Mail 812 Sunday, February 23, 2014

Subject : Seitz: CO2 absorption lines

Regarding Russell Seitz’ comment, "Mark Sanicola claiming that CO2 does not have an absorption band " between 9 and 13 microns is pure hogwash ." Sanicola is correct and Seitz is wrong. The two primary CO2 absorption lines in the atmosphere are at 15.0 microns and 4.26 microns. A CO2 laser operates by pumping the CO2 molecule ground state up to the 2349.3 /cm energy level (= 4.26 microns) and then making a transition to the excited state at 1388/cm. The energy difference between theses levels generates photons with a wavelength of 10.4 microns. For details see Fig. 3 of http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~phylabs/adv/ReprintsPDF/CO2%20Reprints/03%20-%20CO2%20Lasers.pdf.

The CO2 laser does present an interesting argument against the claims of the global warming alarmists. They know that the back radiation from CO2 in the atmosphere cannot raise the ground temperature much, ~ 1 C according to them. They then posit that the extra energy flux, ~ 1 W/m^2, at 15 micron will evaporate extra water into the atmosphere and water vapor’s much larger greenhouse effect will amplify the extra CO2 by about a factor of 4 to lead to catastrophic heating of the earth. [The obvious question is if H2O is such a powerful greenhouse gas, why doesn’t it just bootstrap the heating itself and cause runaway warming? There’s also an infinite reservoir of water called the oceans. But I digress.]

If you do a search for CO2 lasers you’ll come up with ads for lasers for plastic surgery where it’s used for scar removal and other cosmetic problems. The reason they work so well for that application is that 10.4 micron infrared barely penetrates the skin, which is mostly made of water. The surgeon can ablate the skin a few microns at a time because the penetration is so shallow, even with an energy flux of 10^6 W/m^2, a million times higher than the atmospheric flux. The same holds true for the 15 micron CO2 line in the atmosphere. It doesn’t penetrate the water more than a few microns and is consequently incapable of evaporating all that extra water into the air to cause more warming.

Paul S. Linsay–

Subject : Future of Work

Dear Dr. Pournelle;

To begin, allow me to thank you for the excellence of your site. I value the knowledgeable and insightful commentary from you and your readership. I would like to offer some comments of my own on the subject of the diminishing need for certain forms of labor.

One comment in particular, that technological changes are eliminating the need for those that fall on the ‘left side of the curve’ touches upon my own thoughts. I don’t disagree with the statement, but there seems to be an unstated assumption that only those on the left side of the curve are at risk. I believe that they are simply the first to feel the effects of the technological revolution we are undergoing.

The confluence of several technologies will, I firmly believe, eliminate the need for the vast majority of Human labor. It will do so in relatively short order, perhaps within 30-60 years were I so bold as to make a prediction.

The technologies I speak of are battery technology, robotics and ‘artificial intelligence’. I think a case could be made for adding 3D manufacturing to this list as well (and molecular manufacturing a few decades later).

Robotics that can manipulate their environment with greater precision and robustness than any Human, batteries that are energy dense enough to untether them from a wall socket and guiding software that will undoubtedly give them the ability to perform nearly any task a Human performs and do it with absolute consistency. These technologies in particular, as well as cheap, waste free and de-centralized manufacturing could eliminate the need for the majority of Human labor.

I know that predictions regarding artificial intelligence have promised much more than they have delivered so far, but there is little doubt that the coming years, possibly as few as 20, will see software that can replicate Human activities with ease, thus consuming much of the right side of the curve as well.

There is no Human endeavor with the possible exception of leadership roles that will not be more economically performed by intelligent, or at least expert/brilliant software: surgeons, lawyers, engineers, every-damn-thing you can think of. They can work 24 hours a day without fatigue, they don’t form unions or demand higher wages, they can be retrained by simply re-programming them (which will also be competently done by machines). And there is of course something else they cannot do: purchase the product of their work. In point of fact, if a new economic model is not developed in the very near future, when Human input on a grand scale is ‘surplus to requirements’ there won’t be anyone with two dimes to rub together.

This will occur quite naturally as a result of market forces. If firm ‘A’ and firm ‘B’ compete for the same market and firm ‘B’ fires it’s Human staff in favor of robotics and A.I. and can then deliver a service/product for a lower price firm ‘A’ will soon be out of business. Legislated incentives to retain Human staff can, I think, only slow the process, not stop it.

