Posts by Hardrada

Kentucky gov: Violent video games, not guns, to blame for Florida school massacre

Two year waiting period, anyone?

The lack of a waiting period is relevant to gun control in general, but not to this case unless the story author is proposing a period of over a year.

He's correct that Republicans and the NRA are cherry-picking the US Constitution, but a devil's advocate can find instances of Democrats and gun control advocates doing so in the opposite direction. For example, arguing that the 2nd Amendment is obsolete due to changes in technology could open the door to similar arguments about the 1st. (You no longer need to stand on a soap box, and the number of people you might be able to incite is orders of magnitude larger.)

What's missing from both of those arguments is that enforcement has also improved. The violence we currently have in the US is not even remotely close to what he had when the National Firearms Act was passed. An even more dramatic change is how effective enforcement agencies have become at catching people who commit it. A thug in the 1920s could kill occasionally and get away with it for years; now someone with a grudge has essentially no choice but to do as much damage as possible in an hour because the SWAT team will be there by then.

It's also hard to come up with an argument for gun control that isn't an argument for alcohol prohibition. When you tally the murders and domestic violence incidents in which the attacker was drunk, rapes involving the same, fatal accidents and cirrhosis deaths, fetal alcohol syndrome and associated violence, and traffic deaths, the human cost is similar and maybe larger.

There are also few people who could claim a genuine need for ethyl alcohol under the strict standards that are used for gun ownership in many places. (Pick a utilitarian application for it, and there's a better, safer technology: portable water-makers and -purifiers, refrigeration, safer preservatives, non-abusable oral disinfectants and better mechanical cleaning methods.)

I enjoy a Newcastle now and then, so I'm simply pointing out that the public-interest arguments used by gun-control advocates would make it hard to defend my freedom to do so. I don't really *need* it, and the ready availability of liquor (with no waiting period and no background check for past drunk driving convictions - even fatal ones) costs perhaps 50,000 lives in each year in the US.

FBI slams secret Nunes memo alleging Feds spied on Team Trump for political reasons

Yeah, but..

Anyone who followed Rep. Trey Gowdy's investigation into H.R. Clinton knows that the Republicans in Congress are self-serving, but for their own part US lawmen and spooks have put out some embarrassingly sketchy stuff. The Intercept did a nice piece a while ago pointing out that almost half of the Russian IPs that were used as evidence of an FSB operation against the US election system were actually Tor exit nodes:

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/04/the-u-s-government-thinks-thousands-of-russian-hackers-are-reading-my-blog-they-arent/

Climate-change skeptic lined up to run NASA in this Trump timeline

Re: Skepticism

@JLV That's one of the most mature and reasonable posts I've seen on this topic. Have an up-vote on me.

This is a bit tardy, but I'll try to answer some of your questions:

"What I am curious about, in your version of the "big sell" is why other people, including people who do not share the green viewpoint, are suckered in and go along? Why are they buying into the sell? Especially if the findings are inconvenient and annoying, such as limiting their air travel? These are rational people, able to look at data just as well as yourself."

- My impression (from working as a Democratic organizer) was that white collar party activists weren't afraid of that, likely because they didn't expect it to happen.

"Some folks insist on perfect climate science models. Guess what - not gonna happen."

- Correct, and it's easy to understand why there are gaps in calibration data before 1970 (nobody was thinking about climate modeling) and why the surface stations didn't get updated immediately (budgets). What's harder to understand is why it took three decades after the consensus formed to get hard numbers about things like shelter and location biases. We're now forty years into this and there are still missing calibration records.

"But, why is it that very little serious, peer-reviewed science has debunked the AGW alarmists? There would be no lack of funding for someone with solid science to back up that humans are not causing a problem."

- You've already answered that. See above. As you summed it:

"It won't be perfect first time and it might never be perfect at all. It'll be fuzzy, open to interpretation and based on consensus rather than certainties."

That also makes it hard to disprove (which is why I'd rather focus on whether particular mitigation proposals make sense).

"Any oil company would love to throw money at them (and probably do). Yes, riding the AGW is a gravy train, but credible science against it would make any scientist into a top earner in that field."

- I think you've giving them too much credit. Look at the Equifax fiasco - wouldn't it have been in their interest to hire the best infosec people and give them the support needed to avoid this? They obviously didn't.

Also, possibly because the people disputing AGW didn't know where to look. They spent decades trying to find mistakes in the math and the theory even though people in academia tend to be very good at both. While they were distracted by that, they missed problems with the instrumentation and test design.

"What I am wondering about, if people like yourself and Bombastic Bob, are reasoning in good faith, is what would it take to change your mind?"

This wasn't directed at me, but I'll offer my answer:

1: Fix the data. I Having problems in a first analysis is normal, but leaving them unfixed indefinitely isn't.

2: Publish the metadata. Right now a lot of it is on password-protected servers. If it's good, there's no reason to hide it. Even if there are gaps, it might still be possible to fill them in as long as the equipment hasn't been thrown away.

3: I'd be willing to act on the Precautionary Principle, but some of the proposed mitigations aren't precautionary. Anything that requires building new supply chains and factories for a small reduction in lifecycle CO2 doesn't make sense at this point.

Re: Skepticism

@strum "Climate change is real. It's happening now and it shows signs of getting worse, a lot quicker than we feared. Anyone who believes that the 'right' to drive an SUV is more important than our grandchildren's future is a danger to humanity.

This isn't about SUVs, which make up a piddling proportion of global anthropogenic CO2; it's about the few billion people who don't have the ability to refrigerate their food or get picked up by an ambulance if they're injured. Their development aspirations are a much bigger piece of the CO2 pie than US rednecks driving trucks.

