Not really any different from any other record: records are always to within the accuracy of the measurement.
When you look at, say, the world's record for the 100 meter dash, when Nesta Carter broke Maurice Greene's record with a time of 9.79 seconds, compared to Greene's 9.80 seconds, do you really think that the margin of error is less than 10 milliseconds? But it's the best measurement we have
People are interested by records. Measurements have errors.
In any case, if 2014 turned out not to be the record high, then 2010 had the record-- either way, the record is within the last few years. And 2015 beat them both-- it was high enough above 2014 (and 2010), that it was outside the measurement error as a record-breaking year-- it is the undisputed world record.
All of the candidates for warmest year ever recorded are in the last few years (before 2010, the record had been 1998)-- that is hard to explain as measurement error.
... the fallacy that our climate is static is the number 1 reason I dont believe much of this debate
...2. No scientist has ever claimed the climate is static.
the tempa go up, the temps go down, constituent ingredients that make up our atmosphere change,
No. The temperatures change for reasons. The constituent gases of the atmosphere change for reasons.
yet Earth keeps on ticking, there is NOTHING we can do for this,
Well, you are of course totally wrong. We not only can change the climate, we have.
we ride on the Earth, hang on tight and make whatever adjustments you need to to survive.
And, in order to survive the adjustment we will have to make is to stop emitting fossil CO2.
This post is pretty much accurate: no, climate scientists don't claim that the climate is static. What they claim is that the natural sources of variation have been measured, and do not explain the rapid (on a geologic scale) temperature rises we currently see.
The anthropogenic warming is not instead of natural variations. It is in addition to natural variations. But we are now very very accurately measuring the climate forcing factors. They're just not large enough to cause the current warming trend.
The only part I have to take exception to is the final line: "in order to survive the adjustment we will have to make is to stop emitting fossil CO2."
No; global warming may be disruptive, but that's going a bit too far. It's not going go cause extinction.
So what is 18 years of global temperature? I've been told its also weather since 18 years is far too short of a time to count for climate. But now 1 month counts as climate?
lols
Now, that's very peculiar. Why did you pick eighteen exactly, no more and no less? Why not, say, twenty? Why eighteen?
We should always be suspicious when some very unusual number like that gets thrown up as baseline to compare against. Some blog somewhere told you to say eighteen years. Why?
OK, now we can see. Yes, eighteen years ago-- 1998-- was indeed a high point-- more than one standard deviation above the trend line. (Note that anthropogenic warming isn't instead of random variation-- it is in addition to random variation.) But, if you pick 1998 exactly as the starting point-- no more, no less-- up until 2013 you could kind of squint, and say "look, no warming since 1998". Pick the year before 1998 to start the graph, and the warming trend is clear. Pick the year after 1998 to start the graph, and the warming trend is clear. But if you picked 1998 exactly, no more, no less, up until 2013 you could draw the graph and make it almost look flat.
Except, that was then. As of now, even with the high point at 1998... the overall warming trend is very obviously clear.
If the only two choices are "Absolutely right" or "completely wrong," this might make sense. The people who said "the earth is not flat, it's a sphere!" were, in fact, wrong. But, they were not as wrong as people who said that the Earth is flat.
Science actually works by making progressively better models.
The global warming models have error bars. Right now, the error bars are large-- plus or minus about 50%. But, the main feature-- the fact that increasing carbon dioxide does increase warming-- is pretty well established.
Wow, a long comment that's mostly correct, but seems to mostly be irrelevant.
The main point-- that the Earth right now is in the middle of an ice age is indeed accurate. Earth is much cooler than it is on the average-- in fact, most of the time, Earth doesn't have frozen water at the polar caps!
And the climate was indeed much warmer (along with much higher levels of CO_2) during much of the Cretaceous. Rising CO_2 is NOT going to destroy the world-- the world has functioned just fine with higher temperatures and higher CO_2. It will adapt
The tricky part is-- we've sort of built our civilization around the climate we currently have. Flooding the seacoast, turning farmland into desert (and tundra into farmland) all these would disrupt our civilization abruptly.
Many of the environmentalists worried about the climate do, in fact, advocate nuclear power.
James Hansen, for example, is probably the most well known person warning about climate change. He is strongly in favor of nuclear power. He stated:
..continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change. We call on your organization to support the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems as a practical means of addressing the climate change problem.... in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power
Funny how when its extra cold (snow storms, record cold winters, etc) all we hear is 'weather is not climate'. However when its extra hot, is seems weather is climate?
No.
One exceptionally warm month, or even one warm winter, is not climate. (Nor one exceptionally cold one). Climate is long term,.
What is noteworthy is how frequently records are being set. If the temperatures were random, and not rising, you would expect records to be set only on rare occasions.
How many near consecutive broken records does it take for weather extremes to no longer be called 'anomalies'?
