Variability in solar output does not account for the changes seen in the climate.
Right. On top of that, solar output has been dropping since the 80's. To the extent that it does have an effect, it has been a cooling effect for the last 4 decades. - http://woodfortrees.org/plot/p...
Wow, that's a great graphing tool.
I would like to kvetch that by picking a 120 month average for a data set that only spans 420 months, you give a distorted view of the solar data (and you also make a graph that stops 5 years before the end of the data set, since a 120-month average requires data for ± five years).
Here is the same graph, but I removed the averaging of the solar irradiance, so you can see more clearly that the effect is primarily the solar cycle: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/p...
You can now see that the "dive" in the end of the data as you graphed it is simply the variation in solar minima-- and since there are only three solar minima in the data set, this is not significant. Most importantly, note the scale: that "dramatic" change in irradiance is a peak-to-trough change from 1365.2 to 1367.1 W/m^2. That's only ± 0.07%.
Climate change is not a death sentence. There aren't any reputable scientists saying it is. I think you may have been listening to some sensationalist media stories, and possibly embellishing what they state. If you like, you can read some of the published effects of climate change, and "all life dying" is not one of them.
But if no reputable scientists are saying that climate change is a death sentence, why do articles like the one below keep appearing? It's about Christiana Figueres, leader of the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Figueres was trained as an anthropologist, but doesn't do anthropology professionally; she's a Costa Rican diplomat. (Being the daughter of the President of Costa Rica probably gave her a leg up here). I'm willing to add a stipulation that anthropologists who have never actually worked as scientists shouldn't be considered as "reputable scientists" on climate models.
Well, if you actually read the article, it doesn't anywhere quote her as saying that climate change will be "a death sentence". In fact, it's primarily an article about how hard it is to get diplomats to agree. The closest it gets to any such statement is the title of the article (and article titles aren't written by the reporter), and a sentence in the article saying that on the well of her office is a picture of the Statue of Liberty waist-deep in water. I'm not sure if we should judge people by the satirical pictures on their walls.
Sounds like what we really need is a tool to annotate extremists on both sides. Why does this tool do that?
I absolutely agree. Accuracy is desired in both directions. We're in luck, though, the tool discussed here does annotate both sides! Here-- from the link in TFA-- is their tool applied to the Rolling Stone article "“The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here”: http://climatefeedback.org/eva... --along with the reply by the author, the very first point of which was "I didn't get to write the headline; the headlines are written by the editor."
And don't mention that big ball of burning stuff in space. Its output is constant. Not like a star has a climate or anything silly like that.
We measure the output of the sun. We've been measuring it for most of a century, and measuring it very very accurately from satellites for many decades. We can compare the variations of solar output (which are very small variations) against climate on Earth. Variability in solar output does not account for the changes seen in the climate.
We also know a lot about the brightness of sunlike stars. Stars like the sun turn out to be pretty boring. There are some stars with a lot of variability... but not the ones that are similar to ours: main-sequence G stars that are a few billion years old have pretty much settled down.
"Actually it's water vapor, that 'other' greenhouse gas, that is doing most of the warming on Earth."
Water vapor does not stay in the atmosphere, but goes in and out of the atmosphere in the form of evaporation and rain. There is a reservoir of liquid water that is, from the standpoint of the atmosphere, effectively infinite. So, the water vapor responds to changes in temperature.
It is, of course, well understood that water vapor is a greenhouse gas-- this accounted for in all the models. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere depends on the temperature. This is a feedback cycle. One of several feedback cycles.
A problem with non-synchronous orbits is that 75% of the Earth's surface is ocean, and a vast amount of the remainder is uninhabited, so if a satellite isn't geostationary over the place you want, it will spend much of its time over places where you have no place to put a receiver or no market for power.
Nevertheless, I think that there may be clever solutions with other orbits; it could definitely use more thinking.
Competitive with ground power, or it would never be built in the first place. n space you get ~7 times as much sunlight as the average place on Earth.
