[lug] Anyone else hate to get rid of old equipment?

[Davide Del Vento]

>> Let's start with the past and present status.
>> There is overwhelming evidence in thousand of publications.  You can
>> even download CCSM, study its code and do your own simulation and see
>> by yourself.
>
> Can you give me a link to something you think is credible (and preferably without an opposing
> conclusion drawn from the same data)?  I'd prefer measured data, not models.

A good starting point is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record

>> The ball does indeed fall, according to any gravity theory. This is a fact and who doesn't
>> "believe" it is "Flat-Earth-er"
>
> So I can make a calculation that tells me how long the ball will fall and then measure that my
> calculation was reasonably accurate.  Can we do that at all with the climate change data?  Maybe not
> because there's a fundamental difference but perhaps you need a better analogy in that case.

Absolutely, you are right, the analogy works up to a point. You can
raise the ball to the same level it was yesterday, change something in
the room (temperature, pressure) or put a sticker on the ball surface
and let it fall over and over again. You cannot put the climate at the
level it was last century, change something (did that volcano erupt?)
and redo the experiment. Moreover, lot of statistics is required for
climate study, whereas not so much is required for gravity (at least
for the Newton theory).
There might be better analogies, but I chose the gravity because it's
well known. I mentioned also the "gambling", which is probably
better...

> How do we know how accurate the models are?

That's a good question. There are different techniques, the one that I
like the most from a computer science point of view is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_stability which is done only up
to a point for some practical reasons.

They do "validation runs"
http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/working_groups/Software/dev_guide/dev_guide/node14.html
which check that model results are in  agreement with observed
characteristics of the real climate system. Much more complex than
what I said (and what they write in the page I linked), but you get
the idea, and can do your homework if interested.

>> The third point is the most important, and the only one we should argue about. Human presence
>> change the environment, period. [...] The point of the discussion is what we agree is ok to
>> "kill" or "destroy", and what is not.
>
> Which has nothing to do with science except that people try to use it to label certain behaviors as
> killing.

I was using it in a merely biological sense, related to the issue of
our own (human) nourishment and livelihood. No pun intended.

>> Of course a big, huge part of that is that there are too many people on the Earth, and counting!
> How sad.  "How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers."

Very nice sentence, very poetic. And from a poetic/religious point of
view I agree. But imagine the land on the Earth completely covered by
flowers, and with a kid per square foot. That's absolutely too many
kids and too many flowers, isn't it? We'll never get there, of course,
because "too many" will be much early than that.
Each person on the Earth needs a large amount of land for living,
transportation, water supply, crops to feed the person, crops to feed
the animals that the person will eat, growing flowers, drilling the
oil/gas/coal/metals/rocks the person needs to keep the house warm,
have the needed stuff built, and possibly some land should be left
untouched for wildlife and for recreational purposes, at least in
Antarctic shouldn't it?
So, there is a limit over which there are "too many kids and/or
flowers", and we might be close to that level. Is it sad? I don't
think so, I think the planet we have is big enough, if we use it
wisely. Note that I didn't write "let it completely untouched in the
status it was before humans started civilization", but I neither wrote
"we don't need to worry it will adjust fine by itself".
I might be wrong, but I personally think that the biggest problem we
have (and this OT thread confirms my idea) is that these two sides
speak different languages and don't understand that we need a middle
ground to be sure that our grandchildren will have a fine planet to
live in (note that I wrote "fine" and not "the same as our
grandparents"). Saying that we don't have any problem and that we'll
do everything we economically can, to me sounds as unreasonable as
saying that we must leave everything untouched.

Regards,
;Dav