This whole story is strange. Courts have always recognized that Cops can ticket you based on "passing markers"--yes they need only count off the seconds between those little reflectors on the side of the road.

This is considered indisputable if the officer has passed a certification test.

Officers will routinely write, "passing markers" because its subjects them to the least review by the courts.

Other backwards ideas: if Cops use 'stationary radar' they need to do a bunch of work to ascertain whether it is working correctly--it takes two patrol units: the stationary one and the reference vehicle. But, none of this is necessary if they use moving radar!

But moving radar is next to meaningless (cosin error) without careful regulation of the setting which is only required... for stationary radar.

Peak horsepower is mostly irrelevant to engine efficiency. What matters is how much power the driver requests--flooring a 70hp 4c only burns so much gas, flooring a 500p V8 burns a lot more. The pedals of both cars have about the same travel, so within the precision of human control, the bigger engine uses a good deal more fuel.

Turn-on the cruise-control: there is just a tad more frictional loss in the large engine. The idea that chasing horsepower is the story is very misleading.

Criticisms of the Oxburgh report that have been made include: bias of some of the members including the Chair, not examining the papers that are at the heart of the controversies, lack of consideration of the actual criticisms made by Steve McIntyre and others, and a short report with few specifics that implies a superficial investigation. When I first read the report, I thought I was reading the executive summary and proceeded to look for the details; well, there weren't any. And I was concerned that the report explicitly did not address the key issues that had been raised by the skeptics.

My thoughts indeed, and here we have a post that trumpets CRU as exonerated. The post gives two links one leading to a CRU press release and the second to a scant five page report.

Elsewhere Professor Curry continues:

The primary frustration with these investigations is that they are dancing around the principal issue that people care about: the IPCC and its implications for policy. Focusing only on CRU activities (which was the charge of the Oxbourgh panel) is of interest mainly to UEA and possibly the politics of UK research funding (it will be interesting to see if the U.S. DOE sends any more $$ to CRU). Given their selection of CRU research publications to investigate (see Bishop Hill), the Oxbourgh investigation has little credibility in my opinion. ... The corruptions of the IPCC process, and the question of corruption (or at least inappropriate torquing) of the actual science by the IPCC process, is the key issue.

You're wrong in saying "no, just no". Yes, CO2 does act that way; however, a doubling of CO2 would produce only 1 degree C of warming solely on the basis you described. The IPCC claims several degrees of warming. The difference between the simple CO2 only calculation and the IPCC claim stems from the latters incorporation of feedback effects.

That is, they argue CO2 causes changes in the hydrological cycle. This means a change in humidity and cloud cover. Ipso facto, the climate sensitivity from a doubling of CO2 is more than would be suggested by a simple black-body radiation calculation.

This is not just a small part of their argument. Its a significant factor, and yet while black-body radiation is a universally accepted idea; the magnitude (and sign!) of the feedback effects is poorly understood.

Thus my remark was dead-on accurate. You might want to review this from Dr Roy Spencer, one the scientists who does satellite based temperature monitoring.

Uh, no. You're wrong to say that I'm wrong. Expectation is a statistical term which you'd do well to understand before criticizing my remark.

What is wrong is to say "weather is not climate" therefore the recent temperature means nothing. This is false, and its false because climate is related to weather: climate is the expectation of weather. Therefore a few months of data mean a little something--although not very much. That is, with only a few months data we cannot statistically falsify the IPCC claim that the trend-rate of warming is 2C/century. Nonetheless, with the past 10, 15, 20, etc years of data, we can falsify the IPCC claim, but just barely.

Such analysis is easy to do yourself. You can also find people who have posted their own number-crunching. See for instance this from Lucia Liljegren

There you go again. Conflating "climate change" with whether man is the most likely cause. Its really rather rich. The prime highlight of the IPCCs AR3 was to "forget" the existence of climate change prior to the 19th century. Natural variation over the past thousand years was reduced to quiet gradual downtrend with an abrupt surge upward in the 1800s. In so doing they discarded thousands of studies and work of thousands who previously carefully documented periods of great warming and cooling throughout the history of man.

