Slashdot Mirror
Aussie Climate Scientists Receiving Death Threats
An anonymous reader writes "With the Australian parliament beginning the debate on setting a carbon price, climate scientists are reporting an increase in threatening phone calls and even death threats. The threats are serious enough that several universities have increased security for their ecology and meteorology researchers. The Australian government is seeking to introduce a carbon tax by July 2012."
...a guy isn't safe checking his wet dry hygrometer in the morning.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
No.
Next question?
To the people making threats:
The scientists' work has already been published. They can't revoke those publications no matter how much you threaten them. You may discourage them from publishing more work, but that doesn't take back what has already been said. On the other hand, you may also make them more zealous in defending their cause. This isn't only bad for you, but it's bad for science. Either way it's a lose-lose situation, so use your conscience and don't make threats.
Yo. Conservative checking in. There's no hatred of science. There's a dislike of fudged numbers, BS, doom and gloom, including the usual "If we don't..." and "we'll be drowning in 10 years, no wait 30 years, no wait 80 years!!11!" that people get tired of. That's not forgetting the refusal to disclose publicly funded data, and then spending years tying up the courts over that pubically funded data. And so on either while refusing FOIA/SOI requests either. Nah. I know it's difficult to accept, but damn. But I suppose you can't fault groups like greenpeace(among other groups) turning around and trying to get their fingers in the pie either. I mean they sure have gone out of their way to invent BS to get written into the last several IPCC's.
Then again, perhaps I could simply say ah liberals. Actually going out and attacking people, including attempting to assassinate them when they don't like their political ideology. Which is sadly much closer to the truth. The US sure has had no shortage of liberals running amok in the last 6-8mo physically attacking conservatives that's for sure.
Also tip: I'm a canuck.
Om, nomnomnom...
There's a dislike of fudged numbers, BS, doom and gloom, including the usual "If we don't..." and "we'll be drowning in 10 years, no wait 30 years, no wait 80 years!!11!" that people get tired of
Good thing you don't ride a bike to work like me then because its a never ending stream of "if I don't do something now things could be really bad for me in about five seconds".
For me managing the planet should be like riding a bike. I keep an eye out for developing problems and take action when I think something might kill me. The fact that it hasn't so far doesn't invalidate the assumptions I make.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
In the beginning, there was only climate science.
Then came some skeptics, and all was well. And the discussion was between scientists.
Then came some denialists, and all was not well. The discussion was now between politicians.
Now come the death threats, and all is getting worse. The discussion is now between activists.
What's next? Violence? And a 'discussion' between armies?
I'm so glad to see that a lack of knowledge does not hold the world back from taking violent action.
-- Is there any record of a scientist who threatens a religious leader for not agreeing with the Books of Science?
Many activists are more interested in making grand gestures and gaining status within their own organisation, than bringing about actual change. Even terrorist organisations tend to follow this pattern.
And scientists (who want to abide by the law) can't defend themselves using guns...
It appears you are building a straw man so you can have a burning. The sheer idiocy of pretending that all of the people in any one occupation are exactly the same will become clear if you actually think about it.
Are these the same guys who've been refusing SOI/FOIA requests because they claim that their work which is publically funded is 'proprietary'? Or are these the same ones from aussieland that made up the shit including forging the emails that they were being harassed.
No and even if they were that wouldn't justify sending them death threats. Also it doesn't seem to have come up on Slashdot yet, but the CSIRO has opened a site at http://www.csiro.au/greenhouse-gases/ where you can view the raw information about green house gas concentrations that has been collected in Australia.
Then again I can't really feel too much sympathy. People will only take a decade or two(maybe three) of doom and gloom based on fudged numbers, and corrupted policies. Especially when they realize that what you're proposing will effectively bankrupt the entire country and turn it into a 3rd world dirt farming nation.
Step 1. Build a global conspiracy supported by every major research organisation world wide suggesting that emitting large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is going to affect the climate and don't forget to suppress the voices of the brave and heroic rouge scientists and oil company researchers who attempt to reveal your conspiracy.
Step 2. Have governments world-wide introduces nation-bankrupting schemes to charge (some) people who bump lots of carbon into the atmosphere for that privilege.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!
Or something like that right? Looking at other countries, like for example NZ, which has a very very similar scheme to what is being discussed in Australia, the results so far have been positive, or is that just more misinformation?
