No, I am judging how people are using their money. Whether to support the majority view of the scientists and American people, or the minority interests and their needs.
Comment on Week in review: policy and politics edition by Jim D
↧
↧
Comment on Criticism, tolerance and changing your mind by Danny Thomas
Joshua,
Thanks. I’ll take a look.
↧
Comment on Criticism, tolerance and changing your mind by Joshua
Uh Oh. I’m in big trouble now!
So a way of spotting trolls early in their online careers and preventing their worst excesses would be a valuable tool.
Today, Justin Cheng at Stanford University in California and a few pals say they have created just such a tool by analyzing the behavior of trolls on several well-known websites and creating an algorithm that can accurately spot them after as few as 10 posts. They say their technique should be of high practical importance to the people who maintain online communities.
My days are numbered:
↧
Comment on Week in review: policy and politics edition by Danny Thomas
JimD,
Exactly. And that’s my point. Who are we (you or I) to decide? There are self interests all around. It seems you’ll forgive Steyer his “transgressions” (after all his money came from fossil fuels), and won’t give others (Koch) the same opportunity (ever heard of BEST?). The SCOTUS decided it was a free speech issue and resolved it. We live with it.
This kind of thinking is the root of the GW/skeptic contentiousness. So in this case, the fault isn’t on the skeptical side.
It’s up to the public to decide, not having decisions made for them (us).
↧
Comment on Climate change availability cascade by Skiphil
<blockquote>"The rest makes the rather poor<b> assumption</b> that the IPCC climate change projections and science behind them <b>can’t be right despite all the evidence</b>"
</blockquote>
It is highly uncharitable to assert that Judith is relying upon such an "assumption" (absent reasoned judgment) or that "CAN'T be right despite all the evidence" is any accurate description of how Judith approaches IPCC issues.
↧
↧
Comment on Criticism, tolerance and changing your mind by Danny Thomas
Joshua,
Another algorithm? I’m skeptical!
BTS, did that even get a giggle?
↧
Comment on Are human influences on the climate really small? by Wagathon
If you remember, Trenberth told us the heat is missing — we can’t find it — but, despite the many uncertainties, as Dr. Curry reminds us, “there is no particularly convincing evidence that the ‘missing heat’ is hiding in the ocean.” All we have is the changing story of the social cascade that has a vest interest in maintain the illusion of global warming certainty.
↧
Comment on Climate change availability cascade by Skiphil
<blockquote> ‘a precious conceit of a Western elite’</blockquote>
packs a lot of meaning into a few words! Well said, the climate obsessions are both precious and (overwhelmingly) limited to Western elites. To the extent that anyone else cares it is merely for levers to pry money out of guilt ridden Western elites.
↧
Comment on Climate change availability cascade by RiHo08
Capt’nDallas
Ephedrine has a long history, like thousands of years of use in asthma. Caffeine, the Arabica bean, as in strong coffee, particularly as a quick treatment for asthmatic attacks, is rapidly converted in the body to theophylline, a late 1960’s and 70’s popular treatment. Cromolyn, from a flower that grows around the Mediterranean Sea and Nile River was used for asthma 3000 years before Christ. Chicken soup, an “old wives tale remedy” has a more recent Yiddish connection of which I am not terribly informed.
Ephedrine disappeared from regular asthma treatment use when the Olympic Gold Medal was stripped from an Indiana swimmer and instead given to Mark Spitz who subsequently collected 8 Gold Medals in swimming. Ephedrine had been banned from Olympic competition and Marax which contained both ephedrine and theophylline had been prescribed to the swimmer.
Theophylline had its heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s until the cost to develop salbutamol persuaded pharmaceutical companies to lean on allergists to prescribe the selective Beta 2 agents to treat the Cyclic AMP receptor in supposed Beta 2 deficiency of asthma.
Inhaled steroids, an expensive to develop inhaled formulation, have had their run as well with @ 1/3 asthmatic being steroid resistant. The awareness of steroid resistance in asthmatics has asthma treating physicians messing around with Magnesium Sulfate and a host of toxic agents including immune suppressing agents like Methyltrexate, surgeries, etc.
Now to the psychosomatic story. Popular in the post Freudian days with Jung and therapists but nothing has been shown except recent epidemiological data on maternal stress influence on fetus and subsequent expression of infant and young childhood wheezing/asthma. The stress seems to be in the form of maternal depression; i.e., clinical depression.
