@SamH's most recent point: But where are the rebuttals to the IPCC report from scientists that disagree with conclusions and statements within it? It appears to me that we have a scientific consensus on this topic. Am I mistaken?

Quote from ATC Quicksilver :

I don't have any problems, maybe its just because I am in the UK. RSC takes so long to load I just don't go there, but thats because its like 100 times the size of this forum.

RSC moved their servers or upgraded or something recently. It's much better now.

I haven't had any problems with the LFS forums. Very fast as always.

Very good, BlueFlame.

Quote from BlueFlame :

Of course i would, that would be me Avoiding the problem, the problem being the end result.

Todd -

1. You would never know
2. Yea it would still be the same distance
3. There is no reason to believe anyone about anything, if people believed Scientists about Science, that would mean you would believe in God too, as a religious expert tells you to do so?

On point 3, my answer would be no. The religious expert can not provide evidence of the existence of God. The scientist (in this case, the astronomer), can provide ample evidence that the Sun is 93,000,000 miles from Earth. Evidence. They can measure it. Just like they can measure CO2. Go figure.

This is what you originally said that started this whole line of comedy:

Quote :

You had to be TOLD, before you knew what was happening, that means its not happening.

Again, what you're saying here is that I had to be told before I knew what was happening. That's absolutely true. Same goes for the distance to the sun, or better yet, that the Earth revolves around the sun. I didn't know that the Earth revolved around the sun until somebody told me it did.

Here's your quote again:

Quote :

You had to be TOLD, before you knew what was happening, that means its not happening.

The second part is "that means its not happening."

You said that because I had to be told that something was happening, that means it's not happening. Does that make any sense to you? Seriously, do you see a problem with that or not? If not, I'm really worried about you.

If your statement is true, this would mean that the Earth is *not* going around the sun *because* somebody told me it was. Do you understand? This is why many people are laughing at you right now. This all has been going completely over your head.

Here's another interesting thing you said earlier:

Quote :

This place is obviously not the place for high intelligence of political and geographic opinions.

Are you beginning to learn anything here? See any patterns, ironies, or the like, emerging?

Last edited by jtw62074, Tue, 28 Aug 2007 12:49.

Quote from BlueFlame :

Exactly? How could i know it was on fire, before you had told me?

Clearly, I've finally met my intellectual equal. Touche.

Quote :

Bad words, they only become 'bad' when your taught it.


You had to be TOLD, there was a problem with GW, your trying to claim its this MASSIVE problem, well if so, why couldn't you guys figure it out, without being told!?

If you'll confirm your age I can give a more age appropriate response. In the mean time, since it appears you're about 10-11 years old, I'll post this in more familiar school work form:

1) How would I know that the sun was 93,000,000 miles from Earth without being told?

2) If nobody told me that the sun was 93,000,000 miles from Earth, would it still be 93,000,000 miles from Earth?

3) Why should I believe an astronomer who tells me that that sun is 93,000,000 miles from Earth?

Your response should look like this:

1) (Some answer)

2) (Some answer)

3) (Some answer)

Let's see if you can manage that one. My hopes are not high, my :littleang

Quote from Electrik Kar :

Todd-

I've been wanting to ask someone this, maybe you have an opinion.

Hydrogen cars have been offered as a solution as a green, zero emissions car. But they do emit water vapour. Now I understand that water vapour too is a greenhouse gas. So what happens when we get 1000s of hydrogen cars on the road?

I've been wondering the same thing since beginning to read the report. Maybe there's something in there on it. If I find it, I'll let you know.

Al's right about the energy input needed and the pollution that comes from that. I'm all for nuclear power. I can't believe we were so stupid here in the US as to run from it years ago because of an accident or two.

What Al said goes for electric cars too. There was a comedian joking about this once. It went something like: "Electric cars. Yeah, that'll solve the problem, because electricity comes from magic! On the other side of that wall outlet is a magic jellybean field!"

Cracked me up and it's an excellent point. Same would go for H2 as Al said. It would be interesting to find out what the actual tradeoffs would be. Maybe there's something in the report on that too.

Quote :

The other thing is, I do want to ask how accurate the ice core samples are, as evidence of C02 variation in the ancient past. I imagine any kind of sample wouldn't be able to give you a very discreet time/data slice, say even 100 years, - and also, there's the idea that C02 moves around in ice, as someone mentioned earlier. If our C02 situation is unprecedented, in that it's never gone so high so quickly, is that possible to prove once all things/theories have been considered?

