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US Coast Guard Ship To Attempt Rescue of 2 Icebreakers In Antarctica
PolygamousRanchKid writes "A U.S. Coast Guard heavy icebreaker left Australia for Antarctica on Sunday to rescue more than 120 crew members aboard two icebreakers trapped in pack ice near the frozen continent's eastern edge, officials said. The 399-foot cutter, the Polar Star, is responding to a Jan. 3 request from Australia, Russia and China to assist the Russian and Chinese ships because 'there is sufficient concern that the vessels may not be able to free themselves from the ice,' the Coast Guard said in a statement. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority's Rescue Coordination Centre, which oversaw the rescue, said the Polar Star, the Coast Guard's only active heavy polar icebreaker, would take about seven days to reach Commonwealth Bay, depending on weather. Under international conventions observed by most countries, ships' crews are obliged to take part in such rescues and the owners carry the costs."
Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah!
Along came an icebreaker and there were...
Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice. Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice, along came an icebreaker and there were...
Three blue ships, stuck upon the ice...
....to vaporize some of that ice with a couple of thermonuclear missiles
I could have sworn Antarctica only has a northern edge.
In one week will we be reading about how country X is sending an icebreaker to free the three stuck icebreakers?
Good thing it's summer down there. Wouldn't want to be stuck all winter. That would be a pain.
Always Ready
I hope this caused some synapses to fire.
Given that the Chinese icebreaker got stuck as a direct result of attempting to rescue (successfully in conjunction with an Australian icebreaker) the passengers off the Russian icebreaker, who pays the US icebreaker for the rescue of the Chinese icebreaker?
"The 399-foot cutter, the Polar Star, is responding..."
Hey, that's one of my favorite novels! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Star_(novel)
It's funny that the linked story is from fox news lol
How's that global warming thing working out for you?
You mean, for us? Not so well. Chaotic weather, not even, gradual warming over the entire globe, is what we can expect for quite a number of years.
Don't say that like you're not in the same boat as the rest of us.
I once got a chainsaw stuck in a tree trunk, 3 borrowed chainsaws later I got them all out. Thought I was going to end up with an expensive redneck garden art feature though.
10 STUCKSHIP=1
20 PRINT "Oh No!!! we have ";STUCKSHIP ; " ships trapped in the ice!"
30 LET STUCKSHIP=STUCKSHIP+1
40 GOTO 20
50 END
I don't know about you, but when it comes to the only livable planet we know of, and my current home, I would prefer we err on the side of caution.
An Western European led research vessel gets stuck in the ice. A Chinese ice breaker comes to the rescue. The Chinese ice breaker gets stuck in the ice. A Russian ice breaker with an international crew comes to the rescue. The Russian ice breaker gets stuck in the Ice. Now we have a US Coast Guard ice breaker on the way to save the day. The moral of the story? When you subtract nasty international politics from the equation, we really can get along.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The Ozone hole really was a problem in nz and australia, with skin cancer levels increasing, and people having campaigns like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGgn5nwYtj0 . Good thing CFC levels in the atmosphere have since dropped due to extensive regulation, and the ozone hole has started closing.
It would be nice if global climate change went the same way. Average sea levels are still rising, which is a bit of a problem in a place defended by sea walls and/or river walls. (like where I live. ;-)
Why would the US Coast Guard own any icebreakers? We don't have any deep ice around our coastlines.
It's interesting that you say "gradual warming over the entire globe" when global average temperatures are falling.
That suggests rather also that they chaotic weather is not caused by that, but instead by placebo, and that weather has always had extremes.
A expedition trying to prove global warming gets stuck in the ice?
Thank you for yours.
This bit here is pretty popular on the internet these days. Taking a single incident of global warming researchers stuck in ice and using the (rather remarkable) irony of that to debunk global warming as a whole.
My reply to that thus far has been something along the lines of me, using that same logic, being able to prove global warming is occurring by pointing out the 19% of normal snow pack in the California Sierra right now.
I am no environmental scientist, but I do know it's going to take just a bit more critical thinking than either of these two thought processes to figure the thing out.
Beware of the Leopard.
To be fair, the hole in the ozone layer only stopped growing because we actually succeeded in not pumping out CFCs.
Along came an icebreaker and there were...
Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice. Two blue ships, stuck upon the ice, along came an icebreaker and there were...
Three blue ships, stuck upon the ice...
I don't get it.
I was thinking the ice breaker was along the lines of ... "So, come to Antarctica often?"
didn't *require* the u.s. ship to travel all the way down there to perform the rescue. summary is fucked, as usual.
the u.s. is doing the rescue mission because it was asked to and because the u.s. government is in desperate need of good publicity for a change.
Hell, I remember when I was in grade school in the '90s, and we were constantly told of the horrors of the hole on the ozone layer that was going to burn us to death, and the rain forests that would be 100% destroyed by 1995
They didn't happen because people took measures to mitigate them. The ozone layer was disappearing because of CFCs. Now that we don't use them in spray cans and air conditioners any more the hole is shrinking and should be gone in another 100 years.
You're like the people who scoff at the Y2K Armageddon that didn't happen. It didn't happen because a lot of folks did a lot of hard work to keep it from happening.
Had everyone shrugged and done nothing like you propose with global warming the ozone would still be disappearing and the Y2K meltdown would have been serious.
Free Martian Whores!
What is wrong with you people? Seriously. Why does this even qualify as a decent troll argument? Winter is colder than summer, and summer is warmer than winter in the northern hemisphere, and it's the other way around in the southern. They're called seasons. The temperatures go up and down. They have nothing to do with longer-term climate change, which takes place over decades, centuries, and longer. Do you not understand the concept of averages? It's not like Antarctic ice is going to melt away in a century or something anyway. Annual ice melt is accelerating, but there's vast amounts left.
In this case it was wind, not temperatures, that has pushed the ice tightly together in the area where these ships are stuck.
Average sea levels are rising, but temperatures are falling, doesn't that rather suggest to you that (at very least) our models of what causes the sea level to rise, and at what rate, suck, and can't be used to reliably predict anything?
I think that right wing talking points jumped the shark years ago.
By the way, the Ozone hole was saved by concerted international effort. Too bad that was prevented this time around by a small band of billionaires and their useful idiots.
So weather wasn't chaotic before global warming?
It will be interesting to see what happens next year.
Tornado activity hits 60-year low
2013 Atlantic hurricane season wrap-up: least active in 30 years
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Love how, as soon as the USians got involved, the subject of payment came up.
Here's a graph that shows how you're looking at things. It's called cherry picking your data.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Do we know skin cancer is on the rise due to the ozone hole? There are many plausible explanations, so a simple rise in numbers won't cut it.
John
There are some complex facts that usually don't get dragged into this discussion because they make it so much larger. But some interesting facts to color the warming issue are:
1. We are currently in an ice age. The current Quaternary glaciation (i.e., the current ice age) started 2.5 million years ago.
2. Within that ice age, we are in an interglacial: a period of temporary(?) warming within the ice age. Our current interglacial is the Holocene epoch, which started 11,700 years ago.
But as long as we still have ice caps, we are still in an ice age. If the ice caps melt, we'll know the ice age is over and we're back to what is in fact more normal temperatures for Earth.
However, it can't be said that Earth's normal warm is necessarily good for humanity. After all,
3. Humans, as in the genus Homo, evolved around 2.5 million years ago. The same time as the the beginning of the current ice age. In other words, the adversity of the Earth's freezing put heavy evolutionary pressure on our ape ancestors.
So, cold = good? Well, remember the current interglacial started 11,700 years ago. Now that's interesting. The Old Stone Age begins with the first humans, that ~2.5 million years ago. But...
4. The Middle Stone Age started right around when the interglacial started. That's when humans first began to make more advanced tools, create advanced art, develop spirituality, etc. In other words, when things warmed up a bit, humanity began to flourish.
So what's good? Warm, cold, in-between? What's "natural?" 'Cause that seems to be extremely warm... unless you're talking about humans, then it's extremely cold. Or moderate.
Complex, eh?
Now, apart from global warming, the related issue that always gets short shrift is ocean acidification, which is also caused by an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere, and which appears to be a huge threat to life on Earth. But it's harder to understand than warming, so let's not talk about it.
Am I the only one reminded of this?
Yeah, no measurable warming unless you COOK THE BOOKS which they are STILL DOING.
But be expected to be modded down. Slashdot has been overrun by the "diggers" since they destroyed their site. You know, the HuffPost type. They like to have their set like a fake coffee shop, three "reporters" or "anchors" with their iFruit slave labor built trashtops all facing the camera DIRECTLY. Not at a 10 degree angle, but DIRECTLY at the camera to show off the Apple logo and hide their wiry bodies just enough to show off their short, spiked hair, nose rings, and peeved (for no apparent reason) and smug visages.
You disagree with our status quo "we're the victim minority" environmentalist idea, and you're an outcast. And an IDIOT.
So yeah, mod parent up.
People are also saying the maximum speed of cars have increased since early 20th century. Yet, when I look outside, I see plenty of cars standing still. Are we supposed to believe cars in 1901 had a negative speed?
No, it is dropping due to A: People taking better measures. B: the ozone hole closing. Regulation is fixing it.
Do we know lung cancer is on the rise due to cigarettes? There are many plausible explanations, so a simple rise in numbers won't cut it.
it really feels as if over-the-top global warming alarmism has jumped the shark.
It's GLOBAL warming. Not local warming. The fact that some random ship go caught in sea ice carries precisely zero relevance, nor does the fact that they happened to be studying global warming. While amusing and a bit ironic this ship getting stuck doesn't remotely constitute evidence against temperatures rising globally. Last time I checked the Antarctic hasn't thawed and thus it is a very dangerous place to sail regardless of time of year. There always is danger from ice in that part of the world.
We'll look back in 20 years and say, "Remember when that ship got stuck in the ice on their journey to drum up fear about receding ice?"
People who do that will basically be publicly acknowledging their ignorance of science. While it may turn out that fears of global warming end up being overstated to some degree, this incident is not going to be relevant in proving that fact one way or the other. Furthermore a cavalier attitude about something like global warming is incredibly dangerous. We only have the one planet to live on and if we want to keep living on it as a species we would to well to tread carefully.
go and look at Ozone depletion and see that the alarmism was worth it because the world did ban CFCs and the charts show the improvement since. What we need is global coordinated action on the issues of today
Icebreakers being stuck in ice doesn't say much about climate change - incidents of such icebreakers stuck in ice over many decades may say something. Don't confuse an incident with a trend
I am sure there are many stupid Americans in New England seeing how amazingly cold it is this week and mocking Climate Change. (I live in Central Europe and we have at the moment one of the hottest Januaries on record). Climate Change predicts weather extremes because there is more energy available in weather systems to push to hotter and colder extremes.
That thick ice in Antarctica could be an example of climate change if, for example, more ice is rolling off the land faster, or climate change has changed currents to push more ice into that bay. Only objective longterm observations can help here.
There are problems with Alarmism, but it was right with Acid Rain in the 1970s, leaded petrol and Ozone in the 80's - those problems were reversed - and the scientific community is in consensus that CO2 today is a far more serious issue and we need alarmism before we reach tipping points.
I would rather take action with alarmism, then do nothing out of cynicism while species go extinct and Africans and Bangladeshis try to emigrate in their millions.
