OT: Global cooling 34 million years ago

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I should care that Michael Terrell chooses not to read my posts? He does have inflated idea of his place in the scheme of things.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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If Mark wasn't an ignorant idiot, he'd know that you can't verify a theory, only falsify it.

Anthropogenic global warming is less unverified as Newton's theory of gravity, which has actually been falsified, if only to the extent that Einstein theory of Relativity updated it.

None of the data available has yet falsified the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is going on and getting worse. To some extent, this reflects the fact that the climate is a little to complicated to allow us to make particularly precise short term predictions, but there is work in progress aimed at filling in some of the missing details - like the heat transfer by currents in the depths of the oceans - and the theory can be expected to become more precisely testable as this more detailed information is collected.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Bill:

1) I have been civil to you in all my posts. You have no reason to attack me personally. It makes you look bad by the way.

2) The theory of relativity was hard for many people to believe at first and there was no physical evidence to back it up at first. Eventually the measurements became refined enough to verify it. The theory of relativity has now been verified.

3) The theory of AGW is based on computer simulations and calculations but there are no clear physical measurements to verify it. If there were unambiguous measurements of global temperature or sea level rise, then there would be some evidence that AGW is true. Right now it is a theory that predicts that the temp and sea will rise at some time in the future. If and when that starts to happen, I'll be a believer too.

I think it is wrong to base important national and global policy decisions about carbon taxes and sequestration and use of coal on an unverified theory. I have no argument with developing conservation and renewable energy sources.

Mark

He has a perfectly good reason to attack you personally. Insulting other people is the only way he knows to validate his own worth.

John

[snip]

Insulting other people is the only way Slowman knows to validate his own worthlessness.

...Jim Thompson

--
| 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     |
             
       How severe can senility be?  Just check out Slowman.

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I'll survive. Describing a scientific theory as "unverified" on the other hand, is one of those fatally revealing errors that demonstrates

- in this case - that you don't have a clue about how science works.

You can be a civil as you like, but if you post gratuitous nonsense, you have to be expect to be told that you are posting nonsense. There's no polite way of doing it.

If you knew anything about physics you'd know that relatively - as Einstein defined it - is incompatible with quantum theory, and to that extent has also be falsified. It provides an appreciably better approximation to reality that Newtonian gravitation in certain fairly specific situations, but it certainly hasn't been "verified" even if there were a way in which a scientific theory could be "verified" as opposed to tested.

They do provide one way of testing the theory.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice core data could have falsified the theory, and didn't. The global temperature rise over the last century is barely big enough to provide much of a test, but - such as it is - it hasn't falsied the theory. Granting that no experimental mesurement can ever "verify" a theory, your claim about the absence of physical measurements merely confirms that you don't know what you are talking about.

There is

The record is noisy - there are other things going on that affect the global temperature

but the trend is pretty clear.

Temperature and sea level are both rising now, if not all that dramatically yet. At the moment about half the CO2 we are pumping itno the atmosphere ends up in the sea and in tropical rain forests. If we keep on putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, the seas will warm up enough that they will start losing CO2 rather than dissovling it, and we are cutting down the tropical rain forests, so the prospects fro more dramtic rises are good, if we persist.

Since no scientific theory can ever be verified, your opinion is that we should never try to anticipate a natural disaster, and confining ourselves to cleaning up after we've unambiguously wrecked our planet.

Or motherhood or apple pie.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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As personal attacks go

is pretty tame.

In fact the propostion that you could "verify" a scientific theory displays a sufficiently fundamental ignorance of how science works to disqualify any contribution that Mark might think he was making, and calling him an ignorant idiot is a remarkably concise way of making the point, and one of the few that is difficult to ignore.

You don't understand science any too well yourself, so ask yourself how you could "verify" a circuit diagram for a sealed black box if you couldn't open it or X-ray it or whatever and could only infer the contents of the box from the electric signals going in an coming out.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Interesting that Jim Thompson finds it appropriate to post a message with the sole purpose of insulting me. I can only imagine that he has no other way of confirming his own self- worth. Not too surprising, since his brain is so far gone that he can't even spell my name right.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Bill, If you want to base you logic system on the fundamental belief that a theory can not ever be 100% verified, then I will put it in terms of degree rather than absolutes so that we at least have some common ground...

The theory of relativity made predictions that have since been observed by experimental and observational evidence. Of course it is does not explain 100% of all of science and when you get into greater detail it has inconsistencies with quantum theory. But to the level of detail that it goes it has been verified. Time dilatation etc has now been verified with clear unambiguous measurements. Before these clear unambiguous measurement results were available, there indeed was doubt to the validity of the theory of relativity.

Right now, AGW is analogous to the early days of the theory of relativity when there were maybe some noisy data available that could be interpreted as supporting or not supporting the theory. In your own words the AGW data is noisy.

Again my main point is it foolish to base major policy decisions on theories that have a low level of verification.

Mark

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AWG depends on the proposition that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and more CO2 in the atmosphere will raise global tempertures.

There's no doubt that CO2 is a greenhouse gas - that's about as verified as a scientific fact can be - and the only question is how much a given increase in CO2 will raise global temperature. Despite your claims, the various mathematical models predict a roughly 4 degrees Celcius rise by the end of the century, if we keep on pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at the current rate.

The IPCC has recognised the some of the stranger models give higher and lower estimates, so they give a range from 1.1 to 6.4 =B0C.

They don't include any estimates for non-linear run-away processes that they aren't equipped to model, so they've ignored the risk that lots of methane will start coming out of the Arctic permafrost when it gets a bit warmer - the permafrost has already warmed up enough to be emitting quite appreciable amounts of methane, but not enough that anybody thinks that it is going to run away (methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) any time soon.

