OT: Hot, Flat and Crowded

I've just got through Thomas L. Friedman's book "Hot, Flat and Crowded" ISBN

978-1-846-14129-4.

Eeyore wouldn't like it. Friedman - correctly - takes anthropogenic global warming as an established fact, though he does say enough about it to make it clear that he has done his homework on the subject, and proceeds to discuss what we've got to do to adapt our society to deal with this and related problems.

George Monbiot's "Heat" fits the same description, but where Monbiot is mainly interested in the technical details of the mechanisms that will let society continue to work while burning carbon at between 2.5% (American and Australia) and 5% (Europe) of the current rate, Friedman is primarily interested in the ways we can encourage technologists to invent and market the necessary clean hardware in sufficient volumes to bring its costs down to levels where it can compete with existing power sources, both in terms of dollars per installed kilowatt and dollars per kilowatt hour

He's a strong proponent of the tax and subsidise approach, which the Germans are using with some success to persuade people to buy and use wind and solar power units and plug them into the power grid.

Happily, the right-wing nitwits who object to this kind of government intervention in the free market don't believe in anthropogenic global warming in the first place.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Reply to
Bill Sloman
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Anthropogenic? Only GW religious fanatics belive that.

Reply to
Raveninghorde

Boring, fat, and unemployed.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

And that is just his ego. :(

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

You've got to be very dumb to believe that sunspot numbers explain the recent warming, and very ill-informed to believe that the evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming was revealed by revelation.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic if you don't understand the technology involved, and claiming that a belief in anthropogenic global warming is necessarily based on some kind of religious faith just demonstrates that you don't understand the technology involved in collecting the evidence.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
bill.sloman

Boriing? You responded to it.

Fat? My BMI is 24.1 which isn't fat.

Unemployed? I'm 66 now, which means that I'm retired - whether I like it or not (and I don't - but while I do keep on applying for jobs, I can't say I'm all that optimistic about getting one).

Your batting average isn't impressive.

Reply to
bill.sloman

Michael Terrell suffers from the depressing kind of egomania that lets him think that his unsupported opinion is worth posting. He seems to gets his kicks by posting me-too's to our collection of right-wingers.

Maybe one day he will have something interesting and unexpected to say, but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not holding my breath.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
bill.sloman

Occams razor.

I presented you clear data that shows the close relationship between sunspots and temperature. It explains recent global warming.

As to AGW I saw no one predicting global cooling for the next few years until very recently. Until the AGW theories can predict 5 to 10 years ahead I ain't going to take much notice of longer term predictions.

Give it a couple of years of cooling and Jo Public won't bel;ieve in AGW either.

Reply to
Raveninghorde

Jo Public with invest in public hangings in a few years when he finally realizes the fleecing he's been treated to.

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

I'll believe it when I see it. We still have the income tax, employment taxes, death taxes, and witholding.

Reply to
krw

Wait until gasoline is back up above $4/gallon, natural gas is out of sight, oil and coal heat are forbidden, and coal-generated electricity is banned... oh, goody! I can hardly wait ;-)

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

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It cuts your throat from ear to ear.

You presented me with a well-known correlation covering a rather short period. As you ought to know, correlation does not imply causation, and in fact if you stretch the period, the correlation goes away.

More fool you.

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shows that short term fluctuations in climate dominate the one to five year periods; it is only over longer periods that the anthropogenic global warming starts creeping up out of the noise.

You'd look less of a fool if you waited a couple of years before proclaiming the demise of the theory.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Reply to
bill.sloman

"Jim Thompson" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Somehow I doubt that the people who take anthropogenic global warming seriously are going to have to fear for their necks.

There will be a long queue of Republican politicians and hedge fund managers to work through first, followed by the oil and coal industry executives who have been funding the global-warming-denial web sites that are deluding Eeyore, Ravinghorde and the rest of our collection of ignorant lame-brains.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Don't forget that Arizona is going to get paved with solar generating plants in the process - they will be needed to replace the coal-generated electricity. Your back yard may yet become valuable real estate, despite the red-neck blight.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Reply to
Bill Sloman

Your posted graph ends around 1986.

Meanwhile, in the post-1979 era solar output has been very well monitored and has not shown any upward trend.

Furtehrmore, sunspot cycle length got longer than 10 years again since the endpoint of your graph, and global temperature continued increasing.

Furthermore, your temperature anomaly appears somewhat incorrect - with the lowest since mid 1920's around 1970 rather than around late 40's to early 50's. You also show a big dip around 1890 and hardly any around

1910 rather than a big dip around 1910 and a lesser one around 1890. You also don't show the 1878-1879-centered spike - it was major enough to show up well in smoothed annual figures, with smoothed annual value being greatest between 1850 and mid 1920's.

For a graph of global temperature anomaly referenced favorably by The Register in their "A Tale of Two Thermometers" article, go to:

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- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Reply to
Don Klipstein

ISBN

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Bill, do you insult everyone who doesn't agree with you?

I posted a link showing a relationship between sun spots and temperature. You say a rather short period and over a longer period there is no correlation. Yet you post a link to a graph just showing the same temeprature change and no correlation to anything for the same time period. Your point??

If you have information that proves my graph wrong then post it. Don't just insult me for disagreeing.

Reply to
Raveninghorde

Notice with all this GW how hot it's becoming in the NE? I'm glad I moved to the more temperate South. ;-)

Reply to
krw

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Bill is best simply kill-filed. Otherwise he causes great indigestion because of the stress induced by trying to imagine someone so-o-o-o-o ignorant.

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

: >You presented me with a well-known correlation covering a rather short : >period. As you ought to know, correlation does not imply causation, : >and in fact if you stretch the period, the correlation goes away.

: If you have information that proves my graph wrong then post it. : Don't just insult me for disagreeing.

I agree that hard data and proper argumentation is more reassuring than insults aimed at the opponent.

I'd prefer not to comment whether this proves or disproves anything, but as a public service I copypasted the sunspot record from

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on top of the Wikipedia's temperature record which mr Sloman referred to. The result is found at
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.

I also augmented the graph mr Raveninghorde referred to underneath for comparison. Only then I realized that it is not the sunspot *activity level* which has been plotted against the temperatures (and which I feel might conceivably have something to do with the global weather), but smallish variations (within the 10 to 12 years range) in the *length* of the sunspot cycle. Pasteing graphs on top of each other was easy but digging out the sunspot data in a numeric form and Fourier transforming it is too much for now. I suppose the result also depends quite a lot on the details of how the data has been filtered and what sort of a sliding window has been used to find the cycle.

The only mechanism I can think of, which would couple sunspot occurrence frequency to the global weather is that it is somehow correlated with the total radiated solar power, through mysterious inner workings of the sun. But surely the solar radiative power is being monitored directly (is it?), and *that* is the data which one should try to correlate with the temperature record?

I'd like, by the way, to thank mr Sloman for taking the time over and again to protect the cause of us leftist weenies in a (mostly) well-argumented and civilized manner - something hard-working leftist weenies are typically hard-pressed to find time for. I'd also like to thank those right-wing nitwits who have the patience to illuminate their stance in a (mostly) well-argumented and civilized manner in this forum - eg. mr Larkin's name comes to mind from the past.

Regards, Mikko

Reply to
Okkim Atnarivik

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Sloman doesn't care about climate, or about electronics. They are just subjects he uses to demonstrate how smart he is, and how stupid everyone else is.

Now *that's* dumb!

John

Reply to
John Larkin

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