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Conclusive physical evidence for AWG?

This was always a pretty terrible analogy, If anybody in our society
can be seen as "the bus driver" it is the politicians, and some years
ago they set up the IPCC, to take the rather complicated and tentative
map that the climatologists had been putting together, and annotate it
with warning notes - in big letters that everybody could read.

Setting up the IPCC was an example of politicians acting responsibly,
not any kind of power grab.

Scientists have been working on that map for about fifty years now. It
is still pretty rough, and we can't forecast the small hills and
valleys that are going to show up over the next few years. What we can
say is that if we keep on going the way we are, the road is going to
get to pretty horrible in another twenty or thirty years, and there
are a couple of huge cliffs further down the road which could entirely
wreck the bus and kill pretty much everybody on board.

Bill,
Mr Brown brougt up a good point, the real issue is not the validity of
AGW, but rather what our collective response to it should be..

Lets talk about:

1) Carbon taxes
2) cap and trade
3) ban the use of coal for electricity
4) use of nuclear energy
5) improved energy effeciency
6) development of renewable energy sources
7) development of alternative energy sources

Even though I do not believe AGW is valid, I DO believe in some of
the above actions for reasons that have nothing to do with AGW. I am
against actionds 1,2,3. I AM IN FAVOR of actions 4,5,6,7. (I
wonder, does that make me a green wieennie?)


What do __you__ think the world should do in response to AGW?

Mark
 
You like the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/11/climate-change-misl...

/quote

The Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the most prestigious research
facilities in the world, says recent "apocalyptic predictions" about
Arctic ice melt and soaring temperatures are as bad as claims that
global warming does not exist.

/end quote

So claiming huge cliffs ahead is bad science.

No, it is merely bad politics. The Hadley Centre wants to concentrate
public attention on the immediate problems, which aren't apocalyptic -
changes in rainfall patterns and warmer weather are going to create
problem for agriculture, and will probably starve a few million people
in countries that don't have much spare agricultural capacity.

The apocylptic problems - huge cliffs ahead - are further away, and
since they depend on run-away processes, they ar even more difficult
to model and predict than the regular climatic fluctuations, which are
difficult enough.

The worrying thing is that they have happened before in the geological
past, under circumstances that aren't wildly different from our
current situation, and we don't know enough about them to make good
estimates of the risks involved. They ought to be fairly low, but you
don't stick your neck under the blade of guillotine, even if you are
pretty confident that it isn't about to come down now.

The two situations that are most used to frighten the children - but
are - none the less, worth keeping in mind, are the prospect of the
Gulf Stream turning off - which seems to be what happened - ver a
period of less than a decade - during the Younger Dryas, some 12,000
years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

and a sudden relase of methane from methane clathrates, as seems to
have happened during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, some 55.8
million years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum

It only lasted for 20,000 years, but the global temperature spiked by
6C, and it was accompanied by a sudden burst of adaptive radiation
amongst the mammals, which is to say, most of them had to adapted to
radically different environments, which involves population crashes
and drastic selection of the survivors, who weren't well adapted to
the new enviroments.

Despite your distaste for apocolyptic stories (obviously shared by the
Hadley Centre), they don't happen to be bad science - anything but.
They are based on the results of some very good scientific research.
With any lick, we won't screw up the planet anything like badly enough
to risk a recurrence of either of these particular disasters, but
their very existence is evidence that there are "cliffs" ahead on some
of the routes we might be silly enough to follow if we didn't think
about all the risks we might be running.
 
Regardless of global warming, I want clean air and clean sea. One guy
driving a 10MPG vehicle is spending his money, but polluting
everyone's air. The fact that the temperature is rising faster that
ever before, is continuing to rise rapidly and that this rise
coincides with the industrial revolution and the burning of fossil
fuels, indicates that there is likely to be a link ... TOO likely for
the chance to be ignored. If we aren't the cause but clean up, we are
better off anyway. If we are, do we want our kids to curse us for
messing up their world ?
 
