There's probably some elements of truth in the article, but it's so obviously biased that it's really difficult to credit anything he says.
According to him, if you're still running your car after the warantee expires, you've got a "zombie car"-- regardless of how much maintanance you put into it. He says a lot of scary things, but doesn't really have much real information.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Pripyat happened because one of its reactors was running at a higher capacity than allowed and after its designed life cycle
No.
The Chernobyl reactor disaster happened because the operators decided to run a test, and turned off the automatic safety shut-down.
Even in the multi-worlds interpretation (more properly known as the relative-state formulation, by the way), the same correlations are "transmitted." In that case, the "mechanism" is that the worlds only split into the restricted subset in which the measurement of the "sender" is correlated with that of the "receiver." It has all of the same results as any of the other interpretations, all of the same apparent paradoxes, and, like the other interpretations, you can't get any information out of the information "transmitted" until you compare the correlations.
"...and afaik it is the one to which most quantum physicists subscribe."
I've heard this unsubstantiated claim before, but very much doubt it. Actually, most physicists tend to go with the "shut up and calculate" interpretation.
(*Attributed to Feynman, but apparently actually first enunciated by Mermin.)
No, you got it. What you're transmitting is "something." It's not matter, it's not energy, and you can't encode information on it.
Then what is it, and how do we know we that information isn't transmitted?
I'm not trolling,...
But I digress. What's that "something" you speak of? If you don't know what it is, or how it operates, you can hardly speak to it's properties, yes?
English is a poor language to talk about quantum mechanics, because "information" means different things in different contexts.
Roughly, the "something" that's transmitted is quantum correlations. (And maybe "transmitted" should be in quotes here, too). It's information (if you want to expand the definition of the word to use it in this case) that is not informative until you compare your measurements with the sender's.
I often enjoy commercials the first time I see them. By the fifteenth time (or worse, second time in one commercial break - curse your advertising directors, CBC!), I am utterly sick of them and wish they'd never been made....
Point. It's the reruns that make commercials boring.
I suppose, just for completeness, somebody ought to point out that the headline says "Obama" wants the ruling overturned, whereas the actual text states, correctly, that it is Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, who wants the ruling overturned. While it is true that Kagan was appointed by Obama, nevertheless I expect that Obama himself probably has never actually given an opinion on the subject.
Actually, the commercials are the best part of TV. They are innovative, have high production values, and basically all the stops are pulled out to make sure they're effective.
The shows, on the other hand, are usually terrible.
He could have made an intercontinental flight more easily by flying from Europe to Asia: if he flew across the Bosporus, that would be only 700 meters. And, heck, if he picked the right place, he could have just walked!
I never understood why the hell Europeans swap periods and commas. Grammatically it doesn't even make sense. A period ends a sentence or statement, which to me should imply a whole number. A comma is simply a separator, used within sentences. So why would it be used to separate decimals?
By your logic, both commas and periods as the decimal "point" separator are wrong, since the decimal is not the end of the number.
Logically, then, the decimal locator should be a semicolon: more of a stop than a comma, but not the end of the number. Like so:
12,345;67
That would avoid ambiguity in sentences like
"He said I owed 120. 20 for the part and the rest for labor."
Wait. What? I truly don't understand this. If you are transmitting something, and this something "arrives" at its destination, couldn't information have been encoded in this something?
If you can't encode information into it, are you really transmitting something? *Headache*
No, you got it. What you're transmitting is "something." It's not matter, it's not energy, and you can't encode information on it.
Well, yes, I suppose... as long as your definition of "transmission" of information is sufficiently flexible. The quantum correlation is "transmitted" faster than light, but you can't get information out of it unless you receive the (slower than light) classical part.
Special relativity, of course, forbids sending information faster than light. A theory supplanting the space-time unification of General Relativity would also supplant special relativity, and hence might not have that limitation. Here's an inteersting tidbit from the article: "Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light."
