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There is no "two side" of the coins for some stuff

That's true. For some stuff. But "climate science" is not part of it. Or, maybe, it is — and we simply ought to apply tar-and-feathers to the quacks professing to be "climate scientists".

they are free to present peer reviewed article showing climate science wrong

All of the "peers" you are talking about are drawing their salaries from the governments. US alone spends four times more on "climate research" today, than we did in 1993.

Even if one of these guys does have the results you want, no peer will vouch for it, because such results will mean, 75% of them will need to look for new jobs. It is called conflict of interest — and it works the same way, whether the study's subject is "is pasta good for you" or "do we need to ban farting".

No, for it to be accepted as valid science, a discipline needs to not only explain the past, but also predict the future. Internet is full of failed predictions by these people (my personal favorite), but there aren't any successful ones...

Are you aware of any? Please, post pairs of links: one link in each pair going to a meaningful prediction, another — to it coming true (within, say, 20% of the predicted value, if quantifiable). To qualify, the linked-to articles must be a few years apart from each other.

Would you accept somebody denigrating vaccination [...] the same to climate science

Wow... So, medicine and climate are disciplines in the same standing with you? One could be more wrong than you are, but it is difficult...

What if I told you, "climate science" is not even falsifiable — by the some practitioners' own admissions?

What happens when you Give Poor People Cash? They spend it on the things that it makes the most sense to them to spend it on. Things like livestock, tools, and housing repairs. Things like health care and education.

It's almost as though the idea that helping people is bad comes from miserable SOBs who are only ever happy when other people are miserable, too.

Per the summary, this clock is meant to drift by no more than 2 nanoseconds per day. Current GPS clocks drift by 10 nanoseconds per day (ref). So this clock can tell you the time with an uncertainty one-fifth that of current space-based clocks.

promotes such a toxic workplace...

I would hasten to add that toxic workplace is as most subjective as can be, and that this is *your* opinion. There are a lot of external references to Uber's toxic workplace. Try google searching Uber+toxic+workplace. A few hits I could dismiss as "a few haters", but I get 443 thousand hits.

Here are some of the top few. It looks pretty toxic to me: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... https://www.recode.net/2017/6/... https://thinkprogress.org/trav... https://www.recode.net/2017/6/... http://www.businessinsider.com... http://theconversation.com/fix... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... https://www.theguardian.com/te... https://qz.com/1010986/a-timel...

Maybe Alphabet doesn't believe that Google's results are accurate. ;-)

Strangely, I just ran the same search in Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Google: 157,000 hits

Bing: 3,690,000 hits

Yahoo: 21,000,000 hits

the Powerpack system enabling Neoen to sell electricity at up to $14,000 AUD per MWh

The average price of electricity in Australia is AU$0.28/kWh, which is just $28 AUD per MWh. If they're really able to sell the electricity back at $14,000 AUD per MWh, then that points to serious, serious problems with the electrical infrastructure of the country. So serious that incidents like this are almost worthless as a data point for the viability and usefulness of such a system. Other solutions used in other countries are much more cost-effective.

but lower than average temperatures don't disprove it.

Nothing disproves it. Because it is not falsifiable.

And therefor not science — Trump is a heretic.

Of course climate science is falsifiable.

Is it? Not according to this climate-scientist from Australia, nor according to this professor concurring with this blogger (both of them hilariously repeating in earnest this earlier satire).

It's those subtheories that you really need to falsify.

No, I don't. As I explained to you before, the burden of proof is not on me, but on those, who want to compel me — on pain of higher taxes, loss of freedoms, and even actual criminal prosecutions — to change my way of life.

You put in a link that made it looked like you had a citation for how they admit that

It is quite obvious, I simply screwed up the link. This is, what I meant to include, separately from the link explaining, what falsifiability is, and why it is a requirement for real science:

1. Methods aren’t always necessarily falsifiable

Falsifiability is the idea that an assertion can be shown to be false by an experiment or an observation, and is critical to distinctions between “true science” and “pseudoscience”.

Climate models are important and complex tools for understanding the climate system. Are climate models falsifiable? Are they science? A test of falsifiability requires a model test or climate observation that shows global warming caused by increased human-produced greenhouse gases is untrue. It is difficult to propose a test of climate models in advance that is falsifiable. [emphasis mine]

And she is not alone in admitting, there is no — and there can not be — any proof. Interestingly, you chose to completely ignore the other link, which I did cite correctly, where a a DailyKos article admits to treating the question of Global Warming's existence as that of a deity. And Huffington Post concurs. (Hilariously, this entire approach was predicted by a satirist years earlier).

Interesting that you have to resort to a deceptive style of arguing: ignoring the inconvenient arguments completely, while pouncing on technicalities.

If for example the IPCC's pridictions of what was to happen in the future did not come to pass, that would be some falsifying evidence

Our whole argument in this thread is that, by the purported scientists' own admission — now properly cited — their very discipline is not falsifiable. Your babbling about IPCC is not much different from the Bible-thumpers' predictions about His wrath.

Well it's only be ~10 years since the Inconvenient Truth. I'm not sure what "near future" mean. If that means 1 year to you or 50 years to the rest of us. (I think his film was aiming at the year 2100, but I don't recall exactly).

