> Obviously, because the glaciers from the ice age just started retreating from the Carolinas when the industrial revolution > began in the 1800s.
Lord, sometimes I feel like giving up altogether. Maybe this is just a troll, but someone rated it insightful!
Or was that a dogsled that Washington crossed the Delaware in? Correct me if I'm wrong...
mt
Heh. You guys all miss the point. The subtext is "scientists claim that further research should be funded".
Practicing scientists pretty much never say "we know everything there is to know about my specialty". If someone is feeling particularly ornery they might say that after they retire.
For what it's worth, my wife and I were biking in a state park in central Florida about 5 years ago and encountered some sort of feline creature, tan colored, about the size of a large dog, almost waist high. We turned around and hastened in the opposite direction.
We inquired at the nature center. The ranger assured us that there was no such animal endemic to the region. We have no idea what it was we saw.
I'm curious about this. I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience in Florida or elsewhere.
Or does someone have data that global warming is more at the poles than at the equator?
Regardless of the rest of your argument, it is definitely the case that global warming is expected to warm the polar and subpolar regions more than the tropics, decreasing the temperature gradient, and it is also definitely the case that the greatest effects so far have been in high latitude continental interiors, specifically the interiors of Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Now it is starting to show up in the high Arctic and the edges of the great ice caps.
There are two phenomena at work, one subtle one which I've never figured out about radiative equilibrium and the vertical profile of temperature in cold vs warm places, and one very simple one; the ice-albedo feedback. The latter one says that as ice and snow cover retreats, the ground gets darker for more of the year, reflecting less sunlight and absorbing more. That causes warming or cooling trends to be enhanced at ice and snow boundaries.
sampling rate however is extraordinarily low i.e. 1957, 1981, 1992, and 2004.
The time scale of changes in ocean circulation is decadal, so it's not as undersampled as you suggest. However, deep transects are expensive beasts, so it is a bit undersampled. That's acknowledged.
So, the effect is categorically not understood,
It's understood, just not resolved.
a link is pronounced to events 12,000 years ago, bolstered with a guess to a period of recorded history experiencing a "sporadic" Ice Age
Not sure what you mean. The paleoclimate people and geologists are pretty much convinced that exactly this thermohaline shutdown in response to the undamming of glacial Lake Agassiz (of which the Great Lakes are the remnants) is what caused the retreat into ice age conditions especially in the Northern Hemisphere in the 11KA event. The mechanism having been understood, there is concern that it might recur, since we are entering another rapid warming period.
uses weather data from 1961 to 1985 and models of future weather from 2071 to 2095, which assume a doubling of the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide
Don't blame the scientists for what the press release says. Obviously they are comparing model runs with observations, not "models of models", which would be, um, models.
variables are so numerous in climate studies, subsets are grouped and modelled linearly (via principal component analysis). This has the effect of reducing the dimension of the problem at the cost of accuracy.
PCA and similar techniques are sometimes used in analyzing data and in analyzing model outputs, but full-blown climate models do not reduce dimensionality in this way.
On what basis do you obtain the opinion that you know enough about the field to issue broad unqualified criticisms? Could you possibly be jumping to unwarranted conclusions?
Hurricanes == Earth oceans heat dissapation system (Determine the heat transfer method and you will be famous).
The mechanism of the tropical storm system was worked out by the Japanese meteorologist K.V.Ooyama in 1964. His great fame apparently hasn't reached you, alas.
The fact that hurricane trajectories are routinely and increasingly effectively predicted by physical models pretty much proves that whatever else they are, tropical storms are not mysterious phenomena.
As I understand it the situation is that the mechanism proposed for sudden climate change by Broecker some 15 years ago (and exaggerated beyond recognition in a silly movie lately) shows some signs of actually occuring. New measurement expeditions have reinforced the evidence in this direction. Though the evidence isn't absolutely conclusive, it's starting to weigh in that direction and the new evidence makes the case stronger. There is well-understood physics at work, but it involves delicate small-scale structures that are hard to capture in global scale models.
Though most scientific opinion expects it won't be enough to trigger a European ice age (unlike the YD event some 11KA ago) it could lead to a great deal more climate variability in our lifetimes especially in Europe and the northern reaches of the Atlantic than has been captured in most climate models, and in the extreme it may even cool Europe a bit as the rest of us get hotter.
