Michael,
I’m told that temperatures on Mercury’s surface can reach 430 degrees C. Nighttime temperatures on the surface can drop to -170 degrees C.
Just thought you’d like to know.
Oh, by the way. The deepest part of the ocean is the Mariana Trench – some 10,900 m deep. Pretty deep, eh?
Cheers.
Jim D,
First, I’m not saying 4C is ‘unlikely or not so bad’. What I’ve read recently is a backtracking off of 4C to about 1.5 C (down from 2C being a threshold) and that same 1.5C being much worse than the previous 4C (well, maybe….or maybe not…..seems uncertain).
I am also quite comfortable taking a look at issues (starting with land use) which can be addressed based on incentives and not (yet?) by force.
That is my ‘judgement’. It seem that ‘majority’ to which you refer may not have any teeth (see Paris expectations) and based on it’s history it’s been ineffective so my ‘judgement’ suggests a different approach. And that approach does not let you off the hook as an ‘individual’ who does not carry (yet?) the evidence necessary to persuade ‘society’ to implement programs with some level of force.
But that’s just me.
Jim D
Indeed, NGO’s, at least those that share > 95% of their proceeds like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation do the heavy lifting with regards to in-the-field work to alter ingrained poverty. It is the behind the scenes manipulation like the International Monetary Fund that won’t lend money to build coal fired power plants that trouble me most.
Energy, mostly in the form of cheap electricity is needed by developing nations for social and economic development.
The UN and its focus on preventing one more molecule of CO2 from entering the atmosphere that has doomed these developing nation’s people. It is such policy that is all wrong because the money then follows the policy.
Judith, thanks. We could also call the financial crisis of 2008 a pink flamingo….
I don’t care who said what. Only a fool counts citations. 50 authors..Doesn’t matter one whit.
What matters is the actual data. And the nethod.
And once again I expect that you have nothing on those accounts.
I see no observation that prove it was molten. Theory maybe. It’s all uncertain
“This is a statement that the less you know about something, the more cautious you need to be about it.”
Saying that less certainty implies more caution is fine. Going on to say that the existence of uncertainty somehow implies ‘the best course’ is the strong precautionary principle.
“Take tipping points.”
In the context of anthropocentric climate change, I’m doubtful these tipping points exist. They seem like a convenient way to avoid having to deal with the complexity of determining optimal policy with respect to climate change. If the impacts of climate change are some sort of step function (tipping points) as opposed to being gradual, climate change policy is a lot more obvious.
If you have evidence of these tipping points beyond pure speculation, then could you please provide it?
“I would call this a common sense approach in the face of uncertainty.”
Perhaps there is a tipping point in that if you eat too many sandwiches, the flying spaghetti monster will become angry and strangle you in your sleep. Does that mean you should avoid eating sandwiches in order to avoid being strangled in your sleep?
“What’s the alternative under these conditions?”
To make decisions using probability distributions that are quantified based on empirical data and and ignore that which cannot be quantified? I don’t make decisions based on the potential existence of the flying spaghetti monster, and neither should you.
Mosh:
Simply put…youre an equivocating BS artist..
If you only need 100 stations, why bother krigging?
You really should decide just what line of thought you wish to defend.
If you and your colleagues at BEST dont make a living adjusting data, why do you spend your time here defending the practice?
If none of this is part of BEST’s portfolio, then why does BEST create its own time series, containing both adjusted and unadjusted data?
Whats with the defense of your algorithm for adjusting data then?
Still haven’t learned to stop equivocating, eh mosh?
The lesson I’ve learned from you is there is no end to the sloppy dishonest and misleading use of english, when youre at your keyboard or touch screen.
You disappoint me…
Of course, when you tire of this line of work, you can always open “Oxford University Dry Cleaners”….
As for “learning my lesson”….
