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Skeptical Environmentalist Saga Continues
"The Ministry critique holds that the Committee's procedure was unfair. It does not address the scientific issues. Lomborg's book caused outrage among many environmentalists and scientists, while right-wing organizations such as the Cato Institute have defended Lomborg. Scientific American devoted eleven pages of its January 2002 issue to a critique of Lomborg. Lomborg was only allowed to publish a one-page rebuttal, to which Scientific American replied here. When Lomborg defended himself by posting the Scientific American critique on his web site and that of Greenspirit with his commentary [PDF file] interspersed, Scientific American threatened to sue and both sites took it down. It is, however, still available at the iGreens web site."
(Slashdot ran a review of Lomborg's book early last year.)
sceptical environmentalist rocks
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
If he doesn't believe in warming, does that make him a cold danish?...
Just another day in Paradise
8 Summary of the assessment of the Ministry
8.1 Regarding statutory authority
Point 5.1.1. Legal basis for the work of DCSD:
The opinion enclosed with the complaint of 13 February 2003 states the view that the legal basis for the DCSD making rulings regarding whether specific researchers have acted with scientific dishonesty is doubtful.
The Ministry considers that the establishment of the DCSD was clearly provided for in the remarks on section 4e(4) of the Danish Act on Research Advice, and that the duties of the DCSD can be included under the advisory function, which was located in the Board of the Danish Research Councils and its sub-committees.
With this background, the Ministry considers that the DCSD did have the necessary statutory authority for its general work.
Point 5.1.2. Basis for statutory authority in Order no. 933 of 15 December 1998 and use of the term 'good scientific practice'
The opinion enclosed with the complaint of 13 February 2003 argues that the authority of the DCSD is exclusively laid down in the Order concerning the DCSD. This means that the DCSD cannot take a position on whether the respondent has neglected standards for good scientific practice. The special aspect of this case is that the DCSD has included its position on breach of good scientific practice in the conclusion to their ruling.
Irrespective of whether or not the Ministry finds that the DCSD has grounds to take a position on the issue of good scientific practice, there is an independent point of criticism if, in its assessment, the DCSD has applied a standard for good scientific practice in the individual specialist area that is not true and fair.
The Ministry considers that the DCSD has not applied a completely true and fair standard for good scientific practice within social sciences in its examination, and that on the current basis it cannot be ruled out that this delusion could have led to an incorrect assessment of the work of the respondent. The seriousness of this situation is emphasised by the DCSD itself in that it makes this issue the pivot for the ruling in its conclusion.
Errors such as these, that can influence the result of a ruling, must lead to the case being remitted so that the situation can be rectified.
Point 5.1.3. The concept of 'objective scientific dishonesty'
The DCSD divides scientific dishonesty into objective and subjective parts. Thus, the Ministry understands that, as part of its working methodology, the DCSD use the concept 'objective dishonesty'. The Ministry considers this the usual legal working methodology.
However, the Ministry does not consider that the methodological division can be repeated in the conclusion, as this could present a misleading picture of the actual conclusion; namely that in the opinion of the DCSD there is no scientific dishonesty in terms of the Order.
In the opinion of the Ministry, it is a mistake that the DCSD allows the methodological division to appear in the conclusion, but not to the extent that the mistake results in the case being remitted.
Point 5.1.4. The ruling has not been made by one of the three committees under the DCSD
With the basis that the complaints were aimed at the specialist areas of all three committees, in the opinion of the Ministry the three committees are jointly competent to address the complaint on the grounds stated. At the same time the Ministry must emphasise that this is a scientific issue, outside the authority of the Ministry. However, the Ministry points out that the procedures chosen to decide whether or not a case should be addressed by the committees jointly was, in the opinion of the Ministry, not correct. According to the information in the DCSD statement of 5 May 2003, the ruling was made by the committees jointly following recommendations from the chairman.
The Ministry finds that the ruling must be made by the individual committee within whose area the respondent works, in that there is otherwise a r
Jerry Pournelle posted a link to this on his site.
Aliens Cause Global Warming
By Michael Crichton
It is a very good read. Crichton claims that the public believes in things like Global Warming and Nuclear Winter for the same reasons that it believes in little green men. He says that science has failed to act as "a candle in the dark."
There will always be people who dont believe in global warming, no its just a weather cycle that the world goes through where all the ice melts and the earth becomes waterworld.
Well either way, all i know is that we done our fair share to help out or conspiracy theories that have the global warming as part of some alien plot (no really that was a good movie) are true.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
When you have money.
quick! I need a bigger SUV to pull my smaller but still large SUV down the driveway to check my mail! and where is my free H2!?!?
That teaches him for questioning orthodoxy.
Lomborg's book has 2 930 footnotes which allows you to fact check every single assertion that he makes. I've never seen that level of detail from the environmentalist movement and I speak as someone who has read more than just their pamphlets.
It should be noted that the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation published its own response to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty:
"[T]he DCSD has not documented where [Dr Lomborg] has allegedly been biased in his choice of data and in his argumentation, and...the ruling is completely void of argumentation for why the DCSD find that the complainants are right in their criticisms of [his] working methods. It is not sufficient that the criticisms of a researcher's working methods exist; the DCSD must consider the criticisms and take a position on whether or not the criticisms are justified, and why."
Oh, you mean the DCSD has done what they are accusing of Lomborg on? Right then...carry on!
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
...now that I've heard that the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has issued a critique of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty's condemnation of it, I definitely have mixed feelings about it.
I tried opening that msword document with openoffice 1.1 for the hell of it...
:(
It looks ok.. except you have to zoom in 1000% to read any of it.. its like it picked a 0.0001 point font and tried to use it...
Maybe it was my bitstream-vera font.. not sure.
I guess openoffice hasn't come as far as we had hoped either way
The sea level started rising well before the first automobile pounded pavement. How much more proof does one need? I hate politically based environment actions too, but come on already...
I love when people call the Cato Institute "right-wing", and of course when someone reads one of their papers on the war on drugs or gay and lesbian equality, they're immediately labeled "left-wing" or "liberal".
When are people going to realize that politics are not so nearly black and white?
You mean like the .95 correlation between sunspot activity and global temperatures over the last 100 years?
werd!
I'd be a pretty sceptical environmentalist too ;)
People trying to win ideological points will be disappointed to have to face the reality that science is not just another arm of politics... it actually a real discipline of proof and justification toward the evaluation of evidence. Whether you "think" there is global warming or not, higher degrees of scientific analysis should not be tossed aside on the basis of scatalogical arguments. Long live scientific inquiry and the scientific method (it's been on the ropes quite a bit these past years... starting with Cold Fusion... look at the junk reported in the mainstream press and it's nearly always slightly wrong, misguided, or flat-out incorrect).
Anyway, back to Lomborg -- I call myself an environmentalist and I'm certainly concerned about the possibility of a human effect on climate change, but the more the issue gets turned into a matter of theology they may not be questioned, the more skeptical I get about the whole thing. This simply is not the way science is supposed to work.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Perhaps you're thnking of the fact that, smoking doesn't *cause* lung cancer, but greatly *increases* one's risk of getting lung cancer.
There was an issue of scientific American where several respected scientists picked apart the book pointing out it's flaws is theory and conclusions.
It might be worth a read for people looking for more information on this subject.
War is necrophilia.
how can i believe we pitifull humans are causing global warming??? it is proven that the sun will naturally heat the earth 1deg in 10yrs without us.... plus as i was growing up in the 70/80s it was the thret of global COOLING. then BAG in one year it is now global warming.....
seems very much political to me.
so untill there is SOLID sci PROVABLE evidence, i will not believe any of the eviromentalist. besides, they BURN SUVs in a dealership, how is that NOT poluting (burning plastics and ruber parts of the SUVs)?
and they will not give up their airflights to DC for protests or even turn off lights not in use.
sigh...... bitching in a slashdot blog as AC.... might as well watch porn.... get the same results..... trased without pleasing.
As an ex-smoker I've never questioned that smoking causes cancer. I am skeptical of laws that seek to protect me from myself and impose rules on private landowners. There are anti-smoking crusaders that want to ban smoking in public spaces (which is fine by me). Others want to claim a public right to control my lifestyle. I will challenge that nanny-state nonsense until the day I die.
Like environmentalism, for some, the anti-smoking crusade is a religion that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with collective control.
Well, if you do not believe in global warming, then you are in agreement the vast *minority* of scientists the world over. So, censuring a high level goverment scientist that comes out and blatantly supports the "wrong side" of the issue should be expected.
That does not make it right. Guys like Newton faced the same problems. The details (some very important ones, I might add) are different, but the basics are there. A goverment sponsored scientists comes out against the status quo (in our case the emerging status quo) and faces censure from his peers and benefactors.
There is no hard evidence that our excessive CO2 production is a cause of increasing global temperatures. Of course, logically it does make sense, and it would seem prudent to start curbing the output of it as a preventative measure. So, in this instance I think it is gross irresponsibility, and worthy of censure, for a respected scientist to write a book claiming that global warming is a farce.
How they boast that the records go back 150 years, as if that is some sort of absolute factual proof.
Until one realizes that accounts for 0.00000003% of an established span of time.
.. where's the non-circumcised proof?
;P
I'm not Jewish, so I can answer that....
Whooshh....
Well the upper atmosphere is warming, but that can be easily explained by the weakening of the magnetic field which causes more radiation to hit the atmosphere in turn increasing the temperature in that region.
As for the ground data, Urban heat islands are the cause. The material used to build Urban areas retains the heat from the day, and radiates it at night. If you take the urban heat island data out of the ground temperature data, there is almost a zero increases in surface temperature.
No need for CO2 in the equation at all, though, Green house effect and what I outlined above both have an equally strong base of evidence (each is a hypothesis to climatology). I think that the hypothesis outlined above makes more sense personally.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
This move by the danish ministry of science is hardly surprising, considering that one of the first actions of the current government was to shut down a large number of environmental agencies and institutions, replacing them with the "Environmental Assessment Institute", of which they appointed Lomborg the Leader.
This was very much a way for the government to replace the skeptics of their environmental policy (or lack thereof) with their own supporters, such as Lomborg.
This clearing of Lomborg is not about the procedure of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty - it's all about the government needing to keep Lomborg in his position of power.
I opened it in my copy of OpenOffice 1.1 and the fonts worked fine. You need the Verdana font installed
lornberg has always seemed like a bit of a paper tiger to me. first, a large part of his argument just that the scientsts are basically hyping the problem, and making it seem worse than it is. he's not, however, saying that the problem is not bad. second, much of his commentary about the actual state of the environment addresses the fact that it was worse in the past, or that control measures have curtailed the worst of a particular environmental problem. again, he is not addressing the problem itself - he's comparing it to the past. in both cases, he does not address the problem, but rather says 'relative to ________, it's not that bad'. the question that actually matters, however, is if the conditions to support life and, in particular, human life, will be maintained; if not, what damage will be done to life on earth.
This article shows the problem of seperating facts from politics.
l er 121703.asp
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_mul
It talks about a Medieval warm period and the problems of estimating temperatures from just a few hundred years ago. The hard part is to agree on the factual data.
