That is a separate discussion. This data release is about weather station data. This was something I am much more familiar with. How the tree ring data was collected and used is outside my field of expertise. If the data was strictly from a single tree, then that would be a severe problem. However, since I generally work from scientific publications and correspondance and not "The Telegraph", I hope you would excuse me from immediately vilifying Dr. Mann and his associates.

I usually don't reply to AC, but what the heck. All of the published methods were reproducible with established datasets, and the "massaging" process was also reproducible. The data being directly massaged into climate data was available (just not "freely" available -- as in gratis). You would have had to pay money to get at that data, just as CRU did for many of them. People did not want to do the legwork that CRU had to do. CRU was more than happy to release the data, but they were contractually bound not to. But when the same people kept on insisting that CRU break the contractual obligations, that is when they got testy.

Right... so, half the energy goes up into space (assuming the simple RTE model) and half goes down to the earth's surface. Let's consider that energy that went up to space as "lost". What about the half that went down to the Earth's surface? Well, some gets reflected, and most gets absorbed. Then, what happens to that absorbed energy? It gets radiated back out to the atmosphere. Some of which passes right through, some of it gets reflected down to the surface (top of the loop again), and some of it gets absorbed (back at the beginning).

This is taught in undergraduate meteorology courses. Graduate-level courses use even more intricate models that account for far more. Were you under the assumption that climate scientists were not "considering both sides of the molecule"?

Yes and no. The data that was already released was the "reanalysis" data which is the culmination of many, many, many observations from all around the world. These observations were all done at different time intervals, with different methods and different instruments. The raw data is nearly useless as it contains faulty data, biases and other effects that have to be accounted for. The work of those at CRU and other places have been to meticulously quality-control and analyze the raw observations down to a uniform grid (spatially and temporally).

In addition to the reanalysis data that was already fully released, much (but admittedly not all) of the raw observational data used to generate the reanalysis data was also already released. The data that was not already released was being withheld by the various organizations that accrued that data (some European countries and such). CRU was not allowed to release that data that they were given access to -- until now.

Personally, I think all data should always be available and most scientists and research groups do abide by this tenet. However, I can't bring myself to hold it against a research unit for being able to obtain some proprietary data and publish results on that information. When I was an undergraduate student, I had the opportunity to work on an analysis of snow storms/ice storms using an insurance company's accident dataset. That is highly proprietary information, and we were very lucky to even get a glimpse of a small subset of this information. If companies thought that one day down the road, some government would come along and force their proprietary datasets to be opened up just because part of it got shared with a public university, then we would never get access to such data and be able to publish useful research based on it. Heck, researchers within various companies would never publish their works either because of that looming threat.

Again, I repeat, I personally believe that all that data should be open anyway, but as a pragmatist, I would rather have some of the proprietary data rather than none.

Wow! A senator (or was he congressman?) managed to get a bomb onto the space shuttle? Who can you trust these days?

Thanks for the Airplane 2 reference.

Actually, if anything, I have always thought that with the way Canoncial was doing global menus, it was actually helping to phase them out. Quite honestly, how often does anybody use the menus in many of the apps? I think LibreOffice is the only application where I regularly use the menu. By moving menus to a global location, and even doing the hiding of it with the window's title really pushes the menu further and further into irrelevance -- which I agree with 100%.

Maybe now, apps won't need to shoehorn in a menu, just because all other applications have them too.

I never claimed it was a fact. Actually, I only claimed it was a corollary that was entirely dependent upon the general radiative transfer theory being correct

Of course there are more players, but that's why Arrhenius's theory calls CO2's impact as an "augmentation of temperature". He didn''t say that the theory absolutely predicts with absolute certainty that the global temperature will rise. He said that CO2 will have a warming forcing upon the surface temperature of the Earth. Indeed, if all else is kept equal, then that will mean an overall warming, but this was climate science at its infancy, and they couldn't have possibly imagine all of the interesting dynamic feedback mechanisms that we have since learned.

And you would be wrong. You simply fail to understand the context that the theory is used in modern day climate science. It by itself does not explain everything, and no climate scientist ever would claim that it does.

I am sorry, but those last two sentences do not make any sense. At first, you seem to concede that CO2 might have some influence, and that the amount of influence is up for debate (a debate you are about 100 years late for), and then you proceed to then claim that CO2 could never play a dominate role in the temperature regulation of a planet (which is patently false due to the plain evidence of Venus).

Actually, it wouldn't be that hard. Depending on what your tolerance is, it is pretty much the same as any other day. Also, keep in mind that most of the time, climate scientists are speaking of average temperature deviation. Areas of cold are typically balanced out by areas of warm.

