Posts by Steve Crook

Re: Too funny!

Spot on. It's beginning to look as if the GCMs have been over estimating the cooling effects of particulates and aerosols by quite some margin.

Even the AR5 draft contains statements that indicate the IPCC is now expecting rises to be at the bottom end of the range predictions. Their graphs also show that current measured temperatures are in fact bumping along right at the bottom of model predictions and could fall out of range entirely if this period of stability in global temperatures continues, or even moves toward a slight decline over the next 5 years.

The GCMs are looking increasingly fragile and that's a big problem, as trillions of dollars are going to be spent on the basis of their predictions. So big a problem in fact, that I suspect everything possible will be done to avoid having to admit it.

Re: Cheap, effective justice = DMCA takedown

@Eddie Edwards

Tell us more about it if you can. I'd be interested to know what you did and, if it cost you money, how much....

Re: Malthus was right, sort of...

That bit about being a neo-liberal was actually tongue in cheek...

The truth is, none of us knows what the resource limits are. Two years ago, we were being assured by all and sundry that we were at, or had passed, peak oil and the greenies were assuring us that we would be saved from heat death because even if we wanted to burn it, there simply wouldn't be enough oil and gas to go around. Now, they're having to resort to FUD because shale is being exploited.

Given that these limits are still unknown, it would be wise to tread carefully and make the best use of what we know that we have. But I don't think we should fetter growth because of a fear of what we don't know, or at least can only guess at.

Re: Sounds like a big land grab to me...

Well, we'll see how it develops. Something has to be done to make local and national government realise that data security is important.

I did have one (not entirely serious) idea, and that would be that the people responsible should be forced to publish exactly the same information about themselves on the web site of the authority or body responsible for the leak. That wouldn't just be the person that lost the data, but their manager and their managers manager, so on up the chain to the CEO. Perhaps that might get their attention...

Re: "wouldn't be surprised to learn that there's more than a little back-room wrangling going on."

You may be right. Perhaps both companies have realised that there's little point in continuing with this as, eventually, nothing will be settled, and the only winners will be the lawyers. What does concern me is that these two deciding to have a truce will leave them free to kick the shit out of any smaller, poorer rival who looks to be eating into their market share.

Even if peace breaks out, we've still got the batshit US patents office prepared to accept filings that are plainly intended to hinder competition and providing ammunition for another stupid war.

Re: Why stop at Turing?

What I don't understand about this sort of thing is, who are we doing it for? I think that most of us accept that what was done to Turing was wrong, so we're not going to learn anything new with a pardon and Turing is dead, so he's not going to benefit. All I can see is that there might be people who would look at Turing and say "he was persecuted, convicted of a crime that shouldn't have been a crime, but then he was pardoned", as if that makes it all better.

Re: Simple

Wide angle lens, something @ 14-20mm would get a lot in so the arm doesn't have to be that long, and there's some really good panorama building software that'll remove most of the lens aberrations and exposure differences if you can take sufficient pictures with enough overlap.

Re: Get it right next time

At the moment, no-one actually knows what the reserves are. We know from the currently explored areas that there's up to 60 years of exploitable (current tech, current cost) shale. When exploration is complete, there may be two or three times that available to us.

I'm old enough to remember all the hype that surrounded North Sea Oil and how it was going to transform our lives. I'm still waiting. Truth is that most of the money was pissed away by successive governments. So I'm not holding my breath and expecting things to be different this time.

If we spend billions on machinery that's only used for 30 years, that'll be reflected in the price of the gas and mean that it'll either be economic or not, it won't just be extracted for the sake of it.

Yawn...

Page does, sometimes make sense. If you do some basic sums, there's no way that the developed world can cut its emissions fast enough to counter the emissions growth of the developing world and come even close to our current standard of living.

Given that the populations of the developed world are having a hard time coming to terms with a crisis that has (for most of them) just removed the growth seen in the last 5-7 years, how do you think it would work if governments tried to remove the growth of the last 20 years to get carbon output to 1990s levels?

So, the alternative would be to slow the growth of developing nations so the developed don't have to go cold turkey. You can see how India and China might react to that plan, can't you???

Re: Why not diesel?

I think the problem with large scale use of cooking oil is one of collection. You'll need to operate a fleet of tankers and relatively local sites to do the processing, and I think this is what makes it uneconomic rather than the costs of the process itself.

Just how much cooking oil will it take to get a single 747 from London to New York? A lot. Unless there's some other application for this process, I'm inclined to view it as publicity material rather than anything that has a practical application in aviation.

The more we know...

The more we realise how much we didn't know when dire predictions for the immanent heat death of the planet were being forecast and taken seriously during the 90s and the early part of this century. No snow in winter in the UK, warmer drier summers in the UK, sea level rise measured in meters, *both* polar ice caps melting away, glaciers vanishing (Kilimanjaro as the poster child), even the original predictions of century scale 4-6c rise in temps is currently thought to have been wildly inaccurate.

Global warming is happening, and we need to do something about our CO2 emissions, but, frankly, both sides in this debate have their fair share of extremists, and *none* of them have done us any favours in working out what we should be doing, and over what sort of timescales.

