The water comment is pointless, though, because the water acts as an amplifier, making man's contribution more important, instead of diluting the effect of CO2 forcing. An apparent 'lag' in temperature rises just means there is no naive linear relationship in play - our climate models can reproduce past temperature data, so that is no problem for the science.
Shows the 12% have only appeared very recently, without corresponding volcanic events. And that's disregarding the effects of other lifeforms. In fact 'volcanic in origin' is a meaningless statement. How do you distinguish between 'origins' and recirculation effects? Most of the water you drink is urine in origin. Most of the people you meet originated from stardust.
In defense of wikipedia, though, the quote is from one of the fuzzy 'controversy' articles, which have a task of repeating claims without factual criticism.
That's interesting. *click* Though I don't see *click* why anyone would be *click* so *click* mean *click* and nasty to annoy people *click* with constant *click* phone *click* ringing in real life. *click*
No it won't. GR is derived from several axioms - in particular, the assumption that the laws of physics are the same everywhere that they are meaningful. If G Probe B get expected results, then it would back up this assumption, and do disprove Steiner.
...as I understand it, we spent millions of dollars and are getting all hot and bothered because we are proving what we suspected to already be true.
Well, the alternative is not to prove what we suspect to be true. Not a very smart idea, hmm?
Really, the Gravity Probe B mission has been delayed over and over again over the years, so it's a relief that we are finally getting some results. (Though analysis will still take time, probably...) If we get what GR predicts, then fine. We get to shut up a load of crackpots once and for all. If we don't get what GR predicts, then the theoretical physics field will suddenly become very exciting indeed.
You need to understand the situation here. People make the distinction between observation and control.
Observation is ok. The UK has pretty much gotten over the idea of no real public privacy. With CCTV for example, it is generally believed that the positives outweigh the negatives, and the public has a non-paranoid idea of what can or can't be done. Post-reality tv, the idea of being watched or monitored, or to sign some sort of register doesn't creep the average person out anymore.
What puts the media on alarm is whenever someone acts on such information. Hence the whole debate over ID cards - it is generally considered that the privacy concerns aren't a big thing, since the government and private organisations have most of such info anyway. What concerns people is the potential use of the cards to control the giving of services. E.g. evil government can use this to stop people from being able to use libraries, and stuff like that. It's thoughtcrime that scares people, not Big Brother.
Taking this in mind, this policy will probably be passed with no problems. A matter of national mentality.
Examples of mistakes made that contradict McKitrick's argument when corrected. 1. Use of values in degrees for functions taking values in radians. 2. Substitution of '0' as the average temperature of locations with missing data. 3. Claims that that the arithmetic mean temperature is an arbitary measure, contradicting basic principles of thermodynamics. 4. Removing whole data sets that contradict his argument, even though such removal decreases the model's ability to correspond to past trends.
Yes, of course. The system has been going on for billions of years. And what we know of it gives us a timescale for natural changes that also happen to be millions of years. This makes an unprecedented change in a timescale of a hundred years hugely significant. Obviously, in a few millions years time, GW effects might calm down. But our models aren't dealing with geological spans of time, but the sort of timescales that human civilisations operate on. In which case, our data is certainly sufficient to give at least some conclusions.
Sure, everyone has heard that one major volcanic eruption vents more carbon dioxide than all the cars ever constructed by man combined, but that can't really be right, because we are more important than some stupid volcano.
Volcanic eruptions can enhance global warming by adding CO2 to the atmosphere. However, a far greater amount of CO2 is contributed to the atmosphere by human activities each year than by volcanic eruptions. Volcanoes contribute about 110 million tons/year, whereas other sources contribute about 10 billion tons/year.
Of course the troops tell a different story. They are the ones getting the fingers pointed at. I mean, what do you expect? Mass admissions of guilt? And besides, it is easy for your average grunt to be unaware of what he is doing. Artillery crews don't see their victims.
Almost by definition, chemical weapons and incindeary weapons are ineffective methods of killing people. They kill inhumanely, and they kill messily. They are weapons of psychological terror, and as weapons of terror they can be very effective. Now, the Independent claims (and I do not know whether these claims are true) that they have physical evidence to show that WP does kill civilians, and has killed civilians in a most horrible way. The soldiers being ignorant that WP fulfills such a role is not an excuse.
Burning innocent people to death is never a good thing, even if you are just doing it to a small minority of people. It certainly isn't something we want to train the Iraqis to do, is it?
The factual truth is that less than one-tenth of one percent of Catholic priests in the U.S. have even been accused of molestation
Isn't that the whole point? That the catholic system has zero transparency, making it difficult for victims to speak out? And that the article is about the attempts of a certain school to make itself even more opaque, and thus even more difficult for any accusation to be made?
