Posts by NomNomNom 2280 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Apr 2011
When will fools stop insisting graphs should be plotted with origins (0,0) thinking that this "shows reality"?
Would they also demand biologists stop magnifying images of bacteria because it makes bacteria look bigger and more "scary" than they actually are?
Magnifying the data is exactly what you want to do. Otherwise you can't see the details. Of course with climate deniers that's often their objective.
"Whether the "deniers" are wrong or not, it doesn't matter."
Beg to differ. The difference between catastrophe and non-catastrophe kind of hugely matters.
Although if you are saying that the deniers have no influence on world events, I beg to differ too. While impotent now, deniers did initially aid and abet the crippling of early international emission treaties, at a time when the West had enough influence to have pushed them through. Which has now left the West in an impotent position unable to influence the new big Eastern emitting countries.
Deniers have taken quite the gamble. I am afraid whether deniers win that gamble or not will not be dependent on whether the UK installs a few gas power stations, but what happens to the climate.
Do the order of claims in your comment reflect the order of your reasoning? ie backwards?
That is to say did you start off believing man-made global warming is a hoax? Then were you faced with the awkward situation that climate scientists accept man-made global warming? Perhaps not wanting to claim climate scientists know less than you about climate you've had to conclude they know it's a hoax too, so you've had to go down the path of calling them liars.
Which begs the question why would they lie. So you've come up with a motive involving taxes. Although I believe you've missed explaining step 3:
1. You are a politician
2. Claim to be a climate scientist
2. Get Big taxes on energy
3. ????
4. Profit?
"The second URL debunks the current revisionist nonsense that the New Ice Age wasn't a widespread theory back then. No less than NASA, and the National Academy of Sciences predicted as much."
A new ice age wasn't a widespread theory back then. It is historical revisionism to claim otherwise (along with your revisionism about climategate).
A literature review of papers in the 70s found more papers predicted warming than cooling.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-1970s-science-said-about-global-cooling.html
You'd have us believe that in the 70s there was as much of a consensus for global cooling as there is today about global warming? That flies in the face of the evidence. There was no consensus about a new ice age.
You are also confusing matters. Scientists in the 70s realized that Earth would soon exit the current interglacial and enter a new glacial ice age, but this was a prediction on timescales of thousands of years, not decades. Scientists still today accept that the Earth will enter a new glacial period within thousands of years.
they have these secret invisible black helicopters that are completely silent unlike normal helicopters. If you are out on the street and you listen carefully you can sometimes hear voices coming from high above, but if you look up no-one is there! some people mistake them for ghosts but ghosts are heavier, walk on the ground and if they do talk they rarely say things like "target acquired" and "we've located the disk"
You can still do that kind of stuff with games,
Because minecraft servers send all world blocks around the player to the client, not just the blocks the player can see, I spent a good amount of time trawling through the minecraft process memory trying to identify world chunks so I could find all the diamonds nearby the player and plot them into a bitmap.
I could have instead modified the client but aside from probably being illegal, worse the server would probably detect my client was modified and I would be banned. Easier to just get another process to read into the memory. This wasn't to cheat it was more to see if the concept could work.
"SC2k did simulate journeys to an extent. IIRC from the official guide"
Simulating transport connectivity is necessary for a city simulator. But it is more than sufficient to simulate traffic connectivity at a coarse level like Sim City 2000 did. My complaint is the new Sim City simulating at the per-car level.
Not like SimCity 4. I wanted a continuous single map I could scroll across. Sim City 4 tries to fake that by having a kind of campaign view where you can see all your maps in a grid and so if you want to make a huge metropolis theoretically you can create each part in a separate map. SimCity 4 did have information flowing between neighbouring regions, like crime and pollution levels, but the arbitrary map edge barrier was still there. Closing the map and loading it's neighbor just broke immersion too much for me. I never felt it was the same map/city, but lots of separate ones. Biggest problem for me was I knew neighbouring cities were frozen in time and weren't being simulated.
I realize a massive simulation would be a CPU drain, but that's why I was bemoaning all the focus on simulating finer detail in the new sim cities. If they stuck to coarser simulation level like sim city 2000 I wonder how much larger the supported maps could be.
I haven't personally confirmed this, but I have heard the new Sim City has much smaller maps than Sim City 2000. Likely because they are trying to simulate a whole city at the individual-car level.
What was nice about sim city 2000 was the map was so big you could build 4 separate towns in different parts of the map and link them later. Building a town felt like harvesting a crop. You'd lay down some initial town and then hope/wait for the money to come in so you could afford to expand it. And it was always fun to have some big construction project to save up for, eg an expensive tunnel to build or expensive bridge across a river to construct in order to link two separated settlements, or to get the cash to replace that polluting coal plant with a nuclear one.
Now these games seem to be more focused on flashy graphics and having a "the sims" level of detail where you can follow individual citizens around. I guess most people like that kind of stuff.
