Over the timescales being talked about, our modern cities are pretty mobile. There will be quite a lot of new development and redevelopment over the course of a century. Whole industrial regions die and new ones sprout up (say, Detroit versus Silicon Gulch) If rising waters start to be a problem the new development will tend to be higher or more inland than the old, or there will be more investment in breakwaters and such.
Frankly it's silly to be seriously worried about this when there must be dozens of potential threats to humanity that we *wouldn't* have multiple decades to gradually adjust to. It's like if you lived in New York in 1900, extrapolated current trends, and worried about the horse manure problem we'd have in 2000. If you want to worry, worry about meteor strikes. Worry about nuclear strikes. Heck, worry about Peak Oil if you want. Or flu epidemics.
in 2007, Popular Mechanics compared a variety of CFLs. The headline finding was that their staffers subjectively preferred the light from any of the CFLs they tested to that of the incandescent bulb they used as a comparison point. This would be more compelling if they'd included a variety of incandescents rather than just one - perhaps that Sylvania bulb was particularly poorly suited for their tests. But set that aside and just look at the numbers they measured. Every CFL they tested put out less measured light than the "comparable" incandescent. They were all "rated" as being 13% brighter (1200 versus 1075 lumens) but actually measured output was 5-15% dimmer (eg, the Westinghouse Natural Light was 840 lux versus 975 lux for the Sylvania). A difference between "13% brighter" (as advertised) and 5-15% dimmer (as delivered) explains quite a lot of the disappointment surrounding CFLs.
It also might explain their findings - perhaps being 10% dimmer made a significant difference in the subjective light quality. They probably should have compared with a 90 watt incandescent to make the comparison more apple-to-apples.
CFLs are dim.
A "100 watt equivalent" bulbs appear a lot dimmer than a 100 watt bulb. Even if they seemed as bright as that when fully warmed up right after you buy them, they'd still be much dimmer when they first turn on because they take a while to warm up and they'd still get much dimmer over time with use, so in order for the average apparent brightness to be that of a 100 watt bulb they'd have to be much *more* than that initially.
Wikipedia says:
CFLs produce less light later in their life than they do at the start. The light output depreciation is exponential, with the fastest losses being soon after the lamp was first used. By the end of their lives, CFLs can be expected to produce 70-80% of their original light output.
I'd be fine with using CFLs if I could find one that was equivalent to a regular bulb of 150 watts or better. So far, no dice.
Actually in googling about this I just discovered what might be a big clue as to the difference between CFL-likers and CFL dislikers: I like traditional desk lamps. Consider a lamp with a vertical base, a bulb screwed into the top of the base, and a roughly conical shade around the bulb area. If you put a standard bulb in such a lamp, it creates an especially bright spot right under the lamp, because the brightest part of the bulb is wider than the base. If you put a standard CFL bulb in a similarly-designed lamp it might cast as much light into room generally but makes much less light in the area right under the lamp. Because the geometry of the bulb is different, you need a differently-designed lamp if you want to create the same effect. That had not occurred to me - that my old light fixtures were optimized to produce the best effect using the old-style bulb, so to get a similarly optimized experience I might need to throw out all my old light fixtures and replace them with new ones designed around the new bulb shapes.
Your link is based on Jones et al (2008), whose chief conclusion was that urban warming accounts for about one degree per century of the measured surface trend in China. Or to quote from the abstract
Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1ÂC/decade over the period 1951â"2004, with true climatic warming accounting for 0.81ÂC over this period"
Cute, isn't it, how he compares a rate-per-decade with a rate-per-specific-54-year-period in order to make the former appear small. Here's a chart of China's warming since 1900; if UHI accounts for 0.1ÂC/decade there's not much left.
The other plots featured - the ones that don't involve China - are basically cover fire, answering a claim nobody made.
But it actually gets better than that. Jones claims urban trends are carefully accounted for in the NASA data, but the nature of these corrections is basically a secret. Jones is famously uncooperative with anyone who wants to look at the source data and try to reproduce his calculations. Jones is the one who said:
We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.
Oh, wow, gosh, a single scientist disagrees. My mind is totally changed!
