Posts by Wilco 1

Antarctic ice sheet melt 'not that unusual', latest ice core shows

Re: Damn lies, statistics, and the big picture

"Allegedly"? Do you have evidence that proves the extra CO2 is not man-made? Or you simply wish to ignore that fact?

Yes the 30% increase is significant especially since it is unprecedented since at least 500 million years. And according to measurements there is no divergence. Warming trend is accelerating in the last few decades and all of the other climate indicators point to continued melting of ice and increasing sea levels:

http://climate.nasa.gov/key_indicators/

Re: Damn lies, statistics, and the big picture

30% of all CO2 in the atmosphere is man-made. That's less than half we have actually emitted so far (the rest is absorbed by the ocean). Is that not very significant either?

Re: Damn lies, statistics, and the big picture

Nothing is unprecedented if you go back to the start of the Universe. In the early years of earth's existence it didn't support life at all, let alone human life! What matters however is our existence and how much we rely on the current climate and sea levels. So the big picture is this: if our climate is changing it will be a major problem for billions of people - whether it happened 100 millions of years ago as well is irrelevant.

As for our CO2 contribution, humans emit 100 times more CO2 every year than all vulcanoes combined. That should give you an indication of the scale of the issue.

And yes, we are agreed on cutting pollution, improving energy efficiency and using renewable energy.

Re: Lack of Logic Lewis

Most other journalists do appear to have a better integrity and actually report on the science, not distort the science to make it fit within their particular worldview. As several others have already shown, the actual science shows unprecedented melting.

Re: Only quoting the bits where Steig agrees with you?

We'd know 100% sure that man-made global warming is not happening if the global temperature returns to pre-industrial levels, if arctic ice no longer mostly disappears in the summer, if sea levels decrease again, if the retreat of most glaciers is reversed, if ocean heat content decreases - all while CO2 concentration continues to increase.

Now what do you think the chances are this will happen?

Re: Melting is unprecedented for at least the last 1000 years.

Funny how you got downvoted there for reporting the actual facts...

Re: This article is lies, isn't it?

How long have you been on here? Of course it is all lies.

The way to read Lewis' climate articles is to invert the meaning of everything he claims. You'll be a lot closer to the truth.

I wonder when we'll see another one of his "there has been no warming in the last 15 years" articles...

'Til heftier engines come aboard, HP Moonshot only about clouds

Re: Power v Performance

CPU power is quadratic with performance due to voltage/frequency scaling. Assuming all else equal it is also true when you compare high-end CPUs with lower end ones: big, fast, out-of-order CPUs scale non-linearly with increased complexity and need to use leaky transistors to achieve their high frequencies. However it is not necessarily true when comparing between different micro architectures, implementation quality, processes or ISAs (eg. Centerton doesn't look good compared to Calxeda).

In general, if you have a parallelizeable problem, using several slower cores will be more power efficient than one fast core. You can't use too many slow cores though, as the overhead of DRAM, communication etc will eat away the efficiency gained. So the trick is to find the sweet spot where the amount of work done per Watt is maximized. My gut feeling is this is just the start, the next generation of microservers in 2014 will become appealing enough to a wide market.

The UK Energy Crisis in 3 simple awareness-raising pictures

Re: Build Nuclear

Btw if you believe those motor generator claims or think that cars can run on water then I have an incredable investment opportunity for you. Remember how all that cold fusion was swept under the carpet by big oil corporations? Well I just need some money to continue researching it, and it will make you a billionaire when I find the answer.

Re: Build Nuclear

That just runs on the battery, if you disconnect it, it stops immediately of course. Simples.

Re: back to coal

There is nothing wrong with my calculations, eg. for nuclear I did 10GW capacity * 24 hours in a day * 365 days in a year = 87.6 TWh. Multiply with 0.04 deaths per TWh and you get 3.5 expected deaths per year. It's not that difficult is it? Actual TWh generated is very hard to find, so I was forced to use an estimate, but it gives a good feeling of the numbers.

Yes sure, deaths likely increase as we build more wind farms. But deaths are extremely low to start with, so it's not alarming even if it doubled. There are so many more important things which kill or injure thousands where relatively small investments could make a big difference in reducing deaths and cost to society - I already mentioned RCD's.

