[…] journal Earth’s Future. Judith Curry briefly introduced the paper in her December 7, 2013 post Week in review (Thanks, […]
Comment on Week in review by Trenberth and Fasullo Try to Keep the Fantasy Alive | Watts Up With That?
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Comment on Public engagement and communicating uncertainty by Chief Hydrologist
Hi Michael,
Good to hear from you again – I hope you are well.
I was actually leaving it at that as I had said. Nuclear is almost twice the cost of gas in the US – which Peter believes can be addressed by deregulating the industry over a couple of decades. Yes we get it. It is just not all that relevant.
The future of the industry globally is in advanced fuel cycles in newer generation plant. The newer fuel cycles produce much less long lived waste – safe in hundreds of years rather than millions. I have often thought Australia is in a good position to facilitate a fuels technology industry – as well as to ultimately store the waste – hundreds of years remember and much reduced volume. Make a motza and get rid of some of the 270,000 tonnes of high level waste sitting in leaky drums and ponds globally. Take the lot – reprocess it with some of our abundant raw fissile materials and sell it back to them.
But this invites another tedious diatribe from Lang on how these technologies will take decades to commercialise. Well, a decade at least and probably more – but that is different to decades to deregulate how? At any rate – selling deregulation of the nuclear industry would seem a big ask. It would be prudent it seems to have a Plan B.
The new generation designs (Gen 3+ and 4) have significant advantages.
They have a significant potential for reduced costs, passive safety systems, increased proliferation resistance, minimisation of waste and decommissioning issues, elimination of water cooling and a reduced potential for sabotage. The designs have developed since the 1960′s and are currently in advanced commercial development. China is even building one scheduled to commence supplying power in 2017.
Selling the idea of better technology to the public seems an easier task than promoting cost cutting through deregulation of the industry.
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Comment on Week in review by David Springer
Fracking is clean and good on Max_OK’s land but on land he doesn’t own it can be bad.
What did your integrity sell for, Max in Oklahomo?
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Comment on Data corruption by running mean ‘smoothers’ by Greg
Richard, where are these “period plots” you are referring to ??
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Comment on Public engagement and communicating uncertainty by Antonio (AKA "Un físico")
Just in case Tamsin do not post my comment on his blog:
“The All Parliamentary Party Climate Change Group (APPCCG) before dealing about “Communicating Risk and Uncertainty around Climate Change”, should read my document “Refuting IPCC’s claims on climate change” located at:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4r_7eooq1u2VHpYemRBV3FQRjA
Over there, they can check that at present, the climatic risk is only in the imagination of certain “scientists”. And that the uncertainty, at least during the next centuries, is all what climatologist will get from a honest climatic change study.”
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Comment on Data corruption by running mean ‘smoothers’ by RichardLH
Greg: Just me still explaining things badly. I suppose it all comes down to being used to seeing things on log horizontal plots with dB vertically rather than linear scale on both axis. Not your fault, mine.
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Comment on Public engagement and communicating uncertainty by DocMartyn
I do believe that Hansen is using the thespian form of ‘dangerous’, as he is a bit of a drama-queen.
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Comment on Week in review by WebHubTelescope (@WHUT)
Chief, I hope you realize that quoting a press release is not citing peer-reviewed science,
Here you go for a privileged look at how a state-of-the-art energy balance model (CSALT) compares against historical instrumental temperature observations from NASA over the last 130+ years.
http://imageshack.com/a/img513/2702/oa57.gif
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Comment on Pathological altruism by Barnes
@Von Pratt – do you count new enrollees in Medicaid as newly covered and do you consider that to be one measure of success for Obamacare?
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Comment on Data corruption by running mean ‘smoothers’ by RichardLH
Greg: Ok. So one final question. What Lanczos filter parameters would you suggest that completely remove any 12, 48 and 96 month cycles?
I have looked at the Gaussian you provide and the 17 wide kernel leaks too much below 12 months for my needs.
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Comment on Pathological altruism by Barnes
Jashua – name one other discovery in the history of mankind that has done more to lift people out of poverty and enabled humans to live richer, healthier and longer lives that the discovery of how to harnes the energy provided by fossil fuels.
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Comment on Public engagement and communicating uncertainty by curryja
MODERATION NOTE: I have just deleted about 20 comments, and one person has landed in moderation. Stop your bickering and insults
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Comment on Pathological altruism by Barnes
That is Joshua, my apologies for the typo…
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Comment on Data corruption by running mean ‘smoothers’ by Pekka Pirilä
You cannot do that with a Lanczos filter.
Every filter that removes completely those cycles is either the 96 month moving average filter or a convolution of that and any other filter. Other goals that you have determine what the other filter should be (if any).
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Comment on Pathological altruism by Steven Mosher
MAX
‘Sounds right to me. I like feeling good about myself, and if any of my opponents like being angry, I’m doing them a favor. I suspect many of them are the same as me on this.”
so you use the word denier because it makes you feel good about yourself.
That’s fine. You get to do that. I have to assume then that you dont think or dont care that the planet is in danger.
That makes you evil, not stupid.
do this exercise. apply the precautionary principle to use of the word denier.
Tell me the case in which the potential benefits outweigh the harm.
