It sure seems that the ice core data has close to 280 ppmv being the usual story for every discernable point in time from a few thousand years ago to the Industrial Revolution.
It appears to me that chemically-determined measurements of CO2 concentration in surface-level air over land had their main failure being from ground-level air on or shortly downwind from land with a lot of biological activity intermittently having CO2 concentration deviating greatly from "atmospheric baseline", usually upwards when lack of sunlight disfavors both convective mixing and plants removing CO2 emitted by other life forms. It appears to me that the "Wisconsin Tower" tells that story well.
Should some of those chemical analysis results have date and time and weather condition notation for where the air samples were taken, then ones with sample time of day and weather conditions favoring convection (or time of year and location favoring low local/upwind surface-level contamination) would be known to be the good ones.
Where do you get that figure? Is that an upper limit or an average for all plants on this planet? What is this figure for - ratio to theoretical of 240 or 1366 W/m^2 for annual production of biomass per square meter? Or what?
I am aware that conversion of light energy to chemical energy by phoetchemicals in plants is limited to close to 10% due to limited spectral ranges of good reception and a loss similar to the Stokes Loss for reception of wavelengths shorter than the longest that are useful.
Probably less - the ground above the cavity would sink at least a little and the earth below the cavity would rise at least a little. And the oil could be in spaces between grains of sand or rocks of some size for all I know. Possibly there may be need to do a little work removing sand or rubble of some sort in order to have the needed cavity.
Then dump in vitrified high level waste, plug up the borehole with concrete going a kilometer or two deep (in case of SW USA), and the stuff is out of way of causing harm for 10's of millions of years or until it decays to less of a problem (should take much less time than that) or the "eyes in the sky" go out of commission.
But the question is: Did a 1988 PC (386 16MHz with IS_SPICE/386 on MSDOS outrun a VAX11/780 with bare Berkeley PSICE 2G6 (same base as IS_SPICE) on VMS or Ultrix.
With Earth's albedo averageing some 30% being bounced back out, it's more like only 1000 W/m^2 and that's at the equator and assuming that all wavelengths are used and it's mid-day.
Perhaps James might try and put it in context with the following:
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I'd be interested in that.
Also, I'm kind of glad there are plants here. I kinda need them.
Maybe a collectors item by now if in mint condition...
It seems on paper at least that I have fonder memories of the good old VAX 11/780 than are entirely justified. It was a long time ago in my defence.
According to netlib on drystone MIPS the 386 at 2.5-20MIPS was well ahead of the VAX 11/780 and on floating point the 386/387 20MHz combo at
130kFLOPs was just ahead of the VAX 11/780 FPA at 110kFLOPS (source netlib linpack). And at 16 MHZ they were about equal on LinPack.
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It doesn't accord with my recollection in real life on large floating point arrays where the 386 only became really competitive for floating point when paired with the Weitek 3167 or the later and cheaper Cyrix cloned x87. And the 32bit toolset on the early 386 PCs was crude compared to VAX VMS development environments.
You seem to have forgotten that there was a (387) math co-processor.
...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
Yes and no. You are right about it being a separate chip. The program would refuse to run without one, it even refused SW emulation of one (with good reason). So if it ran, the coprocessor was physically present. It required a DOS extender as well, you remember those don't you?
Actually, some politicos take out some scribbled on paper, and says "This freeway ends in a brick wall!" and the driver says "You want to sit down back there..." 8-)
There ain't no map. There are some computer generated fantasies and a lot of political power grabbing going on, but no map.
The floating point was still pretty laggardly compared to the VAX FP. however you are right on MIPS the 386 even at 16MHz was nearly twice as fast as a VAX 11/780. Although it never felt that way...
From about 1989 onwards 32 bit floating point code would run twice as fast by using the oddly implemented Weitek 3167 EMC instead. It was neither pin compatible nor code compatible but it was twice as fast for single precision reals and about the same for doubles.
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Later on Cyrix did a cheaper faster pin compatible x87 clone. The spec for that uncovered various minor defects in the Intel implementation.
I found a webpage that describes their rough and ready performance:
This was always a pretty terrible analogy, If anybody in our society can be seen as "the bus driver" it is the politicians, and some years ago they set up the IPCC, to take the rather complicated and tentative map that the climatologists had been putting together, and annotate it with warning notes - in big letters that everybody could read.
Setting up the IPCC was an example of politicians acting responsibly, not any kind of power grab.
Scientists have been working on that map for about fifty years now. It is still pretty rough, and we can't forecast the small hills and valleys that are going to show up over the next few years. What we can say is that if we keep on going the way we are, the road is going to get to pretty horrible in another twenty or thirty years, and there are a couple of huge cliffs further down the road which could entirely wreck the bus and kill pretty much everybody on board.
The Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the most prestigious research facilities in the world, says recent "apocalyptic predictions" about Arctic ice melt and soaring temperatures are as bad as claims that global warming does not exist.