Well replacing coal with nuclear would certainly be a better option than keeping coal. Too much of Europe is powered by coal. I don't see how you can have issues with subsidising solar panels or wind power when nuclear/gas/oil subsidies are many times larger. Solar panels are now getting cheap enough that they don't require subsidies for much longer.

Re: Build Nuclear

1. I was using 40% efficiency based on overall efficiency of 36% of UK electricity generation (which is held back by coal). This claims 40-50% for CCGT, so the average is somewhere inbetween depending on demand: http://chp.decc.gov.uk/cms/centralised-electricity-generation/ Ie. your 57% average is way too high. It may be true for newly built CCGT's but it certainly isn't true for existing UK generation.

2. Backup is not required beyond what is already needed anyway to follow the daily demand curve (both demand and wind are followed almost exclusively using CCGT, ie. no CCGT is at 100% continuous capacity, so is already running at lower efficiencies to follow demand). Also you don't require 100% backup on hot standby 100% of the time as wind power is predictable and changes rather slowly - you just need to have enough capacity for windstill days. This capacity may be provided by other sources such as links. So unless you can provide hard evidence of that 10% extra gas, it's just another anti-wind myth.

3. Not sure where you get that 3% but a lot of windfarms are being built close to where most electricity is used. Think London Array. So losses are fairly small and not really different from power stations which need to be on the coast due to requiring huge quanties of cooling water.

So actual saving might be closer to 2.20W gas per 1W of wind assuming 45% average thermal efficiency and 1% losses.

Note that even off-shore wind power is about twice the market rate, so not anywhere near 4-7x. The standby claim is just a myth without evidence, and wind power generated at night is used 100% as we scale down CCGT. Look at this for example: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

You never see CCGT going all the way down to zero at night, even when it is very windy like in the last few days. In the summer coal is scaled back as demand is lower anyway. So nothing is dumped.

Re: Gas is far cheaper than electricity

People use gas central heating because it works well and is by far the cheapest option. I don't understand why you keep insisting electric heating is good when in fact it is horribly inefficient compared to a gas boiler or heat pump. I have electric storage heating in my house currently but it's about to be replaced by a combi as that is far cheaper and more efficient, gets rid of the 4 big tanks required and avoids the issue of needing to top up during the day if I use a lot of hot water. Overall the combi will significantly reduce my electricity bill as well as reducing my gas bill due to the increased efficiency.

If you had solar panels then you'd make far more money selling it to the grid and buying gas back for heating rather than heat using electricity. Only if you somehow generated so much electricity that you couldn't sell to the grid then it might make sense to dump it into a storage heater.

In the future we'll move towards heating and hot water using heat pumps. Resistive heating is a waste of energy as it only achieves 100% efficiency.

Re: Gas is far cheaper than electricity

If you use very little gas then don't pay a standing charge. There are lots of deals that don't require you to. But electricity is 2.5-4 times more expensive per kWh, so using electricity for direct heating is the most stupid thing you can do. Electric storage heating is actually a far better option because you can use cheap night electricity at 1/2 to 1/3 of the day rate. It's still 50% more expensive than gas but closer at least.

You're not going to get a 2kW turbine for £600, dream on. The cheapest are around £2000 and that is without the tower, inverter and grid connection. So it'll be at least £4000 before you're on the grid. In any case a small wind turbine on your roof is wasted money even if you can get planning permission - it'll never generate much power. Solar panels would be the way to go. I suggest you do some research on this, as you will lose a lot of money otherwise.

Re: back to coal

I forgot - I completely fail to grasp how you can possibly justify calling wind power "very dangerous, accounting for a great many deaths per year" when you yourself admit it's just 6 deaths per decade. Since when is 0.6 per year a "great many"???

Re: back to coal

Well if you quote deaths per GWh then you can hardly complain when I combine the worldwide numbers (0.04 and 0.15) with actual production in the UK to get expected UK deaths. Nuclear produces more GWh today so also more expected deaths... You can do the math yourself if you like.

