Science and Technology news... :: View topic - OT: interesting global warming quote found elsewhwere

Kris Krieger · Guest

Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:48869E1C.A5570BD@hotmail.com:

[quote]

bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:

Eeyore wrote:

Bill>s claim above is the weirdest I>ve heard to date.

It>s based on published data in peer-reviewed journals.

Peer reviewing makes it OK ?
[/quote]
Let>s put it this way. When someone comes up with an idea for an
injectable pharmaceutical, it>s forst based upon lab experiments which
are written up and submittd for publication - prior to publication, 'peer
review' occurs, and the experiments are, or at least should be, shown to
be replicable. Then a whole process occurs over a number of years,
typically about 10, during which experiments are done to look for
benefits and negative side effects. THere is then a whole quality-
assurance methodology against which it has to be compared and tested.
And each time batches are run, they are tested for contaminants and
breakdown products and other harmful things that might occur. In the
end, more tests are done to be sure that it>s sterile, and to eb sure
that no nasty breakdown products will be formed withing the given storage
parameters. Even at that, thre are flukes, nto to mention points at
which incompetent and/or greedy a-holes piss on the science and do it
"their own way" for the sake of dumbass expediency. But those cases are,
overall, pertty rare.

Now, even given teh occasional fluke of the above, do you prefer that
sort of peer review, or would you be happy if just anyone would be
allowed to inject you with some unspecified combination of who-knows-
what, of questionable sterility, based merely upon popular claims that it
might cure your illness?

Don>t sneer at scientific peer review until you understand what the
process actually is. Sceintific peer review isn>t perfect, and yes,
sometimes a paradigm-shift is called for, *HOWEVER*, it is not merely the
political circle-jerk you insist upon claiming it is.

[quote]
Steve McIntyre was an IPCC peer reviewer until he saw what was going
on.
http://climateaudit.org/

Graham

[/quote]

Kris Krieger · Guest

Martin Brown <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote in
news:86827$4886f0c8$25049@news.teranews.com:

[quote]Jonathan Kirwan wrote:
On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:54:55 -0500, Kris Krieger <me@dowmuff.in
wrote:

I know about precession in the earth>s orbit, but actually, I don>t
knowwhere we are at this moment, i.e. whether the ploe is tilted
more towards the sun, or more away from it.

Um. That>s a problem that you don>t know. The pole tilts towards
and away from the sun, every year, just at opposite halves of that
period. So that has nothing much to do with polar ice cap melting and
so on.

The precessional and faster nutation terms represent gradual changes
in the direction of the Earths spin axis. The Earths orbital elements
evolve slowly with time with periodic terms driven mostly by the moon
but also by the other planets. The best short introduction to the
these effects is online at:

http://www.hartrao.ac.za/nccsdoc/slalib/sun67.htx/node203.html

To get yourself up a little bit on the curve of understanding the
orbital Milankovitch cycles, there is a paper by Berger from 1988,
which included the newer numerical integration of the secular
equations (suggested by Laskar in 1986, I think.) It is available
at:

http://www.agu.org/journals/rg/v026/i004/RG026i004p00624/RG026i004p006
24.pdf

Look at figure 28, page 649.

I think the TAR included a nice graph paralleling the Vostok ice core
data with the Milankovitch cycles, but I haven>t looked for a
repeated version of it in the AR4. It>s easier on the eye than the
above Berger graph and ties into some other real-world data to help
you see the natural cycles. If I find it and think about it, I>ll
post a link to that, too.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v329/n6138/abs/329414a0.html

But you need a subscription to view online.
A bit dated but free access is:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1989LIACo..28..385R
[/quote]
Actually, the first link showed a few paragraphs when I clicked - maybe
it>s just a summary... It does jibe with what I recall (tho' prob did not
express at all well), tho' it>s always good to refresh one';s memoery and
add on some new data. Interesting links, thanks!

- K.

[quote]
According to Berger>s data above, though, you should be able to see
that we are a little bit on the downward slope of millennial-scale
insolation. You can see a bit of what>s up ahead and a lot of what
is in the past.

There are data sets going back many tens of millions of years and
going forward for a similar period, now. If you get to that point, I
can provide a link or two.