All of the graphs that I saw from your three sources, except for one, only date to 2000.
I don't know what files you looked at, but I just checked again, and all three of the links I posted graphed data up through either 2007 or 2008. (2009 data isn't done yet, of course).
On the time frame your data presents, it appears to be rising. Why did you pick such a short data set however?
Because I am addressing the statement "the fact temperatures have been falling for the last eight years mean that anthropogenic greenhouse effect emissions do not cause global warming." Since the statement was about the last few years, that's why I "picked such a short data set" covering the last few years.
This statement only sounds plausible if you don't actually look at the data.
If you go back far enough, temperatures have been far warmer than this and humanity survived.
True. So?
The argument now is that CO2 is causing this increase and as such, we are orchestrating our own doom..
Sorry, but you just made two different assertions. The first one "CO2 is causing this increase" is correct. The second one, "we are orchestrating our own doom" is something so vaguely-worded as to be hard to parse, but if by "doom" you mean "this will cause the extinction of humanity," then, hell no, that's silly.
However, the chorus of ignorant people shouting out that carbon dioxide emissions have nothing whatsoever to do with climate rather drown out any discussion of what effects rising temperatures actually do have.
But, overall, no, the planet's been much warmer in the past. We may like it the way it is, but, as an overall thing for life on Earth, it's been warmer before. This is not "doom" in some global sense.
What caused it back then?
You know what, that's exactly what paleoclimate researchers study. Why don't you do a little searching, and see what the current research is? Of course, if your basic belief is that all scientists are idiots, all data is unreliable and all computer models are unbelievable, then you won't believe any of it anyway, so I'm not sure why you'd bother.
Could the factor that caused such a rise in global temperature back in the days before SUV or even coal be what is affecting us now?
Sigh. Climate researchers have never claimed that human carbon dioxide emissions are the only thing that has ever caused any change in the atmosphere. It is just one thing that effects climate. It does happen to be the one that is, right now, increasing temperatures.
And it happens to be causing changes on a scale that is very fast in geologic terms.
But, no, it's only one of many factors that change climate over scales of millions of years.
Do we know as a scientific fact that CO2 is the driving factor here
Yes
or is it more of an hypothesis?
it is a very well-substantiated hypothesis. It happens to be one that we can characterize very very well, because we have very good measurement techniques, and it's one that's very well understood right now, because a lot of people have studied it in great detail.
Before you go "Of course it is CO2!" how about you follow your own advice and look at the data?
I have. I see little evidence that you have.
[snipping a bunch because it gets tedious]... What we know for a fact is that politics got involved
If you only look at research done before 2000, or whenever it is that that silly movie by Al Gore came out, it is remarkable how consistent the consensus was on carbon dioxide effects-- it wasn't at all controversial until politics got involved. I'm perfectly happy to use the models from back then-- they were crude by numerical computation standards of today, but you know what? Turns out that the sophisticated models come up with more or less the same overall results as the old crude models. Greenhouse gasses cause global warming.
and they all have a very good idea what guesses about climate scientists ought to m
The planet, for the last few million years, has been much cooler than it is in dinosaur times. In fact, ice caps are an unusual phenomenon for Earth, at least for that period since life left the oceans.
This has nothing to do with the anthropogenic global warming (non)-controversy, but it is a true thing.
If you like to put it that way, the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are, crudely, returning the planet to the climate it had millions of years ago.
But this is a different point, of course. Saying "the Earth used to be much warmer" falsify the discussion "the emissions of carbon dioxide are currently warming the Earth."
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet...how can they say the temperature is going to rise 6C based on these CO2 levels? Do they have a working simulation of the global climate?
Yes.
This is a complicated problem, but it turns out that it is one amenable to numerical integration. There are now very good simulations.
(As there should be. A lot of people have been working on this at a lot of different institutions for a long time, and computers are just getting better and better.)
As far as I know, they don't even have conclusive evidence that CO2 causes warming yet.