Put another way. you could try not using the word for a year. do a test. what do you have to lose.
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Comment on Pathological altruism by Bob Ludwick
The good news: Having read Dr. Curry’s blog for some years, I have noticed that there seems to be a gradual shift toward dominance by the sane. Examples (from today’s topic), but obviously not an exhaustive list, would include Jim Cripwell, Matthew R Marler, Mil Cro, Walt Allensworth, Kip Hansen, timg56, Craig Loehle, kim, Wagathon, ROM, and others.
The bad news: The outbreak of sanity seems confined to a this and maybe a small number of other blogs; there is NO evidence that it has ‘leaked out’ into the body politic in any meaningful way. The media–every form, academia (including an overwhelming percentage of the students who matriculated since the late ’90′s), and government at every level of every department, federal, state, and local are still solidly on board with CAGW and the need for a comprehensive ‘climate change policy’ based on taxes on carbon signatures, regulation of carbon signatures, and income redistribution as reparation for damages caused by historic carbon signatures. And it looks like we are going to have one, data be damned.
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Comment on Pathological altruism by Andy West
Pathological Altruism:
I’ve never heard of this term before, but as far as I know the concept is not at all new to folks such as anthropologists and other disciplines engaged on cultural evolution. As a characteristic arising out of our deep evolutionary past, in humans altruism is much more than a surface social choice and is supported via fundamental and co-evolved gene and cultural mechanisms. The concept of *net* benefits (i.e. some ups and some downs with the former winning out) to the social co-operation required for altruism, is I believe well known. Religions provide a mainstream example. On the up-side for instance, they may well have provided the level of social co-operation that triggered the arisal of civilisations, but clearly come with downsides too. Some individual cultural entities can essentially be net negative; in a parasitical manner they are leveraging the mechanisms that exist to support altruism. However, as long as the overall benefits across humanity exceed the negatives (it is proposed that they do by a wide margin; humanity seems to be pretty successful), then the downsides are just a price we’ve had to pay. But that doesn’t mean we’ll always have to pay. Understanding *how* negative societal trends leverage the co-operative mechanisms supporting altruism, would allow us to put in place safegaurds to prevent or minimise this possibility. Signalling, for us essentially social narratives carrying messages that push psychological hot-buttons, are the means by which the social co-operation is accomplished. I mention ‘co-evolution’ above because these narratives have (Darwinian) developmental tracjectories that are independent of the (many) individuals (often spanning generations) who act as their hosts. Social alignment to these narratives is essentially a spin-off characteristic of the spread of the more successful ones (many narratives compete), which is an evolutionary advantage only in the sense of *net* benefit. This is common to pretty much all human social interaction, but to look at specific examples like religion or CAGW, then it is not so hard to spot the narratives that push the psychological hot-buttons. E.g. Personal salvation in religion; salvation substitutes in CAGW such as saving the planet or saving your grand-children. Nationalism offers a nice example because one can see how this benefits a nation in time of war or national hardship, serving to galvanise folks, yet can be parasitically leveraged by social entities or even individuals (tyrants) at other times. The high moral ground of (apparantly) helping others is a pyschological very-hot-button which is intended to foster core altruism; we are primed to appreciate and support narratives which push that button. However, bear in mind that negative narratives (I’ll call these loosely, ‘not connected to reality’, hence having potentially very negative consequences) may survive and spread by leveraging this hot-button *better* than a positive narrative (which I’ll call loosely, ‘in tune with reality’, hence likely to benefit those who take the narrative onboard). In a complex topic with major uncertainty, such as CAGW, most folks react to the hot-buttons in the absence of other solid registration (across all narratives, this includes all of us, certainly me, certainly scientists too). A negative narrative of this type will directly cause pathological altruism as mentioned in the head post; and the rampant spread of various negative narratives of this sort within the overall context of the main CAGW theme, is plain to see. Endless folks are saving us from frying, saving our children, saving us from technology, saving us from fossil fuel addiction, saving us from you-name-it; they are all, apparently saving us, helping us. The NGOs like WWF and Greenpeace are major narrative engines that seem to have fallen into causing some harm while supposedly serving the best interests of the community and the environment. They are slaves of their own narratives. Combating such negative narratives is not easy. Flat facts will eventually (it may take a long time!) strangle arbitrarily evolving narratives, denying them the room to evolve; the sceptics’ determined concentration on science not policy, plus scrupulous audit, is hence a good tactic in this respect. Another option is a counter-narrative, but therein lies danger; narratives have a habit of slipping the leash…
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Comment on Pathological altruism by Pekka Pirilä
If what you write is really true this site must be evolving towards an internal playground of the faithful.
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Comment on Public engagement and communicating uncertainty by Antonio (AKA "Un físico")
As I expected, Dr Tamsin Edwards did not post the above comment in his blog.
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Comment on Pathological altruism by Matt Skaggs
Wagathon wrote:
“That is why the Leftist must deny human nature, deny faith and destroy the Constitution.”
There is no denial of human nature. There is denial that YOUR nature is human (considered here as the root word of “humanity.”) You will not believe that others are capable of compassion and humility because you are incapable of these virtues yourself. Convincing you would be like trying to describe color to someone born blind.
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