There is also some newer work that suggests that some of the short
term periodicities seen in climate may also be due to the influence of
the moon on our orbital elements. Essentially the hypothesis is that
when the elements are just right the enhanced tidal effects cause more
mixing in the oceans (and obviously higher tidal range). The models to
predict these are very good and well tested to avoid coastal flooding.

The work by Keeling on climate and tides and their possible relation
to evolving orbital elements of the Earth moon system is interesting.
It is only one of several possible contenders but interesting non the
less.

http://www.pnas.org/content/94/16/8321.full.pdf+html

Regards,
Martin Brown
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
[/quote]

Joerg · Guest

Spehro Pefhany wrote:
[quote]On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:29:15 -0700, Joerg
notthisjoergsch@removethispacbell.net> wrote:

Joel Koltner wrote:
"Joerg" <notthisjoergsch@removethispacbell.net> wrote in message
news:AXMhk.2526$zv7.849@flpi143.ffdc.sbc.com...
Not long enough? My EMI jobs almost never take longer than that. Unless we
can>t do it without a serious relayout and even then two months is often
feasible.
You might have a hard time finding any customers if you were a new consultant
no one had ever heard from before in a new country. How many times have you
gone and called potentially customers in order to drum up business (what
Bill>s doing) rather than their calling you?

Several times. Not to drum up business but when I saw something
blatantly wrong that I could help them with or if I had a really great
idea. The best ROI was on a proposal I needed to put >50 unpaid hours
into because it was unsolicited. Condensed it to six pages so the CEO
wouldn>t need much of his time to read. Got a call from him. "Can you
really do that?" ... "Yeah." ... "But you>d have to run a small company
and move across the ocean." ... "Ok." Followed by an offer letter,
tearful good-bye scenes, 40ft containers et cetera.

Bill>s difficult in finding employment seems to highlight the important of
networking, I guess.

Yep, got to keep the network going even in phases where you aren>t looking.

The best way to do that, IMO, is to help other people, and spread work
around, with zero expectation of a quid pro quo. Good karma seems to
accumulate.

[/quote]
Indeed. Amen to that!

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

Guest

On Jul 23, 3:59 am, Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelati...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
[quote]bill.slo...@ieee.org wrote:
On Jul 22, 8:58 am, Richard The Dreaded Libertarian <n...@example.net
wrote:
On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:13:31 +0100, Eeyore wrote:
QUOTE: I believe the recent warming is best comparable to or less than the
warming in the 1930s and is now over.

Joseph D>Aleo, former Professor of Meteorology at Lyndon State College,
says there may be a good reason why some land measurerments of temperature
detected a burst of global warming from 1990 greater than what satellites
could detect:

Land-based monitoring Station drop-out has occurred-- from a peak of 6,000
stations in 1970 to 2,000 today. The biggest dropoff occurred around 1990.
Many of the stations that were dropped were rural. A larger

percentage of the stations remaining were urban.

And that>s precisely when the average temperature, as detected by the
remaining stations, soared (see graph 2). As D>Aleo asks, were these
stations measuring a warmer climate or just a suddenly higher proportion

of warmer cities?

This has been known since early in the 1970>s, but since it>s against
their dogma, the warmingists simply dismiss you as a "denialist". They
_KNOW_ they>re Right, because The Infallible Al has Revealed the Truth
to them.

Nice of Rich to share his revealed truth to us. Pity about the real
world truth content. As Don Klipstein has pointed out, ground level
weather stations are no longer our only source of data about global
temperature, which is probably why the rural weather stations have
been closed down, though Joseph D>Aleo, former Professor of
Meteorology at Lyndon State College, doesn>t seem to have taken this
on board. Exxon-Mobil wouldn>t like him as much if he had.

Well Hansen wants them tried now !http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/jim-hansen-calls-for-...
[/quote]
So he should. They have been trying to defraud the public - by pushing
incorrect and misleading information about anthropogenic global
warming - for some years now, in order to protect their own financial
interest in selling as much oil as possible. This is criminal
behaviour. The chance that the justice system will bring them to book
is slight - they can afford enough lawyers to drag out the process
until the US is silly enough to elect another Republican
administration, in the same way the Microsoft did.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Guest

On Jul 25, 1:09 am, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
[quote]On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:02:25 -0700 (PDT), bill.slo...@ieee.org wrote:
We both do things we like to do, and any income is a side effect. She
just has to kowtow for it, and I don>t.