I urge you to look over the policy proposals of US (and to a lesser extent British) environmentalists. If you're honest, what you'll find is that they target certain segments of the population rather than targeting segments that put out the most CO2 or do it most gratuitously.

That's why you had then-Senator Barak Obama blaming industry for CO2 emissions during the 2008 campaign even though US industry only accounted for 20% of our emissions.

Re: Skepticism

@Aedile "Seriously? You don't know why more people don't want more nuclear? Maybe it has to do with the radioactive nuclear waste that sticks around for a really long time? Maybe it has to do with safety and the risk of a melt down?"

There's never been a long-term waste problem. We had reprocessing from the get-go, and by the time President Ford put a moratorium on it, we had MSR. Now we also have IFR.

It's a political problem, and even in that context it doesn't make sense, since about half of the world's people live in countries that already have nuclear weapons.

If you argue that wind is cheaper, you're forgetting that the timing of emissions matters, and that for 30 years nuclear and large scale hydro were the only technologies up to the task. Both were opposed by greens.

Did the story author read the NASA link?

From that link (https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence):

"Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and that the snow is melting earlier."

^ This can't be true because Explorer 6 was only active for 60 days, none of them during the spring, and Ladsat didn't launch until 1972.

"The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950."

^ This is based on data from weather stations that weren't designed to measure sub-degree changes. You have a signal that's close to the noise floor (1: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/tn404/text/tn404_6.html 2: https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/105-6.pdf ) and the investigators didn't use blinds. The reported warming also spiked after those investigators took a political stand (in the 1970s: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15092015/Exxons-own-research-confirmed-fossil-fuels-role-in-global-warming ) and tapered off during the 2000s. That's the pattern you'd expect to see if bias were the main cause.

"All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years."

^ Ditto. The methodology was also changed when recent data showed less warming than expected. (That's non-preferred. See the BAMS analysis of the reproducibility fiasco.)

The proxy indeces are vulnerable to p-hacking because there are lots of potential proxies to choose from, and they weren't pre-registered.

"The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969."

^ This is based on the same data, and is even farther inside the instrumental margin of error.

"Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006"

...out of 684,000 cubic miles, or 0.009% or the total. (I'm being generous. If we use their low estimate, it's only 0.005%.)

"...while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005."

...out of 7.2 million cubic miles, or five ten-thousandths of a percent.

I'm perfectly willing to work on energy-saving technologies (and have done so, actually). I also spent a few years as a Democratic organizer, and I've been a bike commuter for close to 20 years.

My beef is that the policy proposals from US greens don't make engineering sense. At this point, almost nay low-CO2 tech would be worth building, and the feedback loops in the models imply that timing of emissions is as important as total footprint. You won't get anywhere trying to talk to them about that.

Can North Korean nukes hit US mainland? Maybe. But EMP blast threat is 'highly credible'

That may depend on accuracy requirements.

"[E]ven accepting reports that they have a nuclear bomb that can fit inside a missile, there are still hurdles to overcome – chiefly reentry and targeting.

"After its boost phase, an ICBM will travel through space and then reenter the atmosphere. That's a really tough process, because it involves compressing the air around it at such a rate that it quickly heats up the rocket. Without a nose cone capable of withstanding these temperatures, and there appears to be no sign of one on Nork missiles, the bomb would burn up before it could detonate."

The metrologist (not METEORologist) that I trained under told me that according to Livermore's Jim Bryan (https://www.llnl.gov/community/retiree-and-employee-resources/in-memoriam/james-bevan-bryan-2), Soviet ICBMs used pine heat shields.

Jim's story about how they got the information was a little far-fetched, but he was always a straight shooter when I worked with him. It's possible that they really did what he said, or that he was protecting a foreign source.

I can't find the link now, but I believe that I read in an article on FAS.org that balsa could be used as a heat shield if the reentry trajectory was shallow enough. (It chars and is decently insulating.) The problem is that shallow trajectories are less accurate, but that might not matter to Kim if he's targeting a city like Los Angeles.

Wisconsin advances $3bn bribe incentives package for Foxconn

I just double checked:

"The thrust of Walker's bill provides about $3 billion in refundable tax credits to Foxconn as long as they create jobs in Wisconsin. Under the bill, Foxconn also is eligible for lower utility rates and is exempt from sales taxes and environmental regulations during the construction of the 20-million square-foot campus it wants to build."

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/business/technology/4311476-wisconsin-lawmakers-weigh-changes-foxconn-deal

To parse that out:

1: Credits aren't rebates; they're subtracted from Foxconn's Wisconsin state tax bill, which would be nonexistent without a factory.

2: The reduced power rates are a genuine subsidy, since most utilities aren't trying to increase daytime electricity sales.

3: Most environmental regulations in the US are federal, and Wisconsin doesn't have the authority to waive them.

4: If it's primarily used for construction materials, the sales tax waiver is similar to the tax credits. Wisconsin is offering to waive taxes on sales that would't have happened without the project. If Wisconsin's suppliers of building materials were swamped with orders, then there might be an opportunity cost, but the Midwest economy has been slow.

Two things to add:

1: Wisconsin has a bit of a history of subsidizing ambitious projects with poor odds, the DeltaHawk diesel aero engine company being one example.

2: In the US, these projects often rely heavily on "tax increment financing," in which the subsidy comes in the form of reduced property tax rates. The remainder, if any, is often a loan.

If Foxconn builds a factory on low-value land, then even a reduced tax rate might still produce more revenue than the site did before the factory was built. If there are loans, they'll probably be similar to what Tesla received.

As U.S. subsidies go, this is peanuts. If you apply the same critical standard to our $1T per year education system ('What else could we have done with this money?'), you'll find at least $300B in annual spending that can't be justified by its economic impact or other social gains.

Would you rather have healthcare or another twelve gender studies majors?

