I don't argue with most of this. A few points:

a) Global temperatures have largely levelled off over the last 16 years. Yes, this is also looking at the end of a time series, but over that time global CO_2 levels have risen dramatically. The lower troposphere temperature, as one of the few truly global indicators, is simply not showing the sort of growth it did over the first 17 years, and most of that growth is associated with a single discrete event -- the 1998 El Nino. Sea surface temperatures follow this trend even more directly, being nearly flat on both sides of the El Nino. It is also very, very difficult to separate out the CO_2 derived "warming signal" from the natural rise in temperature the planet has experienced after the little ice age, almost all of which had nothing to do with CO_2. The evidence that CO_2 forced warming is associated with a high climate sensitivity is weak already and weakening further. I do not know what sort of confidence one should place in high sensitivity predictions -- there isn't even good agreement among climate scientists or climate models, and the uncertainty is well-represented in the AR working group reports, just not in their summary for policy makers.

b) The only way to test climate models is to wait for decades and compare them to actual data. This is a test they have not done particularly well with over the last 16 years. In the meantime, one has to assign a lot less confidence to their predictions than is commonly done, given that they are trying to solve what is literally the most difficult problem in computational physics in the world, out to truly absurd future times. Their ability to hindcast and e.g. explain the last 1000 years of climate data is essentially nil. I personally just think that we don't yet know the right physics, or perhaps we do know the basic physics itself but that the complexity of the model is not yet computable. Tiny errors in a highly multivariate nonlinear system can have profound effects the further away you go. I also don't have a lot of confidence in various input assumptions -- not when they are applied to the geological data over long time spans. I think it will take as long as the rest of the century just to get the physics right, and if we were LUCKY we might get it mostly right in 20-30 more years of satellite data (the only data I have a lot of confidence in -- too many thumbs on too many scales in the thermometric record, as evidenced by the increasing divergence between reported land surface temperatures and LT and SS temperatures.

c) We know ice is forming as well as melting. Total sea ice isn't even changing a whole lot, and again it went through a very similar cycle back in the 30's, without CO_2. We simply don't have enough observational data to tell whether what is happening is mostly normal. And nearly all of the observed SLR is from the normal thermal expansion of seawater, and is not happening at an alarming rate.

But the main point is that I completely agree that we need to look carefully at cost vs benefit, based on the actual evidence and not unproven models. The actual evidence does not support drastic and expensive action, it supports research into alternative energy resources that might -- when mature in a decade or three -- be able to reduce the consumption of carbon based energy without causing a worldwide energy depression worse than the problem it seeks to "cure". There is a substantial human cost to most of the steps being taken now to "ameliorate" the problem. In fact, they form a real-time "catastrophe" of their own, one definitely affecting the world right now, not in 80 years, maybe. Every day of energy poverty in the third world is another day of misery, and like it or not, carbon-based energy is cheap and plentiful compared to the currently available alternatives.

Then there is the politics of it all. Nuclear power, for example, could substantially reduce our reliance on coal using well-understood technology -- it is a truly feasible short-term solution. Does that mean that supporters of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory support the emergency adoption of nuclear energy, even as a bridge measure until e.g. PV solar matures or energy storage matures? No, curiously they oppose it almost as vehemently as they do coal based power. Then there is the absurd notion of sending money to countries as some sort of compensation for damages suffered from human-caused warming (as if we can tell what fraction of the warming is caused by humans, which we can't), computed by an equally absurd and arbitrary formula that never seems to look at possible advantages/benefits of the hypothetical warming, only the costs.

It may well be the best possible thing to do nothing expensive until the evidence is clear. In fact, I think it is almost certainly the case that it is. If I'm wrong, we're all screwed anyway no matter what, because if the carbon cycle (Bern) model is correct -- which I doubt -- then our choices really are stop using all energy produced by burning anything now, today, and accept the unbelievably catastrophic cost known as "the collapse of civilization and the pursuit of those who suggested it by peasants armed with pitchforks and torches" right now, or else accept the fact that we've probably already pushed the Earth past the hypothetical "tipping point" to a semi-permanent warm phase, pulling the Earth out of the current ice age, etc.