You don>t have to kowtow to your customers? Pull the other leg.

Not even slightly. If they like my stuff they can buy it. If they>re
not happy, they can return it. If they want CE, or ISO9000, or
lead-free, they can go somewhere else. If they want us to do something
stupid or ugly, or don>t like our pricing, ditto. If they have unique
needs, or need customization, or have ideas for features or
applications or for new products, we>d love to meet with them.
[/quote]
Which is to say that you are small enough to do specials, and in fact
rely on them for a lot of your new prodct development, and successful
enough that you don>t have to take on specials that won>t lead to new
products that can be sold to other customers.

So you don>t have to kowtow to all your potential customers, but since
the ones who are willing to pay for your new product deelopment are
particularly valuable, I imagine that you do handle them with kid
gloves.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Kris Krieger · Guest

bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote in
news:71e46f1a-998e-4214-a0d7-71124780d4cc@r35g2000prm.googlegroups.com:

[snip]
[quote]
Not true. I>ve not had the sort of formal training that would let me
describe myself an electrical engineer.
I>ve had quire enough experience to pass as a electronic engineer.
[/quote]
Ah, the dreaded modern "The HR department needs to see your magic scrap of
paper" syndrome. Driven home by a want ad I saw back while living in
Ontario in the early 90>s "WANTED; grocery meat dept assistant, must have
Certificate in Sausage Making". I>m not exaggerating or joking. I was
once tunred down for a position becasue I "only" had worked with Word 6,
and did not have a "certificate" in using Word 6.5. The fact that I can
learn software very quickly, and had used all sorts of software, including
publishing, presentation, and various word-processing software, didn>t
matter one bit. I didn>t have The Magic Scrap of Paper "certifying" that I
had some basic modicum of knowledge re: Word 6.5.

[quote]
(Not that I would expect to be able to find employment in a new
country that
you>ll only be in for two months, but I>m assuming you>re heading
back to
the
Netherlands after your trip to Oz.)

Correct. But Australia isn>t a new country for me - I>m an Australian
citizen, and worked here for some eighteen months as a electronic
engineer (although the job title was senior scientist) after I>d got
my Ph.D.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
[/quote]

Guest

On Jul 25, 1:11 am, d...@manx.misty.com (Don Klipstein) wrote:
[quote]In <a6347502-bc82-4a2c-b474-787e17d3b...@w39g2000prb.googlegroups.com>,
bill.slo...@ieee.org wrote in part:

Mankind hasn>t been around long enough to have run into a seriously
warm climate. For about 40 million years - between 60 and 100 milion
years ago - the climate was lot warmer and there were crocodiles
living inside the arctic and antarctic circle. In order to get the
heat balance to work, it seems to be necessary to postulate lots of
intense hurricanes and typhoons extending much further north and south
from the equator to more enough heat to of the tropics to the poles.
The coast of California wouldn>t have be a good place to live in that
era.

So how warm was the world when we had much higher CO2 and no icecaps or
ice sheets? 7, maybe 10 degrees C warmer than it is now?
[/quote]
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19826611.200-when-crocodiles-roamed-the-arctic.html

The article is back in Nijmegen, but IIRR the world was about 20C
warmer.

[quote] Now, what is the ratio of warming of the Califormia cost to warming of
the whole globe according to climate models that are coming up more true
so far, and according to whatever historical data says anything about
California?
It appears to me that California will warm up a little less than the
world as a whole during the summer and about keep pace in the winter - and
lag many decades also, since coastal CA>s air is usually from the Pacific
Ocean.
[/quote]
Calfornia>s problem with that sort of warming would be intense
hurricanes - one of the points made in the New Scientist article was
that to get the temperature distribution to match the evidence from
the geological record a lot more heat had to be travelling from the
equatorial regions to to poles then than now.