Bill,
Mr Brown brougt up a good point, the real issue is not the validity of
AGW, but rather what our collective response to it should be..

Lets talk about:

1) Carbon taxes
2) cap and trade
3) ban the use of coal for electricity
4) use of nuclear energy
5) improved energy efficiency
6) development of renewable energy sources
7) development of alternative energy sources

Even though I do  not believe AGW is valid,  I DO believe in some of
the above actions for reasons that have nothing to do with AGW.   I am
against actionds 1,2,3.  I AM IN FAVOR  of actions 4,5,6,7.    (I
wonder, does that make me a green wieennie?)

If you don't believe in anthropogenic global warming, you probably
aren't a greenie wiennie - though you'd probably have to consult the
likes of Jim Thompson and his sycophants to get an authoratitive
opinion, since they invented the term, and presumably have some dea of
what they had in mind.

If you don't believe in global warming it is unlikely that you know
enough physics to have a useful opinion on any of the schemes you
listed. There are people around who do know the physics, and still
don't believe in some aspects of anthropogenic global warming but
there aren't many of them - the overwhelming majority of the sceptics
don't know what they are talking about.

If you want to see a more or less sensible scheme for tackling
anthropogenic global warming (and a number of other problems that need
to be sorted out in the process) you could usefully read Jeffrey D.
Sachs' book "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet" ISBN
978-0-14-311487-1.

He's the director of the Earth Insitute at Columbia University where
they study the economics of the process that would be needed to get us
from where we are to where we need to be, and the book presents some
of their conclusions in a form that is more or less accessible to the
general public.

He does like carbon taxes (as I doo too) and he doesn't think much of
cap and trade. He doesn't think that it is remotely practical to ban
burning coal to generate electricity, but he thinks that new power
stations should be required to capture the carbon dioxide generated,
and sequestate it underground or deep in the ocean, and that the
current generation of coal-burning power stations should be retired as
fast as possible (which isn't going to be all that fast).

He's in favour of nuclear energy (which is to say, uranium-burning
reactors - nuclear fusion is eveybody's dream, when it is finally
reduced to practice). I think he's failed to learn the lesson of
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, which is simply that people get
sloppy, and getting casual with a nuclear reactor has a large
potential downside.

Improved energy efficiency is another no-brainer, as is the
development of renewable energy sources.

Renewable energy isn't always availalbe when you want it, so it needs
to be coupled to the development of better schemes for storing
electricity overnight (for solar energy generators) and from day to
day (for wind-powered generators).

"The development of alternative energy sources" is a liitle too
unspecific to be much use.
What do __you__ think the world should do in response to AGW?

I don't know enough to say much useful on my own account. I do know
enough to think that Jeffrey Sachs' program is probably a good
starting point.
 
K

krw

Jan 1, 1970
0
To-Email- said:
On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:35:00 -0700, Jim Thompson

On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:24:23 +0000, Martin Brown

[snip]

The oldest reference I can find to lumped thermal and self heating SPICE
models goes a lot further back in time than I imagined when I made the
comment. It even includes some basic suggestions for how to do it
longhand with sample networks as requested. It is in Intusofts
newsletter for July 1988!

http://www.intusoft.com/nlpdf/nl10.pdf

For IS-SPICE/386 with the tagline "faster than a VAX 11/780"
(a claim I find rather surprising and a bit unlikely)

Except it's true. Virtually all Spice variants on a modern PC run
much faster, as in at least an order of magnitude, than on a VAX
11/780.


Regards,
Martin Brown

Poxy hell. I own a copy of IS_SPICE/386-4. The year is about right,
i may even have an original paper copy of that issue.


...Jim Thompson

But the question is: Did a 1988 PC (386 16MHz with IS_SPICE/386 on
MSDOS outrun a VAX11/780 with bare Berkeley PSICE 2G6 (same base as
IS_SPICE) on VMS or Ultrix.


You seem to have forgotten that there was a (387) math co-processor.

