[Viking Coder]

I like belbear’s design too, except for the font choice. A simple logo mark is a necessity for branding and this is a good one. The mark can be used widely in place of the name; think about Nike’s swoosh, Apple’s bitten apple, Mastercard’s interlocking circles, etc.

As for inadvertent connotations, Focus Fusion Society is already handicapped. Urban Dictionary: FFS

[Viking Coder]

How droll. Are you simply baiting with that or do you consider yourself skeptical of the field of climatology? If so, what is your basis and what questions do you have (in a new thread)?

Phil’s Dad wrote: There is no stronger barrier to learning than certainty.

True. Learning is accomplished by studying new findings or new interpretations that better fit old findings, not through word play.

[Viking Coder]

Rezwan wrote: Did he actually say this? Where?

The thread you linked to.

Brian H wrote: [‘Terminal Confinement Homes For Disgraced Climatologists’] where frequent unannounced fire and Carbon Monoxide evacuations will be called to keep them excited and interested (not all drills; a certain minimum fatality rate to be ensured to sustain realism.)

He clarified above that humor was not the purpose of that post.

Rezwan wrote: I think that, if properly moderated, a conversation between creationists and natural selectionists can be very illuminating. As can conversations between any apparently polarized factions. Illuminating about much more than the topic itself.

I agree, and don’t have a problem with it either. I sincerely like having a discussion with an intelligent, knowledgeable climatology dismisser. Unfortunately, they all seem to degrade into vast conspiracy notions and/or sophistic cherry-picking being presented in rebuttal of the available scientific research. A sparse few times I have found people who are actually willing to discuss this issue. Even more rare is when they are willing to put aside their preconceived notions when their questions are answered, rather than asking the same questions repeatedly in defense of their beliefs.

In my opinion, discussing the age of the planet with a young earth creationist is equivalent to discussing climatology with somebody who seriously uses the phrase “Gore Bull Warming”.

[Viking Coder]

threat: a declaration of an intention or determination to inflict punishment, injury, etc., in retaliation for, or conditionally upon, some action or course

Your choice of words does not show you to be cognizant and capable of critical, independent thought; rather, it shows a pridefully ignorant ideologue who values juvenile insults & word play, cherry-picking sophistry and “I’m not touching you” style threats over rational, primary resource based discussion. Yes, “people who reference the peer-review published & independently validated research should be put to death” is a threat.

Brian H wrote: asking for highly inflammatory and divisive flamewars

Why is that any different than opening threads on evolution through natural selection on a discussion board frequented by a creationist?

The strength of your belief & indignation does not transform a field of science into a hoax.

Brian H wrote: see Climategate

How do sliced and diced comments taken out of context show that 150 years worth of published & independently validated scientific research is nothing but a vast conspiracy?

Scientific consensus is reached through accumulation of peer-reviewed research. It is descriptive, not proscriptive. A scientific consensus is overturned when new research or new interpretations of old research that better fits the observations is presented. It is not refuted by calling it a political consensus and conjuring vast conspiracy notions to explain it without acknowledging the accumulated research.

[Viking Coder]

Brian H wrote:
Yawn. The standard IPCC/AGW Troo Beleever canard that all opponents are shills for the oil companies.

How about discussing the referenced information I provided that dismisses his claims rather than becoming indignant & providing puerile bluster about a closing comment?

Brian H wrote:
700++ credentialed scientists who have publicly repudiated the IPCC’s methodology, structure, and conclusions

Could you please reference that claim? Pointing to a blog post (which only listed 604 rather than “more than 650”, included many economists, TV weather forecasters & was full of quote-mining from actual climate scientists) by a politician’s PR flack is not sufficient, nor credible.
More on Inhofe’s alleged list of 650 scientists

Besides, the number of scientists supporting a conclusion is irrelevant. The only relevance is the science itself. Does a list of scientists presented by the Discovery Institute prove evolution through natural selection is invalid?