It only takes one to be right...
Yes, there is a great deal of debate about global warming. But a clear majority of research and scientists supports the hypothesis that there is global warming, that humans are a significant part of the cause, that it's likely to continue if we don't change anything, and that it's going to suck hard for us if it does continue.
Did you read the article? John Christy agrees that measured temperatures are increasing and that humans are a significant part of the cause, which means he agrees with the widest consensus among scientists but notes that one of the mechanisms by which humans cause increases in measured temperatures is urbanization. The satellite temperature record he prefers also shows warming, just less of it. Less warming means less cause for alarm.
If you actually look at a few of the statements of consensus that are out there you'll notice that last part of your summary, the matter of how hard for us it's going to suck if it does continue is the most speculative and poorly supported part if it's even present - it's often left out entirely. That's the part of "the consensus" that relies the most on rhetoric and offhand guesses rather than data.
Climate change does have the advantage of being theoretically quite simple - simple enough for just about anybody to understand if they're willing to open their eyes just a little bit.
You can't get to the scary numbers unless you add in some feedbacks. Big, positive, feedbacks. Intuitively, one might have guessed negative feedback was predominant. If positive feedback were as large and persistent as the scaremongers would have it, any random perturbation should have caused runaway warming (or cooling!) long ago.
If you just look at forcings and don't assume huge multipliers due to feedback effects, the numbers aren't scary enough to make headlines. Tiny amounts of warming over vast amounts of time, ocean rises so slow nobody could possibly feel any urgency to deal with it this century when our descendants in the year 2100 or beyond will be so much richer and more technologically advanced than we are that it'll be a mere nuisance for them at best.
Vista's handwriting recognition is near perfect (based on personal experience I'd say upwards 95% without training) for print and cursive,
"upwards 95%" is actually pretty terrible. Newton 2.0's print recognizer (Rosetta) was much better than that and even the cursive recognizer (based on Calligrapher) was somewhat better. 98%-99%+ is the level you're trying for.
Some portable windows devices have used recognition based on the Calligrapher engine, the same one Newton used for all recognition in the 1.0 OS and for "cursive-only" recognition in the 2.0 OS. I'm not sure how Vista's compares to that, but I'd hope it's an improvement.
"I haven't seen anyone discredit this panel or this document yet."
The final report is not out yet. All they've released so far is just the "Summary for Policymakers", which is a political document intended to be based on a much larger, more detailed and better-sourced report which...they apparently won't release for another three months.
When the full report actually is officially released, you'll probably find some good responses to the weaker parts at Climateaudit and elsewhere.
Whenever I've bought a CFL bulb that was advertised as "equivalent to", say, a 100 watt normal bulb...it wasn't. Subjectively, it wasn't even remotely as bright. How do manufacturers measure what they claim one bulb is "equivalent to" for advertising purposes? If they fixed whatever is wrong with that process, such that consumers could really rely on the alleged equivalence, I suspect there'd be a lot more uptake of the newer technology.
Seriously: why isn't something advertised as an X-watt replacement as bright in lumens as what it is supposed to replace? How is this not false advertising?
In the film, it is stated that out of 928 scientific studies on global warming, zero had any doubt that A) it exists and B) we are causing it.
What you say is untrue, but it's certainly the impression Gore wanted to leave the viewer with, yes.
What actually happened is that a researcher searched to find 928 studies containing the phrase "Climate Change" and skimmed the abstract of each study in order to classify it. The whole study was not read, only the abstract. As I understand it, each study could have a big section pontificating on why the results cast doubt on every consensus going back to Darwin for all we know; if this doubt wasn't expressed in the abstract, it was counted on the pro- side of the equation.
Another way to summarize the results is that the phrase "climate change" tends to signal support of the consensus view. Searching on other phrases such as "climate variability" can produce different results.
When you survey scientists as to their individual opinions, you also tend to find more skepticism there.
the Geek-A-Cycle, which is a workstation with built-on exercise bike that you have to peddle to run the computer.
No, it isn't. It's just an exercise bike that fits under a desk. It makes pedaling while working convenient, giving you something to do to keep your legs and heart entertained while you do your work, but doesn't make it mandatory.
