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I Lose a Bet, Start an Argument
Back on November 17, 2011 I penned a piece in response to Fed Governor Bullard's assertions regarding the collapse of MF Global. Bullard thought there was no lasting consequences to that blow-out: .
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At the time, I thought that Bullard was full of crap, and that there would be significant consequences to the collapse of MFG. My words:
Okay, Mr. Bullard I'll make you a wager. A six pack of your favorite beer. Give the MFG story another month and it will be a problem. It will undermine markets. It will impact confidence in our financial system. It will impact liquidity. As those things will occur it will force both the Treasury and the Fed to take actions.
I was wrong, Mr. B was right. There were no consequences to the MFG disaster. No heads rolled. No one went to jail. There were no lasting economic consequences. There were were no regulatory changes. The MFG affair was buried. Bullard never accepted my bet, but I still feel I owe him. If he reads this and sends me a note I will forward his beer. He deserves it. He won. Unfortunately, we all "lost" as a result. Today we have yet another MFG in our laps. Perigrine Financial has followed the exact same path as MFG. The PFG bankers looted customer accounts.
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I lost a bet for $12 worth of beer. Customers at Peregrine have lost $220m (so far). I can’t help wondering what would have happened had won the bet. If there had been hell to pay regarding the MFG affair, things might have turned out differently for Peregrine’s customer. But there was no market reaction, the CFTC ignored the signs, the SEC never lifted a finger. Nothing changed, so history has repeated itself.
Perigrine customers, looking at a loss today, might be warming up lawsuits against Bart Chilton and the CFTC. He clearly fell down on the job. I think he should be fired on the spot. Fed Governor Bullard is not responsible for the failure of Peregrine (or MFG), but his dismissing attitude is:
This is no big deal, it will blow over”
To that extent, he shares in the blame.
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The markets are boring, so let's talk about global warming
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I have absolutely no credentials or expertise to discuss matters related to climate change. I’ll do it anyway. I follow this topic and read what I can. In my opinion:
I) - Climate change is happening on a global scale. The evidence that this occurring is conclusive.
II) - I don’t know if humans are contributing to the rapid change, but I suspect they are.
III) - Even if there were conclusive evidence that human activity was contributing to global warming, I’m not at all sure that there is anything that can be done about it.
Consider these before and after pictures from NASA. These are images of the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska.
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May 13, 2012
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One month later
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Okay, so some ice melted. Is that a big deal? The folks at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) think it is:
Sea ice retreat in June is typical, but the first half of June 2012 brought unusually rapid ice loss.
How unusual?
On June 19, 2012, NSIDC reported: “Recent ice loss rates have been 100,000 to 150,000 square kilometers per day, which is more than double the climatological rate.”
Double the rate? How much ice is melting every day in the Beauford Sea? About the size of the state of Illinois – big!
As of June 18, temperatures were above freezing over much of the sea ice in the Arctic, and snow had melted earlier than normal, leading to warming on land.
June 18? It has been hot as hell over the globe since then. This year’s arctic ice melt will set a record.
The rapid melt north of Alaska was part of a larger phenomenon. Sea ice across the entire Arctic reached record-low levels for this time of year. It was also lower than the extent in June 2007; Arctic sea ice reached its lowest extent ever recorded by satellite in September 2007.
This is not a record that we want to set. Now consider this number:
20,900,000,000,000
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20.9 Trillion is the number of pounds of CO2 that humans sent into the atmosphere in the last 12 months. It’s hard to relate to a number as big as that. Think seven billion Hondas. But even that is a number that is hard to fathom, as there are only a billion cars in the world today. How could we be producing 7Xs the weight of all the cars, every year?
Is there a connection to the incredible output of CO2 and the rapid ice melt that is happening all over the world? I wish I knew the answer to this question. I do know that CO2 emissions are directly tied to population growth/economic activity. The question is how rapidly CO2 output will rise:
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Any thoughts?
