i know there's some articles floating around about the melting waters up north messing with the jet stream, but every article i've seen on the topic actually presents itself as a minority view against the consensus. if you think about it for a second, it doesn't actually make any sense. we've had unusually warm winters for 20 years, then all of a sudden the warming trend results in coldness? i mean, i don't like to make a habit of agreeing with people like rush limbaugh but i think the truth is that the media is jumping on this in ways that demonstrate that most journalists really don't have the slightest understanding of what they're typing about.
you mean teaching people grammar for four years doesn't give them a deeper understanding of climate science? my mind is blown.
anyways, the article itself is interesting but please draw specific attention to the chart published, which points out specifically cold years in 2013, 1993 and 1976. specifically:
1976 -6
1993 -5.5
2013 -5.3
those are the three coldest years in the last 50. it's very interesting because it very clearly demonstrates how two different phenomena - cyclical sunspot activity and increasing greenhouse gas concentration - work together. we see that temperatures at the minimum of each cycle have increased slightly. it's entirely reasonable, based on this data and what we know about these two phenomena, to expect another especially cold year around 2030 - although not quite as cold. -5, perhaps. or perhaps -4.5 or even -4, if the warming picks up.
now, if you zoom out a little further to the last 100 years you see especially cold years in the late 50s, late 30s and late 10s, further corroborating a roughly 20 year cycle. further, the 30s (~-6) and 10s (almost -8) are the coldest - further corroborating the warming trend. this even pulls out the slight cooling trend in the middle of the century (when the bottom of the cycle hit in the late 50s, it was -5.5, a bit warmer than the 30s, so it's actually the 70s bottoming that demonstrates the cooling).
going back to the media, they want to present these ideas as counter to one another. and, certainly, the crackpots that want to write off climate change as all sunspots and no carbon aren't helping to clarify how they work together.
but this simple chart demonstrates it very clearly.
http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/has-it-really-been-that-cold-in-southern-ontario/21691/
that's presuming the sun behaves, of course.
my understanding is that this particular relationship is demonstrable across the northern hemisphere (and only the northern hemisphere), and is not localized to toronto. it just happens to really cleanly show the relationship.
there was some murmuring a few months ago that the sun's low activity might be about to throw us into a cold snap for a few years, but my understanding is the sun has come back.
nor is it as simple as just sunlight. of course, i don't understand it down to the precise details. i'm not a climate scientist. but i think the idea is intuitive enough. i mean, it's been cold this year because of the air coming down from the north, which is specifically related to wind. when the wind roars it's way south, it gets cold down here. due to the way the earth is tilted, the amount of sun that hits the northern hemisphere has well known effects that are related to the onset of ice ages (milankovitch cycles).
maybe i should state the argument that convinced me that carbon has an effect. i'm a skeptical person. i was agnostic at first. but, the more i looked into it, the more i realized that "natural conditions" "should" be pushing us into an ice age. that is to say that we are hypothesized to currently exist in an interglacial. i say hypothesized because the future doesn't exist yet. but, based on what we know about the way the climate's been changing for the last really long time, we've been coming in and out of ice ages pretty regularly and seemed to be about on the verge of entering into another one (based on how long past interglacials lasted). that is to say that, based on past climate data, the reasonable conclusion to come to would be that we should expect to be entering an ice age just about any year now.
yet, the data states the climate is warming. therefore, something must be working to counteract the onset of an ice age. the chemistry of carbon works together with the correlation of rising carbon. that's something that requires a terrestrial explanation + correlation + mechanism - enough to convince me.
milankovitch cycles are like 20 some thousand years, though, and has to do with the way the earth orbits as much as it does with the way the earth is tilted. it's not at all the same thing. but the parallel to draw is that both ideas rely on differences in the amount of sun hitting the earth at northern latitudes - very small changes. milankovitch' ideas are based on very small changes making big differences over thousands of years. the sunspot thing is very small changes making relatively small differences over a short period of time. so, it's just a difference of scale.