Sure there is. The fundamental physics is known, and has been known (and not controversial) for a century. There has been some controversy about how much-- this needs to be calculated numerically, incorporating all the feedback loops-- but the basic fact that carbon dioxide causes warming is not controversial (in fact, it's well proven on other planets, not just Earth).
The global climate is far too complex to predict to that degree of accuracy,
No, it's not. You just need enough nodes in the simulation. All of the fundamental physics is well known.
especially when we're adding factors to it that can't be modeled based on historical trends.
The infrared absorption (and emission) properties of carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses, are experimentally measured. This is physics, not history.
Examine the data, and get back to me with the answer to this question: based on the data (and not on the opinions of some pundit telling you what to think), would you personally sign on to a statement that the global average temperate is dropping?
Nobody speaks simplified Chinese; it's a written language.
It's the writing system officially adopted by mainland China, and you can write many different languages using it.
Of the dozens of languages that are written in Chinese characters, the one that people usually call "Chinese" is Mandarin (known in China as "Common Tongue").
Google also censor results in China. Search for Tiannamen Square or Falun Gong on google.cn and you find just the same whitewashed results as with Bing.
...So in summary, Google innovates and Microsoft copies. Not much change there, but unfortunately they have both sold out to the Chinese government. Neither is clean.
Slashdot Mirror
According to him, if you're still running your car after the warantee expires, you've got a "zombie car"-- regardless of how much maintanance you put into it. He says a lot of scary things, but doesn't really have much real information.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Pripyat happened because one of its reactors was running at a higher capacity than allowed and after its designed life cycle
No.
The Chernobyl reactor disaster happened because the operators decided to run a test, and turned off the automatic safety shut-down.
Even in the multi-worlds interpretation (more properly known as the relative-state formulation, by the way), the same correlations are "transmitted." In that case, the "mechanism" is that the worlds only split into the restricted subset in which the measurement of the "sender" is correlated with that of the "receiver." It has all of the same results as any of the other interpretations, all of the same apparent paradoxes, and, like the other interpretations, you can't get any information out of the information "transmitted" until you compare the correlations.
"...and afaik it is the one to which most quantum physicists subscribe."
I've heard this unsubstantiated claim before, but very much doubt it. Actually, most physicists tend to go with the "shut up and calculate" interpretation.
(*Attributed to Feynman, but apparently actually first enunciated by Mermin.)
No, you got it. What you're transmitting is "something." It's not matter, it's not energy, and you can't encode information on it.
Then what is it, and how do we know we that information isn't transmitted?
I'm not trolling,...
But I digress. What's that "something" you speak of? If you don't know what it is, or how it operates, you can hardly speak to it's properties, yes?
English is a poor language to talk about quantum mechanics, because "information" means different things in different contexts.
Roughly, the "something" that's transmitted is quantum correlations. (And maybe "transmitted" should be in quotes here, too). It's information (if you want to expand the definition of the word to use it in this case) that is not informative until you compare your measurements with the sender's.
I often enjoy commercials the first time I see them. By the fifteenth time (or worse, second time in one commercial break - curse your advertising directors, CBC!), I am utterly sick of them and wish they'd never been made....
Point. It's the reruns that make commercials boring.
I suppose, just for completeness, somebody ought to point out that the headline says "Obama" wants the ruling overturned, whereas the actual text states, correctly, that it is Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, who wants the ruling overturned. While it is true that Kagan was appointed by Obama, nevertheless I expect that Obama himself probably has never actually given an opinion on the subject.
Not a particularly useful question. Does it make a difference if we ended up with a Stalin instead of a Hitler? Work with me, this is an analogy.
Funny, it usually takes much longer for Godwin's law to come into effect.
Ever notice how people remember posters by their sigs and not their names?
What? You have names?
The shows, on the other hand, are usually terrible.
I mean, I could drive down to Mexico and make an "intercontinental" jump of 1 foot... But labeling it as such is just stupid.