Well, but of course you don't put solar arrays on the average places on Earth, you put them in the best places. With a tracking array, that number gets to be much closer to a factor to two than a factor of 7. So the take-away lesson is that you don't build space power systems for terrestrial use until after the market for power from the best solar sites has already been saturated. This means that the market for space solar power substitutes for storage and power transmission technologies.
That's due to absorption, night, and weather that happens down here, but not in space. The logic is then you can spend up to 7 times as much building your space solar power system and be competitive with Earth solar power.
Only if the transmission efficiency were 100%, and it's not.
If it costs you more than that, just build ground solar.
To the AC above: If the majority of readers haven't heard about them either, then "who gives a fuck about L5?" Seriously, if this L5 society is worth at least even a little, they should be known as much as Space X, given that they've existed for so long.
If you haven't heard of them, I'd say, well, so what? There are probably tens of millions of things you haven't heard of, some important, some not. That's a statement about you.
I think you have O'Neill's reasoning backwards, though. He didn't say "we need to build solar power satellites, therefore we need a colony of 10,000 people"-- he said "we've shown that there are no showstoppers to building a colony of 10,000 people; what will they do? Here's an idea; they will build solar power satellites."
So, the question now is, if you don't need very many people-- and possibly don't need any people--in space to build solar power satellites, what is the economic base for off-Earth colonies?
' a rectenna array generates 300 W/m^2 for 24 hours a day
That is possible on the high end, but
Not even possible on the high end. The diffraction-limited beam spread means that you can't focus the beam to a tight spot, without making the space transmitter correspondingly larger. The Glaser sizing of a kilometer-scale transmitter in space beaming to a ten-kilometer scale spot on the ground wasn't picked at random; those are the sizes you need. And the keep-out zone around the ground receiver is much larger; due to the diffraction wings.
Shorter wavelengths make things better... but if you go too short, your beam gets absorbed by water molecules, and clouds start blocking the beam.
(of course, you can still use the keep-out zone for lots of uses; farming, for example. You just don't want to put houses and playgrounds there.)
Just because they call a Duck a dog, does not mean it's not still a duck.
Yep. But it does mean that if somebody says "No ducks here! Just good old reliable dogs!" maybe you should still take a look at just what those "dogs" are.
We've learned a lot since the rather naive plans of the 1970s, when space colonization was first proposed by Gerard O'Neill and his students. How are things different now? What's the most important thing we've learned since then?
Diebold can easily be told to go stuff it in a sock when they complain.
Diebold hasn't been around for years. They were getting so much bad publicity that they removed their name from the voting machines they made, and then changed their name to "Premier Election Solutions".
Maybe not everywhere, by in my polling location (GWU in Ashburn) they haven't had the e-voting booths for at least the last 4 years. It's all been paper/marker Scantron-type ballots.
Yes, the article said that Virginia only had 3,000 of them still in use in the 2014 election.
Do you remember on Slashdot in years past, whenever a story about Mars came up, someone would write some kind of science fiction about the Martian council's response to Earth's actions? I sure miss those stories.
My experience has been that the predictions are usually quite accurate about what will happen, but is less precise about when. When they predict a front moving in, you can count on those thunderstorms, but don't always count on the storms starting exactly at 5pm.
The article mostly talks about predicting tropical storms, and for this the modelling of exactly what the path of the storm is going to be is critical. It does see that the predictions of storm tracks is getting better.
This is all very cool but I think if they can keep the thing transmitting it will be much cooler to see what it observes on the far end of the comet's orbit. I wonder if a comet hitchhiking probe could be made to passively observe the Oort cloud and wake back up fully to report the next time its comet came back to the inner system.
67P doesn't make it all the way out to the Oort cloud, I'm afraid; it is a short-period comet. Barely gets past the orbit of Jupiter. http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx... --that's why Rosetta could rendezvous with it.
--if it did go all the way out to the Oort cloud, though, the probe wouldn't be generating any power to speak of at that distance, and hence wouldn't make any observations. Even if it did wake up next time round, all it would report was "I didn't see anything because I was turned off."
Interesting variation in the outgassing rate as the comet rotates! And it's quite clear that the outgassing comes from localized jets, and not from broad areas of the comet, although we'd already seen that from earlier images.