The "anomaly" is defined as the difference in temperature from the reference baseline. Even if that difference were zero, it would still be called the temperature anomaly-- it would be an anomaly of zero.
And it's readily apparent that unfiltered access into the aggregate human psyche has proven time and again that despite the oft-cited belief that humans are fundamentally good -- they are really not.
At a very basic level, here's the deal. If you're going to operate as a multi-national company, and you're going to offer and promote your services around the globe, then you need to be responsible for and liable to the laws of the land in each of those territories..
At the basic level, here's the deal. If you're going to operation internationally, you have to deal with jerks coming at you from both directions. Some countries are going to demand that you MUST censor this, and that, and other countries will demand that you CAN'T censor that, or the other.
About the best you can do is to defy both of them.
The thing that bothers me about all of the summaries I've read, is that a timestamp less than zero (which is Jan 1 1970) is still valid - otherwise how would you represent dates before 1970???
You represent dates before 1970 with a negative number.
It's not the representation that is the problem-- it is letting the iPhone operate with today's date being a negative number.
The iPhone concludes that you have just time-travelled, and thus bricks itself to enforce the chronology protection protocol.
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you.
Same thing in fencing. If you don't like the way the ref calls priority, make sure you make touches on the other guy without getting touched, so there's no priority for the ref to call.
The trouble is that the times the Sat Nav gets you to your destination without incident are not at all memorable and the one time it directed you into the mouth of an active volcano is something you'll never forget.
You know, if my satnav drives me into the mouth of an active volcano even one time, I'd call that a sufficiently bad flaw to be grounds to reject the technology with prejudice.
Driving me into the mouth of a volcano will pretty much not only ruin my whole day, it will ruin my whole year.
The collapse of a wave function might be instantaneous (in the Copenhagen interpretation)... and it might have physical consequences... but the physical consequences are not instantaneous.
Hate to break it to you guys, but the GPS will more reliably find you an optimum route than you can find yourself.
Sometimes.
I've had the GPS suggest turning onto a superhighway that I was passing over on an overpass. I have both had it tell me to make a left turn that was impossible, because the road was divided with a tree-covered strip in the middle, and I have also had it tell me that I couldn't turn into the driveway of my destination but had to drive half a mile past, and take a U-turn to get there, because it thought the road was divided and it wasn't. Once in Italy I had the GPS suggest that my car take a narrow foot-path that climbed up and over a mountain, rather than the highway that went around.
On the other hand, occasionally it suggests routes I hadn't known about.
I have to admit that my first reading of VC is always Viet Cong, and I then have to re-read the article trying other possibilities after it makes no sense.
People born after 1975 don't have this problem, I guess.
Yes. Einstein theorized that spacetime is curved around objects...
More accurately, if you chose to define a geodesic as being the path taken by a light ray, then the space-time coordinate system defined by light rays in the presence of gravity obeys a non-Euclidean metric that is described by the metaphor "curved"-- by which we mean, it has the same geometry as a (Euclidean) curved surface in a higher-dimensional embedding space.
Are gravitational waves different from gravity? Because this article would have you believe that the speed at which they propagate is speed of light, where as gravity has instant effect AFAIK.
Gravity does not have instantaneous effect.
Nothing physical has instantaneous effect.
In any case, if you're talking about the gravity of something just sitting unmoving, it doesn't really mean anything to say that the gravitational effect is instant, or delayed. It only makes sense to ask the question when something is accelerated away from sitting stationary, and in that case, the effect isn't instantaneous; the change in effect at an observer is at the speed of light.
> Nobody actually ever thought that gravity waves wouldn't exist
Which is precisely why this is such a non-important result. You don't learn much about the universe by demonstrating something everyone already knew is true. It would be much, MUCH more interesting if it didn't work.
To the contrary. Now that we have detected gravitational waves, we can start comparing the predictions to the measured data. Until we had detected them, we couldn't compare theory to data. Now we we have a possibility to do so.
That's why the MMX is cool, and this isn't. >But it's amazing that we can actually detect it. From a technology point of view, yes. From a theoretical perspective, not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really any different from any other record: records are always to within the accuracy of the measurement.
When you look at, say, the world's record for the 100 meter dash, when Nesta Carter broke Maurice Greene's record with a time of 9.79 seconds, compared to Greene's 9.80 seconds, do you really think that the margin of error is less than 10 milliseconds? But it's the best measurement we have
People are interested by records. Measurements have errors.
In any case, if 2014 turned out not to be the record high, then 2010 had the record-- either way, the record is within the last few years. And 2015 beat them both-- it was high enough above 2014 (and 2010), that it was outside the measurement error as a record-breaking year-- it is the undisputed world record.
All of the candidates for warmest year ever recorded are in the last few years (before 2010, the record had been 1998)-- that is hard to explain as measurement error.