As you say most of these are construction accidents. We haven't constructed any nuclear power stations or had a serious accident for decades, so it's no surprise there are 0 actual nuclear deaths in the UK. And 6 wind turbine deaths per decade is extremely low given the large number of turbines we have built. Let's see how Hinkley C changes the statistics.

But it's just crazy to talk about 0.6 deaths per year as being significant. You must be interested in saving lives because that's why you quoted deaths per GWh, right? So we should do something about coal as it would avoid many thousands of deaths in the UK every year.

Looking at the wider picture, even those are insignificant when comparing with deaths due to cars and their dirty exhaust (~1900 deaths due to accidents, ~13000 due to exhaust fumes). And you're proposing we should build nuclear rather than wind just to save 0.6 deaths per year?!? That's just insane. Even fitting RCD's to every home in the UK would save 2 orders of magnitude more lives - every year.

Gas is far cheaper than electricity

For heating gas is far cheaper than electric heating, a really efficient boiler achieves 90+% for central heating and 85% for hot water. I pay 20p/kWh for electricity and 5p for gas including standing charges - that's pretty much the cheapest deal for low usage. So that makes electricity 3.5 times more expensive.

With a really good ground source heat pump (COP > 3.5) one could beat gas, but most won't. If the electricity price is closer to 2 times the gas price then fitting new homes with ground source heat pumps as standard would work. Adding solar panels helps offset any extra electricity used.

For cooking it's much closer, gas is still a little cheaper but electric is about as fast, less dangerous (especially induction) and avoids the extra water and exhaust fumes from burning gas. So overall electric cooking is the better choice, and it's used almost exclusively on the continent.

Re: Too right we are running out of gas.

I found an article on the record: http://www.renewableuk.com/en/news/press-releases.cfm/2013-03-23-record-breaking-day-for-wind

Re: Burning Gas = Electricity

Actually as wind penetration increases, it becomes more rather than less predictable (thousands of turbines give a better "average" than any single turbine does - basic statistics). It does become harder to manage of course - if it is windy too much power may be generated (yes that can be a problem too), and if there is little wind across the UK, you need to find enough capacity of gas/coal and interconnectors to make up for the shortfall.

Re: Sellafield disaster

No there are many tonnes of stuff in that pool, mostly from Magnox reactors. One single reactor generates 25 tonnes of highly radioactive waste containing ~300kg of plutonium per year. Yes, that's a lot more than you thought, right?

So the 1300kg is just the actual plutonium that might be there. Lots of it has now corroded into radioactive mud on the bottom as Magnox reacts with water. And it is going to cost a lot more than $4000/gram just to get it out of there. So I wish you good luck with that JCB!

Btw I guess you didn't know the UK is sitting on a stockpile of 112 tonnes of high grade refined plutonium, worth... absolutely nothing. Nobody wants it, we can't even PAY other countries to take their own plutonium back! We could make a killing on it by selling to North Korea for $4000/g...

Re: Build Nuclear

Well let's look at the actual UK capacity factors then, shall we? Average over 2007-2011 was 27% for wind. Nuclear in the UK achieves 60%. Gas does 62%. Coal in the UK does just 42%. So you need ~50% more wind capacity to match coal and ~120% more to match nuclear/gas assuming no technology improvements (we know new wind and new nuclear do much better, new coal/gas might too).

Yes we agree you need more wind capacity to produce the same output - I have never denied that. But why is that a lousy use of money? New nuclear costs more than new wind per MWh. And ultimately the price per MWh matters more than how many wind turbines one needs to match a power station, right?

Also, you seem to believe, like many, that the capacity factor means that wind turbines are turning only a fraction of the time. In reality wind turbines generate power almost every day of the year, especially if dispersed over a large area. It's just that lower wind speeds result in a lower output. Note that nuclear power stations do actually have extended downtimes (months) where no power is produced. Ie. they cannot reach 100% nameplate capacity over a long period either. 60% capacity factor is pretty bad, does that mean they are doomed too or lousy value for money in your opinion?

The reason I'm impressed with the current wind power results is that the UK just broke the 5GW mark for the first time (a large windfarm came online late 2012) and stayed above 5GW pretty much for 4 full days continuously (and still going strong at 80% capacity today). That has saved a serious amount of gas - the subject of the article.