By looking at a very low phase angle (almost into the sun), we're seeing the forward scattering, so the dust shows up brightly-- a good way to look at very fine particles.
More clickbait. The article in question is built on work done at teh ATLAS collaboration and the CMS collaboration, two of the biggest physics experiments around.
You're confusing the article with the example. Work done at the ATLAS collaboration was one of the examples given of massively-multiple-author science papers. It's not "the article".
Design flaw my ass. I bet it was there deliberately and everybody knows who originally requested it. I just love the good ol US of A.
From the article linked:
"To exploit the vulnerability and install the rootkit, attackers would need to already have kernel or system privileges on a computer. That means the flaw cant be used by itself to compromise a system, but could make an existing malware infection highly persistent and completely invisible."
This doesn't let an outsider break into the system; it is a flaw that only is useful if you have already compromised the machine.
...To protect against nuclear EMP (since we were talking Fallout)? Not so much. Even 70s and 80s cars use coils and ECUs, and that would get fried...
Maybe... and maybe not. Old cars had thick metal hoods. Modern cars often use plastic for parts that don't need to be mechanically strong, but the old ones put the engines inside a pretty good Faraday cage.
The evolution of those characters was heavily influenced by the media and writing tools of the time, which remained stable for thousands of years. Now we can make a mountain that actually looks like a mountain.
But the symbols we use don't look like what they are. They are symbols that you just have to know the meaning. For example, right now I'm looking at several symbols. One is four concentric arcs of a quarter circle. This means "wifi is receiving". Does that look like a radio wave? No. Another is a vertical line, with an X through it, and on the right side, the top and bottom of the x and the I connected, forming rightward-pointing triangles. Does that look like a picture of a "Bluetooth Connection" to you? Next to that is a horizontal rectangle, with slightly curved left and right sides, with a symbol in it that could be a stylized Pac-man with a tail, or else maybe a stylized rocket. This symbol means "battery plugged in to charger."
In fact, at the top of the browser there's a symbol that looks a little like the handwritten form of the kanji for "jin" inside a dark green rectangle. That symbol, in fact, means "you're on slashdot".
There's a dozen other symbols in my line of sight. Not a single one of these symbols looks even slightly like what it is.
(I guess you don't drive since horse riding has evolved for thousands of years and people would be pretty arrogant to think they could improve on that.)
Yes, I ride horses. There has been a little evolution of riding since the invention of the stirrup in the middle ages... but not much. If you're saying that cars are a better way of travel than horses-- yes, that's my point. Writing words is a better way of communicating than playing pictionary.
BTW the Chinese ideographical character set is not called "Kanji".
It is when it's used in Japan. Yes, I do know that Japanese is complicated, and that the Chinese word is only one of several readings of a given kanji. This is a/. comment, not a dissertation on writing systems.
Your belief that you can solve the problems of a universal language by abandoning written language and just invent symbols easily and trivially recognized by anybody is:), but in the real world:/. Symbols just aren't as culturally independent as you think:( and memorizing thousands of symbols isn't really going to make the world simpler About all I can say is >:P
Simple. When you're in Germany, write it it German. If you're in China, write it in Chinese.
Did I mention I hate hieroglyphics?
The idea that we can create a universal language that everybody will understand by abandoning language and simply making a recognizable symbol for every single concept that anybody might ever want to communicate is stupid.
However, if that actually is your proposal, there is a simple solution: let's write everything in Chinese characters. They already did that. And if you don't think that Chinese characters work as universally recognizable symbols, well, that's just your western-centric prejudice. They've evolved those characters for thousands of years; you're pretty arrogant to think you can do better in a decade or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Variability in solar output does not account for the changes seen in the climate.
Right. On top of that, solar output has been dropping since the 80's. To the extent that it does have an effect, it has been a cooling effect for the last 4 decades. - http://woodfortrees.org/plot/p...
Wow, that's a great graphing tool.
I would like to kvetch that by picking a 120 month average for a data set that only spans 420 months, you give a distorted view of the solar data (and you also make a graph that stops 5 years before the end of the data set, since a 120-month average requires data for ± five years).
