He doesn't have to. Clouds haven't done anything exciting in the past, and they aren't likely to do anything exciting in the future. Geology has given us a lot of evidence about the way the climate behaves as the CO2 level in the air goes up and down.
You want to make it more difficult and mysterious than it is because you do n't like the results. That's what makes you a "good little paranoid dittohe ad science denier" and a truly rotten discussant of anything you don't wa nt to believe.
net reflectance, damping any future warming, and that soot doesn't melt sno w, decrease albedo, and release more of the dreaded phlogiston.
It hasn't in the past, or at least not enough to get excited about.
eference to the models that predicted *any* of those even five years back.
What purpose would that serve?
licated than computing the energy balance of an imaginary sphere investing an imaginary earth.
The more precision you want, the more detail you've got to include. Sadly f or your "good little paranoid dittohead science denier" position we don't n eed a lot of precision to detect that anthropogenic global warming is going on now, and more CO2 in the atmosphere will make it worse.
If you really want to get excited about the science, take a look at the Eoc ene-Paleocene Thermal Maximum
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It was 55.8 million years ago, and it seems to have been caused by a brief but massive increase in greenhouse gases. Granting your passion for antiqua ted political systems, you may find an antique climatic excursion equally a ttractive. That one didn't actually kill off all that many species, but it messed up the earth's ecology enough to allow the mammals to radiate extens ively, which probably wasn't much fun for them at the time, since it implie s rather vigorous selection. Very character building, for those not selecte d out.
fact - our only hope, we would be doomed. It isn't and we aren't, unless ha lf-wits like you are more influential than you deserve to be.
l (and numerous) possibilities on offer that don't happen to fit your prefe rred view of the world. People with a rather better grasp of physics than y ou have (or John Larkin has) have made similar kinds of mistakes.
I'll depart from customary restraint and return the sentiment.
I'd think that in your mind it should be self-interested consume-a-holic half-wits like you who are the problem. I used 64kWHr of electricity last month, all hydro, and 10 gallons of gasoline. Your European junket alone used close to or more than my entire annual energy consumption.
Yet you presume to lecture because you presume everything, test nothing, and are incapable of more. That's the opposite of science.
If more people were "half-wits" like me, there wouldn't be a problem under any scenario--even your outlandish contrivances--though that data likely wouldn't stop hysterical doomsaying moonbats such as yourself from trying to micro-manage people who live 10x more responsibly than you.
Your own climastrology fixation has blinded you to all other possibilities than the hysterical, impracticable solutions that have, for whatever unknowable reason, thus far taken root inside your demonstrably impenetrable skull.
, solar radiance, solar wind, ocean currents, earth's magnetic field change s, farming, airplanes, and orbital variations.
umed to make CO2 matter much. But those same amplifications make everything else matter, too.
Sadly for your half-baked logic, the "amplifications" that explain the AGW that we are seeing now are the same "amplifications" required to let the Mi lankovitch effect explain the alternation between ice ages and interglacial s over the past few million years.
It's a complicated story, and one of the complications is explaining why th e alternation started off with a 40,000 year period before switching to a r oughly 100,000 year period about a million years ago.
You haven't got the faintest idea about it, and your sterling defense of Ja mes Arthur - who is equally ill-informed - is motivated more by personal lo yalty than any kind of scientific insight. You do pick up fragments from th e Murdoch press but the journalists who peddle those fragments don't know w hat they are talking about, and you know even less.
Sloman doesn't care about the climate, or the fates of people living near sea level. He has admitted that he won't change his personal behavior to reduce his CO2 production.
He just need a substrate for making lame, off-topic, pompous third-person insults. Having nothing to say about electronics, he picks AGW. Ignore him.
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John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
Precision electronic instrumentation
in fact - our only hope, we would be doomed. It isn't and we aren't, unless half-wits like you are more influential than you deserve to be.
real (and numerous) possibilities on offer that don't happen to fit your pr eferred view of the world. People with a rather better grasp of physics tha n you have (or John Larkin has) have made similar kinds of mistakes.
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Sloman's a good source of the latest talking points, which saves collecting them, and makes it easier to explain these things to others. And he's always sure to reply. And crawfish.
I'll miss the ole grouch when he's gone, but yes, he can be pompous and annoying.
All of those, and more. More water vapor could produce more snowfall, another negative feedback. Or the heat could be sequestered, e.g. in deep ocean, or geographically, near the equator. Right now the avg. global temp's about 13oC--OMG, there goes all the ice!!! Not.