Brian H wrote:
The IPCC reports were written by a tight cabal of about 52 scientists

Incorrect. There were 619 authors of the AR4 wg1. There has been one, and only one, resignation. Christopher Landsea of the U.S. NOAA AOML, resigned from the IPCC AR4 wg1, in Januaty 2005; Landsea disagrees that projected warming will lead to increased hurricane risks.

Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), working group 1: the scientific basis (‘wg1’) authors

[Viking Coder]

Brian H wrote: Speaking of mercenary motivation:

Quite. TGGWS is another piece of sophistic tripe. It was produced by Martin Durkin, who only ever produces science-free sophistic tripe. For instance, his piece on silicone breast implants being beneficial to women’s health.

My favorite part of that production is where Ball is identified to be in a department that never existed with a degree that his university never offered.

Carl Wunsch whose words were sliced & diced to make that production issued the following letter upon its release.
Partial Response to the London Channel 4 Film “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

I believe that climate change is real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component. But I have tried to stay out of the `climate wars’ because all nuance tends to be lost, and the distinction between what we know firmly, as scientists, and what we suspect is happening, is so difficult to maintain in the presence of rhetorical excess. In the long run, our credibility as scientists rests on being very careful of, and protective of, our authority and expertise.

The science of climate change remains incomplete. Some elements are so firmly based on well-understood principles, or for which the observational record is so clear, that most scientists would agree that they are almost surely true (adding CO2 to the atmosphere is dangerous; sea level will continue to rise,…). Other elements remain more uncertain, but we as scientists in our roles as informed citizens believe society should be deeply concerned about their possibility: failure of US midwestern precipitation in 100 years in a mega-drought; melting of a large part of the Greenland ice sheet, among many other examples.

…
[letter to Mr. Steven Green, Head of Production, Wag TV]

I am writing to record what I told you on the telephone yesterday about your Channel 4 film “The Global Warming Swindle.” Fundamentally, I am the one who was swindled—please read the email below that was sent to me (and re-sent by you). Based upon this email and subsequent telephone conversations, and discussions with the Director, Martin Durkin, I thought I was being asked to appear in a film that would discuss in a balanced way the complicated elements of understanding of climate change— in the best traditions of British television. Is there any indication in the email evident to an outsider that the product would be so tendentious, so unbalanced?
…
At a minimum, I ask that the film should never be seen again publicly with my participation included. Channel 4 surely owes an apology to its viewers, and perhaps WAGTV owes something to Channel 4. I will be taking advice as to whether I should proceed to make some more formal protest.

Sincerely,

Carl Wunsch
Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Channel 4

[Viking Coder]

Are you even trying, or is a press release from an oil company funded, directly (ExxonMobil) & indirectly through foundations such as the Scaife Foundations (Gulf Oil Corporation), think tank the best you can find?

Scientific rebuttal is valid regardless of the source, so I was going to give it a read-though. However, I didn’t make it past the second paragraph of the summary before encountering blatant sophistry that denied scientific research & compared it to New York Times headlines from the early 20th century.

The entire composition is a piece of sophistry in that it compares social science forecasting, e.g. “How many babies will be born in Pittsburgh, PA in each of the next five years?” or “Will a 3.5% pay offer avert the threatened strike?”, to climate sensitivity projections based on independently, repeatedly validated scientific research.

When you can’t refute the science of a matter, create a strawman & thrash it.

[Viking Coder]

An FF engine does not generate any significant amount of heat. The pulsed magnetic field constricts pinpoints of gas into plasmoids & those pinpoints is where the fusion occurs. The tokamak/ITER is the method that requires a sustained high temperature plasma.
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/heat/

The plasmoids have a top radius of 0.0018 cm.
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/re_analysis_of_texas_data/

Decaborane density is 950 kg/m^3.
http://www.webelements.com/compounds/boron/decaborane_14.html

plasmoid volume: 2.4 x 10^-8 cm^3
decaborane in plasmoid: 2.3 x 10^-8 g

I cannot find the heat capacity of decaborane in a freely available source, so I’ll use an absurdly high estimate of 100 J/g-K. Boron has a heat capacity of ~2 J/g-K at 600° K.
http://www.efunda.com/materials/elements/HC_Table.cfm?Element_ID=B

Based on that assumption, heating the decaborane in the plasmoid to 1 billion K imparts 2000 J (rounded down) of heat energy into it.
heat capacity calculator: http://www.ausetute.com.au/heatcapa.html

At a 1 KHz pulse rate that is 2 x 10^6 J/s or 50 kWh/day. Over the same time period, the engine generates 120,000 kWh of electricity.

The heat generated is less than 0.05% of the electricity recovered from the particle beam & x-rays.

The amount of heat produced can raise the temperature of 1 liter of water 30 K per minute.

[Viking Coder]

A FF engine generates electricity through particle beam & x-ray recovery rather than heat extraction. This is why the construction cost is so dramatically lower.

A decelerator, as opposed to a particle accelerator, is put in the line of the tight pulsed beam of charged alpha particles (He nuclei) that is the result of the pB11 fusion. More electricity is generated by passing the x-rays through a shell of thin metallic foils, with the electrons captured on wires held at negative voltages.

https://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/35/#el
https://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/simulation_results/

An artists’ rendition of the FF engine is on the right side of the header on the LPP site.

[Viking Coder]

Brian H wrote: Read the paper.:coolmad:

I did. Here is the review of it for those who actually are skeptical, rather than just grasping at straws to support their beliefs.

The paper starts off with a misstatement – “The satellite record is the highest quality temperature data series in the climate record.”

The satellite records, RSS & UAH, are measurements of the radiance in various wavelength bands, and thus indirectly the temperature, of bands of the atmosphere – lower troposhere, mid-troposhere, stratosphere. RSS & UAH are not the end all & be all of temperature measurements. GISS & HadCRUT are equally relevant.

The text below Figure 1 is a good example of cherry-picking. Ignore the global data and eyeball local data, namely the Southern Hemisphere, to disprove the global data.

“If it doesn

[Viking Coder]

There is some severe irony in the ‘father of modern chemistry’ being the namesake of a group denying scientific knowledge & theory which is heavily based on chemistry based on nothing more than strength of belief.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v386/Artorius/sci-creat.gif

The difference between The Lavoisier Group and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier is that Lavoisier had quantitative scientific research, that was then independently validated, to support his dismissal of the phlogiston theory which didn’t have supporting scientific research. The Lavoisier Group is attempting to dismiss repeatedly independently validated quantitative scientific research with the same tired partial-truths, outright myths & bluster that their US counterparts are using.

http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/johnquiggin/news/Lavoisier0104.html

This body is devoted to the proposition that basic principles of physics, discovered by among others, the famous French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, cease to apply when they come into conflict with the interests of the Australian coal industry.

JimmyT wrote: The whole thing [CFCs] is now known to be bad science with wrong conclusions.

Please reference that claim.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4010-earths-ozone-depletion-is-finally-slowing.html
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003JD003471.shtml (paper referenced in the article)

Almost 30 years after it was first reported that pollutants were destroying the Earth’s protective ozone layer, there is clear evidence that the global CFC ban has had an impact.

For the first time, it has been shown that the rate of ozone depletion in the upper stratosphere – 35 to 45 kilometres up – is slowing down. “This is the beginning of a recovery of the ozone layer,” says Michael Newchurch, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who led the new research.
…
The role of CFCs in ozone depletion was proved in 1974 – the scientists involved later won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1995/index.html

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995
Paul J. Crutzen, Mario J. Molina, F. Sherwood Rowland
“for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone”

If you are not one of the annointed few who understand the problem; Why you

[Viking Coder]

Brian H wrote: It fails the reasonableness test on many, many levels.

Your, possibly willful, lack of understanding does not refute the accumulated scientific knowledge. The theory of evolution through natural selection fails the reasonableness test of creationists on many, many levels.