like i say, that's just an intuitive explanation - the sun's energy hits us on enough of an angle in the north that small variations have the ability to set off chaotic changes. like lightning hitting a pond. that's the cause of most weather on the planet! so, i think that's uncontroversial. the difficulty is working it out in more detail than that. and there's been some studies noting the correlation i'm pulling out; in fact, that's entirely what i'm drawing on (i'm not one to make shit up).
here's my source. again - it's only the northern hemisphere.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/11/solar-activity-and-the-so-called-%E2%80%9Clittle-ice-age%E2%80%9D/
as an aside, that brings up an aspect of the climate change discussion that nobody talks about. there's this sort of implicit assumption that if we stop carbon emissions then the climate will be static. of course, that's ridiculous. nobody would actually say that. the climate is in constant flux. yet, it remains implicit. in fact, we have every reason to believe that if we were to erase all the warming we've created with carbon then we'd be headed directly into an ice age. that is to say that the carbon we're dumping into the atmosphere is preventing an ice age.
i don't think we want to enter an ice age anymore than we want to go into a warming feedback cycle.
that doesn't mean we can just let the carbon flow and get away with it. milankovitch cycles or not, we can't just terraform the planet into venus and think we'll be ok. but, i don't think it's something the models take fully into account - and it is something they SHOULD take into account. the question of how much carbon is necessary to offset the milankovitch cycles is a valid one, as is the question of how much is too much. we want some carbon to offset the cooling, but we don't want so much that it melts the permafrost and unleashes all the methane. if the latter happens, it could very well take us out of an "icehouse" and into a "hothouse", and then we're totally lost in the woods without a compass.
i don't think that the numbers that are generally thrown around in the media are created with any of that in mind. like i say: it's just that implicit assumption of stasis that everybody knows is ridiculous. but, the other side of that argument is that ice ages don't happen that rapidly and that it's a lesser thing to be concerned about. yet, is it really? that's an assumption i'm less than comfortable with.
what i'm hoping is that we're going to see some stories in the next few months that point out that it's going to take a few years to thaw all the refreezing that happened this year. of course, that won't buck the trend. it might buy us some more time, though.
....but the flip side of that is when the cycle does it turn it could be worse than we're expecting.
i'm just working out possibilities of the way the models are flawed. we'll have to find out. but if there's something deep to the idea that sun activity does have these cycles in the north,
1) we'll need to recalculate the effect of this minimum
2) we'll need to recalculate the effect of the coming maximum around 2020
i think it probably won't just balance out.
this is more precisely what i'm talking about. as you can see, the amount of energy is very small. it's not enough to have serious climate effects on a short term basis (although the milankovitch theory, which is accepted, states that larger changes occur over thousands of years due to changes in the earth's distance from the sun, how it spins and etc). however, the idea is that the small differences in energy might be enough to set off weather patterns - and specifically that it might have an effect on cyclones raging off the coast of siberia and, by proxy, affect how the air pushes southwards into north america and europe.
i just want to make it clear that nobody is suggesting that less sunspots = less sunlight = cold. that neither makes sense in terms of energy or in terms of the cause of the cold we're experiencing (which is already frigid air moving south, not southern air becoming frigid due to the sun not warming it or something). rather, it's the idea that small changes in the amount of energy hitting northern latitudes can affect weather in the north, and that the weather in the north then affects shit further south.
which is not any different than el nino / la nina. it's just in siberia instead of the pacific, and follows a different pattern of air movement.
http://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/Earth8.pdf
lol. there's a whole section in this dude's book. he's a contributor at a prominent climate site (realclimate), fwiw.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=g97ktyTE7LIC&pg=PA157&dq=solar+activity+and+earth%27s+climate+6.5&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R-cCU-vqLoqz2QXksoCwCA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=solar%20activity%20and%20earth%27s%20climate%206.5&f=false
btw, i'm pointing to the 22 year hale cycle of magnetic reversal rather than the 11 year sunspot cycle that all the literature is citing. they're related. it's the same argument, i'm just stretching it out over two cycles. but i should be clear.