I really do doubt this -- the Earth has managed ice ages and warm spells with much higher -- and lower -- CO_2 concentrations than we have now repeatedly over geological time -- and we are still far short of the Holocene optimum (which lasted for thousands of years at least a full degree to two degrees warmer than it is now) -- and that is just in the CURRENT interglacial. But we will see.

rgb

One should indeed! One should also be very leary of fitting any kind of fit, linear or nonlinear, to data over only 10-15 years that has varied rather consistently over 140 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise. Personally, I think the figure says all one could possibly need to say. Note well that anthropogenic CO_2 was completely irrelevant over almost all of this time series even according to the IPCC. Note also the overall range of the entire chart, roughly 1/4 of which supposedly incorporates "substantial" anthropogenic global warming -- just under 9 inches in 140 years. Note also that there are several periods with rise rates comparable to the present, for even longer periods, e.g. 1938-1950, where CO_2 was again not a factor even according to the IPCC reports.

It may be absolutely true that global climate models predict large amounts of sea level rise, but there is no actual evidence in the form of large rises in sea level to support this! . Perhaps there will be in the future. Perhaps not. I'm a theoretical physicist, and I just love theories. I'm a computational physicist, and love large scale model computations. But at the end of the day, I'm just a physicist, and the theories and computations have to agree with observation. So far, these do not, not even over the last 140 years, and they don't even give us insight into the large climate fluctuations observed over the last (fill in the blank with any number greater than 1000) number of years.

In the meantime, I work every summer literally living at the edge of the ocean facing straight out through the Beaufort inlet in North Carolina. Although I know that tidal gauge data indicates that there has been a sea level rise there over the time I've been working there or otherwise visiting, I certainly can't see it in my own (literal) back yard, where if there were any substantial and consistent rise -- I'm talking a rise of a few inches -- my back yard would be underwater at high tide. My neighbors have lived in their houses for over 40 years, and (yes, I've asked) haven't observed any rise at all, let alone an alarming one, of the highwater marks on their docks or seawalls (where the tops of their docks would be underwater at high tide if there were any consistent rise). This is absolutely anecdotal evidence, although the ocean being isostatic it is difficult to imagine it going up one place and not everyplace else, but see the curve above for the best global tidal gauge and satellite data in summary.

If you looked at this data and didn't know it was "sea level rise" and destined to rise because of Evil Human Activity -- if you were told it was the sales price of widgets, or the mean length of romance novels, over time -- and were asked "is there a statistically meaningful acceleration in trend" visible anywhere in the record -- you wouldn't even bother to do an actual statistical analysis because the answer is fairly evidently "no". If you were asked to estimate how likely it is that any aspect of this trend would justify a final sales figure for widgets of 48 (9 plus 39 more) in only 88 more years -- that would be over four times the entire growth over 142 years in only 90 years -- you wouldn't hesitate to give odds of 99 to 1 against. Bayesian analysis might alter the 99 to 1, sure (depending on how sure you are about your priors) but not even Bayes is going to comfortably make this 99 to 1 for.

I'm just sayin'...

rgb

(I will now wait for the usual "refutation" of this, the assertion I'm being paid off by the oil industry or the like. I wish. Instead, take due note of my Russell quote, below.)

Go for it. Bear in mind that the actual data is that SLR is around 3 mm/year -- depending on how short a segment of the data you are willing to cherrypick to prove a point. Since the assertion is made above that SLR is supposed to be a meter more than previously claimed -- hence around 2 meters or even more -- and since here we are in 2012 with SLR having gone up a whole inch (to the nearest inch) in the last decade -- we have to take something like 78 inches and split it up among 88 years. Hmm, if SLR went up by an order of magnitude next year we might just make it.

Otherwise, bear in mind that people who currently have beachfront property could die of old age before SLR becomes an issue for them. You (dear reader) could die of old age before SLR gets high enough to realize a profit on land you bought inland anticipating that it would become oceanfront. Or not.

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Does AC have parents? How could we tell? They too would have to be AC. AC is indeed his own Grandpaw. Or hers. Its.

Why is this sad? Was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire sad? The breakup of the British Empire? Relax, pop yourself a bag of popcorn, and enjoy the show -- it's been a long time coming and worth every minute.

Wait, wait! AC is talking to itself again! It's so confusing. Maybe we need "first AC" and "second AC" but no, then I suppose it wouldn't be anonymous. In the meantime, it sounds like AC is very confused...