The 50/60 times number was something I calculated from what was quoted in the report. I'll have to look it up again and see. Shotglass pointed out that there might be a problem with the polar data, but the report's CO2 rate showed an error percentage that supposedly should have included that. I'm not entirely sure. We'll have to look.

Either way, that CO2 curve is awfully steep.

Quote from Serpentine :

Todd, I fear your wasting your time with him.

I think it was Robeert Heinlein who said: "Never attempt to teach a pig to whistle. It wastes your time and annoys the pig."

Good one! :clapclap:

Hey Axus, is there such a thing as negative intelligence?

I decided to put this one in a separate post. If there are too many words all in one it seems to confuse you.

Why are you ignoring my questions, BlueFlame?

Again:

http://www.performancesimulations.com/files/GW.JPG

1) Look at that graph and tell me humans have nothing to do with it.

2) How old are you?

Quote from BlueFlame :

You had to be TOLD it, before you were told it, it wasn't happening....

When I say "you" it means "you" (BlueFlame), not "me" (Todd).

I (Todd) realized my house was on fire. I then told you (BlueFlame) just now about it. That means my house was not on fire until I told you (BlueFlame)?

Quote from BlueFlame :

You had to be TOLD, before you knew what was happening, that means its not happening.

My house is on fire. You had to be told that to know it was happening. Therefore it's not happening.

Brilliant.

Why are you ignoring my questions, BlueFlame?

Again:

http://www.performancesimulations.com/files/GW.JPG

Look at that graph and tell me humans have nothing to do with it.

I'm taking a lot of time with this and your reply is a three sentence (again), horribly illogical post. May I ask your age? If you're a young kid, I'll cut you a break, but if you're much more than 15 years old or so I might need to lay into you a bit pretty soon.

Why are you ignoring my questions, BlueFlame?

Again:

http://www.performancesimulations.com/files/GW.JPG

Look at that graph and tell me humans have nothing to do with it.

I'm taking a lot of time with this and your reply is a three sentence, horribly illogical post. May I ask your age? If you're a young kid, I'll cut you a break, but if you're much more than 15 years old or so I might need to lay into you a bit pretty soon.


If you believe I'm wrong (a distinct possibility), you'll need to do a lot better than this to change my mind.

Last edited by jtw62074, Tue, 28 Aug 2007 09:33.

Quote from BlueFlame :

jtw62074 Your American. So things are different. You go to Scotland, and tell me, something is wrong.

Global warming and smog are two different issues. The smog you see in the movies over Los Angeles and Detroit actually does not cover the entire US. They're in very concentrated areas. Anyway, that's a separate topic and not relevant here. We mustn't fool ourselves into thinking if we walk outside and take a breath of cool, fresh air, there's no problem.

Quote :

Fresh air. The problem is Cities, too many people sitting in 1 spot, the CO2 emissions aren't consistant enough around the world but saying the Trees aren't doing their job, is like saying Nature doesn't exist.

Let's take another look at the CO2 and other primary greenhouse gas concentrations worldwide over the last 2000 years:

http://www.performancesimulations.com/files/GW.JPG

Again, this is a worldwide average.

The natural warming that has taken place can be seen in the statistically flat data leading up to about 1750. You see how steep the curve becomes after that? That is a combination of both natural and man-made processes. The steepness of that curve is actually accelerating too. How high do you think CO2 will go in another 100 or 200 years if we don't do anything about it? Even in the next 30-50 years? Again, the report covers this thoroughly using various climate models and scenarios.

Look at that graph and tell me humans have nothing to do with it. <---I must insist on a response from you on this point. Don't bother replying if you won't address my points and actually engage in the intelligent debate you insisted we partake in.

From the ice core samples, we know that there has never been a period in the last many tens or hundreds of thousands of years where the curve was so steep. That's some 50-60 times steeper than in any period scientists have been able to measure thus far (specifically, the period of warming over the 11-12,000 years following the last ice age, which subsequently leveled off until 1750.) It corresponds precisely to the human industrial era. I don't know how someone can look at that and other graphs of the greenhouse gas data and see it any other way.

Scientists know with reasonable certainty about how much CO2 is emitted by cars, power plants, cow flatulence (that still cracks me up ), and the like. CO2 causes warming. There is no question about that. If we increase CO2 with no end, we will get more warming.