the nasty cold is only ~20 years (and sometimes a few times in a down cycle) 'cause there's other stuff besides the sun going on.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442%282004%29017%3C0034%3AEOTSCI%3E2.0.CO%3B2
if you're still reading this and can't understand that document, what it says (amongst other things) is that the 11 year solar minimum (not the 22 year one) might create either an extremely cold polar vortex or an extremely warm one depending on whether the wind is easterly or westerly. it works that out by either pulling heat up or down from the atmosphere. this paper was unable to determine a cause or pattern underlying the direction of the wind.
meaning it's not quite the same thing as i'm saying, but it does present evidence that the solar minimum is a cause of extreme polar vortices.
and with that, we have once again derived the immortal words:
the answer, my friend...
</thread>
Monday, February 17, 2014
i think he's mostly right. but.
1) the whole dictators-for-israel thing goes back decades. egypt is a particular example. the peace treaty has always been unpopular in egypt and would probably not survive real democracy. so, the americans send them billions a year to prop up the military to prevent democracy. israel isn't the only factor (there was a suez crisis, but it's sort of ancient history), but it is a really important one.
2) 'stabilize' is basically an orwellian term that really means 'destabilize'.
3) american hegemony is weakened but still in tact. they simply can't remove assad due to threats from other players (most importantly russia). but that shouldn't lead to an exaggeration of iran's soft power. if you look at the agreement, it was basically the united states enforcing it's terms in exchange for an almost trivial reversal of sanctions. the greater context is iran turning to other countries. consider the banking embargo, which was supposed to make it impossible for iran to sell oil. instead, india and china and others started buying iranian oil with GOLD. turkey has been unhappy with the sanctions, and they're a really key us ally. the proper term for that is blowback: blowback on a financial level. it would be catastrophic to us interests if the embargo stimulated the rest of the world to ditch the dollar as a reserve currency rather than iran being isolated - it's both a failure of the sanctions and a weakening of american financial power. oops? absolutely. so, is that iranian soft power? sort of, but not really. it's more of a strategic error by the americans, followed by a sort of compensation for it. but, even with the error and it's possible consequences, the americans still maintain enough hegemony to assert themselves and possibly reverse the effects of the errors. so, what the americans are trying to do is weaken the effects of that blowback by pulling them in with honey rather than vinegar, but it's a sort of acidic honey if you see what i'm saying. it's transparemtly cynical. very tough terms. i think the fundamental realization that the americans have come to is that their hegemony is fragile, but that's a big step away from abandoning it. what that means is the iranians are still powerless to reject american demands, even as the americans are being forced to adjust to a failed policy. in the long run, the strategy hasn't fundamentally changed. the americans are still actively pursuing regime change. but they need to be more subtle, because if they aren't then things might unravel very badly. that's maybe a triumph of realism over neo-conservatism? two sides of the same coin, though. another bad move and the iranians could escape their grasp - but the thing is they realize that would mean becoming a protectorate of china, and they're obviously not going to see that as their first choice, so they largely remain optionless. in the larger picture, then, that's not really iranian soft power. it's more of a satellite being stuck between two powers and trying to find a way to make the best of it.
4) he's really exaggerating the opposition to assad. syrians seem to have temporarily aligned with the government as a lesser evil. ironically, the best way to actually remove assad would be to pull the foreign islamist fighters out and let the people rise against him. but, that moment may now be lost for many years, as the state effectively mobilizes it's citizens against the terrorist groups.
whatever assad's crimes, it's hard to blame syrians for choosing secular stability over religious fundamentalism. i mean, it's the old "would you rather saddam husseein was still in power?" canard. the reality is that a huge number of iraqis would say "yes". i think commentators really need to work that out more strenuously in understanding the depth of the opposition to these islamist groups.
there's this desire to project this third option that it seems like syrians realize isn't realistic in the short term. in the short term, the focus seems to be on saving the country from the fascists, rather than aligning with them to topple the government.
it's a constant problem. even in a simple occupy context, there were nazis popping up all over the place. we decided it was more important to kick the nazis out. so, for me, reproducing that line of thinking is very easy. if i'm choosing between upholding parliament and shooting nazis? it's not even a choice, give me a gun. the only good fascist is a dead one.