Oh, I'm not arguing -- a lot of our linux-centric sysadmin folks here like apple laptops, and as you say, they've long since gotten to where they've got a full or nearly full complement of unixoid tools and features and most of the important OSS offerings. Of course, the students I'm referring to are not in your (or my:-) geek class. They just like them because they are thin, cool as in socially acceptable, and work pretty well. I'd say the "work pretty well" is one of the most important things in the list, even.

My own gripes against apple are strictly premium price, the fact that I need cone-head amounts of compute power even on my laptops a lot of the time (e.g. i7 processors and a mountain of ram), the fact that all of my source is written under linux, and the fact that its "coolness" actually annoys me. Oh, and the fact that my wife's iPhone got a SINGLE DROP OF WATER on the charging port, popped the little red tab, and even though it was fully functional (until it ran out of charge) it refused to charge and had to be completely replaced for almost 1/3 of its cost in spite of us having a service plan on it. Otherwise known as "Rip-Off Hardware Design", brought to you by a company eager to take your money in exchange for coolness.

Personally, I like my Casio android phone with its waterproof covers on all ports. You can (reportedly) drop it into a meter of water, pull it out, wipe it off, and it not only works, it works literally untouched. Not that I care to tempt the gods, but all that AND it cost a fraction of the iphone and has all of the android apps available, most for free.

Apple does sell its own version of kool-ade. That's not to assert that sometimes they don't deliver value for money -- it is to assert that they display the same shocking arrogance that any market leader seems to gain when they get on top in the PC universe. All that engineering skill -- so much that they actually bother to engineer in the little red switch! -- but somehow they can't manage to build a charging interface or user interface that a drop of water can't kill.

Or worse, they could easily do so, but prefer to make all of that money when people have to buy second and third iphones etc.

rgb

I was in our local supermall yesterday. They had an interior kiosk set up to sell Surfaces, manned by an easy half dozen earnest young salespeople hired for the season. They didn't have a single customer in view -- not one in all the times I walked by it. Everybody standing around looking bored.

The Apple store about fifty meters away, on the other had was absolutely packed, as it always is, with customers waiting in line. It wasn't even a busy night at the mall -- parking was actually pretty easy for the season.

The really interesting question is -- can Microsoft compete ANYWHERE on a level playing field? If they didn't have the world's computer retailers in a ball-lock with their pricing formula, would they even exist? The answer is not so clear. I've watched student PC and laptop ownership transition from nearly all WinXX PCs to nearly all Apple products in only five years. iPhone, iPad, iPod, thinline apple laptop -- standard operating equipment for current college students. A smattering of Droid tabs and phones in there -- it is the nerd product and also pretty cool. Even linux-based systems -- the choice of the ubergeek -- are starting to compete with Windows systems for a whole generation of kids.

If Valve/Steam works out and games move over the Linux big time, Windows could actually experience the start of its long awaited death spiral.

rgb

Except that you can practice. State learning matters. If somebody DOES drive all the time high, they very likely learn to compensate, but it is those first few times... and too many people would have lots of state learning on "video games". It would need to be a test nobody is likely to be able to practice on ahead of time.

Perhaps a road simulator video game. That would actually make sense. If they can't drive a video simulator well enough to avoid simple road circumstances that might lead to a crash, then they shouldn't be driving no matter what the reason...

rgb

amendment prohibiting redistribution of money to the states

uneven redistribution of money, conditional use of money, surely, but the provision is already there, in the reservation of the powers to the states. The federal government should not be able to coerce any laws out of the states. If they wanted to pass a federal law raising the drinking age, they should have done so. It would have then been challenged, and would have lost the challenge. Using highway funds as an end run around the inability of the Federal Government to pass a law of this sort itself is de facto proof that it violates the constitution.

This isn't about taxation, BTW. One could argue about their right to differentially tax things to accomplish some end as a completely separate issue. It is strictly about bribery and economic coercion to extend federal powers to issues explicitly reserved to the states.

What in the world were they (the SCOTUS) thinking?

I did not know that. Wow, what were they thinking. That is just so wrong.

rgb

Great minds think alike;-)

See my reply to a different reply on the same thread. CAGW is at heart a partly "religious" argument.

rgb

Sure but the public argument is that you are a dastardly fiend for not doing Argon filled glass and a Prius anyway, damn the cost, because the real cost of not doing so is the end of the world when the sky falls and the seas rise.