Obviously my position is stated as an extreme: Long before 90 percent of the Human race is without work, changes to our civilization will have been made or it will have collapsed. But just what is the answer to a civilization that no longer needs Human workers? When our tools and creations can do Humanity’s work cheaper and more efficiently, what will Humans do? Will we be served by our artificial minions, be saved from menial necessities so that we can turn our attention to bettering ourselves? Ah, Utopia! I rather think not. I seem to be incapable of taking such a future seriously. I simply don’t know what the future holds. The only thing I am quite certain of is that given the pace of technological advancement, we are rapidly reaching the point where a robot can be cheaply built and programmed to do any form of work. Personally I am a technophile and I see this as an opportunity to set our species free, not just from the drudgery that has defined much of Human life to present, but perhaps to fulfill the ideals set out nicely by Ayn Rand:

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."

Respectfully,

Eric Gilmer

Marx wrote eloquently of a time when a man might be a worker in the morning, an artist in the afternoon, and revel in the evening. This was his picture of the end of history.

Of course he also wrote that capitalism tends to widen the gap between workers and capitalists, between rich and poor, and to concentrate more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands. David McCord Wright thought that US trust busting – prevention of monopolies and promoting competition – made America different. Now the goal of most capitalist firms is to buy out their competition, and the government seems to allow or even encourage that. Note that ComCast wants to buy Time Warner and it appears to be on track for government approval; and many other “mergers” recently reduce competition and produce firms and banks that are too big to fail.

Science fiction has long generated stories of a time when work was pretty well uncoupled from actual productivity – recall George Jetson’s job which consisted of fighting traffic to get to “work” where he mostly did nothing. And Poul Anderson explored the theme more than once. None have been very satisfactory.

And our schools continue to send out students who don’t know how to do anything that someone would pay money to have done.

Online learning

http://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/the-end-of-the-uk-university-ii/#more-2972

A friend of mine discussing online learning replacing traditional universities. Pretty much what you have said but if you have a few minutes to kill…..

Neil Craig

Ford’s $5 / day

I’m surprised to see Ford’s own web site implying that Henry Ford raised wages so his employees could afford to buy Ford cars. I’ve searched a number of times, and never found anywhere he said such a thing. His goal was to increase sales by reducing prices, not by giving more money to his employees and hoping they would spend it on his cars; if Ferrari announced they were increasing wages for the guy who bolts the doors on so he could afford to buy a $250,000 Ferrari 458, people would rightly think they were mad.

What Ford did say, and the Ford site touched on, was "The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made, and the six-dollar day wage is cheaper than the five. How far this will go, we do not know." (Henry Ford, My Life And Work). The economy was booming, and auto workers could easily quit and take another job elsewhere if they were offered a better deal; increasing wages allowed Ford to hire the best workers, encouraged them to work hard to keep their jobs, and cut annual employee turnover from nearly 400%(!) to nearly zero.

He certainly believed companies should pay good wages, but had solid financial reasons to do so. Paying his workers more money reduced costs, and increased productivity, which did allow more people to buy his cars.

Edward M. Grant

I would not try to argue that Mr. Ford was a particularly generous man, and having been at Boeing when part of the company personnel policy was to keep people from leaving Seattle for jobs elsewhere because it was in those days difficult to get people to move to Seattle and thus isolate themselves from the aerospace industry – remember, this was before jet airliners were common – I quite understand the notion that it was generally cheaper to pay a good man more to stay than to try to recruit someone from Southern California to come to Seattle.

The point was that part of the increased productivity of the new techniques did in fact go to the workers, not just the stockholders; while most of the recent increases in productivity have not done that. The stockholders get the money, and the displaced workers get whatever they can; while the workers who stay on may or may not get large raises, but most do not get anything like the increases the investors have got. I am trying to stay as emotionally neutral in describing that as possible: objectively it seems clear that the thesis that increases in productivity are not going to the increasingly productive workers seems clear, and of course the size of the work force generally is reduced. America produces more goods than it used to, but with a smaller work force – just as farms produce far more than they did when more than half the working population worked on farms.

Raising the minimum wage.

If the Chinese could be persuaded to raise (or establish) their minimum wage, it would be far more beneficial that raising

the minimum wage in the United States.

Charles Brumbelow

What a marvelous idea. Who bells cat?

