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Let me sum up your argument, then: "You're rubber and I'm glue! What you say bounces off me and sticks to you!"

Very junior high of you, and a logical fallacy to boot: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/T...

Given that you have to specifically go out of your way to set a font on a post on slashdot, it's a bit like the green ink phenomenon, in that someone thinks that it will somehow help establish their argumentative credibility if they make the text itself more unusual.

It's subtle, but if you just conjoin that with allegations of conspiracy, it makes for the perfect brew of "not quite sane", which I took as an art piece. I mean, it's not like the "point" you're referencing actually exists.

It's just a voice shouting in the wilderness bro.

Of course I do. Clear explanations are not the problem here.

Climate change science can be turned into an executive summary quickly and easily. These summaries are essentially a bunch of incontestable facts that still get contested.

A. Carbon dioxide provably has much stronger absorption bands in the infra-red wavelengths than Nitrogen, and Oxygen, and a little more than water. These are the only compounds more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2. You can run experiments in the lab seeing different radiative rates of cooling from different mixtures of "air" and CO2.
B. Paleoclimate reconstructions have show than CO2 concentrations consistently acts as a primary moderator of temperature on earth after the first occurrence of plantlife.
C. Naive modeling shows that substantially increasing the CO2 concentrations from current levels of the atmosphere shift the equilibrium temperatures of the planet substantially. More complex models incorporating other known factors, within the entire range of their uncertainty levels, show the same thing.
D. Human activity has almost doubled CO2 levels.

None of these 4 points are really scientifically questionable, and only naive skepticism(that is, pseudoskepticism) or ignorance leaves much room for debate on them.

Their implications are obvious, and we still get denial, and the problem is not with the structuring, but the behaviors of the deniers.

And for the record, no man made GM food has ever harmed a bee.

Citation needed.

Searching for "gmo harming bees" gives:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/d...
It is said that Terminator seeds provokes something similar to cancer to bees.

Um yea...

Despite presenting itself as a source of scholarly analysis, Globalresearch mostly consists of polemics many of which accept (and use) conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and propaganda. The prevalent conspiracist strand relates to global power-elites (primarily governments and corporations) and their New World Order. Specific featured conspiracy theories include those addressing 9/11,vaccines,genetic modification, Zionism, HAARP, global warming. Bosnian genocide denialism and David Kelly.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/G...

Also, juts go to that sites front page... The nature of the site because quite evident just reading the headlines: http://www.globalresearch.ca/

You might as well be quoting the Time Cube guy.
Check your sources next time.

I play games and never heard of those people before.

Personal anecdote FTW!!!

ProTip: the people you've never heard of number in the billions.

The salem hypothesis.

It's not that engineers are always falsely certain about scientific things, it's just that we're the ones who are most likely to think we're more qualified than we are with regards to science.

you didnt debunk anything.

you just linked to another faulty denier site that has itself been proven wrong, and an article that trots out the same "warm period and "little ice age" misconceptions.
Roy Spencer is not a valid source.

Tree ring reliability: ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... ):

The divergence problem is a physical phenomenon - tree growth has slowed or declined in the last few decades, mostly in high northern latitudes. The divergence problem is unprecedented, unique to the last few decades, indicating its cause may be anthropogenic. The cause is likely to be a combination of local and global factors such as warming-induced drought and global dimming. Tree-ring proxy reconstructions are reliable before 1960, tracking closely with the instrumental record and other independent proxies.

Medieval Warm Period: ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... ) AND ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... ):

The Medieval Warm Period predominantly affected the North Atlantic and Europe, not the whole world. While the Medieval Warm Period saw unusually warm temperatures in some regions, globally the planet was cooler than current conditions.

The Little Ice Age: ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... ) AND ( http://www.skepticalscience.co... ):

The sceptical argument that current warming is a continuation of the same warming that ended the LIA is unlikely. There is a lack of evidence for a suitable forcing (e.g. the sun) and numerous correlations with known natural forcings that can account for the LIA itself, and the subsequent climate recovery. Taken in isolation, the LIA might cast doubt on the theory of climate change. Considered alongside the empirical evidence, model predictions and a century of scientific research into the climate, recovery from the LIA is not a plausible theory to explain the observed evidence and rate of global climate change.

As for Roy Spencer himself:
-He believes in the "global scientific conspiracy" ...a conspiracy involving tens of thousands of scientists, and perfect secrecy...
-He believes that they lie to make money off research grants" myths....cause theres just so much money to be made that way...as opposed to being on the payroll of a big oil company, like him.
-Oh, and he also believes that GW cant be happening....because God.

So ya...that's a "wonderful" source you have there.

http://www.desmogblog.com/roy-...
http://www.desmogblog.com/2014...
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/R...
http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...

