Balta1701

QUOTE(LosMediasBlancas @ Feb 7, 2007 -> 10:28 AM) Easy one. No matter how cold it is outside, if you have on enough protection, you will be OK. If it is 100 degrees out and humid, there is no relief. Yes there is, it's called a "Fan".

Am I the only one who thinks that Brian's performance will be directly tied to how much playing time he gets...in the sense that the more playing time he gets early in the season, the better his overall totals will be by the end?

2 members of the Cincinnati Bengals Indiana Pacers accused of assaulting a bar manager. Man, and I always thought Rick Carlisle was such a good coach too, this stint in Indiana's making him look like he can't control a thing.

Walmart, AT&T, Intel, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) team up to support creating a universal health care system covering all americans by 2012.

QUOTE(Texsox @ Feb 7, 2007 -> 06:41 AM) BTW, has anyone lived in both extremes? From Chicago to L.A.? I think I've got that covered. I'll stick with the heat. No matter how many times people tell me that "you can always put on more clothes" excuse, I just don't buy it. I can't stand snow.

QUOTE(retro1983hat @ Feb 7, 2007 -> 08:15 AM) I laughed about 90% of the time last year. I thought it was great. The only ones I thought were dumb were the ones where he combined the Tigers and the Lions. Oh come on man, the Javon Rodranson story? That was Pure beauty.

QUOTE(Jimbo @ Feb 6, 2007 -> 10:27 PM) only in minnesota!!! Well, until it happens somewhere else.

"We ought to make the pie higher." (My work is done here now, moving on....)

Baseball, beauty, and life.

Just gonna keep my mouth shut before I get in trouble...

QUOTE(kapkomet @ Feb 6, 2007 -> 06:23 PM) *sigh* These people are totally screwed in the head. And, it would appear, in a few other places.

