Posts by Art Slartibartfast 76 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2007
The only time DEI is an issue is when different standards apply because of a person's background, such as universities requiring different SAT scores to get in based on which group a student belongs to. This case went to the US Supreme Court where this policy was struck down.
For those interested in details of this topic, the Reason Foundation provides interesting backgrounds to the state of the FAA and how they are stuck in pre-historic times. It is not just the infrastructure, but also the way they are organised.
Wait, what... did you just assume my political affiliation? In the elections the US constituency was faced with two horrible candidates. For different reasons, but still horrible. Had the democrats put forward Dean Philips and he had won, the US, and the world for that matter, would be in much better shape today. I do not agree with Dean's opinion on climate, but he would easily have been a way better president.
Trump is not only a loose cannon, he is a one-man artillery battery firing barrage after barrage of destructive executive orders.
Good of you to check the actual references. There are two things I have a problem with here. First of all, they include RCP 8.5, an extreme scenario for the rise in carbon dioxide levels. It was originally intended as a test scenario to see what models do. Yet, in many publications it is treated as the most likely scenario because, well, it gets scary results.
Second issue is modelling. Even the researchers creating the models for CMIP 6 say they run too hot. The models are both numerically unstable and inaccurate. See for example this article, in which researchers varied the initial conditions by a trillionth of a degree (0.00000000001 °C) and got completely different outcomes running the models from 1920 to 2100.
Climate science has a long way to go before it can be used for policy making.
Lovely reference to the Yes, Minister! series. However, in my original post what I said was that the quality of many temperature measurement networks is shoddy. I did not claim there was no warming at all.
One of the problems with the concept of an average global temperature anomaly is that it tries to summarise the state of thirty generally recognised different climate types into a single number. An extreme in one direction can cancel out an extreme in the opposite direction. In that case the conclusion would be there are zero problems where in fact you have two.
For one thing Rik, as you probably well know, the effect of CO2 is logarithmic. That is why the effect is defined in terms of doubling CO2 levels. The effect diminishes with increasing concentration and most of the impact is behind us.
Cooking ourselves is a gross exaggeration. CO2 both heats and cools, but it is not the only game in town. Sea water never gets above 30 °C. You can observe that in the tropics where massive thunderstorms remove enourmous amounts of heat away from the lower atmosphere.
Anyway, appeal to authority does not convince me. What counts are facts and falsifiable hypothethes. What concerns me is that we are spending inordinate amounts of money on solutions that do not work on what is unjustly perceived as a problem, crippling our economy and the welfare of people. Dumb stuff such as carbon capture and storage. Expensive stuff that according to the calculation methods touted by the IPCC would have an impact too small to even measure. Bjorn Lomborg calculated using IPCC methods that if all countries in the world stuck to the Paris agreement from 2015 to 2100, the difference would be 0.17 °C at the cost of trillions of dollars. Sheer madness.
There is a strong correlation between ice cream sales in Australia and shark attacks. Does eating ice cream cause shark attacks? No of course not. Ice cream consumption and shark attacks mostly occur in the summer when people go to the beach. Correlation is not necessarily causation.
See for an example the article Melting Glaciers Revealing Ancient Tree Stumps from a Warmer Period that describes that a complete forest was covered by a glacier. The tree stumps found are confirmed to be over 3000 years old.
By the way, the glacier melting is not as bad as it sounds. For example, this article states: "This means that the uncertainty of the estimated volume of glacial ice, not the volume itself but the uncertainty of the volume, is five times the calculated change in the last 23 years."
The point is that the Heartland Institute, which is a climate change skeptical organistaion, still referred to Christopher Monckton in a posting last December. If he has changed his position, it would have happened after that and it would be significant enough to show up on-line. I can find no such message. So the question is, where has he publicly said he has changed position? Or are we talking about a different person here?
Well Steelpillow, with regards to glaciers melting, yes indeed many of them are melting. And what do they reveal? Tree stumps from the vegetation that used to grow there. The glaciers were not always there and we are coming out of a little ice age.
