There is a lot of hypocracy and conflicting information in the global warming research.
Not among people who understand what they're doing.
But there is a large motivation for those
Its really hard for me to buy into that its a people problem and that its even a problem at all until all of this gets sorted out.
It has been sorted out. But there are powerful forced who don't like the answer and the consequences thereof who want to make you believe there is some either conspiracy or misunderstanding.
For the skeptics: be skeptical about your own position as well. Try this for a moment.
Suppose, hypothetically, that actual evidence were fairly conclusive about global warming but there are some wealthy people with a vested interest in confusing the facts because it might be detrimental to their own personal agendas.
What would the most likely characteristics and pattern of the debate be like?
To me, it is pretty much identical to what is happening now.
There are various point by point rebuttals scattered here and there. see www.realclimate.org.
And in at most every place that the paper was probed major errors and enormous misrepresentations come to light.
At some point it is not worth further efforts, and you can judge with nearly 99% accuracy that the author has a fundamental lack of understanding, which is corroberated with the factually true observation that he has no credential, education or experience, and most importantly, past achievement in professional climatology.
An ad-hominem argument attacks somebody's irrelevant personal characteristics, like "distrust so and so because he is an animal-screwing pervert with bad taste in furniture." One's credentials in a difficult scientific field of study have plenty to do with ones reliability in discussing climate.
Suppose this guy were not an upper-class Briton of the same stratum as the Telegraph's editors but some random dude emailing people from Moldova. Would it ever have gotten any attention? No.
To recap, we use the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, the (measured) albedo of earth, the approximate mean temperature of earth, and the solar constant to estimate the effective emissivity of earth for infrared. We find it agrees with Earth's mean albedo. Using this value of the emissivity and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, we estimate lambda as 0.29 K / (W / m^2), in good agreement with Monckton, and poor agreement with the other estimates he mentioned.
As discussed in www.realclimate.org things with the same units do not have the same physical meaning. Suppose I drive from here to the store, get a beer, and drive back. I measure my average speed, and my average accelerator pedal position, and divide the two to get a 'lambda'. That isn't the same as asking, "how much faster will I go right now if I press down the pedal by a certain small amount."
The issue for lambda is not integrating from zero to the current flux we have now, or even taking derivatives on an overly simplified model, but a much more complicated issue involving the physical mechanisms of all the feedfowards and feedbacks starting now. The meaning of 'lambda' per Monckton is not the same as what climatologists care about, which is a far more difficult and complicated thing to know.
Consider that if the average temperature is O(280K) that generic 'first principles' physics computations can get reasonably close without details, because you are looking in a part or two in a few hundred. And of course, it has to, since the radiation has to go somewhere.
But those small percentages, and most importantly the feedback loops therein, are exactly what do matter, 0.2 or 0.4 degrees K on 280 is from first-physics a really small change.
Monckton pursues an 'easy' physics problem which is irrelevant to the issue and thinks he's cracked the puzzle.
What is causing it, however, is another matter... some say there is proof that humans are causing it, others will say it's merely circumstantial... that this warming is just part of a natural cycle the earth goes through before another ice age and then a gradual reheating (the latter period being one in which we are currently living).
This isn't good enough.
If you want to assert a non-human-generated cause you can't just imagine something random might be out there. You need mechanisms and observable facts. Saying "there might be something else" is true, and facile, and has been explored heavily for decades.
If we had climate scientists 10,000 years ago with modern scientific understanding and observations we'd also be able to attribute climate change then to specific causal factors.
Answer is that no explanation which excludes major human-induced greenhouse warming is compatible with known physics and current observations.
Obviously there is a natural cycle of some sort relating to astrophysical parameters, and there are other effects in geological time due to volcanism. But the Earth has not magically changed its axis and violated angular momentum since the advent of industrial civilization, nor has global volcanism simultaneously gone haywire. Those are measured facts.
As to the "circumstantiality" of the proof: direct measurements of infrared emissions from the upper atmosphere (the causal source of the greenhouse effect) have been taken for decades by aircraft, balloons and satellites, simultaneously with samples of the chemical composition of such atmosphere. The result is that the increase in IR flux has been observed and correlates exactly with the significant change in atmospheric composition (due to human activity) and known laboratory-verified facts about the scattering cross sections of molecules. This is the forcing term from the greenhouse effect, and it has changed on human timescale.
It is really impossible by the laws of physics for the climate not to change as a consequence.
Climate scientists certainly do know that there are OTHER things which contribute to warming as well. In geological time you can have other effects start warming which then causes some biosphere-correlated feedback effects which result in CO2 emissions.
Taking them into account is precisely the goal of immense work by the scientific community.
This is the result: you cannot satisfy the known laws of physics and observed facts without including significant human-induced greenhouse forcing.
And the fact that geological evidence sometimes showed warming before CO2 rises is NOT in the slightest comforting. The correct conclusion is that there can be very powerful physics and biology in the natural ecosystem which will rapidly amplify human-generated warming, perhaps to a degree significantly more than we worry about now.
Wanda: To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people. I've known sheep who could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs, but you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape? Otto: Apes don't read philosophy. Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it.
The debunker of Viscount Monckton is entirely correct. The details there-in are sufficient to appreciate the content.
