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Comment on Open thread weekend by kim

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Almost any warming man can do would be Paradise. Almost any descent into glaciation will be a Hell beyond our imagining. Notice the use and unuse of the subjunctive. And yet, we’re stampeded into fearing warming?

A madness of the herd. We’ll get over it.
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Comment on Open thread weekend by RiHo08

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BETH

In the Wind Turbine Turbulence world on the East Shores of Lake Huron, gale force winds off the Lake blow an inconsistent source of power.

Ross McKitrick has a recent piece:

http://web.mail.comcast.net/service/home/~/Excerpts%20from%20Fraser%20Report%20April%2011%202013.pdf?auth=co&loc=en_US&id=950060&part=2

As my own Amen, I just received my Hydro One electric bill for 1 kilowatt hour: $0.07. Delivery charge: $70.48 (which will rise in cost by $3.08) and Ontario Clean Energy Benefit $8.06 all Canadian Dollars of course. All of this compliments of the Green Energy Act, written into legislation by the Green Party as a way to make Ontario Canada a beckon of virtue (not that an act of Parliament could confer such an arrangement.)

In summary: I get my 1 kilowatt hour electricity from Bruce Nuclear down the road a piece for $0.07 and I am awarded a Green windmill subsidized additional feel good expense for the measly cost of $8.06 CnD.

Now this is feel good climate impact change. Ahhhh, I feel better already.

Comment on Open thread weekend by manacker

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Beth

Love your well-researched, witty but tragicomic treatise on windmills, noble knights, dead raptor birds and jackasses.

In Switzerland the environmentalists complained for years about a high tension power line that crossed the Jura mountains, spoiling the otherwise pristine landscape.

Finally they got it removed!

Only to be replaced a few years later with a bunch of even uglier windmills (that evil race of long-armed giants your noble knight fought so bravely).

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Max

Comment on Open thread weekend by willard (@nevaudit)

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A blast from the past:

A major spill in Michigan in July 2010 shut an Enbridge Inc. crude pipeline for two months, and the cleanup still isn’t complete. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last month directed Enbridge to perform more dredging in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River as part of a cleanup from a July 2010 rupture of a 30-inch pipeline that also carried heavy crude.

Exxon was fined $26,200 in 2010 by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for failing to regularly inspect each point where the Pegasus line crosses under a navigable waterway. PHMSA specifically cited the line’s crossing under the Mississippi River between Missouri and Illinois.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-02/exxon-developing-excavation-plan-for-pegasus-oil-pipeline-spill.html

Comment on Open thread weekend by kim

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So far, lolwot, the hand of man on the climate is so light as to be unweighed, and your alternative steps are 4C up and 10C down. Look before you leap. Also, weigh this: 4C up sustains more total life and more diversity of life, 10C down, well lots of things aren’t sustained.
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Comment on Open thread weekend by Faustino

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Kim, on the point of “knowing that it is a serious problem that requires immediate policy action,” the authors are straying from their field of economics into one in which they are not qualified, climate science. But at first glance their work as economists is interesting. I’ve e-mailed them suggesting that they or I do a head-post on CE, given Judith’s interest in uncertainty and many CE posters’ interest in soundly-based policy.

Comment on Open thread weekend by Beth Cooper

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What’s crazy…green economics is crazy.
Refer ter RiHoO8 comment above.

Comment on Open thread weekend by kim

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willard’s anecdotes thrill some and bore others. If only he’d pay attention to the matter the way micro-organisms do.
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Comment on Open thread weekend by pokerguy

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Speaking of the subjunctive:

If…

Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

Comment on Open thread weekend by Faustino

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Don, here’s a take on Thatcher which I liked: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9975006/Margaret-Thatcher-Britain-was-set-free-by-this-class-warrior.html

I was not immediately enamoured of Thatcher (having been a long-term UK Labour supporter), but over the years have come to appreciate what she did. As a Pom who left England in late-79, I don’t think that the then desperate state of the UK could have been addressed by a gentler and less committed approach, there were too many entrenched interests and attitudes to be overcome. Essentially, Thatcher saw value in individual self-reliance and initiative, and faced a culture in which those virtues were not valued.

Those who knew Thatcher seemed to find Streep’s portrayal offensive and demeaning.

Comment on Historic Variations in Arctic sea ice. Part II: 1920-1950 by Eli Rabett

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So, she was frozen in on the 40-42 passage.

Comment on Open thread weekend by kim

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Yes, F, I too was intrigued by the promise of the first part of the abstract. And then they throw in that utter foolishness at the end. Were they actually unaware of how bad it is, or are they surrendered?
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Comment on Open thread weekend by kim

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Heh, look at it this way. I am neither a climate scientist nor an economist, and I can pick out the glaring flaw in the paper with a glance at the abstract.

Something is very wrong about that, and you can smell it all the way over there.
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Comment on Open thread weekend by Max_OK

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Max_CH, thank you for the kind words about Oklahoma. I’m sure any Oklahoman reading your statement would find something to like.

But Oklahoma is no match for your Switzerland. If I could have been born in a country of my choosing, it would have been Switzerland.

