strong regulation. Fortunately for science, this isn't the case, and for the most part, US science is in the same ballpark as other countries'.
This particular dog has been hunting way too long by now. It's just incredibly irritating to see how it keeps getting sent out all the time.
If I knew where my bread was buttered I'd just shut up, frankly. That's bad enough.
What's worse is having to have such altruism as I can muster painted as opportunism. Bah! I may be wrong, but I'm not doing all this squawking for the money!
Of all the global-warming-is-bunk propaganda ploys out there, (and they're all getting wheeled out today, it seems) this is the one that most effectively and reliably makes me just furious. I can't believe people are still buying it. You can't imagine how obnoxious it is.
In addition to D, there's another interesting language called J, not related to Java at all but a descendant of APL. And in today's news there's also a story about X.
Exactly how are we expected to Google for such things?
Please give your projects distinctive names with more than one character, thanks.
Re:Maybe it is because we are skeptical...
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A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 1
The reconstructed one is global. The observational one is northern hemisphere only. It says so right in the text.
Even if they both covered the same area, expecting them to agree perfectly is unrealistic since they are based on different methods. All we're really confident of is that the last century has been unusual.
There have been a lot of efforts to draw such graphs, and they vary in regards to details, but almost all show the twentieth century on a very different, rather rapid warming trend line versus the rest of the record, which is either neutral or slowly cooling with some bumps.
Re:The Cassandra effect and Public discourse (long
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A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Is it even legitimate from a mathematical-modeling viewpoint to talk about long-term average behavior?
Indeed, in a formal sense it is not easy to make a distinction between climate and weather. The casual statement "climate is the statistics of weather" becomes formally unsatisfactory when one starts to talk about climate change.
Nevertheless, I hope you will admit that I am saying something both meaningful and true when I say that the climate of Kansas City Missouri is more variable than that of Portland Oregon. How to cast this into a formal mathematical statement is not obvious, but probably not relevant for the current discussion. Whether it ought to be a practical issue for the field is something I've wondered about, but I don't think it's a current topic.
Interestingly, "climate" is conceptually better defined in our complex models than in the real world, because our models have finite sets of forcings and of free variables, and thus a clearer distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic variability than the real world does.
The prediction you make about 2304 is reasonable, but hardly long-term by geological standards.
Actually, the prediction is robust for any location at 40 degrees north latitude, at any date, on physical grounds, as long as the atmosphere is not almost totally opaque to incoming shortwave radiation (a.k.a. "sunshine") as on Venus.
I simply use it to illustrate that the predictability horizon of weather (defined as preturbations about the climatological mean) does not amount to a predictability constraint on the climate itself. I will make the same assertion for 30,000 years in the future, if you assure me that "Chicago" will be meaningful that far into the future (which I very much hope will be the case!)
I understand this doesn't go directly to your question, which is mathematical rather than physical. Climate is definitely not stationary, and quite possibly not even ergodic.
Climate is easy to define formally in our models though, much more so than in the real world. Our models can do multiple realizations of a particular year, based on specific boundary conditions and forcings. We capture enough of the variability in these models that the realizations differ. We treat the variations among these realizations as stochastic weather and the commonalities as deterministic climate.
In the real world, as opposed to in models, there is only one realization, and in fact, no clear distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic processes. So our meta-model, our model of the model, is difficult to justify formally.
In practice we don't dwell on this much. We just treat the real world as a superposition of chaotic dynamic variability (an unpredictable part) and deterministic climate change which sets up the statistical properties of the chaos.
In the simple chaotic dynamics view, weather is the state of the system (the wandering dot), and climate is the shape of the set of permissible trajectories (the whole phase diagram). Things aren't necessarily that simple in fact, but we don't have a better way of addressing the issue. Ultimately, we aren't trying to prove theorems, we're trying to elucidate complex physics, and this view appears to be both necessary and sufficient for most of our purposes.
The Cassandra effect and Public discourse (long)
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A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This topic is amazingly timely for me as I'll be giving a presentation to a group of geophysicists on Tuesday about abrupt climate change in the last 100,000 years and the upcoming 10,000.
When I first got into this business in the early 90s I spent a lot of time discussing these topics on sci.environment.
It may be worth pointing out that climate change over the past decade has panned out pretty much as was expected ten years ago. It's interesting that this hasn't affected the cerdibility of the field very much.