Yes, I read the original Monckton manuscript and the flaws are as described.
Basic summary: Monckton thinks that pulling out a formula from Physics 101 like a clever schoolboy he can show up with some elementary analysis what thousands of serious scientists over decades had inexplicably "forgotten" to understand.
He's wrong.
The correctness of any debunking doesn't require long pages of formulae, references and tables, any more than saying "you are assuming you can divide by zero in line 311" in some lunatic's supposed 32 page disproof of the Riemann-hypothesis with 11 grade algebra.
As described far better at www.realclimate.org, Monckton assumes that things with similar units must mean the same thing. He doesn't understand albedo and other things that the very first real scientists who thought seriously about the greenhouse effect (planetary geophysicists in the 1960's studying spacecraft data about planets, including those outside Earth) knew.
When it is cleverly deceptive propagandistic puerile bullshit, then that's what it deserves to be called---early and often.
There are not two reasonably valid sides to this issue any more than the phlostigon theory of heat is as equally reasonable as atomic statstical mechanics.
Why isn't there any teaching of "alternate" theories for chemistry which deny atoms, molecules and the periodic table? Elecricity & magnetism with three kinds of charges (happy, dopey & sneezy) and not two?
Genetics without DNA?
Zoology without evolution? (oh wait)
Yes, I am a physicist, but not in climate. Read www.realclimate.org if you want to understand a little bit about what actual climate scientists know and don't know. I'm not at their level certainly but I can discern most of the real stuff from the fake stuff.
I'll nominante Lord Monckton for a first-ever dynamic double of honors: the Ig Nobel Prize and the Upper Class Twit Of The Year.
The last point, the ocean is "not warming" has been recently contradicted by observations.
The ocean is a large, physical, global integrator, and as such using that data can get around many other observational problems.
The signal has started to show up in the ocean data. By the way, the global ocean level rise is at the upper border to exceeding the confidence interval of previous consensus forecasts.
The problem with the denialists is that they don't have any explanation about how to deny the obvious consequence from the laws of physics.
the naysayers will do nothing until all the evidence is incontravertible and at that point it will be to late because the evidence will be something like, "500 million people will die of starvation in the next 2 years."
They'll still be in denial. In any real scientific sense the evidence is now conclusive enough to assert that there is a major human-induced effect and its going to get much worse from here.
And if sometime in the future 500 million people starve no doubt the denialists will say that it's due to civil war (which will undoubtably accompany this) and some other "random" climate fluctuations and they'll ignore the underlying trend.
Humans typically have a bias to blame other people first (it's probably genetic in the brains) rather than complex, and not directly sensed abstract phenomena.
Of course you should have great ergonomics and eye candy.
Mark Shuttleworth said that the problem that Linux didn't look good enough.
That's not really entirely true, it looks OK. But the ergonomics still suck really hard for many things. It works reasonably nastily.
Comparing to Windows isn't remotely good enough.
When it starts to be an ergonomic horse race between Mac OS X and Billionaire Linux, then that's progress. We're about as far in that direction as Afghanistan is sending turbaned men to Mars.
In fact, a number of Mac users have complained, rightfully, that some more recent MacOSX releases sacrifice ergonomics for eye candy.
I know of no comprehensive definition of intelligence that is agreed upon by a majority of scientists, but if you have evidence to the contrary feel free to provide it. Obviously, there isn't going to be any scientific definition of "success in the real world".
This is not true.
There certainly is a pretty well established definition of general intelligence 'g' used in psychometric studies which has, contrary to what some people may desire, withstood many challenges, and is logically and empirically consistent.
Essentially: you have a test of a multitude of widely varying tasks all of which are at some level, obviously "mental", and you measure the performance of people on all these varying axes.
Intelligence is the projection along the first principal component, reflecting the fact that people who do well on some of them, tend to do well, up to some degree, on most of the other ones.
This is a highly consistent phenomenon among all human groups tested.
It is correlated with numerous, objective, biological measurements in prospective, controlled experiments.
This is also a falsifiable hypothesis as well, as for example, performance on a number of *other* tasks, most of which are probably less mental, significantly less correlated with 'g', except probably among the very lowest tail which reflect significant disease or genetic disabilities with systemic effects.
Obviously, there isn't going to be any scientific definition of "success in the real world".
No not in a comprehensive sense but you can definitely come up with specific proxies which approximate it, and quantify it fairly well. For example, 'felony imprisonment' is clearly 'not successful' by almost everybody's standards.
The cartels controlling the oil prices are in the mideast and we can't do anything abou that.
And yes, the gasoline consumption of the USA does make up a nontrivial fraction of global oil consumption, and now half of US personal vehicles are "light trucks & SUVs", whereas by actual utility, it ought to be about 10%, as it is in most other places on the planet.
In other words, banning needless trucks and SUVs in US would be as significant in oil consumption as many of the largest oil projects on the planet put together.
Want to cut gas consumption in half? Start by clearing up the traffic people sit in every day. There, billions saved. It's a start
That's enormously harder because it means forcing people out of where they live and destroying the value of the homes. Why do the hard task instead of having people buy a damn station wagon instead of a Land Rover?
