If you don't want to hear strong obscenity, stop the video at 3:30.
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Friday, May 5, 2017
Minimum wage.
My cousin's kid is a single mother, makes $12 an hour working in a warehouse, and could no longer afford her apartment and had to move in with her mother.
The disparity of wealth in this country is pretty bad, and becomes really obvious when you have poor family living in a below average state.
The liberal argument is that putting more money in the hands of poor people would stimulate the economy, because they would spend it.
I am going to take a position slightly different than my normal libertarian conservative view.
My thinking that a gradual increase might be beneficial, such as a 25 or 50 cent increase per year. This would be useful even just as an experiment, to see if the negative consequences outweigh the beneficial ones.
I am looking at this from a moral perspective. If you ask someone to work for less than a living wage, which I have done, not only does this seem like slavery, but someone else has to supplement that person's living. It might be a family member, or food stamps (which Walmart suggested to their employees that they apply for), or low income housing. Somebody is paying the bill somewhere.
I see the opposite side of the argument. Pay people too much and they have no incentive to better themselves.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
Monckton's Mathematical Proof - Climate Sensitivity is Low
I don't pretend to understand the math, which he doesn't bother to explain, but if the math presented here is correct, then this could be one of the most significant findings of our lifetime.
Lord Monckton is a bit wordy, so I created the link above to start 27 minutes into the video where he gets to his main points.
This seems to give credence to my earlier observation that existing data suggests a relatively low climate sensitivity. Other people have noted that predictions of large climate sensitivity are not supported by the observations.
Lord Monckton sees the climate debate as a struggle between freedom and those who oppose it, and he sees this as a conspiracy. Although I am also concerned about how climate alarmism will impact our freedom, it really should be a separate issue from the climate science, because it could bias how we view this. However, it is possible that the alarmists are also biased.
I also watched some other videos by climate alarmists who noted that if we don't act we will face dire consequences. These same videos further claimed that the reason we don't act is that the threat is not very visible to us. It is not the same as seeing a tiger coming at you, but these videos claim that the threat is real nevertheless.
If the alarmists are correct, then I certainly want to know that. I tried to find a refutation to Monckton's recent claims above, but I think that it is too soon. I hope that the science community takes this seriously and either refutes Monckton's math or confirms it. The consequences to us either way are quite significant, and we need good sound science in to determine the correct course of action.
There are a couple of other factors that I have commented on before, but are almost never mentioned by anybody else. The first is that nuclear fusion as a power source will very likely happen in our lifetime, which in my opinion will make the entire argument mute. The second is that a technique called iron fertilization would allow us to remove as much CO2 from the atmosphere as we want.
In other words, if you argue that the Earth has a low climate sensitivity to CO2, you are also arguing for a low climate sensitivity to other influences such as solar irradiance, orbital changes, and volcanic emissions. In fact, as shown in Figure 1, the climate is less sensitive to changes in solar activity than greenhouse gases. Thus when arguing for low climate sensitivity, it becomes difficult to explain past climate changes. For example, between glacial and interglacial periods, the planet's average temperature changes on the order of 6°C (more like 8-10°C in the Antarctic). If the climate sensitivity is low, for example due to increasing low-lying cloud cover reflecting more sunlight as a response to global warming, then how can these large past climate changes be explained?
https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced.htm
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered
Final climate sensitivity
Substituting in Eqn. (1) the revised values derived for the three factors in ΔTλ, our re-evaluated central estimate of climate sensitivity is their product –
ΔTλ= ΔF2x κ f ≈ 1.135 x 0.242 x 2.095 ≈ 0.58 °K (30)
Theoretically, empirically, and in the literature that we have extensively cited, each of the values we have chosen as our central estimate is arguably more justifiable – and is certainly no less justifiable – than the substantially higher value selected by the IPCC. Accordingly, it is very likely that in response to a doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration TS will rise not by the 3.26 °K suggested by the IPCC, but by <1 °K.
Discussion
We have set out and then critically examined a detailed account of the IPCC's method of evaluating climate sensitivity. We have made explicit the identities, interrelations, and values of the key variables, many of which the IPCC does not explicitly describe or quantify. The IPCC's method does not provide a secure basis for policy-relevant conclusions. We now summarize some of its defects.
The IPCC's methodology relies unduly – indeed, almost exclusively – upon numerical analysis, even where the outputs of the models upon which it so heavily relies are manifestly and significantly at variance with theory or observation or both. Modeled projections such as those upon which the IPCC's entire case rests have long been proven impossible when applied to mathematically-chaotic objects, such as the climate, whose initial state can never be determined to a sufficient precision. For a similar reason, those of the IPCC's conclusions that are founded on probability distributions in the chaotic climate object are unsafe.
Not one of the key variables necessary to any reliable evaluation of climate sensitivity can be measured empirically. The IPCC's presentation of its principal conclusions as though they were near-certain is accordingly unjustifiable. We cannot even measure mean global surface temperature anomalies to within a factor of 2; and the IPCC's reliance upon mean global temperatures, even if they could be correctly evaluated, itself introduces substantial errors in its evaluation of climate sensitivity.