This can be seen clearly by comparing the IPCC-1990 report, which concisely shows the consensus of an old guard (now largely dead). A very warm, much warmer period during the middle ages (shown in read). The IPCC AR3 and AR4 replaced this with the blue curve. Shown a flat-changeless temperature history with a slight downtrend, suddenly accelerating upward.

But their claim was bespectacled from the start by way of special pleading they had explained away each interruption in warming that occurred during the 20th century, but then after the report was published, yet another unexpected cooling period emerged.

Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change". The focus shifted from temperatures to sea-levels and hurricanes. Yet this turned out to be an even more tenuous footing. Its already no longer considered reputable among intellectual circles to discuss such extravagances. Eventually the talking point was settled upon: weather is not climate. The recent cooling is just weather.

Indeed, weather is not climate. Climate is the expectation of weather--and so yes, it surely does matter when year after year goes by somewhat cooler than had been predicted by the IPCCs latest report.

Meanwhile, the very people who had steadfastly refused to deny climate-change are now labeled the climate change deniers. This stemmed from an Orwellian campaign to redefine terminology. Suddenly believing in climate-change meant believing in anthropogenic climate change. The language literally twisted to be an embodiment of the "one true belief"--no need for that pesky modifier anthropogenic, and all the better to co-opt what everyone knows: climate changes.

Several very cogent critiques of the AR3 temperature series have been published which eviscerated that graph as a product of flawed statistical methods and bad data. Yet a loud cadre continues to deny any problem exists, and banks on the lack of specialized knowledge among the public and other scientists to trade on their word alone.

And, no, we're saying that there is no contribution from Man. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but its effect on temperature depends on poorly understood feedback effects. These effects are in part also responsible for the long history of natural temperature variation that the IPCC otherwise ignores. Ultimately, what it comes down to is this: The IPCC claims a temperature rise of 2C/century. To arrive at this number they assume almost all strong feedbacks are amplifying rather moderating the C02 driven warming. Why does this matter? Much of the impetus for "ACTION NOW!" stems from the notion of a climate tipping point, but if the feedback effects are more moderating than the IPCC claims, this is highly unlikely.

Less scare oriented analysis have shown less than 50% of the IPv4 space in actual use. IPv6 is considered a to be a broken ill-designed protocol that screws up more than it fixes. Its basically unusable with mobile networks (WiMax, WiFi, etc). It significantly increases the cost of routers, switches, etc--the exceptions being those hardware that treat IPv6 in the slow-path. i.e., by trapping to the control CPU.

The IP network was designed to be a gateway network, not to connect every dippy host to every other one. Which is a broken, insecure, nonsensical practice. If you believe in it, you should review the Geek Social Fallacies.

The truth will be in the pudding. Once address space begins to be clawed back, abusive users (like IBM; IBM does NOT have millions of protocol compliant IPs: they ought to be NATed), will face a cost of reconfiguring their broken network topologies using IPv4 or switching to IPv6. Then we'll know.

Next time try reading whole sentences. Then you might actually understand what you're being told.

I see that you ask: Might I suggest to you that when you find something someone quotes from them to be demonstrably wrong, you demonstrate that it is in fact wrong. Here is one vein:

Back in December 2004 John Finn asked about the divergence in "Myth vs. Fact Regarding the Hockey Stick"--a thread on realclimate.

Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record - as I believe was done in the case of the 'hockey stick' - is dubious to say the least.

This drove a response from realclimate team (M. Mann):

No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.

With some effort, the methodologies were reproduced and it became clear that MM was not be entirely truthful.

But RC has stuck its party line--even now after some of the leaked emails from CRU show us that this particular fudging technique was quite common and applied to manipulate data more than once.

