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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (7512)	4/24/2009 4:18:16 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86356

That other scientists in other fields haven't been politicized has nothing to do with the current situation. If the "scientific community" feels any of the big players are slanting their research, for any reason, they will be ostracized by the other scientists. Unless they understand and are under the same pressures. And using your logic, do you think public instituions have more money Hell yeah. or more of a reason to slant research than the oil and coal companies? Yes if the public institutions are headed by the believers ... as they are. And as mentioned common sense wold tell you if there is only a 50% chance it is right, don't you think we should be going full speed ahead to find out and do something about it. To find out, yes. Other no. Remember when CO2 levels rose in the Permian age it wiped out 95% of all life on earth! Man that CO2 is really poison. It gagged them to death huh? There h/b many mass extinctions in earths history but I've never heard of one caused by CO2.

To: koan who wrote (7512)	4/24/2009 4:57:05 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 86356

Do you think Einstein or Watson or Crick were pressured or influenced by money to come to certain conclusions. Or Steven Hawking? they do pure research. In their spare time, when the majority of scientists aren't performing government or private sector research. I know this for a fact because I've had family friends who relied upon government research grants to sustain their business, while they pursued their own independent research. This individual, unfortunately recently deceased from Brain cancer, spent the past 20 years developing a new sampling mechanism for bacteria for the food industry, medical, and biological defense sectors. He funded it primarily via grants to do other gov't sponsored research, grants he wouldn't have gotten had he not met their criteria. Now, in his case it wasn't so much theoretical scientific research, but the concept is the same. And, of course, there is peer review, which is very important to the process. However, it's also not immune to the dangers of "group think". Eisenhower warned us about the skewing of scientific data by government sponsored research centers. It's little different from the resistance Galileo faced against Church funded scientific group think. The catholic church manipulated science to back up their theological teachings. If you didn't toe the line, your funding was cut off and you faced ex-communication. This is very similar to trend I see with regard to Global Warming. It's become a religion and if you are rebellious enough not to accede to the pre-set conclusions sponsored by the "Gorean GW'rs", or to demand more research before coming to a conclusion, you'll become a pariah. You want to see a PERFECT EXAMPLE how scientific formulas get twisted to catastrophic results? Look at the sub-prime mess and David Li's mathematical valuation formulas. This is where Mr. Li made his crucial contribution. In 1997, nobody knew how to calculate default correlations with any precision. Mr. Li's solution drew inspiration from a concept in actuarial science known as the "broken heart": People tend to die faster after the death of a beloved spouse. Some of his colleagues from academia were working on a way to predict this death correlation, something quite useful to companies that sell life insurance and joint annuities. "Suddenly I thought that the problem I was trying to solve was exactly like the problem these guys were trying to solve," says Mr. Li. "Default is like the death of a company, so we should model this the same way we model human life." His colleagues' work gave him the idea of using copulas: mathematical functions the colleagues had begun applying to actuarial science. Copulas help predict the likelihood of various events occurring when those events depend to some extent on one another. Among the best copulas for bond pools turned out to be one named after Carl Friedrich Gauss, a 19th-century German statistician. Mr. Li, who had moved over to a J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. unit (he has since joined Barclays Capital PLC), published his idea in March 2000 in the Journal of Fixed Income. The model, known by traders as the Gaussian copula, was born. "David Li's paper was kind of a watershed in this area," says Greg Gupton, senior director of research at Moody's KMV, a subsidiary of the credit-ratings firm. "It garnered a lot of attention. People saw copulas as the new thing that might illuminate a lot of the questions people had at the time." Message 21696564 The one group you cannot trust are the oil and coal companies scientists. They have a vested interest in their reearch. And a lot of money on the line. I think they are just as "captive" as many government research entities. That's why we need more objectivity rather than politicized hysteria. And everyone's conclusions, including my own, must be called into question and examined. Remember when CO2 levels rose in the Permian age it wiped out 95% of all life on earth! No.. not that old.. Sorry.. But I do remember reading in history how Greenland got it's name... And there probably wasn't much hysteria expressed by the people living back then. Hawk

To: koan who wrote (7512)	4/24/2009 8:54:08 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 86356

koan ... re: CO2... I was gonna pass as I rearely talk about this stuff any longer.. figuring I'll do wait and see... but we have not jousted in soooo long I could not resist.. :o) That is really an incomplete story. Here is one source but Google (everybody's friend) has gazillions.. en.wikipedia.org Appears the CO2 may have been a symptom... not a cause.. All these stories seem to make liberal use of the word may :O) To be fair and forthright when proposing that the Permian mass extinction was caused by CO2... you should be sure to include the rest of the story .. Volcanism The world around the time of the P-Tr extinction. The Siberian Traps eruptions occurred on the eastern shore of the shallow sea (paler blue) at the north of the map. The earlier Emeishan eruptions occurred on the north edge of the almost enclosed shallow sea just north of the equator - at this time the blocks that currently form China and South-East Asia were just emerging. The final stages of the Permian saw two flood basalt events. A small one centered at Emeishan in China occurred at the same time as the end-Guadalupian extinction pulse, in an area which was close to the equator at the time.[83] The flood basalt eruptions which produced the Siberian Traps constituted one of the largest known volcanic events on Earth and covered over 200,000 square kilometers (77,220.4 sq mi) with lava. The Siberian Traps eruptions were formerly thought to have lasted for millions of years, but recent research dates them to 251.2 ± 0.3 Ma — immediately before the end of the Permian.[2][84] The Emeishan and Siberian Traps eruptions may have caused dust clouds and acid aerosols which would have blocked out sunlight and thus disrupted photosynthesis both on land and in the upper layers of the seas, causing food chains to collapse. These eruptions may also have caused acid rain when the aerosols washed out of the atmosphere. This may have killed land plants and mollusks and planktonic organisms which build calcium carbonate shells. The eruptions would also have emitted carbon dioxide, causing global warming. When all of the dust clouds and aerosols washed out of the atmosphere, the excess carbon dioxide would have remained and the warming would have proceeded without any mitigating effects.[80] The Siberian Traps had unusual features which made them even more dangerous. Pure flood basalts produce a lot of runny lava and do not hurl debris into the atmosphere. It appears, however, that 20% of the output of the Siberian Traps eruptions was pyroclastic, i.e. consisted of ash and other debris thrown high into the atmosphere, increasing the short-term cooling effect.[85] The basalt lava erupted or intruded into carbonate rocks and into sediments which were in the process of forming large coal beds, both of which would have emitted large amounts of carbon dioxide, leading to stronger global warming after the dust and aerosols settled.[80] There is doubt, however, about whether these eruptions were enough on their own to cause a mass extinction as severe as the end-Permian. Equatorial eruptions are necessary to produce sufficient dust and aerosols to affect life worldwide, whereas the much larger Siberian Traps eruptions were inside or near the Arctic Circle. Furthermore, if the Siberian Traps eruptions occurred within a period of 200,000 years, the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content would have doubled. Recent climate models suggest that such a rise in CO2 would have raised global temperatures by 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) to 4.5 °C (8.1 °F), which is bad but unlikely to cause a catastrophe as great as the P-Tr extinction.[80] However, one theory, popularized by the documentary Miracle Planet, is that the slight volcanic warming caused a melting of methane hydrate, and this created a positive-feedback warming loop, as methane is 45 times more efficient than CO2 at exacerbating global warming. I notice you are not hanging around the gold threads much these days.. Whassup with that ? Hope all is well The Black Swan Alias Alladin Sane alias Spotted Cat alias KastelCo :O)