I've dabbled a bit in sci.environment again in the last few months, but it's been a lot less satisfying. Ten years ago I had the privilege of getting into flame wars with no less than John McCarthy, as well as many other less famous but comparably intelligent, very well-informed conservatively inclined people.
To be sure, there were also many throughly propagandized folks, mostly aligned in two opposing camps, but it was possible to have a serious debate and even, once in a while, score a point.
The conversation on Slashdot is only marginally better than the decaying thrashings on sci.environment. It's better because most people here are grinding different axes, and so their ill-informed commentary is less shrill and confrontational.
There's a hell of a lot of misinformation going around here, though. It's pretty discouraging to see what gets moderated to 5, insightful or informative.
Even the hacker community, chastened though it should be by the ways in which writing code makes you face your mistakes, is sadly overconfident about its opinions. People make broad and confident statements on matters where, (obviously to those few of us here who are serious students of the matter) they know very little. Moderators sharing the politics of the poster mod these up to "insightful" ore even worse "informative".
Let me review the settled science. There's a lot that's unsettled, but when I see these points debated I despair for democracy:
Climate, defined as the long-term average behavior of the atmsophere, ocean and ice, shows a lot of natural variability in response to perturbations in forcing.
While the underlying principles of climate physics are not exotic, the number of degrees of freedom of the system makes the system behavior difficult to predict in detail
While details are difficult to predict, certain global constraints (mass, energy and angular momentum conservation) allows more confident predictions about the big picture than about the details.
Complex computer models are the only way to get any idea about the details, but the global picture can be discussed using old-fashioned paper-and-pencil models
Human behavior is altering the energetic balance of the atmosphere at a larger rate than is normal in nature, with very rare exceptions such as asteroid impacts.
The simple calculations indicate the short term response of the system to this perturbation will be warming at the surface, concentrated at high latitudes, and cooling in the stratosphere.
Observations and complex computer models agree with the first order predictions
Chaos doesn't enter into it in the way that many people suggest. Climate prediction is different than weather prediction. Weather prediction out beyond a month is probably impossible, and even if it turns out to be possible, two months isn't. Climate is the average properties of weather. When I say that Christmas in Chicago is going to be colder than the fourth of July in 2304, I am making a 300 year climate prediction, and a perfectly reasonable one.
The longer and more intense the perturbation, the larger the likelhood that our models (both computer models and simple conceptual models) will fail, due to lack of inclusion of normally slowly-changing phenomena taht are more likely to be in play with larger perturbations. In this case, the models will fail in the direction of understating, rather than overstating the consequences.
Is there any way to turn off the sexy flashing white lights on the Airport base station?
I realize there must not be many people in a studio apartment with Airport (it's a long story) but I have to cover the thing up with a plastic bucket to get any sleep...
The "sleep" light on the iMac has the same problem.
Masking tape 1) is most un-Applish and 2) won't really work because these lights are recessed in translucent plastic casing.
Wow, does that vortex cooler thing really work? I tend to believe Don Lancaster about such things but I'm having trouble with that one.
I know we're wandering off topic, here, but moderators, go have a look at the figure on top of p 26 in http://www.tinaja.com/glib/elesimp.pdf before you mod me down. Isn't this sort of like Maxwell's demon? Is this even possible? If so, why aren't these things everywhere?
The way I read your position is that casual computer use is impossible, and only people with a lot of time and/or money to put in should use computers.
I think the technical computing community ought to be able to design computers for casual and even clueless users. The software would and should be dramatically different than what the vendors are providing, which for the most part is targeted toward corporate settings (MS) with niches for geeks (Linux) and artists (Macs). Nobody is producing appliances for light users, and many people want them, because they don't have the combination of skill and motivation to maintain what amounts to an internet peer.
As I read it, you think that the market for photo hobbyists and for small drywall contractors should be served by the same type of software you and I use. I guess the vast array of problems that result are, in your view, insurmountable. I disagree and am perpetually horrified by the failure of all three contemporary end-user software camps to address this.
Apple is closest to being able to do this, but it would reduce their sexy brand equity to be pursuing the grandma and the sixpack markets, so they probably won't!
That's not her mistake. That's the vendor's dishonesty. In this case Microsoft's. That's my main point.