President Donald Trump taken on by unlikely foe: Badass park rangers

Re: About time

@Geoffrey W:

"We all know that the democrats have been less than successful in many areas and made some mistakes, and that it wasn't entirely due to congress and senate being under control of the republicans, though that played a significant part in lack of progress and movement. But honestly, which side do you think represents at least some chance of movement in the right direction, R or D?"

The post of mine to which you originally responded wasn't about the candidates or parties in general; it was about whether Big John was worse than people on the left who don't hold their candidates accountable. I don't think that he is. I would go farther and say that some of his points had merit (even if they were exaggerated or brusque).

He's right that there are people on the left who've used shoddy evidence to try to shut up opponents or intimidate them. For example, both a sitting US senator and a former high-ranking federal prosecutor have advocated using RICO against oil companies despite a lack of evidence justifying that. They relied on an analogy to tobacco companies, but didn't offer a single example of an Exxon manager making a knowingly false statement about AGW.

For that you have to go to surrogates, and it becomes obvious that Sen. Whitehouse and Mz. Eubanks skipped the details because they were inconvenient:

Real Climate News said that "Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago," which is categorically false. Their article doesn't even include the right general type of data. Exxon took measurements of ocean acidity along a single shipping route over just three years, and any trend would have been buried in short-cycle noise:

https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-ocean-acidity

The Exxon employees who warned about AGW were environmental specialists (not the allegedly-guilty executives), and their evidence was weak. Ars Technica's Scott K. Johnson has admitted that:

"So how do scientists build datasets that track the temperature of the entire globe? That story is defined by problems. On land, our data comes from weather stations, and there’s a reason they are called weather stations rather than climate stations. They were built, operated, and maintained only to monitor daily weather, not to track gradual trends over decades. Lots of changes that can muck up the long-term record, like moving the weather station or swapping out its instruments, were made without hesitation in the past. Such actions simply didn’t matter for weather measurements."

The other lines of evidence for AGW didn't exist in 1977: Landsat 3 hadn't been launched, and Landsat 1 and 2 had only been active for 5 and 2 years, respectively. Sea surface temperature buoys weren't standardized until sometime in the '70s and had notable biases (D. E. Parker [1995]). The trend-line was also quite a bit flatter prior to 1980, and David Anderson's paleo-index wasn't published until 2012.

So while Exxon managers didn't shut down the company and fire all of their workers at the first warning, there is no evidence that they hid proof of AGW in the late '70s and early '80s.

Re: Ah! "The gentler, kinder politics of the left"

RE: "And, obviously, the USA thinks that 'nationalising' the Military is a given too. Why don't all the states have their own armies? Why don't the Cities use private Militias? Because they know that some things require Government control."

State governors do control their states' National Guard contingents (although not exclusively):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_the_United_States

City police forces have significant freedom to buy military weapons and put their officers through combat training. Many do. There are limits on certain weapons: Nuclear reactors and bombs are heavily regulated and supersonic flight over the US is banned. Large missiles are also restricted. It might be legal for them to buy tanks and artillery.

Re: About time

RE: "I didn't overlook [Obama's record on drones, financial corruption and whistle-blower suppression]. I'm so looking forward to the flap headed one reducing drone strikes..."

In other words, your complaint is that Trump is as bad as Obama on security/secrecy issues. Fair enough, but the level of new angst has to come from something else.

I'm a former Democratic organizer, so I'll take an educated guess at what it is:

1: environmental issues and associated funding and regulatory goals

2: support for public (state funded) schools

3: feminist issues

4: protecting academic control over professional advancement

If that's what's bothering you, then your problem is that you're being unreasonable. In order:

(1) As pointed out by a professor at the solidly Democratic University of Minnesota, Democratic ecological and trade policies have often just shifted environmental problems overseas:

http://www.startribune.com/readers-write-nov-26-pipelines-federal-land-policies-president-elect-donald-trump-democratic-party/402779866/

As another U of M professor illustrated, there's also a problem of carelessly blaming the wrong people (in this case farmers):

"There were roughly 70 million to 80 million bison in North America before European colonization. Those bison produced more methane than the average cow, since bison are bigger and eat an all-grass diet. Over a couple of centuries, humans replaced the bison with roughly the same number of cattle, but fed a diet that generates less methane."

http://www.startribune.com/readers-write-nov-26-pipelines-federal-land-policies-president-elect-donald-trump-democratic-party/402779866/

Unsurprisingly, Democrats lost votes among groups that were hurt or threatened.

As a candidate in 2008, then-Senator Obama singled out industry as the source climate change, even though industrial emissions made up only 20% of the US total. He and Congress have generally let consumers off the hook:

http://www.startribune.com/climate-change-while-we-re-waiting-for-solutions-it-must-start-with-us/381582501/

("I find it disturbing that many of my “progressive” friends, who claim to be concerned about global climate change, haven’t really changed their lifestyles all that much." - I can personally vouch for this.)

Unsurprisingly, affluent Democrats lost votes among the people who make their disposable stuff, many of whom are former Democrats and consume less energy than they do.

Similar things happen on the funding side: Wealthy Tesla buyers have received $284M in federal subsidies, ostensibly to combat climate change, but Tesla has never published lifecycle CO2 figures. How is it sensible to slosh a quarter-billion dollars of public money at a company that hasn't even claimed to further your goal, let alone proven it?

(2) Obama's big contribution to public schools was to free them from having to measure their own performance under No Child Left Behind. The law was unpopular, and people complained that the law's mandated tests didn't represent schools' and teachers' true merit, but the same can be said of grading kids: They have no control over their lives, and the tests often don't predict their ability to handle the work in later grades or on the job. If an 8-year-old student can take the heat, why can't college educated teachers do the same?

(3) When police refer to a female college student who filed a false stranger-rape report* as a "victim-survivor", there is no 'war on women.'

