We've more than doubled inflation-adjusted spending since Carter created the Department of Teachers' Unions / Education. Scholastic achievement hasn't changed.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
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.I was streaming a New Orleans station. They were scoffing at people "needing rescue" from thigh-deep water comparing their lot to Katrina, where people were being rescued from the 2nd story roofs of their submerged houses.
Sandy was what, a category I? It just happened to coincide with a Nor'easter. That's bad luck, nothing more.
The main reason storms cause more damage today is that more people live by the coast, I heard a weather guy say.
-- Cheers, James Arthur
And the total lack of planning. :(
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Many were rescued from attics. Some weren't.
Sandy didn't make the Top 10 Storms list since 1900.
Turns out that New York's preparation level is at the 100-year-storm level. Sure enough, roughly every 100 years, they get bashed. Sounds like they got what they expected to get, but were surprised anyhow.
-- 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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And have been for quite a while. Sea levels are now actually slightly lower than they were a few thousand years ago
You do have to figure in the thermal mass of the ice sheets. They have to get up to zero before they start melting at all.
And we should be starting to worry about the ice-caps staying in place. If they slide off into the oceans, they instantly displace a lot of water.
The GRACE satellite data shows that the Antartic and Greenland Ice Caps are losing mass. The current rate of loss isn't all that worrying but if the ice caps start sliding sideways life could become more interesting.
We know that this happened quite a bit at the end of the last ice age. but there was three times as much water tied up in ice caps back then as there is now.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
But it's unlikely to be sustained at that low level
The rate has recently accelerated, and current projection for 2100 are for a rise of between two feet and six feet.
The mechanical stability of the Greenland Ice Cap is the joker in the pack. If large chunks of ice start to slide off and drift down south to melt, we might see a large proportion of the potential 6 metre it represents happening over a century or so.
At the end of the last ice age, about 19,000 years ago, the sea level off the coast of Ireland rose 10 metres in few hundred years (Science vol.304 page 1141). Since the total sea level rise at the end of the last ice age was 120 metres, this isn't going to be repeated, but it does indicate that quite a lot of ice can move into the oceans relatively rapidly.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Which doesn't say anything about the size of the storm surge. New Orleans was built on silt, which shrinks as it dries, so lots of New Orleans was below sea level. Most of New York is built on rock, and it's basically at and above sea level.
But bad luck that going to happen progressively more often, as anthropogenic global warming pumps more water vapour into the air above the tropical oceans, to provide the energy to drive more an bigger hurricanes from time to time.
This may be true at the moment, but if you keep on feeding your hurricanes, you will probably be able to eventually falsify this.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
The graphs actually show that it has changed appreciably. The graph's vertical axis is something out of "how to lie with statistics" and the figures on the achievements of 17-year-olds don't specify what proportion of 17-year-olds had left school before they turned 17, and had thus dropped out of having their achievements assessed.
When UK schools started being assessed on what proportion of their students passed their A-level exams, quite a few schools took care to improve their standing in the pecking order by discouraging the less- promising students from sitting at all.
One of the more entertaining vignettes from "The Wire" was the picture it painted of a section of the US educational system fixated on getting good achievements statistics, rather than turning out students who'd got as much out of education as they could absorb.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
They are related, the data is historical evidence that relatively small amounts of forcing can be amplified by positive feedback. AIUI, they demonstrate the positive feedback loop that makes it possible for AGW to happen.
I am not sure if you made a typo or are actually not understanding the point here... That is what I said, and it supports AGW. Because it demonstrates a positive feedback relationship between temperature and CO2.
Well so you say, that is another issue. I was responding to the specific point you were trying to make about CO2 change lagging temperature change in the ice core data.
[...]-- John Devereux
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I missed that you had times arrow correct. I knee-jerked. Your version flies in the face of most AGW'er yammering about the correlation. Still correlation is NOT causation for either time sequence. And we just do not have enough data or anything like well tested theory. The testing takes as much time as we have written records, many hundreds of years.
Like, maybe, 300 years.
-- 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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By then reality will have caught up with the denialist crew, and the whole question will be moot. The scientific literature tends to move rather faster than that, particularly when there's real data about existing conditions to be looked at.
The Piltdown skull was relatively long-lived error
planted in 1912 and conclusively revealed as a fake in 1953, thought some investigators had come to the conclusion earlier - the first in
1913. In 1923, Franz Weidenreich published pretty much exactly the same conclusion as the 1953 report, but without the extra evidence available from a more comprehensive investigation.-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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I've been saying for some time now that the atmosphere needs more CO2.
You aussies are doing great. Keep shipping those megatons of coal to Japan and China and Korea. The planet thanks you.
-- 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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aAs The Register points out "Mires and Peat" isn't exactly "Nature" or "Cell".
The researchers could be right - this might have been the mechanism that flipped the planet back an interglacial to an ice age in times past.