Re: back to coal

Wrong. Our nuclear capacity is about 10GW, so that's 3.5 deaths per year - or TWICE as many deaths per year than wind power (5GW at 26% capacity). And if we switched ALL our wind to nuclear you'd save... just 1.25 lives per year.

That hardly makes wind power "very dangerous, accounting for a great many deaths per year"... You've got to be a serious spin doctor to make that kind of ridiculous claim.

The fact is gas, oil, coal and even hydro cause about 2 orders of magnitude more deaths. Switching our 20GW of coal to either wind or nuclear would save 2628 lives (or 48700 for Chinese coal) per year. And deaths per GWh doesn't include costs of pollution cleanup, treating illnesses and reduced economic output from work absence. Now that is something that adds up to a measurable quantity.

Re: Build Nuclear

Calm winds will still produce some power with the latest low-speed turbines. Yes it is true you will need CCGT to supplement wind when that happens, but why is that an issue? I don't understand why we would be doomed if we need to burn more gas (or even coal) occasionally. Even using cheap/inefficient OCGT generation for a few total wind still days a year would be fine.

I agree we should diversify renewables far more than we have done so far. That will improve the stability from renewables and further reduce gas/coal usage. The main issue is that most are not as well developed as wind turbines and are often more expensive (the Severn barrier is a huge investment for example, but one we may be forced to do anyway). We should also ensure every new building must have solar PV+thermal panels - the additional cost on a new building is low as panels have become cheap.

About 3.4GW of nuclear power will be decomissioned in the next 6 years, which is replaced by Hinkley C in 2020. It's 2023 before another 5GW goes offline (although extensions to 2030 are expected).

Sellafield disaster

Boris I am not talking about small inaccuracies here but about enormous amounts of radioactive material leaking into our environment. Let's just consider plutonium. For example ~200 kilos of plutonium was dumped in the Irish Sea. Plutonium was found in unfiltered air ducts in various buildings. Around 1300 kilos are thought to be in the leaking open pool "dirty thirty". Nobody actually knows how much radioactive material it contains - radiation around it is so high one cannot get near it for more than a few minutes. It'll cost many billions to clean up just that open air pool. Total cleanup cost of Sellafield is £67.5 Billion: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-21298117 Yes, that's several thousand pounds for every tax payer.

If that sounds like a safe and successful way to reprocessing waste to you then I don't know what to say. And you are surprised that many people are against nuclear power? Seriously, read up on the facts before posting ridiculous nonsense about killing the very people who actually care about our environment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield

Re: back to coal

Shutting down coal is a good thing, it's by far the most polluting of all forms of electricity generation. It's a shame those costs are currently externalized (deaths and NHS costs due to bad air quality), but when you add pollution controls then you start to see the true cost.

We've just agreed to build more nuclear power stations in the UK. It happens to be as expensive as off-shore wind power: $14 Billion for 3.2GW...

Re: Build Nuclear

Off-shore in the UK achieves 32% capacity factor (Denmark is ahead here with several farms doing 44-52% and a 40% average). Greater Gabbard achieves 40% and costs about £1.3 Billion/GW for the turbines - quite a lot cheaper than a nuclear power station. Turbines last for 20-25 years and existing 20 year old farms are still going, so 30 years seems achieveable. No additional capacity is required as power stations already exist, they just have to work less hard, in particular burn less gas - every Watt produced by a wind turbine saves about 2.5 Watts of gas.

Note the electricity cost of Hinkley C is twice the market rate, on par with off-shore wind power.

Re: Too right we are running out of gas.

I meant 100% of max capacity, it stayed above 5GW for 4 days, a lot more than the 26% average. As far as I can tell it's a new record for the UK. You can see it in these graphs: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

Re: Too right we are running out of gas.

CCGT is already doing daily demand curve: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

If you look at the graphs, wind power simply shifts the CCGT curve downwards (ie. we burn less gas). It doesn't change the difference between daily peaks and throughs at all. Also wind power looks highly predictable and changes quite slowly. For example the ramp up from low wind to maximum wind power (1-5GW) took about 16 hours. 0.25GW/h is quite slow compared to how fast demand changes constantly.