Your lack of self awareness is astounding.
stop flattering yourself….theres not a whole bunch to learn from your comments …except maybe the snarky use of fallacies that have been noted and whose use has been derided for millennia now.
cerescokid:
Interesting factoids but irrelevant to the fact that the military budget is bloated. And it is bloated, IMO, because you can always scare up another billion in spending by seeing new risks around every corner. Risk is an infinitely renewable resource.
Also, your $600 billion in direct “military” spending leaves out veterans’ benefits and the debt service on a few trillion spent on wars starting with Viet Nam.
Just compare America’s defense-related expenditures (don’t forget the NSA and friends) to the rest of world either as an absolute amount or as a percentage of GDP. It’s the very definition of bloat-by-fear mongering.
‘The important message,” according to KTLA News, “is to be prepared.”
For example, what El Niño has in store for Southern California may be something, it may be nothing, but we’ve been down this road before. The comparative year is looking back to the winter of 1982/83 –e.g., for the coming winter, the heavies rain months — Jan thru April — may see triple the precipitation: KTLA says, “we could see 35 inches of rain.”
The development of a “Pineapple Connection” would also signify a weather pattern related to El Niño. The most obvious sign of extreme El Niño-driven weather will come in the physical damage it leaves behind… “
Captain Future says, Maybe I’m Full Of It… But — We’ll See!
If I no see no “C” then I no care. I there is no C then they no see no mo’ mo-ney. Therefore, there must be a “C” in CAGW. You see?
The Pros’ dumped the draft and got US into the business…
http://www.rand.org/pubs/periodicals/rand-review/issues/spring2005/nation.html
of working to fulfill the wants of the corporation as a hole.
Big El Nino in 1862 flooded Sacramento valley from mountain foothills in Sierra to SF Bay. Basically filled entire city of Sacramento with 10 ft of water depth. We shall see what unprecedented means this El Nino.
Bigger floods in the deeper past.
Quote, info West without Water.
Scott
3×2
“…Putin…Crimea…”
“If our ‘Western observers and intelligence officials’ couldn’t see these two examples coming then I suggest that we employ new people.”
But we had Hillary at the helm for that 3am call! How could that happen? She’s looking for work again…
“Mosh:
Simply put…youre an equivocating BS artist..
If you only need 100 stations, why bother krigging?”
1. Because with more stations your standard error of prediction decreases. With 100 stations ( or 2 or 3) you can still do a prediction
the issue is you have poor local detail and your errors are higher.
so the more stations, generally speaking, the lower the uncertainty due to spatial sampling, Why Krigging? simple. There are a few standard, tested, methods of interpolation. Krigging is BLUE given the assumptions hold. In our tests on snythetic data it ouperformed both the GISS homegrown method and the CRU homegrown method. Given a choice of methods.. it makes sense to pick the one that performs best in theory
and best when excericised on synthetic data.
#################################
“You really should decide just what line of thought you wish to defend.
If you and your colleagues at BEST dont make a living adjusting data, why do you spend your time here defending the practice?”
1. I dont make a living off it
2. no one I know makes a living off it.
3. somebody has to correct the under educated.
4. i defended the practice from 2007 to 2012 before I ever joined BEST
5. I see no reason to stop something I enjoy,
6. any more stupid questions
“If none of this is part of BEST’s portfolio, then why does BEST create its own time series, containing both adjusted and unadjusted data?”
1. I never claimed it wasnt part of our portfolio.
2. the claim you made was that people make a living off it. they dont.
3..We create our own time series, because it’s interesting and researchers want to use the data.
4. we include raw data because some people want that.
5. We also provide a series that shows you our best estimate
of what the data would have looked like if error and bias are removed. you are free to ignore it.
########################
Whats with the defense of your algorithm for adjusting data then?
1. Simple. if you construct a field using raw data and hold out
50% of the data, and then use the feild to predict the held out data
you get one error. next, if you take that raw data and remove bias and error and predict the held out data.. you get smaller errors. Your error
of prediction decreases.
you cannot argue by asking questions.