...Jim Thompson
Yes and no. You are right about it being a separate chip. The
program would refuse to run without one, it even refused SW emulation
of one (with good reason). So if it ran, the coprocessor was
physically present. It required a DOS extender as well, you remember
those don't you?

I think you are referring to extended memory?

From dim memory, '87 needed an ISR, which the DOS TSR program
provided.
 
M

Martin Brown

Jan 1, 1970
0
krw said:
To-Email- said:
On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:48:27 -0700, Jim Thompson

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:35:00 -0700, Jim Thompson

On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:24:23 +0000, Martin Brown

[snip]
The oldest reference I can find to lumped thermal and self heating SPICE
models goes a lot further back in time than I imagined when I made the
comment. It even includes some basic suggestions for how to do it
longhand with sample networks as requested. It is in Intusofts
newsletter for July 1988!

http://www.intusoft.com/nlpdf/nl10.pdf

For IS-SPICE/386 with the tagline "faster than a VAX 11/780"
(a claim I find rather surprising and a bit unlikely)
Except it's true. Virtually all Spice variants on a modern PC run
much faster, as in at least an order of magnitude, than on a VAX
11/780.

Regards,
Martin Brown
Poxy hell. I own a copy of IS_SPICE/386-4. The year is about right,
i may even have an original paper copy of that issue.

...Jim Thompson
But the question is: Did a 1988 PC (386 16MHz with IS_SPICE/386 on
MSDOS outrun a VAX11/780 with bare Berkeley PSICE 2G6 (same base as
IS_SPICE) on VMS or Ultrix.

You seem to have forgotten that there was a (387) math co-processor.

...Jim Thompson
Yes and no. You are right about it being a separate chip. The
program would refuse to run without one, it even refused SW emulation
of one (with good reason). So if it ran, the coprocessor was
physically present. It required a DOS extender as well, you remember
those don't you?
I think you are referring to extended memory?

Extended memory sat as pages in one of the first 1MB adapter gaps and
used a protected mode 386 driver to remap the address space and make
real physical memory appear to other programs like the awful kludged
extended memory. It could also backfill and load other TSRs into smaller
gaps in a very cunning way.

ISTR The canonical best one was called 386max. After a while MS produced
their own third rate clone of this rather neat program.
From dim memory, '87 needed an ISR, which the DOS TSR program
provided.

The DOS TSR was a fake pure software '87 implementation, which as I
recall came in two flavours - glacially slow and accurate or slow and
inaccurate. Neither were particularly useful and many heavyweight
numerical applications would refuse point blank to run on a CPU without
hardware x87 or 3167 coprocessor support. Support got fed up with why is
it running so slowly / why doesn't it get the right answers calls.

Regards,
Martin Brown
 
R

Richard The Dreaded Libertarian

Jan 1, 1970
0
Regardless of global warming, I want clean air and clean sea. One guy
driving a 10MPG vehicle is spending his money, but polluting
everyone's air. The fact that the temperature is rising faster that
ever before,

Tell that to the people who are freezing to death in the NW US.

Thanks,
Rich
 
Tell that to the people who are freezing to death in the NW US.

He might find a more receptive audience in Australia at the moment

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7879979.stm

With 173 dead after the worst bush-fires on record, after a record-
breaking heatwave, people there might well be more willing to think
about schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In six months Rich
may also get around to changing what mind he has got left.

One of my old friends had a house in Maryville - he and his wife got
out before it burnt down, but they didn't have time to take anything
with them.
 
R

Raveninghorde

Jan 1, 1970
0
He might find a more receptive audience in Australia at the moment

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7879979.stm

With 173 dead after the worst bush-fires on record, after a record-
breaking heatwave, people there might well be more willing to think
about schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In six months Rich
may also get around to changing what mind he has got left.

One of my old friends had a house in Maryville - he and his wife got
out before it burnt down, but they didn't have time to take anything
with them.

The Australian bush fires were of course nothing to do with global
warming. Green policies had prevented clearing of the brush until the
point that fires of this magnitude were inevitable.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/green-ideas-must-take-blame-for-deaths-20090211-84mk.html

/quote

So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been
there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch
mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not
arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.