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My Weekly Reader told me when I was 8 that we were supposed to be under 30 feet of ice by now, other then that melting Ice creates ozone so pick your death, drown or die of radiation, as for me I really don't care. Mother Nature will take care of her self and your betting agains billions of years of practice. Maybe Bruce would like to see that Carbon Credit exchange open up soon so they could pay a burnt offering up to her.....wait, can't do that without a permit, well Algore can.
Based on the nonsense you just typed, I do believe you are living up to your handle....
and base on the factual ass pounding you are receiving on the subject Jr. I will discount you comment as the rantings of just another pimple faced lunatic that thinks he has some control over chaos. You have been schooled.
But the "nonsense" of which you speak was the product of brilliant scientists in the 1970s. You do believe in science don't you?
Time magazine story from 1974: "Another Ice Age?"
http://www.nationalcenter.org/Time-Ice-Age-06-24-1974-Sm.jpg
Are you aware of the paper in question?
Hint:
Rasool and Schneider (1971)
And what the assumptions were? And how the conclusion was phrased?
Here, educate yourself
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-intermediate.htm
Note the fraction of papers that predicted warming as opposed to cooling....
So the scientists were conflicted then as they are now. And even then they were offering up frightening scenarios and telling lies just as they admit to doing today. The claims of cooling or warming come and go but the demands for drastic and expensive measures to be undertaken by the government to save the planet from disaster are the same.
Nope... there is no conflict now.... case closed, shutting down the S02 aerosol factory in the 1970s' revealed the C02 warming signal is all its glory....
And quit with the argumentative fallacies.... the science don't care if your little world view is messed up...
Perhaps the reason why you uncritically believe that the case is closed is because Dr. Schneider enjoined his fellow climate scientists to hide any doubts they have about AGW. Imagine that, they said that they were going to lie to folks by claiming that the science is settled and here you are claiming that the science is settled. Hook, line and sinker.
You keep looking for the lies which Schneider admitted he slips into his research and here you are falling for one he specifically highlighted in his confession.
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. -- Dr. Stephen Schneider, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Quoted in Discover, pp. 45–48, Oct. 1989.)
Is that all you got?...
Repeatedly trotting out a quote from 23 years ago?
You are truly pathetic...
I almost feel sorry for you... Out of curiousity, do you know what a confidence level is?
well if we launched a serious effort in 5 years we could be carbon free in this country, for probably around 2-3 trillion dollars.
look replace teh entire car fleet with electrics or plug in hybrids, have every house and apartment building put in PV and Solar thermal,
and have office buidings modified to zero energy, the germans are doing it now, we can too.
drivers would be a gas tax pegged to $4.50/gallon of gas and give people tax credits for new cars.
and feed in tariffs for PV Electricity.
The US could reduce it's carbon butt-print significantly if the believers in AGW did three things:
1) stop driving cars - including electrics/hybirds - or riding in other vehicles using internal combustion engines.
2) stop eating
3) stop exhaling
AlGore's acolytes, unfortunately, adhere to "do as I say, not as I do".
That would be a free market solution to the supposed problem. Those who wish to reduce CO2 emissions would voluntarily reduce their own and provide funds to educate and organize others to do the same. But the AGW folks don't like free market solutions. Instead of getting to work on solving the problem today they'd rather push big government "solutions." You know, the same government that tries to bring peace through perpetual war and fights the debt crisis with more debt.
While I like to think that my being a fully off-grid electric car driver might be helping, it's not why I made those investments. I did it to both lock in my costs - solar panels and cars last a long time, and to avoid making OPEC wealthier. Letting my rather large place go from fields back to forest is carbon negative as well - but it's also potential income later if those trees get changed into lumber (which still keeps most of the carbon out of the air). I heat with deadfall primarily, which was carbon that was going back into the air anyway - via termites, fungus, etc. Again, not to be green, it's to be cheap! Already down and dry wood is a lot easier to collect if you're paying to have that done!
The problem with most enviornmentalists is they seem to hate humans. Strangely their idea of "the balance of nature" (a dynamic equilibrium in truth) is whatever things were like when they grew up, failing to see that in fact nature always balances - but some of the possible balance points aren't human-friendly. Indeed, we were supposed to be around 50 years from a mini ice age, in a very long established cycle, but we're not seeing that at all now, so "something" went wacky, and it just about has to be us. Heck, even the extreme greenies don't realize how potentially bad things are when measured against what should have been cooling instead of just looking at a rise. Stands to reason that if we push all the carbon back into the air that was there during the dinosaur era, we'll have a climate that's similar again, other things equal (they mostly are).