As to asthmatics who can at times SEEM to provoke an asthma attack in themselves through strong emotions including laughing (or is it only hyperventilating) this is probably an evolving story, definitive research yet to be seen in the tabloids like NYT, Wash Post.
I am waiting for our President’s running account of his daughter’s precipitous respiratory experiences treated by withdrawing the child from stressful experiences; closet therapy.
On the other hand, I have witnessed children in late elementary school basketball games run themselves to death because the child was wheezing only a little and their asthma was labeled and perceived by the parent as mild. Maybe our President will try to exercise his daughter out of her asthma. Won’t be the first time that has been tried.
↧
↧
Comment on Draft APS Statement on Climate Change by kneel63
Joshua: “That answer seems unrealistic given the scientific uncertainties,…”
Heh. Let me see if I have this straight.
You believe there is a risk of damage from CO2 emissions, but it’s hard to quantify the exact risk because we don’t know either future emissions paths or climate sensitivity with enough precision and accuracy. Nevertheless, you propose (or at least endorse) emissions reductions as policy – a “just in case” decision to reduce the unquantifiable risks.
Assuming that’s true, here’s the problem: from a policy perspective, you are proposing (or supporting proposals) to implement policy(ies) that can be costed (disregarding the accuracy of the costings, someone will be able to take an educated guess), but the benefits of which you can’t define in your own terms.
This does not seem to be a reasonable course of action.
However, let me give you the benefit of the doubt and suggest that what you were actually objecting to was the “solid” (or whatever the word was) part.
If that is the case, here is the problem: existing policy proposals do not, as far as I know, supply even “fuzzy” benefits – something like (don’t pick on the numbers – I pulled them out of my nether region as an example only):
Best case: RCP8.5, TCS 6.0, estimated reduced warming: 5C GMST by 2100
Worst case: RCP2.0, TCS 1.4, estimated reduced warming: 0.2C GMST by 2100
Estimated costs per 1C increase in GMST: $150B p.a.
See how that works? If you can’t narrow it down because of the uncertainties, you supply a range from best case to worse case and let the pollies decide what is acceptable – that’s their job, right? Alas, we do not appear to be getting such numbers for ANY mitigation proposals AT ALL. Which makes it hard to support any of them AT ALL.
Hopefully, this explains the issue with your approach.
↧
Comment on Criticism, tolerance and changing your mind by Don Monfort
Don’t flatter yourself, joshie. We don’t need a Stanford paper. You were pegged as an ordinary garden variety troll, from day one.
↧
Comment on Week in review: policy and politics edition by AK
@Peter Lang...
Fact is, I've been spending too much time on what is, at base, a personal project, and not enough on sleep, which I need for my day job. So I'm only going to address a few of your points, not to say that others don't deserve answers.<blockquote>I am interested, but only if you can provide a link to estimated cost of electricity from an authoritative source or you can articulate your design concept clearly and the key design parameters and the basis for your cost estimate – [...] If you cannot provide these, there is no point in continuing because we are just to talking past each other.</blockquote>Yes, well, I'm not nearly at the "here's my proposal with cost estimate" stage yet. I'm still at the "sit around throwing ideas at the whiteboard and see which ones stick" stage. Hoover Dam, for instance, was jferguson's idea, I was actually thinking of a slightly mis-remembered cross between Shasta and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam#Operations" rel="nofollow">Oroville</a>.<blockquote>Construction of the underground Edward Hyatt Pump-Generating Plant was finished shortly after the completion of Oroville Dam. At the time, it was the largest underground power station in the United States,[15] with three 132 megawatt (MW) conventional turbines and three 141 MW pump-generators for a total installed capacity of 819 MW.[6] The Hyatt Powerplant is capable of pumping water back into Lake Oroville when surplus power is available. The pump-generators at Hyatt can lift up to 5,610 cubic feet per second (159 m3/s) into Lake Oroville (with a net consumption of 519 MW), while the six turbines combined utilize a flow of 16,950 cubic feet per second (480 m3/s) at maximum generation.[23]</blockquote><blockquote>Since 1969, the Hyatt plant has worked in tandem with an extensive pumped-storage operation comprising two offstream reservoirs west of Oroville. These two facilities are collectively known as the Oroville-Thermalito Complex.[24] Water is diverted into the upper Thermalito reservoir (Thermalito Forebay) via the Thermalito Diversion Dam on the Feather River. During periods of off-peak power use, surplus energy generated at Hyatt is used to lift water from Thermalito's lower reservoir (the Thermalito Afterbay) to the forebay, which releases water back into the afterbay to generate up to 114 MW of power at times of high demand.[25] The Hyatt and Thermalito plants produce an average of 2.2 billion kilowatt hours (KWh) of electricity each year, about half of the total power produced by the SWP's eight hydroelectric facilities.[26][27]</blockquote>My confusion resulting, IMO, from trying to assimilate too much too quickly without saving links.