Speaking of fallacies, the use of CAGW is generally associated with a strawman, goalpost moving or loaded language fallacies, depending on context.

Nice try, but no. CAGW = Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming and it describes the point of view of alarmism on climate quite well. When public narrative out there uses terms like 'greatest moral challenge of our time', and slogans like 'no jobs on a dead planet', the inference is quite clear : the proponents of such points of view are clearly advocating that a global catastrophe is looming. There is an appalling barefaced hypocrisy in an article that takes um-bridge with the term CAGW, which I assert is not emotive, but factual : AGW that is bad enough to be catastrophic which is a valid hypothesis and a point of view held by many, yet willy-nilly throws the term 'denier' around. Some real class and intellectually meticulous conduct on display there.

My comment was about the cyclical nature of some "skeptic" arguments.

Maybe you can actually reference skeptics how have done this, flip-flopped on data sets, doesn't change the fact that warming is not as much as projected. And you yourself keep changing your argument without explaining why you are abandoning your prior argument, first it was all statistical quackery, then it's not a big deal this slowdown, and now you are trying the 'a good defence is an offence' strategy by asserting skeptics are cyclical and selective in their datasets, when this is exactly what alarmists are doing by abandoning discussion of trends in favour of discussing instances where Tmax records are being set.

It is interesting and has been done.

Yeah that is interesting, the NASA link though is more about how the histogram of anomalies is trending decade to decade, I assume it is yearly or seasonally adjusted anomalies here, not daily Tmin Tmax records, but it shows a growing fat tail anomaly which does support overall higher likelyhood of max temps. SKS link is as trustworthy as SKS always is (as in not at all). My original point is that record counts in a period of a pause after a period of warming is normal outcome for variable highly autocorrelated data. It does not invalidate the observation of a pause. It is actually consistent with it. The concluding point is that counting record events simply isn't a robust mechanism for qualitative analysis. When some skeptics make a big deal out of record winter lows, they are shouted down, and rightly so and they are shouted down by skeptics too. But presumably reporting on Tmax records and saying to paraphrase : "on-noes is the global warming!", is perfectly fine. Presumably. Actually... no.... it isn't okay.

CAGW predicted rapid and accelerating warming. But the data fails to bear it out, so post-hoc rationalisations are put forth and the capacity of the hypothesis to yield falsifiability tests is shrinking : which urges the question is the development of this hypothesis robust?

Speaking of fallacies, the use of CAGW is generally associated with a strawman, goalpost moving or loaded language fallacies, depending on context. It's use is rarely associated with honest debate because there is no actual definition for CAGW.

CO2 emission records are actually what predicts accelerating warming, if C02 is a greenhouse gas and we increase the rate at which we're releasing CO2 into the air, we increase the speed at which the planet warms. And rapid is at best a relative term when applied to changes that are far too slow for human senses to observe.

Your comment " Every time we hit a new high temperature", is with respect absurd particularly given admonishments about dodgy statistics in this thread and the OP.

My comment was about the cyclical nature of some "skeptic" arguments. There is always a previous record high which we almost always below, thus the argument can always be made that there has been "no warming" for some time period. The argument goes out of style for a bit after a new record high has been set, but give it a year or two and it comes back into fashion until the next record high is set. The comment had nothing to do with presenting actual evidence of global warming.

An interesting null would be to compare # high temp records against # of low temp records.

It is interesting and has been done. According to that paper, the split for 2001-2011 temperature anomalies was about 85% high to 15% low. According to Skeptical Science, the records were split 67% high to 33% low over 1999-2009.

Like most things the [truth] is probably somewhere in the middle.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/B...

Since 'the incident' the police is knocking on doors of young couples living in the Fukushima area and in the fall out zones north east of it, telling the couples: " you know, you should consider to have no children" (Or move away to the far south or Hokkaido)

Can you actually show this, or is this just the latest of the tall tales making its rounds on the anti-nuclear blogosphere? And anyway, even if it did happen in some form, all it would show is that people are afraid and giving each other potentially poor advice. It doesn't show that they're at actual substantial risk of harm, otherwise you could go around telling everybody to stay indoors to prevent them from being run over by cars (you know, this we can actually show to happen).

In Chernobyl the death toll over all is estimated to be a million, roughly. /. posters claim it was 3 or 5 ...

