Posts by Steve Crook
271 posts • joined Thursday 17th January 2008 20:54 GMT
Re: Scientific Theory
What has been missing until recently have been the scientists who had access to accurate data that would let them challenge some of the more uninformed guesses that were common during the 90s. This paper is one of several published recently that chips away at the idea of catastrophic climate change.
Each time a paper shows that it's not as bad as we thought at first, it reinforces the opinions held by many economists that the measures being taken to mitigate climate change are almost certainly more costly than adapting to whatever change we will see.
What will be most interesting will be to watch the reaction of the 'climate establishment' as they try and spin these results into "nothing to see here, move along".
Range anxiety
It might have the potential to fix that, but there's still a lot to be done to sort out the infrastructure required to make EVs viable. We needed to install a lot of charging posts and make sure there's the generating capacity in the grid.
Re: Happy with mine
I can't wait. There I am in a flat and the people above me are making use of cheap night time electricity and do a load of washing at 03:00. There are *always* unintended consequences.
The Three Rules of Training
1. It's not an appropriate course for you to go on now as it's not really related to your current work.
2. It's an appropriate course, but at the moment you're fully committed to your current project and we cannot afford to lose you for training.
3. It would have been appropriate for your last project, but we feel you've gained all the relevant experience on the job and this course is not required.
So much for training....
Posted in Outback geothermal plant goes live
Hollywood got there first
I'm sure that there's no similarity between this and "Crack In The World". Really sure.
Re: Surely this is all recorded
And there was me thinking that the "I'll get my coat" was going to be enough of a clue...
Surely this is all recorded
on the Wayback machine?
Re: Green Tax Refund
That 10% (when I looked at my last electricity bill, it was 12%) is the direct cost to consumers 'at the pump'. Companies are also being charged extra, and they're not going to just absorb all that additional cost are they? No, they pass it on the *us* as increased prices *and* we pay VAT at 20% on that price increase.
So the true figure is probably closer to 20% than 10%. But honestly, who knows? I'm sure that it's possible to squeeze the figures to extract whatever truth one requires :-|
The board has rounded corners
Surely that's just asking for a lawsuit.
Re: All the news that fits the agenda
Glad to see you've read the article and almost understood it :-)
It's not ok to continue emitting CO2 at the rate we're doing, but it does mean we don't have to go cold turkey to get off CO2. For which we should be very grateful.
Per doubling
@nomnomnomnomnomnomnom
I think that the relationship between CO2 and its direct heating effect is logarithmic, so the base rise expected from the second doubling of CO2 will be much much less than the second. What feedback will add to it, who knows?
You ask sceptics to accept that co2 is the main driver of warming. I'm not prepared to do that until there's more research that provides a better quantification of anthropogenic effects such as land use change, aerosols and soot pollution as well as some other non anthropogenic causes like cloud formation. Once we have more reliable data for these, then I'd be happy to accept that we know exactly what's going on with the climate system.
It is becoming apparent that we were misled during the late 90s and the early part of this century. A lot of people made predictions that have been shown to be false. We were *assured* that the science was settled and government policy changed as a result. Well, now we that that the science isn't settled.
When someone produces a verifiable explanation for the divergence of measured surface and tropospheric temperatures from model predictions I will be more impressed. Then, someone will also have to explain to me why, when the science was settled, we need this new explanation at all...
Re: Are biofuels Europe's sh*ttiest idea ever?
"by growing interesting new crops on land that cannot be effectively used for other food production"
I think that was what the green groups had in mind in the first place. Trouble is, land that's not fit for growing food crops is generally not fit for growing crops of any sort at a commercial yield.
The reason that they're using palm oil, maize and rape etc for bio stuff is that it's relatively easy to get from plant to fuel. The farming process is already industrialised and once harvested, the route to ethanol or whatever is relatively uncomplicated and again, has few technical hurdles to overcome.
If you want to reprocess waste, generally someone has to sort it and do more work to get it into fuel, and usually at lower conversion efficiencies. This means that the processes would require even more subsidies to get anyone interested in investing it.
Not quite...
But it's up there, floating with some others I can think of.
It's particularly interesting to see the volte face performed by green groups as this train crash has occurred. I'm sure they'd argue that the policy implementation was not what they wanted and outside their control. Well, welcome to the world of unintended consequences.
What's most irritating is that it's not stopped them from proposing other equally doubtful policy ideas, all with the best possible intentions of course, but flawed none the less. Still, it's easy to propose policy, when you have no responsibility for delivering it and can pretend it was never your idea when the hit hits the fan.
Saint Zuck?
Rude but honest?
Punch the opposition in the face? This *must* be 'the plan' in most boardrooms. They just make sure no-one is off message outside the boardroom when the appearance of 'doing no evil' has to be maintained.