I would have preferred if the series instead went down the "bigger maps" route, and made the later game more challenging with a more complex economy where things like recessions could naturally emerge. Having a map large enough to build a dozen huge metropolises miles from each other, linked by super highways with various smaller settlements along the way, would have been really cool.
"to take off on the psychologically gruelling journey to the Red Planet in just five years time. "When you're out that far and the Earth is a tiny, blue pinpoint, you're going to need someone you can hug," he told Space.com. "What better solution to the psychological problems you're going to encounter with that isolation?""
What a load of rubbish. Put me in a room for a year and a half on my own with a PC and copies of Doom, Civilization, Minecraft, etc
Day 207: "Come in Mars Explorer, what is your mission status?"
"Creepers attacked my mine, blew the roof off. Have reinforced the entrance with obsidian. Still looking for diamond. Over."
Day 403: "Come in Mars Explorer, what is your mission status?"
"Requesting mission extension by 100 days to give me time to complete my Aztec empire. Over."
"Yep when the Argo buoys were originally launched the measurements returned were a lot lower than expected so the figures were "adjusted"."
I see. Your dogmatic faith based position has no room for the original, preliminary, data containing errors that needed subsequent correction. Because you liked the original results, therefore any correction away from them must be wrong.
"Extra sunlight does "work" on the system therefore increasing the temperature. Extra CO2 does not do any extra work so does not increase the temperature. Now if you wish to challenge the laws of thermodynamics go ahead."
I have no wish to challenge your lack of understanding of thermodynamics. Anyone who is so foolish as to imagine the greenhouse effect violates laws of thermodynamics is beyond help. You might as well be arguing the Earth is 6000 years old.
"and also please correct for the Argo "corrections""
Correct for the corrections? IOW uncorrect it?
"given radiative energy transfer is the slowest means of energy transfer (or thermos flasks wouldn't work) How can slightly changing the amount of CO2 in a convection current (the atmosphere) change surface temperature? The surface is losing energy at a particular rate (via convection, evaporation and radiation) you slightly reduce the radiative rate - would that not just increase the convection/evaporation rate without subsequent temperature increase?"
The Earth's surface actually loses more energy by radiation than by any other means of energy transfer. For exampe see: http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Atmosphere/images/earth_rad_budget_kiehl_trenberth_1997_big.gif
"you slightly reduce the radiative rate - would that not just increase the convection/evaporation rate without subsequent temperature increase?"
Does extra sunlight just increase the convection/evaporation rate without subsequent temperature increase?
The bottom line is that we have been falsely led to believe Pachauri and the Met Office acknowledged or admitted something they didn't.
Perhaps it's worth exploring what it would be like if it was the other way round.
One day a climate skeptic posts some temperature station data on their blog. They regard it as run of the mill data, but I look at it and think it shows catastrophic global warming. Given it's their data I then go around claiming skeptics have acknowledged (or even admitted) catastrophic global warming. I might, as the Daily Mail did, even claim the skeptics had silently released a *report* admitting this, as if they were trying to hide it. When the reason it was "silent" is of course because the skeptics don't share my interpretation of their data at all and so saw no need to fanfare it.
And when the climate skeptics finally notice a bunch of people saying "Even the skeptics now admit catastrophic global warming!" they put out a statement denouncing my misrepresentation of them and stating they don't actually accept catastrophic global warming. But then I turn round and say "well they would say that wouldn't they!"
And no shit this is exactly how it happened the other way round.
"Why should the world believe a pro-climate change 'railway engineer' over say a sceptical physicist?"
The previous head of the IPCC was a climate scientist, a british one in fact. Was kicked out under pressure from the Bush administration. They wanted a more business friendly chair of the IPCC (ie NOT a scientist). So you get a railway engineer. Although his degree in economics and business background probably was the real reason he was hired.
It's funny how skeptics don't like climate scientists but as soon as you put a business man in place instead they find start moaning how he isn't a scientist.
"Absurd. AGW theory isn't about CO2 IR absorption properties"
Then you don't understand the theory. Simple as that.
"How about co2 change following temperature change"
That's like arguing the hypothesis that chickens come from eggs is falsified by the observation of eggs coming from chickens.
"Pachauri was reported in The Australian" (and so far you haven't cited your source debunking this in the comment above) the Met Office were reported pretty much everywhere"
You mean the Met Office was reported in the Daily Mail, and then this was parroted elsewhere. To which the Met Office responded on their blog saying that they had been misrepresented. To claim the Met Office have admitted or acknowledged something requires the MET OFFICE to have done so. It doesn't mean the Daily Mail or Australian can print rubbish on other people's behalf and then you can go around the internet claiming Pachauri or the Met Office have admitted something they never did.
See skepticalscience.com there is an article there in which they obtained a response from the IPCC office which says the Australian misrepresented Pachauri's views.
"People down voting a post that cites the IPCC's recent acknowledgement of the halt in the rise of global temperature demonstrate this "Reason Denial.""
The IPCC hasn't acknowledged any such thing. Maybe that's why you see the down votes.
