'cause one season is a valid datapoint...

Not.

I keep forgetting, when it gets colder that is weather and when it gets warmer that is climate change! In fact there has been no decline in cover that anyone can measure and by the way snow guns cause precipitation not cooling!

AND

2000:

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said…

2009:
The heaviest snowfall for 18 years paralysed swaths of (Britain) yesterday, bringing chaos to roads, railways and airports, closing thousands of schools and businesses, and costing the economy an estimated £1.2bn in lost working hours.

2012:

Europe continues to be blanketed in snow as the cold snap which has so far killed hundreds across the continent shows no signs of stopping.

I agree but we may be referring to different comments.

Would you care to comment on the recently published calculation that if Europe continues to spend $250 billion a year until the end of the century temperatures will be inhibited by one twentieth of a degree Celsius? Is that a correct figure and if not what is and how was it calculated?

pg 67. 6.1. Snow cover area
"Fig. 10 also shows declines in annual maximum
snow cover from 2000, that are statistically significant at the 80% level
and 95% level, for both interior (magenta) and total detected snow
area (blue) respectively."

Indeed Allan, but Mr Coochey has developed a talent for it.

Questioning credibility is not an arguement from authority.

"but this year must be about the best on record"

Do you mean across all the australian ski fields or just the one you visited?
Did you seek data to substantiate that or is it your subjective view on the basis of your visit?

Are good years of snow fall less common now than they were 30 years ago?

*headdesk*

Ok - introducing Yabuli out of context may be a superb red herring, I'm not sure. In any case the issue is not THAT they use snow making but WHY?

Why do they rely on snow making John? Have they always had to? Remember that climate change is not just about moving from colder to warmer, but changes in precipitation and other climatic conditions.

Snow is precipitation, once certain weather conditions are achieved it will occur. Area of cover is defined by increased precipitation and not necessarily driven by temperature, unless of course you were to look at more on a tight balance regions, where snow fall is rare.
So did more snow fall occur in say the Mount Lofty ranges in South Australia, a place where snow fall or the lack of it is on a very fine balance.

John

Have you considered that at -25C, particularly for a location like Harbin, where the prevailing weather systems have just crossed all of Europe, Siberia & Central Asia, that the air there may be so dry that they don't get much natural snowfall. Just because air is cold doesn't mean you get a lot of snow. Heavy snowfalls need something that chills otherwise moist air. Like air that hasn't had to travel too far from the ocean. Or air that has moved from a lower altitude, warmer and moister and then been forced to higher altitude where it cools.

By the way John, I gave you a response on the previous thread, the one about Prof Chubb. You asked for a calculation and I supplied a rough, back of the envelope one. You never replied.

John

I read through the paper you commented on. The mention statistical significance of different aspects of the study 8 times. 4 of these references are to data that shows statistical significance ate the 95% ConfidenceIinterval. 2 references are to data showing statistical significance at the 90% Confidence Interval, 1 reference to statistical significance at the 80% Confidence Interval, and the one quote you mentioned where the observations at those sites did not satisfy Statistical Significance.

And the quote you presented was very late in the paper. So you needed to skim/read through the paper, past all the other references to find the one out of eight that might possibly give you some ammunition to use.

John, That's not Cherry-Picking; that is well marinated Maraschino Cherry picking.

And it is actually extremely telling about your apparent motivation. Your worked your way through a document that was offering arguments that disagree with what you think to try and find the one element that might, if taken out of context, offer some shred of support to your view.

Don't you get it John? It isn't about finding evidence to support your view, or mine or anyone elses. It is about assessing the body of the evidence, all of it, weighing it up, and then forming our views based on that evidence, and that alone.

In everything in life, evidence, the balance of what the data says, is the only source of our views.

Some skeptics seem to think that science is like some huge piece of knitwear; if we can just find a loose thread and pull, it will unravel. When in fact science is much more like a jigsaw puzzle. Lots of pieces fitting together. Occassionally a piece may not fit perfectly. Maybe it is part of the sky section of the jigsaw but we have the wrong bit of sky. But just becasue one piece of a jigsaw puzzle doesn't seem to fit perfectly isn't grounds for thinking that, Ahah, this piece doesn't fit. So it's not a jigsaw of a farming scene. Its totally different, a jigsaw of a skyscraper.