"I call myself an environmentalist and I'm certainly concerned about the possibility of a human effect on climate change, but the more the issue gets turned into a matter of theology they may not be questioned, the more skeptical I get about the whole thing. "
In this case there are billons of dollars at stake. If global warming is real then entire industries will have to change the way they function. None of these people want to spend one more dime then they have to so its in their interest to turn this issue into a theological/idelogical war.
It is inevitable that the global warming issue will be turned into a matter theology. In a way it strikes at the soft underbelly of the theory of capitalism. That being the environmental impact of large scale economic growth. The founders of capitalism never took into account the impact of their theories would have on the global environment because they presumed there would be an infinate aount of trees, energy, clean water, air etc.
The stakes are huge and the war will be bloody however it is also inevitable. This war will be fought whether we like it not. Nobody knows who is going to win but there will be many losers. As in any war however the truth will be the first casualty.
War is necrophilia.
Through out school I have been taught that we are coming out of a recent ice age. Now, to leave an ice age shouldnt the world warm up? Correct me if Im wrong here, but the logical way to leave an ice age is to become warmer. The globe has been warming up for the last several thousand years. Am I the only one that thinks the whole thing is both natural and makes sense?
This story reminds me of what I hear many smokers say when they're challenged over smoking. They say that there has never been any proof that smoking causes lung cancer, just that it's circumstantial. When A happens, then B happens, this doesn't mean that A caused B. If B happens after A in 95% of cases, that's not proof, and merely circumstantial (although compelling).
Disregarding the carcinogen tests on mice, a pure statistical approach should at least tell you if there is some kind of correlation.
If the probability of getting lung cancer for smokers differs statistically significantly (there are tests for this) from the same probability for non-smokers, then you can say with a certain margin of error (say 99% certainty) that smoking and lung cancer are not independent variables but that they are correlated. Yes, correlation does not equal causality, but if the odds of getting lung cancer are less for non-smokers then I certainly know how not to spend my spare change. Others are free to auto-darwinize themselves with tobacco products.
The problem with fighting a theory backed by overwhelming evidence is that you'd really have to come up with your own bulletproof theory that explains all the results as well as predicts something previously unknown. This is where all the crackpot theories usually fail. They attack existing theories and ridicule their shortcomings then introduce new models which explain all the data adequately but do not accurately predict anything new. Worse, they usually introduce new assumptions and special conditions that the old theories didn't need in order to work.
Being against interventionist foreign policy and the drug war would put them at odds with the right-wingers in the white house. Some right-wingers are more right than others I guess.
We've been keeping track of global climate for more than 140 years!
s hgl.gif) Surely this is the sign of evironmental armageddon!
Surely this is enough to be able to accurately predict the warming and cooling cycles of the Earth!
You stupid people! Global temperature has risen almost 1 degree F in the past 140 years! (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nh
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
Modded as Insightful? Could you even prove what you said?
Do you even know that increased solar activity (i.e. more sonspots) actually means _less_ energy reaching the earth?
And what about the very high correlation with CO2 as determined by scientific studies from people thinking a little harder than you did? They're all just biased, of course... and it's just coincidential that glaciers are melting? They are as far back as they haven't been for the last few 100k years?
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
on Monday, an earthquake shook the foundations of Diablo Canyon nuclear power station in California. This plant, if it had been built as originally planned, would likely have failed on Monday, likely contaminating hundreds of miles of pacific coastline with deadly radiation.
Thank GOD the environmentallist wackos were there, in the 1970's, to halt construction on this plant, and force PG&E to redesign the plant so that it could withstand a 7.0 direct on it's location. The magnatude of the San Simeon quake was estimated to be in the 5.5 to 6.0 range on the site of Diablo Canyon.
I personally don't mind having a nuclear power station in my "backyard". But that's because I've toured it, and I *know* they built it right.
For all those who blamed the 2000 blackouts on environmentalist wackos - screw you. It was fradulent enerygy trading practices.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
...Danish Scientist offered top spot in Bush administration to head working groups on climate change including the Clear Skies and Healthy Forests initiatives.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
hi.
... if you had read the article, you might not have felt the urge to post something so stupid!
your comment is idiotic, as lomborg doesn't deny anthropogenic global warming.
just imagine
Just want to post my agreement:
I am an environmentalist, in that it seems obvious to me that we are destroying much natural beauty and causing damage to human health with pollution. I also suspect (although I am just a layman) that we are causing global warming, and that we should avoid changing the climate until we are more capable of understanding what impact this will have. To me, "first doing no harm" is the truly conservative approach to the environment, not the "we'll do nothing until the proof is overwhelming" argument that some so-called conservatives make.
I do not drive an SUV. In fact, I do not own a car at all, and I take public transportation or walk everywhere.
BUT...I am becoming more and more skeptical of the environmental movement. Too much of it seems to be pushing an anti-capitalist morality with which I do not agree (e.g., I have a friend who once argued that subcontinent Indians are better off in abject poverty than as computer programmers in air conditioned offices). I don't want people to have less goods - I just want to make sure that we all have iPods in such a way that we don't destroy the earth in the process.
More importantly, I am seeing cases where the environmental movement is wilfully exaggerating how bad things are, and is arguing that no matter what the choice, the environment is both the first and the only thing.
Well, I obviously want a clean, healthy environment. But it must be balanced against other needs. And to make the correct decisions, we must have accurate, not exaggerated, accounts of the situation.
That is why I appreciate people like Dr. Lomborg (or Gregg Easterbrook at the New Republic), who bring some balance to the debate between environmentalists and oil-company-sponsored "non-profits."
Care to share where you saw this info? Of course you can't... MODERATORS ARE STUPID!!!
I'm not so sure that humans are the root cause behind any global warming, especially after seeing that Mars is just coming out of an ice age of its own. Given that humans have had, like, zero impact on the climate of Mars, but solar output has impact on both Mars and Earth, doncha think that global warming might, just might, be caused by the sun, not humans?
I'm not saying that humankind has no impact on Earth's climate, but that maybe blaming us for global warming is just another Chicken Little espousing that the sky is falling. We'll likely know better, in a few million years or so. Till then, I'm not holding my breath.
Lemon curry?
And, on the other side of the bias wall... Environmentalists feel that they aren't doing their job unless they prove that all business practices are so harmful that they're hurting our planet in irreparable ways...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
mod me down, but environmentalism is a religion. do not confuse with conservationalism. i am a hunter and fisherman. nobody appreciates a clean environment more than i do. but the extreme measures, like those at kyoto, are based on faith as much as fact. furthermore, the assumptions and value judgements one must make are also religious. so what if species die off, or they are cleared for man. if trees and people are equal, that is YOUR RELIGION. fine. but please do not push your religion on me. the environmental movement is a cover for the global communists and socialist, one world governmentalists. (no, i don't need a tin foil hat.) everything that we need to do to "save" the environment is lower our standard of living. i don't think so. and lastly, why is the environmental movement headed by wealthy white people? you'd think there'd be a little more "color" if you will. perhaps they can see through the elitism?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
"The founders of capitalism never took into account the impact of their theories would have on the global environment because they presumed there would be an infinate aount of trees, energy, clean water, air etc."
:)
Prove it
My understanding of captitalism is nearly the exact opposite; it's that capitalism assumes scarce resources with imperfect but real fungibility (and inevitable but minimizable tradeoffs) which makes money-based exchanges the least friction-bound way to allocate them.
Which capitalists "presumed there would be an infinate aount of trees, energy, clean water, air etc," and when? This sounds more like Conquistodore theology than Adam Smith.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
He never said otherwise. He said activity correlates with temperature.
So far, you just made yourself out to be an asshat without touching a thing he said. Congrats.
Since you have a power meter and know the juice your boxes suck, here is the readout for a cheap laptop
.12 amps
... you won't. It will realize that it is all that is evil in this world ... then decide to grow a beard :-)
Dell Inspiron 1100 with a 2Ghz Celery (15" LCD, 640 Meg ram, Wireless Card)
Average 25 watts at
And it has a built in UPS, is mobile and can be charged up with a car cig lighter.
Laptop ALL the way. But I am not sure it will really matter, your going to get in the middle of know where and even though you think your going to use your computer
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
"right-wing organizations such as the Cato Institute" Cato institute is a think tank, i.e. it can be bought by intrest groups. At UN World Summit on the Information society they even sent SPAM letters to participants of the summit. Scientific American is a popular science magazine, so it seems to be no "real science" as it is used as a communication platform. Politics or Science? I don't believe he is a real scientist. Science shall avoid to deliver to the people what they want to listen to. But science is subject of intrests too. In this case there are probably more commercial intrests in his case than on the side that he attacks. Therefore his opponents are more trustworthy. Perhaps the same as in the tabacco industry. From the linkes text: "The Kyoto Protocol will do very little good--it will postpone warming for six years in 2100." I guess no real scientist can be THAT sure about the effects. "By the end of this century the U.N. expects we will have more forests, simply because even inhabitants in the developing countries will be much richer than we are now." As every rich man plants a tree?? That sounds silly to me but the author claims that would be an UN opinion. Well, "the UN" has no opinion as it is a network of international organisations. It is a popular sinmplification. I think the letter of him sound unscientific to me, too apologetic. "Take all the issues the critics did not even mention (about half my book). We have a world in which we live longer and are healthier, with more food, fewer starving, better education, higher standards of living, less poverty, less inequality, more leisure time and fewer risks." Nobody doubts that. What's the issue?
Remember how when William Jefferson Clinton was beset by, ahem, difficulties arising from his indiscretions and obfuscations? How they conveniently ran some "scientific" piece about how Thomas Jefferson begat illegitimate offspring from his slaves? Made the news, didn't it?
Turns out the "scientific evidence" showed that the offspring was sired by someone else in Jefferson's family. And remember how SciAm retracted, erm... oops, they didn't retract.
So I guess this proves that "science" can never be used for political purposes.
Um, nevermind.
You remember that, too?
I seriously thought I was the only one who remembered that bugaboo.
Good job.
But, unfortunately, solar activity has increased in the last century. So, if he meant negative correlation (as you implied), it would be just as wrong. Because we know that the temperature has increased.
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
So what if global warming is not caused by humans? If it really is a farce we should just continue to burn coal and oil to provide electricity and pump absurd amounts of gasoline into our vehicles, right? Well, last checked, burning gas, coal, or oil also produces other nasty pollutants (other than CO2) that cause awful things like acid rain and kill little children with asthma and other breathing ailments. Burning fossil fuels is not just causing global warming, it's screwing up the air we breathe. Isn't that reason enough to want to find alternatives???
That first paragraph was confusing so lemme post my summary:
Bjorn Lomborg says evironmentalists are stupid.
Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty says Bjorn Lomborg is stupid.
Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation says Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty is stupid.
Cato Institute says Bjorn Lomborg is not stupid.
Scientific American says Bjorn Lomborg is stupid.
okay makes sense now.
There seems to be a misapprehension in many posts that the book is skeptical of global warming itself. It isn't.
There are a *few* comments to the effect that the conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not certain, or at any rate the *magnitude* of the warming is much disputed, but Lomborg's comments just mirror the ongoing debate in the meteorlogical community itself.
Then he gets on with it and says, basically, "but let's just take the final conclusions of the panel as the best estimate we have" - the rest of the chapter is about the 1.5C-5.8C (most likely number : 2.2C) of warming we will see by 2100, according to the IPCC.
What the global warming, ah, community(?) hates about Lomborg is that he takes a position against Kyoto, based on the models and figures in the IPCC report.