Here's an example, some islands are completely covered by water at high tide. http://theconversation.com/sea...

The most up to date information has projections range from 0.2 meters to 2.0 meters (0.66 to 6.6 feet) of sea level rise in the next 100 years. [Melillo et al., 2014]. And that's the thing about science, you'll find that it is never 100% accurate and if you look back to previous theories and predictions can be embarrassingly inaccurate. But the scientific method generally leads to better answers through many iterations of models, research and theories.

Al Gore's 20 feet rise greatly exceeds the most conservative models, as you've already noted. On the other hand if all the ice covering Antarctica, Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). That's the far extreme of what could be done with the matter available on Earth, it's not at all likely. (maybe if the Earth's axis tilted to expose the poles? Or maybe if 10's of thousands of years went by and we acquired an atmosphere like Venus that make air temperature nearly uniform across the planet, including the poles?)

And that makes it right ?

Nobody claimed that.

My problem is that Australian discourse on this was really fucked up for a while. People were arguing about everything except the actual problem.

The point of AHRC mediation is precisely so that cases like this avoid going to court and nobody gets too inconvenienced if a case is meritless. problem is that The AHRC dropped the ball, making the process itself the punishment.

Contrary to what lucm said, the system didn't work. But more to the point, the system didn't work as designed.

This sums up my feelings about the whole clusterfuck, except that I think the AHRC's incompetence is the problem, not 18C itself.

There are hundreds of people with my exact full name in the state of California. I do not know how many share a date of birth with me, but I'd be surprised if the answer was 0.

I wouldn't be surprised - sharing a birthday (Like October 31st) is trivial, sharing a birth date (October 31st, 1972) is exceptionally rare. The odds of you ever meeting someone with exactly your same birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) - ignoring their name - is extremely unusual; factor in that their name has to match also and it will likely never happen.

In the United States, there are about 10,829 births per day - and out of those 10,829 births the odds of two mothers, both named "Smith", with both deliver male children and both will name their children "John" (neither choosing "Jon" or "Johnathan") seems pretty small to me - not zero, but pretty small.

There are lots of people named "Smith" - tons of them. There are a large number of people named "John Smith" - lots of them. There are likely a fair number of people named "John Smith" with birthdays of October 31st. But do you really think there are that many people named "John Smith" that celebrate their birthdays on October 31st and are EXACTLY the same age (in other words they share a birth DATE, not just a birth DAY)?

The surname smith accounts for about 1% of the population, the first name James accounts for about 3.318% of the population, so that gives us a one out of 100 chance that a child will be have a surname of "Smith", and a 1 out of thirty chance that that child with the smith surname will have a first name of "James". I defer to statisticians to do the math.

Ah but I stated in the sentence before that that I have already encountered someone with my exact same full name and date of birth. It was not in the state of California, however. We both started physical therapy for two different injuries on the exact same day and they had to use our injury to identify which chart went with which patient, since it was our first day.

And I had to deal with DHS redress because there is someone with an Interpol warrant with my exact full name and a date of birth within just a few days of me. I was automatically flagged every time I went through immigration. So I have personal experience with the fact that such coincidences DO happen.

There are hundreds of people with my exact full name in the state of California. I do not know how many share a date of birth with me, but I'd be surprised if the answer was 0.

I wouldn't be surprised - sharing a birthday (Like October 31st) is trivial, sharing a birth date (October 31st, 1972) is exceptionally rare. The odds of you ever meeting someone with exactly your same birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) - ignoring their name - is extremely unusual; factor in that their name has to match also and it will likely never happen.

In the United States, there are about 10,829 births per day - and out of those 10,829 births the odds of two mothers, both named "Smith", with both deliver male children and both will name their children "John" (neither choosing "Jon" or "Johnathan") seems pretty small to me - not zero, but pretty small.

There are lots of people named "Smith" - tons of them. There are a large number of people named "John Smith" - lots of them. There are likely a fair number of people named "John Smith" with birthdays of October 31st. But do you really think there are that many people named "John Smith" that celebrate their birthdays on October 31st and are EXACTLY the same age (in other words they share a birth DATE, not just a birth DAY)?

The surname smith accounts for about 1% of the population, the first name James accounts for about 3.318% of the population, so that gives us a one out of 100 chance that a child will be have a surname of "Smith", and a 1 out of thirty chance that that child with the smith surname will have a first name of "James". I defer to statisticians to do the math.

Ah but I stated in the sentence before that that I have already encountered someone with my exact same full name and date of birth. It was not in the state of California, however. We both started physical therapy for two different injuries on the exact same day and they had to use our injury to identify which chart went with which patient, since it was our first day.

And I had to deal with DHS redress because there is someone with an Interpol warrant with my exact full name and a date of birth within just a few days of me. I was automatically flagged every time I went through immigration. So I have personal experience with the fact that such coincidences DO happen.

There are hundreds of people with my exact full name in the state of California. I do not know how many share a date of birth with me, but I'd be surprised if the answer was 0.

I wouldn't be surprised - sharing a birthday (Like October 31st) is trivial, sharing a birth date (October 31st, 1972) is exceptionally rare. The odds of you ever meeting someone with exactly your same birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) - ignoring their name - is extremely unusual; factor in that their name has to match also and it will likely never happen.

