NYCGOBEARS;842854900 said:

---

Shall we start a tort reform thread? I'm all for it.

---

Sure. Just to be clear, I am not commenting on municipalities suing fossil fuel industries. Your post just reminded me of the stupid class action lawsuit against Blue Diamond, and how we waste so much money on these stupid cases. Sorry for redirecting the discussion.

Should they be suing the oil companies or the auto makers? I don't recall tobacco farmers being sued for cigarettes made with their product.

Unit2Sucks;842854901 said:

---

Move back home: we already have it. Not sure it makes that big a difference though. As I've posted elsewhere, medmal is a blip in our overall healthcare spend. We are talking a few dozen dollars per year per person in the worst states and single digits in the best.

It's really just an excuse/boogeyman for exorbitant healthcare costs.

---

It's not just the lawsuits that drag the healthcare costs. It's the unnecessary procedures doctors perform to avoid being sued.

SRBear;842854903 said:

---

Should they be suing the oil companies or the auto makers? I don't recall tobacco farmers being sued for cigarettes made with their product.

---

It would depend on who is sponsoring the deceptive counter-arguments.

calbear93;842854902 said:

---

Your post just reminded me of the stupid class action lawsuit against Blue Diamond, and how we waste so much money on these stupid cases.

---

So my snark was well directed for once

calbear93;842854904 said:

---

It's not just the lawsuits that drag the healthcare costs. It's the unnecessary procedures doctors perform to avoid being sued.

---

Or maybe they are doing it because they get paid more? See here for an article from a few years back. I don't discount that the standard of care has been impacted in some way by medmal, but I'm not sure that it's as big a driver as people like to claim. Given that tort reform has been enacted in 33 states, you would think that these extra costs you are referring to would have been weeded out of the system.

Just one anecdote, but I had a dentist try to fill 2 cavities when I was in college and I said, no thanks I will wait until I have a toothache. My brother had four filled and hasn't had one since. I am still waiting for my first cavity.

Unit2Sucks;842854910 said:

---

Or maybe they are doing it because they get paid more? See here for an article from a few years back. I don't discount that the standard of care has been impacted in some way by medmal, but I'm not sure that it's as big a driver as people like to claim. Given that tort reform has been enacted in 33 states, you would think that these extra costs you are referring to would have been weeded out of the system.

Just one anecdote, but I had a dentist try to fill 2 cavities when I was in college and I said, no thanks I will wait until I have a toothache. My brother had four filled and hasn't had one since. I am still waiting for my first cavity.

---

Was Odonto Bear your dentist?

GB54;842854918 said:

---

Was Odonto Bear your dentist?

---

Bwahahaha!

GB54;842854918 said:

---

Was Odonto Bear your dentist?

---

No, although now that you mention it (and I hadn't thought of it in years), he played college football [not for Cal]. I don't want to say anything else because I don't want to slam a guy in public as it very well could have been inadvertent. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised.

Unit2Sucks;842854927 said:

---

No, although now that you mention it (and I hadn't thought of it in years), he played college football [not for Cal]. I don't want to say anything else because I don't want to slam a guy in public as it very well could have been inadvertent. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised.

---

Whoever the dentist was I'm sure he acted in a moderate way, consistent with the exemplary care delivered by medical practicioners in a bygone era

GB54;842854929 said:

---

Whoever the dentist was I'm sure he acted in a moderate way, consistent with the exemplary care delivered by medical practicioners in a bygone era

---

Sure, cross that with Brian Bosworth and you've basically got it.

sp4149;842854274 said:

---

Having purchased three new homes in the last 20 years; all could have been built with solar in mind, but none were designed for simple, non-intrusive conversion to solar.
In our San Diego county house the electrical sub-contractor wouldn't have been capable of an effective solar installation; he missed NECA codes as it was.

The big problem with home solar is dumping it into the power grid, there are better workarounds now than 20 years ago. It has been far easier for utility management to avoid
the issue with opposition than to find a solution. Imagine you were Mobil and a home owner reclaimed(provided) 20 quarts of motor oil from their vehicles each year and wanted to dump
it into your tanks of MobilOne. Mobil would probably say Hell NO !, to avoid contamination of their motor oil. A stable electrical system is more important to our economy than clean motor oil and 'uncontrolled' external power generation can destabilize the grid.

In any event, I imagine that West Coast states are in far better condition with current renewable energy generation than the rest of the country
which has been (and will continue to be) heavily tied to coal fired power plants.

---

Mobil and PGE are apples and oranges in terms of your examples. Electrons are far more a commodity than would be used motor oil. Do you know that returned power would destabilize the grid or ...? Let's try to stay away from "probably" and other speculation. None of us knows, except that it hasn't been a problem in other places where it's done routinely, as I understand it.