There's nothing natural about that curve being 50-60 times steeper today than it has been at any period in time over the last 100,000 years or so. And it's just getting steeper every year.

Quote :

We wouldn't have a decent climate today, if Ice Age people wanted to keep it the way it was. Climate change will happen if it supposed to.

What do mean "if it supposed to?" Supernatural influences? The will of God? Don't be a dolt. If you get hit by a car do you get angry at the driver or do you lay back and say, "well, that was supposed to happen."

I'm sorry, but when it comes to our climate, I don't want to hear any philosophical/religious bs about predetermined fate. Really. We understand what causes what quite well, and it can be attributed to things other than supernatural forces.

Ice Age: That was due to purely natural influences back then. That's not the same situation we have today. I think the idea to "let nature take its course" is idiotic when looking at data like this. Do you know the consequences of simply ignoring this? Computer simulations paint a rather bleak picture, including those run on the Earth Simulator (the fastest supercomputer in the world, which does nothing but run climate simulations 24/7). This is the same computer that predicted the hurricane off the South American coast line a few years back, by the way, which was an unprecedented event. (I don't know that it had anything to do with global warming. The point is that computer models can simulate climate these days about as well as we can simulate cars.)

Read the report, or at least the FAQ. If there's something specific you can point to that you disagree with, reference it and we can debate it.

Quote :

Nothing anyone tries to do will stop it, so stop cutting down our trees and spread yourselves out across the globe.

The CO2 that gets put into the atmosphere spreads all around the world. The graph I showed is the average level world-wide. You can't get away from it. Again, we're not talking about localized urban smog, but worldwide average CO2 levels and rate of change.

And yes, we can stop this trend. That's what the climatologists are telling us. You know better than they do? That's a pretty arrogant, egotistical suggestion. If you have the flu and all the medical doctors say it can be cured, you listen to them, right? But you won't listen to the climate doctors?

You're right about the trees though. We discussed that already. There are multitudes of other factors as well that can reduce CO2 levels much like trees do (again, read the report FAQ at the very least). One problem is that we can get to certain tipping points along the way where things can run away from us and we can't get back. Once the greenland ice sheet melts, the rate of CO2 absorption, radiation reflection back into space, and so forth, will be changed drastically from what they are today. Scientists seem to imply that it would be in a positive forcing direction (towards yet more warming, which causes the atmosphere to absorb more water vapor, an even nastier greenhouse gas, and we go into a nasty little self-reinforcing cycle). Once the ice sheets/glaciers are gone, you can't go back and fix that. It becomes much harder then to try to get things back under control. So we can't just sit around and wait until you walk outside in Scottland and choke on CO2 before deciding to stop "letting nature take its course." This is no longer nature.

Quote :

Ok maybe not cutting down trees to that extent, but you want Ethanol? Why not use Rape Seed ffs, it explodes under compression, so you can use it as a diesel fuel. Truth is. Your in the worst place, America doesn't know squat about anything. Yea, put a V8 in here, with NO ammounts of horsepower WHAT so ever, yet crank up the Cylinder capacity to 5000cc just cos it sounds better.

I covered ethanol in the last post. Apparently you didn't comprehend what I said. I'll try again, this time typing very slowly so you can understand and don't miss it

When you burn ethanol, you still produce CO2. Ethanol means we can grow our fuel instead of pulling it out of irreplaceable stockpiles underground. If anything, this might be a negative thing for GW because we'll now potentially never run out of fossil fuels.

Quote :

The actuall truth IS, which ever side of the pickett line your on, both of the points for either argument , cancel each other out, so the world is staying the way it is, so the non GW followers win anyway.

Again, provide a specific example of a contradiction as I requested before. Back it up with data if you can, the way I did in my posts. Don't dodge my points and make sweeping, blanket statements that you can provide no evidence for. You're supposedly the intelligent one here, so let's hear it

Last edited by jtw62074, Tue, 28 Aug 2007 04:19.

I wasn't going to bother dissecting this one, but I'm really bored tonight and this is just too amusing!

Quote from BlueFlame :

Trees make O2 for us giving them CO2. We aparently make too much of it. Ok then....

