southern_cross's comments

Heat dumping is done outside the room, of course, but that's a separate airflow, one that's generally disconnected from the room. The cool AC flow itself is usually a closed cycle of some sort. You would be kind of defeating the whole purpose of trying to cool and dehumidify the air if you did otherwise, plus your AC system might have to run continuously in order to get anything done. There will always be some leakage, of course.

It would depend on the situation. For a single room system, generally no; for a multi-room system, generally yes if the other rooms are empty or at least relatively less crowded than the one you're in. That is, I wouldn't expect the AC to really remove any CO2; it might redistribute it, though.

Conveniently not mentioned is this article is the fact that normal CO2 concentrations in human lungs are about 40,000ppm - or about 100x higher than current background levels, and many times higher than the elevated levels mentioned in this article. And I don't know about you, but when I'm in a crowded room what eventually makes me tired and uncomfortable is the heat and humidity from all those bodies. Turn on the AC (which reduces both heat and humidity) and I will be feeling much better in short order.

No, I'm using them to discredit some of the thinking in the article. You did read the article, didn't you? It's pretty simple-minded stuff.

But I do have to ask: If that 100F temperature had occurred recently instead of over 100 years ago, how many people would be absolutely freaking out about it? And it would be all over the news, wouldn't it, complete with satellite interviews and talking heads and repeated insistence that "We must do something about climate change right now!"

As it is, though, it's just a historical footnote isn't it? And it seems that some folks are now trying to claim that it never really happened. (It appears to have been truncated out of the HadCRUT temperature data set, for example.) How inconvenient for them, then, there are other folks out there who have gone so far as to dig up the actual handwritten log for the weather station involved, which appears to be in good order.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-E1nQ_W4AEpC7D.jpg

Still other folks have noted that there are other logs out there for other stations which show equal if not higher temperatures, but Fort Yukon is called out as the official record high temperature for the state. I can only assume that investigation showed that those other stations weren't as reliable as Fort Yukon, but the possibility exists that they did in fact experience equally high or even higher temperatures.

A couple of questions which need to be asked and answered: When Anchorage hit its previous record of 85F back in 1969, was that a "tipping point" and a sign of impending climate doom? Better yet, when Fort Yukon (which is almost 400 miles NNE of Anchorage, and just a mile from the Arctic Circle) hit its record (and all-time state high) temperature of 100F (!) way back in 1915 (!!), what that a "tipping point" and a sign of impending climate doom? Enquiring minds want to know.

It's been pointed out that if these protests hadn't been used as an excuse for skipping school - that if they had generally been held on non-school days - then the turnouts would probably have been much smaller.

I did a quick background check of the ones that I could but I don't remember the details; none appeared to have proper training in climate matters, though, that I recall. But just listed in the article itself you've got "sustainable consumption", "marine biology", "carbon management", "cognitive psychologist", etc. (The other day I ran across someone claiming in an online post to be a "climatologist", but in fact his other posts said that he was an oceanographer.) Those fields are at best only tangentially related to matters of climate, and there's probably not a properly trained climatologist in the bunch.

It astounds me that the field of climate science is taken so seriously when it appears to actually mostly just be full of hangers-on, also-rans, and wannabes. And I can think of a few big names in it who have little to no scientific training at all.

Merkel’s decision to prematurely shut down Germany's generally safe and successful nuclear power program was quite frankly just stupid.

Did you consider remote, on-shore resources? Perhaps work-at-home folks, or those working remotely from other US cities? I ask because I've run into people who would otherwise normally insist that their domestic resources be local and in-house, but then would end up off-shoring stuff instead. WTF?

I'm getting quite annoyed now with the number of people who have little to no training in matters of climate getting called "climate scientists" by the press, or representing themselves as such.

Cellophane is basically a form of paper but it looks and feels like plastic. It's been around forever and is completely biodegradable. I expect that this packaging is maybe just new form of that.

My experience dealing with such folks 10 or 15 years ago was that even if the person presented to you as the "provider" was actually the person doing the work (and not just a frontman for others), you were lucky to be able to hold onto them for a year. I see that others here are saying just six months, though.