Ford doesn't pretend your car needs no maintenance when they sell it to you. (Nor are they doing recalls every other week to fix the incredibly complicated lock mechanism most people don't need, now that I think about it.) (Nor do they regularly ruin the transmission when they fix the lock.)
I can't think of a great analogy to the dial-up fiasco with cars. Err, the recall will take six days because you didn't get the model with the leather seatcovers?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: people need to start being responsible for THEMSELVES. It's not Outlook's fault that the user didn't patch their system.
Everyone seems to forget how thoroughly impractical this is for casual home users with dial-up. My mother-in-law takes lots of digital pictures, some of them pretty good. She has some idea how to use Photoshop Lite. She uses Outlook Express and attaches pictures all the time. The computer is a photography tool for her, not an obsession. I don't think she knows what a security patch is. This is not her fault and she is not an idiot.
She occasionally asks me to install stuff when I'm visiting from out of town. According to Microsoft she has about 100 meg of patches to install through her dial-up connection. Once I tried a partial update, as recommended by a friendly Windows help pop-up. I broke her computer altogether and had to restore from backup.
You have to keep up with these patches. There are apparently cross-dependencies that aren't checked for.
My mother-in-law does not have to spend hours every month upgrading her toaster. She purchased an expensive appliance, and expects it to work reasonably reliably. No one selling her the appliance warned her to the contrary.
If software vendors are going to build devices that are useless without a broadband connection and regular updates, they should bloody well be clear about it. That's not how they are sold.
At least OS X nags you when you need to update. But Apple still pretends these machines are usable with a dialup.
As long as there are home users, there should be machines which are safe for non-experts to use. Capabilities that are of use to at best ten percent of corporate sites are inflicted willy-nilly on a public with no need for them. Then they are expected to essentially reinstall their OS every other week over a 56Kbaud line. There is no one to blame for this situation but the vendors.
For the most blatantly obvious example, there is no way on earth or in hell an Outlook Express user needs executable attachments.
Thank you Microsoft for your endless patches. I'm sure it keeps all sorts of MCSEs busy. Home users don't expect to support a tenth of an FTE to keep their appliances working, though. How about an email client that doesn't run executables, for small businesses and home users (including those that get occasional support from family members who go to some trouble otherwise to avoid getting anywhere near your "great" software)?
Let's hypothesize that SCO is correct and that free distribution of software should be considered subversive. I note that babysitting by grandmothers would also be considered subversive under the same argument (giving things away is communist). Grandma, after all, is interfering with the viability of the day care service industry! Che Guevara would be proud!
Let's leave that aside for the moment, and suppose the argument for some mysterious reason does not apply to most other services but does apply to software. Then marketplace competition will drive prices down, as I understand the theory. How low can they go, in SCO's view, before they become unconstitutional?
Suppose that someone comes up with a brilliant new software package called ninunec ("Ninunec Is Not Unix, Nor Even Close"). Suppose that person wants to give away ninunec, perhaps with the intention of proving his worth to scare up venture capital for an even more ambitious plan he has.
Under the theory that SCO is presenting to congress, he should not be allowed contribute his work into the public domain! since this constitutes "dumping". I'm sure this raises free speech questions, but let's leave that aside, too. What is the lowest constitutionally permitted cost, under SCO's argument. so that our genius can promote his wares and himself. Let's say he keeps a conventional copyright and charges a penny per source download.
As long as the cost remains low enough, the evil consequences that SCO attributes to open source remain. You haven't solved the alleged problem that SCO proposes by mandating that software cannot be free. It therefore becomes necessary under SCO's arguments to mandate a minimum price for ninunec, and for every other piece of software (and every other service that falls under the SCO guidelines) that ever enters the marketplace! (Good luck with that one.)
SCO's letters, aside from their usual dubious claims about ownership of code, make claims that amount to mandating a profit for their industry by preventing contributions from a volunteer sector. The only meaningful way to implement that position into law is 1) to create an exhaustive list of activities that are constitutionally impermissible without charging a fee and 2) to have a government body set mandated minimum prices in all those activities.
That's not the free enterprise model I've heard so much about. I think we should reconsider which position is the subversive one!
This guy must be a lawyer. The idea that saying nothing protects you from consequences that saying "no" exposes you to is ridiculous. If it's true, it's tragic as well as ridiculous.
Bad cops are bad, but ridiculous laws are worse, because they make the law a laughingstock, and promote antisocial attitudes like the ones so clearly on display in the parent.