Your facts don't suggest anything because they are in fact false. http://www.skepticalscience.com/going-down-the-up-escalator-part-1.html
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Those are interesting examples. In each of those cases, the problem was solved by actually doing something (for example, greatly reducing CFC emissions). So, if by "snap people out of it" you mean they should take active steps to reverse or prevent a problem, your examples lend good support to that claim.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
of people setting out to the pole at summer, to highlight the damage wrought by global warming, and then getting stuck in the ice, and then their rescuers getting stuck in the ice... it really feels as if over-the-top global warming alarmism has jumped the shark. Right here
It would depend on these people's IQ. If you start with for example 20 feet of ice, then no ship is going to get stuck in there because they can't get in. If it melts to 10 feet of ice and breaks up because of global warming, then they get stuck.
here's what i want to know about the "chaotic weather" claim.
let's just stipulate for the sake of argument that awg is real and the cause of
climate change.
what has that got to do with weather being "more chaotic". was there something magic about the way things were? or is this just nostalgia?
In this case it was wind, not temperatures, that has pushed the ice tightly together in the area where these ships are stuck.
Remember, the original stuck Russian vessel was retracing the steps of a century old expedition. Funny how Sir Douglas Mawson's Antarctic expedition didn't have this problem back in 1911 despite the fact that
in 100 years time when everyone is clamoring for the last planetary resources in Antarctica, it certainly wouldn't hurt the US claim that they were the only country 100 years ago who were operating a reasonable maritime presence in the area, everyone else kept getting stuck. Therefore oil belong to us bitches.
Let the ice win.
Everybody know's there's a 1998 spike. Who's cherry picking now?
This bit here is pretty popular on the internet these days. Taking a single incident of global warming researchers stuck in ice and using the (rather remarkable) irony of that to debunk global warming as a whole.
So long as you repeatedly and disingenuously take each instance as a single instance, you make sense. The problem is that there are quite a bit of instances, most poignant of which is that southern ice has been increasing for decades, even while the alarmists were pointing at single instances of the southern ice shelf breaking off as evidence of global warming.
....meanwhile the complete lack of any recent compelling evidence of atmospheric warming is explained away by claiming that the oceans are absorbing all of it in ways and with an efficiency that we do not understand.
If it is not important that Antarctic ice melt is this year the lowest ever recorded, then what are we to make of "warmest year", "most hurricanes" and other assorted alarmisms?
The thing about science is that its supposed to be falsifiable. Why is it then that real data is completely ignored in favor of proxy data that doesnt even correlate with the real data?
"His name was James Damore."
People will use any story to advance their ideas, goals. Never let a good tragedy go to waste. Make a possible plausible outcome with some unprovable scientific rhetoric, repeat it as often as you can - BAM: call to action. People fall for it because it makes the news, whose reporters couldn't spell objectivity with a dictionary and coincidentally have their own bias in their reporting.We are having record cold (East coast), I could use a little global warming about now.
Way to miss my point. As I said...
My point was that many, many people on comment threads seem to be disingenuously taking the single instance of the global warming researchers' ships stuck in ice as de facto proof that global warming is bunk. My point was not to debate the merits of either position.
Beware of the Leopard.
It will be interesting to see what happens next year.
Tornado activity hits 60-year low 2013 Atlantic hurricane season wrap-up: least active in 30 years
Yes it will. Or next week. That's kind of the point.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/unseasonable-tornadoes-in-midwest-damage-illinois-towns-killing-6/2013/11/18/36c26332-5064-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html
Congratulations for what will no doubt be the most idiotic comment attached to this story. Something we've come to expect from right wing science deniers.
1. The Akademik Shokalskiy was retracing the Douglas Mawson expedition conducted a century ago. The glacier in their vicinity was named after Xaviar Metz who died on the expedition. It's notable this original expedition was not by ship. It is the subject of David Roberts's book "Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration"
2. The ozone layer hole issue has been ameliorated because the nations of the world got together and banned the CFCs that were causing it. Amazing how science works, eh?
3. You must have a really bad memory. Or maybe you are just a liar. Nobody was predicting loss of rain forests by 1995. Brazil has 5.4 km sq of rain forest, since 1970 they have lost about 10%. Long term it's an issue, which is being addressed by legislation.
But if you zoom that graph way out you'll see that we're cooling. It's called cherry picking your data. Looking at the data in 5-year increments tells a different story then looking at it in 50 year increments tells a different story then looking at it in 500 year increments, tells a different story then looking at it in 5000 year increments and on and on and on.
We are too dumb to understand climate. Any one who calls themselves a climate expert is a huge liar, unless they put it in the context of being relative to the rest of mankind. That lack of relativity has lead to arrogance and away from science. We've seen that the climate scientists are afraid of being wrong. This is an area where our system of academia is a weakness not a strength. People are too invested in not being wrong and finding new truths. In the climate sciences it should be about being wrong and being able to better understand that. Bad predictions should be more celebrated then correct ones, because it's easier to learn from something that went wrong.
skeptics and supporters are opposite sides of the same coin of wrong headedness. There is learning to be done, and a future that is uncertain. Those are things we should be concentrating on.
Here comes USA to save the day..
Regardless of your opinions on global politics, budgets, or political party, you must admit our armed forced almost always prove to be totally bad ass.
Do we know skin cancer is on the rise due to the ozone hole? There are many plausible explanations, so a simple rise in numbers won't cut it.
I don't mean to seem snide but do you really think that same thought hasn't occurred to anyone else? There are ways of testing and controlling for possible causes. Proving causation in cases like this is challenging but not impossible. It's sort of like proving that smoking causes an increase in lung cancer. It's difficult to prove in individual cases but actually much easier in populations. You check a lot of correlations, you test for overlapping, you slowly control for specific alternatives and over time you get a pretty good picture of how much of the problem is causes by the suspect phenomena.
My wife is a skin doctor and her take on the matter is that yes there appears to be some credible evidence that the ozone hole is responsible for at least some of the increase in skin cancer. The exact amount is unknown and realistically unimportant. What is important is that there appears to be a real and measurable (if imprecise) effect on the population.
This was a polar ship, presumably able to be iced in, carrying months worth of supplies. Heck, polar explorers used to deliberately let their ships be iced in over winter to provide a secure base of operations.
Oh, it was also carrying "tourists" in addition to the crew and scientists. I guess the tour must go on
Yes, and the chlorofluorocarbons, you do remember those don't you, were and still are one of the major contributors to the ozone holes. The Montreal Protocol which started in the late 1980's, got a head of steam in the 1990's, and continues to this day pretty much banished chlorofluorocarbons from production. The expectation is the ozone holes will get back to normal around 2050 when chlorofluorocarbon have left the atmosphere.
And as someone below mentioned, there's been quite a large increase in skin cancer in the S. latitudes as a result of the ozone holes. There's something very susceptible to environmental blinkers, and it takes a really magnificent demonstration of intelligence every generation to snap people out of their blindness towards environmental dangers. This is it!
South of Australia some ice breakers a stuck in pack ice.
In Australia we have a heat wave unheard of, and the summer has just started 2 weeks ago.
In Finnland we have the "hottest" winter since recorded history. At the northern polar circle, mind that, we still have + temperatures. In a real winter it would be -30 degrees there.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
you going to see that the japs doesn't kill any whales, right?
Stop watching Captain Planet and go read some of the actual science.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
The problem is that there are quite a bit of instances, most poignant of which is that southern ice has been increasing for decades, /.
I don't get why people still repeat such nonsense on
The ice is retreating since decades, however in winter it grows and in summer it shrinks.
What counts is the long term trend. Long term: every winter it is a bit less than the (or a few) winter(s) before.
If it is not important that Antarctic ice melt is this year the lowest ever recorded,
Never heard about that claim. Any proof? NASA and ESA photos don't confirm this.
The thing about science is that its supposed to be falsifiable. No it is not. It is supposed to be "investigate able" by experiments. That means it is "provable" ... no idea why americans always use the term "falsifiable". Must have a special meaning in some circumstances?
Or, how do you "falsify" the theory of gravity?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
.. F*ck Yeah!
Coming again, to save the mutherf*cking day, yeah!
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
If you zoom that graph way out, you can no longer see the warming that is caused by carbon dioxide emissions that began about a century ago because it becomes too small to see. Yes, it's called cherry picking your data.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Three! Three stuck icebreakers!
Muahhhaaaahhaaaahhaaahhaaahhh!
I *love* to COUNT! That's why they call me the COUNT!
Muahhhaaaahhaaaahhaaahhaaahhh!
Popper developed the idea of falsifiability and defined any question that couldn't be tested for falsification as none scientific. He's quite popular with the Thatcherites so it is probably a right wing thing. To falsify gravity let go of a pen a foot of the ground with nothing connected to it and see if it stays there
Actually, according to the CDC, we know that lung cancer has been on the decline in the US since 2000. We also know that lung cancer is not skin cancer. We also don't know what your point is.
It's like iiiii-iiii-iiiiiiiiice..... on your global warming research trip
Why simply err on the side of caution, when you can scuttle the entire world economy with superstitious ignorance?
Global warming means that the "average global temperature" is rising. But note that this does not mean that the temperatures on land are rising (necessarily). The temperatures at the poles have gone up considerably -- something like 3C -- in the last century.
Now, about being "more chaotic" -- a higher average tempurature means that the atmosphere is absorbing more of the sun's energy than before. The atmosphere is more energetic, and consequently, more dynamic. The kinds of weather that were unlikely before are becoming more likely, simply because there is more energy to get the atmosphere into those unlikely states.
Im not a supporter of AWG, and yes I joke when things like this happen. HOWEVER I understand that when I make a statement on a hot or cold day of "so how about that global warming?" I know its nothing more than a Joke. I cant speak for other people who do not believe in AGW but in my case, Yes i will say it, but Its a joke, AGW supporters need to learn to laugh more
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
They are making fun of people like you who every time a piece of ice falls off a glacier anywhere you point out that as proof of global warming. Go ahead and claim you don't, but every time I hear of a tornado in the US, the hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and on and on, each of those instances people are trotted out on the news as climate experts claiming that this shows AGW is real and we need to do something.
The person making the statement you replied to doesn't believe this single incident proves AGW is false. They are making fun off all the people on your side that use every single instance as proof. The rest of us can look at how far off IPCC predictions are here, or Al Gore's expert opinion about how the arctic would be ice free by 2013 here, or any other time a climate scientists made a prediction that could actually be tested.
They are making fun of you and you are so dumb you don't even realize it and think you can "debate" your way out of the actual truth. The frozen ice in the antarctic isn't listening to your debate no matter how much you try.
I was in grade school in the sixties, and we were taught two indisputable scientific consensus facts:
That the "Malthusian Dilemma" theory PROVED we would all starve to death by the year 2000 or there about. Funny thing, they had a hockey stick graph too.
That the great ice age was coming. In the early 70's, this was on the cover of Time Magazine.
The folks selling this stuff then were just as certain as the folks harking this crap now. Then, as now, the lefties claimed the evil right wing was spreading propaganda. What does this teach us about ourselves?
Nobody ever got rich by telling people that things will probably turn out just fine, and that we as a species are remarkably adept at solving problems
Chicken Little stories attract a lot of highly emotional, intelligent, and supremely arrogant people who want to dictate their version of reality to the rest of us.
The minute somebody tells you in a dire voice that "If we don't do X then we are all doomed... and if you dare question their position they start insulting you... they... are full of crap and are to be ignored.