This of course works for all cars, but when your engine system already has sufficiently high efficiency you have to start looking at the other bottlenecks.
Think about profiling software.
I think jacked up 22" truck tires are far more fugly, both aesthetically and socially.
The Sun uses different fusion cycles from those in human constructed fusion reactors.
Those reactions have far too low a cross section to be practical for power generation, and work because of the inertial gravitational confinement because the Sun is enormously times more massive than the Earth.
One thing about weapons proliferation that is not discussed:
Fusion reactors will produce substantial quantities tritium in their blankets from the neutron flux.
This also means that they would be able to breed plutonium from non-enriched or depleted uranium.
Think how tritium production and plutonium production can be mutually substituted in nuclear (fission) reactors today.
I don't know about the exact numbers and reactions but a fusion reactor capable of commercially useful output (i.e. hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts of electrical power) seems like it would be quite capable for making both parts of the special nuclear materials necessary for compact nuclear weapons, i.e. plutonium and tritium.
I'm also a physicist (not in gravity/cosmology though) and recognize the ad-hoc nature of such theories, but I think they are more valuable than commonly recognized.
Specifically I wonder whether there are new fundamental classical physical fields, apparently as predicted by MOND and variants like the new ones.
The methodological problem is that 'dark matter' theories have so many effective "free parameters" --- e.g. what kind of matter and how it is distributed --- versus the theories which predict specific dynamics with a few new parameters and fields, like these ones. It's much easier to falsify and constrain them with known observation, so as they are developed they will be refuted quickly and thus appear to be uncompetitive versus the whole squishy bag of 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' theories --- where we can put wide ranges of physics and material distribution to fit what we need, fitting empirical arrangement of "stuff" in the universe instead of universal physical law. (an exaggeration, I know but not entirely unjustified)
But more precisely falsifiable theories are in some ways better theories even if proven wrong more quickly.
And yet the single good physics explanation might be in the simple class.
And it's also possible (as apparently the new paper assumes) that dark matter and new fields may exist simultaneously---but dark matter dynamics might be different.
In the long run, discovering new classical fields might have titanic engineering benefits akin to the discovery of electromagnetism, and that's why it is essential to pursue them even if the "expected probability" of success is low---that probability times importance is still large.
Trying to discover such fields in an entirely quantized framework (string theory and quantum gravity and such) may be too difficult---we need a semi-mechanistic classical/phenomenological description first---and rejecting such theories because they don't solve quantum gravity may also be premature. Consider the hypothetical idea that we discovered quantum mechanics before the unification of electromagnetism---we ought not reject Maxwellian electrodynamics just because it didn't arrive in full QED second-quantized form.
Quantum gravity may be as yet unsolved satisfactorily because we don't have classical gravity right yet.
fallacy: "Company X lowers and raises its price according to supply and demand, so it can't be a monpoly!"
truth: A monopoly product still has a supply/demand curve. That does not make it in any way less monopolistic. The point is that with a freer market, the benefits to consumers would be greater still.
background: commonly said fallacy, but an irrelevant distraction, seductive to the ignorant, and cleverly serving the interests of concentrated corporate power over free markets.
The notion that contractors to the government are intrinsically better than civil servants, especially in scientific jobs, is far from being true.
What *really* happens when you have a contractor is that the government doesn't actually save that much money--or could even lose lots of money.
Why? Because of all the rules: the government still has to hire people to check the paperwork of the contractors, and on the contractor side there has to be an army of people and procedures and forms to interface with the government. Think about a for-profit health care company contracting with Medicare. Each has opposing bureaucrats who are trying to extract money and power out of each other---while the real issue (health care) gets worse as a result.
The government still decides what it wants to do, not the contracting company. Hence, the contracting company is just another layer of "crufty thunking" in programming terms.
On the science side, there are just more needless rules, and management of projects is not improved one iota from civil servants, who they often work with daily.
What does change is that the contractors insert their people and make money out of the inefficiency, and the employees on contract have much worse pensions. The extra money went to the shareholders.
There's a reason that of all the labs, LANL---which had been University managed since inception---actually has the best science and attracts the best researchers of the DOE labs. Universities are different from private companies--for better and for worse, the management was lighter.
I used to work at a DOE site which was managed by private contactors. Guess what: the DOE had a whole building of its own employees from Headquarters nearby the site to check up on the contractors, and the contracting company had its own off-site building of its own employees as well. None as far as we could tell had any involvement in the science & engineering mission, which proceeded identically slowly throughout all the different contractors who came and went.
There is no substitute for smart managers with power and sympathy who know how to get things done: putting a private versus public sector badge on them makes no difference.
Problems in NASA are not that much related to civil servant status---interface between contractors and NASA are a big problem.
Think about the Mars missions: the ones which worked right were ones which were built, designed, and managed all by high-end academically motivated teams at JPL. THe ones which failed were split between NASA centers and private contractors (the one who confused the units was at Lockheed), often forced because of Congress who wanted to send money to certain districts.
This already happened at Oak Ridge: the management of the classified weapons infrastructure, i.e. the Y-12 facility, was divorced from that of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is now a scientific institution. ORNL gained by now having a University on its management (where previously all of ORNL & Y-12 & K-25 had been a succession of not very good companies, Dow, MartinMarietta-->Lockheed, etc...)