In the United States, there are about 10,829 births per day - and out of those 10,829 births the odds of two mothers, both named "Smith", with both deliver male children and both will name their children "John" (neither choosing "Jon" or "Johnathan") seems pretty small to me - not zero, but pretty small.

There are lots of people named "Smith" - tons of them.
There are a large number of people named "John Smith" - lots of them.
There are likely a fair number of people named "John Smith" with birthdays of October 31st.
But do you really think there are that many people named "John Smith" that celebrate their birthdays on October 31st and are EXACTLY the same age (in other words they share a birth DATE, not just a birth DAY)?

The surname smith accounts for about 1% of the population, the first name James accounts for about 3.318% of the population, so that gives us a one out of 100 chance that a child will be have a surname of "Smith", and a 1 out of thirty chance that that child with the smith surname will have a first name of "James". I defer to statisticians to do the math.

There are hundreds of people with my exact full name in the state of California. I do not know how many share a date of birth with me, but I'd be surprised if the answer was 0.

I wouldn't be surprised - sharing a birthday (Like October 31st) is trivial, sharing a birth date (October 31st, 1972) is exceptionally rare. The odds of you ever meeting someone with exactly your same birth date (mm/dd/yyyy) - ignoring their name - is extremely unusual; factor in that their name has to match also and it will likely never happen.

In the United States, there are about 10,829 births per day - and out of those 10,829 births the odds of two mothers, both named "Smith", with both deliver male children and both will name their children "John" (neither choosing "Jon" or "Johnathan") seems pretty small to me - not zero, but pretty small.

There are lots of people named "Smith" - tons of them.
There are a large number of people named "John Smith" - lots of them.
There are likely a fair number of people named "John Smith" with birthdays of October 31st.
But do you really think there are that many people named "John Smith" that celebrate their birthdays on October 31st and are EXACTLY the same age (in other words they share a birth DATE, not just a birth DAY)?

The surname smith accounts for about 1% of the population, the first name James accounts for about 3.318% of the population, so that gives us a one out of 100 chance that a child will be have a surname of "Smith", and a 1 out of thirty chance that that child with the smith surname will have a first name of "James". I defer to statisticians to do the math.

I commented on this story in the past, and I'll say it again now. It doesn't make any sense that the Cuban government is doing this. They are a dictatorship, and if they didn't want US diplomats there, or didn't want to try and reconnect with the US, then they simply wouldn't do it. For them to try and injure US diplomats makes no sense at all. I believe this is being done by some 3rd party nation to try and cause problems between the US and Cuba. Why? Because they want to maintain the status quo (the US and Cuba not having diplomatic relations) because they stand to gain either financially and / or in regional influence and power. Several South American countries, as well as Russia, come to mind...

From an excerpt from a 2016 article discussing the US restoring some relations with the Cuban Government:

As if that wasn’t remarkable enough, this has occurred with Cuban-Russian relations at their strongest since the demise of the Soviet Union. Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev has visited Cuba twice since February 2008 while Vladimir Putin visited in July 2014. Meanwhile Raúl Castro has been to Moscow three times in recent years. Can these two relationships really keep improving in parallel?

http://theconversation.com/cub...

The Bering Sea's typically not involved in the Indonesia raft theory. The Kon-Tiki route was all south of the equator. And the Bering Strait was a land route beginning c. 21,000 BP, though access along the coast was blocked by ice until about 17,000 BP and the interior route didn't clear up until about 13,500 BP. There's a pretty good history of the sea level in the area here: http://theconversation.com/fir...

But like I said there's plenty of other evidence against the theory, at least as a significant driver of human migration.

The OP's bizarre, too (I ascribe that to the media losing something in translation, not necessarily the original research); Clovis-first has been out of favor for decades now, and the timing on when the Bering crossing was open doesn't agree with anything I've seen espoused in recent years. The inland route probably de-iced c. 13,500 BP, and the coastal route by 17,000 BP give or take. And most mDNA evidence has suggested that the coastal route was used, so the timing's not only fine for humans in Mexico by 13,000 BP, but even a few millenia earlier.

I'm guessing the research was phrased more as "here's additional evidence against Clovis-first and for an earlier date" and the reporters added some sloppy wording around it to sensationalize things.

The results are not reproducible.

You made that up. That is the problem with climate science.

Heck, they are going around saying now that climate science is "special" and does not need to be falsifiable.

They are basically redefining the definition of SCIENCE.

http://theconversation.com/cli...

Except that they don't. Studies say that more roads leads to more traffic, which leads to more congestion.

http://theconversation.com/do-...

The article reflects current thinking that building highways through cities were a bad idea. Take Atlanta, for example. Three interstates go though the city, and congestion is horrible, not to mention that it is an eyesore.

Pushing AI much, are you?

You must have missed this a week ago. Also, this. Cut-n-paste coders with no real insight will be the first against the wall, along with their bosses, and the hr droids. They will not be missed.

One consequence will be removing the bullsh*t "hour of code" for school kids - something that most of us here recognize as stupid. Another will be killing off the SJWs who are platforming on the evils of the tech world, which in reality are no worse than anywhere else (it's a mess everywhere - and you can be damn sure SJWs aren't going to fix it*).

*For those who believe otherwise, wake up and look at the facts.