As far as predictions go, the media is rife with failed predictions.
But to consider the CO2 concentration to be the thermostat button for earth's temperature is an enormous stretch. Decades of climate research costing billions of dollars has failed to provide a definitive answer what the warming effect is of doubling CO2 concentrations. The equilibrium climate sensitivity or ECS, is likely in the range of 2 °C to 5 °C according to the IPCC. Likely, not definitively determined. Those two extremes a a factor 2.5 apart. At the same time they emphatically say that 30 other factors, including insolation, are insignificant. The climate modelers can't even get the clouds right and they themselves say that their models run too hot.
On the whole I do not disagree that earth's atmosphere is getting warmer. But I strongly disagree that it is a disaster that requires action. The global warming target is a political choice based on a flawed metric against an arbitrary baseline.
People focus on daily news instead of watching long term trends. Hot weather is all over the news where cold spells are hardly mentioned. According to a paper in The Lancet the mortality in India due to cold is seven times higher than mortality due to heat.
The climate narrative has plot holes wider than a beer truck. It is not that I fail to see as you put it, the facts simply do not convince.
The foundations of the whole global warming narrative are rotten to the core. Temperature is an intensive property. It is mathematically possible to average the numbers, but the result has no meaningful physical meaning. Case in point: if I have two equal volumes of dry air at a pressure of 1 bar, identical except for the temperature, where one volume is 20 °C and the other volume is 0 °C, and I let them mix isolated from all other influences, what would the resulting temperature be? Averaging the two temperatures results in a value of 10 °C, but as any qualified HVAC engineer can tell you, the actual result would be 9.65 °C, 0.35 °C less.
Why the difference? Mainly because air at 0 °C has 7.3% higher specific mass than a 20 °C. Another factor is that there are some small non-linearities in how enthalpy depends on temperature. Popularly said, cold air cools stuff down more than warm air heats them up. Averaging temperatures completely ignores this fact and therefore ends up to high. Never mind that air pressure and humidity also play a role in the warming and cooling effects of air and are ignored all together. Disagree with me? Show me one paper that takes these factors into account and comes to a definite conclusion.
And then we still have the matter of temperature measurements themselves. 77.9%, nearly 8 out of 10, of the meteorological stations the MET Office uses in the UK has an accuracy worse than 2 °C. And never mind that the MET Office publishes data from 103 stations that do not even exist. The situation is just as dire in the US where only 7.9% of the surface stations reach an accuracy of better than 1 °C and Australia where the Bureau of Meteorology has been repeatedly found to cook the books.
Even the IPCC does not see any climate influence in the past or the future on fire weather, or many other climate properties for that matter. See Table 12.12 on page 1856 in their latest report. You need to read past the Summary for Policy Makers of which the content is determined by subjective voting rather than by hard facts.
Climate science is a mess and unfit to guide policy.
Depends which ESET product you are looking at. Her is a release anouncement of last September for ESET Endpoint Antivirus for Linux 11.1.3.0. That page contains an end-of-life warning, but that only affects previous versions of the software.
Nice article. Making the move to Linux Mint myself. Nevertheless there are some things to keep in mind:
1. Antivirus does exist for Linux, see for example ESET. Given all the threats out there, I do recommend getting anti-virus
2. If you use Office 365 in the cloud, you do not get all of the functionality available in the desktop versions. For example, no macros or ActiveX controls in the web version of MS Word. See for details for example https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/word-features-comparison-web-vs-desktop-3e863ce3-e82c-4211-8f97-5b33c36c55f8
3. Using Office 365 in the cloud means that Micro$oft still has access to much of your private data.
4. For many Steam games you need to install Proton, a fork of Wine. With Proton many games run without a hitch.
All in all, I think Linux Mint will fulfill the needs of many users. Another reason to move to Linux for me is that Windows 11 does not suport VR anymore. In Linux support is not complete yet, but at least offers more perspective through projects like Monado.