For a few bucks and a technicality this guy ruined the day for eight people doing their jobs. He happily concludes "HA HA f**k him", and advises you to do likewise.
I advise you to cooperate except in situations where the police are clearly violating your rights as in brutality or false arrest, and even then responding with the maximum dignity and calm the situation allows. If a cop asks you for ID, produce it or explain why you aren't carrying any. If a cop asks you to get out of your car, get out of your car. These guys have more important things to do than hassle with opinionated middle class fools picking a procedural fight over technicalities. They are, for the most part, trying to protect you from genuinely bad guys.
Police struggle with false positives and false negatives all the time. They have to make quick decisions with large consequences all the time. They cannot be expected to be infallible. Help them make the call, don't flirt with being miscategorized on some absurd theoretical grounds.
By the way, the US immigration service already has the right to demand ID without cause. If you didn't know that, you don't look Mexican.
I'm no fan of the current administration, but I think it's absolutely necessary under present and foreseeable circumstances for people to be able to identify themselves to authorities on short notice.
I can see why that might bother people, but there's more at stake than just privacy.
Thanks for the link to the 1975 Newsweek article. I read the article twice and didn't see any "alarmist environmentalism". I saw very tentative staements from the founders of a science that has made major progress in the intervening years.
Thirty years of satellite observations, computer advances and improvements in theory go into current thinking that didn't figure in 1975. That said, nothing I saw in the article seems particularly alarmist or ideological.
The period of concern over "global cooling" was brief and driven by intuition. Pretty much as soon as they started doing the numbers, most of the serious physicists who were to be the founders of physical climatology agreed that greenhouse warming was probably a bigger concern. See Science, vol 193 pp 447 ff, Aug 6, 1976 , pretty much right after the Newsweek article.
duplicitous != redundant
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Practical C++
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did the reviewer really mean duplicitous as in fraudulent, or did he just mean to say redundant?
Slashdot Mirror
The stratosphere is expected to cool as the surface and near-surface air warms. As in fact it's doing, as you can see.
Look, artificial global climate change is a real problem, and look, we don't know everything about it and look, we do know a great deal more than nothing about it. Look.
Here's my best recent posting on the subject, typos and all. I gotta go.
It's an interesting point, but it has nothing to do with what upsets me.
I stand accused of saying that climate change is a serious problem, in my capacity as a scientist, because I'm corrupt. This is hugely exasperating, because the corrupting influence goes exactly in the other direction, at least in this country at this time.
In the long run, all the carbon did emerge from volcanoes, but they've had billions of years to do the trick.
The total emissions for 245 years list is a most peculiar way of looking at this by the way.
A similar picture is here .
The IPCC report explicitly shows volcanic input as less than 0.1 petagrams/year, or less than 2 % of human input. (See the figure on p. 188.
Another way of looking at it is that over long time scales limestone formation must essentially balance vulcanism. So the net of those two phenomena must have been near zero before the anthropogenic input.
Hope this helps you in your consideration of the matter.
Global Warming. We will warm up the earth and either melt or be drowned. US government, consistent with the IPCC.
Climate Change. The earth will have rapidly chaging temperatures resulting in the destruction of humankind. The IPCC consensus document, very badly misrepresented.
"Run out of oxygen" theory. We'll ruin the atmosphere to the point we can't breathe it. Totally irrelevant, surface ozone site, very badly misrepresented.
Nothing. All of the above are bunk. A technical paper about middle atmosphere temperatures. Important enough within the field, but not broad enough to merit that summary.
"Various scientists publicizing all possible viewpoints" is a consequence of the importance of the issue. People who don't much care for the scientific mainstream's conclusions will dig up some iconoclasts. Research is about stuff that is uncertain, after all. The stuff that makes it into undergrad textbooks is pretty much settled, but that isn't what scientists think about.
What gets publicized isn;t the same as what people in the discipline think about. The IPCC position is the best representation of the scientific mainstream in this matter. That doesn't guarantee it's right, of course. Science is not infallible. On the other hand, it's a better bet than the various fringe positions you will see here and there. I could find you a better sampling of those than you found, but I'd rather not.
Globally, direct heat forcing is more than two orders of magnitude smaller than anthropogenic greenhouse forcing. You can easily work this out yourself. The greenhouse forcing is already more than 1 watt per square meter, averaged everywhere and 24 hours a day, and is expected to go up to between 4 and 12 W/m^2 over the next century.
