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Comment on Embracing uncertainty in climate change policy (!) by stevenreincarnated

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Just Obama and his appointees have listened and I’m not sure if they have listened to the risks of climate change or the risks of losing climate change dollars. Phones are cheap. Every drug dealer in town has 3 or 4 Obama phones. The next president will have his own phone and his own appointees. Congress hasn’t listened:


Comment on Embracing uncertainty in climate change policy (!) by Vaughan Pratt

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@timg56: One doesn’t need an alternative theory. In fact one can except the current theory and then point out all the many ways people have f’d it up.

In the following I’ll take “people” to refer to the most recent contributors to the topics you raise.

Made an assumption about water vapor with no idea of the processes actually in play. (Alternate assumption – the total effect of water vapor may be mildly positive to slightly negative rather than a 3x positive factor.)

Berkeley’s David Romps has a recent (2014) very detailed analysis of water vapor and its contribution to rising temperature at

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00255.1

Your proposed alternative to Romps’ theory is devoid of any analysis whatsoever and is nothing but completely unsupported conjecture.

Made an assumption that CO2 is the dominant anthropogenic factor impacting temperature. (Alternate assumption – land use changes play a significant role.)

This doesn’t even make sense. The impact of human-caused land use changes is on CO2, which you’re proposing as an alternative to human-caused CO2. If you meant that land-use changes had a bigger impact on atmospheric CO2 than human-caused emissions of CO2, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center estimates the former as around 15% of the latter.

Made an assumption that natural variability was a minor to non-factor. (Alternate assumption – natural variability is non-trivial and can amplify or mask the temperture signal.)

This is a fair alternative based on experience to date. That natural variability of climate is of a similar amplitude to climate variability attributable to CO2 variation is, at least superficially, a reasonable observation about 20th century climate. For example it is often pointed out that the rise during 1970-2000 is about the same as that during 1910-1940 (the superficiality is in neglecting the absence of a comparably large decline from 1940 to 1970).

If however the exponentially increasing excess CO2 (excess over 280 ppmv) continues well into the 21st century, aka the RCP8.5 concentration pathway, then climate variability (CV) attributable to CO2 (CV-CO2) in the 21st century (CV-CO2-21) will considerably exceed CV-CO2-20. CV-CO2-21 can therefore only remain masked by CV-NAT-21 if one or both of the following turns out to be the case: (i) CV-NAT-21:CV-NAT-20 grows like CV-CO2-21:CV-CO2-20, and/or (ii) CV-CO2-20 was much less than CV-NAT-20.

Arguments for either (i) or (ii) would be needed to support your alternative theory.

(Sorry about the abbreviations, but expanding them out into English seemed to make it less readable than more.)

Comment on Week in review – science edition by David Springer

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slywolfe – good one

+1

Comment on Week in review – science edition by justinwonder

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Interesting…good intentions and unintended consequences, hand in hand.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by Steven Mosher

Comment on Week in review – science edition by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.3

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JimD, “The reason they are not using coal already is because it is too expensive to build an electrical grid which is the only way coal is going to be cost effective.”

Given the political and economic situation, every thing is too expensive for many Africans. That is pretty much what makes the “third” world the third world. There are electric grids in Africa complete with Coal, Hydro and even a lonely little nuke plant. If China is crazy enough to finance infrastructure, coal is a serious option.

Comment on Embracing uncertainty in climate change policy (!) by Vaughan Pratt

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@HG (to me): Your strategy is that if the average SLR rate triples over a 10-year period, we should do what? Full Monty Nuke plus seawalls for the non-emergent coastlines? What should we do if we get 5cm in 1-year? Party like it’s 1999?

I imagine every city will have its own idea of what they want to do about it, Horst. In any event, mitigation (IPCC Working Group 3) is well above my pay grade, they need experts in civil and environmental engineering like our Mark Jacobson.

Not that I don’t have a vested interest in seeing it done right. Although our house just off Stanford’s main campus is at a comfortable elevation of 250′, our beach house directly opposite Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station campus is only at 30′.