In brief: that Kyoto is unlikely to delay that 2.2C warming by more than a miserable six years, at a cost of hundreds of billions that could be better spent preparing the hardest-hit nations for the *effects* of the warming, not to mention on R&D for wind turbines, solar power, safer nuke plants, fuel cells, etc.
This, I found pretty convincing.
Yea. Zero tolerance and all that.
War is necrophilia.
You can still read it by copy/pasting blanks to some text editor. Enjoy! ;-D
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
The only people who don't believe in global warming are American right wingers with shares in oil companys.
How come the burden of proof is on the environmental scientists? It should be up to industrialists to show theres nothing wrong with breathing the crap that they spew. We *should* be all for cleaning up the air polution problem first. We know we have polluted air, you can see it. All the large cities I've lived in have brown air. This is unacceptable. Clean this up and it makes the global warming argument disappear.
Apparently its much wiser to not bother to fix it until the atmosphere is seriously broken and we're headed to disaster. Thanks Bush. I for one would rather not be part of this science experiment.
The Cato Institute quite correctly defines itself as libertarian. There are details at:
http://www.cato.org/about/about.html
Its relevance to the "global warming" debate is that pseudo-scientific hysteria is often used to assault the libertarian stress on "individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace."
For an example, think of the hysteria in the 1960s over an alleged "population bomb." What was actually taking place was a "birth dearth" in industrialized societies that made elites in those societies fearful of the much higher birthrates where skins are a bit darker. Read books by those feeding the hysteria and you'll discover that they wanted the same sorts of draconian controls on who would be allowed to have children as many environmentalists now want to place on energy usage. And the scientific community allowed its prestige to support that hysteria, just as it now appears as a supporter of claims of impending environmental disaster.
Long term, the contrived population hysteria kept Europe and Japan from dealing with the real problems they face--few kids, aging populations, and costly welfare states.
Thanks to its greater openness to immigration with their typically large families, as well as a less extensive welfare state, the U.S. faces less of a problem in that area. We're also better at assimulating immigrants, allowing them to fit as they choose, than countries such as France, where politicians think the fate of their nation hinges on forcing school girls to go about bareheaded and shy Muslim women to have their private parts examined by strange men.
For what it's worth, I'm not a libertarian. I simply have enough sense of history to know that hysteria is often used to get social and political changes that are not justified by the evidence. The Skeptical Environmentalist suggest that is the case with many environmental claims. That is why it deserves a hearing.
The first page states a claim that is very difficult for the global-warming denialists: "...since 1980, the solar constant has steadily decreased by 0.02 percent per year."
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The 2000 blackouts weren't only because of fraudulent energy trading practices (although that did play a part). You portray the Wackos as demanding good design of nuke stations. When was the last time a nuke station was built in California? Over 20 years ago, thanks to the Wackos. They don't care about good design; now they only care about no design at all.
You say you've toured the Diablo Canyon facility, and that's how you know it was built right? If you know that's the case, why aren't you in the business of nuclear reactor design? Or do you think that simply touring the facility gives you all the knowledge you need to verify its soundness and robustness?
You sound exactly like the people Bjorn Lomborg looks at. Why not take a look at how much you really don't know, before you make such an ignorant conclusion.
Anybody who would call the Cato Institute a "right wing" group is terribly, terribly ignorant. Cato is very pro-individual rights. On economic issues, they tend to agree with conservatives. On social issues, they tend to agree with liberals.
Contrary to what some people believe, it's possible to have positions other than what most people understand to be left wing or right wing. That two-dimensional scale is terribly inadequate for explaining the range of possible political positions. See the following quiz from Advocates for Self Government for a more useful way to look at the choices:
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
We can wait 20 or 30 years until all the analysis is done and run the risk of saying "Oh, shit!!!" and our children and grandchildren saying "What a bunch of greedy idiots our parents and grandparents were."
or
We can conserve non-renewable energy sources for future generations, saving financial, human and environmental resources.
Seems like a no-brainer for those concerned for future generations. (Note: Hydrogen is no magic source - we can't just scoop it out from the sun.)
horses mouth
that'll teach me to preview first
A blog about stuff.
I am sometime amazed at the rating (1-5) slashdot gives to postings. They clearly reveal a preexisting prejudice, and sometime ignorance. E.g. Has anyone heard from the BBC re online resources lately?
In defense of the other side, I point out that heat transfer away from the surface of the earth relies more on convection, which is not affected by the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, than on radiation, which is where the "greenhouse effect" comes in. I also point out that water molecules are, on a molecule-by-molecule basis, at least as efficient at blocking infrared radiation as carbon dioxide, and that there are two orders of magnitude more of them in a typical sample of air than there are of carbon dioxide molecules. That means that the most important greenhouse "gas" in the atmosphere isn't a gas at all, it's water vapor. Indeed, that can be seen in the recorded experiences of people in the desert from the Roman legions onward.
So, why is a trace element supposed to cause the bulk of the effect? Perhaps there is a simple explanation. Do you know what it is?
Read Gould's A Wonderful Life to get a real feel for how species are always going extinct.
Humanity is a rank amateur in effecting the environment of this planet. Even full-scale nuclear war would fall far short of the KT impact.
If we're exposing political biases here, why not identify the DCSD as being left-wing? After all, they prefer for everyone to accept their a priori conclusion as gospel truth, even without sufficient factual data to support them.
Oh... Thanks for pointing that out. Didn't know that ...
You probably didn't meen "global-warming denialists" but "greenhouse effect denialists", that would somehow make more sence.
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
Thanks for saving (?) me from a nuclear disaster. Can I please have some more nuclear plants in California now? It might help with the whole energy thing? No? Hmmm, so you've traded one potential problem for a very real one in my name then? Thanks I guess?
brief look at the critique:
12 pages long, a bit long-winded, and i'm too lazy to read it.
brief look at Lomborg's Response:
2 pages, including the editor's response, fairly to-the-point.
brief look at the response to Lomborg's Response:
15 pages long, even MORE long-winded, picking apart every work in Lomborg's brief response.
i don't get it. why was Lomborg only ALLOWED 1 page in the magazine, while the critique to his book and to his response are so damned long?
it doesn't seem like the magazine itself is being fair to me. even if Lomborg is wrong (which i personally doubt), shouldn't he be given a chance in the publication to defend himself, instead of giving him one page in an obscure part of the magazine (which most people would probably skip because it's so short)? even if i disagreed with both sides, i'd give them equal chance to make their cases. in fact, i'd let it go on for months if it has to - hell, more money for the mag!
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Growing pains. We're like birds shitting in our nests before we're big enough to leave it.
I used to be an environmentalist (more of a sentamentalist, actually), until I started to view humankind's technology and its impact as a natural extention of our evolution.
We'll eventually reach the end of our dirty industrial phase (without killing ourselves), and begin a green nanotech phase where we're not forced to rape resources in the conventional top-down way, because we've got complete control over 100% recyclable matter, and where we can actually reverse all the environmental damage we've done at the molecular level.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Well they were wrong in the sense that what they predicted didn't happen. Or were they?
Well one reason that their prediction didn't pan out was that some of the behaviour / parameters changed due to the political impact of the book and the debate that followed. Same with Carson's Silent Spring.
Now back to current debate. Given the latency in the system, the risk if indeed the Greenhouse effect is real and can run amok, what would a rational person recommend?
Help fight continental drift.
It's been left for far too long.
mod
see subject
see parent
What I find amazing about this entire "global-warming" controversy is that, even if the theory is true, the clear solution is to use more nuclear power, but few of the so-called "environmentalists" who believe in global warming are touting nuclear power. Check out my web page Ignorance about Nuclear Power is Killing Us (Literally) You will find very enlightening articles by a top expert (no, not me).
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
The other side of the issue is that powerful economic interests in the USA are capable of buying legislation which sells out the public interest to protect their profits, and they are just as capable of manipulating the press, think tank reports and other coverage to blunt public backlash against them. Just because the watermelons are for something isn't necessarily a reason to oppose it; you have to look carefully at everything, preferably with an understanding of the underlying reasons and mechanisms. If you don't have this understanding yourself, take your cues from someone who both has one and has taken the time to explain it in ways which can be checked. Dogma is the enemy, we need to fight it with reason. I've read Lomborg's book, and it is very long on endnotes and short on real supporting evidence; worse, the researchers cited by Lomborg have often disagreed violently with the conclusions he reaches based on their work. This reflects poorly on Lomborg.
(OT re command economies and authoritarian regimes: China's pall of pollution is so bad that it is affecting crop yields. The sources I can find mention pollutants such as ozone and SO2, but I recall reading that soot directly reduces plant growth by cutting off the supply of energy (sunlight) to the plants. China in particular still uses lots of coal in individual coal stoves, leading to the same emissions which caused the killer fog in London in 1952 (here's the NPR feature). These emissions would be drastically reduced if China gasified that same coal in a central plant and piped it through cities as "town gas".)
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
After reading through Lomborg's book and the responses to it, I've determined that there is one tested scientific theory inherent in global warming. Unfortunately it has more to do with psychology than earth sciences.
In 1972 a psychologist named Irving Janis developed the concept of groupthink, a theory that postulated that people within a group will think alike, or as he put it:
In other words, when you get a group of people together with a similar worldview and ask them to process some information, they will process that information in such a way as to coincide with their worldview.
The theory of groupthink is a tremendously useful model for analyzing public policy decisionmaking. Many articles have been written that apply this model to everything from the Cuban Missle Crisis (Graham Allison's indispensible Essence of Decision for those who might be interested in foreign-policy decisionmaking theory) to the decisions over the war in Iraq.
Scientists are not immune from groupthink. The consensus in January of this year was that the incident of ice hitting the space shuttle Columbia was not a major issue of concern. Those who did believe otherwise were dissuaded by others. Of course, the consensus was wrong in the issue and the dissenters were correct.
Global warming is more a consequence of groupthink than of sound science. It is pseudo-science to argue that a system as complex and chaotic as the environment can be predicted with any accuracy over long periods of time. We can't even predict the weather over a given chunk of territory with scientifically reproducable accuracy, yet one is to believe that we can say that the Earth's average temperature will rise x number of degrees by 2100?
The fact is that such claims are unverfiable and irreproducable, and rely on computer weather models that would respond as a model would be expected to but could have no relationship with the real world. Yet we're being asked to base our entire way of life based around flimsy assertions that cannot be proven or disproven scientifically.
So why are scientists behaving so unscientifically?
Because they have been given a worldview in which "polluters" should be stopped using science. In essence, the people who grew up watching Captain Planet are now out there either consciously or unconsciously trying to make the evidence fit their preordained worldview.
Those who dissent, like Lomborg, are practically apostates to the prevailing conventional wisdom. Lomborg is instantly assumed to be in the "pockets of big corporations" and trying to "defend the polluters." Lomborg's arguments are being treated as wrong on a prima facie basis and the prevailing conventional wisdom is being upheld - exactly the way in which Janis would describe for a group in the throws of groupthink.
Certainly pollution isn't good, but the way in which critics have attacked Lomborg have shown a shocking willingness to abandon dispassionate and objective science in favor of using science as a tool of public policy. When such an attitude becomes prevalent, real science falls behind. The scientific community deserves a black eye for this, and the way in which global warming is treated as a prima facie truth rather than a flimsy scientific theory is not hard science - it's a function of personal and professional bias on the part of many in the scientific community.