Since almost all energy use is eventually dissipated as heat, ignore the rest (radiated to space) and calculate the per capita energy usage that would deliver direct heating comparable to that obtained from greenhouse forcing.
Aargh. Scientists are funded by government. In the US, both houses of congress and the executive branch are run by people, hmm, how to put this mildly, disinclined to regulating energy.
If climate researchers were purely concerned with funding, then American science would be contrary to the science of other countries with goernments more inclined to strong regulation. Fortunately for science, this isn't the case, and for the most part, US science is in the same ballpark as other countries'.
This particular dog has been hunting way too long by now. It's just incredibly irritating to see how it keeps getting sent out all the time.
If I knew where my bread was buttered I'd just shut up, frankly. That's bad enough.
What's worse is having to have such altruism as I can muster painted as opportunism. Bah! I may be wrong, but I'm not doing all this squawking for the money!
Of all the global-warming-is-bunk propaganda ploys out there, (and they're all getting wheeled out today, it seems) this is the one that most effectively and reliably makes me just furious. I can't believe people are still buying it. You can't imagine how obnoxious it is.
As usual, for the real scoop see the IPCC Scientific Working Group Report please and thank you.
You are ill-informed on every point you make. If you are genuinely interested see the IPCC reports .
Exactly how are we expected to Google for such things?
Please give your projects distinctive names with more than one character, thanks.
Even if they both covered the same area, expecting them to agree perfectly is unrealistic since they are based on different methods. All we're really confident of is that the last century has been unusual.
There have been a lot of efforts to draw such graphs, and they vary in regards to details, but almost all show the twentieth century on a very different, rather rapid warming trend line versus the rest of the record, which is either neutral or slowly cooling with some bumps.
Is it even legitimate from a mathematical-modeling viewpoint to talk about long-term average behavior?
Indeed, in a formal sense it is not easy to make a distinction between climate and weather. The casual statement "climate is the statistics of weather" becomes formally unsatisfactory when one starts to talk about climate change .
Nevertheless, I hope you will admit that I am saying something both meaningful and true when I say that the climate of Kansas City Missouri is more variable than that of Portland Oregon. How to cast this into a formal mathematical statement is not obvious, but probably not relevant for the current discussion. Whether it ought to be a practical issue for the field is something I've wondered about, but I don't think it's a current topic.
Interestingly, "climate" is conceptually better defined in our complex models than in the real world, because our models have finite sets of forcings and of free variables, and thus a clearer distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic variability than the real world does.
The prediction you make about 2304 is reasonable, but hardly long-term by geological standards.
Actually, the prediction is robust for any location at 40 degrees north latitude, at any date, on physical grounds, as long as the atmosphere is not almost totally opaque to incoming shortwave radiation (a.k.a. "sunshine") as on Venus.
I simply use it to illustrate that the predictability horizon of weather (defined as preturbations about the climatological mean) does not amount to a predictability constraint on the climate itself. I will make the same assertion for 30,000 years in the future, if you assure me that "Chicago" will be meaningful that far into the future (which I very much hope will be the case!)
I understand this doesn't go directly to your question, which is mathematical rather than physical. Climate is definitely not stationary, and quite possibly not even ergodic.
Climate is easy to define formally in our models though, much more so than in the real world. Our models can do multiple realizations of a particular year, based on specific boundary conditions and forcings. We capture enough of the variability in these models that the realizations differ. We treat the variations among these realizations as stochastic weather and the commonalities as deterministic climate.
In the real world, as opposed to in models, there is only one realization, and in fact, no clear distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic processes. So our meta-model, our model of the model, is difficult to justify formally.
In practice we don't dwell on this much. We just treat the real world as a superposition of chaotic dynamic variability (an unpredictable part) and deterministic climate change which sets up the statistical properties of the chaos.
In the simple chaotic dynamics view, weather is the state of the system (the wandering dot), and climate is the shape of the set of permissible trajectories (the whole phase diagram). Things aren't necessarily that simple in fact, but we don't have a better way of addressing the issue. Ultimately, we aren't trying to prove theorems, we're trying to elucidate complex physics, and this view appears to be both necessary and sufficient for most of our purposes.
When I first got into this business in the early 90s I spent a lot of time discussing these topics on sci.environment.
