Quote :

"They say it even puts more radioactive waste into the environment than nuclear power."

Less net activity, but practically infinite half lives. Nuclear releases isotopes that it just created, and almost all will decay away in a matter of years.

Coal doesn't create any new stuff, just puts stuff in the ground into the air. Once it falls down it stays there or moves throughout the ecosystem. Run for enough years, and you'll accumulate a lot, and this is why you have about 3x the dose from a coal plant than a nuclear plant by living nearby.

10/18/2008 12:20:35 PM

Yeah, the waste from a reactor is a bit more manageable than the waste from a coal plant. It's the difference between 50 lbs of incredibly toxic bricks vs 2000 lbs of moderately toxic gas. One's scarier up close, but doesn't require magic or inefficiency to prevent from escaping. Hell, there's even some fairly impressive reprocessing technologies available. The closest thing to coal waste reprocessing I've seen was an article on biologically converting CO2 to fuel. That's great and all, but the solving the CO2 sequestering problem doesn't do anything about the actual toxins in the smoke. Yeah there's cleaner coal technology, but with a closed nuclear fuel system you get almost 0 release while with a clean coal cycle you just get a moderate reduction.

[Edited on October 18, 2008 at 12:40 PM. Reason : cycle not system- very little storage in a nearly closed fuel cycle.]

10/18/2008 12:33:46 PM

^ And I had just read a blog post about reprocessing versus carbon capture.

http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2008/10/comparing-scale-of-used-nuclear-fuel-to.html

Only problem with a comparison is the simple fact that carbon capture was never actually feasible in the first place.

10/19/2008 2:44:22 PM

awesome. Looks like Obama will fuck our economy over in more ways that one! I can't wait. And all in the name of bullshit science that has been unraveling at the seams for the past 8 years as temperatures has failed to rise.

10/19/2008 3:06:22 PM

awesome. Looks like Obama will fuck our economy country over in more ways that one! I can't wait.

10/19/2008 3:50:28 PM

^^ who says temperatures haven't risen?

http://sos.noaa.gov/videos/gfdl_temp800_labeled.mov

[Edited on October 20, 2008 at 12:26 AM. Reason : ]

10/20/2008 12:24:45 AM

As the cold fusion controversy proves, scientist have no ability to measure heat whatsoever. They might as well be guessing.

10/20/2008 12:28:13 AM

Engineers know it's only worthwhile to indirectly measure heat and temperature

10/20/2008 11:47:56 AM

^^^ pretty much everyone except for James Hansen and NASA. There are 4 major temperature measurement records in the world. 3 of them agree very closely for much of the history, and those 3 are in extremely close agreement for the past 10 years. The fourth one is James Hansen's, and his temperatures are inextricably a half-degree higher than the other 3 since 1970 and a half-degree lower before 1970.

[Edited on October 21, 2008 at 5:45 PM. Reason : - at least]

10/21/2008 5:21:23 PM

Links?

10/21/2008 5:24:56 PM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/07/27/do2708.xml

this was posted on page 53

10/21/2008 5:36:11 PM

lol remember temperature doesn't rise during phase change.

10/22/2008 10:49:11 PM

You guys are aware that Obama has mentioned that he'd put Al Gore on his cabinet right? Secretary of Energy I believe is where he'd put him.

Translation: We're all fucked

10/22/2008 11:54:08 PM

Gore would do more to kick our dependence on foreign oil faster than anyone else.

10/23/2008 12:28:32 AM

gore's carbon credit company would make a killing if he was sec. of energy...maaaaaad money

10/23/2008 12:32:37 AM

^^No he wouldn't, because he's opposed to domestic drilling, shale oil and coal development.

Any realistic energy independence solution has to include the use of our vast energy resources.

[Edited on October 23, 2008 at 12:34 AM. Reason : 2]

10/23/2008 12:33:44 AM

Gore would put in place alternative energy policies that should have been implemented 4 or 5 years ago. Increasing use of domestic fossil fuels while also making them safer to burn is part of the solution, but if that's your entire plan you're failing to see the long-term problem.

Besides, it's not like Gore could outlaw cars. No one could get something that drastic done. He'd simply provide leadership on energy policy... something we've been lacking lately.

10/23/2008 12:38:39 AM

Quote :

"Increasing use of domestic fossil fuels while also making them safer to burn is part of the solution"

Yes it is. And yet it's something that Gore doesn't believe in.

Any strategy for energy independence has to focus on both supply and demand. Gore never seemed to pay attention to the supply side other than touting solar panels and shit.

10/23/2008 12:42:05 AM

Look, anything he tried to do to cut carbon emissions would go through rigorous scrutiny, ensuring only sensible decisions be made. But he would aggressively pursue the alternative energy plan this country so desperately needs more thoroughly than anyone else.

