Someone cast Wolven Winter on New Orleans!

[Tichy]

Thank you for all of the assumptions, and the cuss words. Object lessons taste like butterscotch.

I was taking issue with your method of arguing with Edi. The fact that that produced an death-rattle of insults and assumptions about my biases from you confirms my impression of your methods. When in doubt, yell louder and call names. The thing is, you sound like an angry ideologue, whereas Max, who I disagree with, actually sounds like he's trying to engage the issue.

Did you miss the fact that I *stopped* responding to the thread because I was afraid that I was arguing from bias, and didn't have time to "do my damn homework" as you so quaintly put it?

I responded now, because something came up that I *do* know something about -- reasoning and rhetoric -- and you kindly backed me up on it by responding with such delicious fervor to my critique.

[Edi]

Originally Posted by licker

Or perhaps he's not out of his depth as you admit to being.

Impertinent?

*chuckle*

Well when I have the time I will be happy to address his misconceptions, but as I said, I don't have the time right now to do it in detail, and so I'm not going to bother as I'm going to be away for 2 weeks anyway.

I look forward to seeing the reply in two weeks then.

Originally Posted by licker

Look at the other news I've posted about glaciers gaining mass and issues with the modeling of the famous hockey stick.

You posted these where? I just went through the entire thread and these links you suuposedly posted were nowhere to be found. MaxWilson may have posted them, but if he did, don't claim credit for somebody else's posts.

If you really have any articles that can point to solid evidence of glacial mass increase in the past ten years, I would like to see it. Globally glaciers have been shrinking for the past 30 years.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Tichy

When in doubt, yell louder and call names. The thing is, you sound like an angry ideologue, whereas Max, who I disagree with, actually sounds like he's trying to engage the issue.

Yeah, well. Maybe we won't always disagree. Edi's response has given me some new directions to take my homework. (I realized that I need to be as critical of my own skepticism as I wish AGW advocates would be of their theories, which probably means asking my so-called "hard questions" on realclimate.org forums instead of just wishing that AGW advocates would magically address them on their own--maybe the questions *are* well-known and well-answered.) I may be wrong, I frequently am, and when I am I like to think I can change my mind.

-Max

P.S. Obviously what I'll really be hoping for is that someone on realclimate.org will say, "Oh yeah, that's called XYZZY in the literature. A good starting place is FredBob's 2001 paper on it." That's infinitely better than someone's ad hoc response on a forum, but at the same time it's unfair to expect AGW advocates outside the field itself to be able to point out papers like that.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Edi

You posted these where? I just went through the entire thread and these links you suuposedly posted were nowhere to be found. MaxWilson may have posted them, but if he did, don't claim credit for somebody else's posts.

If you really have any articles that can point to solid evidence of glacial mass increase in the past ten years, I would like to see it. Globally glaciers have been shrinking for the past 30 years.

Post #255. I quoted it in my post #256, but I didn't originate the links.

-Max

[licker]

Globally glaciers have been shrinking for the past 200 years...

http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm

Sorry for that link, I cannot vouch for it's authenticity as I haven't looked at it, but it seems to link to quite a few studies which you may find interesting.

And again, stop insulting me. Look at post #255.

Tichy-

Seriously this isn't some debate camp, its a freaking internet forum. And what cuss words did I use anyway? Or assumptions?

For what it's worth I'm not even arguing with Edi, though some people here seem to think that any kind of disagreement or posing of questions must be an argument. Honestly, the tone I respond in is the tone I receive, and I have been nothing other than polite towards Edi as that is the same tone he uses (mostly...).

But now I really must be going, my ride called 5 minutes ago telling me his is running 5 minutes late...

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by licker

But now I really must be going, my ride called 5 minutes ago telling me his is running 5 minutes late...

Have a nice trip. I hope your weather is nicer than ours in Washington--my building at work is like a ghost town because of snow on the roads and there's a five-city-bus-pileup on the corner. (Apparently a new one would come along its route every few minutes and be unable to avoid the ones that were already there.)

Let's hear it for local cooling.

-Max

[Tichy]

Ok, I'm sorry if my annoyance with licker may have derailed the discussion...and I'll admit to taking some pleasure in prodding him once I realized it produced such entertaining responses.

But, licker, are you saying that no one involved in a discussion on an internet forum should be held to minimal standards of reasoning, or be called out when he or she violates them? If so, that's great, but no one needs to take anything you say on this forum seriously after that.

One thing that I like about the Dom3 forum is that this game seems to select for smart people who like to argue about things.

But debating and arguing are different. Debate is about trying to defeat your opponent; it's basically a sport. An argument is an attempt to show that an opinion is correct, with the expectation that others will carefully look at the reasons you offer for your opinion, and cry foul when it appears you are appealing to debaters' tricks instead of offering reasons in good faith.