*http://www.startribune.com/u-police-don-t-think-student-was-victim-of-armed-assault/303006671/

(4) See #2.

Re: About time @Hardrada

RE: "That's a dumb argument. When Dubya was elected there practically were NO drones to send out. He sent the troops instead."

Well, by March 2009 (just over a month after President Obama's inauguration), the Air Force had nearly 200 Predators and had flown 500,000 hours in them:

(http://www.ga.com/us-air-force-mq-1-predators-achieve-500000-flight-hours)

"3 March 2009 – General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA‑ASI), a leading manufacturer of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and tactical reconnaissance radars, today announced that MQ-1 Predator® aircraft delivered to the U.S. Air Force (USAF) have surpassed the 500,000 flight hour milestone, with 87 percent of those hours being flown in combat. The milestone was achieved by P-143 on February 16 while it performed an armed reconnaissance mission in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). This particular aircraft has flown over 330 combat missions in the two-and-a-half years it has been deployed.

“'In July 1994 we delivered the first MQ-1 Predator, and next month we are scheduled to deliver the 200th Predator aircraft to our U.S. Air Force customer,”'"

Re: About time

"I disagree: Trump will be worse, and I am confident of that because I am in no doubt he will continue with just as many drone strikes, just as few fraud prosecutions, and probably even more intimidation of whistle-blowers."

Re-read my post. Given what I was responding to - which I quoted - you should have read it as:

"[Big John] can't be any worse than Democrats, who overlooked Obama's record on drone strikes (ten times as many as Dubya), Wall Street fraud (fewer prosecutions), and use of the espionage act to intimidate whistle-blowers (he's used it more than any other president in US history)."

If I'd been referring to Trump, I would have made a direct comparison to ex-President Obama rather than to "Democrats, who overlooked Obama's record on drone strikes... [etc.]."

I also under-stated the last point. It should have read: "...and use of the espionage act to intimidate whistle-blowers (he's used it more than [all] other president[s] in US history)."

Re: About time

"Why, Big John...I do believe you're in love! You Rightists do adore your strong leaders."

He can't be any worse than Democrats, who overlooked Obama's record on drone strikes (ten times as many as Dubya), Wall Street fraud (fewer prosecutions), and use of the espionage act to intimidate whistle-blowers (he's used it more than any other president in US history).

Trump is pretty good at alienating voters, but these park rangers are playing with fire also.

The people who visit national parks aren't urban yuppies in BMW i3s; they're suburban families in camper-vans, and quite a few of them voted for Trump.

The NPS has seen declining attendance as the US becomes more urban: https://www.fs.fed.us/nrs/pubs/jrnl/2014/nrs_2014_stevens_001.pdf

In other words, people from the most solidly Democratic parts of the US don't actually go to the parks, pay admission or rent campsites. The NPS needs the money, and it can't afford to piss off people who do.

Trump lieutenants 'use private email' for govt work... but who'd make a big deal out of that?

Is Conway even subject to FOIA?

Not all white house staffers are: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/235900-white-house-exempts-office-from-foia-regs

Also, neither Conway or Kushner have any security clearance.

Smart bombs, smart bullets – now guided smart artillery shells, thanks to DARPA dosh

Re: The USA way of doing things

My post should have read:

"About 20 years ago I was talking to [Lockheed's] Robert Bouchard over lunch...

He was their chief manufacturing engineer at the time."

I re-worded things and somehow dropped his tie-in to the industry.

Re: The USA way of doing things

"These contracts are just "keep smart people working for our side" bags of money to keep people working in the defense industry and for the US, in hopes they will come up with some smart stuff along the way that can be used in other projects."

Quite possible. The guidance system for the Tomahawk was originally developed for Project Pluto.

The US arms industry does have a culture of brute force, though. About 20 years ago I was talking to Robert Bouchard* over lunch, and I remember that he favored displacement over revs in engine design and had a high opinion of Henschel tanks.

Out penchant for complexity may have a bit to do with the German engineers that we inherited after the war. Earlier planes like the Wildcat (Martlet) were dead simple, and our admirals spoke warmly about their ability to launch more planes per minute with a handful of escort carriers than with a single fleet carrier that cost more than the whole pack of them.

(*He was their chief manufacturing engineer at the time, and I believe later their chief engineer. His son Rob also works there.)

We've been Trumped! China's Alibaba is a 'notorious' knock-offs souk, says US watchdog

Re: "threaten America's creative industries"

"Just read an interesting article of interviews in, I think, Tennessee, of blue-collar workers who thought that the threats to Obamacare were the same as the promise to build the wall: fun words to say to mark your territory, not which no one ever dreamed would come to be. One woman's husband was down for a liver transplant, which o course was off the cards once Obamacare was gone. They had voted Trump for other issues on the platform, not realising that they could not predict which promises he would keep and which were just said for effect."

I'm a Yank, and when I last checked it appeared that the Republicans were split on how fast and far to go with the repeal. They certainly have not repealed it yet.

"There are lots of people not very well off who rely on things paid for by the commonwealth of taxpayers: schools, road, health insurance (for the moment). The ones who are glad Obamacare is going away have no compassion for the people who are going to be in a terrible situation when it goes. Is this what is meant by making America great again: sending people back to desperation, suffering and fear?"

You don't sound like someone who's lived in the US (and if you have, you could stand to pay more attention to how our government works). Almost all of the left-leaning states had state Medicaid programs, some of which were more generous than Obamacare.

My home state's program would send you to the Mayo Clinic, had no copays or premiums for the poor, and only billed ~$5/15 (respectively) for people with a modest income. We also had a subsidized high-risk pool that was available to anyone and capped at 20% above the market rate, so it was cheaper than buying individual coverage under Obamacare.