Hell you don't even need to believe in climate change to see the need to encourage the uptake of more renewable energies. Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years. In the meantime as demand continues to rise, prices will go up and countries which don't have alternatives will hurt (a lot in the nation bankrupting sense).
So science should be ignored, as it never deals with proof. Kinda hypocritical as you're reading this on a computer. So it seems you accept science when you want to, and dismiss it as sensationalist bullshit when it suits you. You also seem to have a very perverse idea about climate science and the scientists involved in that field. Which in itself is strange, as your actions ("fuck it - it's wrong") would only be a valid position if you had a solid understanding of of this field.
Diabolical super-criminals with a grudge against weather scientists are pretty rare. Stupid ones are much more common.
I think these guys are probably safe - basically if someone holding a gun in one hand and a picture of you in the other asks you if you're 'you', point the other direction, say "I think I saw him go that way" and just keep walking.
How many carbon credits can i claim if i kill someone?
Gotta be worth something... They won't be producing carbon ever again. Just maybe some methane as they rot.
And there were just those two threats, five years ago, eh? No. You need to get your information from other people than Andrew Bolt. Followup to TFA:
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/opinion/editorial/general/change-of-attitude-needed-as-debate-overheats/2194216.aspx?storypage=3
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
You're talking about data submitted to the scientists by tree rings, right? Or by drilling cores? Or satellites? I'm sure those lazy satellites are just making stuff up instead of measuring it! Just like those evil weather stations all over the world!
If there was only one line of evidence that climate science was based on, you might have a point. But it's not.
As the facts continue to mount against them, these groups...
Climate change skeptics
Evolution denialists
"Birthers" (USA only)
become increasingly more extreme due to cognitive dissonance. I guess the end is when they can no longer even separate the facts from the messengers and having lost the factual battle seek to strike back in any way they can.
How pathetic.
Yea, the research universities use data from tired overworked coasties.
Not.
Anyways, even if you guys made up all of the data statistically some of the data would trend in the other direction also wouldnt it?
Have you thought this through?
No, OK. That explains alot.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
So the plebeians will rant and rave about how great science is when it makes their life easier and more productive (internet, modern medicine, manufacturing efficiency, productivity) but when it shows them changes need to be taken that will cost them a tiny fraction of their annual salary they go nuts. The greed of the average citizen in a capitalistic society knows no bounds.
While I think it's great people want to get involved with the environment, stop and think about this like a computer scientist.
If carbon dioxide produces global warming, we will run into problems as the ratio of humans to trees changes. Soon we will have more humans than trees, which means more carbon dioxide than nature can re-absorb.
The only solution is for us to use less land, and have more trees on it, which requires we have fewer humans.
We're like an obese person on a sofa who can't stop spreading out over the whole thing. Soon there will be no sofa left, only fat. What then?
Futurist Traditionalism
They are, but the "Liberals" (just a name; they're actually the conservative group) have been adopting more and more American neo con tactics. They actually invited over several key Tea Party and Republican strategists to discuss tactics in private. Let's not forget the Rupert Murdoch owned newspaper "The Australian", which despite losing money year after year is subsidized by Murdoch to parrot right-wing talking points (see the National Broadband Network "debate"). Australia's media has consolidated and is failing them. The NBN will change that, but for the time being it's a real problem.
Hey, didn't British send their common criminals to Australia, religious nuts and crooks to America? With only two latter conditions being hereditary? Australians were supposed to be the sane ones!
TFA
University of NSW senior psychology lecturer Jason Mazanov said the emails were indicative of a ''closed room'' mentality where people have lost all sense of what is normal.
They must've been originated from America: with this big space available, the Australian can't stand closed rooms...
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
What reports are you referring to here and why should you expect scientific predictions (which are usually couched in error bars and scenarios) to stay constant in the face of new evidence or better modelling? And your appeal for raw data is particularly laughable, given that it's the usual gambit that deniers throw out as if it's all some vast conspiracy and if only scientists would spend every waking moment satisfying specious FOIA requests this conspiracy would be revealed.
And you're so sure because? Of what. A two letter word? Sorry doesn't wash. "Climate scientists" in australia have been doing the same thing as their colleagues have been in the UK, US, and in Canada. Refusing to disclose data including methodology for years.
Actually they have been disclosing their methodologies for years. As one would expect from papers submitted to various peer reviewed journals. That isn't quite the same as feeling inclined to satisfy arbitrary, time consuming FOIA requests from armchair bloggers who want the data merely to nitpick it. It's funny how the so-called "climategate" email leak didn't unveil some vast librul conspiracy. What it did reveal was a bunch of scientists bitching in private about armchair bloggers wasting their time with specious FOIA requests.
Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years.
Rest of it is half plausible, but running out of uranium in the next few hundred years? using fast breeder reactors? not likely.
It is still finite of course, but it will last a shite sight longer than all the other things you mentioned by almost an order of magnitude.
Go find a medical researcher who works with animals and ask him for his death threat collection....
Think again. Instead of trying to fix real existing threats that we have in front of us (waste management, water resources, starvation, pollution, etc.), the goal is to have a CO2 tax for something we aren't sure about. And we're not talking about banishing fossil fuel cars here, and replacing them with electricity, which would be the first thing to do. No, just tax them... Tax everyone, make a bank of the world which will be privately held, and go with that, continuing to pollute the world. If you think that will save you from dying, you are mistaking!
We aren't talking about "armchair bloggers", but about real scientists. Vincent Courtillot, a geologist (so not a climatologist) asked the university of East Anglia, and they really were hiding behind copyright, just as how they wrote on the leaked emails. VC isn't exactly just bloging merely to nitpick, he built his own data sets from many weather stations, and found very different results, simply because he couldn't get the original data sets from the AR4. Yes, they disclosed for a part their methods, and then we saw the leaked Pascal source code having some fudge factor written by hand, with no way to know where it came from.
All the above isn't joke, and you can't just dismiss all these facts because you trust blindly only one side. Recognize that it's a highly politicized field, and that we should be extremely careful reading each results, and we SHOULD ASK and CHECK FOR THE DATA. There's no other field on science where this doesn't happen. Why should we do an exception for climatology?
Please don't reply with insults, I'm sick of it, and FYI, I'm not on any side of this, I just think a CO2 tax isn't a good answer, and that currently, there's NO consensus and we should ask for more research, AND THE DATA that goes with it.
Your first paragraph can be summed up as "My one data point is so much more trustworthy then thousands of scientists." I refuse to address this point because it cannot even stand up on its own.
Your second paragraph says that scientists should instead focus on making another planet habitable. SO scientists can terraform an entire planet, but we as humans cannot cause any inadvertent change in our own environment? That is the argument du jour. That the changes we are seeing are completely natural. If there is no possibility that we as humans have caused these changes, then what hope to we have to terraform a entire planet.
To use a slashdot favorite heres a car analogy. I can probably fix a lot of little things on my car, but I don't have much of a hope building one from scratch. The Earth is our car, it is so much easier to fix what we got, then it is to build a new one.
That doesn't even touch on the fact that this generation, and I'm willing to guess the next few generations, will never live on another planet/moon in large numbers.
This has nothing to do with being conservative, this has to do with ignoring science in favor of a gut feeling.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
This doesn't address (or even acknowledge) my argument at all.
If you have one line of evidence, it may be flawed the way you suggest. But if you have several independent lines of evidence, and they all show the same trend, that's not something you can account for with inaccurate data collection methods (i.e. what you described).
Just by having lots of independently run weather stations, your made up data would be averaged out unless the majority of operators just happen to make up the same trend in their measurements.
The anger and hatred isn't over the science. It's about taxes. People get tired of being taxed to death. Here in the US they had terrorists throwing tea in the harbor over the tea tax back a few years ago. I think they were the neo-cons who started the whole tea party thing.
If we were doing the right thing we would stop burning brown coal tomorrow and live without power for a while. The carbon tax is very nearly the least the Government could do. What should happen is that polluters should pay the full cost of the pollution they create so that cleaner energy generators can compete. The carbon tax is a small step in that direction.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Same with the tea-baggers as well...
This is blinging
Climate science and particle physics both depend on large amounts of data, theoretical models, and lots of computer power. They are at the leading edge of their disciplines and their standards are more or less identical. Are you saying that, pari passu, particle physics doesn't meet the standards set by classical mechanics?
I conclude that you are not really a physicist or a chemist, or you would not be so ignorant of the kind of research that goes on nowadays.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Because liberal groups would never send death threats to scientists right?
The point of view that the people who send death threats to scientists are mostly conservative would be news to scientists involved in animal testing.
There is an excellent reason why climate scientists are being targeted personally. This is -- and has been -- the deniers' game plan all along.
The evidence for AGW is scientifically fairly certain, but powerful vested interests have attempted to derail regulation and legislation, firstly by lobbying, then by paying shady PR outfits to do "doubt mongering" and whip up the unhinged elements of the political Right.