/end quote
 
B

Bill Sloman

Jan 1, 1970
0
Raveninghorde said:
The Australian bush fires were of course nothing to do with global
warming.

There's been a spectacularly long running drought in Victoria for
years now. It might not have naything to do with global warming,
but it is precisely the kid of shift in weather patterns that global
warming is likely to produce.Your "of course" prentends to a
confidence to which you are not entitled.
Green policies had prevented clearing of the brush until the
point that fires of this magnitude were inevitable.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/green-ideas-must-take-blame-for-deaths-20090211-84mk.html

/quote

So many people need not have died so horribly. The warnings have been
there for a decade. If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch
mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not
arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.

/end quote

It's more tree-huggers than environmentalists, if you want to be precise.
I grew up in the paper industry, and the tree-huggers habit of getting
mystical about trees and shrubs has always got right up my nose.

They will happily describe second growth timber in an
area that was logged out (not clear-felled, but left with enough
young trees to regenearte rapidly) some thirty years ago as
primeval forest, and the water vapour coming out of the steam
generating plant at the paper mill where I grew up became
"chemical pollution" when the tourists buses went by. The
guides knew better, but weren't going to compromise their
tips by telling the tourists things that tourists didn't want to hear.

I'm not in the least surprised to learn that they were sabotaging
controlled burn-offs - it's a standard idiocy. Much like your
unwillingness to beleive in anthropogenic global warming.
 
B

Bill Sloman

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim Thompson said:
Had it been a blizzard, Slowman would have blamed AGW.

Wonder what cockamamie theory he uses to account for normally bitter
cold winters in the US, after quite a few years of unusually mild ?:)

Some winters are colder than others. It's called random variation.
Unlike the drought in southern Australia, which looks like a once in
in a thousand year freak, your blizzards are of the sort that show up
every decade or so.
 
O

OpaPiloot

Jan 1, 1970
0
What are the physical manifestations of global warming that we can
actually MEASURE and OBSERVE?

When it comes to making important policy decisions that effect all of
us, there needs to be a clear distinction between PREDICTIONS and
SIMULATIONS vs. physical MEASUREMENTS and OBSERVATIONS. To make an
analogy to electronics, are you going to make major decisions that
impact the economic health of your company based solely upon the
results of PSPICE simulations or are you going to build prototypes
and make real measurements?

1) CO2 CONCENTRATION
The measured increase in CO2 concentration is well established. The
CAUSE of the increase is not well established. The measured increase
is within the same order of magnitude as the amount of CO2
civilization is putting into the atmosphere therefore theory that the
CO2 increase is anthropogenic is a reasonable possibility but not a
100% certainty. The CO2 concentration has varied widely well before
the use of fossil fuels. The increase in CO2 concentration is
conclusive but the cause of the increase is not conclusive.

2) GLOBAL TEMPERATURE INCREASE
The measured global temperature increase we measure today is very
small and is within the noise of normal weather variations. There
are no conclusive measurements that can show the cause of this small
temperature increase is due to CO2 or to sun spots or to anything
else. Predictions that there will be dangerous climate temperature
increases in the future are based on simulations. The simulations
assume that the temperature rise is caused by the C02 concentration
increase and that the CO2 increase is anthropogenic. The cause of the
small measured global temperature increase is not conclusive.

3) SEA LEVEL INCREASE
The measured global sea level rise today is very small also. There
are no conclusive measurements that can show this small increase has
anything to do with CO2 or temperature or anything else. Predictions
that there will be dangerous increases in sea level in the future are
based on simulations. The cause of the small measured sea level rise
is not conclusive.

4) POLAR ICE
The measured decrease in Arctic polar ice is well established. The
measured increase in Antarctic polar ice is also well established.
There are no conclusive measurements or physical evidence that
indicate a dangerous trend.