Trees take away CO2, but one tree doesn't just gobble up all CO2 that's in the atmosphere every day. A certain number of trees will remove x amount of CO2 every year. Consider it a CO2 "sink" (referred to in the report as a one of many "negative forcings" effecting the level). If we put more CO2 than that in the air the trees will not suddenly kick up their O2 production to whatever level is required to restore the CO2 balance any more than you'll actually eat all the food put on your plate without limit. Trees take what they can and the rest remains in the air. The more trees, the better.


The IPCC report covers the effects of deforestation in quite some detail. It's a good read.

Quote :

Ethanol is a better fuel than Crude Oils... ok, where do we find it? We find it on plains that have been created by deforestation because people want to plant crops for Ethanol in 3rd world countries.

We grow it (corn is one source). If done through deforestation I don't know if the crop itself acts as more of a CO2 sink (absorber) than the trees that were in the field in the first place were, but I suspect not. The report details changing land use as an influence (some cooling, some warming) and had some things to say about farming. I don't recall the details now, but if you really want to know, it would make sense to stop theorizing about something people have already studied extensively and read the reports yourself.

The third world countries comment is confusing. Brazil is probably the biggest producer of ethanol. This or last year in the US we had record crop production specifically grown for bio-fuels. If I recall correctly, the area was about the same size as the entire state of Nebraska. However, I don't know that this has so much to do with global warming as getting off foreign oil. When you burn alcohol you still produce a lot of CO2, but I don't recall now how it really compares to gasoline.

Anyway, these aren't third world countries, obviously.

I must admit that while reading your post up to this point I though you were a GW believer.

Quote :

ANYONE who things Global Warming is a problem, needs to be shot, i am not being fed anything. nobody needed/s to tell me that it doesn't Exist, i thought it before it was publically mentioned.

Oops, you're not a GW believer after all. My bad.

The folks that need to be shot are the ones who can't be bothered to properly research something before spouting off about it, especially if it's opposite to what scientists are finding and is highly detrimental to the environment. When your doctor tells you that you have the flu because all the medical science to date indicates that you have the flu, do you argue and give him your own second opinion?

Quote :

As for GW, everyone that 'believes' in it, had to be TOLD it, they didn't think about it, before it was 'fashion'. so just SIT down.

I had to be told the world was round. I was dumbfounded by this crazy "big ball theory." I pondered that idiotic possibility for some time before my parents finally showed me a globe.

Quote :

You GW people, are the kinda people to believe in Evolution

Of course. More credit to us. Shows you what sort of mind it takes. I also believe in the "big ball theory" now. I probably wouldn't believe it today if I hadn't see evidence to support that crazy idea. The pictures from space were good enough to convince me, but who knows? Maybe it's all an elaborate sham and conspiracy by the evil corporate machine to scare me.

Quote :

, if you knowed SH** you would know we evolved from Sea creatures... More Sea, more Sealife....

Err... Do you believe in evolution or not?

Quote :

You GW people have so many theories that you have been fed, they all contridict each other.

Name one.

Quote :

The worlds climate changes, all the time.

Indeed it does.

1) Some are natural causes that tend to warm things.
2) Some are natural causes that tend to cool things.
3) Some are human made causes that tend to warm things.
4) Some are human made causes that tend to cool things.

Climatology is the field of study of these things, primarily, and is where this global warming stuff is coming from. It didn't come from some pissed off loner that hated cars.

Who could possibly benefit financially from having people believe in global warming? Why make something like that up? I can think of lots of reasons certain groups would want the public to NOT believe it's real, but can't say the same for the other side.

Quote :

Global warming was just thought up by one guy who doesn't like cars.

Shen Kuo was the first person we have a record of to hypothesize that climates naturally shifted over time. He figured this out somehow by studying petrified bamboo from underground (beats me). That was the start of the field of paleoclimatology which is where all this global warming research is coming from. There probably wasn't much talk about cars, emissions, or any man made global warming in his day though.

He died over nine hundred years ago.

Helmut Landsberg is another noteworthy name in the history of climatology. From his Wikipedia page:

"Helmut Landsberg's contributions to the field of climatology are considerable. As early as 1941 in his book on physical climatology, he began to raise the status of climatology from one of geographic classification to a well-developed applied physical science. This book stressed, for the first time in English, the use of statistical analysis in climatology. His work over the next twenty years elevated the study of climatology to the quantitative science it is today......... Beginning in 1964, Dr. Landsberg served continuously as the editor in chief of the World Study of Climatology through 15 volumes."

