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The Limits To Skepticism
jamie found a long and painstaking piece up at The Economist asking and provisionally answering the question: "Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong?" The author, who is not named, spent several hours picking apart the arguments of one Willis Eschenbach, AGW denialist, who on Dec. 8 published what he called the "smoking gun" — it was supposed to prove that the adjustments climate scientists make to historical temperature records are arbitrary to the point of intentional manipulation. The conclusion: "[H]ere's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand. So for the time being, my response to any and all further 'smoking gun' claims begins with: show me the peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating the error here. Otherwise, you're a crank and this is not a story. And then I'll probably go ahead and try to investigate the claim and write a blog post about it, because that's my job. Oh, and by the way: October was the hottest month on record in Darwin, Australia."
Oh .. .and where I live it began snowing earlier than ever ... mid october and is now experiencing the coldest temperatures in recorded history.
In my Inconvenient Truth Analysis, I point out how Al Gore and/or his graphic designers use a set of information design tricks to try to increase the visual impact of their money slide. For instance, on the right side of the chart you can see where they overlaid one set of data (the red peaks) over another (the blue peaks).
So what European country will be first to make "AGW denial" a crime?
Look. These guys are wrong, ok? So just say so. Once. And then move on. Do eminent geographers launch into frenzies of analysis whenever some loony asserts that the Earth is flat? Acting defensive just makes you look defensive.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
... where I live it began snowing earlier than ever ....
And where I live, we have had the coldest early December in about 20 years. It must be caused by all this global warming.
All theory is gray
... and demonstrated the anonymous Economist author was a little short of the facts.
This is Slashdot. We have to believe that that there is something sinister going on with the author's name being withheld, so that doubt is cast on the article and therefore AGW in general. Namegate! NAMEGATE!!!!1!!1
Please, please. See a great talk from David Deutsch at TED towards the end he talks about global warming, very interesting point of view.
And no, I'm not a climatologist, but neither I'm uneducated and will not bow before ANY priest of ANY religion.
Show me hard data; show me the experiments that prove your theory and I will certainly and humbly accept whatever it is you are saying.
Now, if you want me to just take you word for it, sorry. No can do.
In the 1970's the then current and accepted theory by the high priests was that pollution (i.e industrial waste gases) was going to freeze the Earth. Now it is going to burn it.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Science will always have it's fame whores and agenda driven hacks, on both sides of any issue.
Climate Science looks an awful lot like Social Science, mounds of data with statistics offered as proof.
If there are not results that can be reproduced in a controlled experiment I can't call it science.
Even if the worst scenarios turn out to be true there is no excuse for totalitarian world government.
It took a real world war to end the airplane's patent wars. - Fâché Rouge -
An AC typed something into a keyboard. Amazing.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Why was this modded flamebait?
Because he's using his ignorance of the field of climate science to imply that the peer-review process is no better than a religion. If you can't see what's wrong with that, then there's something very wrong with you.
The scientific community is still a human institution, and thus vulnerable to the various human weaknesses.
That's right, they are, which means that no matter how good the system is there will always be some who abuse it. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that the system itself is no better than one which is based on faith-based acceptance of dogma.
To put it another way - sure, in any democracy there will be people who take advantage of the political system to give themselves increased wealth and power at the expense of others. That doesn't mean that democracy and fascism are the same thing, even though there are plenty of idiots who will tell you that they are. And those idiots would get modded "flamebait", also.
Of course, you should also point out that scientists at universities are funded by government grants. It's hard to get those grants if you say something that the politicians don't want you to say.
I'm willing to bet that you've never been to grants.gov in your entire life. I'm also willing to bet you didn't know the application proposals are reviewed and approved by scientists (not politicians). You're probably a non-scientist / non-researcher who's attacking a system you clearly don't know jack about, so you've attempted to compensate for your ignorance by filling in the gaps with your (incorrect) assumptions.
Happens to me all the time because I don't buy into the Slashtard groupthink.
No, it happens to you all the time because you don't take the time to think. As long as you insist on throwing emotional FUD all over the place, you're going to keep getting modded down.