I know that California, Washington and New York had similar programs, so together with my state, they covered more people than there are in the UK. Add in Massachusetts and quite a few other states, and I think that half the US population or more was covered. A hundred-fifty million people with good coverage isn't exactly the Wild West.

There was also nothing barring people in more miserly states from moving to more generous ones. It's not as though they had big real estate investments holding them down.

Even the West isn't very wild anymore. You're more likely to see a sick hiker airlifted from a trail by a $5M helicopter than you are to be denied care if you show up in a clinic with no insurance. (It's illegal for hospitals to do that in in emergencies.)

You might want to visit sometime :) There's some pretty cool stuff.

Chinese boffins: We're testing an 'impossible' EM Drive IN SPAAAACE

Re: Many Bothans died to bring us this plot device

"Here is one: UNKNOWN MEASUREMENT ERROR.

This is a device into which you pump a LOT of energy and then check whether there is force at the boundary of the instrument sensitivity."

That would certainly be precedented. NOAA spent 30 years basing their global climate forecasts on instruments with tolerances that exceeded the entire reported trend:

"Instrument quality varies from country-to-country. Surface temperatures can be recorded to within 0.5 degree C."

(http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/tn404/text/tn404_6.html)

To anyone who says 'But it'll average out!,' go read the papers. There were uniform changes to large blocs of instruments, spotty documentation of exactly how large those blocs were or when the changes were made, no calibration documentation kept, and no blinds.

There were notable upward biases, like the change from buckets to engine room intakes for sea surface measurements, with lots of wiggle room in setting the correction factors.

There's more of the same over at NASA (http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/):

"Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006"

...out of 684,000 cubic miles, or 0.009% or the total. (I'm being generous. If we use their low estimate, it's only 0.005%.)

"...while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005."

...out of 7.2 million cubic miles, or five ten-thousandths of a percent. So in 2,000 years of melting at that rate, Antarctica would lose 1% or its ice volume.

Those two figures were used to argue that a global net heat gain of 0.17% of the total greenhouse effect ("net absorbed" vs. "back radiation" here: http://bit.ly/2i5QgFq) is severe, but it's not a direct measurement of that. You have to assume a strong net positive feedback based on the instrumental data above, which was never designed for this.

Some of the other points in that link over-state the degree of corroboration because they're non-independent. (They rely on the instrumental record.)

Then there's Anderson's paleo-index, which is geographically non-representative (skewed toward land and coasts) and has no corrections for precipitation (which is increasing: http://bit.ly/2ipGBu2 ...and under-reported: http://bit.ly/2hjpckS) or methane distribution (skewed toward land: http://bit.ly/2i3AbOo).

This is a long way of saying that while it's entirely possible that this 'reactionless drive' is just a measurement fluke, it's not fair to knock NASA's measurements unless you're ready to hold other areas of science to the same quality standard.

NASA – get this – just launched 8 satellites from a rocket dropped from a plane at 40,000ft

Re: Only perfect storms ?

"There are quite a few nuclear-powered basements in the oceans."

...and they are quite storm-proof.

Here's how the missile-free Royal Navy can sink enemy ships after 2018

Re: lack of stealth ?!

"To save money (and production difficulties) we didn't equip our wartime multi engine planes with different handed engines. The downside of this is that the torque from the props rotating the same way pulls the plane off to the side on takeoff."

I'm a Yank, but I believe that the Mossie had canted engine nacelles (slightly up on one side, down on the other) to counteract prop torque.

Swedish prosecutor finally treks to London to question Julian Assange

Re: "I don't know what the standard term for rape in sweden is "

"No doubt I'll get modded to hell for this since there's a bucket load of these clowns on this site."

Not really. As I write this you're at +7/-9, which is pretty tame. (I didn't vote on your post, BTW.)

Kotkin: Why Trump won

Re: Blame it on the elitists?

"Bullshit. It's the triumph of the American reactionary impulse. [...] The Trump win is a win for the know-nothings..."

Like the Neoanderthals who took over the US during the Stoner Age? This is hardly America's first peasant revolt. We have a pretty long tradition of them :)

"The right in America is not conservative."

Correct. A lot of us don't mind. I mind some of their policies very much, but I'd say the same of Democrats.

"the reactionary harks to a golden era that never was, while trumpeting ignorance and a willful disregard of reality."

You mean like environmentalists who think that 'going back to nature' means moving back into the Garden of Eden? At least the alt-right in the US only wants to go back 60-70 years, not 5,000 :P I'd argue that bringing back the '50s is a more realistic goal than getting rid of Evil Technology altogether.

"The 'Make America Great Again' movement is about a return to the 'golden 1950s' -- when the KKK was still lynching blacks, coal miners were poorer than they are now and died by the hundreds in unsafe mines, and the river where I live was so polluted no-one fished or swam in it."

Yep, and now we're drugging little boys literally to death for the crime of being energetic. Back in the bad, bad '50s*, that was called motivation. One of my childhood friends died on Monday from a lifetime of drugging. The drugs knock out basic reflexes like swallowing, putting you at risk of drowning on your own saliva in your sleep (if you can sleep at all). Even if you don't, it's like being waterboarded all night, every night for your entire life.

You're a callous person if you think that our current system is ethical or kind. I personally find it downright ghoulish.

(*By the '50s, I mean Fermi's 1950s, Darwin's 1850s, Voltaire's 1750s and Descartes' 1650s. When H.G. Welles Time Traveler said "I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours--that is another matter," every one of Welles' contemporaries would have nodded knowingly. The modern Enlightenment was driven by human motivation. You're speaking for a culture that didn't exist before 1970, and won't exist by 2070.)

As for coal miners, one word: Technology. It's safer now, and we also have gas, passively safe reactor designs, and quite a few other options. Besides, how would you have run your beloved universities and heated their huge edifices without coal? Remember, we're talking about the 1950s.