Take a breath. Think about what I said. I didn't say they weren't scientists working for important climate research institutions. They are, but somehow you think your assertion of those facts cuts against what I said. It does not.

The problem with realclimate is not they don't have some good, accurate, etc information. The problem is that when someone from their 'tribe' is caught doing bad science they don't play the honest broker. They man the fences, truth be damned--no matter now glaringly in the wrong they are.

So I stand by my claim. realclimate is too partisan and too dogmatic to be used as a reliable source of information.

Again, you don't get the logic. The core science is right; yet, the conclusion being drawn does not follow. The people blogging at realclimate are the same ones monopolizing the lead author positions at the IPCC. So there is no independence here and no meaning to the repetition.

The question here is: "how can they tell that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is due to CO2".

Yes they can measure carbon ratios; no, the data does not necessarily mean what they claim it means. Yes, the changes are consistent with burning fossil fuels, but that does nothing on its own to explain why the equilibrium level of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher today than before.

Let me illustrate this:

Bin(t) - Biological intake of CO2
Bout(t) - Biological emission of CO2
Oin(t) - Inorganic absorption of CO2
Fout(t) - Burning fuel emissions of CO2

CO2 = \int (Bout(t) - Bin(t) + Fout(t) - Oin(t)) dt

All four terms are time varying. Isotope ratios only indicate that Bout/Fout are higher than before. They cannot explain why the CO2 in the atmosphere is rising which necessarily requires understanding the other terms as well.

Don't link to realclimate.org; its heavily partisan and apologetic for even bad science and outlandish claims.

In a common value auction, the auctioned item is of roughly equal value to all bidders, but the bidders don't know the item's market value when they bid. Each player independently estimates the value of the item before bidding. The winner of an auction is, of course, the bidder who submits the highest bid. Since the auctioned item is worth roughly the same to all bidders, they are distinguished only by their respective estimates. The winner, then, is the bidder making the highest estimate. If we assume that the average bid is accurate, then the highest bidder overestimates the item's value. Thus, the auction's winner is likely to overpay.

No. The real problem is that FCC has only made a very small, very expensive allocations to GSM use. The equipment can support many more channels but the frequencies are legally limited in the US. Thus why bandwidth is bad here and much better elsewhere. Ditto for cost concerns. Wireless carriers have paid a lot of more at auction to the US Government than similar allocations cost in other countries.

See for instance this recent article at the wsj

The FCC has approved a threefold increase in available spectrum in recent years, but projections for data traffic show a 30-fold increase in demand, Mr. Genachowski said. "That's a 10-to-one gap," he said. "It's a very serious challenge."

...

Wireless industry lobbyists have spent months trying to persuade lawmakers to pass legislation that would require the government to do an inventory of the U.S.'s airwaves and how they are being used. The U.S. government controls much of the available airwaves, which are set aside for military and other official uses. Rights to airwaves are auctioned off to companies to use exclusively.

Mr. Genachowski said the FCC would look at ways to promote secondary markets for airwaves, which would give people who hold licenses for airwave usage the right to lease those licenses to others. He said the agency would also try to clear obstacles for wireless companies trying to install new networks, including speeding up approvals for new cellphone tower construction, which often are met with community resistance.

"Captain" Bligh of the Bounty was a lieutenant. Young and still a bit green as a commander.

Bligh and _2/3rds_ of the crew were placed into a small dingy and set adrift. Having only a compass and sextant he went 6700km and nailed the nearest British outpost Timor. Only one man died on route.

Further wikipedia concisely notes:
"The Bounty's log shows that Bligh resorted to punishments relatively sparingly. He scolded when other captains would have whipped and whipped when other captains would have hanged. He was an educated man, deeply interested in science, convinced that good diet and sanitation were necessary for the welfare of his crew. He took a great interest in his crew's exercise, was very careful about the quality of their food, and insisted upon the Bounty being kept very clean."