Now that governments are paralyzed, the vested interests hope of tackling climate change have been foiled, by the climate action lobby appealing to the public directly.
The logical counter? Vilify climate action activists and climatologists, depict it as yet another battle of the Culture Wars, and whip up the lunatic Right into an even greater frenzy -- and make it has hazardous and dangerous as possible to advocate action on climate change.
The WORST thing we can do right now is back down in the face of abuse, vilification and threats, because if we do, then the oil majors and Koch Industries wins.
> Yo. Conservative checking in. There's no hatred of science. There's a dislike of fudged numbers,
The problem with the "dislike of fudged numbers" theory is that no-one has ever been able to show that the numbers have been fudged. Climate change has been a hot topic for more than 25 years, and even after all that time no-one has been able to provide and convincing evidence that there is a conspiracy to present false information as fact. Even the infamous East Anglia e-mails showed no evidence for a plot to defraud the world. The reality is that after nearly a generation of trying the extremists have not been able to provide any evidence to back-up their claims of fraud. At some point rational people accept the fact that they were wrong and move on.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
weather stations all over the world!
Our cutter was one of those weather stations. 98% of the time the data we gave out was bogus. Obviously some data is good. My point was one should not place blind faith in what people are telling you. You should question assumptions, and the validity of the world view.
So, who got court-martialled?
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-07/
Always do the opposite of a conservative, especially the "freedom-loving" libertarian types.
Opposite? So I can't cheat on my wife with my young male interns? Or have, as I like to call them, "Tickle Fights"?
I8-D
And how do you intend to make them stop doing it? In case you missed it, that's the entire point of taxes on pollution: they gradually raise the cost of polluting until it's not economically feasible anymore. Simply legislating that coal-fired power plants had to be switched off tomorrow would be a disaster, because there's no transition plan. A tax that increases every year at a predictable rate lets people depending on coal have a predictable point where it will no longer be feasible and plan accordingly.
More importantly, it gives a financial incentive to be the first person to switch. If you say 'no more coal in 10 years' then there's a strong incentive to let everyone else pay the R&D costs of developing and deploying other technologies and then roll out your own version in 9 years, for much less since everyone else has helped push the economies of scale. If you start taxing and keep increasing the tax rate, then someone who switches now saves a lot of tax, while someone who switches in 9 years pays a lot more.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Also, planes don't fly. At least not in a deterministic fashion: Navier-Stokes is a differential equation. Non-linear, too.
Really, objects don't move, as this involves differential equations.
Clearly, thermodynamics are wrong, because it is as differential equations (or large numbers and probabilities, if you go the quantum route).
You have no clue what you are talking about: you assume that the solution must be steady state. You have no way of knowing that. In fact, you ought to know Sol cycles, so steady-state solutions are certainly wrong.
You have no clue what you are talking about: If I tell you that we are all going to die, with a certainty of .999 in 30 years, give or take 20, the proper reaction is not, in fact, to claim that as the error bounds are large, this must be bullshit.
The proper reaction is to say: oh, we'll prepare for the worst case, then.
Of course. Any responsible citizen will call the cops after they've been mugged/raped/stabbed/shot/burnedwithfile/killed.
Amazing!
FTA: "One researcher told of receiving threats of sexual assault and violence against her children after her photograph appeared in a newspaper article promoting a community tree-planting day as a local action to mitigate climate change."
Death threats for planting trees? WTF?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
You mean this data?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
It's very clear from a quick google of Vincent Courtillot that his opinions are not held in high regard by climate scientists. Indeed one of the leaked emails suggests Phil Jones rejected one of his papers as "awful".
Of course Phil Jones doesn't like Courtillot, because he has a complete different opinion as his, and he is giving out numbers, curves, and plausible scientific explanations on what he says, WITH the data together.
Therefore why should a scientist bend over backwards to satisfy his requests?
Maybe because:
- It may give a chance to anyone to prove or disprove what has been researched
- It is what everybody does on all science field
- Because your dislike of someone who doesn't agree with you isn't a scientific argument
- Because it's public financed research
- Because it's the only way to do a satisfying peer review
I do agree that some protocol should be put in place for scientists to release data and in return to be immune from being pestered by FOIA requests but that's a separate topic altogether, and certainly does not imply that absence of arbitrary-data-request-being-satisfied that somehow it implies conspiracy.