It's really a strange modern variant of Pascal's Wager -- by making the cost of the "catastrophe" associated with AGW sufficiently great, they create an unlimited bias in the expectation value of outcomes. Even if "catastrophic" global warming is a 1% chance, by making it a million times more expensive (if it happens) than doing nothing, they can make it a 10,000 to one bet that mitigation is the economical choice and justify any investment or political strategy to accomplish it, just as Pascal pointed out regarding the "bet" that God exists -- moderate costs if you bet that God exists and are wrong, but infinite punishments (costs) if you bet God doesn't exist but are wrong (forgetting entirely about the benefits in both cases as well, although they are equally skewed between "none" for the atheist or theist alike if there is no God, "infinitely good" if there is a God and you pick the right God and get into "heaven" for eternity).

Again, otherwise I mostly agree with your reply. Personally, I've got R30 in the attic, low-E double paned windows on the house, and three uber-efficient furnace/ACs doing the three floors of my house, plus a tankless water heater. My energy expenses are indeed about a third of what they were (or would have been, extrapolating usage and prices) and yes, the amortization schedule is long enough that each of the investments will not really pay for the cost of the money in less than 15 to 20 years. That's sort of "break even". A 10 year amortization would be much better. Of the changes, I personally love the windows the most. Good windows matter, and one can e.g. clean them from the inside and they lock securely and have little flip-thingies so that you can leave them open and not let humans raise them fully to get in and they are very, very quiet compare to the old crappy windows we had. And I don't even "believe" in CAGW, and suspect AGW is minimal against the background GW of completely natural origin associated with coming out of the LIA.

As you say, many of the things done won't "sacrifice our economy", and the reason I introduced the extreme version of the argument is to draw attention to the parallel to Pascal's Wager, where a sufficiently large negative payoff justifies any strategy that might avoid it. Similar things apply to the risk of kilometer scale asteroids falling, global pandemics occurring, nuclear war occurring, even terrorism -- make the negative payoff high enough even at low risk, amplify the public perception of risk, and people will cheerfully give up their civil liberties and endure enormous expense and inconvenience to mitigate what is really a tiny risk. We forever lock the barn door once a horse is flown but ignore the open window through which our chickens are about to fly.

I personally would like to see the extreme edges taken off the entire debate. Don't predict meter-high sea level rise (and hence unimaginable "disaster", with unbounded costs) while the actual measured rate of sea level rise has been 9 whole inches since 1870 and is currently around 3 mm a year, or less than 9 inches more by the end of the century (assuming one cherrypicks the least favorable interval to use to compute the rise -- a fairer estimate would be a constant extrapolation of the post 1870 rate). Don't predict the melting of the ice caps (again, disaster) with Antarctic ice on the rise and just about matching the decrease in Arctic ice -- say instead that we don't really understand what and how polar ice is modulated. Don't predict horrible storms and droughts (disaster, worth any amount of money to mitigate) when there is zero evidence of increased drought, zero evidence of increased frequency or severity of storms. All of these things are predicted, but they are not actually happening. There may well be some things that are happening, but they are less catastrophic and hence don't justify the enormous expenses and measures proposed to mitigate them.

IMO sensible things to do about this unknown "problem" are all ones that are beneficial whether or not the problem exists. They include continuing to support aggressive research into energy, especially solar and nuclear (both fusion and alternative fission). I'm up in the air about wind -- there are large problems with wind generation and it has the feel of a technology that is not yet mature being implemented with enormous subsidy, at a loss. I think carbon trading is silly beyond measure and should be abandoned instantly, and the world seems to largely agree as it is being abandoned. I think that it is a mistake to demonize electricity produced from coal and to artificially inflate its price, at the same time I don't think it is good to actively subsidize it. At some point things like PV solar will simply overtake coal as cheaper ways of making electricity, and the problem (if any) will then solve itself, long before the end of the 21st century. If anything, I was annoyed with Obama because he didn't invest enough in developing PV solar, not because he did too much. The problem isn't with the technology, it is guaranteeing the markets. PV solar is already break even to win in many markets, and in a decade it will be an increasing win in almost all markets, taking over a steadily growing share of total energy production worldwide. A breakthrough in battery technology could make the market explode overnight at current costs, as conversion and storage are two remaining major barriers to existing PV (which already costs ~1/watt full retail for large projects, more for consumer projects, just outside of a sensible amortization for me personally).