Brian H wrote: What CO2 emissions caused the warmth in Greenland circa 900 AD when the Vikings named it?

http://skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm

This argument is based on the idea that as climate has changed naturally before, current climate change must be natural also. The obvious flaw in this argument is that the main driver of climate during the Medieval Warm Period (e.g. – solar variations) cannot be causing global warming now.

Brian H wrote: How is it that a vastly more plentiful equivalent molecule, H20, which evaporates into and remains in the atmosphere much more strongly in warm periods, does not overwhelm the quantitatively puny effects of CO2?

I’ve already answered this question for you in two separate threads on this forum. That is the mark of a denier, asking the same question question repeatedly and refusing to acknowledge the answer. Water cycles through the atmosphere relatively quickly, weeks rather than decades.

Brian H wrote: There have been NO declines in CO2 emission over historical times, yet climate swings much wider than anything experienced recently have happened repeatedly.

That is an entirely false statement. The historical temperature swings, which occurred over tens of thousands of years rather than decades, were accompanied in lockstep, offset by a few centuries, by atmospheric CO2 concentration swings and were caused by the Milankovitch Cycles, increasing & decreasing total solar irradiance due to planetary orbital cycles. The CO2 swings were to due decreased & increased oceanic net absorption from the temperature swings and were a passive feedback agent rather than a forcing agent.

your beloved

[Viking Coder]

Brian H wrote: H2O is the exact equivalent of CO2 for greenhousing

No. It isn’t. CO2 absorbs spectra that H2O doesn’t & vice versa. CO2 has a complete blockout of infrared radiation in a band where H2O doesn’t absorb any, and again – vice versa This is why a positive feedback cycle from an increased CO2 concentration is a crucial concept to understand.

H2O’s long-term atmospheric concentration is based solely on temperature (Clausius-Clapeyron relation) with any deviations quickly resolving away through either evaporation or precipitation. There is no such “quick fix” process for atmospheric CO2 concentration. This is why water vapor is referred to as a passive feedback agent.

http://www.iitap.iastate.edu/gccourse/forcing/spectrum.html

This has been known for over 40 years.

http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0477312
Report Date : Feb 1962

http://skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-january-2007-to-january-2008.htm

2007’s dramatic cooling is driven by La Nina which historically has caused similar drops in global temperature and should recede in mid-2008.

TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) needs to drop considerably to be considered the driver of 2007 cooling.

Satellite measurements show no dramatic drop in TSI over the past several years. Instead, the solar cycle is following its usual 11 year cycle, flattening out as it reaches solar minimum.

The moral of the story – don’t use short term weather patterns to draw conclusions about long term climate trends.

Why are you so desperately clutching at straws to avoid acknowledging repeatedly, independently validated scientific research?

[Viking Coder]

Brian H wrote: The graphs of rising temps in the last few decades suddenly switch slope when the data from sensors being engulfed by urban heat island sprawl are excluded.

Please reference this claim.

http://skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm

(Peterson 2003) did statistical analysis of urban and rural temperature anomalies and concluded “Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures… Industrial sections of towns may well be significantly warmer than rural sites, but urban meteorological observations are more likely to be made within park cool islands than industrial regions.”

Another more recent study (Parker 2006) plotted 50 year records of temperatures observed on calm nights, the other on windy nights. He concluded “temperatures over land have risen as much on windy nights as on calm nights, indicating that the observed overall warming is not a consequence of urban development”.

Surfacestations.org are compiling photographs of US weather stations photographs to demonstrate the unreliability of surface temperature measurements. Photos are an anecdotal way to do science – the only way to quantify the impact of urban heat island is to analyse the data from these stations. This is what GISS have done, with their methodologies and data freely available online.

If Urban Head Island effect was exacerbating global warming records, there would be a correlation between urbanisation and warming. Instead, the regions of the globe with greatest temperature rise seem to be anywhere but the urbanised regions.

[Viking Coder]

Please reference this claim of “huge %

[Author]

Posts