"Anyway, my point is that AGW has nothing to test. What can we test that could show the theory is wrong? Please tell me. I asked before in another thread and I'm pretty sure your reply was waffle waffle."
You falsify the IR absorption properties of CO2. Or you can falsify the CO2 rise in the atmosphere is caused by man. Or even falsify CO2 is rising. There are loads of ways you could falsify the theory. The problem though is that AGW is pretty much fact. Rising CO2 has a warming effect, there's too much science behind this. You are unlikely to falsity the IR absorption properties of CO2. It's been too thouroughly tested.
When creationists make the same claim that evolution cannot be falsified, I point out the old one that finding a rabbit in cambrian rock would falsify it. Or finding a transitional fossil between birds and mammals. Etc. But again I point out that the theory is pretty much fact, they are unlikely to find these things.
"What would it take you to disbelieve it? 25 year sof plateauing temps? 30? 15 Winters in a row with no record temps? What? Nothing, right. Because it can't be argued against."
Would 25 years of plateauing temps despite a cooling Sun prove that the Sun cannot cause cooling? Ask yourself how silly that conclusion would be.
"Which the Met Office, Pachauri and numerous others have now admitted have now admitted have not increased for 16 years+"
False. False.
Neither the Met Office, nor Pachauri (and I also question what "numerous" others you are refering to) have "admitted" any such thing. What this is, is climate skeptic spreading false rumors, or propaganda. It's as cheap as old war propaganda. Claim the enemy has deserted and now supports us.
"and yet no AGW theorist will tell us an event that would or even could falsify AGW. That's because it isn't falsifiable, it isn't even a science, it's just dogma."
Kind of hard to take climate skeptics seriously when they are simultaneously arguing AGW has been falsified and can't be falsified. Scroll up for climate skeptics arguing AGW has been "trashed".
This is much like creationists who in their denial are torn between claiming evolution has been disproven and then arguing it can't be falsified.
"What melted the previous ice age?"
Changes in Earth's orbit altering the distribution of sunlight which triggered melting of ice sheets and emission of greenhouse gases which acted as a positive feedback on the warming.
...what you thought there was no answer to your question?
"Haven't you heard? IPCC Chairman Pachauri confirms it: Global warming stopped in 1997!"
Not true. He never confirmed that (not least because it's wrong). The IPCC office says that his views have been misrepresented by a certain Australian newspaper where this "claim" comes from.
Not content with simply denying climate change climate skeptics have recently taken to falsely claiming others are denying it too. It's a sick little tactic.
My first thought was how can these things be weaponized. Depending on how much weight these things can lift, speed, battery life, miniaturization, AI etc these things could eventually render meat based infantry obsolete.
If a state can afford to cheaply mass produce 1000s (or millions?) of such drones armed with blades (like the manhacks in halflife2), or even explosives then they effectively have a form of cheap robotic infantry without having to develop difficult navigation and obstacle avoidance AI for walking or wheel based robots.
Question is for the price of 1 human grunt how many manhacks could be afforded? Given they can be stored for nothing (unlike meat soldiers) I imagine a lot. Defensively they could be scattered around an area to sit idle like landmines, the difference being that unlike landmines they can move in to attack a target. Or they could be used offensively by sending in swarms of them to attack bases at night. I don't see how current ground infantry would be able to survive in an environment swarming with these things. It would be hard enough to see them let alone hit them.
These kind of drones will also be a big problem for counter-terrorism. How is any leader going to be able to do any outdoors speech in the future when an assassin could just release a dozen kamikaze drones 2 miles away?
I can imagine there will soon be an international ban on development of such drones for warfare, because typically when there is a game-changing weapon that is cheap and dangerous the big states ban it. For example using cheap lasers to blind soldiers or pilots is banned, but you are perfectly allowed to blow them up with expensive missiles!
How would you know your machine was part of a botnet these days? Given flash and java are so full of holes, browsers aren't always that secure, anti-virus is not perfect, then all it may have taken is some malicious google ad appearing on some website I visited at some point to have installed some rootkit.
If anti-virus doesn't pick it up then it's hidden. I can't trust any readout from software for what my computer is doing. Internet running slow? I can run netstat to see all active connections, or run wireshark or something to look at packets, but have the underlying network assemblies been tampered with so that certain information is being hidden from me?
The only thing I can think of is to resort to extremes like always browsing the internet under a VM, or setting up another machine as a router so that I can monitor the traffic without fear that some rootkit is hiding stuff. Or reinstall the OS regularly (under the idea that it might help).
Then again there is the tree falls in a forest principle: if I am part of a botnet but don't know I am part of a botnet, do I care?
In 30 years in the UK it will be illegal to build steps outside without putting some kind of shelter above them to prevent rain wetting them. Steps will considered a health and safety hazard in general. Buildings will convert outdoor steps to very long and gentle slopes with soft padding and gripping surfaces as well as erecting shelters to cover them.
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