Mark Silbert: Beta Blocker … Don’t you get tired of repeating the same old vapid pleas over and over again? CO2 is a blessing not a curse and certainly not a pollutant.. Demonizing it is not going to achieve your goal of a nuclear renaissance.
Mark, there is a chicken-or-egg situation with reviving the stillborn nuclear renaissance here in America. The costs of building large nuclear plants can’t be substantially reduced unless we start building a lot more of them than we currently are today. But the only way we can start building those larger numbers of new plants is to reduce price competition from the emerging alliance of the natural gas interests and the subsidized wind and solar interests, thus restoring the lifecycle cost advantage nuclear power had before the price of natural gas collapsed.
An example of the realities the nuclear industry now faces is the recent decision by its owner to close the Pilgrim nuclear plant in Massachusetts. The basic driver for the owner’s decision to close the plant is that a private company whose profits depend upon selling electric energy to the power transmission and distribution markets can make more money selling peakload electricity than it can selling baseload electricity.
Gas-fired generation is more technically flexible than is nuclear generation in supplying a combination of peakload capacity and load-following capacity. Recently developed technologies can make the large unitary nuclear plants better than the older nuclear plants for handling load-following chores, but there is still no practical way to quickly reduce the up front capital costs of the large nuclear plants sufficiently enough to restore the lifecycle cost advantage nuclear power had before the price of natural gas collapsed. Here in America, the only practical means of quickly restoring price competition between nuclear and natural gas in a way that actually does revive the stillborn nuclear renaissance is for the US Government to put a price on carbon and to directly constrain the production and distribution of fossil fuel energy resources.
Mark, I don’t want America to end up being covered with windmills and with gas fracking wells from one side of the country to the other. As things stand today, paying a reasonable cost premium up front for going with low-impact nuclear power — as opposed to covering America from one side to the other with windmills and with gas fracking wells at a much higher economic and environmental cost — is strictly a public policy decision.
The plan is to be able to fight two major wars. Which is a low probability scenario.
PE –
IMO, there are at least two primary components to the tribalism: identity aggression and identity defense. I see both, quite abundantly, coming from the “skeptical” side of the battle line in the climate wars.
Even if I were to grant that there is more fundamental variety in the “skeptical” arguments than among “realist” arguments (personally, I’ll reserve judgement until I see some non-purely anecdotal evidence on that ), and even if I were to grant that variety of arguments is an important metric for quantifying tribalism, it certainly isn’t the only one. Look at this blog and any other in the “skept-o-sphere” and you will find identity-aggression and identity-defense as an overriding characteristic (as you will on “realist” blogs also, of course).
And as I said, anecdotal observations aside, the evidence of a very strong correlation between ideology and views on climate change is overwhelming, IMO. It is even “dose-dependent,” ; for example the data show that among Tea Partiers the ideological association is stronger than among mainstream Republicans. Tea Partiers are more sure in their opinions about climate change just as they are more certain that they know a great deal on the topic and that they don’t need any more information to evaluate the science. That kind of “dose-dependency” is the kind of pattern that lends a depth of significance among associations.
“Alarmist” is a polemical term. I’m not saying that you (necessarily) intend it as a polemic, but the ubiquitous use of polemics in the climate wars is an indication of the identity-aggression I spoke of before. Just as the term “denier” is used as a polemic, so is the term “alarmist” or “warmist” … etc.
I’m certainly not in a position to evaluate the facebook posts of libz and conz on some large-scale basis, but it doesn’t take much in-depth study to see that polemics with reference to climate change are ubiquitous in mainstream conservative media, such as Fox News, Limbaugh, Hannity, O’reily, the Wall Street Journal, etc. IMO, the polarization and tribalism related to climate change is no different than what we see with so many other issues. For the vast majority involved, the issue of climate change is a proxy for a more generalized ideological warfare.
As for my anecdotal perspective, FWIW, my observation about the pervading ideological orientation at this blog and other “skeptic” blogs is quite different than yours.
