Thx.

True. "Global cooling, we are all going to die!!" 30 years ago, now it's "Global Warming, we are all going to die!!"

After all, there is no difference between them, right?

Oh, and the hottest year was 1934. The hottest decade was the 1930s. There were "accidental errors" in the the data set at Goddard (home of JE Hanson - who is widely featured in the leaked emails) that all changed the original data in the direction that made the 1990s look hotter.

Actually it's water vapor. But water vapor is too hard to model, so instead they model CO2 (which has a much smaller effect) and claim that because the model that ignores water vapor shows that CO2 rise is the cause that we need to all go back to the neolithic to "Save the planet".

Deep Green terrorists, anyone?

Many of them have been authenticated by the senders or receivers who were not read into the conspiracy.

Lynx is your friend.

That's not what I've gathered from the politician's blubbering. It's either "do it now" or "completely ridicule any and all concerns about climate change so we can ignore it forever and I can get my big fat Power Company paychecks for saying so."

So you're disputing that 2005, 2007 and 2009 are the three hottest years on record? Interesting.

and it's not back to the neolithic. There's no reason that (for instance) America's energy grid needs to be coal, oil, and natural gas based; There's no reason for us to be Polluting the way we are currently except that current business costs don't include the loaded costs of environmental impact so there's no real incentive not to do it.

I make no claims as to whether or not mankind is the ultimate cause of the current temperature anomaly; I do posit that we should realign our civilization to being resilient against long term temperature mean changes in excess of ~2C simply because it's in our interests to do so regardless of what the ultimate cause of that change might be. Part of why so many are advocating for these changes now is so that they can be made a measured pace, rather than the frantic one that would be necessary until we delay until we find out which way the chips fall. Risk management says it's prudent to do something about it regardless of whether or not you believe humans are the cause of the current anomaly.

That there is such vociferous opposition to rebuilding and modernizing decaying infrastructure, cleaning up our local environment, wasting less space on landfill storage, obtaining energy independence and positioning America to be a world leader in Energy, Space, and Environmental Technology just makes this all that much more perplexing.

this is the last I'll say on the topic because I hate having to be off board topic like this; so to get back on board topic - this reinvestment is why we have Grid-Guide, Electric Grid run cars, and a national DC power system in SR; it is also why most of the power plants are Fusion, Fission, Geothermal, and Solar (either Microwave Collectors or wide area absorption.)

About the hottest years...
The latest info I could quickly find. Jan 12, 2008 http://samanoontheissues.blogspot.com/2008...-on-record.html
"
* The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998;
* The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006;
* Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940; and
* Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred prior to 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century.
"
@Jericho: If you have data that says otherwise pls post it.


Note the data discrepancies and the "fix" used; is that the same as the one mentioned in the emails?

As for this being a RL example of a SR:
Large financial investment on both sides. Check
Careers built upon it. Check
Egos built upon it. Check
Something available to blow up/vandalize/steal. Check

Yep, it's a viable SR.

make sure to note the reactions to this hack - the mainstream press is mostly trying to ignore it, or phrase any stories in such a way as to favor their own particular political slant (fox news is screaming conspiracy, CNN is saying 'out of context' a lot). And on discussion boards there are true believers on both sides of the issue arguing about the hack while neither side actually reads the data dump.

When people start latching on to a single measure of a huge and complex system and acting like it "proves" or "disproves" anything, it's a sure sign that the people in question don't have more than a passing familiarity with the science involved. There cannot be a useful discussion of this on this board, so I bow out.

I'll break my self-imposed no-post to add one more.

the difference is we're comparing U.S. mean yearly temperatures and Global mean yearly temperatures. the hottest U.S. year was 1934(#1), I don't remember #2 off the top of my head but #3 was 1921 (as opposed to 2009 which is currently beating 2006.)

the hottest years on Global mean yearly temperature measurement are 2005, 2007, 2009. this is including the corrections to the U.S. data from 1990-2006. (although the majority of the error was 2000-2006 at about 0.15C.) the temperature data on http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/* should include the fixes to the errors discovered by McIntyre, who is the one who broke the 0.15C error. (h/t http://www.climateaudit.org/) this difference between US and global temps is mostly due to polar and Central Asia temperature differences. this is succinctly demonstrated by this image.

this is the mean temperature anomaly for 2009 YTD compared to a baseline of 1900 to 1980. blue is cooler, red is hotter, grey is no data/missing baseline.