The mechanism proposed was lots of intense hurricans over a much wider
belt arond the equator - as you>d expect, since hurricans grow where
the sea surface temperature is over about 26.5C - that mixed the
surface layers of the tropical oceans much more thoroughly - and
deeply than they are mixed at the moment, putting a lot wmore warm
water into the cean currents flowing towards the poles.

With enough intense hurricans around, the coast of California would
not be a good place to build a conventional house.

[quote]
How bad would it be if LA and San Diego become more like Acapulco and SF
becomes like San Diego or a degree or two warmer than San Diego is now?
[/quote]
Better analogies would be Galverston and New Orleans.

[quote] The worst I see for coastal CA if the world gets that warm is having to
move a couple hundred meters uphill - which is not far.
[/quote]
Probably not far enough to cope with storm surges

[quote]And high food prices from agriculture being in the process of adapting to climate
shifts.
[/quote]
When there isn>t enough food being grown to feed everybody, food
prices become astronomical, and the poorest starve.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Guest

On Jul 25, 1:35 am, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
[quote]On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:22:07 -0700, "RST Engineering $jw$"

j...@rstengineering.com> wrote:
I resemble that remark {;-)

Jim

Yes. Physicists are generally terrible circuit designers.

John

I did say "generally." The MIT RadLab, and wartime Los Alamos, were
run mostly by physicists, and they changed the world; in a few years,
they took us from "radio" to "electronics." Perhaps the pressure of
war changed the culture for a while.
[/quote]
The UK physicists whose work on radar prompted the creation of the MIT
Radiation Laboratory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Laboratory

seem to have included some tolerably competent circuit designers, but
the British radar work soon sucked in the electronic engineers from
EMI>s Central Research Laboratories, fresh from their work on
inventing modern television.

[quote]Check out the schematics in RSI for the occasional howler.
[/quote]
I send comments to RSI from time to time, pointing out defects in the
electonic engineering they do publish. Some of them even get
published. Their referees seem to tolerate very poor electronic
engineering.

[quote]But I suppose I could have also said that most engineers are terrible
circuit designers.
[/quote]
Too true.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Don Klipstein · Guest

In article <WuednUT-tZFBexXVnZ2dnUVZ_rPinZ2d@earthlink.com>, Kris Krieger
wrote in part:
[quote]bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote in
news:a9d1157b-4736-4d90-9aca-e7c433685026@2g2000hsn.googlegroups.com:

It does, but the direct effect of polar orientation is relatively
small. There are a couple of positive feedback mechanisms that amplify
the slight change in global mean temperature caused by changes in
polar orientation up to the rather larger differences we see between
ice ages and interglacials - we are in an interglacial at the moment.

I remember that we>re in an interglacial epoch, but admittedly haven>t
studied this topic, just going on memory.

One of the amplifiying mechanisms is changes in snow cover in the
northern hemisphere - colder weather means more snow, and snow
reflects more heat than bare vegetation, which makes the climate
colder. Another in CO2 solubility in the oceans - colder oceans
dissolve more CO2, so that there is less of it in the atmosphere,
which reduces greenhouse warming.

When our ancestors took up cattle raising and growing rice in paddies,
we increased the methane levels in the atmosphere. Methane is a rather
potent greenhouse gas, and the - minor - global warming this produced
was enough to swamp minor cooling we should have got from the changing
polar orientation, so all the positive feedback went the other way.

The depressing thing is that I tend to think the only eventual solution
will be whatever teh planet "comes up with" so to speak, which I suspect
will be conditions that wipe out the vast majority of our species. To be
honest, what depresses me more is that we>ll probably take 99% of all other
species out with us. Then I want to forget wbout it all and have a couple
beers... :(
[/quote]
If we manage to warm the globe by 6 degrees C or whatever and melt
Greenland>s icecap and reduce Antartica>s icecap to a few glaciers, I see
humanity surving - but probably requiring a worldwide population decrease
to maybe 4-5 billion people until agriculture in such a world gets worked
out. It gets easier if people live with less meat, poultry and dairy and
eat more vegetable products such as grains. Grains get healthier when
they are "whole grains".

I also see that if we manage to so much as warm the globe by 7 degrees C
over a few centuries, that will still be at most the most cataclysmic
event since the one that ended the Cretacious Age about 65 million years
ago and still second to that one. That event only caused extinction of
only one subclass (sometimes argued to be a class) of animals (dinosaurs).