I disagree strongly with the suggestion of using email as an instant messaging platform.
e-mail's guarantee of service, I believe, is 48 hours. This is a good thing. It allows you to politely batch your email messages at the end of the day. (Far recommended over the beginning of the day; best not to start the day with distractions). Usage of email as an IM service is an abuse of the medium and an abuse of the recipient's time, assuming the recipient is a reasonably busy and productive person.
Anything that requires a response in under 48 hours SHOULD NOT be sent by email. Expecting an instant response to an email is just rude. It shows you do not respect your recipient's time.
There's no fundamental reason that a chat client/server pair can't be secure and open source; and it turns out to be a fairly straightforward exercise to write one. Don't go abusing systems that were carefully designed for other purposes. The whole point of software is that you can get what you need. Why subvert something to an unintended purpose when there are plenty of options that are designed for the intended one?
Yes, and Mac users like their machines and use them a lot more hours per week.
Developers of mass market software who base their strategies on platform market share and not platform usage share are making a big mistake. About half the machines I see in coffeeshops are iBooks and PBooks these days.
mod parent up. A very nice, terse way to say what I was about to spend a few paragraphs kvetching about.
DRM on paper books, anybody?
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html if you haven't already.
mt
A typical puff piece, barely worth reading. But I agree with Jobs on many points, notably that most non-Apple tech products are ridiculous.
Consider the article itself. Typical vapid press, yes, but the design is so stupid! Why use two narrow columns on a web page? This triples my scrolling, and makes a dull article even more annoying. This in an article which extols the power of the iPod interface! Well, the article itself presents a user interface, and that UI the essence of the sort of ridiculous that Jobs so studiously avoids.
It would be bad enough if it were sheer laziness, but someone had to go to some extra trouble to make the experience of reading this article so annoying.
Greenhouse gases are a big problem and getting bigger.
A ton of uranium yields as much energy as 16000 tons of coal. We bury the nuclear wastes in a small hole. (Work out the size of a ton of metal.) We bury the much larger coal wastes in the atmosphere, where they change the radiative properties of the planet, not to mention various other toxic side effects, including radiation emissions.
It's really a no-brainer. Of course, sometimes it seems that society has no brain.
The right doesn't want to admit it was wrong about global warming and the left doesn't want to admit it was wrong about nukes. So we go on merrily pursuing a thoroughly avoidable catastrophe.
>> Slab oceans are not used in state-of-the-art climate models.
> Climateprediction.net uses a slab model of the ocean
climateprediction.net is a desktop model, not state of the art. I qualified it deliberately. Simpler models have their uses, but if you are focused on models
>> Arrhenius was wrong
While I appreciate your reference's using our U of C gateway, I think his calculation is nonsense. He obtains an emissivity using a fixed temperature profile, then feeds that back into the Arrhenius equation. But, of course that is the wrong temperature profile.
Nobody says Arrhenius was quantitatively right. He was conceptually right and in the right ballpark. A model which didn't have any CO2 sensitivity would be complete nonsense.
> Credentials battle:
I have a PhD in high performance modeling of ocean dynamics.
> Tell me, what is your knowledge of thermal transfer between discrete interhaline countercurrents?
None whatsoever. Google has none either. "Your search - "interhaline countercurrents" - did not match any documents. " What the hell does "interhaline" mean? Google did turn up one hit on the word. Check it out!
>scorecard
I easily identified several points of misinformation...
Everyone on the scientific working group is a prominent published scientist.
Their position has been reinforced by other "political" groups like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The National Academy of Science, The American Meteorlogical Society and the Amereican Geophysical Union.
I really don't understand how people can get things so totally backwards. I try to assume that people aren't willing to maliciously damage the entire planet for short term gain, but stuff like the parent posting makes me wonder.
do you accurately model the largest heat sink on the planet, or are your oceans just a thin slab of water that is basically a rigidly driven model that doesn't adjust to changes realistically
That's a very valid criticism of the climate models of around 1985. Slab oceans are not used in state-of-the-art climate models.
modelers set up the model so that CO2 holds more heat in the model
Well, nature set things up that way too. It's been known since the 1890s.
do they just solve for two of the three (pressure and temperature, but not volume)
um, ever hear of an equation of state?
I can go on for hours about how completely inaccurate these models are.
You are very creative indeed. Unfortunately, you show no signs of knowing what computer models are in use, why, or how they relate to the science.
we have data that all of the inner planets are now heating up.