Murphy was an optimist
You do know that graph you just linked has an upward temperature trend, right? And that some of the projections are actually under the best fit line?
. Chaotic weather
Chaotic weather will be here, whether the earth warms or cools. Weather conditions on Jupiter are chaotic, and it's a lot colder than here.
Arguably it's the temperature differential that causes chaotic weather, not the mean temperature. Blaming every weather event on AGW is what makes people doubt AGW.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
All weather is chaotic and current weather is no more chaotic than past weather. The only thing that is more chaotic are the vainglorious attempts by various activists, NGOs and interest green business people to get publicity. Still, regardless of the facts of the matter, as long as nobody gets killed we're having fun laughing at them all.
I agree anti global warming supporters lie but you are the first I've seen admit it.
No. Don't bring Y2K into this. Y2K was a money grab by salesfolk to fleece idiots. Here's a hint sparky: "All computers have clocks" is true of most computers. But the clock is a square wave sync pulse. Its also called an oscillator. When you talk about a computers 'clock rate' this is what you are talking about. It doesn't give a fucking fig about the year 1999. If you had a system that used the COBOL programming language, then you had a problem. THERE ARE NO industrial controllers, microcontrollers, embedded systems of any kind that use COBOL, yet the fucking sales idiots (who themselves know dick all about computers) yelped and screamed and made millions in sales because of the fear. Most people don't know from sync pulses or heart beats. So they spent millions needlessly (and the charlatans got rich). A few people had to do some work so your pension check printed correctly. The electrical power grid was never in any danger. FTFY.
My reply to that thus far has been something along the lines of me, using that same logic, being able to prove global warming is occurring by pointing out the 19% of normal snow pack in the California Sierra right now.
Sadly, someone actually said that exact thing to me two weeks ago. Any time there is anything perceived as unusual, it is taken as a sign (sometimes even by scientists!).
It's almost like we're still in the dark ages, using weather events as omens, and peering into day-to-day changes in temperature graphs as if they were tea leaves in a cup, determined those signs will tell us that we'll win the battle.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Or, how do you "falsify" the theory of gravity?
I've been floating here on the ceiling all day and still no one believes me!!! There are plenty of ways to falsify it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You're like the people who scoff at the Y2K Armageddon that didn't happen. It didn't happen because a lot of folks did a lot of hard work to keep it from happening.
Y2K armageddon was never going to happen. At worst, it would mean some payroll calculations would be delayed, and airline flights would be cancelled. Anyone who thinks we were going to see power plants blow up and raging hordes across the landscape, well, they are deservedly mocked.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It wasn't global warming that caused the recent economic collapse and it never will be. The economy is set up and defined by humans (I'm one btw!) so it is a reflection of them rather than the world, thus those claiming it would collapse if we stopped global warming are helping to engineer such an event when Keynesian economics would suggest. I know that's not so popular round here where so many have drunk the Kool aid but there you go.
You falsify the theory of gravity by observing two objects with mass unaffected by a force pulling them together.
A hypothesis being "falsifiable" means that while it may or may not be directly observably true, it can be directly observed to be false. In fact, the vast majority of scientific hypotheses (yes, including the theory of gravity) can't really be said to be "proven," since it takes only one instance ever of two objects with mass not affected by gravitational force to prove -- without scare quotes -- that the theory is not correct. Since we have not observed every two objects ever, we have not proven gravity.
The point is that while some hypotheses are so strongly verified we call them laws, they can almost never be "proven" true. Accepting that fact is humbling, and also leads to better science as opposed to anec-data fights on the internet.
"couldn't spell objectivity with a dictionary and coincidentally have their own bias in their reporting."
Such as yourself? Global warming doesn't mean every point on the planet will be warmer than it was at -x seconds ago. For instance global warming is threatening the gulf stream that helps keep the UK from being like Norway (in temperature). Thanks to all the ignorant who are threatening the rest of the world because of stupidity or greed. I say stupidity because I know of no scientist I respect who denies global warming and those denials I have seen are a load of rubbish.
At least in principle. The exact details of *weather* are always complex.
Here's a link to an article explaining where the ice in question comes from:
“There's a misconception here – we are not trapped in new ice that's been created because its cold,” said Turney. “This is very old, thick ice that's been re-mobilised. It was attached to another part of the continent and has broken out and, with the south-easterly winds we've had, has pushed it up against the coast and pinned us in.”
The austral sea ice situation is complicated by the fact there's a continent down there and it's not perfectly round. It sticks out into the sea in irregular ways. This means that the extent of sea ice (which is present year round) is dependent on the wind, which in turn is stronger with a more energetic (warmer) atmosphere.
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Very badly... We get things like fresh water from melted ice lowering the salinity down as deep as 30 meters, and basically floating on top of the salt water that is supposed to sink down as part of the global convection belts.
Did you take junior-high physics btw? Not to mention we have a 100km large ice sheet drifting in to block the bay in question.
Its become less predictable
Skin cancer is raising in the northern hemisphere, specifically the US and UK. So there is your control group not affected by the ozone hole.
And the results of your two second "study" are published where exactly? Which form of skin cancer are you referring to specifically? What studies are you citing from which journals?
The proposed reason is bunk and if your wife is a dermatologist, not sure why you said skin doctor, and you asked her you would have known this already.
Glad you are so knowledgeable that you you can post anonymously with no citations to set the record straight. [/sarcasm]
And I said skin doctor because when I say her actual specialty (dermatopathology) most people give a deer in the headlights stare. If you know what that is, good for you but skin doctor gets the point across just fine.
I agree that the vast majority of sceptics cherry pick data to support a foregone conclusion. But on the other hand, I am far from convinced that there is no issue here at all with the surface temps. Rather than the usual examples of dodgy sceptics, what do you think of this interview with a fully legit, mainstream climatologist (who actually believes in global warming):
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von-storch-on-problems-with-climate-change-models-a-906721.html (sorry I dont know how to link properly in slashdot)? It is a simple fact, that **all** climate change models had predicted a rise in surface temps, and for the last 15 years this simply has not happened, which noone had predicted. Now it may well be that the temperature of the oceans have risen by a large amount so that overall warming is still happening without any slowdown. Fine, thats all well and good. But the fact remains that the models made a huge prediction and the prediction was wrong. This is a simple fact, not a right wing slander.
Now tell me why the population should trust the climate change models to the extent of taking drastic, economically painful measures, when the models are, frankly, very far off from being reliable. That seems like a huge thing to demand from them. Tell me why we should trust predictions like "the surface temps will go up by 6 degrees in 100 years" when they can't even predict the present temperatures, let alone the distant future? And why we should trust them enough to take a substantial pay cut to reduce C02 emissions by some drastic amount.
I personally am agnostic on the concept of man made global warming, and deep down I think it may well be, at least partially, true. But it must be said that this whole idea of trying to model inherently chaotic things based on computer simulations is rubbish. It is simply not science. Science is the process of observing phenomena, coming up with a general theory to describe all these observations, and then testing the theory against predictions. It is not just writing a computer simulation and then, when the predictions are wrong, tinkering the parameters (adding more "ocean temperature damping" in this case), and hoping that eventually your program will converge on the truth. This is not science and there is, as far as I know, no reason to thing that such a procedure will evetually generate a working model that reflects reality. This kind of stuff is just rubbish on a par with Ptolemaic astronomy, except that the weather is far more chaotic than the orbits of the planets, so there is less likehood of being able to eventually rely on the predictions (yes I know the orbits of the planets are also chaotic, but the error doubling time is much longer than with the weather).
The other issue I take is with the politicisation of the field. Scientists should try to keep their work out of politics as much as possible. Of course they can advise the goverment, but when it gets too political we end us with a huge mess, like we currently have, where the population gets polarised around a scientific question. This situation where the left supports global warming and the right opposes it is entirely the fault of those scientists who very loudly stepped into the public arena rather than just focusing on doing hard science and letting the politicians get their hands dirty. Dont blame the right for the fact that they have been turned against global warming, blame the popularity-whoring climate scientists.
Im not someone hostile to science. I am an academic in a STEM field. But I am hostile to many of the antics of climate scientists, since it goes against every value I was brought up with as a budding scientist. We are told to be impartial, to be sceptical of our results, to try to be objective and stay out of politics, and to let predictions be the judge, jury and executioner of our theories. These guys, like string theorists before them, are breaking every rule and value all scientists should have. Of course that doesnt mean their theory is wrong. But it does at least make them arseholes and non-genuine scientists.
Any one else reminded of this "The Truck Got Stuck" Corb Lund video?
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
Boy, your grade school sucked.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
My wife is a skin doctor and her take on the matter is that yes there appears to be some credible evidence that the ozone hole is responsible for at least some of the increase in skin cancer. The exact amount is unknown and realistically unimportant. What is important is that there appears to be a real and measurable (if imprecise) effect on the population.
Some? Exact amount unknown and unimportant? Yet still real and measurable, but yet imprecise?
So, what kind of "skin doctor" is your wife, a fucking shaman?
Blaming every weather event on AGW is what makes people doubt AGW.
Well, I think in many cases the doubt for AGW rises from financial interest, whether it's direct payments from the oil foundations or that vague fear in a recession that fixing the problem could cost average people their jobs, but whatever the cause, thank goodness I didn't blame every weather event on AGW. You know, the way deniers cite every cold snap and snowfall as evidence to the contrary.
Well, keep laughing as the prolonged droughts do start killing people. No reason not to have a good time.
but whatever the cause, thank goodness I didn't blame every weather event on AGW.
Yes, that was very wise of you.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Is reported to be approximately 100 nmi (115 statute miles) east of this position.
Unfortunately I haven't found any online mapping resources that employ a reasonable projection for polar regions.
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There might not be any industrial controls run on cobol now (although I suspect there are) but there used to be. Microcontrollers aren't the only sort of controllers and there was definitly a lot of trouble with db backed apps and similar using 2 digit years. This might not instantly kill you but you might be a little upset if, for instance, the bank decided you hadn't paid anything to it yet.
What prolonged droughts? Scientists predict more precipitation at the same time other scientists predict more droughts. The former is responsible for the greening of the Sahara. All I know about their models is that they're a pile of utter bilge.
but whatever the cause, thank goodness I didn't blame every weather event on AGW.
Yes, that was very wise of you.
Okay, here's an example - remember when Sen. James Inhofe (R - Oklahoma) whored his own grandchildren for a photo op by getting them to build a snow fort in D.C. when it snowed a few years ago, and put a sign on it reading, "Al Gore's New Home"?
No, I didn't think so.
No droughts? Okay, here you go.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/06/30/258263/inhofe-heartland-denier-conference-oklahoma-record-heat-wave-and-drought/
Just look at the long term trend of sea ice in the Arctic, it is noticeably decreasing! Most glaciers are substantially retreating.
There is overwhelming evidence of Global Warming, besides the above.
A consequence of global Warming is more extreme weather, some places ARE expected to get more colder weather, but this is more than offset by other places get even more warmer weather - Global Warming means the GLOBAL AVERAGE temperature goes up, not that everywhere will get warmer at the same rate.
ok, that wasn't very wise of him.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Stop making things up. It may make you feel smart, but you have no clue what you're talking about.