Even without that, the net AGW "forcing" alleged is on the order of 1% of net insolation, which is totally overshadowed by the uncertainties of huge factors like...clouds.
If there were no negative feedbacks the planet would've been incincerated ages ago.
in fact - our only hope, we would be doomed. It isn't and we aren't, unless half-wits like you are more influential than you deserve to be.
real (and numerous) possibilities on offer that don't happen to fit your pr eferred view of the world. People with a rather better grasp of physics tha n you have (or John Larkin has) have made similar kinds of mistakes.
There are about a billion of us in the developed world. There are ways wher e our tendency to live our lives within the possibilities that our society offers could result in less CO2 getting into the atmosphere, but individual restraint isn't one of the potentially effective ones.
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Good for you. You may have delayed the climate catastrophe by several milli seconds, but your politically motivated postings against effective measures against anthropogenic global warming will have more than undone your virtu ous abstinence. Though I suspect that your virtue is primarily miserliness.
In fact, I doubt if I make it to first base in the consume-a-holic stakes. My "European junket" is all about long-term obligations, rather than consum erism. I'd have been much happier to stay at home, but my wife would have b een peeved if I had.
and are incapable of more. That's the opposite of science.
I've made my contribution to science, which is more than you can claim, and my opinions are based on rather deeper insights than you can manage. I've got no problem with lecturing you - you know very little, and what you thin k you know comes from gossip and misapprehension, with occasional contribut ions from the Murdoch media.
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The problem with half-wits like you you is that you are confident in your i gnorance.There's no micro-managing involved in pointing out the US needs to stop burning fossil carbon as its major energy source.
It's actually a bit odd that you should use the phrase "micro-managing" - I imagine that you are harping on my socialist leanings, and allowing your i gnorant confusion of socialism with communism to persuade yourself that you can claim that I want some sort of central planning authority to shift you r energy generation to renewable and non-polluting sources. I'm perfectly h appy with the free market approach of making the polluter pay for the real, long term costs of the pollution they emit.
I really don't give a damn where you get your energy from, so long as it do esn't involve injecting even more CO2 into the atmosphere. The problem is t hat retiring your coal, and natural-gas power power stations and building e nough non-polluting power stations is a society-wide choice, as is building enough of them that electric cars and trucks could work without flattening your grid.
No matter how "responsibly" you think you live, the problem has to be tackl ed right across your society, and your complacent blindness isn't helping t hat process - in fact it's actively hindering it.
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Climastrology? Hysterical? Impenetrable? You are over-egging your pudding.
Just tell me what you understand by "effective radiating altitude" and expl ain why it is wavelength dependent. It's a simple test of the depth of your understanding of the basics of greenhouse warming, and I'm confident that you don't know enough to know what I'm talking about.
It's also simple enough that I can explain it one decidedly patronising pos t.
Since phlogiston doesn't actually exist, discussing its trickiness is akin to discussing James Arthur's grasp of reality. Both are entirely hypothetical entities, unsupported by any shred of evidence.
We are actually above the temperature of a black-body sphere at this position in space, which would be -19C. So we have over 30C of greenhouse warming already. How we got here is complex.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
th isn't static or easily measured, and it's not shrouded by a crystal ball . We're shrouded by an ever-variable mix of gases and clouds, and the surfa ce changes color and reflectance in myriad elusive ways.
science denier that you are.
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Cloud cover is about 50% at the moment, and seems to have been fairly close to that over much of the geological history of the earth. Since clouds app ear when air is rising and or moving away from the equator (both of which c ool the air mass) and vanish when the air is moving the other way, conversa tion of mass dictates that 50% is the likeliest level of cloud cover.
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Climate science is perfectly happy with long term averages. John Larkin lik es to confuse weather prediction, where "when" it happens matters, with cli mate prediction, which is more into "how much per season" which is rather m ore dclosely constrained by thermodynamics.
complicated than computing the energy balance of an imaginary sphere invest ing an imaginary earth.
That complicated enough. You have to know about "pressure broadening" to do it right.
on, solar radiance, solar wind, ocean currents, earth's magnetic field chan ges, farming, airplanes, and orbital variations.
Cosmic rays don't seem to matter. The other sources of cloud nucleation see m to provide enough nuclei to give you clouds when the air is super-saturat ed with water vapour.
Orbital variation is better known as the Milankovitch Effect. It does expla in the timing of the ice age interglacial alternation, but not why this swi tched from every 40,000 years to every 100,000 years about a million years ago.