10/23/2008 12:48:46 AM

Quote :

"pretty much everyone except for James Hansen and NASA. There are 4 major temperature measurement records in the world. 3 of them agree very closely for much of the history, and those 3 are in extremely close agreement for the past 10 years. The fourth one is James Hansen's, and his temperatures are inextricably a half-degree higher than the other 3 since 1970 and a half-degree lower before 1970."

I must not be looking at the same data as you are. I took the UAH, GISS, NCDC, and RSS and plotted the temperature anomaly with respect to the same base line. I chose the time span because the satellite data doesn't go back so far. The results is:



Can you tell which one is GISS? I couldn't just eye-balling it. Doing a linear fit to each to find the trend :

#1 .0166-->GISS #2 .0137--> UAH #3 0.0177-->RSS #4 0.0166-->NCDC in deg. C/yr. So GISS doesn't even have the greatest trend. There is one anomalous series--the UAH satellite time series. It is also entertaining to look at the residuals from the fit to the GISS series:







[Edited on October 23, 2008 at 12:53 AM. Reason : x]

10/23/2008 12:49:34 AM

nvm

[Edited on October 23, 2008 at 1:02 AM. Reason : i would suspend me if i were a mod and read that]

10/23/2008 1:01:37 AM

^^GISS had to go back and revise their data after Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit found a number of notable errors in their methods. That looks like the revised temperature numbers.

Remember when GISS came out and said, "whoops, we fucked up, it turns out that most of the hottest years on record in the United States were back in the 1930's"? That was when they revised their temperature data.

10/23/2008 1:12:59 AM

Quote :

"the hottest years on record in the United States "

i thought this kind of person left after page 3.

10/23/2008 1:16:14 AM

Quote :

"WE THE DUMBASS"

10/23/2008 1:18:19 AM

Yes, I plotted the global temperature anomalies. I plotted the residuals to the fit to GISS since it shows what the change in the trend is.

[Edited on October 23, 2008 at 1:36 AM. Reason : x]

10/23/2008 1:32:15 AM

I understand what you did; I can read a graph.

What I'm saying is that Hansen was manipulating the data in the past, and his data only conforms to the other temperature readings now because somebody called him out on it.

In other words, Hansen is in the Gore camp that believes that exaggerating the risks of global warming is an acceptable way of getting the point across and prompting action. His conclusions and evidence can't really be trusted because he manipulates the data.

[Edited on October 23, 2008 at 1:41 AM. Reason : 2]

10/23/2008 1:40:31 AM

You guys spent 56 pages talking about a powerpoint.

Al Gore just one fucking upped you exactly 2776 times.

10/23/2008 1:42:59 AM

^^
If you look at the pre- and post-GISS correction I fail to see why this is relevant:


^
What's funny is that I've never seen Gore's powerpoint. My interest in GW is mostly from doing some radiative transfer calculations that are similar in spirit to the IR transport physics responsible for warming the atmosphere.


[Edited on October 23, 2008 at 2:13 AM. Reason : x]

10/23/2008 2:09:50 AM

HOCKEY STICK

HOCKEY STICK

HOCKEY STICK

10/23/2008 2:12:29 AM

^^solid post, backed up by great visual evidence.

I retract my statement about Hansen and GISS. He's an agitator, but I can't say that he manipulated any data since I can't back up that assertion.

10/23/2008 2:16:50 AM

This stuff about the correction was blown way out of proportion. Next month I'm publishing a paper on a precision measurement of a nuclear cross section. If a large group of rabid partisans look over my paper and find a mistake in my measurement that changes my answer by .1%> I'd feel incredibly good about myself.

10/23/2008 2:31:32 AM

^^ I'm impressed. Mature posters do exist in a political forum. Props to you sir.

10/23/2008 2:37:38 AM

so, how exactly does posting graphs of temperature anomalies show that temperatures have risen. You should be fucking ashamed of yourself if you claim to be a scientist of any sort. You are looking at contrived numbers and trying to dispute that they somehow have more merit than the actual recorded data. Good work, man. Please, find another career if you can't understand that.

10/23/2008 6:36:58 AM

I assume you're trolling here but if anyone doesn't know what a temperature anomaly is, it's this:
Take the average temperature from some base period, say 1950-1971, and then look a the deviation of the temperature from this base period. Subtracting a constant value from a time series has no effect on the trend of a time series and these days most adults know enough about addition to recover the original time series. But maybe not.

10/23/2008 12:26:01 PM

I dislike the term temperature anomaly.

We don't know what average temperature the Earth should be at (note: no such number exists). The graphs only imply a temperature difference referenced to an average of some arbitrary collection. They should just give the real temperature on the vertical scale.

10/23/2008 12:34:11 PM

I agree 'temperature anomaly' is a lousy term but I didn't invent it. But I think plotting it gives one more insight if you're interested in inspecting multi-decadal trends in the temperature record.

10/24/2008 2:27:30 AM

so, again, you have to take a fucking manipulated figure in order to try and refute what the actual evidence says: temperatures have not risen since 2001. If the temperature yesterday was 90 and today it is 90 and every day for ten days from now it is 90, have the temperatures risen? NO. and fucktards like you are the ones who claim to be doing science

10/24/2008 1:47:37 PM

Maybe you are more stupid than I supposed. Temperature anomaly has the same exact information content as temperature. If you can't understand this than you have no business even entering the climate debate. Everyone involved in this debate uses this metric, whether Steve McIntrye, Anthony Watts, or the folks at Realclimate.

10/24/2008 9:12:08 PM

ceding ignorance on anomalies, remember, the original claim is that temperatures have been flat since 2001. I'm not seeing a rise in your graphs there, buddy...

[Edited on October 24, 2008 at 9:50 PM. Reason : ]

10/24/2008 9:43:32 PM

^
That's why I plotted the residuals. If the temperature series really is deviating from the trend since 2001 then you will see it from a plot of the residuals. There are single year spikes in the residuals but at this point there doesn't seem to be a statistically significant departure from the trend.

10/25/2008 1:05:05 AM

Indeed, I am perturbed by the use of "temperature anomaly", but understand it has no bearing on the discussion. At the same time, it would be just that easy to change the label to make a 'politically unbiased' graph. For the anti-AWG crowd may just as well label it "completely normal temperature deviation".

And I'll go ahead and be the one to ask:

Will someone please define 'residuals' as it was used in the graph above?

10/25/2008 5:05:31 PM

Residuals are the difference between the fitted function f(x)--the trend--and the actual date: f(x_i)-x_i. If the function is a good fit to the data than the residuals should be normally distribution with mean zero and some variance. My plot shows that it isn't clear there is a deviation from the trend since 1998 or 2001 or whatever.

Some people argue that the global temperature has been cooling or GW stopped by picking 1998 or 2001 and finding the trend in the data since that date. But this is either cherry-picking and/or stupid. If you construct a time series with the same trend + noise characteristic of the GISS/RSS/NCDC time series you can find 10 yr or 7 yr periods that are flat or decrease in temperature.

10/29/2008 12:30:00 AM

Yes, I would easily accept that all those numbers fall in a normal distribution. It still exhibits sustained highs and lows, kind of like... the weather *shock*.

But still, this is data done after the fact. In order to really convince someone, what you essentially need to do is give your prediction for the next 10 years, and plot the residuals after that. But then again, if you get 10 scientists to do this, and one matches the trend, that still gives little confidence for the validity of the trend further into the future.

As such, I would maintain that the global warming debate is here to stay. And I still maintain skepticism regarding how well we can predict the behavior. Global warming itself is a cold hard fact, but at the present stage of knowledge, I don't think you can show me a graph that will reliably predict future year's temperatures.

If you do think you have such a graph, plz to post it, I'll revisit it as long as I still post here

[Edited on October 29, 2008 at 11:14 AM. Reason : ]

10/29/2008 11:14:11 AM

^^ I agree that cherry-picking 1998 is disingenuous, but could it not also be argued that the other starting dates for trends are cherry-picked in favour of the GW argument? Why not start in the 30s? At the very least you must admit that when looking at 2001 onward, the temperatures have not risen, despite the CO2 which still remains in the atmosphere from the last 120 years of burning fossil fuels, and that that fact is, well, a bit damning. If the margin of error for a 30-year-trend" is such that a 7-year period of something completely against the claim of the trend can still be "in the trend," then what good is that trend, really?

10/30/2008 6:47:28 AM

^^everyone knows GLOBAL WARMING is real. The human effect however, has no substantiated proof.

10/30/2008 10:26:20 AM

Global warming seems to be merely one part of a growing environmental crisis:

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn15063-disastrous-eco-crunch-threatens-planet.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

Or so the alarmists say.