Yeah, the climate is really complicated. So is the human body, but we can now 3D print working organs and implant them into patients. So is rocket science, but we now have robotic rovers driving around on Mars. If a problem is hard, that doesn't mean we can't solve it. That just means we have to work really hard. And we've been working really hard at understanding the climate for half a century. You have no clue what amazing progress has been made and how deep an understanding we now have of some really complex processes.
So if you want to know what's going on with the climate, what do you do?
1. Learn all about it, recognizing that's a big task and it will take you years of study if you really want to become an expert.
2. Listen to the people who have spent years studying it and are experts on it.
3. Don't do either of the above. Just say, "No one understands this because it's too complicated." After all, if you don't understand it then obviously no one else does either.
Yeah. That's what I thought.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
An observation of gravity not working is as uncertain as all other observations. Basically negative evidence is no more reliable than positive evidence.
All questions of falsifiability that I can think of can also be expressed as its inverse so really its just which way you ask the question as to which evidence falsifies and which evidence supports. I haven't yet managed to prove that that is always the case though
The Chinese ship is rated for 1-meter ice. The USCG ship is rated for 6-meter ice.
Neither the minimalizations like yours, nor the "end of days" predictions were credible, nor are they any better in hindsight. Just some cancelled flights, you say? Tell that to those who had to reprogram or replace process control systems at industrial facilities, as just one example. Many things worse than late paychecks were mitigated - not armageddon of course, but serious problems.
- T
Are you serious? If you throw an apple off your balcony and observe that its trajectory is not a parabola, but say, a straight line, then you would disprove Newtons theory of gravity. A good theory makes precise predictions and when these fail it is falsified. This is the scientific method. Anything less than this is not science but mere empirical observation like say the ancient Sumerians made of the cosmos without any real understanding of what they were seeing. Its amazing how much ignorance there is about science even on slashdot.
But if you only look at the period with sizable human CO2 emissions then you lose the context within to gauge them as an independent variable. If you don't have context then you could conclude that the correlation between the rise in use of solar and wind power and the rise in average surface temp implied that solar and wind power caused global warming.
My point was more that the specific zoom out argument wasn't a logically valid foil to the very localized analysis because essentially the same method could be used to invalidate it. Just like how I used a parallel correlation to demonstrate why your attempt to refute my point of logic by appealing to a specific correlation wasn't logically valid. Pointing out that an argument is not logically valid does not invalidate the conclusion only the method of arriving at it.
The larger point being that in a field of study like climate that is highly complex and where we can only observe and not experiment, we shouldn't be propping up or tearing down our previous conclusions with logically invalid arguments. Our conclusions to date should be freely and often subject to re-evaluation and refinement, and that seemingly good conclusions should not kill parallel lines of investigation and further that new work should be done as neutrally as possible from previous work so that good analysis can be kept and applied to refined and altered versions of previous conclusions.
There's no reason to believe that the use of solar and wind power led to global warming because there's no mechanism to explain it. But carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and the warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions was predicted many decades before we observed it. Add to that the fact that no other plausible explanation for the warming has been found, and therefore our best current hypothesis is that the carbon dioixide emissions are causing the warming.
Do you have some other explanation for the observed warming that I haven't heard of?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You mean in the southernmost region of our planet, where summer is the coldest time of the year?
Damn, you are a fucking moron.
Do you have some other explanation for the observed warming that I haven't heard of?
The point being debated is that this "observed warming" is actually occurring. As for "other explanation", isn't that what models are supposed to provide?
It seems to me that the most persuasive climate models would be those that account for temperature patterns from prehistoric records all the way to today. Anything less can only be based on an incomplete understanding. Unfortunately, the livelihood of manmade global warming scientists depends on manmade global warming actually existing. For a researcher thus employed to admit that the evidence is untenable not only jeopardises his career, but those of thousands of fellow researchers as well. Given *this* reality, if I were a climate change scientist I would never put my name on a study that promoted a contrarian view.
Von Storch concisely summarizes the dilemma of global warming proponents, as well as the frustration of sceptics. In particular: "It [science] is not just writing a computer simulation and then, when the predictions are wrong, tinkering the parameters (adding more "ocean temperature damping" in this case), and hoping that eventually your program will converge on the truth."
I didn't say "no droughts", I implied, "well within range of natural variation".
My concern on this is that health care has dramatically increased lifespans. More people are dying of cancer because the things that used to kill them no longer do so as often. Yes, i figured they controlled for age, exposure, environment, but even so, it's really hard because melanoma is so slow acting.
John
We observe the warming. It's not being debated at all as far as I can tell. I can see people denying that it's happening (i.e. saying it isn't warming), despite umpteen graphs being posted that clearly show it happening. It seems to me that they are simply not looking at the graphs, or not willing to admit that they see the warming when they do see it. I suppose it upsets them too much to admit.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Some things have changed and some haven't. I didn't really learn much about his expedition till after the hype several years ago died down. At least it created a lot of material. The story is amazing.
The ice is retreating since decades, however in winter it grows and in summer it shrinks.
So you admit to being ignorant and believing a complete alarmist lie, then?
Which part of record ice levels confuses you? If I have to google the facts for you, that would be because you are willfully ignorant, so I wont bother. You will call NASA a bunch of deniers or something.
"His name was James Damore."
I get sunburned on a clear hot day here where I live in South Australia in about 20 mins of unprotected exposure, it's uncomfortable if anything touches the sunburned bits. I recently went a touch furthar south to Tasmainian latitudes and got burned so badly that all the skin on my head pealed off after only 25 mins exposure on a 7/11ths cloud cover 24C degree day (A moderate day).
It blows goats not having an Ozone layer, as I understand it the northern hemisphere and equatorial regions are still reasonably well protected by Ozone, despite pumping out most of the polutants because for whatever reason the hole is over the southern pole and improves in a graded fashion North.
So Mother Fkers living not living in the southern parts of the southern hemisphere aught to be thankful.
What did I make up? That if you zoom out far enough the climate is cooler now then the average. Nope I'm pretty sure that's agreed upon by most. The implicit fact that that makes the prior argument invalid? Nope that's just logic. (It should be noted the an argument being logically invalid does not negate or affirm it's conclusion). That we are naive when it comes to climate science? Again, this one I'm pretty sure of, I've heard many climate experts say that mankind is the species that has impacted the environment the most, but I'm pretty sure that that distinction goes to the species of bacteria that evolved into chloroplasts.
You seem to have refuted my point about how well we understand the environment, with a couple of examples of similarly complicated systems that we are making great strides with. First of all there is the logical fallacy that progress in some complex systems implies progress in others. That's just not a sound way to refute the point. I'm considered an expert in somethings but that doesn't mean I'm an expert in everything. Then there are the examples of complex things that we have "mastered". Let's start at the Human body. Drug companies, who tend to hire some of the people that know the most about the human body end up with a lot of failed attempts at new drugs. Some of the time it happens because of unintended consequences, but a lot of the time it's because a correlation that was thought to be causal turned out not to be. ( Here's a wired article about the phenomena http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/1 ). The other is space. Sure we have some successes but we also have a number of failures. In late 2011 we were looking at abandoning the ISS because of a string of Souyez rocket malfunctions. Also of the 3 mars missions launched during the 2011 launch window, only 1 (that's 33%) reached mars, so while Curiosity is cool, it's the exception not the rule. So to say that we've mastered either field is also not logically valid. Of course in both of those fields we can perform somewhat rigorous experiments so our progress is also faster.
That's not to say that there is necessarily anything wrong with naive science. Our understanding of gravity is still undergoing refinement, but it's force has been part of our engineering for quite some time. But having a naivety of gravity employed in a lot of the engineering hasn't been a downfall. I would say that the goal should be to know when you are doing naive science and respond accordingly perhaps by leaving terms in generic equations abstract, so that they are more readily adjusted if need be or can have more complex expressions plugged in as appropriate (for example gravitational attraction to the earth).
But on the whole your comment as an attempt to refute mine was trash. You start off with an attack, which is not a logically valid method of refutation, and justify the attack with a logically invalid argument that was based on logically invalid arguments. Then you go on talking about climate experts (which I denied the current existence of and you failed to validly refute), which you then use to declare your attempt to refute my comment successful, which does not logically make it so.
My comments were about logical validity, the absolute level of our understanding of the climate, and how the nature of our academic system interacts with fields like the climate that are very hard to study. I'm happy to go off on tangents relative to discussing those topics, but if what you're really trying to do is show me to the curb because you think I'm denying climate change, then you can rest assured that that is not my goal at all.
You don't need to google ... there is no record ice level anywhere on the world.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Breath out your helium, man!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I was in grade school in the sixties, and we were taught two indisputable scientific consensus facts:
That the great ice age was coming. In the early 70's, this was on the cover of Time Magazine.
Are you sure you remembered that correctly?
http://science.time.com/2013/06/06/sorry-a-time-magazine-cover-did-not-predict-a-coming-ice-age/
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/the-1970s-ice-age-myth-and-time-magazine-covers-by-david-kirtley/
And if you think that you were taught in the 1960's that Thomas Malthus essay PROVED we would all starve to death by the year 2000, well, you need to go find that teacher and have your grade changed to "F".
Thomas Malthus wrote that essay in 1798, and it had been debunked long before our great-grandparents were twinkles in our great-great grandparents eyes.
Here are some examples of things you said that are totally false:
We are too dumb to understand climate.
Nonsense. We're entirely capable of understanding the climate.
Any one who calls themselves a climate expert is a huge liar
This is total BS.
That lack of relativity has lead to arrogance and away from science.
Climate researchers are doing fantastic science.
skeptics and supporters are opposite sides of the same coin of wrong headedness.
The two groups are about as unlike as you can get. Climate scientists are dedicating their lives to working really hard, trying to solve really hard problems and figure out how the real world actually works. So called "climate skeptics" are, as a rule, willfully ignorant of the state of knowledge. They've just decided what they want to believe, make no effort to actually study climatology, and just go around making claims that are simply false. LIke, "We're too stupid to understand the climate and anyone who claims to is a liar."
So how much time have you spent actually studying climatology? And no, I don't mean reading books and websites written by self-proclaimed climate skeptics out to expose the massive fraud being perpetuated on an unsuspecting public. I mean actual climate science. Studying basic physics, reading scientific papers, understanding the math behind climate models, studying the experiments used to parametrize and validate those models, and so on. Not so much? Then maybe you should assume that you know less about the subject than people who spend their entire lives doing that.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Not only is Antarctica losing ice each year, the ice loss is accelerating.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about regarding Y2K problems, nor how irrelevant your discourse on COBOL and industrial controllers is.
I'm not the parent you're responding to but here is Washington Post reporting that "Antarctic sea ice hit 35-year record high Saturday":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/09/23/antarctic-sea-ice-hit-35-year-record-high-saturday/
In the middle of the article there is a link to the data from "National Snow and Ice Data Center" web site. The data is available in CSV format for you to download. That is not the record but quite close to the record numbers set 3 decades ago in 1978.
The official ice data is here. The antarctic ice has been at maximum recorded highs.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
BBC: "One of the aims was to track how quickly the Antarctic's sea ice was disappearing."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25573096
Dr Pierre Dutrieux of the British Antarctic Survey publishes results showing that:
"We found ocean melting of the glacier was the lowest ever recorded, and less than half of that observed in 2010. This enormous, and unexpected, variability contradicts the widespread view that a simple and steady ocean warming in the region is eroding the West Antarctic Ice Sheet."
http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press/press_releases/press_release.php?id=2452
Le Monde gives the figure, for each of the icebreakers involved (the French one also spent 7 days) of
20 000 euros/day for the French vessel and 60 000 euros/day (=$100000/day) for each of the Chinese and Australian vessels, figures which do not include crew salaries.