But the primary problem I'm throwing ideas at the whiteboard tying to solve is, AFAIK, one you consider a waste of time: how to make best use of the rapid exponential decline in cost of PV? You think it won't continue, I think it (probably) will, thus justifying the time and effort I spend trying to explore <b>possible</b> plans and predictions of its deployment.<blockquote>I read your post and now realise that Lake Mohave extends right up to the Hoover Dam power station tailraces (I hadn’t realised that before).</blockquote>I actually hadn't noticed the mention in Wiki either, but if I had I would have blown it off until I found the reference to actual water levels. I had actually read the blog post you linked to the first time, and one of the takeaway messages <b>for me</b> was that any pumped storage requiring miles of high-pressure pipe wouldn't be worth my trouble investigating. (Dredging is "iffy".)
Anyway, I'll repeat that I'm working far in advance of detailed plans/designs with the necessary parameters for good cost estimates, I'm still exploring, trying to find examples of them. Not that, If I find something that looks good, I won't go ahead and do those estimates. Once I have a (hopefully) optimum design in mind.
↧
Comment on Climate change availability cascade by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2
RiH008, Chicken soup just seems to be good for about anything :) It supposedly has mild anti-inflammatory properties. Now we just need free-range chicken fed a high caffeine, ephedra and Cromolyn diet .
↧
↧
Comment on Week in review – science and technology edition by omanuel
The AGW debate is over. Now we need to identify a sane way to restore sanity to society, integrity to science and civilian rights to citizens.
↧
Comment on Climate change availability cascade by popesclimatetheory
A much better opinion might be. There is no proof that global warming increased asthma rates. I have not actually seen any proof that asthma “rates” have increased or decreased. I suspect the rates are not known well enough to determine if they have increased.
↧
Comment on Week in review – science and technology edition by bentabou
Oh, no, now there’s a warm blog in the ocean (RealClimate?). Maybe that’s the source of the missing heat?
↧
Comment on Climate change availability cascade by Barnes
The cascade effect is in fact alive and well. It more or less started, or maybe just got legs, with hansens senate testimony. The liberal msm, smelling a good story complete with a convenient villain, evil oil companies and fossil fuels in general, saw an opportunity to increase revenue by helping to promote the oncoming doom lest we give up our evil ways. Of course, the green blob mob throws it’s substantial financial weight behind the meme, along with gollywood, pop culture, and a k-graduate indoctrination system that I suspect even our hostess helped along at one time. It continues to be the perfect liberal cause since everything can be blamed on it, and libs feel so good about themselves for saving the planet, while condemning those in developing nations to lives of continued poverty. This administration can still do a lot of damage in the next 2 years. In some way, I hope he has enough success for people to see just how damaging his policy wishes can be.
↧
↧
Comment on Week in review: policy and politics edition by Jim D
The fault is on the righty SCOTUS, but given what they have done to the elections, people have to figure out how to play the system back into favoring the majority over the minority in them.
↧
Comment on Climate change availability cascade by matthewrmarler
Jim D: <i> The transient climate does not have to maintain relative humidity immediately, especially since the drier areas are the ones heating up first, as it happens.</i>
Have the sea surface temperatures remained constant over the time span that you were writing of? The US, at least between the Rockies and Appalachians has had an increase in maximum rainfall of 7% since 1950.
↧
Comment on Week in review – science and technology edition by Turbulent Eddie
Warm blob in ocean linked to weird weather across US …
Bond coined the term “the blob” last June in his monthly newsletter as Washington’s state climatologist. He said the huge patch of water — 1,000 miles in each direction and 300 feet deep — had contributed to Washington’s mild 2014 winter and might signal a warmer summer.
Some get incensed when weather patterns are ascribed to ocean temperature.
Did the blob cause mild winter?
Or was a big ridge and fewer frontal passages cause both the blob and mild winter? And Cali Drought as well?
↧
More Pages to Explore .....
