Posts by Douglas Lowe

Sorry, but this comment is so vague and hand-wavy I have no idea what you're trying to say with it. Can you try again (with proper proof, or references to some proof, for your claims)?

Re: and yet still

Sorry, but you're plain wrong. The euro has got weaker against the dollar, not stronger - it dropped from roughly 1.125 dollars to 1.100 dollars after the referendum.

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=1M

Re: Another remainer...

"I sometimes hark back to the days when the village idiot - or 'natural' would stumble around, get looked after and fed an treated as one would a pet dog, but be generally happy because after all it was a Christian country, and there but for the grace of god...and instead see the mumbling incoherent schizophrenic accosting people in the town centre before being dragged off to who knows where."

I almost took you as a sensible, if on the other side of the fence to me, commentator. Then you spouted this claptrap, and all vestiges of respect for your position that I may have had faded away.

Medieval Britain was not a halcyon period of social responsibility, where we looked after our own with love and respect. Go away and read up on your history (especially on the witch trials that we used to persecute social misfits), don't come back until you actually understand what progress we've made in the last 500 years.

Re: Back in the 70's...

IIRC the new ice age was meant to start sometime before the industrial revolution really got going. I believe it is farming which most researchers credit with stopping us dropping into a new ice age. Which is a good thing, it's just a shame that the burning of fossil fuels threatens to send us to the other extreme instead.

Re: 5c

I'm still using my 3GS - which is still going strong even after getting dunked in the sink and thrown down a couple of flights of stairs (though admittedly with the help of a rubber case). If I upgrade at some point I'd much prefer to have another plastic backed phone, rather than one with a pointless glass back which just something else to break, so the 5c is looking much more appealing than the 5s at the moment (at least until the app designers have had a chance to make proper use of the 64-bit chipset).

Re: The warming has stopped....

It's good to avoid global cooling - and maybe our CO2 emissions have helped us do that - but let's try not to go too far the other way either ;-)

Re: Impartiality and scientific theories

@Christo

Great scientific advances can be made by mavericks who prove the current consensus wrong. However 99%+ of those people who believe that they are such a maverick are just wrong. To the scientific consensus you have to: a) understand the basic physics behind them; b) construct a coherent alternative theory which explains the observed phenomena; c) convince other researchers that your theory is more valid than the currently accepted explanations for those observations.

Most AGW denialists fail at point (a). Of those who have passed that point a few might manage to achieve point (b). But none have provided any theory which survives examination by other experts to achieve point (c). Until someone does that then AGW is the best explanation we have for the observed climatic changes of the last 50 years.

Re: Nice graph, however...

There are natural cycles superimposed on top of the warming that we are causing - however we should also remember that a lot of the air pollution that we were pumping out in the early half of the 20th century formed a hazy layer of aerosol particles which actually had a cooling effect. The clean air laws introduced in the middle of the 20th century did a lot to reduce mortality from lung diseases, but as an unintended consequence they skewed the anthropogenic influence more strongly towards heating the atmosphere.

Re: Upgrade the software, not the hardware

I trust Met Office predictions past 48 hours - but then I use them to get a general idea of what the weather will be like over a period of several days, rather than trying to determine when this evening I'm least likely to get rained on walking the dogs.

Also, increasing the processing power will allow the use of higher resolution models - which are needed if you're attempting to predict (very) localised extreme weather events. Increasing the efficiency of (already well optimised) code will not make the same increase in resolution possible.

pendatically...

...they'll never have left the US either ;-)

stereotypes

In all likelihood that section of the crowd was picked by the journalists for the close-up image precisely because it embodied the stereotype of football fans. Confirmation bias can be very obvious at times in news reports.

No more...

I agree - Lewis Page please could you stop writing these overly optimistic articles about the safety of these nuclear incidents which have not, yet, been bought under control.

At the same time, I'd also like to request that all the media doom-whores out there also stop writing their overly pessimistic articles about these nuclear incidents which have not, yet, caused significant radiation exposure to very many people at all.

Of course, the second request is never going to be fulfilled; as scare stories = big money. So, while I don't fully share with your optimism Mr Page, please do keep on writing these informative articles.

Hype

There have been cases of leaked emails before now which have been hyped up like mad, but have contained nothing but innuendo and a few ill-advised phrases.

What excites the public isn't the same as evidence which would stand up in a court of law.

RTFA

The university subsequently expelled her after she was hounded by the baying mob. This they would be responsible for, and is presumably what the judge set the compensation based on.

Style over substance

Your Mac Air may be slim, but it's got a poor (and non-swappable) battery life. What's the point of a slim-line laptop if you have to keep it plugged into a wall when you want to use it?

From the NYDailyNews article:

"Franklin, who graduated from Duke in 1999 with degrees in biology and psychology, appeared in several YouTube videos put up by Columbia Business School that show her traveling to Africa and offering advice to incoming MBA students."

Doesn't particularly sound like porn to me, unless Columbia Business School are having to branch out in these hard economic times.

Who pays which cost?

Economic development could be hindered by both adaptation and mitigation, neither is cost free. Whichever route is chosen, we should aim to ensure that the brunt of the costs are paid by those who can afford to, i.e. us.

CO2 gas/solute balance

The CO2 content of the ocean is influenced by both the water temperature *and* the CO2 mixing ratio in the atmosphere above the ocean (as well as by the composition of the sea water - but we'll ignore that for now).

Increasing the temperature of the oceans will decrease the amount of CO2 that can be dissolved in the ocean, for a given fixed mixing ratio of CO2 in the atmosphere. Conversely, increasing the CO2 mixing ratio of the atmosphere will increase the amount of CO2 which will dissolve in the ocean, for a given fixed temperature.

So, it's a question of which factor increases most: if it the atmospheric mixing ratio of CO2 then the CO2 content of the oceans will increase; if it's temperature then the CO2 content of the oceans will decrease.

There has been no serious suggestion that CO2 released from the oceans will cause runaway heating, in our current scenario, because it's is increasing CO2 content which is causing the heating. It is possible, though, that in the past rising temperatures have led to the release of CO2 from oceans (causing increases in atmospheric CO2).

The only important effect I could imagine for CO2 release from oceans in the current scenario would be that CO2 release from the oceans after we stop large-scale CO2 emissions *could* extend the period of MMGW influence. But that would depend on the rate of gas-solute exchange (compared to reservoir size), and the comparative rates of CO2 chemical decay in the two media.

I agree...

...it would be great to have the government provide more field work equipment for tracking this kind of event (though I think that we'd be better off having more aircraft, rather than more balloons). However the cost of providing this would be very high, and the equipment would not be as useful for other work if it was required to be readily deployable with 24 hours (our department conducts field experiments in Borneo, Chile, France, etc, as well as ship-based campaigns - none of which would be possible if the equipment and researchers were on call for UK work). If such a network was to be setup it would have to be funded in addition to current research work, it could not be funded by moving money from other projects.

Show all your workings...

"I have read the Russian report on the Russian part of their data"

So, did you read the Russian report critically - checking whether their claims were correct and what impact the supposed errors would have on the data? Or did you accept their claims without question simply because they fitted with your worldview and were written with a little rhetorical flourish?

Well, as I said in the first place...

...it's the content of the documents which matter, not the method of release.

There's issues raised by the documents which do need, and are being, investigated; such as the comments made by Prof Jones on FOI.

However I've yet to see anything come out of these documents which calls into question the validity of the research done at CRU, or the theory behind MMGW.

Please note this isn't a request for links to analysis of single lines of 'dodgy' code taken out of completely out of context - I've see plenty of those already, and none have turned out to have any relevance to anything.