What would be great is if the Wii could have some game where you strap Wiimotes to your arms and legs with some sort of holder and you could have more of a full-body dancing game that could detect your motions. I wonder if this arcade has or plans to have some game like that?
In the arcades, there do exist dancing games that involve or include hand movement. One is called Para Para Paradise; the sensor mechanism is that your arm breaks vertical light beams. For home users, there are versions of DDR that use the PS2 EyeToy as a secondary controller, requiring the user to clap or wave hands at particular points in the game. But the home game that best meets your description is EyeToy Kinetic. The camera detects the movement of your body; you run around waving your arms and legs to hit or avoid onscreen targets. It's pretty cool; when it works, it does feel like aerobic dancing.
There was an arcade game called "Sky Cycle" about ten years ago,
The game was actually called PropCycle. You drove a pedal-powered hanglider. You could coast in stretches, but stop pedalling for too long and it stalls.
If the government had ANY, I repeat ANY sense at all, they'd look into this, and support or fund, to stem the apparent obesity epidemic the media is reporting on among America's youth. Is there? Really?
The government is already on this bandwagon. Local grade schools are using Dance Dance Revolution as part of a physical exercise program. West Virginia has it in all 765 public schools in the state.
If you're interested in following this issue, let me humbly recommend my blog.
And what exactly is their expertise in climatology? And would you accept claims from climatologists about the inner workings of the sun?
The questioner was looking for reputable scientists, not specifically climatologists. And these seem to fit the bill. I never said I accepted their claim. In fact, I personally wouldn't have taken such a bet at even odds. But then, I have expertise in neither climatology nor solar science.
Incidentally, realclimate has biases of its own; you might want to read climateaudit.org as a counterpoint. (I follow both.)
Would you happen to have the name of a reputable scientist that claims solar output variation is responsible for global warming, by any chance?
The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev of the Irkutsk Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics think that recent warming is directly tied to the sunspot cycle and the planet will soon start cooling again. They are so sure of this that they accepted a $10,000 wager to that effect with climate scientist James Annan. The bet is that the planet's average surface temperature will be lower 1012-2017 than it was 1998-2003.
Last time I was in New Zealand, a year ago, every glacier I visited was a long, long, long hike past signs that said "this is where the glacier's end was in 1780"
The original claim was that all the glaciers "are now in retreat." Most New Zealand glaciers are not in retreat - they are now advancing - but that doesn't mean they are at an all-time maximum extent. Many are simply recovering previously lost ground. For instance, the Franz Josef in New Zealand's Southern Alps is growing at about three metres a day, but it's still below where it was in 1900.
quotes:
"Over the last three years, the glaciers have gained in mass, halting the declines seen between 1998 and 2002. This past year was the seventh largest gain since we started aerial surveys in 1977" ...
"The recent gains do not compensate for the large overall losses seen over the past century."
A simple fact check would be that the ALL of glaciers that existed before christ are now in retreat.
Is that true? I thought the glaciers in Norway were growing, as are some in New Zealand, Patagonia, and various other locations. A quick google search bears this out. Um, try here.
Please. Nobody here is "chained to a desk". Electronics assembly is delicate work requiring a clean, cool, dry, well-lit environment - or the product doesn't work! People take the job because it pays much better than the other options available to them at the time (working on the farm in a poor northern village). You've no idea how nice the factory environment is until you've experienced August in Dongguan without air conditioning.
They live in dorms next to the factory, so travel to and from work takes 5 minutes. They likely don't work 15 hour days *every* day, just during crunch periods. (At least, that was my experience when I was working at/with such a factory.) The people doing this are young single women, probably 16-20ish, so they don't have kids yet. It's transitional employment, kind of like working at McDonalds here only far, far more lucrative by the standards of the town the workers come from - they are probably earning more than their parents, sending money home to support the family. (Plus gaining valuable job experience that will enable them to get a higher-paying job later.)
Slashdot Mirror
imminent death of the planet predicted; news at 11.