Maybe the same will happen at LANL as well---note that they brought in private-sector contractors (Bechtel, BXWT) who had experience in the "production" side of things, including the management company of the Y-12 plant.
I believe that previously, it was only the UC who managed things.
At DOE there is already the "NNSA" divison which is essentially the re-invention of the old Atomic Energy Commission---it handles nuclear weapons and nothing but.
So the divorce between science & engineering and nuclear weapons is already in effect.
The non-weapons engineering is not the same necessarily as a university---where people have to go for individual glory (& grants) over longer team-project slogs with big capital investments that are better suited for national labs.
That would have been one side effect, but the contemporaneous attitudes were generally stronger than that, and more akin to the modern "liberal" interpretation in some areas. In personal feeling it was true that Christians were favored over atheists and non-Christians by almost all at the time, but despite that, the Constitution was adopted as it is.
For example, consider this:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
As was discussed at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, this is not just a prohibition against a "state religion", but any sort of religious requirement AT ALL.
For instance, a test which required people to be "Christian", but not of any particular sect (i.e. no state religion) was discussed and was explicitly considered to be disallowed. The writer supporting the Constitution (Madison?) admitted that this meant that "atheists" and "Mohamedeans" (Muslims in modern language) would indeed be permitted in any office.
This gives evidence to the intent at the time.
If it were merely that no state religion was to be allowed, the Constitution would have only said, "The United States shall not establish any national religion."
Madison's original wording here was "The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretence, infringed."
So, clearly Madison believed in a broad interpretation close to contemporary judicial interpretation, and the possibility of merely banning a national religion could have been entertained. The current phrasing is less specific and hence less definitive, but that it encompasses more than a narrow prohibition on a state religion is a certainty.
The Constitution intentionally does not describe specific, algorithmic statutes: mostly it describes objectives, and leaves the details to legislatures and courts. It is not a piece of prolog software. Therefore the current interpretation by court precedent falls very safely within the parameters of the Constitution and the original intent of those who adopted it.
In my reading of the constitution, it's the Congress (that is the FEDERAL legislature) that's barred from establishing religion. This was intended to preserve the rights of individual states to do what that wanted in this area.
No, this is untrue. Firstly there is the explicit prohibition on "religious tests" extending to state officials as well, as well as the 14th Amendment: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States". There is the other obvious principle that a "Bill of Rights"---as it was described contemporaneously by its adopters---would have no meaning if any state were able to abrogate it, because all citizens of the US were also citizens of some state or another.
Of course there is the similar rationale that if states may establish any religion then they may freely abridge freedom of speech and the press, the right of peacable assembly, possibly the right to bear arms, and the rights of habeus corpus etc.
Clearly the original debaters and adopters of these amendments would never have considered such an enormous loophole to be desirable, and there is ample written evidence concerning the specific arguments in play at that time.
Still, this meretricious line of reasoning did have some following in the Civil War and the 14th Amendment was force-fed to them to ensure that such a dangerous and silly idea would be forevermore seen as wrong.
This is a dry run where their extreme measures will not be as controversial.
What they really want is Linux-free PC's. Namely they want to ensure that the cheap, consumer level hardware which runs Windows will be---by crypto-in-hardware---unable to run Linux.
And hardware which runs Linux, or any other operating system which is not Microsoft approved, will not run Windows.
Entirely new motherboards and processors would have to be designed for Linux. This will raise costs dramatically. No doubt that implementing such Windows-able hardware will require licensing software (BIOS) and patents from Microsoft, and it just happens that those hardware companies which are "friendly" and "decide on their own" to go Microsoft-only get a very large discount---one which makes or breaks the profit margins in such fierce competition as CPUs and motherboards.
Microsoft is attempting to do what's never been done before: make an entirely proprietary hardware architecture where everybody else has to put in the capital investment and take big financial risks and face competition, while they skim off huge profits.
Do you think the antitrust settlement will prevent this?
NO! Microsoft very cleverly negotiated enormous loopholes---anything dealing with "security" they have a free hand.
All of this will be couched in terms of security.
This way they can negate two of Linux's advantages at once: lower price (as Linux HW will be as expensive as Mac HW), and security (Only Windows works on "highly secure PC's!!!!").
The copyright and patent scare didn't work to hurt Linux. Now they go for the final solution.
Google is the only thing that Microsoft will, at present, be unable to destroy.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a lot of hypocracy and conflicting information in the global warming research.
Not among people who understand what they're doing.
But there is a large motivation for those
Its really hard for me to buy into that its a people problem and that its even a problem at all until all of this gets sorted out.
It has been sorted out. But there are powerful forced who don't like the answer and the consequences thereof who want to make you believe there is some either conspiracy or misunderstanding.
For the skeptics: be skeptical about your own position as well. Try this for a moment.
Suppose, hypothetically, that actual evidence were fairly conclusive about global warming but there are some wealthy people with a vested interest in confusing the facts because it might be detrimental to their own personal agendas.
What would the most likely characteristics and pattern of the debate be like?
To me, it is pretty much identical to what is happening now.