And your river? Maybe you've forgotten that private households raked their leaves into the street every fall and burned them. The resultant pollution was quite a bit worse than anything VW has been accused of recently, and probably on par with industrial pollution at the time. People also changed their cars' oil in their driveways, diluted the refuse and poured it into the ground behind their garages. One thing that you can say for a Superfund site is that at least you can clean it up. What are the odds of cleaning up 50 million undocumented household sludge-piles?

On target

Andrew's interview absolutely nailed it. Kudos for covering US politics better than CNN, Slate, the LA Times and the New York Times.

I'm a former Democratic organizer, but I just can't support Clinton, partisan universities or a lethargic press.

The Old Guard Democrats and Republicans can't counter Trump because they're guilty of all of the same things:

- They say that Trump University was a scam, but our public universities aggressively marketed degrees to students who obviously weren't ready and couldn't benefit. A lot of them were good kids who would have been just fine if they'd taken a few years off, worked, and gotten some life experience, but now they're $20k or $80k in debt and don't have time to learn anything.

- They say that he's not a real businessman, but he's hardly the only fake winner around. I once quit a tech job where I was no longer learning anything and took a position with Americorps because it gave me health insurance, a chance to meet people in Seattle and a basic living stipend. I was shocked to find that almost all of the entry level Americorps positions were reserved for college students or graduates - even clerical positions. What kind of 'winning class' needs special preferences to land secretarial jobs that qualify them for government food aid?

- They say that he'll start a war, but Hillary took a more consistently hawkish position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has no regrets about Libya, and responded to Gaddafi's roadside execution by channeling Julius Caesar and saying "I came. I saw. He's dead." Yeah, that's totally stable :-|

- They say that his supporters are deplorable, but Hillary ran interference for Bibi Netanyahu in the Obama administration, and by extension the settler movement that he caters to. None of Trump's "deplorables" are half as racist, violent or sectarian as Israel's hard-line settlers.

- They say that his "bromance" with Putin is dangerous, and it probably is to Europeans, but compare Putin's actions in Crimea and Donbass to our ally Saudi Arabia's 2011 invasion of Bahrain and tell me that Putin is the greater threat to democracy. Or compare Russia's human rights record to China's, and remember that Clinton's affluent supporters couldn't wean themselves of Chinese imports if their lives depended on it because they've given up not just the knowledge of how to make things, but also the managerial skills to run organizations that do.

- They say that he's sexist, but American women will still be able to tweet "I don't need men!" from their slave-produced iPhones under a Trump administration. That's a pretty sweet BATNA. At the same time we will still have very restrictive laws governing sex. How is consensual paid sex (for example) worse than forcing little kids to work in factories making fashion accessories? How does all of this put women at a net disadvantage?

Hillary has also said that "women have always been the primary victims of war," and she idolizes a first lady whose advocacy of disarmament forced American airmen to go up against Japanese Zeros in Brewster Buffalos (planes so ungainly that they were said by their own pilots to 'fly like a dead pig.' - an assessment reinforced by their losses at Midway, and also by British losses earlier in the war.)

- They say that he's anti-science, but there are enough internal problems in science right now that I doubt Trump is the primary threat.

There's no Trumpian excess that Hillary or her supporters weren't also guilty of.

F-35 targeting system laser will be 'almost impossible' to use in UK

Re: Lewis Page

"...one of the few remaining editors that would run a piece that contested parts of AGW"

One of the best things about his LTA coverage was that he was skeptical about a technology that clearly excited him (in contrast to most green-tech coverage). He dug into details like buoyancy control, the size of the potential freight market, and the exact contribution to the greenhouse effect, making for an interesting and professionally useful read.

It also makes it ironic that he took so much flak over AGW, since he was one of the few (only?) commentators to suggest any credible way to reduce the fuel consumed by air travel.

Even scaling up 1930s LTA designs to the largest size that would fit in the three remaining US airship hangars (14.7 million cu. ft.) yields favorable fuel efficiency numbers: gross buoyancy of ~950,000 lbs., structural dead-weight of perhaps 300,000, fuel consumption of around 20,000 lbs. per thousand miles, and a top speed of ~100 mph.

I've taken the Amtrak from Seattle to Minneapolis, and the generous luggage allowance and freedom from TSA nude-o-scopes was very nice. Doing it in half the time, without track noise, at an altitude that gives you a more interesting view than either a train or a jetliner, and on 2.5 gal. of fuel per passenger would be relatively painless as climate change mitigation proposals go, especially with lie-flat seats.

The only alternatives that I've seen have involved high speed rail, and the bills of material for the two systems aren't close.

I've often heard greens say that 'the deniers never offer solutions.' Bull. Not only was Lewis more serious than most of them, but nuclear power has been reducing atmospheric CO2 for half a century, much longer than solar of wind have been viable. If you accept the positive feedback loop in their models, then the associated CO2 reductions have a bigger impact per ton than their own tardy solutions.

Re: Lewis Page

"Shame."

Quite right.

"His long tenure at El Reg were a good period for the site and we lost their best writer on all things military."

I also enjoyed his airship coverage.

Is it clear that this is a safety issue vs. a security/secrecy one? Maybe they've done something 'special' to evade jamming and they don't want to make it easy to reverse engineer...

The US has a long history of restricting new planes - letting the F-117 out at night only, allowing front photographs of the B-2 but no derrière shots, maintaining a no-man's-land around air bases used for black projects, etc..

That's what I would have assumed from the details if not for the rest of the article.

Re: Lewis Page

I hadn't seen his byline for a while... Did he leave for greener pastures?

Silicon Valley's contribution to the US Republican Convention: Gayness

"Such distorted thinking is also apparent in his attacks on the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton – blaming her for wars in the Middle East and conveniently forgetting which administration made the decisions that led to the current situation in the region."