Ugh, not that rag again. Yablokov's publication is a book, not a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It contains tons of errors and was translated and pushed onto the New York Academy of Sciences by known anti-nuclear crazies who aren't above outright falsehoods (like their assertions that Fukushima killed 15000 people in US in the initial 14 weeks after the accident, even though their data is trivially shown to have been manipulated and utterly bogus; Mangano is often seen publishing together with another crazie, Sherman, and they've even been torn a new one by an avid linear-no-threshold-supporting researcher). The Yablokov publication has since been criticized by the NYAS and they've distanced themselves from it. The short story is that the NYAS' reputation was co-opted as a vehicle to fluff up the credibility of an utterly bogus piece of non-scientific writing by anti-nuclear activists.

I witnessed 1986 about a few ten thousand ... it was news every day on TV. I really wonder how people in our days with straight face claim only a few people died.

Oh my, so if something's on TV, it is truth! Well fire the scientists then, obviously all we need to do to determine fact from fiction is to listen to the daily news cycle. Fox News will be pleased.

Luckily the initial disaster in Fukushima was far away from this. However the long term issues we only will know in 30 years ... plus.

Even assuming the fairly uncontended (mainly in anti-nuke cycles) linear-no-threshold dose response model, according to actual peer-reviewed studies, on average we'd expect ~250 excess deaths over the years with an upper bound of ~2500 (and that's assuming no evacuations). Was the accident harmless? Certainly not. Should TEPCO be made to compensate people for their troubles? Absolutely! But this fear mongering using junk science is in no way different to global-warming deniers and 9/11 truthers simply ignoring scientific facts to meet their political agendas. Do be like them.

... attempt to falsify any claims...

Falsifying claims is the worst thing a scientist can do. Once they're caught their career is over.

This a misunderstanding of the the term "falsify". Unfortunately, there are two well-understood meanings for the word:

• to alter in a misleading way, to lie
• to prove that a statement/theorem/idea/claim is false

In the sciences, we use the second meaning of the word a lot. It is considered a good thing. We propose an idea, or make a claim, then find ways to test the idea/claim. A useful idea in science is one which is said to be "falsifiable", that is, one which it is theoretically possible to disprove. If you can find a way to test your claim, and state beforehand which results will prove that your claim is wrong, then your claim is falsifiable, and is now a scientific claim. Then you run the test, and see what results it gives. If you get any results which don't falslify your claim, then the claim stands for a little longer. If you get results which falsify your claim, you throw the claim away and come up with a new claim. So science moves forward when we make claims and attempt to falsify them.

Using the first meaning of the word, you might say that someone "falsified some data". That would be a bad thing. This is not the common usage of the word in the scientific community, but is a popular understanding of the word elsewhere, so the distinction is worth calling out.

Notably, you can lie about data, but you generally can't lie about a claim; so context is essential in determining whether the verb "falsify": lying about data/evidence/results is bad, but attempting to disprove claims/ideas/hypothesis is good.

Even if he were right on all his facts, just the way he conducts himself makes him completely untrustworthy. Conspiracy theories and flaming rhetoric are no substitute for honest intellectual debate.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dinesh_D'Souza

Why does this guy have so many dedicated fans?

You're the guys who have this whole fictionalized "al gore obsession" where you pretend there's a cult of personality. You don't actually need to have one over Watt. He's just one shithead. Let it go.

Here's your Liar cite promised that a new examination was neutral and he'd base his views on that.

Immediately rejected it when it showed the scientific consensus. He's a liar. Established.

Shilling established

Now will you PLEASE stop defending this scum?

Galileo gambit

Copyright infringement leads to loss of revenue to the content owner, therefore it is a form of theft.

"Loss of revenue" is not a recognized crime and for good reason, if it were, you could charge a reviewer with "theft" if he didn't give you a "good enough" review. You could charge your competitors for "stealing" your customers with their lower prices. You could charge window shoppers with "theft" for not buying what they're looking at... I could go on, but if you've got half a brain you should already understand the problem.

Either way, without using the word theft, according to you and your buddy, not paying for IP is okay, since the owner is not being deprived anything he originally had.

Neither of us said anything of the sort. You are creating strawmen. What we said is that copyright infringement is not theft, because nothing has been taken. Copyright infringement is violating the copyright holder's right to restrict who can make copies of the protected work. Notably, in most juridisction, copyright applies regardless of whether you are selling copies of the work or not. So for instance, a diary is no less protected simply because the author had no intention of publishing it, and copyright can be infringed in other ways that just copying. For instance, the copyright owner's moral rights prevent unathorized modifications to the work.

The original point was that the loss of bitcoins at Mt. Gox could actually theft because the bitcoins have been taken from the owner without permission, as long as we consider bitcoins to actually be property. Adn yes, theft is a more serious crime than copyright infringement because in theft the owner has been deprived of their actual property, where as copyright infringement may potentially deprive the copyright owner of hypothetical profits that they might have otherwise earned.