Most of the confusion over climate change frequently comes from sources comparing US climate (which has been cooler relative to global averages, thanks in large part to well understood south pacific cooling effects on our local climate...) to global climate without noting the difference in sourcing. whether this is accidental or malicious isn't *really* germane to the current discussion.

Tying this to shadowrun! imagine hacking weather stations to 'adjust' their temperature measurements...

*yes this is Goddard; this is also 2009 and not 2006. please check conspiracy theories at the door...

<<Not to talk out of class. but my team did a run about two weeks earlier in the same target.. I can't say what that run entitled, but our code monkey says "thanks" . She takes pride in her work and rarely gets any Kudo's.>> -JollyRoger

-

THIS is the problem. China brings a new coal-fired power plant online EVERY MONTH and they have no intention of stopping or signing any emissions reduction treaties. Why should the US and the EU hobble their already struggling economies, raise taxes, burden what little production they still engage in AND pay everybody else for "environmental sins" based on some highly questionable computer models? "Going Green" sounds real nice, but the technology isn't there and its not going to be all sunshine and kittens and teddy bears crapping rainbows. Its going to be unemployment, lower standard of living and higher energy bills. And all based on computer models? Show me a model that can accurately predict the Dow Jones Industrial Average a year into the future or determine the winner of the next US presidential race. If you can't why not, and why do you buy the climate change models?

ROFL. Apples and oranges much?

Indeed. But these are no less complex (which is my point) and much more "anthropogenic" phenomenon. Plus the time interval involved is considerably shorter than that posited by climate change models. So why don't we just whip one up? Would you trust such a model? The answers of course are "because we can't" and "no".

It's still a strawman argument. for that matter, people make models of the DOW every day (and stocks generally)- their reliability is less than perfect but that's what margins of error are for.

Show me the physics for an economics model. Modeling the behavior of a system that relies entirely on predicting the behavior of large numbers of individual people is *completely* different than modeling a physical system. The fact that they're both complex systems is about all they have in common. I have great sympathy for the economists, and social science modelers in general, they have a much harder job that makes climate modeling look easy in comparison.

BTW, China is also putting up wind farms at a substantial, and accelerating, rate. Nothing is ever that simple.

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Straw man is it? So the accuracy of computer modeling has nothing to do with the discussion? Okay. Care to comment on the rest of my post above? Taxes perhaps?

No, the accuracy of computer modeling a predictive behavior system has nothing to do with the discussion of computer modeling of predictive physical system. as pointed out succinctly above. If the question was simply about whether or not computers can be accurate at all, I'd point out that we hit a 20 square foot mark on the moon with the equivalent of two TI-87s (one here and one in transit) 40 years ago; *And* returned to talk about it.

As for the rest of it; I already commented on what appeared to be the main thrusts of the points in brief; Is there one in particular you'd like me to tackle more in depth?

basically what it boils down to is you're arguing that America should do nothing because a) you don't want to go first (or perhaps more finely stated; don't want to go when there's a risk that major competitors won't go); and b) the science *might* be wrong. I'm arguing that *someone* has to go first (and stands to benefit from doing so if it's done intelligently, which involves doing it before possible panic) and that the penalty for doing nothing *if* the science is right outweighs the economic harm done by acting on it if its wrong. the last point of mine is obviously a judgment call and I'm willing to have that discussion with you if that's where your disagreement is; but the alpha error on this particular hypothesis assessment is pretty huge so I'd be surprised if there were serious arguments to the effect that the beta error is too big to bear.

If I were an up and coming 2nd or 3rd world country, I know I would love to see the United States gut their economy. I'd pollute like a mofo and tell the US to piss up a rope while raking in every last scintilla of profit I could wring out of the world wide market.

I find your point of view completely incomprehensible. how you can just ignore all of human history and just assume every country on the planet will just hold hands and go green because someone TOLD them to do it...well, it cuts against the grain, so to speak. And it indicates a completely whacked view of the human condition.

sorry dude. just how I see it.

I honestly don't give a damn what any other country does. I want my local environment to be cleaner. I'm tired of smog -- you know, that stuff people have become so accustomed to that they don't even acknowledge its existence anymore. I was living in a very rural area up until about six years ago, then I moved to a major city. It was and is gross. The air is absolutely disgusting, the water is this over-chlorinated goop that's practically undrinkable without a water softener. And except for the few businesses that take pride in their outer appearance, it's just flat out ugly.