Re: According to the UK Met office,

According to the met office, there's been a 0.03 increase in temps over the period. Which, as they admit, is *not* a statistically significant increase in temperatures. So, either you accept that HadCrut4 provides an acceptable record of global temperatures or you don't.

Re: There aren't any

I'm pleased to hear that there's at least one other person that thinks Horizon has degenerated to the point of being barely worth the effort. I used to tolerate the insane camera work because there was at least some useful information, but in recent years the bit rate has dropped to a point where the actual information if delivered sensibly, would have occupied about 15 mins.

Re: How about discrimination?

Who's to say they're not treating their customers equally? These two were pigging out, so unless you're saying they were discriminated against because they're hogs, I don't see there's a case to answer.

I'd be interested to see how you choose to implement a 'fair use' policy, seems easy to say there should be one, harder to work out practical details I think.

People do abuse EAMAYL buffets, and I can remember something on usemet that described how to pack as much salad as possible into the small bowls offered by a well known restaurant chain. Hint, use celery sticks lined with lettuce to extend the walls of the bowl....

All I can say is that perhaps these guys could have been given a verbal warning and then banned when they chose to ignore it.

Re: Way to go Lewis.......

Well, the paper was about sea level rise, so why not talk about it.

You mention the US drought, but current trends would indicate that US droughts are generally less severe and less frequent at the moment. Indeed, there have been papers published that would suggest that one of the effects of global temperature rise may be *fewer* mid-west droughts. There's evidence that there are periodic US mega-droughts that make this years affair look like a couple of hot days.

The interesting thing about the paper is that, having shown that sea level rise *may* not be a worrying consequence of climate change the authors feel suitably qualified as economists to recommend a course of action to deal with a problem that they've just said doesn't exist. I assume that they felt obliged to toe the party line or risk being ejected from the consensus.

Re: Pumping water up hill...

The problem with pumped storage is one of scale. Atm, in the UK the pumped storage is used to deal with short term outages in base load supply, and to provide 'instant' extra capacity at peak times. It's not sufficient to act as a battery for renewables. This means we'd have to find sites that have sufficient area to be able to provide longer term (a period of one or two weeks perhaps) storage. In the UK they are few and far between and would be costly to construct, not to mention the planning issues if the best sites happen to be in the national parks.

Nope, it won't fly I'm afraid. How about flooding old mine workings with water and then heating the water using 'renewables' for later recovery to provide heating for homes and businesses, similar to ground source heat pump?

Re: US Tech Industry ..

What needs a good kicking are the standards for considering a piece of software patentable, plainly too many have been let through by people who seem to be woefully uneducated in software development or the IT industry in general. There's no reason that the patent system shouldn't work as well for software as it does for hardware, inventors and companies need some time to recoup the costs of genuine innovation.

Perhaps all software patents should be reviewed so that the more obvious clunkers can be slung out. If nothing else, it might make the patent troll a thing of the past...

Re: The Life Of Brian

That, is the point I think. The last record minimum occurred under similar circumstances. It's likely that the storms are just weather. The problem is that the Arctic ice sheet has been thinning for decades and is more susceptible to this sort of thing and it's probably been thinning because of our activities, but this summers record low still doesn't like it's that "tipping point".

It was just the way in which it was presented that irked me. Like I said, there's a group of people who are desperate for that one killer event that will be so conclusive that 'deniers' like me will be forced to hang our heads in shame as we are rounded up and tried for crimes against humanity....

Re: Watts Up

Watts already has an article about it (and it does seem likely that the Libyan record wasn't). The more disappointing thing is that the new record is likely to come from a new station in Death Valley that would appear to have been set up (in a compromised location) with the express purpose of recording a new highest temperature. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/13/dr-jeff-masters-shows-why-siting-matters-death-valley-steals-all-time-temperature-record-from-libya/

Re: The UK Needs Climate Change Sceptics to Restore Common Sense.

Actually there's enough paleo-climate evidence to show that indeed climate shifts *do* cause variation in atmospheric CO2 levels, because as you change water temps differing levels of CO2 are absorbed and released. This is settled science I think. Indeed, one of the possible +ve feedbacks from anthropogenic CO2 raising global temps is that CO2 from defrosted permafrost areas will be released significantly increasing atmospheric CO2.

However, I'd agree that there's no evidence that current world CO2 levels are anything to do with that sort of behaviour, and like it or not, it's our CO2, and we'll have to do something about it....

Re: Lets not just blame java here

I think he did. He was pointing out that it takes two to tango, and that while JITB is a high risk gamble, running an OS that apparently just lies down, rolls over and sticks it's legs up in the air isn't actually going to help matters.

Ironic that Java was originally intended to be a browser thing that was going to be the secure multi platform alternative to the evil that was (and still is) activeX. Finally, nice article and lots of useful information that I really hope I never have to use.

At least malware authors are paying proper attention to version management :-)

Re: Trevor, I love you

My exposure to write once run anywhere was relatively limited, but I did write a data distribution server using RMI and windows, and had no problems running it on Sun/Solaris without have to do *any* porting. Sure, I *tested* it, but only a complete tool wouldn't. Not only that, but the code worked across a mix of Solaris and Windows machines which could be updated from a single repository.

Frankly, if your developers don't adequately test their applications and do their version management, then perhaps you ought to be looking for better programmers...