Neither of us have said anything about whether "not paying for IP is okay" because that is a completely different and multi-faceted issue. Effectively you're like the guy who's yelling that his computer doesn't work because "the CPU is full of RAMs and Gigs", you have very effectively demonstrated that you know next to nothing about what you're writing about.

Sorry, no. That's a conspiracy theory website.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/S...

"the junkyard example"

I had to look that one up. Is it this?

Hoyle's fallacy, also known as the Junkyard tornado

no, the study did not test anything related to what he said. the study was quite simply a factor analysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

as you put it, it inferred the empirical statistical correlation of correct / incorrect answers.

the study showed only that the question about evolution was a relatively independent component. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

the rest of the article was the author's unfounded -- and as almost everyone in this forum has demonstrated, wrong -- inferences.

the study did not establish - at all - what is or is not part of scientific literacy.

what is or is not part of scientific literacy is established by the _philosohpy of science_.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/P...

http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

This article is just another PRATT. No scientists are not ignoring the increase in sea ice. I think the parent comment reflects the depth of AGW opposition.

Is this Richard Lendzen MIT dude not at all respectable?

Would that be the Richard Lindzen who has been funded by Exxon and OPEC, who actually does accept the basics of anthropogenic global warming, but disagrees with exactly how high the earth's climate sensistivity is (ie the amount of temperature increase you'll see from a doubling of CO2 levels). The man who been a keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute, who writes opinion pieces for the Rupert Murdoch owned Wall Stree Journal, and who recently joined the Cato Institute?

Not so much, no.

I didn't get what he meant by "Whyd"

Typo for why'd, a contraction of "why did".

In May 2008, Barack Obama's political opponents tried to discredit him by claiming that they had a tape of Michelle Obama calling President Bush the racial slur "Whitey". The tape never surfaced, and what evidence we do have is that it was actually the question "Why'd he?".

In their paper in Physics of Plasmas [aip.org] they report having achieved the density and temparature necessary for aneutronic (hydrogen-boron) fusion.

Fusion woo.

even with isotopically pure fuel there are several nasty side reactions, including these:

        11B + alpha 14N + n
        11B + p 11C + n
        11B + p 12C + gamma

The first two produce neutrons (albeit low-energy), and the third produces hard gamma rays.

Think for yourself. Immerse yourself in conspiracy theory

The RGGI has better documents, but it's in this document. Poor people get rebates. Richer people get assistance winterizing their homes. Factories and businesses get similar investment assistance. It varies by state, and you can see the breakdowns of where the tax gets spent. Businesses get most of it (on average), and the document lists energy savings. The investments create jobs for construction and technology companies that provide measurable energy savings. The document lists (p5) that there have been $240million in saved energy bills to date, and lifetime projections for existing improvements of $2 billion.

This document gives some analysis on actual energy bills with the carbon tax in them, and you can see they hardly change. The analysis has assumptions in it, and this analysis is conservative. I've seen other analysis that shows on average that electricity bills are slightly less. The bill change is so close to zero that it simply fluctuates around zero over time.


This has created 1000s ongoing jobs directly -- far more than keystone will create. The improvement services are provided by the private sector, with individuals and businesses getting the investment money from the raise in their tax bill. (Money raised from the carbon tax.) The financial services industry is supposed to allocate investment dollars to businesses; however, they've failed miserably in doing this, and America's corporations are sitting on $1 trillion of cash looking for good investment opportunities. This program is doing something that the financial services industry has failed to do over the last 20 years.

As renewables come down in price (and solar is now only twice the price of coal, wind cheaper -- I'm talkin levelized cost), expect to see new financial instruments created as a threshold is crossed where it is cheaper for people to borrow money to pay 20 years of electricity bills at once (i.e., install solar). The carbon tax is a way of doing this without anybody borrowing money -- by putting a small price on carbon pollution. The net economic effect is (as demonstrated) less carbon pollution, which is what the world needs.

There is no economic catastrophe.

Most libertarians [...] believe in minimalist government, not no government.

This is true, but it's somewhat complicated. Whether { we can do away with all government tomorrow } and whether { coercive national governments with minimal powers are the perpetual ideal } are two separate questions.

Some libertarians (ex. "Anarcho-Capitalists" (not to be confused with any other kind of anarchist (a chickpea is not a chicken))) believe in no government - which of course is a long-term vision. This means universal recognition of NAP, and all higher-level governance being voluntary.

Most libertarians are gradualists - we recognize that coercive government is a consequence of human folly which is not going to disappear overnight. Pure free market is a more complex system of social organization, which requires a more literate populace with better access to technologies that will make the centralized state obsolete. Some pro-capitalist libertarian gradualists even go as far as advocating direct wealth redistribution, because it would be much more efficient than the welfare state - a step in the right direction.