I like what Elon Musk said to Bob Lutz and Charlie rose about this. "Heck we're not sure, but we are definately doing an experiment that has no reset button and huge consequences even if there's only a 1% chance we fry the place - do you want to take that chance?"
But money talks, bullshit walks. The only possible solution to all that is to make more people aware that you can either make or save money "going green" as I did...and in my case, it was all about power (over my life and bills), and money - I just don't object to the green part. When the greenies visit here I make sure to show them all the non-politically correct stuff I do as well, just to mess them up.
Show people how it makes economic sense and you get what you want if it's truth. The whole approach being taken is dead wrong and doomed to fail.
When they lit the fuse on the first atomic bomb, the best scientists on the project said there were 3 chances in a million that it would ignite all of the oxygen in the atmosphere. I agree, it's the biggest science experiment the world has ever seen. Like QE XXX to infinity is. How does it feel to be a lab rat?
The only solution is the rule of law and institution of death penalty by hanging or some other measure to get the point across that this shit will not stand going forward. I know I'm wasting my breath shouting to the rooftop on this, cause eveybody has been effectively neutered in this fucking country and thinks violence solves nothing. Well fuckheads your wrong, violence solves everything because it re-installs fear and respect for the law rather than minor penalties imposed by bureaucrats as they see fit, right before they leave their "regulator" post and take a job at the same firm they were just regulating.
Tree-rings prove climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than it is now - and world has been cooling for 2,000 years
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2171973/Tree-ring-study-proves-climate-WARMER-Roman-Medieval-times-modern-industrial-age.html#ixzz20L8wRQS7
Yep. Hannibal's elephants did not wear snow shoes.
This is true, and it was quite predictable in fact, there's a mid term cycle due to our orbital wobble, and things were set to cool again just about now to maybe 500 years out - we've left that cycle some way it seems.
The Dark ages actually were dark - a lot of that cooling was from massive volcanic eruptions - luck, if you will.
You might find some interesting info here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png
Also consider http://iceagenow.info/
OK here's another factoid for you: for 95% of the history of the Earth there was NO ice cap at all.
There are plenty of facts to prove either side.
But let's get real. If you put fifty rats in a sealed aquarium eventually they would eat up all the food and breathe up all the air. Too many rats.
ON PFG, I'm just utterly disgusted. What further proof do you need of regulatory capture & incompetence. ZH has always been right.
That smug CFTC bastard was interviewed on Bberg today - and was grinning the whole time while they asked him how this could have happened and why they didn't look a little harder after MFG.
No good answers from him. "We need more money and computers to set up a system some years out".
What's the point of calling yourself a regulator if you take what people in the regulated business tell you at face value and never check yourself? How again are you earning my money?
There is no statistical correlation between global CO2 levels and global temperature. Please don't repeat the fallacy.
Really!? Care to cite a peer reviewed study that comes to that conclusion, or will you parade out some blog-science that I will shred before your very eyes?
Go ahead surprise me...
I think actually there is, but it's "the other way around": CO2 increase follows warming with a ~800 year lag (as data from Vostok ice core drilling seem to show).
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/
You might want to reconcile it with this
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm
and in partcular
http://www.skepticalscience.com/skakun-co2-temp-lag.html
Also try to reconcile 800,000 years of C02 history via your Vostok Ice core data...
its cold-its hot-it rains-it doesn't. global warming is just another example of man's hubris that we are ultimately the masters of the earth. when mother nature tires of us we will be swatted away like a fly on a horse's ass.
of course we have something to do with it, the writing is on the wall
"Perigrine Financial has followed the exact same path as MFG."
Not exactly - there was improvisation: Corzine did not - yet - try to do himself in. It would be the right thing to do though - I was going to say honorable thing to do, but he has no honor left and can't get any.