Here is the same graph, but I removed the averaging of the solar irradiance, so you can see more clearly that the effect is primarily the solar cycle:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/p...
You can now see that the "dive" in the end of the data as you graphed it is simply the variation in solar minima-- and since there are only three solar minima in the data set, this is not significant. Most importantly, note the scale: that "dramatic" change in irradiance is a peak-to-trough change from 1365.2 to 1367.1 W/m^2. That's only ± 0.07%.
Climate change is not a death sentence. There aren't any reputable scientists saying it is. I think you may have been listening to some sensationalist media stories, and possibly embellishing what they state. If you like, you can read some of the published effects of climate change, and "all life dying" is not one of them.
But if no reputable scientists are saying that climate change is a death sentence, why do articles like the one below keep appearing? It's about Christiana Figueres, leader of the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Figueres was trained as an anthropologist, but doesn't do anthropology professionally; she's a Costa Rican diplomat. (Being the daughter of the President of Costa Rica probably gave her a leg up here). I'm willing to add a stipulation that anthropologists who have never actually worked as scientists shouldn't be considered as "reputable scientists" on climate models.
It's titled, "The Woman Who Could Save Humanity". http://www.realclearpolitics.c...
Well, if you actually read the article, it doesn't anywhere quote her as saying that climate change will be "a death sentence". In fact, it's primarily an article about how hard it is to get diplomats to agree. The closest it gets to any such statement is the title of the article (and article titles aren't written by the reporter), and a sentence in the article saying that on the well of her office is a picture of the Statue of Liberty waist-deep in water. I'm not sure if we should judge people by the satirical pictures on their walls.
Sounds like what we really need is a tool to annotate extremists on both sides. Why does this tool do that?
I absolutely agree. Accuracy is desired in both directions. We're in luck, though, the tool discussed here does annotate both sides! Here-- from the link in TFA-- is their tool applied to the Rolling Stone article "“The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here”:
http://climatefeedback.org/eva...
--along with the reply by the author, the very first point of which was "I didn't get to write the headline; the headlines are written by the editor."
And don't mention that big ball of burning stuff in space. Its output is constant. Not like a star has a climate or anything silly like that.
We measure the output of the sun. We've been measuring it for most of a century, and measuring it very very accurately from satellites for many decades. We can compare the variations of solar output (which are very small variations) against climate on Earth. Variability in solar output does not account for the changes seen in the climate.
We also know a lot about the brightness of sunlike stars. Stars like the sun turn out to be pretty boring. There are some stars with a lot of variability... but not the ones that are similar to ours: main-sequence G stars that are a few billion years old have pretty much settled down.
"Actually it's water vapor, that 'other' greenhouse gas, that is doing most of the warming on Earth."
Water vapor does not stay in the atmosphere, but goes in and out of the atmosphere in the form of evaporation and rain. There is a reservoir of liquid water that is, from the standpoint of the atmosphere, effectively infinite. So, the water vapor responds to changes in temperature.
It is, of course, well understood that water vapor is a greenhouse gas-- this accounted for in all the models. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere depends on the temperature. This is a feedback cycle. One of several feedback cycles.
I've looked at various other orbits.
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/n...
A problem with non-synchronous orbits is that 75% of the Earth's surface is ocean, and a vast amount of the remainder is uninhabited, so if a satellite isn't geostationary over the place you want, it will spend much of its time over places where you have no place to put a receiver or no market for power.
Nevertheless, I think that there may be clever solutions with other orbits; it could definitely use more thinking.
Competitive with ground power, or it would never be built in the first place. n space you get ~7 times as much sunlight as the average place on Earth.
Well, but of course you don't put solar arrays on the average places on Earth, you put them in the best places. With a tracking array, that number gets to be much closer to a factor to two than a factor of 7. So the take-away lesson is that you don't build space power systems for terrestrial use until after the market for power from the best solar sites has already been saturated. This means that the market for space solar power substitutes for storage and power transmission technologies.
That's due to absorption, night, and weather that happens down here, but not in space. The logic is then you can spend up to 7 times as much building your space solar power system and be competitive with Earth solar power.