Recently I installed Linux Mint 22 to see how it fares as an alternative to Windows. Definitely looks slick enough. At the moment the latest nVidia graphics drivers for my 3080 cannot be installed, many games I bought on Steam don't run, and my expensive VR headset has no support. The latter was a direct reason to look for an alternative to Windows 11, still on 10 now.
Then again, I will not be discouraged by this out of the box experience. I probably have not delved deeply enough into yet to get everything going. Still need to set up Wine and Proton to see how far I can get.
In the Netherlands it is possible to get a second passport for business use with twice the regular number of pages. Often for obtaining visa the passport has to be given to an embassy for several days and this prevents you from traveling during that time. The second passport allows you to travel anyway. Also useful if you need to travel to conflicting countries.
Apart from that, many countries allow dual citizenship, and some countries, such as Morocco, make it just about impossible to get rid of Moroccan nationality. Which means as a Moroccan you can naturalize to a new nationality but not denounce your original citizenship. And the you have two passports.
True, but the data shows that the local precipitation extremes are not increasing in frequency. Even the IPCC sees zero influence of climate on mean precipitation and heavy precipitation combined with pluvial flood landslide (Table 12.12 on page 1856 of AR6) except for the most extreme emission scenario RC8.5/SSP5-8.5 which is not credible at all.
Looking at the Finland article, the title is misleading. What the article says is that so many trees in Finland have been cut that the CO2 the forest absorbs is less than the country's emissions. In other words that Finland is not net zero anymore. It is not that the trees have stopped absorbing carbon.
The rain in Spain is extreme, but not unprecedented. On September 11, 1996 Tavernes de la Vall had 520 mm of rain and on November 3, 1987 the area around Gandia south of Valemcia even got 700 mm of rain.
"Those damages include food supplies, which Oxfam estimates have led to crop losses able to provide enough food for 14.5 million people - annually between 1990 and 2023"
This is bollocks. Corn yields, for example, have never been better, in part due to fertilisation by higher levels of carbon dioxide in the air. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Also, a recent study shows that vegetation absorbs 31% more carbon than previously thought which means current climate models should be subject to defenestration. See also this article on global greening.
Removing WMR is a slap in the face of users who invested serious money in VR. My HP Reverb G2 will become a useless paperweight once I can no longer hold on to Windows 10. It is not just me, but also the countless people in the simulation community who are affected by this decision.
A truly private phone would have hardware switch or switches built in that physically airgap wifi, microphone, camera and satellite positioning in the phone. That would be my minimum requirement for starting to call a phone secure. Even then, the phone could still be tracked through triangulation of the 5G connection.
Pile driving operations for placing the wind mills create noise levels of 190 dB and sonar equipment for surveying even goes up to 200 dB. Under water, sound travels much faster and is dampened less than in the atmosphere. To compare, 190 dB is a sound pressure 1 million times the sound of of a jackhammer (130 dB) which can cause almost instant measurable hearing loss in humans.
To whales, sound is critical for communication, and important for navigation, finding food, and avoiding predators. There is some controversy whether whale deaths are linked to wind turbines, looks like the jury is still out on that. Keep in mind though that whales are not the only sea mammals that will be effected.
This said, I seriously hope the orange man is lawfully convicted and put away where he can do no more harm to society.
In 2022, Google's data centres used 22.29 TWh of energy, which is 8.0244 × 10^16 J, including the energy to run the cooling. The global sea water volume is 1,370,000,000 cubic kilometers. Heating a kg of water by 1 K requires 4184 J. Google's energy use would increase the average world sea water temperature approximately by 0.000000014 K. An immeasurably small difference.
Interesting take. Reminds me of the company that rented servers the size of radiators to heat homes. It was a thing a couple of years ago, but lately not so much in the news anymore. Maybe the fans are too loud, I don't know.