The transition to a freer society is not inevitable (no "historical determinism" here), and the "powers that be" (and their moochers) will of course resist. But many trends are working in our favor. Globalization and cultural integration will make nationalist collectivism less potent. The Internet is making censorship very difficult. Secession movements are becoming more and more popular, leading to more intergovernmental competition. Intergovernmental competition rewards the freest economies with the inflow of brains and capital. You get the idea.

We'll end up with thousands of nations (including seasteads and some day space stations), and people will be free to vote with their feet. Some will have freer markets than others, but the more choice people have the closer we come to the ideal of doing away with involuntary government.

--libman (old account)

How could you ever tell if you're a skeptic, or a pseudo-skeptic? After-all, every pseudo-skeptic thinks they have the facts on their side, just like every other crank who ever lived. This is a way to tell for yourself, and it's not easy, and most people go to the grave believing in bullshit.

How could you ever tell if you're a skeptic, or a pseudo-skeptic? After-all, every pseudo-skeptic thinks they have the facts on their side, just like every other crank who ever lived. This is a way to tell for yourself, and it's not easy, and most people go to the grave believing in bullshit.

What's wrong with bashing the bible, it's just a work of surrealist fiction, not everyone's cup of tea, it just so happens that an awful lot of rather unenlightened apes have decided that it's either a historical account or a guide for life, it is neither.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Geocentrism#For_the_Bible_tells_us_so may help if you feel that the wrong passages are being used to imply that the bible supports a geocentric view of the universe(the universe was a much smaller place back when that book was first written.), it certainly seems to suggest that humans and the earth are rather more important in the scheme of things than seems reasonable. Of course the quotes used may be taken from very specific translations in order to bash the bible(bible-basher is generally used in these parts to describe an overzealous and preachy christian arsehole, btw), but i'm sure you can help source some additional facts to straighten that out.

captcha: angelic

You are correct of course. Thanks for pointing that out. I should have written "proof". Likely Tart puts it better. To agree with you, from:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A...
"There are a few caveats to take into account to refine what a lack of supporting evidence says about a hypothesis. Absence of evidence is not necessarily strong evidence that outright disproves the hypothesis in the way that an observation that contradicts the hypothesis would be. ... As such, absence of evidence acting against a hypothesis is only a probabilistic approach and works best in a full Bayesian-style framework, which also takes into account other probabilities and other evidence."

== Some rambles on weighing the meaning of absence of evidence in US society

First, Tart claims evidence os paranormal activity from research studies. People may dispute that including by questioning the studies, so let's just assume there still is no evidence for the sake of discussion.

An important factor in weighing the meaning of the absence of evidence is the intense competition for research funds which is increasingly corrupting science. See: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals."

For example, when Pons and Fleischmann submitted their "cold fusion" results to a peer review process for grant funding, it turned out one of the reviewers was working in the same area and was about to publish on it. This conflict (whoever is most at fault) ultimately lead to the press conference announcement (against the scientist's preferences) at the university wanted to claim priority on the discovery (via creating artificial scarcity through patents). A handful of hot-fusion scientists (especially at MIT) after fairly brief and limited attempts then claimed the results could not be duplicated an that failure to replicate was essentially proof that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong and "cold fusion" could not exists given popular conceptions of nuclear physics at the time. Pons and Fleishmann may have been wrong in several ways, including in calling it "fusion" of any sort and also in their neutron measurements. But these were expert chemists well experienced in heat measurements and that part of what they did was likely valid, and likely they did detect excess heat. But for *decades* any mention of doing cold fusion research became academic suicide based on the handful of failures to replicate by people whose short-term interests were served by not finding results. Only a few (mostly older, tenured) people continued to work on that. Related:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/r...
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

"Cold Fusion" (now LENR) Research has been picking up in the last few years though, such as with this LENR conference ironically at MIT:
http://world.std.com/~mica/201...

Another example is when Halton Arp was denied telescope time to pursue his "electric universe" ideas. Ignaz Semmelweis is another example from centuries ago, where his evidence of how to prevent disease by hand-washing was dismissed as in conflict with conceptions of health and disease at the time.

When I put:

No, you did falsely paint the medical consensus as 'extreme'.

I was referring to:

I consider it to be a piece of sanity in the world of two extremes

You are calling the mainstream advice of the medical community 'extreme', no? This categorisation looks an awful lot like the argument to moderation fallacy.

I don't know where you're getting Anything that does not match your view is 'extreme' according to you from. I'm not calling anyone extreme. I'm questioning your use of the term.