JEP

Tariffs should level the playing field nicely. Impose a tariff on any imported goods, and we’ll build them here.

iPods. MADE IN THE USA. Who could complain?

Mike Lieman

People who buy iPods?

JEP

People who buy iPods can afford the extra marginal expense to support their friends and neighbors, can’t they? At the end of the day, we need to choose what’s important to us. PEOPLE ( labor ) or THINGS (capital ) . I know what side I’m on.

Mike Lieman

When I was younger in in sixth grade in the Old South, at a time when the South voted 99.44% Democrat, it was taught in the public schools that Democrats wanted “Tariff for revenue only” while Republicans wanted protective tariff to prevent industrialization of the South.  The South could afford to be customers for northern manufactured goods, and could pay for them by shipping cotton and other agricultural products to the north – but could not buy spinning mills and looms because there was a huge tariff on importing such equipment. We will leave out examining the truth of this assertion.  Now the Republicans are for Free Trade, or say they are. No tariff at all, not even for revenue.

CUI BONO?

Hi, Doc.

I’m so tired of hearing straw-man arguments about "conspiracy theories".

You don’t have to conspire with anybody to notice you can get grant money for lying.

You don’t have to conspire with anybody to notice which scifi horror flicks scare lots and lots of voters.

You don’t have to conspire with anybody to notice which candidate’s rhetoric will let you make more money for your overproduction of corn, either.

That’s all I have for now, as it is too chilly in this house for me to care about much else.

Matthew Joseph Harrington

e pur si muove (the motto of consensus deniers since 1633)

The SBI : A New Approach To Drone Warfare

Dear Jerry :

Here is a link to a recent piece of mine that may be considered an homage to Poul Anderson, whose work first inspired scientific analysis of the specific impulse of beer as a rocket propellant.

It may have strategic uses still:

http://takimag.com/article/the_strategic_beer_initiative_russell_seitz/print

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2014/02/06/a-tale-of-two-droughts-n1790132/page/full

Dr Pournelle

"It would be great if we could pick out which, among the bright kids, will be the future Steve Jobs, and which will be philosophers and statesmen, but we can’t do that." https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/the-education-disaster/

If we picked out the future Steve Jobs in order to give him a university education, he would not be Steve Jobs. Jobs dropped out of college. So did Bill Gates. Albert Einstein never earned more than a bachelor’s degree.

The propaganda is that higher education correlates to higher achievement and higher earnings. I am not persuaded.

The only institution of higher learning in the United States that has a demonstrated record of turning out graduates who go on to become great men is the USMA at West Point. I doubt that has much to do with the academics they teach there.

Live long and prosper

h lynn keith

Jerry,

You might enjoy this paper: http://conference.leansystemssociety.org/focus-talk-comparing-parasitic-behaviours-biological-organisational-systems.htm

I have cited the technological strategy book you coauthored more than once.

Cheers,

Carlo

Dr Carlo Kopp, Fellow LSS, Associate Fellow AIAA

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Mail 811 Friday, February 21, 2014

Minimum wage

Like all progressive legislation, the mobs will be sold that this is their Right.

It can not be defeated, so acquiesce, but extract a price.

Any new business ( not counting existing business under new management) would be granted a ten year exemption from all wage laws (and hopefully all other government regulations) They could even hire teenagers for 50 cents an hour. Throw in your proposal of a doubling (actually I would favor a five fold increase) in the size of the workforce for exemption from government regulations and you begin to return Freedom to the workplace. Also add a rider that small businesses under 100 would be exempt from regulations under Interstate Commerce – the States can protect their own citizens.

And to appeal to those politicians who sold their souls, don’t stop with $10 or $12 go all the way to $20. (and to stop the trend towards subsidizing illegals) make the minimum wage only count for actual citizens of the United States. With a high penalty for falsely claiming citizenship. Not that it would ever be enforced.

This would be an excellent camel nose under the tent to get the Right Wing attached. In return for the Lefts pipe dream we would release the small businesses from bondage.

Earl Smith

 

Raising the minimum wage…

If the Chinese could be persuaded to raise (or establish) their minimum wage, it would be far more beneficial that raising the minimum wage in the United States.

Charles Brumbelow

What a marvelous idea.  Who bells cat?

Productivity and Pay

William Galston makes good points, but, as seems always to be true of those "in the mainstream Democrat intellectual community", his suggestions require a state with substantial coercive power and further assumes that the public programs will be efficiently administered by the state.

