Thanks for posting that information.

With the plumb reaching 10 to 15 and possibly 20km it will be interesting to see how much total SO2 is released.

I’m afraid I’m a bit of a pedant too. The mistake I spotted earlier was the use of the word factoid to describe a small fact. The dictionary definition of factoid is: -n. an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact; a simulated or imagined fact.

A better word might be factette. (-ette. suffix meaning small, ie kitchenette, cigarette.)

I, too, am sorry; but I, also, cannot help it!!!

http://volcanism.wordpress.com/

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=38985

“MadCap & Tirade”

Is that covered in the Taxman/Malarkey bill?

Of course, since they never actually intended to do the thing they are being paid not to do, this scheme is quite literally Money for Nothin”

I am glad you agree “money for nothing” is a scam
Sham = fake = scam

“I think Brook needs therapy. There’s a bigger issue going on here. Does he feel guilty for his existence? Does he have OCD?”

I kind of felt some concern for Brook after reading his article (though at the same time I couldn’t help but chuckle), but at the same time I was kind of joking around, too. No one’s prompted me to do this, but I apologize for saying the above, in all seriousness. People’s foibles are their own and I shouldn’t joke about them. I think I was expressing my frustration at the realization that people like Brook who have an obsessiveness and shame about what we emit have as much influence as they do over our lives.

Changing the subject some, I’ve had this sneaking suspicion that one reason why we’ve seen what we’ve seen with AGW proponents is the dominant role that mathematics has played in the institutional study of climate influences, over science. I’ve been doing a little reading about mathematics, and the profile seems to fit. It seems the whole idea is to make an assumption and then make a deduction from it. This is seen as absolute truth. In the realm of mathematics this is perfectly fine, because it’s okay to deal with abstractions that have no basis in reality. I heard a prominent man in my field of study, Alan Kay, say once, “Mathematics without science is dangerous.” I don’t remember him elaborating on this, but I think he was referring to this quality of mathematics, and that people can become convinced they are discovering truth in the real world through mathematics alone. After all Galileo said that the universe is written in the language of mathematics, right? If people in the field try to draw wisdom and justification from this they are misinterpreting what he said. It’s been written in the language of mathematics by us, but the universe is not mathematical in the purest sense. Mathematics just happens to have been the best tool we’ve found to explain what we see (though in some quarters this idea is being challenged by my field of study, computing). This is what science informs us about.

A while back I read “The Art of Mathematics” by Jerry King (a good book), and in there he talks about how mathematicians tend to have an air of intellectual superiority about them, that only they and their colleagues can understand what they are doing. Everyone else is not mentally equipped for it (that’s the assumption). We’ve heard this from the AGW proponents, haven’t we?

I can’t say this arrogance is universal. I had the thought that another area where mathematics has intruded on science is string theory in physics, and I have not heard the same complaints in that field as I’ve heard (and I’ve had) about AGW alarmists in climatology. Perhaps the only reason for this is the funding differential…

My understanding is that string theory came about when a student happened to compare a mathematical theorem for the motion of a spring to a physics formula for the motion of a particle, and they seemed kind of similar. This student and others opened up a whole new realm of theoretical physics by doing some combining and recombining of the math and physics formulas to come to some conclusions. The physics field was initially very skeptical of this approach (rightly so), but there’s been some acceptance of this theory as time has passed, with as yet no empirical evidence. Its proponents say it just seems to help explain some phenomena that were unexplainable before. It doesn’t seem that physics has lost its head with this stuff though.

I understand the political aspect of AGW, and that there are those who want to control and restrict freedom, destroy capitalism, and destroy manufacturing, but I’m sure there are many in this area of work who don’t have those sorts of desires, but are mistakenly convinced that by their use of mathematics they can arrive at scientific truths.

In any case Bush was faced with something the senate had rejected hands down; would have been political suicide to push Kyoto on the American people; and the subsequent history has borne that out.

I just file this stuff away in my head so sometimes I recall it incorrectly.

George

A bit of an exaggeration — it’s only like 400 average U.S. households!”

which comes to about 1500 people. Average desktop PC consumes 400 watts, divided into 1.2MW means 3000 desktops. Does this supercomputer equal the processing power of 3000 CPUs?

“When it is finally completed, around 2011 the Met Office machine will be the second most powerful machine in Britain with a total peak performance approaching 1 PetaFlop — equivalent to over 100,000 PCs and over 30 times more powerful than what is in place today.”

What is a petaflop in re PC capacity?
http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=Roadrunner&i=59167,00.asp

“The first supercomputer to reach one petaFLOPS (one quadrillion floating point operations per second). Running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Roadrunner comprises 12,960 Cell chips, 6,948 dual-core AMD chips and 80 terabytes of memory. Developed by IBM for Los Alamos National Labs and achieving its record performance in 2008, Roadrunner weighs in at 250 tons, much larger than the behemoth computers of the 1950s. It takes up an area approximately 100 by 120 feet. Although Roadrunner soaks up nearly four megawatts of power, its performance is that of 100,000 fast laptop computers and is actually more energy efficient than many of its peers.”

A PC is not a “fast laptop computer”. PC computers are generally significantly more powerful than laptops.

I suppose that “climate change” is now code for AGW caused climate change. Is there anyone who reads this blog that ever doubted that climate is always in a state change? Of course not!

This use of strawmen puts put everyone who disputes AGW into the category of raving fringe minority of attention seekers and professional refuters funded by the oil companies. The AGWers do this rather well. If only they could come up with some research to support their dogma.

The policy advocacy-science conflict of which this example and its corruption of science is analyzed in an excellent speech/essay, “Aliens cause global warming,” by Michael Crichton, 2003 speech at Cal Tech:

http://michaelcrichton.net/speeches.html

Crichton’s website is a wellspring of wonderfully crafted prose. Enjoy.

Typo’s are never a good first post so feel free to snip.

Nor should “Typo’s” (sic) have an apostrophe. The correct pluralization is “Typos.” An apostrophe is used for possession, e.g., “Anthony’s typos should be corrected,” or a contraction (it is), e.g., “Anthony’s the one that should correct the typos, not me!”

Sorry to be a punctuation Nazi, but I cannot help it!

Mark

Then there’s the new “Deep Black” supercomputer being installed by the UK Met Office that will use 1.2 megawatts of power to run climate models.

When larger desktop machines are equipped with 600 W power supplies, you can’t really be surprised at 1.2 MW supercomputers.

That’s enough to power a small city

A bit of an exaggeration — it’s only like 400 average U.S. households!

PaulH (09:50:30) :

How about funding based inversely on the size of your “footprint”. I suspect that would spur a new industry to develop computer models that would produce tinier and tinier outputs.

I thought the prevailing wisdom here was all about more observation and less reliance on blind modeling. ;)