ROFLMAO. Any port in a storm, eh? With one sentence, your sworn enemy becomes your best bud.

Most real people, ya know, have opinions on lots of things. Their opinions differ, in some cases, with others. That's what makes us humans. We talk about it and listen to one another. Consider the other guy's point and come to a conclusion.

Then, there are those who must be right about everything. They can take anything and try to turn it into proof that they are. To them, a cigar is never a cigar. To them, a cigar is whatever they say it is, at that moment. Could be something else five minutes from now.

Unit2Sucks;842854910 said:

---

Or maybe they are doing it because they get paid more? See here for an article from a few years back. I don't discount that the standard of care has been impacted in some way by medmal, but I'm not sure that it's as big a driver as people like to claim. Given that tort reform has been enacted in 33 states, you would think that these extra costs you are referring to would have been weeded out of the system.

Just one anecdote, but I had a dentist try to fill 2 cavities when I was in college and I said, no thanks I will wait until I have a toothache. My brother had four filled and hasn't had one since. I am still waiting for my first cavity.

---

When I was at Cal I did the same thing. Unfortunately by delaying I wound up having to have a root canal procedure at Cowell Hispital.
I learned the hard lesson not to put off cavity work.

Phase angle shifts are a very common problem with electrical distribution. Generators coming on line have to match phase angles with the existing power grid or the grid can collapse. The more power dumped into a grid the bigger the problem of phase angle mismatches. The systems to automatically match phase angles when entering into the grid require expensive equipment, manually shifting the phase angle to match requires technical skill; neither are likely found in home systems. As long as utilities can prevent massive amounts of home generated power from entering the grid, the safer, more stable the grid will be. A better analogy could have been your potable water supply; if you injected your well or spring or pond water into the potable water supply there could be major problems resulting. It's not a question of could it be done, more a question of how well it could be done.

Rushinbear;842854973 said:

---

Mobil and PGE are apples and oranges in terms of your examples. Electrons are far more a commodity than would be used motor oil. Do you know that returned power would destabilize the grid or ...? Let's try to stay away from "probably" and other speculation. None of us knows, except that it hasn't been a problem in other places where it's done routinely, as I understand it.

---

sp4149;842855376 said:

---

Phase angle shifts are a very common problem with electrical distribution. Generators coming on line have to match phase angles with the existing power grid or the grid can collapse. The more power dumped into a grid the bigger the problem of phase angle mismatches. The systems to automatically match phase angles when entering into the grid require expensive equipment, manually shifting the phase angle to match requires technical skill; neither are likely found in home systems. As long as utilities can prevent massive amounts of home generated power from entering the grid, the safer, more stable the grid will be. A better analogy could have been your potable water supply; if you injected your well or spring or pond water into the potable water supply there could be major problems resulting. It's not a question of could it be done, more a question of how well it could be done.

---

Got it. Makes sense.

okaydo;842855349 said:

---

---

Old news. Those were from a long time ago well over 16 months ago. Since then Scaramucci has had a "brain wipe". Now he agrees that GCC is a hoax.
BTW it has been reported that Scaramucci has been deleting a large number of old tweets in order to avoid a "distraction".
A politician can't let the truth get in the way of him/her doing his/her job.

NYCGOBEARS;842854919 said:

---

Bwahahaha!

---

I get it. You pick you dentist on the basis of political beliefs. Repubs must be horrible dentists, doctors, whatever.....Sad for you.

Questionable, but then totally believable.

Most all of my medical practitioners have been moderate rather than extreme. However the real radical right wing ones have always been easy to spot. Refuse to accept Medicare patients;
Have a concierge practice (pay a $2000 fee (bribe) for the privilege of seeing the doctor); Don't honor major insurance plans. As long as they are upfront; I avoid them on economic reasons alone.
I feel sorry for moderate and progressive and fiscally responsible Republicans as their party has abandoned them; the new Lincolns, Roosevelts, Eisenhowers, Rockefellers, Dirksens have not appeared; then again the current GOP would not let that old guard into the party.

OdontoBear66;842855432 said:

---

I get it. You pick you dentist on the basis of political beliefs. Repubs must be horrible dentists, doctors, whatever.....Sad for you.

Questionable, but then totally believable.