Huh? I never 'just' invented a position

Looks like I rather mangled my point there: I was trying to say that no-one is arguing that everyone should be given every vaccine irrespective of their state-of-health/family-history/intolerances. No-one is saying to ignore the do-not-vaccinate-if conditions. That, of course, really would be an extreme pro-vaccination position.

since you lost the debate on increase risk (there is none)

I lost nothing. It is here that you move from arguing category to assuming vanishing degree:

I'll agree that someone has additional risk due to someone refusing the vaccine, considering that the risk is so small it's irrelevant to debate

You have no idea if it's actually so small it's irrelevant to debate, you just made that up. I have no idea either, but I'm not pretending.

If you have pneumonia it is not recommended that you get vaccines. Period.

I wasn't able to find anything on the web about getting vaccines whilst having pneumonia. If you have a good source on this - or on any failure of the medical community to communicate the 'do-not-vaccinate-if conditions' - I'd be interested.

The doctors point was that we need to treat vaccines like other medical procedures, not all refuse vaccines.

I'm just not convinced that they're not already doing this. I've already pointed-out an example case (with the severe egg intolerance).

Currently there is very little done to measure a persons health at the time they get a vaccine. Further, we are compounding potential issues by giving multiple vaccines at the same time.

Again, extraordinary claim, but no evidence. I'm not going to just take your word for it that the medical community is negligent.

Are people falsely convinced that vaccines do nothing to the human body, including some medical professionals?

Well naturally they're not expected to do nothing. The side-effects are studied and documented, and patients are told what they are. You are suggesting hidden damage is done?

Are we doing enough testing of the vaccines themselves to ensure they are safe (contaminated vaccines are uncommon but happen)?

As far as I can see, yes we are.

I feel bad for your children because that's reckless behavior

Extraordinary claim. Evidence please.

let me close with these two points

We're not done yet, surely. Thanks for your time anyway though, if you insist.

We have already agreed that there is no increased risk to you by allowing me making my own choices.

This really is curious. At which point exactly do you think I agreed to this? Please, quote away. I have repeatedly pointed out why the increased risk is non-zero, and you have even agreed, only to go on to assume that the non-zero value must surely be tiny (though you have offered nothing as to why this must be true).

Democrat infested cesspool such as this.

Any time someone mentions global warming, the chorus of the usual PRATTs comes up. I've been modded down many times for daring to disagree with some teabagger.

But anything not part of the right wing echo chamber is a "Democrat infested cesspool".

As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one.

Gore's Law

You can't disprove a negative.

False

First it has to be proved true, and it never has been. Check for yourself.

Your logical fallacy is burden of proof.

No. You were factually wrong, and AC corrected you. You clearly do not understand herd immunity. Your immune system does not exist in a vacuum.

These two comments make the same correction, and quite rightly.

If John Doe decides not to get vaccinated and you get vaccinated, how are you at risk? John gets polio and you do not, there is no issue.

This is wrong. You absolutely are affected by an increased number of potential carriers. I don't care to be the fourth person to try to explain herd immunity, though - please, just go and read the Wikipedia article.

If you wish to argue that it is a real dilemma lets see your arguments. If you can't, then I am correct.

Now that's just beautiful.

If you continued reading, you'd figure out that the so called foxes don't have any important authority in the Fed.

Interesting attempt to paint the "rightmost elements" of government as being responsible for our dysfunctional government.

A 30-year senior GOP insider said explicitly that the agreed strategy to destroy government, and then blame the other guy.

I suggest, instead, that the primary problem with our government, and our economy, is the Federal Reserve.

Ah, I see we're dealing with a crank. Well no-one expects a true believer to give due diligence to counter-arguments, but for those reading... both provided links are pithy, and highlight just how screwed up our situation really is.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

First problem, the gambler's fallacy refers to a mistaken belief that a random process that has locally shifted away from its mean somehow "owes" the universe a return to its mean. After a long losing streak, the gambler erroneously believes he has a better chance of a win.

Second, for the gambler's fallacy to apply, you need an independent random process. Specifically, if the randomness in question has a history to it, the gambler's fallacy doesn't apply as a fallacy - The deck of cards with all the non-face cards played out really does "owe" you a 20 or a blackjack (Hmm, do aces count as face cards? Whatever - You get the point).

In this case, you want something more like confirmation bias or a sunk cost fallacy - Though neither of those quite properly applies to what I described, because I haven't ignored evidence contrary to my opinion (quite the opposite, I've weighed it heavily), and I haven't needed to keep pumping more money into my BTC position to keep it afloat (again, contrary to that, I've steadily syphoned money out and what remains just keeps going up in value).


It's a zero sum game, their gain will be matched by the losses of ordinary punters like you.

You have the first clause right, though you use it as though you don't realize that makes it 2.5% per year better than USD, which systematically loses value over time.