Not that I’m at either this week, I’m enjoying the island climate on Martha’s Vineyard at my wife’s sister’s house at 35′ (the house in Figure 26 (p.410) of this remembrance of Raoul Bott—the little cabin at the pond’s edge, elevation 10′, is where my wife and I are staying). For my east coast island climate report here’s Thursday’s sunset as seen from Zack’s Cliff beach,

It looked considerably redder than the little pocket camera captured, maybe I should have stopped it down more. Wife’s sister and wife at right.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by fulltimetumbleweed/tumbleweedstumbling

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I never got the feeling it was good intentions. I always got the feeling it was about power and control over us and a need to impose rules and regulations on us. That’s what is felt like anyway.


Comment on Week in review – science edition by fulltimetumbleweed/tumbleweedstumbling

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That needs a bit more explanation. They came in with all their rules and ours on paint confidentiality and informed consent, the ones developed over many years that all of us had to abide by, were a whole lot stricter than theirs were. They didn’t like that.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by climatereason

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Jimd said

‘tonyb, I keep telling you, I have two well known numbers to back it up.’

Way back you made a sweeping assertion. I asked you to validate it with actual studies. You hand waved and didn’t provide these. Its an important topic and if the facts are as you say it would be expected that there are numerous peer reviewed studies to validate them as they would form an important plank of govt policy

In the total absence of your providing the two samples I requested your premise remains an assertion.

tonyb

Comment on Week in review – science edition by cerescokid

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Or Triple Dog Dare Ya’

Comment on Week in review – science edition by AK

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<blockquote>They came in with all their rules and ours on paint confidentiality and informed consent, the ones developed over many years that all of us had to abide by, were a whole lot stricter than theirs were. They didn’t like that.</blockquote>Do you know what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here" rel="nofollow">"NIH"</a> stands for (in the tech world)? Hint: it's not National Institute(s) of Health.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by jim2

Comment on Week in review – science edition by AK

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<blockquote>The reason they are not using coal already is because it is too expensive to build an electrical grid which is the only way coal is going to be cost effective. Local microgrids with solar power look more in reach.</blockquote>They aren't reliable. The moment the sun goes down, they stop. Those micro-grids need storage, which is still way too expensive, on a general scale. Full sized grids connected to coal plants will be cheaper, once you scale it up past a few pilot villages. Or they could be connected in small batches to gas turbines. Gas is more flexible, can shut down or back when the sun is shining. But you need some sort of gas distribution system. AFAIK a nation-wide gas distribution system combined with a mix of CCGT and open-cycle gas would be <b>much</b> cheaper than a full electrical grid system, even paying for the extra capacity needed to handle local peaks. And it would make much more economic room for PV, as well as storage. But the supply line would have to be built, along with some sort of price guarantees. Otherwise, a national grid with whatever hydro-power they can get and otherwise coal appears to be what everybody's building. If you want them to build something else, <b>you can't ask them to wait.</b> You need to offer them a cheaper and equally dependable alternative <b>right now.</b>

Comment on Week in review – science edition by AK

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This is similar to how they jump past land lines to cell phones, […]

Got that wrong!

Cell phones require a great deal of infrastructure. They may be able to skip lots of “last-mile” cable, but for high capacity they need fiber to connect the towers, there just isn’t enough bandwidth for more than local connectivity.

Or satellites. But satellites are very expensive infrastructure, and they have bandwidth limitations too.

I’ll agree that the new infrastructure doesn’t have to look like the old. But nobody’s developed new infrastructure yet. In developed countries, they use the existing grid. No scalable alternative has yet been offered.


Comment on Week in review – science edition by jim2

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AK. If you’ve ever been forced to use vendor-supplied “tools,” you might understand why NIH is appropriate in some cases.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by AK

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I have and I do. But not always.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by David Wojick

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JimD, given that I do not believe in AGW I find your responses basically meaningless. In any case our US coal will still be there when we need it, so running out of fossil fuel is not an issue. In the meantime I applaud the poorer countries for burning their way out of poverty. Burn baby burn.

As for African solar micro grids, the question is storage? Batteries are expensive and short lived. Or should they just use juice in daytime, and be thankful for that? It is very useful at night. I imagine they will go the way we went, which is to start with the cities.