---

sp4149;842855469 said:

---

Most all of my medical practitioners have been moderate rather than extreme. However the real radical right wing ones have always been easy to spot. Refuse to accept Medicare patients;
Have a concierge practice (pay a $2000 fee (bribe) for the privilege of seeing the doctor); Don't honor major insurance plans. As long as they are upfront; I avoid them on economic reasons alone.
I feel sorry for moderate and progressive and fiscally responsible Republicans as their party has abandoned them; the new Lincolns, Roosevelts, Eisenhowers, Rockefellers, Dirksens have not appeared; then again the current GOP would not let that old guard into the party.

---

Have to agree with you on the last sentence, and most of the rest of your post as well--don't care to much for the assumption of the me first stuff attitude though, which I did not find existing barring a couple of exceptions in professional life. Pretty giving professional situation. I think political tendencies are left behind when the patient is engaged.

Rushinbear;842855352 said:

---

ROFLMAO. Any port in a storm, eh? With one sentence, your sworn enemy becomes your best bud.

Most real people, ya know, have opinions on lots of things. Their opinions differ, in some cases, with others. That's what makes us humans. We talk about it and listen to one another. Consider the other guy's point and come to a conclusion.

Then, there are those who must be right about everything. They can take anything and try to turn it into proof that they are. To them, a cigar is never a cigar. To them, a cigar is whatever they say it is, at that moment. Could be something else five minutes from now.

---

ROFLMAO. Any port in a storm, eh? With one sentence, your sworn enemy becomes your best bud.

Most real people, ya know, have opinions on lots of things. Their opinions differ, in some cases, with others. That's what makes us humans. We talk about it and listen to one another. Consider the other guy's point and come to a conclusion.

Then, there are those who must be right about everything. They can take anything and try to turn it into proof that they are. To them, a cigar is never a cigar. To them, a cigar is whatever they say it is, at that moment. Could be something else five minutes from now.

Clever.

Rushinbear;842855556 said:

---

Clever.

---

Just to put this out there for folks...this out today:
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/06/29/new-study-maps-out-dramatic-costs-of-unmitigated-climate-change-in-u-s/

mbBear;842856150 said:

---

Just to put this out there for folks...this out today:
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/06/29/new-study-maps-out-dramatic-costs-of-unmitigated-climate-change-in-u-s/

---

Even if you concede the accuracy of published global temps, this report, at least, fails to cite a time frame within which these catastrophes are to befall us. The language such as "could reach as high as..." and "...is projected to be, if current rates of change continue," takes us from purported data accuracy to speculation.

Having lived on or near the ocean practically my whole life, I have seen little, if any, change in the sea level. Sure, beaches and coastline disappear. Storms, tides and currents take them away and usually return them the next month/year. The sand is washed out a ways and then is washed back in. You can see it.

I know what you're going to say, "C'mon, Russian, you know anecdotal observations don't count." But, if observed sea levels don't differ from one decade to the next, how do you argue that they do, unless you hypothesize that the oceans don't balance themselves and between one and another. Or, are you saying that the Pacific might be 5 feet higher than the Atlantic, for instance.

As to the econ impact of higher air temps, say, we had a dust bowl in the 30's and now we don't. CO2 (the boogeyman) levels, in addition to being made the whipping boy, have created at least part of the conditions under which global agriculture has improved and the general coverage of vegetation has increased.

Nature changes on its own, by virtue of a complex interaction of global and extraterrestrial forces. No one is anywhere close to modeling it all. How anyone can claim that a 1% change in a factor that represents only 4% of that factor in the total of only one of the many forces (atmosphere) is a mystery. Unless...

"The apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore cannot possibly come about." See for yourself.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/07/al-gore-humiliation-nasa-study-confirms-sea-levels-falling/

Will be interesting to see how Trump tries to suppress the new climate change report authored by 13 federal agencies.

Quote:

---

The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.

The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.

“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times.

---

Unit2Sucks;842859194 said:

---

Will be interesting to see how Trump tries to suppress the new climate change report authored by 13 federal agencies.

---

Simple solution for Pres. Trump. Simply close down the 13 Agencies. Then the facts reported by those agencies disappear as well.
Much as Scaramucci's comments contradicting Trump were magically undone where he (Scaramucci) deleted his Tweets. disappeared

Unit2Sucks;842859194 said:

---

Will be interesting to see how Trump tries to suppress the new climate change report authored by 13 federal agencies.

Quote:

---

The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.

The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.

“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times.