I cannot wait to move again.

If you're going to say that you care about the 'global environment' then you'd damn well better start caring about how other countries act, because for this thing to work you need EVERY country on the same page, running under the same regulations and all at the same time.

If you give China a free pass to pollute like mad, but slap a ton of regulations on the US, you've just created an imbalance that will lead to chaos. you need to craft regulations that will work to level out the playing field and not harm one country while giving another country a license to pollute like crazy.

Here's another thing to consider - tougher environmental regulations in the US have already disrupted the US labor market. with our tougher regulations in place, corporations moved more and more jobs out of this country and placed them in countries with no EPA regs to contend with. the air and water got better here, but worse in those countries (mostly china, india and mexico). But now our labor market has gone into the crapper and with more and more people out of work, we lack the payroll taxes to fund things like unemployment compensation or social security.

the inability (or flat out refusal) of the deep greens to consider the implications and consequences of their ideology are both horrifying and fascinating to watch. I just hope to God none of those wacko policies ever get put into practice!

If you're going to say that I give a damn about the global environment, you better fucking quote me. I care about the local environment. The closest you'll find me saying is that anything done to combat the climate change, whether it's real or imagined, will also improve the local environment.


No more than the conservative nut jobs like yourself. FOX News is at once hilarious and pathetically sad to watch. You should go get your own show there. You seem like a natural. I know I'm laughing my ass off at you in this thread. You really should profit off that, since profit's all you seem to care about. It's a shame that I probably have more money in my wallet right now than you have in your entire bank account.

Here's another angle I haven't seen much of yet, and not at all in this thread.

There comes a time when sacrifice must be made, not because it won't hurt, but because it needs to be done. It comes to one and not another, not because it is right that he sacrifice, but because he can.

My country, Canada, made such a decision more than once in the last century. So did the USA. We paid dearly for it. But we were among the few nations who could act. Others who did nothing benefited from our sacrifice. That didn't make the sacrifice any less important, any less necessary, and any less effective. We did what had to be done. Period.

We are at such a crossroad again. We balk, as we did at first then. But our example, our sacrifice will make a difference. We may end up not being so rich. Not being so powerful. Not being number one. So what?

We will be right. The world will be better because we acted, and willingly payed the price for it. That's what makes leaders. That's what makes greatness.

I like how you automatically assume what my politics are from what? 4 posts on the subject?

tsk.

My response was based upon your line of:
So yeah. I think that was a safe assumption based upon that kind of spewed vitriol. And I know a thing or two about spewing vitriol.

have you not been paying ANY attention to the responses this data archive has had on the environmentalists?

Hmm.

Melting the ice caps reveals more natural resources for us to exploit and hitting China with bad weather reduces their threat as a political and economic powerhouse - while simultaneously giving us longer growing seasons and mellow winters?

Awesome, sounds like a good plan to me!

However there in lies the fallacy, as it is not so much is green enviromental policies good for humanity in the long run. The problem is that in the short run loss of profits/negative imapct (however defined) prevent such policies/incentives being implemented in the first place. Now if green technologies ever become more cost effective than non-green technologies, the markets will eventually take care of it.

BACK OT----I see data dumps happening like this all the time. You'll have eco friendly outfits like Evo (and maybe horizon) calling it a conspiricy by SK/AZT/ AREs <insert other industry heavy company>, while SK and ares would respond, see we knew this was bunk. The avg joe, hears both areguments and promptly tunes out. He has more things to worry about (like making a living to support his family).

I believe these files are now availble on wikileaks, for those who might still be interested.

As an aside, wikileaks and cryptome.org are wonderful places to scavange ideas for shadowrun adventures.

Your post is missing some major prepositions, so I MAY be misunderstanding you, but you said green policies will always be more expensive in th short term, so will never be implemented?

That may be true, but the real question is, will it become competitive?

Had I bought solar panels 6 years ago, I would have paid twice as much for half the power production, compared to today. I'd be paying an arm and a leg for a product which effectively expires in 10 years, just because it's so outclassed. It's like with computers. I could pay $10,000 for a ten-processor, 50 GB RAM computer, or wait six years and get something with the same power and better software for $3,000 (and in another two years, $1,000). From where I'm sitting, investing in something like solar or wind doesn't make sense because it's just too young still.

