OT: but frequently seen here - A PNAS paper on why conservatives devalue climate change and what can be done to cure them.

ote:

Sciences, and it is a fairly high-prestige place to publish

hold of a back door copy. If I can I'll e-mail it to anybody who wants it.

the warming can't be stopped, the morons are going to be steamed alive, an d they won't be missed.

noaa-data-tampering/

ters like John Larkin excited.

dependent studies using a range of different proxies for historical tempera tures. The denialist press just loves concocting conspiracy theories about changes to official temperature measurements, not least because they go dow n so well with gullible suckers like John Larkin, but the real world doesn' t play along.

enough.

ng is that the Greenland ice sheet will slide off into the Atlantic as load s of ice-bergs.

ge, it seems to have stopped the Gulf Stream for 1300+/-10 years, making No rth America and Northern Europe a whole lot colder (while warming up the so uthern oceans which pushed a whole lot of CO2 out of solution, raising atmo spheric CO2 levels enough to finish off the ice age.

alifornia) while the rest of the globe warms up even faster (and has to cop e with six metres of sea level rise).

c and immediate than the kind that religious fanatics used to go for, and r ather better founded - not that John Larkin knows enough about science to r ealise this.

denialist propaganda machine you will get jeered at.

place, which would take centuries.

most recent ice age is that some of the ices sheets will slide off into the sea in big chunks

ice sheet rests on rock and the East Antarctic ice sheet is going to be th ere for the foreseeable future.

Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of t he University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will becom e ?a very rare and exciting event?.

as, north of Finland, push cold air south into Europe, dumping much more sn ow there than usual. Reduced Arctic sea ice means more snow in the UK (from time to time).

prediction, and another to the revised prediction. I've tracked down your probable chain of logic in one example above - you exaggerated the predicti on from "snowfalls will become rare and exciting events" to "Our kids would not know about snow", while including US kids into what had been a UK popu lation.

prediction originated in some claim about reduced quality of life in Bangla desh.

The "water as a greenhouse gas positive feedback" doesn't. The "northern he misphere ice sheet feedback" doesn't seem to have either - but since it sto ps when all the Northern hemisphere ice has melted (which it has in the pas t) it isn't going to "latch" either.

ming means more water vapour in the atmosphere and more rain somewhere, but the rain doesn't always fall on the same place as it did when the climate was cooler. At the peak if the current interglacial - from 10,500 years ago to 7,300 years ago - the Sahara got lots of monsoon rains, but these then declined and had stopped some 5,500 years ago.

s aren't any kind of way to make the problem go away. Getting suckered by p eople who make their money by digging up fossil carbon and selling it as fu el isn't an entirely responsible reaction either.

re of your kids may survive if you do it right, which would be an extra bon us.

Burning fossil carbon as fuel is now an unfortunate mistake that needs to b e fixed. Burning gasoline in internal combustion engines is not a habit we can sustain. You may not like electric cars, but your kids are going to hav e to learn to live with them.

You are too much of a gullible sucker for fossil carbon extraction industry propaganda to realise why, but they can't fool enough people for all that long.

These would be PhD guys educated at American universities with stipends provided by their mother country so language and cultural skills would be in place and there would be no student debt to force them to find job-killing very high paying tech industry jobs. For example, the taco bowls for the Cinco de Mayo lunch special would be truly authentic and served correctly but at a bargain price.

Jobs requiring lower level skills such as poo cleaning and putting the highest quality mints on pillows would be performed by H2B visa holders at a lower cost (but the work would still be performed correctly and ahead of time).

True. Is it the wrong article? If yes, need more details.

True, but I?d hazard that that won?t be a problem in AD 3000.

Maybe, but their idea of less energy may well exceed our definition of less energy.

Nuclear fusion would certainly remove our need for efficiency.