Come on! Nobody is pretending we are in a James Bond movie. We are just saying that the head of the IPCC is refusing to have his work peer-reviewed by people he dislike, or who will have enough knowledge to redo all the calculation and maybe disagree. That's important! It's not at all what you just wrote. We aren't just talking about the average scientist here, but THE HEAD OF THE IPCC, Phil Jones. To date, we still don't have his data (unless I'm mistaking), even after the leaks. Shame on these researchers.
The UEA emails don't reveal any "smoking gun" at all, just a bunch of scientists engaged in technical, mundane and occasionally bitchy chitchat with their peers.
It does reveal however that Jones doesn't like his opponents to peer review his work, and is hiding behind copyright.
Let me quickly give you an example. In China, there's a lot of electric bikes. I mean A LOT. In Beijing, it's even forbidden to use any kind of motorcycle if they don't use electricity. But in France, if you want to sell a bike on the market, it has to be "electricity assisted", which means that you have to move your legs, and not pressing a button, to have the electricity motor to kick in. Otherwise, it's considered a motorized vehicle, and has to comply to all sorts of regulation. The result? In China, such an electric bike is sold for 200 Euros, but in Paris, the starting price is 2000. There's a justification on having prices higher in France, but not that much: it really is because of the regulation. I suspect that you'd see the same kind of policies in other countries as well (otherwise, how come we don't see electric bikes everywhere, when they are so common in China?).
Pushing for a tax on CO2 emissions by vehicles is only part of the needed regulation, and we're skipping all the part that makes it possible to afford having electric.
It's not about science, it's about sacrifice. People are perfectly fine with science, as long as it either benefits them or is neutral. But the second some government talks about asking them to pay higher taxes, forgo some luxury, sacrifice jobs, etc. based on some scientific finding (legitimate or not)--well, WATCH OUT!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I guess that is what happens when you are setting the standards which will eventually be used to tax people out of the ability to earn a living. I am an eco-freak, but honestly if as much effort had been put into developing space travel, or cold-fusion as has been put into extorting people out of burning fossil-fuels...we'd have already cleaned up the detritus from the ills of the industrial revolution, entered the post-nuclear age, achieved super-luminal speeds, and be well on our way to starting another Earth somewhere by now.....
-Oz
"Banishing coal electricity really is possible" Sure it is if you are willing to ignore the consequences. The majority of electric power on the globe is generated by coal. Remove coal from the equation and at a minimum you are reducing global power production by 50%. Can you see the population of any country, especially the leading industrial countries, putting up with this? No power means no jobs.
I accept that there may be a good explanation for the following, but I have never encountered one. If you examine the adjusted versus raw USHCN and GHCN temperature data, the Adjustments have a steady upward trend for the last century. Why? Using naive averaging with the USHCN, the adjustments are just enough to bring the spike in the 30s below the spike in the 90s, while the raw data shows the 30s as marginally warmer. This pattern is deeply suspicious.
It's especially suspicious after the debacle about the Darwin station in Australia that Watts pointed out. He was accused of cherry picking, and realclimate.org proceeded to cherry pick their own data to show no warming trend in adjustments for a subset of weather stations. His single station choice demonstrated how hard it was to determine exactly why a given station was adjusted the way it did. Since his accusers were focusing on cherry picking, there was no reason to avoid using all stations to see if their was a pattern, except that they didn't like what using all stations demonstrated.
What the east Anglia emails did show was scientists who believed in a particular explanaion, didn't really know what was going on as well as they claimed, and who were disinclined to work with anyone who questioned their data or methods. They did adjust presentation of data to fit narratives, and used tricks that other climate scientists said they never did, like combining temperature data and proxy data into one curve. Stonewalling is bad even if it isn't some sort of plot.
Why did they do this? Because proxy data was demonstrated to be unreliable by what they call the divergence problem, but they didn't want to give up their tree ring data because they didn't have anything better to fall back on. If you calibrate data against one set of hypthetically linked data (pre 70s), then find that it doesn't match against a different set (1980+) it's not legitimate to pretend your calibration is correct. The inconvenience of giving up all the data you've been working with for a decade doesn't make it OK.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Let me ease your doubts. The energy required to propel a bicycle nicely is about 200 watts, 300 if you wish to go extra fast or are climbing hills. Electric motors are pretty efficient, lithium batteries are also pretty efficient in charge/discharge. 5 hours of use (more than you get from one charge, but bear with me) gives you about a kilowatt-hour of energy. Double that, just to be really generous, and call it 2 kilowatts. That's 25 to 30 cents worth of electricity, to travel 60-80 miles. You can also roughly estimate the amount of fuel burned, from the cost of the energy. 30 cents is not much fuel, meaning not much pollution (and it is burned in power plants, which benefit from economies of scale in their pollution control). Another way to look at this is that if you could eat "gasoline", you'd get about 600 mpg on a bicycle, and electric use is comparable to that in scale.