^I'm a former Democratic organizer, and was an anti-war activist in 2003, but this is wrong. The Democratic Party in the US has the same attitude toward pacifism that Republicans have toward balanced budgets; a lot of talk, and completely contradictory actions. Here are some things that you won't find in blue-tinted talking points:

- Removing Saddam was a policy goal of the Clinton Administration.

- Hillary voted for the war.

- Each of the last four US presidents has bombed Iraq for one reason or another.

- Clinton's 1998 war was justified by Saddam's refusal to allow inspectors into his palaces, which not all of the inspectors considered a violation.

- Our lack of knowledge about Iraq's weapons was a result of the above breakdown of inspections.

- Most Democrats (myself included) thought that Saddam had retained some capacity to make chemical weapons, and probably wanted to build nuclear ones as well. The debate was about the severity of the threat, and whether the new round of inspections had really failed.

- The New York Times and New Yorker were vocal, influential war proponents.

- For all of his folly, Bush did not try to overthrow Gaddafi's government; he started to make peace with it.

- President Obama egged on Syrian rebels and then bailed on them. Jimmy Carter thought that his focus on overthrowing Assad was a mistake.

- Hillary Clinton has been more consistently hawkish about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the Republican nominee.

President Obama's policies have been a continuation of the Bush administrations concept of spreading democracy by overthrowing governments. Trump would be a pain in many ways, but he's slightly better positioned to cut back on foreign wars. (His supporters aren't as heavily invested overseas and Clinton's, and the US has a small enough population relative to our natural resources that we could probably pull back if we really wanted to.)

Revealed: Mystery 7-year cyberspy campaign in Latin America

Agreed. Unless it's a sophisticated attack, I don't see why the US would top the list. We're currently ignoring Latin America for the most part, and our federal government's anti-communist stance has softened.

Untamed pledge() aims to improve OpenBSD security

Re: Only goes down, not up ;)

I can't help thinking that having an external rule set (like SELinux, etc) is a good idea in case someone tries to replace/modify-in-place a program/daemon with a Trojan version.

OpenBSD has systrace.

Pledge() is a good example of why I like OpenBSD. They ship with basic tools that work. If you need something fancier, you know where to find it.

Who gets Teslas made and throws Apple shade? It's… MUSK!

"You can't just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: build me a car."

Actually, it's pretty close with EVs. You don't need to make nearly as many custom parts.

Spirit of Steve Fosset lives on as glider is poised to soar to 90,000ft

Re: Total non-sequitur

"Especially the interaction of the upper Troposphere with the Stratosphere is not that well known, and weather (and climate) models will indeed benefit from knowing the physics better."

My grandfather was an engineer on the Skyhook sounding balloon project, which by 1948 had sent instruments as high as 105,000 feet. Sounding rockets went higher, and were active around the same time. It would seem downright odd to not have data on the area that you mention.

Big Blue welds bits of carbon for nanotube transistor

"The contact was created by 'the reaction of molybdenum with the SWNT to form carbide', in what the company says is a process 'akin to microscopic welding'."

That sounds more like brazing or soldering.

Massive global cooling process discovered as Paris climate deal looms

This isn't surprising given that NASA's own figures show a global power surplus of only a fifth of a percent of atmospheric back-radiation (0.6 W/m^2 vs. 340.3 W/m^2). When the heat-retention that's allegedly pushing us out of equilibrium is two orders of magnitude smaller than the amount that's needed to keep the earth at pre-industrial temperatures, you need accurate data on every effect that might come close to that level,

Petrol cars are dead in the water, says Tesla CTO waving numbers on the back of an envelope

"There are actually no rare earths used in the Model S battery or motor."

Nope, just ~2,000 pounds of "condensed electricity," which is what old engineers called aluminum.

BMW is claiming a 30% reduction in the lifecycle CO2 emissions of an i3 relative to one of their similarly-sized diesels (when it's powered with a typical European energy mix, or 50% if it's powered by wind/solar/hydro). They achieve that by making the body with hydro-power in Washington, specifying that at least 80% of the aluminum had to be recycled, and using rare earth motors. Aluminum is already recycled at a high rate, so buying more recycled Al probably may not increase the recycling rate (and reduce refining and CO2 output) that much.

"lol, you call -20c cold? The guy who has the most Tesla cars lives in arctic circle in Norway. It gets so cold, diesel freezes. But his Tesla cars work well."

I live in Minnesota, and I can vouch that gasoline doesn't freeze at -40 C. I've also never heard any complaints about diesel freezing, although most people here drive gasoline cars. The more common problems are failure to start because the glow plugs don't get hot enough, or because the starter motor won't turn the sticky crank (often because the battery is too cold).

I can also vouch for the comment about the heater. Even a modern gas engine won't get a car to more than > 0 F (-18 C) in the time that it takes to drive several miles to work. Granted most of the engine's waste heat goes out the tailpipe and only the block heat is used to heat the interior, but I think it's still likely to use a fair amount of power.

How much of one year's Californian energy use would wipe out the drought?

Re: Small issue of infrastructure

"Let me punch up one point for you... the financial analysis does not consider the COST to build and maintain the infrastructure (both de-salinization and power infrastructure, not to mention water delivery infrastructure), only the cost of energy to run it. The financial model being presented is bogus."

The same applies to most green policy proposals. Do they consider the energy required to refine enough aluminum for the extra transmission lines needed to make the solar economy work? No. Do they bother to look up the recycling rate to make sure that specifying 80/20 would actually increase recycling (and decrease refining)? No. Do they bother to check whether a 60 year lifespan is the hard limit for a nuclear plant? No. Do they include the CO2 cost of building factories to make solar cells in large volumes? No.

