[RD] Daily Graphs and Charts

[luiz]

You missed the point. One flaw in a report doesn't invalidate the whole theory that took decades of independent lines of research to validate. We already have a GW thread if you want to take it there.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=452333

I didn't say it did?

All I said was sometimes scientists have made plainly wrong assertions, and that those assertions have made their way even to the IPCC report (meaning the much less rigorous media reproduced many more nonsensical predictions). Make of that what you will.

 

[Winner]

What you talking about? The only facts you can discern from a poll are the statistics it represents.

I am talking about the complete and utter uselessness of such polls (not just this one in particular). An average person that's being asked has nowhere NEAR the amount of knowledge to answer anything related to the issues of climate change.

There are decades of research into climate change. The fundies are the ones who think it's all a hoax without any supporting evidence.

There are fundies on both sides. I walk the middle line, and especially lately I tend towards the "agnostic" position. There clearly is climate change going on, but that's about the only thing that I accept as a certainty. The causes of it are a different matter entirely.

Amen to that. This is what annoys a lot of "skeptics"; the certainty some scientists place in their predictive models.

Actually, most scientists refuse to say things with certainty. It's the journalists and the politicians who constantly pressure them into making definitive statements concerning the causes of the climate change, the human impact, future trends, etc.

My personal position - it's too early to say anything with certainty. I don't oppose measures to reduce CO2 emissions because they in general lead to improved efficiency and environmental standards, but I refuse to treat global warming as some kind of a religion that a certain part of the environmentalist movement turned it into.

Because then it leads to insanity such as this: Germany’s Sunshine Daydream (read the article, it's short and interesting). Of course, we in Czechia emulated the German approach, as a result of which our landscape is littered with solar panel farms and our electricity is 50% more expensive. Great.

 

[luiz]

I agree entirely with your approach, Winner. I think AGW is real (the "A" means I believe men are primarily behind it), but it's true extent and future behavior are much more difficult to assess than most people believe. I am also not convinced that the consequences of moderate warming would be catastrophic.

Does that mean we should do nothing? Of course not; by all means lets work on better climate models (the present ones are quite poor) and take precautionary steps (as long as they are not economically crippling). But - and this is a BIG but - there are far more pressing problems facing the world than GW, including environmental problems. I don't understand why some people have turned GW, as you aptly put it, in some sort of religion, as if that was the most important thing going on Earth.

 

[Leoreth]

Because then it leads to insanity such as this: Germany’s Sunshine Daydream (read the article, it's short and interesting). Of course, we in Czechia emulated the German approach, as a result of which our landscape is littered with solar panel farms and our electricity is 50% more expensive. Great.

Good to see this is getting attention in international press. The opposition of course is still trying to frame this as an act of lobbyism in spite of the bad plain numbers. Especially the "green jobs" argument drives me mad every time I hear it.

 

[Ayatollah So]

Benkler and Shaw write:


"Based on qualitative coding of the top 155 political blogs, our results reveal significant cross-ideological variations along several important dimensions. Notably, we find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation across political blogs. Sites on the left adopt more participatory technical platforms; are comprised of significantly fewer sole-authored sites; include user blogs; maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content; include longer narrative and discussion posts; and (among the top half of the blogs in our sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization as well as discursive production."

 

[Tycho Brahe]

Good to see this is getting attention in international press. The opposition of course is still trying to frame this as an act of lobbyism in spite of the bad plain numbers. Especially the "green jobs" argument drives me mad every time I hear it.

...

Because then it leads to insanity such as this: Germany’s Sunshine Daydream (read the article, it's short and interesting). Of course, we in Czechia emulated the German approach, as a result of which our landscape is littered with solar panel farms and our electricity is 50% more expensive. Great.

Oh no! Not Bjørn Lomborg. He's a complete waiste of time.

He's as one sided and manipulative as he accuses the green lobby of beeing. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Besides, cheap energy based on non-renewable energy resources is only cheap because the costs of pollution is going to be paid by our grandchildren. With interests. Energy should cost something, so there's an incentive to use energy more efficient. The notion that growth and progress is based on cheap energy is false.

 

[Winner]

Oh no! Not Bjørn Lomborg. He's a complete waiste of time.

He's as one sided and manipulative as he accuses the green lobby of beeing. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

I don't care, he's completely correct about the solar photovoltaic boom and its insane nature. In this country alone, it has costed us a lot of money, and it's we the taxpayers who will now pay much higher prices for electricity for decades. And of course, it's various investment groups who took advantage of the outrageous subsidies who will reap the benefits. Nobody knows who will pay for the ecological removal of all these solar panels when they reach their expiration date, probably the taxpayers as well.