Keep in mind that the world had global temperatures fluctuating a
goodly 10 degrees C by going into and out of the interglacial periods of
the ice ages of the past 400,000-500,000 years, and things were only
slightly milder for the 2-3 million years before that or since Antarctica
moved into an antarctic area. The homonid family of primates has been
through a few of these fluctuatuions already.

I expect AGW to be a major event, eventually having more impact than
WWII and the Great Depression, but far short of causing extinction of Homo
Sapiens.

- Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

Don Klipstein · Guest

In <c0c8b408-ea13-4cbd-82f1-80c4700c8716@h17g2000prg.googlegroups.com>,
bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:

[quote]On Jul 25, 1:11 am, d...@manx.misty.com (Don Klipstein) wrote:
In <a6347502-bc82-4a2c-b474-787e17d3b...@w39g2000prb.googlegroups.com>,
bill.slo...@ieee.org wrote in part:

Mankind hasn>t been around long enough to have run into a seriously
warm climate. For about 40 million years - between 60 and 100 milion
years ago - the climate was lot warmer and there were crocodiles
living inside the arctic and antarctic circle. In order to get the
heat balance to work, it seems to be necessary to postulate lots of
intense hurricanes and typhoons extending much further north and south
from the equator to more enough heat to of the tropics to the poles.
The coast of California wouldn>t have be a good place to live in that
era.

So how warm was the world when we had much higher CO2 and no icecaps or
ice sheets? 7, maybe 10 degrees C warmer than it is now?

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19826611.200-
when-crocodiles-roamed-the-arctic.html

The article is back in Nijmegen, but IIRR the world was about 20C
warmer.
[/quote]
That article does indeed claim that Antarctica was once warm and
forested.

However, 10>s of millions of years ago to one or two hundred million
years ago, Antarctica was far from its present location. I find it easy
for Antarctica to have had crocodiles 70 or 100 or 125 million years ago
in the Cretaceous Age when the global average temperatue was maybe 22
degrees C and Antarctica was at least majority north of the Antarctic
Circle.

[quote] Now, what is the ratio of warming of the Califormia cost to warming of
the whole globe according to climate models that are coming up more true
so far, and according to whatever historical data says anything about
California?
It appears to me that California will warm up a little less than the
world as a whole during the summer and about keep pace in the winter - and
lag many decades also, since coastal CA>s air is usually from the Pacific
Ocean.

Calfornia>s problem with that sort of warming would be intense
hurricanes - one of the points made in the New Scientist article was
that to get the temperature distribution to match the evidence from
the geological record a lot more heat had to be travelling from the
equatorial regions to to poles then than now.
[/quote]
I expect that the LA-SD region of California with such extreme warming
would run into a hurricane problem a little worse than Acapulco has to
deal with now. And that the SF area and West Coast North America will
only worsen to about what LA and SD deal with now.

[quote]The mechanism proposed was lots of intense hurricans over a much wider
belt arond the equator - as you>d expect, since hurricans grow where
the sea surface temperature is over about 26.5C
[/quote]
That is not a critical temperature carved in stone. Should the middle
and upper troposphere in hurricane formation areas also warm, then the
critical sea surface temperature for hurricane formation will aslo rise -
probably by a small amount. Also keep in mind that the tropics will warm
less than the globe as a whole.

Furthermore, keep in mind that the hurricane uptick of the last decade
or so is in significant part not from global warming but from the Atlantic
multidecadal oscillation.

[quote]- that mixed the
surface layers of the tropical oceans much more thoroughly - and
deeply than they are mixed at the moment, putting a lot wmore warm
water into the cean currents flowing towards the poles.
[/quote]
That one is a more serious concern, to the extent there is an increase
of hurricane activity that is independent of the multidecadal oscillations
of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. That can melt away sea ice in polar
and near-polar regions - for now in/near the Arctic, since most tropical
cyclones are in the northern hemisphere.

[quote]With enough intense hurricans around, the coast of California would
not be a good place to build a conventional house.
[/quote]
I would advise coastal Southern CA to be advised that in a few centuries
they may get what Acapulco gets now.