Bill, Mr Brown brougt up a good point, the real issue is not the validity of AGW, but rather what our collective response to it should be..
Lets talk about:
1) Carbon taxes
2) cap and trade
3) ban the use of coal for electricity
4) use of nuclear energy
5) improved energy effeciency
6) development of renewable energy sources
7) development of alternative energy sources
Even though I do not believe AGW is valid, I DO believe in some of the above actions for reasons that have nothing to do with AGW. I am against actionds 1,2,3. I AM IN FAVOR of actions 4,5,6,7. (I wonder, does that make me a green wieennie?)
What do __you__ think the world should do in response to AGW?
No, it is merely bad politics. The Hadley Centre wants to concentrate public attention on the immediate problems, which aren't apocalyptic - changes in rainfall patterns and warmer weather are going to create problem for agriculture, and will probably starve a few million people in countries that don't have much spare agricultural capacity.
The apocylptic problems - huge cliffs ahead - are further away, and since they depend on run-away processes, they ar even more difficult to model and predict than the regular climatic fluctuations, which are difficult enough.
The worrying thing is that they have happened before in the geological past, under circumstances that aren't wildly different from our current situation, and we don't know enough about them to make good estimates of the risks involved. They ought to be fairly low, but you don't stick your neck under the blade of guillotine, even if you are pretty confident that it isn't about to come down now.
The two situations that are most used to frighten the children - but are - none the less, worth keeping in mind, are the prospect of the Gulf Stream turning off - which seems to be what happened - ver a period of less than a decade - during the Younger Dryas, some 12,000 years ago
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and a sudden relase of methane from methane clathrates, as seems to have happened during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, some 55.8 million years ago.
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It only lasted for 20,000 years, but the global temperature spiked by
6C, and it was accompanied by a sudden burst of adaptive radiation amongst the mammals, which is to say, most of them had to adapted to radically different environments, which involves population crashes and drastic selection of the survivors, who weren't well adapted to the new enviroments.
Despite your distaste for apocolyptic stories (obviously shared by the Hadley Centre), they don't happen to be bad science - anything but. They are based on the results of some very good scientific research. With any lick, we won't screw up the planet anything like badly enough to risk a recurrence of either of these particular disasters, but their very existence is evidence that there are "cliffs" ahead on some of the routes we might be silly enough to follow if we didn't think about all the risks we might be running.
Regardless of global warming, I want clean air and clean sea. One guy driving a 10MPG vehicle is spending his money, but polluting everyone's air. The fact that the temperature is rising faster that ever before, is continuing to rise rapidly and that this rise coincides with the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil fuels, indicates that there is likely to be a link ... TOO likely for the chance to be ignored. If we aren't the cause but clean up, we are better off anyway. If we are, do we want our kids to curse us for messing up their world ?
If you don't believe in anthropogenic global warming, you probably aren't a greenie wiennie - though you'd probably have to consult the likes of Jim Thompson and his sycophants to get an authoratitive opinion, since they invented the term, and presumably have some dea of what they had in mind.
If you don't believe in global warming it is unlikely that you know enough physics to have a useful opinion on any of the schemes you listed. There are people around who do know the physics, and still don't believe in some aspects of anthropogenic global warming but there aren't many of them - the overwhelming majority of the sceptics don't know what they are talking about.
If you want to see a more or less sensible scheme for tackling anthropogenic global warming (and a number of other problems that need to be sorted out in the process) you could usefully read Jeffrey D. Sachs' book "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet" ISBN
978-0-14-311487-1.
He's the director of the Earth Insitute at Columbia University where they study the economics of the process that would be needed to get us from where we are to where we need to be, and the book presents some of their conclusions in a form that is more or less accessible to the general public.
He does like carbon taxes (as I doo too) and he doesn't think much of cap and trade. He doesn't think that it is remotely practical to ban burning coal to generate electricity, but he thinks that new power stations should be required to capture the carbon dioxide generated, and sequestate it underground or deep in the ocean, and that the current generation of coal-burning power stations should be retired as fast as possible (which isn't going to be all that fast).
He's in favour of nuclear energy (which is to say, uranium-burning reactors - nuclear fusion is eveybody's dream, when it is finally reduced to practice). I think he's failed to learn the lesson of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, which is simply that people get sloppy, and getting casual with a nuclear reactor has a large potential downside.
Improved energy efficiency is another no-brainer, as is the development of renewable energy sources.
Renewable energy isn't always availalbe when you want it, so it needs to be coupled to the development of better schemes for storing electricity overnight (for solar energy generators) and from day to day (for wind-powered generators).
"The development of alternative energy sources" is a liitle too unspecific to be much use.
I don't know enough to say much useful on my own account. I do know enough to think that Jeffrey Sachs' program is probably a good starting point.
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