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Comment Re: Talking about the weather (Score 1) 146

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

Comment Re:I live (Score 4, Interesting) 146

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Comment Re: Vassal state should behave like one (Score 1) 143

Those articles just say that the gap between the richest and poorest in each country is growing, and that the US has a larger gap. The articles are not comparing the countries to each other so there may be different computation methods. In particular the CA article talks about the top 20% (at least for men, I'm going to have to assume for women) while the US graph talks about the top 1%.

It does look like there is better results for American rich, as the US graph allows me to guess as to what the top 20% are:

Top 20% life expectency in CA: men: 83 women: 86
Top 20% life expectency in US: men: 86 women: 87.5

Comment Re:I like that we are going to burn our entire wor (Score 2) 76

I know this is a joke, but waste heat is not what is causing global warming. We would have to raise the amount of energy we are using by some orders of magnitude for waste heat to make a measurable fraction of global warming.

IMHO I hope Google only paid a few hundred dollars for this.

Comment Damn (Score 1) 61

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

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