So, you're basically saying that we should dedicate a human to manually do a job that a chip could do trivially. Great.
I, for one, would like my electronics to do their charging quickly, efficiently, and without my having to babysit them.
nice argument, but it then puts the 29/30 year baseline into the same category!!.
So, use the whole data set. Temperature is rising, and the rise is higher than the error bars.
Data is here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
Define abruptly....
OK, fair point. "Abruptly" here means "on a time scale of decades to centuries."
This is rapid on a scale of climate, and even on a scale of human civilization, but slow on a scale of human lifetime.
... the fallacy that our climate is static is the number 1 reason I dont believe much of this debate
...2. No scientist has ever claimed the climate is static.
the tempa go up, the temps go down, constituent ingredients that make up our atmosphere change,
No. The temperatures change for reasons. The constituent gases of the atmosphere change for reasons.
yet Earth keeps on ticking, there is NOTHING we can do for this,
Well, you are of course totally wrong. We not only can change the climate, we have.
we ride on the Earth, hang on tight and make whatever adjustments you need to to survive.
And, in order to survive the adjustment we will have to make is to stop emitting fossil CO2.
This post is pretty much accurate: no, climate scientists don't claim that the climate is static. What they claim is that the natural sources of variation have been measured, and do not explain the rapid (on a geologic scale) temperature rises we currently see.
The anthropogenic warming is not instead of natural variations. It is in addition to natural variations. But we are now very very accurately measuring the climate forcing factors. They're just not large enough to cause the current warming trend.
The only part I have to take exception to is the final line: "in order to survive the adjustment we will have to make is to stop emitting fossil CO2."
No; global warming may be disruptive, but that's going a bit too far. It's not going go cause extinction.
So what is 18 years of global temperature? I've been told its also weather since 18 years is far too short of a time to count for climate. But now 1 month counts as climate?
lols
Now, that's very peculiar. Why did you pick eighteen exactly, no more and no less? Why not, say, twenty? Why eighteen?
We should always be suspicious when some very unusual number like that gets thrown up as baseline to compare against. Some blog somewhere told you to say eighteen years. Why?
Here's the data:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
OK, now we can see. Yes, eighteen years ago-- 1998-- was indeed a high point-- more than one standard deviation above the trend line. (Note that anthropogenic warming isn't instead of random variation-- it is in addition to random variation.) But, if you pick 1998 exactly as the starting point-- no more, no less-- up until 2013 you could kind of squint, and say "look, no warming since 1998". Pick the year before 1998 to start the graph, and the warming trend is clear. Pick the year after 1998 to start the graph, and the warming trend is clear. But if you picked 1998 exactly, no more, no less, up until 2013 you could draw the graph and make it almost look flat.
Except, that was then. As of now, even with the high point at 1998... the overall warming trend is very obviously clear.
If the only two choices are "Absolutely right" or "completely wrong," this might make sense. The people who said "the earth is not flat, it's a sphere!" were, in fact, wrong. But, they were not as wrong as people who said that the Earth is flat.
Science actually works by making progressively better models.
The global warming models have error bars. Right now, the error bars are large-- plus or minus about 50%. But, the main feature-- the fact that increasing carbon dioxide does increase warming-- is pretty well established.
Wow, a long comment that's mostly correct, but seems to mostly be irrelevant.
The main point-- that the Earth right now is in the middle of an ice age is indeed accurate. Earth is much cooler than it is on the average-- in fact, most of the time, Earth doesn't have frozen water at the polar caps!
And the climate was indeed much warmer (along with much higher levels of CO_2) during much of the Cretaceous. Rising CO_2 is NOT going to destroy the world-- the world has functioned just fine with higher temperatures and higher CO_2. It will adapt
The tricky part is-- we've sort of built our civilization around the climate we currently have. Flooding the seacoast, turning farmland into desert (and tundra into farmland) all these would disrupt our civilization abruptly.
Many of the environmentalists worried about the climate do, in fact, advocate nuclear power.
James Hansen, for example, is probably the most well known person warning about climate change. He is strongly in favor of nuclear power. He stated:
citation: http://grist.org/news/more-nuk...
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes....
Or, check out this one:
http://www.takepart.com/articl...
Funny how when its extra cold (snow storms, record cold winters, etc) all we hear is 'weather is not climate'.
However when its extra hot, is seems weather is climate?
No.
One exceptionally warm month, or even one warm winter, is not climate. (Nor one exceptionally cold one). Climate is long term,.
What is noteworthy is how frequently records are being set. If the temperatures were random, and not rising, you would expect records to be set only on rare occasions.
How many near consecutive broken records does it take for weather extremes to no longer be called 'anomalies'?
The "anomaly" is defined as the difference in temperature from the reference baseline. Even if that difference were zero, it would still be called the temperature anomaly-- it would be an anomaly of zero.
