
Re: Seriously
"relatively recent research showed that the ozone hole was caused by cosmic rays"
ah ha, just for poops and giggle please provide a link to that research.
9 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jul 2009
"what is questionable is to what extent we do and how far that goes"
Well it depends what error bound you're happy dealing with: Is there some element in the order of 10-20% not due to us - there's an argument there, Are we mainly responsible for climate change? That's clear.
Let's face it mankind has form on altering the atmosphere on a global scale, remember CFCs? The effect of (mostly) westerners using CFCs as the coolant gas for refrigeration caused the ozone layer to deplete drastically and only drastic action (the replacement of CFC with other substitutes) prevented disaster. With the emission of carbon it's not just the west but the whole world - but yeah who knows, could just be coincidence.
I understand the term exponential, but you'll notice I didn't include 'me' in the argument. I used the word 'measured' i.e. it has been shown to be so. I encourage you to look it up, the evidence backs up my claim. A doubling in output per unit time. Exponential.
"On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics."
Richard Feynman
So then let's bring a completely unnecessary piece of maths to it all and very slowly go through what I said:
"CO2 is continuing to be put in to the atmosphere at an exponential rate":
This is not in doubt, we have measured this:
We know the amount of hydrocarbons we extract, we have measured it. Lets say that the amount of hydro carbons we extract is X. We then try a simple model that assumes we burn all the hydro carbons and get some amount of CO2, lets call this Y or (Y(X) if you want to be a complete pedant). We then have measured the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, lets say this the number Z. We find that the rise in Z over the years quite nicely correlates with a simple model of burning all of X and getting Y(X) CO2.
From the beginning of exploitation of coal (1800 onwards) there has been an exponential increase in X. There has been an exponential increase in Z in that time.
“A possible negative feedback mechanism has been found”
That is to say that for some amount of stuff (Ice), we remove some amount of carbon. This consumes the stuff, we have no stuff left once it has done its removing of carbon. So for some amount of stuff, m, we remove some amount of carbon C(m).
A very basic model for the amount of carbon is:
TotalCarbon(t) = Z(t)-C(m)
Z(t) grows exponentially so we don't need to do anything more advanced to draw our conclusions. We know that C(m) needs to increase exponentially or TotalCarbon(t) will continue to increase. C is dependant only on m so one of the following must apply: m(t) increases exponentially and C(m) is a monotonic increasing function OR C(m) increases exponentially and m(t) is an increasing monotonic function.
Back to measuring – we know m(t) is not increasing exponentially, it might be bobbing about some equilibrium point but the measurements do not show an exponential increase in m(t). Nor do we see a monotonic increase in m(t). Thus the behaviour of C(m) doesn't matter, its overall behaviour compared to Z(t) is not exponential so TotalCarbon(t) grows exponentially. QED.
Let's just put the whole article in plain English:
-CO2 is continuing to be put in to the atmosphere at an exponential rate
-A possible negative feedback mechanism has been found
-The mechanism takes a finite resource (Ice) to make this happen
-When that finite resource runs out we loose the negative feedback mechanism
-CO2 continues to rise.
I don't see how this gets us away from a fairly obvious problem:
No mater how many buckets you have to store the filth, the problem still exists, and at the end you have no more empty buckets and just as much filth pouring out of the spout.
As a productivity device I can see how it overlaps with the usefulness of a netbook but I just can't help but think about the brick walls which without jailbreaking are out of the question. I recently tried a similar trick replacing my laptop for my netbook, to my real suprise I hardly noticed the change, the software I already use was available and worked well enough to be usable.
This is not true with the iPad, eclipse? No. Any kind of coding? Maybe HTML but not sure how you'd view anything given there is no concept of a file system on the iPad. That's a bit of rare example, most people aren't planning to write code on it but this is just one example of many where the iPad will most likely never be able to fulfil. Essentially I mean the walled garden approach that Apples whole business model is built on means that however useful the iPad is (or eventually will be) it will always have a failing in one area or another than means it simply can't be used by some.
I think people are asking the wrong question. Let's start by assuming that Paul is guilty as a puppy sitting in a pile of pooh. Let's just say for sake of argument he WAS a danger and this threat WAS real. Given all this the real question is why was it discovered by chance? This wasn't MI5 swooping in from on high after high level 24-hour style wire taps...this was just bad/good luck on the part of one airport employee.
If he's is guilty the police/MI5 are negligent. If he's not then they're incompetent.