Germany, UK, Denmark and many other countries use mainly coal for baseload. That's extremely polluting indeed - can you imagine how bad it would be without wind power? It can be improved by replacing dirty coal with a mix of renewables, gas and nuclear.

Re: Burning Gas = Electricity

Not true at all. Just look at the graphs: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/index.php

You can clearly see CCGT following the demand curve and going down dramatically when the wind picked up last Thursday. There is no OCGT at all.

And it doesn't make any sense either, you'd only need OCGT for unexpected peaks, while wind and solar are very predictable.

Re: Build Nuclear

I don't agree cost is irrelevant even if all of it is funnelled back into the UK economy - it still means higher electricity bills for all consumers. And if costs were not an issue for nuclear, then it shouldn't be an issue for solar/wind either.

Wind turbines are far simpler to design and build, and it's much easier to get planning permission. A nuclear power station takes several decades from planning to operation, while a wind farm takes a few years at most.

As for nuclear waste, we have tried and abysmally failed at reprocessing. Precisely because it is very radioactive, it's very dangerous, expensive and polluting. Do you have any idea how many kilograms of plutonium were "lost" at Sellafield? So rather than reprocessing, we need reactors that can burn existing waste and produce very little of their own. And that needs more research.

Re: Burning Gas = Electricity

Which means that every Watt a wind turbine produces is ~2.5Watts worth of gas saved. Easy?

Re: Build Nuclear

Didn't you hear? The UK recently decided to build new nukes. Don't expect to see a story about it on here though as it shows the true cost of nuclear: £14 Billion for just 3.2GW. And electricity from it is going to cost twice the market rate, on par with off-shore wind power.

Thorium, molten salt etc all looks interesting to research further, but even if it works (and I hope it does as we do need simpler fail-safe designs), the question is whether it is going to be cost effective. Especially given that old-fashioned nukes are already expensive before even considering the waste.

Re: Too right we are running out of gas.

If we didn't have the 5GW wind capacity we would have run out of gas weeks ago. It's not just the last 4 days were wind power was close to 100% continuously and produced record amounts of electricity (when will we see a story on El Reg about that?), but the last few months were extremely good as well.

Blaming a potential future gas shortfall on wind power when wind power in fact saved us from gas shortages in the first place is spin one could expect from some with an agenda, but making those claims when it is especially windy right now and has been for months is absolutely unbelievable!

Fukushima switchboard defeated by rat

Re: peter_dtm

No we don't need 30GW of backup or storage. We already have existing power stations that provide the baseload. Nobody ever claimed we should get rid of those. And neither do we need to build any new power stations to backup solar/wind - we already have them! When it is windstill we do exactly the same as we currently do when a power station has an unexpected problem and goes offline in mere seconds - hydro/peakers and other power stations pick up the slack. Luckily wind and solar are far more predictable than those kinds of events...

It's not possible to store 30GW today. But we don't ever need to, so stop making the claim that renewables require that kind of storage. They don't and never will. What's more, suggesting that renewables are useless because of that is even more stupid. The fact is we can't go 100% nuclear either. How do you follow the demand curve? Nuclear can't do that so of course it's completely useless! Neither 100% coal - way too slow for demand, completely useless! Nor 100% gas - where on earth do we get that much gas from? Stop people from cooking and heating their homes??? So according to your logic nuclear, coal and gas are all useless and a complete waste of money/resources/effort...

Re: peter_dtm

Well better not read your own post then, you will laugh so hard at the total BS you wrote you might actually die this time... 30GW of pumped storage, what the hell would you need that for? Every single solar panel needs a power station as backup?!? Where on earth did you pull that stuff from? Oh, I know, did you forget to take your meds?

Re: In other news... @Wilco 1

"Rubbish. It's 32% like for like on a five year average, according to the wind farm enthusiasts at DECC."

Rubbish. That's the UK average which includes some farms with low availability (67% vs EU average of 93% for some due to maintenance issues) taking the average down. I provided several links showing 40% average, one for a newly built UK farm (yes it did over 40% since it was completed: http://www.variablepitch.co.uk/station/370/) and one for Denmark showing newer farms are at 44% average, with some breaking 50%! The capacity factor of the latest turbines has improved a lot so that is the benchmark to use for future wind farms.