Anyway, wages as we understand them do not couple compensation to productivity; they couple compensation to time at the job. Piecework is the simplest way to couple compensation to actual productivity and it can and has been applied to large-scale manufacturing. Perhaps this archaic idea should be dusted off and given a fresh coat of wax.

Richard White

Austin, Texas

It looks as if officialdom have finally learned about tularemia.

<http://theweek.com/article/index/256780/how-do-you-weaponize-a-rabbit>

——-

Roland Dobbins

Luck is the residue of opportunity and design.

— John Milton

I first wrote about the use of tularemia as a terror weapon in about 1977. I also did a paper for a team at Edgewood Arsenal on the subject. I haven’t followed it much since, although I have toyed with using it in a novel sometime, but was worried about giving someone an idea. Glad to hear they are taking it seriously in the open now; I suspect that there was considerable attention paid to in at Edgewood at one time.

The Economics of Doomsday Preparations.

<http://www.smartasset.com/blog/economics-of/the-economics-of-doomsday-preparations/?ns=1>

—-

Roland Dobbins

As some of you may recall I was once a contributing editor to the late lamented Survival magazine.  Sometimes I am tempted to find some of my old columns and polish them for the modern era.  There are many things one should be prepared to survive: any one of them may be a low probability, but the probability of a Black Swan is not zero, and all the possible disasters are not uncorrelated.

Keystone Pipeline and energy independence

Jerry,

I was listening to an interview this evening where an environmentalist was vehemently against the Keystone Pipeline and stating that we need to make self sustaining communities producing sustainable energy and being self sufficient in other ways. I began putting other thoughts together and began to wonder…could it be the progressives are trying to reduce the capability to travel or ship goods over distance, having the communities have their own food production, people working locally and having housing become less sprawling and more centralized. By doing this they are attempting to make the populace into small, heavily concentrated population centers with reduced physical communication between the centers and potentially monitored electronic communication between them. All the things I’ve mentioned have been promoted in various initiatives I’ve seen over the past several years from ‘we don’t need the grid’ to placing monitoring devices in vehicles to cube type housing in city centers. Perhaps I’m guilty of too much paranoia but a picture is emerging…or perhaps everyone else has seen it and I’m just behind the power curve. 🙂

Tracy

We can all hope you are wrong.

sousveillance strikes again

Sousveillance is surveillance from underneath; when we serfs and peasants hear what our lords and masters really think. For instance:

http://boingboing.net/2014/02/20/report-from-a-meeting-of-wall.html

To the tune of Dixie: “In Wall Street land we’ll take our stand, said Morgan and Goldman. But first we better get some loans, so quick, get to the Fed, man.”

I forgive his failed attempt at humor; for humor is subjective. What sounds like gentle mockery of failure to one’s friends might sound like arrogant callousness to the victims of those failures. He had enough self-awareness to attempt this jest in private; but then sousveillance struck.

I also forgive his untuned singing voice. Not everybody has the gift; and those who don’t must spend 10,000 hours practicing to attain expertise.

But I do not forgive his rhymes, nor do I forgive his scansion. If he can count megabucks, then he can count syllables. He should not give up his day job.

Or maybe he should. Maybe he should quit banking, move to a cheap small room, and there spend 10,000 hours learning how to write a poem. At 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 2 days vacation per month, that’s only 5.31 years. He could afford that, easy.

It would be like a short prison term, even though bad poetry is not, technically, a crime. For him to voluntarily confine himself at hard labor for bad poetry would be poetic justice; but also a fantasy, for he and his friends have avoided being ‘guests of the State’ for far worse misdeeds.

Literary critique aside… I see in his song a reconciliation of Northern and Southern power systems. At last Wall Street and the Plantation are one. It’s not about wage servitude, nor about chattel slavery; they met in the middle at debt serfdom.

[long time contributor]

Navy deploying laser and railgun weapons

Jerry,

It’s not science fiction any longer! The Navy is deploying a laser defense weapon this year, and has plans to deploy a railgun experimentally next year.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/star-wars-on-the-seas-us-navy-to-deploy-laser-for-1st-time/

In the next 10 years or so, say medium-term, I think these two technologies have the potential to be game changers.

I hope that your recovery from your fall continues to go well.

