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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...
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.
"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)
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.
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. ;-)
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?
RTFS
Under international conventions observed by most countries, ships' crews are obliged to take part in such rescues and the owners carry the costs.
Why would the US Coast Guard own any icebreakers? We don't have any deep ice around our coastlines.
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?"
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!
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
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.
No, it is dropping due to A: People taking better measures. B: the ozone hole closing. Regulation is fixing 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.
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
Everybody know's there's a 1998 spike. Who's cherry picking 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.
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.
Which owner? The owner of the rescuing ship or the owner of the ship needing to be rescued?
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.
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!
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.
Yeah, I kind of thought it was a dick thing to do for the summary to talk about who has to pay for it at all--when someone breaks down at sea, you rescue them. If there's money, great, but you don't talk money *before* you've rescued them, because it implies you would be leaving them out there to die. Like how the fire department in ancient Rome would settle the price with you as your house burned down...
Why simply err on the side of caution, when you can scuttle the entire world economy with superstitious ignorance?
It's the only way to be sure.
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.
The ecotourists were running out of weed. And you can NOT have Chinese Military Helicopters airlift in another kilo of weed. It just doesn't work that way. So they HAD to be rescued.
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.
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."
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Maybe someday you'll look back at this reply and realise it was unnecessary harsh.
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
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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."
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.
Here's an article that shows that Antarctic ice is melting at an accelerating rate, in addition to the Arctic sea ice and ice sheets and glaciers worldwide.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
I don't think so. It's not any colder down there this year and a very big iceberg (Texas Ranch sized) has broken off to trap the pack ice. Trying to use that to fuel science denial, even as a joke, is going to annoy those of use that still think that subject matter experts have value.
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
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
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
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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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.
If you start arguing about science topics like it's a religion, then I no longer consider that debate related to science either.
I'm not denying any science publications (all signs seem to point they are indeed right), but I hate these so-called "scientists" that try to force their views upon me. I already had that treatment with religious nuts years ago.
If you can't tell the difference then I can help a bit if you quote what I've written that looks like religion to you and I'll explain the difference to you. Go ahead. Put up or stop pushing this silly "it looks like Dogma to me" line.
How's that for calling a science denier's bluff when they try the "I'll pretend to be too stupid to tell the difference" trick?
We can go back to laughing at him now for pretending that a breakout of sea ice built up on the edge of the ice shelf over many winters, trapped by a very old broken off glacier portion is in some way evidence that it's getting colder. From what little I know about the subject it appears that ice tends to break off when things get warm not cold.
I wasn't specifically referring to your comment, but to that irate response I've got to what I intended to be a joke (I'm not a researcher, why should I contest their research?). However, my point was: if you are so devoted to your subject that you can't take any amusing comments, than I doubt it you can hold a constructive debate on that subject, and I doubt it you can write an objective report about it too.
The whole setting of "don't you dare to attack our point of view or we'll break your leg" reminds me of the religious views I had forced upon me during my childhood, and in my opinion gives scientists a bad name. Science is in my opinion about publishing the results and letting the world know. Whether the people are convinced and want to change their behaviour is a pure political debate.
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.
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.
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.
"Simulations" - get it? SIMULATIONS. Models with no skill being used to make predictions. The horror!
Apparently this icebreaker is manned by horses specially trained to rescue any livestock swallowed by the crew of other ships.
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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The same "joke" has been repeated with the intention of being serious through the Murdoch press (some others, but the same article goes out in many outlets in that group). There are also a lot of very active posters here that try to pretend that the earth sciences (meteorology, geology etc) and biology are not "real" science. If your comment was intended as a joke and not an attack there really was no way to tell - just like the "only a joke" with racist slights comparison (eg. British Black and White minstrel show verses the US ones which looked designed to be nasty).
Either way it looks like pushing even possible evidence of warming (a massive ice breakout from the edge of the continent) as some sort of proof that warming isn't happening. Even if it's innocent it looks like it's calculated to offend, it looks like deliberately arguing the opposite of reality so as to be able to get a "win" every time.
That's assuming it was all perfectly innocent and ignorant of the how it would be seen as a troll.
Of course your subsequent posts, backtracks and refusal to address what an inconvenient real person has written instead of a conveniently silent and attackable strawman has presumably written makes that very unlikely. It appears instead that you are whining about the consequence of your deliberate trolling.
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."
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.
I guess your response shows how hard it is for people to distinguish between genuine comments and comments ment as mockery/outlet. I have never been found guilty of trolling (and certainly not in a language that I am not fully familiar with).
I don't read newspapers of Murdoch; here in Europe those only have a minor share of the market, just like the global warming debate only has a minor role (most people that opposite it here are just out to get the energy taxes lowered).
I guess I'll have to take lessons and be more careful next time.
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.