If we did not have sensitive scientific instruments, we would not
even be aware of some of the small changes that have been measured.
These observations are interesting and worthy of further study.
However, there is no conclusive physical evidence that anything
dangerous is actually happening.

Does it make sense to base a national and world energy policy on
simulations without conclusive physical evidence?

Does it make sense to levy a carbon tax or establish a cap and trade
bureaucracy, without conclusive physical evidence?

Does it make sense to use resources to build large carbon capture
facilities to sequester CO2 underground without conclusive physical
evidence?

Does it make sense to forgo the use of our oil and coal resources
without conclusive physical evidence?

Regardless of the validity of AGW, we do need to address the issue of
our energy supply. We DO need to develop alternative energy
sources. We do need to develop renewable energy sources. We do need
to improve energy efficiency. We do need to consider nuclear energy.
These are all forward moving productive steps for civilization to
progress and improve the quality of life.

However, imposing taxes, building CO2 sequestration plants, creating
a cap and trade bureaucracy and demonizing oil and coal without
CONCLUSIVE physical evidence of a real problem just does not make any
sense.

Mark

A proof is a convincing reasoning.
There are people who cannot be convinced.
Those are unreasonable people.
In many cases they are believers, who are, by definition, not interested
in the truth of their propositions, because they claim these _are_ the
truth, without the need for inspection.
By definition, science is not fully 100 % truth, otherwise no scientific
research would be done; however, reasonabe people consider the margin
small enough to take it seriously.
 
D

Don Klipstein

Jan 1, 1970
0
Raveninghorde wrote: said:
It will be interesting to compare data from AIRS with the current
measurements at Mauna Loa, Barrow etc.

http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/story_archive/Pre-Release_CO2_Data_Available/

Looks like about 375.5-377 ppmv over Hawaii, maybe 375.5-376, probably
closer to 376 over "The Big Island" for the July 2004 color coded map.

The official data from Mauna Loa Observatory says 377.48 ppmv for
monthly figure, maybe 2 ppmv higher, maybe more like 1.5 ppmv higher.

I try further, and I run into .hdf files - how do I read those?

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])
 
D

Don Klipstein

Jan 1, 1970
0
In <[email protected]>,
On Feb 12, 6:00 am, [email protected] wrote:

Bill,
Mr Brown brougt up a good point, the real issue is not the validity of
AGW, but rather what our collective response to it should be..

Lets talk about:

1) Carbon taxes
2) cap and trade
3) ban the use of coal for electricity
4) use of nuclear energy
5) improved energy effeciency
6) development of renewable energy sources
7) development of alternative energy sources

Even though I do not believe AGW is valid, I DO believe in some of
the above actions for reasons that have nothing to do with AGW. I am
against actionds 1,2,3. I AM IN FAVOR of actions 4,5,6,7. (I
wonder, does that make me a green wieennie?)
<I snip the bit from here>

Action 4 apears to me to be usually opposed by "green weenies". But I
favor that one, as well as 5-7, and think that to some extent 1 makes
sense. 2 appears to me less sensible and 3 appears to me to deserve
exceptions for purposes of avoiding major economic downturns, to allow for
development time to deal with CO2 emissions, and to allow less purchases
of petroleum (only minor improvement over coal for CO2) from nations that
disfavor the interests of the "western world".

- Don Klipstein ([email protected])
 
J

JosephKK

Jan 1, 1970
0
On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:35:00 -0700, Jim Thompson

On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:24:23 +0000, Martin Brown

[snip]

The oldest reference I can find to lumped thermal and self heating SPICE
models goes a lot further back in time than I imagined when I made the
comment. It even includes some basic suggestions for how to do it
longhand with sample networks as requested. It is in Intusofts
newsletter for July 1988!

http://www.intusoft.com/nlpdf/nl10.pdf

For IS-SPICE/386 with the tagline "faster than a VAX 11/780"
(a claim I find rather surprising and a bit unlikely)

Except it's true. Virtually all Spice variants on a modern PC run
much faster, as in at least an order of magnitude, than on a VAX
11/780.


