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Comment Re:The alternative (Score 1) 492

That is not, however, the case for most fat people in the US, and there are some cases of quite-fat people who decided to lose weight and did so. See http://www.bicycling.com/training-nutrition/nutrition-weight-loss/i-lost-320-pounds-riding-bike?page=0,0

On the other side of the argument, I find that my weight (220lbs) is surprisingly resistant to change. I like to eat, and the more I exercise, the hungrier I get. Doubling the exercise moves the set point down about 5 pounds, and it was 15-20lbs higher with no exercise (and that was 7 years ago).

And the professional sports guys have ruined things for the rest of us. Pushing your hematocrit up like they did is nuts (there were guys in Europe dying in the sleep from too-thick blood clotting), but a 10% nudge in my CV capacity would be right nice (though I am nowhere near anemic).

Comment Re:Dude! (Score 1) 437

It is by no means guaranteed that the sea level rise will be limited to 1 meter per century, even for this century. The IPCC predictions are conservative, don't include melting ice cap contributions, and assume that we would be more aggressively cutting emissions by now. From a paper on the subject:

"Rahmstorf (2007) made an important contribution to the sea level discussion by pointing out that even a linear relation between global temperature and the rate of sea level rise, calibrated with 20th century data, implies a 21st sea level rise of about a meter, given expected global warming for BAU greenhouse gas emissions. Vermeer and Rahmstorf (2009) extended Rahmstorf's semi-empirical approach by adding a rapid response term, projecting sea level rise by 2100 of 0.75-1.9 m for the full range of IPCC climate scenarios. Grinsted et al. (2010) fit a 4- parameter linear response equation to temperature and sea level data for the past 2000 years, projecting a sea level rise of 0.9-1.3 m by 2100 for a middle IPCC scenario (A1B). These projections are typically a factor of 3-4 larger than the IPCC (2007) estimates, and thus they altered perceptions about the potential magnitude of human-caused sea level change.

Alley (2010) reviewed projections of sea level rise by 2100, showing several clustered around 1 m and one outlier at 5 m, all of which he approximated as linear. The 5 m estimate is what Hansen (2007) suggested was possible, given the assumption of a typical IPCC's BAU climate forcing scenario. Alley's graph is comforting, making the suggestion of a possible 5 m sea level rise seem to be an improbable outlier, because, in addition to disagreeing with all other projections, a half-meter sea level rise in the next 10 years is preposterous.

However, the fundamental issue is linearity versus non-linearity. Hansen (2005, 2007) argues that amplifying feedbacks make ice sheet disintegration necessarily highly non-linear. In a non-linear problem, the most relevant number for projecting sea level rise is the doubling time for the rate of mass loss. Hansen (2007) suggested that a 10-year doubling time was plausible, pointing out that such a doubling time from a base of 1 mm per year ice sheet contribution to sea level in the decade 2005-2015 would lead to a cumulative 5 m sea level rise by 2095."

Additional caveats and quid quo pros follow in the paper, but it's safe to say that there's a bunch of scientists who would not bet much money on at most a meter of rise in this century.

Comment This is relatively good news. (Score 4, Insightful) 158

Given that we show every sign of running the CO2-enhancement experiment to completion, it is reassuring to know that this low-probability but extremely-high-cost outcome is that much more unlikely. (To my warmist comrades -- given a choice between losing a toe, a leg, or a life, we know which choice we would most want to avoid, but that does not mean the remaining choices are good. Anoxia is among the worst of the outcomes, far worse than the middle of the US becoming uninhabitable or the seas rising 100 feet. And to you denier bozos -- greenhouse science is cut-and-dried stuff, with only the detailed outcomes unclear, but it's also clear that between natural human greed and your foolish efforts, we will almost certainly burn all the fossil fuels we can until something truly alarming occurs. Perhaps we have overestimated the effects of the current CO2 levels -- but that's okay, we're just going to keep on burning it till we see an effect, and a big and unambiguous one.)

Comment Re:Morons (Score 2) 457

Yeah. Jeff Bauman, who looked at the guy who left the bomb, got his legs blown off, and remembered it all, and described him to the police after regaining consciousness. Or Carlos Arredondo, who held a big artery shut running beside him in the wheelchair (that, or a tourniquet, but it looked like an artery -- it's cropped out of most of the photos you see now). Flawless. All those legs blown off could easily have been deaths, except that people got to them in time and took care of them.

Comment Re:Morons (Score 5, Interesting) 457

The terrorists are NOT especially smart. Sometimes they get lucky. Witness these two bozos in Boston, or the underwear bomber who about set his nads on fire, or the shoe bomber who failed to execute, or the butt bomber in the middle east who (ahem) blew his own ass up. The jerks who tried to bomb a terminal in Glasgow caught themselves on fire, and one of the people who caught them in the act kicked one of them so hard he tore a tendon in his own foot. Several of the otherwise successful bombers (Spain, London) got caught because they screwed up security with cell phones in traceable ways.

I also know a few people who may or may not have at one time worked for the NSA, and they're all smart, and one of them was kinda intense. Don't assume that you're smarter than them; the risks, if you're wrong, are high.

Comment Re:Plain Evil (Score 1) 109

It cannot log the specifics of the information, since that defeats the entire point of avoiding a discoverable record of evil. The most it can do is count the number of times someone was warned, preferably at a very coarse granularity so that spikes in warnings cannot be correlated with other business activity.

Comment Re:or... (Score 1) 133

Oil-sulfur plant spray IS just oil and sulfur. It's a fungicide. It also gets mixed with lime in another fungicidal formulation. And here: http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/pyrethrins-ziram/sulfur-ext.html . Especially: "There is slight oxidation of sulfur to the volatile oxide." Apparently the oil-sulfur mix of my youth is no longer recommended, but they would also spray the grove with parathion back then, and that's no longer recommended either.

Comment Re:or... (Score 1) 133

I said not one darn thing about H2S, did I? This was a faint whiff of SO2, not the full on stuff. I was a kid before chemistry sets got safe, I know what SO2 smells like in quantity. Whatever the smell was, it was the same, and I'm pretty sure it was extremely dilute SO2

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