Aside from the deceptive graphing (see Tutte), my problem with these alarmist graphs is that we know nothing about what they mean. Since we have only been gathering data for 30 years or so, we have no idea what the "natural range" for this variable is. In fact, we have no idea what the natural range of temperatures for the Earth is -- e.g., do we really know what the mean temperature during the Roman Empire was? We don't know where CO2 comes from, or where it is stored. A recent article indicated that the ocean stores enormous amounts of CO2, CO and other gasses. I bought gas saving cars for years, but then discovered that all my liberal friends (big donors to the Sierra Club) drove gas-guzzling SUV's. Scientists are paid to be alarmist -- that's how they get funding -- e.g., looking for asteroids that might hit the Earth. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to drop everything every time they scream that the sky is falling. Scientists have cried wolf about 10^6 times too often, and they've used up all their credibility. They've become yet another political lobbying group -- just look at any issue of Scientific American for the past 10 years or so. At 09:23 AM 1/16/2004, Ed Pegg Jr wrote:

Can you laugh away this graph? http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccgg/figures/co2obs.jpg

Eventually, we're going to find out what happens when this graph hits 420, or higher. A conservative, in my mind, would be happy with the current levels of carbon dioxide, and would not want to take the risk of ever higher levels.

--Ed Pegg Jr.

--- Eugene Salamin <gene_salamin@yahoo.com> wrote:

...

This little chuckle pales in comparison to the damage done by the pervasive belief that nuclear power is unsafe, or that human activity is casusing global temperatures increases.

Gene

If you guys want to argue about global warming on math-fun, and there is nothing I like better than arguing about global warming, you should get up to date on the latest flap. Google "hockey stick"+warming to get lots of links. A climate journal published by Elsevier (1101 scientific journals) had an article on the medieval warming period refuting a previous article that claimed it hadn't occurred. The article was by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. This article caused a big flap among scientist political enthusiasts for global warming, and Elsevier fired the editor causing six other editors to resign. The afore-mentioned enthusiasts have long hated my friend Sallie who is head of the science advisory committee of the Marshall Institute in Washington which is pro-defense and pro-development and pro-nuclear. I think that who hates whom is signficant in understanding this flap.

--- John Conway <conway@Math.Princeton.EDU> wrote:

On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Eugene Salamin wrote:

...

This little chuckle pales in comparison to the damage done by the pervasive belief that nuclear power is unsafe, or that human activity is casusing global temperatures increases. Explain this last point to the people in Quebec City. It's -50 and the laughter may help warm them.

I well remember being in England about 20 years ago when the whole of Western Europe was suddenly very much concerned at the rapid rise in radioactivity that we later learned was the result of an accident at Chernobyl in Russia (but now Ukraine once again). The concern was amply justified, since many thousands of people in the Ukraine have died as a consequence, and very many more, all over Europe, would have done so had a few dozen volunteers (unwittingly) sacrificed their lives in order to save us.

That assertion sounds dubious. Can you quote measurements of radioactivity in Europe outside of Ukraine?

Conservatives usually pride themselves on being hard-headed, but surely the hard-headed view here is that cock-ups will always be with us, since what's not impossible will, with probability one, ultimately happen, So we are assured that such accidents will happen again, and some of them will be worse than the Chernobyl one. You don't have to get much worse for it to become pretty awful!

John Conway

If we shut down the nuclear industry, then the energy will be generated instead from fossil fuels. Coal produces air pollution, which kills people, about 50000 per year in the US. But these deaths occur widely separated and over time, and so are not newsworthy. Natural gas is nonpolluting (except for those who think CO2 is a pollutant). But natural gas and liquid fuel storage facilities are potentially dangerous, and quantitatively more likely to lead to fatalities than a nuclear reactor. [Today's Yahoo news: SKIKDA, Algeria (Reuters) - Rescue workers searched through rubble for missing workers at Algeria's largest refinery and export port Tuesday after a blast at a nearby liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant killed at least 23 people, officials said. ... It was the worst LNG accident since 1975 when about 40 people died in an explosion in Staten Island, U.S. ...] The Chernobyl reactor had known design problems that required strict adherence to an operating protocol. This protocol was violated, in spite of a warning from the control computer. A similar situation occurred at the SL-1 reactor in Idaho in 1961, killing the 3 people in the building. Power generating reactors in the US are of a safer design; water is both coolant and moderator, so loss of coolant is automatically also a loss of moderator, which shuts down the chain reaction. A loss of coolant accident followed by a failure of the emergency core cooling system (the Three Mile Island scenario) leads to core meltdown due to the heat from radioactive decay. Because US reactors have containment buildings, the Three Mile Island core meltdown caused zero injuries. The fact that nuclear energy is so concentrated is what makes it economically feasible to build containment structures. This just couldn't be done with natural gas storage. Commercial nuclear power in the US has zero injuries and deaths from radiation accidents, although there have have been steam explosions. (I exclude SL-1, since that was a military research reactor.) These statistics justify the safety of nuclear power. By refusing to accept a very low probability of a nasty nuclear accident, we pollute our air and water and land, and with certainty sicken and kill large numbers of people. Reference: Petr Beckmann, "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear", Golem Press. Gene __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus