Well, my all time top five are probably
Adventure (originally seen on an IBM system 360, and numerous places since)
Asteroids (on a PDP 11, with a nice re-release on Win 3.1)
Rogue (mostly on DOS, but originally on Sun workstations, and these days in Classic mode on OS X)
Snake Byte (on an Apple 2)
Tetris (everywhere else)
I guess I'm not in the target demographic here, though...
mt
One thing that is always striking when nerds talk about this stuff is that there seems to be an overlap between the people who think it's unlikely that we have the capacity to make the earth unlivable and those
who think it's likely that we have the capacity to make other planets livable.
Which process do you think is easier?
Lech Walesa once said something to the effect that it's easier to make a fish soup out of an aquarium than the other way around. He was referring to Poland, but he could have been referring to the whole world as well.
Many of the phenomena you discuss happen on much longer time scales than present the rate of accumulation of CO2 and are pretty much irrelevant to the current situation.
There are plenty of complications, but there's no reason to make matters look more complicated than they actually are.
However AFAIK there is no solid proof that human activity is a major or even significant factor in the changes over the last 200 years.
This is pretty much considered proven on mass balance arguments. It is important to understand that the atmosphere is relatively thin and light, and that the components of the atmpshere that make it hold heat in, notably H2O and CO2, are a very small component by weight. So the amount of CO2 needed to shift the balance noticeably is relatively small.
Now, if you compare the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 with economic data on fossil fuel usage, you will find that about half of the emitted carbon is accounted for. The rest must be going into the ocean or the biota, and that proportion is somewhat harder to measure and more controversial, but that's beside the point that you raise. The point is that human activity is providing a source of about the right size.
If you intend to argue that the source of the extra carbon is NOT anthropogenic, then, you need to come up with a pretty complicated argument. It would require some mechanism whereby very little of the anthropogenic carbon would stay in the atmosphere (even though that is where we dump it), while at the same time, a great deal of OTHER carbon was somehow making its way into the atmosphere.
As a clincher, the isotopic signature of the accumulating carbon is very C-14 depleted, consistent with an ancient or abiotic source.
So, no, you are barking up a tree that isn't even there.
No, but it sure doesn't refute it. Now suppose there were lots of other reasons to expect causality, say, classical physics for example.`
The same beer that only makes a small "psst" when cold will foam all over the place when opened warm.
This is a real phenomenon, but it doesn't prevent the greenhouse effect from taking place. It's a positive feedback that could make the situation worse. Fortunately, not much worse. It's a long story, but in short, the ocean is heated from above, thus for the most part not well-mixed, so the source of carbon must be small. Which is why it's pretty much beside the point about where the extra carbon came from.
Anthropogenic CO2 is averages about 80 g/m3/yr. Rain is 800 kg/m2/yr. 1e4 times more is likely to have a much bigger effect.
That's complete BS. Your house weighs more than a bullet, so how could the bullet have killed you?
CO2 might even have a cooling effect if it increases cloud nucleation and increases albeido.
Exactly how might CO2 increase cloud nucleation?
If you can't answer that question, answer this one. Since you don't have the very much of an idea what you are talking about, why do you think you should pretend otherwise?
Chaos has not gone away, but the objective of the project is not to perdict specific weather events.
Climate is the aggregate statistics of weather. The fact that we have a word "climate" indicates that such statistics are predictable to some extent. The Japanese are planning to try to get as far as is possible in predicting climate. This is not a thirty year weather prediction, and they know it.
The fact that there is a language barrier and probably an incompetent journalist in the mix doesn't invalidate the project.
Actually a little facetious
on
Ruby For Rails
·
· Score: 3, Funny
agree. I wandered the site a bit and found a lot more stuff that read like the author was given ten minutes to write the article, and that all that mattered was word count. I can't believe a human editor recommended this article or this site. The content is zero.
Want to talk about productivity? Don't waste my time with noise like this. Slashdot editors, your job is to find the important stories, remember? Finding noise is easy.
Warming is both a) established as a fact beyond debate and b) that the CAUSE of such warming is also established beyond debate
are beyond *sensible* debate unless someone brings pretty spectacular new evidence to the table. They are decided within the relevant scientific communities.
Either that or the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the National Academy of Sciences, and similar bodies in other countries, are "ignorant savages" comparable to religious fanatics.
The sun IS burning hotter. NASA is detecting upward temperature trends on Mars and I really don't think that is amendable to human intervention. The temprature on Mars doesn't depend on our CO2 emission levels, whether or not you drive a hybrid car or if we ratify the Kyoto Treaty.
Not on the right time scales. This one's easy for me because I read the rebuttal before I ever heard of the claim.
