I am a Conservative’s Recent Comments

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  Thanks

  David,

  Thanks for the welcome.

  Sunflower,

  Your numbers are correct, over the past several decades temperature has been fairly steadily increasing at a rate equal to about 0.8C per century.  The actual increase in temperature over the past ~150 years is about 0.6C.  Obviously what will happen in the future is open to question.

  JMG,

  Look at it this way.  Take Jim Hansen's paper that has a temperature history for the past several decades.  http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/103/39/14288

  In this document, look at the past ten years of Station Data for average global surface temperature.  You will find (by eyeballing it) 5 up years and 5 down years.

  So there is a trend, but the average annual trend of .008C is so small vs. annual variation that the odds of any one year being up or down are very close to 50/50.

  Biodiversivist,

  I don't have an online subscription to the NYT (don't draw any special conclusions from that), but my guess is that your link is to the crazy creationist "museum".  All I can say is that all coalitions have some pretty wacky skeletons in the closet (so to speak).

  Tico89,

  "Surely there are more important things to discuss than almost pure semantics."

  I agree

  Best,
  JimOn They went down because of random factors, not Bush posted 2 years, 5 months ago 15 Responses

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  Good for the Goose, etc.

  You say:

  "Hmm. An unusually warm winter -- wonder what caused that."

  As you well know, the temperature change in any one year is, for all practical purposes, entirely stochastic, even in the presence of a long-term trend of about .008C warming per year.

  Similarly, the change in GHG emissions / $GDP is any one year is, for all practical purposes, entirely stochastic, even in the presence of a long-trend of reduction.

  Why do you (implicitly, at least) take one data point as evidence of a trend, but not the other?

  Jim Manzi
  (Planet Gore author and non-denier of AGW)On They went down because of random factors, not Bush posted 2 years, 5 months ago 15 Responses

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  Your Premise is Unproven

  Ms. Mitchell:

  You describe as the "key issue" that Wal-Mart and other big box retailers are causing some portion of the increase in total driving in the US because they create a retail distribution structure with fewer stores that are therefore farther away, on average, from people's homes.

  There is something to this argument, but it is one side of a trade-off, and it is not clear whether Wal-Mart increases or decreases total driving.  

  One of the features of Wal-Mart is that it allows consumers to combine several trips that would otherwise be separate drives into one trip.  A typical Wal-Mart Supercenter (almost entirely what they are building these days) combines a large grocery store, gas station, clothing store, electronics and appliance store, pharmacy, health clinic and other features in one location.  So, while I may now have to go 10 miles to the WMSC instead of 3 miles to my local grocery store, I don't have to do a separate 3 mile trip (or added 1.5 mile segment) to a Kmart and another 0.5 mile segement to my favorite gas station and so on. It's not totally unlike the idea of a mall.

  Obviously, if my alternative was to drive 1 mile to a downtown area where I would then walk between stores, it clearly increases net driving.  If, on the other hand, I lived exactly at the mid-point of a square 8 miles on a side with the nearest grocery store, clothing store, gas station and electronics store at the four corners, then replacing one of these with a Wal-Mart would definitely reduce total driving.

  It's actually complicated, and would take a lot more analysis of the spatial distribution of shopping trips with vs. without Wal-Mart, rather than your simple assertion, to answer the question as to the net impact of Wal-Mart on total US driving.

  Best,
  Jim ManziOn The impossibility of a green Wal-Mart posted 2 years, 6 months ago 27 Responses