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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: A.J. Mullen who wrote (7438)	3/7/2006 10:37:14 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 12249

Ashley, yes, I did think my swarm of posts was like a Katyusha rocket launcher en.wikipedia.org Oh well, quantity if not quality [though of course I claim quality too]. It's good to see, finally, Mq's Climate Control Theory of 1987 being adopted at least in part = the speed with which changes can happen. It used to be that people thought in terms of geological time. <Global climate is very complicated. It can change quickly. There are records going back thousands of years. Not on paper, but in tree rings and the air trapped in ice cores. Cores from Antarctica show that temperatures there have change very quickly in the past. People have speculated that Co2 could cause a rise in the global temperature, and that any change could switch the climate into a different equilibrium, so, yes, another result could be that temperatures plummet.> Now, people see that things do change quickly. I'm making progress. I just need to get them to see that Earth is NOT a balanced system, but on a one way trajectory to a frozen crystalline state with ice everywhere. The Gaia idea got people thinking that Earth was a happy, harmonious, in-balance, ecological perpetual motion machine until naughty people came along with their industrial revolution and technological tricks. Yes, there are plenty of feedback loops which stabilize things, but in the big picture, it's on a one-way trip and always has been. You are right about the arbitrary nature of "maximum permitted" quantities. I set one myself, being benzene in NZ's petrol. I thought 5% was a good number. There had been no specification in 1983 when I was given the job of setting specs for NZ. I wasn't happy that people could get a large dose of benzene if the supply department got a load with maybe 30% if somebody wanted to get rid of a lot of benzene and they noticed we didn't have a specification. Petrol sniffers should be able to sniff in reasonable safety. People used to use petrol to wash their hands and general inhalation was common too, just from handling the stuff. Graham Wilson of Shell at our Technical Managers meeting asked "% mass or volume?" I hadn't thought it out in that detail and on the spot, figuring that %mass would give less benzene, which is what I was after, said %mass. The other 3 Technical Managers agreed and so it came to pass. Very arbitrary, with zero confounding-variable adjusted, double-blind studies of threshold limit values and actual impacts. As it turned out, my guess was pretty good as the annual death rate from benzene in petrol in NZ on a statistical basis was less than 1. Since humans have a value in NZ of about $2 million, that was a good approximation to the right figure. Smoking of course is vastly the cause of myeloid leukaemia, but people prefer to worry about petrol, while sitting in smokey bars [which are now banned in NZ]. Mqurice