Training is the most popular initiative to increase workplace diversity, according to a study of 829 tech and non-tech private companies over 31 years. Four in 10 companies offered bias training in 2002. Yet training had “no positive effects in the average workplace,” the study found.

The numbers of women in computing have taken a nose dive for over two decades. Data from the American Association for University Women (2015) and WebCASPAR (2015).

Diversity efforts have been especially futile in the tech sector. The percentage of women among US tech workers has steadily declined over the past two decades, for instance, now standing at 26%.

The field is toxic for both sexes - it's become more and more of a dead end where you'd better have a backup plan when you're perceived as "too old to code", or you're hosed. It's easier for women to leave because the sexism and gender bias give an additional incentive not to "tough it out" - it's one more straw on the proverbial camel's back - but men are also getting their lives turned to sh*t by the crappy bosses who think that "beatings will continue until creativity improves" actually works.

Consider that the global average land+sea temperature for this month (February), averaged over the entire 20th century, was 12.1 C. In a chaotic system, one would expect a roughly equal probability of seeing a cooler temperature as a hotter one, individually or averaged, though the average of large numbers of readings are less likely to show outliers. Seasonal and other cyclical factors would skew temperatures one way for a while, then the other way, balancing out over time.

For 2015, the globally-averaged temperature for February was 0.86 C higher than that 20th century average. If that was a single reading, or a local average, that wouldn't be at all noteworthy. Even averaged across the entire globe for the month, it was merely the second-highest February recorded, next to 1998. Similarly for land-only average temperatures, though with larger variations.

But when you consider that 2015 was the 30th hotter-than-average February in a row, the odds shift dramatically. If there's a 50/50 chance that we would see a hotter-than-average February any given year, then there's 1 chance in 2^30 that we would get 30 hotter "heads" in a row - ridiculously improbable. There hasn't been a cooler-than-average February since 1985 - and February 2016 was even hotter, setting a new record at 1.21 C above the average. Clearly the global average temperature isn't stable, but is showing a long-term underlying rising trend, which makes the new highest-temperature-ever records not only more likely, but bound to happen eventually. (Incidentally, if you use yearly averages instead of just February, it's now been 38 years of above-average temperatures.)

So the existence of a rising temperature trend is virtually certain. Whether it's anthropic or caused by a hitherto-undiscovered long-term natural cycle is a separate discussion, but the probability of the former is very high indeed.

In reality they have just crossed another milestone: they are cheaper when they are generating. That will do for now while there is substantial fossil capacity to back them up, but if we are to phase out fossil fuels entirely the figure you have to compare nuclear to is generation plus storage.

The cheapest by far is pumped storage. In countries with plenty of hydro it's effectively free. For the rest of us it's about $1/watt generation capacity. Nuclear comes in at $8/watt or so. Wind comes in at $4/watt and solar is hitting parity with that, so even with storage renewables are cheaper. Nuclear is already history.

An argument I often see here is there are no sites available for pumped storage. Turns out that's wrong. Here in Australia (which is mostly flat desert) we did a survey recently. You need is a hill where you build a dam about 500m in diameter, that has a valley about 400m below within 3km or so. Turns out the country is littered with literally 10's of thousands of sites like this.

None of this is free of course - you still have to spend the $5/watt or so. Australia's energy consumption is 50GW, so that totals AU$250 Billion. That's a metric fuck ton of money to a small country like Australia. But as it happens out coal generation facilities are near retirement, so we would have to spend it anyway.

Here is a recent contrary view, where they dated a mega-wombat fossil to 17000 years after the arrival of humans at that location. (However, if web search results are anything to go by, the human-caused-extinction hypothesis seems much more popular.)

What exactly do you believe we are not doing and what effect do you believe will be achieved if we start doing what you believe we should be doing?
Oh I know, I bet you believe we should cut emissions, Right? well the

• US has cut emissions,
• EU has cut emissions,
• Russia has cut emissions,
• Japan has cut emissions,
• Indonesia has cut emissions,

Global Carbon Budget 2016.
What would happen if we cut emissions to zero in the US? well by the models used by climatologiists, it would decrese the warming of the planet from a projected 4-6C to a much cooler 3.5-5.5C!
How could we make a real difference? well China and India is putting out almost as much CO2 as The US and India combined, and both are increasing their emissions as well, so obviously the real answer would be to either have India and China fall on their swords or start massive ocean fertilization.

Oh, I looked at your "damning" links - and not one of them cited a relevant or useful study. What I saw instead was a lot of "here's a graph, here's another graph - they're different in a way I don't like - therefore, it must be deliberately faked". No attempt was made to find out why the data was adjusted, no evidence that the adjustments made readings less accurate instead of more, and no challenge to the peer-reviewed methodology of the corrections. Instead they leaped immediately to the conclusion that it was a hoax and a conspiracy - just as you are. No contrary evidence of your own, no studies, no science, just "I don't like the results so that science must have been faked". That's the very soul of denial.

Why just the 1970s? If they go further back, it disproves what they're trying to indoctrinate you with. They'd have you believe that bad storms never happened before. Hogg wash. In fact HOGG Island, NYC.