When one piece doesn't seem to fit, if most of the other pieces fit together well, and an image is emerging that looks like what we are expecting, we don't reject the whole jigsaw puzzle based on one supposedly errant piece.

If most of the pieces fit, but one doesn't, the sensible reaction is to assume there is something wrong with that piece, not with the whole puzzle.

Only if we see lots of large and significant pieces all being wrong do we start to doubt the puzzle rather than the piece.

Unless of course we have a strong and vested emotional interest in not wanting to believe the picture emerging from the jigsaw. Then we might well clutch at any errant piece as a defence against the emerging image we do not want to confront.

Then it is so easy to understand why someone might want to repudiate the emerging image in the jigsaw puzzle by going -'Look, look, This piece doesn't fit!'. .... Listen to that silence. That is the quiet sound of sighs of relief from those distressed by the image in the jigsaw puzzle. The salvation that comes from finding the little thread that will make it all unravel - "please, please, make it unravel..."

Hey, dont disagree with everything you said but the sentence

"- at a purely theoretical level, sure. In reality, no. We have unlimited supplies of energy, water is not destroyed by use, food is endlessly creatable."

shows a vast ignorance of the situation we are actually in, not having a go at you but you should do some research on desertification, permaculture, modern agriculture and the impact of eating meat, its really interesting. The situation is actually the reverse of what you said, In theory we have unlimited supplies, in reality we do not. If we are sustainable in our use of resources we wont have a problem but we are far from being sustainable

"New business models"

Self explanatory I would have thought

"peer-to-peer networks" computer networks that work by allowing each computer to act as a client or server for the other computers in the network. It makes sharing resources and files far faster and easier.

"micro-transactions"

Small payments, often for software elements for additional functionality. For exaple, you might get an app for your mobile device - a GPS map program for example. Rather than include the entire map set, they provide one map of your choice with the purchase of the app, then you buy additional maps as required for a small fee each time.

"collaborative consumption"

In simple terms - bartering. You have a good, I have a different good - we each want the one we have, and the one the other has. Where this is legally permissible (such as music under digital rights management arrangements) we can swap with each other. Say we both create devices for measuring - and we develop, in house, part of an approach to a certain task - but a different stage each. If we operate in different markets we might decide that the benefit to be gained by swapping the knowledge outweighs the risk.

Generally those terms all apply to new businesss models that rely on digital transactions.

Gerard

Just speculating, haven't read the report.

'Collaborative Consumption'. Possible things like small scale integrated patterns of production and consumption - the model of communities where different people produce products that are exchanged wwith each other based on a collaborative approach to deciding what should be produced.

Peer-to-Peer networks. GM has given a more narrow, IT type definition. I suspect that what is meant here more broadly is interactions between people, sytems etc that are less top-down/hierarchical and more interchanges between smaller scale 'peers'. More side-to-side transactions (whether of goods, services, mutual benefit, self esteem, whatever). Perhaps the emergence of networks within society that are less monolithic and hierachical. Various technologies now allow us to establish relationships with other folks for a whole range of purposes that side-step conventional distinctions such as country, language, economic scale or whatever

Micro Transactions. The capcity to engage in exhanges with other foks that are very small scale in nature. Whether economic or otherwise. A relatively recent development for example has been the rise of the 'micro-credit' movement in the 3rd world, begun by the Grameen Bank. Loan just a few dollars, often female, customers to start the absolutely tiniest of businesses. Perhaps more broadly it is the emergence of systems to allow individuals and small groups to sidestep the major, larges-cale institutions of society and achieve what they need using very small scale methods.

Disruptive Technologies. Any technology, whether large or small scale, hard technologies or soft, that disproportionately 'disrupt' how the existing systems work. On-Line shopping for example Go to your major department store to decide what you want to buy, then go on-line to buy it from an e-retailer at a fraction of the price. Internet based information services that completely break the business model of free-to-air television, paper newspapers. And national censorship laws, IP rules, Copyright etc.