---

---

Recent decades have definitely not been the warmest for the US of the past 1,500 years. In fact, recent US temps haven't been as warm as in the 1930s:



Much of North America has had devastatingly hot and dry summers in the 1930s (aka the Dust Bowl years). In comparison, the Midwest today has been having record crops in corn and wheat. The 1930s were devastatingly hot in much of the US, while the current period has been great for agricultural output, as well the current period has had historically low levels of hurricanes across the Atlantic and Gulf seaboard. The heat records from the 1930s still stand today:







The temperatures were hotter in the 1930s in the US and Canada. That period was followed by a steady cooling period in the 1960s and 70s, when there was a scientific consensus about global cooling, and when the scientific establishment and the media were panicking about an impending ice age, clamoring for a global action plan to avert that looming ecological catastrophe.

Note that the global cooling in the 60s and 70s occurred while CO2 emissions were accelerating, and the warming in the 1930s took place when human CO2 output was much, much smaller than it is today.

Thanks for the misinformation via cherrypicking Cal88. i wouldn't expect anything less from you.

I don't have the time to counter all of your charts at this point but there are at least two that are manifestly suspect.

First, you used the heat wave index but not that doesn't contradict the quote that you referenced. There is other data from NOAA that shows that the percentage of land mass in the lower 48 with unusually hot summer temps is higher than ever for that period, and that still doesn't necessarily speak to the averages which the report purportedly discusses.

Second, as for the wattsupwithfakeclimatenews chart that you love to post about heat records - I note that it only goes through the 1990s. Do you have an updated version through 2016? Do you know how the list of records was calculated? Were the records evenly distributed by landmass across the country or are they perhaps skewed based on measurement stations? Who knows the answer, but the chart looks good to you so you love to post it here.

There is so much climate data out there and given your comfort posting false information, it's no wonder you always have just the chart to support your viewpoint, but only if you ignore the mountains of other data that support the truth.

That mountain of other data has a habit of melting if you care to shine a light on it.

It's not that you don't have the time to refute all the evidence I've posted above, it's more that you can't hold your end of the debate due to your lesser grasp of the elements discussed. Hence the reflexive ad hominem types of responses like this one above. Anything that doesn't jibe with your preconceived beliefs boils down to "cherrypicking".

Quote:

---

Second, as for the chart that you love to post about heat records - I note that it only goes through the 1990s. Do you have an updated version through 2016? Do you know how the list of records was calculated? Were the records evenly distributed by landmass across the country or are they perhaps skewed based on measurement stations? Who knows the answer, but the chart looks good to you so you love to post it here.

---

there you go:



The methodology is very straightforward: for each state, you look at the year the highest temperature ever was recorded, then tabulate by decade. The beauty of this dataset is that it is harder to fudge, unlike composite data sets built from averages that are inherently more subjective and easier to manipulate by emphasizing certain elements within that set. The data is based on Shein, K., D. Todey, F. Akyuz, J. Angel, T. Kearns, and J. Zdrojewski, "Evaluating Statewide Climate Extremes for the United States" published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology in 2012.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2012/07/13/the-heat-was-on-before-urbanization-and-greenhouse-gases/

Those record heat events occurred much more frequently in the 1930s than in any other decade, by a long shot, as you can see in the table below:



The top 5 years when most of the records were set are shown below (when multiple years tie for the high, each individual year gets a fraction of a "record"):




If the current era is the hottest evah, with the atmosphere loaded with catastrophically high levels of CO2, how come none of the record maxima across the US happened recently, and this, despite the Urban Heat Island effect, which compromized recent readings due to modern urbanization?

So just to be clear, you are saying these 13 federal agencies are incorrect that the last few decades are the warmest on record because an arbitrarily chosen list of the hottest days by state is overwhelmingly influenced by a few extreme what waves in 1930, 1934 and 1936? I had always assumed your stupid chart was based on all temperature stations to reflect some sort of geographical balance but it is literally just a list of hottest day for every state.

If someone asked you how good Cal football was in the 200's would you say we were the best team in FBS because we were theoretically ranked no 1 for the last few minutes of the 2007 OSU game? Or would you say we were one of the worst based on our low point in 2001?

Cal88 has got some Mrs. Sandusky levels of denial going on right now

Lulz Danger, I guess you're either with the program, or you're a denier that's somehow associated with the most notorious child molester n US history.

Funnily enough, the overnight low in State College, PA tonight is 52F, I bet Mrs Sandusky doesn't have her AC on right now. One data point doesn't make the climate, but there is no question that the recent trend in much of the eastern seaboard and the midwest has been for milder, cooler summers. In what are supposed to be the hottest years ever.

mbBear;842856150 said:

---

Just to put this out there for folks...this out today:
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/06/29/new-study-maps-out-dramatic-costs-of-unmitigated-climate-change-in-u-s/

---

Um, no. Talk to anyone who believes this again in 5 years, 10 years, and 15 years. Bet anyone a Top Dog this stuff doesn't happen as forecast...