There are lots of models that have been used and studied for decades, and yet regularly fail to correctly simulate new phenomena. Try Plasma Science, the science behind nuclear fusion:

For instance, the US National Ignition Facility - despite the best of models, no break-even. It was sold as being able to get well past ignition, and the world?s best physicists built the models, and were baffled when the NIG fizzled. They will get there someday, and their models will have been greatly improved by the experience.

In the engineering world, there is an old saying: "All models are wrong, but some models are useful.? And the standard reply is that the proof is in the lab, and not the computer. In practice, they interact until both are good enough.

Ad hominem - not a valid logical or scientific argument.

Definitely a series of ice ages. Looks like we are just past the last warming peak, and the temperature will now decline. Perhaps this is at least part of the reason for the current Hiatus. Hard to say.

True enough over that short segment, but it has been as high as 7000 ppm, in the Cambrian Period:

. seems to have been some ten thousand years ago, but we do seem to be close to getting back there

Well, the period between ice ages is tens of thousands of years, so if the last warming peak is 10,000 years ago, it will continue to cool for at least another 10,000 years. The two million year data supports this general conclusion.

I tried this on my work computer, and you are right - it is behind a paywall. My home computer must remember my credentials (but it would not allow me to download a pdf). But look at Figure 1 and the abstract. The article is about how the data was generated, and is very a very detailed description of how the various proxies were calibrated and combined.

Joe Gwinn

Why? Will there no longer be back yards? Will there no longer be nuclear waste? Will there no longer be people?

That's not obvious. Wouldn't it depend on the fuel? If powered by unobtanium, we would still have a problem.

There you go. The models can be good, it just takes time and experiments to get them right. What's your point?

Both? Everything is worked on until it is "good enough". Continuing to work on something that works is like continuing to look for a lost thing after it is found.

Only if you *assume* we have reached the peak and that this trend will continue in spite of AGW.

NIF has exceeded breakeven, at least from optical energy in to fusion energy out.

What's interesting is that the successful optical waveshapes were not what the supercomputer simulations had long predicted.

I designed the beam modulators for NIF, and I was really relieved to find out that the initial yield problems were not my fault. They were just programming the wrong waveforms.

Hard to say for sure. Temperature-v-time seems to be pretty random, and it's easy to assign trends (and causalities!) onto random sequences. Easy and wrong.

On Dec 31, 2016, John Larkin wrote (in article):

Then, it should be practical to throw all trash into the Sun, where it will be recycled when the Sun goes nova in a few billion years.

I knew that optical break-even had at last been achieved, but as the article mentions, use as a practical power source is a distant hope. They have two orders of magnitude to go to get practical break-even, and at least another order of magnitude to become a practical power source, and two orders would be best.

But surely solved over the next 1,000 years.

Ahh. Can you expound on these beam modulators. This sounds like a perfect thing for SED denizens to chew upon.

Ice ages are not at all random. Nor is Figure 1 all that random - it?s a very definite albeit slightly noisy sawtooth waveform. Anyway, seeMilankovitch Cycles:

Joe Gwinn

Why would they take that job when there are real engineering jobs that American's won't do.

Are you saying that he'd have priority for H2B visas (there are only

No longer be leftist loon "environmentalists"? Hope it doesn't take _nearly_ that long.

Nuclear fission would be more than enough. Again, the enviro-weenies (leftists) won't allow it.

It would take less energy to put it on a hyperbolic orbit out of the solar system. ...but why? You're throwing away a valuable resource.

We designed and built the 48 modulator chassis. Each is a triggered arbitrary waveform generator, 4 gs/s, 16 bits, a couple ps RMS jitter. We drive a dual-stage mach-zender fiberoptic modulator that shapes the waveforms that whack the target. The fiber blip gets optically amplified, converted to free-space, and feeds the 192 big laser amps.

I really wanted them to buy 192 of these, but they economized to 48.

Temperature is pretty noisy in the short (years, decades) term. Enough that people can extrapolate doom, and make a lot of money.

By that time, why would there be any trash? We should be able to recycle it all here on earth. I'd be willing to bet we could currently recycle most things using less energy than it would take to "throw" it into the sun.

BTW, that 40% is for the world..remember France generates 20% of their power by nuclear means and we generate essentially 0% that way.

To reduce pollution, USE the generated power as close to the generator as possible AND do not waste it by intermediate storage schemes. EG: charging batteries wastes energy, discharging them wastes more - i am talking about the so-called "all-electric" cars like the "Volt".

To reduce pollution, use generation technologies that are (reasonably) efficient,and improve the efficiency thereof. So far, "solar" is still lax on efficiency, "wind" seems worse.

Sadly, carbon-based fuels (coal, oil) have this Carnot cycle limit that screws it royally, tho numerous engines in production for over 100 years have had little design improvements. Maybe the only 2 areas were the fluid-bed coal burning scheme with atomized spray, and the gas turbine scheme that Chrysler tried for cars.

For real efficiency, borrow from Einstein and go fusion.

rote:

a Proceedings of the IEEE a decade or so ago that went into that in detail.

ed

ucing the amount of fossil carbon burnt as fuel does involve real facts, ev en if you can't be bothered to find out what they are.

n a

y."

er if people don't bother thinking about what's going on.

These all help, but not a lot - perhaps around 10% of the power generated t oday is "wasted" that way. We need to reduce our CO2 emissions by a factor of ten or more, and the mains power generation system isn't the only CO2 so urce.

puts burning solid fuels - mainly coal - is about 35% of our contribution ( and that will be mainly in generating plants) while burning liquid fuels is 36% (which will mostly be in internal combustion engines).

Again, not a lot.

The point isn't to minimise energy waste, but rather to minimise CO2 emissi ons.

So what?

Again, you miss the point. The solar energy hitting the earth every day dwa rfs anything we produce, and any waste heat we produce doesn't influence th e surface temperature of the globe as a whole.

More CO2 in the atmosphere raises the effective emitting altitude where the temperature is the -18C which allows the planet to radiate as much energy as it absorbs from the sun. If there's more atmosphere below that altitude, the temperature at the surface ends up warmer, climate changes, and we've got all kinds of problems.

Nothing that's going to wipe out the human race, but perhaps enough problem s to dismantle advanced industrial economies, and cause a population crash.

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I read the Proceeding of the IEEE regularly in the EMI Central Research lib rary when I worked there from 1976 to 1979, and less frequently - in univer sity libraries - later. I didn't read it at all in the Netherlands after 19

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Nuclear fusion was always a better idea - there's a lot more deuterium arou nd than uranium. By AD 3000 we'll probably have found a form of cold fusion that works.

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Probably not. Keeping a whole house warm to provide a comfortable environme nt for a single human being is inelegant.

Far from it. Inefficiency implies waste heat, which has to be dissipated, w hich takes up space. My 1996 thermostat used a switching drive for the Pelt ier junctions because I didn't have the space for the heat sinks I would ha ve had to put on a linear power driver.

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Exactly. The National Ignition Facility did a lot better when they tailored the shape of the ignition pulse to suppress the instability that wasted mo st of the energy delivered by less carefully tailored pulses.

Climate science has got much better access to the physical reality they are simulating, and many more people have been at it a lot longer

but

is in the

Climate science is short on interaction - it's an observational science, mo re like astronomy than plasma physics, which doesn't make it ineffective.

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Since denialist propaganda is entirely aimed at people, the ad hominem cont ent is completely appropriate. If human being weren't susceptible to irrati onal nonsense, denialist propaganda wouldn't be a problem or an issue.

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Only if you can't be bothered to read the literature, or look at the temper ature data for last ten thousand years.

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Not always.

Wrong. You haven't understood how it works. The planet flips between two qu asi-stable states. During an ice age there is a lot of snow cover on the no rthern parts of the northern hemisphere, and about 180ppm of CO2 in the atm osphere.

Every now and then you get enough extra sun on the the northern hemisphere to melt a lot of that snow cover, and the planet flips to the interglacial state, with less snow cover, and more CO2 in the atmosphere.

We now know enough about exactly what happened at the end of the last ice a ge to have a reasonable idea of the way the flip worked - the Younger Dryas reflect the Gulf Stream being turned off for 1300+/-10 years, which actual ly helped the north American and European snow cover, but dumped a lot of h eat that normally would have flowed north into the southern ocean, where it boiled off enough CO2 to get us going into an interglacial.

Paradoxical stuff.

thropogenic global warming is real and likely to go quite a bit further.

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But even the abstract also points out that the current CO2 levels are highe r than they have been for 3 million years, and mean that the planet is goin g to end up some 5C warmer over the next few millenia.

They don't got to the trouble of mentioning that we have caused the problem , and don't bother suggesting that we might be able to do something about m aking it less severe, which is reasonable enough - their interest is in the data, rather than what can be done to change the outcome.

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Fission power was always a silly, short term, idea. Uranium and it's isotop es are produced - in small quantities - in supernova. There isn't enough ar ound to run an economy for all that long.

Deuterium was produced in the Big Bang in enormous volumes - 26 deuterons p er million protons - and it would take us a lot longer to fuse what we can get hold of easily.

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Their models are already greatly improved by having the National Ignition F acility producing plasmas of the relevant temperature and density in a plac e where they can be observed. Climate science started off way ahead of them there.

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Since denialist propaganda is working on human weaknesses, the ad hominum a rgument is relevant and valid. The business of explaining the human suscept iblity to self-interested nonsense is of interest to science, and it's perf ectly valid to point out when it's going on.

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Sure. He hasn't read the paper he cited, which said exactly that - even in the abstract.

Nuclear fission depends on digging up uranium, which is produced in small quantities in supernova. There's not a lot around to dig up.

Nuclear fusion depends on deuterium, which was produced during the Big Bang, at the rate of 26 deuterons per million protons. There's a lot around.

Fusing dark matter would be even better - there seems to be six times more dark matter around than ordinary matter (which is mostly protons).

Mining it could pose problems.

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John Larkin likes to see noise where other people can see cyclic processes,

Few of them are kind enough to be neatly periodic.

Anthropogenic global warming isn't extrapolation, but rather applied atmosp heric physics. More CO2 in the atmosphere means a higher effective radiatin g altitude and a higher average temperature down at sea level.

John Larkin skipped the relevant classes at Tulane, so he doesn't know enou gh to follow the arguments, and he gets his opinions from the Murdoch media , who are happy to publish denialist propaganda - they don't have to pay jo urnalists to write the content.

If John Larkin had paid attention when Tulane was trying to teach him criti cal thinking he would be able to spot the weaknesses in the denialist propa ganda he's exposed to, but sadly he's just the kind of gullible sucker the propaganda is intended to deceive, and he soaks it up like a sponge.

"Efficiency" is often a specious measure of what you want to achieve.

As a simple example, most people here reckon that a typical journey in their car is around 40mpg. I point out that I could /easily/ raise that to

How?

Most of their journeys are ~5 miles in stop-start city traffic. I offer to do the same journey but by driving 200 miles on the motorway at 45mph.

The mpg will improve, but so will the total fuel consumed.

Guess which is more important: mpg or g!

On Saturday, December 31, 2016 at 9:57:24 PM UTC-5, snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote :

argument is relevant and valid. The business of explaining the human susce ptiblity to self-interested nonsense is of interest to science, and it's pe rfectly valid to point out when it's going on.

Ad hominem arguments are not relevant, because they do not work. Bill uses ad hominem arguments all the time and yet he can not point out anyone whos e mind has been changed.

I suspect that Bill never took any psychology courses in college.

Dan

Dan