The operating costs of the very big American and Russian icebreakers which are on a 3 weeks trip to save the Shokalskiy, are not mentioned.
http://tinyurl.com/qfa5pap
The minimum rescue cost appears to be of the order of $2 million.
[antarctic zen]
noisy humans leave theories stranded in eternal ice
[climate goose]
Chris Turney went up on a fence
To show humans’ climatic offense
But a giant ice wall
Made his theories fall
And all the king's horses and all the king's men
Cannot put Turney’s science together again
Threescore men and threescore more
Cannot make things back as they were before
[climerick]
A climate professor named Turney
Went on a melting finding journey
His companions were whiny
And his science was tiny
So now Turney’s journey put climate on a gurney
[climate goose]
Ring-a ring o’roses,
Global warming posies,
Ice up! Ice up!
It all falls down.
Adrian O
Hey kids! With relativism we can all be right no matter what we say! Apart from those bastards that have actually thought about a subject and considered evidence - ignore them because they will tell little Timmy that there is no Santa Claus.
The attacks on biology, geology and now climate science for being a threat to dumbed down religion for money franchises have now extended as far as denial of expertise in general.
Don't blame the above poster, he's just a victim and carrier of the idiocy and seems to have got more than halfway to seeing what's wrong with him.
Close but not yet, not even for mice in a lab.
Not that the source of the warming was a point I was even trying to discuss, but as to the need to provide a need to explain the warming, no explanation is needed. Until you can explain the 4+ billion year history of the earth's climate, you can't say what would be happening with or without that CO2. That's part of the whole thing I was saying about context. But again, I am saying this not to present any ideas about climate change but as part of a discussion about logic.
And not that this is the point, but if I have to spruce up my counter correlation to make it more believable, then here's me spitballing. Large scale solar installations tend to be installed where there is very little cloud coverage, which largely means deserts. (here's where it becomes more back of the napkin) deserts tend to be pretty bright from space, so they are likely pretty reflective and are places where solar energy gets directed back into space. Solar installations are less reflective then the deserts they go on top of and as such increase the globe's absorption of solar radiation, and since most of that energy ands up as surface level waste heat contributes to global warming. For wind the best I can say is that it seems plausible that unharnessed wind energy doesn't heat the earth much as the waste heat from that portion of it that is collected for our use. There you go a plausible mechanism for my correlations since you seemed to get hung up on that. That wasn't the point though.
The point wasn't about warming. The point was that you tried to counter my argument about logical validity of arguments about arbitrary time slices, by giving merit to one arbitrary time slice because it contains a correlation that plausibly could be causal, and that is not a valid counter because you actually need the time slice to be much bigger then the one with the correlation to have the context to even understand if it could be causal. And now the point is that you weren't responding to my point and your attempts at counter points aren't even logically valid.
So what if global warming has or hasn't stopped in the last five years. Is that what you really care about? Or do you care about other changes that have resulted from the changes up until now that have continued to accumulate. I think that for most people it's the accumulating changes that matter to them, not that it's happening because it is getting warmer. Because even if it really is done getting warmer, the damage isn't done, and it's really that damage that I think that most people want to stop or mitigate. It's important not to lose site of why it matters.
We all KNOW it wasn't global warming. Nor can blame be assigned to the people shrieking about anthrogenic climate change. Thankfully they've never had enough power to do all that much damage yet.
I think I'll bookmark that as the difference between a technical viewpoint and an MBA.
"Oh let the Moorlocks sort it out while we play in the garden, doing nothing more useful than contributing to the food chain."
And in the Midwest US and Canada we've had the coldest winter in 30 years. Weather is weather.
China got it's shit together (Mao dying helped) and went from the prospect of hundreds of millions starving when the weather got rough to being a food exporter. Around the majority of the world vast improvements were made to agriculture.
Sometimes they print shit. I've read some old Scientific American magazines from that time pointing out the S.A. editor thought so on that topic.
Is that all you've got?
Why didn't you manage to work those two things out for yourself?
This is like suggesting that you have proof of a Doomsday Device because your source is the New York Times.
Stop making things up... we can now 3D print working organs and implant them into patients
Pot, meet Kettle.
You mean, for us? Not so well. Chaotic weather, not even, gradual warming over the entire globe, is what we can expect for quite a number of years.
You seriously believe that weather is "more chaotic" than it always has been?
where summer is the coldest time of the year
Do tell how summer is the coldest time of year AC. I'm sure we will all be enthralled with your derp.
Here's what's fun about logic. I can assert something and you can disagree, but logically I am not wrong until you prove me wrong, until then either the assertion or it's logical negation may be true. I think you tried to disprove some of my assertions, but your attempts were not logically valid.
So I continue to stand by statements "We are too dumb to understand climate", and "Any one who calls themselves a climate expert is a huge liar, unless they put it in the context of being relative to the rest of mankind.", (yes, I did notice you taking it out of full context) "That lack of relativity has lead to arrogance and away from science.", and "skeptics and supporters are opposite sides of the same coin of wrong headedness.". But I'll address them to give them some more perspective to maybe help you see what I am talking about or give you some more meat to use to argue against.
Now let me address that last one first since that's the one you seemed to want to actually try to tear down the most. And in point went to talk about the differences between skeptics and climate scientists. And those differences are irrelevant. Because I was talking about skeptics and supporters. You'd hope that skeptics would be different then people that supporters are supporting because then why would they be on opposite sides. But In my experience "arguments" between supporters and skeptics become a back and forth of logically meaningless nonsense.
As to us being too dumb to understand climate. I don't mean that mankind is collectively too dumb to ever figure it out. I suspect that we can and hope that we will. But today we are standing on the backs of thousands of years of people who came before us, and we seemed to be gaining knowledge perhaps faster then ever and since the advent of the computer we've been tackling problems that were far beyond our capabilities before. But we've got good climate data for like 40 years, much less thorough (and more likely to be error prone) data for a few hundred before that, and then the data starts to get really iffy. And also to be clear when I talking about understanding I'm talking about absolute understanding. Things like gravity are hard and it was a long way from before galileo to F = G(m1)(m2)/r^2, but I wouldn't call that understanding gravity. We are learning about climate daily and I frequently hear about new factors that are being considered to improve models, which certainly implies that we didn't understand it yet, and if our models are still being improved at the 10s of years scale, it's hard to imagine that we are close to a final perfect model. And all of this holds for my comment about experts. Sir Issac Newton was the man, and so many people are standing on his shoulders (arguments about parallel discovery aside), but Physics undergraduates today probably have to know more about physics then he did and an undergraduate degree and an undergraduate degree is generally not considered an expert degree. So while he was pioneer, absolutely speaking he wasn't an expert. That's why I added that bit that you truncated off. Relatively to the totality of many subjects we have no experts today, relative the mankind's understanding of given topics there are often experts
And as for the comment about being lead to arrogance and away form science. Maybe it is just the particular manner of the climate scientists that I hear speak relative to that of the other scientists, but climate scientists seem to me to speak with far more certainty then their peers from other fields. Especially other new fields. And again relative to their peers they don't seem to talk much about the difficulties of their field. They are studying the one earth we have that so far has never completely repeated itself making it really hard to get good control data and experiment and all that other stuff that becomes. I've heard scientists working in green land when talking about the sites and the dangers of working on the ice talk about how incredibly dynamic it is and how what's on the bottom one da
Are you really expecting a serious reply from me with such a worthless question?
As has been explained before, the reason there's lots of ice in the Antarctic sea is that the ice on the land is melting, which makes more of the ice flow into the sea. http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/antarctic-ice-melt
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Well, I could keep pinning you down as you wriggle away like a snake under a stick, but it's clear you're not interested in reason.
Enjoy the show - hope you don't have children to deal with the mess that's coming.
Won't this leave our *own* Australian coast undefended from rampaging icebergs!
hawk, scratching his head trying to figure out what the USCG is doing in Australia
The guys who got trapped in the Antarctic ice are supposedly recreating the expedition of Australian explorer, Sir Douglas Mawson:
Mawson declined an invitation to join Robert Falcon Scott's expedition in 1910 (see below) and instead led his own expedition in 1911.
On Mawson's journey, there were constant blizzards, and the average wind speeds were 50mph, but reached as high as 190mph.
Mawson's main team consisted of three men: himself, Xavier Mertz, and Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis.
Ninnis fell through a snow-covered crevasse and was never seen again.
Mawson and Mertz tried to survive starvation by eating their pack of dogs. However, Hypervitaminosis A from eating the dogs' livers gave Mertz brain seizures and drove him insane. He later fell into a coma and died.
Mawson's ship, the Aurora, actually left him behind. He was forced to winter there until being rescued in December 1913.
Here are the stories of a few other British explorers who weren't as lucky as Mawson...
* Robert Falcon Scott (1910–13): All five explorers died on the return journey from the Pole through a combination of starvation and cold.
* Ernest Shackleton (1914–17): Their ship, the Endurance, was trapped and crushed in the ice. The expedition then rescued itself after a series of exploits, including a prolonged drift on an ice-floe.
* Aeneas Mackintosh (1914–17): These eight were depositing supplies for Shackleton's main group. Three of the eight men, including their leader, Mackintosh, lost their lives.
By contrast, the lucky individuals down there now have it pretty good. No winds, no blizzards, they haven't had to eat their dogs or each other, and nobody's dead.
Er, exactly how reliable have weather predictions ever been? The inaccuracy of weather predictions has been a running joke long before either you or I were born.
Three words. Ice Station Zebra.
No. Don't bring Y2K into this. Y2K was a money grab by salesfolk to fleece idiots. Here's a hint sparky: "All computers have clocks" is true of most computers. But the clock is a square wave sync pulse.
As well as using those clock pulses to synchronise logic they also count them to measure the passage of time and record and process those date values in various ways. There are a few popular methods of such counting (and lots of strange custom ones). Some use simple linear counts, others use the same date structures we humans use. Which is chosen for a particular system is pretty arbitary and as systems grow more complex it is very likely that there will be many conversions between different date formats.
Since a complex system will likely use multiple date formats in different places different parts of system will respond in different ways to the rollover. Taking the year 2000 as an example some will handle itfine because they don't use a vulnerable date format. Some will wrap round to 00 (which may be later interpreted as 1900), some will produce malformed dates (like 1/1/100 which may later end up being interpreted as 1/1/0100 or 1/1/19100 or 1/1/A0 or 1/1/:0). So suddenly different parts of your system may have very different ideas of the date and anything that compares those dates to measure elapsed time will start generating nonsensical results or possiblly even crashing.
THERE ARE NO industrial controllers, microcontrollers, embedded systems of any kind that use COBOL
Even if that is true (and I find it doubtful) COBOL is far from the only place that human style date formats with 2-digit years are used (and if you think Y2K stopped people using such date formats you are sadly mistaken).
The electrical power grid was never in any danger
A wraparound in a common date format is a risk because it can break many independently developed systems at the same time. A power grid can handle a few plants dropping off at once because they shutdown due to a control software bug but if too many drop off you have a grid collapse.