Comment on Open thread weekend by kim

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She refused the part. Well, the actress in her did.
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Comment on Open thread weekend by kim

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He should tend his garden of rigs. What’s Switzerland got but tough terrain and marginal living from the land. Oh, Zurich grows garden gnomes, for at least the last millenium.
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Comment on Open thread weekend by RiHo08

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Chief,

The Respiratory effects of woodburning stoves reporting begins in the 1980′s. Infants carried on the backs of mothers into cooking huts developed permanent airway injury is reported from Papua New Guinea, Katmandu Nepal, and the Navajo Hogans in the desert Southwest USA.

Of all the chemicals and carcinogens that wood smoke and woodburing stoves emit, it is the aldehydes: formaldehyde and especially acrolin that attach to the respiratory mucosa lining resulting in coagulated mucus, cilia immobility, and cell death. The fine respirable particles <2.5 microns carry attached toxins to the lower respiratory bronchioles.

Burning biomass for fuel results in the same air pollution as wood stoves. Advocates for biomass as fuel should think about what is causing the sweat smell of a wood fire; aldehydes. The only colorless and odorless compounds from these fires are CO2 and Carbon Monoxide.

When first going outside, I know precisely from which direction the wind is blowing as I can smell the sulfur dioxide from the coal fired power plant five miles away.

I can tell my neighbor's gas furnace is on by the steam trickling from their chimney.

We as a developed society have achieved cleaner air by moving from biomass burning to coal, and now to nuclear and gas.

During the gentle snowfall this morning, the wind wasn't blowing and the wind turbines weren't turning.

Wind turbine energy can't exist without subsidies and back-up energy source.

Wind turbines, the pinwheel toy of the rich.

Comment on Open thread weekend by kim

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Fertile field for suspicion if not fraud. Caveat Evermormptor, quoth the Maven.
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Comment on Open thread weekend by kim

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Yes, PG, this is fascinating. One easy divide is between the curious and the less so. Some seek, some educate. Some dunno, some do.

It’s all too easy.
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Comment on Open thread weekend by willard (@nevaudit)

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Poker guy,

Just thought that you might like this, as it is somehow related to your “different conclusions when presented with the same information”:

For Quine, the criterion of successful communication, whether or not translation is involved, is fluent interaction, verbal and nonverbal: “Success in communication is judged by smoothness of conversation, by frequent predictability of verbal and nonverbal reactions, and by coherence and plausibility of native testimony” (1990, 43). From this point of view, talk of synonymy and of ideas in the mind is simply a theoretical gloss which is (at best) in need of justification. Quine doubts that the gloss is justifiable; his scepticism about the theorizing, however, is not scepticism about the data. Smooth communication certainly occurs, sometimes in cases where different languages are involved. That successful translation occurs is not cast in doubt by anything he says; his claim, indeed, is that it may be possible in more than one way.

At this point we need to distinguish the two kinds of indeterminacy. Quine introduces the general idea of indeterminacy, in Chapter Two of (1960), without explicitly making the distinction but subsequently comes to treat them quite differently. The first is indeterminacy of reference: that there is more than one way of translating sentences where the various versions differ in the reference that they attribute to parts of the sentence but not in the overall net import that they attribute to the sentence as a whole. (This doctrine is also known as “ontological relativity” and “inscrutability of reference”.) To use an example which has become famous, a given sentence might be translated as “There’s a rabbit” or as “Rabbithood is manifesting itself there” or as “There are undetached rabbit parts”, or in other ways, limited only by one’s ingenuity. Something like this, Quine suggests, can be done systematically for terms referring to physical objects: each such term is translated as referring to all of space-time other than the portion occupied by that object; each predicate is translated by one which is true of the space-time complement of an object just in case the original predicate is true of the object. It will not help to ask the person we are translating whether she means to refer to the family dog or to its space-time complement: her answer is subject to the same indeterminacy.

Indeterminacy of reference is akin to a view of theoretical entities put forward by Ramsey: that there is no more to such an object than the role that it plays in the structure of the relevant theory (see Ramsey, 1931). For Quine, however, the point holds for all objects, since he “see[s] all objects as theoretical… . Even our most primordial objects, bodies, are already theoretical” (1981, 20). Quine holds, moreover, that considerations akin to those of the previous paragraph amount to a “trivial proof” of indeterminacy of reference (1986c, 728).

The second kind of indeterminacy, which Quine sometimes refers to as holophrastic indeterminacy, is another matter. Here the claim is that there is more than one correct method of translating sentences where the two translations differ not merely in the meanings attributed to the sub-sentential parts of speech but also in the net import of the whole sentence. This claim involves the whole language, so there are going to be no examples, perhaps except of an exceedingly artificial kind. There is also nothing resembling a proof; in some late work, indeed, Quine refers to it as a “conjecture” (loc. cit.). At some earlier points, he seems to think that sufficiently clear-headed reflection on what goes into translation will suffice to make the idea at least plausible. All that can be required of a method of translation is that it enables us to get along with the speakers of the other language, why should there not be more than one way to do it?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/#UndTheEviIndTra

My emphasis.

Hope you’ll like this,

w

PS: Notice the guy’s name, wink wink.

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