There are various point by point rebuttals scattered here and there. see www.realclimate.org.
And in at most every place that the paper was probed major errors and enormous misrepresentations come to light.
At some point it is not worth further efforts, and you can judge
with nearly 99% accuracy that the author has a fundamental lack of understanding,
which is corroberated with the factually true observation that he has no credential, education or experience, and most importantly, past achievement in professional climatology.
An ad-hominem argument attacks somebody's irrelevant personal characteristics, like "distrust so and so because he is an animal-screwing pervert with bad taste in furniture." One's credentials in a difficult scientific field of study have plenty to do with ones reliability in discussing climate.
Suppose this guy were not an upper-class Briton of the same stratum as the Telegraph's editors but some random dude emailing people from Moldova. Would it ever have gotten any attention? No.
To recap, we use the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, the (measured) albedo of earth, the approximate mean temperature of earth, and the solar constant to estimate the effective emissivity of earth for infrared. We find it agrees with Earth's mean albedo. Using this value of the emissivity and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, we estimate lambda as 0.29 K / (W / m^2), in good agreement with Monckton, and poor agreement with the other estimates he mentioned.
6 /11/cuckoo-science/#more-367
As discussed in www.realclimate.org things with the same units do not have the same
physical meaning. Suppose I drive from here to the store, get a beer, and drive back.
I measure my average speed, and my average accelerator pedal position,
and divide the two to get a 'lambda'. That isn't the same as asking, "how much faster
will I go right now if I press down the pedal by a certain small amount."
The issue for lambda is not integrating from zero to the current flux we have now, or even taking derivatives on an overly simplified model, but a much more complicated issue involving the physical mechanisms of all the feedfowards
and feedbacks starting now. The meaning of 'lambda' per Monckton is not the same as what climatologists care
about, which is a far more difficult and complicated thing to know.
Consider that if the average temperature is O(280K) that generic 'first principles'
physics computations can get reasonably close without details, because you
are looking in a part or two in a few hundred. And of course, it has to, since
the radiation has to go somewhere.
But those small percentages, and most importantly the feedback loops therein, are exactly what do matter,
0.2 or 0.4 degrees K on 280 is from first-physics a really small change.
Monckton pursues an 'easy' physics problem which is irrelevant to the issue and thinks he's cracked the puzzle.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
"Climatology class is hard."
Monckton's hypothesis is simpler, if you ignore the fact that there are oceans.
Since there are oceans, and they do have a heat capacity.
What is causing it, however, is another matter... some say there is proof that humans are causing it, others will say it's merely circumstantial... that this warming is just part of a natural cycle the earth goes through before another ice age and then a gradual reheating (the latter period being one in which we are currently living).
This isn't good enough.
If you want to assert a non-human-generated cause you can't just imagine something random might be out there. You need mechanisms and observable facts. Saying "there might be something else" is true, and facile, and has been explored heavily for decades.
If we had climate scientists 10,000 years ago with modern scientific understanding and observations we'd also be able to attribute climate change then to specific causal factors.
Answer is that no explanation which excludes major human-induced greenhouse warming is compatible with known physics and current observations.
Obviously there is a natural cycle of some sort relating to astrophysical parameters, and there are other effects in geological time due to volcanism. But the Earth has not magically changed its axis and violated angular momentum since the advent of industrial civilization, nor has global volcanism simultaneously gone haywire. Those are measured facts.
As to the "circumstantiality" of the proof: direct measurements of infrared emissions from the upper atmosphere (the causal source of the greenhouse effect) have been taken for decades by aircraft, balloons and satellites, simultaneously with samples of the chemical composition of such atmosphere. The result is that the increase in IR flux has been observed and correlates exactly with the significant change in atmospheric composition (due to human activity) and known laboratory-verified facts about the scattering cross sections of molecules. This is the forcing term from the greenhouse effect, and it has changed on human timescale.
It is really impossible by the laws of physics for the climate not to change as a consequence.
And this is but one small piece of the evidence.
So what if warming preceded CO2 rise?
Climate scientists certainly do know that there are OTHER things which contribute to warming as well. In geological time you can have other effects start warming which then causes some biosphere-correlated feedback effects which result in CO2 emissions.
Taking them into account is precisely the goal of immense work by the scientific community.
This is the result: you cannot satisfy the known laws of physics and observed facts without including
significant human-induced greenhouse forcing.
And the fact that geological evidence sometimes showed warming before CO2 rises is NOT in the slightest comforting. The correct conclusion is that there can be very powerful physics and biology in the natural ecosystem which will rapidly amplify human-generated warming, perhaps to a degree significantly more than we worry about now.
Wanda: To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people. I've known sheep who could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs, but you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape? Otto: Apes don't read philosophy. Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it.
The debunker of Viscount Monckton is entirely correct. The details there-in are sufficient to appreciate the content.
Yes, I read the original Monckton manuscript and the flaws are as described.
Basic summary: Monckton thinks that pulling out a formula
from Physics 101 like a clever schoolboy he can show up with some elementary analysis
what thousands of serious scientists over decades had inexplicably "forgotten" to
understand.
He's wrong.
