Posts by Robinson 264 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2007
Yes, you did hit a loop. It's called the bullshit feedback loop. No mention of clouds in your piece of course or the fact that the oceans store 1000 x as much heat as the atmosphere, hence their temperature beyond a few m cannot be influenced by it (it's the other way around). Not that scientists know all that much about this of course. But don't let that stop you from indulging in the environmentalist's favourite feedback fantasy!
Who uses Pirate Bay anyway? Pirate Bay is ooooooooooooooooold baby, yea.
Here's a little anecdote for you: there are some series I love so much I can't wait for them to be released on blue-ray/DVD here in the UK. It's so often the case that they play their run on a cable channel and then are released on DVD a long time after the run has finished in the US. Two such examples I can give from my recent experience are Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.
Now being a conscientious fellow, I like to pay for my TV series and movies. No, really: Movies, TV and Games I always pay for. However I would have had to wait SIX MONTHS for a blue-ray release on Walking Dead, even though the run had long since finished in the US. Worse, it was available on a pay-per episode basis on iTunes in the US but not in the UK!
To cut a long story short (hell, it's still a long story), I downloaded the entire season 2 from newsgroups. I was willing to pay whatever per episode on iTunes for it, but it wasn't available. No, I don't want to subscribe to Sky + a whole channel just to see this one series...
Now, give me the stuff in good time when I want to watch it and I'll pay you. Otherwise, I'm highly motivated to steal it.
"...Don't notice the humans killing each other over resources around the world. Those people being washed away in massive floods, and land being swallowed by the sea are nothing to worry about. Everything is fine."
This is called argumentum ad neurosis. I'm thinking a trip to see your GP would be a good idea.
"Despite that there are plenty of deniers of the hockey stick graph, which was confimed by the recent BEST study"
What a load of utter bollocks. The BEST study did not confirm the Hockey Stick. Before you criticise others for their ignorance, it would be better if you did a little light reading first yourself.
So us software developers will now have to code for 3 OS's that are really quite different from one another. Believe it or not, in most corporations, XP is still the OS of choice. At the moment we have to test against XP SP3 and 7 (we skipped Vista, but if it runs on those two it probably runs on Vista anyway). Now we're going to have the craptastic 8 to throw into the mix too.
In my humble opinion this "research" is yet more bollocks of the kind which seems to be accumulating rapidly as more research funding becomes available, due to the irrational scare that is AGW. I'm actually quite shocked that the researchers here chose to soil the underpants of their reputations with such idiotic speculations.
But such is science in this day and age. Nobody has any shame any more.
Total operating expenditure from the Met Office is £197m in 2010/2011. This does not count the extra cash from the government to purchase Yet Another Vastly Expensive Computer.
"All climate research depends on "modelling", because unlike most scientific research, we cannot repeat the experiment a thousand times to see whether a different outcome occurs when the conditions are changed. "
Precisely. It depends on modelling. And models are useless. End of story. Models have NOTHING to do with the Scientific Method. They are toys. They are verified or rejected by comparing them with REAL EMPIRICAL DATA. Even Phil Jones says they are all wrong:
http://junkscience.com/2011/11/22/climategate-2-0-all-models-wrong/
So why on Earth are you whining at me for pointing it out???!
If you are going to make a prediction about "one small specific location", you'd better be prepared to receive the criticism when your prediction turns out to be crap.
Otherwise it seems you want it both ways: us to be scared and do something about each and every little prediction, whilst at the same time saying "well, it was only a little prediction of a tiny little piece of the Earth" then the prediction turns out to be false.
First, it isn't a straw man. It's a fact. You can't argue (1) that ice loss is significant but that (2) looking at sea level data, nothing has happened, unless you're suggesting that the sea level rise is "missing". The two contradict one another. So, no, sea level rise is not above trend, regardless of what's happening in the Arctic. Therefore, whatever's happening there has made ****-all difference to sea level and if it makes ****-all difference to sea level, we shouldn't give a flying **** what its magnitude is.
Secondly, I conclude it's natural very easily by simply reducing the argument to what is more likely. Is it more likely the oscillations of sea ice are caused by a climate that varies naturally, as all historic data shows it is currently varying well within, or is it more likely that a small segment of that variation, almost exactly the same in length and magnitude as a previous segment of that variation, this time has a different cause?
Talk about Cherry Picking. You catastrophists are the loons here, not us sceptics.
It's a symptom of how idiotic this debate has become. Given we have only a paltry 30 years of records, it's IMPOSSIBLE to say what is "normal" and what isn't. It's impossible to see cycles of natural variation too, of which this is almost certainly one.
So all of this ice is melting/ice isn't melting being good/bad is just so much complete and utter bollocks cooked up by the Greenies to give you all something to be fearful of. Not that you should be in any case, because melting Arctic ice won't make a bit of difference to sea levels, which themselves are not increasing over and above their four hundred year trend.
Thanks for listening.
I have a Windows desktop with a Linux (Mint) VM, an iPhone and an iPad. I don't want viruses on any of my things!