Only if the transmission efficiency were 100%, and it's not.
If it costs you more than that, just build ground solar.
To the AC above: If the majority of readers haven't heard about them either, then "who gives a fuck about L5?" Seriously, if this L5 society is worth at least even a little, they should be known as much as Space X, given that they've existed for so long.
The L5 society merged with the National Space Institute back in 1987 to form the National Space Society ("NSS") NSS is still around.
If you haven't heard of them, I'd say, well, so what? There are probably tens of millions of things you haven't heard of, some important, some not. That's a statement about you.
History of the L5 society here: http://www.nss.org/settlement/...
True enough.
I think you have O'Neill's reasoning backwards, though. He didn't say "we need to build solar power satellites, therefore we need a colony of 10,000 people"-- he said "we've shown that there are no showstoppers to building a colony of 10,000 people; what will they do? Here's an idea; they will build solar power satellites."
So, the question now is, if you don't need very many people-- and possibly don't need any people--in space to build solar power satellites, what is the economic base for off-Earth colonies?
' a rectenna array generates 300 W/m^2 for 24 hours a day
That is possible on the high end, but
Not even possible on the high end. The diffraction-limited beam spread means that you can't focus the beam to a tight spot, without making the space transmitter correspondingly larger. The Glaser sizing of a kilometer-scale transmitter in space beaming to a ten-kilometer scale spot on the ground wasn't picked at random; those are the sizes you need. And the keep-out zone around the ground receiver is much larger; due to the diffraction wings.
Shorter wavelengths make things better... but if you go too short, your beam gets absorbed by water molecules, and clouds start blocking the beam.
(of course, you can still use the keep-out zone for lots of uses; farming, for example. You just don't want to put houses and playgrounds there.)
Just because they call a Duck a dog, does not mean it's not still a duck.
Yep. But it does mean that if somebody says "No ducks here! Just good old reliable dogs!" maybe you should still take a look at just what those "dogs" are.
We've learned a lot since the rather naive plans of the 1970s, when space colonization was first proposed by Gerard O'Neill and his students.
How are things different now? What's the most important thing we've learned since then?
Diebold can easily be told to go stuff it in a sock when they complain.
Diebold hasn't been around for years. They were getting so much bad publicity that they removed their name from the voting machines they made, and then changed their name to "Premier Election Solutions".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
(following that, it was acquired by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), and then by Dominion Voting Systems).
Maybe not everywhere, by in my polling location (GWU in Ashburn) they haven't had the e-voting booths for at least the last 4 years. It's all been paper/marker Scantron-type ballots.
Yes, the article said that Virginia only had 3,000 of them still in use in the 2014 election.
Still, three thousand is a lot.
Do you remember on Slashdot in years past, whenever a story about Mars came up, someone would write some kind of science fiction about the Martian council's response to Earth's actions? I sure miss those stories.
http://pocho.com/wp-content/up...
Isn't weather forecasting just solving PDEs?
...in four dimensions, with complex boundary conditions.
It would be hard even if partial differential equations were not chaotic.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0910
My experience has been that the predictions are usually quite accurate about what will happen, but is less precise about when. When they predict a front moving in, you can count on those thunderstorms, but don't always count on the storms starting exactly at 5pm.
The article mostly talks about predicting tropical storms, and for this the modelling of exactly what the path of the storm is going to be is critical. It does see that the predictions of storm tracks is getting better.
This is all very cool but I think if they can keep the thing transmitting it will be much cooler to see what it observes on the far end of the comet's orbit.
I wonder if a comet hitchhiking probe could be made to passively observe the Oort cloud and wake back up fully to report the next time its comet came back to the inner system.
67P doesn't make it all the way out to the Oort cloud, I'm afraid; it is a short-period comet. Barely gets past the orbit of Jupiter.
http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx...
--that's why Rosetta could rendezvous with it.
--if it did go all the way out to the Oort cloud, though, the probe wouldn't be generating any power to speak of at that distance, and hence wouldn't make any observations. Even if it did wake up next time round, all it would report was "I didn't see anything because I was turned off."