so, the revolution in syria is not likely to carry on.
but it doesn't fall under the category of "blunder" the same way that the screwed up sanctions do because the crux of the operation was to *prevent* democracy in syria (assad was building a constitution at the time).
it's not the preferred outcome, but it's an acceptable result in the short run.
to an extent, i'm reminded of the spanish or russian revolutions. there were far deeper anarchist movements there than in contemporary syria, and there was a lot of debate, but in the end they had to align with statist interests to fight a far greater threat - franco and the bolsheviks, respectively. they lost in both cases. but they picked the right side of the fight.
it's interesting today, fwiw, that nobody talks about the slaughter that the republican forces were no doubt responsible for. i'm deducing this, i can't cite anything.
i should probably get a good book on the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_%28Spain%29
it's maybe perilous to draw an exact analogy, but you get the point.
war's a shitty deal all around.
i mean, we see what's happened in libya, and that is far less organized. just total racist and sectarian slaughter. i shudder to think at would what happen if these groups actually succeed, and i think "the average syrian" is well aware of what the stakes are in supporting assad to defeat them.
if anything, support seems to have strengthened. there was supposedly a huge pro-assad rally yesterday.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrians-support-assad-western-propaganda
presstv should be read critically, rather than dismissed. they may be exaggerating. i can't possibly know, i can just read the reports skeptically.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/02/16/350993/syrians-hold-progovernment-rallies/
1) the whole dictators-for-israel thing goes back decades. egypt is a particular example. the peace treaty has always been unpopular in egypt and would probably not survive real democracy. so, the americans send them billions a year to prop up the military to prevent democracy. israel isn't the only factor (there was a suez crisis, but it's sort of ancient history), but it is a really important one.
2) 'stabilize' is basically an orwellian term that really means 'destabilize'.
3) american hegemony is weakened but still in tact. they simply can't remove assad due to threats from other players (most importantly russia). but that shouldn't lead to an exaggeration of iran's soft power. if you look at the agreement, it was basically the united states enforcing it's terms in exchange for an almost trivial reversal of sanctions. the greater context is iran turning to other countries. consider the banking embargo, which was supposed to make it impossible for iran to sell oil. instead, india and china and others started buying iranian oil with GOLD. turkey has been unhappy with the sanctions, and they're a really key us ally. the proper term for that is blowback: blowback on a financial level. it would be catastrophic to us interests if the embargo stimulated the rest of the world to ditch the dollar as a reserve currency rather than iran being isolated - it's both a failure of the sanctions and a weakening of american financial power. oops? absolutely. so, is that iranian soft power? sort of, but not really. it's more of a strategic error by the americans, followed by a sort of compensation for it. but, even with the error and it's possible consequences, the americans still maintain enough hegemony to assert themselves and possibly reverse the effects of the errors. so, what the americans are trying to do is weaken the effects of that blowback by pulling them in with honey rather than vinegar, but it's a sort of acidic honey if you see what i'm saying. it's transparemtly cynical. very tough terms. i think the fundamental realization that the americans have come to is that their hegemony is fragile, but that's a big step away from abandoning it. what that means is the iranians are still powerless to reject american demands, even as the americans are being forced to adjust to a failed policy. in the long run, the strategy hasn't fundamentally changed. the americans are still actively pursuing regime change. but they need to be more subtle, because if they aren't then things might unravel very badly. that's maybe a triumph of realism over neo-conservatism? two sides of the same coin, though. another bad move and the iranians could escape their grasp - but the thing is they realize that would mean becoming a protectorate of china, and they're obviously not going to see that as their first choice, so they largely remain optionless. in the larger picture, then, that's not really iranian soft power. it's more of a satellite being stuck between two powers and trying to find a way to make the best of it.
