Posts by MondoMan 612 publicly visible posts • joined 8 May 2007
The white paper provides essentially no details, nor even any information on how the "carbon neutrality" was achieved (offsets? emissions rights?). It does, however, seem quite proud of setting double-sided printing as the default on all the company's printers!
Given that, this article seems mostly content-free; perhaps not writing another such would save a few grams of carbon?
Having now skimmed through the original paper (thanks for the link, Simon!), below is my explanation of what's going on. It's not surprising that Simon and others here have misunderstood the paper, as the climate system is quite complex and our current knowledge of past climate more like peering through foggy muck rather than reading a book in a brightly lit room.
One of the pesky issues that bedevils those who study the history of our atmosphere over geologic time periods is that when global temperatures change significantly, as far as has been determined, this always seems to happen hundreds or thousands of years *before* rather than *after* CO2 levels change, making a simplistic CO2-caused-temp-change mechanism a hard sell, at least to the general public.
In this paper, they (a) use CO2 data from high-deposition core sites (thicker ice per year means smaller time error bars) and (b) infer Antarctic temperature data from a group of cores around Antarctica rather than a single core from just one region. They claim that this approach allows them (using fancy maths) to correlate the CO2 levels and Antarctic temperatures more accurately and with smaller predicted errors than has previously been done.
Their result: changes in CO2 came about 160 years *after* changes in Antarctic region temperatures, plus or minus about 220 years. This is shorter than previously thought. Since 160 years - 220 years is -60 years, their results suggest a small but significant chance that CO2 changes actually happened a few decades *before* the temperature changes.
What does this mean for the current controversy? Not much, directly. However, it places some constraints on global climate models that are different from those previously thought to apply, which in the best of all possible worlds would be quickly used to improve those models and better understand the details of how and why the last ice age ended.
Asiren,
Nope, if you read the article (and are somewhat familiar with paleo temp and atmosphere data), "lag" refers to the delay between increased or decreased global temperatures and the changes in CO2 concentration that *follow*. Check it out, read my more complete description below, or read the paper itself.
The USA has actually significantly increased its forest cover and biomass over the last hundred years. Recent large forest fires have been made more massive and destructive by short-sighted forest management policies that emphasized suppressing all fires, not realizing that fire is a necessary and important part of natural forest life cycles.
Ethnic Estonians are not descended from the Swedes or Finns; however, they are related to the Finns, and their languages are mutually intelligible to some degree. Their main claim to historical fame (other than being the first state victim of cyber warfare) is that they caused the breakup of the Soviet Union merely by gathering and singing in great song festivals.
The Sorcerer -- now that was a sweet computer! User-definable graphics characters so you could set up a small portion of the display as bit-mapped, a ROM cartridge word processor that actually worked better than a typewriter, and the not-so-sweet screeching of a dot-matrix printer.
There are in fact 5 Lagrangian points; the two most generally stable (L4 and L5) are those mentioned in the article as containing the Trojan asteroids. Since the Trojans are clustered in somewhat elongated, curved areas of space surrounding the actual L4 and L5 points, it's probably best to refer to "regions" or "points" rather than "belts", which would imply a complete ring.
Rather than "...the resistivity of the wire *unaffected* by its width..." surely you meant to write that the resistivity *formula* remains unaffected by its width, as the resistivity itself should vary in an inverse linear fashion with the wire's width. The neat finding here is that the resistivity formula still holds for such narrow widths.
From your link: "...it has become apparent that "Medieval Warm Period" or "Medieval Optimum" temperatures were warmer over the Northern Hemisphere than during the subsequent "Little Ice Age", and also comparable to temperatures during the early 20th century. "
They don't have enough data for the Southern Hemisphere to be able to say anything about that time period. Thus, the current evidence is consistent with a global "Medieval Warm Period".
The current difficulty level of mining for bitcoins is so high that using standard CPUs for it doesn't make much sense. Essentially, by the time you get a result from one of your CPU-mining herd, the global mining community will already have moved on to the next problem, and your result will be "stale" or worthless.
Then again, perhaps they are only infecting machines with higher-end AMD graphics cards...
You claim "...the AMS requires more power than any feasible satellite or spacecraft built here on Earth could possibly yield. "
A wee bit 'o checking would have turned up the fact the the old Soviet RORSATs, with their onboard nuclear reactors, not only were highly effective at inducing cataplexy in Greenpeaceniks, but generated more than 2kW of electrical power, and so would have been able to supply the 2kW power need of the AMS-02.
Otherwise, congrats on the creative language use!
"The data was three days old by the time Ehman spotted Wow!, meaning that if it were a message, the sender could have moved on for lack of a reply."
Unless the sender were in our solar system (within a few light-days), it wouldn't be expecting a reply within three days. In any case, they would have had plenty of disco music and bad TV to decipher...
The MM5290 datasheet can be found here: http://www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/pdf/148600/NSC/MM5290.html
Brings back fond memories of doing so many assembler runs on my IBM PC's floppies that the disks wore out! After a while, we only bought Verbatims, since they lasted the longest.
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