Soren wrote on Oct 20^th, 2009 at 10:38am:


Yes, the Irish are very racist. They just introduced new blasphemy legislation.

Soren wrote on Oct 20^th, 2009 at 10:53am:


Maybe they've sent him to Ireland. 

Guys, I'm having a really hard time trying to bring myself to care about climate change. While more and more I'm realizing that the science behind it is valid and that it is probably happening as a result of human industrial activity, it only takes twenty seconds of looking at the kind of people who are complaining about it all the time to make me want to bag the hell out of them. Is there anybody who can help me or am I right to believe that it's basically happening but there's nothing that can be really done about it at present and its prophets of doom are just incorrigble faggots?

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Have a look on the 'New value of Pi' thread and you'll be encouraged by such manly figures as Richard Lindzen and Christopher Monckton (aka the Potty Peer) with his pink House of Lords logo. Both of them will be quick to reassure you that there is nothing to worry about.

There is a lot that we can do about it, but it's not a simple as some protesters think. Maybe they believe that we can just turn off all coal powered power stations overnight, but some of us have a sense of reality.

Maybe some appear to be total noobs, but if you think about the people in your high school class who actually went out to become doctors and solicitors, they were probably the nerds.

Like it or not, the technocrats - the people who actually know what's going on and the people who have the real say, happen to be nerds. They get into politics too.

No personality? No problem. Just employ a publicity agent. They can advise you to do all kinds of things to improve your popularity with the hip members of society who just like to go out, get drunk, stoned or both, achieve absolutely nothing in life while having a totally epic time, then boast about it on Facebook.  

Slip into a New York strip club, swear at staff occasionally and drop a few really ocker expressions from time to time, and even if you can speak faultless grammatically correct Mandarin, just make sure you learn the ocker expressions carefully and with the right emphasis to make you look like a normal aussie. An intelligent self-respecting nerd could even become PM of Australia by following those simple rules.  

Yeah, I notice what an utterly bogus graph it is. Laughable. Look at the scale. Ridiculous.

blutigeroo wrote on Oct 30^th, 2009 at 10:50am:


Hopefully after Copenhagen in December. I sincerely hope that there will be no more empty promises.

As for Uranium, the Australian people will never agree to commercial scale nuclear reactors in Australia, but in the end it doesn't matter where it's used as fuel, as long as it is used as fuel. We share the same atmosphere with the rest of the world.

As long  as we keep producing as much Uranium as possible for power generation purposes, then the end result will be the same or better.

There are better informed populations elsewhere who will welcome it, and they don't have the benefit of huge geothermal and solar resources like Australia. If we concentrate on deveoping geothermal and solar resources and sell our uranium overseas, it might be the best option anyway.   


Soren, for an obviously well-educated person, the depth of your delusion and hypocrisy on this issue quite frankly astounds me.

I think you're missing the point. The pH of the ocean is changing dramatically as a result of increased CO2 from burning fossil fuels, cement production and changes in tropical land use.

You can clearly see how far removed we are from the slow natural changes.

The graph was part of the Copenhagen Sythesis report and was submitted by Dr. Carol Turley, Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK.

It was submitted by the researcher herself, and was not third hand and distorted like most of Plimer's.

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It's not the scale of the graph that's ridiculous, but the recent rate of change in ocean pH.

Soren wrote on Oct 30^th, 2009 at 9:08pm:



Aha! - deliberately spreading confusion again.  Acidification is the recent process where increased production of CO2 is leading to reduction in ocean pH. The parameter measured over 25 million years is pH, not acidification. Soren, if you protest wildly about technical matters that you don't actually understand, then it doesn't matter how much impeccable rhetoric you use. You still end up looking foolish.

As far as the question of how you measure ocean pH over 25 million years, it is done by the use of proxies. Obviously an indirect method was used.

You are familar of course with the proxy data that is used to measure global temperature using Deuterium in ice cores? The one that is quite happily accepted and manipulated by denialists such as McIntyre? (I should add that he doesn't have the resources to produce his own data, so he manipulates that of others)

Anyway that's another example of proxy data. The proxy data matches quite well with recent data, and that gives us the confidence to use it over a longer period, especially if it's backed up by other proxy data.  The boron isotope ratio of biogenic carbonate is well established as a proxy for ocean pH.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/282/5393/1468

There have been many other studies that corroborate that one of course. Corals? - no, bad guess, Soren. They usually use benthic foraminifera.  

It's quite enlightening that you didn't ask the question "how did she measure ocean pH?" like most normal people would have done. Instead, you go on the attack immediately without any data to back you up. She was "guessing", you splutter, "conjecturing from corals" probably. In fact the only person doing the guessing is you  

Now for the question of error bars. She could have used error bars, but to do so would have been difficult in this case.  The error in this case is extremely low. A graph of pH is on a logarithmic scale. A pH increase from say 7 to 8 represents a tenfold decrease (in hydrogen ion concentration), so any error in concentration would be reduced to being insignificant on a pH scale.  Try it on your scientific calculator if you don't believe me. There is one built in to your operating system. I'm sure any highschool student worth his salt would be happy to demonstrate its use.

You do understand the concept of logarithm I take it?