I apologize if you thought I was using "argument" in the colloquial sense of an angry exchange.

Oh, and, enjoy your trip!

[JimMorrison]

Originally Posted by licker

Jim-

Do you think the tipping point has not been reached yet? What do you think the tipping point is?

I've never disagreed that taking preventative and mitigative actions are a bad thing, but I'm curious to hear about what you think can be done (not should be done, CAN be done) on a global level, and how one determines the tipping point.

Clearly many proposed actions are nonstarters for the developing world.

I do believe that we've been teetering close to it for some time now. As advanced as our science is, however, we can only estimate oil reserves in various regions, we can never gauge them. Sometimes they run low faster than we expected, sometimes they last longer than we expected, sometimes we drill and get nothing, and sometimes oil spurts up in someone's yard.

Honestly, I think that at a certain point, we can no longer look at the "world supply" as a whole entity with any sort of global responsibility. The problem that we are having now, and will increasingly experience, is that we are pushing closer and closer to our theoretical production limits, and demand is increasing much more quickly than development of new refineries.

I learned a long time ago, that often you cannot even rely on your best friends for help, at times. But what we are doing now, in regards to oil manufacture, is relying on our enemies for help. Besides that, a developing Russia is consuming more and more of their oil output, while China's industry continues to expand at breakneck speeds, and the US has a hard time cutting down on usage even when prices double to consumers.

This is the problem, as I see it. As the Admiral pointed out, the problem is not whether or not we are at the "tipping point" -now-, but whether or not we can have an adequate solution to the problem, by the time we reach it. It's rather impossible to say how much longer we can hold out, but it does seem that we are increasingly approaching the limit, and full saturation of demand vs supply. If we have 10 more years of oil market stability (generous? conservative? who knows?!), and it will likely take 10 years of concerted effort to move our society beyond total reliance on oil, then that means that we needed to start today, to avoid serious turmoil 10 years from now.

Now, all things being fair, I would project that critical point to come somewhere in the next 8-15 years most likely. If you would like, later I might take some time and dig up oil consumption figures, drilling estimates, etc, and refine that - but without collecting notes, or recording citations, that is the window I've seen implied indirectly by much of the data that I've come across over the last several years. And bear in mind, that 8-15 year estimate would -only- be if the world remains relatively stable in general. If Venezuela suddenly shuts its borders and stops exporting oil, for example, it could cause massive economic instability.


Also, I feel it is worth pointing out - any conversion will necessarily take some time, and not be a complete conversion immediately. There is nothing saying that we cannot implement massive scale solar+wind+etc that mostly services the south, and remain oil dependent for power in the north for a few more years. If we did manage to cut our oil consumption by 40-50% in the next decade (NOT going to happen under current plans), it would give us a lot more breathing room to hammer the rest out in an effective manner.

Also bear in mind that current PV cell costs are relative to smaller scale manufacturing efficiencies, and use of new materials. If we were to base our energy supply on solar, it would only make sense to put a lot of resources and effort into developing largely automated, on site, materials reclamation PV cell fabrication facilities. That is to say, that the amount of energy required to dismantle and recreate a solar panel is entirely insignificant to the total output over the lifespan of the panel. So there is no reason not use a fraction of that energy, to minimize the needed upkeep and replacement costs inherent in the system. With a bit of creative redesigning, it's likely that any particular material in existing top-output solar designs that is not easily recyclable, could be replaced to make the system more efficient in the long term. Even if efficiency of the panels went down 10%, or even say 20%, it would still be worth it if 100% of the material involved could be recycled, and that recycling process become largely automated.

[Edi]

Sorry, licker. I had managed to miss those links.

The news article on the Alaskan glaciers was interesting. I also took a look at the Ice Age Now website and I was less than impressed. So I did some digging on the reliability of that source, and came up with this. A further look on the biography, claims and accomplishments of Mr. Felix expose him as a complete fraud who doesn't have a clue what he is talking about. Try again, licker.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Edi

The news article on the Alaskan glaciers was interesting. I also took a look at the Ice Age Now website and I was less than impressed. So I did some digging on the reliability of that source, and came up with this. A further look on the biography, claims and accomplishments of Mr. Felix expose him as a complete fraud who doesn't have a clue what he is talking about. Try again, licker.

How is Mr. Felix's biography relevant to the quality of the sources he links to? I say this as someone who was likewise unimpressed with the signal/noise ratio on Ice Age Now, but argumentum ad hominem is beside the point. (All licker said was that it links to some interesting studies--although I found mostly only news stories.)

Not that your link to the guardian story wasn't interesting in its own right as a story of journalistic carelessness and/or malfeasance.

-Max