The correctness of any debunking doesn't require long pages of formulae, references and tables, any more than saying "you are assuming you can divide by zero in line 311" in some lunatic's supposed 32 page disproof of the Riemann-hypothesis
with 11 grade algebra.
As described far better at www.realclimate.org, Monckton assumes that things with similar units must mean the same thing. He doesn't understand albedo and other things that the very first real scientists who thought seriously about the greenhouse effect (planetary geophysicists in the 1960's studying spacecraft data about planets, including those outside Earth) knew.
When it is cleverly deceptive propagandistic puerile bullshit, then that's what it deserves to be called---early and often.
There are not two reasonably valid sides to this issue any more than the phlostigon theory of heat is as equally reasonable as atomic statstical mechanics.
Why isn't there any teaching of "alternate" theories for chemistry which deny atoms, molecules and the periodic table? Elecricity & magnetism with three kinds of charges (happy, dopey & sneezy) and not two?
Genetics without DNA?
Zoology without evolution? (oh wait)
Yes, I am a physicist, but not in climate. Read www.realclimate.org if you want to understand a little bit about what actual climate scientists know and don't know. I'm not at their level certainly but I can discern most of the real stuff from the fake stuff.
I'll nominante Lord Monckton for a first-ever dynamic double of honors: the Ig Nobel Prize and the Upper Class Twit Of The Year.
The last point, the ocean is "not warming" has been recently contradicted by observations.
The ocean is a large, physical, global integrator, and as such using that
data can get around many other observational problems.
The signal has started to show up in the ocean data. By the way, the global ocean
level rise is at the upper border to exceeding the confidence interval of previous
consensus forecasts.
The problem with the denialists is that they don't have any explanation
about how to deny the obvious consequence from the laws of physics.
the naysayers will do nothing until all the evidence is incontravertible and at that point it will be to late because the evidence will be something like, "500 million people will die of starvation in the next 2 years."
They'll still be in denial. In any real scientific sense the evidence is now conclusive enough to assert that there is a major human-induced effect and its going to get much worse from here.
And if sometime in the future 500 million people starve no doubt the denialists will say that it's due to civil war (which will undoubtably accompany this) and some other "random" climate fluctuations and they'll ignore the underlying trend.
Humans typically have a bias to blame other people first (it's probably genetic in the brains)
rather than complex, and not directly sensed abstract phenomena.
No kidding. I don't think the US has even thought about the turban part.
Not enough TurbanWare makers in the districts of the appropriation committee congressdroids.
Of course you should have great ergonomics and eye candy.
Mark Shuttleworth said that the problem that Linux didn't look good enough.
That's not really entirely true, it looks OK. But the ergonomics still suck really hard for
many things. It works reasonably nastily.
Comparing to Windows isn't remotely good enough.
When it starts to be an ergonomic horse race between Mac OS X and Billionaire
Linux, then that's progress. We're about as far in that direction as Afghanistan is sending turbaned men to Mars.
In fact, a number of Mac users have complained, rightfully, that some more recent
MacOSX releases sacrifice ergonomics for eye candy.
It doesn't matter what they first go up to.
The point is that the "feel", and that means deep, cognitively focused ergonomics, matters more than eye candy.
Candy rots your teeth.
If something looks good and it communicates function and state well, then that's fine.
Remember: beauty is skin deep, but bitch goes right down to the bone.
I know of no comprehensive definition of intelligence that is agreed upon by a majority of scientists, but if you have evidence to the contrary feel free to provide it. Obviously, there isn't going to be any scientific definition of "success in the real world".
This is not true.
There certainly is a pretty well established definition of general intelligence 'g' used
in psychometric studies which has, contrary to what some people may desire, withstood many
challenges, and is logically and empirically consistent.
Essentially: you have a test of a multitude of widely varying tasks all of which are at some level, obviously "mental", and you measure the performance of people on all these varying axes.
Intelligence is the projection along the first principal component, reflecting the fact that people who do well on some of them, tend to do well, up to some degree, on most of the other ones.
This is a highly consistent phenomenon among all human groups tested.
It is correlated with numerous, objective, biological measurements in prospective, controlled experiments.
This is also a falsifiable hypothesis as well, as for example, performance on a number of
*other* tasks, most of which are probably less mental, significantly less
correlated with 'g', except probably among the very lowest tail which reflect significant disease or genetic disabilities with systemic effects.
Obviously, there isn't going to be any scientific definition of "success in the real world".
No not in a comprehensive sense but you can definitely come up with specific proxies which approximate it, and quantify it fairly well. For example, 'felony imprisonment' is clearly 'not successful' by almost everybody's standards.
You mean something like this deal they might offer to Dell et al?
/computer.
Google: We bid $15 per computer to have Firefox be default browser
and Google
Microsoft: We bid one cent for IE and Microsoft Search.
By the way, the price of Windows Vista is $195.99
If you also select us as the Winning Bidder, you may get a
Really Really Big Rebate check worth about $100 or so. Hint hint.
The cartels controlling the oil prices are in the mideast and we
can't do anything abou that.
And yes, the gasoline consumption of the USA does make up a nontrivial
fraction of global oil consumption, and now half of US personal
vehicles are "light trucks & SUVs", whereas by actual utility,
it ought to be about 10%, as it is in most other places on the planet.