Interesting variation in the outgassing rate as the comet rotates! And it's quite clear that the outgassing comes from localized jets, and not from broad areas of the comet, although we'd already seen that from earlier images.
By looking at a very low phase angle (almost into the sun), we're seeing the forward scattering, so the dust shows up brightly-- a good way to look at very fine particles.
More clickbait. The article in question is built on work done at teh ATLAS collaboration and the CMS collaboration, two of the biggest physics experiments around.
You're confusing the article with the example. Work done at the ATLAS collaboration was one of the examples given of massively-multiple-author science papers. It's not "the article".
The interesting part of the article is the graph.
Design flaw my ass. I bet it was there deliberately and everybody knows who originally requested it. I just love the good ol US of A.
From the article linked:
"To exploit the vulnerability and install the rootkit, attackers would need to already have kernel or system privileges on a computer. That means the flaw cant be used by itself to compromise a system, but could make an existing malware infection highly persistent and completely invisible."
This doesn't let an outsider break into the system; it is a flaw that only is useful if you have already compromised the machine.
...To protect against nuclear EMP (since we were talking Fallout)? Not so much. Even 70s and 80s cars use coils and ECUs, and that would get fried...
Maybe... and maybe not. Old cars had thick metal hoods. Modern cars often use plastic for parts that don't need to be mechanically strong, but the old ones put the engines inside a pretty good Faraday cage.
The evolution of those characters was heavily influenced by the media and writing tools of the time, which remained stable for thousands of years. Now we can make a mountain that actually looks like a mountain.
But the symbols we use don't look like what they are. They are symbols that you just have to know the meaning. For example, right now I'm looking at several symbols. One is four concentric arcs of a quarter circle. This means "wifi is receiving". Does that look like a radio wave? No. Another is a vertical line, with an X through it, and on the right side, the top and bottom of the x and the I connected, forming rightward-pointing triangles. Does that look like a picture of a "Bluetooth Connection" to you? Next to that is a horizontal rectangle, with slightly curved left and right sides, with a symbol in it that could be a stylized Pac-man with a tail, or else maybe a stylized rocket. This symbol means "battery plugged in to charger."
In fact, at the top of the browser there's a symbol that looks a little like the handwritten form of the kanji for "jin" inside a dark green rectangle. That symbol, in fact, means "you're on slashdot".
There's a dozen other symbols in my line of sight. Not a single one of these symbols looks even slightly like what it is.
(I guess you don't drive since horse riding has evolved for thousands of years and people would be pretty arrogant to think they could improve on that.)
Yes, I ride horses. There has been a little evolution of riding since the invention of the stirrup in the middle ages... but not much. If you're saying that cars are a better way of travel than horses-- yes, that's my point. Writing words is a better way of communicating than playing pictionary.
BTW the Chinese ideographical character set is not called "Kanji".
It is when it's used in Japan. Yes, I do know that Japanese is complicated, and that the Chinese word is only one of several readings of a given kanji. This is a /. comment, not a dissertation on writing systems.
Your belief that you can solve the problems of a universal language by abandoning written language and just invent symbols easily and trivially recognized by anybody is :), but in the real world :/. :( and memorizing thousands of symbols isn't really going to make the world simpler
Symbols just aren't as culturally independent as you think
About all I can say is >:P
Except many Chinese can't read (or write) a significant fraction of Chinese characters, and no one knows all of them.
My point exactly.
The whole reason we abandoned hieroglyphic representations of language was so that we wouldn't have to learn 80,000 hanzi.
Simple. When you're in Germany, write it it German. If you're in China, write it in Chinese.
Did I mention I hate hieroglyphics?
The idea that we can create a universal language that everybody will understand by abandoning language and simply making a recognizable symbol for every single concept that anybody might ever want to communicate is stupid.
However, if that actually is your proposal, there is a simple solution: let's write everything in Chinese characters. They already did that. And if you don't think that Chinese characters work as universally recognizable symbols, well, that's just your western-centric prejudice. They've evolved those characters for thousands of years; you're pretty arrogant to think you can do better in a decade or two.