For instance, assume the Earth is warming in a non-cyclic pattern. Is the answer to destroy industrialized civilization in order to save it or is it possible to use our science to offset the bad effects?
I don't think it is the opinion of the scientific community that it is necessary to "destroy industrialized civilization". You apparently have the scientific community confused with the Unabomber.
Seriously, do you think everyone who is concerned about climate change wants to shut down civilization? There may be a few cranks who make such a linkage, but that really is a straw man argument against a very serious claim.
Read the links. So far nobody has come up with a peer reviewed paper predicting an imminent ice age from the scientific literature of the 70s, far less a consensus. The press was all over it, but it was in the early speculative stages. Once people did the numbers, the community pretty quickly decided that global warming from greenhouse gases would dominate. In 1976, Science published a paper called "Global Cooling?" (note the question mark). The first statement in the abstract, if I recall correctly, was "No."
As for "the complex models" of the 1970s, they did not exist. Practical simulation of the complete climate system as not practical at that time.
It would be interesting to know more about the schoolbook. Please pass the info along to William Connelly, who will probably be interested, or send it to me if you like. If it's short enough I'd appreciate a scan or a xerox of the relevant pages. It's unfortunately not surprising that a school textbook got it wrong, given what the press was saying. The important thing to understand was that from the point of view of the scientific community, the cooling scare of the 70s was very different in nature from the warming scare now. The former was more of an urban myth with a few tentative proponents, while the latter is a scientific consensus.
You made a sign error. There are several human perturbations to climate. CO2 is the biggest one, and on a global scale it contributes to warming. Dust is the next biggest one, and on a local and regional scale it contributes to cooling.
Dust, largely from pollution, has a short residence time, and CO2 a longer one. So remove the dust, (which you want to do for health and aesthetic reasons) and the local and regional temperature goes up. Remove enough dust in enough places, and it makes a warming impact on the global temperature. More clearly, it reverses an existing cooling impact.
Please note that ANY large human perturbation changes the climate in detailed ways that are hard to predict; though we have a good sense of the global changes, local changes are much harder, and may have a lot of year-to-year and decade-to-decade variability. So while it is possible to cancel ever-increasing CO2 with ever-increasing dust releases as far as global average temperature goes, this will not actually prevent the climate from changing in disruptive ways other than mean surface temperature (notably moisture and wind). It might cure "global warming" but not accelerating climate change.
Since the models will never be perfect they will always have a weakest link. At present, on the radiative timescale at least, it is not the water vapor feedback but the cloud radiative feedback. Paleoclimate validation of models as you suggest is seriously pursued. My guess is that the reason you don't hear about it in the general press is because people are walking on eggshells around the huge subset of the population who have convinced themselves that time started a few thousand years ago. Nobody wants to stir that mess around.
i will point out that the argument
from classical radiative physics is very well known for more than a century.
i understand from some of your previous posts that you are most sceptical
and disbelieving of large numerical models requiring extensive computation.
i therefore suggest you read the following paper
Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science,
Fifth Series, page 237 et seq., April 1896.
'On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature
of the Ground' by Svante Arrhenius
i further suggest that you equip yourself with pencil and paper and
work through the arguments presented therein.
this is a very nice paper and may be verified with some elementary
calculation, with no use of elaborate computer models. i have done
so and satisfied myself that the result is sound.
if you are able to find some glaring error in the physics or the
mathematics in this paper, i am sure you will forever be famous.
these can't even predict the weather beyond four days with any reasonable accuracy
Irrelevant. Waves are not predictable but tides are.
we find engineering solutions to the problem, hm?
yes please. Nukes, I think.
we can sure as hell figure out how to build carbon dioxide sinks and somehow get this out of the atmosphere. If engineering is the problem, engineering can sure as hell find a solution.
Not much surer than hell, though. The scales are daunting, and by the nature of the problem we can't solve it by applying more energy. People are working on it, but the solutions so far all turn out to be either non-functional or more expensive than just finding ways to cope with less energy. I'm sure if you have any specific ideas you can find some funding to develop it, though. Don't let me discourage you in this regard. We NEED such a solution. It's just not sure there is one.
I am confident that Hanson never made the prediction you claim, as it is far enough outside the scientific mainstream (in which Hanson is an influential figure) that it would be well-known in the field.
Can you provide any evidence that he did say that? Made up evidence doesn't count.
It's not clear what you are replying to, but you have your facts garbled.
Human activity has increased CO2 concentrations from 280 ppmv to 380 ppmv, far faster than any natural change could achieve. Anthropogenic emissions are 15 times larger than the volcanic activity to which nature has equilibrated, and still increasing. Residence time of excess CO2 in the atmosphere is about 1000 years.
So while the amount added every year is rather small, it keeps adding up.
I love their products but have found their support as indifferent and off-the-cluetrain as any other large commodity company's.