The IPCC overstates the radiative forcing caused by increased CO2 concentration at least threefold because the models upon which it relies have been programmed fundamentally to misunderstand the difference between tropical and extra-tropical climates, and to apply global averages that lead to error.
The IPCC overstates the value of the base climate sensitivity parameter for a similar reason. Indeed, its methodology would in effect repeal the fundamental equation of radiative transfer (Eqn. 18), yielding the impossible result that at every level of the atmosphere ever-smaller forcings would induce ever-greater temperature increases, even in the absence of any temperature feedbacks.
The IPCC overstates temperature feedbacks to such an extent that the sum of the high-end values that it has now, for the first time, quantified would cross the instability threshold in the Bode feedback equation and induce a runaway greenhouse effect that has not occurred even in geological times despite CO2 concentrations almost 20 times today's, and temperatures up to 7 ºC higher than today's.
The Bode equation, furthermore, is of questionable utility because it was not designed to model feedbacks in non-linear objects such as the climate. The IPCC's quantification of temperature feedbacks is, accordingly, inherently unreliable. It may even be that, as Lindzen (2001) and Spencer (2007) have argued, feedbacks are net-negative, though a more cautious assumption has been made in this paper.
It is of no little significance that the IPCC's value for the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation depends on only one paper in the literature; that its values for the feedbacks that it believes account for two-thirds of humankind's effect on global temperatures are likewise taken from only one paper; and that its implicit value of the crucial parameter κ depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for a value as high as that which the IPCC adopted.
The IPCC has not drawn on thousands of published, peer-reviewed papers to support its central estimates for the variables from which climate sensitivity is calculated, but on a handful.
On this brief analysis, it seems that no great reliance can be placed upon the IPCC's central estimates of climate sensitivity, still less on its high-end estimates. The IPCC's assessments, in their current state, cannot be said to be "policy-relevant". They provide no justification for taking the very costly and drastic actions advocated in some circles to mitigate "global warming", which Eqn. (30) suggests will be small (<1 °C at CO2 doubling), harmless, and beneficial.
Conclusion
Even if temperature had risen above natural variability, the recent solar Grand Maximum may have been chiefly responsible. Even if the sun were not chiefly to blame for the past half-century's warming, the IPCC has not demonstrated that, since CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth part more of the atmosphere that it did in 1750, it has contributed more than a small fraction of the warming. Even if carbon dioxide were chiefly responsible for the warming that ceased in 1998 and may not resume until 2015, the distinctive, projected fingerprint of anthropogenic "greenhouse-gas" warming is entirely absent from the observed record. Even if the fingerprint were present, computer models are long proven to be inherently incapable of providing projections of the future state of the climate that are sound enough for policymaking. Even if per impossibile the models could ever become reliable, the present paper demonstrates that it is not at all likely that the world will warm as much as the IPCC imagines. Even if the world were to warm that much, the overwhelming majority of the scientific, peer-reviewed literature does not predict that catastrophe would ensue. Even if catastrophe might ensue, even the most drastic proposals to mitigate future climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide would make very little difference to the climate. Even if mitigation were likely to be effective, it would do more harm than good: already millions face starvation as the dash for biofuels takes agricultural land out of essential food production: a warning that taking precautions, "just in case", can do untold harm unless there is a sound, scientific basis for them. Finally, even if mitigation might do more good than harm, adaptation as (and if) necessary would be far more cost-effective and less likely to be harmful.
In short, we must get the science right, or we shall get the policy wrong.
https://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm
Monday, April 24, 2017
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Friday, March 31, 2017
The Winner of the Google Doodle contest
Who can complain about a politically correct drawing? Well, I can.
First of all, it seems derivative of the bumper sticker that I had on my old car.
Second, it feels like I am being preached to. Condescended to. Like it is telling me that I don't accept people different than me, and that I need to be more accepting, and they are going to tell me who I need to be accepting of.
In the picture, you have the Muslim hugging the Jew. Nice idea. Possible, but not likely. I wish that it could be true. The purpose of the bumper sticker on my car was not to say that we should all be friends, which in today's world might not be realistic, but to say that we should live in peace and not kill each other.
On a one on one basis, I can be friends with just about anybody. But from my perspective, there are groups who would like nothing better than to kill us all, and I am in no hurry to cozy up to these people.
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Not a bad finish.
I lost to two higher rated players, including a master, but I beat higher rated SpeedyChess11 in a wild last round game.
Earlier in the tournament I blundered against two lower rated players, but came back to win both games. I hadn't done much tactics so far this week, so I needed to get warmed up.
[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2017.03.29"]
[Round "?"]
[White "john2001plus"]
[Black "SpeedyChess11"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "D94"]
[WhiteElo "1754"]
[BlackElo "1851"]
[Annotator "Coffey,John"]
[PlyCount "101"]
[EventDate "2017.??.??"]