If you bothered to read the paper you'd see the data they present goes back to 1930, and only the recent increase in intensity starts in the 70s. And maybe you'd care to explain how a single storm from 1893 somehow disproves a peer-reviewed statistical analysis about storms getting stronger a hundred years later?

Likewise, please explain where the original "cold snap" study claims that Greenland before 1300 was "MUCH warmer" than today. Please explain how ice cores from two lakes in Greenland somehow mean that the average temperatures for the entire globe were warmer at that time, when no reconstruction places them anywhere close to modern levels. You think the Medieval Warm and Little Ice Age periods are unknown to climatologists? But you're already convinced it's all a scam, despite the evidence directly contradicting your claims.

As for the fuel companies, do you really think that? You think that they won't adapt?

You really think they'll happily wave goodbye to trillions of dollars without a care in the world? You're quite wrong. They'll adapt if they're forced to, but you can be certain they'll do whatever they can to exploit the reserves they have first - there's plenty of evidence of them spending hundreds of millions to confuse and delay the issue as long as they can - just like the tobacco companies did.

Instead, you're harping on about Al Gore - who's not even a scientist. Nobody cares what he says - we care what the climatologists say. They saw the problem long before Gore made a movie, and why would they care if he made money from it? Is Gore paying climatologists to falsify evidence? The ones doing that are the oil companies. Frankly, your efforts to claim that Gore somehow orchestrated the whole thing to make a buck are laughable in the face of the evidence - all the more so when you're so keen to ignore the FAR bigger amounts being made by those who benefit from ignoring it.

older people are harder to train and have a harder time learning new things.

Sweeping generalization, that may not even be true. I'm a 53 year old systems programmer and administrator and I learn new things all the time. I know plenty of older people that learn just as well, if not better, perhaps because of their experience, than younger people. One small study points out the following:

Older people may be able to learn more from visual information than their younger counterparts, according to a study published today in the journal Current Biology.

“The take-home message the study authors gave was that healthy older people are good at learning,” said Professor Henry Brodaty, co-Director of the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) at UNSW. “They have the same plasticity, but they’re not as good at filtering out other information.”

The brain needs to be able to easily learn new information (plasticity), and filter out irrelevant information (stability). The experiment was designed to test whether ageing affects the brain’s plasticity, stability, or both.

Of course, I imagine that mileage may vary - a lot. Perhaps people just learn different things in different ways and/or based on how it's taught. It's possible that people go into jobs based on how easily they learn the associated information and that it's switching the type of job that is the problem. Electrician to Tech Support rather than Electrician to Plumber.

That's part of why South Australian economy is faltering.

And worse than that, US taxpayers will (once again) have to foot the cleanup bill.

Rapid changes in global temperatures can absolutely cause mass extinctions.

Rising sea levels are "easy" to adapt to for us - but not cheap. We have a lot of valuable property on low-lying coastal areas, and billion-dollar floods from storm surges will only get more common, until we either build massive levees (where possible) or start relocating vast amounts of city infrastructure. Who gets stuck with that bill, the taxpayers? Owners of private homes who can no longer insure them? And that's assuming it doesn't turn out to be a lot worse than we expected.

Rising sea levels are not so easy to adapt to for the hundreds of millions in less-developed countries, where e.g. tens of millions of people depend on river delta farmland that will get flooded with salt water. (BTW, claiming there's no evidence of that is simple denial).

As for food production, the research shows both positives and negatives up until about 3K warming - and then highly likely to be negative after 3 degrees. It also shows that again, developing countries are least able to adapt and will experience more of the negatives (in part due to lower latitudes).

it is going to happen no matter what policies we adopt

Citation certainly needed for that. Sure we're stuck at 400ppm and probably higher, but we can still avoid far larger increases by phasing out fossil carbon as soon as practical. We're locked in to significant warming and we'll have to deal with that, but it will certainly get far worse (and far more expensive) if we stick our heads in the sand. The business-as-usual case is likely to see 3.7 to 4.5 degrees this century - much higher than the 2.0-2.5 we're hoping we can keep it to.

The press that was allowed to sail out/with/invited to the Falklands in 1982 was really a fun test after Vietnam.
The friendship and camaraderie just gets built on for every war. Training, early access, deployment as part of a team soon allows for troops suggestions and questions to reshape good journalists.
"Looking for failure? Why the ADF hates the Australian media" (August 13, 2013)
http://theconversation.com/loo...
has some good insights and links into the thinking in Australian and New Zealand that results in "favourable messages".

This story was originally published in April in TheConversation: http://theconversation.com/kin...

I found this interesting article how to argue about doping in sport. I am not a sports fan in general, it's just never interested me. Thus, I am sitting on the sidelines rather than involved as so many are. From the sidelines the anti-doping movement has the flavor of a witch-hunt. Now, you might have good arguments in favor of it, but it should not go as unchallenged as it seems to be today.

anti-science nutters that cannot understand

My irony meter just exploded.

Yes some warming is occurring, but not enough to matter in any way worth even getting excited about - at least that's what the hard facts and careful research tell us.

Funny how the anti-science nutters are always so highly selective about their "hard facts and careful research", hand-waving away all the rest of the data that doesn't fit their own narrative as "manipulated". Let me guess, the whole of the IPCC Working Group II's collected data is all compromised and ignorable, every bit; none of those described impacts could possibly happen, amirite?