Regarding the article, using "could care less" to mean "couldn't care less" is an expression that should not appear in written communication. Lacking the tone of voice cues, it's meaningless and distracting.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever hear of the concept of sampling bias, pup?
Well, my all time top five are probably Adventure (originally seen on an IBM system 360, and numerous places since) Asteroids (on a PDP 11, with a nice re-release on Win 3.1) Rogue (mostly on DOS, but originally on Sun workstations, and these days in Classic mode on OS X) Snake Byte (on an Apple 2) Tetris (everywhere else) I guess I'm not in the target demographic here, though... mt
re: clinton supposedly "going ballistic": see Olbermann's take on this.
Let me be the one this time to point out that it's completely irrelevant, as explained here.
Which process do you think is easier?
Lech Walesa once said something to the effect that it's easier to make a fish soup out of an aquarium than the other way around. He was referring to Poland, but he could have been referring to the whole world as well.
There are plenty of complications, but there's no reason to make matters look more complicated than they actually are.
This is pretty much considered proven on mass balance arguments. It is important to understand that the atmosphere is relatively thin and light, and that the components of the atmpshere that make it hold heat in, notably H2O and CO2, are a very small component by weight. So the amount of CO2 needed to shift the balance noticeably is relatively small.
Now, if you compare the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 with economic data on fossil fuel usage, you will find that about half of the emitted carbon is accounted for. The rest must be going into the ocean or the biota, and that proportion is somewhat harder to measure and more controversial, but that's beside the point that you raise. The point is that human activity is providing a source of about the right size.
If you intend to argue that the source of the extra carbon is NOT anthropogenic, then, you need to come up with a pretty complicated argument. It would require some mechanism whereby very little of the anthropogenic carbon would stay in the atmosphere (even though that is where we dump it), while at the same time, a great deal of OTHER carbon was somehow making its way into the atmosphere.
As a clincher, the isotopic signature of the accumulating carbon is very C-14 depleted, consistent with an ancient or abiotic source.
So, no, you are barking up a tree that isn't even there.
No, but it sure doesn't refute it. Now suppose there were lots of other reasons to expect causality, say, classical physics for example.`
The same beer that only makes a small "psst" when cold will foam all over the place when opened warm.
This is a real phenomenon, but it doesn't prevent the greenhouse effect from taking place. It's a positive feedback that could make the situation worse. Fortunately, not much worse. It's a long story, but in short, the ocean is heated from above, thus for the most part not well-mixed, so the source of carbon must be small. Which is why it's pretty much beside the point about where the extra carbon came from.
Anthropogenic CO2 is averages about 80 g/m3/yr. Rain is 800 kg/m2/yr. 1e4 times more is likely to have a much bigger effect.
That's complete BS. Your house weighs more than a bullet, so how could the bullet have killed you?
CO2 might even have a cooling effect if it increases cloud nucleation and increases albeido.
Exactly how might CO2 increase cloud nucleation?
If you can't answer that question, answer this one. Since you don't have the very much of an idea what you are talking about, why do you think you should pretend otherwise?
Not bad science, just bad journalism.
Chaos has not gone away, but the objective of the project is not to perdict specific weather events.
Climate is the aggregate statistics of weather. The fact that we have a word "climate" indicates that such statistics are predictable to some extent. The Japanese are planning to try to get as far as is possible in predicting climate. This is not a thirty year weather prediction, and they know it.
The fact that there is a language barrier and probably an incompetent journalist in the mix doesn't invalidate the project.
http://sqlonrails.org/
Peapod is still going strong in Chicago, perishables and all, and they seem to be in other markets as well. mt
So far, most replies address the headline, not the article. It's a most misleading headline, too.
The article is about encouraging FOSS on Windows.
agree. I wandered the site a bit and found a lot more stuff that read like the author was given ten minutes to write the article, and that all that mattered was word count. I can't believe a human editor recommended this article or this site. The content is zero.
Want to talk about productivity? Don't waste my time with noise like this. Slashdot editors, your job is to find the important stories, remember? Finding noise is easy.
Peculiar. I think present-day Chicago is the best city ever, and getting better every day. No accounting for tastes, I guess.
Warming is both a) established as a fact beyond debate and b) that the CAUSE of such warming is also established beyond debate
are beyond *sensible* debate unless someone brings pretty spectacular new evidence to the table. They are decided within the relevant scientific communities.
Either that or the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the National Academy of Sciences, and similar bodies in other countries, are "ignorant savages" comparable to religious fanatics.
The sun IS burning hotter. NASA is detecting upward temperature trends on Mars and I really don't think that is amendable to human intervention. The temprature on Mars doesn't depend on our CO2 emission levels, whether or not you drive a hybrid car or if we ratify the Kyoto Treaty.