Comment on Week in review – science edition by AK

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<a href="https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/never-invent-here-the-even-worse-sibling-of-not-invented-here/" rel="nofollow">Never Invent Here: the even-worse sibling of “Not Invented Here”</a><blockquote>The NIH archetype is the enterprise architect who throws person-decade after person-decade into reinventing solutions that exist elsewhere, maintaining this divergent “walled garden” of technology that has no future except by executive force. No doubt, that’s bad. I’m sure that it exists in rich, insular organizations, but I almost never see it in organizations with under a thousand employees. Too often in software, however, I see the opposite extreme: a mentality that I call “<b>Never</b> Invent Here” (NeIH). With that mentality, external assets are overvalued and often implicitly trusted, leaving engineers to spend more time adapting to the quirks of off-the-shelf assets, and less time building assets of their own.</blockquote>[...]<blockquote>The core attitude underlying “Agile” and NeIH is that anything that takes more than some insultingly small amount of time (say, 2 weeks) to build should not be trusted to in-house employees. Rather than building technical assets, programmers spend most of their time in the purgatory of evaluating assets with throwaway benchmarking code and in writing “glue code” to make those third-party assets work together. The rewarding part of the programmer’s job is written off as “too hard”, while programmers are held responsible for the less rewarding part of the job: gluing the pieces together in order to meet parochial business requirements. Under such a regime, there is little room for progress or development of skills, since engineers are often left to deal with the quirks of unproven “bleeding edge” technologies rather than either (a) studying the work of the masters, or (b) building their own larger works and having a chance to learn from their own mistakes.</blockquote>[...]<blockquote>To the bad, it makes it hard for engineers to progress beyond the feature-level stage, because meatier projects just aren’t done in most organizations when it’s seen as tenable for non-coding architects and managers to pull down off-the-shelf solutions and expect the engineers to “make the thingy work with the other thingy”.</blockquote>[...]<blockquote>Thus, if most of what a company has been doing has been glue code and engineers are not trusted to run whole projects, then by the time the company’s needs have out-scaled the off-the-shelf product, the talent level will have fallen to the point that it cannot resolve the situation in-house. It will either have to find “scaling experts” at a rate of $400 per hour to solve future problems, or live with declining software quality and functionality.</blockquote>[...]<blockquote>With core infrastructure (e.g. Unix, C, Haskell) I’d agree that it’s best to use existing, high-quality solutions. I also support going off-the-shelf with the relatively small problems: e.g. a CSV parser. If there’s a bug-free CSV parser out there, there’s no good reason to write one in-house. The mid-range is where off-the-shelf solutions are often inferior– and, often, in subtle ways (such as tying a large piece of software architecture to the JVM, or requiring expensive computation to deal with a wonky binary protocol)– to competently-written in-house solutions. </blockquote>[...]<blockquote>The failure, I would say, isn’t that technology companies use off-the-shelf solutions for most problems, because that is quite often the right decision. It’s that, in many technologies, that’s <b>all</b> that they use, because core infrastructure and R&D don’t fit into the two-week “sprints” that the moronic “Agile” fad demands that engineers accommodate, and therefore can’t be done in-house at most companies. The culture of trust in engineers is not there, and <b>that</b> (not the question of whether one technology is used over another) is the crime.</blockquote>[...]<blockquote>The never-invent-here attitude is stylish because it seems to oppose the wastefulness and lethargy of the old “not-invented-here” corporate regime, while simultaneously reaffirming the fast-and-sloppy values of the new one, doped with venture capital and private equity. It benefits “product people” and non-technical makers of unrealistic promises (to upper management, clients, or investors) while accruing technical debt and turning programmers into a class of underutilized API Jockeys. It is, to some extent, a reaction against the “not invented here” world of yesteryear, in which engineers (at least, by stereotype) toiled on unnecessary custom assets without a care about the company’s more immediate needs. I would also say that it’s worse.</blockquote>

Comment on Week in review – science edition by peter3172

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Jim D, you should perhaps try to find out a bit about Africa before offering your completely ignorant opinions.

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