[quote] How bad would it be if LA and San Diego become more like Acapulco and SF
becomes like San Diego or a degree or two warmer than San Diego is now?

Better analogies would be Galverston and New Orleans.
[/quote]
How do you see coastal California getting that bad? The climate
forecast models that made more sense to me have LA and SD hardly worse
than Acapulco (besides sea level higher) even if we warm up our planet to
what it was like in the Cretaceous Age.

[quote] The worst I see for coastal CA if the world gets that warm is having to
move a couple hundred meters uphill - which is not far.

Probably not far enough to cope with storm surges
[/quote]
A Cat-5 hurricane storm surge is generally 6-9 meters.

[quote]And high food prices from agriculture being in the process of adapting
to climate shifts.

When there isn>t enough food being grown to feed everybody, food
prices become astronomical, and the poorest starve.
[/quote]
I see that being mainly from severely high income diversity, allowing
higher income people to afford less-cost-efficient food (generally meat)
and bidding food prices out of reach of lower income working people.
I also see that great income diversity has such an effect even worse in
the area of medical care in the nations where medical care is
more-free-market.

If income diversity is less, then rising food prices motivate close
enough of all people to eat more economical foods - less beef, pork,
poultry and dairy, and more grains and "produce"/veggies/fruits.

Sharply rising grain prices should also motivate voters to prod their
elected politicians to *to put it mildly* reconsider American biofuel
policy being mandating *specifically American corn ethanol* as opposed
to non-ethanol and non-corn biofuels.

- Don Klipstein (don@misty.com)

John Larkin · Guest

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:44:17 -0400, Spehro Pefhany
<speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> wrote:

[quote]On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:29:15 -0700, Joerg
notthisjoergsch@removethispacbell.net> wrote:

Joel Koltner wrote:
"Joerg" <notthisjoergsch@removethispacbell.net> wrote in message
news:AXMhk.2526$zv7.849@flpi143.ffdc.sbc.com...
Not long enough? My EMI jobs almost never take longer than that. Unless we
can>t do it without a serious relayout and even then two months is often
feasible.

You might have a hard time finding any customers if you were a new consultant
no one had ever heard from before in a new country. How many times have you
gone and called potentially customers in order to drum up business (what
Bill>s doing) rather than their calling you?

Several times. Not to drum up business but when I saw something
blatantly wrong that I could help them with or if I had a really great
idea. The best ROI was on a proposal I needed to put >50 unpaid hours
into because it was unsolicited. Condensed it to six pages so the CEO
wouldn>t need much of his time to read. Got a call from him. "Can you
really do that?" ... "Yeah." ... "But you>d have to run a small company
and move across the ocean." ... "Ok." Followed by an offer letter,
tearful good-bye scenes, 40ft containers et cetera.

Bill>s difficult in finding employment seems to highlight the important of
networking, I guess.

Yep, got to keep the network going even in phases where you aren>t looking.

The best way to do that, IMO, is to help other people, and spread work
around, with zero expectation of a quid pro quo. Good karma seems to
accumulate.

Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
[/quote]
Read "Who Really Cares" by Brooks. What he found is really amazing...
makes you really want to believe in karma. Or luck. Or something.

John

James Arthur · Guest

bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:
[quote]On Jul 25, 1:11 am, d...@manx.misty.com (Don Klipstein) wrote:
In <a6347502-bc82-4a2c-b474-787e17d3b...@w39g2000prb.googlegroups.com>,
bill.slo...@ieee.org wrote in part:

Mankind hasn>t been around long enough to have run into a seriously
warm climate. For about 40 million years - between 60 and 100 milion
years ago - the climate was lot warmer and there were crocodiles
living inside the arctic and antarctic circle. In order to get the
heat balance to work, it seems to be necessary to postulate lots of
intense hurricanes and typhoons extending much further north and south
from the equator to more enough heat to of the tropics to the poles.
The coast of California wouldn>t have be a good place to live in that
era.
So how warm was the world when we had much higher CO2 and no icecaps or
ice sheets? 7, maybe 10 degrees C warmer than it is now?

