Re: OT: Global warming strikes again.

Yeah - haven't you seen "Waterworld?" Everybody knows that's a future documentary. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Well, that'd be a start.

Good Luck! Rich

Actually, if a scientist could prove such a thing he would win the Nobel Prize for Phyics.

This is a rather odd post. Rich makes an ad hominem attack, to which I make a reasoned response, pointing out the logical error in his claim

- which Rich then dismisses as an ad hominem attack on him, as if any other kind of response to dumb ad hominem attack would be appropriate

John then comes to support Rich's claim, with an equally nonsensical attack, claiming that I'm not interested in facts, when I adduce them regularly to point out the holes in John's more bizarre pontification

He then goes on to point out that I'm not doing anything, apart - of course - from collecting the f facts that he finds it necessary to ignore. I'd much prefer to be doing something more practical, but I've spent some years trying to find work in Dutch electronics, and it doesn't seem likely that there is any way left that promises me any ghost of a chance of success.

John' idea of a ritual insult is my repeatedly pointing out that John is pontificating about something where he doesn't actually have a clue. John does know stuff about electronics, but he seems to think that his hard-won knowledge in this important but limited area means that his half-baked opionions about a wide range of other subjects are equally worthy of respect.

So he makes any number of basically similar pratfalls, and resents the repeated injuries to the same part of his already over-sensitive ego whenever I point this out.

He claims I do this to puff up my own useless ego. He may be right. I think I do it because I have a low tolerance for nonsense, but one's insight into one's own motives are never that trustworthy.

This may tell us something about John's domestic arrangements. He - predictably - doesn't know anything about mine. I've already got a DVM which is good enough for my needs. If I needed something appreciably better, I'd buy myself a Thurlby-Thandar 1906 from Farnell tomorrow (order code 724-026). I've bought several at various places where I've worked and the price/performance ratio is pretty good. My wife might wonder why I'd bought a laboratory-grade DVM, but she wouldn't get excited - I have spent this kind of money before on projects that didn't eventually take off.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

And one of the worst movies of all time. Then he made "Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves" aka "Mudworld". But that inspired Mel Brooks' "Men in Tights", so it was all worth it.

I'll change my name to Gil.

John

No physics education helps predict the states of a chaotic system with unknown forcings and unmeasurable parameters.

John

He doesn't believe in the lottery, yet, because they haven't figured out a way to force everyone to buy tickets.

ge

The internet bill is about 50 euro per month, which is small change. I spend more on books every month. Like Rich, I'd be delighted if I got paid for my advocacy, but anthropogenic global warming doesn't actually need advocacy - good scientific evidence is pretty persuasive

- and nobody has come up with any evidence of pro-anthropogenic-global- warming propaganda machines.

Despite the claims of the denialist press, the IPCC isn't any kind of propaganda machine - their job is just to report the scientific data in a form that the politicians can understand. As with all organisations that advise politicians, some of the politicians being advised have a clear idea of the advice they would like to hear, and some them try to put pressure on the IPCC and the scientists whose work is being reported. Chris Mooney's book "The Republican War on Science" ISBN 0-465-04675-4 reports a few US examples.

If George Soros has a pro-AGW "spin factory" anywhere, Sourcewatch hasn't found it yet. Their entry on him concentrates on his campaign against Dubbya and the neo-cons

Since Chris Mooney clearly shows that Dubbya and the neo-cons were denialists, the fact that Soros doesn't like them might be seen by some as some kind of implicit endorsement of anthropogenic global warming, but it would be a long stretch from there to some imagined "spin factory". By contrast, the links between Exxon-Mobil and the Heartlands Institute are clear and well-documented.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Hard-won? Hardly! It's been fun.

Fathead. Boring fathead.

You said it was flakey.

John

te:

now

bal

ea

the

nd

No. The worst case - including everything in the Antarctic - about 240 feet, and that isn't going to happen in thennext couple of millenia unless there are some totally unexpected positive feedbacks.

That "few hundred years" represents an assessment of how the Greenland ice sheet might choose to come apart. David Archer's "The Long Thaw" ISBN 978--0-691-14811-3 points out that the Heinrich events 50,000 years ago saw a century-timescale crumbling of the Launrentide (Canadian) ice sheet into ice-bergs in the North Atlantic. If the Greenland ice sheet chose to come apart the same way, your factory would be submerged rather sooner.

That - incidentally - is a fact that I've adduced (and not for the first time), despite your claim elswhere that I don't deal in facts.

Not as much as I should have done.

I walked up one, the one time I visited San Francisco. Even rode a cable car.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You can't win the lottery with facts that you can dredge up with Google.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

a way

I don't believe in the lottery because the lottery organisers are the only certain winners.

My grandfather said he wasn't going to bet on horses until he saw the bookies cycling home from the races, which is another version of the same line.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

enda?

There are a couple of published papers and a patent or two that say otherwise. Check out "A W Sloman" on scholar.google.com.

This isn't the only evidence that I can design electronics, but it is the easily accessible evidence.

It's odd that you will believe every kind of unverifiable nonsense published in the right-wing media, but won't believe in the verifiable claims that I make. Maybe if I embedded them in fulsome flattery you'd find them easier to swallow.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

ist

in

he

ou

We can predict the positions of the planets for the next 100 million years - the system is chaotic, but happily susceptible to short term forecasting.

The earth's climate has been cycling around in a rather more complicated way for the past million years or so, but we are starting to get a handle on what was actually going on. If it is chaotic, it has been stuck in a fairly predictable limit cycle for the past few million years.

The sole force acting on the earth's climate is radiation from the sun. This is actually predictable within fairly narrow limits. Some of the parameters involved in the redistribution of the heat coming in from the sun aren't currently known as accurately as we'd like - the heat transferred by deep ocean currents is being measured by the Argo buoy system - but we are working on it.

Your own education in physics looks as if it could do with a bit of sprucing up.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Persistent fun.

I read that as a gotcha.

Temperamental. Sanding the contacts on the batteries I was testing made the problem go away. I didn't need to do that as recently as last year, so my first thought was that the DVM was showing it's age - about twenty years. I was wrong.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Cool, we can commute by gondola.

John

You mean like this?

That's silly. Volcanoes, cosmic ray flux, orbital variations, changes in geography, the occasional comet or asteroid impact, plants, animals, and people affect climate. And we don't even know the longterm behavior of the solar radiation.

John

...i LIKE that...in _intelligent_ ice sheet!

ote:

armist

gh in

than

f the

. You

Exactly like that.

Most of this is just parameter setting. The solar radiation is the forcing function, and the rest affects how the heat flows through the atmosphere and gives us our climate.

We do have a pretty good idea of the long term behaviour of the solar radiation. The nuclear fusions going on in the core of the sun are pretty well understood.

The short term variations with the sun-spot cycle are less well understood but they aren't large.

Your grab bag of stuff that might affect be affecting climate over a bunch of wildly diffeent time scales doesn't constitute any kind of argument that the prolbem is intractable - as you seem to want to claim - merely complicated and occasionally idiosyncratic.

Cosmic ray flux is particularly weird - some nutters do think that it does influence clouds by providing condensation nuclei, and their claims do show up on denialist web-sites, along with a bunch of other failed hypotheses, but it has to be a minor player when compared with solar wind, which doesn't seem to do much either.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen