A 1908 Siberian style wack at a slightly higher entry angle could do the trick.

Dinosaur thought has never been the same since their experience with a similar rock…

If I had added “profit-driven harvesting” as opposed to “profit-driven depletion” (ie working to ensure a continuing sorce of profit rather than the on-off play-school grab it not share it version), would it have made the concept any easier to accept? No?

Pity … I wonder if the dinosaurs took the same view …

“shifting our energy demand from profit-driven resource-depletion to harvesting” - what a crock of ‘s**t’.

Do you think that ‘harvesting’ can exist without harvesters, and harvesters without industries to make them, and industries without filthy ‘profit’?

Business will exist in any climate in a market driven economy. If CO2 warming theory gets a run and Government is the buyer of ‘black hole’ renewables - business with sing from that song sheet to make a dollar.

When the AGW theorists can run their models backwards and duplicate the Holocene with accuracy; when the IPCC explains what happened to the Mann ‘hockeystick’ and where went the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age; and when Ian Plimer recants and seeks Jim Hansen’s forgiveness - then I will gladly become a convert to the established religion of CO2 driven warming. Meanwhile, tune in for more heresy from Tamas and yours truly!

Ken Lambert

Bruce, I do exist in the real world of manufacturing and exporting, engineering and even a little bit of science - so please understand that my reference to the “Flower Children” was pure mischief. My point was simply that by your drawing attention to perhaps $3000 of “Profit” in a $12000 PV power station installed in your home, you might have implied that this profit could somehow be removed and a supply still exist. That may be so for the serious DIY’er who wants to buy the parts direct and put it all together. The ‘retail’ public won’t do that.
Now you seem to be justifing the 25% profit margin as a good thing. Of course its a good thing - prople can’t run business without profit - not even “Flower Children” from Nimbin.

My point is that in a competitive non-monopoly market, the ‘market price’ is around $12000 for a 1kW ‘home power system’. If that is ‘noise’, mate - I, just like Tamas, will continue to make it - loudly!!

Ken Lambert

And no, I have no shares in the oil industry or carbon-genrating companies, although it’s possible some are held indirectly via my super - but I have no idea.. I just work in a normal job and moonlight as a pest on Crikey.

One further pont. Maybe I am wrong. But what if you are wrong and we ‘transform’ our economy because of a problem that doesn’t exist. We will all be poorer as a result. Is that moral? Is that sensible?

That’s why we need to debate it and why I hate the mono-think you get from the media and government on this subject.

Except it would be the opposite of what Mr Dabner suggested would be useful.

I intended - as I think is in fact plain from the correspondence - to express that I second his suggestion that this particular dialogue be “reverted” back to the area where it is most appropriate and where sufficient time, detail and space for proper analysis is available to those who give one …

Meanwhile, as an individual who works hard to remain unimpressed by received wisdom, I totally support your right to keep banging on about the lack of conclusive evidence that - to paraphrase - we are all going hell in a handcart if we don’t make some substantial changes to our approach to the heavy-duty risks increasingly-uniformly flagged for us by so many qualified and unqualified “experts” and fervently resisted by many others.

As I am sure others have pointed out to you before, your insistence on conclusive evidence of global warming / cooling or artificial climate variation before shifting our energy demand from profit-driven resource-depletion to harvesting reminds me of the pedestrian who believes that because they have crossed many roads without taking much care successfully in the past they will never encounter a large, heavy object travelling too fast to stop soon enough to protect them.

As for your bollocks about free speech, my endorsement of the suggestion you speak freely elsewhere - in the public forum provided specifically for this sort of shallow tosh (from both sides) - is pretty far from undemocratic. Unless of course you demand the (exclusive?) right to shout whatever you like wherever you like as often as you like while denying others the same prerogative? “Power to the correct people” as the National Lampoon stars once put it a while before they got rich.

Your off-argument introduction of the right to free speech - right or wrong - is plainly self-serving and gratuitous here. And makes me wonder (says he, smugly copying the technique): “Exactly how much in the way of shares, income or career interest in carbon-generating companies or industries do you and your super involve?

You may just be wrong, too. It would be cataclysmic if you are. Deal with it. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh … Basta.

And the simplest way to calculate the arithmetic mean is to use the =average(X:Y) funtion in excel.

Go for it.

I used every monthly data point since 1979. The data go back just over 30 years, but I limited it to three 10-year chunks. I used a simple mean.

I downloaded the data from their website. I then dumped it into excel and performed the calculations. The entire process took abouut 10-15 minutes (including a bit of playing around). It’s really easy. Give it a try

The link to download the UAH data set is here: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/public/msu/t2lt/tltglhmam_5.2

The first data column is the temperature reading for the world.

And one more point. You call my comment “ad hominem” after you’d seconded a comment telling me to shut up? Seriously?

Bad luck mate. I refuse to shut up on this subject and you can’t make me. You know, democracy, free society and all that. Deal with it.

So did you add up ALL the observations in the set (any germane clues on what methodology was involved in collecting the dataset to offer?), discovered that they cited a margin of error and used the lowest figures in the range, perhaps? And share the datasets disclaimers with us?

My point is that extracting LCD “snapshots” of any massive set if statistics and then deriving a quick and dirty primary school “average” from it does nobody any favours and is likely to mislead more than illuminate. Let alone usefully inform public policy, for example.

Hey, ho.

Meanwhile, just for fun:

“Definitions of average on the Web:

* approximating the statistical norm or average or expected value; “the average income in New England is below that of the nation”; “of average height for his age”; “the mean annual rainfall”
* lacking special distinction, rank, or status; commonly encountered; “average people”; “the ordinary (or common) man in the street”
* lacking exceptional quality or ability; “a novel of average merit”; “only a fair performance of the sonata”; “in fair health”; “the caliber of the students has gone from mediocre to above average”; “the performance was middling at best”
* amount to or come to an average, without loss or gain; ‘The number of hours I work per work averages out to 40’
* a statistic describing the location of a distribution; ‘it set the norm for American homes’
* around the middle of a scale of evaluation; ‘an orange of average size’; ‘intermediate capacity’; ‘medium bombers’
* achieve or reach on average; ‘He averaged a C’
* (sports) the ratio of successful performances to opportunities
* modal(a): relating to or constituting the most frequent value in a distribution; ‘the modal age at which American novelists reach their peak is 30’
* compute the average of
* an intermediate scale value regarded as normal or usual; ‘he is about average in height’; ‘the snowfall this month is below average’
* median(a): relating to or constituting the middle value of an ordered set of values (or the average of the middle two in a set with an even number of values); ‘the median value of 17, 20, and 36 is 20’; ‘the median income for the year was $15,000’ “

Ian - by “average” I mean, um, average. Mathematically that would be the sum of observations divided by the number of observations. Make sense?

Also please publish extracts from “How To Lie With Statistics” whenever anyone uses the phrase: ‘I have … taken an “average” temperature’ without defining precisely what they mean by “average”.