So, screw it. Central Europe is no place for large scale photovoltaics. I don't mind it if people do it on small scale where expedient, but marketing it as a viable and affordable alternative energy source is pure madness. We could have had a new nuclear power plant or two for the money we wasted on this boondoggle and be better off for it - we could then actually make money by selling our excess power capacity to the Germans, who have recently decided to commit economic suicide by phasing of nuclear power entirely (Italy did the same thing, and look how great its economy is ).

/rant

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

"FIG. 1: Food prices and model simulations - The FAO Food Price Index (blue solid line) [2], the ethanol supply and demand model (blue dashed line), where dominant supply shocks are due to the conversion of corn to ethanol so that price changes are proportional to ethanol production (see [1], Appendix C) and the results of the speculator and ethanol model (green and red dotted lines), that adds speculator trend following and switching among investment markets, including commodities, equities and bonds (see [1], Appendices D and E). The green curve is the fit extended to the present with the original parameter values, the red curve is the fit with new optimized parameters. The vertical blue bar marks the end of the original fit in March 2011."

 

[Leoreth]

I grew up surrounded by those non-existant green jobs...

I never said they don't exist. I'm saying marketing photovoltaic jobs as a net gain is pure Broken Window Fallacy, since they're purely subsidy-sustained, and very inefficiently so. And the subsidies don't even come from taxes where you could at least claim a beneficial redistribution effect, but from the energy costs of average people without any social compensation whatsoever.

And that comes from someone who grew up in rainy/cloudy northern Germany where rich landowners are making a fortune by installing solar panels that are subsidized by their lower-earning neighbors.

Don't get me wrong here: I'm not saying that green energy needs to make money to be worth subsidies. Subsidies are useful tools to encourage the development of viable technology so it's market ready when it's really necessary. My problem here is:

1) It's not advertised as such, but rather as the new Wirtschaftswunder
2) Given the opportunity costs, it's still sunk money because photovoltaic is not viable in Germany and EEG money is not supposed to be used to set up a(nother) new export industry anyways

 

[Cutlass]

Subsidies =/= broken window fallacy.

 

[Leoreth]

I was not referring to subsidies in general, but to a) using jobs created by them as their only selling point and b) disregarding the opportunity costs you have compared not to abolishing the subsidies, but to directing them to more worthwhile sectors.

The latter comes quite close to the logic behind the broken window fallacy.

 

[Winner]

Mass in low Earth orbit of Mars missions that have been proposed. For comparison, the ISS 'weighs' about 450 tonnes.

Note that this doesn't say much about how realistic some of these proposals are (the VASIMR mission is a pure fantasy - with existing or near term technology it would probably weigh a hundred times more). The NASA DRM4 (design reference mission) is probably the most realistic and a good compromise between safety and capability. Mars Direct is probably possible, but the risk involved is considerably higher.

 

[Cutlass]

I was not referring to subsidies in general, but to a) using jobs created by them as their only selling point and b) disregarding the opportunity costs you have compared not to abolishing the subsidies, but to directing them to more worthwhile sectors.

The latter comes quite close to the logic behind the broken window fallacy.

Well, that's a more complicated way too look at it. The problem of subsidizing one alternative at the expense of another still isn't a broken window. Broken window is the destruction of something for the purpose of forcing a replacement of it. Subsidizing choices doesn't really do that. Though opportunity costs should be factored, but unpriced externalities should also be factored. Essentially solar is reducing the externalities of fossil fuels. But those externalities are not captured with the price mechanism, exact costs have to be estimated. It also factors for imports in that Germany is importing its gas and oil, but not its sunlight. So the equation certainly isn't an easy one.

 

[Monsterzuma]

http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/energy-prices-two-trends-2-graphs/

 

[Ayatollah So]

On the graph below, each point (the X- and Y-coordinates thereof) represents the performance of one teacher in two classes, the same subject matter, taught in the same calendar year. Performance measures are year-over-year improvement in student test scores. Apparently in percentiles measured against all teachers of the subject.

Source. I find the low correlation impressive.

 

[Mise]

So if I understand that correctly, the same teacher can score really well when teaching grade 4, but really badly when teaching grade 5? Or rather, how well a teacher teaches at one grade has no relation to how well the teacher teaches another grade?

That seems counterintuitive. I'm assume the article is using the graph to suggest that the metric of performance is flawed.

 

[Murky]

 

[Leoreth]

Will Castro beat them in his lifetime?

I'm surprised at the rather high approval rates of the IRS.

 

[Bamspeedy]

I'm surprised at the rather high approval rates of the IRS.

I'm not surprised when looking at how many don't pay any income taxes.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/28/46-percent-of-americans-e_n_886293.html

 

[Traitorfish]

I'm not surprised when looking at how many don't pay any income taxes.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/28/46-percent-of-americans-e_n_886293.html

I'm afraid I don't really see the connection between not paying federal income tax and having a positive view of the IRS. Not having a pronouncedly negative view, maybe, but that's not what was being measured.