QUOTE(Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 6, 2007 -> 03:35 PM) Hey Balta- You seem to be the guy in the know with this (thanks for the earlier post btw, very informative). What causes natural rises in C02, like in the graphs posted above? Natural disasters (specifically volcanoes I'm thinking) or meteors or something? All of those things can, to some extent, cause CO2 excursions, yes. Like many things that are worth time in science though, it is in fact a very complex matter, perhaps entertainingly so. Meteors is probably the most obscure of those, so i'll just sort of touch upon that a little; it would take a really odd event to change the global CO2 budget, because they're such short lived things. Even if you burn every forest in the world, which may have happened in the Cretaceous impact, you only stick a transient pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere. So it's not really a big contributor to that. Volcanic activity though appears to be able to have major effects on the earth's climate, in multiple ways, including CO2. There is in fact an average flux of CO2 from the mantle to the Earth's surface from volcanoes every year, and in fact, ever day. However, the Earth's system has adapted to this. Thanks to biologic systems and other feedbacks, it takes an awful lot of volcanism for volcanic CO2 to have a major impact on the climate in terms of warming, and even more importantly, volcanic activity spews more than just CO2 into the atmosphere. Single eruptions produce ash, high concentrations of sulfur, aerosol particles, and other things, which actually can go in the opposite direction of CO2. So, while an eruption like Tambora in 1815 almost certainly spat out a ton of CO2, the earth wound up having "The year without a summer" because of all the other junk that it spat out into the atmosphere. If, however, you were to go through a massive, and I'm talking absolutely massive period of sustained volcanic activity, you might be able to jack up the CO2 enough to do some serious damage to life (especially considering all the other catastrophic things, like acid rain, that other volcanic gases can do). This may have happened roughly 2 or 3 times in the past 500 million years, specifically with the Siberian Traps and Deccan traps volcanic provinces which formed 250 and 65 million years ago, respectively. Both of them do correlate with mass extinction events, but we see nothing even close to their size active in the modern system (think about an amount of magma roughly 25 to 50 times the size of Hawaii being erupted in 1 million years or less). But, neither of those really put a controlling effect on the graphs you're seeing above. They're very interesting geologically, but I'm getting sidetracked again. The things that create that graph you see above, the ice-core (and other proxies) atmospheric CO2 record are things that operate on much shorter timescales and with much larger volumes of CO2 change. Specifically, we're talking about things that react to small climatic forcings; for example, the oceans, weathering, and vegetation. There's another little issue I haven't brought up yet about that ice core variation record. Specifically, it seems to be controlled by atmospheric variations. If you do a fourier analysis on it and analyze the dominant frequencies controlling the variation over the last million years or so, a lot of them are close matches to orbital forcings. The eccentricity of the earth's orbit cycles on a 100,000 year timescale or so, the earth's axis wobbles on a 20,000 year timescale, and so on. These are the same numbers that we see in the climate system. But, if you do the simple "how much does the energy hitting the earth change with these cycles" calculation, the changes are no where near big enough to cause the starting and ending of large glaciations like we see. What is actually happening though is that the much smaller shifts in energy wind up causing much larger shifts in the earth's climate because of feedbacks. This is where the CO2 comes in, along with a number of other issues. By shifting the amounts of solar radiation, the orbital forcings are able to shift the locations and sizes of things like the Gulf stream current, or the location and size of deserts, the amount of rainfall, etc. This can have enormous impacts on other systems. First and foremost, the ocean itself responds dramatically to temperature changes. In fact, right now, with what we're doing to the atmosphere, the oceans are our biggest friend. Something like 1/2 of the CO2 man has actually released has been taken up by the oceans, because adding CO2 to the atmosphere can drive up dissolution of CO2 into the oceans. But, changes in global temperature can drive this cycle also; if you jack up the earth's temperature, you drive CO2 back out of the oceans and into the atmosphere (eventually, we do expect this cycle to catch up with the CO2 we've pumped into the oceans in the past 50 years, which is why climatologists will always say that there is more warming built into the system now even if we totally stop releasing CO2 right now). Beyond that, changes in the atmosphere feed back strongly into plants and the terrestrial ecosystem as well. If, for example, you start making subtle changes in the climate, you can move vegetation north or south to areas that are larger or smaller, and therefore either lock up or release CO2 in that way. The Sahara desert, for example, towards the last glacial maximum, was much wetter than it is today, to the point that significant amounts of plant life thrived there. It has since dried up. On top of that, the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere have profound impacts on the weathering of organic carbon. If you start to increase the temperature and therefore the humidity, you make it easier for the environment to degrade organic carbon and turn it into CO2, while in a lower temperature system it is easier to bury and sequester that same carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere. At least most of the evidence i've seen suggests that these sorts of feedbacks have been the dominant controls of CO2 content in the atmosphere over the last set of glacial cycles. There are a few other ways to change things (change production in the ocean, change ocean circulation patterns, change the earth's albedo by adding ice cover, change rock weathering rates, etc.) but those 2 are key, and it would take me forever to talk about all of them. The one other issue you might notice I've sidestepped a little bit is that in both of those examples I gave, CO2 forcing was only accomplished in response to something else; you heat the oceans, then you get more CO2 out, or you change the temperature pattern and then you change CO2. But here we have a chicken-and-egg problem which I'm not sure has been resolved yet. Because increasing atmospheric CO2 causes the earth to warm up, but warming up the earth can also increase atmospheric CO2, it's worth asking which one of them came first. The fact is, to some extent it is probably both. The small nudges that the orbital system produces pumps enough energy change (warming?) into the system to begin driving CO2 upwards for one of the many possible reasons, and the driving upwards of CO2 starts a feedback that keeps the planet warming until it finds some sort of new stable equilibrium after the glacial system falls apart. However, what is happening right now thanks to man is, as far as we can tell, unprecedented within the last few million years. Not only have we increased CO2 to levels not seen anywhere in the last few million years, we have also jumped CO2 by over 30% within a period of a few decades, which may very well be an unprecedented change in earth history. QUOTE(bmags @ Feb 6, 2007 -> 04:17 PM) science question... is the water making up the ice caps ... different. In some ways, yes, it is quite different from what we see in the ocean. Specifically, isotopically it is very light. Through a process we call Rayleigh distillation, the snow that falls at the poles has a much lower concentration of heavy isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen in it than the rain that falls at the equator or the water in the oceans. When ice caps form, this water locked up at the poles is actually so different isotopically that the isotopic composition of the normal ocean water changes in the opposite direction (The ice caps are very light, and as they get bigger, the ocean itself gets heavier). This produces one of the signals we see in the ice cores; as the isotopic composition of the oceans varies, the isotopic composition of the snow falling at the poles also is changed, and we can use these trends in the ice cores to track the waxing and waning of the ice caps. We can also confirm these signals with a variety of other proxies (none of which give the nearly annual resolution of ice cores), but anything which interacts with water and produces a preservable signal may well also show a similar pattern (a good example is microfossils that form from life in the ocean...you can take cores of oceanic sediments and see the same patterns you see in the ice cores. In fact, that is how the glacial cycles were identified before the ice cores were available.)

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Feb 6, 2007 -> 02:52 PM) moooooooooooooooooooooo... The amount released by livestock is thankfully orders of magnitude less than what currently exists at the earth's surface.

And now the fun begins.

Link.

QUOTE(Alpha Dog @ Feb 6, 2007 -> 02:19 PM) If we just put muzzles on our politicians I bet we could cut CO2 by 15% or more! Add self-important celebrities to that and we can increase the percentage to over 20!!! And for the bonus, stuff a cork in Mike North and you can cut an additional 8%! Cork both ends and you get a 12% savings! Woo hoo! Actually, Methane is another potentially severe greenhouse gas, possibly even more severe than CO2 because there's so little methane in the atmosphere right now.

QUOTE(NorthSideSox72 @ Feb 6, 2007 -> 11:40 AM) I'll let Balta throw out the right data, because when I search for more recent charts, I either get the short-recent ones or the long-term but cut short ones (like you show). I can't find a long term chart that includes the last 50 years (which is of course very, very short on that timescale, but the rise puts CO2 and temp values way above the previous spikes). I have to sprint to a class and Science is being a F***ing B***h and taking absolutely forever to load, but here's a random version I found for now. I'll look for a better version in a couple hours.

He will somehow stay healthy. Why? Because both God and Ozzie Guillen Hate Brian Anderson, and both are doing everything they possibly can to rob the kid of playing time. Anderson will barely face any righties this year, will continue to hit righties better than lefties, and by the end of the year, my mind will be blown as to how we missed the playoffs for the same reason 2 years in a row.