Was Y2K overhyped? somewhat
Was there a need to check big systems to make sure they weren't vulnerable to systematic failure when one of the worlds most common date formats wrapped round? yes
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Hot air, actually.
Please do not pretend the other side is the superstitious one. It is you who ignore the majority of scientists in favour of your beliefs. Thinking "I better trust the experts on this, just like they trust me on X" is not superstition, it's being rational. While your attitude of "ha! those egg-heads sure are stupid! if it were up to me we'd have colonized the Sun by now as we can land at night!" is plain foolishness, although I suppose it helps your ego.
Climatic temperatures tend to follow 30, 60 and 120 year cycles, they can easily explain past warming.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Planet Earth is just an endless WTF.
Endless ice breakers are getting stuck while some woman rides her tricycle to the South Pole?
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/450608/British-women-sets-new-world-record-for-cycling-to-the-South-Pole
Your statement is exactly why these scams always work for a significant portion of the population... and it's just a version of Pascal's Wager; In this case, you are saying "I might as well believe in {insert apocalyptic eco claim} and behave accordingly, because if the claim is true we'll be better off, and if it's not then no harm is done"
Of course, by choosing to "err on the side of caution" you forego many possible things and you might have been much better off but you just do not know it. For example: by limiting carbon emissions, you might supress entire industries thereby causing many people to have lower-paying jobs and therefore shorter lives with worse healthcare, fewer vacations, cheaper less-safe cars and homes, lower-quality diets, etc. Millions of humans will be negatively impacted in one way or another by carbon taxes and/or limits, but the proponents of measures to fight AGW never want us to consider THOSE people.
Some? Exact amount unknown and unimportant? Yet still real and measurable, but yet imprecise?
So, what kind of "skin doctor" is your wife, a fucking shaman?
Back to your RealDoll, you jealous troll.
As an embedded systems programmer, I worked on at least 100 different systems between 1995 and 1999. Some problems were just cosmetic, others caused overrun buffers, infinite loops, code paths that would no longer run, and of course the usual date comparison and cosmetic problems.
The 'doom' wasn't so much a single system going down, but a sudden coordinated failure of hundreds or thousands of systems at the same time. At least 1 in 5 of the systems we worked on were 'critical' systems that would very likely have caused serious damage, injury and/or loss of life if they weren't fixed. The company I worked for primarily dealt with equipment used in hospitals, power plants / utilities, and industrial equipment. Other companies would audit a facility (eg. a hospital), and we'd be called whenever they found something that hadn't already been dealt with.
Sometimes we didn't have access to source code, and had to recommend replacements or rewrites.
If there were 6 studies, each showing some particular increase in skin cancer between 50% and 300% due to the "ozone hole", it would be proper to say the exact amount was unknown, yet the phenomenon was real and measurable (and measured) but imprecise. Referring to the exact amount being "unimportant" is OK if it's understood that what's being argued is the existence of the phenomenon rather than its strength.
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The point of the distinction between falsifiability and provability is not the certainty of observations, but the effect of observations. Falsifiability is the understanding that one contrary observation can "disprove a theory" (i.e. show that a statement does not agree with reality). No number of observations can prove a theory; the best that observations can do is reinforce the utility of using a statement to describe reality. (Ultimately, that's all we have, "utility of using a statement to describe reality." And that's all we need; we live in reality and need to be able to use statements about reality to live well therein.)
Falsifiability is an important concept because if a statement is not falsifiable, it adds nothing to human understanding of reality.
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And what is seldom mentioned is that there's increasing volcanic activity under the antarctic ice.
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If you can never disprove something then it's not science, because science only reduces, not eliminate, uncertainty. So, you can't prove a theory, we just use the simpliest ones we aren't able to disprove. If we were able to prove things, as in math, there'd be no need for further inquiry. However, we obviously can't say that our current theories take everything into account, hence the current system.
Your example of gravity is a good one, as it's quite poorly understood, but we have a few competing theories that haven't been disproven yet. Does gravity result from space-time distortions, a "gravon" particle, or perhaps something else entirely? We cannot prove either, but if we knew the speed of gravity we could disprove one and be better closer to knowing the truth.
As for my two cents on climate, I'll say this. I'm more familiar with medical research. Observational studies are good for curiosity and further study design, but not terribly accurate because humans are amazing at rationalizing. To change policy you need several large, independant, randomized controlled trials. Climatology doesn't come close, but alarmists suggest economic actions that will foreseeably kill millions. Hence why we do so little despite one field's concensus.
We're not.
That's called projection.
Just like we're too dumb to understand that smoking is a cause of lung cancer, or that erosion created the Grand Canyon, despite there not being a written record of its creation.
One part hand waving, one part word salad. 100% bullshit.
Wait, is it your contention that the average surface temp of the earth over it's 4+ billion year history is less then it is today? Or simply that at that generally at this point in time we are headed back to that average surface temp, not away from it?
Arguing that a 5 year sample of data isn't valid because a 40 year sample of data paints a different story, without any other justification just isn't logically valid. That doesn't make the 5 year sample valid, it is just a comment not the logical validity of the argument. And since parent had smugly used the phrase "That's called cherry picking your data", in response to someone picking an arbitrary time scale that suited their agenda, I repeated it when they did the same thing.
As to your comment about the next paragraph, I think we all know that it was One part hand, waving, one part word salad, 100% bullshit.
You see what I did there? I pointed out that I repeat smugly delivered words when appropriate, and then I did the same back to you. I'm only mentioning it to make sure you got the point.
If you want to logically attack something you see as a false assumption, you must show that it leads to a contradiction. Pretty much any other strategy is not logically valid. With the best that you can do otherwise being to state a that while that may be true a contradictory assertion may also be true, thus putting the other side in the position where they have to logically refute your assertion or failing to do so concede that the matter is at least uncertain.
Since so many people seem concerned about my supposed bias, I'll go the other way now. What does one do when someone presents a point in a discussion that seems counter the point of the discussion. The most clearcut thing to do is prove it invalid. In this case you can't do that. So you can argue that the point is not directly relevant. Which in this case I think it would be since it's the effects of warming not the actual warming that people don't want to happen,and the effects seem to continue to accumulate. Or lastly you can acknowledge the point as valid but use it to construct a stronger point that works in your favor. If you just use a parallel argument then you haven't really done anything to counter the other party.
I'm not wriggling, I'm simply pointing out that there's no evidence of an increase in "extreme events" either globally or locally in my country (UK). An increase in extreme weather is predicted by computer models that have so far shown zero skill. Indeed, the number of hurricanes and typhoons has actually decreased over the last 30 years.
As for earthquakes, I'm sure someone is submitting a paper to Nature on how CO2 causes those too, right now, and no doubt it will fly through peer review.
And if you look at it in 100 year increments then anyone who died less than 50 years ago would be alive; which is a pretty good indication of why when you're looking at something that has only happened in the last hundred or so years you shouldn't amalgamate data over vastly larger periods.
What you're suggesting is as equally dumb as leaving as boiling a pan of water and letting it cool over an hour from 100 degrees to 30 then turning the burner on full power and then after 30 seconds when the water is back up to 40 degrees saying "the water is cooling".
It's getting warmer. The warming is well within the range of natural variation. Michael Man is a liar and bodged up a graph, known as the Hockey Stick, to make the warming look unprecedented. The graph is now considered to be junk science. Yet here you are, still promoting the same enormous bollocks. Give it a rest.
When you say long term, you mean short term, because 30, 60, 100 years are fucking short term with respect to climatological processes. So shut it.
Hello "than", have you met Egdiroh? Apparently he doesn't know you.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
otherwise fondly known as 'The Polar Pig'
signed,
a crew member of Uncle Sam's Canoe Club
So geostationary satellites falsify gravity ;)
The thing about science is that its supposed to be falsifiable. No it is not. It is supposed to be "investigate able" by experiments. That means it is "provable" ... no idea why americans always use the term "falsifiable". Must have a special meaning in some circumstances?
Or, how do you "falsify" the theory of gravity?
Falsifiability is one of the basic tenets of empirical science - and being American has nothing to do with it. Karl Popper was Austro-British and worked in New Zealand and England.
"The concern with falsifiability gained attention by way of philosopher of science Karl Popper's scientific epistemology "falsificationism". Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific—and makes falsifiability the demarcation criterion, such that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience."
If you have no understanding of the philosophical basis of empirical science and how it differs from the 'inductive method' maybe you should spend less time spouting off and more time reading up.
Hmm...
You said "... fucking ... So shut it."
These words tend to undermine the validity, if any, of the rest of your comment - to put it politely. Also gives the impression that you are uneducated, and probably never really looked at the issue under discussion in any more than very superficially.
If you really want to make a comment to be taken seriously, please repost with a more appropriately phrased comment. Otherwise, you merely come a across as some kind of troll.
No they don't. They express my exasperation with the cretinous stupidity of all greens and their bibulous lies and misrepresentations. So you know, you can fuck off too.
As for "not predicted in theory", how does a result from 1902 grab you?
The relatively greater importance of wind over thermodynamics in antarctic sea ice extent was well established over thirty years ago;
[Ackley, S. F., 1981: A review of sea-ice weather relationships in the Southern Hemisphere. Sea Level, Ice and Climatic Change, Vol. 131, I. Allison, Ed., International Association Scientific Hydrology, 127–159.]
If you want a smoking gun, here is one from 2001 (Flato, G.M. and G.J. Boer, 2001: Warming asymmetry in climate change simulations. Geophys. Res. Lett., 28:195-198.:
In summary, the models did not predict a reduction in Antarctic summer sea ice extent, because has been well-established for decades now that wind patterns account for more than 2/3 of the annual variation.
And, *yes*, there have een
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You cannot "prove" physical theories as you prove math theorems.
But you can falsify a theory if you find even only one experiment (which can be reproduced) that shows that the theory is false.
Newton's theory of gravity was indeed falsified by the precession of mercury and many other experiments. When hints appear it's not always clear if the theory is wrong or there are some missing elements (for example an unknown planet perturbing Mercury's orbit).
Einstein's general theory of relativity made a prediction about how light would be bended in a gravity field. This meant that the theory was falsifiable if we didn't observe this phenomenon. It was observed after Einstein came out with the theory (http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/EinsteinTest.html).
Making predictions and getting them right increase our confidence in a given theory.
A theory which cannot predict anything more than what we already know is not very exciting. (And let's not confuse depictions/stories about reality with theories; there are often many ways to look at/explain a physical theory that are physically quivalent)
A theory which predicts things which we cannot test is said to be non falsifiable.
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Falsifiability.html
No more worthless than the assertion it was addressed to.
And if you look at it in 100 year increments then anyone who died less than 50 years ago would be alive
That is fundamentally not true. All of my grandparents died in the last 50 years, and none of them were alive 100 years ago. Whether or not, I can convince you that any of the rest of what you said wasn't logically valid, please, PLEASE, acknowledge that you got this one wrong.
To your larger point about implying that time scales of human lives are somehow significant and as such picking them is not arbitrary. What does the human life span have to do with it. According to wikipedia we know about 15 trees that are over 2000 years old (we don't know the ages of all the trees) And there are some whole forests that are same tree that we think are 10s of thousands of years old, and it take our intervention to extend a fruit fly life span up to 3 months. Why is our lifespan somehow special when studying the climate? Why are humans the organism with the magic life span?