Over the timescales being talked about, our modern cities are pretty mobile. There will be quite a lot of new development and redevelopment over the course of a century. Whole industrial regions die and new ones sprout up (say, Detroit versus Silicon Gulch) If rising waters start to be a problem the new development will tend to be higher or more inland than the old, or there will be more investment in breakwaters and such. Frankly it's silly to be seriously worried about this when there must be dozens of potential threats to humanity that we *wouldn't* have multiple decades to gradually adjust to. It's like if you lived in New York in 1900, extrapolated current trends, and worried about the horse manure problem we'd have in 2000. If you want to worry, worry about meteor strikes. Worry about nuclear strikes. Heck, worry about Peak Oil if you want. Or flu epidemics.
http://seekingarrangement.com/
correction: the article was comparing "like 75 watt" bulbs so they should have used a 65 watt incandescent to have comparable light output.
It also might explain their findings - perhaps being 10% dimmer made a significant difference in the subjective light quality. They probably should have compared with a 90 watt incandescent to make the comparison more apple-to-apples.
CFLs are dim. A "100 watt equivalent" bulbs appear a lot dimmer than a 100 watt bulb. Even if they seemed as bright as that when fully warmed up right after you buy them, they'd still be much dimmer when they first turn on because they take a while to warm up and they'd still get much dimmer over time with use, so in order for the average apparent brightness to be that of a 100 watt bulb they'd have to be much *more* than that initially. Wikipedia says:
CFLs produce less light later in their life than they do at the start. The light output depreciation is exponential, with the fastest losses being soon after the lamp was first used. By the end of their lives, CFLs can be expected to produce 70-80% of their original light output.
I'd be fine with using CFLs if I could find one that was equivalent to a regular bulb of 150 watts or better. So far, no dice.
Actually in googling about this I just discovered what might be a big clue as to the difference between CFL-likers and CFL dislikers: I like traditional desk lamps. Consider a lamp with a vertical base, a bulb screwed into the top of the base, and a roughly conical shade around the bulb area. If you put a standard bulb in such a lamp, it creates an especially bright spot right under the lamp, because the brightest part of the bulb is wider than the base. If you put a standard CFL bulb in a similarly-designed lamp it might cast as much light into room generally but makes much less light in the area right under the lamp. Because the geometry of the bulb is different, you need a differently-designed lamp if you want to create the same effect. That had not occurred to me - that my old light fixtures were optimized to produce the best effect using the old-style bulb, so to get a similarly optimized experience I might need to throw out all my old light fixtures and replace them with new ones designed around the new bulb shapes.
Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1ÂC/decade over the period 1951â"2004, with true climatic warming accounting for 0.81ÂC over this period"
Cute, isn't it, how he compares a rate-per-decade with a rate-per-specific-54-year-period in order to make the former appear small. Here's a chart of China's warming since 1900; if UHI accounts for 0.1ÂC/decade there's not much left. The other plots featured - the ones that don't involve China - are basically cover fire, answering a claim nobody made. But it actually gets better than that. Jones claims urban trends are carefully accounted for in the NASA data, but the nature of these corrections is basically a secret. Jones is famously uncooperative with anyone who wants to look at the source data and try to reproduce his calculations. Jones is the one who said:
We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.
Oh, wow, gosh, a single scientist disagrees. My mind is totally changed!
It only takes one to be right...
Yes, there is a great deal of debate about global warming. But a clear majority of research and scientists supports the hypothesis that there is global warming, that humans are a significant part of the cause, that it's likely to continue if we don't change anything, and that it's going to suck hard for us if it does continue.
Did you read the article? John Christy agrees that measured temperatures are increasing and that humans are a significant part of the cause, which means he agrees with the widest consensus among scientists but notes that one of the mechanisms by which humans cause increases in measured temperatures is urbanization. The satellite temperature record he prefers also shows warming, just less of it. Less warming means less cause for alarm. If you actually look at a few of the statements of consensus that are out there you'll notice that last part of your summary, the matter of how hard for us it's going to suck if it does continue is the most speculative and poorly supported part if it's even present - it's often left out entirely. That's the part of "the consensus" that relies the most on rhetoric and offhand guesses rather than data.