I have, and I found it very interesting.
Without taking sides, I would much rather talk about the facts quoted in the book. Is the air in London cleaner now than at any time since the 1700's (because sulfur-laden coal is no longer used for heating and making tea)? Do we have enough oil for at least another few hundred years (and it appears to be well argumented)? All a bit offtopic, but since it was started, let's all read the book (it is WELL worth it whatever you believe) and debate it.
Michael
---
BDOS ERR ON A:>
[1] Albedo of the Earth is about 0.3. Earth receives about 1360 W/m^2 of disc, or 340 W/m^2 of surface; roughly 30% is reflected, the rest is absorbed. The radiation from a blackbody is 5.67 * 10^(-8) W/m^2/K^4, so:
340 W/m^2 * 0.7 = 5.67e-8 W/m^2/K^4 T^4
T^4 = (340 * 0.7 / 5.67e-8) K^4
T^4 = 4.1975e+09 K^4 --> T ~= 255 K.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Bjorn Lomborg says Bjorn Lomborg is not stupid.
Yeah, that's half the problem -- neither side of the `debate' seems to know when to stop talking and listen for a while.
... in many ways the sort of rampant consumption that people love these days, and the infrastructure which supports it, is pretty disturbing. Not just for `environmental' reasons, but the way it affects peoples' lifestyles, and the (often not so obvious) costs that must be paid. In the end I don't think a full suite of the latest goodies for everybody is a sufficient justification for a world consisting of a single huge walmart and a really big parking lot... but because such changes happen incrementally, the connections are not always clear until it's too damn late.
I'm pretty liberal, and pretty `pro environment' (don't drive, like forests far more than golf courses, would rather enjoy seeing the price of gas hit $500/gallon), but even I'm embarassed by some of the morons I see associated with the `environmental movement.' In far too many places, it seems to have degenerated into mindless dogma and a social club for people who like goretex.
On the other hand, that doesn't excuse the similarly mindless stupidity of typical right-wing responses (`hey, there's still some small doubt that there's a problem, so let's completely ignore everything, and buy more SUVs!').
BTW, I'm all for ipods, but
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I'm wondering what the CO2 content of the atmosphere was back when hadrosaurs were growing to full size in one season, great herds of thousands of them.
Herbivorous dinosaurs... they must have eaten a *LOT* of vegetation.
Could any modern ecosystem sustain this sort of animal in the sort of numbers we guesstimate from the fossil record?
Maybe the rapid and lush plant growth required by these animals required more CO2?
Also, the sahara desert was once, not *so* long ago, lush with greenery.
Either there were other areas of the planet which are now lush which were desert back then, or there is less carbon in circulation these days?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I have no way of knowing who is "right" or not, but ... does it really hurt to make the environment our highest priority? It seems rather important to me and I am happy to have extremists looking at worst case scenarios and seeing how we can prepare for them, rather than wearing rose tinted glasses. Maybe it will even lead to an age when no one can complain.
It's raining in NYC. We get a variety of weather in our temperate city, but I can't remember it ever raining on Christmas Eve in my life. It's obvious to everyone that the atmosphere is warming, and becoming more destructively chaotic. You think the beancounters at the reinsurance underwriters are just imagining the higher risks? Human contributions to the warming are becoming glaringly obvious - whether they're the major contributor or not, we've polluted enough to push our own destruction. Listen, unless you're getting a check from an oil or coal company to live in denial, you should open your eyes, and do your part to get past the greenhouse which will otherwise kill us all.
--
make install -not war
1) Actually, Lomborg's reasoning is quite sound and not hard to follow, and is mostly based on dismantling the assumptions made in the horribly bad "science" of Global Warming.
2) There are thousands of environmental researchers out there in the world right now studying climate change, and many of them would have no jobs in the environmental field if they weren't working on GW. Add in the hundreds to thousands of people who are getting quite healthy paychecks running things like the Kyoto Treaty effort, and you're going to find literally *billions* in paychecks going to "research and fight" Global Warming. This is very different from when I was in environmental science back in the late 1970s, when you had to search long and hard to find any job at all.
3) Lomborg's work was in analyzing the material put forward by environmental researchers to support GW, and he found large, gaping holes in it in many places. It's not the meta-analysis so popular in a lot of fields, it's direct commentary on bad science, very similar to the theoretical physics work done to dismantle cold fusion.
The big problem with Lomborg's "science" is that the work done by the GW researchers that was so flawed. Look at the recent scientific collapse of the "hockey stick" graph in the IPCC report.
It's also very funny that you, as a physicist, complain about an economist working outside of his field when you're also doing the same thing in analyzing his work...
"...The New York Times reports that the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has issued a critique of the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty's condemnation of Bjorn Lomborg's book..."
So this would be a reply to a post about an article regarding a critique of a condemnation of a book. I feel so connected to the original situation, I just might have a stroke!
mod parent up
The founders of capitalism never took into account the impact of their theories would have on the global environment because they presumed there would be an infinate aount of trees, energy, clean water, air etc.
Er, the founders of capitalism had no theories themselves, per se. They were just trying to get rich. But there was a theory that described what the factory owners were doing. It was first described by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Karl Marx, Robert Malthus, and David Ricardo each contributed to it. That theory, known as classical economics today, does, in fact, take account of the effects of humans on the environment. Malthus famously worried so much about this that even today we talk about Malthusian catastrophies where human population growth outstrips resource limits.
Problem was, they were mostly all wrong. Smith based his theories on the notion that economic value was based on the amount of labor that went into the production of a good. His production function (the amount of output as a function of the quantity of inputs) was based on the idea that labor and capital had to be used in a fixed ratio to produce larger amounts of output. But it is obvious to us today that it is usually possible to substitute between labor and capital. Smith also missed out on the notion of productivity gains where the same quantities of inputs could produce larger amounts of output through time.
It is this last one that is where hope lies. For the last 400 years, we have steadily increased the productivity and standard of living of, at least, those people living in the developed nations. No reason I can think of to assume technology advances won't continue. And if they do, they may well render the whole problem of global warming irrelevent. Either new tech is found that scrubs CO2 from the air at a reasonable cost (maybe some kind of super tree) or new tech is found that provides cheap energy without releasing CO2 (fusion?).
I've never understood either the greens or the far right. Why can't I have cheap energy, a high standard of living, and a clean environment?
FreeSpeech.org
I also see humankind and it's creations as part of evolution.
/dev/null anyone that forgets to keep adapting...
What I'm not so sure about is the blue sky picture you paint in the future,"without killing ourselves" that we will have to wait and see, if you look at evolution's track record you will see that it doesn't make any friends and has no problem in sending to the eternal
My personal pet blue-sky future dream is to move out of this rotten(by us) planet and see what is awaiting us out there, the universe is big enough to keep us entertained for a while...
Best wishes
\\K.
Uhh... you might want to look at this data from NASA before you say that.
http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/msusci.html
Am I blind? Because all I see is noise?
To see a trend that is below the noise and then say that it's correlation with increase of CO2 (0.06% increase) is causing more of an effect than the increase in H2O vapor (almost 5%) is not science. Two trends being in the same direction have a 50% probability of being true. Also, a correlation does not show cause and effect.
Is the 0.06% increase in CO2 the cause of the increase in brest cancer?
Nobody is going to prove one way or the other in our lifetime. Any trend can be explained as an unrelated anomaly. And for all we know it was going to happen anyways, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
However, anyone who thinks that a relatively small, closed system like ours won't sustain some type of damage from our activities is just plain crazy. You can only piss in the pool so many times before it starts turning yellow.
Determining the threshold and what to do about it is left as an exercise for the reader.
Cheers.
erudite or pedantic depending on the context.
What? You don't know? I'm not surprised.
Heat islands have been the subject of intense discussion and research in this area for as long as I've been following it, and a quick search immediately turns up refutations of that claim. From physicist Martin I. Hoffert (who is certainly more qualified to expound on the issue than Lomborg): Here's another take on the issue: and another independent measurement: (I can't believe the things that get modded up. Okay, given the lack of research obvious in what gets posted, maybe I can believe the credulousness obvious in what gets modded up. But it's still dismaying.)Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
... that the axial tilt of Mars and the relative timing of seasons vs. perhelion and aphelion might have more to do with its ice ages than small variations in the solar constant?
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
You are probably not going to make too many friends with this sort of behavior.
Just my $0.03
CUNT
The only way a heat island explanation would make sense would be if somehow the atmosphere trapped heat emitted at night and failed to trap heat emitted during the day, which is utter crap.
That's not saying that I completely buy into the whole global warming theory, but the reasoning posed by its detractors has been completely unconvincing.
I think you should look at the data before you speak - I just don't think there is enough signal in the noise to get excited.
http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/MSU/msusci.html
Probably both.
The problem with empiricism is demonstrated thus:
My father (now disceased) was a Nuclear and Electrical Engineer, a Lawyer, a pilot (and a bunch of other things) but he had allowed a single presentation by a single person convince him that "The depletion of the ozone layer was not a concern because there was 'good evidence' that the ozone layer 'might have been created by the industrial revolution.'"
Whaaa?
I know! It is incredible! It seems impossible. A rational and educated man latching onto an odd tidbit of spin and then using that to skew an entire world view. I spent several years carefully and gently trying to probe to the heart of this oddity and there were all sorts of things revealed. One of the interesting bits was that in his youth people actually beleived that when you dumped an industrial efluvent into a stream, and then didn't see it a mile downstream, that nature had taken care of the problem.
This concept of reality is so close to contemporary that it it is scary, and people tend to forget. Look up the invetion of the smoke stack sometime. Consider the first smokestack legislation came to this country in the late 1930's
So anyway, what is my point...?
See, lots of people believe that research and science is about piling up evidence and looking for answers. In tis lesser form this is empiricism, in the greater form (get answers from having "all truth") it is gestaltism. The problem is that when you start piling up facts and then pawing through them your own biasis become the prime consideration. You find and see those shapes that best match up with your existing brain. That, unfortunately, includes your biases.
The "scientific method" that they pushed on you in school was created, and it lauded, because it *DIRECTLY* OPPOSES the skew that empiricism naturally carries with it. See, science *starts* with a tiny bit of empiricisim because a scientist piles up his facts and his experiences and looks for a pattern, but that is the pre-science, having done his pre-science he then engages in the incredibly simple sequence we know of as "science".
1) Take your opinion and carve it down to the simplist and most direct statement you can. (The "hypothesis") These are simple things like "glass is unbreakable".
2) Figure out what it would take to make you a Liar. That is, think up ways that the statement of step one could be disproved. These ways can be little actions (experiments) like "throw rock at glass at least this-hard" "shoot glass with gun" etc. They can also be more collective "look for any record of persons having broken glass" and so forth. Some evidence *may* be discarded if you can show that it wasn't credible or wasn't well structured ("in the Bob's glass-works experiment the rock was thrown at random and never actually struck the glass, so its assertion that the 'glass never broke in a thousand throws' is bull, as there were zero hits").
3) If any avenue in step two shows your step one to be wrong, go back to step one and see if you can make a new statement that could survive step 2. e.g. "glass is unbreakable" becomes "*this* glass is unbreakable" becomes "this glass will not break for forces up to this range".