You may think it is foolish to "base major policy decisions on theories that have a low level of verification" but the choice not to do anything to restrict CO2 emissions is implicitly endorsing one of several even more suspect theories.

One would be that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, so we can put as much of it into the atmosphere as we feel like. This is obvious nonsense.

The next is that while CO2 may be a greenhouse gas, there are other mechanisms that will prevent any significant increase in temperature. Lindzen had some silly idea about ocean cloud cover that got shot down years ago, and since there have been some pretty massive temperature excursions in the geological past it is difficult to believe that any such mechansm is likely to protect us in the near future.

Check out the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, which happened some 55 million years ago

Beyond that you've got a bunch of silly conspiracy theories in which the world's climatologists hae invented the whole story to get more and bigger research grants.

So if it would be foolish to "base major policy decisions on theories that have a low level of verification" the decision to do nothing about anthropogenic global warming would have to be rejected, because it would be based on theories that have even less supporting evidence than AGW.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The theory of AGW is also based on observational data. Even sceptical scientists admit that it is not possible to balance the global energy equations for the Earth after about 1970 without including GHG forcing. Crucially we have satellite data of the solar flux so you cannot magically handwave away the recent warming trend by pretending that the sun somehow got brighter.

That is a basic tenet of modern science. The best scientific models describe nature as completely as possible and are self consistent. To be a valid scientific theory it must also make testable predictions and those predictions can be used to test the theory. In particular you can only learn something new when the theory makes a prediction and the experiment shows that the theory is wrong - nature does something else.

It doesn't matter how many times you see the predicted results the theory can never be proved. Proof is only available in mathematics.

A scientific theory becomes more trusted each time it is tested in a new way and found to make a correct prediction. But most of the interesting science comes from testing theories to destruction and revealing new physics. Quantum physics and relativity were both paradigm shifts.

It also fitted nicely with Maxwells equations and the null result of the Michelson-Morely ether drift experiment. There was great appeal in the very elegant idea that the laws of physics should be the same for all observers in an inertial frame.

Some people had a lot of difficulty in accepting relativity and especially electronics engineers. You still get the odd nutter spouting off about it in the UKs Wireless World magazine.

Comparatively little. There were plenty of people who refused point blank to accept relativity because it conflicted with their common sense. Notably in the polemical leaflet "100 authors against Einstein" to which he retorted that if they were right then one would be enough.

The AGW signature is well established in the scientific literature. We can see the CO2 concentration increasing in the atmosphere and we can establish from the changing isotope ratio that it is from our burning fossil fuels. We know from their IR spectra that CO2 and CH4 are both potent greenhouse gasses. The only thing in doubt now is exactly how bad things will get and how quickly.

The confusion in the public mind is sown by fossil fuel lobbyists using techniques well honed to keep people smoking tobacco (and some of the same practitioners too).

It is even more foolish to be influenced by drooling right wingers to continue with profligate waste of energy for short term profit. You can bet your bottom dollar when the chickens come home to roost that the politicians will blame scientists for not being more vocal.

I don't favour doing much more than taking prudent "no regrets" energy efficiency measures at this stage. But I do object very strongly to right wing ostriches pretending that there isn't a problem.

Regards, Martin Brown

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Speaking about attention spans, the discussion wasn\'t about the
difference between aluminum and tantalum electrolytic capacitors, it was
about your using 30 year old data in presuming present-day aluminum
electrolytic capacitor leakage current is bad enough to preclude their
being used in RC timers with long timeouts.

[snip]

Now! Now! Don't give Slowman a boost and elevate his ranking from imbecile to stupid. He's definitely imbecile level. But I will be gracious and allow that his imbecilic actions may be due to senility ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
| 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     |
             
       How severe can senility be?  Just check out Slowman.

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I didn't suggest that aluminium capacitors were bad enough to preclude their use to get long time-outs - this wasn't true thirty years ago either - but that tantalum electrolytic capacitors worked rather better in that particular application.

Sure. You felt a burning desire to advertise your own stupidity, and you succeeded beyond your wildest dreams.

Quite why you have this enthusiasm for misunderstanding simple arguments escapes me. Presumably you suffer from the delusion that it might makes you look good. Sad really.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Jim Thompson gives advice to one of his intellectual equals - the West Virginia red-neck counseling the Texas red-neck, as if Jim had wisdom to impart, and John was capable of learning anything.

It's either comical or pathetic - possibly both.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Nice to see Jim enjoying himself with his fan club. None of them have an ounce of sense, so they are free admire one another's pathetic attempts at wit.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Here\'s What you said:

"I hope your 100uF electrolytic capacitor is a tantalum device - back
in the 1970\'s, when I would with these sorts of time constants,
tantalum electrolytic capacitors offered much lowr and more stable
leakage currents than aluminium-based devices."

Now, had you known (or taken  the time to find out) what kinds of
leakage currents modern aluminum electrolytics are capable of
exhibiting, there would have been no need for you to hope that his
electrolytic was tantalum, because you would have known that an aluminum
electrolytic would have been perfectly adequate for his job, today.

Don't insult the senile. He barely rates useless.

--
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--
Well, you certainly don\'t know anything about chip design, like Jim
does, or radio transmitter facility design, like Michael does, or even
how to properly use the lowly 555, like I do, plus you\'re impossible to
teach, so all that leaves you with is rehashing your salad days here,
reliving those fond old memories of not falling into the pitfall of
using leaky old aluminum electrolytics when those groovy tantalums are
sooo much better.

Barf...

   
JF