"Range" depends a lot on the design of the bike and how you use it. Electric-only, when the battery is dead, you're stopped. "Assist", you can keep on going under your own power if you need to, which gives you a range (in my experience, on a cargo bike) of about 65 additional miles. The battery weight is not that big a deal, on a bike that is designed for it. Put it this way -- you're not stranded, like you are in a car.
Climate change policy is about redistribution of wealth and globalization, not saving the environment.
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, " -- Ottmar Edenhofer, UN IPCC
It is a tool for those seeking power, nothing more.
Instead of trying to fix real existing threats that we have in front of us (waste management, water resources, starvation, pollution, etc.), the goal is to have a CO2 tax for something we aren't sure about
...and when people try to solve those problems the same people whining about how global warming is a myth suddenly argue that waste management isn't a problem and only commie pinkos care about water conservation, and how poor people should starve because they deserve to and how pollution isn't a problem.
One could conclude then liberals are not very tolerant of differing viewpoints.
Didn't read TFA, didja? Or are death threats a sign of tolerance of differing viewpoints?
The goal is minimize production of CO2, not to stop using petrol. If we tax petrol to the point that coal-based electricity is cheaper, we're still producing CO2. By taxing CO2, you get everything at the same time, at the correct ratios. It even becomes possible to invest in technology to extract CO2 from coal fired plants, for example.
Howdy, there --
I'm an e-bike enthusiast. To put it briefly -- pedal-assist adds very, very little to the price of a bike; it's a sensor and slightly more smarts in the controller, all of which are very well-understood and widely implemented. The biggest difference between Chinese e-bikes and those seen in premium markets is the components used -- Chinese e-bikes, because they're built to be powered principally by the motor and to be motorcycle replacements rather than recreational equipment (albeit recreational equipment with a huge amount of utility value), can afford to use heavy, inexpensive, lead-acid batteries (which also are hard to dispose of cleanly, but that's a separate discussion) and cheap, low-end components that weigh a lot and result in poor ride quality. French and American e-bikes cater to a different market -- people who cycle by choice. As such, the demand is for a lightweight bicycle with excellent handling and high-end components that one can actually enjoy pedaling -- although there is no mandate for users to pedal in the American market, an e-bike you couldn't assist with your legs would be an absolute flop. Li-Ion batteries are expensive. High-end bicycle components are expensive -- my last truly high-end e-bike came with a wheelset made in France that retailed about $1kUSD and an internally-geared hub made in Germany that retails around $2kUSD (and is considered the finest available).
It's a completely different market, driven by a different kind of consumer. Of course the prices will be different -- the products are nothing like each other.
I make point A. You reply no, look, it's A. Thus whoosh. See also sarcasm.
I don't agree with your 4 steps, so I have produced my own 9 step plan below:
Step 1: Recognise energy security as an issue of vital national interest
Step 2: Incentivise grant feeding egoists in academic ivory towers to produce the evidence required to help you promote your energy policies
Step 3: Vilify and denigrate anyone who does not agree with the paradigm, including equating them with creationists and holocaust deniers
Step 4: Construct idiotic renewable energy targets that cannot possibly be met without shutting down 90% of your entire economy and building 500,000 windmills
Step 5: Refer anyone who questions the paradigm to realclimate, an activist website run by Al Gore's Fenton Communications
Step 6: Completely ignore academic misconduct in support of your paradigm, including but not exclusively inappropriate use of statistical methods
Step 7: Retire before new research shows that atmospheric sensitivity to plant-food trace gas CO2 is barely perceptible, that sea levels aren't rising above trend, that Earth's thermostat is controlled by the complex interplay between ocean/sun/cosmic rays, clouds and water vapour
Step 8: ???
Step 9: National bankruptcy
No. My point was precisely what you are saying. Using sarcasm I implied that if the originator of the thread was right, than aeroplanes would not fly. And certainly we could not build them.