Not until Mexico conquers Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama, you can't.
He could have made an intercontinental flight more easily by flying from Europe to Asia: if he flew across the Bosporus, that would be only 700 meters. And, heck, if he picked the right place, he could have just walked!
I never understood why the hell Europeans swap periods and commas. Grammatically it doesn't even make sense. A period ends a sentence or statement, which to me should imply a whole number. A comma is simply a separator, used within sentences. So why would it be used to separate decimals?
By your logic, both commas and periods as the decimal "point" separator are wrong, since the decimal is not the end of the number.
Logically, then, the decimal locator should be a semicolon: more of a stop than a comma, but not the end of the number. Like so:
12,345;67
That would avoid ambiguity in sentences like
"He said I owed 120. 20 for the part and the rest for labor."
Wait. What? I truly don't understand this. If you are transmitting something, and this something "arrives" at its destination, couldn't information have been encoded in this something?
If you can't encode information into it, are you really transmitting something? *Headache*
No, you got it. What you're transmitting is "something." It's not matter, it's not energy, and you can't encode information on it.
Exactly.
Actually, faster-than-light transmission of information has already been observed in science.
Well, yes, I suppose... as long as your definition of "transmission" of information is sufficiently flexible. The quantum correlation is "transmitted" faster than light, but you can't get information out of it unless you receive the (slower than light) classical part.
Special relativity, of course, forbids sending information faster than light. A theory supplanting the space-time unification of General Relativity would also supplant special relativity, and hence might not have that limitation. Here's an inteersting tidbit from the article: "Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light."
I'd call that a feature, not a bug!
No matter who wins, the money still goes to China.
I'm sorry, but that's "No matter who wins... we lose."
(*actually, the quote was "whoever wins... we lose." So, which one is the predator?
I could say, I suppose, that if he wants to talk about leptons, you need to give him some SLAC... but I won't.
(typos, on the other hand-- the one where the "r" and the "d" switch order in the word "hadron"-- would be appropriate... but still tasteless.)
All of the graphs that I saw from your three sources, except for one, only date to 2000.
I don't know what files you looked at, but I just checked again, and all three of the links I posted graphed data up through either 2007 or 2008. (2009 data isn't done yet, of course).
On the time frame your data presents, it appears to be rising. Why did you pick such a short data set however?
Because I am addressing the statement "the fact temperatures have been falling for the last eight years mean that anthropogenic greenhouse effect emissions do not cause global warming." Since the statement was about the last few years, that's why I "picked such a short data set" covering the last few years.
This statement only sounds plausible if you don't actually look at the data.
If you go back far enough, temperatures have been far warmer than this and humanity survived.
True. So?
The argument now is that CO2 is causing this increase and as such, we are orchestrating our own doom..
Sorry, but you just made two different assertions. The first one "CO2 is causing this increase" is correct. The second one, "we are orchestrating our own doom" is something so vaguely-worded as to be hard to parse, but if by "doom" you mean "this will cause the extinction of humanity," then, hell no, that's silly.
However, the chorus of ignorant people shouting out that carbon dioxide emissions have nothing whatsoever to do with climate rather drown out any discussion of what effects rising temperatures actually do have.
But, overall, no, the planet's been much warmer in the past. We may like it the way it is, but, as an overall thing for life on Earth, it's been warmer before. This is not "doom" in some global sense.
What caused it back then?
You know what, that's exactly what paleoclimate researchers study. Why don't you do a little searching, and see what the current research is? Of course, if your basic belief is that all scientists are idiots, all data is unreliable and all computer models are unbelievable, then you won't believe any of it anyway, so I'm not sure why you'd bother.
Could the factor that caused such a rise in global temperature back in the days before SUV or even coal be what is affecting us now?
Sigh. Climate researchers have never claimed that human carbon dioxide emissions are the only thing that has ever caused any change in the atmosphere. It is just one thing that effects climate. It does happen to be the one that is, right now, increasing temperatures.