Ok, I think I see the confusion here. The theory that I am talking about was the general greenhouse effect theory that Arrhenius constructed and used to explain the atmosphere's impact on a planet's surface temperature. From that, he drew the logical conclusion that if his theory was correct, then increasing CO2 would increase surface temperatures.

A theory for each planet and moon is not necessary, as Arrhenius's theory has the conditions of a planetary body as parameters to the theory. As for planets like Mars and Venus, we do have surface temperature measures, albeit not long-term measurements. However, because Arrhenius's greenhouse effect theory was not addressing how the surface temperature will change over time (it was a 1-dimensional, steady-state model), short-term observations would be all that was needed to support or disprove his theory. The moons and Mercury do not need in-situ temperature measurements because their surface temperatures can be measured from their brightness temperatures (they do not have much of an atmosphere). Bodies with and without atmospheres provides the means to test for the greenhouse effect.

keep in mind that his theory was only meant to explain the first-order effects of the atmosphere to the surface temperature. In other words, in the presence of an atmosphere, the average surface temperature is significantly warmer than what the steady-state, thermodynamic equilibrium would allow without an atmsphere. Furthermore, his theory stated that different gases at different concentrations had more or less warming of the surface. Arrhenius's statement of "if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of temperature will increase in nearly in arithmetic progression" is merely a corollary to the mathematical formulation he used for his theory. One way to disprove the statement is to disprove the greenhouse effect (by any gas, not just CO2). Another way to disprove it is to find that the temperature augmentation does not follow this formula in lab experiments.

True, but given that the CFCs-Deplete-Ozone-Over-Antarctic theory has a well-explained mechanism that has been thoroughly tested in the lab and match well with observations, it has become widely accepted as the explanation. Therefore, the hypothesis that the ozone hole is naturally occurring (to this extent, that is) will require an explanation of the mechanisms that could account for the observations we have. Note that there are ozone observations in the antarctic from before CFCs, so differences in ozone observations before and after CFCs were introduced would need to be addressed.

You are right that it is too early to tell for certain that the ozone hole has "recovered". But, do keep in mind that this is slashdot and not your local news channel. This is a first observation, and more are needed over the next few years to even know for sure that that first observation was even right. But it still doesn't diminish the fact that this is an observation. Nothing more, nothing less. Even more obs will be needed over several years to even be sure that it is permanent, but the scientists never claimed it was permanent.

Actually, you have it reversed. The CFCs will eventually break down. They are extremely inert at surface pressures and temperatures (which is why it was ideal for use without health effects). However, at the pressures and temperatures of the ozone layer, and with the level of ultraviolet radiation up there, CFCs do break down. Therefore, a re-established ozone layer is evidence towards CFCs causing ozone depletion, but an ozone layer that does not re-establish itself is evidence that something else caused the depletion. However, even then it would never be 100% for sure, because *maybe* it was a natural oscillation and this was just a coincidence (if it re-establishes itself), or maybe some other agent causes a continued depression of ozone (if it never comes back).

Well, of course we can't just deplete the Earth of its atmosphere in order to satisfy your whims (because that would be the most direct way to support or falsify the theory), but we don't need to. There are several planetary bodies in this solar system with and without atmospheres, and those with atmospheres have different compositions. The temperatures of those planets and moons all match well to the theory put forth by Arrhenius. We have yet to observe a situation where the theory did not hold true. Until that happens, his theory is sound.

Heh, must be a bug in slashdot... your post ended up with the wrong article...

Please!

Note, I was talking about how Ubuntu originally got my attention, 3 or 4 years ago. Admittedly, USB sticks were cheap back then, but I only had a 1 gig stick at that time. At this point in time, they can probably consider going up to DVD sized, but is sticking to a CD size really that onerous? It does force Ubuntu to improve its software download process, and I have seen some nifty features where they are making it easy for users to know what software is available for immediate download and installation. With broadband speeds becoming more common, size limits (whether it is CD or DVD) seems fairly arbitrary.

And like I said, I think Ubuntu is heading towards making DVD sized images available as well as CD-sized "core" installs as well.

I could, but I wanted to have a "Linux-on-a-Stick"-like LiveCD on hand. It has been a very useful tool for diagnosing troublesome Windows and Linux computers where-ever I go. Also, it is useful for doing trial spins of alpha and beta releases of Ubuntu, especially with its persistent storage feature allows me to test the update programs as well. Nothing against PXE, I just find the USB image to be more useful for my purposes. Admittedly, the startup times are killing me...