It's interesting to hear that this guy published a book on climatology before my mother was even born. This isn't stuff that was just made up out of the blue five years ago. The recorded history in the field is almost 1000 years old now. When measurements finally became capable of showing these trends, scientists saw them, became concerned, and let the public know. Sort of like the scientists manning stations around the world to watch for tsunamis and earthquakes.

My, how sinister. I wouldn't be surprised to find tsunami and earthquake conspiracy theories too involving mad scientists in secret government labs deep underground.

Quote :

And we are sitting here on a RaceSim forum, debating on how we should kill motoring?

Heavens no! I hope not! Take heart though. It's not just the cars producing all the nasty stuff.

One rather amusing part of the report actually went so far as to discuss the increase in methane in the atmosphere that can be attributed to the upbringing of cows for food.

They fart so much methane it's measurable around the world! It's up there in the ballpark scale of CO2 production from cars, believe it or not. I'll never look at a cow the same way again.

Ah, the lighter side of GW Fight global warming. Eat a cow. (Take that, vegetarians )

Anyway, the point is, there wasn't "some guy" that thought up global warming. Climatology is a vast field with lots of scientists involved, just like any other other field in science. There also wasn't some individual guy somewhere that thought up "obesity is unhealthy" out of the blue just to piss off fat people and cost the food industry money.

Quote :

Eventually some people agreed with this man,

That's a bit like saying some biologists and geneticists agreed with Darwin, and some astrophysicists agreed with Einstein and Maxwell. Bring on the conspiracy theory.

Quote :

now its Propaganda for Companies. Everyone brags they save energy like Vauxhall (oh, we have cut down on our Ellesmere Port Factory Energy savings) YOU CAN'T SEE THAT? YOU CAN'T SEE, THAT people are making MINCE meat of you.

And there it is. Right on cue.

A company will do things to reduce their own costs, naturally. However, I can think of no greater enemy to an energy company than public outrage over pollution, and especially global warming. Making things more efficient and clean costs considerable money that a company would much rather not spend in the first place. They're responding to demand just like any other industry in a free market does. Why on Earth would an energy or fuel company actually promote GW themselves, creating a "clean/efficient demand" in their own customers, as well as inviting governments to force emissions regulations on them? They do nothing for an energy company other than drive up their costs. R&D costs (somebody has to figure out how to make things cleaner), production costs (you have to retool the place with new equipment), and the whole gamut. I'd bet that global warming is a big, painful sliver in the side of the energy industry they wish would just go away. Auto manufacturers would probably prefer not to have to spend the resources they do on fuel economy either.

If anything, I'd expect them to do just the opposite. Minimize the risks of GW in the public eye to the point you're ridiculed for "believing in it." Hire a couple of scientists for really big bucks to repute things publically. Much like what was done when scientists started telling the public that smoking was actually very bad for us. Here in the US, tobacco companies hired scientists to go to Congressional hearings and tell everyone that smoking was not unhealthy in the slightest, and later that nicotine was not addictive (I'm a smoker. It's addictive). There are some rather amusing videos of this floating around online, but to me it's the same thing all over again with global warming. If you're in the fossil fuel business or energy business, you don't want the public to think the science is right. If either of us are getting duped by somebody on this topic, I'm betting it's not me

Ah, global warming.. The "smoking is bad for you" of the 21st century has finally begun

Quote from BlueFlame :

Thanks, thats a good suggestion, but it angers me, people think they have an opinion that is their OWN, when those people had to be 'TOLD' its just like alot of things. Things to do with Crime, people need a statistic before they can agree, and i think its sad. Go in with 2 feet people, don't try to weasel the ball away.

Some people prefer to look for and refer to facts when investigating matters of importance. Others prefer to use The Force.

Channeling, meditation, telepathy with supernatural entities, and sorcery are equally common techniques in the non-scientific community for forming arguments for or against phenomena of interest to scientists. Direct communication with God, Allah, etc., about the inner workings of the universe via prayer is right up there. These approaches work especially well for people who don't like to be told what to think, especially by some guy in a lab coat with an IQ of 180 that spent 12 years at MIT earning his PhD. Why do we trust our medical doctors, but not other doctors in science?

These methods are plenty good for most people, but I still think the best way to find out how tall I am is to measure my height and write it down for later reference.