And it happens to be causing changes on a scale that is very fast in geologic terms.
But, no, it's only one of many factors that change climate over scales of millions of years.
Do we know as a scientific fact that CO2 is the driving factor here
Yes
or is it more of an hypothesis?
it is a very well-substantiated hypothesis. It happens to be one that we can characterize very very well, because we have very good measurement techniques, and it's one that's very well understood right now, because a lot of people have studied it in great detail.
Before you go "Of course it is CO2!" how about you follow your own advice and look at the data?
I have. I see little evidence that you have.
[snipping a bunch because it gets tedious]... What we know for a fact is that politics got involved
If you only look at research done before 2000, or whenever it is that that silly movie by Al Gore came out, it is remarkable how consistent the consensus was on carbon dioxide effects-- it wasn't at all controversial until politics got involved. I'm perfectly happy to use the models from back then-- they were crude by numerical computation standards of today, but you know what? Turns out that the sophisticated models come up with more or less the same overall results as the old crude models. Greenhouse gasses cause global warming.
and they all have a very good idea what guesses about climate scientists ought to m
Yes. But then I'm looking at this chart: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png
And this chart shows the Earth is at its coldest point in the last 500 million years: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Climate_Change.png
Absolutely true!
The planet, for the last few million years, has been much cooler than it is in dinosaur times. In fact, ice caps are an unusual phenomenon for Earth, at least for that period since life left the oceans.
This has nothing to do with the anthropogenic global warming (non)-controversy, but it is a true thing.
If you like to put it that way, the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are, crudely, returning the planet to the climate it had millions of years ago.
But this is a different point, of course. Saying "the Earth used to be much warmer" falsify the discussion "the emissions of carbon dioxide are currently warming the Earth."
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet...how can they say the temperature is going to rise 6C based on these CO2 levels? Do they have a working simulation of the global climate?
Yes.
This is a complicated problem, but it turns out that it is one amenable to numerical integration. There are now very good simulations.
(As there should be. A lot of people have been working on this at a lot of different institutions for a long time, and computers are just getting better and better.)
As far as I know, they don't even have conclusive evidence that CO2 causes warming yet.
Sure there is. The fundamental physics is known, and has been known (and not controversial) for a century. There has been some controversy about how much-- this needs to be calculated numerically, incorporating all the feedback loops-- but the basic fact that carbon dioxide causes warming is not controversial (in fact, it's well proven on other planets, not just Earth).
The global climate is far too complex to predict to that degree of accuracy,
No, it's not. You just need enough nodes in the simulation. All of the fundamental physics is well known.
especially when we're adding factors to it that can't be modeled based on historical trends.
The infrared absorption (and emission) properties of carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses, are experimentally measured. This is physics, not history.
+1 informative. Next question:
How come the world temprature has dropped half a degree since 2000?
Look at the data.
Here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png,
or here
or here.
Examine the data, and get back to me with the answer to this question: based on the data (and not on the opinions of some pundit telling you what to think), would you personally sign on to a statement that the global average temperate is dropping?
So who speaks simplified Chinese?
Is that a trick question?
Nobody speaks simplified Chinese; it's a written language.
It's the writing system officially adopted by mainland China, and you can write many different languages using it.
Of the dozens of languages that are written in Chinese characters, the one that people usually call "Chinese" is Mandarin (known in China as "Common Tongue").
Google also censor results in China. Search for Tiannamen Square or Falun Gong on google.cn and you find just the same whitewashed results as with Bing.
Yeah, they all do. The interesting change here is that they are censoring based on language, not based on where you're searching from. See:
Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China
List of what they're censoring here: List of words censored by search engines in the People's Republic of China (including, almost as interesting, some comments on words not blocked)
...So in summary, Google innovates and Microsoft copies. Not much change there, but unfortunately they have both sold out to the Chinese government. Neither is clean.