Also, promises were made which were broken almost immediately. For example, there was a promise made that all meetings would be conducted on US time as opposed to Indian time. But only two weeks into the contract I noticed that our US outsourcing manager was routinely coming into the office late, where before she was always quite punctual. When I asked about this I was told that it was because she was now having regular 3 AM meetings with the folks in India.

We were also told (all of us) by upper management that if the whole thing didn't work out as planned, then WE would be the ones held responsible for this, not the outsourcing folks. You can imagine how well this went down. It became routine for some people to just lie to their bosses about well how things were actually going, all while looking for other jobs elsewhere because they knew it was going to hit the fan soon enough. In one particular case that I remember, I attended a teleconference with a project manager where folks were laying it on the line and being honest about how badly things were going. Then in an immediately following teleconference (which I also attended) this project manager turned around and flat-out lied to his bosses by telling them that everything was going great! He bailed for another job at another company before he really got caught out on this though.

The company finally got wise and cut loose the outsourcing group after a couple of years. But by that time things were in such bad shape that they were considering just tossing out their custom software (which they'd spent decades developing) and replacing it with some kind of package. I don't know how far along they got with that before the big bankruptcy came, though.

Ever since they emerged from that bankruptcy (and then only barely, after enduring great pain) they've been looking for a buyer, but with no great success. They've finally found one now, though, except that one of the conditions of the buyout is that all of upper management is going to lose their jobs. Oh well!

If they survive this experience, there will probably still be good money to be made helping clean up the mess which will no doubt occur here.

> We only have two operating systems now Windows and Linux.

That all depends on what platform(s) you're using. For example, IBM still gives you zOS, AIX, the System i OS, and so on. And there are other operating systems for other platforms.

The computing world doesn't begin and end with Wintel, you know; it may seem that way sometimes, though.

Having spent my entire career with one foot on the "legacy" side of things (mainframe-like systems) and the other on the Wintel side, I can tell you that I've had to deal with any number of problems on the Wintel side that generally just wouldn't happen - and indeed in many cases couldn't happen - on the legacy side.

As an example of how things are done on the legacy side, I was once dealing with a piece of Power hardware which could be configured as either a Linux system or an iSeries system. There was a USB port in the hardware which was enabled on Linux systems but disabled on iSeries systems, and AFAIK it couldn't be enabled, either. This puzzled me at first, until I found out how USB ports can be used to attack systems and then it made perfect sense - they had chosen to disable the USB port for security reasons.

> Was there never a firmware bug that would take down an entire mainframe?

Yes, there was quite an ugly one not that long ago in fact. A local mega-corporation which still has some mainframes had its main (and redundant) systems just roll over and die suddenly, plus their hot backup systems which were offsite. I don't remember all of the details, but IIRC this was a case of "We [the vendor] knew we had a major bug, and we had a fix for it, but we were remiss about getting it out to all of our customers in a timely manner." This type of thing is shockingly rare in the mainframe world, though.

Pretty much all of the related documentation is publicly available, AFAIK, and freely accessible on the internet from what I can tell. This availabilty is actually a legal requirement from times past, IIRC.

Open a terminal session on pretty much any platform. If it defaults to being 80 columns wide, guess where that width comes from.

Why the change?

If you've read a few of the relevant papers and reports like I have, then you would know that they routinely state that they assume that most of the errors and uncertainties and such cancel out. But mathematically you can't get away with that; instead you have to know that they mostly cancel out, using whatever methods legitimately allow you to know this. But since we only have really good instrumentation and data going back at most a few decades, there's no way they can actually do that (at least for most of the historical data), so instead they just pretend.

And to my point, no, you can't claim that the errors in various temperature readings mostly cancel each other out, without having any solid proof of that. Nor can you then turn around and claim that since there are enough errors out there that obviously don't cancel out, that this then gives you the right to set loose a computer program to blindly "correct" those errors, said program having been constructed using whatever models and biases you were operating under at the time. (Those "corrections" may not be anywhere close to accurate, in other words.) But that's exactly the kind of thing they've been doing.