4) he's really exaggerating the opposition to assad. syrians seem to have temporarily aligned with the government as a lesser evil. ironically, the best way to actually remove assad would be to pull the foreign islamist fighters out and let the people rise against him. but, that moment may now be lost for many years, as the state effectively mobilizes it's citizens against the terrorist groups.
whatever assad's crimes, it's hard to blame syrians for choosing secular stability over religious fundamentalism. i mean, it's the old "would you rather saddam husseein was still in power?" canard. the reality is that a huge number of iraqis would say "yes". i think commentators really need to work that out more strenuously in understanding the depth of the opposition to these islamist groups.
there's this desire to project this third option that it seems like syrians realize isn't realistic in the short term. in the short term, the focus seems to be on saving the country from the fascists, rather than aligning with them to topple the government.
it's a constant problem. even in a simple occupy context, there were nazis popping up all over the place. we decided it was more important to kick the nazis out. so, for me, reproducing that line of thinking is very easy. if i'm choosing between upholding parliament and shooting nazis? it's not even a choice, give me a gun. the only good fascist is a dead one.
so, the revolution in syria is not likely to carry on.
but it doesn't fall under the category of "blunder" the same way that the screwed up sanctions do because the crux of the operation was to *prevent* democracy in syria (assad was building a constitution at the time).
it's not the preferred outcome, but it's an acceptable result in the short run.
to an extent, i'm reminded of the spanish or russian revolutions. there were far deeper anarchist movements there than in contemporary syria, and there was a lot of debate, but in the end they had to align with statist interests to fight a far greater threat - franco and the bolsheviks, respectively. they lost in both cases. but they picked the right side of the fight.
it's interesting today, fwiw, that nobody talks about the slaughter that the republican forces were no doubt responsible for. i'm deducing this, i can't cite anything.
i should probably get a good book on the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_%28Spain%29
it's maybe perilous to draw an exact analogy, but you get the point.
war's a shitty deal all around.
i mean, we see what's happened in libya, and that is far less organized. just total racist and sectarian slaughter. i shudder to think at would what happen if these groups actually succeed, and i think "the average syrian" is well aware of what the stakes are in supporting assad to defeat them.
if anything, support seems to have strengthened. there was supposedly a huge pro-assad rally yesterday.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrians-support-assad-western-propaganda
presstv should be read critically, rather than dismissed. they may be exaggerating. i can't possibly know, i can just read the reports skeptically.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/02/16/350993/syrians-hold-progovernment-rallies/
at
02:14
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
deathtokoalas
the people that censored this didn't understand it. strangely, that's often the case with artistic censorship.
it's anti-hierarchical, but it's explicitly rejecting violence as a means to that end and pointing out that attempts at violent revolution always backfire.
also, for those that are arguing about it, the offspring were, from the start, a middle point between old punk and what i'm going to call corporate punk. they have a certain affinity with the ending points of the first wave of punk - later damned, some dead kennedys and certainly bad religion. but from the very beginning they infused it with a very pop aesthetic. that's not to say they engineered the idea, but they certainly took it to a different level. strangely, though, the thing that made them stand out was a softening of the crossover sound. there's a really strong thrash narrative through their early work that clashed really well with the poppier influence that wasn't just from stuff like the descendants but also bands like the police.
think of it like this: you could very easily take out the lyrics on any offspring record up to 1997 and insert blink 182 lyrics and it wouldn't really stand out that much. it's like they had a pop-punk sound with an anarcho-punk ideology.
that being said, you can tell holland didn't lean completely anarcho-punk. people are often shocked to learn that there were actually republican punk bands in the period. southern california was a very wealthy area, and a certain right-wing subculture did arise from that. my hypothesis has always been that holland started there and grew out of it. you can hear it in his later stuff, like "why don't you get a job?", for example. that's kind of a conservative tune. even 'come out and play' has a certain right-wing vibe to it.