Anyhow, geographically splitting the data centres statistically would help to avoid some of the troughs in power generation, but it is no guarantee. Winter nights can be dead calm and then your servers would still need thermally generated power. And the duplication of equipment would definitely increase the cost.
The whole idea of a submerged data centre seems interesting though as a permanent sea bed structure with regular access. The tides could provide the water flow to dissipate the heat. And northern seas can be quite cold. Would be interesting to hear whether there is a business case for this.
"...opportunities with offshore wind farms. This would give it ready access to renewable energy, overcoming challenges related to power transmission..." good luck running a server farm on variable power as the wind blows, or are we going to duplicate energy infrastructure with thermal power generation on shore?
My private phone is a CAT S62 Pro and no other phone offers a FLIR thermal camera with 320 x 240 pixels. Other phones only offer a quarter of that thermal resolution. With all of its features, it has quite decent battery life too, even after three years.
Since there are no recent security security updates (last one is of March 1, 2023 for Android 11), I am going to have to replace it soon. It sucks that there is no worthy successor on the market. Also, no way I am buying a Chinese brand.
If you are referring to Fourier analysis, he got it right, as long as it is applied to bandwidth limited applications on stationary signals. Bandwidth limited also implies strictly periodical. For signals varying in frequency and time, newer methods, such as Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (CEEMD) are much more appropriate. Each situation requires its own tool and in that sense, Fourier's work is incomplete, and therefore imperfect.
A conspiracy seems unlikely to me, it looks more like an emergent phenomenon where several schools of thought and interests align:
- politicians - we need a new cause that we can all rally behind
- scientists - ooh, shiny new field of interest that I can leave my mark on
- misanthropists - a new cause where all humans are guilty
- consultancy firms - if there is no money in solving a problem, there is money in prolonging it
- famous actors - this should be good PR to show that I care for humanity
- neo-colonialists - lets deny developing countries their access to cheap energy to stunt their development
- school kids - this is what my teacher has taught me
- climate activists - yaay, another conference in places like Bali and Rio that tens of thousands of of us can take the plane to and attend every year
- keeping up with the Jones's - now we can have Tesla's and solar panels to signal our virtue
There are undoubtedly many people who are sincere in their motives. Nevertheless, even if you disagree with some of the above, if there are enough people of the types mentioned, no conspiracy is needed to explain what is going on in western society today.
I call it climate science because that is what it is commonly called in the world. Climate science is one of the most complicated fields, covering many sciences, from astronomy, to physics, geology and biology, just to name a few. Just to show you how broad the field is, Ross McKitrick wrote a paper thoroughly refuting a high-profile attribution study that the IPCC relies on to determine the "human fingerprint" in global warming. His comment that stuck with me was:
"If someone trained in econometrics had refereed their paper 20 years ago the problems would have immediately been spotted, the methodology would have been heavily modified or abandoned and a lot of papers since then would probably never have been published" (emphasis mine).
The problem was with the statistics used, something that many scientists and engineers often do not have sufficient knowledge of.
I believe that there are many scientist that do their work with integrity and a number of bad ones who are truly disingenuous. But even the good scientists self censor or pay lip service to the climate orthodoxy, because if the don't, they will not get published, or even worse, lose their jobs. That is the state of the world today.
From the website of the International Maritime Organization (IMO):
"Known as “IMO 2020”, the rule limits the sulphur in the fuel oil used on board ships operating outside designated emission control areas to 0.50% m/m (mass by mass) - a significant reduction from the previous limit of 3.5%. Within specific designated emission control areas the limits were already stricter (0.10%). This new limit was made compulsory following an amendment to Annex VI of the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL).
The resulting reduction in sulphur oxide (SOx) emissions from ships is having major health and environmental benefits for the world, particularly for populations living close to ports and coasts. Sulphur oxides are harmful to human health, causing respiratory, cardiovascular and lung disease. Once released in the atmosphere, SOx can lead to acid rain, which impacts crops, forests and aquatic species and contributes to the acidification of the oceans."
