yes.
I don't need any credentials to identify the tools of a hack. There are other climate scientists who don't resort to the kind of rhetorical flourishes Hansen uses.
Trudge through "Real Clear Science" a bit.
-- Les Cargill
My concern is that we will fix on the state of the science, say "something must be done, this is something, this must be done."
If we do the wrong things, people will get hurt. I think the vehemence of the AGW debate alone leads me to think that we're not ready to act.
True, but the biases from climate change are really long baseline. It's hard to actually correlate them out, much less.
Assuming, of course, that it actually *is* :)
-- Les Cargill
John Larkin schrieb:
Hello,
many big and wide levees doesnt help against flooding if there are some small and weak levees too.
Bye
Jim Thompson schrieb:
Hello,
it is not that easy to protect tunnels against water levels of about ten feet or more with sandbags only. If the water is only one feet high sandbags will help, but for ten feet, you will need very heavy doors with good seals.
Bye
Like I said before, check out my home town... reinforced concrete doors dropped into slots (with a small crane), then the seam is sand-bagged. Never a failure since it was built after the 1939 flood. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | 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.
In practice, the "terribly poor" are usually the mentally ill that the public health system can't - or doesn't want to - get a grip on.
They don't show up in come statistics, which are relatively coarse- grained but people do surveys on the homeless and those who are "sleeping rough".
Making unverifiable claims about them doesn't address the point made in the Wikipedia article that a lot of the US economic growth over the last forty years has shown up in the incomes of the top 1% - up 275% - while the middle of the distribution has only seen their incomes rise by 40%, or the point that I was making that from 2010 to 2011, pretty much all the economic growth ended up in the hand of the top 5%.
Germany certainly isn't going broke - quite the reverse. Nor are France or the Netherlands. The UK is a more dubious case, but their National Health Service is a real bargain by international standards.
Greece and Italy are in trouble, but that's primarily due to old- fashioned corruption, rather than any particular extravagance on health care (which is still a lot cheaper per head than the US system).
Actually, slow growth can be shown to be a consequence of misdirected stimulus spending. Keynesian stimulus money has to be directed at people who can be relied on to spend it, or invest it by buying stuff, as opposed to stuffing it into their bank account.
At the moment, the income statistics make it very clear that the poor
- who can be relied on to spend everything they get - are getting less money to spend, while the rich (who do have the luxury of building up their reserves) are the only people getting more. Your government clearly needs to redirect its stimulus spending, but with a Republican majority in congress - who see stimulus spending as one more pork barrel - this isn't going to happen.
Precisely, and that's what Kenyesian deficit-financed stimulus spending is intended to cope with, by borrowing some of the accumulated liquidity and giving it to people who will spend it.
Take another look at the figures. In fact the argument is not that income inequality causes poverty, but rather that it slows economic growth, largely by lowering the quality of the work force, who end up less well-educated, sicker, and less likely to retrain during the course of their working career. Will Hutton made the case in detail in his book "The World We're In".
Americans hate the book because they perceive it as anti-American, but in fact it's more directed at the Anglo-American economic approach which puts more emphasis on the free deployment of capital and less on the construction of a work-force that can allow that capital to be put to the most profitable use.
The whole point about a Potemkin Village was that it went away when you weren't there to look at it. Germany is here to stay. Germany's export success depends on providing high quality high tech products, and probably has more to do with their tendency to promote ex- engineers into the board room - where the US promotes ex-lawyers, and the UK ex-accountants - than the representation of the trade union on the secondary boards of the companies, but the availability of skilled labour, which is willing to be retrained when its skills become obsolete, is definitely a contributing factor.
What underlies the EU "problem" is bad government in some of the countries of the union. That's being cleaned up, but you don't cure bad habits and corrupt practices over-night. And nobody in the US can complain about the mote in Europe's eye without considering the beam in their own eye - you spend much more than you can afford on importing oil, which is essentially why you've been running a huge balance of payments deficit since Regan was president - and you don't spend enough on educating the children of the poor, or on keeping them healthy.
If you started earlier, and made sure that kids had had breakfast before they got into the class room, they might be less difficult to educate. The illegitimate children of US servicemen in Germany did better in the German education system after WW2 than the legitimate children of the same US servicemen in the US education system. You might like to think about plausible explanations for this difference. Better Social Security in Germany could come into it.
What is the - profit-making - University of Phoenix supposed to represent? The Wikipedia article mentions that "The university has paid several government fines and settled whistle-blower lawsuits concerning its admissions practices and education programs." The problems in your education system aren't at university level, but rather at the lower levels that are supposed to offer literacy and numeracy to any child that isn't actually mentally sub-normal.
Right wing economists have a lot of practice in producing the result that their richer customers want to see. James Arthur demonstrates their tactics here from time to time. Careful selection of the statistics that you present can allow you to get just the result that's most palatable to the intended audience.
Why? The system that Bismark stole from his socialist opponents and dressed up as a national insurance scheme isn't wildly different from what you've got, except that it provides more help to the people that need it.
More fool you. You could cherry-pick a cheaper, better health-care scheme at the same time, but your health insurance providers are making much too much money out of your current scheme not to lobby tooth and nail to hang onto their ridiculous profits.
Actually, they will. Better trained workers are more productive workers, and it pays employers to pay them more.
Because you refuse to direct the stimulus where it ought to be going.
If the income inequality means that the poor aren't eating well - not just enough calories, but enough protein and so forth - their kids don't get as much out of what education they get - and grow up to be less productive members of the work force.
This has been empirically demonstrated - Scientific American published an article on it a few years ago - in Central America, where there are larger samples of underfed kids to experiment on.
Obviously not hard enough, or you would be aware of the evidence, rather than denying its existence.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
"If Sandy causes $20 billion in damage (in 2012 dollars), it would rank as the 17th most damaging hurricane or tropical storm (out of
242) to hit the U.S. since 1900?a significant event, but not close to the top 10. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 tops the list (according to estimates by the catastrophe-insurance provider ICAT), as it would cause $180 billion in damage if it were to strike today. Hurricane Katrina ranks fourth at $85 billion."-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
You need to read "Inequality by Design"
It was written as a counter-blast to Herrnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve" and - amongst other points - dealt with Herrnstein and Murray claim that IQ was the best available predictor of social success. There's actually been quite a bit of work on what does correlate with social success, and Herrnstein and Murray had conflated the known contributors - parental income, neighbourhood, and educational success
- into a single "socio-economic index" - which was essentially parental income - which didn't correlate very well. Treating the three separate contributions as more or less independent variables (they are correlated, but not that tightly) makes it clear that they - taken together - predict a substantial proportion of eventual socio-economic success, and a good deal more than IQ score.
It's well worth reading, because it also gives a fairly clear picture of how such correlations are teased out, and how simple-mined use of statistics can lead you astray.
You don't subsidise the really expensive parts of your health care, which rather destroys that part of the argument. You don't subsidise primary and secondary education enough, and people who live in low- rent areas have to live with poor-quality education for their kids, while the kids don't get enough education. You do subsidise tertiary education, and the best parts of the US tertiary education system are amongst the best in the world, although you do also boast some universities where the average IQ is below 100, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, though in any sensible country you'd call them technical colleges, technician training centres, primary teacher's colleges or the like.
As in China and Japan, and for the same reason - if you are copying what a more technologically advanced country has pioneered, you can grow your economy a lot faster than they did. In fact, if you look at American history in detail, a lot of the people who lead the developments had been to Europe to learn about the latest techniques, and applied the knowledge that they'd acquired when they got to the US. An educated elite can get a lot out of a mediocre - but motivated
- work force.
This hasn't got a lot of relevance to here and now - except perhaps in China and India, where there's still an appreciable amount of catching up going on.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Modern Dutch levees/dikes are a lot wider than they are high. They are designed in detail by specialist engieers.
IIRR, New Orleans hired at least one Dutch company to plan their new, improved sea defenses. To be fair to the US Army Engineers who were responsible for the sea defenses around New Orleans that failed, they were aware that what they had was inadequate, and were working on improving them, but not - as it turned out - fast enough.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
is
lSo what? The human race has raised the CO2 levels in the atmosphere to the highest level recorded for the past 20 million years. That is making a difference, even if Jim can't quite follow the connection.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
is
lHappily, CO2 levels have gone up a lot since aircraft spotting of hurricanes became practical. There does happen to be a long enough data series available to make it likely that the correlations observed are statistically significant. If John Larkin had paid a little more attention during his physics classes, he would also know that there was a physically plausible causual relationship that can explain the correlation.
And John Larkin lacks the background knowledge to distinguish a pathetic argument about earthquakes from a serious, evidence-based argument about hurricanes and extreme weather generally.
And he's going to vote for Mitt Romney. There's one born every minute ...
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
is
lThis is backwards. The scientific debate about anthropogenic global warming was pretty much over before the "discussion" got vehement.
The vehemence all came from the fossil carbon extraction industry, who realised that doing something effective about anthropogenic global warming was going to limit the amount of fossil carbon that they could extract and sell.
While the scientific debate was still going on, they couldn't care less, but as soon as it became clear that there was a real problem that needed to be dealt with they started spending millions on denialist propaganda.
Atmospheric CO2 levels have been rising progressively faster since the industrial revolution, when it was about 270ppm
It was about 315ppm when they first started measuring it systematically at Mauna Loa in 1958. It's about 385ppm now.
That's a lot of difference in 54 years.
There's no doubt about that. What there is doubt about is when the Greenland ice cap will start sliding off into the ocean.
The IPCC doesn't figure this into their sea-level rise predictions, because nobody really knows what is going on under the surface of the ice cap.
What we do know is that when the Laurentian ice cap slid off Canada at the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago, it slid off in large chunks, and something messed up the Gulf Stream for about 1300 years, causing the Younger Dryas.
Greenland's ice cap represents about six metres of sea level rise.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
To find
-global-warming-15114
from
which does seem to back up Hansen's point of view.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
It is a warning shot across the bows. You have to put money into flood defences now and/or slowing the rate of increase of CO2 or suffer the consequences. US attitude seems to be that the kids will pay the bill.
How frequent do major city direct hits by large scale hurricanes have to become before you AGW deniers will finally admit defeat?
Or will you still have your head in the sand denying climate change when catastrophic "hundred year storms" are annual events?
One spectacular sideshow that Sandy has shown up on the fringes of the storm was a magnificent display of haloes from high ice crystals.
View is from Marshall Space flight centre Alabama
-- Regards, Martin Brown
I may look that one up. This being said, the whole argument seems poorly framed. Pretty sure at least Murray has gone on to other work on the subject.
Ah, but we do. Significantly. We just make it quite convoluted.
Arguable, but there is a large data base which shows the infuriating tendency for "educational outcomes" to be resistant to spending.
We have a revealed preference for rents - not surprisingly.
It doesn't really matter what they are called.
No, you really can't. You run the risk of cargo cult. At least Japan's development out of its long medieval period did not come all at once.
This is especially true of medicine, but not true of the main things that differentiated the US as a productive power.
The US usually hit quantum increases in productivity when large populations moved to industrial centers.
Generally, people from China and India are many times more productive when they emigrate to the US*. I suspect that there are public choice problems still in China and India.
*but not just the US... it's just easier to see.
-- Les Cargill
Just... no. The fossil carbon extraction industry just doesn't have that kind of power.
Not all climate skepticism comes from denialist propaganda. one reason this is harder than it used to be is that now we have warmist propaganda.
So ad hominem for everybody! Yay!
it certainly is - now, what does it *predict*? We can narrow it to multiple scenarios, but nothing more than vague ones.
Of course there is.
It's a lot more fun when there's a disaster in the offing, isn't it?
-- Les Cargill
Don't the kids *always* pay the bill?
Even if AGW is true, there's little we can do about it. I'd like to see something like Pigou taxation ( especially if it replaces income taxation ) but the pricing is very problematic. Too steep, and it unnecessarily thwarts growth, leading to (possibly) unrest.
We have legacy systems in place which are at very real threat if we do this wrong. We'll get a good look at how intractable replacing legacy systems can be when the story of the subway comes out.
We in the US ( which, like it or not - it's probably a template ) mainly use hydrocarbons to change land use patterns. I've seen very little that addresses this directly.
Heh. First thought is "didn't they clean the lens?" Very compelling images.
-- Les Cargill
Wrong.
I have had an idea for several years now that will put a dent in it.
Albeit a small and costly one.
I have it completely worked out. Folks here *could* argue over it for a few weeks or months or years, but I have mulled it over for a long time.
Death Valley is 3 miles deep of a known, relatively soft material.
We could take iceberg fragments from the melt fields and make a new "great lake" by replacing that medium with water.
It would be a small dent though.
We should refreeze (hard freeze) ice AT the North and South poles and make ice mountains, like earth movers do when they are making a mountain of fill from an excavation site. Then they will grow on their own.
IF we hoard vast tank systems of fresh water, we can actually reverse this thing, and bring the thousands of years past old sea shelf back up.
Maybe fire some chunks up on a monster linear motor and rail gun hybrid to be stored at the dark side of a lunar crater.
Then, we should build hundreds of airships with chlorine gas scrubbers in them to fly around the HUGE chlorine cloud over Antarctica, sucking some of that up.
It will not be that hard, guys.
Think of a golf tee. I'll be back.
On 31/10/2012 15:45, John Larkin wrote: > On Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:39:30 +0000, Martin Brown > wrote: >
I don't know about earthquakes (although it is not impossible to imagine ways that permafrost melt or glacier retreat could trigger some rebound fault movements) but it is certainly vexing the Swiss cable car engineers where anchor points into permafrost are being compromised by AGW.
Or if you prefer a US source
-- Regards, Martin Brown
That's insane. Hurricanes have happened since the planet has cooled enought to have oceans. Read the WSJ quote above. This hurricane wasn't big or unusual by historical standards.
Al Gore is not a scientist. He's a huckster, a very rich one now.
Annual events? The previous big East Coast storm was 1938.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
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