If it weren't our fault, there would be no reason to expect it to continue to accelerate. Unfortunately, the chances that it isn't our fault are vanishingly small by now, and there is plenty of reason to expect warming and the climate changes it brings to continue to accelerate.
The natural background warming since the last ice age peaked 6000 years ago, and temperature declined gradually since then, until about 100 years ago when it began to rise rapidly. But that is only peculiar and suggestive. What's actually alarming is the rate of accumulation of greenhouse gases, which has no known predent over geologic time.
There is no reason to appeal to "harmonics" here. Indeed, that would be an error, because it would be extrapolating based on an assumption that the situation is unaltered by humans. But we know that isn't the case. We have radiative transfer physics. If it fails to warm up rapidly over the next century we will have to throw away a whole lot of physics.
I wonder if it was dog slow before they got slashdotted. AJAX does make HTTP requests, you know. You can't expect them to scale their servers to support a slashdot flood right at the beginning.
> Is this thing binary? No holes = secure, one hole = as insecure as a hundred holes?
well...
After Katrina hit just in the right place to cause the Pontchartrain nightmare that happened, while the "dodged a bullet" nonsense was still going on, there was a brief time that the media was saying "it's not too bad, the levee is only broken in one place and the flooding is only local". The people who said this were clueless. Do you see why?
mt
there are actually some people in the world who can go an entire day without shopping on the internet. Apparently, they still go into those store things to buy things
I've heard rumors of people who can go days at a time without buying anything at all, but those are unconfirmed.
Bill Gray is one of the rare important atmospheric scientists who still thinks humans aren't changing climate very much. (Kuhn might point out that like most of them, he is close to retirement.)
Nobody is saying that hurricane frequency is climbing because of human induced climate change; that's a subtle question and it could go either way.
It's a pretty simple argument, though, to suggest that when they do form, they will be able to grow to an increased extent, because they have more thermal energy to draw upon. Recent evidence at least starts to show this observationally.
Slashdot Mirror
> Obviously, because the glaciers from the ice age just started retreating from the Carolinas when the industrial revolution > began in the 1800s. Lord, sometimes I feel like giving up altogether. Maybe this is just a troll, but someone rated it insightful! Or was that a dogsled that Washington crossed the Delaware in? Correct me if I'm wrong... mt
Heh. You guys all miss the point. The subtext is "scientists claim that further research should be funded".
Practicing scientists pretty much never say "we know everything there is to know about my specialty". If someone is feeling particularly ornery they might say that after they retire.
For what it's worth, my wife and I were biking in a state park in central Florida about 5 years ago and encountered some sort of feline creature, tan colored, about the size of a large dog, almost waist high. We turned around and hastened in the opposite direction.
We inquired at the nature center. The ranger assured us that there was no such animal endemic to the region. We have no idea what it was we saw.
I'm curious about this. I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience in Florida or elsewhere.
Regardless of the rest of your argument, it is definitely the case that global warming is expected to warm the polar and subpolar regions more than the tropics, decreasing the temperature gradient, and it is also definitely the case that the greatest effects so far have been in high latitude continental interiors, specifically the interiors of Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Now it is starting to show up in the high Arctic and the edges of the great ice caps.
There are two phenomena at work, one subtle one which I've never figured out about radiative equilibrium and the vertical profile of temperature in cold vs warm places, and one very simple one; the ice-albedo feedback. The latter one says that as ice and snow cover retreats, the ground gets darker for more of the year, reflecting less sunlight and absorbing more. That causes warming or cooling trends to be enhanced at ice and snow boundaries.
The time scale of changes in ocean circulation is decadal, so it's not as undersampled as you suggest. However, deep transects are expensive beasts, so it is a bit undersampled. That's acknowledged.
So, the effect is categorically not understood,
It's understood, just not resolved.
a link is pronounced to events 12,000 years ago, bolstered with a guess to a period of recorded history experiencing a "sporadic" Ice Age
Not sure what you mean. The paleoclimate people and geologists are pretty much convinced that exactly this thermohaline shutdown in response to the undamming of glacial Lake Agassiz (of which the Great Lakes are the remnants) is what caused the retreat into ice age conditions especially in the Northern Hemisphere in the 11KA event. The mechanism having been understood, there is concern that it might recur, since we are entering another rapid warming period.
uses weather data from 1961 to 1985 and models of future weather from 2071 to 2095, which assume a doubling of the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide
Don't blame the scientists for what the press release says. Obviously they are comparing model runs with observations, not "models of models", which would be, um, models.
variables are so numerous in climate studies, subsets are grouped and modelled linearly (via principal component analysis). This has the effect of reducing the dimension of the problem at the cost of accuracy.