As to your boiling water analogy, Imagine that you had a pot of boiling or near boiling water in that state for extremely long period of time (years) then something disturbed it and it's temperature dropped to 30 degrees, before starting to climb back up, and then we found it when it was back up to 40. We'd wonder why the water was so cool, even though it was on it's way back to normal. But if the whole change in temperature happened because an external factor came into play and then was removed, and you are only looking at the period where the temperature was back on the rise, and are looking for a why, you're not going to find it because it's not there. That goes to you "only happened in the last hundred or so years", comment as well. By only looking at the period over which something is happening you can't isolate any other unusual activity as the cause if you don't have the context required to rule out all the usual activity. This is why scientific experiments require repetition and controls. Since that's not available all possible context is required.
But again I'm not saying what time period is relevant. I'm trying to make the distinction that arbitrary timescale choices aren't valid for refuting the validity for choosing other arbitrary time slices.
I accept, and respect that you believe with all your heart that unless some transformation in human behavior occurs, we're all doomed in some way.
My point that this kind of thinking has gone on for a lot longer than either of us has been alive, it is nothing new. If someone older than me comes along, they can educate us on the horrific tales being told in the 1950's.
Arguing with you would be akin to convincing a Muslim that his God was no good, and he should choose mine. Or trying to convince an Oracle DBA as to the wondrous capabilities in SQL Server. Or selling a MAC user on Windows 8.
What you need to understand is that not everybody in this world has altruistic intentions, and that money, and greed, motivate people to do some pretty astounding things. That being said, please try to have faith in humanity - We are capable of pretty amazing things when presented with problems.
Murphy was an optimist
"Simulations" - get it? SIMULATIONS. Models with no skill being used to make predictions. The horror!
Falsifiable means that it has criteria for a situation that would prove it wrong. Gravity isn't provable in that we don't have any experiment that will tell us that is the exact and only way the effects of gravity could be observed. We can only look for situations where it might be wrong and test those (These do exist for Newtonian gravity). In a sense falsifiable means investigatible, it's a term introduced into scientific philosophy by Sir Karl Popper to distinguish between unprovable assertions and testable theories.
Cute story, but that would make Earth the only planet in the observed universe whose weather gets more chaotic with global warming, as opposed to more uniform!
Slam. Dunk.
If it is not important that Antarctic ice melt is this year the lowest ever recorded,
Never heard about that claim. Any proof? NASA and ESA photos don't confirm this.
It was, like. really hard to google "Antarctica Ice Melt" and click on the first news article, but I managed to do it. The only problem is that the article's source is behind Science magazine's paywall.
Or, how do you "falsify" the theory of gravity?
Ask Jan Hendrik Oort, Horace Babcock, Louise Volders, Vera Rubin, or Kent Ford.
The Time Magazine one was false...
But what about all these other ones?
Apparently this icebreaker is manned by horses specially trained to rescue any livestock swallowed by the crew of other ships.
Funny how nobody seems to mention the curious fact that this was an expedition of global warming nutjobs on a mission to prove how the polar ice caps are melting, polar bears are drowning, sea levels rising, ad nauseum. Stuck in an unexpected ice pack in the middle of summer, no less! Poetic justice!
The thing about science is that its supposed to be falsifiable.
No it is not. It is supposed to be "investigate able" by experiments.
You need to read up on your philosophy of science. Karl Popper was the one who identified that the key element of a hypothesis that makes it scientific is falsifiability. Some later work has added that some additional requirements, but falsifiability is very much a key requirement.
That means it is "provable"
No, because nothing can ever be truly proven. In mathematics, we can define axioms and prove theorems based on them, but science is effectively about trying to discover what the axioms of the universe are so we can never have that solid basis from which we can prove things.
But, what we can do, is disprove things. But if you have a hypothesis which can never be disproven, under any circumstances, then it isn't scientific. Generally this is because it doesn't make any testable predictions.
... no idea why americans always use the term "falsifiable".
It's not an American thing. Anyone who has studied modern philosophy of science will understand and use that term.
Must have a special meaning in some circumstances?
In discussions of science, it has a very particular meaning. The definition given by Wikipedia for it is "A statement is called falsifiable if it is possible to conceive an observation or an argument truthness of which proves the statement in question to be false." Note that a hypothesis can be beyond our ability to test and yet still be falsifiable. It's not necessary that we be able to make the observation that could falsify the theory, just that such an observation is concievable.
Or, how do you "falsify" the theory of gravity?
By finding or constructing some scenario in which your theory is shown not to hold. Basically, by finding a counterexample.
Actually, Einstein conjectured many scenarios in which Newton's theory of gravitation would not hold, and tests have shown that Einstein was right, and so Newton's theory of gravitation has been proven to be false. Of course, Newton's theory is right in enough situations that it's still highly useful (and used), but, for example, if we used Newtonian mechanics to construct the Global Positioning System, it would give inaccurate results, because relativistic issues do come into play.
It's also worth pointing out that Einstein didn't just tweak Newton's theory of gravitation around the edges, he completely replaced it. Gravity, it turns out, isn't a fundamental force at all, but instead is an effect of curved spacetime. This is an entirely different explanation than Newton's theory of gravitational attraction -- though in everyday experience the observed effects are the same. And when I say "it turns out" that Gravity is an effect of curved spacetime, that's per Einstein's relativity, which is itself a falsifiable theory which makes various testable predictions. So far, all of our testing has confirmed the theory, but it's always possible that we'll find a way in which it doesn't work and then we'll need a new theory, which might completely revise the way we explain gravitation yet again.
If you'd like to understand this stuff in detail, there's a fascinating (and very readable) book by David Deutsch called "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World". Deutsch addresses not just Popper's theories of scientific reasoning but some of the improvements made by later thinkers.
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Finding a counterexample is the right way. :) (copy/paste does not work on this web site on iPads, no idea if it is a iOs problem or a problem with Java Script)
But having a theory that is 'hard to find a counter example for' like e.g. theory of gravity, does not make the theory wrong as most americans claim here.
Anyway, I read your post again on my laptop as here on iPad it is hard to answer
Bottom line my argument is: for all scientific theories I know about, it is IMPOSSIBLE to find a counter experiment. So the 'american' claim about falsifiable does not make any sense at all to me (and it certainly never as mentioned in my science education).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Nice try, but I won't let you move the goalposts.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's getting warmer. The warming is well within the range of natural variation.
Really? Please cite a study indicating
(a) That the present warming is within natural variation and
(b) Demonstrating a theory as to what happened to the warming we were expecting would happen due to increased levels of greenhouse gases. Were the laws of thermodynamics broken?
If it's impossible to find a counter experiment, meaning that there is no conceivable way that a counter experiment could exist, then the theory is pseudo-science at best. If it's conceivable that a counter experiment could exist, but no one has been able to show one, then that's a currently-valid theory.
Also, there is nothing "american" about the notion of falsifiability. Not in the slightest. Popper was British, and his explanation of the philosophy of science (essentially, a theory of how and why science works), has been generally accepted everywhere.
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u r simply an asshole. just shut up and go on making ur "logic" houses of the cards while serious ppl try to solve real problems.
Bullshit. When speed is required you end up with whatever prepared solution is closest to market. If you have nothing you are stuck with nothing.
You don't start R&D six months before you know you need a new product. You go broke and someone else that has been funding R&D gets the market you wanted.
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html
We're in the very early stages, but it's already happening.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
So if you want to know what's going on with the climate, what do you do?
1. Learn all about it, recognizing that's a big task and it will take you years of study if you really want to become an expert.
2. Listen to the people who have spent years studying it and are experts on it.
3. Don't do either of the above. Just say, "No one understands this because it's too complicated." After all, if you don't understand it then obviously no one else does either.
Yeah. That's what I thought.
So climate scientists are the new clergy.
You are entirely correct, of course... but you're missing an important point. Those screaming about "alarmism" don't really mean what they say.
If we weren't being alarmist they would use our nonchalance as proof that we did not really believe AGW would have serious consequences.
Most AGW deniers are on the right-far right. How often do we see them railing against "socialism alarmists" or "gay alarmists"? Alarmism about those things is just fine because those things are bad, whereas alarmism about AGW is bad because communists.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Nice strawman you are building of me. With such obvious lies about a person you know nothing about how can you expect people to take you seriously? You just threw the global cooling lie in to stir people up and never fell for that stupidity back in the day did you? I certainly didn't know anyone who fell for that.
With reference to analysis of Vostok series. Still, here's the Vostok temperature graph and here's the Greenland temperature graph. Do you see unprecedented present day warming, or do you see current temperatures being well within the range of natural variation?
With respect to the laws of Thermodynamics, climate sensitivity is low, as the IPCC are slowly admitting.
I win. I accepted your opinion, and expressed my respect for it - You accuse me of being a liar.
Murphy was an optimist
And still you have contributed nothing. (Golf clap) Well played, sir, bravo.
You must not know much about science if you don't understand why falsifiablity is important. Hypotheses have to be falsifiable, otherwise how do you craft an experiment to disprove them? Its not just Americans, Dawkins goes on at length about the importance of falsifiablity in his book "The God Delusion."
What would falsify the theory of gravity? Dropping a feather and a bowling ball on the moon at the same time and having one of them hit the ground faster than the other. What would falsify evolution? Fossilized rabbits in the Precambrian period.
Then why are textbooks about physics full with experiments that "support" (prove) a certain theory and no single (obviously failed) experiment for anything is in a text book?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So playing a petty game AND a liar?
Plus your "respect" was an outright insult suggesting that I believe with all my heart something that was wrong. Don't try to spin it as paying attention to my opinion, your strawman construction proved that you most definitely do not.
Nice petty little "getting the last word" trick to "win" your little game as well.
You've missed my point - NONE OF THIS HAPPENS AUTOMATICALLY.
The choices available when market forces drive action depend on what is known about.
You only know by trying things out. This takes time. Market forces do not leave much time.
Simple enough?
This should be so incredibly obvious that people who think it all happens by magic should be ridiculed for their magical thinking.
Summer starts on the 1st of December by Australian convention.
Certainly December wasn't that warm by recent standards.
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
RE: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/the-1970s-ice-age-scare/
Nice link - it must have taken a lot of work to make that page, and it is good to see that someone has taken the trouble to gather actual evidence to support a position. Kudos.
The problem is that the wordpress page is a list of newspaper articles that talked about the "coming ice age",
It takes a side and says "look at these". What we would want to see is a list of all climate-related articles from the 1970's and then determine if there was a preponderance of one kind of another, and what kind of magazines/journals published each.
Secondly, these are not links into scientific journals, so it can hardly be considered a consensus of scientific thought, but it does serve very well to show how public opinion may have been influenced.
I have to agree that the press published be-scared articles, but as I recall (and I was an adult), there as a significant number of articles saying balderdash to popular press imminent ice age articles. The people that I knew at that time admitted to the possibility that we may be moving into an ice age eventually, or perhaps a period of cooling in the near future, and everyone was aware that ice ages come in cycles. I don't know anyone that thought the newspaper articles were compelling enough to be actionable.
Confession: my degree and work is in a sci/tech field so the people I associated with tended to be a good bit more skeptical and knowledgeable than the general public.
Here's some counter-examples to the belief that there was a universal ice-age scare, see the links at the bottom/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
However, the wiki isn't looking at both sides either, but it gives you another point of view.
As for the wordpress blog. It could be improved somewhat, though. here are some suggestions.