Speaking of investing infrastructure, there's an additional concern - do you replace a functional unit, reducing its long-term value, or do you wait until it expires? I don't think it's a good idea to take a coal power plant we built last year for $2M and replace it this year with a wind power plant - even if the wind power plant costs less to run year to year (which it doesn't). Wait until the coal plant is approaching the end of its lifecycle THEN replace it with the wind plant. That's just good sense. A lot of the global warming suggestions don't recognize this.

Look, I'm not going to delve into the shithole of whether or not Global Warming is real or not, and caused by man or not, but the idea that the entire planet would be better off if the First World punishes ourselves while giving a free reign to the rest of the world to polute all that they want just makes me giggle. And IF Global Warming is both true and caused by man then the idea that your local enviroment is going to be worth living in unless everyone "goes green" just isn't thinking things through.


I do feel sorry for you on the smog though, makes me glad that I've choosen to live in an area where I don't have to worry about it.


*EDIT*

Yes I'm well aware that I've responded to two different people with this post and didn't bother to diferenate between them. My bad but they know who they are and what they did and did not say.

Please excuse the following "Wall-o-text". If all the underlines annoy you, I apologize, read my sig for the reason behind them.

I heavily endorse this post! Though, I'm not sure if he was being sarcastic or not. As some of you have heard (read) me mentioning before; you can never hold it against someone when they do what is in their own best interest... Kill them for it? Absolutely. But, holding it against them is illogical.


I agree completely. Free markets can handle almost any issue without interference, given time.

I can see how it would be good in the long run, but considering the state of the U.S. economy right now, I cannot possibly endorse such action at this time. Like our dear Funkenstein the global environment is not my primary concern (sorry Funk if I'm misquoting you, I've been misquoted and taken out of context enough to commiserate.) However, I spend so much of my time out in nature murdering innocent creatures such as deer, prarie dogs, pheasant, and fish, that I really get annoyed with litter, dirty water, and smog (I've lived in Denver and L.A., nasty towns). The truth isn't that I don't care, it's that I don't believe the issue is enough of an emergency (In fact I think it's not likely to ever be more than a nuisance) to allow my country's economy to be gutted by a unilateral effort that will not do any good on it's own, and, given that the world's other leading polluters will not match our effort, I cannot see such action as anything but a fool's errand.

For the record, yes, I'm an avid hunter. And, every time I see a poacher, it takes all my willpower not to put one in his head and bury him in the wide open emptiness. Hunting licenses are carefully controlled to the point of maintaining a healthy predator/prey ratio while also maintaining enough population for a healthy level of genetic diversity. Poachers willfully break this balance and should be dealt with accordingly.

Incidentally, I've noticed a few people mention the "Republican getting checks from the Big Evil Energy Company" cliché here, and just wanted to mention that most of us conservatives spend a great deal of time out in nature, hell, WE EAT THE MEAT FOR FUCKS SAKE! This cliché does not really have the room to run that some may think it does. Yes, there are bad apples, but they exist on both sides of that fence.

Also, as for the poor, poor polar bears which were mentioned earlier (I think, maybe I'm drunk and read it in an article elsewhere), their numbers are at the highest they've been since the 1950s (over 50,000), that's why they're dying. Predators require a minimum range to hunt, when their numbers reach a critical mass the weaker specimens are forced out into non-viable hunting grounds and die. It's called balance. Yes, the ice caps are smaller, yes, we could have supported more bears in the past, but, unfortunately, there are SIX BILLION people on this planet whom require basic living standards. Survival of the fittest, and we are the fittest. I don't apologize for this opinion, it is what it is.

As for the "Hole in the Ozone Layer", which was also mentioned earlier, well, since scientists discovered that it grows and shrinks a nearly identical amount every year, I haven't actually heard it mentioned very much in company with the "Environmental Apocalypse".


I will be seeding FOI2009.zip on Bit Torrent for the next few days and I encourage others to do the same.

lead by example?

anyway, the amount of black/white grandstanding on this topic, seems like a perfect example of what horizon may try to fuel in SR

If I believed that "leading by example" worked among nationstates I might be inclined to agree, but since I don't I call bullshit.

Shhh! The more you say stuff like that the more people want to move to those places and ruin them!

Agreed. The world is not a vacuum. Nor are others going to act against their own best interests. They leave that up to us. Then they reap the profits while our economy falters. We are no longer an industrialized country because of this type of BS, we now depend on the service industry. Hence the rising star of the SEIU.