Re: In other news... first new UK nuclear power station approved

Actually wind power is as predictable as tides, you know what weather is coming days ahead and take appropriate action. You could even keep an old coal station as backup for the few rare days when there is no wind at all across the whole of the UK (if you wanted it to be 100% renewable you could burn wood pellets). But in general it is always windy somewhere, so as long as you spread turbines across the UK, you are OK. The same is true for tides, when it is low tide in one place, other places would be at 100% capacity.

Wind power is never going to be baseload on its own obviously, but combined with tidal, pumped storage, solar etc it can provide a significant percentage of our energy needs without major upheaval to the grid.

Re: In other news... first new UK nuclear power station approved

Oh I forgot: no a 30m tsunami would be ~1m in open sea. Won't take out a single off-shore turbine, ever.

It really helps if you know what you are talking about...

Re: In other news... first new UK nuclear power station approved

Your numbers are all wrong. Capacity factor for off-shore wind power is around 40%, and modern turbines can give well over 50%: http://energynumbers.info/capacity-factors-at-danish-offshore-wind-farms. Life expectancy is 20-25 years based on older designs, new turbines should be able to reach 30 years. The area used for off-shore wind farms doesn't matter at all, we won't be running out of sea soon, will we? And you don't need additional backup beyond existing gas peakers and mainland connectors, the number of total windstill days per year across the UK is extremely small.

As for costs, an off-shore windfarm costs about £4.6 million per 3.6MW turbine installed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Gabbard_Wind_Farm). The grid connection is the expensive part if there isn't already one (£862 million for Gabbard). If we scale up to 6400MW (2x peak power needed due to 40% capacity factor vs 80% for nuclear), then the turbine cost would be £8.25 Billion. Add say 3 billion for a high capacity grid connection and you're still way below £14 Billion.

So yes, even off-shore wind-power is cheaper than new nuclear. And that's assuming that Hinkley C will be on budget - a big assumption.

In other news... first new UK nuclear power station approved

at £14 Billion with price per MWh at twice the market rate - on par with off-shore wind power. Let's hope it will cost less to decomission at the end of its life. When will we see an article about this on El Reg? I am especially looking forward to see the positive spin that the editor can put on it after repeatedly claiming how cheap nuclear power is compared to wind turbines...

Cheeky Boston fires up x86-to-ARM porting cloud for server apps

Re: Not so fast

The issue is not that unaligned accesses are bad, on the contrary, you can indeed improve performance that way - memcpy is a perfect example. The problem is lying about the alignment. All mainstream compilers support unaligned as an extension (__unaligned, __packed etc) to change the natural alignment of a type to 1. So if you want to explicitly do unaligned accesses or pack structures tightly, you can do so portably without causing crashes. On x86 it can be ignored in most cases (apart for SSE), and on other targets the compiler can choose the correct sequence. So you don't even need #ifdefs besides a simple macro in a portability header to add the unaligned attribute on a pointer.

The problem with the idea of "x86 only" is that can change in time, even if management claims it will never change.

Re: Uhm... if you have problems with porting from x86 to ARM...

Porting isn't as easy as it sounds, have you ever done it? I guess not...

There are many subtle differences between ARM and x86, for example memory ordering, alignment, floating point accuracy, intrinsics etc etc. While ARM supports unaligned accesses, it doesn't on every load/store (eg. not on load/store multiple), so you can still encounter issues with badly written software which casts a char* to int* or double*. Incompetent programmers who do that should be taken out and shot but on x86 they get away with it. And this is not a C/C++ issue either, I see exactly the same thing in C# and other "high-level" languages despite all the bogus claims of being "type-safe".

Also if you rely on the results of the x87 FPU (which is not anywhere near IEEE compliant) you get different results when you run the code on an actual IEEE compliant FPU. If you use SSE and remember to configure all FP settings (like denormal flushing) identically you will still get different results for math functions.

Then there are source code bugs which happen to compile silently on one compiler but fail when you recompile for a different target. Many years ago I added a check to ensure all stack variables are always accessed within bounds. Reasonable, right? Guess what, it triggered too often when building Windows for ARM so I had to remove the check! And there are target-specific bugs you may have to work around... The list is endless, these are just a few of the issues I've encountered.