PCA and similar techniques are sometimes used in analyzing data and in analyzing model outputs, but full-blown climate models do not reduce dimensionality in this way.
On what basis do you obtain the opinion that you know enough about the field to issue broad unqualified criticisms? Could you possibly be jumping to unwarranted conclusions?
The mechanism of the tropical storm system was worked out by the Japanese meteorologist K.V.Ooyama in 1964. His great fame apparently hasn't reached you, alas.
The fact that hurricane trajectories are routinely and increasingly effectively predicted by physical models pretty much proves that whatever else they are, tropical storms are not mysterious phenomena.
As usual there is a better discussion on realclimate.org.
As I understand it the situation is that the mechanism proposed for sudden climate change by Broecker some 15 years ago (and exaggerated beyond recognition in a silly movie lately) shows some signs of actually occuring. New measurement expeditions have reinforced the evidence in this direction. Though the evidence isn't absolutely conclusive, it's starting to weigh in that direction and the new evidence makes the case stronger. There is well-understood physics at work, but it involves delicate small-scale structures that are hard to capture in global scale models.
Though most scientific opinion expects it won't be enough to trigger a European ice age (unlike the YD event some 11KA ago) it could lead to a great deal more climate variability in our lifetimes especially in Europe and the northern reaches of the Atlantic than has been captured in most climate models, and in the extreme it may even cool Europe a bit as the rest of us get hotter.
I disagree strongly with the suggestion of using email as an instant messaging platform.
e-mail's guarantee of service, I believe, is 48 hours. This is a good thing. It allows you to politely batch your email messages at the end of the day. (Far recommended over the beginning of the day; best not to start the day with distractions). Usage of email as an IM service is an abuse of the medium and an abuse of the recipient's time, assuming the recipient is a reasonably busy and productive person.
Anything that requires a response in under 48 hours SHOULD NOT be sent by email. Expecting an instant response to an email is just rude. It shows you do not respect your recipient's time.
There's no fundamental reason that a chat client/server pair can't be secure and open source; and it turns out to be a fairly straightforward exercise to write one. Don't go abusing systems that were carefully designed for other purposes. The whole point of software is that you can get what you need. Why subvert something to an unintended purpose when there are plenty of options that are designed for the intended one?
Yes, and Mac users like their machines and use them a lot more hours per week.
Developers of mass market software who base their strategies on platform market share and not platform usage share are making a big mistake. About half the machines I see in coffeeshops are iBooks and PBooks these days.
mod parent up. A very nice, terse way to say what I was about to spend a few paragraphs kvetching about. DRM on paper books, anybody? See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html if you haven't already. mt
A typical puff piece, barely worth reading. But I agree with Jobs on many points, notably that most non-Apple tech products are ridiculous.
Consider the article itself. Typical vapid press, yes, but the design is so stupid! Why use two narrow columns on a web page? This triples my scrolling, and makes a dull article even more annoying. This in an article which extols the power of the iPod interface! Well, the article itself presents a user interface, and that UI the essence of the sort of ridiculous that Jobs so studiously avoids.
It would be bad enough if it were sheer laziness, but someone had to go to some extra trouble to make the experience of reading this article so annoying.
Commander, if this was intended as a joke, it's not funny enough.
This kind of thing makes me consider removing Slashdot from my feed aggregator. You probably lost a few dozen right there.
It's not your job to know everything, but if you can't tell whether something is crap, either leave it alone, or get someone qualified to help.
thanks
Greenhouse gases are a big problem and getting bigger.
A ton of uranium yields as much energy as 16000 tons of coal. We bury the nuclear wastes in a small hole. (Work out the size of a ton of metal.) We bury the much larger coal wastes in the atmosphere, where they change the radiative properties of the planet, not to mention various other toxic side effects, including radiation emissions.
It's really a no-brainer. Of course, sometimes it seems that society has no brain.
The right doesn't want to admit it was wrong about global warming and the left doesn't want to admit it was wrong about nukes. So we go on merrily pursuing a thoroughly avoidable catastrophe.
Joel is pretty clever but the article was dated five years ago. Cross-platform development is a lot easier than it was then. mt
>> Slab oceans are not used in state-of-the-art climate models.
_ Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine3 63/509b
> Climateprediction.net uses a slab model of the ocean
climateprediction.net is a desktop model, not state of the art. I qualified it deliberately. Simpler models have their uses, but if you are focused on models
>> Arrhenius was wrong
While I appreciate your reference's using our U of C gateway, I think his calculation is nonsense. He obtains an emissivity using a fixed temperature profile, then feeds that back into the Arrhenius equation. But, of course that is the wrong temperature profile.
Nobody says Arrhenius was quantitatively right. He was conceptually right and in the right ballpark. A model which didn't have any CO2 sensitivity would be complete nonsense.
> Credentials battle:
I have a PhD in high performance modeling of ocean dynamics.
> Tell me, what is your knowledge of thermal transfer between discrete interhaline countercurrents?
None whatsoever. Google has none either. "Your search - "interhaline countercurrents" - did not match any documents. " What the hell does "interhaline" mean? Google did turn up one hit on the word. Check it out!
>scorecard
I easily identified several points of misinformation...
> Name the risks
Flooding, storms, droughts, pestilence, famine, massive forced migration...
> petition
The "petition" with 17000 names is old news, and rather controversial news at that:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Oregon
and
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/280/5
> The IPCC is a political group
You really are a piece of work, you know.
Everyone on the scientific working group is a prominent published scientist.
Their position has been reinforced by other "political" groups like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The National Academy of Science, The American Meteorlogical Society and the Amereican Geophysical Union.
I really don't understand how people can get things so totally backwards. I try to assume that people aren't willing to maliciously damage the entire planet for short term gain, but stuff like the parent posting makes me wonder.
mt
That's a very valid criticism of the climate models of around 1985. Slab oceans are not used in state-of-the-art climate models.
modelers set up the model so that CO2 holds more heat in the model
Well, nature set things up that way too. It's been known since the 1890s.
do they just solve for two of the three (pressure and temperature, but not volume)
um, ever hear of an equation of state?
I can go on for hours about how completely inaccurate these models are.
You are very creative indeed. Unfortunately, you show no signs of knowing what computer models are in use, why, or how they relate to the science.
we have data that all of the inner planets are now heating up.
Where? The Mars matter is addressed here.
Trillions of dollars and Millions of lives will be lost if the "we should take action just in case" crowd wins.
I don't know why you are only interested in the risks on one side.
We have no hard evidence to support anthropogenic global warming theories.
Hope this helps
This is addressed at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192
If it weren't our fault, there would be no reason to expect it to continue to accelerate. Unfortunately, the chances that it isn't our fault are vanishingly small by now, and there is plenty of reason to expect warming and the climate changes it brings to continue to accelerate.
The natural background warming since the last ice age peaked 6000 years ago, and temperature declined gradually since then, until about 100 years ago when it began to rise rapidly. But that is only peculiar and suggestive. What's actually alarming is the rate of accumulation of greenhouse gases, which has no known predent over geologic time. There is no reason to appeal to "harmonics" here. Indeed, that would be an error, because it would be extrapolating based on an assumption that the situation is unaltered by humans. But we know that isn't the case. We have radiative transfer physics. If it fails to warm up rapidly over the next century we will have to throw away a whole lot of physics.
Why this is irrelevant
I wonder if it was dog slow before they got slashdotted. AJAX does make HTTP requests, you know. You can't expect them to scale their servers to support a slashdot flood right at the beginning.
> Is this thing binary? No holes = secure, one hole = as insecure as a hundred holes? well... After Katrina hit just in the right place to cause the Pontchartrain nightmare that happened, while the "dodged a bullet" nonsense was still going on, there was a brief time that the media was saying "it's not too bad, the levee is only broken in one place and the flooding is only local". The people who said this were clueless. Do you see why? mt
I've heard rumors of people who can go days at a time without buying anything at all, but those are unconfirmed.
Nobody is saying that hurricane frequency is climbing because of human induced climate change; that's a subtle question and it could go either way.
It's a pretty simple argument, though, to suggest that when they do form, they will be able to grow to an increased extent, because they have more thermal energy to draw upon. Recent evidence at least starts to show this observationally.
see the most recent posting on realclimate for more.
Families have been split up. People need to find each other.
Groups of people are stuck on roofs and under underpasses. The buses and helicopters need to know where to go.
Information needs to be collected and disseminated from a lot of places.
That's where the tech comes in. These are not trivial needs now.
They should have been set up in advance, but like a lot of other things that should have been set up in advance, apparently they weren't.