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19826611.200-when-crocodiles-roamed-the-arctic.html

The article is back in Nijmegen, but IIRR the world was about 20C
warmer.
[/quote]

Several sources give 22ºC as an ancient global mean temp. Maybe
that>s what you>re remembering?

This page has a graph of CO2 and temp. vs. time, 0-600 Myrs ago:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html

This Wikipedia article plots CO2 over the same interval:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimate#Phanerozoic_Climate

Cheers,
James Arthur

Kris Krieger · Guest

mpm <mpmillard@aol.com> wrote in
news:13816631-4896-4913-af5b-901807a294cc@p10g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

[quote]On Jul 24, 2:08ï¿½pm, Kris Krieger <m...@dowmuff.in> wrote:
Eeyore <rabbitsfriendsandrelati...@hotmail.com> wrote
innews:48869FF5.E72
FD997@hotmail.com:

Kris Krieger wrote:

As for Al Gore, love him, hate him, whatever, neither
changes the fact that pollution is harming both humans, and other
living things,

The fact of the matter is that general air pollution now is lower
than it had been for decades on end.

Graham

True, except for some places such as LA. ï¿½Lower is better but sti
ll not teh
ideal, not the goal. ï¿½ ï¿½

Also, the point of it being lower in variosu areas is not that we can
go ahead and give up on any and all controls now, and just go back to
indiscriminately crapping everything up.

What you>re implying is like a parent saying, OK, Billy got A>s and
B>s in
the first semester of Fifth Grade, so it>s OK for him to totalyl
flunk out
the whole second half of the year.

Doing things only half-way means doing them half-assed. I
specifically
addressed the issue of human health, focusing upon children>s health
(since
they>re more vulnerable to the effects of pollutants). If
something like
heavy metals and lead in the water supply is doen half-assed, that is
tantamount to saying that it>s fine and dandy if children "only" get
"a little" bit of brain and organ damage from drinking tapwater.
Saying "it>s
better than it was", and leaving it at that, implies that "only half
the damage done" is acceptable.

Wow!
All I can say is, a quick review of the Princeton Review>s Podcast
series:
LSAT Logic in Everyday Life
...would be very helpful here.

[/quote]
Er, you lost me there...<?> Not sure that it>s related. I just "calls
'em as I sees 'em", and what I see is petty egocentric unconstructive
verbal gamesmanship that amounts to little more than a lot of people who
bicker just because they love to bicker.

I>ve seen what has to be megabytes of bandwidth devoted to what is, in
essence, nothing more than useless bickerfesting that misses, or often
seems to intentionally ignore, the core fact thats, even if one doesn>t
give a horse>s patoot about other creatures and doesn>t comprehend squat
about the importance of biodiversity, pollution does have a deleterious
effect upon human health (including brain function), and a crapped-up
environment has a deleterious effect on the overall quality of life for
humans in general.

What I see is people who
(1) pick out specific little phrases or segments of phrases, and launch
into the nastiest forms of hair-splitting over something that is only
part of the overall equation;
(2) condemn *all* alternative energy across the board becasue this or
that single specific potential energy source is (like oil!!) insufficient
to *immediately* meet *all* of the US>s energy needs;
and/or
(3) label *anyone* and *everyone* who has *any* concerns over issues of
energy and/or the environemnt a POS moron *merely* because this or that
dingbat celebrity <!> says one thing about it while doing another.

And this sort of muddleheaded ego-obsessed nonsense is what passes for
"discussion" in the US today...

If people brought to medicine the same sort of naysaying negativistic
hair-splitting bickerfesting that is brought to energy and the
environment, we wouldn>t *have* to worry about either because the
mortality rates from injuries, diseases, and natural disasters would keep
the human population pared way down, enough for the planet to clean up
after most of our messes, just as it>s cleaned up to some degre each time
this or that empire grew too big for its britches, and collapsed back
down into tiny bands of hunter-gatherers.

Kris Krieger · Guest

mpm <mpmillard@aol.com> wrote in news:f92c644d-f3c5-420f-858c-
6805e44b8e48@b2g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

[quote]On Jul 24, 1:57ï¿½pm, Kris Krieger <m...@dowmuff.in> wrote:

Or is it that you assume it>s a lie depending *only* upon who presents
something?