Heck it's probably

Ah, another hard fact, with more careful research behind it?

not even enough to counteract the next global cooling phase which is close at hand

It started 8000 years ago, temperatures have been dropping since then - up until we changed everything.

Now the soft facts and panicked revelations made by so called "scientists" who are backed by governments trying to bilk the people into more central control

Now the baseless allegations of conspiracy and paranoia, with the inevitable government agenda behind it. Did you notice all the Australian climate scientists recently protesting their government's agenda?

But of course I forgot, they just want to keep their jobs, and they have to keep manipulating their data and falsifying their results even when their government clearly doesn't want to hear it - low-paying research on global warming is all they can do, because the fossil fuel industry certainly doesn't have any money for them.

isn't it astounding that after literally decades of being utterly wrong about long term climate forecasts, people still listen to them?

Dammit, my brand new irony meter just exploded as well.

Quit lying. Here's what you wrote:

they have a vestigial and unexpressed male chromosome

What they have is a body that doesn't respond to testosterone. And guess what - the X chromosome is involved. And that is NOT what you said. "Vestigial male chromosome." You make me laugh. The "Y" chromosome is already much smaller than any other chromosome -50 genes as opposed to 1600 on the X.. Most of the genes that were originally on the Y chromosome are now on the X chromosome. And there are mammals with ONLY XX genes, no Y.

So now we have 2 genes that can turn a female into a male, and one of them is not located on the Y chromosome! How can that be? It turns out that SRY is probably just a facilitator that allows a more critical gene (or genes) to function, by blocking the action of another opposing factor. Can the magic of genetics do the opposite – turn a male into a female? Indeed it can. A gene on the X chromosome (the chromosome one typically associates with “femaleness”) called DAX1 when present in double copy in a male (XY) mouse, turns it into a female.

So now we have genes on the Y that can turn females with XX chromosomes into males and genes on the X that can turn males with XY chromosomes into females wow! Maleness and femaleness are NOT determined by having an X or a Y, since switching a couple of genes around can turn things upside down.

In fact, there’s a whole lot more to maleness and femaleness than X or Y chromosomes. About 1 in 20,000 men has no Y chromosome, instead having 2 Xs. This means that in the United States there are about 7,500 men without a Y chromosome. The equivalent situation - females who have XY instead of XX chromosomes - can occur for a variety of reasons and overall is similar in frequency.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. With the brain autopsies and the brain scans, we know that the "wishing" is because the brain acts in part like the opposite sex, because it resembles the opposite sex to a certain degree, in critical areas. There's no "wishing" involved - just a realization that sex and gender both begin and end in the brain.

We have known for decades that male-to-female transsexuals don't get the testosterone signal at 12 weeks. It's simple enough to track - the finger bones are developing at the same time, and testosterone also affects the lengh of the fingers. Less testosterone results in a hand with finger lengths more aligned with women than with men - longer index finger, shorter ring finger. Normal levels of testosterone cause the opposite effect. Extremely high levels of testosterone cause the ring finger to be almost as long as the middle finger.

And where does this testosterone come from? The fetus. If the genes that govern release of testosterone in the gonads fail to do their jobs, the various parts that are developing at that point develop more as female than male - and that includes the brain. And it's entirely due to the fetus' genes.

You said you knew about this stuff, and it's obvious you don't, or your would have known about all the science done since 1995 showing brain development is different in transsexuals because of that failure to release testosterone as the brain cells start dividing like crazy. The testes will most likely function to produce testosterone at other critical stages, otherwise - when they don't, you end up with a baby that for all intents and purposes is a female, even if it's xy.

You're allowed to have your own opinion, but you are not allowed to have your own set of bs facts, and use them to insult transsexuals, including myself, by implying that we "wish" to be the opposite sex, without any biological or genetic basis, when in fact it's those very genes that fail to send the "make testosterone" signal at a critical time of development.

So what about the men who are attracted to women with CAIS? Even the Olympics recognizes them as women, despite having XY chromosomes. They don't know about them being XY until they get a gene test. And what about those cases where XY women gave birth? You're saying the guys making babies with them were gay?

Let me get this straight: You're arguing that a person with female gametes is a male because they have a vestigial and unexpressed male chromosome? That argument is as silly as saying that you have a legitimate claim to identify as an ape because you carry much of their genetic structure.

Also, you seem to be misinformed about transsexuals. There's no "large penis".

You missed the reference I was making. At any rate, a penis isn't even relevant; they could chop the thing off and stuff skin from their legs into their pelvis to make a skin pocket next to their prostate, and the point remains no less valid.

SRS has been found to be the best option, with success rates in the high 90's, with post-op suicide rates about the same as the general population. No treatment for a mental illness has a success rate anywhere near that, not even cognitive behavioral therapy, at ~50%.

Nice claim; let's do a little fact checking, shall we?

http://theconversation.com/fac...

Shelton was correct to say that research shows that transgendered people who have had sex reassignment surgery had a suicide mortality rate later in life that was roughly 20 times higher than the non-transgendered population.

However, it is also possible some viewers may have been left with the impression that the study showed sex reassignment surgery causes a higher risk of suicide later in life. That is not what the Swedish study showed. In fact, the researchers wrote that things might have been even worse without sex reassignment.