Respectfully,

Tom Brendel

I have been waiting for this for a long time. Note that a nuclear carrier has a great deal of electric power, a lot of deck room to mount various sizes of rail guns, and a great capacity for ammunition…

Non-replicable research

Dear Mr. Pournelle:

You recently noted an L.A. Times article regarding landmark research the results of which can’t be replicated. I’ve read such articles also, and find the question fascinating.

The one comment I’d make is that it would be prudent not to assume this stems from fraud or sloppy science. It may, of course. But I’m thinking of an article in the Atlantic some years back about medical errors, which pointed out that while it would be comforting to attribute medical malpractice to a few bad apple doctors, it would be inaccurate. It turns out that more often serious errors in medicine result from unrecognized points at which errors are likely; as in when anesthesiologists pointed out that at that point their equipment was not standardized. On some models, you turned a knob clockwise to reduce the anesthetic. On other models, counterclockwise… Once this was standardized, serious operating room errors dropped dramatically.

So, a more interesting question regarding non-repeatable research would be: are we systematically not noticing a point of probable failure? Not through inattention or intellectual dishonesty, but perhaps an excessive confidence in our ability not to make mistakes.

Sincerely,

Allan E. Johnson

Subject: Student Debt Hurts Housing Market

Who would have thunk it? Putting the middle class in life-long debt to attend college hurts other parts of the economy?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/student-debt-may-hurt-housing-recovery-by-hampering-first-time-buyers/2014/02/17/d90c7c1e-94bf-11e3-83b9-1f024193bb84_story.html?hpid=z2

—

Dwayne Phillips

Who would have thought that making bondsmen of the middle class would have a deleterious effect? Yet I seem to recall that being debated in the time of Cicero.

.

Hawking’s Revenge

Dear Jerry

Your correspondent , Mr.John R. Strohm complains :

The latest version seems to say that Cthulhu could not only pop out of the black hole, but he could pop out of the black hole and into the “normal” universe at ANY point in the normal universe. It also seems to say that something that is at ANY point in the normal universe could suddenly, without warning, find itself engulfed by the black hole. Yes, of course the probability is inversely proportional to the distance from the center of mass of the hole, but it ain’t zero…

The bloody thing seems to me to be SCREAMING at us that one of the fundamental assumptions going into the discussion is false.

I beg to differ, as there is another ontologically coherent explanation :

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

How can Black Holes even "exist"?

As far as we know, isn’t it true that due to relativistic effects there is not enough lifespan to the universe for an asymptotically time-dilating (to ‘normal space’ observer) collapsar to form an actual event horizon? Like Xeno’s runner we can wait until the stars are cold (or atoms themselves are torn apart by the constantly accelerating expansion of Space) and never record the formation of an actual, fully formed event horizon?

Would not Superman himself fail to EVER see a singularity; even if he was standing with the top of his head level with the surface of a star when it began its final collapse?

According to Einstein, and never refuted that I know of, all "black holes" are, in relation to all of the universe WE can ever inhabit, possess the effects of a true black hole but are actually frozen an almost infinitely small step from ridiculously dense neutron star matter to that theoretical hole; which could only be observed by a point-like observer at the gravitational center of a pre-collapsed star "riding the front of the wave of implosion.

Or am I missing something as obvious as when Larry had to gently point out to me (Back in the fthp@aol.com days) that my modern, science-based space drive was nothing more than a re-invention of the principal of Cavorite? 😉 Questions? Comments? Criticisms? Old TV Guides with cool articles?

Guy DeWhitney

weather

Several blog posts. Salient data: Globally, Jan 2014 was warmer than Dec 2014. So the extreme cold in the US is balanced by warmth

elsewhere. In other words, it’s weather, not "climate change."

Jim

Of course I have never seen a rational explanation of the measures and weights used to achieve a single figure ‘global temperature’ from any of the modelers and I am not sure there is one. What ocean temperature depths? Is the ocean weight by surface area or by volume? If volume, doesn’t the land have volume too? Or it is all atmospheric temperature?

Jerry Pournelle

Chaos Manor

I believe that the UAH measurements use temperature normalized to a specific altitude and averaged over all resolution cells.

The models are likely a hodge podge, and to the extent that I suspect most are spherical earth, my back of the envelop suggests that the corrections for insolation on oblate earth are greater than their measurement fidelity.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/

Epicycles

"When you have to invent dark matter and dark energy as the makeup of most of the universe – something you cannot detect – it seems to me that you have gone far away from scientific methods as I learned it."