Bruce...
Spot on with the MFG, PFG (and I'm sure more three letter looters to come) consequences.
But anthropogenic global warming?! WTF, man!?!
Please, please PLEASE don't opine until after you've seriously researched it. Reading the last several years of this fellow's work http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/ as I have should bring you up to speed.
And when you research it, especially dig into who will profit from the legislation. Hint: They do God's work, or hang out with those who do.
Yes, the Earth gets warmer, the Earth gets cooler... From near complete desertification to near complete glaciation! But the evidence we have anything to do with is (to be infinitely charitable) scant.
What's the word I'm searching for... "moron?"
YEAH RIGHT! Let us assume that 50,000 PhD Climatologists around the world
are just like 50,000 PhD Economists....
but Climatologists uses Peer Review Science
for every Scientific Paper that ends up published about Global Warming.
975 papers published in last 30 years.
It may take 10 years from start to finish to get a paper thru Peer Review.
Not one single paper ever could DISPROVE Global Warming based on measured evidence called hard facts.
And most conservatives want to ignore it all...its cyclical, sunspots, normal blah blah blah
Geologist banging head on desk at work after reading sensationalist bullshit...
LowProfile: Congratulations on your confirmation bias. Are you enjoying those cherries?
There is no doubt that humans are changing the atmosphere.
Every living thing affects the climate. Bacteria, plants, and animals all changed the atmosphere historically.
Which of these has been expanding in numbers worldwide in the past 100 years?:
As the top resource-controlling life form and the only one growing in numbers exponentially, Humans have the biggest effect on homeostatis of the atmosphere.
The percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere goes up and down every year because there is more land mass in the northern hemisphere.
The CO2 output of volcanos and vents has been quantified and it does not dominate.
The long term CO2 trend upwards slows down during resessions.
CO2 has a known physical effect of trapping infra-red light, so more of it traps more light, so there is reason to be concerned.
I have read enough climate studies to vary my opinion which over the years went from skeptic to "we need more study" to "concerned". A complex system cannot be understood with a simple narrative flow, so it requires a multitude of analysis viewpoints/models and this presents numerous opportunities for cherry picking. If climate studies are normalized by theory (to factor out author and area-of-study biases), the arguments point toward a strong probablity climate warming due to humans.
You obviously aren't reading anything I've posted.
And
Really? Link please.
How 'bout the affect of the "recession" that occured after 9/11 for the airline industry:
"Condensation trails have been suspected of causing "regional-scale surface temperature" changes for some time.[9][10] Researcher David J. Travis, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, has published and spoken on the measurable impacts of contrails on climate change in the science journal Nature and at the American Meteorological Society's 10th Annual conference in Portland, Oregon. The effect of the change in aircraft contrail formation on the three days after the 11th was observed in surface temperature change, measured across over 4,000 reporting stations in the continental United States.[9] Travis' research documented an "anomalous increase in the average diurnal temperature change".[9] The diurnal temperature range (DTR) is the difference in the day's highs and lows at any weather reporting station.[11] Travis observed a 1.8 °C (3.24 °F) departure from the two adjacent three-day periods to the 11th–14th.[9] This increase was the largest recorded in 30 years, more than "2 standard deviations away from the mean DTR".[9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail#September_11.2C_2001_climate_impac...
I think not
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/911-not-to-blame-for-climate-e...
From your linked article:
"The theory is that contrails suppress DTR by cooling daytime temperatures and warming night-time temperatures, so in their absence DTR increases," says Prof Piers Forster of the UK's University of Leeds.
The UK and German studies that incorporated contrails into their state-of-the-art climate models actually found that contrails over the USA do suppress DTR, but only by a tiny amount.
The UK study, led by Leeds University which joined forces with the Met Office within the aviation research initiative Omega, found it would take 200 times as many flights over the USA as there are today to see DTR changes approaching those suggested by the US work conducted by David Travis of the University of Wisconsin."