It may be worth pointing out that climate change over the past decade has panned out pretty much as was expected ten years ago. It's interesting that this hasn't affected the cerdibility of the field very much.
I've dabbled a bit in sci.environment again in the last few months, but it's been a lot less satisfying. Ten years ago I had the privilege of getting into flame wars with no less than John McCarthy, as well as many other less famous but comparably intelligent, very well-informed conservatively inclined people.
To be sure, there were also many throughly propagandized folks, mostly aligned in two opposing camps, but it was possible to have a serious debate and even, once in a while, score a point.
The conversation on Slashdot is only marginally better than the decaying thrashings on sci.environment. It's better because most people here are grinding different axes, and so their ill-informed commentary is less shrill and confrontational.
There's a hell of a lot of misinformation going around here, though. It's pretty discouraging to see what gets moderated to 5, insightful or informative.
Even the hacker community, chastened though it should be by the ways in which writing code makes you face your mistakes, is sadly overconfident about its opinions. People make broad and confident statements on matters where, (obviously to those few of us here who are serious students of the matter) they know very little. Moderators sharing the politics of the poster mod these up to "insightful" ore even worse "informative".
Let me review the settled science. There's a lot that's unsettled, but when I see these points debated I despair for democracy:
You are making this up, aren't you?
According to them, we should be all dead by now
Yup, definitely making it up.
Care to cite the slightest shred of evidence?
Is there any way to turn off the sexy flashing white lights on the Airport base station?
I realize there must not be many people in a studio apartment with Airport (it's a long story) but I have to cover the thing up with a plastic bucket to get any sleep...
The "sleep" light on the iMac has the same problem.
Masking tape 1) is most un-Applish and 2) won't really work because these lights are recessed in translucent plastic casing.
I know we're wandering off topic, here, but moderators, go have a look at the figure on top of p 26 in http://www.tinaja.com/glib/elesimp.pdf before you mod me down. Isn't this sort of like Maxwell's demon? Is this even possible? If so, why aren't these things everywhere?
The way I read your position is that casual computer use is impossible, and only people with a lot of time and/or money to put in should use computers.
I think the technical computing community ought to be able to design computers for casual and even clueless users. The software would and should be dramatically different than what the vendors are providing, which for the most part is targeted toward corporate settings (MS) with niches for geeks (Linux) and artists (Macs). Nobody is producing appliances for light users, and many people want them, because they don't have the combination of skill and motivation to maintain what amounts to an internet peer.
As I read it, you think that the market for photo hobbyists and for small drywall contractors should be served by the same type of software you and I use. I guess the vast array of problems that result are, in your view, insurmountable. I disagree and am perpetually horrified by the failure of all three contemporary end-user software camps to address this.
Apple is closest to being able to do this, but it would reduce their sexy brand equity to be pursuing the grandma and the sixpack markets, so they probably won't!
Ford doesn't pretend your car needs no maintenance when they sell it to you. (Nor are they doing recalls every other week to fix the incredibly complicated lock mechanism most people don't need, now that I think about it.) (Nor do they regularly ruin the transmission when they fix the lock.)
I can't think of a great analogy to the dial-up fiasco with cars. Err, the recall will take six days because you didn't get the model with the leather seatcovers?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: people need to start being responsible for THEMSELVES. It's not Outlook's fault that the user didn't patch their system.
Everyone seems to forget how thoroughly impractical this is for casual home users with dial-up. My mother-in-law takes lots of digital pictures, some of them pretty good. She has some idea how to use Photoshop Lite. She uses Outlook Express and attaches pictures all the time. The computer is a photography tool for her, not an obsession. I don't think she knows what a security patch is. This is not her fault and she is not an idiot.
She occasionally asks me to install stuff when I'm visiting from out of town. According to Microsoft she has about 100 meg of patches to install through her dial-up connection. Once I tried a partial update, as recommended by a friendly Windows help pop-up. I broke her computer altogether and had to restore from backup. You have to keep up with these patches. There are apparently cross-dependencies that aren't checked for.
My mother-in-law does not have to spend hours every month upgrading her toaster. She purchased an expensive appliance, and expects it to work reasonably reliably. No one selling her the appliance warned her to the contrary.
If software vendors are going to build devices that are useless without a broadband connection and regular updates, they should bloody well be clear about it. That's not how they are sold.