If you get through step 2, having done your best to disprove item 1, then you have a "good scientific idea" that your statement is true.
So... what is wrong with the book? How can it be chock full of facts and footnotes but still be condemned by as bad science?
Well the book is aparently full of all this empirical information, but there is no sign of the effort to complete step 2. A well written *SCIENTIFIC* book would have a short section at the front filled with "enough" empirical stuff to validate that the question was worth asking. Then it would proceed on with a section by section attempt to show what it would take to disprove the empirical idea, demonstrate that the data or experiments took place, and that all the credible results failed to disprove the idea.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Dude, give it up. You're making a complete ass of yourself, and demonstrating the political sophistication of a retarded monkey.
Who's behind the Cato Institute? Well it seems a major benefactor is the John Hazen White family. What business are they in? Heating and cooling systems and a host of other ventures that are dependent upon oil and gas and all those nifty industrial applications that the global warming scientific community are concerned about. I did a little bit of checking and found little tidbits here and there - there's probably a lot mroe to it, but the key to finding out the agenda of this organization is to follow who's funding it.
I know a couple senior scientists at my work who, although they tend to lean Left, *cancelled* their Scientific American subscriptions after that magazine ran their hatchet piece against Lomborg.
Go dig up that issue of Scientific American and read it. It's a blithering pile of character assassination, ad hominem attacks, and about a dozen other logical fallacies. It's disgusting to see in a supposedly respected journal.
Every rational review of Lomborg's work has wound up either defending it, or taking his critics to task.
It's all ideology. Ideology, not fear, is the mind killer.
--- Ban humanity.
Here is a couple of comments. First of all denying that there is scientific evidence in favor of global warming as some people here have said is hogwash. There exist plenty of evidence for this, wether it is caused by humans is however debateable.
u lprit/audio/culprits.ram
The danish climate researcher Henrik Svensmark has shown there are other more convincing mechanisms for explaining the temperature variation than human pollution.
H. Svensmark and E. Friis-Christensen, Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage - a missing link in solar-climate relationships, J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys., 59, 1225-1232 (1997);
H. Svensmark, Influence of cosmic rays on Earth's climate, Phys. Rev. Lett., 81, 5027 (1998).
Recent research have shown that CO2 might not be the most important gas in global warming, but rather methane and soot are.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/images/climatec
Icecore drillings in greenland have shown that the tempearture varies a lot and the global average over the last couple of million years which have been iceages, are 10 K lower than today. An intersting thought is that it might be better with a bit of controlled global warming(think terraforming) rather than another iceage. I live in Denmark and think that it is cold enough as it is.
(for people who understand danish have a look at http://www.glaciology.gfy.ku.dk/) IAMAPBNAGP (I am a physicist but not a Geophysicist)
More about Groupthink and how it contibuted to the destruction of Challenger here.
Merry Christmas
Technology Consulting & Free Downloads
UHH, I think you should check that out (the radiation that is)
the magnetic field is what keeps our atmosphere from boiling off from Gamma radiation emitted from the Sun.
Visible, Ultraviolet, and infrared light are not the only electromagnetic waved bombarding out planet.
as to the heat island issue, I will take it into consideration.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Why can't you be more like Diablo Canyon 2?
I think part of the problem is that most of us enjoy nature, the outdoors and the environment and most of us dislike some of the unethcial practices persued by industrialists in the previous century or so.
The knee-jerk reaction is to cry out that we need the government micro-regulate every aspect of industry to "save" the environment. However, this is just plain wrong and has hurt society greatly.
1) It has led to an entrenched system of government funded and institutional research that has little measurable accountability.
2) The regulations that have resulted from this have often made the problem worse.
#1) is the reason why Lomborg had such an easy time nailing them, and their response has been so hostile.
#2) is the reason that so many people instantly embraced his book (even without reading it in many cases.)
Consider the example of companies like Ford that promoted enviromental regulations to force used cars out of the marketplace, or other industries that when met with new and innovative competition cried out for environmental regulations that significantly increased the cost of starting a business in their industry. One of the worst examples of all is DOW chemichal - where Freon was outlawed the month after their patent expired, but DOW still held a new patent on the only known replacement that is scientifically speaking more harmfull than Freon was which scientifically speaking wasn't nearly as harmfull as it was portrayed to be when outlawed.
Ironically, the best solution is a free market solution. For example, in Communist Russia - they had a horrible toxic waste problem (compaired to the US) because industries had no motivation reprocess industrial waste into other products. Where in the US a large amount of waste was being resold to other industries for other specialized uses.
...get a bad rap.
Especially when one reads this from the Disclaimer on the ELF terrorist advocacy site...
The EarthLiberationFront.com website and the domain names earthliberationfront.com exists in the interest of free speech, freedom of information and public interest.
The information contained within EarthLiberationFront.com website and the domain names earthliberationfront.com is NOT intended to encourage anyone to do anything illegal.
(Did you just laugh out loud? I did. there's more...)
EarthLiberationFront.com website and the domain names earthliberationfront.com provide all information for education and research purposes only.
The information, views and opinions contained within the information on EarthLiberationFront.com website and the domain names earthliberationfront.com are not those of the owner or the site host, neither are they necessarily those of the maintainer or the contributor.
Like I said... cowards.
So, I guess they'd never lie, huh? I still don't understand why you're pro-terrorist trolling instead of going out and committing arson, AoT.
We'll eventually reach the end of our dirty industrial phase (without killing ourselves), and begin a green nanotech phase where we're not forced to rape resources in the conventional top-down way, because we've got complete control over 100% recyclable matter, and where we can actually reverse all the environmental damage we've done at the molecular level.
The majority of corporations/people will always take the option/path that produces the most profit with the least amount of effort. (Profit can be defined as personal pleasure/gratification and expenses can be defined as personal sacrifice.) In addition, a corporation's sole guiding principle is to maximize profit on behalf of it's shareholders. (e.g. if they can get away with it, they will)
Until the costs of not being a good environmental citizen are greater then the costs of being a good environmental citizen - corporations and people will not change their patterns. These costs can be raised through regulation or the exhaustion of resources, but as long as it is cheaper to make widget X through raw materials / dirty pollution / moving to a less regulated country, a company will make widget X in that manner or else they will be put out of business by another company willing to do so.
Green nanotech phase is a nice wishview, but unless the economics are cheaper then traditional pollution-heavy methods, it's a non-starter. Even then, it's a stretch to believe that corporations will sink costs into repairing past damage of their own free will.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Why?
In the same article, Pournelle describes SETI as "religion," rather than science.
Breakfast served all day!
I agree with you that Cato doesn't have right-wing positions on all issues. For example, they're against the drug war, against the Iraq war, and against the erosion of civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism.
I wouldn't say that people who don't know this are "terribly, terribly ignorant" though. The reason I say this is because the only time they're in the news is when they're being used as another prop by right-wing extremists to support whatever outrage they're committing that day. Like all Libertarians, they're used by the right-wing to add a veneer of academic respectability when the right-wing agrees with them, and totally ignored when the right-wing does not agree with them.
BTW over 90% of americans believe in god. If that's not a failure of science to act as a candle in the dark I don't know what is.
Frankly you seem to be in the dark with respect to science and history. Belief in God's existence or non-existence are equivalent to scientists. They are philosophies that science can neither prove nor disprove.
I attended a state university in California. One of the chemistry professors was a local Roman Catholic Parish Priest. He also served as the Dean of the department for a few years. A belief in science and a belief in God are not mutually exclusive. If you bother to explore history you will find that many of the great mathematical and scientific shoulders we stand upon today were scholars seeking to understand "God's Universe".
Squabbles over whether the word "day" as used in Genesis refers to the 24 hours we know and love or refers to a block of time that could be billions of years long are political not religious. Politics exists in both the religious world and the secular world. I think you have confused factional religious politics with religion in general.
What you say is good.
You didn't read his post very carefully. He wasn't blaming global warming on "heat islands." He was blaming the rise in the data on heat islands. Since most official measurements are taken in cities or in airports not far from cities, heat islands do account for some of or all of the rise in recorded temperatures.
I had the unfortunate experience of having to enter temperature readings from 400 stations across the US and Canada from over a 50 year period. The readings from the stations at airports and near cities rose nearly 0.75 degrees C! The readings in more remote areas decreased by almost 0.5 degrees C! So, it looks like heat islands do explain the increased recorded temperatures, and we're in period of rapid global cooling.
...but then I noticed there is mod for "too stupid to realize that the poster he thinks he's disagreeing with is actually trying to say the same thing with sarcasm."
"Defend that conclusion"?
Well, it's been defending against real criticism by real climatologists who know what they're talking about. And it came out smelling like a rose.
Your comments about water vapor only demonstrate how little you've actually thought about the issues involved. The question is not whether H2O or CO2 cause the bulk of the effect. The question is: Which is changing and is that change producing an undesirable effect?
The Danish skeptics are being skeptical about the skeptic. Sounds very fishy. I wonder how the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty. Unfortunately groups like this tend to project what they are doing on to other people. BTW, a skeptic who is pointing out onesidedness on an issue will end up showing one sided data. Lets say group A fudged data 5% of the time. Well, if I were rebutting them them, I would show each of the times they fudged data...hence 100% of my cases would be about fudged data.
The biggest problem is that politically popular ideas rarely get enough rebuttal or public scrutiny. The fact that Dr. Bjorn Lomborg has been actively trying to poke wholes in the global warming argument is good for the debate, even if it is not the absolute best science. There is a lot of "not the best science" that goes on to prove politically popular causes, that rarely get called by Scientific Dishonesty circles.
If 1% of the people who played violent video games turned violent, then we would have a nation crisis. Even 1 in a 1000 would be scary.
Lots of kids posting here. They grew up with the orthodox dogma of 'Global Warming'.
One of the things that I remember is that the same scientists who 'proved' Global Warming' in the 90's 'proved' 'Global Cooling' in the early 80's. They even used the same data to prove both ways. The message was the same. If we don't dismantle western civilization, we're all gonna die. Back in the 80's, the position was that sea level would drop by about 60 to 100 feet, and that the glaciers would cover Europe down to Paris, and NA, down to NY within 20 to 30 years. So, is London or Toronto buried in year round ice yet? No, then maybe the 'Experts' aren't so expert.
Now these same 'Experts' are telling us that Sea level is gonna rise by 40 to 60 feet, and we're a gonna bake. Oh, and they're using the same data to 'prove' it that 'proved' that we are all freezing to death by now. I guess Lincoln was right. You really can fool some of the people all of the time.
I subscribe to Scientific American, and while I havn't read the book, the rebuttals that SA published were enough to convince me that whatever he said, he must have been right. He really hit a nerve. The tennor of most of the 'rebuttals' was basicly 'how could he question my work'. The worst for them was that he quoted most of them from 20 years ago, and today. Same evidence, diametricly opposed conclusions. The sense I got from the short response they allowed the author was that he didn't question thier conclusion, just thier methodology. (He showed that they fuged a lot.)
The editor of SA was really down on the guy. You have to realize that the for the Editor, this is his religion. There was no evidence that he would accept. The issue was a badly put together hatchet job. Result, It clearly showed that scientists are human, and often more commited to thier ideas emotionally than logically.
I see the same problem on both sides of the Evolution issue. It's a religion for both pro and anti. Not enough reasoned logic there. Maybe with the passage of time, as the old guard die off, the new guard will be less emotionally welded to the old dogma.