Throw in neutrinos magically morphing into _undetectable_ neutrinos to account for the "missing" solar neutrinos, and the ever-increasing count of new undetectable "dimensions" in string/brane theories…

… and I keep thinking, "Epicycles."

Carl "Bear" Bussjaeger

Author: Net Assets, Bargaining Position, The Anarchy Belt, and more Free Books, Craft How-To Articles:

http://www.bussjaeger.org/

I may be near with Laser Fusion

Jerry,

Two interesting papers, an overview in Physics and the principle paper in Phys Rev Lett

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

Physics: Steven J. Rose Viewpoint: Encouraging Signs on the Path to Fusion, <http://physics.aps.org/articles/v7/13>

Phys Rev Lett: <http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v112/i5/e055001>

Abstract:

"High-Adiabat High-Foot Inertial Confinement Fusion Implosion Experiments on the National Ignition Facility

H.-S. Park,* O. A. Hurricane,† D. A. Callahan, D. T. Casey, E. L. Dewald, T. R. Dittrich, T. Döppner, D. E. Hinkel, L. F. Berzak Hopkins, S. Le Pape, T. Ma, P. K. Patel, B. A. Remington, H. F. Robey, and J. D. Salmonson Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, P.O. Box 808, Livermore, California 94551, USA J. L. Kline

Los Alamos National Laboratory, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA

(Received 14 October 2013; published 5 February 2014)

This Letter reports on a series of high-adiabat implosions of cryogenic layered deuterium-tritium (DT) capsules indirectly driven by a “high-foot” laser drive pulse at the National Ignition Facility. High-foot implosions have high ablation velocities and large density gradient scale lengths and are more resistant to ablation-front Rayleigh-Taylor instability induced mixing of ablator material into the DT hot spot. Indeed, the observed hot spot mix in these implosions was low and the measured neutron yields were typically 50% (or higher) of the yields predicted by simulation. On one high performing shot (N130812), 1.7 MJ of laser energy at a peak power of 350 TW was used to obtain a peak hohlraum radiation temperature of ∼300 eV. The resulting experimental neutron yield was ð2.4 _ 0.05Þ × 1015 DT, the fuel ρR was

ð0.86 _ 0.063Þ g=cm2, and the measured Tion was ð4.2 _ 0.16Þ keV, corresponding to 8 kJ of fusion yield, with ∼1=3 of the yield caused by self-heating of the fuel by α particles emitted in the initial reactions.

The generalized Lawson criteria, an ignition metric, was 0.43 and the neutron yield was ∼70% of the value predicted by simulations that include α-particle self-heating."

Dr. Stefan Possony was convinced by his friends at Livermore that laser triggered fusion weapons were inevitable, and would be developed before the end of the Twentieth Century. If they have been I do not know it.

Thwarting Climate Change

Hello Jerry,

The one thing that all official Climate Experts agree on is that Anthropogenic CO2 (ACO2) is causing run away heating of the planet and that the heating will be catastrophic if something is not done to drastically limit ACO2. Taxes on CO2 and regulation of any activity that produces ACO2 directly (power plants/driving) or indirectly (consumption of electricity) seem to be the favorite ‘go to’ solutions.

Everyone (all the experts) agree that we need to Do Something Right Now or We’re All Going To Die, but when asked to provide evidence of the efficacy of their ‘solutions’ their reaction tends to be to ignore the question or call the questioner names.

Since I have had no luck on Dr. Curry’s site in getting answers to these questions (except the obvious from respondents with views similar to mine, that we don’t know and there is no way to find out), maybe your readers can help:

a. If we take absolutely NO action to control ACO2 and simply derive our energy from whatever sources are most convenient and economic, what will the Temperature of the Earth (TOE) be in 10, 50, and 100 years?

b. If we convene a panel of 100 of the climate experts most convinced of the existential threat posed by ACO2 and implement their recommended solutions to our ACO2 problems, world wide, what will the TOE be in 10, 50 and 100 years?

c. Why is the TOE obtained by absolute government control of ACO2 ‘better’ than the TOE that we will experience by ignoring ACO2 completely?

d. Do Climate Scientists have any actual, empirical evidence that their solutions, if imposed world wide, would have ANY measurable effect on the TOE

It would seem to me that if the problem is that the TOE is increasing we should be relatively certain that controlling ACO2 would in fact prevent the TOE from increasing, and a pretty good idea of how much. Or that halting or reversing the rise in the TOE actually desirable in the first place.