+1 for being honest. But I still hope HyperCompuGlobalMegaCorp have to cough up a substantial sum.
Not according to Beddington.
On Today BBC R4 this morning he was asked about the cold wet weather we've had and how the forecasts were for warmer and drier. He couldn't bring himself to deal with it and only wanted to talk about extreme events, so he ignored the question.
Which is exactly what I'd expected. I don't have a problem with forecasts being wrong, but these were handed to us with the full authority of the scientific establishment and were given the weight of being near incontravertible fact. Poicy was based on them, why else did we run out of salt when we had the first cold winter à couple of years ago.
Just like frakking...
Seems to me that you could apply these arguments to almost anything new being done where there was an organised group campaigning against it.I suppose it's a bit like a reverse placebo effect... Probably file under more research needed.
Re: The politics of it
It's the monomania with CO2 and feedback effects that's the problem.
Land use change also has a significant impact on on climate. You can't just build thousands of 100sq mile conurbations and cut down trees to grow crops that require irrigation without seeing changes in climate. The focus on CO2 has distracted effort in trying to gauge the significance of these effects. Consider the increased rain run-off from cities and towns, it goes to the sea when much might have been absorbed into the ground. How much contribution to sea level rise does that make? Recent papers have shown irrigation run-off as a significant player in sea level rise.
Ever wonder why we don't hear much about Kilimanjaro's shrinking glaciers any more? It's because all the evidence points to man made deforestation being the cause, not temperature rise.
The real debate is over the scale of these effects compare to that projected for CO2 from models. Remember, on it's own, doubling CO2 will give around a 1c rise in temps and everything else is feedback from that rise. Recent papers have pointed at a significantly reduced climate sensitivity.
The science isn't settled.
Re: Low lying inhabitant
@NomNomNom Those satellites and buoys you refer to show that sea level rise has remained at a low constant rate for many decades and will have to increase rapidly over the next 5 decades if IPCC forecasts are to be met. Recent papers have also attributed a significant portion of seal level rise of the last 100+ years to irrigation run-off, and, while that cause is still anthropogenic, it has little to do with CO2.
Re: Scientific Terminology
It would be odd if the changes in Arctic ice didn't have an effect on climate. The interesting thing is why the ice is disappearing. There are three factors, AGW, natural variation, and soot pollution. There's good body of peer reviewed evidence showing man made effects are the dominant cause, but recent work indicates that soot may be playing a much larger role in summer melt than had been previously assumed.
If soot is a significant factor it's a problem that is a piece of piss to fix compared with trying to prevent more CO2 getting into the atmosphere.
Posted in New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083
Even if it works
I'm assuming there will need to be a full scale demonstration plant built, tested and certified. So it's years if not a decade or more away from commercial deployment. It's not going to be the thing that gets our government out of the hole it and its predecessors have dug, because long before its available we'll probably be having scheduled power cuts and a government telling us that it's good for us and that we're helping save the planet.
Re: But we were told it was going to get drier...
@AC You weren't listening. OFCOM are interested in intensity, but the rain gauges were also measuring QUANTITY.
To quote "and shows rainfall increasing across almost all of the UK with only a few bits of Cornwall getting drier"
And, as another commenter pointed out, the meme has changed as often as the weather. First it was hotter and drier in the UK (particularly in the south) with snow being a distant memory for all except those in the far north of Scotland. Then, when it snowed we were told that, yes or course melting Arctic ice was always going to cause colder winters because of jet stream effects. Then when we had a very wet year we were told that, overall, rainfall wasn't going to change, but it would be delivered in more extreme events.
Normally, I don't object to people getting things wrong, but when I'm beaten around the head with today's truth and am called a 'denier' because I say "show me", I deeply resent being expected to blithely accept another truth that conflicts with the earlier one and still be called a 'denier' when I quite rightly say WHAT THE FUCK.
But we were told it was going to get drier...
We've had a decade or more of being told in no uncertain terms that climate change meant that, on average, the UK would be getting drier. Plant drought tolerant gardens, gravel not grass we were told. At the same time we were told this, the data from these rain gauges was accumulating (sorry) and giving a completely different story.
I wonder if this data has surfaced because it fits comfortably with the last year of heavy rain and the changed stance of the met office.
Posted in Arise, Lord BONG
Blond Prong
Oh how I laughed.
But she's still a baroness, and still pouring poison in the ear of the gubermint and being well rewarded for it. I suspect she'll have the last laugh while I end my days on one of those horrible council estates she knows fuck all about.
Hindenburg + Hydrogen = ?
As far as I was aware, the Hindenburg was undone by the aluminium paint that was applied to its fabric covering. Static discharge from the tethering pylon caused the coat to burn (turns out it burns really easily). AFAIK there's no such thing as a hydrogen fire, it's generally a bang rather than flames...
Re: Reason for an older couple?
I asked Brigitte and at first, she thought I was joking, then NO! (please imagine double underline, italic and a much bigger font). I suppose I was unsurprised, and will console myself with the thought that they probably wouldn't have accepted us anyway....
Re: Too late
Mono. Last I looked, there were still some bits missing, and I've never had a reason to use it, so I'm not sure just how cross platform it really is. It seems to have suffered the same issues as Java when it comes to GUI toolkits (fragmentation). Impressive none the less.
In a world a long long time ago
I worked at a local authority, programming on an ICL2900 (in COBOL too). We had plenty of outages, but the guy responsible for keeping the 2900 up and running was always quoting up times of well over 90%. Then we found out that as far as he and his stats were concerned 'up' basically meant the power switch was in the 'on' position.
Ahhh, how we laughed...
Morons, dickheads and anything else you can thing of...
It goes to show that it's not just the fruity firm that have a hunger for this sort of conflict. I wonder if there's a virus that's going round infecting corporate types and causing their egos to swell even further to the point where they really believe this sort of shit. I assume they'll eventually drop it and say that it was all a big mistake and that amazon over-reacted. Perhaps Games Workshop will respond and explain their behaviour? No? I thought not...
Re: An avoidable tragedy
It always seemed to me that the risks were acceptable. The 'nauts knew what they were getting into and were brave enough to decide it was worth it anyway. I was sorry for them and their families when they died, but I thought there was far too much fuss made. I'm aware that there were faults in the way NASA operated and they directly caused the deaths of the 'nauts, but NASA needed to fix the problems and we needed to move on.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of colonisation, how many lives were lost in building the US through failed expeditions, sunk ships, disease and the rest? Many thousands undoubtedly, but people still went because the rewards were high enough. If we're going to go out into the solar system and do stuff, lives will be lost, probably hundred or thousands if we get serious about it. But there will always be volunteers because for some people the rewards will always outweigh the risks.
If they were looking for old farts to go on a Mars mission today and there was only a 1 in 10 chance of a safe return, I'd accept an offer of a place. Obviously I'd be expecting at least get to Mars, but I'd take the chance of not even making it into orbit and I wouldn't expect a memorial...
Re: A golden opportunity
Off you go then, let me know how you get on...
Re: Hong Kong @ AC
If I ever reach the exalted state of Benneton and have enough cash to spare to be able to fund an F1 team I probably shouldn't be worrying too much about a guy on the street selling shirts. In fact, if he's got that much cheek and enterprise, I might do well employing him somewhere...
Develop a sense of proportion.
Hong Kong
Some years back I was there, and two doors down the road from the Benetton shop there was a guy selling Benneton rip offs (of good quality). To wrap up the deal, he'd put them in a Benetton carrier bag.
I hope he's a millionaire by now...
The equivalent of sending a gunboat...
We used to send a gunboat and shell the offending <insert your offensive adjective here> when they upset the Empire. This is no different. It should be a reminder to the US and others that the Chinese are flexing their muscles on the global stage and would be quite happy (and capable) of continuing this sort of low level attack if it silences criticism and inhibits competition in areas close to their hearts.
While I don't entirely agree with the current US, Indian and Japanese paranoia about Chinese manufactured hardware, this isn't exactly going to calm fears.
Libre Office does it for me...
It doesn't do as much as MSO, but it does enough, and I can live with the quirks. When I used MSO at work there's rarely (if ever) anything that couldn't be done with Libre Office...
Re: Ughhh
I thought the Abrams Star Trek was brilliant. It managed to simultaneously keep all the original characters and their traits, and at the same time give us a completely different universe for future films. If Abrams can work similar magic on the Star Wars franchise I'll be surprised, will Lucas really be able to let go?
Still, anything that gives us a decent story and dialogue will be a good start. I thought that generally star wars films were at best mediocre and at worst, something close to Plan 9 with top of the line special effects.
I see what you did there...
You quoted the bit where the paper forgot that it was a science paper and switched to making policy recommendations.
Fact is, that there are a lot of papers popping up that indicate that the climate sensitivity is somewhere between 1.6-2c and this is good news if true.
Perhaps then we can concentrate a little more on lifting the majority of the worlds population out of poverty, making sure they don't die of stuff we can already cure or from drinking dodgy water. We can save millions every year *now*...
Re: Nasa scientist says this decade warmer than last
There's this quote:
"The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing."
Which comes in a paper from the well known climate change denier James Hansen, so which NASA scientist were you thinking of?
Re: Graphene = crap
Nope, not crap, it's a solution to a problem we haven't discovered yet or a solution to a problem we have, but no-ones thought to try using Graphene or nanotubes. Timing is everything.
Re: Gosh
"Linux desktop going mainstream?"
Whoaaaaa there, steady on, lets not get carried away...
Good news and bad news
It's good news they built a better model, and bad news that they'd prefer us not to have seen the results. However, if, the new prediction is accurate, and we really have had a 20 year period without a significant rise in temperature, then climate scientists will have one important question to answer:
If natural cycles can completely mask the global warming signal for 20 years, is it not likely that they can *enhance* the global warming signal for a similar period?
My guess is that a significant portion of the warming of the 80s and 90s will turn out to have been caused by natural cycles, and that when they're accounted for we'll end up with a climate sensitivity of ~2c for a doubling of CO2 over pre-industrial levels.
I think the main purchaser of the Kingston will be...
Local government and the civil service. Now, they'll be able to lose all their databases in one go having made sure they're unencumbered by encryption. They won't even have to do an extract to be able to fit the information on the drive. Or am I being unduly cynical?
When the price has dropped below £100 (I'm not holding my breath) I'd definitely be interested in using one for offsite backups. I can post them to friends for them to keep for me. Encrypted of course.
Re: Too funny!
Spot on. It's beginning to look as if the GCMs have been over estimating the cooling effects of particulates and aerosols by quite some margin.
Even the AR5 draft contains statements that indicate the IPCC is now expecting rises to be at the bottom end of the range predictions. Their graphs also show that current measured temperatures are in fact bumping along right at the bottom of model predictions and could fall out of range entirely if this period of stability in global temperatures continues, or even moves toward a slight decline over the next 5 years.
The GCMs are looking increasingly fragile and that's a big problem, as trillions of dollars are going to be spent on the basis of their predictions. So big a problem in fact, that I suspect everything possible will be done to avoid having to admit it.
Re: Ironic!
Awwww evil old Google beating up on poor wittle Micwosoft. There there poor baby, console yourself with the thought that you're a big fat corprate bastard that's been kicking sand in the faces of smaller guys for years so it's about time you got yours. I'm old enough to remember FUD and Astro Turf. Stop whining and innovate!!!!
Nice try, probably no cigar
If there's something between a niche and nothing at all, then that's the market share that this will have unless Ubuntu manages to conjure a fully formed and very well stocked app store at launch. Happy to be proved wrong, but atm this just has FAIL written all the way through it.
Better than nothing at all...
So, what they're really talking about is the so-called Heuristic scanning that's supposed to nip infection in the bud, and the responsiveness of the vendors to update signatures when a virus is found. Everything else works pretty well by the sound of it...
Given some of the problems we've seen with rouge scanner updates trashing legitimate OS components, I'd rather they took a little time to do the testing to make sure it's not going to brick my OS. I try to be careful in what and where I visit, so I hope there's not too large a window of opportunity.
As for the heuristic rubbish, did anyone really believe that worked in anything but the simplest cases?
Re: Cheap, effective justice = DMCA takedown
@Eddie Edwards
Tell us more about it if you can. I'd be interested to know what you did and, if it cost you money, how much....
OMG!!!!
Someone exploits browser plugins loophole? Well, I never saw that coming. It was just so unexpected I can see why the Google overlords haven't put this protection in until now...
Re: Malthus was right, sort of...
That bit about being a neo-liberal was actually tongue in cheek...
The truth is, none of us knows what the resource limits are. Two years ago, we were being assured by all and sundry that we were at, or had passed, peak oil and the greenies were assuring us that we would be saved from heat death because even if we wanted to burn it, there simply wouldn't be enough oil and gas to go around. Now, they're having to resort to FUD because shale is being exploited.
Given that these limits are still unknown, it would be wise to tread carefully and make the best use of what we know that we have. But I don't think we should fetter growth because of a fear of what we don't know, or at least can only guess at.
Re: Malthus was right, sort of...
I'm not saying that we shouldn't be concerned or that resources are infinite. The market ensures that if the price for something rises due to shortage, people will start to look around for ways to make consumption lower by efficiency, look for alternatives to the resource, exploit previously uneconomic reserves *and* use less, all because the price is too high. Then the price drops. The end result is that, generally, we're all still living the same lives, but that resource, whatever it is, is going further.
It's actually a rather cool feedback mechanism, and one that seems to be horribly underestimated/misunderstood by many politicians.
Re: Uhm..
It is that black and white if you just consider the market for rare earths. Plainly they didn't understand it. In any event, the rare earth monopoly was merely a step on the way to the main event, the complete control of global manufacturing of the commodities that rely on rare earths.
Thankfully, that's proved to be a bust. Long may it continue.