So yes, believe whatever you want, but porting millions of lines of code is a huge task, irrespectively of the language. Especially when originally written on x86.

ARM server hype ramps faster than ARM server chips

Re: how compatible are these ARMs ?

Very. They all use the same instruction set, so you only need one compiler and any application that runs on one of those CPUs will run on all of them. OSes obviously will need to be ported to each CPU as the interconnect and other IO will be different.

ARM CPUs are more compatible than x86 CPUs as ARM controls the architecture specification, so you don't get different companies producing different, incompatible instruction set extensions like AMD and Intel.

No increase in droughts since 1950, say boffins

Re: knuckleheads on both sides

I agree with you we should replace all coal power stations with gas ASAP. But nuclear is too expensive, takes too long to build, requires huge subsidies and to be really blunt, the UK's experience with nuclear has been absolutely disastrous. Seriously, how many people want another Sellafield in their backyard? Increasing solar, wind, wave and hydro storage is clearly a much better (and ultimately cheaper) alternative. Before you claim it is more expensive, wind power is already at grid parity in Europe, with solar reaching parity soon - all without subsidies.

Re: Golly

I wouldn't say the models are fairly crude - sophisticated is the right word. That doesn't mean they are perfect, but with computing power increasing fast, resolution and accuracy is improving. As others have already mentioned, the models are typically conservative and underestimate the effects of climate change. For example arctic ice is disappearing much faster than the models predicted. With the current rate of CO2 accumulation the chance of less than 2.5 degrees warming is pretty much zero.

Re: So IPCC model *simplistic* rather than simple.

Another denialist "there hasn't been any warming in the last decade"?

http://www.skepticalscience.com/going-down-the-up-escalator-part-1.html

Looking at just a decade is incorrect as it includes short term oscillations, so you can easily claim that it has been cooling every decade in the last 40 years, whereas the long term trend is clearly going up. And that trend is 0.27C per decade, ie. 2.7 degrees this century if warming doesn't accelerate. Given CO2 concentration is accumulating faster than ever, we are going to see warming much beyond 2.5 degrees.

Intel launches ARM battery life Windows 8 Atom chip

Re: Process Size

Note this Atom is 32nm (for 22nm Atoms you have to wait until the end of next year), while the latest ARMs use 28nm TSMC - so much for having a process advantage! Note that while Intel may claim to have similar battery life, either video playback (where most of the power goes to the display) or standby are not proof of that. What they would need to show is being able to run benchmarks or do browsing for as long on the same size battery/screen.

Did genetically modified food cause giant tumours in rats?

Roundup resistance is already a huge problem in the US

The use of just one weed killer year after year means many weeds have now evolved a high resistance to Roundup. Which leads to even more use of the stuff until no amount is enough to kill the weeds. That can't be a good thing for those who are eating the crop...

As a solution new GM crops are proposed using even more dangerous chemicals: an Agent Orange ingredient is now proposed as the next Roundup (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19585341).

GM never seemed like a good idea, even more so with the resistance issues and possible health effects. It's unlikely this study will be conclusive, so more detailed studies will be needed. No doubt Monsanto will deny any link found, just like asbestos and tabacco companies claiming their products were harmless for decades.

Error found in climate modelling: Too many droughts predicted

Re: positive-feedbackitis

I presume that is because your post had no actual information content in it. Do you seriously think you can make a claim about actual climate models based on your misunderstanding how they actually work?

I suggest you first read up on climate science and how modelling is actually done. Here is a good article describing the 23 models used in AR4, and a link to more papers about those models, including actual source code:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter8.pdf

http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=667

Re: Test Your Model

This is already done - after all, climate scientists have only been doing this stuff for over 30 years... Predictions turn out to be quite accurate, and usually conservative (ie. predicting slightly lower warming than actually measured, or predicting sea ice to disappear more slowly than it currently is doing). This link gives a few examples:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm

Note that climate models will never be 100% perfect as you can't model every molecule in the atmosphere individually. However it is unlikely the predictions will change drastically as the models are made more accurate: the refinements are increasingly about the small details, not about the underlying physics which are well understood.