As for the second half of that - If BTC entirely collapsed tomorrow, I've already done better than break even on my original investment. Except, haters like you don't seem to get that my "investment" consists of having fun (and $50 in electricity, but hell, I've paid more for a single concert ticket). I got to play a part in the success of the first viable non-commodity non-government currency. I got to learn OpenCL as a result of tweaking miners to squeeze every possible hash out of my GPU. I got to watch my "just for laughs" investment turn into the price of a new car (if I hadn't slowly spent most of what I had over time) - And no, I don't regret spending it at $4/BTC, at $30/BTC, at $200/BTC, because I got involved for the idea, not because I someday hoped to get rich fleecing morons out of their dollars in exchange for worthless ($0.10 each, when I started) bits in a shared transaction record.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

First problem, the gambler's fallacy refers to a mistaken belief that a random process that has locally shifted away from its mean somehow "owes" the universe a return to its mean. After a long losing streak, the gambler erroneously believes he has a better chance of a win.

Second, for the gambler's fallacy to apply, you need an independent random process. Specifically, if the randomness in question has a history to it, the gambler's fallacy doesn't apply as a fallacy - The deck of cards with all the non-face cards played out really does "owe" you a 20 or a blackjack (Hmm, do aces count as face cards? Whatever - You get the point).

In this case, you want something more like confirmation bias or a sunk cost fallacy - Though neither of those quite properly applies to what I described, because I haven't ignored evidence contrary to my opinion (quite the opposite, I've weighed it heavily), and I haven't needed to keep pumping more money into my BTC position to keep it afloat (again, contrary to that, I've steadily syphoned money out and what remains just keeps going up in value).


It's a zero sum game, their gain will be matched by the losses of ordinary punters like you.

You have the first clause right, though you use it as though you don't realize that makes it 2.5% per year better than USD, which systematically loses value over time.

As for the second half of that - If BTC entirely collapsed tomorrow, I've already done better than break even on my original investment. Except, haters like you don't seem to get that my "investment" consists of having fun (and $50 in electricity, but hell, I've paid more for a single concert ticket). I got to play a part in the success of the first viable non-commodity non-government currency. I got to learn OpenCL as a result of tweaking miners to squeeze every possible hash out of my GPU. I got to watch my "just for laughs" investment turn into the price of a new car (if I hadn't slowly spent most of what I had over time) - And no, I don't regret spending it at $4/BTC, at $30/BTC, at $200/BTC, because I got involved for the idea, not because I someday hoped to get rich fleecing morons out of their dollars in exchange for worthless ($0.10 each, when I started) bits in a shared transaction record.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

First problem, the gambler's fallacy refers to a mistaken belief that a random process that has locally shifted away from its mean somehow "owes" the universe a return to its mean. After a long losing streak, the gambler erroneously believes he has a better chance of a win.

Second, for the gambler's fallacy to apply, you need an independent random process. Specifically, if the randomness in question has a history to it, the gambler's fallacy doesn't apply as a fallacy - The deck of cards with all the non-face cards played out really does "owe" you a 20 or a blackjack (Hmm, do aces count as face cards? Whatever - You get the point).

In this case, you want something more like confirmation bias or a sunk cost fallacy - Though neither of those quite properly applies to what I described, because I haven't ignored evidence contrary to my opinion (quite the opposite, I've weighed it heavily), and I haven't needed to keep pumping more money into my BTC position to keep it afloat (again, contrary to that, I've steadily syphoned money out and what remains just keeps going up in value).


It's a zero sum game, their gain will be matched by the losses of ordinary punters like you.

You have the first clause right, though you use it as though you don't realize that makes it 2.5% per year better than USD, which systematically loses value over time.

As for the second half of that - If BTC entirely collapsed tomorrow, I've already done better than break even on my original investment. Except, haters like you don't seem to get that my "investment" consists of having fun (and $50 in electricity, but hell, I've paid more for a single concert ticket). I got to play a part in the success of the first viable non-commodity non-government currency. I got to learn OpenCL as a result of tweaking miners to squeeze every possible hash out of my GPU. I got to watch my "just for laughs" investment turn into the price of a new car (if I hadn't slowly spent most of what I had over time) - And no, I don't regret spending it at $4/BTC, at $30/BTC, at $200/BTC, because I got involved for the idea, not because I someday hoped to get rich fleecing morons out of their dollars in exchange for worthless ($0.10 each, when I started) bits in a shared transaction record.

The whole thing is talking about formats for distributing audio to consumers, not for production work. So, it sounds like you're arguing with a non-existent opponent.

Maybe if this Monty guy understood...