[TimeControl "180+2"]
1. Nf3 Nf6 2. d4 d5 3. c4 c6 4. e3 g6 5. Nc3 Bg7 6. Bd3 O-O 7. O-O Re8 8. Ne5
dxc4 9. Bxc4 Nd5 10. e4 Bxe5 11. exd5 Bg7 12. Be3 cxd5 13. Bxd5 Nc6 14. Qb3 e6
15. Bxc6 bxc6 16. Qa4 Qc7 17. Rac1 Qb6 18. d5 Qxb2 19. Qxc6 Ba6 20. Qxa6 Bxc3
21. Rb1 Qc2 22. d6 Bf6 23. Rfc1 Qe4 24. d7 Rf8 25. Rb7 Bd4 26. Rc8 Raxc8 27.
dxc8=Q Rxc8 28. Rb4 Rd8 29. Bxd4 Rxd4 30. Qc8+ Kg7 31. Qc3 Qb1+ 32. Rxb1 e5 33.
f4 f6 34. fxe5 fxe5 35. Rb7+ Kf6 36. Qf3+ Ke6 37. Qc6+ Kf5 38. Rf7+ Kg5 39. h4+
Kxh4 40. Rxh7+ Kg5 41. Qf3 Rf4 42. Qg3+ Kf6 43. Qb3 Rd4 44. Qf7+ Kg5 45. Rg7
Rd6 46. Qe7+ Rf6 47. Rf7 Kh5 48. Qxf6 e4 49. Rh7+ Kg4 50. Rh4+ Kg3 51. Qf4# 1-0
Saturday, March 4, 2017
Average Household Income.
If we compare average household income between Indiana and Utah, Indiana is below the national average and Utah is above it. There is a big difference between the two. However, if we look at income per capita, Utah is barely below Indiana. This implies that the average family size is bigger in Utah, which I am sure that it is.
Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Trump a liar?
Norm, from Utah, said I look foolish in my Trump support because of the constant stream of lies from Trump. My response to this was ...
"The political sphere has on both has sides different opinions, different interpretations, different spin, and often different misconceptions. Obama said many things I disagreed with, and many things I thought were either spin or inaccurate, but I didn't go around calling him a liar, because I just thought that he had a different opinion than I did. (I actually thought that Obama was a nice, intelligent man, whom I disagreed with.) Republicans view Democrats as misguided, but Democrats either view, or try to portray Republicans as EVIL. That is because Democrats engage in a policy of personal destruction. (I think that this is because it is hard to rationalize excessive government.) Many Republicans still harbor a grudge over the way Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas were treated. What I am seeing now is a daily relentless attack on Trump trying make everything he says or does or anyone associated with him a national crisis. You have tried to claim the moral high ground by saying that you have the better facts, but even if true, which I am not sure about, much of it seems to me like nitpicking given all the crap that goes on in Washington, and it doesn't make your political philosophy better. I think that we are in better hands under Trump, although I say that with the caveat that I think that Trump has inherited a dangerous world and a country way too deep in debt, so I can't guarantee that things are going to be all roses and sunshine. Best wishes, John Coffey"
The facts matter. Trump is proposing policy based on a lie namely that murder rates are at their highest level in 45 years, I hear you saying that's okay because he's picked on. You don't even acknowledge that he misspoke and still hasn't corrected the record. I've noticed that you never call him out on his lies.
"So Trump got one fact wrong. This is the first I have heard about it. But almost everybody has called him out on it, so I assume that he is aware of it. 'One possibility is Trump, back in October, was trying to say that murder in 2015 saw its highest increase in 45 years, which he also said at the second presidential debate. As PolitiFact found, this is mostly accurate: The number of murders rose by 10.8 percent from 2014 to 2015, the highest since an 11.1 percent spike from 1970 to 1971.' http://www.vox.com/2016/10/12/13255466/trump-murder-rate http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/27/donald-trump-right-crime-increased-significantly-2015/ Honest I think that he misspoke, as many politicians on both sides have done recently, but to call him a liar, a serial liar no less, is your spin, not mine. I wouldn't have done the same thing to Obama. It is not my nature to do so, but I might be a little too trusting. Best wishes, John"
Sunday, January 29, 2017
ACLU 1 | Trump 0
In response to:
ACLU 1 | Trump 0
I wrote:
I don't want to stir the pot more than I already have, but I feel compelled to say something: American people: 0. This reminds me about the pre-911 debate about racial profiling. That pretty much went out the window after 9-11. Do we need another 9-11 to make people worried about terrorism again? I say NEVER FORGET. What happens when somebody sets off a nuke on American soil? It will make this whole debate look pretty silly. Every September 11th I watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1gpJyFHETw&t=46s (I'll shut up now. People are entitiled to their opinion. I understand people's desire to be compassionate and I completely sympathize. I just think that the world is an extremely dangerious place right now.)
Sunday, December 18, 2016
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