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Comment Re:Can't reply to what you don't say (Score 1) 278

Possibly in some other thread somewhere, but in multiple replies to me in this thread you made no "specific mention" of where you claim to have gotten your data.

OK, I did a search of other threads, and see that in fact in a post responding to somebody else, in a different fork, you did make an attempt to back up your assertions.

First take-away point: you can't expect people to be familiar with something you posted in response to a different person, in a different fork.

Most of your comments were addressed by riverat1, who points out that you misinterpreted what was pretty clearly stated by the IPCC report.

What I deduce from your comments is that no, you didn't read any of the IPCC reports, but you did skim them to quote mine, without bothering to actually try to understand what you were reading.

OK, that's a start. I suggest next you actually read some of these reports. Then you will be able to comment from a position of knowledge, instead of ignorance, and the discussion may at least be somewhat higher level.

riverat1 doesn't address one comment. You wrote:
what's important [about climate sensitivity estimates] "is they keep shrinking as we learn more."

Refining estimates is, of course, how science works-- but, in fact, they haven't been shrinking. The reference you give is a blog that seems to have cherry picked a dozen estimates over a very short time period-- out of perhaps thousands of climate models run over fifty years by dozens of groups on five contents. The first real estimate-- by "real", I mean "using experimentally measured values of IR absorption, and numerically integrating, instead of approximating"-- is of course Manabe and Weatherald 1967. Their estimate, with no feedback other than the assumption of constant humidity, was 2.25C per doubling. The 1979 National Academy of Sciences estimate was 3 C, plus or minus 1.5 C. Since then, the IPCC has been compiling the results of many models to come up with "best guess" estimates of climate sensitivity. These have been:
1990 IPCC: 1.5 - 4.5 C ( "best guess" of 2.5)
2nd IPCC: "No strong reasons have emerged to change" these estimates
3rd IPCC: 1.5 - 4.5 C.
4th IPCC: 2 - 4.5 C
5th IPCC: 1.5C - 4.5C

(These actual IPCC WG-1 reports give detailed explanation of what they mean by "likely," and citations and figures showing where the estimates come from, as well as discussion of the high and low outliers.)

What is astonishing about climate sensitivity is how little they have changed since the National Academy of Sciences assessment in 1979. Basically, the models have been getting progressively finer scale, with more nodes and more and more of the second and third-order effects incorporated, but the overall result has not changed.

In fact, the original 1967 estimate, 2.25C, is still within the error bars-- it's quite remarkable how Manabe's very simply model (simple by today's standards: a top-of-the-line supercomputer model by 1967 standards) still holds up.

Comment Can't reply to what you don't say (Score 1) 278

How about you stop grandstanding and discuss the post where I specifically mentioned where in the IPCC reports I got my info.

I would... except you didn't.

Possibly in some other thread somewhere, but in multiple replies to me in this thread you made no "specific mention" of where you claim to have gotten your data. Not only did you not "specifically mention where," you didn't even say which IPCC report you think you got your information from (in fact, this is the first post you've made that suggests that you know that there even is more than one IPCC report.)

Comment Re: David Cameron is actually a genuine idiot (Score 1) 260

We might need some friendly, Vulcan-like AI to decide stuff for us. It won't stop some people from crying "I'm being oppressed!", but at least we'd have some confidence that it isn't actually trying to oppress anyone (or at least greater confidence than is the case with most humans, that is).

Comment Re:David Cameron is actually a genuine idiot (Score 1) 260

Socialism demands big government

I'm not sure that's the case. Socialism requires state ownership of productive assets (if not all of them, then at least the large ones). But considering the traditional meaning of the word "government", I'm not sure that a state-owned factory counts as government. In other words, would you classify a car production line as a part of the legislative, executive, or judicial branch?

Comment Re:I can see it now (Score 1) 44

Imagine if you would, the ability to reproduce an F1 rocket engine.

That's what Dynetics is trying with the F-1B project... With 8 MN of liftoff thrusts, despite the other projects in the works (the Falcons, Vulcan, the mythical Blue Origin launcher), it could still make for an interesting single-stick launcher.

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