Sorted out in the 80's? Oh really? Like when they were trumpeting oncoming ice ages? Come on man, are you really that fucking gullible?
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
You are so full of false assumptions you smell like manure.
B.S., and no I'm not saying you've got a bachelor's of science. lol.
Perhaps you should close your garage door, turn on your car, and hang out for a good 15-20 minutes.
Fyi, don't do that. I'll end up being investigated for causing you to die (because you are ignorant and gullible).
But... you might find some proof.
I just don't think the proposed "solutions" will solve it and I don't think that reducing output will stop it.
If a car is about to hit a kid, and you dont think you could save him would you walk away without trying?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
For some reason I don't think going, "Lalalalalala, I can't hear you" instead of refuting the points they bring up is going to engender somebody to change their viewpoint, rather the opposite.
Sounds like you are talking about the "warmies", except that they are usually considerably ruder. When it comes to anything which does not fit with their claims.
It starts and ends with congress. And last time I checked, congress is a nothing more than a bunch of politicians who were able to make enough promises to get elected and will tell whatever it takes to gain more power and get reelected.
Mmhmm. And when's the last time you saw a politician drying to drum up scare tactics to get votes?
"Oh my god, the gays are going to destroy marriage, elect me so I can stop it!"
"Oh my god, there's going to be world war 3, elect me so I can stop it!"
"Oh my god, your kids are going to get sold drugs in school, elect me so I can stop it!"
"Oh my god, your house will be worthless in the crash unless you elect me to push more fiscally irresponsible bullcrap!"
"Oh my god..."
And yep... "Oh my god, the world is being destroyed by global warming, elect me so I can stop it!"
Don't tell me the leftists in Congress, and the people they've appointed to their pet agencies (which ALSO have to justify their existence... for example, the EPA has a lot less work if there's not doom-and-gloom, the-sky-is-falling crap they can use to bludgeon people) don't have a reason to push grants with a specific agenda.
Much like Al Gore. Gore testifies that both of his "businesses" are "carbon-neutral", and that everybody else had better get "carbon-neutral" (the "math" of which is just pure horse manure) too. Surprise surprise, Gore's businesses are all about selling carbon credits. He gets rich off scaring people, pure and simple.
Somebody earlier mentioned "this is why we have peer review." The unfortunate problem here is that the CRU emails show a deliberate campaign to subvert the peer review process. Any journal through which anything contradicting AGW got published had its reputation mercilessly attacked. Any shitty little crap journal which published pro-AGW papers suddenly found its lot improving as the CRU group started to pump their reputation up.
If the peer review process is subverted and not honest, then you can't take peer review seriously. That is the point we're at now. At least on the topic of "climate science", there is political suppression going on that has nothing to do with the facts, and rather than examine their own research for flaws and admit they have them, they're trying to hide the flaws and going out and pushing sensationalist nonsense in order to make it easier for politicians, and politician-appointed bureaucrats, to use the sensationalist nonsense as a way to scare people.
AGW is not real science. It's a political industry. Sad, but true.
Here's an idea: if you believe the GP and the majority of people who believe as he does are irrational, haul out your global climate data sets and indicate why they're irrational.
All climate data can do is show that things are changing. It says nothing about why.
It's also a big "problem" that ice core data shows that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration follows temperature. You can make a case from this data for warming "causing" more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But this data also shows that varying atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration does not affect temperature to any significent degree. The whole AGW theory thus appears to be without any foundation.
Thank you for taking a more reasonable look at why many people don't really buy into AGW. For me, I don't really have the time to fully evaluate the claims that the earth is getting warmer and that it is mostly due to human release of CO2. IMHO, for things like this, we can never really be 100% sure about it - it's more of a question of how confident we are in the whole chain of events, that the earth is warming, that the warming is caused by human activity, and that the results of this warming will be catastrophically bad. What are you prepared to do about it based on your level of confidence in the theory?