Because his original point was that you cannot solve things which involve differential equations, because then they become non-deterministic.
Which is silly, and wrong. To which you clearly agree.
BTW, yes, I also am a great fan of the relativistic magneto-hydro-dynamic version of the NS equations you use to model supernovae. But this is not relevant. Yes, NS is one of the most intriguing set of equations. Yes solving them numerically is absolutely a great research field. BUT THIS IS BESIDES THE POINT.
Then publish a paper at a respectable journal. What's the problem? Your arguments have been refuted, and it's easy to check it with Google.
And I've actually professionally worked in the field of climate modeling, including working with hydrological data, weather system simulation, etc. You might not realize, but we literally have hundreds of various datasets and nearly ALL of them scream 'AGW!!!'.
It's feasible that, say, meteostations might have flaws causing artificial upward trends, it's feasible that our hydrological records are somehow skewed, it's feasible that our satellite records are flawed (though it's difficult to imagine how) and that the recent upswing of hot weather records is just a fluke.
But it's not feasible at all that ALL our datasets are in error. That would require truly bizarre circumstances, bordering on world wide conspiracy involving hundreds thousands of people.
Because he's prepared to ignore real science because the findings are changing. The fact it's changing, to him, seems to imply that he should ignore it. I pointed out that science doesn't deal with facts, just evidence.
Nothing in your post addresses the real issue : to be considered valid a theory has to make correct predictions. That means a climate theory, like the ones laid out in AR1 to AR4. AR1 to AR3 make predictions, and the predictions of AR1 and AR2 are wrong. There can be no debate about this. They are as wrong as 1+1=3. They do not match reality. AR3 is at the very edge of it's confidence interval, and not looking good. So your reply is ... "but AR4 is so much better". Sorry. I may owe you an apology in 10 years, but for now the IPCC has to rebuild it's credibility, and that means making correct predictions for *at least* 10 years. Is that such an unreasonable demand ?
This is science. If what you say were true and "we know" then why do research at all ? You're putting theory before measurements, which is a cardinal sin in the exact sciences. You have a "beautiful" "obviously right" "fantastic" "simple" .... theory ? Great ! Let's measure ! Awwwwww .... no match. Sorry, get your ass back to the drawing board and try again. No matter how many reasons there are to believe in the correctness of your theory, it's "God" who decides. It either matches nature, or it doesn't. The IPCC was claiming *in 1990* to be able to predict the climate 100 years out, their longest lasting predictions lasted 12 years ...
And then there is AR4. AR4 was written quite recently. It predicts the solar cycle oscillation is the universal eternal gospel truth, continuing from 3 billion years ago until kingdom come ... and this effect is now predicted to stop. Nicely done guys ! And you refuse to make predictions. Well sorry. As I said, claiming this is science is borderline fraud. At a physics conference, you'd get a "friendly referral to the applied sciences" (which is not a compliment).
"if we drop co2 production, climate change won't happen" is an extreme exaggeration of what they are saying. In the first place, it's already happening and that's well documented. What they are really saying is something like "the sooner and more drastically we curb the rise in greenhouse gases the better the final outcome will be".
I don't agree that's the message they're spreading, but even this message is completely wrong. The co2 added by humans to the atmosphere, counted against the total volume (from all the years we have been seeing global warming) ... is negligible. All the co2 combined is but a minor player in the whole atmospheric forcing phenomenon. In other words, stopping co2 prediction will cause a almost invisible delay (invisible in climactic timescales : 30-50 years, maybe even less). The end outcome will be exactly the same. We just get a little more time. There will not be 1 mm difference in the sea level (according to their own - very inaccurate - models). We're in an exponential feedback loop according to their models and stopping co2 production will merely stop the cause of the loop. That's great and all, but again, it is about as effective of slamming your foot on the brakes when the car is already over the cliff.
So how about the message becomes "we're over the cliff, too bad, and it's probably this-or-that-guy's fault, but right now our only option is : let's forgive and forget about the cause and start thinking about the landing". But nobody's interested. Assigning blame, forcing others to implement popular agendas, that's what's important, not the science, and most certainly not solving the problem.
We all know why we're focusing on the cause, assigning blame evokes a sense of guilt, which means a lot of people consider themselves guilty and feel the need to implement the greenies' agendas as "repayment" : it doesn't help, in fact it makes things worse, but it is the excuse greenies use to force others to implement their pre-existing ideas, no matter how useless or counterproductive they are. The only thing the climate tre