Here's a hint - when confronted with 2 sides, one of which has pages of information which fits together in a seemingly logical manner, and links to videos explaining exactly what is happening in a a/d/a demo, and links to double blind test programs and other trials; and the other side is a video showing some rad dudes with long hair talking about the "warmth" of 24/192, you should probably stick with the first side for the technical stuff.

Yeah, yeah, appeal to authority fallacy, yadda yadda yadda, but then again, fallacy fallacy, suck it!

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/G...

"In written form, a Gish Gallop is most commonly observed as a long list of supposed facts or reasons, as a pamphlet or green ink web page, with a title that proudly boasts the number of reasons involved. The individual points must also be fairly terse, so that each point individually can be easy to refute because it simply proves nothing."

Your words:

"There about a few dozen things to cover in order to describe the tests for AGW."

You've boasted about a "few dozen things", and failed to even get your first one right :)

(A) is a decadal trend. Less than two decades doesn't make a trend.

If you want to move the bar to 20 years, fine - we've certainly observed rising CO2 and 20 years of statistically insignificant warming in some modern temperature records, and in the long term proxy records as well.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

"For UAH: Since November 1995: CI from -0.001 to 2.501
For RSS: Since December 1992: CI from -0.005 to 1.968
For Hadcrut4: Since August 1996: CI from -0.006 to 1.358
For Hadsst3: Since May 1993: CI from -0.002 to 1.768
For GISS: Since August 1997: CI from -0.030 to 1.326"

Your need to move the goalposts here is *classic* ad hoc special pleading, and if you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that you'd be arguing that 25 years isn't enough once we hit that in the modern instrumental record.

Put simply, you have not established one whit of credibility here with your "precludes" statement - you've made an empty statement, since your preclusion, be it 20 years, or even 100 years, has been observed in the historical record, and your response to that is invariably an ad hoc special pleading.

Put another way, there is no "A" - properly and honestly stated, the only thing you can defend is this:

A) AGW does not preclude the absence of a warming trend - it is possible for it to be true no matter what temperature trend is observed over any period of time.

Unfortunately, since you haven't started forbidding observations, you haven't even begun the process of Popper's falsifiability :)

The count is thirty-nine now for the low climate sensitivity answers, and it now stands at twelve for the "constellation" question.

Can we agree that your contention is that there are no contradictory predictions in the name of AGW/CAGW in the peer reviewed literature, and that you furthermore contend there exist thus far unspecified good tests to discriminate AGW from natural variation?

I understand that. I'm asserting you're not finding good tests.

But I'm not talking about good tests yet. One thing at a time.

I've already stated the reason for this. Remember? I'm not dodging, I'm trying to stop a gish gallop.

So, before we get to good tests, can we agree what the theory is.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/L...

Yes, although many of the writers seem to be there just to make fun of the concept. I would not be surprised if the majority of the editors there are trolls.

Maybe a Sudden Outbreak Of Common Sense soon...

We can go on like this for days, by the way.

• Do you still think anyone who opposed the Second Iraq War is an "Idiotarian"?
• Do you still think the scientific consensus on global climate change is a conspiracy?
• Are you still a scientific racist/"race realist"?
• Do you still believe that the 2010 Haitian Earthquake was caused by a Voodoo curse?

In all seriousness, why is this guy still a thing in the Open Source movement? He wrote a few books in the 90s, very good ones, but he's been irrelevant for years and he's a nut. He has nothing to offer.

Quoting the daily mail should get you modded down, not up.

The daily mail has a long record for making up statistics and deliberately misunderstanding facts, so as to push an an agenda which includes anti-animal-welfare.

Also, you seem to have upped the statistics from 84% in one shelter (according to the mail) to 90% for all animals (according to you). Silly you.

Still he did pretty well for a daily mail reader. He raised it above 84% but knew not to go above 100. It was also still connected with animal euthenasia. Many readers would have come up with something like "they machine gunned 120% of all the people who worked in the shelter".

The daily mail has a long record for making up statistics and deliberately misunderstanding facts, so as to push an an agenda which includes anti-animal-welfare.

Also, you seem to have upped the statistics from 84% in one shelter (according to the mail) to 90% for all animals (according to you). Silly you.

"Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do." Terpenes are a well known component of aerosol away from cities, and studied since many years. Nothing new in the headline, after all...

Yes, these are the terpenes that Reagan and James Watt (Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, not the inventor) were referring to. While they were sorta correct that you can't eliminate all the VOCs that contribute to smog by curtailing their emission by human activities, it was presented in the "complete solution or nothing at all" sort of fallacy. The whole thing got widely ridiculed -- albeit for the wrong reasons, even though it deserved it -- and Reagan distanced himself, throwing Watt under the bus. Or at least that's how I remember it. Memory might be kind of hazy, mostly due to all the smog back then.