Climate change does have the advantage of being theoretically quite simple - simple enough for just about anybody to understand if they're willing to open their eyes just a little bit.
You can't get to the scary numbers unless you add in some feedbacks. Big, positive, feedbacks. Intuitively, one might have guessed negative feedback was predominant. If positive feedback were as large and persistent as the scaremongers would have it, any random perturbation should have caused runaway warming (or cooling!) long ago. If you just look at forcings and don't assume huge multipliers due to feedback effects, the numbers aren't scary enough to make headlines. Tiny amounts of warming over vast amounts of time, ocean rises so slow nobody could possibly feel any urgency to deal with it this century when our descendants in the year 2100 or beyond will be so much richer and more technologically advanced than we are that it'll be a mere nuisance for them at best.
"upwards 95%" is actually pretty terrible. Newton 2.0's print recognizer (Rosetta) was much better than that and even the cursive recognizer (based on Calligrapher) was somewhat better. 98%-99%+ is the level you're trying for.
Some portable windows devices have used recognition based on the Calligrapher engine, the same one Newton used for all recognition in the 1.0 OS and for "cursive-only" recognition in the 2.0 OS. I'm not sure how Vista's compares to that, but I'd hope it's an improvement.
When the full report actually is officially released, you'll probably find some good responses to the weaker parts at Climateaudit and elsewhere.
Seriously: why isn't something advertised as an X-watt replacement as bright in lumens as what it is supposed to replace? How is this not false advertising?
What actually happened is that a researcher searched to find 928 studies containing the phrase "Climate Change" and skimmed the abstract of each study in order to classify it. The whole study was not read, only the abstract. As I understand it, each study could have a big section pontificating on why the results cast doubt on every consensus going back to Darwin for all we know; if this doubt wasn't expressed in the abstract, it was counted on the pro- side of the equation.
Another way to summarize the results is that the phrase "climate change" tends to signal support of the consensus view. Searching on other phrases such as "climate variability" can produce different results.
When you survey scientists as to their individual opinions, you also tend to find more skepticism there.
If you're interested in following this issue, let me humbly recommend my blog.
Disclaimer: yeah, that was a blatant plug.
The questioner was looking for reputable scientists, not specifically climatologists. And these seem to fit the bill. I never said I accepted their claim. In fact, I personally wouldn't have taken such a bet at even odds. But then, I have expertise in neither climatology nor solar science.
Incidentally, realclimate has biases of its own; you might want to read climateaudit.org as a counterpoint. (I follow both.)Correction: I meant 2012-2017...
The original claim was that all the glaciers "are now in retreat." Most New Zealand glaciers are not in retreat - they are now advancing - but that doesn't mean they are at an all-time maximum extent. Many are simply recovering previously lost ground. For instance, the Franz Josef in New Zealand's Southern Alps is growing at about three metres a day, but it's still below where it was in 1900.
two good articles:http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?art_id=qw110602 2963550R131
http://www.niwascience.co.nz/pubs/mr/archive/2005- 08-30-1
quotes: "Over the last three years, the glaciers have gained in mass, halting the declines seen between 1998 and 2002. This past year was the seventh largest gain since we started aerial surveys in 1977"
...
"The recent gains do not compensate for the large overall losses seen over the past century."
Please. Nobody here is "chained to a desk". Electronics assembly is delicate work requiring a clean, cool, dry, well-lit environment - or the product doesn't work! People take the job because it pays much better than the other options available to them at the time (working on the farm in a poor northern village). You've no idea how nice the factory environment is until you've experienced August in Dongguan without air conditioning.
They live in dorms next to the factory, so travel to and from work takes 5 minutes. They likely don't work 15 hour days *every* day, just during crunch periods. (At least, that was my experience when I was working at/with such a factory.) The people doing this are young single women, probably 16-20ish, so they don't have kids yet. It's transitional employment, kind of like working at McDonalds here only far, far more lucrative by the standards of the town the workers come from - they are probably earning more than their parents, sending money home to support the family. (Plus gaining valuable job experience that will enable them to get a higher-paying job later.)