In other words, banning needless trucks and SUVs in US would be as
significant in oil consumption as many of the largest oil projects on the planet
put together.
Want to cut gas consumption in half? Start by clearing up the traffic people sit in every day. There, billions saved. It's a start
That's enormously harder because it means forcing people out of where they live
and destroying the value of the homes. Why do the hard task instead of having
people buy a damn station wagon instead of a Land Rover?
This of course works for all cars, but when your
engine system already has sufficiently high efficiency
you have to start looking at the other bottlenecks.
Think about profiling software.
I think jacked up 22" truck tires are far more fugly,
both aesthetically and socially.
The Sun uses different fusion cycles from those in human constructed fusion reactors.
Those reactions have far too low a cross section to be practical for power generation, and work because of the inertial gravitational confinement because the Sun is enormously times more massive than the Earth.
One thing about weapons proliferation that is not discussed:
Fusion reactors will produce substantial quantities tritium in their blankets from the neutron flux.
This also means that they would be able to breed plutonium from non-enriched or depleted uranium.
Think how tritium production and plutonium production can be mutually substituted in nuclear (fission) reactors today.
I don't know about the exact numbers and reactions but a fusion reactor capable of commercially useful output (i.e. hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts of electrical power) seems like it would be quite capable for making both parts of the special nuclear materials necessary for compact nuclear weapons, i.e. plutonium and tritium.
Time Warner. They bought AOL and never looked forward since.
lynchy thingies that Einstein might have been subject to.
I'm also a physicist (not in gravity/cosmology though) and recognize the ad-hoc nature of such theories, but I think they are more valuable than commonly recognized.
Specifically I wonder whether there are new fundamental classical physical fields, apparently as predicted by MOND and variants like the new ones.
The methodological problem is that 'dark matter' theories have so many effective "free parameters" --- e.g. what kind of matter and how it is distributed --- versus the theories which predict specific dynamics with a few new parameters and fields, like these ones. It's much easier to falsify and constrain them with known observation, so as they are developed they will be refuted quickly and thus appear to be uncompetitive versus the whole squishy bag of 'dark matter' and 'dark energy' theories --- where we can put wide ranges of physics and material distribution to fit what we need, fitting empirical arrangement of "stuff" in the universe instead of universal physical law. (an exaggeration, I know but not entirely unjustified)
But more precisely falsifiable theories are in some ways better theories even if proven wrong more quickly.
And yet the single good physics explanation might be in the simple class.
And it's also possible (as apparently the new paper assumes) that dark matter and new fields may exist simultaneously---but dark matter dynamics might be different.
In the long run, discovering new classical fields might have titanic engineering benefits akin to the discovery of electromagnetism, and that's why it is essential to pursue them even if the "expected probability" of success is low---that probability times importance is still large.
Trying to discover such fields in an entirely quantized framework (string theory and quantum gravity and such) may be too difficult---we need a semi-mechanistic classical/phenomenological description first---and rejecting such theories because they don't solve quantum gravity may also be premature. Consider the hypothetical idea that we discovered quantum mechanics before the unification of electromagnetism---we ought not reject Maxwellian electrodynamics just because it didn't arrive in full QED second-quantized form.
Quantum gravity may be as yet unsolved satisfactorily because we don't have classical gravity right yet.
This is my hope, because I want warp drive.
fallacy: "Company X lowers and raises its price according to supply and demand, so it can't be a monpoly!"
truth: A monopoly product still has a supply/demand curve. That does not make it in any way less monopolistic. The point is that with a freer market, the benefits to consumers would be greater still.
background: commonly said fallacy, but an irrelevant distraction, seductive to the ignorant, and cleverly serving the interests of concentrated corporate power over free markets.
The notion that contractors to the government are intrinsically better than civil servants, especially in scientific jobs, is far from being true.
What *really* happens when you have a contractor is that the government doesn't actually save that much money--or could even lose lots of money.
Why? Because of all the rules: the government still has to hire people to check the paperwork of the contractors, and on the contractor side there has to be an army of people and procedures and forms to interface with the government. Think about a for-profit health care company contracting with Medicare. Each has opposing bureaucrats who are trying to extract money and power out of each other---while the real issue (health care) gets worse as a result.
The government still decides what it wants to do, not the contracting company. Hence, the contracting company is just another layer of "crufty thunking" in programming terms.
On the science side, there are just more needless rules, and management of projects is not improved one iota from civil servants, who they often work with daily.
What does change is that the contractors insert their people and make money out of the inefficiency, and the employees on contract have much worse pensions. The extra money went to the shareholders.
There's a reason that of all the labs, LANL---which had been University managed since inception---actually has the best science and attracts the best researchers of the DOE labs. Universities are different from private companies--for better and for worse, the management was lighter.
I used to work at a DOE site which was managed by private contactors. Guess what: the DOE had a whole building of its own employees from Headquarters nearby the site to check up on the contractors, and the contracting company had its own off-site building of its own employees as well. None as far as we could tell had any involvement in the science & engineering mission, which proceeded identically slowly throughout all the different contractors who came and went.