...and it landed them in some hot water with their peers. they really wanted to be on epitaph and eventually got there but gurewitz always hated them, initially rejected them repeatedly and literally sold them to columbia the first chance he got.
so, they don't really fit into either category. along with bad religion, and to a lesser extent fugazi, they form a bridge between punk and pop. the difference is just that they were way more successful than the others...
i don't know how much of their fan base really followed them back to their punk roots. i'm sure enough did. for me, they were the first punk band i really heard (well, excluding nirvana). smash was out when i was 13. had the disc. had the shirt. just from looking around at the other kids around me, it seemed like the same kids that were listening to offspring in grade 7 were listening to avril in grade 12. it seems like most people followed the punk pop trend forwards the way that mtv presented it to them. i hope they weren't listening to thursday after they graduated :\
but i have to say that if i were to run across them today as a new punk band, i'd be a lot more critical of what they have to say, and i can entirely understand why they were rejected by so much of the punk rock community. they were always half very punk, and half very not punk and in a very strange and almost contradictory way.
but i'm glad i'm not a trendy asshole :P
slumdog
Well maybe violent revolution always backfire but maybe killing a president or two would not harm, after all now they can just fuck us in the ass as long and as hard they want without any consequences but maybe if a couple of heads rolled just maybe they'd think twice..
deathtokoalas
nah. you need to think structurally. the president is the fall guy. you're supposed to hate him; keeps the oligarchs safe.
lincoln's death accomplished nothing, and they took out kennedy from the inside.
the people that censored this didn't understand it. strangely, that's often the case with artistic censorship.
it's anti-hierarchical, but it's explicitly rejecting violence as a means to that end and pointing out that attempts at violent revolution always backfire.
also, for those that are arguing about it, the offspring were, from the start, a middle point between old punk and what i'm going to call corporate punk. they have a certain affinity with the ending points of the first wave of punk - later damned, some dead kennedys and certainly bad religion. but from the very beginning they infused it with a very pop aesthetic. that's not to say they engineered the idea, but they certainly took it to a different level. strangely, though, the thing that made them stand out was a softening of the crossover sound. there's a really strong thrash narrative through their early work that clashed really well with the poppier influence that wasn't just from stuff like the descendants but also bands like the police.
think of it like this: you could very easily take out the lyrics on any offspring record up to 1997 and insert blink 182 lyrics and it wouldn't really stand out that much. it's like they had a pop-punk sound with an anarcho-punk ideology.
that being said, you can tell holland didn't lean completely anarcho-punk. people are often shocked to learn that there were actually republican punk bands in the period. southern california was a very wealthy area, and a certain right-wing subculture did arise from that. my hypothesis has always been that holland started there and grew out of it. you can hear it in his later stuff, like "why don't you get a job?", for example. that's kind of a conservative tune. even 'come out and play' has a certain right-wing vibe to it.
...and it landed them in some hot water with their peers. they really wanted to be on epitaph and eventually got there but gurewitz always hated them, initially rejected them repeatedly and literally sold them to columbia the first chance he got.
so, they don't really fit into either category. along with bad religion, and to a lesser extent fugazi, they form a bridge between punk and pop. the difference is just that they were way more successful than the others...
i don't know how much of their fan base really followed them back to their punk roots. i'm sure enough did. for me, they were the first punk band i really heard (well, excluding nirvana). smash was out when i was 13. had the disc. had the shirt. just from looking around at the other kids around me, it seemed like the same kids that were listening to offspring in grade 7 were listening to avril in grade 12. it seems like most people followed the punk pop trend forwards the way that mtv presented it to them. i hope they weren't listening to thursday after they graduated :\
but i have to say that if i were to run across them today as a new punk band, i'd be a lot more critical of what they have to say, and i can entirely understand why they were rejected by so much of the punk rock community. they were always half very punk, and half very not punk and in a very strange and almost contradictory way.
but i'm glad i'm not a trendy asshole :P
slumdog
Well maybe violent revolution always backfire but maybe killing a president or two would not harm, after all now they can just fuck us in the ass as long and as hard they want without any consequences but maybe if a couple of heads rolled just maybe they'd think twice..
deathtokoalas
nah. you need to think structurally. the president is the fall guy. you're supposed to hate him; keeps the oligarchs safe.
lincoln's death accomplished nothing, and they took out kennedy from the inside.
at
00:44
Location:
Windsor, ON, Canada
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