Starting with the first one, the NCAR graph from Newsweek.
It's NOT an article predicting an ice age. it's an article saying the minor cooling in the Northern hemisphere may severely impact agriculture output. Why did you not post the other graph in that article that showed warming in the Southern hemisphere?
What about the quote in the article: "Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions"
National Academy of Sciences graph. The graph shows Northern hemisphere temperatures. I don't see any prediction of an ice age. The link returns two non-weather articles from 2005.
The Milwaukee Sentinel screen shot of a fraction of a George Will opinion piece from 1992.
He is not saying that there is a coming ice age, he is saying the exact opposite. However, his stance is that some newspapers were using scare tactics, and he is using several newspaper articles quote fragments to show that the newspapers had got it wrong back in the 1970's.
You really should not use a 1992 opinion column's article to support claims that 1970's were having an ice-age scare.
BTW, two of the links in the Wordpress article point to the George Will article.
The Windsor Star article: Scientist Hubert Lamb, who also said "not for another 10,000 years"
Here's another contemporaneous article offering Professor Lamb views and some balance. That is, rejection of his position by other scientists
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1314&dat=19750908&id=jfJLAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ae0DAAAAIBAJ&pg=5280,2927204
Sarasota Herald-Tribune article:
Read the entire article on page 14A. This article is the exact opposite of an ice age scare - it says of the recent cooling trend "The first, which he said is held by the majority of weather and climate specialists, see trends originated in th
Very hard to get studies that go against the dominant paradigm published.
Yes - the dominant paradigm of requiring evidence must really put a kibosh on this and other similiar theories, such as the moon being made of green cheese. The only surprise is that you are suprised that nobody takes this guff seriously.
We submitted these findings sequentially to Science Magazine, Nature, and Nature Climate Change. The editor of Science Magazine replied that the results were not of sufficient general interest, suggested we submit the work to a specialty journal, and declined to proceed with external scientific review. Nature also rejected the paper without external scientific review, for reasons that we considered spurious. Nature Climate Change initially rejected the paper, but after some discussion the paper was assigned to a senior editor and reviewed by two anonymous reviewers. Given the context of their comments, both reviewers appeared to be climate modelers. With reference to analysis of Vostok series. [wattsupwiththat.com]
This is the same Anthony Watts who gets a salary from the Heartland Institute to tell lies about climate, who once claimed that he had personally falsified the HADCM3 model (a claim quickly proven to be utterly wrong), and then later claimed the IPCC AR5 would halve the estimate of climate sensitivity (only to be proven wrong several days later) - and then did not bother to publicly correct his remarks? That guy?
Do you by chance take financial advice from scammers as well?
Still, here's the Vostok temperature graph [rocketscie...ournal.com] and here's the Greenland temperature graph [drtimball.com].
Except that isn't Taylor's or Jacksons graph. It's Easterbrook's graph. It's the infamous graph by Easterbrook that caused a scandal and embarrassed the denialist movement and threw egg in the face of it's oil industry backers.
Read the whole sorry saga here Who told you it was Taylor's graph? If Taylor submitted that graph as his work, he is lucky his paper was just rejected. He could well have been accused of fraud, given the circumstances.
Do you see unprecedented present day warming, or do you see current temperatures being well within the range of natural variation?
In the actual greenland ice core data, rather than a set of data explicitly defined to exclude the last 120 years of climate data? Yes.
With respect to the laws of Thermodynamics, climate sensitivity is low, as the IPCC are slowly admitting.
It's convenient you choose to use the IPCC (AR5) as the source of truth on sensitivity. Since AR5 says that sensitivity is holding steady at 2.1, whereas the uncertainty has decreased. Which makes all your previous statements on the subject a nonsense. Congratulations.
The choices available when market forces drive action depend on what is known about. You only know by trying things out. This takes time. Market forces do not leave much time. Simple enough?
And in practice, we observe real world markets acting fast enough. That's my point.
No. In practice we don't see real world markets acting fast enough and instead the real world markets have months or a year or two to make a choice from what is already available if not necessarily mainstream. That's my point.
There is no magic.
The market cannot decide to chose something that is not already there when there isn't a choice already provided by the work and time of those who had the foresight to move before the market decided. The best of a bad lot becomes the default instead.
Your suggestion of magic happening is depressing to see on such a technically orientated site but not entirely unexpected from your earlier posts on other topics which indicate such a tendency.
My whole point, that was lost on you, is that some of us have quite a different perspective on all of this based on what we have personally lived through.
Consider these two quotes about the "polar vortex" from Time Magazine:
From 1974:
Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world.
From this month's edition:
But not only does the cold spell not disprove climate change, it may well be that global warming could be making the occasional bout of extreme cold weather in the U.S. even more likely. Right now much of the U.S. is in the grip of a polar vortex, which is pretty much what it sounds like: a whirlwind of extremely cold, extremely dense air that forms near the poles.
So the "polar vortex" was the result of global cooling in 1974, whereas now the same "polar vortex" must be related to global warming? Sure looks like whatever the conditions are, they support the popular theory of the time. In my opinion, this isn't science, this is politics and trolling for money. That's my opinion, please try to understand that in 1974 I was a senior in High School and very passionate about these things. I was the one arguing about climate change and how we have do to something about it. Today I believe my personal concerns about the coming ice age were the result of youth and gullibility.... and I just can't get on board with the populist theory of today, having lived through all this. That doesn't mean I am against clean air and water, or want to abolish the EPA, or any such thing.
So perhaps you can take a moment to consider my life experience, and where I coming from, instead of assuming I am some kind of ideologue who simply shouts his opinions, and considers everyone else to be the enemy. That's how I behaved in 1974, but that's not who I am now. All I ask is that you respect my opinion. That is the basis of getting things done. Hurling accusations at each other solves absolutely nothing.
Murphy was an optimist
That means it is "provable" ... no idea why americans always use the term "falsifiable". Must have a special meaning in some circumstances?
It is only special in that it correctly describes how science works. As a practical matter, scientists may consider a theory proven, but it never really is proven. It just happens to be the theory that matches the most observable evidence at this time. What science can conclusively do, though, is disprove a theory. If a theory does not match the observable evidence, it is false.
I suggest you look at the evidence.
Your rude words, insults, and insults, suggest strongly that you don't know what you are talking about.
For a meaningful discussion, give examples - seems like that you don't actually like to think, being rude is so much easier for you.
Your statements seems to much more appropriately applied to the global warming denialists:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/08/climate_change_the_north_polar_vortex_and_global_warming.html
You are not applying your life experience to this situation.
You are merely using that as a bluff to scare off the kiddies born after 1970. That's not going to work on me.
Nice story though, but we all believed stupid stuff when we were young. I thought Trotsky had some sort of point without understanding that he was just the least objectionable of a band of bloodthirsty bandits.
Your opinion about mocking other opinions? Fine. But you are pretending there are different facts - everyone gets their own opinion but denying reality is a different story.
I'd swap your polar vortex with the 41C day I had on Saturday if I could, so that bluff fails too. Nice attempted shift of the goalposts from climate to weather, but personally I think I'll go with the experts on this one instead of lying tricksters that should know a lot better.
This is clearly hopeless and I am sorry. I do have a lot of friends just like you though, so I get it.
Murphy was an optimist
These are the observed facts. Any theory that is proposed therefore has to align to these observations. Therefore, postulated theories need, at a minimum, to explain:
1. What happen to the warming we expected to see as greenhouse gas concentrations increased
2. What the alternate source of the warming actually is
3. Why the atmosphere behaves as observed
Until such a better explanation is proposed, the current explanation will remain.
It is insufficient to observe that some people are not convinced. That is a rhetorical issue, unrelated to observation or fact.
It's been clear from the start that you have been pretending just to have a straw to grasp to back up what some idiots in politics are telling you to say, whether you believe it or not. In this case the straw is a bullshit article Time magazine introduced as "balance" to stir up interest some years after a report on global warming was put on President Johnson's desk.
Using "life experience" as an excuse to believe a debunked magazine article from decades ago over an entire field of study is truly a perversion.
In short I think your attempt to mislead the readers here for petty political ends is disgusting. Some of us don't live in the same place as you so your political squabbles are of lesser interest than just about any topic you could mention.
No. In practice we don't see real world markets acting fast enough and instead the real world markets have months or a year or two to make a choice from what is already available if not necessarily mainstream.
Which is much faster than necessary for deciding about energy technologies. I really don't see your point at all. The real world just doesn't change that fast where a couple of decades isn't sufficient to adapt.
The market cannot decide to chose something that is not already there when there isn't a choice already provided by the work and time of those who had the foresight to move before the market decided.
Those choices already exist. The whole point of choice is that something gets chosen and something does not. The market already provides incentive for people who have that foresight.
The best of a bad lot becomes the default instead.
That's your subjective opinion that these choices are "bad". The other choices simply aren't embraced for whatever reasons, usually economic or user preference. That doesn't make them bad choices.
This pretended stupidity is extremely annoying and I wish you would stop doing it. "Best of a bad lot", as you know, is a common phrase for a limited set of choices and not whatever stupid spin you are putting on it.
It seems as soon as an issue appears to look even remotely like it's going to become political some people decide to turn their brains off because it gets in the way of the slogans.
As for your "fast" markets - I remember seeing two hybrid car prototypes in 1987. They were not the first by a long shot. It took a long time from then and a lot of work by a lot of people before they were a marketable choice and now there are a lot of them in the market. Just waiting for the magic to happen would not have made Toyota etc the money they made from selling those products. Just waiting for the magic to happen and not training engineers and scientists means missed opportunities. Just waiting for the magic to happen will mean that China and India will eat your lunch and leave you hungry - because they don't believe in magic just like the people who built the industry that formed your society didn't believe in the magic of things just happening when a niche appears.
A niche appears and then whoever has whatever can best fit gets in there. People who see the niche already there and then start to react are too late, because they can't get instant results by magic.
So it comes down to reason versus magical thinking. Guess which end of the stick you are waving with your bullshit of the market providing so there is no point attempting to make improvements.
Then you should watch news.
There where already heat records of over 50 degrees celsius reported in various places in Australia around christmas.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
My second quote is from the this month's Time Magazine.
In 1974, decades of study as well as the "scientific consensus" phrase (still used today) were taught in schools - That we were headed into an ice age. Something tells me you weren't alive then. I was. I'm not sure how that is "petty political ends". I lived it. One can learn a lot from the past, as history often repeats itself, and what is old, becomes new again.
Murphy was an optimist
Your bluff failed. I didn't hear about the cooling thing back then, it certainly didn't make it into my school, but I did read later in Scientific American back issues about how far off the mark the Time Magazine article was.
Using an out there "balance" piece from a magazine to oppose an entire field of study just makes you look utterly ridiculous IMHO, let alone using an ice melting event as "proof" of cooling and recent weather as "proof" of cooling. Niagra falls may be freezing but a coastal city near me is forecast to have four days over 40C next week. So which weather event do we use? Maybe if we ask the experts and consider climate as a whole instead? Oh that's right - you are mocking the experts so let's ask a Time Magazine hack who's looking for a contraversy instead. Then that gives us plenty to mock.
This whole anti-science Christianity-Lite thing crept in the back door of one of your political parties when they went for the evangelical vote. You've been spewing some of their talking points, it's depressing that you think I'm so stupid as to not have noticed right from the start.