For the record, I once put two SEIU goons in the hospital (using my knife) because they thought they could intimidate me into voting to unionize the place I worked (I had been sick for two weeks and was the swing vote.) They caught me outside my apartment. Both they and the other two with them ended up in the clink. One of my fonder memories. My employer did not unionize, I got a raise. Small justices are golden. I don't react well to intimidation or coercion.

Edit: Removed extremely heinous underlining.

Naw, I ain't too worried about that, the cityslickers all leave from the shock when they are hit with the reality of what having a low population density really means. And the few that are left leave after their first winter.

Tachi, please for the love of all that is holy, have mercy on my poor eyes and go easy on the underlining? Pretty please with sugar on top?

Yup, I changed it. First sentence will be the only one underlined. I hurt me too. I apologize to all those I may have inadvertently traumatized due to my ill conceived method of warning which posts are made while drunk. And, will forthwith cease and desist all such heinous tendencies.

Promise not to do it again. I will however fix the one above, mostly because it is easily accessible and I don't have to work much to get to it, as well as any I happen to run across, as I won't have to look for them. Yeah, I'm that lazy.

I think that is one of the most interesting aspects of this particular hack - watching the greenies close ranks and try to evaluate just how badly damaged they are, if at all. Just within the first 24 hours we walked the circle: denial, then acceptance, followed by the counter-attack. This data dump was damaging to the deep greens, not just in terms of political impact but in that it revealed a LOT about how the scientific insiders worked their magic to prevent peer review from doing it's intended job. esoteric stuff as far as the masses are concerned, but now a lot of people who are involved in the politics of this issue have some insight into how the greenies work behind the scenes, and in their own words to boot. that'll be hard to recover from, and it'll take time. In some ways, they may never recover.

All because a hacker (or maybe several hackers, we'll never know for sure) decided to let information be free.

Hoorah..

Freedom of Information is beautiful thing. Someone asked me today, can't remember who or where, would I prefer to know all and be bitter, or know nothing and be happy? Well, hell, I'm already bitter, I may as well know the truth.

I kinda saw this coming, it had to happen sooner or later. Even if their science did check out , the way they have been behaving should cause a stir, "redefining what a Peer Reviewed Journal is" to silence a dissenter is particularly heinous. And, for the record, I have a copy of this crap and have been reading it, I am NOT taking anything out of context.

that actually happened to Bjorn Lomborg - read up on some of the crap he's had to deal with since he turned apostate and started writing about the flaws in the deep green's approach to life, the universe and everything. All the guy did was tell the truth, and now he has to wear a bullet proof vest to teach class.

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. There are a large number of climatologists that were originally consulted for the first U.N. Global Warming reports whose opinion was completely disregarded. Now, many years later, they're still trying to get their names removed from the current reports coming out. Just because someone once asked them a few questions regarding climate change, their names are being used against their will to make the reports valid. Watch the documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle", or something like that, it's been a few years since I saw it but it's very enlightening.

To be fair, the people freaking out over the topic are just scared and behaving as much. It's not wrong to be scared, and it's not wrong to want to take the safe approach and preach for a cleaner world. It's just that fear is controlling them a little more than they realize, so they come off sounding almost as cracked as the staunch Republican types who freak out at the idea of having to spend money on anything, valid or not. Again, FOX News is a great example of that side of the fence.

Then you have the people who actually are reasonable on both sides of the discussion, but both sides point to the opposing nutjob factions and lump everyone who disagrees with them into that category. That's plain to see in this thread alone.

Dr. Funk, what I see is a whole bunch of third world countries gutting the US and laughing all the way. If they played by the EXACT same rules we play by then I would be all for this global warming crap. Since they don't, I don't give a damn about them.

Hey... I resemble that remark.

In truth, I'm all about logic, weigh the issues. Ignore the nuts. That doesn't mean I ignore a looming collapse of the U.S. economy. I seriously hope it doesn't happen... But, I'm not holding my breath. Be prepared. After all, I was an Eagle Scout, once.


Yup. Unilateral change creates nothing. And, yeah, they (the Third-World) are drooling, just waiting for their pound of flesh. Everyone hates the dog on top.

I don't give a damn about them either.

But I do give a damn about the air I'm currently breathing. And living in a major US city, that air sucks. Especially after having lived in a nice rural area for as long as I did prior to moving here. "Going Green" isn't just about improving the global climate.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/...,662092,00.html

I have nothing else to say.