There is no substitute for smart managers with power and sympathy who know how to get things done: putting a private versus public sector badge on them makes no difference.
Problems in NASA are not that much related to civil servant status---interface between contractors and NASA are a big problem.
Think about the Mars missions: the ones which worked right were ones which were built, designed, and managed all by high-end academically motivated teams at JPL. THe ones which failed were split between NASA centers and private contractors (the one who confused the units was at Lockheed), often forced because of Congress who wanted to send money to certain districts.
This already happened at Oak Ridge: the management of the classified weapons infrastructure,
i.e. the Y-12 facility, was divorced from that of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is now a scientific institution. ORNL gained by now having a University on its management (where previously all of ORNL & Y-12 & K-25 had been a succession of not very good companies, Dow, MartinMarietta-->Lockheed, etc...)
Maybe the same will happen at LANL as well---note that they brought in private-sector contractors (Bechtel, BXWT) who had experience in the "production" side of things, including the management company of the Y-12 plant.
I believe that previously, it was only the UC who managed things.
At DOE there is already the "NNSA" divison which is essentially the re-invention of the old
Atomic Energy Commission---it handles nuclear weapons and nothing but.
So the divorce between science & engineering and nuclear weapons is already in effect.
The non-weapons engineering is not the same necessarily as a university---where people have to go for individual glory (& grants) over longer team-project slogs with big capital investments that are better suited for national labs.
That's not true either.
m endment01/01.html#4
That would have been one side effect, but the contemporaneous attitudes were generally stronger than that, and more akin to the modern "liberal" interpretation in some areas. In personal feeling it was true that Christians were favored over atheists and non-Christians by almost all at the time, but despite that, the Constitution was adopted as it is.
For example, consider this:
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
As was discussed at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, this is not just a prohibition against a "state religion", but any sort of religious requirement AT ALL.
For instance, a test which required people to be "Christian", but not of any particular sect (i.e. no state religion) was discussed and was explicitly considered to be disallowed. The writer supporting the Constitution (Madison?) admitted that this meant that "atheists" and "Mohamedeans" (Muslims in modern language) would indeed be permitted in any office.
This gives evidence to the intent at the time.
If it were merely that no state religion was to be allowed, the Constitution would have only said, "The United States shall not establish any national religion."
Madison's original wording here was "The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretence, infringed."
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/a
So, clearly Madison believed in a broad interpretation close to contemporary judicial interpretation, and the possibility of merely banning a national religion could have been entertained. The current phrasing is less specific and hence less definitive, but that it encompasses more than a narrow prohibition on a state religion is a certainty.
The Constitution intentionally does not describe specific, algorithmic statutes: mostly it describes objectives, and leaves the details to legislatures and courts. It is not a piece of prolog software. Therefore the current interpretation by court precedent falls very safely within the parameters of the Constitution and the original intent of those who adopted it.
In my reading of the constitution, it's the Congress (that is the FEDERAL legislature) that's barred from establishing religion. This was intended to preserve the rights of individual states to do what that wanted in this area.
No, this is untrue. Firstly there is the explicit prohibition on "religious tests" extending to state officials as well, as well as the 14th Amendment: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States". There is the other obvious principle that a "Bill of Rights"---as it was described contemporaneously by its adopters---would have no meaning if any state were able to abrogate it, because all citizens of the US were also citizens of some state or another.
Of course there is the similar rationale that if states may establish any religion then they may freely abridge freedom of speech and the press, the right of peacable assembly, possibly the right to bear arms, and the rights of habeus corpus etc.
Clearly the original debaters and adopters of these amendments would never have considered such an enormous loophole to be desirable, and there is ample written evidence concerning the specific arguments in play at that time.
Still, this meretricious line of reasoning did have some following in the Civil War and the 14th Amendment was force-fed to them to ensure that such a dangerous and silly idea would be forevermore seen as wrong.
This is a dry run where their extreme measures will not be as controversial.
What they really want is Linux-free PC's. Namely they want to ensure that the cheap, consumer level hardware which runs Windows will be---by crypto-in-hardware---unable to run Linux.
And hardware which runs Linux, or any other operating system which is not Microsoft approved, will not run Windows.
Entirely new motherboards and processors would have to be designed for Linux. This will raise costs dramatically. No doubt that implementing such Windows-able hardware will require licensing software (BIOS) and patents from Microsoft, and it just happens that those hardware companies which are "friendly" and "decide on their own" to go Microsoft-only get a very large discount---one which makes or breaks the profit margins in such fierce competition as CPUs and motherboards.
Microsoft is attempting to do what's never been done before: make an entirely proprietary hardware architecture where everybody else has to put in the capital investment and take big financial risks and face competition, while they skim off huge profits.
Do you think the antitrust settlement will prevent this?
NO! Microsoft very cleverly negotiated enormous loopholes---anything dealing with "security" they have a free hand.
All of this will be couched in terms of security.
This way they can negate two of Linux's advantages at once: lower price (as Linux HW will be as expensive as Mac HW), and security (Only Windows works on "highly secure PC's!!!!").
The copyright and patent scare didn't work to hurt Linux. Now they go for the final solution.
Google is the only thing that Microsoft will, at present, be unable to destroy.