Global-warming believers (crappy term but I can't come up with better right now) blamed it on global warming.
Then this year is now the wettest in history here.
That's caused by global warming, too, I guess. Riiight.
Firstly, being a moderate does not mean that a person is unwilling to take a stand:
/moderate/ adj.
Moderate
4. Opposed to radical or extreme views or measures, especially in politics or religion.
Secondly, I'm unsure how such a man-centric view can even be supported based on what I know of Judeo-Christian ethics. It has been a while since I looked at a bible, but I seem to recall that Adam was set as a sort of caretaker of Eden in the creation stories (giving names and stuff). Adam was even directed not to eat a type of protected wildlife (a tree).
I also remember hearing many sermons on stewardship (usually coinciding with when they collected the yearly "voluntary" membership dues). If we are not stewards of this earth, then what are we? In this sense it is our duty to God to take care of the earth he has entrusted unto us. So go thee hence and some such...
Myself, I tend to stay away from religion (too much group-think, and since I'm no good at group-think I don't really fit in). So for me environmentalism is not a religion. I don't worship the grass the air or the trees, but I am sensitive to what I breathe in (of course I come home for christmas and my parents have put mothballs in every closet....ek...). I happen to like fresh air and fresh water. Walk around a city during rush hour traffic and tell me the air is healthy.
In short it's not about judeo-christian ethics, humanocentric views, God, god, or human rights. It's not even a matter of priority of man vs environment. It's a matter of what is best for man.
PS. Thanks for the straw man. I've always wanted one of those ^_^.
Just FYI, I'm about to go upstairs and fuck the living daylights out of my girlfriend.
Traditionally, we do something "new" on Christmas Eve, and I just thought I'd share this delicious moment of anticipation of you. 11:45. She's usually excited enough that she doesn't even want foreplay. Man...gotta boner just thinking about it.
This is always the best present!
- Gamma radiation is not impeded, reflected, refracted, or altered in any way by Earth's magnetic field. Magnetic fields only affect charged particles, which gamma rays are not. (Do you have any idea what they are?)
- The Sun does not emit significant quantities of gamma rays.
- A strong magnetic field is not required for a planet to hold an atmosphere (see Venus). Venus has only a small magnetic field and gets twice the solar radiation that Earth gets, but has 90 times as much mass of atmosphere.
You need to spend some serious time studying before sounding off. I also suggest turning off the radio when programs like Coast to Coast are on, and subscribing to informative periodicals. Discover isn't bad, but doesn't cover the kind of breadth you really need so I suggest Science News as well.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yep.
A climatologist researcher friend of mine was going along with the global warming consensus while he was running Global Circulation Models. Then he got deep into paleoclimatology and changed his position, because he saw first hand how terribly bad the historical climate record was, and what large, important conclusions were drawn from inadequate data coupled to very suspect indirect causation chains.
Other acuaintances of mine in the field, at least during the Clinton administration, would not publish their skepticisms and didn't want to be quoted by name because being a GW skeptic meant not getting research grants!
Another acquaintance doing research on increased CO2 on plant growth had trouble getting grants once he started showing very positive results.
Global Warming "science" is already highly politicized. And I put "science" in quotes because forecasting something 100 years in advance is not particularly scientific, given the lack of testability in reasonable time frames. Furthermore, there is a sampling bias in the models... huge amounts of assumptions go into models, many in what is called "paramterization" - which means literally sticking in fudge factors to account for many phenomenon either too fine grained, too poorly understood or just too hard to model to put into the program. Naturally, those models which can "forecast" the historical record tend to be considered the best ones. However, given the level of tweaking the models require, this is more likely to be a matter of chance than to indicate that the model is really correct.
Finally, what BL says about the Kyoto accords is true. Put in different terms, the change in temperature as a result of Kyoto would not be measurable (separable from noise) in 100 years. In other words, Kyoto does nothing to help the environment (the other formulation is to say it delays warming 6 years out of 100). If one pins down a knowledgable Kyoto proponent, they will admit that Kyoto doesn't achieve anything of significance with regard to the climate, but rather gives a start to what is really required, which (if you believe the IPCC models) is a reduction in CO2 emissions so great that with current technology it would destroy the economies of the world and result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 3rd and 4th world.
In other words, Kyoto was meant as a trojan horse (with goodies in there to make the US economy less competitive with Europe, and a complete lack of regulation of the largest and fastest growing countries). Its purpose was to get people used to suffering to reduce CO2, and to get agreements in place that could be used to tighten the CO2 rules over time.
Finally, many environmentalists believe in the "precautionary principle" which in effect says that if we suspect something might be harmful, but can't prove it, we should stop it anyway.
This sounds reasonable on the surface, until one realizes that it is applied to restrict CO2 emitting activity, but is not applied to the potential social impacts of those restrictions. In other words, precautionaryism (to coin a term) is okay for the environment, but potential harm to man does not receive the same level of caution. Furthermore, it is easy to extend the precautionary principle to end all progress. For example, the precautionary principle, applied to genetic engineering, would cause us to shut down all efforts in the area, because it is likely (yes, likely) that the technology will be used by terrorists to create dangerous pathogens.
On another topic, I read the Scientific American criticism of The Skeptical Environmentalist. It almost caused me to cancel my subscription after forty years. It was an poor excuse for a rebuttal - it was an attack on the person, BL, more than on what he had to say. It ignored most of his main points and where it found specific fault (and there was almost none pointed out), it was on trivial details. And yet, they only gave him one page to respond. Furthermore, the threatened him with copyr
The only good weather is bad weather.
Heat islands are areas which are hotter than their surroundings because they absorb and hold heat better; for instance, asphalt absorbs more heat than vegetation, and retains and re-radiates that heat for hours even after the sun goes down. Heat islands can (and do) change local thermometer readings completely independent of any regional or global climate effect.
Here is a good intro to heat islands. The home page has pointers to other data, such as causes and remedial measures. And yes, this was all on the first page of a Google search for "heat island".
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
no, he was saying that global warming data is inaccurate on the ground measurements BECAUSE OF urban heat islands.
"I've never understood either the greens or the far right. Why can't I have cheap energy, a high standard of living, and a clean environment?"
Because there is no such thing as free lunch and there is not an infinate amount of anything in the world.
Like it or not the economy is nothing more then converting natural resources into money. Natural resources are finite therefore it's a zero sum game.
Even productivity (which at first glance seems infinate) requires humans who eat, shit and need to be sheltered and machinery which requires materials and energy.
War is necrophilia.
It was interesting to note that some scientists took offense to the rebuttal that SA made of his book. The rebuttals called into question the statistics of respected scientists. Apparently the rebutting scientists didn't research there rebuttals very well.
I would like to salute the ashes of american flags, and all the fallen leaves filling up shopping bags.
If people actually went and educated themselves on the issues before forming opinions it would be the end of western democracy!
Much better to have voters like the guy on kuro5hin who informed me that he didn't need books to tell that the environment was messed up.
Clear, Dark Skies
... such as the Little Ice Age. Take a gander at this article from The Economist 12/20/2003; find it here. Not conclusive, by any means, but food for thought.
Quote:
"Three times in the past 2,000 years, there have been periods of cooling (most recently, the "little ice age" of the 17th and 18th centuries). These, he notes, followed the three largest known periods of plague, when the human population shrank in various parts of the world. The first period was a series of plagues that racked the Roman empire from the third to the sixth centuries. The second was the Black Death and its aftermath. The third was the epidemic of smallpox and other diseases that reduced the population of the Americas from some 50m to about 5m in the centuries after Europeans arrived, and which coincided with the little ice age. In each case, a lot of previously farmed land turned back into forest, sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and cooling the climate. As environmentalists are wont to observe, mankind is part of nature. These observations show just how intimate the relationship is."
Every rule has an exception (except this one).
is the new facism. It's not about saving the earth, it's about controling the way you live.
In particular, it explains why Lomborg was demonized when his actual conclusions are much milder than is suggested by his detractors.
Clear, Dark Skies
Of course it's unfair - it's a blatant hatchet job, which is peculiar coming from a publication that's been harping about the importance of skepticism for the past few years.
Their attack of Lomborg is why I won't be renewing my subscription.
Clear, Dark Skies
There's a good news article on this affair in the journal Nature (no ref handy, sorry). The authors suggest Lomberg was a bit selective in picking his data, but that he appeared to be earnest if nothing else... not an oil company pawn, for example. Still, the potential for abuse of his book in backing up terrible policymaking is a problem, especially when politicians with massive interests in the resource industry are running too much of the show.
Because it's hard to budget for the unanticipated cost of spending decades litigating whether or not your plant will ever be built or allowed to operate?
And who is doing the suing? Hmm?
Clear, Dark Skies
The Cato Institute is hardly a right wing organization. It says right there at the top of their web site "Individual Liberty, Limited Government, Free Markets, and Peace." Doesn't sound too much like the current right-wing administration at all.
Let's take a quick look at a few of Cato's recent "right-wing" ravings.
December 23, 2003: The Bush Betrayal, by David Boaz
December 18, 2003: U.S. Options in Iraq: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, by Charles V. Pena
December 4, 2003: Medicare Expansion and the Mirage of Fiscal Responsibility, by Doug Bandow
November 20, 2003: $80 Billion Pork-Barrel Power Bill, by Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren
As you can tell, the Cato Institute is clearly in GWB's hip pocket. In my opinion there are few organizations out there that consistently shoot straighter and truer than Cato.
Peter
Downsize DC Today!
including Shulsky, Bolton, and Wolfowitz. They have been one of the main outlets of Scaife/heritage funding, and have been given tons of influence of Fox News by Rupert Murdoch.
what problem are we supposed to be solving?
what's the problem?
You make no sense. Lomberg (not "lornberg") took the sensible step of pointing out that there is no absolute reference point for environmental science - there is no place or time that you can point to and say "this is when the environment was ideal and in equilibrium" because it never was - the environment has been and will always be in flux and will always suit some life forms more than others.
Given that we have no frame of reference, it isn't surprising that Lomborg said, quite explicitly, that all we can do is compare the environment of today with the environment of some previous time and get an idea of what's changing and where the problems and answers lie.
Finally, whether or not people are hyping environmental problems is actually the most important issue - hype and fear are what are driving things like arsenic regulations that won't save lives, while letting us ignore more rational and important changes we should be making, like raising fuel efficiency standards.
Hype and fear are what drives us to force 3rd world countries to stop using DDT as an indoor pesticide - condemning tens of thousands to malaria.
Hype and fear are what drives us to declare the "red wolf" to be an endangered species, when geneticists are quite certain that there is no such species - red wolves are simply what happens when the coyote and grey wolf ranges over lap. So again, wasted money and energy for zero benefit.
Finally, hype and fear are what are driving the Kyoto protocol when, again, implementation of Kyoto would severely harm the prospects of hundreds of millions of workers but would not, actually, prevent climate change.
Science via headlines is the cowardly trick of people who cannot tolerate peer review.