That's one of the positive feedbacks that lets the tiny Milankovitch variat ions in insolation produce an alternation between ice ages and interglacial s.
All that ice over Canada and Northern Europe during ice ages increases the albedo of the earth by a significant amount.
ear the equator. Right now the avg. global temp's about 13oC--OMG, there go es all the ice!!! Not.
Tracking the ocean currents is what the Argo buoy project is about. We alre ady know about the the El Nino/LaNina alternation. The Atlantic Multidecada l Oscillation is less well understood.
ssumed to make CO2 matter much. But those same amplifications make everythi ng else matter, too.
Don't project your own ignorance as the uncertainties that better informed climatologists have to deal with.
ages ago.
The ice albedo positive feedback is a good example of why this doesn't happ en.
Once the Laurentian and Northen European ice sheets have entirely melted, t here's no of that positive feedback going on. The current progression of an thropogenic global warming is going to get rid of the ice cover on the Arct ic Ocean in a decade or two, which will give little more positive feedback (which is why the Artic is warming up twice as fast as everywhere else. Sin ce the Arctic Ocean is only exposed to glancing illumination, making it ice
-free has a lot less effect than melting the Laurentian ice sheet did.
In any event, a positive feedback has to have a gain of two before it can r un away. The combination of changing albedo and changing CO2 levels that dr ove the ice age inter-glacial alternation may well have come close to that, but once you've melted most of the Laurentian and Northern European ice sh eets you've killed off a lot of the gain.
The Eocene-Paleocene Thermal Maximum does seem to reflect some kind of run- away, but the temperature rise was only 6C, which - while it was tolerably catastrophic - does fall short of incineration.
That's profound. I think I have a partial explanation, too.
You lose neurons with age, and it helps a lot if you can patch in some extras to wire around the failures.
Rigid thinkers, comfortable in their box, don't grow redundant nerve pathways. That takes novelty, physical exercise(*), curiosity, and discipline. Even with all those it's a losing battle, but without, you lose more often, and more quickly.
Cynics are *really* rigid, close-minded, pessimistic. Knee-jerk cynics-- who see no solutions, imagine no world beyond their playpen--they'd seem very susceptible.
(*) (as a practical matter, it's one of the very few things that documented to add neurons to brains)
cting them, and makes it easier to explain these things to others. And he' s always sure to reply. And crawfish.
d annoying.
xtras to wire around the failures.
The cynics who fit James Arthur's description may well be very susceptible. My kind of cynic is always open to the possibility that other people may no t be acting as altruistically as they claim to be, but only as a possibilit y. That's more open minded than James Arthur's kind of position which is t o always be cynical about Democratic motives, and never to be cynical about Republicans, and probably needs more - rather than fewer - neurones to ope rate.
A Finnish study showed that social contacts were an even better predictor o f the incidence of Alzheimers - the more social contacts (even by phone and by e-mail) the lower the incidence of Alzheimers. "Cynics" - as defined by James Arthur - would have fewer social contacts. My kind of cynic would ha ve developed his less-judgemental point of view to be able to cope with a w ide range of social contacts, by keeping his eyes open to various possible modes of behaviour.
Not really. It had everything to do with the mill owners instructing their boilermen to have the thing hot, overpressure and ready to go for the start of a shift. The majority of major boiler explosions occurred just as the workforce was arriving with commensurately high casualties as parts of the building rained down on them. The rest came from continuing to run boilers when they were obviously about to fail (and a serious lack of understanding of the dangers of stored energy in compressed gasses and high pressure steam in particular).
A few contemporaneous accounts for you to consider:
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You can tell how miserable and penny pinching the industrial mill owners were by the fact that the UK (almost alone amongst the combatant nations of WWI) does not recognise Armistice Day as a national holiday because it would have interfered with productivity.
Coffin ships were a similar disgrace of that era which eventually resulted in the Plimsoll line after they had run out of ways to frustrate the passage of his bill through parliament.
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One of his most famous speeches - unbridled capitalism views workers as a just one more commodity to be traded and exploited for maximum yield up to and including killing them to claim the insurance money!
It's been previously observed that active intellectual activity deters senility. PCB-level electronic design seems ideal to me. It involves learning new applications, often involving physics, architectural brainstorming, reading byzantine data sheets, breadboarding, detailed electronic/packaging/thermal design, checking multilayer PCB layouts, and intense reviews looking for errors. That's hard and diverse brain work, mental exercise.
It is physically sedentary, so some exercize is a good idea, too.
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John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
Precision electronic instrumentation
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