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I don't think anyone is discounting the possibilities. They are discounting the shady individual making even shadier claims with no real evidence to support such claims.
If he continues to act like a snake oil salesman then he will be treated like a snake oil salesman. When he begins to act more like a true scientist instead of the next Bedini fraudster I think more people will take him seriously.
When I was at school, my parents hired a contractor to build an extension to the house....
Stop. Just stop.
Programming is not the same thing as building house. It's a popular, but ludicrous analogy. Even a small program can have billions of different possible execution paths. In fact, if your code has 30 if statements you're already over a billion execution paths (2^30). Why do you think it's so damn hard to make bug proof code? You can have unit tests, integration tests, a dedicated test team and still miss bugs. Even years after the product is finished bugs can still be found by ingenious users who use your software in a way never thought or intended. Look at how long some software products have been around. Look at the Linux kernel for example. There's a team of crack programmers hammering on that thing year after year and yet they still find bugs in OLD CODE.
Using your line of reasoning, software developers would never get paid and would have to give lifetime support for their product for free. That doesn't make any sense.
You're going to have one hell of a time trying to prove your cancer 30 years down the road was caused by some insignificant radiation exposure and not some other biological/ecological factor. Carcinogens. Carcinogens everywhere.
I'll wait for 3-D printable Colon Blow before I buy one. Although I suspect any 3D printable food would be marketable as a respectable clone of Colon Blow.
The only new thing in there was "holds its charge for a long time", which I thought was the only real barrier to supercapacitors replacing batteries...
No, that's just one of the barriers. Another PITA barrier is voltage. Capacitiors lose voltage rapidly with discharge, unlike batteries whose voltage drops slowly. For example, a battery drained half-way will still deliver a high enough voltage to keep a phone running. A super-capacitor won't, even though there is still plenty of "charge" left.
Perhaps the words mean something different to you. The abstracts that expressed no position were papers on other aspects of climate science, therefore were not counted. Global warming is only one aspect of climate science, and not every paper on climate science deals with global warming.
Of the remaining 33.6% of papers that did express a position on global warming, 32.6% agreed with the theory,
...Total human emissions of CO2 only account for about 3% of the world's CO2 emissions...
He was referring to human emissions, not the natural carbon cycle emissions. The natural carbon cycle is balanced. Human emissions are not, hence the ever rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
WHAT warming trend ?? The world temp has stabilized and DROPPED. And it appears we MAY be going into a Maunder-type Solar Minima. .
[citation needed]
According to the data you're incorrect. That is, if you're actually doing a real climatological analysis. If you're using the Anthony Watts method of analysis, well you can show just about anything you want to.
Yeah! It's like saying that 97% of priest believe in god anyway.
No it isn't. Not even remotely close. Climate scientists don't BELIEVE anything. They know. And the reason they know is because they have a large set of validated repeated research and data to back up their conclusions. That is the strength of the scientific method. Climate scientists agree that the scientific results show anthropogenic global warming. No faith or belief is needed or required.
Plus that number means nothing, it would be foolish to say that human activity has no consequence, though what matters is how much.
According to the current orbital positioning and axial tilt, if things had remained the same (no additional CO2) the planet would have continued cooling. Based on physics originally discovered in 1824 by Fourier (and considerably improved upon since then), we know that greenhouse gases will warm the planet. Based on the isotope analysis of atmospheric carbon, we know that the CO2 influx has come from fossil fuels (C-13 vs. C-14). The recent consensus on how much we are contributing range from 80% to 120% due primarily to GHGs.
Also, science isn't about democracy. More than 60% of the scientists didn't believe in the movements of continents in the 50ies, yet it is admitted now.
Science isn't a democracy. That's why they surveyed peer-reviewed published papers instead of people. And the result of the survey of the current science (not people) show almost all of them agree that we are causing the change.
You seem to be forgetting about the laws of physics. In fact, we are already hitting them. You can't shrink transistors much more or you get slapped with Schrodinger's cat. The interconnects are already using fiber optics. You can only put machines so close to one another. So on and so forth.
When people have made claims before, it was due to either their idea of market forces or the limits of the current technology. Now, the actual physical limits are beginning to present roadblocks. Even if quantum computing becomes an everyday thing by 2020, you still have to get data to the QPU which still requires a speed-of-light limited data transfer to every node running the computation.
The problem isn't processing power or memory or even disk space. It's latency, and that is limited by the speed of light.
The interesting part is that they looked at the "habitats that these species now live in". They did not look at habitats that are not currently suitable for the species to live in. For all we know there could be more area that species could live in when the climate changed. By concentrating on current species ranges the scientists are skewing the results. One should look at the whole system before coming to a conclusion.
Oh but they have looked into it my friend. In fact some areas are already experiencing the lovely influx of new wildlife. Like the harmless little bark beetle that has been destroying acres upon acres of forests in Colorado. Or the migration northward of the harmless killer bee. In fact there have been several studies on the influx of invasive species and diseases due to a warming world, and the picture they paint isn't pretty.
Despite what you may think, scientists don't earn Ph.D's by being stupid.
