Posted: Sun Jul 19, 2009 3:41 am
The solar project was a kit supplied by Bell Labs to get kids interested in technology. It had cup cores for the L (it was an audio oscillator) and you had to wind the coil by hand. Real geek fun.
a discussion forum for Polywell fusion
https://talk-polywell.org/bb/
Was there a climate scare in the 1880's? Do you have any shred of proof for that? Was there another scare in the 1920s?MSimon wrote: We have been having climate scares about every 30 years since the 1880s. Warming, cooling, warming, cooling, warming. Now the PDO changes sign about every 30 years. I wonder if it is just coincidence.
The PDO went negative (cooling phase) a few years back. Probably just a coincidence. Because, you know, the science is settled.
TallDave wrote:1)There could be a LOT more economically viable oil out there. The cheapest oil costs less than $5/bbl to extract, but it's so useful it's competitive at prices up to something like $250/bbl. When it gets over $200 and stays there for a decade, then it's time to worry.
2)Investment in oil infrastructure is tricky. OPEC does its best to keep the supply/price curve in what is a very unstable region. Because of this, price fluctuates wildly with demand/supply shifts. Investors don't want to get caught in 10-year projects that deliver $50/bbl oil when prices could drop close to the Saudi production costs again. Meanwhile, environmentalists do their best to make it difficult to produce oil anywhere but in very poor countries.
3)The same thing happened to uranium. We should be building nuke plants right and left, but again environmentalists have stopped any new plants from being built for decades. Now some mines have closed because only the highest-grade uranium is economically viable, but there's massively more available at higher cost.
4)Climate change, or "global warming" as it used to be called before proponents decided to rebrand it after people started noticing it wasn't getting warmer anymore, is a largely mythical nonproblem; the notion CO2 is driving anything more than a degree of temperature change looks increasingly unlikely,
5)and warmer temps have generally been a boon for mankind anyway.
6)It makes a convenient cause celebre (or perhaps I should say raison d'etre?) for environmentalists because there just isn't much else left to complain about in Western countries: water and air are cleaner than ever.
Dude. You should be ashamed of yourself. Accusing me of making stuff up. You know I have been wildly in error from time to time but inventing facts is not my style. I have a reputation for honesty. I intend to keep it:jmc wrote:Was there a climate scare in the 1880's? Do you have any shred of proof for that? Was there another scare in the 1920s?MSimon wrote: We have been having climate scares about every 30 years since the 1880s. Warming, cooling, warming, cooling, warming. Now the PDO changes sign about every 30 years. I wonder if it is just coincidence.
The PDO went negative (cooling phase) a few years back. Probably just a coincidence. Because, you know, the science is settled.
I don't think your statement that there is a climate scare 30 years and the Pacific Decadel Oscillation has the same period is a coincidence at all. Mainly because I think you've made up the fact that there's a climate scare every 30 years because you know that this is the period of the PDO.
http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2 ... record.php
"But the warmest year globally remains 2005, followed by 1998, 2002 and 2003 and 2004. And the of the 12 hottest years on record, only one -- 1990 -- does not occur in the last 12 years."
From the graphs in this link:
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/
You would expect maximum recorded global temperatures to have occured in 1985 or 1990, you wouldn't expect 2005 to have record temperatures at all... but it has.
He worries that not enough horrid things are happening in the world. A real stand up guy.http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/20/q ... e-week-15/
#2 It’s a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious.
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#3 But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening — you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth — that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.
1) There's just nothing that competes with liquid-fueled internal combustion engines for power/mass ratio, safety, cost, and convenience. It's hard to see how we could ever engineer around all those advantages at once. Maybe it will happen someday, but at the moment it looks like ICE is going to be around for a long time.The reason that oil is competitive up to $250 per barrel is because you can't use anything else for a wide number of transportation functions, this isn't a good thing.
And not only do they have to prove nothing has been left out (see statistical sun above) they have to prove that they have the numbers to sufficient accuracy. Both initial conditions and all the factors (even the climate guys say their models are not good with clouds and that UV radiation is not well done). How is that going to work?Back to Lorenz. Complex deterministic systems suffer not only from sensitive dependence on initial conditions but also from possible sensitive dependence on the differences between Nature and the models employed in representing it. The apparent linear response of the current generation of climate models to radiative forcing is likely caused by inadvertent shortcomings in the parameterization schemes employed. Karl Popper wrote (see my essay on his views):
"The method of science depends on our attempts to describe the world with simple models. Theories that are complex may become untestable, even if they happen to be true. Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification, the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit."
If Popper had known of the predictability problems caused by the Lorenz paradigm, he could easily have expanded on this statement. He might have added that simple models are unlikely to represent adequately the nonlinear details of the response of the system, and are therefore unlikely to show a realistic response to threshold crossings hidden in its microstructure. Popper knew, of course, that complex models (such as General Circulation Models) face another dilemma.
I quote him again: "The question arises: how good does the model have to be in order to allow us to calculate the approximation required by accountability? (…) The complexity of the system can be assessed only if an approximate model is at hand."
From this perspective, those that advocate the idea that the response of the real climate to radiative forcing is adequately represented in climate models have an obligation to prove that they have not overlooked a single nonlinear, possibly chaotic feedback mechanism that Nature itself employs.
"In particular, I have wondered how the current global average can even be compared with that of 1987, which was produced using between six and seven times more stations than today."MSimon wrote:
A scientific look -
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/20/a ... record-is/
it explains how the GISS temp record is corrected. It is real ugly.
Very good question. I think it wasa pointed out in the comments that the number of stations does not meet the Nyquist Criteria for spatial resolution.jmc wrote:"In particular, I have wondered how the current global average can even be compared with that of 1987, which was produced using between six and seven times more stations than today."MSimon wrote:
A scientific look -
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/20/a ... record-is/
it explains how the GISS temp record is corrected. It is real ugly.
Why would there be more weather stations around in 1987 then there are today when interest in climate change has increased?
Not quite sure how important power to mass ratio is considering you don't actually want to release all that energy in the shortest possible time in anycase (i.e. by exploding to fuel in the tank of your car) electric cars can reach 50 mph easily and soon 70 or 80 mph should be routinely attainable. That is enough for many applications.TallDave wrote: 1) There's just nothing that competes with liquid-fueled internal combustion engines for power/mass ratio, safety, cost, and convenience. It's hard to see how we could ever engineer around all those advantages at once. Maybe it will happen someday, but at the moment it looks like ICE is going to be around for a long time.