Regards,
Martin Brown

Poxy hell. I own a copy of IS_SPICE/386-4. The year is about right,
i may even have an original paper copy of that issue.


...Jim Thompson

But the question is: Did a 1988 PC (386 16MHz with IS_SPICE/386 on
MSDOS outrun a VAX11/780 with bare Berkeley PSICE 2G6 (same base as
IS_SPICE) on VMS or Ultrix.


You seem to have forgotten that there was a (387) math co-processor.

...Jim Thompson
Yes and no. You are right about it being a separate chip. The
program would refuse to run without one, it even refused SW emulation
of one (with good reason). So if it ran, the coprocessor was
physically present. It required a DOS extender as well, you remember
those don't you?

I think you are referring to extended memory?

...Jim Thompson

That is just part of what is involved. Among other things the DOS
extender had to switch the CPU into 32 mode with 32 bit flat address
space then re-start the MMU to map around the legacy memory holes from
the XT era. This also required mapping legacy 16 bit interrupt code
with 32 bit services and application code (DOS used software
interrupts for much of the access to DOS services).
 
J

JosephKK

Jan 1, 1970
0
krw said:
To-Email- said:
On Wed, 11 Feb 2009 07:48:27 -0700, Jim Thompson

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:35:00 -0700, Jim Thompson

On Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:24:23 +0000, Martin Brown

[snip]
The oldest reference I can find to lumped thermal and self heating SPICE
models goes a lot further back in time than I imagined when I made the
comment. It even includes some basic suggestions for how to do it
longhand with sample networks as requested. It is in Intusofts
newsletter for July 1988!

http://www.intusoft.com/nlpdf/nl10.pdf

For IS-SPICE/386 with the tagline "faster than a VAX 11/780"
(a claim I find rather surprising and a bit unlikely)
Except it's true. Virtually all Spice variants on a modern PC run
much faster, as in at least an order of magnitude, than on a VAX
11/780.

Regards,
Martin Brown
Poxy hell. I own a copy of IS_SPICE/386-4. The year is about right,
i may even have an original paper copy of that issue.

...Jim Thompson
But the question is: Did a 1988 PC (386 16MHz with IS_SPICE/386 on
MSDOS outrun a VAX11/780 with bare Berkeley PSICE 2G6 (same base as
IS_SPICE) on VMS or Ultrix.

You seem to have forgotten that there was a (387) math co-processor.

...Jim Thompson
Yes and no. You are right about it being a separate chip. The
program would refuse to run without one, it even refused SW emulation
of one (with good reason). So if it ran, the coprocessor was
physically present. It required a DOS extender as well, you remember
those don't you?

I think you are referring to extended memory?

Extended memory sat as pages in one of the first 1MB adapter gaps and
used a protected mode 386 driver to remap the address space and make
real physical memory appear to other programs like the awful kludged
extended memory. It could also backfill and load other TSRs into smaller
gaps in a very cunning way.

First there was expanded memory which mapped 4 total 16 kiB pages into
the 0xD0000 block in the first meg. This was useful in XT and AT
hardware. Then with the AT series and more so on the early 386 class
PCs the capability to use LIM [1] Extended Memory. This memory
appeared above the 1 meg boundary and the drivers usually also
provided for an expanded interface (MS HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.SYS)
ISTR The canonical best one was called 386max. After a while MS produced
their own third rate clone of this rather neat program.

While 386max was good QEMM was more versatile and had better tools for
programmers. Then there was also PharLap which had adherents as well.

X87 use int 13.
The DOS TSR was a fake pure software '87 implementation, which as I
recall came in two flavours - glacially slow and accurate or slow and
inaccurate. Neither were particularly useful and many heavyweight
numerical applications would refuse point blank to run on a CPU without
hardware x87 or 3167 coprocessor support. Support got fed up with why is
it running so slowly / why doesn't it get the right answers calls.

Regards,
Martin Brown

[1] Lotus - Intel - Microsoft
 
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