Check out the attachment on this post.

EDIT: It didn't attach for whatever reason, so here's a link: http://www.performancesimulations.com/files/GW.JPG

The current levels of greenhouse gases are one thing, but that is not in itself what's setting off the alarm bells over at NASA and elsewhere, even if it's the only thing the general public and news media seems capable of grasping. They usually aren't very good at math. Rather, the rate of change (the steepness of the slope) is what would be foolish for us to ignore. This is roughly some 50-60 times steeper than any period in recorded history, including the data from the polar ice caps going back many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of years, predating the last ice age by a long shot. Whether or not in some prehistoric era there was a higher CO2 concentration than we have today is not important or worth investigating unless you want to figure out how to turn Antarctica into a tropical paradise again. In that case, we can make our great, great, etc., grandkids super rich by investing in polar real estate now while the gettin's good.

In addition to this graph, if you'll look elsewhere in the IPCC data that shows this over a smaller time frame leading up to the present, the curve's steepness is accelerating in a manner that's just as, if not more alarming. (That means it's steep now, but it's getting steeper and steeper at a rapid rate). We've got a classic exponential acceleration here that correlates quite nicely with human industrial era activities, just as the leading NASA scientist from the video I posted earlier said.

(As for the causal aspect to this correlation, perhaps the never before even approached, "naturally occurring" CO2 acceleration caused humans to begin the industrial era rather than the other way around. In that case, we should all hope CO2 skyrockets to the moon some day, the sooner the better, because it obviously makes us a more technologically advanced society. I wonder how that works. Sadly, I couldn't find any mention of a single of the dumb scientists even investigating this possibility. Rats. So much for my Nobel Prize dreams.)

Project that data over the next few hundred years if you care about our decendents at all.

This is in fact done using multiple models and scenarios elsewhere in the report. I'll leave the search for that up to you. Somehow I think you won't bother yourself with that sort of nonsense though. I understand it's time consuming and a pretty tough read. All those fancy numbers and scientific lingo. Ugh. Besides, it would seem your imagination and intuition are so highly developed that the universe communicates its innermost workings directly to you with zero error. Some of us don't have these incredible channeling capabilities so need to refer to measured data and mathematics. Do you have a decent grasp on quantum loop gravity as well? If not, could you think about it for a few minutes? I'd love to learn (be told) more about it, and how it agrees or conflicts with string theory's multidimensional interpretations of gravity, or lack thereof.

Other data shows volcanic eruptions in the timeline, the greatest natural greenhouse gas emission event we'll hopefully ever witness (a huge meteor strike would be worse). They give a little blip in the data, but are relatively small compared to the backdrop of human industrial era activities. They pretty much just blend in with the rest of the noise on the rapidly climbing slope many non-climate scientists would have everyone believe is caused naturally. If you don't believe me, try to find the major volcanic eruptions in the chart in my attachment. There were quite a few over the last 2000 years.

Whether or not this recent acceleration in the CO2 and other greenhouse gas atmospheric introduction rate is caused by human activities is not a question in the scientific community any more than evolution or Einstein's GT and ST of Relativity are. The latter two issues were settled by investigation and consensus in science before most of our grandparents were born. The implications of both are not pleasant to many people, especially those of faith, but the universe does not appear to care whether it works in a way that gives you a warm and cozy, safe feeling about it. The world isn't flat, the Earth isn't the center of the universe, and time is not constant. Whether those are uncomfortable ideas to some people and deflate their human superiority/divine egos does not change reality.

Thankfully, scientists don't let it bother them too much when the general public uses one or two hundred year old arguments in their "scientific debates" with one another (head over to sci.physics to see how many physics students are still trying to rebut what Einstein came up with over a hundred years ago, simply because the ideas shake the foundations of their sense of reality), and spring them forth as great new ideas that somehow must have slipped by the same people that designed and launched the GPS satellites into orbit so we don't get lost or have to learn to read a map and road signs. (The GPS satellites use full relativistic corrections for time deviations from velocity and gravitational effects, by the way. If they didn't they'd be rather useless and inaccurate.)

Public master-debater: "Hey, man, what about the effects of the sun changing it's output over time and all that, dude? Did you guys think of that yet? Haha, I've got you right where I want you and just blew a big hole in your GW scam!"