So, the critique you cite of Travis' hypothesis actuallyconfirmed his findings, just to a lessor degree (200x). For the sake of argument, lets assume that this answer is actually correct, and that actual answer does not lie somewhere between, and that the 2 deviation spread Travis noted in his data is indeed the product of a statistical anomaly - this still implies a significant impact on climate by industrial pollution given the percentage of daily emissions of jet traffic when compared to all other industial emissions.
It's pretty clear that we do impact climate through our activities, be it through deforestation, or industrial emissions.
The whole article:
The idea that the absence of airliner contrails during the brief US grounding in the wake of the 9/11 attacks had a significant influence on the climate has been challenged by a team of UK and German scientists.
According to US scientists who studied US skies after civil aircraft were temporarily grounded in 2001, the absence of artificial clouds triggered variations in the Earth's temperature range by 1.1°C (2°F) each day.
But follow-up work by a number of scientists working independently has shown that the observed change in the daily temperature range (DTR) was more likely to be a statistical quirk associated with the weather and that contrails by themselves are likely to have had only a very minor effect on DTR.
© Andy Drysdale/REX FeaturesThe claim was that such a 1°C change would have a very large effect in climate change terms because global warming over the past 100 years has been pegged at an increase of about 0.7°C.
"The theory is that contrails suppress DTR by cooling daytime temperatures and warming night-time temperatures, so in their absence DTR increases," says Prof Piers Forster of the UK's University of Leeds.
The UK and German studies that incorporated contrails into their state-of-the-art climate models actually found that contrails over the USA do suppress DTR, but only by a tiny amount.
The UK study, led by Leeds University which joined forces with the Met Office within the aviation research initiative Omega, found it would take 200 times as many flights over the USA as there are today to see DTR changes approaching those suggested by the US work conducted by David Travis of the University of Wisconsin.
A further US study by research scientist Dr Gang Hong and colleagues has re-examined the temperature data for the USA, not only looking at the 2001 data but going back to earlier Septembers. They found that such 1°C changes in DTR were not uncommon and that the 2001 DTR change was most likely caused by changes in wind direction affecting low cloud cover.
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...And you actually thought this article somehow supported your position?
LOLOLOL
the shit you linked is just that, shit. Its embarrassing actually.
Didn't see an argument or a link to an argument in your response there Skippy.
do you really want me to link you every reputable journal and study done that proves this assertion? It would take hundreds of pages. Its not my fault school failed you, its our education systems fault, I simply cant undo decades of ignorance in one thread there ...skippy.
Just the best one, thanks.
yeah, using google must be above your paygrade as well I see.
Your assertion, your burden of proof, fucker.
Shh...you'll upset BawlforDiddly and Flaksheister...and Al Gore will have to re-invent the InterClickity thing so you can't join in the fun anymore...
When I want your opinion, I will rattle my zipper...
i am one of those conservatives that listens (sometimes) to right wing talk shows. and even like some of them. they try to convince us that humans are not to blame for rising global temps. but i know that we burn 85 million barrels of oil on this earth EVERY DAY. how in the world can we possibly escape understanding that doing this HAS to have a tremendous impart on the environment with potential dire consequences?! cant be ignored if you are honest about it! burying our heads in the sand and pretending isnt going to make all that heat and CO2 go away folks!
The energy reaching the Earth surface is 3.2 million Exajoules/year, which is close to 7000 times the (2005) global energy consumption. That is from http://home.iprimus.com.au/nielsens/solrad.html
Please help reduce CO2 levels by burying your head in the sand if you think that a 1/7000th increase in energy will have a tremendous effect. The Earth's climate is not that delicately balanced.
You are comparing apples and oranges.....
Could you explain what the effect of a 35% increase in GHG would do? Given that pre IR GHG levels raise the temperature of the Earth by ~18 degress K...
Could you explain what the effect of a 35% increase in GHG would do?
Close to nothing, maybe increase precipitation in the Basin and Range, equatorially arid places like the Sahara. Boost the polar snowpacks some, bit O' sea level rise or maybe not.
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BTW, what's with using K? Hell, you could use Rankine units, I mean heck, if we're gonna look for obscure temperature standards with respect to the audience and how we want to look really scientifically serious, we should be using Reaumur or Delisle units.../sarc