Posts by Sapient Fridge

Sorry to disagree but humans are actually responsible for most, if not all, of the 140ppm CO2 rise. You are right that our CO2 emissions are low compared to nature, but we are adding ancient carbon on top of the natural cycle. Over 150 years it adds up to the extra 140ppm we see today.

If you have a bath where you fill it at 10 litres per minute and have water draining out at 10 litres per minute then the level won't change. If you then add even a tiny drip from another source the bath will eventually overflow. That's what humans are doing with CO2. We are digging up ancient sequestered carbon and adding it on top of the natural production/absorbtion cycle.

https://skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm

Re: Sounds a typical

I was part of a team brought in to upgrade a large multi-terabyte company database. We did have multiple upgrade rehearsals but these took most of a weekend each so to save time the managers decided (against our advice) to use an old snapshot of their database rather than copying the live system, which would have added 3 hours to each rehearsal. This meant we were testing against the same old static data over and over again. When the real upgrade happened it failed because the live data had something unexpected which wasn't in the test data! Guess who got the blame?

Re: Identity

What you do feign interest for long enough to get them hooked, then ask for a web site address to "verify that they are a real company". Or even give them a throwaway E-mail address and wait for them to send more information and/or contracts to it. Once you have that you can prove which company it is.

Sometimes they sell the details to another company (who doesn't care that the original call was illegal). Send the the second company a SAR (Subject Access Request) asking where they purchased your personal contact information from. That works pretty reliably, and the ICO will back you up if they try to ignore you.

Re: Cloudflare are also a spam support company

Most ISPs have AUP (Acceptible Use Policy) agreements with their customers which includes no hate speech, no terrorist glorification, no spamvertised pages, no child porn etc. When abuse reports come in they investigate to see if the complaint is likely to be true, and act if it is.

Yes this is more work, but almost every ISP on the planet manages it so why can't Cloudflare? Instead they do nothing about abuse reports and make it impossible to send reports to the real host.

Re: This again?

The denial of climate change in the face of peer reviewed science and events that are obvious to everyone puts everything that The Register publishes into doubt. Perhaps their tech articles have the same bias and lack of fact checking that their climate change articles do?

Re: Picking ever shorter time periods to deny climate change

Anonymous Coward wrote:

> Just who actually stated "30 years" as the magical boundary between

> weather and climate first?

The World Meteorological Organization:

http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/518.htm

Defines climate as:

Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the "average weather", or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.

The reason for picking 30 years is that it is long enough to average out natural variation such as ENSO. As soon as you look at 30 year periods then the current warming trend is completely obvious.

It was certainly hot in America last year so by your reasoning they should have had a bumper harvest. Let's see how that worked out:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/economics-blog/2012/aug/13/america-corn-harvest-hit-world-poor

We may gain some crop growing areas, but you forget about all the growing areas that will be lost from seawater flooding, droughts and temperatures too high for current crops in those areas to cope with.

http://sks.to/species

Re: Eh ?

http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

Re: And on cue...

Wow, cherry picking just over a year's data. At this rate you will soon be claiming that sea levels aren't rising because clearly it falls twice a day.

Sea level is noisy because of the amount of water taken out of the sea and dumped on land as rain, especially in La Nina years. You have to look at the long term trend to see what is happening.

http://sks.to/sealevel

Re: Optional

Perhaps if you read the paper then your questions as to how the scientists know the PH has changed over the last 300 million years would be answered.

> Yes, this is a societal investment in renewables, as are subsidies

> for fossil fuels (never mentioned by Andrew. Ever.).

Andrew never mentions the subsidies for nuclear energy either. In fact the only subsidies he complains about are the ones for renewable energy sources. Biased? Yep.

Nuclear fission might be a solution, if there was enough uranium. If you take the known reserves of uranium and work out how long it would power the world's electricity needs (ignoring non-electricity uses e.g. petrol for now) if other power sources were phased out then it comes out at about 12 years supply.

Thorium and breeder reactors could possibly solve that problem, but breeder reactors are slow at producing fuel and not currently economical, and thorium reactors are unproven technology. In addition nuclear reactors take a long time to build, and have serious political and waste disposal issues.

My grey import Desire HD upgraded to 2.3 just fine

I actually have a Thai HTC Desire HD because that's what simplyelectronics.co.uk shipped me when I ordered one in the UK (I must admit I wasn't very happy when I realised I'd been sold a grey import, but that's another story).

HTC released the 2.3 upgrade for the European region last month, the Thai one was about 3 weeks behind. It arrived last week and installed without problem. So it's not true that they can't be upgraded here but you do have to wait for HTC to issue the upgrade for the phone's original region.

Feersum Endjinn

Feersum Endjinn is the only Ian Banks book that I found impossible to read, well not impossible but running the continual phonetic to word translation in my head was more work than fun. I gave up about 1/3 through as I just wasn't enjoying it.

evolution happens very s..l..o..w..l..y

And how many years ago was the "fookin big rock" and how long did it take for life on the planet to recover? I'll give you a clue, both answers are in the millions of years range.