Scientist: "Umm... Yeah. Actually, that did occur to us. It was at about the same time Sir Isaac Newton published his law of cooling, describing heat transfer via radiation, convection, etc.. The year was 1701. You're over 300 years late on this new insight, but thanks anyway. If we need your help, we'll call you."

There's a reason the general public is not usually invited to scientific conventions for debates and discussions on such topics, while physicists and the like, are.

Have a wonderful day, good luck racing, and may The Force be with you.

Last edited by jtw62074, Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:09.

The steering lock angles are shown in LFS in the setup screen for each car.

Quote from Serpentine :

Meteorologists, with an awful lot of computing power at their disposal, have difficulty predicting tomorrow's weather. What chance do we have of predicting the outcome of our input to the environment?

This is the quote of yours that I was responding to. There was a good portion in the particular FAQ I was referring to dealing with it specifically, and the first paragraph or two of it laid out the groundwork for it. Specifically, the difference between "climate" and "weather" in terms of definition as well as predictability. Weather is generally not well predicted more than a few days in advance, but climate, even over many hundreds or thousands of years, is.

I do agree with the rest of what you said in that post. I just had to pick it apart and anally focus on the only negative thing I could find

Last edited by jtw62074, Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:41.

I aim to annoy as usual!

It seems nobody bothered to spend more than a few minutes skimming through the extensive set of information BuddhaBing just provided. I just read the FAQ (actually read it, not skimmed through to look at the pretty pictures) at http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html after reading the first few pages of one of the 800 page chapters.

Amazingly enough, the FAQ alone deals with every objection that was just raised by the EDIT: (two of the three, sorry Nodo ) posters before me. Yet you all missed it. Go figure

I hope there aren't too many people that seriously believe climate scientists are so naive as to have not thought about or investigated such simple, obvious points, and reported on them extensively. (The sun's radiation has an effect on the thermo equilibrium of our planet and thus on climate? Gee... Why didn't anybody tell that NASA scientist? Thanks for setting me straight U4IK ST8! )

Do your homework, guys. And thanks for the links, BuddhaBing. There's a lot of enlightening information there. I will learn a lot there on a subject I clearly know very little about compared to your run of the mill climate scientist, Ph.D..

Last edited by jtw62074, Thu, 23 Aug 2007 23:50.

Quote from tristancliffe :

I think that is the one Todd is involved with.

If the real karters times were close to real life times then I suspect something is wrong with the sim

Yep, that's the one using my physics engine/tire model that I "did the physics" for (I hate that phrase, but people use and understand it so there ya go).

That video is Matt Wall driving, the Australian and Japanese series Karting champion. IIRC, his best lap time was 0.1 second slower than what he gets in reality in the same kart at that track, which was a surprise as I had no idea what the lap times were supposed to be and had to completely guess at the tire force curves, chassis flex, etc.. He said everything was spot on and really good except for the brakes which didn't feel right. Probably just a progressiveness issue there in the end. Mind you, he was the fastest guy at the show, so it's not like everybody was transformed into a karting champ at the first go

I made a three minute video of it, but unfortunately can't post it. I'll have to beg Cameron and Zach to change their minds and take the risk

The thing that might help you the most setup-wise is to reduce the power side differential setting a bunch. At some point you should get inside rear wheel spin when leaving a corner, acting like a safety valve. It's not good for acceleration of course, but will help keep the tail in line. Then start adding in more power side diff a bit at a time until you both like the handling and are still reasonably quick.

If I'm nervous and can't predict what will happen with the throttle at any given time, I won't be quick, so I often make the car easier to drive and my lap times improve.

Quote from Shotglass :

sadly it isnt quite that simple
you see normally a rigid body will spin about its cog a car on a suspension however has a rotational centre thats not the cog so youre forced to transform the simplest things like moments of inertia
so far that sounds easy enough but things get messy when the suspension moves and along with it the rotational centres (not sure if youd ever notice a engine taking that into account)

That's pretty much right. Computationally, however, you can indeed treat it as rotating about the center of gravity without worrying about the transformations if you're treating the car as a single rigid mass. The suspension link and spring forces will make it rotate more or less around the roll axis all on its own, negating the need for any of the transformations.

250kph/150mph in an Audi A6 wagon on the Oberhausen Straight (autobahn). Spent a good 15-20 minutes at that speed. Was quite a blast and took plenty of video of it (I wasn't driving, of course )