Drop solar to necessary to set a government policy or take public action to regulate carbon. Why pay money for fuel when sunshine is free? It's the amortized cost of collecting and storing it that is the problem, and that is strictly a technological and engineering problem, precisely the kind of thing humans excel at solving, when they really want to.

So in the end, it isn't whether GW is happening -- of course it is, look at the thermometric record post 1800. It isn't whether or not it is partly anthropogenic, especially when we do not know precisely what fraction of the observed warming is anthropogenic -- almost none of the warming observed before 1950, and post 1950 separating AGW warming "signal" from the natural GW "signal" againstthe substantial natural "noise" clearly visible across the thermal history is "difficult" to say the least and easily biased to agree with prior beliefs. It is whether or not GW A or not will be C. Only CAGW justifies the "at any cost" mitigation that delivers both political and economic power into those who -- curiously -- both are the most vocal proponents of CAGW and the most visible beneficiaries of the money and power used to mitigate it.

rgb

Well, this isn't quite true. If you eat (say) an ounce of high-grade, THC-rich bud mixed into a bowl or two of chili you will learn that a) THC really is a hallucinogen. Who knew?; b) that while you will not be dead (no known fatal dose), you will be pretty much incapable of moving or doing complex anything, inclined to doze off, and quite capable of getting lost walking a few blocks down the street to get home. Been there, done that. The same is true to a lesser extent doing bong hits or smoking joints -- marijuana has a dazzling array of psychoactive compounds with quite different effects and concentrations. The one thing about doing bong hits or smoking joints is that it tends to be self-limiting as one reaches the point of physical impairment because it is incremental, and the time of maximum impairment is relatively short.

So the safest thing to say is that somebody who isn't trying to get maximally stoned and who isn't smoking or eating weed at a rate or in a way that boosts THC up to the levels that seriously mess with your cognitive abilities is likely to self-regulate their high to levels that leave them quite functional and capable of driving with only a slightly elevated risk of accident, equivalent to drinking a beer or two no more. This is, in fact, the rule far more than the exception.

However, one certainly can get truly wasted on marijuana, hashish, pure bud, and even get differently wasted on different variants of weed that have been bred for different concentrations of different cannabinoids.

You, and others reading this thread, might want to take a quite detour through:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabinoid

that works through some of the psychopharmacology of pot. Sound bit facts: The human brain has more receptors that respond to cannabinoids than to components of any other drug or substance. There are many, many such cannabinoids. The brain's reaction to different cannabinoids in different strains of pot is therefore quite different depending on the particular mix and the overall concentrations. For example (from the article) Cannabis Sativa strains are known for their "cerebral high" with relatively little body involvement and leave one reasonably functionally unimpaired, at the cost of introducing a certain amount of anxiety/paranoia. Cannabis Indica, OTOH, is quite sedative and not a good idea for people who have to function while high. These factors are used in the medical marijuana business to literally prescribe different strains of pot for daytime and nighttime use, and is also a major factor in genetic crossbreeding carried out by growers legal and illegal across the country.

A big dose of high-potency Indica strains is not the best thing to take onboard right before you plan to drive through rush hour.

rgb

Ah, silly beanie, video game tests won't work, not for somebody who has "practiced" playing video games high (which would very likely be everybody under the age of 30 and a lot of people older than that).

Back in the days when I used to get high daily I also used to play pinball and ping pong and other games involving nearly instantaneous reflexes in order to succeed. I was truly excellent at both, high. I played the best evening of ping pong in my life high one night, with a friend who was also high. We were literally smashing the ball back and forth at maximum for volleys of twenty or more exchanges at top speed before somebody would miss, looking for a moment like ping pong olympiads. Pinball ditto -- marijuana often increases your ability to concentrate, and does not interfere with your reflexes in anything like the way alcohol (a depressant that will eventually render you incapable of coordinated movement or thought) does.

As I remarked above, "doubling the risk of a fatal crash" is multiplying a number near zero by two, and roughly matches the increase in risk of drinking a single beer. Marijuana is enormously variable, and so the best thing to do is deal with visible impairment and not worry about chemical tests at all.

rgb