Clear, Dark Skies
Tehe! Whenever I hear this kind of environmentalist rabble, I can now clearly associate them with dihydrogen monoxide issues. The biggest green house gas in a newly discovered substance known as dihydrogen monoxide. Yet it is invisible to most environmentalists radar. They don't know it exists. Most media have never heard of it let alone mention it. Even if you were to mention that two thirds of the planet is covered with dihydrogen monoxide (or H2O as its commonly referred to) its somehow fogs out the core issues. There is plenty of steam in dihydrogen monoxide theories make it THE number one factor for global warming and since dihydrogen monoxide covers two thirds of the planet, there is nothing that anyone can or should be doing about it. Dihydrogen monoxide carries gigawatts of heat energy around the planet. It is responsible for all the heat retention of the planet and maintaining conditions suitable for life. Without it Earth would be cold and dead just like the Moon. Environmentalists leap at their sceptics as heretics - but in their haste to preserve their funding, they can't address dreadfully simple issues like dihydrogen monoxide. I can only hope they grow up some day and admit their childish pseudo science was all a waste of money and not real science.
My 11-year old pointed out today that the Earth has warmed since the last Ice Age.
If you substitute "AIDS" for "global warming", you kinda sound like Ronald Reagan.
[o]_O
Should be:
If Slashdotters would learn to not trust 99% of the alleged facts returned by Googled results before posting, things here wouldn't be quite so stupid.
Heaven forbid a credible scientist should disagree with the idea of global warming. Mind you, I'm old enough that I remember being taught about global cooling as a Proven Scientific Fact(TM). You just don't dispute that kind of thing.
Except...
Just because something is taught as true doesn't make it true. The guy who first proposed plate tectonics was laughed at and now it's common knowledge.
The main problem with your three demands is that one of them, "a high standard of living," is impossible to satisfy. Regardless of whatever the current standard of living is, people always demand a higher standard of living: more stuff and cheaper. If this wasn't true, then the GDP could only grow at like, inflation + population growth, but instead it grows much faster. People aren't going to be satisfied with X amounts of stuff; they're only satisfied with more stuff relative to their neighbors (local or international.)
One of the fundamental tenets of contemporary capitalism is unlimited, never-ending economic growth as the keystone of prosperity. Unfortunately, no matter how little pollution you produce or how few resources you consume to fulfill the standard of living, you are eventually going to run out of SOMETHING. You can't grow forever.
Can you stick your finger in a light socket, and maybe energize your brain to the point where you can fathom that Cato is not completely right wing or left wing? Can you get out of the ideological fog that has murderer your critical thinking skills and comprehend what Libertarian means?
Geez, you people who see the world only in a monochromatic way are so pointless. I just wish there was a way to make you understand what an ass you are.
Growing pains. We're like birds shitting in our nests before we're big enough to leave it.
We're going back to the moon and we have sent probes to Mars.
Hopefully it won't be too long before we go to Mars in person.
The technologies necessary will help us process environmental damage and recycle our ecosystem.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Gamma radiation is not impeded, reflected, refracted, or altered in any way by Earth's magnetic field. Magnetic fields only affect charged particles, which gamma rays are not. (Do you have any idea what they are?) Gamma Radiation doesn't reach the earth's surface! Why? Because it is block, refracted, and impeded by Earth's magnetic field! Any High School education should teach you this. What causes the Auroras? High energy EM waves that have been redirected to the poles. Other high-energy EM waves are absorbed! Geez, google it if you must
"It is pseudo-science to argue that a system as complex and chaotic as [a cohesive in-group]can be predicted with any accuracy over long periods of time."
"The fact is that such claims are unverfiable and irreproducable, and rely on [psychological] models that would respond as a model would be expected to but could have no relationship with the real world. Yet we're being asked to base our entire way of life based around flimsy assertions that cannot be proven or disproven scientifically."
Utter nonsense. Capitalism is all about finite resources. Capitalism, amongst other things, is about exploiting scarcity. You obviously know nothing about economics or the whole concept of capitalism if you think it hinges upon the assumption of "infinite resources". This is just the socialist back argument bleeding through the "pro-environment" smoke screen that so many "environmental" organizations are really pushing, when what they are really all about is anti-capitalism. Your argument is utter bunk and you have been misinformed about how economies really work, and what capitalism really is. Next time you hear an "environmental" group blatthering on about how "evil" "capitalism" is, just ask yourself what this has to do with the evironment, when socialist countries have caused terrific and sometimes unimaginable damage to theirs (The former Soviet Union is a great example of Socialist Ecology gone amuk).
The structure of a countries economic system has nothing to do with it. As there are Socialist countries that have managed their ecologys well, there are also capitalist nations that have done likewise - and the inverse is true as well. Your suppositions is just one part of the larger agenda pushed by socialists that have taken over the environmental movement because they know green language raises money and can be a great tool for manipulating people towards other ends. The argument for or against socialism has nothing whatsoever to do with environmentalism. Those social and economics systems have proven to be no better or worse at managing the enviroment than has capitalism, although some of the worst ecological disasters of all time occured under socialist governments. Regardless, its a completely moot point. Its about the environment, not the economy.
Python
Technically speaking no, but practically speaking there is a nearly infinite source of power, and its called the Sun. It'll still be burning long after the human species is long gone.
Python
Why do you never have mod points left when you find a post like this one's parent ?
The pollution problem is simple: there's way two
many mammal bipeds on this planet. Either the
breeding frenzy of the third world is stopped,
or at some point nature will take care of it
in her own way (and it's not going to look
pretty). Hail AIDS!
I find it strange that Lomborg calls the panel's criticisms "mudslinging" when they make substantive criticisms. That's convenient rhetoric for him to adopt. Conservatives are experts in mudslinging though. Witness the comment from the scientist from the Cato Institute calling the panel "the keepers of the environmental-gloom paradigm." That's real thoughtful scientific criticism. Luckily, the current Danish government looks likely to lose badly in the upcoming election. Then maybe these politically motivated condemnations of the work of the Committee on Scientific Dishonesty will stop.
The Presidnet is form the Green party! Er, nope.
The Senate is under control of the Green party! Er, nope.
But they have many Senators, er, not really.
And Representatives! Er nope.
Funny way to pursue power: point thinks that are clearly wrong and guide politicians to fix them.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is just that US politics have moved so far to the right that there are many people like you that no longer understand where the left is.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That is part of the problem.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Gees what do they teach people in school these days. Nope, not much gamma from the sun and even so it would act like the mag fields were not even there since those mag fields only affect charged particles. Sorry, but to be blunt you have no idea what you are talking about. The original poster is right on the money.
Bitter and proud of it.
One of the fundamental tenets of contemporary capitalism is unlimited, never-ending economic growth as the keystone of prosperity. Unfortunately, no matter how little pollution you produce or how few resources you consume to fulfill the standard of living, you are eventually going to run out of SOMETHING. You can't grow forever.
And why not? Why can't productivity and technological growth guarantee ever higher standards of living? I'm an economist by training and I understand that TANSTAAFL. But that is a static concept. It says nothing about the economies long term prospects.
FreeSpeech.org
Like it or not the economy is nothing more then converting natural resources into money. Natural resources are finite therefore it's a zero sum game.
Nonsense. What if we convert natural resources into capital goods that can then be substituted for the natural resources? You are making the same mistake that the classical economists made. You assume that the economy must use fixed ratios of capital, labor, and natural resources in its production function. But technology growth makes it easier and easier to produce more using higher ratios of capital to natural resources. The past 400 years of steady growth show that the economy is far from a zero sum game.
FreeSpeech.org
Given the abject poverty of the third world, they are hardly the cause of all pollution. We in the 'civilized world' pump out way more than our fair share of pollutants. The difference is that we pump out less harmful pollutants. However, it's a little disingenuous to blame the third worlds mass breeding habits for it. The fault is actually the industrialized second world - China and India.
I don't know what libertarians you are talking about, but for the ones I know it's simple: If it's not in the constitution, it's a not role for the federal government. This is not a religious statement.
Liberals claim libertarians ignore the fundamental nature of humans. Liberals ignore the fundamental nature of government with their ivory-tower logic. The founders of this country well knew the nature of government when they wrote the constitution.
Libertarians merely point out that if the government is not limited by the constitution, then government has unlimited power(which we are all seeing). The constitution can be changed at any time when society asks for a bigger role for the federal government.
How the simple request that the laws of the constitution be actually applied to the government became associated with the bullshit described above is beyond me.
I suspect from the tone of your letter that you are a do-gooder progressive that doesn't want all your good works to be constrained by any law.
Libertarianism is NOT a religion and not based on utopia. READ THE CONSTITUTION. OBEY IT OR AMEND IT. Real simple. Not a religion.
P.S. 'Extreme libertarianism' is a progressive weasel word use so the sheep will turn off their brains and stop thinking principles (where we actually have many agreements)
I'm not a weather guy or climatologist so I can be dismissed as being totally clueless. Nevertheless about 15 years ago, when global warming was beginning to get hot, I had the pleasure of falling in with a bunch of academic climatologists who looked at weather from a very long perspective. Their take on global warming was that the data was thin but that the proponents of global warming didn't really know their science. Their take was as follows:
- We are coming out of a small "ice age"
- The last optimum was about 1000 AD when Baffin Island could be circumnavigated most of the year - we not that warm yet.
- There was a "climatic optimum" about 6000 years BCE where the earth was about 5 degrees warmer on average than now. Equatorial jungles extended up through the Arabian peninsula.
- 12000 years BCE was an ice age.
- We really don't have enough data to definitively say anything about long term climatic change.
Educate yourself about different political ideas sometime. The change will do you good.
He agued against their ideas and conclusions.
In response, they attacked him personally, calling for his dismissal.
This is enough for me to conclude that he is right and they are wrong.
The sound reason is this:
By attacking him personally they have, in so many words, conceded that their arguments are unable to stand on their own merits. While logic alone cannot decide human arguments (subjectivity always reduces to solipsism when using logic), in this case it is logical to infer that if they themselves really believed their positions held merit then they would argue them based on those merits. Instead, they immediately resorted to trying to personally destroy anyone arguing against their positions (by calling for Dr. Lomborg's dismissal). Talk about having a chilling effect on scientific inquiry and the free and open exchange of ideas...
Observational:
Though this is not a strictly scientific method of determining each side's validity, it is good enough for me because it has a long history of observational evidence showing that it is a reliable method.
Merry Christmas A.C. (for good reason that has already been demonstrated)
You forgot that the UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol requires that some countries (Annex II) pay for climate studies (gee, if climatologists state that humans are causing global warming then they get more money...) and for "damage" caused by it.
Notice when reading those documents that the glossary states that "global warming" means man-made global warming, so the entire document is not considering natural climate.
Take another look at those "climate models". Pick any of them and see how many "significant" influences they state are not well understood or not included.
...and remember that the climate having warmed or cooled does not indicate the causes.
It is interesting that those models now can explain the cooling from 1945-1975. Too bad they don't explain why half of the warming since 1900 happened before 1945. Because 80% of the fossil fuel burning happened after 1945. Why did the Earth warm as much before the CO2 appeared as afterward?
that is what I said moron.
.5 degree C drop, according to another poster in this thread, in the temperature over time.
let me talk slower for you.
10% weaker magnetic field means that gamma radiation can push farther into the field. more of it hits the upper atmosphere causing an increase in the temperature of the upper atmosphere.