FAQ: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/moni...
And it's readily apparent that unfiltered access into the aggregate human psyche has proven time and again that despite the oft-cited belief that humans are fundamentally good -- they are really not.
#NotAllHumans
Sadly, one side effect of internet anonymity is that people feel they can be complete assholes without consequence.
obligatory xkcd: https://www.penny-arcade.com/c...
At a very basic level, here's the deal. If you're going to operate as a multi-national company, and you're going to offer and promote your services around the globe, then you need to be responsible for and liable to the laws of the land in each of those territories..
At the basic level, here's the deal. If you're going to operation internationally, you have to deal with jerks coming at you from both directions. Some countries are going to demand that you MUST censor this, and that, and other countries will demand that you CAN'T censor that, or the other.
About the best you can do is to defy both of them.
You can't please everyone.
The thing that bothers me about all of the summaries I've read, is that a timestamp less than zero (which is Jan 1 1970) is still valid - otherwise how would you represent dates before 1970???
You represent dates before 1970 with a negative number.
It's not the representation that is the problem-- it is letting the iPhone operate with today's date being a negative number.
The iPhone concludes that you have just time-travelled, and thus bricks itself to enforce the chronology protection protocol.
If you don't want to the outcome of the game to be determined by referees and shot clocks, then you need to put enough points on board so that there's no doubt that you've won.
I coach a wrestling team and that is more or less exactly what I tell my team. If you don't put enough points on the board then you risk having the referee decided the match in a way not favorable to you.
Same thing in fencing. If you don't like the way the ref calls priority, make sure you make touches on the other guy without getting touched, so there's no priority for the ref to call.
"achieving extremely low perplexity score on a large dataset"
That's quite an achievement, since I have a very high perplexity score on that sentence.
Do they check whether it achieves low perplexity only when the sentence is not, in fact, perplexing?
The trouble is that the times the Sat Nav gets you to your destination without incident are not at all memorable and the one time it directed you into the mouth of an active volcano is something you'll never forget.
You know, if my satnav drives me into the mouth of an active volcano even one time, I'd call that a sufficiently bad flaw to be grounds to reject the technology with prejudice.
Driving me into the mouth of a volcano will pretty much not only ruin my whole day, it will ruin my whole year.
Meh indeed.
The collapse of a wave function might be instantaneous (in the Copenhagen interpretation)... and it might have physical consequences... but the physical consequences are not instantaneous.
Hate to break it to you guys, but the GPS will more reliably find you an optimum route than you can find yourself.
Sometimes.
I've had the GPS suggest turning onto a superhighway that I was passing over on an overpass. I have both had it tell me to make a left turn that was impossible, because the road was divided with a tree-covered strip in the middle, and I have also had it tell me that I couldn't turn into the driveway of my destination but had to drive half a mile past, and take a U-turn to get there, because it thought the road was divided and it wasn't.
Once in Italy I had the GPS suggest that my car take a narrow foot-path that climbed up and over a mountain, rather than the highway that went around.
On the other hand, occasionally it suggests routes I hadn't known about.
I have to admit that my first reading of VC is always Viet Cong, and I then have to re-read the article trying other possibilities after it makes no sense.
People born after 1975 don't have this problem, I guess.
Yes. Einstein theorized that spacetime is curved around objects...
More accurately, if you chose to define a geodesic as being the path taken by a light ray, then the space-time coordinate system defined by light rays in the presence of gravity obeys a non-Euclidean metric that is described by the metaphor "curved"-- by which we mean, it has the same geometry as a (Euclidean) curved surface in a higher-dimensional embedding space.
Are gravitational waves different from gravity? Because this article would have you believe that the speed at which they propagate is speed of light, where as gravity has instant effect AFAIK.
Gravity does not have instantaneous effect.
Nothing physical has instantaneous effect.
In any case, if you're talking about the gravity of something just sitting unmoving, it doesn't really mean anything to say that the gravitational effect is instant, or delayed. It only makes sense to ask the question when something is accelerated away from sitting stationary, and in that case, the effect isn't instantaneous; the change in effect at an observer is at the speed of light.
> Nobody actually ever thought that gravity waves wouldn't exist
Which is precisely why this is such a non-important result. You don't learn much about the universe by demonstrating something everyone already knew is true. It would be much, MUCH more interesting if it didn't work.
To the contrary. Now that we have detected gravitational waves, we can start comparing the predictions to the measured data. Until we had detected them, we couldn't compare theory to data. Now we we have a possibility to do so.
That's why the MMX is cool, and this isn't.
>But it's amazing that we can actually detect it.
From a technology point of view, yes. From a theoretical perspective, not so much.
If a nuclear missile tumbles after launch, it won't survive entry.
Stabilizing your payload is not optional for nuclear weapons, it's mandatory.