10/30/2008 1:03:58 PM

BBC SHUNNED ME FOR DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE

Quote :

"FOR YEARS David Bellamy was one of the best known faces on TV. A respected botanist and the author of 35 books, he had presented around 400 programmes over the years and was appreciated by audiences for his boundless enthusiasm. Yet for more than 10 years he has been out of the limelight, shunned by bosses at the BBC where he made his name, as well as fellow scientists and environmentalists. His crime? Bellamy says he doesn't believe in man-made global warming. Here he reveals why – and the price he has paid for not toeing the orthodox line on climate change. 'When I first stuck my head above the parapet to say I didn't believe what we were being told about global warming I had no idea what the consequences would be. I am a scientist and I have to ­follow the directions of science but when I see that the truth is being covered up I have to voice my ­opinions. According to official data, in every year since 1998 world temperatures have been getting colder, and in 2002 Arctic ice actually increased. Why, then, do we not hear about that? The sad fact is that since I said I didn't believe human beings caused global warming I've not been allowed to make a TV programme. My absence has been noticed, because wherever I go I meet people who say: 'I grew up with you on the television, where are you now?' It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on Blue Peter and I also had an article published in which I described global warming as poppycock. The truth is, I didn't think wind farms were an effective means of alternative energy so I said so. Back then, at the BBC you had to toe the line and I wasn't doing that. At that point I was still making loads of television programmes and I was enjoying it greatly. Then I suddenly found I was sending in ideas for TV shows and they weren't getting taken up. I've asked around about why I've been ignored but I found that people didn't get back to me. At the beginning of this year there was a BBC show with four experts saying: 'This is going to be the end of all the ice in the Arctic,' and hypothesising that it was going to be the hottest summer ever. Was it hell! It was very cold and very wet and now we've seen evidence that the glaciers in Alaska have started growing rapidly – and they've not grown for a long time. I've seen evidence, which I believe, that says there has not been a rise in global temperature since 1998, despite the increase in carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere. This makes me think the global warmers are telling lies – carbon dioxide is not the driver. The idiot fringe have accused me of being like a Holocaust denier, which is ludicrous. Climate change is all about cycles, it's a natural thing and has always happened. When the Romans lived in Britain they were growing very good red grapes and making wine on the borders of Scotland. It was evidently a lot warmer. If you were sitting next to me 10,000 years ago we'd be under ice. So thank God for global warming for ending that ice age; we wouldn't be here otherwise. People such as former American Vice-President Al Gore say that millions of us will die because of global warming – which I think is a pretty stupid thing to say if you've got no proof. And my opinion is that there is absolutely no proof that carbon dioxide is anything to do with any impending catastrophe. The ­science has, quite simply, gone awry. In fact, it's not even science any more, it's anti-science. There's no proof, it's just projections and if you look at the models people such as Gore use, you can see they cherry pick the ones that support their beliefs. To date, the way the so-called Greens and the BBC, the Royal Society and even our political parties have handled this smacks of McCarthyism at its worst. Global warming is part of a natural cycle and there's nothing we can actually do to stop these cycles. The world is now facing spending a vast amount of money in tax to try to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist. And how were we convinced that this problem exists, even though all the evidence from measurements goes against the fact? God knows. Yes, the lakes in Africa are drying up. But that's not global warming. They're drying up for the very ­simple reason that most of them have dams around them. So the water that used to be used by local people is now used in the production of cut flowers and veget­ables for the supermarkets of Europe. One of Al Gore's biggest clangers was saying that the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was drying up because of global warming. Well, everyone knows, because it was all over the news 20 years ago, that the Russians were growing cotton there at the time and that for every ton of cotton you produce you use a vast amount of water. The thing that annoys me most is that there are genuine environmental problems that desperately require attention. I'm still an environmentalist, I'm still a Green and I'm still campaigning to stop the destruction of the biodiversity of the world. But money will be wasted on trying to solve this global warming 'problem' that I would much rather was used for looking after the people of the world. Being ignored by the likes of the BBC does not really bother me, not when there are much bigger problems at stake. I might not be on TV any more but I still go around the world campaigning about these important issues. For example, we must stop the dest­ruc­tion of trop­ical rainforests, something I've been saying for 35 years. Mother nature will balance things out but not if we interfere by destroying rainforests and overfishing the seas. That is where the real environmental catastrophe could occur."

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/69623

Hear, hear!

11/8/2008 5:08:43 AM

that guy is obviously paid off by big oil

11/8/2008 11:12:45 AM

Quote :

"From a lecture delivered by the late Michael Crichton at the California Institute of Technology on Jan. 17, 2003: Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two-week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation: N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live. This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses -- just so we're clear -- are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice. The Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. . . . The fact that the Drake equation was not greeted with screams of outrage -- similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example -- meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough, pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks. . . . I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. . . . I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. . . . To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model." But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world -- increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs. This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynman called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands. Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122603134258207975.html

11/8/2008 12:29:18 PM

clearly Michael Crichton was paid off by the oil companies

11/8/2008 1:00:21 PM