Ground temps on the other hand are miss calculated because the readings are made in cities which Hold in heat in the materials and slowly radiate it. when you take temp readings outside of cities, there is actually a
Global warming is not real. Weather pattern are changing because of the heat island issues and the jet stream being effected by different temperatures in the upper atmosphere caused by the mechanism described in the first paragraph.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it's not just the committee on scientific dishonesty, which is incidentally a highly respectable danish quango that has thoroughly derailed Lomborg's career. Every reputable scientific journal has poured scorn not only on his conclusions but on his methods, his choice of data and his analyses. It's corporate pseudo-science of the most depressing kind.
this is from Nature, for example:
"It is a mass of poorly digested material, deeply flawed in its selection of examples and analysis."
and from Scientific American:
"Even where his statistical analyses are valid, his interpretations are frequently off the mark."
For the whole story I recommend Mark Lynas excellent overview. It's not impartial, as the pie incident will quickly make clear, but it's very thorough and he knows his stuff.
ps. the only positive article I've seen with any depth was in Wired at the height of the bubble, and can be summarised:
1. burn everything
2. think of something
3. ???
4. profit!
oh yeah...replace Gamma radiation with Solar radiation...same mechanism, just wrong thing hitting earth.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
"The past 400 years of steady growth show that the economy is far from a zero sum game."
You are not looking at a big enough picture. Sure the economy has grown in the last 400 years but it has done so at the expense of natural resources.
There is less oil in the world then there was 400 years ago, less trees, less clean air, less clean water, less minerals in the ground, less fish, less fertile soil, less plants, less animals.
As I said economy is the act of turning natural resources into money. We took oil, trees, water, soil, plants and animals and turned them into money.
War is necrophilia.
I was born and raised in Alaska and I have had the wonderful opportunity to travel all over this great state.
I can tell you with authority that environmental groups have an agenda and often lie about issues.
Remember a few years back about a group of scientists seeing open water at the artic circle? The news groups and many environmental groups jumped all over this as proof of global warming. What the articles did not mention is that open water in the artic circle is normal. Ask any of the scientists studying artic weather, not the biologists on that personal sight seeing cruise.
How about the Tongass? Is anyone aware of the fact that the state of New York harvests more timber than the entire state of Alaska?
Yet people make it sound as if "Big timber" is raping the Tongass. I am not aware of any substantial timber operation on public land in Southeast Alaska.
Anwar is another good one, those pretty pictures of the Brooks Range near the coast that drilling will destroy? I fly into Deadhorse on a regular basis and you can't even see the Brooks Range from the coast as it is almost a couple of hundred miles inland. They call Anwar the last pristine wilderness in America, which is a joke as Alaska is nothing but pristine wilderness. Alaska is a state 1/5 the size of the continental US or 2 1/2 times the size of Texas.
Any issue regarding Alaska is turned into a political issue, like the Cold bay gravel road to and all weather airport. Clinton personally got involved in that one. A seven mile gravel road requires the personal attention of the President of the United States?
The gist of all of this is that Alaska is good fund raising material for many groups
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What we've got right now is an establishment of Environmentalism as the new worldwide government sponsored and supported religion.
Michael Crichton said it best in a speech in September.
In other words, the Cato Institute is composed of anonymous cowards who like to arrogantly defend the nobility of the organization with which they're associated, yet prefer to not identify themselves? Pardon me if the credibility of your argument escapes me.
Yellow skies are bad? For whom? Why? How much "yellow" is bad? Adding acid to water can have a buffering effect to neutralize alkalis dissolved in the same - as any aquarium owner can attest.
And, you say clear skies are good. For everyone? Not for plants that wither in direct sunlight, nor animals that depend on a good amount of rain to thrive.
You make the same argument global warmers make - warming is bad. Why? Because it's change. Yet in the past the world *was* much warmer than it is now and, inevitably, it will someday be much colder, too. At which point shall we freeze this natural cycle, in order to conform to your idea of a "reference" ecosystem?
Ditto for extinction and preservation. What, exactly, is preservation good for, except preventing evolution?
Originally, the earth's entire biosphere was anerobic. Are you saying we should strip the oxygen from the atmosphere and return to that as a starting point? After all, that was the best possible biosphere for anerobic life forms - creatures now unfairly restricted to a few niche ecosystems.
Clear, Dark Skies
...an ad hominem attack by "mabu" combined with an attack the messenger fallacy is somehow better? Get over yourself. I just don't have a regular account here.
You rest on a truism, while I attempt to come to a useful conclusion. Yes, it is true that oxygen was toxic to life on earth when it first came about. Yes, things have undoubtledly been worse in the past, and will probably be worse in the future. BUT. But. Maintaining conditions favourable to the current life on earth is a good thing. Moreso, it is essential for our future existance as a species. If you find the prosepect of humans dying out to be of no consequence, then you lack the instinct for survival necessary for any discussion of such matters.
you stupid!
People keep trying to portray the question of greenhouse gas emissions as one of finding incontrovertible evidence that global warming has already occurred.
That's completely missing the point. Emitting increasing amounts of greenhouse gasses will inevitably cause climate change in the long run--it's elementary physics. And by the time significant changes to our climate have happened it will be too late to do anything about it because carbon dioxide takes centuries to clear from the atmosphere. The only prudent thing to do is therefore to reduce greenhouse gas emissions until we can have definitive proof that increased emissions are safe.
Someone who claims to be an authority on climate change should understand this point. Either Lomborg just doesn't know what he is doing or he is deliberately trying to confuse the issue for political reasons.
As for Lomborg's dismissal, I see no problem with it. Even if Lomborg weren't someone who ignores the facts and who has a political ax to grind, government-appointed committees are intrinsically political. The Bush administrations dismisses scientists whose positions they don't like with regularity. Why should pro-pollution scientists be any more protected than environmentalists from political forces?
Crichton wrote a bizarre book called "Travels" that consists of short pieces that supposedly detail his travels in the outer world to exciting destinations (like scuba diving with sharks) and his travels in the inner world with psychic phenomena like spoon bending and aura reading.
This book bugs me because either Crichton, a trained doctor, either believes the crazy stuff he talks about (even channeling...anyone remember that?) or is a huge liar. Does anyone know if this book is a hoax? If so, why did he do it? If not, is he nuts?
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
... hope you don't claim to be a scientist.
"During those days there was a measurable difference in the diurnal temprature variations due to lack of contrails."
The above statement, except the part in italics is possibly true. The "measurable difference" is only if you choose your margin of error to favour what you want to believe.
And that adjustment of data is what makes climate change and human involvement such bunk. Case in point: if we understand the atmospheric chemistry so very well as to make the dire predictions of our effect on it, why are we continually surprised by it(auroras at unexpected heights)?
It seems the height of presumption to believe that we humans, greatly outnumbered as we are by numerous other species, have anything but a local impact on this huge complex planet. Signs of our passage, like cockroach droppings, may be everywhere but it does not mean that we are having any effect in the grand scheme.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
This is a bit outside the bounds of where we started, but a lot of people don't understand what a huge difference it makes whether your system is a "winner take all" system or a proportional system. In a winner-take-all system, there is always going to be a strong tendency for people to choose (and identify with) one of two major parties, because a vote for anyone other than the top vote-getter (in each district) is essentially worthless as anything other than a protest vote. Groups which would otherwise attract minor support (10-20 percent of the voters, for instance) are going to vote for the major party which is closest to their positions, because they know that depriving that party of their votes would be an advantage for the other major party which is the worse choice from their point of view. In this way, it's very hard for a third party to EVER emerge with serious support.
In a proportional system, though, a group which attracts 10 percent of the overall vote will have 10 percent of the seats in the legislature. Because of this, there is an incentive to support minor parties if they truly reflect your views. Even if that party doesn't have enough votes in the legislature to pass any legislation, it is at least "at the table" when issues are discussed and the bigger parties have to make deals to win its votes.
To take my 10 percent example, let's assume that 10 percent of the voters all over the United States voted for the congressional candidate of the New Idea Party. Because the top vote-getter in each district wins off, the New Idea Party is left with zero votes in Congress. In the same situation if we had a proportional system, the New Idea Party would end up with 10 percent of the seats in Congress.
There are advantages and disadvantages of each system, of course. The proportional system is good for representing minority opinions and making it possible for new ideas and new voices to be heard. The disadvantage of the proportional system is that it can give tremendous power to minority parties when there are to larger power blocks competing for their support as part of a coalition. It also tends to give power to people with new and untried ideas fairly quickly. In the winner-take-all system, stability is the advantage. Radical new ideas must reach a very high threshold of acceptance before they have a chance of winning (by which time one of the major parties will probably have hijacked a watered-down version of the idea, preventing a "pure" form of the radical idea of gaining more traction. The disadvantage of winner-take-all is the flip side of that. It's hard for change to happen when the major entrenched parties get far off course.
Personally, I would tend to favor a proportional system, BUT I have to say that could be because 1) I'm a risk-taker, and 2) My political views are very much in the minority.
One thing that I've found interesting is that the UK has managed to have to major parties for many years without any of the splinter parties gaining major power. That's not the common pattern in countries with some form of parliamentary rule. Since you're in the UK, do you have any thoughts about why that's true?
Does any of this take the following into consideration? I'm just wondering since I only remember hearing about this in mid-late December.
Soot More Culpable in Climate Warming Than Expected
The fatal flaw is assuming that the human race will continue to burn hydrocarbons in the same old way for an entire century. We went from a shaky theory of atoms to nuclear fission in 40 years. We went from horses, oxen, and wood fires to coal in much less than a century. Then coal in turn fell to liquid petroleum distillates in the blink of an eye. Photoelectric bandgap devices (i.e., solar cells) went from exotic laboratory gadgets to consumer commodities in 50 years; their quantum efficiencies went from a dismal few percent to ~50% over the same time period. The uncertainty of the human variable is gigantic; even on a logarithmic scale we'd have no idea where to put the error bars.
The Kyoto Protocolists are idiots because they treat human activity as an exact constant, when the reality is an exponential curve with no anticipated inflection point.
Russia voted it down because the United States voted it down... get your facts straight
Yes, I have argued before [see section "In 1910 They Thought They Knew the Future, Too!" that forecasting that far in advance is absurd.
Oh, also the "science" of global warming prediction involves some degree of science, but hardly any degree of scientific confidence of correctness. There are too many variables (the most important involve water vapor and clouds) which affect earth's albedo and which are sufficiently hard to predict that the science is no different from magic... we might as well roll old bones to predict that actual effect.
Another serious problem with the whole thing is the fundamental assumption that we should not cause warming. That is a theological argument to some extent. Further, one should do a cost benefit analysis to see whether our efforts should go into adapting to warming rather than trying to prevent it with silly treaties which have massive economic effects and virtual no climate effects.
The only good weather is bad weather.
Probably why political systems like Scotland's and Japan's use a combination of first-past-the-post (winner-takes-all) and proportional measures; one gets the stability and accountability of choosing directly one's representative, as well as giving voice to minority opinions.
The UK does use the first-past-the-post system, actually, even though it's parliamentarian. On the opposite side, France has a presidential system with a proportional parliament. The reason some minor parties survive in the UK for so long probably has to do with historical background: the Scottish National Party in Scotland and the Plaid Cymru in Wales represent ethnic nationalists wanting greater autonomy from the UK, while the Liberal-Democrats were descendants from the Liberal Party that used to be the major progressive party until the rise of Labour in the 20th century.
HTH, and Happy New Year!
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut