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Comment Re:Deniers (Score 2) 525

Yeah, but what is their impact on climate in numbers? What is the the end result of the sum of greenhouse gasses emission, global dimming, deforestation etc.? You cannot just say X causes Y therefore if we eliminate X we avoid the Y result, that is totally wrong and there are a lot of cases where a poor comprehension or an oversimplification of a system has caused unwanted consequences, i.e. the mesopredator release hypothesis.

Comment Re:Hu what ? (Score 1) 525

  1. We commonly say that a theory has been "proved" when all its predictions have been verified. It can be disproved again later, but that is another problem.
  2. The two body problem is itself an idealization, not to say that even the pendulum model or every other simple model of classical mechanics is exact in the same sense. However, a sufficiently exact model must not diverge from the observations; in this case models tend to diverge or to not converge after they are perturbed by noise, discrepancies etc. This is a symptom of not good enough, i.e. wrong, models.
  3. Using the word deniers is a way to demonize who dissent, for every reason, and hamper further discussions. Usually, progress is the result of a discussion between different point of views, not the result of blind adherence to a creed.

Comment Re:Deniers (Score 1) 525

Sorry, but this is complete bullshit. The fact that temperature increased on average in the last decades doesn't tell us anything about future temperatures, from a system theory stand-point. The model must adhere to the observed system for a long period of time (and climate periods last millennia) otherwise it is practically certain that in the long run they diverge enough to render the model useless. And nowadays, the divergence between climate models and climate is very large after just a decade or two.

Comment Re:Deniers (Score 1, Informative) 525

They have not shown them to be wrong. They have shown them to be inaccurate. Nobody can predict a system as complex as weather and temperature with 100% accuracy.

And here I thought that climate != weather. It seems it only works the other way around.

Besides that, an inaccurate scientific prediction is wrong by definition, i.e. it cannot be used to prove anything.

Comment Re:Deniers (Score 0) 525

The problem is that practically all the climate models used so far are wrong. From a scientific viewpoint it is just an unproven theory, because its predictions are either not proven (because we're waiting the results) or proven wrong.

There's a fine line between:
  • Climate change: this is a well known phenomenon, from ice ages to the end of dinosaurs is nothing new
  • Global warming: this is less known, the period between ice ages lasts millennia, our sampling of global warming a few decades
  • Human-made global warming: every sensible man should consider this a wild speculation at the moment

Comment Re:Here's a better idea (Score 1) 678

From what I've read, The Alfalfa crops are about 1B gallons of water being moved to China.

The fact is that California harvest alfalfa up to 12 times a year, it sucks up a lot of water not because it is a particularly thirsty crop (it is not), but because farmers want very high yield. Cutting alfalfa would mean less returns for farmers, guaranteed.

Comment Re:there's a strange bias on slashdot (Score 1) 192

google needs to be reigned in and bought to heel on issues where it's power is too complete

i'm glad someone is doing it. i don't really care if microsoft is along for the ride or not, and it doesn't really matter

The big flaw of your idea is the same that tricked the US to act in Iraq the second time: thinking that fighting something evil is good per se. It is not.
You're basically hoping not just that the evil of Google is diminished, but also that the far worse evil of Microsoft is strengthened. Microsoft is not fighting Google just because, their aim is a stronger Microsoft and I don't think there's a need for that.
If the end result would be a less evil Google, an equally evil Microsoft and a third party rising from obscurity, you'd be right, but that's absolutely not what it is shaping up here.

Comment Re:Remember M$'s role on SCO? (Score 3, Insightful) 192

So M$ or Google, meh, both just as fucking evil as each other. I just preferred the kernel under Android ;).

This is an example of what in Italian is called "qualunquismo": considering every party the same, so that you don't have to make your choices (because in all-equal world is pointless to choice). The point is that MS and Google are not evil as each other, their respective track records are much different in that regard, and even if they're as evil and it's just that Google is able enough to hide it, there's a huge difference in corporate culture (like there's difference between the corporate culture of Apple and Microsoft) and the corporate culture of Microsoft is one of the most irritating: they're like a naughty, bossy boy, that thinks he can get away with every mischief he does, and when he is caught guilty, he tries only to get revenge (and does nothing to hide it).

Comment Re:Capacity vs availability (Score 1) 356

Likewise a coal plant has not a CF of 63%, but a range from perhaps 60% for a load following plant, and something like 85% - 95% for a base load plant.

I personally don't see a difference between a dispatachable coal plant that idles at less then 10% of its load over night, just to keep it warm, and peaks to 90% of its max over daytime versus a solar plant that idles during darkness at 0% and ramps up following daylight to 100% around local noon (or what ever daytime the plant owner decided to have its maximum.

I see a big difference instead. If a coal plant has a CF lower than 85-90% that is because you want it so, that is you don't need that power, while with a solar plant, you may need that power, but it's cloudy or it's winter and you're in the northern hemisphere etc. And that's just half of the story, because electric companies deliver electric power, not energy.

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