The essence of what they are saying is essentially that the old structured, hierachical, somewhat mecnahistic model of how human iteractions occur, economic, legal, experiential etc is breaking down. The 19th century gave us a rather mechanistic model for how production works. The 20th century tried to give us a similar model for how consumption works - brand loyalty, structured 'purchasing experiences' called supermarkets & Shopping Malls, etc.

This moel is under assault and failing, being replaced by a model of interactions between people, systems, processes that is less mechanical, more organic. The old paradigm of modelling societies on machines is being supplanted by a paradigm that models societies on organisms.

This has strengths and weaknesses. Mother Nature (to anthropomorphise a bit) has been in the business of figuring out what sorts of systems work best across a range of circumstances and pressures.

And her answer is simple. Fluid, adaptable 'organic' systems are more resilient, more robust. The creative application of directed chaos has been the basis of the success of life on Earth.

That said however, for those of us immersed inside the 'constructive chaos' of an aorganic system, it can be very disturbing. It just doesn't feel nearly as 'safe'. Our more deterministic, mechanistic approaches can seem so much safer. They certainly can seem that.

But the difficult reality is that our mechanistic approach to organisation, whether one is talking about engineering or economics, is of limited utility. It is fantastic in those situations where we have sufficient control of the circumstances around us that we can impose our mechanicistic systems. And in times and situations where the demands on our systems are not too great the mechanistic approach can work well. However its inherent rigidity leaves it vulnerable when the response we need to make to an external pressure exceeds is capacity for adaptibility.

A more organic response, which is how I read the descriptions from the CSIRO report has the great virtue of incredible flexibility. Organic systems can adapt far more easily than mechanistic systems can. However, organic systems tend to not give priority to stability, security for those participants within the system. Our sense (and sometimes our actual reality) of security is greatly diminished in an organic system.

Organic systems work better AS SYSTEMS. Mother Nature has proved that ad infinitum. But they really aren't supportive of the well being and interests of those within the system.

Mechanistic systems seek to preserve the wellbeing of those within the system because that is what they are designed to do. BUT, the rigidity and inflexibilty of mechanistic approaches leaves them vulnerable to major system collapse under external pressure.

It sems to be a choice between robust and adaptable systems, that roll with the punchs and keep on going, but don't put our well being as a high priority, vs systems that are focused on supporting our well being and scurity, but are brittle, inflexible and vulnerable to major failure ander severe stress.

A bit of a Sophie's Choice.

Also I hear what you are saying, at least as a sub-text, about language and jargon. One development over recent decades has been the rise of what might variously be called Management Speak, Motivated Speak, Concerned Speak, etc.

Aesthetically this is a backwards step. However, all languages are fluid and evolving things. In some ways this is simply the ongoing story of the evolution of the Englisg language. In the past it asimilated French, German, Sanscrit, the Romance Languages. It withstood the schism into English english & American English. And it evolves to this day.

The noun Action as become the verb To Action.

And so the evolution continues. When we are reading articles such as this, or the CSIRO report, those of us of a 'certain age' need to separate our aesthetic inclinations wrt to what the form of English should be - here we will always be outvoted by those driving the evolution of English to its next state -from our arguments concerning the substance of what is being said

Focus on the meaning behind the form of words, rather than our irritation with the form - the form moves on and leaves us behind sadly. It has ever been thus. It ever should be thus.

Crop failures and water shortages - won't affect our daily lives? Well maybe if you are a rich westerner who can afford to pay more for food.

Insurance premiums if all you care about is money.

If you are a farmer (or know any) more crop failures and bankrupcies.

But you are correct - most of the effects of our current policies will be felt far more than 20 years into the future.

Don, I imagine that is true. It is remarkable that we have arrived at the point where the economic value of the extracted minerals from such a small source has become a viable options. However, given improvements in processing techniques over the past few years, particularly in gold recovery, it is perhaps not surprising. I've been watching with interest in my own investment portfolio the advances in recovery and the decreasing costs in Australian operations (when examined as a proportion of yield).