QUOTE(Jenksismyb**** @ Feb 6, 2007 -> 07:49 AM) http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm I'm beginning to realize more and more the political machine that is behind the global warming debate. I find it fascinating that large governmental bodies like the UN are behind the global warming theories, but major independent scientists are still skeptical of the human element involved. Who's to believe? Is there an agenda? Could the liberals be using fear as a means to get control of the country again (something they accused Bush of doing with terrorism)? Is Al Gore REALLY being considered for a Nobel Prize? Some points first and foremost. You are simply incorrect when you say that the UN is behind these Global warming theories. Yes, the IPCC was organized by the UN, but that is not because the UN is taking sides, its because the UN is the only body in the world capable of organizing a summary of the beliefs of 2500 scientists from a hundred countries. There is no single government, with the exception of the United States, that could organize something as complex as a 5 year research project and summary involving that many people, and the U.S. government has no interest in doing so (in large part because of $). Secondly, there is something you should understand about scientists; if you want 110% of them to agree on something before anything is done, you would still be making axe heads out of obsidian. There will always, always be people who can be found to disagree on an issue...especially when there is an awful lot of money available for people who disagree, as there is on this issue. I'll give you an example from my science; the entire basis of most work in thinking about geology these days is the idea of plate tectonics; oceanic plates form at mid ocean ridges and subduct into the mantle at spreading centers. However, this theory only really began to gain wide acceptance in the 1960's, before that there were a wide number of explanations for how mountains and arcs were formed which relied on some honestly wierd ideas. But...there are still, in all honesty, some holdouts who for some reason reject the modern evidence, and say that these cracks in the earth are because the earth is expanding or shrinking or something like that. That is simply how things work; there are always some people who will refuse to accept every single idea. Here is what I would say in response, as a person working in earth sciences; weigh who is speaking on each side. On one side you have a handful of people, some of questionable quality (we'll get back to that in a few minutes), and on the other side, you have 2500+ actual climate researchers just from the IPCC, plus somewhere in the thousands of physicists, modelers, geologists, and an awful lot of other folks. On top of that, here's another cute one, in 2004 in Science, an article was published taking a look at what the actual research community was saying on the issue. From 1993 to 2003, the author found 928 different papers looking at climate change, and not a single one of them offered up evidence disagreeing with the consensus view that anthropogenic climate change was real. I don't like the appeal to authority explanation, but in this case, based on the sheer volume of work out there on one single side of this issue, I think it approaches foolhardy to focus so much attention on the naysayers. Ah, some actual science, this I will enjoy vastly more than the politics of the issue. Ok, I'll start off with the basics of the theory. Every second, a certain amount of energy hits the earth from the Sun. A small additional component is radiated out from the inside of the earth. If the earth had no atmosphere (i.e. the Moon) then all of this energy would bounce quite rapidly back out into space, and the temperature would be controlled solely by how close the spot was to the sun and the angle facing it. But, the Earth is a more interesting case; it has an atmosphere. More than that, it has an atmosphere containing molecules like water, O2, and CO2. These molecules are really really interesting, in that they can absorb radiation and turn it into heat, and they do so at discrete wavelengths of light. If the correct wavelength of light hits a molecule of CO2, H2O, O2, etc., the molecule will absorb that light and will begin to vibrate. Those molecules therefore have the ability to turn radiation (light) into heat (vibrational energy). If the earth had no atmosphere, some fairly easy calculations can be done based on the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and the Earth would sit at an average of 255 K. 0 Degrees Celcius, the freezing point of water, is 273.15k, so without the atmosphere, all water on the earth would be frozen, and life wouldn't exist. So at least to some extent, what we call the greenhouse effect is quite useful; it makes life possible. So, how does this work. When sunlight hits the earth's surface, it comes in at visible wavelengths. It is then absorbed by the surface of the earth, and then rapidly radiated back out in the Infrared (that's where the materials on the earth radiate). Without an atmosphere, all this energy would just depart. But if you start sticking molecules that absorb those IR wavelengths into the atmosphere, they form a barrier to emission of energy at those wavelengths. The earth can not radiate out the excess energy at those wavelengths if there is an absorber that converts the energy back into heat. So, when this happens, the system reacts by heating up. Simple blackbody physics tells us that changing the temperature of an object will change the wavelength of light at which the object radiates away energy; in other words, if there is an absorber at the wavelength of light where a planet wants to radiate away heat, the planet will heat up until it starts to radiate away energy at a wavelength where there is not a strong absorber. This is the basis of the CO2 issue in the atmosphere. Because mainly of water, the earth is unable to radiate out energy at 255k like it would want to. So the earth heats up to a temperature where water is not in the way; something around an average of 290-300K. But, it just so happens that the reason why the planet can radiate at this level is that there is not a very high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere; CO2 is another greenhouse gas, and it absorbs radiation at these same wavelengths. The earth was in relative equilibruim at current temperatures without all this CO2, but adding that CO2 into the atmosphere means that the earth again must heat up in order to radiate out the sun's energy. And CO2 is at a much lower concentration in the atmosphere than H2O, so it does not take much additional CO2 in terms of volume to cause a significant increase in the relative abundance of CO2; thus far through the industrial revolution alone, man has caused a 30% increase in the abundance of atmospheric CO2. So by putting more CO2 there, we are making the atmosphere more able to absorb the energy the earth is trying to emit, and so to get rid of that energy, the earth has no