No, not at all.
I think CGI is a fantastic tool for getting across complicated
concepts.
Afterall, people see better than they can think or read. (Present
company excluded, of course)
[/quote]
OK, sorry, I was admittedly feelign a bit cranky (outer edges of
Hurricane Bertha here, makes the joints ache and then I sometimes get
cranky).

[quote]
But I also feel if you have the right, real footage, then CGI is
probably better relegated to the backseat on something like this -
i.e., a demonstrable physical process.
[/quote]
As I mentioned (I think), I didn>t see the film, so I have no idea
whetehr they were illustrating something like a "mega-calving", or some
other theoretical event.

If it was just a substitute for a suitable film of a real-world event,
then you>re right, they should use the film.

What bugged me was that someone had gone into sneer-mode merely because
it was CGI, with no other reason/critique.

[quote]
But to your point, let>s take Dinosaurs.
For years we>ve seen CGI animations of them stomping through the
primordial forests, only to find out now that a lot of those
dinosaurs had feathers!!!
[/quote]
Science constantly evolves as new discoveries are made - which is a big
part of what makes it fun :)

[quote]
My point, and I think the point the other poster was trying to make,
is that CGI, as wonderful a tool as it is, can be manipulated to give
a false impression (intentional or otherwise).
[/quote]
True - but no such specification was made; there was no actual
*critique*, just a statement to the effect that it used a CGI animation
of a glacier falling into the sea, as tho>the mere use of CGI rendered
the film hooey. Now, maybe it *is* hooey - again, I>ve not seen it, and
really have not feel driven to see it - but there need to be reasons, not
merely the fact that a CGI animation was used.

[quote]
Put another way, Colin Powell>s agrument before the U.N. would have
been MUCH stronger had he held up a vial of real Anthrax actually
captured from an Iraqi weapons lab. The prop (analogous to your CGI?)
didn>t have nearly the same clout, or veracity as it turned out.
[/quote]
See, I don>t think it is analagous, for several reasons that are probably
not really worth going into ;) as it>d be too much of a digression (and
becasue I>m tired right now).

I don>t want to get started in on anything to do with the supposed-WMD
circus...

[quote]
Of course, notwithstanding the fact that one will be ill-advised to
carry live anthrax around on their person. Especially when delivering
speeches at the UN. :)

[/quote]
Ugh...

John Larkin · Guest

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:14:32 -0700 (PDT), bill.sloman@ieee.org wrote:

[quote]On Jul 25, 1:09 am, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
On Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:02:25 -0700 (PDT), bill.slo...@ieee.org wrote:
We both do things we like to do, and any income is a side effect. She
just has to kowtow for it, and I don>t.

You don>t have to kowtow to your customers? Pull the other leg.

Not even slightly. If they like my stuff they can buy it. If they>re
not happy, they can return it. If they want CE, or ISO9000, or
lead-free, they can go somewhere else. If they want us to do something
stupid or ugly, or don>t like our pricing, ditto. If they have unique
needs, or need customization, or have ideas for features or
applications or for new products, we>d love to meet with them.

Which is to say that you are small enough to do specials, and in fact
rely on them for a lot of your new prodct development, and successful
enough that you don>t have to take on specials that won>t lead to new
products that can be sold to other customers.
[/quote]
Boeing does specials. Bechtel does specials. A bit under half of our
business is OEM, which we really like because it>s steady revenue and
doesn>t need a lot of support. Except when we>re presented with the
potential for a big longterm OEM deal, we won>t develop a product
unless we think there>s a general, sustained market for it. Of course,
it is nice to have a "launch" customer, namely to have purchase orders
before the product is designed. In plain English, we don>t sell
engineering: it>s too valuable.

[quote]
So you don>t have to kowtow to all your potential customers, but since
the ones who are willing to pay for your new product deelopment are
particularly valuable, I imagine that you do handle them with kid
gloves.
[/quote]
Our company philosophy is to tell them the truth, about the technology
and about what we want to do. If we screw up, we call them and tell
them so. We rarely ask customers for NRE, because we don>t want them
or us to feel like thay have any ownership position in any of our
products.

John


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