Nevertheless, there is lack of research on the topic and his comment appears to be based on one study from Sweden. – Kairi Kõlves

Sorry, you're wrong here, and unlike you I'm not going to omit any important details. It should be acknowledged that social pressures probably do contribute to these higher suicide rates, but I strongly believe that they don't explain a 20 fold increase. Why? Well, look further up in the page:

However, suicide risk was found not to be significantly higher in female-to-male transsexuals compared to the general population in an 18 year follow-up of 996 male-to-female and 365 female-to-male transexuals.

It just doesn't seem likely to me that FtM is somehow seeing dramatically (that is, 20 fold) reduced societal pressure for suicide than their MtF counterparts. Personally, I'm leaning towards (and yes, this is pure speculation on my part) that it's likely due to the difference in psychology between an FtM vs MtF transexual. That is, I believe that there's something much deeper than simply "I'm a woman trapped in a man's body" going on, and gender dysphoria is merely a symptom. Another condition called BIID (which...SHOCKER...nobody treats through surgery) is probably, in my opinion, another symptom of what is fundamentally the same underlying cause.

Nonetheless, and all speculation aside, your assertion that post op transexuals have a suicide rate similar to the general population is undeniably false.

Making the body match the brain works. But you have a pretty obvious hang-up about penises being the be-all and end-all of determining a person's sex. Science says otherwise.

Actually the science more or less says that sex is determined by gametes.

This is a global issue. The globe is losing about 3% per year, net, of its forest area - particularly in the tropics. Luckily this is slowing.

A carbon price is a proxy for the missing external costs of coal power, so it helps raise the wholesale price to better reflect its true cost (which is around double current wholesale prices). This alone encourages alternatives - both demand for carbon-neutral alternative power, and investment in further renewable generation.

But of course, the revenue from that didn't vanish; it was funneled back into industry adaption schemes and consumer tax cuts. And it worked, driving emissions down significantly, until it was repealed in 2014 (at which point they immediately started rising again.

You mention industry adaption schemes like that's a bad thing. It's a required thing. You can't legislate someone out of business and not provide an exit strategy. That's a good way for them to fight you tooth and nail the entire way. People will lose their jobs if/when coal goes away. As a coal/natural gas worker, I've been to many former coal towns and poverty, drug abuse, and crime are very quick to creep in when the coal money runs out. We're talking about intentionally destroying lives and communities here.

The green movement is winning. I can't stop that, nobody can. It is inevitable. I have to give the environmentalists credit, they fought persistently over a long period of time. They won, or they will win. But now it is very important that we take care of those who will be harmed by the transition. If coal-free truly is "better for all of us in the long run", then surely the green movement can afford some compassion for those who found themselves on the opposite side of the argument. It isn't anyone's fault they were born to parents who live(d) in a coal town. Most people would not choose that life if they had another option. If sinking the coal boat needs to happen, common decency demands that we rescue the victims on that boat.

A carbon price is a proxy for the missing external costs of coal power, so it helps raise the wholesale price to better reflect its true cost (which is around double current wholesale prices). This alone encourages alternatives - both demand for carbon-neutral alternative power, and investment in further renewable generation.

But of course, the revenue from that didn't vanish; it was funneled back into industry adaption schemes and consumer tax cuts. And it worked, driving emissions down significantly, until it was repealed in 2014 (at which point they immediately started rising again.

Or, y'know, the coal business.

Anonymized hospital and health care data are widely available to researchers inside the U.S. as well

Neither the writeup nor TFA mention "anonymized". Could you explain, where you got the information from?

Um, you know, by doing research. By reading other things. By using teh interwebs.

https://theconversation.com/your-nhs-data-is-completely-anonymous-until-it-isnt-22924

The data are scrubbed of direct personal identifiers, which are replaced by an ID code. The database does include things times, diagnoses, and prescriptions, which could be used to de-anonymize the data with enough ancillary information, but without which the data would be mostly useless for any kind of analysis. My point is that there are already publicly available databases in the U.S., such as SPARCS which contain similar information for hospital visits, and are similarly de-anonymizable. If you know what hospital you went to on what date, it's pretty easy to find yourself in the SPARCS dataset.

Again. Yawn.

I don't deny them, I simply don't call them subsidies.

Society pays for those costs, so that the producers don't have to. This lowers the sale price of the goods to half their true cost. If it waddles like a subsidy, and quacks like a subsidy...

Anyway, we can disagree about the transition time, but consider this: The average lifespan of a coal power plant is about 40 years - and many of them are due for replacement fairly soon. Knowing what we now know, it would be insane to replace them with more coal plants, and since new solar & new wind is already cheaper than new coal in many places, we have the opportunity to clean up a whole sector by 2050. And most vehicles have significantly shorter lifespans than that, so they can be transitioned too. In fact, TFA itself points out that Brazil changed their whole market over to flex-fuel ethanol-capable vehicles in just 5 years, so any cars sold after that can be fully carbon neutral.

Ah I see, it's your opinion - hence the redefinition of "fact".

So you feel the only reasonable standard is one a business can meet without difficulty, regardless of the external costs to everyone else. Which of course would mean there'd be no pressure to develop new technologies that meet these higher standards (such as catalytic converters or electric vehicles), and LA would look more like Beijing.

It's obvious that not ALL companies are cheating (Tesla certainly isn't), and there's certainly no evidence that consumers are ignoring these standards either - if they were, VW wouldn't have been faced with such a huge public scandal.

http://theconversation.com/jap...

If all judges were this sensible, then those who want to imprison people for "climate change denial" will be thwarted.

All zero people.

Well probably not quite zero, there's enough people in the world that there's probably one nutjob who says something like that. I'll bet you can't find a remotely significant number of people with such views.

Crawl out from under that rock, because you're WRONG:

Read a US Senator (Democrat, natch) call for bringing RICO charges against climate deniers.

More here: Arrest Climate-Change Deniers

And here: Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent?

More: Al Gore Blasts GOP Climate Deniers, Thom Hartmann Says Throw Them in Jail

Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice

Death Penalty for Global Warming Deniers?

WTF? DEATH PENALTY?!?!?!

Yes indeed - death penalty. And he's not alone:

Climate “Deniers” Must Be Jailed or Killed

What States' Attorneys General Can Do About Climate Deniers (Hard to believe the Kennedy clan has fallen that far - JFK tried to depose a Communist dictator instead of sucking up to him...)

Well, first of all, you would have us believe the same about the scientists funded by ExxonMobil. Koch brothers, et cætera. Why is suspicion more believable about the corporation-funded folks, than about the government-funded ones?

The corporation-hired folks are paid to write a paper (called a deliverable) with arguments supporting the theory of their sponsors, while government scientists are paid to do research regardless of the result, much to the annoyance of various politicians.

But the way the system is set up, the would-be "rebels" get screened-out long before making a name for themselves — if you argue in your papers, that AGW is insignificant and a misplaced concern, what are the chances of making it into a grad-school today?

As good as any one else's, unless their denying AGW is an indicator of their prowess in science.

Most people would go into sincere denial.

So you think thousands of scientists can produce bogus results without ever having an inkling that their results are wrong. So they all read their instruments incorrectly, get their math wrong, and still they all get the same results, and still none of them notices anyone else's errors despite the reviews. You call that believable?

But the way the system is set up, the would-be "rebels" get screened-out long before making a name for themselves

So on one side we have plenty of proof that a few dozens of scientists are being paid to deny or minimize AGW; and on the other we have thousands of scientists producing lies supporting AGW but we have not a single shred of evidence that anyone is pushing them to lie. And according to you that's because the selection and formatting process is so efficient that out of thousands of scientists none of them got depressed to the point where he would publicize their frustration with the system. And none of them rebelled either? And the exact same phenomenon worked across 120 countries with different cultures and opposing interests. And you really claim with a straight face that your conspiracy theory is the more plausible one? Just, wow!

A seasoned and established tenure-professor might be able to get away with it, but not scratch-free.

So Lindzen is your best example of a scientist being unfairly persecuted by the AGW crowd? The Lindzen who, from your own article, charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus," was underwritten by OPEC. And you were the one who talking about conflicts of interests was asking people to recuse themselves! And instead of asking for Lindzen to recuse himself you try to pass him off as a martyr?

why is the CO2 increasing rather than plants doing more converting and keeping the number stable?

Increased plant growth is thought to be sinking about 20-25% of our carbon emissions. So it does have something of a dampening effect. - http://theconversation.com/pla...

LOL fucking noob.

After Fukushima Japan passed a new law to forbid journalist from reporting anything about it.

While sites like Enenews have been reporting how all the underground water has been polluted near Fukushima.

There are even radioactive hot spots in Tokyo.

And many Japanese are faking the origin of the food so that they could export radioactive food.

The Japanese are fucked.

No more fucked than us Australians. We chose Homebush for the site of the "Green" Olympics because it was so heavily contaminated. Then we got caught lying about the mercury clean up - several times. All so a few companies could make a few fast bucks and the government save money, and face. Mercury - one of the main problems at Homebush, is actually not difficult to clean up, and one company (FineMetals) came up with a process to make it profitable - but instead it was decided to pay (buddy deal for Thiess) to have some of it dug up and dumped elsewhere.

The dioxin problem was kept fairly hidden until after the Olympics.

http://theconversation.com/no-...

Yes, I said it.

Welcome to the Mark Levin Show.

Yes, I said it. It is a non-existing problem. And until you can find and post here a set of materialized predictions of the Global Warming "scientists", it shall remain non-existing.

http://www.universetoday.com/9...

https://theconversation.com/20...

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

Yes, the evil government. I did find one government that acts on climate change

http://theconversation.com/beh...

You might also want to take a look at this post (just came across it with a quick search), which notes that a mainstream projection (in Science Magazine) in 1981 has come in very close to actual warming, but a little lower. Or you could look at this post or this post about projections made in 1990 and 1999 which are also coming out right.

More fundamentally, I'd ask you to take a look at the basics of atmospheric modeling, and point out where you think the mainstream models are wrong. You could start with the American Chemical Society's section on "Atmospheric Warming", particularly the Single-Layer Atmosphere Model and Multi-Layer Atmosphere Model. These are pretty easy to understand, and the underlying principles are at least as well established as the other areas of science we rely on for our high-tech lives. If you can't be bothered to understand the basic physical processes involved, you have no business debating climate science.