choice but to heat up further. Now, your question about places like Texas getting snow, etc. Unfortunately or fortunately (however you want to look at it), the climate system is also a very complicated mess with a huge number of different things going on at once. The long-term CO2 increase is simply not the only thing going on. First and foremost, there are repetitive cycles imposed on the Earth's climate by events which occur in the oceans and atmospheres on regular intervals. The most recognizable of these is the El Nino cycle, one of which we are going through right now. Roughly every 8 years or so, the normal pattern of warm water circulation in the Pacific ocean breaks down, leading to a pool of warm water sitting off the coast of South America. The best analogy for what this does to my mind is basically like throwing a wrench into a complicated machine. Some winds strengthen because of this effect (winds which, for example, break up hurricanes). Other winds weaken. There is more moisure in some places in the atmosphere, while others are dry as a bone. This is the complexity of the climate system; small perturbations can lead to very large signals. So, because of the El Nino cycle, right now we're getting large cold snaps in some places that aren't used to them at all, dryness in some places, 85 degrees for a week in California, and on and on. If you talk to anyone who understands this issue well, they will tell you that it's virtually impossible to tie any single climate event to anthropogenic climate change. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was not caused by global warming. What a scientist will tell you is that as you increase the temperatures, you make extreme events, like ungodly strong hurricanes, more likely. They will also tell you that you will see many more gradual effects; like migrations of animal and crop populations northward following their normal climate, gradual melting off of glaciers as the average environment in which they formed is on average slightly warmer each year, and so on. No single Hurricane, drought, heat wave, cold snap can be tied to global warming. But what the science will say is that dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and driving up the earht's temperature will make a lot of those events more likely. You also refer to the cooling period in the 60's. This is another little blip imposed on the long-term trend. The general thinking on this right now is that it was actually caused by aerosol emissions; basically, you stick more soot into the atmosphere and it helps seed slightly more clouds. It's another little feedback in the system. The problem is, the added CO2 has simply outraced what adding Aerosols can do. And overall, the weather patterns in the 60's were still warmer than they were during the 40's anyway. Here's a useful graph to show the scale of these changes: And one other note; personally, knowing something about the science, I really dislike using the phrase "Global warming" because that's not actually what happens. On average, the earth does heat up, but not every single place on the earth will heat up. One wierd thing about global warming is that it can actually make places on the earth significantly colder on average. Europe and Northeastern North America might well be candidates for this at some point, because the current climate change system may well lead to a weakening of the Gulf Stream, the gigantic current in the Eastern North Atlantic which takes warm water from the equatorial regions and moves it northwards towards Europe. Slow that system down somewhat by dumping Fresh Water into the North Atlantic from Glacial meltwater, and Europe can begin to cool down because the waters off of Europe are colder on average. Let's put it this way; anything, and I mean anything is up for research if someone can provide evidence for it. The problem is, in this case, the people who are saying it isn't happening simply aren't providing evidence to back up their claims. And it's not for lack of trying, it's for a lack of actual evidence. For example, the guy Tim Ball you cite, well, he has a bit of a checkered background on this issue. First of all, there has been some amount of legal action, and some degree of admissions (not sure about the outcome of the legal action) where Ball was accused of lying about his background, claiming to have been the first climatologist in Canada when there were clearly people before him, accused of adding extra years to his resume, etc. But beyond that, just on the actual matter of scholarly work, Ball is somewhat lacking. Specifically, he hasn't actually published anything in terms of actual results that would argue against anthropogenic climate change. He has only published a handful of scholarly papers, and most of the things he cites on his own CV aren't actually scholarly publications. He mainly seems to spend a lot of time giving lectures and writing media pieces on global warming, without publishing anything on the subject. This is the general pattern of many of these guys; either they don't have a strong background on the subject, or they don't publish anything of scholarly value on the subject, but they mainly make a living giving lectures, talking to politicians, and writing op-ed pieces. There are actually a few, as I said, genuine scientists who do publish on the contrary side. Where that is done, they do generally receive scholarly responses. For a wide variety of reasons, the overwhelming majority of scientists think they're wrong, but they do manage to gain significant amounts of public notoriety, because the folks who want to make it appear that this issue is still up for debate have an awful lot of money and political power, and use it to build up the few examples of contrarians actually doing work that they do have. Whew, that was a bit of a mouthful. Feel free to fire back more questions.

Where is that from DH? The LA Times had This bit in it last sunday:

The Senate Republicans have officially begun a filibuster of the watered-down, non-binding resolution opposing the increase of U.S. troops in Iraq. 2 Republicans up for reelection in 08 voted for Cloture; Susan Collins and Norm "about to be beaten by Franken" Coleman. The rest of the Senate Republicans are officially on record now as having supported Mr. Bush's augmentation. Senator McCain missed the vote. Here is the roll call. When this fails, and Iraq is still a mess in November of 08, this is one of those votes to remember. And Hell, even Senator Roberts, who I believe helped draft the compromise language, voted against cloture.

Take care of yourself Nuke-stir. We'll hopefully have another world series trophy waiting on you when you get back.

Rudy about to make it 100% official.

QUOTE(Rex Kicka** @ Feb 4, 2007 -> 07:02 PM) I think the real story is really "Just what was Prince wearing on his head? And why does he look like the hermaphrodite offspring of Lena Horne and Little Richard? And why was he playing Foo Fighters songs?" At least I'm not the only one wondering why the Hell he was playing Best of you.