I may not know much about climate theory, but I do know a little about power production technology. The important part to me is that I have no confidence that human society as a whole will be able to achieve a meaningful reduction in CO2 output. Even the current debates, which are mostly for stuff like reducing the rate of increase of CO2 output or holding the output rates to a level of a few years ago, have gone nowhere, and as far as I can tell, if you fully buy into AGW, those levels of reductions will accomplish nothing at all. None of the solutions that the big AGW advocates have been pushing really work - solar power, wind power, electric and hybrid cars have no capability to give us a really meaningful reduction in CO2 output in the context of AWG theory; even if they manage a 10% overall reduction, which I highly doubt, it still won't change anything. The best thing we can do to actually reduce CO2 output is to build lots more nuclear plants - they are a pretty mature technology and they work right now, and each one can fully eliminate a gas or coal plant which produces tremendous amounts of CO2. But even if we went all-out on that, I still don't think we could take enough fossil fuel plants offline fast enough to even slow down AGW.
If you wanted to actually reduce CO2 emissions enough to make a real difference, you'd have to turn off all of the fossil fuel power plants and abandon all of the cars, trucks, trains, buses, and ships, and do it all right now. You'd have to reduce human society to a 18th century subsistence farming level of technology. Trouble is, there are 6 billion people on the planet, and we can't feed them all with subsistence farming. If you really want to do this, then a LOT of people are going to die. Like billions of people. The Holocaust, the Gulags, Mao's mass murders, all of it is just a drop in the bucket compared to what this would cause. Even nuclear war probably wouldn't kill that many people. And you'd also be saying goodbye to the technology what would allow us to save ourselves from all of the other potential threats to human society out there.
It's pretty damn hard for me to believe that even if AGW is real and the results will be catastrophic, that it will be that bad. I say we keep doing pretty much what we're doing right now and rely on our ever-increasing technology to prevent or mitigate anything bad that actually happens.
I'm also affected by the behavior of the big AGW pushers - if these guys really believe that AGW is happening and that the results will be apocalypse-level bad, then why are they always flying private jets to ritzy conferences where they drive around in limos and SUVs, producing more CO2 than some small countries? Why are they pushing things that won't actually reduce CO2 emissions meaningfully, but will make them rich and increase their levels of power and influence? It looks like they're just milking the theory for money and power. If they don't really believe it, then why should I?
I don't reply to ACs
Global warming legislation aims to be the largest power grab since the civil war.
And we all know how badly that one turned out. If only that war never happened, then slavery and officially sanctioned power-through-wealth could be still dominate in half the county.
Seriously, it's good to doubt the purpose behind all politics, but in this case, scientists were researching and warning against global warming even when Bush was president (and many of those scientists on bush's payroll were silenced for it). Beyond politically-driven scientific research, a vast amount of study comes from non-profit institutions that have no ulterior motive other than accurately understanding any given aspect of our universe, whether it's about the truth of planets orbiting stars or gaseous molecules in the atmosphere trapping infrared radiation.
Socialism, first and foremost, is about the government's control over the means of production. This is justified by the supposed need for equality. Your "minimum guaranteed quality of life" is a lie: once you make the electorate accept the need for a "certain minimum quality of life" for the "unfortunate", you will begin to continuously raise that minimum, until the "safety net" becomes a perfectly comfortable place for perpetual occupation. Still, the sheer power of the redistribution will keep giving you and yours such a kick, you'll never give it up voluntarily.
Another lie — intended for the already mentioned establishing and maintaining the power to redistribute ever bigger share of the nation's wealth.
Canada has the same geography — even better, for they don't have a northern neighbor (hint: the only time, the residence of the US President was captured by an enemy, the enemy was Canadian.) Santa Ana's Mexico was not a friendly neighbor either.
Brazil is even more wonderfully endowed — Amazon alone is a treasure trove. Unfortunately, they've dabbled with Socialism too much — some say, it is due to their being dominated by Catholicism. Either way, US is not unique in its geography. The GP is right about American exceptionalism.
Do start holding your breath now. Thank you.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Pretty much fucking sums up the "debate": climate science vs. propaganda, hosted on zero-standards websites. Seriously, check the publication standards on the places that host denier material, versus the original sources of legitimate climatology information. Scientific legitimacy, publication in Science or Nature is significantly more challenging than submitting an e-mail address and creating a unique user ID.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p