But nowhere near as much as we have already given it, let alone as much as 'business as usual" is going to give it over the coming decades.
In fact the current interglacial looks as if it was always going to be a long one, even before we'd put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to make us ice-age immune for a few ten of thousands of years
It beats having the Chinese and the Japanese invading Australia and taking away the coal without paying us for it. The Chinese do have the wit to realise that anthropogenic global warming is a bad thing, but they seem to be working on the principle that they need to build up their economy a bit more before they start going over to renewable energy.
After all, if America isn't doing anything to curb it's emissions, it's a bit quixotic to worry about your own.
If the Chinese keep on buying up your debt, they'll eventually be in a position to buy up all your carbon-dioxide emitting power plants and shut them down. By then you will have burnt all you own oil, and won't have the money to import anybody else's. Since you are a bunch of irresponsible idiots, you will probably just go over to burning natural gas on a large scale, but that at least does inject less CO2 per joule into the atmosphere than burning oil, let alone coal.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Can't be too careful.
It's like balancing the budget; we need to spend now, and we'll balance later. Sure.
They have US government bonds and we have all those TVs and Iphones and steel. When the bonds come due, we'll print money and give them that, nicely diluted. Then they'll have maybe half as much as they put up, at zero interest to boot; it will be kind of late for them to start buying up power plants and shutting them down.
By then you will have burnt all you own oil, and won't
People keep finding oil, and especially natural gas, in stunning volumes. Cool.
So, your bottom line is that Americans are irresponsible for burning natural gas for our own use, but aussies are wise for exporting hundreds of megatons of coal per year for profit.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser drivers and controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
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.With this difference, China is playing catch-up and you aren't. When a developing economy invests heavily in expanding it's economy, it can do it a lot more efficiently than a mature economy because it can go out and buy the latest technology - no expenditure on research and building prototypes, or money wasted heading up blind alleys.
Dream on.
Natural gas, not oil. The rate at which new oil fields are being opened up has dropped way back.
Australia hasn't got a lot of choice. Exporting it for profit makes everybody happy. Playing the dog in the manger would probably lead to some right-wing nitwit telling the world that we were building weapons of mass destruction ...
You are actually burning a whole lot more fossil carbon than we are exporting, and you've got a whole lot of reasons for burning less of it, starting with the enormous balance of payments deficit you've been running since Regan was president, which is pretty much the oil you are importing.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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China could buy stuff and build stuff and could pay their slave labor better, and improve living standards and bring down the suicide rate. But they invest in US government bonds.
How else is the US going to pay 20+ trillion in debt, once interest rates return to reality? The traditional method is to inflate the debt away, namely screw bond holders and anybody with pensions or savings. It must happen.
Google oil fracking and get up to date.
The US will probably become a gas exporter and get close to neutral on oil. From fracking and artic fields and deferring some oil for cheap gas.
I don't think Australia is going to quit exporting coal. It's shipping several hundred megatons per year now, and India is going to buy a lot more.
That's OK. We need the CO2. With the risk of an ice age, you can't be too careful.
-- 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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e o e aIt's really interesting to see Bill rationalize his own behavior while criticizing others for the same. It's mindblowing, actually.
Canada's a big exporter, as is Norway, and a number of our other friends. Mexico, too. Where's the outrage?
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eAn ice age is definitely something to avoid, but melting the Greenland ice-cap and rending the the Arctic Ocean ice-free would create a different set of problem. In this case we are navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.
You are blind to Charybdis, and happily recommending a course that would wreck us all on a rock that the climate scientist who are paid to navigate us can all see, all too clearly.
o eYour grasp of economics might have been good enough to get you a pass in Economic 101 a few decades ago, but you should understand that paying China's cheap labour better wouldn't improve their living standards if there weren't any better accommodation for them to rent or buy, or better quality food and the like. This all requires investment in infra-structure, and China is concentrating it's energies in building up it's industrial productivity at the moment - it's got a lot of people to move off the land, and it's not going to invest a lot in increasing their productivity until it starts to exhaust that resource.
aBut that rather depends on US having enough military and economic power to persuade China to sit still while this is going on. China is still spending a lot less on it's military forces than the US, but it's probably getting value for money, and it's investing overseas in a big way. The US may find that the cost of trying to inflate the debt away may be more than it can afford.
Understand what Google is actually telling you, and get back to reality.
If that was going to happen, you'd already be into converting your cars to run on natural gas. It takes a while to put natural gas pumps into enough garages to cover the country, and you don't seem to have started on that.
That's right, steer as far away from Scylla as you can and ignore Charybdis looming up straight in front of you.
These sort of decisions are a little more complicated than you like to imagine - in fact more complicated than you seem to be equipped to imagine. Pity about your education.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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China is a kleptocracy. The rulers don't give a damn about the workers or the infrastructure, except fearing a rebellion that would damage their interests.
The country is run by poorly paid politicians who turn out to be billionaires.
-- 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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