Does an ancient cellular proton transport mechanism that has a component that rotates on an axle count?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-ATPase

Drought isn't just about precipitation. A warmer climate might mean more rainfall (eg. flash floods), but also that rainwaters evaporate faster, so that when it doesn't rain, lands become drier faster.

Both are problematic.

Also, precipitation that now comes down as snow and get released slowly in snow melts in the warmer months would in the future just come straight, exacerbating flooding in some areas, and again affecting the consistency of water supplies.

Don't you meant to citizens, or to voters? If a public servant's responsibility is to tax payers, your voting power would have been proportional to the amount of tax you pay.

First you say the atmosphere is too complex to model, then cite an article that uses an even simpler model with its own projections. A bit of a double standard if you ask me.

But fine, let's go with it. What do the calculations regarding double CO2 actually say?

Sounds right - or does it?

Well, the amount of energy absorbed by the entire atmosphere doesn't change much - I can grant that much. This is because as you get higher into the atmosphere, because of all the CO2 below you, there isn't much heat coming out for you to block further anyway - hence the extra blankets analogy - the extra blankets don't do much more.

However, the analogy is wrong.

The problem is, it is calculating the total absorption of the entire atmosphere and then calibrating it against the surface temperature changes (which is totally unrelated). It doesn't matter to us how much the total temperature of the atmosphere increases. What matters is how much the surface temperature increases, because that's where we live.

It mentions earlier:

Let's say 5km of atmosphere is capable of absorbing 100% of the heat energy. If you double the CO2, then the same amount of energy is absorbed in the bottom 2.5km. If you double again, then the same amount of energy is absorbed in the bottom 1.25km.

If 1.25km of atmosphere absorbed 5km worth of heat, that's 4 times the amount of heat as before. As we double the CO2 concentration twice, the amount of CO2 is 4 times more.

In other words, the surface temperature increases mostly linearly. That the total atmospheric temperature increase is logarithmic because more and more of the upper atmosphere is getting colder is immaterial. We don't live there!

The article is intentionally confounding two unrelated concepts to fool you into believing it.

I say this because earlier in the article, it said

So they know this, yet still manage to overlook it in their model.

No, I wasn't proposing that trillions should be spent. I was using the fact to illustrate that the amount of political will or political commitment to solving the problem of climate change pales in comparison to that of solving the global financial crisis.

A couple of problems:

1. The US and other nations didn't have trillions to spend on fixing the global financial crisis either. But the trillions were found nonetheless, whether from debt or relaxation of fiscal policy.
2. It would still be cheaper than finding accomodation for dislocated climate refugees and dealing with resulting social problems.
3. Spending money is not the best way to fight climate change in any case. It's much better to raise a carbon tax and use the revenue to cut other taxes. As there is no net tax revenue change, there is no net effect inflationary or deflationary effect on the economy, but it introduces the incentives for investment new technologies. In no way does fighting climate change require killing an economy.

The US doesn't have to sign up to Copenhagen to act. All I want is for the US to act seriously. How it does it is immaterial to the rest of the world - only that it does. A number of European nations have long ago enacted a carbon tax for instance without any agreement or damage to their economy.

That was never what I proposed.

Neither does the vaccuum of empty space.

Why you would compare the glass of a glass house to the atmosphere is beyond me. The air contained in a glass house convects. The air in the glass house is a more appropriate analog to the atmosphere is it not?

Hurricanes would likely fall under that category.

Not straightward isn't the same as not true.

You don't get convection without a temperature gradiant, so the existance of more convection presupposes that a temperature gradient has already become exaggerated, one manifestation being that the surface temperature has already increased.

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/2005_warmest.html

As I understand, solar activity correlated for most of the time we have direct temperature records, but the correlation diverged markedly in the last two decades. Solar activity having reduced in that time is unable to explain the continued rise in temperature. http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm Solar activity is therefore not something I can use to explain currently warming trends.

The "greenhouse effect" in any sense of the word not a closed system. Even a glass greenhouse has external energy input via sunlight and output via the gradual dissipation of heat into its environment via the contact of glass with air. The distinction is false.

As if changing the world economy is a bad thing. The standard of living of billions of people is already poor and developed nations grapple with traffic congestion, pollution, rising grocery prices due to poor planning and energy security. Trillions of dollars were spent on saving the economic system from collapse and bailing out banks to preserve a world economy that didn't work particularly well. Commitments to save the planet pale in comparison by orders of magnitude.

By which time projections say we will be too late.

Type inference makes anonymous types more useful.

For instance in Scala I could do this (this is the Scala interpreter by the way):

scala> class A {
          | val value = new {
          | val x = 1
          | val y = 2
          | }
          | }
defined class A

scala> new A().value.x
res10: Int = 1

scala> new A().value
res11: java.lang.Object{def x: Int; def y: Int} = A$$anon$1@bc9f8fb

In other words, in Scala, type inference wasn't just allowed on local variables. It was allowed on methods and fields too. This makes it possible for me to store the value, {x = 1, y = 2} of an anonymous type in a field for reuse.

This is impossible to do in C# and it means I can't store results of Linq queries somewhere in a typesafe manner for later use as well.

Plus Scala has an interpreter and can be a scripting language. A scripting language that has access to the Java class library is really cool.

I'm surprised JScript.net isn't a scripting language given its name. I can't just put JScript.net code into a *.js text file just run it without compilation.

This is a poor effort on Microsoft's part.

<i>I'm not sure what you mean by "class method return types" in regards to type inference.</t>

Something this:

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/127

C# let's me use anonymous types, but I can't return them from my method. How sucky is that?

I was initially excited by .net when it was first released and have preferred it over Java, which as a language seemed to have stagnate. Now, I am finding C# quite a disappointment with Microsoft not investing the time and energy to ensure the features they add to the language are polished:

* Adding extension methods without also adding extension properties
* Refusing to implementing covariant return types
* Adding type inference, but disallowing it for class method return types

As so forth. Microsoft simply doesn't have the discipline to finish any feature addition to the language before moving to the next.

That doesn't mean I prefer Java either. I only use Java and C# at work out of necessity.

My language of choice is now Scala.

Funny how you so easily dismiss the tree ring data, but desperately latch onto the sunspot data as if it was proof of the causation between solar activity and temperature.

Guess what? It diverges too:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm

Recent data totally disproves your thesis that solar activity is the prime driver of climate change in recent history. Yet the meme persists in climate skeptic circles and highlights the bankruptcy of the movement.

Tree ring data however is not settled yet. The divergence happens in some trees - especially in those found in the northern hemisphere where the majority of the world's population lives, but not in the southern hemisphere. It is certaintly plausible that human activity is causing the divergence, and if so, the tree ring data would be likely fine in a pre-industrial era.

We don't know for sure, but a person genuinely interested in the science would want to know why - perhaps even favoring more funding to investigate the discrepancy.

Yet instead of teasing out the real cause of the divergence, you'd rather have all tree ring data tossed out so that we can never know the truth.

That there exist people who think that way is truly sad.

"when there are billions of dollars riding on cap & trade and the whole green industry behind it"

Funny. I could have sworn, I read something about a leading climate scientist opposing cap and trade in his fight against global warming.

http://www.georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/12/worlds-leading-global-warming-crusader.html

Just because there are billions of dollars to be made, doesn't at all mean the climate scientists are the ones to pocket any of it as part of *any* action against climate change.