And besides, you don't pick a random person off the street and make him a priest, or a teacher, in a direct position of trust over hundreds of youngsters. Positions of sensitivity demand a greater focus on protecting the vulnerable.
Escape velocity isn't the problem. It's the massive acceleration from the cannon.
A cannon accelerates a projectile from a standing start to massive speed in a very short amount of time. This means a massive acceleration for a small period of time - and so a massive force on your payload. Some simple calculations:
Say the cannon takes 0.5 secs to fire. Escape velocity is 11100m/s.
Your payload would be feeling an acceleration of 22200m/s^2 = 2220 Gs.
Humans die at less than 20G. Your sensitive electronics will be mush at well below 1000G's, or below 100G's if they have moving parts. Space cannons are simply incompatiable with anything we have today.
That's like saying that anyone who dislikes the currents US admin should just emigrate.
The point is that in the long term, the current way of things is untenable. If nothing is done, then the situation will indeed degrade into small, fragmented national internets, with everyone living in their own information bubble. The EU/UN plan is to build a compromise that will hold things reasonably close to the status quo, and make it unlikely for nations to break off the internet entirely.
Would any more private sector research money (by far the most research money spent) go into finding a cure or better treatment for AIDS? Would anyone be able to write a business case to get venture money to start a new bio-tech firm looking at AIDS treatment?
Surely the solution to that is to expand public sector research funds. Why does the saving of lives have to be profitable?
It's like the article said. People, and specifically the people who fall for these things are idiots. Black, or white. Rich, or poor. However nasty and bad they are, these scammer do know their targets, and that's what explains their success.
Why must slashdot report every silly rant that this Dvorak fellow has ever made? The guy's an idiot - we only needed a number of these slashdot articles to prove that. He doesn't have any real control over the computer industry. He's just a public troll, and I'm a firm believer in the idea that one should not feed the troll.
Is there a way to filter out Dvorak articles from slashdot?
Methane is certainly effective. See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=186 , in particular the graph, which puts it at number two in the list of primary forcings (behind CO2). But control of it's production is far harder than with CO2.
CH4 is produced primary by agriculture, and organic waste decomposition. The waste decomposition issue can be dealt with in more industrialised nations - just burning waste turns it into CO2, which is less damaging per volume. Using biogas reactors can also be effective - and there has been alot of research into it. But the more significant effect of agriculture is decentralised. You can't collect all of the gas that comes out of the world's cows, or the world's paddyfields. Peasant farmers the world over cannot be regulated at the stroke of a pen. Unlike CO2, the worst offenders are the least able to adopt any sort of change, because it would mean starvation for them and their dependent populations. In many cases, the worst of the damage - the creation of terrain and ecosystems that produce methane have already been done centuries ago. And for the forseeable future, there is no alternative to it - people will always have to eat.
What an utter load of lies and deception. These issues are known about, and have been carefully tackled many, many times. To state these goes beyond mere ignorance, to deliberate attempts to mislead the public.
Myth 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
That's because the satellites were taking an average of several layers, the weather balloons weren't accounting for improvements in radiation shielding technology and so on. Adjusted, they now fully match the results we have.
Myth 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
Not according to the actual data. The proportional increase in carbon dioxide is huge, by all available data. And yes, ALL of that increase is due to human activity, because for example measurements of carbon dioxide concentration in the sea shows that the sea is actively absorbing CO2. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87
Myth 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.
This is a strawman. Hell, the most common greenhouse gas is probably Nitrogen. Anything has a greenhouse effect. The issue is whether the gas is a cause of climate change or not. Water, despite it's significance, isn't. Changes in water concentration in the atmosphere is rapidly evened out - we call it rain. But it never rains carbon dioxide. The action of water is as a positive multiplier for global warming - warming increases the level of equilibrium of water in the atmosphere, which makes CO2 a more significant effect, not less.
Don't listen to these 'friends of science'. They are lying to you.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a comma, not a semicolon.
I don't suppose there is a way of getting one's hands on the toolkit for module development without buying the game? Or what if you are running Linux?
Exactly. mountains move slowly, while greenhouse gas effects move quickly. Global warming is happening quickly. So which is more likely?
Tectonic effects also tend to be very visible. We don't see any major geological things happening recently to explain climate change.
The water comment is pointless, though, because the water acts as an amplifier, making man's contribution more important, instead of diluting the effect of CO2 forcing. An apparent 'lag' in temperature rises just means there is no naive linear relationship in play - our climate models can reproduce past temperature data, so that is no problem for the science.
0 00%20years%20graph.gif
The 97% looks like a made up statistic:
http://www.dar.csiro.au/information/image/CO2%201
Shows the 12% have only appeared very recently, without corresponding volcanic events. And that's disregarding the effects of other lifeforms. In fact 'volcanic in origin' is a meaningless statement. How do you distinguish between 'origins' and recirculation effects? Most of the water you drink is urine in origin. Most of the people you meet originated from stardust.