Not on the right time scales. This one's easy for me because I read the rebuttal before I ever heard of the claim.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005 /10/global-warming-on-mars/
For instance, assume the Earth is warming in a non-cyclic pattern. Is the answer to destroy industrialized civilization in order to save it or is it possible to use our science to offset the bad effects?
I don't think it is the opinion of the scientific community that it is necessary to "destroy industrialized civilization". You apparently have the scientific community confused with the Unabomber.
Seriously, do you think everyone who is concerned about climate change wants to shut down civilization? There may be a few cranks who make such a linkage, but that really is a straw man argument against a very serious claim.
Read the links. So far nobody has come up with a peer reviewed paper predicting an imminent ice age from the scientific literature of the 70s, far less a consensus. The press was all over it, but it was in the early speculative stages. Once people did the numbers, the community pretty quickly decided that global warming from greenhouse gases would dominate. In 1976, Science published a paper called "Global Cooling?" (note the question mark). The first statement in the abstract, if I recall correctly, was "No."
As for "the complex models" of the 1970s, they did not exist. Practical simulation of the complete climate system as not practical at that time.
It would be interesting to know more about the schoolbook. Please pass the info along to William Connelly, who will probably be interested, or send it to me if you like. If it's short enough I'd appreciate a scan or a xerox of the relevant pages. It's unfortunately not surprising that a school textbook got it wrong, given what the press was saying. The important thing to understand was that from the point of view of the scientific community, the cooling scare of the 70s was very different in nature from the warming scare now. The former was more of an urban myth with a few tentative proponents, while the latter is a scientific consensus.
mt
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_ 400kyr-2.png
You made a sign error. There are several human perturbations to climate. CO2 is the biggest one, and on a global scale it contributes to warming. Dust is the next biggest one, and on a local and regional scale it contributes to cooling.
Dust, largely from pollution, has a short residence time, and CO2 a longer one. So remove the dust, (which you want to do for health and aesthetic reasons) and the local and regional temperature goes up. Remove enough dust in enough places, and it makes a warming impact on the global temperature. More clearly, it reverses an existing cooling impact.
Please note that ANY large human perturbation changes the climate in detailed ways that are hard to predict; though we have a good sense of the global changes, local changes are much harder, and may have a lot of year-to-year and decade-to-decade variability. So while it is possible to cancel ever-increasing CO2 with ever-increasing dust releases as far as global average temperature goes, this will not actually prevent the climate from changing in disruptive ways other than mean surface temperature (notably moisture and wind). It might cure "global warming" but not accelerating climate change.
The tech dates back to the 60s
m ary.html&full_summary=1
http://www.tv.com/my-mother-the-car/show/5763/sum
Since the models will never be perfect they will always have a weakest link. At present, on the radiative timescale at least, it is not the water vapor feedback but the cloud radiative feedback. Paleoclimate validation of models as you suggest is seriously pursued. My guess is that the reason you don't hear about it in the general press is because people are walking on eggshells around the huge subset of the population who have convinced themselves that time started a few thousand years ago. Nobody wants to stir that mess around.
false
from sci.environment today:
these can't even predict the weather beyond four days with any reasonable accuracy
Irrelevant. Waves are not predictable but tides are.
we find engineering solutions to the problem, hm?
yes please. Nukes, I think.
we can sure as hell figure out how to build carbon dioxide sinks and somehow get this out of the atmosphere. If engineering is the problem, engineering can sure as hell find a solution.
Not much surer than hell, though. The scales are daunting, and by the nature of the problem we can't solve it by applying more energy. People are working on it, but the solutions so far all turn out to be either non-functional or more expensive than just finding ways to cope with less energy. I'm sure if you have any specific ideas you can find some funding to develop it, though. Don't let me discourage you in this regard. We NEED such a solution. It's just not sure there is one.
You claimed a man said something which he did not say . This is covered in the current lead article on realclimate.org . mt
I am confident that Hanson never made the prediction you claim, as it is far enough outside the scientific mainstream (in which Hanson is an influential figure) that it would be well-known in the field.
Can you provide any evidence that he did say that? Made up evidence doesn't count.
It's not clear what you are replying to, but you have your facts garbled.
Human activity has increased CO2 concentrations from 280 ppmv to 380 ppmv, far faster than any natural change could achieve. Anthropogenic emissions are 15 times larger than the volcanic activity to which nature has equilibrated, and still increasing. Residence time of excess CO2 in the atmosphere is about 1000 years.
So while the amount added every year is rather small, it keeps adding up.
Regarding the article, using "could care less" to mean "couldn't care less" is an expression that should not appear in written communication. Lacking the tone of voice cues, it's meaningless and distracting.