So far, no luck on obtaining answers to any of the above.

Bob Ludwick=

Dear Jerry

The Steve Goddard piece you link, written by one Mark Sanicola claiming that CO2 does not have an absorption band " between 9 and 13 microns’ is pure hogwash .

10.6 microns is the molecule’s primary vibrational band, the one on which CO2 lasers are based.

Sanicola’s claim to have worked all his life as " a professional infrared astronomer " is equally suspect- he is a retired optometrist..

When new contrarians make extraordinary claims, it is wise to run their names through Google Scholar to see if they are for real. Most of them prove to be all hat and no bibliography

best regards

—

Russell Seitz

Fellow of the Department of Physics Harvard University

Ah well. So what was he saying?

The Iron Law

Jerry,

I will have to label this as "the Iron Law" at play…

An understanding of bureaucracy

http://www.gocomics.com/9chickweedlane/2014/02/10#.Uvl4Q8-YaWg

Jim

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

SUBJ: Fred on Education

Since education is the topic du jour. Our house curmudgeon turns his blowtorch on schools.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/Soul.shtml

One money quote:

"Keep’em dumb, keep’em mad. Especially, keep their tuition."

Fred at his best. Depressing, yet rather entertaining – and always enlightening.

Minds me of an old anonymous quote "You have made me think. I’ll be wary of you in future."

Cordially,

John

Fred is generally worth your time. and particularly so this time.  He is blunt, of course, and not politically correct; but he calls things as he sees them and that is a remarkable quality in these times.

Schools

From the letter from Karen

“In the context of "America hating its bright kids" you have suggested that NCLB, by requiring more resources, at least in the form of teacher attention and time, being directed to low-performing children, makes those resources less available for bright and/or self motivated children. The implication is that schools and teachers can tell which children are brighter and stupider, and that their unimpeded freedom to direct their attentions as they see fit would lead to a better allocation of resources.

Respectfully, this is not true, and is in fact a load of horse manure. Indeed, you yourself have noted your wife’s success in teaching children who arrived at her classroom with piles of paperwork from previous "teachers" proving that these children could not be taught.”

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I am not sure how Karen managed to get from the first paragraph to the second. The fact that Roberta was successful in teaching students to read suggests a teacher can determine brighter students from slower students. Karen suggests that Roberta’s success shows they cannot?

The piles of paperwork showing a student will never learn to read did not really come from a ‘teacher’. At least not a teacher with unimpeded freedom to act. I suggest the paperwork came from the system, via a teacher blindly following mindless rules. I suggest Roberta threw out the rules and used her own good sense and judgment in place of it and was successful.

There is a mentality here which I call ‘Going Corporate’. Not sure how to define it, but I know it when I see it. The earmarks are when mounds of rules are used as a substitute for good judgment and common sense.

Brice

Indeed. But in California the Superintendent of Public Instruction ordered that teachers in California Public Schools not teach “decoding” or Phonics because it impeded good reading, and that was the state school policy for a long time; and while the policy was rescinded, it was after a decade in which all the teachers going to state colleges of education learned that, and learned that teaching phonics caused student to be bad readers, and a great deal of other such nonsense; and California has never recovered.

And to this day the Federal Department of Education has the crazy concept of reading readiness, and that young children are not ready to learn to read and thus will be harmed by early exposure to phonics; so that the Head Start program does not teach reading, because Head Start students are “not ready” to read. Yet for a hundred years and more English upper middle and upper class children were taught to read in the nursery by nannies at age 4; and just about all of them learned. English children are not better protoplasm than American children, and what they can learn ours can learn – but only if it be taught to them. Most theories of reading are excuses for why the teachers are not teaching them to read.

About a quarter to a third of children in first grade will learn to read no matter what it taught to them; a similar group will learn if given any rational clue to the notion of the Phoenician Alphabet as opposed to ideographic writing; but it is hard work teaching the last third or so. Hard enough that if you don’t know how to do it, you will fail. And thus the pounds and pounds of literature proving that these particular kids can’t learn for various reasons. Alas, most of the teachers do not know they are part of a vast cover thy arse conspiracy. But those who do not learn to read by grade four are not going to be scientists and engineers.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.