In defense of wikipedia, though, the quote is from one of the fuzzy 'controversy' articles, which have a task of repeating claims without factual criticism.
That's interesting. *click* Though I don't see *click* why anyone would be *click* so *click* mean *click* and nasty to annoy people *click* with constant *click* phone *click* ringing in real life. *click*
Was I the only one who was expecting the article to be about pictures of some neat hardware in revealing attire?
Am I the only to be feeling slightly disappointed, at the moment?
No it won't. GR is derived from several axioms - in particular, the assumption that the laws of physics are the same everywhere that they are meaningful. If G Probe B get expected results, then it would back up this assumption, and do disprove Steiner.
...as I understand it, we spent millions of dollars and are getting all hot and bothered because we are proving what we suspected to already be true.
Well, the alternative is not to prove what we suspect to be true. Not a very smart idea, hmm?
Really, the Gravity Probe B mission has been delayed over and over again over the years, so it's a relief that we are finally getting some results. (Though analysis will still take time, probably...) If we get what GR predicts, then fine. We get to shut up a load of crackpots once and for all. If we don't get what GR predicts, then the theoretical physics field will suddenly become very exciting indeed.
Passenger: Hey, I have rights, you know?
BZZZT!! LIAR!
You need to understand the situation here. People make the distinction between observation and control.
Observation is ok. The UK has pretty much gotten over the idea of no real public privacy. With CCTV for example, it is generally believed that the positives outweigh the negatives, and the public has a non-paranoid idea of what can or can't be done. Post-reality tv, the idea of being watched or monitored, or to sign some sort of register doesn't creep the average person out anymore.
What puts the media on alarm is whenever someone acts on such information. Hence the whole debate over ID cards - it is generally considered that the privacy concerns aren't a big thing, since the government and private organisations have most of such info anyway. What concerns people is the potential use of the cards to control the giving of services. E.g. evil government can use this to stop people from being able to use libraries, and stuff like that. It's thoughtcrime that scares people, not Big Brother.
Taking this in mind, this policy will probably be passed with no problems. A matter of national mentality.
And this site shows McKitrick is an utter idiot.
http://timlambert.org/category/science/mckitrick/
A summary of issues are here http://timlambert.org/2004/10/mckitrick8/
Examples of mistakes made that contradict McKitrick's argument when corrected.
1. Use of values in degrees for functions taking values in radians.
2. Substitution of '0' as the average temperature of locations with missing data.
3. Claims that that the arithmetic mean temperature is an arbitary measure, contradicting basic principles of thermodynamics.
4. Removing whole data sets that contradict his argument, even though such removal decreases the model's ability to correspond to past trends.
Exactly wrong.
f or.html
i mate_effects.html
Yes, of course. The system has been going on for billions of years. And what we know of it gives us a timescale for natural changes that also happen to be millions of years. This makes an unprecedented change in a timescale of a hundred years hugely significant. Obviously, in a few millions years time, GW effects might calm down. But our models aren't dealing with geological spans of time, but the sort of timescales that human civilisations operate on. In which case, our data is certainly sufficient to give at least some conclusions.
Sure, everyone has heard that one major volcanic eruption vents more carbon dioxide than all the cars ever constructed by man combined, but that can't really be right, because we are more important than some stupid volcano.
The IPCC models incorporate the effects of volcanic eruptions. Scientists aren't stupid. You can see some of the code they used at http://climatechange.unep.net/jcm/doc/jcm/mod/rad
In any case, your 'everyone' is wrong, dead wrong.
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/cl
Volcanic eruptions can enhance global warming by adding CO2 to the atmosphere. However, a far greater amount of CO2 is contributed to the atmosphere by human activities each year than by volcanic eruptions. Volcanoes contribute about 110 million tons/year, whereas other sources contribute about 10 billion tons/year.
Of course the troops tell a different story. They are the ones getting the fingers pointed at. I mean, what do you expect? Mass admissions of guilt? And besides, it is easy for your average grunt to be unaware of what he is doing. Artillery crews don't see their victims.
Almost by definition, chemical weapons and incindeary weapons are ineffective methods of killing people. They kill inhumanely, and they kill messily. They are weapons of psychological terror, and as weapons of terror they can be very effective. Now, the Independent claims (and I do not know whether these claims are true) that they have physical evidence to show that WP does kill civilians, and has killed civilians in a most horrible way. The soldiers being ignorant that WP fulfills such a role is not an excuse.
Burning innocent people to death is never a good thing, even if you are just doing it to a small minority of people. It certainly isn't something we want to train the Iraqis to do, is it?
Ah, hell, I have karma to burn.
Modern Linux distributions are easy to install and easy to use.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
it's too hard and that the average person couldn't possibly grasp the complexity. That's rubbish.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
People aren't stupid
HHAHAHAHAHha... *choke*
The factual truth is that less than one-tenth of one percent of Catholic priests in the U.S. have even been accused of molestation
Isn't that the whole point? That the catholic system has zero transparency, making it difficult for victims to speak out? And that the article is about the attempts of a certain school to make itself even more opaque, and thus even more difficult for any accusation to be made?
And besides, you don't pick a random person off the street and make him a priest, or a teacher, in a direct position of trust over hundreds of youngsters. Positions of sensitivity demand a greater focus on protecting the vulnerable.
Escape velocity isn't the problem. It's the massive acceleration from the cannon. A cannon accelerates a projectile from a standing start to massive speed in a very short amount of time. This means a massive acceleration for a small period of time - and so a massive force on your payload. Some simple calculations: Say the cannon takes 0.5 secs to fire. Escape velocity is 11100m/s. Your payload would be feeling an acceleration of 22200m/s^2 = 2220 Gs. Humans die at less than 20G. Your sensitive electronics will be mush at well below 1000G's, or below 100G's if they have moving parts. Space cannons are simply incompatiable with anything we have today.
That's like saying that anyone who dislikes the currents US admin should just emigrate.
The point is that in the long term, the current way of things is untenable. If nothing is done, then the situation will indeed degrade into small, fragmented national internets, with everyone living in their own information bubble. The EU/UN plan is to build a compromise that will hold things reasonably close to the status quo, and make it unlikely for nations to break off the internet entirely.
Would any more private sector research money (by far the most research money spent) go into finding a cure or better treatment for AIDS? Would anyone be able to write a business case to get venture money to start a new bio-tech firm looking at AIDS treatment?
Surely the solution to that is to expand public sector research funds. Why does the saving of lives have to be profitable?
It's like the article said. People, and specifically the people who fall for these things are idiots. Black, or white. Rich, or poor. However nasty and bad they are, these scammer do know their targets, and that's what explains their success.
Any idea how?
Wait a couple of years, and people will be paying $$$ for a VHS tape of it as a cult classic.
Why must slashdot report every silly rant that this Dvorak fellow has ever made? The guy's an idiot - we only needed a number of these slashdot articles to prove that. He doesn't have any real control over the computer industry. He's just a public troll, and I'm a firm believer in the idea that one should not feed the troll.
Is there a way to filter out Dvorak articles from slashdot?
Methane is certainly effective. See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=186 , in particular the graph, which puts it at number two in the list of primary forcings (behind CO2). But control of it's production is far harder than with CO2.
CH4 is produced primary by agriculture, and organic waste decomposition. The waste decomposition issue can be dealt with in more industrialised nations - just burning waste turns it into CO2, which is less damaging per volume. Using biogas reactors can also be effective - and there has been alot of research into it. But the more significant effect of agriculture is decentralised. You can't collect all of the gas that comes out of the world's cows, or the world's paddyfields. Peasant farmers the world over cannot be regulated at the stroke of a pen. Unlike CO2, the worst offenders are the least able to adopt any sort of change, because it would mean starvation for them and their dependent populations. In many cases, the worst of the damage - the creation of terrain and ecosystems that produce methane have already been done centuries ago. And for the forseeable future, there is no alternative to it - people will always have to eat.
It may provide tantalising evidence that powered flight evolved twice.
Powered flight evolved many times. Insects got there first. Bats evolved it separately from birds. Humans managed it last of all.
What an utter load of lies and deception. These issues are known about, and have been carefully tackled many, many times. To state these goes beyond mere ignorance, to deliberate attempts to mislead the public.
Myth 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
That's because the satellites were taking an average of several layers, the weather balloons weren't accounting for improvements in radiation shielding technology and so on. Adjusted, they now fully match the results we have.
Myth 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.
Not according to the actual data. The proportional increase in carbon dioxide is huge, by all available data. And yes, ALL of that increase is due to human activity, because for example measurements of carbon dioxide concentration in the sea shows that the sea is actively absorbing CO2. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87
Myth 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.
This is a strawman. Hell, the most common greenhouse gas is probably Nitrogen. Anything has a greenhouse effect. The issue is whether the gas is a cause of climate change or not. Water, despite it's significance, isn't. Changes in water concentration in the atmosphere is rapidly evened out - we call it rain. But it never rains carbon dioxide. The action of water is as a positive multiplier for global warming - warming increases the level of equilibrium of water in the atmosphere, which makes CO2 a more significant effect, not less.
Don't listen to these 'friends of science'. They are lying to you.