Overall a laudable initiative, although I much dislike the term "ocean acidification" because the oceans are nowhere near having a PH lower than 7 and because depending on time and place the PH value varies quite much.
Ok, buckle up, because this is a long one. Let us start with the basics then. Methodology:
1. The principles of the IPCC state that: “The role of the IPCC is … understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change”. So, from the outset in 1998, the IPCC assumes there is climate change and that it is caused by humans. This reversal of the null hypothesis is a big scientific no-no. This starting point biases everything that comes after it. The proper null-hypothesis is to start from the point that there is no climate change and then assess whether there is evidence to disprove this.
2. The main KPI for climate policy is to keep the average deviation of the baseline temperature below 1.5 °C. Apart from that it is a gross simplification to characterise the change in the thirty types of climate our planet has in a single variable, it also hides a lot of information. A serious positive temperature excursion one way can be masked with an excursion in another direction. On average everything looks good while we in fact have a major problem. A better measure would be to look at the standard deviation, however, this is something most policy makers and the general public would not be able to wrap there head around. It also does not work because of the next point.
3. Temperatures measured with thermometers represent the temperature for a certain volume of air around them. The main worry of rising atmospheric temperatures is that it might negatively impact natural processes on Earth. It is possible to take the numerical temperature values and perform statistics on them, but the result is unphysical.
Case in point: if I have two volumes of dry air at 1000 mbar, one at 0 °C and one at 20 °C and I allow these volumes to mix without external influences, what do you think the final temperature is? Many people would say 10 °C and they would be wrong. The actual value is 9.65 °C. A significant difference.
The proper way to calculate this is to determine the enthalpy of each volume, add them together and from that calculate the final temperature. The enthalpy of air depends on temperature, pressure and humidity and this dependency is non-linear. Any HVAC engineer with knowledge of psychrometrics can tell you this. The outcome of 9.65 °C becomes easier to understand once you realise that air at 0 °C has 7.3% more specific weight than air at 20 °C.
In the 17 years of tracking climate science, only once have I come across a paper that takes air pressure and humidity into account. Blindly averaging temperatures biases the result to warm values, although there are instances where averaging yields a value that is too low (high humidity warm air at 1040 mbar mixed with dry cold air at 980 mbar for example). Anyhow the method is fundamentally flawed.
And yes, temperatures are also measured with satellites, but they too do not measure air pressure and humidity.
4. Next plot hole: models. Ever wonder why tens of models are used to make climate projections? Because after decades of research not a single one has been found fit for purpose. So it was decided to bunch the results from many models up in the hopes that the outcome would be more accurate. The necessary prerequisites for this to work is that: a) the models are independent and b) the errors have a gaussian distribution. Both requirements are not met. Many models share parts of the same core source code and are therefore not independent. The errors in the models have far from a gaussian distribution, they are systematically wrong. The researchers working on the most recent CMIP-6 project themselves have said that their models run too hot. The average of a bunch of outcomes wrong in the same direction, is a wrong outcome.
Not only that, the models were all taken into account to avoid having to select the best one because all other research groups would be clamouring about this as they would lose their funding. It would also spark much debate that was deemed to draw energy away from progressing climate science. This was a political decision, not a scientific one.
Further consider this: if you feed climate models pink noise, i.e. zero trend slightly autocorrelated time series as temperatures, you would expect climate models to sometimes predict warming climates and sometimes colder climates. In practice they all predict warming, it is built in to their algorithms.
5. Another nail in the coffin: more not following the scientific method. Quote from Phil Jones, Director of Climate Research Unit, UEA, UK: "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?". The whole point of the scientific method is show your work and make sure it is reproducible. There are many instances of institutions and researches declining to show their data and explain their methods. Older temperature records are mysteriously cooler over time and newer ones warmer.
The above just scratches the surface of what is wrong with climate science, there are many more topics that I not have touch upon here. My conclusion is that climate science is unfit as an input for policy making.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