ClearCase...only within the bowels of hell could such a hideous evil have been conceived. It drinks the blood of tormented programmers, and feasts upon their carcasses. Many programmers have gone mad just looking up it's hideous countenance. The mere utterance of it's name causes minds to crack and ears to bleed. Even Satan himself is leery of looking ClearCase in the eye. Religious programmers do not use the fear of god to keep their teams in line. They use the abomination known as ClearCase.
You can tell when a programmer has used ClearCase. All you need to do is walk up to them and whisper it. The eyes go wide. Sweat starts forming. They shake uncontrollably. They'll start backing away, or start muttering, "My happy place...I must go to my...happy place!". The physical wounds heal with time, but the psychological scars last a lifetime.
I've had the most unfortunate experience of using ClearCase before. I can honestly say I would rather have NO VERSION CONTROL than use ClearCase again. I'm not kidding. It is THAT bad. The team I was on stuck it out for about 2 months (I'll give them credit for lasting that long) and then we fled screaming to SVN. When we wiped the ClearCase machine, all the developers gathered around to watch like how villagers gathered around to watch a hanging. There was much rejoicing.
I've known people who quit the project and/or company they worked for because they were forced to use ClearCase. ClearCase transcends bad software. It is ABOMINATIONWARE.
Agreed. If you're a decent software developer then it doesn't matter what the latest buzzword tech is. Any developer worth their salt will be able to pick up and use a new language/tool/etc. in a short period of time.
Much bogus science has survived based on the naive expectations of experimental rigor that later turned out to be ill-advised. Cold Fusion comes to mind.
Hardly. You see, what happened with cold fusion was a couple then-scientists said they got neutron radiation out of their experiment along with heat production. They went public and it caused a sensation. However, they did this before others could duplicate their work. When other scientists tried to duplicate it, they failed. Upon review, it was shown that the original scientists at best were sloppy. Their work was summarily rejected.
In other words, science worked just the way it was supposed. Just like the recent kerfuffle over faster-than-light neutrinos.
The point is that scientists have to document, and publish, ALL of their methodology. And in this case, as far as I can tell, they haven't.
Yes they have: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html . It really isn't that hard to use Google.
Of course, I didn't pony up to the research journal paywall to read every published paper. But I have read a great deal about volcanic test stations for CO2, and their arguments seem unsupported to me.
I find this very hard to believe considering it took me all of 5 seconds to find link on the methodology.
An audience member raised his hand: "I am only a physical chemist, and so can't really speak to your separation methods. But the way we do it is to cool the air to -78C and then collect the solid precipitate."
He got a standing ovation
You're either leaving out critical information or this story is pure bullshit. Dropping the temperature to -78C will NOT precipitate CO2. Try reading up on partial pressures. Not only that, but producing the right conditions to have CO2 precipitate takes quite a bit of energy in and on itself.
But that's my skepticism in a nutshell. If I light some candles in my apartment it gets gradually warmer, For a while. Then the AC kicks in. The temperature feedback mechanism in my apartment is much larger than the heat source of a candle, or my gaming rig for that matter.
The feedbacks in place on this planet typical function over thousands of years. What's happening now is taking place over a 100 years. That's not lighting a couple of candles, that's dumping gasoline all over your apartment and setting it on fire.
It's not just the amount of warming, it's how fast it is occurring.
We know there's some sort of 100 k year cycle. Is it a feedback mechanism? Is it a strong one?
That's known as Milankovich cycles and it has to do with the natural orbital dynamics of the planet. It's not a feedback mechanism. And right now we should technically be cooling (an we were until we started burning fossil fuels in earnest).
Is more CO2 just going to kick in the cooling sooner, or overwhelm the cooling?
CO2 is not going to cool the plant. Fourier figured this out back in the early 1800's, and all the science done since then bears this out. Oh people have certainly tried to come up with negative feedbacks based on increased CO2, but none of them have stood up to the test. And now that scientists are runnin fully coupled climate models there is no evidence of a natural negative feedback from increasing CO2. In fact, they have been finding more positive feedbacks.
The one thing we do know is that "stable climate" is an oxymoron. Keeping temps at the same level just isn't one of our choices. So is warmer or cooler going to bring a better standard of living in the long run?
Neither. Our entire civilization depends on how the climate is. Climate shifts, even regional ones, can be quite painful to deal with an historically have caused whole civilization to collapse. And we could have kept things relatively stable if we hd started taking action 20 years ago, but we're way past that.
And is more CO2 going to make it warmer (the simple analysis) or cooler (due to corrective feedback coming sooner)?
There's plenty of peer-reviewed research to answer these questions, but in short yes to the first and no to the second.
And if it's going to get bad, what that cost in $, and what's it cost to avoid some of it in $, and what's the cheaper path?
That's just one aspect that climate scientists are researching. It WOULD have been cheaper if we had started taking steps to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but at this point we're going to see at least a 2C rise (even if we stopped all CO2 production today). There is also little hope for any serious actions to be taken in the near future. We lack the will and global cohesion. Basically, I doubt any serious action will be taken until it "gets bad" but by then it will be far to late to prevent anything.
It amazes my how many people have strong opinions about this, but have never thought about it beyond "man change - man change bad".
Science is not opinion. It is also not a popularity contest. The science shows that the climate is changing. The science shows that this will result in negative impacts. The science, in this case, is showing "man change bad". Make of that what you want.
Creditor, n.: A man who has a better memory than a debtor.