Arguments as to which is intrinsically safer are usually correct insofar as the history of Windows is that of a totally insecure OS having to evolve into a more secure one, leaving plenty of holes behind, coupled with the fact that it's by far the most common OS on desktops.
I honestly don't think any of them are secure against the combination of determined attacker and non-expert users. My advice to anyone and everyone is to store anything important, encrypted, onto a memory key that you only plug in when you need it, never run as Administrator, use complex 128 or 256 bit passwords for all of your online banking activity, which you store in something like a KeePass .db (as there's no way you'll be able to remember them!), saved onto your encrypted memory key and try not to visit dodgy websites!
I don't think you can do much more than that other than unplug your system from the internet or switching it off, whatever OS it is.
Do you know what's really funny about this? They start the graph 1950. If they started it at, say, 1900, then we'd see it in its true context: natural variation. But worse, isn't GISS Hansen's baby? I wouldn't trust any data that fraud had put his thumb into. Older, hotter stations regularly disappear in order to increase the gradient of the trend.
Speaking of Hansen, his prediction from 1980 *was totally wrong*. In fact it was "not even wrong". The temperature record is lower than his zero emissions scenario!
This is just wrong. Models are essentially curve fitting against historical temperature. Every time they update the model with new temperatures, they make it "look" like their prediction was correct in the past. But if you look at their forecasts from 10 years ago, you'll see just how utterly wrong they are!
I can't remember the last time I had a BSOD with Windows 7, or had to reboot it because it was fubar. It's been remarkable stable.
Windows 8 looks like a dog's breakfast on the desktop, however, so I probably won't use it. Installed Linux Mint into a VM to get the hang of things ready for when I have to replace W7.
Well, I haven't bought a hard copy game since I installed steam back in 2007 (or around that time, I can't remember). I've spent a lot buying games online, not just for myself but for friends and relatives for birthdays and so on. I no longer even have a DVD player in my PC.
Yes, you can buy the games cheaply, if you wait a while rather than buying them on release day!
It's ok with some things. For example I just asked it the following questions and it got them all right:
When did Franklin Roosevelt die?
How many protons are there in a Helium atom?
What is a gluon?
Now, obviously as I live in the UK, I can't use it to ask where the nearest restaurant is or anything like that.
Regardless, it's a new technology and kind-of works, sometimes, but I agree the adverts make it look better than it is at present.
Firstly, what problem? Climate is always changing and we are always adapting to it. Secondly, if the UK reduces emissions by 80% by year 2040, as set out in the Climate Change Act, it will have spent around £750,000,000,000 and achieved a global average temperature reduction of 0.08C. In other words, the reduction will completely destroy our economic competitiveness, our relative economic strength, jobs and our standard of living, for an imperceptible decrease in temperature.
Frankly, you people are ******* idiots.
Fascinating. The Maldives had the same problem. They even had a cabinet meeting under water with snorkels. But what's this? The man who has spent more time on the Maldives measuring, cataloguing and studying sea levels there for two decades, said he saw no evidence whatsoever that sea levels were increasing. If anything, he said they'd fallen.
By all means completely ignore empirical evidence and go with the output of some ridiculously idiotic computer model if you like. Personally, I prefer to think that what's going on in the real world is more important than what's going on inside the head of a Environmentalist.
" why did they extinct the mammoths but not elephants?"
I would suggest that's simply due to the local environment and the availability of other food sources. One might just as well ask how Elephants and so on survived in Africa and Asia but wiped out everywhere else by this asteroid. It doesn't really make any sense.
I've been playing with 8 today and even when you go to desktop there's still some metro shite mincing around in the background. There's no start menu for example and you have to move your mouse pointer to one of the screen corners to get anything interesting to pop-up (huh?!).
As for Metro itself, I imagine having 30 seconds of fun re-organising my tiles and making them look pretty but honestly, this is not a desktop GUI experience so why the **** Microsoft are insisting on pushing it out as an all-in-one solution is something I have absolutely no idea about.
It's a massive fail for desktop compared to 7 which I happen to think is fantastic in general. So in conclusion this is the new Vista. I'll be waiting for Windows 9, where like Clippy, Metro will be asked politely to bugger off.
The placebo effect is very powerful. When you say "it doesn't work", what precisely are you asserting here? If you've ever heard of The Decline Effect, you will know that a lot of conventional medicine doesn't work either over the medium to long term!
No, I don't want scientific advisers framing policy. There are enough advocates calling themselves scientists in the world already. If anything we need them to bugger off from getting involved in policy, because given the absolutely cretinous state of the UK's Climate Change policy (£700,000,000,000 cost to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% to 2040, resulting in a 0.08C reduction in global average temperature), it seems their advice is so complete rubbish.
Thanks for listening.
Standard Microsoft tactic... fear, uncertainty, doubt. I saw precisely the same thing happen over OpenGL in Vista (the FUD was that it wouldn't work or be supported). In the end, it'll work fine and it'll be easy to do.
I'm not anti-Microsoft by the way - in fact I love Windows 7 and will almost certainly get Windows 8, but you know, I'm quite long in the tooth now and have seen it all before!
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