You Musk be joking: Tesla's zero to 60MPH in 2.8 SECONDS is literally 'ludicrous'

Will it go plaid?

Seriously, though, I'd think that the same crazy acceleration would be possible with hydraulic hybrids:

http://hydraulicspneumatics.com/200/TechZone/HydraulicPumpsM/Article/False/84554/TechZone-HydraulicPumpsM

You Brits did elegant work on that back in the '80s:

http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/v1ewaveg/Robert%20Clerk/Index.htm

...and more pragmatic stuff recently:

http://www.artemisip.com/applications/on-road

Natural geothermal heat under Antarctic ice: 'Surprisingly high'

"Well as we are measuring a trend, it doesn't really matter how the error bars are distributed as long as we don't think that there is a systematic change in distribution of error over time."

That's only true if you don't care about slope, acceleration or deceleration, since they depend on correct magnitude and linearity.

In addition to that, instruments can have offset scales, drift, random noise or hysteresis. All but the last two can be directional, and all six can be caused by manufacture and design.

Drift can can fabricate a trend entirely, as can changing from one class of instrument to another with a different error profile.

"If you think there has been [a change in distribution of error over time], you need to justify why"

Science requires traceability and reproducibility, which you can't claim of a dataset that depends on undocumented behavior of unnamed instruments. I'm only obligated to rebut scientific conclusions.

(There are also plausible sources of bias in manufacturing, such as compression of the capillary of a liquid-in-glass thermometer during the glass-blowing step if the glass heats up more than the fixture that holds it.)

"...and how come that change has been gradational rather than stepped"

Non-linearity is as likely to be smooth as stepped, and magnification is evenly distributed over an instrument's range by definition. (The same physical defect may cause other types of error, but they're accounted for separately.)

Switching to a different type of instrument would only cause a sharp change in the global trend if all of the international agencies supplying data made similar changes simultaneously.

"...and why the change has the same sign for different measuring technologies."

As far as I'm aware, it would only take one type of instrument to skew the GST, since lower readings at sites with other types would be attributed to local variability. It's possible that the SST is more resistant to that.

I can't comment on satellite measurements except to say that they would need to be prepared much more thoughtfully than the surface temperature record.

"For extra credit explain why temperature surrogates (tree rings,, stalactites etc) are congruent with the instrumental record."

I've only read Anderson et al. 2013, which doesn't include tree rings:

"To avoid potential loss of low-frequency variations, we excluded tree ring series."

Most of the site records relied on O-16/O-18 ratios:

"Sixty percent of the 170 records are oxygen isotopes preserved in ice or carbonate"

Precipitation has been increasing (as per climatologists' own literature), and snowfall has been underreported due to problems with gauge design (ditto). Precipitation decreases salinity and increases the O-16 fraction, both of which would be interpreted as increasing temperature in Anderson's index.

That's a fine rebuttal of an argument that I didn't make. From earlier:

1: Polar melting is one of the main lines of evidence corroborating the instrumental trend. (Note that arguments similar to yours above could be used to dismiss that.)

2: Even before this recent paper, measurements of geothermal heat flux showed that Greenland and Antarctica have relatively high geothermal heat flow.

3: When you also account for the poles' lower insolation and higher reflectivity, it's no longer a dismissable factor in the areas where the melting is occurring. (From the chart that I linked to, it looks as though most of Antarctica has a flow rate of 0.09-0.15 W/m2, which is equal to 15-25% of the global average power surplus, and a larger fraction of the energy available in the Antarctic.)

The above has nothing to do with geothermal heat flux changing the surface temperature of the entire planet, and only deals with how strongly Arctic and Antarctic glacial melting corroborates the instrumental record.

...it may not, though, in which case I've found no numbers at all for instrument error.

"Please show us the numbers, Lewis! There are no number in this story."

Perhaps you could do the same.

"Global average geothermal heat flux = 0.06 W/m2, varies from place to place.

The Antarctic Thwaites Glacier average, these new measurements, like 0.1 W/m2

Thwaites hot spots, up to like 0.2 W/m2

Clearly, geothermal isn't a big factor globally, it is very small."

As mentioned on the previous page, Earth's average power surplus (which is a more relevant comparison value) is only 0.6 W/m2. The insolation in polar regions is also lower, and the reflectivity is higher. So the 0.2 W/m2 value that you give for those hotspots is 33% of the global average surplus that you attribute the glacial melting to, and a significantly higher fraction of the available energy in the area where that melting actually occurs.

Do you and your 'thousands of scientists' have no better argument? That would be pretty sad.

Since it wasn't clear in my original post, I interpreted the NCAR value as referring to instrument error because of the sentence preceeding it ("Instrument quality varies from country-to-country.") and other context in that section of the manual.

"Please trust that other specialists know their field better than you do. Defer to them in their field, as you would have them defer to you in yours."

That would be a fine argument if it were reciprocal.

I spent a decade at an instrumentation maker that supplied calibration systems to NIST. I trained under Livermore's longtime chief of measurement, ran their main laboratory and worked with some of the best people in the world.

Coming from that perspective, I'm perplexed by the error bars on the instrumental trend. The papers supporting them don't consider instrument error at all (meaning errors intrinsic to the instruments, rather than site- or shelter-biases). The closest figure that I found was in an NCAR manual ("An Introduction to Atmospheric and Oceanographic Datasets"): "Surface temperatures can be recorded to within 0.5 degree C."

Using that figure (and I've found no other), the entire warming trend over the last 120 years would be within the error margin of the instruments alone.

If you claim that instrument errors will be normally distributed, then you need to justify that. If you can't understand why it's not OK to take that as a given, then you should ask a metrologist, quality engineer, or other qualified expert. Meteorologists and climatologists aren't trained to answer those questions.