At least OS X nags you when you need to update. But Apple still pretends these machines are usable with a dialup.
As long as there are home users, there should be machines which are safe for non-experts to use. Capabilities that are of use to at best ten percent of corporate sites are inflicted willy-nilly on a public with no need for them. Then they are expected to essentially reinstall their OS every other week over a 56Kbaud line. There is no one to blame for this situation but the vendors.
For the most blatantly obvious example, there is no way on earth or in hell an Outlook Express user needs executable attachments.
Thank you Microsoft for your endless patches. I'm sure it keeps all sorts of MCSEs busy. Home users don't expect to support a tenth of an FTE to keep their appliances working, though. How about an email client that doesn't run executables, for small businesses and home users (including those that get occasional support from family members who go to some trouble otherwise to avoid getting anywhere near your "great" software)?
Let's leave that aside for the moment, and suppose the argument for some mysterious reason does not apply to most other services but does apply to software. Then marketplace competition will drive prices down, as I understand the theory. How low can they go, in SCO's view, before they become unconstitutional?
Suppose that someone comes up with a brilliant new software package called ninunec ("Ninunec Is Not Unix, Nor Even Close"). Suppose that person wants to give away ninunec, perhaps with the intention of proving his worth to scare up venture capital for an even more ambitious plan he has.
Under the theory that SCO is presenting to congress, he should not be allowed contribute his work into the public domain! since this constitutes "dumping". I'm sure this raises free speech questions, but let's leave that aside, too. What is the lowest constitutionally permitted cost, under SCO's argument. so that our genius can promote his wares and himself. Let's say he keeps a conventional copyright and charges a penny per source download.
As long as the cost remains low enough, the evil consequences that SCO attributes to open source remain. You haven't solved the alleged problem that SCO proposes by mandating that software cannot be free. It therefore becomes necessary under SCO's arguments to mandate a minimum price for ninunec, and for every other piece of software (and every other service that falls under the SCO guidelines) that ever enters the marketplace! (Good luck with that one.)
SCO's letters, aside from their usual dubious claims about ownership of code, make claims that amount to mandating a profit for their industry by preventing contributions from a volunteer sector. The only meaningful way to implement that position into law is 1) to create an exhaustive list of activities that are constitutionally impermissible without charging a fee and 2) to have a government body set mandated minimum prices in all those activities.
That's not the free enterprise model I've heard so much about. I think we should reconsider which position is the subversive one!
Aeron chairs are worth every penny if your job involves 1) sitting and 2) concentrating. But keep on mocking them so I can get a good price on one.
Bad cops are bad, but ridiculous laws are worse, because they make the law a laughingstock, and promote antisocial attitudes like the ones so clearly on display in the parent.
For a few bucks and a technicality this guy ruined the day for eight people doing their jobs. He happily concludes "HA HA f**k him", and advises you to do likewise.
I advise you to cooperate except in situations where the police are clearly violating your rights as in brutality or false arrest, and even then responding with the maximum dignity and calm the situation allows. If a cop asks you for ID, produce it or explain why you aren't carrying any. If a cop asks you to get out of your car, get out of your car. These guys have more important things to do than hassle with opinionated middle class fools picking a procedural fight over technicalities. They are, for the most part, trying to protect you from genuinely bad guys.
Police struggle with false positives and false negatives all the time. They have to make quick decisions with large consequences all the time. They cannot be expected to be infallible. Help them make the call, don't flirt with being miscategorized on some absurd theoretical grounds.
By the way, the US immigration service already has the right to demand ID without cause. If you didn't know that, you don't look Mexican.
I'm no fan of the current administration, but I think it's absolutely necessary under present and foreseeable circumstances for people to be able to identify themselves to authorities on short notice. I can see why that might bother people, but there's more at stake than just privacy.
Thirty years of satellite observations, computer advances and improvements in theory go into current thinking that didn't figure in 1975. That said, nothing I saw in the article seems particularly alarmist or ideological.
The period of concern over "global cooling" was brief and driven by intuition. Pretty much as soon as they started doing the numbers, most of the serious physicists who were to be the founders of physical climatology agreed that greenhouse warming was probably a bigger concern. See Science, vol 193 pp 447 ff, Aug 6, 1976 , pretty much right after the Newsweek article.
did the reviewer really mean duplicitous as in fraudulent, or did he just mean to say redundant?